Inside sales staff augmentation is something companies are increasingly pursuing. At Valenta we provide many different virtual staff and staff augmentation personnel. In addition to IT, software development, and financial back office roles, an increasing percentage are virtual assistants and virtual inside salespeople.
Many companies seek to outsource inside sales teams. Adding one or a few individuals can also provide outsized benefits and complement existing staff. Outsourced inside sales personnel can take over the lowest value work in a sales department. This offload can allow existing onshore staff to focus on the highest value tasks, be customer facing, and engaged in actual sales activities a high proportion of the time. Offloading work to outsourced inside salespersons can also allow senior staff to be more strategic.
Engagements when it comes to staff augmentation are flexible and cost effective. Companies can ramp up quickly when they are in high growth modes. They can also scale down without penalty if business conditions change. To put all of this in perspective looking at the salaries for various roles in different cities can help. On Glassdoor the salary of an inside salesperson is 67K USD in Washington DC, USA. It is 85K CAD in Vancouver Canada. These rates do not consider office costs, infrastructure, taxes, and benefits. Outsourced personnel can often be obtained for 70% less than these salaries.
Tasks an Inside Sales Assistant can Perform
The best approach to take when adding inside sales staff augmentation is to map out all the processes within a sales department. The next step is to clearly define who is doing each step in the process and make sure that the right people are doing the right roles. During this phase it is also important to identify any work that is not getting done that should be. Routine customer outreach, funnel research, making sure prospects and customers attend company events can all be areas that are missed in the day to day of getting things done. Taking a deep dive on standard operating procedures upfront and clearly defining perfect world scenarios can keep the highest value and highest skilled persons on a team at their most productive. Sellers should be selling, and closers should be closing.
Some of the roles an inside sales or business development person can perform include:
• Sourcing and mining the leads from various business directories and websites and updating the same prospects in company’s CRM
• Obtaining and assembling new Lead Contact lists based on client criteria
• Telemarketing and outreach for company events
• Telemarketing to clients’ customers to conduct customer satisfaction survey and probe for new business opportunity
• Establishing contact with prospect Key Decision makers to introduce the services offered by client company
• Setting up appointments and conference calls for Senior Sales Manager/Business Owner with new prospects
• Independently manage pre-sales support function including:
• launching and managing email campaigns/webinars /customer experience days
• direct mail campaigns
• developing prospect lists
• proactively creating business opportunities
• Using CRM to send promotional emails and newsletters
• Using CRM to manage database of leads and categorize by industry, size, geography etc.
• Regular and planned email blasts of leads, short regular messaging, managing drip mail campaigns
• Email blast management and follow up including checking to see who has opened emails & sending emails to close finalize appointment setting and/or sales
• Customer service capabilities and responding to incoming enquiries on email, chat etc.
• Working with Marketing team to compose sales and marketing collateral
Want to Learn More?
Everything we do at Valenta is about helping companies focus on and have time for what they do best and their core mission. We do this through process consulting, digital transformation, and the automation of tasks. We also do this by providing virtual staff augmentation, virtual staffing, and outsourcing. Valenta is focused exclusively on SMB clients, typically enterprise customers with 10-1,000 employees. However, we have customers with more and less than these numbers of employees. Most tier one consulting and outsourcing firms so far have only focused on Fortune 500 or Fortune 1,000 companies. In addition to providing specialized virtual assistants some of the staff augmentation we provide includes bookkeeping, accountants, financial crime personnel, project managers, IT staff, managed IT, software developers, software administrators, digital marketing, AI and machine learning specialists, data analysts and scientists, IT security analysts, and much more. Contact Us to discuss more.