Inside sales vs. outside sales — which is the better sales model for your business?

Both sales models can help you convert leads, but their approaches vary greatly.

In an inside sales model, reps sell remotely to a vast lead pool. In an outside sales model, reps sell to prospective clients in person.

In this article, I’ll cover what inside sales and outside sales are.

Then, I’ll highlight five critical differences between these sales models and tell you why you should combine them for better results.

Finally, I’ll answer three FAQs to clear any doubts you may have about the skills required for each sales role and the typical salary of an inside sales or outside sales position.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links below to jump to specific sections.)

• What Is Inside Sales?
• What Is Outside Sales?
• Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales: 5 Key Differences
  • Sales Cycle Length
  • Close Rate
  • Maintenance Cost
  • Scalability 
  • Sales Tools
• Why You Should Combine Inside Sales and Outside Sales
• Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales: 3 FAQs

Let’s go.

What Is Inside Sales?

Inside sales (also known as virtual sales or remote sales) involves selling products or services remotely. Your sales force would typically leverage various digital channels to reach and engage potential customers.

These channels include:

• Email
• Social media
• Phone calls
• Video conferencing
• Text, and more

Since an inside sales model doesn’t rely on in-person, face-to-face interactions, it’s convenient in scenarios where it’s just not possible to meet with the client in person — for example, during a pandemic like COVID-19. This approach is also cost-effective and allows you to sell to customers regardless of their location.

With an inside sales model, your inside salesperson can usually approach, nurture, and potentially convert a higher number of leads from the safety of their office or home.

Next, we’ll go over the basics of outside sales.

What Is Outside Sales?

Outside sales (aka field sales) involves in-person meetings with sales leads to sell your product or service.

For outside sales, your rep would normally meet the potential client at:

• Their office
• A restaurant
• A trade show or conference, etc.

An outside salesperson usually goes out of their way for a face-to-face meeting because closing an outside sale can often depend on the pitch and the relationship that your sales rep builds with a prospective client.

Now that you have a basic idea of what inside sales and outside sales are, let’s dive into their key differences.

Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales: 5 Key Differences

While both inside and outside sales models focus on revenue generation, the sales strategy that each model uses is different.

Here are five key differences between inside sales and outside sales:

1. Sales Cycle Length

Sales cycle length is the amount of time it takes to close a sales deal.

Here’s a comparison of the sales cycle lengths of inside and outside sales models:

A. Inside Sales

Usually, the inside sales model has a shorter sales cycle.

Why?

The inside sales model is commonly used for selling things like technology solutions that solve simple problems and aren’t very expensive.

It’s typically easy for an inside salesperson to convey the value of the functionalities of a product that solves a simple problem (like a simple SaaS product). As a result, a sales rep won’t need to spend much time to close prospective customers — making it a shorter sales cycle.

Additionally, if the product or service matches a potential customer’s requirements and isn’t expensive, the prospect could have fewer reservations about making the purchase.

However, with a low-cost product or service, your profit margins could be low as well. And to turn in a good profit, your inside salesperson may need to close a higher volume of deals.

B. Outside Sales

The outside sales model generally has a longer sales cycle.

Why?

Outside sales is normally preferred for selling products, services, and solutions that are complex and expensive.

When selling complex solutions (for example, enterprise software), it can be challenging for your outside salesperson to convey the actual value of all the different functionalities of your offering.

Your outside sales personnel may need to meet in person with potential customers and walk them through the many features, customization options, pricing tiers, and more.

Additionally, more stakeholders tend to get involved in the decision-making process with an expensive solution or a larger deal size. As a result, it will take longer on the client side to reach a consensus on the purchase decision. 

That’s why the sales cycle length in outside sales is generally long.

2. Close Rate

Close rate is the percentage of leads that your sales reps convert into revenue-generating customers.

Let’s see how the close rate compares for inside sales and outside sales.

