SalesLoft makes sales more personal with Twilio

In 2015, developer Steve Bussey built the first version of an internal dialer for the SalesLoft sales team. Using the Twilio Voice API, it was easy: the project was started on a Friday, and the sales team was using it by Monday. All in, Bussey spent less than 24 hours developing it. Within a few weeks, the dialer was ready to roll out to SalesLoft’s customers.

What was once a weekend project for a single engineer has now become a cornerstone of the business, allowing sales reps to call opportunities from right inside SalesLoft or their browser. Today, the dialer’s popularity is surging, with a 4x increase in usage in just the last year.

A Single Sales Engagement Platform

SalesLoft believes the buyer’s experience has been terrible for far too long—both for sales professionals trying to make meaningful connections and for those on the receiving end—and the company is on a mission to make meaningful improvements. Before SalesLoft created their sales engagement platform, sales professionals relied on disparate products. Sales dialers weren’t integrated into the other tools they used, and this led to more than just logistical challenges.

“If you’re trying piecemeal solutions and it’s not all in one place, you have to worry about data being stored in different places and using different providers. Trying to manage all of that, instead of having a single organized, multichannel approach for your entire sales team, is incredibly difficult,” said Bryan Hill, product manager at SalesLoft. “What we’ve been able to do with Twilio is bring all that in together into one single sales engagement platform.”

Connecting Human-to-Human

The SalesLoft platform helps sales teams set and execute on a cadence of communications to convert more target accounts into customer accounts. As a company that lives and breathes sales, SalesLoft sought to add a dialer to its suite of services to help sales professionals reach customers faster and more effectively. Although they already offered a popular email product, adding a tool to support voice connections was equally important.

“When you’re thinking about a multichannel approach in sales, the best way to humanize it is to get people on the phone and speak to them human-to-human. The most personal you can be with someone in an inside sales position is to use your voice and actually have a conversation with them,” said Hill.

While the product team looked for solutions that could be implemented quickly, they also needed it to be reliable and easily scalable as the company grew. Twilio was an obvious choice, favored by SalesLoft engineers and the COO. The team built the dialer using Twilio’s Programmable Voice API, based on VOIP technology, which allowed sales reps to either call opportunities from right inside their browser or bridge the connection to an existing mobile or desk phone.

Now, Hill explained, “Our dialer is not just part of our business, it’s part of our identity. It defines the SalesLoft approach of personalization at scale.”

Dialed for Success

The dialer has gone through several iterations over the years, evolving from a simple outbound dialer that worked within the SalesLoft application to a tool that sales reps now use to take notes, record sentiments, and drop pre-recorded voicemails from inside the Google Chrome browser, a Gmail inbox, and the popular CRM platform Salesforce.

“We act as the number one location for connecting with customers through voice, both outbound and inbound,” said Hill. “You can open up our dialer wherever you are; it goes with you. Essentially, we work where you work.”

SalesLoft has added a “tremendous amount of functionality and transparency,” according to Hill, including “everything from letting our customers know if there are any issues with their call to letting them know who’s talking and speaking on the call using a visual indicator for volume.”

Sales reps can also ask for help, flagging their conversations so a sales manager can listen in, provide one-sided feedback live on a call, or join the two-way conversation directly. Other features include LocalDial and Custom Caller ID, both utilizing Twilio Proxy. LocalDial automatically matches the area code of an outgoing call to the current area code of the lead a rep is dialing. And Custom Caller ID makes sure the number that shows up in caller ID matches the rep’s number in their email signature.

Intelligent Sales Journeys

Using Twilio Voice Insights, SalesLoft can provide detailed performance insights for every call, allowing users to quickly analyze the outcome of the team’s sales conversations. Users have the option to automatically record calls, track disposition, and analyze sentiment and call outcomes.
“Twilio Insights has become absolutely critical to how we serve our customers,” said Hill. “Because of the insights that we get from Twilio, we’re able to give them recommendations so that they can be successful.”

The SalesLoft dialer offers 15 custom activity fields, such as call duration, sentiment, disposition, and cadence identifiers for deep insights into every activity. It also automatically logs calls, records tasks, captures notes, and syncs directly into Salesforce. And with A/B testing, users can test multiple call openings and call scripts to uncover which variations lead to the best conversions.

Rising Above the Noise

The biggest challenge modern sales professionals face, according to Hill, is “rising above the noise.” With so many options available to customers today, sales professionals are always looking for new ways to engage their customers so they can share their products and services with them.

“That’s what we think about for the future as well. How can we help our customers rise above the noise and be heard by their customers so that they can have a positive buying experience? The buying experience has just been so terrible for so long. We’re excited to help change that,” said Hill.

Enabling excellent buying experiences: that’s a mission worth believing in.