Is Your Business Ready for the Next Step?

For any sales-based business, a quality tech stack should already include a CRM and a phone system. You need to keep track of your leads, and you need to be able to communicate with them. As your sales increase, so does the size of your staff, your communication volume and the amount of leads you need to keep track of. Features and products that you may not have needed on day 1 become crucial to continued growth. 

Let’s talk about some of those features and why you need them! 

Training and Onboarding

For many entrepreneurs, their first business might have been a one- or two-person enterprise, born out of hard work, hustle and a couple of Excel spreadsheets. But as sales increase and a business booms, you need to hire more and more people to help out. Even the most natural agents will need training and onboarding on the specifics of how you want your business to be conducted. Let your phone system be an integral part of that process! 

Call Monitoring tools allow you to listen to your Agents, as well as let them listen to how you sound on a call! Call Recordings are great to hear how calls go after the fact, but live monitoring is even better for training and saving deals for new Agents.

• Listening In on a call that’s happening live – without the caller hearing – gives supervisors a chance to ensure that new agents are performing as expected. You can also let those agents listen to your veteran calls to see how an expert gets it done!

• Whispering on a call takes it a step further, by allowing you to speak to an Agent without the caller hearing. Provide extra data or coaching on-the-spot to save a deal or provide encouragement. 

• Barging onto a live call is helpful in multiple scenarios; either your Agent is struggling and you want to save a deal, or the customer wants to speak to someone else in real time – don’t lose someone by offering a callback! 

Quality Assurance

Listening, Whispering and Barging aren’t just for your new agents – those are tools you’ll use over and over as your team works. Drop into any live call to see how it’s going. Maybe via reporting you’ve seen that an Agent routinely has very long calls – find out as they’re happening why they’re struggling to close! AJ Asad listens to Call Recordings over 10 minutes to hear why a deal isn’t closing sooner – live monitoring could then let him check in on those agents to see if their performance is improving!

Another smrtPhone customer, Marissa McWilliams of Ogle Properties, uses call monitoring tools to peak into her Agent’s work styles and learning their strengths and weaknesses. This allows her to optimize operations, and assign Agents to campaigns that best suit their strengths, or learn who needs refreshers in training. 

For years quality assurance was always associated with call recordings (who hasn’t heard the phrase “this call may be recorded for quality assurance and training purposes!) but live monitoring allows you to do QA in real time – and maybe SAVE some deals going south! 

Room to Grow

Is your team growing? Congrats! That means you’re killing it! But sometimes business owners struggle to fully comprehend all the ways they need to grow – you need a CRM and a phone system that’s built with growth in mind. A good system should be there for you when you have 1 User and 1 phone number, and still there for you when you have 50 Users and hundreds of phone numbers. Many phone systems make you pay per User, which quickly adds up – especially when you have low-contact Users like VAs or bookkeepers who only need access to a couple of features at very limited times. 

Unlimited Users without a per-User cost attached is the most growth-friendly model there is! Hire as many agents as you need – even some who only work a couple days per month – and only pay for the actual calls and texts they’re making. Make sure you’re only paying for what you use! 

Improved Answer Rates 

What ultimately lands deals? Connections! You might have high-quality, super long lead lists – but what if no one picks up the phone? Geo-Caller ID is a feature that allows you to match the area code and country code of your outbound Phone Numbers to align with the number you’re calling.

Let’s say you’re doing a power dialing campaign that has leads from PA, NJ and NY on it, and you own a bunch of phone numbers from those areas. Let your phone system automatically match up each of your outbound calls to the locality you’re reaching – people trust a familiar number, and a localized business! 

By the way – it’s super easy to buy phone numbers and search via the area code or locality you want to target. It doesn’t matter if you live in Las Vegas – your calls can be originating from Beverly Hills! 

Faster Deal Cycles

Be honest – have you ever lost a deal by saying you’ll have someone call a lead back – whether it was your manager, a broker, or a bank contact – and by the time you all sync up, the lead has gone with another deal? If you have an interested party on the phone, keep them on the phone! Here are the features you absolutely need to make your deal cycles as lean and fast as possible: 

• Warm Transfers allow you to introduce a third party onto the line, make the intro, and then drop off so you can keep hitting that campaign – pass off a lead to a closer or someone else at your company with specific expertise. 
• Conference Calling means you can have a bunch of Users hashing out a deal at the same time, weather it’s a lead that wants their other family members privy to the conversation, or multiple people on your end, like a bank contact or another Agent to keep the convo alive.
• Hold means you never have to say “let me call right back!” – keep those leads on the line, no matter what. Do you have to contact your boss quickly, or run to the other room for a crucial file? Never let someone hang up, keep them on the line. Your Hold Music can be your favorite song, or extra info that keeps the lead engaged.

You should be excited if you’re at the point where smrtPhone Pro is solving a bunch of your problems, because that means you’re having growing pains – and that means you’re super successful! For all the features that smrtPhone Pro provides – for both your dialers and smrtDialer – it’s kind of a no brainer. But if you’re not sure, hop on a call with one of our customer success agents so they can show you the ins and outs. 

Congrats on your growing biz – and happy dialing!