Lifting Sales Productivity with Inside Sales
by Mary Donato, President Applied Principles and Associate Director, ISBM at Smeal College, Penn State -
June 1, 2010
Lifting Sales Productivity with Inside Sales
By Mary Donato, President Applied Principles and
Associate Director, ISBM at Smeal College, Penn State
In today’s economic turmoil, companies have huge pressure to lower their cost of sales. Those with a direct face to face sales force are reducing sales positions, marketing staff and support functions which in turn, are reducing customer relationships and market reach. So how do you address the critical issue of reducing cost of sales and at the same time continue to provide visibility with clients, create awareness with new prospects and drive revenue growth?
A highly effective way to lift the productivity of your face to face sales organization is through a well run Inside Sales Channel. Many Inside Sales Channels aren’t being leveraged to their fullest capacity nor are companies seeing the type of productivity “lift” they should be getting from a face to face sales person once the inside channel is up and running. Here are a few checkpoints to determine if you’re Inside Sales teams are giving you the most for your investment.
• An effective Inside Sales Channel helps the face to face organization have more time to spend on enterprise and larger opportunities. Don’t just organize Inside Sales Reps around the SMB (Small to Medium Business) market. Look at expanding to the National or Major Accounts. If you still have significant opportunity to cross-sell and grow additional business in your top accounts, put a TeleCoverage model in place where you partner field reps and inside reps together. The inside rep can focus on the less complex products as well as lead generation of more complex solutions to the field rep. The field rep spends more time selling the larger opportunities and passing on the smaller ones to their inside partner. This type of model can also allow your field rep to cover more accounts and have larger territories. For the customer, they now have someone available on the phone when they have questions and aren’t able to connect with their face to face rep.
• Inside Sales is just that, “sales”. If you are still caught in the model of a “lead generation” only mode, it’s time to change. Why send out a lead for a simple product when it could be sold over the phone, freeing up your more expensive field resource to sell high value products. And why have Inside Sales sell simple products that customers could buy from you over the internet? It’s all about cost efficiencies and leveraging each channel in the product/solution complexity chain.
• Are you getting too caught up in the measurement metrics of dials, talk time, time between calls and not focusing on what really matters which is the quality of the conversation? Don’t get me wrong, I am the first one to insist that metrics must be in place and monitored daily. However, metrics only tell one side of the story. If Inside Reps aren’t having good quality conversations that are moving the sales cycle along, then the metrics become a futile exercise. Managers must be actively involved in listening to a reps dialogue and providing coaching, training and support to help people improve their conversations.
• Is your sales compensation plan driving conflict or cooperation between your field and inside channels? If you’re seeing too much conflict, then there’s a good chance your coverage model needs work. Field reps may try to hold onto the simple transactions which they are comfortable with vs passing them to the inside. Inside reps may not be passing on the more complex leads soon enough thinking they could become a hero by closing the large deal. Compensation should be driving the behaviors of where you want each of your channels focused.
• Do you have the right tools in place to make your Inside Sales team productive? Inside Sales needs a “dashboard” that gives them quick information for that next phone conversation. That includes an efficient CRM system, accurate account information on both clients and prospects, phone numbers and email addresses, quick access to electronic marketing information, proposal templates to name a few. Field sales need these things as well, but an inside rep has great dependency upon the data and systems as they should be making make 5-10 times the number of calls per day as a field rep.
• Is Senior Management supporting the Inside Sales approach or is it just another program that some hope will eventually “go away”. Creating an Inside model should be of strategic importance to any organization. If Inside Sales is new in your company, it can also create concern from the field organization if they think it’s being put in place to replace their jobs. They may also resist having someone else calling within “their accounts”. After all, we work hard to teach our field people to “own” their accounts and now we are asking them to allow someone on the phone to build a relationship with their customer. You need leadership at the top behind this initiative with a clear vision of the intent and goals of the program.
Creating an effective Inside Sales organization requires hard work and nurturing. Done right, the results can bring significant productivity to the entire sales process.
If you have comments or questions, contact Mary at mary@marypdonato.com.
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