Inside Sales Process: Techniques And Tools Every Marketer Needs For Success

Inside sales are constantly changing than ever before, and it is growing 15 times faster than outside sales. As a result, inside sales is the powerful sales model for  B2B Sales reps,  Saas marketers tech, B2C sales, and more. In addition, inside sales are the process of managing sales remotely. 

B2B sales are complex and challenging because of multiple processes, methods, and strategies. However, inside sales is one of the best models that has quickly developed. In addition, it is the most popular method to make business sales online. As a result, there is no niche operating model anymore, and B2B sales through inside sales are increasing. 

Both inside or outside sales are an important part of sales organizations. If you have heard of inside sales before, don’t worry. You are not alone. This article will explore the inside sales, and we shall see how it fits into modern sales teams. New technologies keep popping up to help businesses right from the automation tool and understand your prospect behaviors.

What Are Inside Sales?

The inside sales describe the process of identifying, nurturing, and turning leads into buyers remotely. Or in other words, it indicates the sales process where the sales reps primarily perform the sales remotely.  These inside sales tasks are performed by the inside sales reps who are responsible for marketing the business product or services through emails, calls, or over the internet. 

The sales team will sell the medium and high ticket products through multiple interactions in the inside sales. In the inside sales process, the salesperson primarily sells the products or services remotely rather than directly reaching the person and performing the sales. Inside sales teams utilize different technologies and communication channels like mobile devices, emails, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, video conferencing, and social media. 

The inside sales reps and the telemarketers are highly trained to answer the technical and industry-specific queries and sell the product or service to resolve potential customer pain points or challenges. In this B2B sales process, the prospects are reached multiple times (High touch sales) in the sales cycle. 

 An inside sales representatives  primary roles comprise of the following:

• Lead qualification
• Handling product demos 
• Explaining value propositions to prospects
• After-sale activities like assuring the clients are well-taken care of their needs.

In recent years, inside sales are becoming a more successful sales model, and buyers conveniently purchase and collaborate remotely.

Inside Vs. Outside Sales, What's the Difference?

In the Inside sales, the sales professionals sell the product or services right from the office or home desk (Remotely). The four basic inside sales skills every salesperson requires are listening, developing a rapport, following organized strategy, and reliability.

In contrast, outside sales reps or field sales reps will travel and meet the process with face-to-face conversion and close the sales deals. The employer will have physical offices in the outside sales, and the field sales rep meets their prospects at industry events, trade shows, conferences, and more. 

Outside sales are the traditional sales method in which the sales reps head out to meet the client and make the sales closer. As per the 2019 data, among the 5.7 million salespeople in the United States. Around 45.5% of people are inside sales, and 52.8% are Outside sales reps.

There are various advantages on the inside sales and some disadvantages on the traditional outside sales approaches. Here we shall get into more detail on the advantages and disadvantages of the inside and outside sales. 

Benefits of Outside Sales

The significant benefit of outside sales is the human factor. You will be reaching the buyers directly, so there is no chance for disconnecting or missing your sales pitches entirely, as there is no chance of emails landing on the spam folder, ignored messages, and more. Another benefit is you are spotting the business out on the road, not using the online presence or technical savvy. 

Benefits of Inside Sales

The major advantage of Inside sales is to provide your business with a wider market reach. In Inside sale, you can draw your potential client irrespective of the location. You can reach the prospects anywhere, being at the comfort of your own office. Whereas in the outside sales, the team has to seek marketing opportunities by leaving your current state or country.

By using the UpLead tool, your business can perform B2B Prospecting with 95% data accuracy. In addition, this software offers a huge lead database to perform your inside and outside sales and save your time. 

Inside sales, your business can perform paid advertising, social media marketing, and other online marketing tactics, so high costs are involved in the inside sales. 

You can easily spread your message through inside sales. Your business can take advantage of the email campaigns and can reach your potential clients through email marketings, cold calling, and more.

Inside VS Outside Sales Model

Choosing Among Inside vs. Outside Sales

There are no barriers to switching your business from outside sales to inside sales, but for better sales results, combining both the inside and outside sales will be perfect for the B2B sales process. 

Inside sales are growing faster than outside sales, and it offers a more simple sales cycle. However, according to the Spotio study, the outside sales reps earn 12-18% higher than inside sales professionals. Soon, the sales reps want to focus on both inside and outside sales techniques for better sales and to improve revenue. 

How Can Inside Sales Benefit Your Business?

