Everything you always wanted to know about Inside Sales but were afraid to ask  

For: Entrepreneurs, small business owners, sales people & Inside Sales people. 

Q 1. What is Inside Sales? 

A1. Selling from inside the office is called “ Inside Sales”. 

 Inside Sales is also referred to as 'Virtual Sales’ or ‘Remote Sales’ or ‘Sales Development’ or ‘ Business Development’ or ‘Account Management’ in organizations.  

This kind of sales activity is done virtually or remotely or from inside an office rather than from outside the office. Some of the preferred tool s used are: Skype, WebEx, GoToMeeting, TeamViewer, Google Hangout, etc. 

Inside Sales Scenarios:    

1. A SaaS startup selling their productivity tool to New York based media companies via a small team of sales people sending proposals, clarifying doubts, rebutting objections, closing sales and chasing payments, etc., all virtually, from their Gurgaon office. 

2. A global recruitment job board hires an Inside Sales Team in India to handle sales to companies, globally. 

3. A cloud/IaaS company in Santiago selling to their European customers via online chat, email and telephone. The hosting industry has been using some form of Inside Sales for almost 2 decades, now. Incidentally, my introduction to Inside Sales happened when we sold hosting and ASP(earlier avatar of SaaS) in the late 90s, remotely.  

4. A startup in Bengaluru, having sales reps virtually engage with customers over Email/Whatsapp/Skype/TeamViewer, etc. The same sales reps also make occasional customer office visits. From the customers' perspective, this a complete (traditional) sales experience.  

Useful videos/links on the topic:

What is inside sales, the definition, by Kevin Gaither

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Crhw4er4-U

Q2. Is Inside Sales, the same as telemarketing?

A2. There are some similarities.

Telemarketing is B2C. Inside Sales is B2B.

Both techniques use virtual tools like telephone, email, Skype & other sharing tools to communicate with customers. 

In my experience, most of what is known as telemarketing is focused on the consumer. Telemarketing is broadly, 'spray and pray’. The usual tactic is: get a good database and get 20 telecallers to dial up 100,000 people in 4 weeks and hope for an x% hit rate. While Inside Sales is sales, conducted virtually. It includes the usual functions — account mapping, relationship building, pitching, negotiating, demonstrating, closingm, etc. 

The skills needed are similar, albeit to a limited extent.

Inside Sales is a larger super set of telemarketing. Most of telemarketing is one-call-sale while most of Inside Sales involves multiple calls, emails and other interactions. Most of telemarketing happens with bound scripts. Most of Inside Sales happens without sales scripts. Though I would like to see successful Inside Sales teams which do not use any scripts. The core skill required for Inside Sales is sales.

An important point for entrepreneurs is that while setting up their Inside Sales infrastructure, they can easily learn from the telemarketing industry.

Useful videos/links on the topic:

Varun Mittal, Product Manager, InsideSalesBox, has an interesting take on the overlaps between telemarketing and inside sales, here. 

Is Inside Sales Just Telemarketing? (HubSpot) 

Telemarketer vs Inside Sales Rep, what’s the difference? by Chris Bourne.

Q3. Which industries are already using Inside Sales to get customers?

A3. Almost all online products for businesses are sold online via Inside Sales. Some only via Inside Sales and some by a combination of Inside Sales and traditional sales. 

Common examples are found in SaaS, cloud & Web Hosting services, design, VoIP, recruitment, software products, etc.

I have sold a SaaS security product to SMB customers in New York, Auckland, Sydney, Birmingham and San Francisco, back office legal services to advocates in the UK, web hosting to SMBs in Connecticut, etc. all using pure Inside Sales.  Hosting, VoIP and web telephony, SaaS are some of the common examples of sectors which are using Inside Sales.

Inside Sale, in its changing avatar, is at least a 20 year old industry. As more and more SaaS companies grew over the last few years, Inside Sales became prominent. 

Useful videos/links on the topic:

+1 year old post but very relevant Outside In: The Rise of the Inside Sales Team

Q4. Can tech founders train themselves to sell via Inside Sales?

