What are inside sales?
Inside sales mean the sales of goods or services with the help of salesmen, who reach customers online or by phone instead of meeting customers face-to-face.
Previously, the idea behind sales was exchanging goods and services with something of equal value. As the competitors increased in number, the traditional sales method was not enough. Hence, a better strategy had to be put into practice.
What better strategy?
A strategy that involves seeking customers deliberately in an attempt to sell the goods or services and that sparks the concept of sales. It is pretty evident that sales began in the form of “outside sales,” which consists of a salesman selling his products or services to the customer directly and face to face.
But now, as the technology is touching higher skies, the sales method is too gradually evolving into a form that we have come to acknowledge as “inside sales.”
What must you know about Inside sales?
Inside sales embrace the concept that sales no longer need a vendor going door to door seeking customers because that job can be done remotely via technology. The inside sales initially began with telephone calls. The negotiations and description of the products could be done remotely, without having to go door to door or even without having a physical location for sales.
And now, with email and the internet that facilitates video broadcasting and social networking, the sky’s the limit. This site claims that inside sales are growing fifteen times faster than outside sales.
How can you master the art of inside sales?
Use these three core principles of Inside sales in your favor!
1. Lead Sourcing
Lead sourcing implies finding the ideal customers to approach based on your products. This includes excessive and extensive research made by the marketer. It is the procedure that helps you to identify the steady supply of customers by observing and realizing the interests and demands of your audience to set up a path for you to reel them in as paying customers.
2. Sales Prospecting
The key difference between the leads and prospects is that leads show interest in your products and can be potential buyers, whereas the prospects are the leads that fit your idealized role of the customer. To convert a lead into a prospect and a prospect into a customer, you need to do these three things:
Research and track the leads to further learn about their quality and know what can turn them into prospects and, ultimately a, customer. Connect with the leads and grab a chance to communicate with them
Inform them about your products and use your research to persuade them why your products or services can be useful to them and how you meet their challenges.
3. Engage and close
Now wrap things up and engage your customers, offer them your services, and arrange an environment by which the prospect can be successfully converted into a customer and close the deal.
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These fundamental principles are more like guidelines than a complete blueprint. However, these TOP 10 TOOLS FOR INSIDE TRADE ensure these policies work in your favor.
1.LinkedIn sales navigator
Although it is not a free tool (quite expensive to be honest), you can generate a lead from the giant professional network. It arms you with an array of filters that enable you to effectively search for the potential prospects along with the recommendations, insights, and analytics that allow you to concentrate on just the right ones.among its humongous sets of data.
2. ContactOut
“ContactOut” is another good tool that allows you to get people’s emails with a single click.
They have a Google Chrome Plugin that works with LinkedIn and Github.
3. MixMax
One benefit of using MixMax that replaces alternative legacy tools by providing a single platform for analytics, automation, and calendaring. Mixmax can be best used for cold emailing as it directly sends emails from your Gmail. One benefit of using other alternatives and not any other replacement tools is that the emails will not end up lost in the promotion section of the mail. Another added benefits of this tool are the email and click tracking, embedded surveys, and meeting scheduler that can always come in handy.
4. Salesforce.com
This is a good customer relationship management (CRM) tool capable of boosting your sales team’s productivity while offering you flexibility. It will give you more insights into the leads. You can use this tool to track clicks, manage leads, run targeted campaigns, and automate the marketing process that ultimately helps convert a lead into a customer. This award-winning tool is effective in creating a smooth workflow in your sales section.
5. Calendr
It is a meeting tool that has been able to create quite a “bang” in the market. It is a simple but effective tool that allows people to book a meeting in your schedule with just a click. Just embed the link on your website and you are ready to go. This tool also synchronizes time zones and notifies you of a meeting which can be one or one or group meetings as well.
6. Yesware
Yesware is an excellent tool to get information about the emails that you sent to your prospects, this email tracking tool can give you the info about when your emails were opened and how many times they were opened. It has customizable templates and can perfectly sync with Gmail and Outlook. With the CRM system, the calls emails, and calendars can be synced. This makes it a lot easier for the managers to evaluate the performance of the members of the sales.
7. Rapportive
This is a Google Apps plugin that allows you to see social media information by hovering over someone’s email in the Google Apps account. This can help confirm that you have the right email and write content in the email for the possible prospects. A small tool that can prove to be powerful ammo.
8. Zapier
Zapier is not just a sales app; it can make all the sales apps work together as you have never seen before. Just pick one of the go-to tools you feel are the best for a particular task, and then Zapier combines all those tools to work for you. Not all tools share the same strength in all aspects, so Zapier helps you to integrate the tools for what they are best at.
9. Webtrends
Active sales can only do so much: meet the real hero behind the stage. That is content marketing. Webtrends is one of the best tools that lets you optimize digital campaigns while offering features such as targeting, behavioral segmentation, analytics, and more. Never underestimate the power of good content.
10. Hootsuite
HootSuite is a social media marketing and analytics tool with a nicely designed interface and a huge set of options at a fair price. It includes built-in listening, influencer identification, and engagement tools for all good social media. A definite must-get if you want to impact social media to boost sales.