The Best Dialer for Salesloft - Calling within Salesloft, or a parallel dialer?

Salesloft's Dialer

Salesloft offers a dialer that lives within their platform, and thus integrates natively with the workflows you already have in the product. As of 2023, Salesloft has expanded access to the dialer to every tier (Essentials, Advanced, and Premier, though it's available as an add-on for custom Enterprise plans).

While Salesloft's dialing capabilities live seamlessly within the product's UX, Salesloft's dialer is restricted to click-to-call, without any power or parallel dialing features. Though this can be convenient for one-off phone calls to contacts, it's difficult to power through 100+ contacts in a single session, which is necessary to make cold-calling a reliable source of top-of-funnel (still fuzzy on the difference between power dialing and parallel dialing? Check out our explainer here). 

Though Salesloft's dialer is a well-integrated product and a cost-effective add-on for teams that don't rely heavily on cold-calling (after all, what's cheaper than free?), it may not be the best choice for teams with demanding dialing quotas and long lead lists. For those users, it may make more sense to look into a third-party parallel dialer.

What to look for in a third-party Salesloft dialer

At this point, you're either sold on using a third-party dialer with Salesloft, or you're not hitting enough call volume to justify the investment. With so many dialers out there, though, how can you narrow down the search?

First thing's first — what type of dialer are you looking for? I'd recommend checking out our article on the different types of dialers to get a sense of which one would boost your team's performance the most. If you're processing a high volume of leads and your reps' time is the main bottleneck for getting more meetings, a parallel dialer is a worthwhile investment that'll give you instant results.

When evaluating a parallel dialer to use with Salesloft, there are a few important points to consider:

• Depth of Integration: How natively will the dialer work with Salesloft? Table-stakes features include importing cadences, syncing dispositions, and writing back call tasks. Some nice-to-haves worth thinking about are time-zone filtering and step-filtering.

• Spam Protection: virtually every dialer procures its numbers from the same few digital telephony providers. Most of these numbers, though, show up as Spam Likely the second they're purchased. Furthermore, parallel dialing can hurt a number's reputation quickly, especially if the number rotation logic isn't robust. It's important to ensure that you're using a dialer that alerts you to spam issues with your numbers and remediates those issues so you're not losing out on connects.

• Human Detection Speed: The cornerstone of the parallel dialer is its ability to detect when a human has picked up the phone, as opposed to an IVR or a voicemail inbox. Delays in human detection can at best lead to an awkward opener, and at worst lead to premature hangups and lose you hot leads. When deciding on a parallel dialer, try calling yourself & coworkers to measure the latency, and listen to recordings of past calls to hear how long it took for you to get patched in.

• Cost: Parallel dialing is expensive to run; dialing multiple numbers in parallel and attaching AI listeners leads to additional costs for the dialer, which in turn means a higher price compared to normal power dialers. If a parallel dialer is a good fit for your time, the cost is almost always recouped multiple times over by the additional meetings you'll generate. That being said, it's important to compare costs across providers, as they can vary dramatically.

• Overall efficiency: The point of dialing isn't making calls; it's booking meetings. A powerful dialer will maximize connect rate by remediating spam issues and minimizing delay pre-pickup, while also optimizing its UI/UX and integrations to help salespeople get through tasks as quickly as possible.

The verdict

That's a lot of information, but what should your team do?

For starters, if you're regularly making calls in Salesloft, you need a third-party dialer. Salesloft's click-to-connect quickly becomes unwieldy if you're trying to make outbound calling a core part of pipeline generation.

Once you've settled on getting a third-party dialer, I'd recommend reading our article to decide which type of dialer is most useful for you. A good rule-of-thumb is that if each rep is doing fewer than 50 dials per day, a normal power dialer may be enough. Furthermore, if your team is dialing corporate numbers, dial trees, or small business numbers, then a parallel dialer will likely end up just as efficient as an ordinary power dialer.

In almost every other case, though, a parallel dialer is probably the choice for your team, and I'd recommend following the criteria above when making your decision.

While I'll try to remain unbiased here (and I do recommend that you look into all of your options), the Elto team has worked hard to make an unbeatable product on all of those axes.

• Depth of Integration: Elto's Salesloft integration is comprehensive, and includes every one of the quality-of-life features listed. Have something unique to your workflow that you'd like to see supported? The Elto team can usually handle one-off feature requests within 24-48 hours, even during trials.

• Spam Protection: Elto SpamCheck detects whether outbound numbers are registering as Spam Likely on prospects' phones with a single click. Furthermore, the Elto team remediates all problematic numbers by registering them under your business's name with carrier registries within 24 hours.

• Human Detection Speed: EltoAMD2 is the fastest human voice detection model on the planet. Trained on hundreds of thousands of call recordings, it can often detect humans before they've even spoken, ensuring that you never start off on the wrong foot because of your dialer.

• Cost: Elto's custom logic and blend of telephony providers enables us to shave some of the cost off of parallel dialing, which we then pass onto you. We have the most affordable full-featured parallel dialer on the market, bar none; if you pass us an official quote from another one that's competitive, we're happy to compete.

• Overall efficiency: Our numbers speak for themselves. Most customers are able to generate multiple meetings during their trial alone, and we're constantly improving the product to increase booked meetings for our customers.

Want to give Elto a try? Get started on our free 7-day trial here, and learn why dozens of Salesloft sales teams turn to Elto to power their outbound calling efforts.