A4 . Yes. It is relatively easier for a technology founder to equip themselves in inside sales than traditional sales. 

This is because: 

1. Inside Sales has, relatively, a limited personal exposure to the customers / prospects. That reduces the areas and time required to learn.
2. If you are selling from behind a computer, you can use technology, other people and information resources, without ‘breaking stride’ and out of the customer’s views.  

So, in that respect, tech founders have an advantage with Inside Sales.

Useful videos/links on the topic: 

How One Head of Sales Tackled Building a Sales Playbook

Q5. Can you give a more detailed example of how tech founders or business owners can start selling on their own? 

A5 . Presuming the following background:

You are 2 tech founders building a productivity tool for SMBs

MVP completed. 4 SMBs using. 80 users signed up. Some engagement observed. 

Investor asks for more traction before investing.

Total Rs. 5 lakh in the bank. Can take care of 3 months of their personal costs, only. How to get sales traction without the budget required to hire an A class sales person. 

Step 1: Study your own sales cycle.

Recount the ‘sales process’ that you followed while ‘selling’ to your first 4–5 customers. 

A sales process will look some thing like this. 

http://www.slideshare.net/rudhirsharan/b2b-sales-31311152

Of course, for your specific product's sales cycle, you will have a custom sales cycle. Like the following is a sales cycle for an on-demand cloud security tool for SMBs in a pure Inside Sales model. 

Step 2: Create your own sales process by breaking it up into smaller stages. It could be some thing like:

Stage 1: Contact CTO of startup with an introductory email

Stage 2. Send qualifying questions if they respond

Stage 3. Assess answers to questions and if qualified, send offer for demo

Stage 4. Demonstration

Stage 5. Commercial proposal presentation

Stage 6. Negotiation

Stage 7. Closing and signing up

Step 3: Make buckets for each of these stages of your sales process. Then sort all your Prospects in these buckets.

e.g. ‘Bucket number ’1 can be called "Established Contact with CTO”(shorter name), 'number 2', “Sent Questions to”, 3, "Qualified from answers”, and so on. 

Now, if you are talking to 16 prospects, try and put each of these into your 7 buckets as above.

Bucket segregation of your prospects will start looking like this:   

Above shows the journey of a total of 16 prospects though the first 3 of the 7 total stages of the sales cycles. Out of the 16 Prospects represented above, 8 have moved to Stage 2. Out of the 8 who had moved to Stage 2, 4 moved ahead to Stage 3, leaving 4 behind in stage 2.

A 50% drop off rate at every stage.

Step 4: Analyze the sales funnel. Now these buckets or stages can also be seen as a funnel. 

Using buckets can easily help you understand the ‘bottlenecks’ in your sales process. You can use any of the good CRMs — like Salesforce (very extensive and a leader. Viable version: $75 per user per month.), Close.io (very good in telephony integration. $65 per user per month) or Pipedrive (quite good and only $12 per user per month) — to get further analytics on your buckets.

As you start filling your sales funnel or stage buckets with your Prospects, your sales process will start becoming clear to you. 

Step 5: Break up the sales process into smaller problems to solve.

Sophisticated sales teams typically organize themselves around specific stages of the sales process. Even at an early stage, some smart division of labour can help you become effective.

e.g. If you are a team of two, you can decide which of you are better at stages 1–3 and which at the later ones. Then, divide the tasks between the two of you.

So, in the above sales funnel, the first obvious problem to solve is to ensure that there is a 80-90% conversion rate from Stage 1(Established Contact with CTO) to Stage 2(Sent Questions to). Similarly you can optimize the conversion rates from each stage to the next.

Once you have completed these steps,

Step 6: Once you have analayzed this, define actions which will take prospects from step ‘x’ to step 'x+1', for each step.

e.g. The following actions will take prospects from step 1 to step 2:

a. follow up after 1, 3 and 7 days for an answer. (the periodicity can be defined by you)

or

b. send a customized presentation to CTO and following up after 7 days

Now, you will be left with a number of smaller easier to complete, actions. Each of these actions is connected to a stage and a transition.

