For sales teams, the days of getting their index card stack of “Glengarry” leads and pounding the pavement for house calls are over.
Technically, those glory days faded away decades ago, but a more sophisticated form of outside sales persisted. Keeping reps on the road and in the field for a steady stream of in-person meetings, office visits, and face-to-face prospect interaction was an enduring sales approach.
Then came the pandemic.
Suddenly, companies that relied heavily on outside sales had to shift to remote selling driven by inside sales. The shift was so prevalent that Salesforce, a long-time leader in CRM software, launched an entirely new suite of features to help sales reps see success in an all-virtual world.
Despite this desire and need to make this change, a fast transition to inside sales isn’t always possible. It can be fraught with complications unless you have the right personnel, tools, and processes in place.
My team has helped hundreds of B2B tech companies with their sales efforts over the years. We’ve seen our fair share of those complications as well as many success stories.
Here’s my advice on how to do it right:
Make sure you’ve assembled the right kind of inside sales team.
While there are a few different sales team structures, the “assembly line” reigns supreme for B2B tech inside sales. It breaks the team into four different and complementary groups:
- Lead generation. Focused on the top of funnel, this area of your inside sales team should be skilled in identifying and gathering names, phone numbers, emails, data, and mining/developing as many legitimate leads as possible.
- Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). After your lead gen team has developed a solid pool of prospects, your SDRs—aka qualifiers/prospectors—should be in place to reach out and qualify the leads based on customer need and persona data.
- Account Executives (AEs).When the SDR has deemed the lead(s) worth the time and effort to pursue, AEs are responsible for sealing the deal. With outside sales, AEs leaned on face-to-face meetings with prospects. Now, it can all be done through follow-up calls, online product demos, and customer-centric virtual conversations meant to answer questions and ultimately close the sale.
- Customer success team. Any inside sales team built the right way understands that the customer relationship doesn’t end at the sale. The customer success team is a key segment of the sales team, tasked with account management to foster an exceptional customer experience. This is critical in creating brand ambassadors out of your customers while fostering loyalty, gaining referrals, and increasing the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer.
This type of inside sales structure will not only create predictability for your business, but the advanced specialization will increase efficiency throughout the sales cycle.
As we touch on the ideal inside sales structure, it’s worth a mention that some of this team may actually live in the marketing department. The growing popularity of RevOpsand similar concepts has blurred the lines between sales and marketing.
With more and more organizations moving away from the traditional sales and marketing funnel where clear distinctions in roles and handoffs were the norm, it’s become more accepted that all client-facing teams share the same tools and data, working in lockstep to drive revenue (more on this a little later).
Help your traditional farmers become better hunters.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when transitioning to an inside sales team is continuing to lean on “farmers” over “hunters.”
You want to make sure your sales development team has a good amount of reps who are fiercely independent and self-motivated. The lead gen segment of your team in particular needs to be made up of people who enjoy the “thrill of the hunt” and are always hungry to chase down new business.
Historically, hunters were often found in outside sales roles. But with the absence of an outside sales team, it’s critical to have some hunters on your inside team. They’ll keep a steady influx of new leads coming in, and that’s key to building a robust pipeline.
Make sure your inside sales team is well-versed with the tech you’re using.
Bringing high-tech services and solutions to market is often more efficient using an inside sales model — and an inside sales model is more efficient with the right tech stack.
According to Smart Selling Tools, reps use an average of five enablement tools.
For a pure inside sales team, I’ve found that the number is much higher. From sophisticated CRMs to prospecting tools, appointment scheduling software, web/video conferencing, reporting tools, and much more — inside sales teams must have their own little command central in order to really be successful.
Most inside sales teams lean on automating a lot of their processes, much of which can be done with tools like:
- Outreach for sales engagement
- HubSpot for email
- ZoomInfo for data quality
- Calendly for appointment scheduling
- PandaDoc for E-docs and signatures
Just beware the pitfalls of relying too much on automation.
Make sure you’re enabling your openers.
ABO—Always Be Opening
That’s right, an opening is the new closing. Especially when it comes to moving from an outside sales model to an inside sales model.
When your lead gen team and SDRs are prospecting and generating an influx of quality leads, starting the conversation is every bit as important as finishing it. It’s during the initial stages where you’ll establish credibility, gain trust, and show the prospective buyer you’re an industry thought leader who has answers to their questions and solutions to their problems.
This is why marketing is so important to the success of inside sales.
It’s a beautiful thing when marketing and sales align, but it’s a relationship often strained by sniping, grousing, and finger-pointing. That simply can’t happen with an inside sales team model.
According to Kapost, 65% of sales reps can’t find content to send to prospects. That’s a scary statistic when you’re banking on inside sales to educate customers and drive revenue. In order to achieve the best results, marketing and inside sales teams must work together to:
- Create thoughtful collaborative campaigns that hold both sides accountable to specific KPIs
- Develop any account-based marketing tactics they wish to deploy
- Have constant feedback loops on what’s working and what isn’t
- Constantly align and realign sales enablement content, audience messaging, lead quality, etc.
- Always remain flexible and agile
Tighten Up Your Inside Sales Team
For many organizations inside sales is nothing new. But there’s never been more riding on its success. Selling via email, phone, social media, and other online channels is now the dominant sales model, and it will only continue its dominance as the sales landscape continues to shift in a post-pandemic world.
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Today, just about every sales team has tried to adapt to purely remote sales. Based on my experience, the right organizational structure, powerful sales enablement tools, and proper sales-marketing alignment are the keys to making that shift a fruitful one.
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