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Inside Sales is so much more than remote selling – a method that has inevitably grown in popularity and effectiveness. When done right and with a collaborative partner, it’s the ultimate knowledge sharing engine – fuelling quality lead generation that is fast, confident, and scalable.
And when your Inside Sales is outsourced, the business benefits are even greater, from budget maximisation to boosting close rates. Keep reading for our guide on Inside Sales, outsourcing and the ever-successful Bollin Green approach. (Already using Inside Sales? Skip ahead to Why Outsource your Inside Sales.)
Inside Sales is the process of prospecting and selling remotely. Inside Sales representatives use phone, email, video meetings and other digital channels such as LinkedIn messaging to generate demand, nurture leads and deliver sales opportunities. It is popular for B2B selling and particularly in industries where a remote intervention, such as online demos and audits, can further qualify a lead and expedite a deal.
Inside Sales representatives can work the entire sales funnel, nurturing a lead up until close, or only a certain stage of it. For example, some organisations use Inside Sales to qualify leads only, or to keep expressions of interest warm until they are ready to move forward.
Despite its moniker, Inside Sales can be undertaken in-house or outsourced to a third party. The latter enables organisations to deploy resource more strategically (and cost effectively), and quickly adapt their sales function to achieve the best results campaign-by-campaign. Click here to skip straight to outsourced benefits.
Outside Sales representatives broker deals in-person, physically connecting with prospects along the way. They sell on the road at events and business sites, fostering relationships and meeting clients. Although not always the case, they often work very collaboratively with Inside Sales teams. From hunting down an opportunity their research uncovered, to nurturing a qualified lead or closing a deal. It’s not a matter of either or – more a question of balance.
Inside Sales representatives have become a vital part of sales departments during the pandemic. But even before their specialism of connecting with potential customers remotely became in such high demand, Inside Sales had become massively important. In 2019, there was an approximate 55/45 split between Outside and Inside Sales representatives.
Selling remotely doesn’t mean less product or service knowledge. In fact, quite the opposite! With limited time and no tangible product, Inside Sales reps need in-depth knowledge, and the ability to explain features and value extremely efficiently. In prospecting and qualification scenarios, this can even happen on a cold call.
Similarly, selling remotely doesn’t have to mean less closed deals. Although traditionally Outside Sales reps have been the “closers”, this is all changing with the dawn of widespread remote and hybrid working. In fact, since the transition to remote sales in 2020, 64% of sales leaders said they exceeded their goals! 63% also found virtual meetings to be as or more effective than face-to-face meets. With the right expertise and appropriate deal value, Inside Sales reps are an ideal resource for nurturing and converting leads in addition to acquiring them.
Shared sales technologies, such as CRMs, sales automation tools and video conferencing apps also put Inside and Outside sales reps on equal footing for much of the deal process. This makes a strong case for balance within the sales team structure. Allowing strategic flexibility depending on objectives and non-modifiable factors (such as high product value or on-site application).
Since Inside Sales reps usually have dedicated daily schedules, they are able to really focus on gathering knowledge, nurturing relationships, and pursuing multiple close opportunities at once. Having time to doggedly investigate new decision makers and inroads, and to educate themselves about these opportunities, sets you in a winning direction.
For example, at Bollin Green, we use Licensed Data Sourcing. This advanced prospecting process enables our Inside Sales reps to find new people and organisations that expressly want to hear about new options. Click here to read more.
Being remote, they also have the agility to pivot quickly and speak to more prospects in a day, so no opportunity is missed, and prospects are easily prioritised.
Bollin Green clients find that our Inside Sales service is excellent for:
Phone, email or video call is undeniably quicker than hitting the road or waiting for face-to-face availability. From actioning a new business lead to answering a customer’s question about an upgrade, you can fill the pipeline faster.
Whether you need to quickly increase capacity in a market turn, switch a campaign to a new territory or simply drive all your resource into a high value opportunity. Inside Sales calls for minimal effort for maximum impact.
Inside Sales, at its heart, is a knowledge sharing engine. Its collaborative, process-driven and tightly monitored approach to managing the sales funnel brings teams together, and boosts results.
If experience and feedback tell you that your product or service can be sold without investing in in-person resource, try Inside Sales. It could save a significant amount in overheads.
It’s a fact that Inside Sales reps spend more time selling than Outside Sales reps. Being able to work the pipeline from one desk certainly makes time management simpler.
If you’ve ever neglected an opportunity because its ROI couldn’t be justified against Outsourced Sales rep expenses, consider Inside Sales. We all know that a small first deal often grows to become a valuable client with time.
With the right partner, outsourcing your Inside Sales will transform your sales function and deliver business-wide benefits. Bollin Green clients say that their organisations have benefited in the following vital ways through working with us.
Already outsourcing your Inside Sales? Skip to The Bollin Green Approach to Inside Sales.
Businesses with sales peaks and troughs, set campaign activity periods, smaller teams or a product that can be sold and implemented remotely (to name a few reasons) may find Inside Sales more cost effective. You can switch on and off. So, aren’t spending on salaries in periods of downtime, or putting expensive sales resource into repetitive tasks like data cleansing and lead acquisition.
Even with Inside Sales, scaling in-house can be very disruptive and often demands a lengthy bedding in period. As Inside Sales experts, Bollin Green are poised and ready to go immediately, with rapid results. We have the resource, expertise, technologies, data, and insights at our fingertips, so can pivot as quickly as your strategy evolves.
