Featured Sales Cycle Technology
Published by The Pursuit Group, Inc.
April 2008

Our monthly pick to make your sales efforts more effective.

When searching for innovative sales-enabling technologies, it’s easy to overlook the ones designed to squeeze more mileage from the tools you already use every day.

Take the telephone. For most businesses, the phone is the primary mode of interaction – with customers, dealers, and even their own employees. Obviously, a tool that increases the amount and speed of that interaction via the phone is worth considering, right?

So consider Vontoo, a Web-based application that allows you to easily create, send and track recorded phone messages to any number of people without buying and installing your own hardware or software. Used properly -- a point we must be clearly emphasize -- recorded messaging can be a terrific assist to sales and customer service performance. Here’s a few thoughts on how:

- If you sell consumables, create a phone reminder system to ensure that opt-in customers never run out of your products.

- If your products or services have an expiration or renewal cycle, set up phone reminder well in advance of customer renewal dates.

- Encourage customers to sign up for phone alerts to new or updated products/services.

- If you need to get some types of information to channel partners quickly and efficiently, consider an automated phone message…one call and one message to as many people as necessary.

We really like that Vontoo is designed for companies that want to start small and test the waters. Not only can you do it yourself, but you can send out a handful of messages without buying an expensive package of services. Yet Vontoo is also scalable, and can even interconnect with other sales/marketing software to create and send automated reminders.

And Vontoo knows that there’s no place in the business world for the invasive blast of recorded phone messages like the ones voters receive during an election year. By prohibiting the use of purchased or rented target lists, they’ve taken deliberate steps to ensure that none of its users can “voice-spam” target lists of prospects. Every contact using Vontoo must be permission-based. Opt-in, in other words.

Vontoo also makes integration with your own software – your CRM system, for example – completely possible. Via a web services API, Vontoo allows users of their “Embedded” version to create a new level of automation and efficiency for phone-based sales and customer support. Some of the ways this can be beneficial include:

- In many organizations, salespeople are highly mobile, and use only their phone to connect with the office during business hours. Automated reminders of customer and prospect touches could prove far more effective via phone, especially if salespeople have gaps in their day and don’t have the time or place to set up laptops and connect to the company extranet.

- In order to save staff time identifying which customers to call for updates, re-purchases or other events, you can create automated triggers through your ordering systems or ERP software. Then, when a customer’s stock gets low, or they are approaching a renewal date, the call is automatically triggered, and a follow-up reminder can be appended to the customer’s CRM file.

Vontoo is one of the only companies in the automated phone support space that offers a free trial, so if you’re intrigued but not sure automated phone messaging is for you, log on to www.vontoo.com and take advantage of the 7-day trial offer. We think you’ll find ways to make the phone an even more important part of your sales toolbox.