Useful videos/links on the topic:

1. Assembly Line Selling. Do you have a sales process? — By Marjorie Dudley 

2. Here is an interesting blog post by Arsh Sidhu on prospecting which may also be relevant and interesting.

Says Arsh, about outreach to (Suspects and) Prospects,

“Establishing a cadence of emails and calls manually is incredibly inefficient, and several years ago there weren’t any robust tools for this. Sales reps were typically tracking who they had to do followups email and calls mainly in spreadsheets or with tools that were just frustrating to use. Tools now can automate the followups. They can also track reply, click, and open rates per template used, which is great for experimenting.

”

This is very valid. If used effectively this can become one of the key differentiators for an effective sales team. As CRMs smarten up, reps will become smarter.

3. Quick introductory video introduction to sales process. (~2min)

4. A useful earlier blog post on Sales Call Planning. 

5. Growth Hacking Enterprise Sales SaaS

Q6. Can I sell a customer support SaaS using a pure Inside Sales team?

A6 . Yes.

Here are a few of several dozen if not 100s of Indian startups using pure Inside Sales for certain categories.

Social Loyalty platform, Xeno

InsideSalesBox, a sales CRM

FreshDesk, a CRM SaaS 

Most online product sales cycles, today, are pure Inside Sales. Hosting, entry to mid level SaaS, software, online subscriptions, etc. By default, the answer to the question is a big ‘YES'. 

Useful videos/links on the topic:

1. Another great post on Saastr: How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople ? A ‘must read’ for SaaS business owners.

In this, Jason Lemkin says , “ So the straight math says it’s tough to have inside sales reps working on deals < $3,000 ACV or say $299/month if monthly with churn.” 

But this is based on a sales person @ OTE of $80–100k calculation.

“ OK, so if the rep needs to make say $80-$100k in OTE (base + bonus) … and you need to clear say $300k in revenue from that rep to make the math work on your side … at say 100 closed deals a year, to bring in $300k to the company, each deal has to have a $3,000 ACV on average .”

Inside Sales Rep in India have an OTE within $20k-40k.

Even after discounting for (temporary productivity drops), that is a big difference. 3x to 4X!

That changes the math!

2. Another good post on bridgegroupinc.com on viability. What’s the Minimum ASP Where Sales Development Makes Sense? 

Again, the math is similar to above and the same changes happen when the OTE (cost) drops.

Q7. Do hybrid sales processes work? 

A7 . Yes. Let us take the example of you, as an IaaS provider.

Your sales process for a complex redundant multi location hybrid cloud solution to a multi-location enterprise could look like this:

In this case, your Inside Sales team will make the initial contacts, send the qualifying questions & get answers for them and qualify the prospect via telephone/email/WebEx/GoToMeeting/Skype. Once a prospect is qualified i.e. once they pass the stage 3 and go on to a demo stage, they will be handed over to the ’outside sales’ team or the in person sales team.

From here on, a more traditional model will be adopted by the sales team — which will go to the Prospect office to meet the decision makers, shows demo, negotiate and close it. 

Q8. How to figure out which sales model is best: a. Pure Inside Sales , b. Pure in-person sales or c. Hybrid 

A8. 

Broadly:  

1. What is good for SaaS, is good for pure Inside Sales.
2. Almost all sales models today can become more effective by incorporating Inside Sales processes. In fact, most are hybrid in some ways, already. e.g. telecalling / initial lead generation, etc. 
3. As deals start getting larger and more complex, the need for in-person sales increase

Once you have completed the Step 2 (in Q5, above), you will know which one of your steps can be Inside Sales actions and which, ‘Outside’.

Once you try out a model, you will know best, what works. All the best!

Q9. Email is dead! So what is the ‘new email’ of sales?

A9 . Whatsapp! Its better.

Over the last few months, I have seen a few entrepreneurs use Whatsapp as a very effective pre-product test marketing CRM! 

Test marketing with Whatsapp + Inside Sales model is the mantra. With a 1 billion user base of Whatsapp’s, it is easier to do Inside Sales to test a market even before a product is built.  

