Evaluating your ROI – The core of inside sales

Insides Sales Prospecting Strategy

Evaluating your ROI – The core of inside sales

In today’s world, buyers are more comfortable with remotely purchasing, this makes inside sales one of the most popular sales models. Also, the evolution of technology has paved the way and has equipped companies to make sales without an expansive team on the field.

What are inside sales?

A “virtual sale” is an inside sale. Unlike outside sales personnel who travel, inside sales reps are proactive about contacting potential customers remotely, which has become a dominant sales model that routinely involves high-touch transactions over emails and phone. Today, reps can explain through presentations, live demos, etc, thanks to advances in communications technology.

Prospect identification

Segment and analyze your customer base to pull out your best customers by using the criteria points. Then, go on to determine the characteristics possessed by these customers in the sales processes – need, buyer’s title, etc are a few factors.

From the collected data, you define and build a “profile” of the “ideal” prospect using the compiled information.

You can go on to create a lead qualification checklist for the top ten criteria with an ideal prospect profile in hand, on the variables to look for in future prospects. You can now score and target your potential prospects with the data-driven metrics you’ve found.

Competitor analysis

To be successful, you should keep an eye on your competitors and find out what they are doing and any threats they present to your company’s success. A competitive analysis begins by digging deeper into the type of content they’re publishing and comparing their quality with yours. This can help you determine the things that they are doing successfully that you aren’t and also find the potential opportunities to outperform your competitors. Remember to consider the content’s SEO.

Determine the success rate of your competitors’ integration of their content using social media as the next step of your competitive analysis and see how effectively they’re using it.

Ask questions like what type of posts do they update? What kind of information are they posting? What is their posting frequency? Then, move forward to check out their rate of engagement. Do their posts garner clicks? Are they often liked or retweeted? Are they posting photos that showcase events? How many followers do they have? Now that you’ve analyzed thoroughly, you have a better idea and understanding of your competitors and the particular areas of your own business that need improvement.

Marketing strategy vs. sales plan

Marketing strategy is a long-term objective used to build brand recognition, loyalty and help promote products by reaching out. In other words, it is a blueprint for reaching your customer base. The initial step involved in developing the marketing strategy is to identify your target customer base, what they’re looking for, and whether you can provide it. Whereas a sales plan is a short-term strategy, this strategy helps a company gain a competitive advantage that outlines your business’s goals concerning selling products or services. It helps to reach the financial targets and is typically organized around a business’s central goals that often form part of the larger marketing plan. These goals should be relevant, measurable, and specific to your customers’ needs. Always be sure to identify a target market by considering the buying attitudes. Considering the ins and outs of strategies such as this help dictate how a company promotes and distributes its products.

Pipeline stages

A sales pipeline measures the steps taken by a prospect from becoming a lead to a potential customer through your sales process. This is one of the most important strategies as it outlays and defines the step-by-step process to ensure your marketing efforts to your ROI.

The steps include

Lead generation – You attract and engage prospects through marketing campaigns.
Lead nurturing – By using marketing automation, you further qualify leads and have an effective follow-up.
Marketing qualified lead – A lead that shows certain interest in the purchase after the effective follow-up.
Sales accepted lead –Leads from marketing that is decided to pursue through a follow-up call.
Sales qualified lead – Sales reps further qualify the leads that represent a quantifiable business opportunity and are ready to make a final purchase decision and assign them to a dedicated account manager.
Closed deal – The leads make a purchase decision which is converted into revenue. This speeds up product delivery and assists implementation.
Post-sale – A post-sale relationship with a customer extends far beyond the closed deal. By continuing to engage with the customers, both sales and marketing can increase ROI.

Making the right decision

Today, most companies prefer outsourcing inside sales because performing it remotely would be expensive and drain precious time. It is also worth a lot of effort to have an in-house sales team and have them trained to solely perform the inside sales operations. Third-party companies, when outsourced to them, are professionals who follow a set of strategies to bring in the best qualified for your business and boost ROI.

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Author
About Barath Kumar

IT Entrepreneur with an experience of more than 20 years in Enterprise Software and IT & IT Enabled Services. Barath holds a Masters in Computer Application with a Graduation in Applied Sciences and Computer Technology.

Insides Sales Prospecting Strategy