If you’re looking to increase your contact rate, provide a personal touch and gain a competitive edge, a local presence dialer might be just what the doctor ordered. It’s just one of the many tools included with powerful customer relationship management (CRM) software like CRMDialer, and it provides a dynamic new way to reach out to prospects and clients. So, before we delve into how local presence dialers help salespeople, let’s take a quick look at what this tool is and how it works.

What Is It?

Simply put, local presence dialing is a powerful CRM system feature that allows sales agents to dial prospects using area codes based on the number being dialed. In other words, you don’t have to be in New York City for your caller ID to show up as an NYC number. You could be located in the heart of Midwestern America, Thailand or anywhere for that matter, and your number will be displayed as a local one on your prospect’s incoming call list. Pretty cool, right?  No business has ever made less money with the assistance of local presence 🙂

Watch this video of Local Presence in action with CRMDialer:

Local Presence Is NOT Call Spoofing

If you’re thinking that this sounds a lot like caller ID spoofing, don’t worry. Spoofing is designed to purposely dupe the recipient into thinking the call is coming from a company other than the one that’s calling. For example, the caller ID might read “Humane Society” or “IRS” when the call is really coming from a debt collector. This practice, which was written about extensively in a 2011 New York Times article, has been popular among Robo-callers and debt collectors who want to fool call recipients into thinking the call is coming from an important source…

Local presence isn’t about deceiving the person on the other end of the line. It’s all about expanding your reach as a salesperson and establishing a local presence for your prospects. While spoofing frustrates prospects with fake numbers and IDs, local presence provides local numbers they can actually use to call you back. Nothing fake, nothing fraudulent — just a smart business tool designed to boost your conversions and help you contact more prospects to close more deals. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to the good stuff — how it helps and the benefits it provides.

Benefits of Local Presence Dialing

So, now you know: This is a tool that helps you create a local presence for the folks you’re calling.

1. Increased Contact Rates

This is the big one. Studies suggest that people are four times more likely to answer the phone for a local number. That gives you an edge of nearly 400% — and we all know the more people you can contact, the more you can convert. But don’t just take our word for it — check out the results of a survey conducted by Software Advice. They asked participants about how they would respond in three scenarios: receiving calls from an out-of-state number, a toll-free number, and a local number. The results?

• Toll-Free: When receiving an unknown call from a toll-free number, only 7% said they’d be likely to answer, and 80% indicated they’d be extremely unlikely to pick up.
• Out-of-State: When receiving a call from an unknown number with an out-of-state area code, respondents were more likely to answer the phone, with 13% indicating they’d be somewhat or extremely likely to pick up and 75% saying they’d be extremely unlikely to answer.
• Local: When receiving a call from an unknown number with a local area code, 28% of participants said they’d pick up the phone, and only 53% indicated they were extremely unlikely to do so. That’s a significant boost in the percentage of people picking up the phone for your sales calls.

2. Geo-Targeting

As a salesperson, you might not think about geo-targeting as much as your marketing counterparts do, but it should definitely be on your radar. Local presence dialing enables you to gain visibility using geo-targeting metrics to take advantage of the local reach you’re establishing. Geo-targeting is a marketing strategy that puts your business in the right place at the right time to capture more local sales. The “near me” internet search has really changed the marketing and sales landscape with an exponential increase in the number of mobile searches for services and goods located in the searcher’s area. This has the potential to ultimately increase engagement, increase the number of leads you have coming in and attract more customers for increased inbound sales.

3. It’s Effortless

No extra effort, all the added benefits — that’s what local presence dialing gives you. CRMDialer’s local presence dialer CRM tool is typically built right into your power dialer CRM. There’s no extra manual work required — just dial and go. Depending on the system you’re using, you may have the option to add local and commercial numbers. For example, CRMDialer allows you to add an unlimited number of local phone numbers to your database.

Types of Sales People Who Benefit from Local Presence

Local presence dialing can really impact your outbound sales efforts, and that’s equally true for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals. Essentially, this tool can benefit all types of salespeople, providing acceleration and a competitive edge in connecting with decision-makers.

Local Presence for B2C

As a B2C sales professional, you understand the importance of connecting with your prospects and customers. Local presence dialing gives you a better chance of doing just that — no matter what type of B2C commerce you’re involved with. Whether you’re repping an e-commerce business or making calls on behalf of brick-and-mortar establishments, it’s all about getting through to your target audience. With local presence dialing, you not only enjoy an increased contact rate, but you also give your prospects and customers a local access point for improved communications and engagement.

