Five Tips To Boost Inside Sales Effectiveness

• Realize that your inside sales team is at the tailend of your go to market process and can be effective only if it's equipped with upstream go to market elements like marketable offerings and supporting collateral. Giving them a mailing list and telling them to make cold calls won't work.

• Inside sales should supplement, and not act as surrogate to, your field sales organization. While it's fine for the head of your inside sales organization to report to the head of your sales organization, avoid making individual inside sales reps report to individual sales persons.

• Have a clear separation of roles and responsibilities and performance evaluation criteria between inside sales and field sales. Otherwise, you might land up in a situation where your field sales people tend to delegate everything to inside sales people but won't give them due credit for their achievements.

• Make sure that inside sales reps are totally involved in the sales / presales cycle, so that they understand what all it takes to win a deal.

• A typical inside sales person might have only 1-6 years of work experience but makes a far more direct contribution to your topline than many of your project leads, project managers, not to mention senior managers in your support functions. To that extent, when it comes to allocating seating space and telephones, go by their job requirements, rather than by their grades or designations. Given their un-earthly working hours, don't skimp on the measly costs involved in providing transport to their doorsteps.

Also read the post Why Inside Sales Guys (And Gals!) Don’t Stick Around For Long in our blog.

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Marketable Offerings Give A Shot In The Arm To Inside Sales>>> (PDF 200KB)