What Is Inside Sales? – Your Ultimate Guide
Inside sales refers to any sales role, where you speak to your potential and ideal clients remotely.
Over the last few years – and even more so today; inside sales is becoming increasingly popular, because it’s got excellent benefits compared to Sales Professionals that don’t sell remotely.
Just some of the business methodologies utilising inside sales include:
- Software as a service
- High ticket sales
- Business to business selling
- Large scale business to consumer businesses
In this article, you’ll learn the benefits of inside sales, the difference between inside sales vs outside sales, what you’ll personally need to be successful, and what tools you’ll need.
What Is Inside Sales? – Your Ultimate Guide
The Benefits Of Inside Sales
According to Harvard Business Review, inside sales has some excellent potential benefits for you and your business.
One of the benefits of inside sales include potentially a lower cost of accommodation and physically hosting staff.
Due to the Sales Professional working remotely, there are potential cost savings with floor space needed to house office staff. Add in the potential of a Sales Professional increasing their sales call effectiveness, and you have a winning formula.
The fact that you can save on floor space, means you also have the benefit of scalability.
As Sales Professionals will be working remotely, one of the other benefits of inside sales is that you can hire and scale your workforce a lot faster without the need of having to give them internal office space.
It also reduces relocation costs, which is great for the bottom line.
Scalability give inside sales another excellent benefit; being that your sales team can respond to your potential clients a lot faster, enhancing your customer experience.
With the benefits of inside sales being so good for your margins without hurting effectiveness; you should give this a serious look when structuring your sales team.
The Difference Between Outside Sales Vs Inside Sales
The main difference between outside sales vs inside sales, is that inside sales in done remotely; where outside sales generally means you meet with your potential clients where they are based.
Outside sales is usually associated with businesses that have a complex sales process or have clients that are larger in size.
When a buying decision involves a number of decision makers, account management, and customer success management; usually the business will benefit more from an outside sales structure.
This is because clients want to meet to discuss potential complications, intricacies, and potential customisation to meet their personal and business needs.
Related article: Outside Sales Vs Inside Sales – What’s The Difference?
How To Be Successful At Inside Sales
Because inside sales require Sales Professionals to work remotely, there are a number of attributes you’ll need to have to be successful at your role.
Goals
The first requirement needed to be successful at inside sales, is to have personal goals for what you want to achieve in your role, your day, and by the end of the month.
This includes how many calls you need to make, what profit you’d like to make by the end of the month, and more importantly – what it will mean if you hit your goals.
This will help you get through sales call reluctance and stay driven when you’re working remotely.
Related article: How To Set Goals The Right Way
Focus
As per a study done by Microsoft, humans have a general attention span of up to eight seconds, compared to twelve seconds in the year 2000.
To be successful at inside sales, you’ll need to ensure you’re not easily distracted and stay focused on doing everything required of you that day.
In order to do this, it may mean putting your phone on silent, informing people around you to only disturb you if need be, and block out ample time to purely focus on work rather than being distracted by social media or emails.
Related article: 10 x Successful Habits Of Peak Performers
Organised
In order to reach your goals, stay focused, become successful at inside sales; you’ll need to have excellent personal organisation skills.
An important way to maintain being organised, is to know what numbers and metrics you need to hit regularly.
Some of these numbers include:
- The lifetime value of a customer
- Sales revenue
- Your retention rates
- The cost of acquiring a customer
- Your operational costs and overheads – are they all justified?
- How long does it take to close a deal?
- Your on boarding processes
- Your average conversion rate per conversation
- Cost per lead
Related article: Sales Forecasting – What You Need To Know
Tools For Inside Sales
Below is a list of tools that you can use to help you in your inside sales role.
Video Conferencing Software
Tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet are excellent tools that help inside sales reps speak with potential clients while enhancing communication.
When communicating, 55% is done through body language, 38% our tonality, and 7% with our words.
Video conferencing software is great because it allows you to use the whole communication ratio when speaking with your potential clients.
It’s also excellent for building and maintaining rapport, because your ideal client can see that you’re a person – rather than just a faceless business.
Customer Relationship Management Software
A CRM; or customer relationship management software is important for inside sales, because it allows you to add new contacts, keep conversation and sales records up to date, and allows you to send emails quickly.
Some examples of sales CRM’s to potentially use include:
- HubSpot
- Zoho
- Pipedrive
- Insightly
- Streak
A Sales Process
The most important of all the inside sales tools, is your step by step sales process – or framework.
A sales process helps guide you and your potential clients towards a positive outcome. It helps you build rapport, position yourself correctly, handle objections early, and close without being pushy.
Our sales process involves the following key steps:
- Build rapport and qualify
- Pre-frame and positioning
- Ask questions to find pain
- Learn about their desired results
- Talk about money
- Present your offer
- Handle objections
- Ask for the sale
To learn how to do this effectively, read the linked article below to find out how.
Further reading: The 8 Step Sales Process – A Detailed Guide
Training
All successful Sales Professionals undergo sales training, and the same is true for inside sales reps.
Sales training; in particular online sales training, is a great way to learn exactly how to guide your potential clients to sell themselves, handle objections early, lead generation, and ask for the sale in a non-pushy and systematic way.
To learn more about our online sales training program, The 5% Sales Blueprint, read the linked article below.
Our Online Sales Training Program – The 5% Sales Blueprint
Final Thoughts On Inside Sales
Due to the many benefits of inside sales, it looks to be the way of the future.
Scalability without breaking your budget is crucial to business success, and inside sales is a great format and structure that’ll help you achieve this.
Ensure you give your team the right ingredients, tools, and hire people who can work remotely.
If you’re interested in learning more about improving your sales, register for our free 7 day sales challenge here.
Want To Close Sales Easier?
Are you committed to closing sales a lot easier, and consistently?
If so, you should check out our self-paced and affordable online sales training program; The 5% Sales Blueprint.
It’ll give you everything you need to close sales consistently.
To learn more, simply click on the link below for more information.