Local Presence for B2B

Local presence works much the same way for this type of sales. The importance of connecting with customers is equally important in driving results for B2B sales professionals. Developing B2B sales is much easier when you actually get through to key decision-makers. Increasing your answer rate by 65% or more is a great way to get started.

How Local Presence Dialing Fits into Your Sales Strategy

Building a strong sales strategy is the key to developing a thriving business. Experts suggest that businesses should build their sales teams to be scalable with a smooth, streamlined process capable of coping with a larger stream of prospects hitting your pipeline. The same advice is applicable to individuals too. You want your business to boom, but you have to be able to handle it once that happens, right? Other key tips for sales professionals looking to grow their business include:

• Differentiating your business from the competition
• Understanding prospects better to replace cold calls with meaningful conversation
• Improving long-term strategy with effective follow-ups

Do you know what can help you do all that and more? A great CRM. And you know what’s included in the best CRMs? Hint: If you guessed local presence dialing, you win the prize! Now that we’ve covered how much local presence dialing helps salespeople, let’s take a closer look at five of the other amazing tools you get when you choose the right CRM.

A Killer Database

You need a great database to manage your leads and pipeline. Without it, you could easily get swamped with information and could even miss important details. With this CRM, you get unlimited fields for reporting, a lead importer with a duplicate checker and user assignments to help distribute leads across a sales team.

Real-Time Visitor Tracking

Visitor tracking is an amazing tool for transforming cold calls. It gives you key information about what your website visitors are looking at on your site. Even better, CRMDialer’s real time visitor tracking gives you a pop up as soon as visitors click on your site, so you get all the details you need as they happen. That allows you to reach out with perfectly timed calls and emails and more targeted messages.

Next-Level Communication Tools

The power dialer with click-to-call functionality makes fast work of rolling calls. It also includes IVR to make sure incoming calls get routed appropriately, missed call notifications, and call forwarding in addition to the local presence dynamic dialing that we’ve been talking about. And that’s not all. You also get SMS, increasing the ways you can reach out for follow-ups, reminders and personalized messages. The integrated inbound and outbound email offers tracking and the ability to sync with your Gmail or Outlook accounts. The email scheduler lets you prepare emails to be sent out at the perfect time for increased engagement.  

Internal and B2B Chat

Building a collaborative environment is important for sales organizations. Even though you do a lot of your work independently, having a chat feature with a searchable database can be a real game-changer. Have a question for a colleague? Shoot them a quick message. Wondering about a specific topic? Search the database to find files, images and other information as needed. With CRMDialer’s newest chat feature, TechHub, you can also set up a chat with outside contacts to facilitate awesome collaborations.

Built-in Helpdesk

Providing stellar customer service should be at the top of every sales person’s — and organization’s — list of priorities. With the integrated helpdesk, you can track help tickets from the moment they hit the system until they’re resolved to ensure speedy, efficient customer service. Every. Single. Time.

Loads of Extras

When you choose CRMDialer you get a power-packed roster of game-changing tools. In addition to those mentioned above, you get:

• Email validation: Validating email addresses improves the likelihood that you’ll connect with prospects and reduces your bounce rate.
• Coaching: Whisper and barge functions allow managers and supervisors to listen in on sales calls to whisper suggestions and advice to sales reps as needed or directly enter the call to handle tricky situations.
• Recording: Every call gets recorded and stored within lead records, so salespeople can later listen and analyze them to improve their strategies or for training purposes.
• Voicemail drop: Slash the amount of time you spend leaving voicemails without sacrificing quality or the personalized touch you like to provide.
• Calendar management: This CRM integrates perfectly with your Google or Outlook calendar, allowing you to seamlessly set up tasks, reminders, and appointments right from the system so you enjoy streamlined access to your calendar while minimizing the chance that you miss that important follow-up or fail to complete an important task

Not only do you get all the benefits of local presence dialing, but you also get one of the easiest-to-use, powerful CRMs available. 

Scalability? Check.

Developing meaningful interactions with prospects? Check.

Standing out from the crowd? Check.

This CRM checks all the boxes. Transparent, hassle-free pricing, no contracts and cloud-based software you can implement quickly that easily changes everything. Get local presence dialing and much, much more.