Many sales people and entrepreneurs are using Whatsapp smartly to sell products services to businesses as well as consumers. I am not referring to Whatsapp spam. 

While researching the viability of a real estate product , I used this technique. I mined a few hundred mobile numbers of real estate brokers in NCR and sent them an initial one time message asking them to respond if they are interested in knowing more about niche properties.

I scanned whatsapp on my Mac and set about waiting for a response on what essentially became my (sales)CRM for pre-product market testing. About 15% responded. Engagements — questions, more information, escalated to telephonic conversations and in-person meeting setup— were managed via whatsapp & voice — happened over whatsapp. 

Here is another way it can be used: 

If you are testing a hyper local delivery solution, you point your prospects to a whatsapp number instead of asking them to download an app. Then using whatsapp as a CRM between you and your prospect and customer, you can take orders, confirm delivery, take feedback — do both (Inside) sales and customer relationship management.

or

You are selling a SaaS product to Indian schools.

Your prospect profile: Director/Owners/Principals of schools in India.

You set up a special interest group for educators in India on Whatsapp.

You start uploading useful new research and studies, reading material, training material, information on this group. As the group grows, you get to have a larger audience of people who may be potential influencers in your future selling process with the schools.

After a certain amount of activity is noticed in the group, you start generating warm leads from the group.

You initiate topics of similar interest for people which genuinely add value to their knowledge and capability as well.

e.g. A topic like “technology adoption for schools as a key value addition to students” . 

or

"We installed a learning product for XYZ.

They were facing issues with adoption. We solved a part of the problem. Now the benefits ‘a', ‘b’ and ‘c' (this being your pitch) are accruing to this school. But we still have unsolved issues 'm', ‘n’ and ‘o’, left.” 

Q10. How does one go about finding a good salesperson when the product is finished but one has no funding?

A10 . This question has some good answers on Quora .

One person talks about first having a repeatable sales process first, before hiring (an Inside) sales person.

This is also addressed in Q5, above. That(Q5) has step-by-step directions for starting your sales process.

2 cents: 

1. try and make the first 5–7 odd sales yourself
2.  learn your way to do some elementary sales. Get first hand feedback on your product.
3. if you really-really cannot sell on your own and have to hire or get a cofounder then, 

sell to the sales person, first!

Why? Because unless they are bought-in to the idea that this product will take off in a big way, a good in-demand sales person will compare your product sales opportunity with that of entrenched products. Not a comparison that is likely to work in your favor.

Selling to them means walking them through the entire idea, problem solving statement, demo, FAQs, etc. Treat them as your first customer. Don’t worry about doing a bad or a good job. Just try to sell. They realize you do not know sales, so don't worry about being judged. Answer the questions, truthfully. Be upfront with your SWOT.  

Q11. What are the top questions to ask when interviewing an Inside Sales Rep?

A11. Personally, I feel that if you are asking such a question, you should first hire a professional consultant/contractor to hire other sales people for you or hire via a strong personal recommendation. You, as the interviewer, will find it difficult to properly assess a sales pro with a ‘battle card’ of questions. It is like some one, whose computer eeducation is limited to reading “Smart and get things done by” Joel Spoelsky, trying to interview a Lisp programmer.  

But if you have to ask these questions to your prospective Inside Sales candidate, you can start the conversation with: 

Question 1. What do you sell at your current / previous assignment and to who?

Question 2. What is your pitch to your Prospects? Would you like to draw a quick Venn’s diagram, explaining what is your pitch and what you are trying to achieve in a sales campaign? (Refer to Q13)

Question 3. (Hypothetical - don’t take this one seriously) If you had a chance to get a job offer with 100% commissions, would you take it? If yes then what percentage of or fixed amount per sale would you want?

Question 4. Tell me how you went about closing one of your best or most memorable sales.  

Useful videos/links on the topic:

1. An earlier post called "Are you firing your best sales people?”
2. Quora : What are good interview questions to ask a inside sales manager when hiring?

