Does Local Presence Help or Hurt your Sales Production?

For those of you following PanTerra Networks, it should come as no surprise to you that we often get custom requests to generate new features that our customers want or need. In July 2016, we received a request from one of our large customers to create a feature known as Local Presence. For those of you that have never heard of Local Presence before, let me quickly describe it to you. The concept for local presence, is that the PanTerra platform identifies the phone number to which you are dialing. It pulls from a list of DID’s registered to the PanTerra Customer's Account to use in the Caller ID. That way, if you are dialing a local phone number, it will display with a matching Area Code.

My experience has been that sales organizations and debt collection companies have high demand for this feature. Their belief is that if they can get their foot in the door, the brand recognition and skill of their associate will make up for the small deception. Some statistics claim that 80% of the general public is “Highly Unlikely” to pick up a call from an unknown Toll-Free Number. When you change that unknown Toll-Free Number to an unknown Local Number, apprehension in picking up a call from an unknown local number is reduced to a 50% likelihood that the person being called will answer.

The results are very clear that people are nearly four times more likely to answer calls from local numbers. Only 7 percent said they’re “Likely” to answer a call from an unknown caller with a toll-free area code—but that number leaps to 27.5 percent when the unknown caller is using a local area code. As a salesman, I love the ability to promise a 4x increase in contact rates, with the use of this one feature. But I want to look at this from a holistic approach. What negatives may I be causing by introducing this type of deceit?

The one negative effect that I think local presence may have is the minor deception involved in your first contact with a customer. Based on the same survey I quoted above, once people realize the caller’s actual location, they’re generally smart enough to understand the reason for the discrepancy. The strategy does have a small element of deception, and a large portion of respondents in the survey, claim they’d react strongly to this (by hanging up the phone). It’s uncertain whether or not, in reality, people would react as strongly as they claim.

I think that local presence dialing could negatively affect the chances that a person will want to do business with the caller. This indicates that the practice should be used with caution. The second is that there’s an equally large group indicating they’re unsure if it would impact their decision. This uncertainty means that in these cases, local presence dialing does work to get the caller’s foot in the door.

At the end of the day, local presence dialing can increase the answer rate by several hundred percent, the 41 percent who claim they’d hang up can, in a statistical sense, be written off as a loss. That number of slammed doors is more than made up for by the increased rate at which others are opened. Along with other factors that may affect results, such as the company’s reputation or broader public relations strategies, local presence dialing can be very effective.