A look at the 18 unique challenges of those in the role of inside sales.

If you are responsible for training, leading, or developing a team of inside sales representatives (or your field team spends a majority of time selling over the phone), you understand the unique challenges of selling and prospecting over the phone. Every aspect of selling has a different set of challenges and requires a unique skill set. 

To help you assess if you have all the resources in place to support your inside sellers, here’s a list of the 18 challenges they face every day: 

Enhancing Relationships

1. Creating the intimacy of a face-to-face meeting over the phone by learning to establish: Building trust through words, tone, and responses 

2. Building credibility through approach to leading the call, words, tone, and responses 

3. Enhancing rapport by blindly reading and adjusting to the customer’s communication style, unique needs, and preferences

Political Structure/Access

4. Determining the political structure (the real influencers and decision-makers) without being in the building, reading body language, and interactions among the decision-making team

 5. The specific tactics to gain sponsorship when you don’t have the luxury of building a relationship in person

Engaging the Decision Maker

6. Negotiating the barriers an organization has specifically put in place to keep an inside seller from reaching the decision makers and key influencers (i.e., working with receptionist, screens, and gatekeepers)  

7. Leaving an effective voicemail message 

8. Leveraging social media to get a meeting

9. The outbound introduction (cold): eliminating resistance and engaging a new decision maker 

10. The inbound introduction (warm): leading the call and shifting from responding to the customer’s stated to exploring unstated needs

11. Responding to the five false objections a decision maker will use to get rid of a sales rep over the phone

Discovering Needs & Qualifying

12. Initiating and leading a discovery meeting over the phone, where a customer is more guarded, preoccupied, or easily distracted

13. Interpreting the customer’s response- reading the meta-language without the visual clues

Building Value & Online Presentations

14. The unique skills and process to validating the payoff of your solution without making a face-to-face presentation 

15. Identifying and surfacing barriers to commitment when you can’t read body language or response to the recommendation. 

16. Utilizing online presentation tools to build value in solution and solution provider 

17. Blindly managing a meeting with multiple participants

Advancing the Opportunity

18. Specific strategies for advancing the opportunity when you can’t set up an onsite meeting

Have inside sales training questions for us?

We’re here to nurture your team’s ability to find, grow, and convert more accounts and opportunities. Have a question about how we can create a custom training program for your company?

Tom Stanfill

As Co-founder and CEO, Tom’s primary role is to create content that helps people live, sell, and serve more effectively. Find him on LinkedIn