Why your sales reps dread cold call blitzes and what to do about it

Let’s face it: Being a sales rep is not for the faint-hearted. Working in sales is like jumping on a rollercoaster every day, staying on track to reach your targets without getting taken down by all the twists and turns along the way. Throw in a cold-calling blitz, and your reps may find themselves stuck in a loop of nonstop callbacks and admin without a clear way off the ride. 

Let’s get to the real facts about outbound calling. Did you know, according to a 2024 Salesforce report, reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks, instead of focusing on conversations that add value? That’s a lot of time wasted juggling tools and taking care of manual tasks. They rarely talk to anyone, even when they block time to conduct cold calls. This results in a lot of time wasted without substantial sales.  

In this post, we’ll explore what makes outbound calling so frustrating and how new sales automation tools, such as advanced auto dialers, also known as AI dialers, may be the answer.

The very word might be enough to give it away. Cold-calling can feel pretty chilly at the best of times, let alone when you’re dealing with the following:

1. Manual calling is causing burnout and low connect rates

Picture this: you’re a sales professional with a carefully curated and maintained list of promising prospects. You block out a dedicated hour for outreach calls, but face a disheartening challenge; so much of that precious time is consumed by tedious waiting games, repetitive voicemail drops, and administrative busywork—all highly manual tasks. On top of that, when you call prospects from a different area code, your chances of connecting with someone plummet dramatically. Getting anywhere near a successful outcome means persistent follow-up across multiple days and careful timing to match prospects’ time zones, all just to land one conversation. 

It’s painful, yet it’s a common scenario that plagues modern sales teams. So much valuable selling time is lost to the above-mentioned manual tasks. It’s an obstacle course on top of a rollercoaster ride of a job that diminishes productivity and drains energy and motivation.  

2. Toggle tax and voicemail fatigue are real

To reach their targets, reps must make a high volume of calls in a short time. However, with traditional methods of outreach, there are too many apps to juggle and steps to take to lock in a high-value sales conversation. As mentioned above, that equates to a lot of time not actually spent selling your business’s products or services. 

3. Not enough quality connections = missed revenue targets

Reps rarely have meaningful conversations with sales-ready prospects, even when they have dedicated call time. While 92% of customer interactions occur over the phone, according to Salesforce, reaching a prospect takes an average of 8 cold call attempts. 

It’s safe to say that this directly impacts sales reps’ hitting or missing their quotas. In fact, according to industry benchmarks, less than half of sales professionals expect to hit their quotas, often due to poor targeting and engagement.

Manual overload, toggle tax, rep burnout, missed quotas. Here’s what happens without an integrated AI Dialer:

• More voicemails and chasing down prospects = less time identifying opportunities  
• More friction with app toggling = less selling
• Difficulty prioritizing the right prospects and maximizing every opportunity = missed sales

Big problems need big solutions, right? Wrong! The unsung hero of sales automation tools is the intelligent auto dialer.

Sellers use phone outreach to generate new opportunities, qualify prospects, and book meetings. To do this effectively, they create contact lists and dedicate specific time blocks for phone outreach and call blitzes.

Reps use dialers with advanced sales phone features like local dial, parallel dialing, and automated voicemail drop to streamline the process. Existing dialer solutions are expensive, lack comprehensive phone functionality, offer minimal conversation intelligence, and don’t provide sales leaders with unified visibility. Most importantly, they fail to deliver the extensive analytics and single-dashboard view that modern sales teams require.

Auto dialers, on the other hand, retain contact or lead information from a host of sources. After the contact information is loaded, auto dialers can automatically place calls. Auto dialers use answering machine detection technology to identify if a human has answered a call. When a human doesn’t answer, voicemails can be automatically dropped or dial trees skipped. 

While auto dialers can be set up easily in minutes, they can have a long-term impact. Finding the best auto dialer software for your team can be a minefield. That’s why we built our Auto Dialer feature for Zoom Phone, which integrates natively with Zoom Revenue Accelerator, our revenue intelligence solution.

Zoom Auto Dialer can give reps time back to focus on high-value prospects and hit their targets faster, while giving your sales managers deep insights to improve sales conversations. Here’s how: 

1. It amps up call blitzes

Automate outbound calling in line with your strategy to help reps breeze through call blocks and make the most of their time with the choice of:

• Power-dialing: single or one-at-a-time calling
• Smart-cascading: multiple staggered calling (patent-pending)
• Parallel-dialing: multiple simultaneous calls

2. It can save valuable time

Automatically leave pre-recorded voicemails when prospects don’t answer, no need for reps to wait or repeat themselves.

3. It can build trust and accelerate pick-up rates

Automatically matches outbound calls to the prospect’s region whenever possible, using the best local match.

4. It can increase sales productivity

Free reps to focus on conversations, not logistics. Let the system handle post-call busywork by logging activity and call notes, while reps can view team availability and send calendar invitations, without needing to leave the dialer.

5. It reduces friction and provides a comprehensive view of performance

Pull contact lists directly from Salesforce. Call data syncs back automatically for unified visibility and reporting.

Some enthusiastic words from our beta testers:

 “The ability to have Zoom Phone, Revenue Accelerator, and Auto Dialer in one platform is the main reason my customer is currently looking at Zoom Dialer above other solutions.”

Zoom Auto Dialer is available exclusively as a paid add-on to Zoom Phone customers in the US and Canada.

Zoom Revenue Accelerator is built for the future of sales. Tailored to your team’s unique workflow, it integrates with your CRM without a hitch. And with agentic AI at the helm, it reduces friction and drives performance, giving your team the toolkit they need to close more deals in record time and creating actual value for your business. 

When combined with Zoom Phone and our new Auto Dialer feature, Zoom Revenue Accelerator helps you and your team to enjoy all the highs and mitigate the lows of the sales rollercoaster ride. 

Want to see Zoom in action? Request a demo and discover how your team can hit those targets – with less stress and more impact.