The importance of Inside Sales in the post-COVID world has grown significantly, as door-to-door, personal, “external” sales have been standing or working with delays for almost a year.
For example, in the United States, more than half of the nearly 6 million sellers are engaged in inside sales.
Inside Sales differs from Telesales primarily in that the seller knows the product well and does not work by script. But what if the number of products that your Inside Sales team sells of their new features information are constantly growing? Even if you conduct permanent training of sales managers, the amount of information that the seller can operate without asking the help of the Product Manager / Brand Manager is limited.
Ideally, the Inside Sales department has two divisions: Sales Development Representatives (SDR or Inside Sales Associate) and Business Development Representatives (BDR). SDRs target inbound sales, such as hot leads from potential customers, such as coming from a website or attending a webinar.
SDRs contact these potential customers, clarify the need, and through CRM deliver the contact to a senior salesperson, called an Account Executive (AE), with whom an appointment or presentation is scheduled. The Account Executive develops the opportunity and closing the deal.
BDRs usually do cold selling to potential customers who have not previously shown interest in the product.
Sometimes they separate Inside Sales managers, which work only with existing customers. Their functions are almost like the popular now Customer Success Manager, which increases the size of the business with an existing customer.
It is stated that internal sales cannot replace the value of face-to-face conversations. When a salesperson goes to meet a client in his office, it is often easier for him to gain trust and articulate how the product will solve the client’s pain.
But companies are now looking for ways to broaden dialogue across all stages of their sales funnel, and building a skilled Inside Sales team is a logical way to compete for their share of ever-dwindling customer attention.
What can help technically Inside Sales employees today? They certainly use CRM systems, and they are integrated with e-mail marketing systems that can create landing pages, provide information about visits to social networks by users and other digital marketing tools. Roughly 25% of Inside Sales’ time is spent working with email, using letters chains and knowing exactly what their customer is reading. Undoubtedly, there are video conferencing systems for webinars in the arsenal. Today, calengly-like systems are actively used to make appointments. Account Based Marketing systems help show clients personalized ads, for example influ2. Social networks, especially linkedin, are today the most powerful tool for finding clients and selling. Sales teams internally exchange information with internal chats (i.e. slack). The most advanced big companies are experimenting with best-of-breed systems like people.ai. If the projects are complex, then a project management system is required. All sales managers are regularly trained and certified using LMS distance learning systems.
We can go on with the list of products that are available for automation, but what needs to be achieved with the help of Inside Sales in the end? Contacting the user, informing him of information and receiving a response! That is all! You just need to talk to the client and bring a really potential client to the presentation with “Closer” whose pain our product will solve. Usually, the number of arranged presentations is the main metric of SDR.
But what if there are not enough “driving” SDRs or catching “AEs” and the product is very difficult for SDR. Conversion of webinars to leads is decreasing. They don’t even come to a really interesting speaker and are not ready to listen, even for an hour. Everyone’s schedules are overloaded with virtual meetings.
We can see that cold calls for BDR are getting harder and harder. GDPR and similar laws outside the EU do not allow them to just write letters to unknown contacts, and it is more and more difficult to get through with your phone.
A suitable solution is to use unique content, articles, lead magnet, insights, YouTube videos, but how can you convert them into a real on-line meeting?
An interesting fresh approach combining content and lead generation is the recently offered by Pitch Avatar product. Inside Sales makes a web link to a recording of a presentation, for example, a product or offer, with voice and a personal greeting, and sends it to a trusted contact that will open the link. As soon as a potential client at a convenient time for him opens and listens to the presentation in the browser, a notification appears in the seller’s mobile application and he can see what the client is watching and listening to. The product allows you to talk to the client through the browser and take control of the online sales presentation slides. This is quite unexpected for the client when “they spoke to him from the browser with a presentation,” but according to the vendor, the conversion to conversation reaches 30%. This solves the problem of coordinating the presentation time, the quality of the content and confirming to the client that he is ready to communicate – he has just listened to the voice of this person.
BDRs can also use this product. For example, they can embed these presentations into web pages the client trusts and “catch” them for conversation right on the site. The system allows existing PowerPoint, PDF, YouTube content to be converted into “active presentations.”
For companies with partner networks, this solution allows them to transmit ready-made presentations so that they themselves “catch” their customers and use high-quality ready-made content, already with script what to say to the slide, or learn how to sell and deal with objections themselves.
An interesting feature of the product is the idea of saving time and choosing a “pitch” presentation – a few key slides for a couple of minutes of telling the digest instead of a full presentation. This saves the client’s time.
With these innovative Inside Sales support technologies, sales teams can sell even more sophisticated products and services without actually seeing the customer.
