Local presence dialing

What is local presence?

Local presence, or local presence dialing, is typically a phone system or sales call center feature that lets sales reps and outbound agents make phone calls to customers in different regions while displaying a local phone number with a familiar area code. This is a useful feature for sales teams especially when they're making cold outbound calls, because most people won't bother picking up a call from a phone number with an area code that they don't recognize.

Cold calling is hard enough on your sales team. One simple thing you can do to help their outreach efforts is to give them phone numbers with area codes that recipients recognize. This will increase the chances that prospects will pick up—and get them more at-bats.

With Dialpad’s local presence dialing, sales teams can leverage a bundle of area codes that match up with their territories throughout the US automatically—without any extra work for your call center team.

How local presence works with Dialpad

Dialpad's AI-powered sales engagement platform comes with not only a sales dialer but also the option to include local presence packages. These give sales managers two options for purchasing local presence numbers:

1. The 100 top metro areas bundle (around 80% of the US population)

2. The comprehensive bundle (98% of the US population)

Once you've purchased your local presence bundle, you can assign the feature to any of the contact centers associated in your Dialpad account. (Which means more than one contact center within an office can leverage this feature!)

Sales reps will then just need to choose the local presence option when placing an outbound call from their Dialpad app to automatically detect and match the recipient’s number.

When a call is returned, rather than routing to whichever rep is available to take a call, Dialpad will automatically route to the specific rep who originally placed the call. If that rep can’t answer for some reason, the call will be routed to the next available rep in the group (or follow the call routing options the manager has set).

Why use local presence dialing?

• Smarter outbound: Increase your sales reps’ chances of connecting with a prospect by automatically matching the area code of the territory they’re calling
• Intelligent routing: Make sure every rep gets credit for their work with intelligent inbound routing that matches the call with the rep who originally placed it
• Coverage you can count on: With options for purchase that include over 100 numbers, your reps aren’t left without the right coverage they need to make a connection

A simple way to boost your connection rates

Answer rate is a key metric to determine the success of your contact center or call center. After all, if customers aren’t picking up in the first place, then something’s wrong—so, how do different types of phone numbers affect answer rate?

Answer rate for toll-free numbers

When someone sees a toll-free number on their caller ID, they know that it’s a business calling. When the recipient doesn’t recognize the number (it’s an “unknown number”), then they likely won’t pick up the call. For this reason, answer rates for toll-free numbers are generally quite low.

Answer rate for out-of-state codes

Answer rates for out-of-state area codes are higher than for toll-free numbers, but they’re still not as effective as local codes. Out-of-state codes aren’t local, but consumers won’t necessarily associate them with a business either, so they’re more likely to respond than they are to a number they don’t recognize at all.

Answer rate for local codes

When you call people with a local business phone number, answer rates tend to increase dramatically.

Think about it—would you be more likely to answer calls from a local number, or a number with an out-of-state area code?

TL; DR - If you want to increase your connection rates, then local presence dialing is the way to go.

Get prospects to answer their phones with local presence dialing

Whether you’re a small startup or a global business, local presence dialing can be a simple and effective way to improve your connection rates and drive more successful telesales or telemarketing campaigns.

Looking for a robust, AI-powered communications platform that allows you to set up local phone numbers in just a few clicks?

With Dialpad you can do just that and more. Along with a local phone number that's included in all paid plans, Dialpad empowers your contact center team with advanced calling features, omnichannel communications, and CRM integrations with popular tools like Salesforce and HubSpot—all from a unified platform.