Item: InsideSales.com / XANT PowerDialer for Salesforce (discontinued)
Rating: 9
Author: Ryan McCarty

Overall Satisfaction with InsideSales.com

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

InsideSales is only being used for our outbound sales team. It addresses our need of a database of leads and tracking the interactions we've had as well as providing an excellent dialing software to effectively perform outreach.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Powerdial - Definitely the main draw. Make calls, send emails, input notes, leave pre-recorded messages, then move on the to next lead!
List-Building - Seek lists are really powerful. You can upload 5,000 leads, set your criteria on just about anything, and your list is updated hourly during calling to bring the best leads forward to call. Domino lists can be useful as well. I've used them for specific company outreach and smaller lists (Domino lists are only called through once, without reactive filters)

Cons

Quirky - Sometimes the filters don't act like you'd like them to. There seems to be parts of the software that are under-unitized and therefore under-supported. The one that comes to mind is "Contacts" as apposed to leads. You should be able to easily link all your contacts from a specific company (your contacts) to that company (your account) but these two don't always intersect well and don't like to work with Seek lists like "Leads" do.

Return on Investment

Positive - You can really hit a lot more leads in a day. With a prioritized seek list and prerecorded voice mails, I could easily call 120+ leads per day, and get a lot of touches on these contacts whether through just a call, a VM, or a templated email.
Positive - Tracking reports is also a great asset here to determine your ROI. It's easy to test new emails/voicemails for a week at a time and discover what's working and what's not working to improve the process.

Other Software Used

Zoho CRM, Close.io, DiscoverOrg

Likelihood to Recommend

Outbound dialing is where it excels. It's especially good with larger teams of reps. Organizing through campaigns and seek lists is very powerful once you understand how to use it. There is definitely a learning curve with seek lists (I've spent tons of time on the phone with their support staff) but once you understand it the possibilities are endless. You can sort which leads show up by a variety of filters. Even with a list of 10,000+ leads and 5 reps calling on it, you can ensure no leads show up in two reps lists, the reps are calling specific territories, and even skipping leads that are likely on their lunch break! One my of favorite tricks with seek lists and only calling people with titles like Director/VP/C-Level before 8:30am or after 5pm their time, when those people are more willing to pick up the phone. They also appreciate a sales rep who is putting in the extra time to call during those blocks.

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