The world of sales has evolved over the past few decades. While outside sales was predominately the sales model adopted by most businesses, the advancements in technology have created a whole new side of sales—inside sales.
Today, inside sales is the most widely used and accepted sales model in industries selling niche and high-ticket items. In this guide, you’ll learn the importance of an inside sales team, their role in an organization, and what tools you need to have in place for your inside sales team to work efficiently.
Inside sales is not telemarketing. Although inside sales was evolved from telemarketing and both selling methods use the phone to make sales, they are not the same. Telemarketing focuses on selling low-ticket items and involves only a one-time contact with a prospect. Inside sales, on the other hand, involves multiple touchpoints—by phone, email, and social media—with a prospect to close a deal.
The job of inside sales representatives varies from company to company. Some organizations use inside sales reps for both cold outreach and inbound sales, while others use inside sales team solely for inbound sales.
Depending on your sales model, you can define roles and responsibilities for your inside sales representatives.
The role of an inside sales representative is to identify, qualify, nurture, and convert leads remotely. Your inside sales reps must have excellent product and industry knowledge, and they should be highly trained to answer any questions related to your product or to the prospect’s industry. They should also be trained to educate prospects on how your product solves their business challenges. On a day-to-day basis, the role of inside sales representatives include:
Build your ideal customer profile by identifying companies who will benefit from your solution. Use sales intelligence tools and source companies and prospects to approach that match your ideal customer profile.
Understand prospect’s needs and pain points, and educate them through online presentations and demos on how your product can help solve their business challenge.
Reach out to prospects through cold calls and emails, and promptly follow up with those who have inquired about your product via phone, email, and social media.
Negotiate and close new opportunities, or pass them to field sales executives for further development and closure
Reps working in inside sales have to be quick on their feet, excel in solving the prospect’s business challenge through your product, and should have a positive outlook that isn’t put down by objections. Some of the other skills to look out for when hiring sales development representatives for your inside sales team are:
| Inside Sales | Outside Sales |
|---|---|
| Reps establish and nurture relationships with a larger group of people every day. | Reps reach out in person to only a few but well-targeted prospects. |
| Cost-effective sales model as reps work on fixed schedules and have a stable salary. It involves a one-time investment in computers, internet, and software. | Expensive sales model as the base salary of the reps is high. Also, travel and accommodation add up to incidental costs. |
| Shorter sales cycle as they can work on multiple deals at a time and move them towards closure from their workplace. | Longer sales cycle as reps have to travel to different locations to meet clients and close deals. |
| Rely on phone, email, CRM software, web conferencing tools, etc., to communicate with prospects. | Primarily use phone and email to schedule in-person meetings, and CRM software to update the status of deals. |
| Reps have to create engaging conversations with prospects and show confidence about the product or service they sell. | Reps have the ability to build rapport and long-lasting relationships with customers. |
The telephone is still one of the most widely used sales tools to reach out to prospects and have a conversation. Although inside sales don't use the physical device anymore, an auto dialer software or a CRM software with a built-in phone functionality makes it a lot easier for sales reps to call prospects. Sales reps can call prospects in a click, leave voicemails, transfer calls to other sales reps, and even have the calls automatically logged in the system. Some tools also have an option to create a local presence by calling prospects from the same area code number.
Although social media like LinkedIn has changed the way inside sales communicate, email remains vital in business communications. In fact, most of the time, the initial contact with a prospect is done by email. With an email management system in place, sales reps can send out mass emails, create and save well-crafted emails as templates, create nurture journey campaigns, and even track email open and click rates. Most CRM software have the provision to integrate with email clients like Gmail, Outlook, etc., allowing sales reps to send and receive emails, and view every sales interaction without switching between applications.
If your business receives a high volume of leads each day, your inside sales team is in for a hard challenge. Without being able to spot hot leads from the cold, there are chances to neglect viable opportunities because leads aren’t prioritized. A lead scoring tool solves the problem by effectively prioritizing sales leads. You can set scores based on the lead's characteristics—job title, country, company, etc.—and interactions with your website, product, and email. Lead scoring enables sales reps to quickly identify sales-ready leads who are likely to convert, and spend more time engaging with such leads.
For inside sales team, having meaningful conversations with prospects is essential to build rapport since they aren’t interacting face-to-face. But to have meaningful, engaging conversations, sales reps need to have context into the prospect’s buying intentions. An event tracking software integrates with your website and product to capture visitor activity and engagement. By tracking their website behavior, sales reps can get a visual idea of the leads’ interaction with your website, where they are in the buying journey, and how likely they are to purchase your solution. A good CRM software can intelligently track lead activities and chronologically arrange their activity in a timeline to the relevant record in the CRM, helping inside sales reps track events and manage sales in one place.
To build a successful inside sales process, you need to track metrics that matter and extract actionable insights from it. Using reporting tools, you can identify who are the top performers in your team and what sales activities—emails sent, phone calls made, tasks and appointments scheduled—correlated to the results they achieved. You can also track the response rate for each email template, analyze the time your inside sales team takes to complete a sale, identify which stage in your sales process reps spend most of their time, and view how many deals are likely to close in the coming months. While it’s essential to track all the data points in a system, a good sales reporting tool should also allow you to create reports quickly and easily, and slice and dice data to extract meaningful insights.
Since a majority of the activities revolve around prospects and engaging with them, inside sales representatives need a centralized database to store and access prospect data as and when required. A CRM software is a great tool to do that and a lot more. A good CRM software gives sales reps an overview of all their sales activities and helps them stay on top of their sales pipeline. It also automates manual and administrative work, providing more time for sales reps to do what they do best—sell.
The CRM system has built-in AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, automations, event tracking, reporting, and a lot more. It comes with a 21-day free trial, has a freemium plan, and free 24x5 support over phone and email—irrespective of whether you are a free user or a paying customer.
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