The Rise of Inside Sales
In 2008, the convergence of the decade’s most important trends fueled a sales movement that’s been slowly redefining the way businesses organize their sales operations. The popularity and importance of social media was rising as rapidly as the economy was declining. The combination of events shifted the course of the sales profession in a new direction, and as the economy recovers and job growth increases, the prevalence of inside sales will only grow more prominent.
When the recession set in, businesses shifted focus from growth to survival.When you’re faced with massive budget cuts, perks like first class business travel and $100 meal stipends go out the door very quickly. Field sales reps that depended on face to face communication with prospective customers were grounded to offices, and they had to learn an entirely new set of skills to survive. It’s estimated that in the middle of the recession, 14 out of 15 salespeople in the U.S. were inside reps.
Online collaboration software, such as the ones that Webex and Cisco offer, enabled completely online transactions. However, a virtual sales call is very different from a face to face pitch; you can’t communicate body language and facial expressions. You have to know the intricacies of your product very well, and you have to know the industry in which you contend even better. A sales rep that can sell a brick for $1,000 isn’t as valuable as a sales rep that can sell your specific product.
The role of the salesperson used to be the gatekeeper of information. Now, purchase decision making is much more available to consumers than it used to be. Today’s salespeople need to differentiate themselves, and to so, they need to arm themselves with data and insights that help them develop relationships with their prospects.
Where virtual calls make communication between salespeople and customers more difficult, social media eases the communication strain. While you can’t communicate your personality as easily on a virtual call as in person, you can build a visible personality on social media. You can communicate your expertise through your Twitter feed. You can position yourself as a thought leader with your LinkedIn profile.
As more buyers turn to social media for solutions and expertise, the value of inside sales reps with strong social media skills replaces the value of field sales reps with strong social skills.
Efficiency v. Engagement
Low Efficiency & Low Engagement
Sales organizations look to maximize efficiency and minimize costs, and inside sales is one of the few sales approaches that accomplishes both. Groupon is an example of a company who demonstrated to everyone in sales why old fashioned cold calling no longer works. After hiring thousands of sales reps to cold call data lists of small businesses, Groupon’s sales saw a lot of success. So they hired more reps to do more cold calling, and sales numbers did not increase. They were able to handle a huge volume of leads, but their impersonal approach turned customers off, and Groupon quickly burned out their target audience.
High Efficiency & Low Engagement
Employing autodialers, such as Connect and Sell, to guarantee call connections automatically eliminates all the incorrect data from your sales pipeline and saves your reps hours of time that they’d otherwise waste trying to get through at the wrong time. However, without proper pre-call research, small business owners are unlikely to respond to sales pitches.
High Engagement & Low Efficiency
Sending reps into the field to pitch products face to face offers undeniable advantages. If field sales were as cheap as inside sales, we’d probably all be doing a lot more of it. But as technology makes business more efficient, field sales grows egregiously inefficient. In the time it takes a field rep to fly across the country for a meeting, an inside sales rep could qualify 50 leads and close 10 deals. For corporations that sell complex software to teams with massive budgets, field sales makes a lot more sense. For companies that sell higher volumes of smaller deals, field sales is a waste of time.
High Efficiency & High Engagement
If you sell to small businesses, employing a productive and skilled inside sales team is the only way to scale revenue growth. The decision makers at large corporations aren’t always business owners; the decision makers at small businesses are almost always decision makers. Business owners’ brands are their lives. Their social reviews are personal. Take a look at the difference between small business owners and big business executives on social media:
As the profession of inside sales propels into the future, tailor-made sales approaches will become more important than ever. The information about your prospects is out there, and if you don’t take advantage of it to enlighten your sales calls, your prospects won’t listen to you. Social media and big data technologies give you an opportunity to mimic the personal approach that traditional field sales fosters, and it’s up to you to evolve your sales process to incorporate the strategies of traditional sales with the technologies of modern sales.
Read more at : The Rise of Inside Sales - Radius
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