Inside sales is also often known as remote sales or virtual sales. It’s your internal sales engine. These team members don’t travel to clients, but they are constantly contacting clients and prospects, mostly using calls and emails although other communication channels are starting to be adopted by some organizations.

There is never a one-size-fits-all approach to inside sales, but there are some basic lessons and strategies you can deploy to build the best possible team.

Structure Your Business For Success

You need everyone on the team to be clear about their role. Sales is a process and in fact the classic inside sales model is often known as the ‘assembly line’ because leads should seamlessly pass from one area of the sales team to the next. There are four basic roles that all need specialists:

• Sales development inbound: handle all incoming questions and requests for information.
• Sales development outbound: qualifying potential leads by calling prospects.
• Account executives: the qualified opportunities are handled by the account executives who close the deal.
• Account management: existing customers can extend contracts and become more valuable in time.

The team requires this structure so everyone knows their precise place and purpose. 

Align Marketing And Sales

Your marketing and sales team needs to be closely aligned so both understands the drivers and objectives of the other. A disjointed marketing and sales process can lead to marketing campaigns being launched without any focused sales support. The marketing team needs to understand the process of qualifying leads and developing a pipeline.

Set The Right Goals

Your Sales Development Representatives usually have access to a lot of data, but it is the metrics you are measuring that really matter. You need to build a dashboard to monitor all inside sales activity broken across the various relevant categories such as sales activity, pipeline, and revenue.

Focus On Hiring The Right People

Hiring the right people is critical for any team, but with sales professionals the cost of hiring mistakes will be immediately noticed. Your typical search will focus on skills, experience, attitude, results, cognitive skills, and habits aligned with a sales professional.

However, to build the best team requires some deeper thinking. Explore motivation, approach to failure and rejection, and relationship skills. In particular always ask potential sales team members for their advice – what kind of company or team do they think they are joining?

Onboarding And Training

Typical sales team onboarding means pairing those with experience with the new team members, but there are several more specific areas of focus that can improve the process:

• Library: create a central resource featuring ideas, articles, blogs, where the team can regularly share experience and find new ideas.
• E-learning: use online training systems to create a learning culture.
• Feedback: create a culture of feedback. Report back to team members regularly and use technology where appropriate to monitor calls and suggest improvement.

Focus On Culture

Many companies don’t have much of a vision, the focus is on the balance sheet. Within a sales-focused organization culture has a greater value because it helps the team to focus on why they are doing what they do. Ask some questions around the broader purpose of your organization and start taking action to create a positive culture that makes people want to be a part of this team. This has a dramatic impact on performance.

Use The Best Tools

Your sales team cannot perform at their best without the right tools. CRM systems such as Salesforce are the basic bread and butter, but you can also use email management, lead generation tools, and productivity tools like Slack to keep the team communicating without wasting time on email.

Building the best inside sales team is a step by step process. It’s similar to building any successful team, but there is more acute pressure than most other corporate roles because sales is the front-line for revenue in your business. Channel that pressure correctly and your team truly can be the best.

Get in touch with ICON directly if you would like further examples or case studies about companies that have dramatically improved their inside sales process through a partnership with a BPO.