What is local presence dialing and how does it impact your sales

What is local presence dialing?

Local presence dialing is a sales and marketing strategy that aims to increase engagement and response rates by displaying a local phone number to prospects, rather than a toll-free or out-of-state number. The theory behind local presence dialing is that people are more likely to answer a call from a number that appears to be local to their area, versus an unfamiliar long-distance number.

How does local presence dialing work?

To use local presence dialing, you need to purchase local DID numbers from a service provider such as VoiceSpin which offers international local numbers from 160+ countries. These providers maintain a pool of numbers with local area codes from various geographic locations. When a business initiates outbound calls using the dialer software for call center, the dialing system automatically selects a number from the pool with the same area code as the recipient’s location. It ensures that your prospect will see a local number on their caller ID screen, helping your business appear legitimate, more credible, and trustworthy.

For example, if you are calling prospects located in New York, the dialer system will select numbers with 212 or 315 area codes from your pool of purchased numbers. From the recipient’s perspective, the call appears to be coming from a local business. The best part is that your agents don’t have to select numbers for each location manually. The dialer system automatically detects the location based on the area code of the prospect’s number and adjusts the local caller ID accordingly, saving your reps a great deal of time and effort.

How can local presence dialing help you improve sales

Before we go into more detail, first let’s see how local presence dialing can help you improve sales.

Local presence dialing increases your call answer rates

Low call answer rate has always been one of the biggest challenges sales reps face when making cold calls. There might be several reasons why your prospects aren’t picking up (e.g., you might have called at the wrong time). But if you call your prospects from numbers with local area codes rather than toll-free numbers, that can dramatically change the outcome.

According to research by Software Advice, people are nearly four times more likely to answer calls from local numbers. While only 7% of the respondents said they’re likely to answer a call from an unknown caller with a toll-free area code – that number leaps to 27.5% when the unknown caller is using a local area code.

Local presence increases the efficiency of your outbound calling campaigns

Leveraging local presence dialing doesn’t just improve call answer rates – it can also have a significant impact on the overall productivity and efficiency of your outbound sales team. Since more prospects are likely to answer calls from local numbers, your sales reps will engage in more conversations with potential customers rather than wasting time dialing numbers and waiting for calls to connect.

This boost in productivity is compounded by the cost-effectiveness of using a local presence dialer. Rather than having to staff separate call center teams in each location you’re calling, you can simply purchase bulk local phone numbers from a DID provider and have your agents call prospects from those local presence numbers, regardless of their actual physical location. This allows you to streamline your operations and focus your resources on generating more sales opportunities, rather than managing complex multi-site infrastructure.

Best practices for using local presence dialing

Since we’ve established the benefits of local presence dialing for sales without further ado it’s time to explain the best practices that you can incorporate to .

Purchase local numbers from reputable providers

To ensure you get the maximum out of local presence dialing, purchase local DID numbers from a reputable service provider. Carefully research different VoIP providers, paying close attention to customer reviews and factors like availability of numbers in your desired geographic regions, pricing, per-minute charges, any restrictions and limitations, and the quality of customer support.

Keep an eye on the reputation of your numbers

When using local presence dialing, it’s essential to constantly monitor the reputation of your numbers to ensure they don’t appear as ‘Scam Likely’ on your recipients’ phone screens as it may negatively impact your call answer rates. If you are making large volumes of outbound calls in a specific area, you should have multiple numbers in rotation to ensure the same number isn’t used multiple times in a row. That will also naturally reduce the number of phone calls made per hour from each of these numbers. And if some of your numbers get flagged for suspicious calling behavior, it’s important to timely take them out of rotation and replace them with fresh numbers.

Combine local presence dialing with other strategies

While using local presence is an effective tactic that can improve your outbound calling success, use it alongside other strategies like:

• Use predictive auto-dialers: Predictive auto-dialing solutions can help you further improve the efficiency of your cold calling campaigns by increasing agent talk times and reducing idle time between calls. Predictive dialers use AI and machine learning capabilities to ‘predict’ agent availability based on real-time and historical metrics and connect agents to answered calls as soon as they complete their previous interaction. That means each agent can handle more outbound calls in less time, helping you maximize conversions.
• Call during the recommended times: Calling your prospects during recommended times and days of the week can also make a difference, increasing your call answer rates. For example, research by CallHippo revealed that the best time of day to make cold calls is between 4:00 – 5:00 PM, following the second best time between 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM. According to another study by Revenue.io, decision-makers are more likely to engage in the late afternoon, with the best times to cold call between 4:00 – 5:00 PM, followed closely by the 3:00 – 4:00 PM and 5:00 – 6:00 PM hours.

Conclusion

Despite the low average success rate for cold calls, cold calling remains an effective outbound sales strategy many businesses and organizations rely on. Using local presence dialing when running cold calling campaigns is an excellent way to improve your call connections and increase the efficiency of your cold calling campaigns. When prospects get calls from a number with an area code that matches their location, they are more likely to answer even though the number is unknown. Combined with other effective strategies and tactics, local presence dialing can make your outbound sales team much more productive and efficient and help you boost sales.