New reality: Inside vs Outside Sales

As a marketing leader tasked with driving sales and revenue, how you integrate with the Sales team and support their responsibilities seriously impacts your success.

No surprise there.

But, what if support a single Sales team really means supporting multiple teams at the same time?

Traditionally, there are two distinct approaches to sales: inside sales and outside sales. To muddy the waters, these simple names can have different meanings to different people:

• Inbound vs. Outbound
  People who field inbound calls and demo requests vs. those that “hunt” through cold-calling, emailing, or knocking on doors.
• In the office vs. in the field
  People that work in the office (or remotely) vs. those that work outside the building and regularly visit their customers.

In the past few years, with massive changes worldwide, you and your teams have had to steer towards a new reality.

Teams have been left thinking beyond what they knew best to cope with an actively changing market. We’ve seen huge shifts between inside and outside efforts – especially with inside sales experiencing more rapid growth than ever.

Before, outside sales reps focused on relying on their interpersonal skills to engage with the customer. While they still do that, over the past few years we have seen outside sales leaning harder towards leveraging winning content and establishing a strong social media presence.

Outside sales had gone from shaking hands in person to going for outreach from their couch. Before they could meet in person, conversations had to be taken online first. If that first interaction is a success, then an in-person meet can happen. It’s a completely different process. (Potentially) Faster. More qualified.

What’s certain – there is no going back. However, struggles to support the two teams – inside and outside – continue. A lot of the struggle comes down to the right content and right sales strategy for the team design and making sure the foundation is in place.

So what’s the best way to support inside + outside sales approaches today?

Insides sales:	Outside sales:
The customer approaches the business, looking for answers to their problem/need/pain. The prospect does research, reads blogs, goes to a webinar, and schedules a free consultation. The prospect signs up for a free eBook, an infographic, a tool, or requests a demo or quote. The prospect contacts or emails them.	The salesperson makes contact with the prospect to provide them with the service/product. The salesperson cold calls the prospect and uses a solid persona template and product messaging templates. The prospect is sent brochures, whitepapers, or blogs to encourage purchase. The sales rep contacts or emails the prospect.
Prospects are generally more informed and engaged, but may not always be in the ICP (Ideal Customer Persona)	These prospects are less aware and less engaged but should be the right target, since sales would have researched who best to sell to.

Let’s explore each of them and their processes to decide what works best for your product or service.

Inside Sales

For inside sales to work, marketing must generate a lot of qualified inbound leads. Lead quality will vary because you won’t know if they are qualified until you speak with them.

Therefore, the most important task of inside sales is quick qualification to find out if the prospect is in the target market and has the ability to buy.

An effective inside sales process identifies what that journey looks like for its customers so that a sales representative can provide support throughout the entire process.

That typical inside sales process looks like this:

Inside Sales Process

The inside sales process can be generally laid out into four stages:

1 - Qualify your leads

The inside sales process starts as soon as an interesting prospect reaches out to your business as a result of your inside marketing efforts. This is where you interact with them to disqualify or convert them into opportunities.

2 - Engage with your leads

You’ve completed the first step in converting your website visitors into sales: You’ve educated them on their problems and asked whether you can assist them. They’re evaluating your options in light of their objectives. You will ask them a series of sales qualifying questions to navigate the prospect towards the sales process.

3 - Identifying the concerns and opportunities

You begin a conversation with the leads to develop trust and obtain a deeper understanding of their challenges in order to see whether your product or service can satisfy their needs and identify sales possibilities.

4 - Offer Advice on a solution

When you’re confident that your product meets the demands of your leads and has their confidence, you offer expert guidance on how it’s the best answer for their problems. Remember, this will be your sales pitch, so you’d better put your best foot forward to convert those leads into customers.

Outside Sales

Outside sales have the benefit of targeting the right audience and reaching out to them even when they are not looking. This is a great augment to your marketing and in some industries may be the most effective approach.

These methods can seem more aggressive and intrusive. There is a moderate cultural shift occurring towards more inside sales as more consumers turn to the Internet to take control of and start the sales process for themselves.

Outside sales processes may be conducted without being annoying or intrusive, and are particularly useful, and even common when there are not a large number of people looking for your solution or product.

Outside sales Process

The outside sales process can be generally laid out into five stages:

1 - Identify Your Prospective Audience:

Narrow down your target market and market segments, and prepare your team to contact that targeted audience.

2 - List Generation:

Now that you’ve narrowed down to your prospective audience, you’ll need their contact information - either through your in-house lead generation BDRs, a database purchase, or outsourcing sales lead generation to a third party.

3 - Contacting and Qualifying Your Leads:

The outside sales team now reaches out to the list of contacts by email or phone to determine whether they are a suitable fit for your product or service. They move on to the next step if they are; otherwise, they remove them from the list.

4 - Give Your Best Sales Pitch:

Now that you’ve scored a qualified lead with your cold outreach, your reps will schedule a meeting/demo with the prospect where you get your prospect to engage with your product/service.

It’s the right moment to give your best sales pitch, talk about all the benefits and how it will provide them value, and address their pain points. This is your moment to get your prospect interested in your offer.

5 - Now You Close the deal:

You’ve probably impressed the prospect by now. And if that’s true, then it’s time to close the deal, make it official, and work out all the specifics.

Inside sales or Outside sales? How to decide?

Although some businesses may be compelled to choose between inside sales and outside sales, neither is inherently better. The ideal sales approach is frequently a mix of both inside and outside sales since they are both strong tools in their own rights.

A business’s emphasis on one or the other might differ based on the industry, kind of company, average sale size, and customer awareness. The combination of inside and outside is a powerful growth driver.

There are no set rules or standards for determining how much attention a business should devote to inside sales versus outside sales. However, there are several variables to consider, as well as some typical tactics for each approach.

Here’s when to use inside sales approaches:

• when there are a lot of people looking for your product on the Internet.
• when the purchasing decision doesn’t take too long.
• when you’re already creating content that will attract your target audience.
• when cold-calling or buying lists of leads don’t work well with your target audience

Here’s when to use an outside sales approach:

• When you have business customers and are selling an expensive product.
• When your product requires elaborate demonstrations or a lengthy sales cycle.
• When you have margin to pay commissions to your outside sales reps.
• When you have a very narrow and precise target audience.

Enable Your Sales Process With Content Camel

As a marketer, you need to enable your sales team with the right sales enablement tools, regardless of which sales process your team leans toward. With Content Camel, it’s much easier to organize, tag, track, and report on the collateral that enables Sales to close deals faster. Having content organized by funnel stage, content type, and tags allows sellers to browse and search for content when they need it most.

And, if you’ve ever done a sales content audit, you know it’s hard to wrangle assets, keep them up to date, and also make sure sales reps are sending the right content to prospects at the right time.