Inside sales is the practice of turning leads into customers remotely. Communication between the client and the customer occurs via phone, email, or the internet. Inside sales become a critical sales acquisition strategy when a company or startup needs to convert leads into potential small and medium business paying accounts. Thus, the inside sales representative will help prospect, qualify, assess and close those opportunities.
Understanding inside sales
Inside sales has become the predominant sales model in the past decade or so for representatives in B2B, SaaS, tech, and B2C industries where high-value products are the norm.
The inside sales model normally entails high-touch transactions over email and phone. Unlike telemarketers, inside sales require representatives to be knowledgeable and experienced. They must also be able to use technology to conduct demos, present information, and perform any other function that a traditional sales rep would.
Inside sales is the opposite approach to outside sales, where the sales representative goes out into the field to meet with prospects. However, the line between inside sales and outside sales is less clear than it once was. Many outside sales reps who work on-premise handle some aspects of their business remotely and utilize the same tools inside sales reps have used for years.
The coronavirus pandemic has shifted the goalposts once more, with the vast majority of outside sales representatives now working remotely. To some extent, this has destigmatized inside sales and its ability to close high-value sales without direct, face-to-face client interaction.
Essential inside sales tools
Inside sales representatives use some or all of the following tools:
Telephone
Even though the telephone was invented in the 19th century, voice conversation is still an integral part of remote sales. Calls are made to first schedule an appointment and then follow up with a pitch.
Inside sales representatives are also turning to text messages to communicate with prospects, leads, and customers.
CRM software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software provides an overview of sales activities and ensures the rep can effectively manage their pipeline.
The most capable CRM software also allows the rep to manage their client relationships more effectively by building stronger relationships and fostering mutual growth.
In most cases, sales professionals reach out to prospects via email once the marketing team has acquired them. Email tracking software then allows the rep to see whether an email to a prospect has been opened or whether the attached files have been downloaded. Based on these insights, a specific course of follow-up action is taken.
Reporting tools and dashboards
Successful inside sales also rely on data monitoring and the ability to extract useful and actionable data insights.
Reporting tools should clarify, among other things:
The best performing representatives.
The email templates with the highest response rates.
Whether monthly sales target will be hit.
The optimum follow-up sequence.
Social intelligence software
Social intelligence software utilizes social media data to improve, inform, or enhance business strategy. The most adept inside sales professionals use social media to their advantage – whether that be to nurture a lead or identify a new opportunity in an existing account.
Social selling tools
In the context of inside sales, social telling involves the utilization of tools that integrate with social media to create and maintain relationships.
Social selling may include endorsing a prospect on LinkedIn or scouring the platform’s search function for outbound targets. It may also include something as simple as following important accounts on Twitter or sharing the target company’s content across multiple sites.
Productivity apps
Like any work that occurs remotely, distraction is a constant menace for inside sales personnel. To work more efficiently, some use tools such as Focus which blocks access to social media sites or any others considered to be a time sink.
Others use Slack to increase productivity in a different way. Here, the platform enables automated sales notifications to be fed into a chat room. This allows the rep to keep abreast of day-to-day operations and recent developments.
Key takeaways:
Inside sales is the practice of turning leads into customers remotely. Communication between the client and the customer occurs via phone, email, or the internet.
Inside sales is now the default sales method thanks to advances in technology and a shift to remote work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inside sales representatives utilize some or all of the following tools: telephone, CRM software, email tracking software, reporting tools, social intelligence software, social selling tools, and productivity apps.
Business development comprises a set of strategies and actions to grow a business via a mixture of sales, marketing, and distribution. While marketing usually relies on automation to reach a wider audience, and sales typically leverage a one-to-one approach. The business development’s role is that of generating distribution.
The more you move from consumers to enterprise clients, the more you’ll need a sales force able to manage complex sales. As a rule of thumb, a more expensive product, in B2B or Enterprise, will require an organizational structure around sales. An inexpensive product to be offered to consumers will leverage on marketing.
A sales cycle is the process that your company takes to sell your services and products. In simple words, it’s a series of steps that your sales reps need to go through with prospects that lead up to a closed sale.
RevOps – short for Revenue Operations – is a framework that aims to maximize the revenue potential of an organization. RevOps seeks to align these departments by giving them access to the same data and tools. With shared information, each then understands their role in the sales funnel and can work collaboratively to increase revenue.
In negotiation theory, BATNA stands for “Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement,” and it’s one of the key tenets of negotiation theory. Indeed, it describes the best course of action a party can take if negotiations fail to reach an agreement. This simple strategy can help improve the negotiation as each party is (in theory) willing to take the best course of action, as otherwise, an agreement won’t be reached.
