In my early days working for a multinational financial services firm in India, I was in the B2B Sales function.
One day our CEO stopped by our sales outpost only to be surprised that all the sales people ‘Are sitting in office’
Unlike door-to-door salesman or a distributor field rep or medical rep, B2B sales often requires you to have appointments set up in advance
Put an MBA from a leading management institute behind a phone and ask him to start getting appointments with prospects. Chances are that the cost of getting appointments is going to be very high.
Business Development through face-to-face meetings is an art that requires special skills. The same ‘Great Business Development Person’ may not be very effective when it comes to getting an appointment
To improve the efficiency of your high cost business development team, you can invest in an inside sales team. Their job would be to create a solid pipeline of prospects with which appointments are set up for the sales team.
The inside sales team should be equipped with the following:
A central database and lead management system such as salesforce.com or Zoho
Good quality phone system and headsets that cut out any background ambient sound from the office
Access to high speed internet to be able to do extensive research on prospects
A premium account to business networking sites like Linkedin
Sales support materials including email templates, direct mail, presentations
Case studies and white papers that highlight your services in action
Access to the sales team calendars to be able to set up meetings with prospects at short notice
Setting up and managing an insides sales team is not a very easy process. It can pose several challenges for any organization.
Companies can outsource their inside sales function to specialist firms like Kankei
To have your inside sales team set up at Kankei and to experience a boost in your Business Development team efficiency please contact Ashok Chugh – Mumbai (ashok.chugh@kankei.com) or Sumana Brahma – Kolkata (sbrahma@kankei.com)
Author : Ajay Miglani
Linkedin : http://in.linkedin.com/in/mig928
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