1. Increase Cost-Efficiency 

Inside sales are more cost-effective than field sales. It eliminates travel and accommodation expenditure, and your business can spend time and money on scalable sales processes. Thanks to marketing & sales automation, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, social selling software, and analytics software, the sales team can quickly identify the ideal prospects for the business. As a result, it helps your business to reduce the sales cycle and cost per acquisition. 

2. Get More Time for Other Important Sales Tasks 

B2B Sales are not easy like it looks. It involves many administrative and prospecting works to achieve successful sales. However, the inside sales help the sales leaders to concentrate on their important and high-priority tasks more efficiently. 

3. Revenue Predictability

Inside sales are a calculative approach, so your business can find how many calls and demos an individual sales rep needs to take. For example, you can easily calculate the number of demos per day by the sales department. By knowing the number, you can predict your revenue and can plan a future-proof strategy.

Based on the CRM, your business can now predict how much revenue a salesperson/ sales department can produce and assist in identifying your ROI. A lead-driven approach ensures predictable revenue, and inside sales are the team in the best position to work together with marketing to fill the sales pipeline.

4. Enhance Sales Productivity

In the inside sales, your business can map the roles and responsibilities of different sales team members. It enables the sales team to prioritize the workflow and help to concentrate on all the customers on the buyer's journey. It enables your business to engage your profitable prospects at all the stages in the sales funnel.  The traditional way of sales will take longer to deal closer on sales.

5. Excellent Chances for Collaboration & Coaching

The benefits of an inside sales team for a company are that they maximize higher performance and better customer service because the sales managers and reps are in close proximity. In addition, the proximity to each other will promote better team cohesion and allow for more training. It reduces the time on new employee onboarding. Team cohesion is a key advantage and helps the business to offer a better opportunity for training and onboarding employees in a cost-effective way to improve business performance.

6. Scalability

Once you have analyzed what works best for your business, you can easily train more individuals with your successful business sales strategy. Inside sales teams can scale up their business without any travel expense and inconvenience of relocation, and this offers cost savings to the organization.

7. Capability To Accommodate a Changing Customer Demographic

Nowadays, it's likely that your target buyer will be someone who responds to digital campaigns. The powerful inside sales team can take advantage of this trend to reduce the cost of sales. It also enables your business to take advantage of cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

8. Agile & Transparent

Everything moves inside sales faster. As a result, your business can easily test existing processes, implement the A/B test, and find the best fit and modify the existing process more rapidly.

In the inside sales process, the CRM and the automated tool offer complete visibility to every individual on the team. As a result, each salesperson can know the progress of each potential prospect. 

9. More Comfortable to Manage

This sales methodology has numerous benefits for the sales manager. In the Outside Sales or the field sales, the sales reps need to spread across the location nationally and internationally. In contrast, in the inside sale, every team member can work from the same location. In addition, it makes the workflow easier among various levels and departments. 

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The Inside Sales Process

The inside sales process may differ from business to business, and there is no right and wrong way of doing inside sales. For instance, some businesses inside sales complete the sales without many meetings /demos or in-person meetings.  In contrast, some expensive products or services or B2B sales will meet in person with the customer, give a sales presentation and demo their product /service, and then move for the close of the sales. As discussed before, the inside and outside sales are completely different. Some businesses need to adopt both methods to succeed in their sales. In this section, we shall take a look at the basic inside sales process flow chart.

First Contact

It is the first step in the sales process where the qualified leads enter the inside sales pipeline. Your business sales development representative will reach the targeted clients over a phone call, send out an email, or look for the leads to sign up for the website.

Once the ideal customer responds to the b2b inside sales team sales pitch, the lead enters the sales pipeline, either making a purchase or showing interest in your product/service. 

Nurture / Call Back  

In this sales process stage, your business can automate your email sales follow-up using sales automation tools like Mailshake. With the help of the tool, your businesses can make the sales outreach in the autopilot method. Businesses can perform automated prospection outreach follow-ups through emails, social media channels, and follow-up calls. During this stage sales development rep will lead the targeted clients into the decision-making process or purchase. 

Sales Demo / Presentation / In-Person Meeting

In this process, the marketing team and sales development rep will showcase the business product or services through the sales presentation or by offering a demo with the ideal customer.  If genuinely interested, the customer will begin the interaction.  From this point, your business can fairly expect a constant conversion. 

