Making The Case For Inside Sales

Making The Case For Inside Sales:
One mistake we see repeated in many of the companies we work with is the belief that there are only two ways to grow revenues; hiring more sales people and increasing deal size.  Unfortunately there are two flaws to this line of reasoning.
First, asking your sale team to focus only on larger deals means there may be many smaller, winnable opportunities that go unnoticed.  (In the right accounts these smaller wins can also open the door for future larger deals).  The second flaw is that outside sale people are an expensive resource and good sales people are extremely hard to find and recruit.  The new reality is that many organizations are increasingly investing in inside sales teams to lower selling costs and to increase the number of sales touches – compared to pure outside sales models.
The sales process has changed dramatically over the last few years with many buyers typically completing 60% of the buying process before ever engaging with a sales person.  With visual tools such as Webex and GoToMeeting even complex products and solutions can be clearly articulated to a prospect in an online sales call.
Selling will always require that a sales person be able to develop a relationship with a prospect, but it doesn’t always have to happen face-to-face.  From a cost perspective inside sales people generally have lower compensation packages than outside reps.  And because they are not travelling, their expenses are lower and their productivity is often higher.  It is also easier to train and coach inside sale people because a manger can monitor and provide coaching real-time.  This approach also allows for faster acquisition of product knowledge.
If you’re interested in exploring inside sales a good first step is to review your current marketing-to-sales lead lifecycle process.  Analyzing this process can show where qualified leads are falling through cracks or the outside team is only working the high value leads.
Realize that inside sales will never completely replace the need for outside selling teams for most companies, but can be a good investment for many firms. Be prepared to counter internal skepticism such as; we can only sell if we are face to face with a prospect or we had an inside sales team but it failed. Don’t continue to blindly add sales people and hope your results will improve, if you have sales pipeline that is leaking, an inside selling team can be an excellent investment to grow your revenues.