Inside Sales is not an Art, but Science

There are numer­ous inside sales strate­gies and method­olo­gies that com­pa­nies employ.

However, the key to the prac­tice — and the many ways to suc­cess­fully implement it — is to think of inside sales scientifically.

It’s definitely not an art form. Sure, there are sales­peo­ple that pos­sess cer­tain abil­i­ties and skills that may seem art­ful, but the process is similar to a formula. The president and chief strategist for inside sales consulting firm The Gridge Group, Trish Bertuzzi, echoed that sen­ti­ment to Mar­ket­ing Inter­ac­tions. Inside sales is definitely not magic, art, or any­thing like that. It’s science.

Bertuzzi and The Bridge Group devel­oped a nice Peri­odic Table of Inside Sales Met­rics to sup­port this idea. Rather than includ­ing lithium, sodium, and nitro­gen, this peri­odic table speaks about lead gen­er­a­tion, productivity, quota and compensation.

It reminds me of two meet­ings I had recently. The first was with Townsend Ward­law, who is  extremely skilled at constructing high effi­ciency inside sales teams.  Recently, he  swooped into one of our port­fo­lio com­pa­nies, AtTask, and spent about a year recraft­ing the inside sales process. Prior to AtTask, he invested six years run­ning a lead gen­er­a­tion ser­vices company.  He’s really good at his craft because he approaches inside sales with a scientific perspective.

At AtTask, his char­ter was to increase the inside sales team’s efficiency.

For his first step he decided to redesign the company’s exist­ing sales process.

Townsend’s sec­ond step in building a sales team was to divide the inside sales team in to more spe­cial­ized group­ings. One group (Sales Devel­op­ment Reps) focuses on lead qual­i­fi­ca­tion, while a sec­ond group (Account Exec­u­tives) is committed to out­bound prospect­ing and man­ag­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to close, and yet a third group (Cus­tomer Ser­vice Reps) was given the responsibility for account man­age­ment prac­tices to renew and up-sell exist­ing customers.

A sub-process was created for each group and put into practice within the CRM and the day to day tasks of the reps. Here’s an exam­ple of their SDR process:

Last, but not least, Townsend com­mu­ni­cated with the team members and gave them a clear set of expectations, hold­ing them account­able to execute the process with discipline. Here’s the gist of AtTask’s expectations:

• Set distinct responsibilities and roles. The reps in each sales group should their exact expectations and supply at each step of the sales cycle.

• Define the activity goals that are more aggressive and hold the reps account­able to them. For instance, an SDR is expected to make about 100 calls that result in 4 leads that can be passed down to an account executive. Those AE’s should, in turn, make 30 out­bound prospect­ing calls, lead­ing to four con­ver­sa­tions, and result­ing in one to two oppor­tu­ni­ties per week.

• Mea­sure and track all the activ­ity and oppor­tu­nity met­rics on a weekly and daily basis. Sales man­agers should be drill sergeants in charge of a pre­cisely designed activ­ity engine.

• Repeat the process over and over. This system won’t work if you have one good week or only stick to the process for a few months or a year. As long as you keep your sales teams intact, they should adhere to these expectations.

• Make your reps happy. Inside sales can be a rough career. Brighten it up for your employ­ees by shuffling hard work with hard play. And pay the reps well if they succeed.

Max­i­mum Vol­ume, Opti­mal Results

I had my second meeting with Dave Elk­ing­ton, the CEO and founder of InsideSales.com, Elk­ing­ton is another guru in the industry, and specializes in manufacturing very efficient lead qualification systems, processes and people.   He’s a co-contributor to Lead Response Man­age­ment and he focuses on creating highly effi­cient, high vol­ume out­bound call­ing teams.

InsideSales.com pro­vides a telephone-based work flow sys­tem created for high vol­ume out­bound calls. Elk­ing­ton and his part­ner, Ken Krogue, developed their own out­bound call­ing team and they also claim their reps can make 85 dials an hour.   Take a look at the video on Krogue’s blog that dis­cusses this distinctive sales methodology sys­tem in more detail.

All of this ties back to the the clas­sic paper on the Sales Learn­ing Curve. This paper should be read by any­one build­ing a new sales process or team. The bot­tom line is that some company prac­tices have cer­tain artis­tic qual­i­ties. But inside sales is not one of them. If you start to think about that part of your busi­ness sci­en­tif­i­cally, I’m sure you’ll reap the ben­e­fits of a much more effi­cient sales team.

Firas Raouf is a partner at OpenView, responsible for leading investments and being the point person for several of our portfolio companies.

Related articles

• Sneak Preview: 2010 Inside Sales Compensation Study (thecustomercollective.com)
• 3 Perspectives on a Bigger, Better & Faster Inside Sales in 2011 (customerthink.com)
• An Inside View on Inside Sales (customerthink.com)
• What is Sales 2.0? (salesentrepreneurinstitute.wordpress.com)
• In-house or Outsource Teleprospecting? How to Decide (customerthink.com)

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