A. Inside Sales

Inside sales generally have a low close rate.

Why?

Businesses relying on the inside sales model tend to leverage strategies like inbound marketing to generate tons of leads.

But when an inside sales representative reaches out to one of these B2C or B2B sales leads, and it doesn’t pan out, they usually move on without a second thought.

A remote sales professional can walk away from challenging leads because:

• There are more qualified prospects that they can pursue instead.
• Customer acquisition cost is low — so when a lead doesn’t buy from you, it won’t feel like a significant loss.

Since inside sales professionals can easily walk away from leads, they often lose out on many sales opportunities, resulting in a low close rate. Fortunately, they usually have a large pool of leads from which to choose.

B. Outside Sales

Usually, the outside sales model has a high close rate.

This is because outside sales professionals spend a lot of time, money, and energy on a single lead. And when a B2C or B2B sales lead they’ve invested so much into doesn’t convert, it becomes a significant loss for the outside rep and their company.

For this reason, the field sales rep carefully chooses which leads to pursue and tries their best not to lose out on even a single potential customer. As a result, outside sales personnel tend to have higher close rates.

3. Maintenance Cost

By maintenance cost, I mean the money you’ll need to support your inside or outside sales rep in their selling efforts.

This doesn’t include the salaries and commissions of your sales representatives.

Let’s see which sales model tends to have higher maintenance costs and why.

A. Inside Sales

An inside sales model usually incurs a low maintenance cost.

Why?

Inside sales professionals require only essential equipment (like laptops and mobile phones, etc.) and access to different software applications (CRM, video conferencing tools, etc.) for their sales job.

But apart from the cost of essential equipment and software, there are typically no additional expenditures that contribute to the maintenance cost of inside sales professionals.

B. Outside Sales

On the other hand, an outside sales team generally has a high maintenance cost.

This is because your outside sales representative will often need to travel to various locations to meet potential clients. Naturally, their airplane or cab fares, hotel accommodation, and other costs can quickly add up.

Moreover, your outside sales personnel rely heavily on client relationships to close deals.

Your company may need to foot the bill of corporate hospitality initiatives like dinners, tickets to shows or sports events, and more.

This usually results in an outside salesperson being more expensive to maintain.

4. Scalability

In the context of inside and outside sales models, scalability is the ease with which your sales team can cater to a more extensive customer base when provided with additional resources.

Let’s see which sales model is easier to scale.

A. Inside Sales

An inside sales team and its sales process can be easy to scale.

Why?

Your inside sales rep communicates with leads from the comfort of their laptop or mobile phone.

Equipped with the right communication tools and sales automation software, your inside sales representative can conveniently engage and manage relationships with an increasing number of potential customers.

Moreover, since an inside sales representative sells remotely (through cold calls, scheduled video calls, etc.), they don’t have to meet with potential customers in person. This means that a remote sales rep isn’t necessarily bound by location.

For that reason, if the sales representative wants to pursue leads in new territory, they can do so almost effortlessly.

Not just that.

For inside sales, you don’t need to be very particular about hiring experienced reps since they would rarely meet with customers. All you need to do is provide these reps with proper sales training, and they’re good to go.

In short, your inside sales process and team are easily scalable in most cases.

B. Outside Sales

Outside sales efforts can be very challenging to scale.

Why?
Success in a field sales role depends on the ability of your field sales rep to build meaningful and long-term relationships with potential customers.

But customer relationships take a lot of time and effort to build.

Every outside sales representative will need to be highly receptive to the needs of the potential client and will need to come up with a tailored sales process for them.

Additionally, an outside sales job normally involves targeting a specific territory. And so, an outside rep may be uncomfortable about moving to and pursuing leads in new territories.

On top of that, the outside sales reps you hire will need to be well-experienced since they’ll need to handle in-person interactions and large-ticket sizes.

5. Sales Tools

Sales tools are designed to make the lives of your sales force a lot easier.

