A progressive dialer places the next call only once a rep is confirmed free, one line at a time. It behaves almost identically to a power dialer and, like one, abandons no calls — the difference is that availability triggers the dial rather than the previous call ending.
In B2B sales tooling the terms progressive and power are used more or less interchangeably, and the distinction matters mostly in contact-centre software where agent state is tracked formally. The practical property they share is the important one: one line per agent means zero abandoned calls, structurally.
Neither is a parallel dialer, and neither will move a high-volume outbound team past the ceiling that single-line dialing imposes.
The reason to know the term at all is that contact-centre vendors sell progressive dialing as a distinct and more advanced product than power dialing, and for an inbound-blended floor with formal agent states that framing is fair. For a B2B outbound team the two behave the same way and should be evaluated on price and CRM integration rather than on which word the vendor chose.
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