Defining Inside Sales and How It Is Changing In 2021
The definition of the term “inside sales” refers to any kind of sales activities that are handled remotely.
Now, over the past decades, this type of selling has been a prevailingly dominant model for salespersons working in SaaS, tech, B2B, and also several B2C industries marketing high-ticket offerings to their consumers in the marketplace.
Inside sales involve high-touch transactions over email or phone, however contrary to general telemarking reps professionals involved in inside sales are highly skilled and knowledgeable about their brand’s products and services.
Thanks to advances that have happened in communication technology, reps performing inside sales are capable of providing presentations, conduct demos, and are conversant with most of the functions that are traditionally handled by reps in the field.
What Does Inside Sales Mean in 2021?
While there was a time in the past, when there was a proper distinction between remote (inside) sales and field sales, but in the present times, those lines have started to blur.
This is because even sales reps that perform on-premises sales typically handle part of their business even remotely, using some of the best business growth technology solutions that inside salespersons have sued for years such as sales dialers, CRM, and more.
Additionally, in the wake of this long continuing COVID-19 Pandemic, most salespeople have already migrated to the remote selling model.
Therefore in many ways, inside sales are not just simple sales, which today former field sales reps have been finding out for the first time which many businesses already discovered long ago.
Hence while it is true that no form of communication or interactions can be as powerful as in-person interactions, nevertheless in the wake of this pandemic, several companies across the globe have also understood that even high-ticket sales can be successfully handled remotely.
Now before we dig deeper for finding what the future holds for the inside sales model, let us examine in brief the history of inside sales and how it differs from telemarketing.
Even though selling over the phone from distant locations is nothing new and businesses as far back as in the 1950s have used telemarketing and those over-the-phone techniques in selling have for several decades interrupting family dinners, nevertheless, telemarketing is a lot different from inside sales.
This is because telemarketing is scripted and as we said even before focuses primarily on selling relatively low-value offerings (like insurance policies and extended warranties) and seldom involves multiple touches.
In other words, in telemarketing, each call is a do-or-die, and deals done through this selling technique are quickly closed or lost forever, as the agents swiftly move on to the next lead in their sales pipeline.
On the other hand, inside sales is a process that focuses on high-ticket offerings and is mostly used in the B2B landscape.
Hence, reps doing inside sales, even though might use campaign-specific talking points, rarely rely on sales scripts, as inside sales reps are mostly highly trained and are adept salespeople having ingenuity and acumen comparable to outside sales reps, which is far-cry from any average telemarketers in the marketplace.
Additionally, inside sales reps also tend to earn a much bigger pay-cheque than telemarketers, who are often made to work on sales commissions for their company.
The Evolution of Inside Sales
There are two main ways that inside sales have evolved over the last fifteen years. Primarily, inside sales has grown more prevalent nowadays as in a study report published by MIT Lead Management Study, which states that hiring in inside sales is outpacing outside (or traditional) sales hiring by 15:1.
In fact, many reps working in the field are not only spending time in their offices closing deals but as the corporate landscape is moving away from traditional work hours, many outside sales reps are even closing deals from their mobile devices or homes, sending emails and returning phone calls from their homes after their work hours.
Another way inside sales has evolved has to do with the stellar advances that have happened in technology that has enabled the salespersons to connect with more leads and have smarter interactions based on contextual and real-time prospect data that can be readily found in their cloud-based CRM software tools.
Therefore, here are a few benefits that an inside sales model provides over an outside sales model which includes:
• Inside sales — is more cost-effective
• Inside sales — is preferred by the modern-day customers
• Inside sales- offers better collaborations
So let us examine each of these benefits of inside sales in greater detail.
A More Cost-Effective Sales Model
According to data published from a study done by PointClear, it states that the average cost of making outside sales call is even more than six times than the average of inside sales calls.
This is because, even without using a dialing technology, reps working for inside sales can dial more leads or get connected with more decision-makers and also hold more meetings in a single day than reps that are working in the field.
Therefore, in the present times inside sales reps can carry increasingly large sales quotas, whereby many inside sales reps generate seven figures in revenue for their company every year.
• Customers Prefer the Inside Sales Model
According to the Sales Benchmark Index, it shows that 70% of the customers in the U.S.A do not even want an in-person meeting with the sales reps, as the key decision-makers in most organizations are quite receptive to doing purchases remotely.
More according to a polled survey done by DiscoverOrg, it shows that 78% of the decision-makers attend appointments or events that came from a cold call or an email.
• Boost Productivity with Sales Acceleration Tools
Nowadays every year new sales acceleration tools arrive in the marketplace. Therefore by creating a powerful technology stack members of the inside sales teams can gain the ability to dial more leads, send more emails, and have more interactions with their prospects.
A recent study that was done by the Bridge Group shows that tools that can help the inside sales reps by connecting them with more leads can provide a powerful advantage over outside sales compared to inside sales reps who are not adequately leveraging sales acceleration or business growth technology for harvesting more revenue.
• The Future of Inside Sales
If you ask us as one of the pioneering vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM software how will sales continue to evolve, or how this pandemic is going to change the business landscape in 2021, surveys done by companies like IBM shows an increased desire from employees and staffs to work remotely.
Therefore, it can be fair to speculate that while inside sales will continue to grow and gain its dominance, selling technology will also become more ubiquitous, whereby an average sales stack that mostly includes different solutions like a sales CRM, social selling tools, dialers, conversation intelligence solutions and more, inside sales technology will be around consolidation, whereby a variety of sales and marketing tools will be consolidated into a solitary platform providing the sales teams with different capabilities from a single, easy to use CRM platform for boosting sales and revenue growth.
