What Kind of Inside Sales Team Do I Want?
Most b2b direct sales teams can improve their productivity by segmenting into four major types of roles:
1) Inside sales reacting to inbound leads (high-volume, simple leadgen process)
2) Inside sales proactively prospecting into specific target markets (low-volume, complex leadgen process)
3) Inside quota-carrying sales (high-volume, simple closing process)
4) Outside quota-carrying sales (low-volume, complex closing process)
Here’s some more reasoning behind why this works so well.
Sales Productivity Increases With Comparative Advantage
One of the simplest, but most important, ways to build an effective sales machine is to organize into distinct groups that have simple, focused missions at which they can become expert. In economics the principle is “Comparative Advantage” – it’s better to have countries (teams) focus exclusively on what they can produce at the highest efficiencies/lowest cost (either create leads OR close business), than have each team try to do everything on their own.
Specialization Increases Need For Clarity Of Purpose
More specialization can lead to dramatically more productivity…IF the mission and roles are clearly and simply defined for each group. Specialization increases the standard for clarity in the sales organization – any fuzziness or uncertainty about roles, territories or responsibilities will lead to wasted time and energy as people step on each others toes.
“Eat What You Kill” Is Outdated
Historically, most companies have been good at prospecting and complex outside field sales (think about the hundreds of books on these topics). Usually the two roles were done by the same person – a field salesperson who was supposed to generate and close their own leads and customers.
Things have changed, and that generic model, without specialization, now breaks down. For example, the best field salespeople are terrible at doing any amount of cold, or even warm, prospecting (working prior relationships is a different story for a different posting). Plus, the only way to find a more-expensive way to generate leads than having a $300,000/year person making cold calls, which don’t work in any case, is to have your CEO do it. “Eat what you kill” is a legacy attitude that makes no sense today. The bar has gone up for success. Field salespeople (and even many inside salespeople) should not be responsible for doing their own prospecting. They should be responsible for qualifying and closing, and leave the lead generation to those teams that are expert at it. People and teams have to specialize, because it takes real expertise to proactively generate leads in this “attention deficit economy”, just as it takes a certain expertise to be a great field salesperson.
When Do You Begin To Specialize?
When you think about designing your sales organization, think about comparative advantage, specialization and expertise. Here’s a good rule of thumb: when your quota-carrying salespeople are spending 20%+ of their time on either account management or lead qualification, consider adding someone to take on those tasks to free the salespeople up to acquire new customers.
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