Parallel Dialers Are Having a Moment

Who you gonna call? Everyone, everywhere, all at once.

Parallel dialers are having a moment.

I keep meeting sales leaders that have just purchased Orum and rave about more connects and more meetings. (Seriously, there was one just last week.) Nooks just raised a big Series B from Kleiner Perkins.

It’s the humans, stupid

If you read Kleiner Perkins post about the Nooks investment, they frame it as “bringing AI to sales in a human-centric way” and highlight how terrible email has become as a sales channel.

This fits with a larger theme in some parts of the sales world: a retreat to humans.

When you spend a high-cost “human token” to talk to a prospect (even if that human is behind an AI-enabled call cannon), you’re demonstrating that you care a bit more than the team sending you their 17th AI-personalized email that includes a snippet of your LinkedIn bio.

That human touch just might get you the meeting. And you can do it at scale with a parallel dialer? Awesome.

Thoughts on calling everyone (smartly)

So, for the moment, hitting the phones hard is working for some teams. How do you take advantage?

As usual, I’m going to focus on accounts. The book of accounts you target is the strategy (and the bottleneck). After all, you can blast calls to a bad list all day long and all you’ll get are crazy activity levels.

With that, here are 3 things to consider for your account strategy when adopting a parallel dialer.

1️⃣ Working a book ≠ 1 call and done

You may be tempted to believe that you can radically increase your book size as a result of increased activity from these dialers. That could be true if you’re calling SMBs and doing one-call closes. However, if you’re focused on mid-market and up, you need multiple consistent touches with multi-threading. Calls are one part of that strategy. Keep mid-market rep books in the 100-150 range and enterprise much lower than that.

2️⃣ Maintain ICP focus

You may be tempted to reach out beyond your defined ICP because you feel like you can reach more accounts now. (Maybe—see point 1). This comes in two flavors, both driven by a feeling of account scarcity: rationalizing that you could succeed outside the core ICP or simply reaching for marginal accounts for fear of running out. Resist this urge.

Focus on your core ICP. If you find yourself going outside the lines, either slow down and increase the quality of coverage or do the work to identify more great ICP fits to feed the team.

3️⃣ Be smart about disqualifying

More connects can mean two things: more meetings (yay!) and more disqualifications (boo?). More DQs is (are?) actually a good thing! You’re quickly finding out where not to spend your time.

But it’s only good if you use the info. That’s why I highly recommend you adopt a dynamic books-style return process. Require reps who disqualify an account to “return” it to an overall account pool with a clear, validated reason. Some of those may be terminal (acquired, out of business) and some of those may be temporary (need to hire X, under contract with a competitor until Y).

By capturing these, you’re either cleaning up your CRM or collecting timing signals you can use later.

Velocity isn’t everything, but it’s something

Long story short, parallel dialers can make your team more efficient and higher velocity. You can use that incremental velocity to your advantage. They don’t, however, change the fundamentals about focus and ICP.

Don’t get lured into the siren song of blindly ramping up activity. You might see a short-term burst of meetings but it’ll be at your long-term peril as you rapidly burn through your TAM and get less efficient over time.

Stay focused on the right accounts and ramp up the quality coverage—that will work over the long term.