Sales and farming have a lot in common. Both have long fulfillment cycles and most often than not, fraught with uncertainties. But between sowing seeds and waiting for results, there is a lot that goes behind the scenes.
Farming is traditionally an outdoor activity. Not much has changed since farming first started 12,000 years ago. The process very much remains the same.
On the other hand, sales as a process that was strictly outdoors has undergone a seismic shift. It’s moved indoors and has given birth to a new breed of sales pros called – “Inside Sales,” a crack team that works on the inside to maximize conversions.
Your takeaways from reading this article
This article outlines the growth of Inside Sales teams and explores why it is vital to nurture this unit alongside the traditional sales function. The report also discusses how these teams need to be structured and incentivized to ensure the right balance between Inside and Field (sales) units.
Inside Sales Teams – The rise
Business-to-business (B2B) sales have long gestation periods. Traditionally, the bastion of field sales representatives, the people inside, were now providing the research and intelligence to the field sales team to facilitate or close the sale. The “inside” team had no say in the sales process between the field sales staff and the prospecting company.
This Inside team was usually less in number, earned way less, and their contributions to the overall sales tally were generally passed off as support.
Something changed when companies began to go online and bolstered their digital footprint. As digital campaigns became the norm, leads started flowing into the system and were increasingly managed by the inside sales team whose “job” was to respond and convert prospects.
Sales witnessing a paradigm shift
With the advent of digital tech (i.e., VCs, conference calls, etc.), the percentage of in-person sales calls reduced. According to industry sources, last year, many executives preferred digital communication rather than the stodgy entourage of field sales executives at their offices due to the pandemic. But this trend cannot be attributed to the pandemic alone; several cues were propping up even before the pandemic started. Case in point, over 50% of all sales meetings and demos were conducted online even before the pandemic.
Probably, one of the reasons for this shift is the amount of information that was already available on the World Wide Web. Stakeholders were no longer interested in information sessions but in sessions that were all about addressing pain points.
With increasing competition, companies now knew that if they had to win the race to the CXO table, they had to be problem solvers rather than information providers.
The Inside Sales teams were increasingly beginning to attain the coveted ‘SWAT’ status in the corporate hierarchy. So much, so that top companies were looking to hire Inside Sales VPs to manage a crack inside team that worked in sync with marketing, product, sales, and engineering teams. As a result, B2B selling was transforming quickly. Companies were finally giving credit to the Inside Sales teams, which were once relegated to executing customer service and company/industry research tasks.
We’ve come a long way off from the days when the Inside Sales team and other support functions were mentioned in the same breath. In organizations that are heavy on-field teams and carry a legacy of selling boxes, not solutions, the concept of inside sales is tough to digest. But then there are companies like SalesForce, SAS, Microsoft that have taken this concept to another level. It’s no small wonder that their Inside Sales Team is a significant contributor to their sales quota, month-on-month.
What is an Inside Sales team?
Inside Sales, teams are the guys who close or affect sales or its process from a remote location.
Unlike field sales, who are active participants in the sales process due to their in-person presence, Inside Sales teams focus on customer research, prospecting, interactions, and in some cases, closure. Another aspect differentiating them from their traditional sales counterparts is that they move from case to case rapidly. Their objective is to push for conversions and not build relationships.
Characteristics of Inside Sales Teams
They are designed to move quickly across prospects, i.e., they are more transactional rather than relationship-oriented. They are primarily problem-solvers and probably the first line of defense when clients call. Inside Sales would typically consist of teams handling market intelligence, inbound, and outbound activities. The one thing that characterizes Inside sales Teams is their turnaround time.
How do you set up your Inside Sales team?
Your decision to set up an Inside Sales team should be dependent on your product or service that you’re selling. Inside sales are about scale and interactions. Field sales are all about building that relationship and big tickets.
For instance, if you are selling a product like SalesForce or Microsoft Azure, your Inside Sales team should be qualified enough to field initial questions from the prospect, just enough to get them thinking or started on the solution. Like the paramedic who is the first to arrive on the scene and wheels in patients to the hospital. He’s not a Doctor but knows the basics of human anatomy to keep the patient alive.
In our case, the patient is the client, and his status (alive or dead) is the conversation. The Inside Sales team keeps the conversation “alive” with the client by providing information quickly.
These Inside sales teams deal in high prospect volumes thanks to the many touchpoints available to an organization these days.
Inside Sales is a discipline. And, to be effective, you would need to have few tools in place before you get going.
At a base level, a lead management application is good to have. For mature organizations, a CRM system is a must.
Why? Unlike their field counterparts, inside sales teams deal in volumes, and to be effective, they need to move from one case to another quickly. When that happens, the chances are some cases (or prospects) may slip between the cracks. To ensure that does not happen, a lead management system or a system that manages the pipeline of leads into the system becomes essential.
Factors to consider when you are building an Inside Sales Team
You could set up your Inside Sales team product/service-wise, customer, industry-wise, or geography-wise. Here are some factors to consider.
- Competition – Big players in the market usually dictate the sales process. Small and medium firms merely follow suit. If competition is driving your decision to set up an Inside Sales unit, think again. It may not be something you are ready for. Audit your organization’s strengths, process readiness, culture, and resource skill set before going on this route.