They can help you execute your sales strategy effectively, streamline your sales process, and allow your sales force to reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, etc.

However, the type of sales tools that an inside sales team and an outside sales team use differ.

A. Inside Sales

An inside rep heavily relies on sales tools that help them discover, reach out to, and manage prospective customers.

Here are seven technologies that someone in an inside sales position commonly leverages:

• Email outreach tools like GMass to communicate and engage with prospects with ease.
• Lead generation software like Leadfeeder or OptinMonster to find leads from your website.
• Prospecting tools like Datanyze or Owler to gather sales intelligence on B2B sales prospects (for example, details of the decision-makers at a company).
• Customer Relationship Management tools like Salesforce or HubSpot CRM to organize lead data.
• Appointment scheduling tools like Calendly or Doodle to schedule meetings effortlessly.
• Video conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype for holding video calls with potential clients.
• Sales automation tools like Pipedrive or Pega Sales Automation to automate repetitive tasks in your sales process.

B. Outside Sales

Companies using the outside sales model primarily adopt sales tools that complement their field sales activities.

An outside sales job may require:

• Sales territory management software like Zoho CRM or EasyTerritory to monitor and compare revenues from different sales territories.
• Sales rep performance tracking tools like SPOTIO or Outfield to help a sales leader or sales manager oversee the sales performance and quota attainment of your field reps.
• Email automation tools like GMass to keep in touch with potential customers.

Generally, an outside sales team needs fewer sales tools since an outside rep does most of their selling in person.

However, whether you adopt an inside sales or outside sales model, you’ll need to stay on top of the minds of prospective customers to close deals.

And while you can keep in touch with prospects on various channels, I recommend using emails.

Why?

Emails are non-intrusive, professional, cost-effective, and scalable — making it the ideal channel to contact and engage with inside and outside sales prospects.

Additionally, with software like GMass in your toolkit, you can take your email outreach efforts to the next level.

What’s GMass?

GMass is a powerful email marketing and sales email automation tool that works entirely inside Gmail.

Used by employees in large companies such as Google, Uber, and LinkedIn, GMass is also perfect for people in an inside sales or outside sales position, business owners, startup founders, solopreneurs, and more.

GMass helps you:

• Automatically personalize your emails, including attachments, links, images, and paragraphs.
• Send automated follow-up emails based on specific recipient behavior such as didn’t open or no reply.
• Generate detailed analytics reports to evaluate your email performance quickly.
• Schedule emails to reach your clients at the right time.
• Save any email as a template to easily reuse it for a future email campaign.
• Overcome Gmail’s email daily sending limit so your reps can reach out to every single lead that comes their way.

To start using GMass, just download the Chrome extension and sign up using your Gmail account.

Now, while exploring the critical differences between inside sales and outside sales, you may have realized that sticking to just one sales model may not be ideal for your business.

Instead, what if you combined the best of both these sales models?

Why You Should Combine Inside Sales and Outside Sales

As more and more businesses serve global markets and customers become better informed, the traditional divide between inside sales and outside sales is slowly blurring.

Many companies have combined the positive aspects of both these sales models to create a more robust and effective hybrid sales model.

With a hybrid B2C or B2B sales model, your sales rep:

• Does most of their selling virtually, meeting with the prospects only for important occasions.
• Builds and sustains long-term customer relationships with the help of sales technology solutions.
• Uses a customized sales approach for each lead.

Essentially, a hybrid sales model enables your sales organization to sell more, improve customer retention, and remain flexible.

Next, let’s look at some common questions asked about inside sales vs. outside sales.

Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales: 3 FAQs

Here are answers to the three most frequently asked questions about inside sales vs. outside sales.

1. What Skills Does an Inside Sales Rep Need?

Inside sales personnel rarely, if ever, meet with a potential client face-to-face.

For that reason, excellent written and verbal communication skills are must-haves to be successful in the inside sales profession.

