Five ways 3CX can power your sales team

In today’s digital world of email, instant messaging, live chat and video conferencing, phone systems are not often the first thing that businesses look to modernize. But sales teams have always had a close relationship with the phone. While intelligent prospecting, email tracking and automation is becoming increasingly important to modern sales processes, getting hold of a prospect or key customer over the phone can be so much more valuable than by email.

According to Brevet, 92% of key customer interactions happen over the phone. While some teams believe email is the key to sales, calls are immediate, powerful and leave a lasting impression on a prospect. If you get the right person on the phone, you can understand what they’re looking for, problems and concerns they may be having and offer them a solution. The building blocks of good consultative selling.

Modern phone systems, like 3CX, go way beyond just a way to make and receive calls. Instead, they help power sales teams in the same way that specialist sales tools and software do – driving efficiency, saving time and ultimately, increasing your team’s chance of hitting their targets.

At Gradwell, my own sales team uses 3CX as a key part of our sales and marketing technology stack. Here are five features we love and depend on every day.

Saving time with CRM systems

Salespeople both love and hate CRMs. Having one view of all your prospect and customer activity can be incredibly useful, but manually logging interactions, opportunities, requests and more can be a huge time drain. 3CX connects directly to popular CRMs using APIs, meaning that calls are automatically logged against contacts (no manual input required), and contact details pop up on inbound calls when the system recognises a contact. Every number in the system also gets a simple click to dial. If your team does a serious amount of calling, these features all add up to saving a significant amount of time, allowing you to do less admin and more selling.

Even better, with a bit of help from your IT team, you can integrate 3CX with other apps that work in a similar way to CRM systems using the 3CX API. We’ve done this ourselves with Salesloft – a sales automation platform, allowing us to do better prospecting at scale.

Video conferencing with easy setup and great quality connections

Video conferencing is becoming the primary way of meeting people in a post-COVID world. For us at Gradwell, our sales team depends on great quality video presentations and meetings. Most people have heard of Zoom and other video-first solutions, but 3CX’s WebMeeting is as good as virtually any of the competition. With practically no setup, you can start live meetings, webinars, presentations, training and more, all linked with your phone system.

No-drama calling on any device

My sales team is working almost entirely remotely, and depending on the time of day, can be in front of PC or Apple laptops, iPhones, Android phones and any sort of tablet. One key feature of 3CX is the ability to make and receive calls seamlessly on any of these devices. We also particularly love the browser extension. Being able to make, receive and manage calls and call flows in seconds is a godsend.

Training new reps with analytics and call features

3CX allows managers to get detailed reports on call volumes, either through wallboards or reports sent via email. Managers like me can check on progress and see performance by rep – particularly crucial for monitoring the progress of newer staff who might need a helping hand. On similar lines, the Call Whisper and Silent Monitoring are useful features, both for our current sales team and for training new starters. With these CFD features, managers like myself can listen in to a sales call and whisper suggestions to my colleague without the customer hearing. It’s extremely helpful – especially during remote working – as it means I can monitor sales calls and evaluate what the team are doing well and what they could improve on. With call barging, you can even jump in and take over a call – useful for those difficult conversations.

Turn leads from live chat into opportunities with calling and video

Whatever you think of live chat, it’s not going away any time soon. If your business doesn’t have an existing product to allow your customers and prospects to chat to reps via your website, you are leaving leads, enquiries and revenue on the table. 3CX allows you to combine this with your phone system, meaning you can turn a casual chat into a voice or video call at the click of a button, turning a very low-intent lead into an active opportunity in minutes. We work closely with our marketing team to make sure we make the most of leads from live chat, following up any initial conversations with a call or video meeting to dig into the detail as quickly as possible.

Gradwell is a leading provider of communications technology to the UK’s SMEs providing a wide range of leading telephony and connectivity products. Founded over 20 years ago, Gradwell are one of the top 3CX partners in the UK and achieved 3CX Titanium partner status in 2020.