Outsourcing Inside Sales allows you to deploy your internal Inside Sales resource more strategically. For example, you can funnel lead acquisition, qualification, and nurture to your outsourcing partner, and ensure that your high-value salespeople are doing what they do best – closing.
Bollin Green often help our clients in this way with our Licensed Data Sourcing. This takes the critical but time-demanding task of pinpointing people and organisations, and building the target market prospecting lists that fuel a campaign.
Similarly, you can prioritise Account Management resource to growing accounts or key customers showing signs of churn, and keep those low-spend, simple sale process accounts with a partner.
With all good intentions, an Internal Sales team will be pulled into the wider machine of your business at some point and become distracted. Being responsible for a full pipeline and the entire sales funnel can also impact focus, leading to productivity drops. An outsourced Inside Sales resource like Bollin Green has experts that are razor focused on the objectives of your account. We also collaborate with your teams closely, so understand where we can add value and enhance effectiveness within the sales cycle.
At Bollin Green, we don’t consider what we do as just telemarketing. Rather, Inside Sales is all about creating a meaningful conversation and genuine relationship with a potential customer, remotely, over a longer period of time.
From identification through to engagement, nurture, close, retention and scale, we work with clients to drive business initiatives that can be achieved by picking up the phone. Our Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) support this with email, social media, and other digital channels.
Here’s what is different about the Bollin Green approach to building a healthy pipeline, remotely.
We conduct market research to discover your audience, their challenges, and their pain-points. This allows you to tailor your marketing and sales approach. The information gathered during this phase is often used to create a Buyer Persona or/and a Firmographic.
We create an open dialogue between your business and your prospect, using a combination of email marketing, social media, coupled with picking up the phone and speaking to people, to gain new information and insight on your prospect.
We build a relationship with the Decision Maker to see if there is a real opportunity. We use a collection of Lead Qualification methods to determine if they are sales-ready or not.
When a prospect who meets all of our lead qualification criteria has been discovered, we’ll either pass the prospect over to your internal sales team to close the deal, or we can close the deal for you.
Bollin Green are here to improve and enhance client sales functions and widen the capability of sales and marketing efforts. We achieve this through building a genuine and effortlessly collaborative relationship with our customers.
You and Bollin Green are a team working together, sharing knowledge and collectively working toward a common goal – delivering and closing qualified opportunities that drive your business and growth ambitions.
Our entire team pride themselves on our customer relationships. It isn’t just about getting in a room together and working through a strategy, it is the day-to-day collaboration and transparency too. Our SDRs work as closely with your sales teams as you want them to and check in regularly. No end of month report after a week of silence or dropping leads into a CRM without a discussion.
Bollin Green are different in that we find not just the organisations that you want to work with, but the individuals who will sign off on your solution. Our Licensed Data Sourcing is an advanced prospecting offering that gives our clients’ campaigns the edge.
Using expert tools and communication skills, we hunt down new decision makers and organisations that are in the market for a change, and expressly open to hearing from businesses. From here, we build specific, highly qualified target lists and develop effective messaging for specific industries and personas.
Our SDRs are true specialists in their clients’ products and propositions. Every Bollin Green client has a dedicated SDR working on your initiatives from day one, acquiring leads and nurturing opportunities and even closing if you’d like us to.
When you introduce a new product, service, and campaign, we invite you for a virtual or in-person fact-finding session so that every detail and nuance is captured. Working with you, we develop a proposition that will prick ears, and plan for every objection.
SDRs work directly with your internal sales teams, essential becoming a remote colleague. In addition to their research (fed in from our research team or independently), they’ll be in a continuous information exchange with you. We like to say that our goal is to know more about our clients’ businesses than they do!
Our collaborative approach makes silos, blind spots and oversights a problem of the past. Sometimes all a pipeline needs to be reinvigorated is a fresh perspective. If you can contribute, you are invited to the table – Sales Directors to Key Account Managers and Sales Admins, plus members of your Bollin Green Inside Sales team in varied roles.
In particular, our Buyer Persona and Firmographic Research often identifies opportunities and angles that are an ideal fit, but yet to considered. And with their finger on the pulse, talking to prospects day in day out, our SDRs are invaluable sources of knowledge, bringing a unique perspective on everything from positioning to objections and evolving pain points.
Bollin Green has robust and proven processes that enable clients to get the most out of their relationship – and budget – with us. We have a clear sales process, including our Lead Qualification measures to ensure a contact is sales-ready decision maker, and provide reports with metrics that matter. If you wish, Bollin Green can also take care of your sales admin to further streamline sales functions.
With all this said, we are flexible to every client’s approach and our SDRs are skilled using a wide range of CRMs, marketing automation and other sales management platforms. We are more than happy to work in your environment, or you can benefit from our bespoke CRM.
Our leading range of integrated services means that if your campaign hits an objection, you won’t have to press pause. From our market research division that identifies new markets, to using our multilingual native speakers to get past a gatekeeper at an international HQ, Bollin Green has the insights and people to make your sales function more successful.
Are you ready to try Inside Sales? Book a conversation with a Bollin Green expert to discuss how outsourced Inside Sales can fit with and enhance your business goals. Click here, email hello@bollingreen.com or call 01625 626209.
