Plan an inside-sales go-to-market strategy

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Business Benefits

Equip your inside sales team with the tools and data they need to successfully sell your new product.


Set goals for your go-to-market strategy by considering your inside sales team’s bandwidth.

If you only have one inside sales representative, it may not be reasonable for him or her to schedule 100 product demos in a week. Consult with your inside sales staff to ensure they can realistically hit their sales targets. Your goals can be aggressive, but they shouldn’t be so far out of reach that they are impossible to attain.

Ask your inside sales team members which tools they will need to sell your product.

Consider:

  • A customer relationship management tool (CRM).
  • Appointment and scheduling tools.
  • Prospecting tools.
  • Call tracking software.
  • Wireless headsets.
  • Video and screen-sharing tools.
  • At least two monitors so they can demo a product on one screen and type notes on another screen.

Establish rules of engagement for your inside sales staff and other departments by outlining the guidelines surrounding commissions, sales territories, and account ownership and maintenance.

You can search for a template on Google to document your sales guidelines or create an Excel grid that outlines who is responsible for what. This will ensure that there is no overlap within your inside sales department, which will make it easier for you to credit the appropriate team member with a sale.

Create buyer personas by interviewing prospects or conducting surveys, then come up with generalizations about your current customers.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target customers. Use them to identify who your sales team should sell your product to. When creating your buyer personas, consider their demographics, geographic locations, educational backgrounds, job titles, and motivations. Focusing your efforts on the customers who are most likely to buy your product will increase your sales reps’ chances of success.

You can have more than one buyer persona, but make sure that each one is unique and not generalized.

Use your buyer personas to create a value matrix: make a chart that lists each of your buyer personas. Next to each persona, write a list of each of their pain points, how your product can solve them, and how you will convey that information to your potential customers.

A value matrix helps you determine the best messaging for your product by identifying the problems it solves.

Research competitor pricing, measure demand for your product, and calculate your business costs before setting prices for your product.

Setting an accurate price for your product is crucial. If the price is too high, you’ll miss out on potential sales. If it is too low, you’ll lose valuable revenue.

Measure demand by searching for keywords on places such as Google’s Keyword Planner, Quora, Reddit, and social media. If a lot of people are talking about topics that are relevant to your product or service, it could indicate that your product will be in high demand, and you can set your prices a bit higher.

Define your sales funnel and what should happen at each stage to help your sales team understand how to nurture leads throughout the whole buyer journey.

Your sales funnel, or buyer journey, represents each step potential customers take on their way to making a purchase. The primary stages in a sales funnel are:

  • Awareness: become aware of your product or service.
  • Interest: research and comparison shop.
  • Decision: ready to buy.
  • Action: make a purchase and turn into customers.

Create an advertising and marketing budget and develop a plan for demand generation. Consider inbound and outbound marketing strategies, using your buyer personas to judge which methods your ideal customers are most likely to respond to.

  • Inbound marketing: drive leads to your website via social media, search ads, or content marketing
  • Outbound marketing: reaching out to potential customers via cold calling, trade shows, or email blasts to purchased lists

Optimize your inside sales process by reviewing each sales rep’s performance. Use the most common key performance indicators (KPIs) for sales: volume, conversion rate, and time.

Analyze how many leads come in versus how many turn into customers. You can do this manually by keeping track of your leads in a spreadsheet or Google sheet or by using a customer relationship management tool (CRM) such as Salesforce or HubSpot. Use at least a month’s worth of data so you have a long enough time period to spot trends. If your leads drop off at a certain point in the sales funnel, find ways that your sales staff can improve. Offer them more personalized training or coaching so they can close more sales.

You can also create customizable outreach templates for your sales team. This will make it easier for them to contact more prospects, and outreach templates can elicit more responses from potential customers.

Shorten your sales cycle by using sales automation tools to eliminate the need for manual work and improve your inside sales team’s productivity.

The sales cycle is how long it takes a lead to turn into a customer. Shortening your sales cycle helps bring in more business because your sales team can reach more prospects. Use a sales automation tool such as HubSpot’s Sales Hub or Prospect.io to automate tasks, set goals for each sales call, and make it easy for your sales team to schedule meetings or send contracts to potential customers to shorten your sales cycle.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:40:47Z