When you are growing a business or building your sales team, one of the most challenging responsibilities is to create and manage a successful inside sales group. Traditional outside sales reps expect to have the support of a strong inside sales team, and inside sales is usually where leads are generated and nurtured.
By the same token, inside sales is one of the hardest functions to fill. It is work that is both intense and repetitious. And it requires a personality dedicated to consistency but comfortable thinking creatively and picking up the phone yet again after a string of rejections. How can you strengthen inside sales at your company and build a sales team and strategy that works?
1. Rethink Your Lead Generation Processes
Start with your lead generation process. How do you generate leads for your business today? Is it primarily from cold calls dialed out by your inside sales team? Is it mostly from referrals? Is it focused on outside sales visiting with a select group of target accounts? In most businesses, lead generation remains a fractured and outdated process. Some leads come from a trade show, others from referrals, and still others from some form of advertising.
The problem is that leads go cold quickly, and there are new ways to generate leads that need to be moved into the mix. Content marketing and web-based calls-to-action create interest and allow your prospects to find you. This also gives you the tools to start engaging leads more dynamically through your inside sales efforts as well.
2. Integrate Marketing and Inside Sales to Nurture Leads
Lead nurturing is an underdeveloped function in most sales organizations. In most sales teams, leads are generated — then they are sold, with little if any time being spent on qualifying. The problem with this is that qualifying serves two purposes, not one. The first purpose is to determine who is ready to buy and is in the market for your solutions now. The second purpose, is to determine who is not ready to buy now, but could be in the market at some point in the future. Most sales teams toss these away, or keep them in a seldom-used email list.
Today, marketing systems and automation tools can help you to really nurture these leads, through automated workflows, questions and forms. For example, you can either tell your inside sales team to call every lead in their list and ask them if they are ready to buy — or you can have your marketing system send customized invitations to the leads, inviting them to download a new guide in return for answering a few questions.
Then, have your inside sales team follow up on the ones that self-qualify as more interested, or those who haven’t yet responded, to remind them of the special content offer. This allows your inside sales staff to not only focus on the highest priorities, but also to always have a legitimate reason to call. Instead of just ‘touching base’, they are following up on a recent communication that is part of a logical process.
3. Provide More Online Content and Engagement
The other key to this prospect self-selection approach is to give your inside sales team more and better content. Launch a city-by-city webinar series and give your inside sales staff the opportunity to follow up by phone and offer a free guide to those who decide to register. Set up a webinar series and then prioritize those who register for a webinar or workshop for your inside sales staff to follow up with (and survey them on the experience). Create a new eBook, white paper or buying guide for a specific industry sector and make that available.
In short, your inside sales team needs regular reasons to call or email their lists, and they need to be equipped with good questions to ask, and great offers to present. Keep them equipped, not only with new leads — but also with new content, new programs, new events and new offers — and you give them the ability to always move their relationships forward on a solid footing.
4. Strengthen the Lead Qualifying Process
When’s the last time you reviewed and evaluated your lead qualifying process? Who qualifies your leads — inside sales or outside sales? What is your definition of a qualified and forecastable sales opportunity? Chances are, now is a good time to rethink and improve your qualifying process.
This also gives you the opportunity to rethink how the qualifying function works between inside sales and outside sales. And what happens when a lead that passes qualification and moves from inside to outside meets a dead end. Does the lead get dropped? Does it return to inside sales for nurturing or re-connecting? Are you losing prospects because of a clumsy handoff between your inside and outside teams? Remember, the most important aspect of the sales process is always the relationship that you build with the prospect. Nothing in your process should damage or weaken that relationship.
5. Train Your Team on Social Selling
The social selling opportunity is here, and it has the potential to revolutionize your sales team. Give both your inside and outside teams training and support to begin implementing social selling techniques.
Then, pilot new lead generation activities using social selling methods. You can begin by connecting with and fully promoting your current customers on the web. Then, ask them in return to help you connect with people who they know and to whom they can vouch on your behalf. Social selling is all about building and leveraging relationships, so it’s an excellent forward step to pursue alongside the other four strategies presented here.
By implementing these five strategies, you can position your inside sales team to become a re-energized and more strategic resource that drives new business throughout your company.