3. The Real Difference Between a Director and Inside Sales Manager

4. Interesting take by Rishabh Kaul : An early-stage enterprise VP of sales for India? Any takers?  

Q12. What are the critical factors to focus on while setting up infrastructure for an Inside Sales team? 

A12 .

i. High speed redundant broadband. Critical. If this is down, your sales team is on a holiday.

ii.  Separate closed offices for each Inside Sales Rep. Please do not ask Inside Sales reps to sell from a ‘we have an open office and great startup culture open desks’. It is a functional requirement. They can still be a part of the open culture.

They need privacy. And zero noise pollution. You do not want others disturbed by their constant talking on the phone, either.

Several other techniques for sound reduction are employed by call centers, who have dozens of callers in a single room —  sound reduction headsets, sound proofing of the rooms, echo cancelling, etc. But what works for Inside Sales is private offices, in my experience. Or you will see sales people running for conference rooms, smoking rooms or other places of solitude when they get customer calls. That is unproductive.

iii. ensure web telephony backup — physical phones lines/other vendors, etc.

iv. Here is a good list of tools to choose for Inside Sales(Quora).

v. What are the top B2B software tools in the sales stack for Field Sales & Inside Sales teams in 2016 (Quora)?

vi. SaaS Apps for High Velocity Inside Sales Teams

Q13. I am not a marketing person either. How do I get my positioning/pitch right?

A13. The need-benefit-product-competition mapped by way of a Venn diagram:

Looking at the above: your competiton would try to sell the need for ‘E’ to the customer. Because you do not have it and the customer needs it. Your sales pitch should be to push him to 'D’ and de-sell 'E’. The customer needs ‘D' and you have it. Your competition does not.

Positioning/pitch 101.

e.g. Competition is positioning their USP — the largest number of merchants signed up for their e-wallet. You do not have a long list as you are just starting up. Then ‘largest merchant list’ is their ‘E', provided it is needed by the customer.

The competition sales team's job then is to sell the need for 'E’ to the customer.

If you can offer a quick sign up turn around time, which this competitor does not have then that becomes your ‘D'.

Startups may not be prepared to wait for weeks to get vetted. Your team can bring them on board within 24 hours. This is your ‘D’. Your sales pitch then needs to focus around this.

Lets presume a real life case resembling the following:

Now, your ‘D' becomes: telephony integration with Sales SaaS.

Feature: Seamless telephony integration for sending and receiving calls and SMS and whatsapp messages from the CRM.

Benefit: great time saver for sales people, especially those with a lot of telephonic communication

Sales Pitch to customer:

- “… we are building our Sales SaaS especially for sales people who do a lot of telephonic communication with their customers.“

or

•  “…our product saves time in/for voice engaged sales people/scenarios…"

or 

• “…we are complementary to 'the B product’. You can use us for scenarios where you would like to make your customer calls easily and efficiently…”

…and so on.

Q14. Can Inside Sales be done without selling skills?

A14. A few months back, I had a small enthusiastic team, who just could not sell. The CEO had earlier hired a good sales consultant. The consultant tracked metrics, identified some ‘chokes’ in the sales funnel and went about executing it in a rather ‘regimental manner’. The calls increased. Nothing else did.

We broke the process into 2 stages.

Gave them all an extensive script to handle stage 1 and hand over the prospect to the sales manager when they cross over to stage 2. Surprisingly, even to me, they became effective within a week and started moving qualified prospects through the funnel.

While that was not a complete solution and we did need to hire additional sales people, it definitely helped save the day. A ‘process engineering’ worth exploring. 

Q15. Tips on hiring an Inside Sales coach or trainer?

A15.

1. They should be great sales pros, themselves — should be able to sit down and make a sale on their own.  Nothing like teaching by example.

2 .

…The trick is finding that balance between coaching and telling them it’s your way or the highway. When I expressed this to my friend, he immediately said, “Great. But how?”, Laney Pilpel Dowling , in an interesting post which rings in some first hand experience and smart thinking in Inside Sales Training. Link to the blog post .

