Are your sales teams still pounding the pavement and knocking on doors to try to find your next sale? You might be wasting your time and money. Inside sales teams are quickly overtaking the tired approach of outside sales.
What Are Inside Sales Teams?
Inside sales happens in the virtual setting. There isn’t face-to-face interaction. Instead, your inside sales team manages the content of your website, email marketing efforts, phone calls, social media engagement, and other virtual tools that land the deals.
Inside sales teams use the speed and agility of the Internet to improve connections with leads and prospects.
The Proof Is In The Numbers
Inside sales efforts don’t just sound good – they look good on paper too. Just take a look at some of these surprising statistics from across the industry.
- Email marketing outperforms cold calling, networking or trade shows with double the ROI, according to MarketingSherpa.
- Buyers are 60 percent to 90 percent finished with the sales process before ever engaging with an outsides sales team member, according to Forrester.
- Only 13 percent of customers trust a salesperson to understand their needs truly, according to Josiane Feigon.
Do a quick search on the Internet and you’ll find plenty more stats to back up these claims. The point is if you want your company to stay “leading edge,” you need to have a stronger understanding of the way your customers want to be sold to.
What This Means For Your Company
Brands that continue to pour money into travel budgets and outside sales calls will continue to fall further and further behind. These outdated practices are quickly turning people away. As soon as your sales team leaves, your customers open a web browser and do a quick search for your company. It’s what they find online that will make or break the sale.
This research behavior is good news for companies today.
Virtual environments make it easier for businesses to land sales because of how easy it is to test and adapt to market demands.
For example, Mail Chimp, a leader in the email marketing world, found that the optimal time of day to reach potential customers depends greatly on the type of content being presented. For example, government emails are better suited for the morning while emails with content about hobbies maintain decent open rates throughout the morning and early afternoon.
Inside sales teams can use this information to schedule their messages at a time that’s most likely to get heard. They can reach a wider audience by sending a mass message out at the same time – something face-to-face interaction will never be able to accomplish.
The same applies for social media postings. QuickSprout pulled together a series of statistics from various social media management tools to determine the best times to post on various networks.
I know I see an increase in social media traffic by up to 39 percent when I post during ideal times. – Neil Patel, QuickSprout
Where To Start
Inside sales teams are necessary but where do you start? How do you make the transition from outside to internal?
At Groove Digital Marketing, we partner with companies to make the transition easier and the efforts more rewarding. This partnership is one way to ease the transition of abandoning the road warrior mentality in your company.
To give you a better understanding of what it’s like to partner with Groove Digital Marketing, we’ve written an ebook called, “What to Expect in a Partnership with Groove Digital Marketing.” Download it now to learn more about what a partnership with us means for your business.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Abandoning The Suitcase: Why Inside Sales Teams Are Growing In Popularity
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