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Building an Inside Sales team is structuring a team capable of conducting distance sales with as much involvement as if it were a face-to-face sale. Removing the time lost in travel or with delays in meetings, of course. Sounds too good to be true? It is not, but it is an undertaking with some complexity.

Many CEOs and sales managers believe that building a successful sales team is simply about hiring good, experienced salespeople and letting them “do what they do best”. They forget that team creation starts at the top and they need to have priorities well aligned.

Design your sales process

Before you start recruiting salespeople, you must define what your sales process will look like. This planning defines the steps that salespeople will have to go through and what approach they should have with a potential customer, to guide them from the first contact to the sale.

For example: Prospecting › Contact and Qualification › Research › Presentation › Handling objections › Close › Interaction and expansion

Whatever the process, the idea is to have a systematic, logical, replicable plan that proves to be highly effective.

Segment the team No

Regardless of your sales team size, the company can only benefit from segmentation. Thanks to segmentation, sellers can shape their message and customize the entire sales approach to contacts in a given segment.

Segmentation can be done according to:

• Company size, whether in number of employees or billing;
• Sector or market;
• Geographical location, time zone, or language;
• Other criteria that you consider relevant in the reality of your company.

Plan your pay and commissions

Pay and commissions? Already? Yes, it is that important. All departments are indeed essential for the company’s success, but none is as directly linked to invoicing as sales. Therefore, the role of sales commissions is to associate performance with very concrete bonuses and guide the team towards results that are also concrete.

There are some recommendations you can follow to strike the right balance between fixed salary and variable commissions:

• Experienced and specialized salespeople look for more attractive salary bases;
• If your sales process is very particular and you have to train talent with less experience, you can opt for a lower base and bet on commissions.
• Salespeople who operate in long sales cycles need a fair salary base, as they cannot live on commissions;
• You can opt for lower commissions if you have a small margin and work with a subscription service.

Create the Sales Playbook

If you’ve ever been surprised by how quickly and efficiently a sales rep responded to your request, chances are that rep has used a playbook sales as the name implies, these are each company’s “rules of the game,” which include processes, strategies, documentation, and resources to reduce response time and increase accuracy.

When the entire team uses a sales playbook, your company also maintains a standard in customer service and achieves the much-desired sales scalability.

Define the salesperson profile

One bad hire can jeopardize the financial performance of an entire business year. But how can you reduce the risk of making a bad hire? Knowing very well what you want is something you must have already understood when designing the sales process and segmenting the team and the playbook. Create a detailed job profile:

• What roles will you play?
• What skills do you need to perform the function?
• What behaviors, attitudes, or personality traits are associated with good job performance?

Create a hiring funnel that also reveals other important characteristics, such as whether they are problem-solving people who like to learn, have a work ethic, like to work in a team, and fit into your company culture.

Plan the onboarding and prepare for the ramp

Contrary to what you often hear, sales are not an innate talent that only a lucky few have. It is a competency that people willing to learn can develop and train. Hence the importance of creating an onboarding to train new sales reps quickly and efficiently.

Not only should you take this time to educate them on the sales process, approaches, and sales playbook, but it’s also important to give them time to get to grips with the product or service. It’s unthinkable to think they can sell well without knowing their solution inside out and the competition.

I realize that many companies feel that they don’t have time to waste and that they need new hires to get down to business as soon as possible. But as they say in Portugal, haste is the enemy of perfection. In this case, the lack of training will greatly increase the ramp time, that is, the time that new reps need to be able to perform functions at a good level and independently.

Building a team is more than looking at resumes

Despite the focus on the profile and skills of each salesperson, it is essential not to forget one thing that is very well illustrated by the following quote.

“Hiring the right people takes time, the right questions, and a healthy dose of curiosity. What do you think is the most important factor when building a team? For us, it’s the personality.” – Richard Branson

If all of this sounds like a daunting task, it’s because anything new has a learning curve. Trust an Inside Sales specialist to help you create an inside sales commercial department or adapt your current structure to this methodology.

 

Structuring a commercial department is much more than hiring sales specialists and assigning certain titles. In reality, a successful sales department is made up of technologies that accelerate performance, sales support resources, and an agile sales force with certain skills – all under a customer-centric sales process. 

And it’s not just us who say it. Renowned consultant and author Jacco van der Kooij, a SaaS sales specialist based in Silicon Valley, argues that these are the 5 best sales practices he has had the opportunity to see in action in successful Startups.

