Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

Working Better with Field Sales

  

  

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Within the last several years, several of the finest Inside Sales managers I know of lost their departments, either because field people needed to gain revenue by having additional product transferred to them, or the field was successful in convincing upper management that prospects and customers were getting "confused" by all the attention they were getting in receiving calls from different salespeople in the company.  Bruised field sales egos seem funny until someone gets handed the pink slip. I think it's important to recognize this as an important issue. If you're an Inside Sales Manager, you may want to take steps to pre-empt these types of difficulties in the following ways:

1) Strive to let the field know the value your team adds to their sales process.  Do you sell products that your outside people don't?   Why not ask your inside team to ask at least one additional field-product related question to each of your prospects in order to feed a few good leads to the field?

2) Always make the field look good. That doesn't mean taking the blame for their foul-ups, but it does mean offering to make a few calls for them when their travels present difficulties that your team could help solve. One or two of these calls can dramatically improve the in-house PR your inside team needs to continually have a high profile within the corporate sales matrix.

3) Poll the field. At least every quarter, poll either the entire field or, if you're part of a large company, the most influential regional sales managers. Ask them honestly what they think of the value your inside team brings to both them and the company as a whole. If you detect any negativity at all, understand that you are operating at risk until you've taken steps to solve the problem.

As the manager of an Inside group, you've got to make allies out of the field so when issues arise that could result in cuts in head-count, training budget, or marketing resources, they'll be on your side. This is more than just a CYA exercise; it calls for some strategizing within your department so that all your inside people realize that revenue generation is only part of the picture. Your department must be positioned within the company --- just as your product must be positioned in the mind of the prospect --- as a maximum-value entity that presents the best possible solution to a critical business problem. In short, superior team communication covers the entire sales force.

There's also a message here for you VPs of Sales whose primary focus is the field, but have an inside group working for you as well. When I sold in the field, I found my most pressing problem was getting maximum coverage to all my prospects while at the same time making enough face-to-face calls to generate sales for our IBM Series/1 communications solution (yep, this was a while back.)  When I began using the phone effectively to better cover my territory, I dramatically increased my sales (today, I can train your field team to do it.) 

I soon became a real believer of superior territory coverage by telephone. If I had had the luxury of an inside team to work along with me, I could (and would) have leveraged them to further increase my sales, even if they had their own revenue responsibility. Some of you field sales managers are fortunate enough to have an inside group in place right now, but may be wrestling with communication issues between your field team and the inside team. Good solutions don't include firing their well-liked manager or lowering their revenue, but they do include team training courses as well as your continued personal emphasis on the value of the inside group as a necessary and vital strategic and tactical component to closing sales and the revenue generation process.