It’s All Too Much

I hate this supermarket, But I have to say it makes me think
A hundred mineral waters, Fun to guess which ones are safe to drink
Two hundred brands of cookies, 87 kinds of chocolate chip
They say that choice is freedom, I’m so free it drives me to the brink?

One reason is the sheer volume of stuff out there. According to Chiefmartec.com’s latest Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic published in May, the marketing technology landscape exploded in 2024, with a 27.8% increase in tools from last year (now featuring more than 14,106 products)! Let that sink in for a moment. More than 14,000 products to choose from, and nearly a third of the products out there didn’t exist a year ago.

Your number or your name

Finding a phone number for a business, or an executive at that business, shouldn’t be an Olympic sport. But find phone numbers is getting increasingly difficult and complicated. The once-common practice of companies listing a phone number in the footer of their website is long gone. Even the investor or media contacts at an organization (me included) have removed their phone numbers from news releases. I did it out of self-defense, because I was getting inundated with calls for employment verification, accounts payable, and sales pitches for everything you could possibly imagine. And even several months after leaving my last role, I still get these calls.

B2B companies typically have a team of Sales Development Reps (AKA Business Development Reps), who reach out to prospects by phone or email to set appointments for the company’s salespeople. So how do they find phone numbers or email addresses? Reps located offshore would often unknowingly populate the CRM with toll-free numbers. I would advise them that most area codes in the 800 range are toll-free numbers, which are rarely answered by someone who works for that company. In fact, the people answering those numbers probably work for an outsourced customer care partner (our competitors). Not only would the agent taking the call not know who that decision maker is, they wouldn’t have contact information or the ability to transfer a call to them. Toss out the toll-free number and continue searching.

You can consult a search engine, but the chances are excellent that the phone number will be wrong, disconnected, or not answered by humans. Aren’t there tons of companies that claim to sell contact information? Sure. ZoomInfo, UpLead, Apollo, and others provide email addresses and phone numbers. But these are not especially accurate. The email addresses stand a better chance of being correct because there are only a handful of email address conventions (e.g., first initial then last name, or first name dot last name, followed by the email domain) so if you find one person’s email address at a company you can guess your way to finding your prospect’s email address. Telephone numbers are a totally different story. My experience shows that 10% to 20% of company phone numbers provided by ZoomInfo and their ilk are correct, and maybe 5% of the individual phone numbers will get you to the correct person.

Once you’ve found a number for the company, the next hurdle is reaching the prospect. Call the main number and set the bar low. Gone are the days when a helpful receptionist would answer and route your call. Press 1 for Sales, press 2 for HR (usually a link to an employment verification service that I hope isn’t me), press 3 for Customer Support, and so on. Good luck getting a human. And if they have a dial-by-name directory, run screaming.

Companies such as Ring Central, Mitel, Dialpad, 8×8 and more develop dial-by-name directories. Unfortunately, they are all frustrating to use. With technology that has been around for more than 30 years, why doesn’t it work? Can we use AI to make them useful?

As the eternal optimist, I think we can. Full disclosure – I’ve never purchased, installed, implemented, or maintained a dial-by-name directory in my life. I just try to use the things. This is all just conjecture based on some research I’ve done on the subject. Here goes…

AI can significantly enhance dial-by-name directories by improving their accuracy, efficiency, and user experience. Here are several ways AI can be applied:

  • Speech Recognition: Implement advanced speech recognition algorithms to accurately transcribe spoken names. AI models trained on large datasets can better understand diverse accents and pronunciation variations to improve recognition accuracy.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP): Utilize NLP algorithms to interpret user queries and match them with the most relevant names in the directory. This includes understanding synonyms, variations in naming conventions, and contextual clues to provide more accurate results.
  • Machine Learning: Train the models to continually improve recognition accuracy by learning from user interactions and feedback. Maybe these directories don’t get enough use for machine learning to learn anything?
  • Contextual Understanding: Develop AI systems capable of understanding the context of a conversation to refine search results. For example, if a user asks for “Kevin from the marketing department,” the system should prioritize names matching both “Kevin” and “marketing” over other results.
  • Integration with Other Systems: Can you integrate the AI-powered dial-by-name directories with other enterprise systems such as HR databases? This would go a long way toward matching the letters on the dial pad with up-to-date contact information.

By leveraging AI technologies, dial-by-name directories should become more accurate, efficient, and a lot less frustrating to use.