What is Inside Sales? How to Succeed with Inside Sales?
By Sam Nguyen
Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
Nowadays, buying goods and services online or via phone is getting more and more common among consumers thanks to the development of technology and the Internet. Also, buyers are often busier than ever, their time is limited and they often do extensive research online before deciding a sale as well. That’s why the inside sales came out as a way to allow salespeople to use technology in every process in sales, from the presentations and product demos to closing the deals, which is more convenient method with the ability to offer better results.
According to a study that has recently shown that the inside sales teams are growing at 15 percent each year, and it keeps expanding three times faster than the traditional sales. So, what is exactly Inside Sales? and How to Succeed with Inside Sales? I will carefully show you all the information you need to know in this field.
What is inside sales?
Definition of inside sales
Inside sales, which is also called “remote sales” or “vitual sales”, is defined to be the sale of products or services made by personnel that approaches to customers via phone, email, or the Internet. The contrast version of this kind of sales is outside sales personnel. The inside salespeople often do not travel as well as brokering face-to-face deals like the outside salespeople do, they focus on contacting potential customers and may engage in cold calling instead. This model of sales is a dominant one for reps in B2B, tech, SaaS, and a variety of B2C industries selling high-ticket items.
What do inside sales representatives do?
As the inside sales representatives typically don’t spend their time in face-to-face meetings, then they utilize leverage tools such as phones, email, video, and virtual meetings to connect with potential customers instead. They have a more predictable schedule as well as a list of target numbers for activities to accomplish each day. For example, they can set their goals for a number of calls, meetings booked, proposals sent, and many more.
In order to be an inside sales rep, then you should own a deep and versatile understanding for your product because you will have to explain the functionality and value of your products clearly for you customers via the calls, which is a disadvantage when outside sales rep can have an in-person demo.
The advantages of inside sales
Below are 4 main advantages that inside sales can do for your business:
1. Inside sales is more cost-effective
The PointClear data has estimated that the average outside sales call can cost with more six-time larger than the average inside sales call does. The inside sales reps itself is able to dial more leads, get connections with more people who make decisions in purchasing even without using dialing technology. Also, it can take far more meetings in a single day than outside sales reps do. As a consequence, we will have the quotas carried by the inside sales reps become increasingly bigger.
2. Inside sales is preferred by customers
The Sales Benchmark Index has pointed out that 70 percent of customers would not like to participate in an in-person meeting. Meanwhile, those people who have a key role in making decisions are usually quite receptive to doing business remotely. At the same time, DiscoverOrg has stated that 78 percent of decision-makers of the poll have taken an appointment or go for an event that is invited or sent from an email or cold call.
3. Inside sales enables better collaboration
When we look at the B2B model, it might be complicated as the average B2B deal includes an average of 5.4 decision-makers. Consequently, it requires the inside sales representatives to work in teams more, collaborate with managers, marketers and other branches of a business so that they can move leads through the sales cycle and close those deals too.
With the CRM and sales acceleration technology, the inside sales reps are confident in logging pertinent details about accounts in an automatic way. Then, the data will be leveraged in real-time, supporting superior collaboration later on, which makes a better collaboration.
4. Inside sales offers reps tools that increase productivity
There are many new sales acceleration tools invented to be annually directed to the market. So, the powerful sales technology stack was formed inside the sales teams so that they can obtain the ability to send more emails, dial more leads, and gain more conversations. The Bridge Group team has made a recent study of a distinct correlation between the number of conversations that representatives have per day and the quota attainment.
With the tools provided by inside sales, the representatives might be helped a lot in dialing and connecting with more leads, which can, therefore, bring inside sales reps amazing benefits over outside sales reps as well as the sales reps, which are not having the adequate leverage sales of acceleration technology.
Inside sales is starting to gain momentum over outside sales
As a matter of fact, inside sales is increasingly gaining momentum over outside sales for some improvements below:
Video conferencing
The Video conferencing tool has improved a lot with some app, like GoToMeeting, Skype, Digital Samba and WebEx, for example. As a result, the sales representatives will be able to communicate in a fast and easy way with buyers without requiring them to show up in a real meeting. Then, both the buyers and sellers can save a big amount of time and money for traveling.
What is more, the time and effort involved in holding meetings with so many different people in so many places really matter. So, just a video conferencing can really take the entire problem away. In the future, it is expected that 85 percent of buyer and seller transactions will take place online via social media and video.
Changing buyer behaviors and preferences
Nowadays, buyers often tend to research mostly online before contacting the sales representative. Consequently, they will have the chance to know more about their chosen product. As a matter of fact, customers often in the middle of 60 to 90 percent while in the process of completing a purchase before they even start to engage. When your customers have very busy schedules, their behaviors and preferences will have the intention to change, and 70 percent of them become interested in the inside sales and video conferences rather than face-to-face meetings.
Customers’ online profiles
Social media now enables salespeople to research their prospects and give out the requirements as well as areas of interest by going through their online profiles deliberately in a brand new way. As a consequence, you will be able to have more personalized conversations and the ability to contribute real relationships with your customers. There was an estimation that there is a staggering with 72.6 percent of salespeople utilized social media as part of their sales process.
