Sales Advocate Newsletter

How and When to Scale Your Inside Sales Team

June 2004

As your company and its sales team grow, your Inside Sales group typically needs to expand as well. With an increase in field sales reps, there are more leads needed from Sales Development. New products, markets, and customers give rise to increased territories for Telesales reps.

Too many companies, however, don’t do the necessary planning and testing prior to adding new inside sales reps, which results in confusion both internally and for your customers, not to mention lackluster revenue and profitability results.

Typical Mistakes Based on Actual Case Stories

One of our clients wanted to scale up their 35 telesales group, but only ten percent of the reps were making quota. We needed to first understand the group’s underperformance before adding additional people. With an Assessment, we were able to hone in on the problems and fix them, resulting in the majority of the reps making quota. By getting the results on track, our client is experiencing a successful group expansion.

Another client, with an existing group of twenty telesales reps, was adding new markets and products to the inside sales territories. Without any knowledge or experience in these new markets, they wanted to expand the group to 60 reps. Our recommendation was to do a Pilot sales campaign first with the existing reps to test and measure what the results should be in terms of call activity metrics, length of sales cycle, average sale, sales tools needed and other key criteria. With that information, we were able to set realistic quotas and performance metrics and create a formula for success for the existing as well as new group members. By tracking the original group of twenty, we learned what kind of experience level and background would lead to the best results n the new hires. And not only were we able to bring new reps up to speed much more quickly but also we knew ahead of time what their ramp-up time should be.

How to Do it Right: Test the Inside Sales Model and Metrics

Before you grow Inside Sales, it is imperative to have a defined and tested inside sales model. With a brand new group, starting with a small number of reps (two-four people) makes most sense while you are still perfecting your phone and email “scripts” or messages, testing which customers and markets are best-suited for your products or services, and tracking metrics that will help you set activity and productivity goals for Inside Sales. Key metrics include daily call and email attempts and live connections as well as numbers of qualified leads or sales generated by each rep on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. Trying to manage or grow a group without understanding these basics is a recipe for disaster, as you won’t know the difference between poor and exceptional performance and results.

Establish Consistent Processes

In addition to proven inside sales metrics, there are a host of processes that are critical to a successful expansion of Inside Sales. These include:

• Clearly defined sales process. Step by step, document how your prospects are converted to customers, who in your company is responsible at each stage, draft voicemail and email message templates to insure a consistent message, etc.
• Sales cycle and length. Measure and communicate expectations.
• Lead qualification criteria. Document definitions for Lead Qualification to help everyone in Sales stay focused on the highest priority follow-ups. Without this, reps waste time on the wrong prospects.
• CRM usage and reports. Have a system that is customized to reflect your sales process. And consistent usage is important for understanding your business. A new rep should be able to look up her/his prospects and customers in your system, see a historical record of contacts, and establish credibility and rapport faster, leading to shorter sales cycles.
• Sales tools, collateral, demos. Create the documents and tools that support your inside sales team to get new reps up to speed quickly.
• Training programs. Establish inside sales-specific training to accelerate the start-up time for new reps.

When to Expand the Group

Once you have defined, tested and refined your model and processes and are producing consistent, predictable results with your first few inside reps, you will be ready to add people. For most companies, this period is at least 3 months for Sales Development and 4-6 months for Telesales. If you attempt to expand the group faster, you could be adding people only to duplicate a model that doesn’t work. In addition, you should only add as many people as you can manage while carefully training, tracking, and measuring their performance relative to your tested model.

This newsletter is provided as a complimentary service from Phone Works, LLC, the San Francisco Bay Area's leading sales consulting firm. Phone Works helps technology firms increase revenue, shorten sales cycles and implement successful, repeatable sales models. Phone Works has multi-lingual consultants based in London and southern France that build and restructure lead-generation, lead-qualification, telesales and sales-productivity programs on the European continent.

You can reach Phone Works at 510.749.9073.