Follow Up

Follow-up with the prospect is important. Sending follow-up will help generate business, increase sales, and clarify or offer values to your potential customers. Follow-up will catch your recipient's eye, and there would be chances to notice your email message even if they missed the initial email.  Experiment with the 42 best ways to follow up with customers close deals. 

Timing is important for email outreach and sales follow-up. The inside sales team need not contact them quickly after an initial outreach. There should be a 2-3 days time interval for the follow-up email. The follow-up email should not force the customer on your product or service. And too late follow up will lead to the failure sales process entirely. So your sales team needs to experiment and find the best time for follow-up. 

Inside Sales Techniques and Strategies

You can implement numerous sales strategies and techniques on your business inside sales. In this article, let's explore various aspects of inside sales and how you can apply them to your business. 

You can implement numerous sales strategies and techniques on your business inside sales. In this article, let's explore various aspects of inside sales and how you can apply them to your business. 

1. Lead Generation

You can't convert your potential prospects into your buyers without a valid lead on your sales pipeline. So the business requires a strong lead generation process apart from inside or outside sales strategy. So lead generation plays a vital role, and we shall look into the best strategies and techniques for the lead generation process. 

2. Cold Calling / Cold Emails: 

You can generate leads by searching on the internet. In addition, businesses can perform another way of lead generation by using lead generation software solutions like HubSpot, LeadPages, OptinMonster, Hello Bar, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc. 

Using B2B lead generation tools is the most effective way for searching leads than manual search. After identifying and validating your leads, you can send out personalized cold emails, and the sales team can begin the cold calling processes with the effective targeted B2B contact lists. 

3. Generating Traffic ( Paid Ads)

Facebook ads, google ads and LinkedIn ads are the most effective ways to drive quality traffic to the website on your inside sales. In addition, these social media ads and google ads help the business to generate more leads. LinkedIn’s paid ads are the most effective way for B2B inside sales. You can leave a cold message to pre-qualify the prospects. While, with analytics and LinkedIn Ads performance dashboard, you can understand which campaigns and messages work well.

4. Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a marketing term. In this process, a business offers a free product or service to gather potential buyer data. For example, offering free trial subscriptions, e-newsletters, white paper, free consultation, etc. Marketers utilize the lead magnet to identify and gather potential buyers' information or process of gathering data of the people who are already interested in your product or services. 

5. Qualify Leads That Are Good Fit

When you add more prospects to your sales pipeline, it is more essential to weed the least converting prospects. In other words, you need to find profitable prospects to boost your conversion. With the set of open-ended questions, your business can identify the least profitable prospects for your sales. 

Spend some time on the lead nurturing process, identify the leads that are a good fit for your product or service that you offer. And create a lead list separately. Your business can easily qualify your prospects by asking qualification questions particular to your buying intent through cold calling.

Always ask queries related to the useful feature and find what kind of outcomes come from your prospects. From that, you get to know how the customers are fit for the product or service. 

6. Utilize the Right Tool for Successful Inside Sales

Inside sales are all about gaining potential prospects through effective lead management.   Finding the targeted prospects is a data-driven approach so that software like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools, social analytics, sales automation tools, web conferencing platforms, prospecting tools, Appointment & Scheduling software, sales calls & tracking tools, reporting tools, productivity tools, video & screen-sharing tools plays a major role in the success of inside sales.  In contrast, the outside sales reps don't require tools and technology.  

But inside sales reps require an effective tool and technology to operate a strong sales process. Thanks to the advancement of the tools and technology, this improves efficiency, visibility and enhances better communications. As a result, it will improve your business's growth and success. 

There are plenty of inside sale technologies available today. But finding the right tool for your sales team is challenging as there are numerous options available in the market.  One of the best methods to find the right inside sales solutions for the team can be achieved through homework. Your business should not be afraid to experiment with various tools and technology to determine the right one for your business.

You can find a combination of tools, or your business can choose an ideal single solution based on your business requirements. Begin using technology and tools for inside sales  and grow your business

7. Utilize Bots to Accelerate Inside Sales

Inside sales are all about interacting with potential buyers remotely, although there is no need only humans have to build the connection.  Bots are a great way to have a conversational approach to sales 24/7. This will build trust and credibility among the potential leads and help to turn out the leads into customers. 

To succeed on the conversational marketing approaches the inside sales team has to start implementing the AI chatbots to initiate the conversation with your website visitors. If the chatbots are effectively built, then with the help of bots, your business can qualify the inbound leads with qualifying queries, and then your relevant sales team can reach the interested leads. 

