One of the fastest and most cost effective approaches to predictable and sustainable sales performance improvements is Inside Sales function.
Any sales organisation is difficult to scale up. Field Sales work includes meetings, relationships, in-depth knowledge of the customers business that are difficult to scale-up. Lead Generation, on the other hand, can be scaled up with specialisation of roles, technology and management. This does require an Inside Sales team.
What does this mean in practice?
Inside Sales, as oppose to Field Sales (Account Managers, Sales Managers or Solution Sales Experts), works with computer and phone. Inside Sales (Lead Generation) focuses on desktop research about potential customer companies, finding the right decision makers at these companies, sourcing contact details and getting in touch with these people via email, social platforms and phone.
Parts of these activities can be automated and scaled up with technology (which is not the case in Field Sales as relationships matter, face to face meetings matter and in-depth knowledge of the customer, their business and needs matter).
The reason for setting up an Inside Sales function is to improve efficiency. Parts of the Lead Generation can be automated. In the previous blog post (https://www.leansalesmethod.com/lead-generation-in-b2b-sales/) I’ve discussed sales technology stack and laid out some examples of tools enabling automation and scaling of Lead Generation process for small B2B sales team and a more established B2B sales organisation.
Key considerations
Sizing your Inside Sales team must in designed in relation to the size of our Field Sales organisation and how new deals are closed.
Let’s assume you only create revenue in countries / locations where you have Field Sales people. Setting up an Inside Sales function will not change the way your customers make purchase decisions. In this scenario you should match the Field Sales team with Inside Sales team.
Staffing and sizing the Inside Sales team. Hire a small team to begin (say three people at minimum to create momentum and to manage the risk of hiring wrong people) with and no more than one Inside Sales person per Field Sales person. One skilled Inside Sales person is able to deliver 10 to 15 new opportunities per month within 3 to 5 months.
Management. Encourage Inside Sales and Field Sales to work together on weekly basis on defining who are the target customers, which roles at the company we need to get in touch with and what should be our message to them. Case studies, white papers, value proposition, etc. Field Sales people will most likely push back in the beginning. And they should! Some resistance is healthy and they need to understand why they have new team members. If you have hired right people you’ll start to see traction within one month.
Process. You must define a sales process and make sure both Inside Sales team and Field Sales team members have their own areas of responsibility. They also need to agree on the handover. What is the output of Inside Sales work? What can the Field Sales people expect from Inside Sales? You can create a definition of the sales process on paper but only the Inside and Field Sales people can agree on these items on practical level. Let them define how they work together and guide the process.
Tools and technology. This is the leverage with Inside Sales team. Technology helps sales organisations improve and scale up their work. Contact detail sourcing, automated and personalised emails are great examples of areas where automation delivers significant improvement. But only after you have the team and the process in place. Look into tools like Apollo.io and Seamless.ai for contact detail sourcing. Look into like Growbots and Prospect.io for email outreach. More information about sales technology stack: https://www.leansalesmethod.com/lead-generation-in-b2b-sales/.
Why Inside Sales is “Lean”?
Lean thinking focuses on the customer (of any process). In sales we typically think customers as the real customers of the company. How about taking a different perspective? How about thinking the Field Sales people as customers of Lead Generation process? How can we optimise and improve the work of our Field Sales people?
Challenges Field Sales people typically have:
1. Too few sales opportunities
2. Focus on the right customer accounts and the right decision makers at the customer
3. Versatility of activities (research, contact detail sourcing, getting in touch with new people, setting up meetings, presenting, selling, asking open questions and so on).
They have other challenges as well (prices, offering, etc) but these are quite typical. Inside Sales team is able to alleviate these three challenges. One Inside Sales is capable of identifying at least 10 new opportunities per month. They also work based on strategy and plans as they don’t have current customers pulling them in different directions. And lastly Inside Sales takes on a set of activities from the Field Sales allowing them to spend more time with potential customer and on selling.
In successful sales organisations Inside Sales function feeds Field Sales people with new contacts, meetings and new opportunities or leads. One Inside Sales person should be able to create 10 to 15 new opportunities every month.
Putting the pieces together
Your sales process should have two key parts:
1) Lead Generation and
2) Opportunity Management.
Inside Sales team should run the Lead Generation process. So far it has been one of the many responsibilities Field Sales people have.
Lead Generation feeds it’s customer, Opportunity Management process. Lead Generation helps Field Sales to work at full capacity.
Opportunity Management covers the whole life cycle of sales opportunities from identified to closed. This includes opportunity qualification, solution design, pricing, negotiations and closing. We’ll discuss key parts of this process in other blog posts (https://www.leansalesmethod.com/increase-hit-rate-with-opportunity-qualification/) and in the Lean Sales -book.
Flow optimisation vs. resource optimisation
This is a bit more theoretical point of view so I’ll keep it short.
Resource optimisation, keeping people busy, is very common. We track the number of meetings and activities Field Sales performs on weekly basis and hope that will yield results. Sometimes it does but sometimes it doesn’t.
Efficient Lead Generation improves flow across the entire sales process. With automation and specialisation Inside Sales team and Lead Generation will speed up the whole sales process. This improves the flow through the sales process. More sales opportunities will enter the sales process. You will have more sales opportunities. Field Sales people will be able to pick and choose the best sales opportunities to work on. One side effect to this is improvement of resource optimisation. Field Sales people will have more work to do. As your team has more sales opportunities in the pipeline they will also increase their resource optimisation.
More about flow vs. resource optimisation in a bit older blog post (https://www.leansalesmethod.com/solving-the-efficiency-paradox-in-sales/).
Summary
- Inside Sales team improves efficiency of your Field Sales people
- Hire small team first, no more than one Inside Sales person per one Field Sales person
- Sales Process (Lead Generation and Opportunity Management) should be defined and finalised by the Inside and Field sales together
- Facilitate the co-operation of Inside Sales and Field Sales people on weekly basis during the first 1 to 2 months. Replace quickly if you don’t see rapport and trust between the people
- Technology and tools are very important component of scaling up the Lead Generation efforts.
- Management and metrics. Identify the one key metric you wish to improve. Maybe it is new opportunities per month, maybe it is meetings set up per month.