Why Inside Sales Guys (And Gals!) Don’t Stick Around For Long

Unearthly working hours are often blamed for the high attrition rates seen among inside sales guys (and, increasingly, gals!) in the IT industry.

My last two months of interviewing over 15 people for inside sales positions within my company GTM360 and its customers reinforces the common belief that inside sales professionals keep job-hopping once in 12-18 months. However, after talking to many inside sales people who have jumped ship frequently and a few who haven’t, I’m inclined to believe that there’s lot more to attrition than unearthly working hours.

Most inside sales reps are young (mid- to late-twenties) and have few family commitments. They’re eager to learn the selling process and are excited to be in a unique position where they’re able – in fact required – to required to reach out to senior customer executives so early in their career (contrast this sharply with most of their colleagues in delivery and technical functions who have to wait for eight to ten years before they become project managers and can get to interact with similar levels of a customer organization). Inside sales people don’t really mind working late hours because they know that’s the only way they can get to interact with their customers and overseas colleagues during the typical US or European business day.

A common refrain I’ve heard from many inside sales reps is that their company lacks focus and offers very little support while they’re toiling away at their tasks of generating qualified leads from a market that has little or no knowledge of their company. Having sensed the mistaken notion among some companies that qualified leads will start gushing simply by hiring a couple of inside sales reps, giving them a few mailing lists and asking them to start making cold calls, I’m not very surpised at what I’m hearing from these inside sales people. In fact, cynical though it may sound, I can’t help recalling the early days of offshoring when many companies thought that employing a few field sales people would automatically turn on the tap of orders.

On the other hand, the few companies that have mastered the go to market process have been able to provide the tools that ensured success of their business development efforts and gained the loyalty of their inside sales staff.

While a detailed description of the go to market process is beyond the scope of this blog post (interested readers can click here to know more), suffice to say that offering creation, collateral development and inbound marketing constitute its vital elements.

Offerings should not be confused with traditional technology service lines like application development, maintenance, implementation, upgrades and support. During the go to market stage, which precedes the sales and presales cycle, offerings have to be conceptualized as solutions to business pain areas that appeal to the target audienc’s C-Suite. Traditional technology service lines and associated collateral like capability documents and presentations, tend to work only when the service provider has already generated / received a qualified lead and must convert that into an opportunity. But, they will fall flat when a service provider’s inside sales organization has to generate qualified leads from the open market comprising of companies that are strangers to the service provider. To cut it at this stage, offferings and supporting collateral like offering detail notes and presentations must demonstrate clearly how they will help customers increase revenues, reduce costs, improve  margins, manage risks and address other business pain areas.

Inside sales reps resorting to traditional email and telephone campaigns will find that the odds are stacked against them as they attempt to garner the attention of increasingly guarded and fickle executives who have no choice but to spurn such conventional outbound marketing tactics practiced by a multitude of service providers who all sound quite similar to one another. To bolster inside sales effectiveness against this backdrop, service providers have to blend conventional approaches with next-generation inbound marketing techniques like search marketing, landing pages and microsites.

These challenges are not too new. The responses are not exactly rocket science. However, the extent to which IT companies are fighting the problems with the right mix of go to market inputs is certainly not uniform. And therein lies the key to containing inside sales attrition.

Companies lacking a comprehensive go to market strategy will find that their inside sales reps will have very limited effectiveness. With very few people in their companies willing or able to understand their plight, inside sales people tend to jump ship every so often with the fond hope that their next employer will show greater appreciation of the go to market process. Because inside sales people generate leads and have direct contact with many prospective customers, a company loses lot more than its training investments on these people when they leave the company.

Over the past few years, IT service providers have adopted globally-recognized process and quality frameworks like ISO and CMM after realizing that, without them, their vast pool of qualified and experienced people will not be able to deliver good quality software. The time has now come for them to embrace world-class go to market processes to boost inside sales effectiveness, keep sales funnels full and grow revenues. While many service providers will debate the ROI of investing in marketing, there are a few smart ones – among them some small, but enlightened, companies – who have made the move knowing fully well that they need to bag only one incremental deal in order to recover their entire investment in devising and implementing an all-round go to market strategy.

PS: I’ve heard a few more genuine concerns from inside sales people around office seating arrangements, rewards and recognition and career path. But, since I don’t want to make this blog post any longer or stray too far away from its basic theme of attrition, I’m deferring their coverage to a future post.