This will more likely have more conversion as your business reaches the potential leads who are already interested in your product or business. The sales representatives use the information gathered by the chatbot and can identify the customer's wants and pain points. This will increase their possibilities of closing the deal.

8. Don’t Ignore Cold Calling 

Many marketers think that cold calling will not work anymore, but cold calling plays an essential part in inside sales. Liz Wendling (President of Insight Business Consultants) says below five major elements for successful cold calling.

• Research: Perform a completed reach on the prospect and their company. It will help you understand the actual need instead of assumption, and you can sell what they actually want. By spending time on the search will help to give better initial conversation with clients.  
• Ask: Ask the question on your cold calling to qualify your prospects. Ask the questions that are useful to the customer. It need not sound like a sales call. Your business needs to provide value to them. 
• Listen to prospects: If prospects want to share something with you, listen to them and avoid stopping them, understand the challenge they face and their pain points, and brief how your business solutions can resolve their problems. Avoid your conversation in the tone of a sales pitch. 
• Be Honest: Avoid being so hypocritical. It will not help you to land a meeting with your prospect. Be honest and ask them if they want to meet with you. It's important to be honest with your prospect. Honesty builds trust and creates a better impression. The last thing you want is to meet an uninterested prospect, so it's best to speak up.
• Honor: When speaking to your customers, remember always to keep your promises. Whether you've promised on a follow-up email or a call back at a later time, If your business breaks the promise, there would be more chances of the deal-breakers and leads to loss of trust & credibility on the business. It's important to keep your word when cold-calling. Once you've promised an email or called back, keep your promise. This is crucial to success.

9. Personalize Your Prospecting Messages

When it comes to email outreach or social media outreach with the prospect, avoid using a standard email template for all the prospects. To avoid the spam filter, make your email message personalized. The Personalization of your outreach message will help your business to stand out from the crowd. Personalization is more likely to be opened and ready by the receivers. 

By smaller out of reach or using Smartwriter AI tools, inside sales reps can connect with the potential prospects with hyper-personalization that have more chances of getting replies. Here are the best ways to follow up with customers

Cold email to potential clients with personation plays a crucial part in sales. Smatwriter solution will help you to create a personalized pitch for email and LinkedIn messages. Get started with AI-powered personalized outreach on your next sales campaigns and get 8x more responses.

10. Discover Your Potential Customer on LinkedIn

Utilize LinkedIn and its Sales Navigator tool for prospecting. Sales prospecting is the most vital part of the sales process where your business needs to find the ideal customer profile. 

Implement the best sales prospecting tools for modern inside sales. The prospecting tool helps create a prospect list, find contact details, qualify prospects, schedule meetings, and engage your clients. 

If you want to discover new leads and prospects and gain insights into your customers, try solutions like  Leadfeeder, FollowerWonk, AngelList, Voila Norbert, Hunter, FindThatLead, Prospect.io and more, Many of the tool comes with plugin option and more integration. This tool gives lead suggestions based on your prospecting activities.

Another useful resource for the inside sales professionals is LinkedIn Groups, where the sales reps can connect with the targeted customer by giving guidance and sharing insights.

Inside Sales Solutions That’ll Make Your Team More Productive

In the world of inside sales, various tools make the sales professional life easier. Generally, there are thousands of distinct software choices available, and some of them are better than others. In this, we shall look deeper into the most effective tool to make inside sales more successful. 

These software solutions are worth investing in without any lead generation tool, and the inside sales team can't make sales.  The lead generation process is complex; if the business doesn't find the ideal lead, there would be a drop in both the inside and outside sales. Here are some lead generation tools to kick up your lead generation process. 

Smartwriter.ai

Smartwriter is the best sales automation solution where your inside sales reps can write personalized emails and LinkedIn messages that process 8x more responses. The AI engine will write personalized content with a single click, so your inside sales team doesn't require spending tons of hours reaching and crafting a compelling, personalized message. 

Automate your entire outreach process with personalized thought that is 40x faster. The software uses the prospect's online data and creates a tailor-made outreach message. Your business can do personalized outreach with the help of Smartwriter AI that helps your business to build a one-to-one relationship with your targeted customer. 

Businesses can now create a product pitch and company-based personalization in no time. The AI engine analyzes your prospect's website, case studies, Google news, Blogs, the LinkedIn profile of the decision-makers. It creates unique hyper-personalized content for your email and social media outreach. 

Nealy more than 21,400 hyper-personalized emails are sent every single day using smartwriter tool. Why are you waiting for start your 7 days free trial today and maximize your sales conversion?

