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Inside Sales on the Rise in 2010

Quota bearing inside sales has long been a staple of the sales coverage model. With expense pressures only outweighed by the pressure to perform, sales leaders are looking more closely at how to best exploit the capabilities of inside sales. Inside sales teams have proven their ability to effectively manage accounts, achieve revenue targets, and penetrate the SMB market while being less costly to support, manage and train. Customers are more accepting of an inside resource and sales technologies have improved marketing’s ability to provide leads and sales ability to close them.

Sales leaders evaluating their coverage model need to consider three inside sales realities: 

• Inside sales will grow as a percent of total revenue
• Inside sales can handle larger/ more complex accounts
• Inside sales can sell more complex products/solution with higher ASPs 
  
  

As sales leaders look beyond the missed revenue targets, headcount reductions and budget cuts that typified the sub-prime recession of 2008-9, they need to consider further expanding the role of inside sales as they adapt their organization to capitalize on the next growth cycle.

Recent client interactions reveal three categories of inside sales expansion being developed by sales leaders to meet 2010 growth objectives:

• Innovation: Organizations developing an inside sales function for the first time or moving beyond regionally assigned resources are carving out the lower end of their client base and targeting penetration into the SMB market through a lower cost, high-performance inside sales team.
• Expansion: The growth of an existing inside sales function is demanding a more sophisticated inside coverage model exploiting a tiered account structure, hunter/farmer designations or the introduction of a “hybrid” inside sales rep.
• Optimization: Organizations with mature inside sales functions are looking to optimize the performance of their inside team capitalizing on new sales technologies for prospect identification, qualification and acquisition along with the continued refinement of inside sales specific skill sets.