• Customer-Centric Sales Process

First of all, what is a sales process? A sales process is a guide for how sales should unfold, which standardizes and systematizes everything in order to create a quality, consistent and complete consumer experience. From the point of view of the sales manager, it is also useful because it allows evaluation of professionals, activities, and incisively acting on problems.

In the sales process, everything is planned: contact cadences, how to discover pain points and objections, lead qualification, how to do a product demonstration, call scripts, all the steps to close the deal, etc.

Companies without these internal processes end up in very precarious situations: they have difficulties in training new recruits, they do not learn from their mistakes, and they are dependent on the experience of a few isolated salespeople (who may leave, taking their good practices and contacts with them).

Now that we’ve explained what a sales process is, let’s see why you should create it with the customer in mind.

Focusing the sales process on the customer means adapting to their needs at each sales funnel stage. Over time, build a dialogue in which the customer feels heard and acts as an ally in resolving a problem.

Taking the different stages into account helps to avoid a mismatch between where the salesperson thinks they are and where the customer actually is in their buying journey.

This is a real risk. Sellers are results-oriented, so it’s very tempting to push a potential customer step by step, as quickly as possible, toward the purchase decision.

Imagine, for example, that the salesperson is preparing the proposal while the customer is still just acknowledging the problem he has. As the seller fails to correctly assess the information needs of this contract, the negotiation is doomed to fail.

To differentiate yourself from the competition, it is essential to adopt an advisory role and work with the pains, challenges, and specific goals of each prospect. Thus, you are helping a potential client to make the best decision and to cultivate a lasting relationship of trust.

• Content Sales support

In 2007, it took an average of 3.68 call attempts to reach prospects. 13 years later, it takes 18 attempts. Only 23.9% of sales emails are opened.

The decline in effectiveness, and even with the emergence of social selling and referrals, the cell phone and emails continue to be important tools for direct contact. How to make them more effective? The answer is in the content: insights, tools, news, statistics or studies, anything that enriches the prospect’s life.

Sharing a useful resource – and not more of the same, which is the product and the company – is increasingly asserting itself as the best way to start a conversation, gain the prospect’s attention and advance the negotiation.

This forces you to hire sales specialists who manage to escape the traditional sales script (“I’m here to tell you about the upgrade we made to the XPTO product, etc”) and who are able to gather relevant insights (“the latest statistics in your sector show that X% of companies use a technological solution like ours” or “Have you seen the latest free tool we created to increase your productivity?”).

In this way, they manage to position themselves as trusted advisors, reduce the perception of risk in the purchase and accelerate sales.

• Sales-accelerating technologies Sales

technologies are also known as enablement. No matter how well your salespeople are trained, you can’t expect exponential growth if you don’t use technologies that multiply efforts. Even because, probably, your competitors are already using them to make more and better contacts.

These technologies can be part of the sales stack from any B2B company, regardless of industry:

• Marketing automation software – automate contact management, segmentation and content nurturing.

• CRM – prospect management, sales pipeline management and monitoring of key metrics.

• • Inside Sales Software – software to plan and make customer calls and remote product demonstrations with integration with CRMs; monitor the metrics and recordings of each sales rep, which allows for coaching.

• Dashboard Software, Proposal Software, Email Marketing, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc.

• Coaching for the Right Skills

Traditional sales coaching is light years away from today’s sales reality. It does not focus on developing the necessary skills to sell online, it is not focused on the customer, and it does not include tools to accelerate sales.

Modern sales force coaching must be done according to the specialization of each rep (Sales Developer, Account Executive, Customer Success Manager, Account Manager, etc.), always emphasizing problem-solving.

• An agile sales force

One of the realities of today’s commercial departments is a high turnover of just a few months. Therefore, it is important for sales managers to implement a process that can serve as a basis for quickly training new talent, as well as providing individual coaching. Together, these two strategies promote agile sales teams, capable of maintaining performance even in the face of turnover. 

It may seem counterintuitive, but hiring top-notch salespeople with immense experience is not always a good bet for this sales force. The more experienced ones are not as permeable to coaching, and in these cases, the success of the sales operation depends on a consistent consumer experience in all stages, from Marketing to Sales and Customer Success. 

