In recent years, “Inside Sales” has rapidly increased its demand. Many start-up companies and small and medium-sized businesses have newly established inside sales departments.
However, some of the people in the Inside Sales department, who are still new in Japan and have few success stories, seem to find it 's painful'.
In this article, we will delve into the reasons why inside-sales seems to be "hard." In particular, if you are in charge of sales department and marketing department management is a must read!
Inside-sales sales are conducted by internal communication such as telephone, mail and chat based on the information (leads) of potential customers acquired by the marketing department. It is a sales method that has been attracting attention in recent years, but when you search for "inside sales" on Google, you will find words that make you uneasy.
"Inside sales hard"
What appears in Google Suggest means that the keyword "inside sales hard" has been searched quite a number of times.
Em Tame! The company that operates the media also has an inside sales department, so you can clearly understand the desire to search so. However, it's too bad for us to encourage marketing soaring that inside-sales impressions are just "hot" jobs. So, this time, I would like to delve into the causes of the "spiciness" of inside sales.
First, let's review the background to the increasing demand for inside sales.
With the evolution of cloud technology, in Japan, "subscription type" services that use software on the cloud for a fixed fee such as monthly fees have become extremely popular. A subscription-based business model is one where users can get a stable profit by keeping the contract long even if the unit price for one user is low. In addition, many companies offer a basic service free of charge and use the "freemium" strategy to charge for advanced services in order to lower the entry barrier.
In such a business model, "to get interested customers to become a free member first" and "to shift from a free service to a paid service" are important issues. Inside sales plays a role of "growing" potential customers into actual customers by communicating with customers remotely in this business strategy.
With this background, companies that want to set up an inside sales department are very much in the market, and various tools are also being sold to streamline inside sales.
However, there have been few successful cases of inside sales in Japan, and companies that have already adopted inside sales are still in the process of trial and error. The reason why people who are engaged in inside sales feel "striking" may be because they have a strong feeling that they do not know the correct answer.
Based on our experience in practicing inside sales, I think that the cause of the “smartness” of inside sales comes not from the business itself but from the instability of the organization and system. We summarized common issues in an organization where the inside sales department is not working well.
For companies that previously focused on field sales (outside sales), the inside sales department may be considered as a subordinate organization of the field sales department or may be considered as a teleapo unit for the sales department. It is common.
Other departments are also considered to have a sales role, so they are misunderstood as “inside sales performance = sales” and tend to see less contribution when compared to field sales.
The inability to achieve KPI and KGI will cause every department to feel the difficulty of work, but in the case of the inside sales department, there is a problem that the setting is deviated from the beginning because of the newness of the work There is a case.
Getting a lead isn't a job, as the Inside Sales department is different from the Teleapo unit and the Marketing department. As an organization, if you do not have the number of leads that can achieve the KPI and KGI you set in the first place, it is natural that you can not reach your goal because there is nowhere inside sales can approach by phone or email. If you do not have enough leads, it may be better to dedicate a marketing budget for lead acquisition.
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If only the number of apo acquisitions and the number of actions (calls and opportunities) are used as the indicator of inside sales, the person in charge is desperate to handle the number of calls regardless of the content and quality, and to acquire apo. As a result, the inside sales department may become a teleapo unit, or the sales may be swayed by poor quality apo and become inefficient.
Inside-sales needs a metric that was originally intended to "get a potential customer." For example, "number of status ups" and "number of ranks up". It is important to keep track of multiple KPIs in a balanced manner by combining such indicators with the number of apoons, the number of projects, and the number of orders received.
In addition, there is a good side that there is no information in the company, and when you request information from outside, you can sympathize with each other and exchange information. However, because inside sales are still in its early days, there is also the problem that there is little information that is "successful" in the first place and you have to spend a lot of private time.
As you can see, it is natural for you to feel hard with the mind that you can not see the correct answer and that you can not really know what you are doing right. The ideal is to have a positive sense of "I will find the correct answer!" But in order to do so, it is essential to support the boss and the surroundings.
At the start of the department, I often hear that only one or two inside sales people say, but there are cases where it is difficult because there is only one person.
However, there are times when you think that any department can not afford to maximize the results of its own department. Because inside sales are intermediate organizations, it takes a lot of time to put together and often suffer from both claims.