Inside sales is a dominant sales model in high-value SaaS, tech, and B2B industries. It involves handling sales remotely where reps mostly work inside an office or in a shared office environment, unlike outside sales reps who are traditional field reps that travel to meet clients. Inside sales reps typically use online technology, phone, or email to identify, nurture, and convert leads into customers.
The popularity of inside sales has gained momentum with technological evolution and increasing adoption of remote selling and buying—more so during the current pandemic. There are several benefits of implementing an inside sales model. Take cost-effectiveness for instance—an average inside sales call costs $50, whereas an average outside sales call costs $308.
However, not all companies can leverage inside sales effectively. Here, you’ll find 4 key strategies to help your inside sales team perform exceptionally and increase your revenue.
1. Don't lose track of past and current customers
You may already have contact and other data for your existing accounts. But, what about the people from your current customers who have moved to a different organization or taken up a new job role? Have you covered all of the buyers and influencers from your existing accounts? If not, it could be a reason you’re missing some of the crucial inside sales opportunities.
It’s also equally important to keep track of contacts from your past customers. These are the buyers who have already tested your brand, used your product or service, and have first-hand experience dealing with your company. They are more likely to convert than a new lead who is yet to hear about you or speak with your sales rep. Note that the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%, while that of selling to an existing or previous customer is 60-70%.
So, how do you not lose track of past and existing customers? You can use LinkedIn and its features like Sales Navigator to reach them. LinkedIn is where most professionals and companies like to interact with each other and build their networks and business profiles.
At OutboundView, we offer a solution called BuyerMovement, which tracks down individuals who have moved on from your past and current customers. It uses proprietary software to analyze your CRM or MAP data to find, prioritize, and track down lead data for your past customers and users.
2. Improve B2B Appointment Setting to Increase Closed Deals
A great B2B inside sales rep books appointments, meetings, and product demos to enable closing sales reps to only focus on qualified leads. This helps closing sales reps not waste their time and energy on leads with no purchasing authority or that are not the right fit. Furthermore, they become able to drive more relevant conversations, conduct contextual selling, and close more deals.
Sales teams that have to deal with long sales cycles and sell expensive B2B products or services are the best candidates to use B2B appointment setting.
It’s important to train your B2B appointment setters to understand the needs and pain points of prospects and handle their objectives. They need to gather prospect information, ask the right discovery questions, deliver value propositions, and follow up with leads consistently. Additionally, they are required to properly navigate CRM or other sales tools and have accurate contact data to work efficiently.
A better way to optimize B2B appointment setting and deliver improved results is to outsource the work. Outsourcing helps save the cost and effort needed to build and train an internal B2B appointment setting team. Further, it allows you to focus on advancing other areas of B2B lead generation and delivering stronger inside sales results. For instance, at OutboundView we promise over 3K personalized emails, calls, and social touches per month and 2X the productivity of the average internal SDR.
3. Fast-track Your Inside Sales with Prospecting Tools
Equip your inside sales team with prospecting technology to strengthen their efficiency and productivity. Your inside sales reps need more than a CRM, automated dialer, and LinkedIn. Lack of access to modern prospecting tools can limit their ability to perform the way they should. Moreover, prospecting technology helps build targeted lead lists faster and with authentic contact information.
For instance, the free Chrome extension, RevDriver powered by SalesIntel reduces prospecting time by revealing 95% accurate, human-verified B2B contact and company data for individuals and companies. Whether you’re prospecting on LinkedIn or company websites, this cost-effective prospecting intelligence solution allows you to collect verified direct dials, phone numbers, and email addresses for targeted prospects. Moreover, you can export the revealed prospect data to your CRM or MAP as a free user.
4. Use Firmographics and Technographics to Stay Ahead
Firmographic data gives in-depth insights into companies or firms, covering key attributes such as office locations, revenue, decision-making, type of clients and business, organization size, and industry. Technographic data helps understand a company’s tech stack, technology usage, current technological expectations, and plans to adopt technological solutions.
Leveraging B2B company data including firmographics and technographics is a great way to personalize and customize your inside sales approach to better engage and nurture leads. Tailoring your messages, content, ads, online experiences, and communications to your targeted prospects helps increase inside sales success. 84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. Further, companies using advanced personalization report a $20 return for every $1 spent.
Firmographics and technographics can also be used to create ICPs, segment and prioritize prospects, identify qualified leads, improve sales productivity and velocity, and align sales and marketing to stay ahead of the competition.
Final Advice
With the powerful strategies explained above, you can prepare your team to rock inside sales. Before you start implementing these strategies, make sure you support your inside sales team to grow their time management, interviewing, communication, rapport building, follow-up, and research skills. These skills are crucial to helping your inside sales team reach their goals.
SalesIntel is the top provider of accurate and affordable sales and marketing contact data with highest number of direct dials and human-verified contacts in the industry. SalesIntel is your resource for contact and business intelligence.
Our combination of automation and researchers allows us to reach 95% data accuracy for all our published contact data while continuing to scale up our number of contacts.
Ariana Shannon – Creative Director and Marketing Coordinator