 

The role of a manager is never easy, but it is particularly challenging in sales. Salespeople are independent, self-motivated, self-assured, and dynamic by nature. If you’re a sales team manager, I don’t need to remind you how difficult it is to influence the working methods of people with these personality traits.

So today I’d like to explore some strategies and principles that help you manage and improve your sales team’s performance. I’m not going to convince him to be the alpha wolf of the pack, which everyone fearfully respects. This creates a toxic environment that causes too much wear and tear. I’m going to talk about creating a motivating work environment that invites collaboration.

Be Present

Salespeople don’t have it easy. They spend the day hearing “no” and are always under pressure. Even after reaching the goal, they start from scratch each new month, like Sisyphus pushing the boulder to the top of the mountain.

Even the best salespeople struggle under all this pressure and can become demotivated, especially if they feel unsupported on a day-to-day basis. That’s why it’s often said that 99% of a sales manager’s job is to be present.

Being present allows you to provide moral support. But not only. With their attention and availability, it is possible to identify individual difficulties, be more successful in transmitting best practices, be a mentor, and even keep abreast of the market.

Therefore, organize your time to dedicate yourself to supporting your team and avoid being away for long periods!

Establish bonds of trust

Before asking your team for words and funds, establish an interpersonal relationship. Try to get to know people, the way they work, their motivations, and their ambitions so that you can adjust your communication and keep them motivated.

Be transparent about your plans and objectives

Many companies do not consider it relevant to share the organization’s plans and general objectives with their employees. As a result, individuals do not fully understand their role and may think they are just a pawn in the game.

That’s why it’s good practice for a sales manager to share his plans, goals, and tactics with the department. In this way, it gives the team direction, which helps them to understand the reason for the recommendations, practices, or changes that it tries to pass. The conversation is also an opportunity to hear your team’s views and involve them in the process.

Focus on behaviors and not just results

We’ve already seen the importance of being present to motivate the team. But there is another, even more, beneficial effect: the ability to correct your team’s counterproductive behaviors and habits right away.

If you wait for the end of the month to observe the “inputs” of the salespeople, you will only register that a goal of the month has not been reached, for example. But this does not allow him to understand the reason for this result, and without it, he cannot be a good manager. Therefore, use your time with the team to review your actions in time, when it is still possible to step in and change course.

Focusing on behaviors rather than just results gives you yet another valuable insight. If a salesperson exhibits the right behaviors, even if he doesn’t always hit targets, he’s a team member with potential. On the contrary, a salesperson who hits his goals but has undesirable behavior can destabilize the entire team – nullifying the benefits of his goals.

Give your team regular feedback

I want to reinforce the importance of feedback. After gaining their trust, being present, saying what you expect from them, and observing their behavior, it’s the right time to help your employees improve in the context of sales. 

However, feedback is only effective if there is positive reinforcement. Think about helping to correct, them so that there is a positive development, not about tearing them down. As they say, flies are caught with honey, not vinegar!

Then, don’t forget that only regular feedback can produce significant and permanent changes in the team’s habits and behavior.

Give incentives

Although all these actions are motivating and promote well-being and personal development, there is an asset that sales managers can use to encourage results in particular. I’m talking about incentives, monetary, and not only.

Incentives can 1) promote concrete results and 2) promote desirable behaviors.

Encouraging desirable behaviors is useful when introducing a new step in the sales process, for example. Even so, they are just as fundamental as incentives for results, such as:

• Incentives for those who generate more revenue;
• Who closes more deals;
• Whoever reaches the goal first;
• Whoever reaches a minimum income.

Do not make the mistake of establishing unattainable numbers, which endanger you. Be based on achievable objectives that meet the needs of the company.

Incentives can be concrete or intangible:

Concrete: prizes, trips, dinners, parties.

Intangibles: public recognition, medals, plaques, trophies.

Now, go back to your company and apply these ideas! Then tell me how it went. 

By now, we all know that any customer goes through several stages before making a purchase. Traditionally, we describe these stages in a sales funnel. But if the purchase goes through several stages, the relationship with the customer has to follow this process to provide a good experience.

Therefore, an Inbound Marketing and Inside Sales operation ideally has 3 distinct roles. A Marketing specialist generates leads, in the first part of the funnel; a Sales Development Representative qualifies leads during the engagement phase; and an Account Executive closes sales.

As the company evolves or tries to take bigger steps, it is crucial to expand the sales structure and recruit for all necessary functions, to provide a better customer experience and become competitive.

