Inside Sales – Meaning, Example, Challenges, Benefits

Meaning of Inside Sales

Inside sales refers to selling of goods or services to customers without meeting them face to face directly. It is a method under which company’s personnel sell products to people remotely by contacting them through email, phone or internet. Inside sales are also termed as ‘’virtual sales’’ or ‘’remote sales’’. Under this sales person do no need to travel to distant places for interacting customers, but they can perform there function by connecting to customers via various virtual means.

Inside sales has now days become an effective tool for business organization as online shopping is much popular at present. People prefer online shopping as it provides them a wide variety of products from different sellers to choose by just sitting at their home comfortably. It helps companies in growing their sales efficiently by saving their money and time needed for contacting peoples physically. Inside sales remove all distant barriers and enables in connecting to people at far places. 

Examples of Inside Sales

Contacting peoples for providing them information regarding new arrivals of brand by doing them phone calls on routine basis by sales personnel. Also, sending promotional emails to customers over internet come under the category of inside sales.

Benefits of Inside Sale

Various benefits of Inside sale are explained below:

  1. Increase flexibility: Inside sales technique provides convenience and flexibility to sales persons. They can reach large number of customers and communicates to them by just sitting in their offices. It has more success rate in comparison to traditional field sales where they need to reach each person for face to face contact. 
  2. Cost-effective: It is an efficient method of growing company’s sales. Under inside sales, company representative are not required to travel at far places for approaching customers but can connect to them by making calls day in day out. This saves both time and money required for meeting peoples physically. 
  3. Wider reach: This allows you to connect with people even at far places. Companies by acquiring data regarding target market can inform them of brand products via emails and calls. It has removed place barrier which was present in case of field sales under which sales persons cannot travel to distant places. 
  4. Provide transparency: Inside sales method provides transparency to organizations in dealing with customers. It works through CRM software where whole data is stored, process and analyzed automatically. All records of customers dealings with business are properly recorded which helps in resolving all issues and conflicts properly. 
  5. Enhance customer experience: It has enhanced the shopping experience of peoples. They can purchase their desired products by just sitting within their home comfort with wide variety of products to choose. Customers like to connect and do conversation with their brands over phone call or email which is available at any point of time. 
  6. Easier to manage: Inside sales method of selling products helps in strengthening relations with customers. It provides a system where customer queries and confusion can be handled in a better way all the time. Inside sales provides complete track record of all interactions between salespersons and customer. It keeps a check over all dealings and makes it easier to manage them.

Challenges of Inside Sales

Challenges of Inside sales are discussed in points:-

  1. Hiring right personnel: Recruiting right employees is must for every organization for performing inside sales efficiently. Managers need to evaluate traits of employees so that they are able to interact properly with customers. Hiring wrong candidates will adversely affect business relations with customers. 
  2. Training and coaching: Organizations need to train and provide various coaching to employees for enhancing their skills. It requires a lot of effort in terms of money and time for training workforce.
  3. Longer sales cycle: Another major challenge of inside sale is the longer time period for closing the deals. Sales personnel need to interact for long term with leads for convincing them to close the deal.
  4. Difficulty in getting quality leads: Business organizations find it difficult in finding quality and right leads for selling their products. Sometimes sales representatives get nil results after putting a lot of efforts.