Top 5 Inside Sales Strategies
A recent Aberdeen study discovered the top inside sales strategies used to identify and convert optimized opportunities. Here are five strategies that came up tops:
1: Grow Your Sales Pipeline
The study found 61% of inside sales business leaders were focused on growing their overall sales pipeline.
Leads aren’t just going to jump out at your team; they must be sought and pursued. This means that lead generation should be at the forefront of your team’s daily activities, which includes delivering complex value propositions in the hostile environment of cold calling.
To excel, sales teams should be trained to understand the most excruciating pain points and prospect demands before initiating the conversation. And, of course, the team should have a well-defined lead management process, where all sales campaigns and proven processes are automated.
2: Improve Contact Rates
Despite the overwhelming evidence that the more contact you have with a prospect, the higher chance you have of closing, it seems like a constant struggle just getting reps to pick up the phone.
With guided selling, sales managers can put into place a contact cadence that is based on proven historical data, and that informs reps when and how often to mix the appropriate forms of outreach – mainly through phone calls and email.
These mediums can then be used to deliver the proper marketing materials that position specific products and services with the leads they develop.
Sales teams that make use of guided selling are shown to achieve their quotas 57% of the time, as opposed to the 45% who “feel the situation out.”
3: Improve Quality of Leads Passed to Field Team
For field teams and high-performance sales reps, the number one goal of any sales manager should be to avoid wasting their time. That’s why sales operations utilize CPQ solutions to streamline the proposal and approval process and that’s why 34% of inside sales business leaders are focused on improving the quality of leads they pass to them.
Qualifying leads through lead prospecting and accurate scoring can make a major difference when it comes time to pass along leads to the field team. This ensures that only the decision makers and, most importantly, those ready to act make it through to the next stage of the pipeline.
4: Boost Lead Conversion Rate
While growing the number of leads your team has is important, it means nothing if they can’t close them. Increasing your lead conversion rate requires improving your response time, standardizing your communications, and streamlining your internal sales processes.
Utilizing a CPQ solution can give your reps the tools they need to sell smarter and more efficiently. In fact, organizations that use CPQ see a 16% improvement in lead conversion rates versus all others.
5: Enhance Profitability of Inside Sales Business Activities
Every sales manager should want to improve the profitability of their sales activities because that’s one of the few demands coming down from above. Yet only 22% of sales leaders mention it as one of their top inside sales business strategies. That’s probably because it’s not really a strategy – it should be the NATURAL RESULT of successfully enacting one or more of the four strategies above.
With more time saved and more quality leads pushed through the pipeline, the sales team’s profitability instantly increases. The sales force becomes a well-oiled and efficient machine, capable of competing and succeeding in today’s competitive marketplace.
What inside sales strategies are you most focused on to hit or beat your quota? Let us know!
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