Cost-savings
It is quite obvious that significant cost savings can save a big amount of money for a single business. Specifically, the cost of sales has been reduced from 50 to 90 percent compared to the traditional field sales as it can cut down some physical costs.
These inside sales would be a significant saving for most people, which costs six times less than average outside. Even if there is no dialing technology, the inside salespeople can still get the ability to reach out to more leads, get connection with more decision-makers and have the chance to take part in more meetings in a day than outside sales reps can do.
The way we work is changing
The way we work in our corporate world is changing. Many businesses are getting far away from traditional working hours in order to get their own flexibility.
Also, those salespeople who are working remotely can now have the ability to close more and more deals from their mobiles outside of office hours. Inside sales supports the change of working now, which is becoming smarter in working socially, virtually, and inter-culturally for happier sales reps and satisfied customers.
Inside Sales Tips: key to success
1. Understand your product/service
Understanding your product and service is more necessary than ever as there is no prospect that will trust you while you pitch about your product or service and don’t know what you’re talking about, and you even might not be able to answer simple questions about your products. So, convincing your prospect to spend their worthy time and money needs your confidence and knowledge in your products to sell them effectively.
In order to do this, you need to care about two major things, which are:
- First, you should make the extra effort and concern with different departments, like products, marketing, and engineering so that you can understand their perspectives of the product.
- Also, have meetings with more experienced sales reps on your team so that you can do role-playing exercises where they can throw prospect FAQs your way.
2. Personalize your outreach
You will be more likely to utilize the same emails all over again when you put yourself inside your inbox. So, it’s best for you to personalize your outreach by utilizing the email templates to make things a lot easier.
So, just try to save the email, with placeholders, into a custom library and put it in your inbox, instead of spending ten minutes on finding an old email and sub in your new information.
3. Social selling like a pro
Social selling is a tool that really works. There is a study that shows the LinkedIn InMail’s response rate can be three times higher than a regular email. So in case you want to make the social sell like a boss, then you should connect to your recipients and catch their attention instead of annoying them.
In order to spark a connection with LinkedIn InMail, just do your research to understand the customers’ pain points, needs, likes, and dislikes. Put them in your emails. Then, before you press the send button, just ask yourself questions like: “ If I were the person who gets this email, would I say “yes” to this request?”
I have the LinkedIn InMail template here for you in order to warm up a cold connection. Just save this template to a library in your inbox:
Subject Line: {!How You’ll Solve Pain Point}
Hi {!First Name},
{!Positive Connection To Their Company}.
Working at {!Their Company}, you must experience {!Pain point} quite often.
At {!Your Company}, we help our customers {!How You Solve Pain Points} and have achieved great results. {!Fact or Statistic About Your Company}.
I’d love to have a chat with you more. Does this sound like something you might get interested in?
Talk soon,
{!Your Name}
4. Keep an eye on your competitors
As you can see, your competitor sometimes is your biggest motivator, as you and they have the same goals for your customers, and you care about beating them to prove your worth. So, keeping an eye on your competitors is necessary to better understand them.
In order to do this, you should set up Google alerts for competitor news so that you can understand where they are headed and what kind of improvements their product or service will have. Another method is to follow them on social media for big announcements, content posts, and tools to track their customer’s complaints as well.
I have an example here of a template for cold email heroes:
Subject Line: {!Pain point}? We can fix that
Hi {!First Name},
We’ve been hearing from several existing {!Competitor}’s customers that they’ve been experiencing significant application performance problems recently. We can see that your team would be getting troubles if that’s also happening at {!Company}.
We’ve developed our solution to help you in leading enterprises such as {!Customer 1}, {!Customer 2}, and {!Customer 3} with stability, security, and reliability in mind so you won’t have these problems with {!Your Company}.
Are you available early next week to discuss why companies like {!Customer 4}, {!Customer 5}, and {!Customer 6} moved from {!Competitor} to [!Your Company} this year? If not, please let us know when’s best to reconnect.
Best,
5. Send follow-up emails
A sales person can only devote one call or two for each lead on average. However, the determined and winnable inside sales rep will not change their mind if you double or triple that effort. When you have taken good advantage of marketing efforts like promotions, creative content, emails, talking points, then just make more attempts in approaching their prospects. Just keep trying, keep calling as well as sending them the follow-up emails.
6. Develop a close partnership with the marketing team
It is important for inside sales team to develop a close partnership with the marketing team. As the marketing team always want to train for the team, and it is critical to have the latest information on products, so you need a two-way street as well. When you have the product marketers team that listens on the calls to learn firsthand about how the customers respond to your positioning, then you will know the problems and find out what was right or what can be improved, which is a really important loop for every inside sales team.
Conclusion
Overall, inside sales is constantly growing together with the productivity software. As a result, businesses can put their work on autopilot and have the ability to know more about the prospect’s behavior. When you are running your inside sales, if you have the right tools and data, you will be able to sell things smarter and keep your customers satisfied at anywhere in the world.
That wraps my article today about Inside sales and the way to succeed with it. I hope this information can help you somehow in your business career. If there is anything you want us to explain more, don’t be hesitated to leave your questions here. We are willing to help you at any time.
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