What is Inside Sales?
Our Definition of Inside Sales

Inside Sales is “remote sales,” or professional sales done remotely.

This definition of remote sales is probably the most pragmatic, and if we hold to it, the majority of all sales is done remotely and the numbers are growing. In fact, the recent study done by SKKU and MIT in conjunction with infoUSA found that Inside Sales is growing at a fifteen times higher growth rate (7.5% versus .5% annually) over Outside Sales. This is to the tune of 800,000 new jobs over the next three years.

If you don’t believe it, grab of list of 10 traditional or Outside Sales people and call them. 7 or 8 will be working in their cubicle, office or home office; just like the Inside Sales people.

‘Inside Sales’ is a term that came about in the late 1980’s to try to differentiate phone-based business-to-business (B2B) and more complex business-to-consumer (B2C) selling practices from ‘Telemarketing’ (or ‘Telesales’ in the UK.)

Telemarketing is often believed to have begun in the 1950’s by DialAmerica Marketing, Inc., which is reported to be the first company dedicated to telephone sales and services.  By the 1970’s telemarketing was a common phrase used to describe the process of selling over the telephone.  It often included both outbound and inbound, but later became much more synonymous with outbound calling.

By early 2000, Inside Sales was also the term used to differentiate from Outside Sales, or the traditional face-to-face sales practices where salespeople went to the client’s location of business to engage in the sales process.

Companies found the new channel of Inside Sales to be undeniably effective, but often didn’t know what to do to solve the conflict between the younger, disruptive, more technically savvy upstarts who sold over the phone and their more senior counterparts who wielded incredible political power in their organizations as the entrenched source of revenue for nearly a century.

For years Inside Sales has been relegated to generating leads for the more senior Outside Sales reps or merely closing the smaller accounts.  This is now no longer the case. Many companies are only using a form of pure Inside Sale a hybrid of reps calling from the home office and traveling occasionally to client locations and merely calling it “sales.”

Salesforce.com, by admission of Marc Benioff himself in his new book “Behind the Cloud,” grew their company for the first five or six years with a telesales or Inside Sales model. They added Outside Sales or Field Sales to go upmarket when they wanted to sell Enterprise-class companies, but still does a majority of their work remotely.

Sometimes the best way to define something is also to say what it is not.

Inside Sales is not Telemarketing.  Telemarketing is a scripted, single-call-close, smaller ticket  business to consumer (b2c) model.  Inside Sales is not scripted, a multi-call-close, medium or larger ticket, that targets b2b or larger ticket b2c model.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely, not that drone that calls at dinner time and won’t hang up until you have said “no” seven times.

Inside Sales is not Customer Service.  Though Inside Sales has an element of inbound call handling like a customer service department, in its pure form it is not customer service.

Some companies use inbound call centers and call them inside sales, but this does not fall within the boundaries of this definition unless their primary function is selling.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely… it is remote sales.