Bringing Your Outside Sales Team Inside

With the economy being in the state that it is, there is an overall trend to bring outside sales teams into the office. This is being done in an effort to reduce costs. Inside Sales teams are cheaper to maintain because they do not have the added costs of travel expenses which may cut deeply into a sales team’s budget. Cutting back on outside sales teams makes a great deal of sense if you are trying to get the most bang for your buck. The big challenge in the transition is the change in environment for your sales team.
Although an inside sales team is not the same thing as telemarketing, but sit at a desk and make many calls day in and day out. This may be a difficult adaption for an outside sales rep. There are definitely other pros to an inside sales team over an outside sales team, however.
It is true that face to face lead nurturing can be more effective than lead nurturing over the phone, especially if you have a very charismatic sales rep. The increased close rate inherent to face to face selling, however, is far outweighed by the sheer volume increase in sales possible by inside sales reps. An inside sales representative can contact dozens of leads or prospects a day, while an outside sales rep may visit between 3 and 8 tops. Outside Sales reps do not have tools to automate travel or to get between prospects faster. The simple fact that they are outside limits their contact capabilities.
An inside sales agent on the other hand has a plethora of tools he can use to improve efficiency. A dialer, for instance, can speed up prospecting and lead qualification several fold over and outside salesman. Online lead management tools also allow the sales representative to track and help to improve the progress of leads into sales. They empower sales representatives to manage multiple complex sales with ease and thus close more deals faster.
Also, inside sales teams have the capability of specialization. Outside sales reps often have to do lead generation, prospecting, qualifying, and closing all themselves. With an inside sales team, you have the ability to specialize your sales reps into teams that that focus on just qualification, or simply on closing deals. In this ways you can focus an individual sales rep’s job function on the things he is strangest at.

Tags: Lead, Management, Marketing, Lead response Management, Sales, Marketing Software, Insidesales, Salesforce, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Dialer, demand generation, lead generation