Sales efficiency is more important than ever. Accurate direct dials not only reduce the time your reps spend dialing to get connections. They also help you increase your sales funnel and ultimately your revenue. As a result, identifying ways to eliminate calling into switchboards and gatekeepers should be a priority for any outbound team. One of the best and easiest ways is finding direct mobile numbers.
This article will help you to understand the importance of direct dials for your sales team, their impact on sales productivity, the overall value of mobile numbers to your organization, and how you can find them.
Why Are Work Mobiles Important
If you dial a company’s switchboard and ask for a decision-maker (DM) from upper management, it’s likely that the gatekeeper is trained to not let you straight through. On average it takes 22 minutes to connect using switchboard numbers, but just five minutes to connect with direct dial numbers.
Alternatively, you might reach someone who is assisting the decision-maker. However, convincing them to pass you along is as time-consuming as convincing the decision-maker to learn more about your product or service. Either way, you have a gatekeeper to deal with, someone you’ve got to convince that your cold call is important enough to annoy their boss. So you have to deliver a successful pitch just to get to your intended target.
Getting bogged down with gatekeepers has a detrimental impact on sales reps for various reasons:
- It is one of the biggest demotivating factors for a sales rep
- It makes sales reps unwilling to pick up the phone
- It is embarrassing to repeatedly ask a gatekeeper to put through
- It kills productivity
Let’s see the impact of Work Mobile Numbers on sales productivity.
The Impact Of Work Mobile Numbers On Sales Productivity
Productivity depends primarily on the ability of reps to spend their time selling as opposed to administrative tasks and sales activities like dialing. Calls and emails are the most commonly used form of communication, with emails getting the upper hand in terms of the ROI they produce.
Why?
Earlier, sales reps had to convince a gatekeeper on the switchboard to pass you to your decision-maker. According to research by ScaleX, where they compared the productivity of dialing switchboards, direct desk numbers, and direct-work mobile numbers from SalesIntel:
- The dial-to-connect ratio (DCR) for switchboard was 59:1, which means it took 59 calls to reach the decision-maker.
- The DCR for the direct desk number was 73:1. A caveat is required here though as the test was conducted in the early days of COVID and many desk phones likely had not yet been routed to work from home (WFH) locations. Prior to COVID you would have expected the DCR here to be higher than switchboards and it warrants revisiting the study to see if the trend has held after time has passed for companies to adjust to WFH policies or return to the office.
- The DCR for work mobile numbers, however, was 10:1. That’s a 7X higher DCR than direct dial desk phones and 6X for switchboards!
Thus, these obstacles are unnecessary obstacles for sales reps. This is where direct work mobile numbers are a game-changer for reps. The easiest way for a B2B sales team to improve their DCR is to use work mobile numbers.
How Work Mobile Numbers Help You and Your Sales Team
Work Mobile Numbers can help you and your sales team to achieve four primary goals:
1. Higher ROI
Work Mobile Numbers have an immediate impact on the time it takes to identify and reach decision-makers. Sales reps end up using fewer resources in terms of time spent dialing as well as managing multiple channels to chase decision-makers and convert them. It’s even worse when reps are not equipped with reliable data (such as verified email addresses) and need to spend time researching the information they need to reach out via additional channels. Each of these, and more, lead to a significant decrease in lead acquisition costs. Since sales targets can be met quicker through Work Mobile numbers, additional time can be spent on expanding the sales funnel by reaching out to more prospects.
What is this leading to? A greater and longer-lasting positive impact on earnings.
2. Overcome the Call Reluctance
Sales efficiency is not just limited to the time spent dialing trying to get through to a DM. It is also a function of how many dials a rep makes in a day and call reluctance and distraction both have a huge impact on that dialing efficiency. Imagine going through the difficulty of making phone calls to unknown strangers you have never spoken to before, only to have most of your calls go unanswered, and when they are you have to pitch a gatekeeper before you can even to your DM. It’s even worse when they get through only to realize that the numbers they have are inaccurate and they’re pitching the wrong person or even calling the wrong company. It’s a lot to ask of anyone.
Selling to B2B companies is not only about working hard, it’s equally about working smart and staying motivated. The lack of motivation is what is known as Sales Call Hesitation, where there is a psychological hesitancy to making calls.
Work Mobile Numbers connect reps faster and more reliably, giving them real-time rewards for their efforts and increasing motivation in a positive feedback loop.
3. Enablement in Reaching Higher-level Decision Makers
DM’s are the lifeblood of all core sales activities. The whole sales cycle revolves around the ability to reach and effectively convert DM’s. When reps are armed with reliable work mobile numbers, sales reps have confidence they will be able to quickly target and reach decision-makers or higher authorities without having to spend time navigating gatekeepers. Sales reps are therefore more likely to connect with the right decision-makers, allowing them to focus on their pre-call research and nailing their pitch. Reps are more motivated, strive to aim higher and perform better, improving success for the company as a whole.
The actual outcome? More qualified conversations leading to more pipeline
4. Easier Sales Enablement and Training
Training and sales enablement are a significant and never-ending part of sales operations. This is particularly important for reps who are new to the organization and have to go through a holistic learning process. With Work Mobile Numbers, sales managers and leaders need to spend less time and attention training on how to work around not being able to get a DM on the phone and can focus more on their pitch and qualification process. More time spent training on how to pitch and less on learning the process means a quicker ramp time and fewer resources that need to be dedicated to training.
However, you can achieve success in these four areas only if your team has access to accurate work mobile numbers. Otherwise, with inaccurate data, they will end up wasting their productive time.
How to Find Direct Work Mobile Numbers
The conventional way of finding numbers is by asking your sales team to play treasure hunter on different platforms and websites, which obviously impacts the time dialing and pitching DM’s. Even worse, when they do find numbers to dial they will rarely be a direct dial number and even less often will be a work mobile number.
However, many organizations have come to recognize the inefficiency of manually prospecting for phone numbers and have begun working with a data partner that can accelerate and streamline the process. The obvious caveat here is that your data partner must offer you both accurate numbers as well as the right kind of numbers, i.e. work mobile numbers.
Unfortunately, work mobile numbers are notoriously difficult to track down, particularly if you are targeting B2B businesses. Yet, a few data partners have developed the means for effectively gathering work mobile numbers. Since Direct-Work Mobile Numbers are challenging to collect, most B2B data partners limit access to desk phones and company switchboards and if they have work mobile numbers they charge a premium for them beyond the basic terms of the contract. Even when data partners promise mobile numbers, the data you buy is generally machine-processed. And when you have machine-processed data, you cannot trust the accuracy as it lacks human-verification.
Fortunately, SalesIntel provides you with an additional layer of human-verification. With over 48M work mobile numbers, SalesIntel has the highest coverage of human-verified work mobile numbers on the market. And all human-verified mobile numbers are re-verified every 90 days by our research team to ensure data accuracy. The best part is, you do not have to pay more to access them as SalesIntel’s entire dataset is available to all customers.
Wrapping Up
It’s clear that work mobile numbers are essential to driving efficiency across your sales team and accelerating pipeline. However, having work mobile numbers is only part of the puzzle. You also need supporting information to help you identify and prioritize your target accounts as well as the DM’s at those organizations. Data points such as firmographics, technographics, company intel, and buyer intent signals.
SalesIntel provides you with all of these data points along with human-verified direct work mobile numbers with guaranteed 95% accuracy.
