Ken Krogue

Five years and four months ago on Monday I officially started working at InsideSales.com. Actually it was called Sales Team Automation at the time. We were still a few weeks away from buying the InsideSales.com domain from a guy who needed money just before Christmas in 2004.

We paid three thousand dollars. Now it is arguably our single greatest asset.

We had the website up by the first week of January, and the first day we generated 8 leads, now we get 50 a day. Back then you typed in “Inside Sales” to Google and you found us and 10,000 companies trying to hire inside sales reps.  There may have been a lot more but I stopped scrolling through the pages to see how many.

Now there is more, much more.

I used to be concerned when I noticed that we have several competitors mimicking our every move and driving adword costs up, then I realized that is the best thing that could be happening; Inside Sales is becoming an industry… it is an industry.

American Association of Inside Sales Professionals

We just became a Member and a major sponsor of the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, AA-ISP. Industries have associations.

Every morning I have an email that comes to my inbox from Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com of new job listings from companies that are trying to hire Inside Sales jobs.  It keeps getting bigger.

We knew that inside sales would become Inside Sales. What had been a 2nd class department that generated leads for Outside Sales and took all the scraps off the table would one day grow up.

For sixteen years I have watched inside sales evolve.  From my years at Franklin Quest when we had to find our own leads and hand off every large corporate sale we caused that turned into something big (and we caused a LOT of sales.) It wasn’t fun being a second class citizen under the thumb of Field Sales and the Great Generation sales leadership and Baby-Boomer sales management who only know one way to sell. We were the fastest growing department at the 2nd fastest growing company in America.

Just recently our joint research with infoUSA, SKKU, and MIT has shown that Inside Sales is growing at a rate that is 15 times higher than Outside Sales, which really isn’t growing at all (7.5% annually versus .5% annual)

It hasn’t been a revolution like I sometimes hoped it would be. It just became the default way to sell for hi-tech companies who did everything over the web.  All of B2B and the big ticket business to consumer companies that live off of web-based leads like mortgage, insurance, online education, debt consolidation, and even automotive before the crash have all gone to outbound call centers with professional sales reps who sell remotely… That’s Inside Sales. In fact, our definition of Inside Sales is simply remote sales (see “What is Inside Sales? Our Definition of Inside Sales“)

I think much of it came about because of technology: The phone, the fax, the internet, email, WebEx and GoToMeeting. Then hosted CRM, dialer tools, voice messaging, presence detection or “Sales 2.0″ as so many call it took it to a new level. The crash and the down economy has actually accelerated the growth of Inside Sales. Travel costs and savvy buyers who would rather meet by web conference have increased the effect. Companies just aren’t replacing the attrition of Outside Sales, while actively staffing up their Inside Sales teams.

Mostly I just think it is the coming of age of every generation after the Baby-Boomers. They are more comfortable interacting, communicating, and selling remotely.

We have stopped hiring old-timers, they can’t seem to keep up. I’m forty-four, two years shy of being in the Baby-Boomer Generation and I’m the oldest person at InsideSales.com. LinkedIn says our median age is 25 years old. My partner, our CEO, just won Forty under 40, top 40 entrepreneurs under the age of 40 in Utah.  He can keep winning it for 3-4 years. I’m a geezer; the only one with grey hair. Even my son Josh and one of my old Boy Scouts Scott Gardner works here.

Inside Sales isn’t just a department anymore… it’s an industry. And it is the fastest growing industry in all of sales and marketing.

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.

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