virtual sales team: New roles for telesales and telemarketing, The

Telemarketing, Sep 1994 by Barnwell, Mike

Imagine being able to leverage your company's most appropriate people in crucial steps of every sales opportunity--instantly and with little effort. You're able to draw upon your top sales, technical, consulting and management expertise to close new business and generate more business from existing customers. The primary sales rep may drive the sale, but others are involved in the sales process and alerted when their input is necessary. When key issues standing in the way of a sale arise, the right people in your company step in quickly and automatically to share their expertise and provide the answers.

The groupware capabilities of the latest generation of sales force automation (SFA) software applications can help make this scenario a reality by enabling a powerful new approach to corporate sales: the "Virtual Sales Team." In a Virtual Sales Team, the telesales staff plays an enhanced role in the total sales process by working as a direct inside complement to the field staff. Internal (corporate-based) and external (field-based) sales personnel collaborate throughout to build a shared corporate knowledgebase of customer/prospect information. Leveraging intrateam communications and fostering collaboration in the sales process helps to focus inside and field resources where they can best understand customer requirements and issues, and enables them to work through issues standing in the way of closing sales. This integrated approach to sales can help improve the close ratio, shorten the sales cycle and raise margins.

BREAKDOWNS IN THE TRADITIONAL MODEL

In the traditional corporate sales model, telemarketing reps are responsible for generating leads via outbound calling, and for lead processing of inbound calls (including identification and simple qualification). Telesales might handle day-to-day order taking and expediting, usually with very little account development activity. It falls to the field salespeople to handle the real qualification of all leads in the sales funnel, including managing inactive and deferred leads.

In many cases, internal and external sales reps work independently, with minimal shared information between the two groups. Interaction between field sales and telemarketing is essentially limited to the handing off of leads from telemarketing to field reps. Leads sent from telemarketing to field sales that don't move quickly through the funnel (such as deferred or inactive leads) often get lost, or require a great deal of the field sales rep's time to follow up. Productivity breaks down even further here because field sales reps are not always available--resulting in "phone tag" with customers and prospects. From the customer's perspective, the loss of continuity from the first encounter with the telemarketing rep to the callback from the field rep, often weeks later, does little to contribute to a good working relationship with the company.

Customer information is not easily shared or analyzed because it is often held in multiple, disconnected databases across the organization, with little concurrency and consistency of data. For instance, the field reps may use a contact manager to track sales leads, while telesales reps use a separate telemarketing system--with no links between the two. Voice mail and the telephone are the primary communications vehicles, with no automated intercommunication and interaction systems. Without a reliable mechanism for tracking tasks and action items, there's no single, overall audit trail for viewing everyone's roles and activities. It's impossible, for instance, for managers to view the entire sales life cycle and compare costs versus revenues for the total sales opportunity.

AN ENHANCED ROLE FOR TELESALES

The concept of the Virtual Sales Team has evolved for several reasons. First, internal telesales personnel are more stationary and therefore more effective at reaching and being reached by contacts--so it makes sense to give them a larger role in the overall sales process. The telesales reps are better equipped to handle much of the telephone-intensive work of prospecting and qualifying initial leads than the nomadic field reps. Only qualified and active leads go to field sales reps, who, in turn, work those leads and collect new field-identified leads to be worked in conjunction with telesales. If the field rep is working a lead that gets deferred or otherwise becomes inactive, the lead is turned back to the telesales rep, who is better equipped to handle the tracking and phone-intensive follow-up. Field reps also provide value in situations where their physical presence is necessary or helpful, such as doing initial customer presentations, resolving special problems, or times when the customer simply wants to physically see someone from the company.

Also, because internal sales personnel are less costly and don't travel, using them for more of the traditional field activities makes sense from a monetary standpoint. Companies can control the rising costs of field sales by leveraging internal staff more extensively to do phone-intensive work such as initial lead qualification. With only highly qualified and active leads to work with, field sales reps can spend their more expensive time closing sales, rather than on the phone doing initial qualifications or following up on deferred or inactive leads.