In negotiation, WATNA stands for “worst alternative to a negotiated agreement,” representing one of several alternative options if a resolution cannot be reached. This is a useful technique to help understand what might be a negotiation outcome, that even if negative is still better than a WATNA, making the deal still feasible.
The ZOPA (zone of possible agreement) describes an area in which two negotiation parties may find common ground. Indeed, ZOPA is critical to explore the deals where the parties get a mutually beneficial outcome to prevent the risk of a win-lose, or lose-win scenario. And therefore get to the point of a win-win negotiation outcome.
Revenue modeling is a process of incorporating a sustainable financial model for revenue generation within a business model design. Revenue modeling can help to understand what options make more sense in creating a digital business from scratch; alternatively, it can help in analyzing existing digital businesses and reverse engineer them.
Customer experience maps are visual representations of every encounter a customer has with a brand. On a customer experience map, interactions called touchpoints visually denote each interaction that a business has with its consumers. Typically, these include every interaction from the first contact to marketing, branding, sales, and customer support.
AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. That is a model that is used in marketing to describe the potential journey a customer might go through before purchasing a product or service. The AIDA model helps organizations focus their efforts when optimizing their marketing activities based on the customers’ journeys.
Social selling is a process of developing trust, rapport, and a relationship with a prospect to enhance the sales cycle. It usually happens through tech platforms (like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and more), which enable salespeople to engage with potential prospects before closing the sale, thus becoming more effective.
The CHAMP methodology is an iteration of the BANT sales process for modern B2B applications. While budget, authority, need, and timing are important aspects of qualifying sales leads, the CHAMP methodology was developed after sales reps questioned the order in which the BANT process is followed.
The BANT process was conceived at IBM in the 1950s as a way to quickly identify prospects most likely to make a purchase. Despite its introduction around 70 years ago, the BANT process remains relevant today and was formally adopted into IBM’s Business Agility Solution Identification Guide.
The MEDDIC sales process was developed in 1996 by Dick Dunkel at software company Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC). The MEDDIC sales process is a framework used by B2B sales teams to foster predictable and efficient growth.
STP marketing simplifies the market segmentation process and is one of the most commonly used approaches in modern marketing. The core focus of STP marketing is commercial effectiveness. Marketers use the approach to select the most valuable segments from a target audience and develop a product positioning strategy and marketing mix for each.
The sales funnel is a model used in marketing to represent an ideal, potential journey that potential customers go through before becoming actual customers. As a representation, it is also often an approximation, that helps marketing and sales teams structure their processes at scale, thus building repeatable sales and marketing tactics to convert customers.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
The general concept of Bootstrapping connects to “a self-starting process that is supposed to proceed without external input.” In business, Bootstrapping means financing the growth of the company from the available cash flows produced by a viable business model. Bootstrapping requires the mastery of the key customers driving growth.
The virtuous cycle is a positive loop or a set of positive loops that trigger a non-linear growth. Indeed, in the context of digital platforms, virtuous cycles – also defined as flywheel models – help companies capture more market shares by accelerating growth. The classic example is Amazon’s lower prices driving more consumers, driving more sellers, thus improving variety and convenience, thus accelerating growth.
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Enterprise sales describes the procurement of large contracts that tend to be characterized by multiple decision-makers, complicated implementation, higher risk levels, or longer sales cycles.
Outside sales occur when a salesperson meets with prospects or customers in the field. This sort of sales function is critical to acquire larger accounts, like enterprise customers, for which the acquisition process is usually longer, more complex and it requires the understanding of the target organization. Thus the outside sales will cut through the noise to acquire a large enterprise account for the organization.
A freeterprise is a combination of free and enterprise where free professional accounts are driven into the funnel through the free product. As the opportunity is identified the company assigns the free account to a salesperson within the organization (inside sales or fields sales) to convert that into a B2B/enterprise account.
Zero to One is a book by Peter Thiel. But it also represents a business mindset, more typical of tech, where building something wholly new is the default mode, rather than building something incrementally better. The core premise of Zero to One then is that it’s much more valuable to create a whole new market/product rather than starting from existing markets.
Palantir is a software company offering intelligence services from governments and institutions to large commercial organizations. The company’s two main platforms Gotham and Foundry, are integrated at enterprise-level. Its business model follows three phases: Acquire, Expand, and Scale. The company bears the pilot costs in the acquire and expand phases, and it runs at a loss. Where in the scale phase, the customers’ contribution margins become positive.
Consultative selling is a sales approach favoring relationship building and open dialogue to adequately meet the needs of a prospective customer. By building trust quickly a consultative selling approach can help the customer better meet her/his expectations and the salesperson hit her/his targets more effectively.
A unique selling proposition (USP) enables a business to differentiate itself from its competitors. Importantly, a USP enables a business to stand for something that they, in turn, become known among consumers. A strong and recognizable USP is crucial to operating successfully in competitive markets.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
