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DittoTalk closes the closing gap
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: July 13, 2017
Closing ratio. It is the mark of either success or failure of any sales effort. But the difference between sales success and failure may just be inconsistency of message, said Michael Boccia, president of Youngstown’s DittoTalk (https://www.dittotalk.com), a company that has taken sales presentations into the digital age.
“DittoTalk is what webinars want to be when they grow up,” said Boccia, who came on board with the company after being a customer at Transamerica about four years ago.
DittoTalk is a completely interactive sales tool that puts all of the sales people and potential customers on the same page throughout the sales presentation, said Boccia.
The idea for the product came to the company founder and inventor, Michael Helm, after trying unsuccessfully to respond to a television fundraising appeal in 2006.
“Imagine if when I phoned, your television turned on. And every time I said something over the phone the TV backed it up with beautiful visuals,” said Helm.
DittoTalk works in much the same way. The potential customer and the sales person are looking at the same presentation and same screen, he explained. When a customer is (or is not) interested in any aspect of the presentation, Helm says the screen and sales reps respond accordingly adding that the program is infinitely scalable to any organization.
DittoTalk does that and more, said Boccia, including interactive calculators for, say, working on a mortgage deal.
“This is not a boring PowerPoint presentation,” said Boccia. “The customer is fully engaged.”
“When I found that research shows 91 percent of people daydream and don't pay attention during presentations, I knew there had to be a better way,” Helm said. “I created DittoTalk and DittoTouch to respect the viewer, and to allow them to determine what they see by interacting with, instead of merely watching, a presentation.”
The company’s client sales organizations are experiencing record-breaking sales ratios, said Boccia.
“Our client closing rates average 84 percent, with some as high as 90 percent,” he said.
These claims are backed up by DittoTalk clients.
Theodore Wilson, a field leader for small sales organization Valentus, credits DittoTalk for both a tremendous increase in closing percentage and in corporate income since his company started using the software in April 2016.
“Since we started using DittoTalk, we have had approximately a 90 percent closing rate,” said Wilson. “The company’s income has gone from $3 million in the sixteen months before we started with DittoTalk to over $22 million in the fifteen months since.”
He describes DittoTalk as “revolutionary.”
Transamerica’s Deanna Marimonda, who has been using the software since the company began, said that the real key to sales success is “confidence.”
Marimonda also said that her company’s closing ratio has increased substantially in the four years that they have been using DittoTalk.
“Something like the closing ratio comes down to confidence in not messing it up,” she said. “If that happens, the closing ratio naturally goes up and it has tremendously here. It is a definite confidence booster, with a perfect script that is taken from presentations of top salespeople.
“It accommodates to the person we are talking to. Memorizing the script is one thing, but responding to the customer’s questions is the key.”
Although the closing rate may be an indicator of sales success for a salesperson, the real mark for the company according to the sales software company Profitfinderpro, is the answer to the question “what does it cost the company to make a sale compared to the dollar volume of sales (the salesperson) is bringing in?”
Beyond increasing income, Boccia said that DittoTalk decreases costs for client companies in two specific ways.
First, there is a very small cost of training.
“There is zero learning curve,” said Boccia. “The sales person is up and running immediately and the platform scales up the sales staff.”
Second, the time of the presentation is significantly diminished, because the potential customer controls where the presentation goes, getting to an answer much more quickly than usual.
“We can take a 90-minute presentation and reduce it to 20 minutes,” said Boccia. In that way, he said, “they don’t talk themselves out of a sale.”
DittoTalk is beginning to roll out its newest product: DittoTouch, an “automated version” of DittoTalk that will act as a pre-qualifier, saving the clients companies even more time and money, said Boccia.
DittoTalk’s offices are located in the Youngstown Business Incubator, where a small staff oversees remote workers from around the globe.