What can easily be pushed aside as a meaningless relic of a bygone era, area codes provide more benefit (especially for businesses) than most people give them credit for.

“Since 1947, area codes have been the foundation of the North America Telecommunications System.”

310 (LA) takes the cake as the most popular area code with 212 (NYC), 305 (Miami) and 702 (Las Vegas) as the second most popular area codes. Combine an area code like that with a custom vanity number and you could be talking big bucks.

Typically used for cheesy marketing gimmicks, vanity numbers are one thing. For serious sales connect rates, local area code numbers are a whole ‘nother ball game. As sales gets more competitive and people get more and more suspicious of answering calls, technology comes to the rescue with local presence dialing to give you the upper hand in local area code game.

How much game? A recent survey found people are 4 times more likely to answer a call from a local number. That’s 4 times more likely to connect with the person you’re calling and 4 times more likely to increase your sales quota with each call!

So how do you get the coveted “local presence” without shelling out thousands of dollars?

Area-Code Matching or Local Presence Dialing is the key to getting the presence of a field or distributed sales team of 100’s with just a team of a few people.

How does Local Presence work? Local Presence Dialing matches your outbound call’s area code to the area code of the location you are calling.

How does Local Presence Dialing help your sales team:

1. Increase Cold Call Answer Rates: Let’s be honest. In an outbound calling model, the connect rate can be downright dismal. Especially if you’re making hundreds of calls a day with a simple goal to get the person on the other end of the phone to answer, you need every advantage you can get. 400% advantage to be exact.
2. Unify Remote Offices: Unifying your offices which may be in multiple locations. With satellite offices, you can have one unified presence regardless of where people are located.
3. Establish Local Credibility: This let’s your prospects know your services extend out to their location. You know their area, you’ve done business there before and you can handle any circumstances unique to their location.
4. Remote Team, No Problem: Work from home, the road or anywhere else and no one is to the wiser. Gone are the days (almost) of huge call centers in cubicles. Your diverse team needs to be everyplace at once.

ProTip: To keep to continuity, use Agent Return Call to ensure the callback gets to the last person that called them — regardless of where the call originated from. You can also set-up zip code routing for your inbound calls for smart routing across multiple locations.

Caution: As tempting as it may be, do not engage in auto dialing. You can run into some serious issues with the TCPA compliance of telemarketers.