At last week’s Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, I attended the panel discussion “Practices & Technologies used by Top-Performing Inside Sales Organizations” led by Anneke Seley, CEO and Founder of PhoneWorks and co-author of Sales 2.0. On the panel, Sales 2.0 co-author, Brent Holloway, Regional Sales Director, Verint Systems; Matt Benelli, Group Vice President – Sales, OracleDirect; and Jennifer Brandenburg, VP Corporate Sales, Good Technology. Here are some of the key points from the discussion.
Inside sales is leading the Sales 2.0 transition and is growing at 15x the rate of field sales. McKinsey & Co. reports that “shifting from face-to-face to inside sales can actually increase satisfaction and renewal rates.” According to IBM Market Insights, “buyers are increasingly open to using inside sales and the Web to buy more sophisticated and higher value IT products and services.” For example, Inside Sales at Oracle Direct will exceed $1 billion in revenue this year.
The model for Inside Sales is evolving and consists of three primary functions:
- Sales Development: non-quota-carrying reps responsible for prospect development. Sales Developement reps work via phone and email and typically follow up on marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) as well as penetrate target accounts. They are often compensated for meetings booked. They may team with inside or field sales to cover a region or vertical territory.
- Inside Sales: quota-carrying reps who sell via phone, email and Web. For companies with field sales, inside reps often are responsible for a segment of the market, such as SMBs as defined by a level of revenue. For Good Technology, the revenue for SMBs is <=$500 million, whereas Oracle defines SMBs as <=$50 million. In some cases, inside reps will actually “dispatch” field sales reps to meet face-to-face with a prospect if needed.
- Hybrid (Inside Sales/Field Sales): Senior Inside Sales reps who can travel to meet face-to-face with prospects and customers as needed. This makes for a nice career path to field sales. Reps in this role at Verint can earn in excess of $200,000 annually.
The goal in these models is to use the right resource for the right job and to sell over the phone whenever possible. Buyers prefer it and it drives down the cost of sales while boosting productivity.
Sales Development and Inside Sales reps can be located at corporate headquarters, in branch offices or other countries such as India and South America.
Verint has 10 Sales Development reps who report into marketing, 18 Inside Sales reps who manage deals up to $75,000 and 50 Field/Channel reps.
The panel members discussed the Sales 2.0 technologies they have deployed to drive productivity in their organizations.
- Verint uses Eloqua for marketing automation and InsideView to provide reps with company and contact information.
- Good Technology uses Marketo for marketing automation, Salesforce.com for CRM, InsideView and LeadLander – which notifies reps when prospects/customers have hit the corporate website. They also leverage LinkedIN for prospecting. The PR team manages the company’s Facebook page and Twitter accounts and escalates any customer issues to the Inside Sales team.
- Oracle uses LinkedIN for hiring, Twitter to drive people to events and Skype and Skype TV for remote employees to help with retention. Oracle also uses an internal Twitter system called Oratweet to help employees communicate and collaborate.
The role of Sales Development, Inside Sales and the new Hybrid model continue to evolve and leverage Sales 2.0 technologies to provide a better customer experience while efficiently driving revenue growth.