- Complexity – If your product or service is multi-layered and requires an in-person interface, then it’s a good time to think about building an Inside Sales team to complement your Field Sales unit.
- Cost – An Inside Sales team does come at a fraction of the price, but it relies on collaboration (e.g., Slack), task management, and knowledge management tools to be efficient.
- Coverage – Studies suggest that Inside sales teams are best suited to penetrate small and medium organizations; this is where ticket sizes are not too large. Sales cycles are quick as there are not too many stakeholders involved. Hence, processes need to be in place to ensure that the organization can manage the influx of customers.
If your organization is starting with an Inside Sales team, being product/service-wise makes sense. In this case, there is redundancy in the system as cross-product knowledge is high.
An industry-wise setup, on the other hand, allows for industry specialization.
But once you get into this sort of stratification, an organization might get vertical redundancy (within the industry), but horizontal redundancy (across products) may be challenging to achieve. This kind of specialization works in companies where industry practices are multi-million-dollar business verticals having their own P&L. For instance, consulting firms, software services companies usually go in for this sort of sales specialization.
Inside Sales – the hybrid model
This approach is seen in companies where the selling process is long drawn out and has several hundred moving parts.
In these companies, the Inside Sales team would, for example, research the product-solution fit for the prospecting company and then “hand-off” that information to the field sales team or the strategic sales team and move on to the next pitch.
In this scenario, the Inside sales team acts as a client–servicing unit servicing the information needs of the field sales team.
A clear request-response framework must be drawn up with Turnaround Times (TAT) firmly established between both parties for a hybrid model to work efficiently. Ideally, a single channel of official communication or collaboration like – Slack works best. When combined with a task management application, Slack ensures that leads or requests do not slip between the cracks.
Hiring your Inside Sales Team
Skillset
Communication and problem-solving skills are a must-have in this role. Familiarity with marketing tools/marketing automation software like Marketo, HubSpot are good to have. Working with collaboration and task management applications are definite pluses. Last but not least, knowledge of CRM software comes in handy in scenarios where funnel management is critical.
Inside Sales is usually a problem-solving role where time is of the essence. Leads have to be immediately addressed as they come into the system. Therefore, prioritization and time management skills are good to have. In essence, they have to be quick learners with the ability to context switch with ease.
Training
The Inside Sales team will often leverage other organizational units like marketing, commercial, compliance, legal to close requests. An overall perspective of the business and the various stakeholders in the sales process will be an essential aspect of the training.
Experience profile
It would be best to look for some couple of years of selling or customer service experience. But a combination of customer service and sales makes a good hire.
Structure
From a hierarchy point of view, the Inside Sales team should have a leader whose reporting would roll up to the sales head or director.
Apart from managing the team, the Inside Sales Director’s responsibilities include hiring and training salesforce, meeting sales targets in his/her business unit.
As the organization matures rather than gets into markets where selling cycles are long and multi-layered, the chances are that there would be additional levels added between the executive and the Inside Sales director.
You have to think that your Inside Sales team is like a specialized sniper unit whose only objective is to target and land clients. They work on leads from a distance and hence have their limitations when closing deals or building relationships.
Incentivizing the team
Unlike Field Sales, there’s a high degree of teamwork with Inside sales. One reason, it’s close-knit, and second, they are focused on closing deals and moving to the next one quickly. That being said, even large enterprise deals most often start with a dip-stick-efforts from Inside Sales teams.
If you are an organization, say with revenues around the US $ 1 billion-plus mark, Inside Sales should contribute 20-25% of those revenues.
Incentivizing an inside sales team is not as tricky. The crux to incentivizing any group is its attribution. When multiple layers are involved, the prospecting team usually does not get the spoils but only receives a tiny percentage.
Usually, sales incentives in an organization go to the man or woman who signs on the dotted line, much like Oscars where the coveted best actor and director are the highlight of the evening and not the best technician or the best VFX.
Modeling the incentive
From an Inside Sales team perspective, this is perhaps pretty important as this one aspect can make or break the team motivation. Hence, the need for a system to ensure that this model is fair and robust. Every effort or interaction towards the conversion path should be modeled like a network diagram with nodes. The value of each node (at every stage of the sales process) needs to be calculated until the final node (goal) is reached.
If one can assign probabilities to this model (to predict the conversion at each state), then we have a system that aligns effort to the reward. For instance, consider an Inside Sales executive making his first call to a million-dollar prospect. It’s two months into the sales cycle, and nothing has moved (the probability, at this time, is 10% to convert).
Upon doing some research (which has taken more than a month), the executive comes up with a solution that this prospect is looking for. The customer calls for a final meeting, and now the team is close to conversion. It’s in situations like these that a good incentive structure that takes the process into account helps.
To Sum up
Inside Sales is here, and it’s here to stay. Gone are the days when Inside Sales teams were relegated as poor cousins of the more visible field or outside sales team. Today they function more as a cohesive unit. To achieve a certain degree of cohesiveness, organizations should balance their Inside and Field Sales teams. As they say, individuals win matches, but teams win championships. As an organization, it’s your choice as to what you want to win.
Thank you for reading!
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Photo credits:
Lego Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
Interview Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash