September 10, 2014
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
Business-to-business inside sales is not a project for the faint of heart. These sales professionals spend a great deal of time sifting through mountains of information in order to find a few nuggets. While outside sales personnel have the luxury of knowing that the leads they receive are pre-qualified, for inside sales, no such guarantee exists. They ARE the qualification process.
Many organizations are stumbling on B-to-B lead management. A study by Decision Tree Labs conducted last year found that 59 percent of B-to-B marketers lack confidence in their lead scoring models because of incomplete information. Forty-four percent said they didn't have enough insight into which attributes indicate buying behavior. This means that a lot of inside sales are happening in the dark, and the dark is never a fruitful place to work.
Smart companies are turning to new software-based sales tools to help gain the insight and direction they need, according to a recent article by Lauren Horwitz, Executive Editor of TechTarget. These solutions help sales organizations manage and leverage data.
“Inside Sales is one of several technologies in a new breed of software designed to aggregate company data -- internal and external -- and provide better insight into prospects and existing customers,” wrote Horwitz. “Some call it marketing automation, others refer to it as multidimensional lead generation, and still others call it sales acceleration software.”
The goal of these solutions is to take all available data and draw complex conclusions that would normally be out of reach of most humans, making connections and identifying roadblocks before they cause problems. Buyers have a lot of power today, and they operate in a lot of channels, so simply finding them is part of the enormous challenge. Connecting with them in a way that is meaningful is an even bigger challenge.
According to Horwitz, these sales lead management solutions can help companies qualify real leads based on predictive criteria that identify which customers are ready to buy or to target existing customers that can be sold additional products and services. They can, for example, extrapolate that a customer filing patent applications or receiving government grants might be ready to begin a buying cycle.
While inside sales still requires companies to do a lot of footwork and place a lot of cold calls, thanks to analytics technology, those calls might not be as frigid as they once might have been.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson