Building a calling Smart View
In order to use the power or predictive dialer effectively, the first step is to create a list of leads you know you need to call.
Here are the basic concepts to consider when creating your calling Smart Views.
What's the goal?
Your goal in creating a great calling Smart View is to make sure you don't have to think about two key questions:
Should I call this person?
What should I say?
Step 1: Specify particular lead statuses
If you're using lead statuses effectively, a good place to start with a calling Smart View is to specify which statuses should be included in the Smart View.
Let's start simple by only using one lead status. For example, here at Close we only call leads that are currently in a Trial.
Only show leads in trial status
Now, let's say in your sales process, we want to call any lead that is in either Potential or Interested status.
Show leads in either potential or interested status
The key here is that any lead status change to a different status will remove the lead from this Smart View.
Step 2: Decide how long to wait between calling attempts
Another decision you'll want to make is how often should you be calling these leads?
You can exclude leads from your calling Smart View that have had a call within a specified timeframe using not call_date in your search.
Once you do that, you'll be left with leads that either have calls but not within the specified timeframe, or leads that have never been called.
Let's say you have an inbound lead funnel and you want to call your leads every 4 hours.
Exclude leads that have been called in the past four hours
Another example would be in an outbound strategy where you want to wait at least 2 days between call attempts.
Exclude leads that have been called within the past two days
Once a call is made to the lead, they'll be removed from the list until the amount of time you specify has passed.
Step 3: Exclude leads with follow-up tasks set
Often times you'll have leads that might say "Call me back on Thursday" or "I'm not in the office again until next week." In these cases, your team is likely creating a specific task to follow-up, and you'll want to exclude those leads from your calling list.
For this we can simply using the search query not has:incomplete_tasks.
Exclude any lead that has an incomplete task
Step 4: Call at the right time
If you are dealing with a list of leads across a variety of timezones, you'll want to make sure you're only calling leads at the right time.
An easy way to control this is to utilize the local time search within Close. You can narrow down your list to only show you leads where the local time is between certain time periods.
For example, if you wanted to only show leads where it was between 9am and 5pm, you would add the following query:
Phone local time between 9am and 5pm
You can easily adjust the times to be more specific if needed (i.e. only call between 8am and 12pm)
Step 5: Take your lead assignment into account
If you're assigning leads to a lead owner, you'll want to make sure each user is only seeing leads they're assigned to. Thankfully, this is easy as long as your lead owner field is a User type.
If so, we can just show the logged user their leads by searching custom.Lead Owner:"Me"
Only show me leads that are assigned to me (meaning the logged in user)
Are you using a different user field for lead assignment?
If you created a new version of the lead owner field, and called it Sales Rep or something similar, you'll want to adjust the above query to say 'Sales Rep' instead of 'Lead Owner'.
Step 6: Sort your list
After you've defined your list criteria, you'll likely want to sort and prioritize your list in a logical way. There are a number of different ways to sort your list. You could sort by date created newest > oldest, date created oldest > newest. You could also sort by a number type custom field if you had specific criteria to sort.
In this example, we'll provide a sorting method that works well with many calling lists we've seen. This sort will first sort your lists from fewest to most in the number of calls on the lead, and then sort by call date, order from oldest to newest.
In simpler terms, you'll have a list of leads sorted with the leads you've called the least, and then the leads where it's been the longest since your last call.
Calls least to most, and oldest to newest call dates
Now put it all together
Once you combine all of the above concepts, you'll end up with a list that consistently refreshes itself with leads to call, while excluding any lead you may not want to call at that time.
Here's what it looks like all together:
Sample calling Smart View
Need to get more specific?
There are so many other ways to use searching and Smart Views to build a great calling list based on your business and sales process.
If you need any help building the list you need, just reach to us at support@close.com and we'll be happy to help!