3. The organization must define concrete goals for the inside sales coach to achieve in a predefined time period.

4. There must be a succession plan from the trainer to the sales team leadership. 

Useful videos/links on the topic:

Jeff Goldberg’s response on "As a first-time enterprise software startup founder, how does one go about finding a “sales coach”?” , here/Quora .

Speaking of coaches: Steli Efti, Founder Close.io, has put out good basic sales videos. Check them out.

Now, I am a great fan of Leonardo DeCaprio but I might pass if the character played by him shows up for the sales trainer’s job!

Q16. Can a team totally rely on scripts to do 100% of their Inside Sales?

A16. While, traditionally, scripts have been associated with telemarketing more than Inside Sales, this is an area worth exploring — also see Q14. Lesser complex and lower ticket value products and services can definitely be sold, to businesses, via multi layered , multi branched sophisticated frozen scripts. It will be difficult to be able to perform functions like ‘closing’ and 'negotiating’ with scripts. Though those can be made simpler and easier to execute with fixed sales processes. 

Here is how you can make it work in your organization:

Lets say you are selling a 'Zomato like service’ to the education sector.

You are offering profiles of a variety of professionals and organizations offering your services to the education industry.

In a sales process that looks some thing like above, we can try and "scriptify” the light blue steps. 

Using a mind map kind of a multi-layered sales script, which accounts for all possible question-answer scenarios and guides the ISR or Inside Sales Rep to close the sale or qualify prospects. Without ‘having to think like a sales person’ or being a sales person.  

As a business owner, if this can work, you can cut costs and drive up sales productivity like crazy.

You take a sales pro and put them on the task of creating a fully optimized multi-layered, all situation, sales script .

Hire 5–10 aggressive telecallers — people with good language skills. In other words, hire people who have done telemarketing with some reasonable success. Hire a meticulous manager whose only task is to ensure that the script is followed by the ISRs. 

If your sales cycle is 1 month then try it for 2 - 3 months.

Within this time, follow the closed process to improve the script based on feedback from ISRs. 

This will help you cut your sales payroll by a significant amount. More importantly, you will become empowered to go to market quickly. It is easier to hire good language skills people, at least in India — from call centers or the hospitality industry — than good sales people.

So you may be able to do equally well in scenario A — with a team of 4 good sales reps and 8-10 process & script trained aggressive communicators — as in scenario B — if you had, say 10 sales reps. The exact advantage in headcount numbers will vary on sales reps, the process, product, market, etc.. But this can be done.

Useful videos/links on the topic:

Analyzing an Inside Sales interaction (real life case)

Q17. Can traditional small and medim businesses also employ Inside Selling as a strategy for customer acqusition?

A17.

When I bought a newspaper advertisement a few weeks back — don’t ask me why — the Times of India advertisement agent interacted with me the whole time about price and delivery via Whatsapp. It was his Sales CRM. That is Inside Sales is in its most elementary form. 

Some industries and companies should be able to immediately sell more efficiently using Inside Sales, either in a pure or hybrid model.

Most small businesses like real estate companies use SMS and telemarketing for consumers. As the delivery of products and services transitions to online delivery mode — e.g. download songs instead of selling a DVD, SaaS ilo products— the B2B side of the business will automatically transition to Inside Sales.

My own observation is that as businesses are getting smarter, they are adopting Inside Sales, regardless of size, industry or stage of growth. That is the reality of sales, today. Insiders in the job market observe that Inside Sales openings are x times more than that of traditional sales.

Q18. What metrics to track for an Inside Sales team? 

A18. 

Some useful Inside Sales metrics:

One can pick & choose / mix & match as per focus. 

1. conversion rates between stages — e.g. 50% conversion rate from stage 2 to stage 3 (in Q5).
2. contacts made per day / average time spent per call 
3. average attempts required to contact per lead
4. percentage of leads contacted
5. opportunities in the pipeline / open opprtunities / closed opportunities
6. LTV of sign-ups achieved
7.  average days(time) to convert suspect to customer(cycle) 
8. closure rate per rep / team / products

The ultimate sales metric: MTD (Month To Date revenue booked). 

Please feel free to add comments, ideas, suggestions, critique and links.