How to build an Inside Sales Team?

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.