Therefore, today we are going to see in detail what is expected of each role, and the characteristics that candidates must have to be a good addition to your Inbound Marketing and Inside Sales team.

Attraction

At the beginning of the sales funnel, Marketing promotes paid media and owned media initiatives to attract the target’s attention. The content specially designed to attract the right person can generate visits to a variety of channels managed by the company. These visits are the first phase of lead generation.

The responsibility for generating leads falls to Inbound and Outbound Marketing specialists. An excellent marketer is adept at designing personas based on the information they get from Sales and the quantitative data they capture from analytics tools. By getting to know the persona well, you know their preferred channels and pain points. And so all the ingredients for a successful inbound and outbound marketing plan come together.

What to look for in Inbound and Outbound Marketing:

• Ability to analyze data and gain insights
• Ability to organize and manage projects
• Knowledge and appreciation of automation
• Deep understanding of the customer experience
• UX
• knowledge Advanced knowledge of social networks
• Strategic thinking

Recognition /Education

O The purpose of this phase is to generate leads from the visits collected earlier. Marketing continues to operate at this stage, as it creates the contents and mechanisms that capture the visitor’s contact information, transforming it into a lead. 

At this point, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) comes into play. It is usually a junior position, whose primary function is to contact leads, usually by phone, to qualify them.

To fulfill this prospecting phase, they employ qualification criteria corresponding to the Ideal Customer Profile and forward the best opportunities to sales. They are the first human contact between the company and the potential customer, so they need to know the range of products “back to front”.

What to look for in a Sales Development Representative: A

• Natural communicator, which includes not only speech but also active listening
• Coachability (permeable to mentoring)
• Curiosity, love of learning, and ability to acquire new knowledge
• Organization and excellent time management
• Empathy and ability to build relationships
• Ability to adapt to the interlocutor

Selection

In the selection phase, the lead becomes a sales opportunity. He has already consumed several contents and resources, he feels capable of making a decision and is ready to negotiate. However, you are likely comparing your service or product with competitors. 

So it’s time to let the Account Executive step in. This is the professional charge of negotiating, making the proposal, and closing the sale. It is no longer time to educate; the objective now is to help potential clients make the best decision for themselves. Despite having results in his sights, he is an expert at building relationships, not just “closing deals”. 

Characteristics you should look for in an Account Executive:

• Great written and verbal communication skills
• An assertive and confident attitude
• Ability to organize, plan and manage time
• Results-oriented
• Highly self
• Enthusiasm, perseverance, and resilience 
• Knowledge of CRM tools
• Knowledge of sales techniques
• Emotional intelligence
• Sales

Onboarding

The moment immediately after the purchase is a source of a lot of excitement. The customer wants to quickly confirm that they have made the right choice and see the return on their investment. The company seeks to facilitate implementation and adoption and deliver on its promised value proposition.

Customer Success Managers (CSM) are the professionals responsible for managing this process, but their role does not end with onboarding. They are also responsible for technical support. The ultimate goal of this role is to reduce churn (cancellations) and extend Customer Lifetime Value.

• Creativity and ability to solve problems
• Relationship management and proactivity
• Deep technical knowledge about the product/service, which may require other technical skills
• Empathy and active listening
• Management of expectations
• Crisis management
• Excellent communication
• Ease of working in a team
• Excellent interpersonal
• Ability to work effectively under stress and time pressure

Expansion

Currently, the sales funnel is not complete without the expansion phase. This is the phase in which the company can obtain even more returns from the customer. By guaranteeing satisfaction through Customer Success, it becomes substantially easier to promote new business opportunities with the customer and to upsell a higher-value solution or cross-sell to another company solution.

Account Managers (AM) manage the relationship with the customer outside the technical scope, which belongs to the CSM. In this sense, they are responsible for maximizing the Customer’s Lifetime Value, which includes obtaining referrals to other potential customers and ensuring the continuity of the commercial relationship. They are also known as “farmers” because they “plow the land” to extract the maximum benefit.

• Empathy, understanding, and practicing active listening
• Excellent project management skills
• Excellent communication, written and oral
• Work well in a team, but also independently
• Leadership and responsibility
• skills Analytical thinking
• Excellent interpersonal
• skills Expectation management
• Ability to work well under stress

 

Hiring for the sales team is not an easy task! But if you segment sales roles around the customer journey, it’s much simpler to assemble a team that is much more than the sum of its parts.