UpLead

UpLead is the B2B Prospecting tool to develop a prospecting list with 95% data accuracy. You can create a prospecting list by ignoring the low-qualified leads or bad fit buyers using the tool. 

You can find qualified leads with all the content information, and with the help of the tool, your business can stop wasting time on impossible leads and focus on profitable leads by buying inside sales reps. You can find the targeted customer from 62M+ contacts from 200+ countries with 95% accuracy on the data from the UpLead software. 

Increase your open rate with valid information of the qualified prospect and reduce your bounce rate. Your business can now perform prospecting effectively with higher accuracy on your B2B leads contacts. The pricing of the Upleads starts from $99/month to $299/month. You can find the ideal package that suits your business needs & budget, and the software also offers a 7-day free trial. 

Voila Norbert

Voila Norbert is an amazing software for inside sales to obtain any valid email address. You can build a massive database with B2B email addresses, fill your sales pipeline with more qualified leads, and reach out directly to your decision-makers. 

With this tool, your business can find leads, verify email in real-time and reach the right person. Businesses can find corporate emails of decision-makers and start their outreach. The prices start from $39 to $499 a month. 

Autodialers

Sales time is at a premium these days. Even little downtimes can add up and take away from the effectiveness of small teams and individual reps. This is why we value auto-dialing software: It saves time and minimizes the need for downtime while still offering convenience for the sales rep.

Autodialers are a must-have for anyone looking for a solution to increase the efficiency of their inside reps. In addition to saving time, they also offer huge optimization opportunities, as these call automation software solutions allow you to make up to 100 calls per day. Here are our favorite auto-dialing tools. 

CallHub

The CallHub software provides voice and text service where your business prospects inside and outside sales reps can connect with customers.  It is the best way to follow up with your leads and a great way to quickly and easily follow up leads.

CallHub software integrates with the CRM tools so your business inside and outside sales rep can schedule calls and text right from your CRM platforms.  The software also provides insightful analytics. With auto-dialers, your business can reach the right person at the right time through calls and text. The CallHub is available in over  200+ countries.

PhoneBurner

Make use of dialer software like PhoneBurner that makes outreach more profitable. It is a great tool for both the inside and outside sales reps and can drive 4X sales. 

Apart from the auto-dialing feature, the PhoneBurner has other useful features like automatic lead distribution and workflow automation. 

Besides auto-dialing, PhoneBurner has other useful features, like workflow automation and automatic lead distribution. 

With the help of this software, your business can do multiple calls and live connections. Your business can perform 60-80 dials per hour and make a quality conversion. The pricing starts from 149$ /Per month to $199 per user/month. Based on your budget, company size, you can choose the right plan.

Social intelligence Tool 

Social intelligence software is the best tool for competitor analysis, trend monitoring, crisis management, and more. These give insights into understanding how people interact with your bands online. 

For inside sales reps the social intelligence software is more useful to find valuable insights from social media. The sales professional can use the data to re-engage the prospects, unlock new opportunities, and nurture leads. 

Pulsar

Pulsar is the most popular audience intelligence tool that helps you find digital platforms' conversational and behavioral signals. Your business can get data-driven social media insights. The solution is designed to help the brand understand their social media platform audience and helps the sales reps to create custom messages using the power of AI. 

Final Thoughts On Inside Sales

As mentioned above, there is huge growth and changes in the inside sales. The buyer expectation continuously changes every day, and the inside sales team needs to evolve along with them. 

For a successful inside sales strategy, businesses need to have human touch along with artificial intelligence. AI plays a bigger role when it comes to sales. In the next 10 years, AI will become an essential part of B2B and B2C sales. So the inside sales team has to embrace AI to keep up with the competition. Chatbots will help reduce the sale cycle, and the inside sales teams can close leads more efficiently. AI enables the business to provide personalized service in every sales stage. 

From the above article, you can get to know more about Inside sales and their process. The inside sales are constantly growing, and your business can autopilot your sales. Find your right tool and sell smartly and make your customers more satisfied and happy. From the above inside sales, tips improve your sales process, and these proven sales prospecting techniques will help to double your revenue. 

Unlock your account-based and personalized sales using a sales tool. Smartwriter software allows inside sales teams personalized communication with potential prospects, which is a great way to turn potential leads into buyers. You can also integrate with your daily tools like Reply, Outreach, Lemlist, Smartlead, Mailshake, Woodpecker, and more.