If you look inside a modern B2B organization, you are likely to discover an efficient and metric based internal sales team, which is led by a passionate sales professional.
Internal sales are what many call a “growth engine” when properly organized. Currently, inside sales grow 15 times more than field sales and here you will discover what makes this engine work.
3 secrets to an extraordinary team of inside sales
1. Develop a hiring process to find the best talent
247 inc developed a rigorous recruiting process to identify the best candidates from the first interview. Follow these steps to bring it to your organization:
- Identify the characteristics of a high-performance inside sales representative as soon as the product is ready for market. Active learning skills, curiosity, intelligence, work ethic, and prior success were identified by HubSpot as traits that determine better performance.
- Measure each candidate and vendor considering their traits, starting from the interview stage through to incorporation, to ensure that progress can be followed. If they don’t meet the criteria, let the reps leave as soon as possible, as they will directly affect the bottom line in lost revenue and increased expenses.
- Test, learn and repeat. You will be in a better position to identify the best performers if you run a process multiple times before scaling your sales team. It will be comforting to have this group develop as the years go by, when the time comes to hire dozens of new vendors.
2. Build an income machine and master it
- As a sales leader, you have one of the most important roles in the growth of your company. This is true regardless of whether you have the experience or the resources. Understand it and prepare hard to grow the numbers.
- Establish a regular rhythm for reviewing revenue targets with your team so everyone has the same focus and understands the challenges ahead. Focus all your attention on performance indicators that directly affect revenue.
- Surround yourself with a team that complements your weaknesses. For example, if you are not a person with quantitative skills, hire someone who can fill a sales operations position as your right hand as soon as possible.
- Read, learn and replicate what other successful sales teams have already accomplished. Having at least this base will help you recruit and manage your operating team.
3. Don’t over-automate the human aspects of sales
Inside sales are one of the most automated sales disciplines. Although automation is a key pillar in inside sales, it is advisable to maintain the human factor in these areas:
- Building trust and discovering the specific needs of a consumer are difficult aspects to automate. This personal selling process takes time and requires you to dig deep to identify your buyer’s challenges and discover how to help them succeed.
- On the leadership side, it is impossible to automate the diagnosis of a vendor’s training needs, as well as the development of a plan based on their deficiencies and learning preferences.
You need professionals who want to continually optimize every step of the sales process and who have the passion to truly understand their customers. That’s the key to a successful inside sales team!