Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales: Building the Right Sales Strategy

Intro: You’re listening to The Sales Focus Podcast. Your go-to for developing high-performing teams, next level sales skills, and real results. It’s time to get focused.

Welcome back to the Sales Focus Podcast. I’m your host, Tony Horwath, CEO and founder of Sales Focus Inc. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about sales techniques, tools. How can we help regular salespeople become better salespeople? How can we help managers become better managers?

My focus on this podcast is really just to give you tips and tools that I’ve acquired over the past 30 plus years in developing and managing salespeople. We have launched over 3000, 4000 companies launched their sales organizations into the U.S. market and internationally. We’ve hired, trained and managed somewhere between 25 to 30,000 salespeople. Every industry you can imagine.

We have a tremendous amount of success and we have a tremendous amount of experience that allows us to speak from a level of confidence when we’re talking about how do you find quality people? What makes a good salesperson? But also, how do you build an effective sales team? Today, I want to talk a little bit about the difference of outside sales, inside sales, and why I believe outside sales are face to face, if you will, boots on the ground, feet on the street, all those terms, is the most effective way of acquiring new clients. And then I’m going to talk a little bit about the models that you’ll find within the sales outsourcing industry, our industry that we started, that we founded in 1998. So to start with, I’m going to talk a little bit about outside sales, face to face.

When I talk to people now about how do you want to build your sales team, right? What does your sales team look like to you? The vast majority of the people that we speak to always are thinking now that it’s more of a electronic sales organization, right? There’s outreach, emails, phone calls, and then they have inside salespeople who trying to close the deals. That’s a great model if you’re very spread out, right? Or your target is very spread out and you just can’t be everywhere, or if you can’t afford to have face-to-face salespeople out there. There are some industries where it works better. There are some industries that really in a face-to-face world, it’s almost a must. It’s a must have. In 2020 when COVID happened, everybody went to an inside model. Everybody went to, oh, we can do this on the phone. We can save money. We don’t have to fly people around. We don’t have to drive. We can do everything from the comfort of our home or the comfort of our desk.

I’m not a big believer in that. I still think sales is done best when you can look at someone eye to eye, face to face, body language to body language, and really understand what they’re saying to you. There’s so much that can be hidden in a Zoom call or in an email or misread in an email compared to having conversation.

If you must do it inside and we do inside sales for companies all over the world because it makes sense for them from a geography perspective, cost perspective, the outreach is just too vast or it’s you know, or it may be very transactional, the sale in nature, meaning a simple sale. It’s not a high level sale. It’s not a high price point. It’s a it’s a shorter sale cycle that can be done inside. It’s not a bad thing. It can definitely work. My point is or my perspective is, it’s better if you could do it face to face. So we have launched sales teams anywhere from five people to 150 people across the U.S. And we’ve also done international sales. But I’ll speak specifically to the inside. I mean, to the U.S. based sales teams. We have so much more success when our salespeople are meeting people face to face. And the reason is because there’s somewhat of a relationship that can be developed.

Now of course you need to be a good salesperson. You need to understand how to greet somebody. You need to understand how to read somebody, their personality profiles, to really ask the right questions. But then not just listen to what they’re saying, but look at how they’re saying it. Understanding someone’s response in their body language, in their eye contact, that is, it’s a skill in sales that got lost in the COVID area because everyone was doing Zoom calls and everyone was doing just inside sales. What I would tell you, if your model allows for the face-to-face outside sales, whether it’s residential sales where you’re selling internet services across the US, which we’re doing a lot of, or energy sales, when you’re out knocking doors and talking to people, again, whether it’s business-to-business or residential, if you, if you truly work on your skill in that interaction and that communication and reading people, your success will be much greater than just people who are inside or on the phone. Because when you’re on the phone and you’re making phone calls, you’re sending out emails, it’s much easier for someone on the other side to not answer or to not respond to your email. But if you’re staring at someone face to face, it’s a little harder for them to say, no, I can’t talk now or I don’t want to talk now or whatever the case may be.

And they definitely can’t ghost you when you’re looking at them face to face. So think about your product, your service, who you’re targeting, what is the sales cycle, all those things factor into it. The industry in which you work in. We do a lot of work within the health care arena, whether it’s pharmaceutical or medical products or prescription area. There’s a lot of different areas within the health care arena that we work in. That industry is very much a face-to-face industry, right? For years, salespeople, let’s put them in the pharmaceutical world or medical product world, that healthcare arena, they have always done face-to-face sales. And when COVID happened, a lot of organizations pulled back, but then they went back into the face-to-face because that industry is used to that. And when we do healthcare sales, we always recommend that. It is too difficult. The industry itself has not changed so much that they only want to do it remotely. Now, can you do some things remotely? Yes, you can. But there’s nothing better than the face-to-face interaction you’re going to get from a doc or from a healthcare provider or from an industry expert, if you will. So those areas are very important. Now, if you’re doing what we call transactional sales in the SMB world, small, business world. Again, there are large companies out there. We’ve represented some of the biggest companies in the world in the top 10 of the Fortune 500. So when we’re out representing those organizations and we’re going face to face, it’s very important that we have their brand attached to us. And our ethics and professionalism obviously is the most important thing when we bring that to marketplace.

But, when we’re selling in the SMB world, those organizations, the larger organizations, they have to factor in, okay, if I’m selling to small, medium business or I’m selling to residential and I need a large quantity of customers, the most effective way to do that in a geographical region is to have a team out there selling face to face. Again, we’ve had teams throughout the US. We do a lot in the energy sector. There’s about 14 to 16 states that are under deregulation. So we’ve had face to face sales teams doing B2B. We’ve had them doing B2C. We’ve done a lot in the solar sector and the health care sector. We do a lot in the telecom or internet sector. All of those areas lend themselves nicely to put the face to face team out there and let them knock doors, let them talk to people, let them interact directly, not only to get their business, but to get their referral business because that’s the most important you build in any organization. So if you need transactional sales teams, look at doing feet on the street, look at doing face-to-face sales.

Again, whether it’s B2B or B2C, you can do that face to face in a geographical target. And if it’s a, always refer to it as a transactional sale or a tactical sale, a one touch, two touch, three touch sale is really what you’re looking for in the SMB world. If you have a very lengthy sales cycle, like a six month, eight month, you’re typically not knocking doors in that arena. You need to build relationships, understand strategically what that operation needs, or what that client needs. There’s probably multiple people you’re dealing with and it’s you’re selling to larger organizations, larger price points and it takes more time. So yeah, there’s gonna be some phone calls, emails, correspondence if you will, but I still recommend once you get to a certain level in that relationship, go out and meet the person, go out and talk to them one-on-one, take them out to dinner. Those old school things that I’m told, are still the most effective way to really build a sales team. So think about what makes sense for your organization. Again, if you need us, if you want to reach out to salesfocusinc.com, we can help you in many different areas. It could be as simple as one inside salesperson and we’ll help you grow your business. Or you may need 50 outside people very quickly in geographical regions across the US or globally. We could do that as well. So as I’ve spoken about before, we can build any size sales team anywhere in the world in 45 days or less. So speed to market is important and that quality is important. Sales focus can take care of it for you. But again, if you’re building it yourself, think about what are you selling? What is the sales cycle? What are the price points? Is it SMB or is it more of a strategic sale? All those factor into how do I want to build my sales team and how can they be the most effective team out there?

Thank you. Appreciate the time. We’ll talk again on the sales focus podcast. Bye.