Inside sales reps should be able to:

• Perform online presentations
• Handle prospect communications
• Use tools like CRM software, lead generation software, etc.
• Engage in professional discussions, and more

2. What Skills Does an Outside Sales Rep Need?

Outside sales personnel will frequently need to meet in person with prospective customers.

That’s why they must be:

• Confident
• Excellent at building strong relationships
• Adept at non-verbal communication
• Skilled at delivering sales presentations
• Able to manage their own schedule effectively
• Proactive at problem-solving

Additionally, in an outside sales role, they may be expected to be something of a sales engineer — someone who’s analytical and capable of explaining complex technical concepts to potential customers.

3. What is the Average Sales Rep Salary?

Both inside sales and outside sales professionals receive base salaries and performance-based commissions on top of that salary.

The average annual base salary of an outside sales representative is more than $50,000.

However, when you add in the bonuses, commissions, and profit-sharing, the pay scale of an outside sales rep can go up to an average of $70,000 annually.

Note, in cases where a product or service is very expensive, complex, or high-profile, and your company has to compete for the most experienced and successful salespeople, outside sales salaries and bonuses can easily become double or triple this average.

On the other hand, the average annual base salary of an inside rep is around $44,000. After adding bonuses, commissions, and profit-sharing, an inside sales rep’s salary can go up to an average of $60,000 per year.

In high-profile companies with complex products and services, these salaries may grow, but usually not more than about 25% above average.

However, these numbers depend on the industry, location, and experience level.

Final Thoughts

The type of sales model you choose can vary depending on the solutions you sell and the resources at your disposal.

If you’re selling a low-cost product to a large and distributed lead pool, I’d recommend you choose the inside sales model. And if your business primarily deals with complex, large-ticket items, the outside sales model could be suitable for you.

However, your sales organization might do even better if they can combine these models into a single hybrid sales model.

Whatever sales model your sales organization uses, staying on the prospects’ radar is vital for closing deals.

Fortunately, a sales email automation tool like GMass can help.

You can use GMass to send auto-personalized emails to potential customers, set up workflows to send follow-ups until new prospects respond, monitor your email campaign performance, and do so much more.

Why not try GMass today and maximize the effectiveness of your sales model?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

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A sales cycle acts as a roadmap that your sales team can follow to close a new lead.

While sales cycles vary across businesses, their end goals are usually the same. They help you sell better, train your sales team easily, and track the effectiveness of your sales operations properly.

In this article, I’ll explain what a sales cycle is and why it’s critical to your business. I’ll then cover the seven important stages in a typical sales cycle and offer five actionable tips to help boost your sales cycle efficiency.

This Article Contains:

(Click on the links below to jump to specific sections.)

• What Is a Sales Cycle?
  • Why a Sales Cycle Is Important to Your Business
• What Are the Essential Stages in a Sales Cycle?
  • Stage #1: Find Leads for Your Business
  • Stage #2: Reach Out to Your Leads
  • Stage #3: Qualify Your Leads
  • Stage #4: Pitch to Your Prospects
  • Stage #5: Overcome Prospect Objections
  • Stage #6: Close the Sale
  • Stage #7: Follow Up with Customers
• 5 Practical Tips to Improve Your Sales Cycle Efficiency

Let’s get started.

What Is a Sales Cycle?

A sales cycle represents the series of steps that a sales rep follows to convert a new lead into a new customer for their business.

Although sales cycles are unique to each business, usually, the first step is to find sales leads. Then, each salesperson will be assigned a sales lead to make contact with, qualify, and eventually close.

The specific steps in your B2C or B2B sales cycle would vary depending on your:

• Industry or niche
• Competitors
• Type of offerings
• Pricing structure
• Sales strategy
• Cost of acquiring a new customer, and more

Now that you know what a sales cycle is, I’ll cover why it’s crucial to your business’ success.

Why a Sales Cycle Is Important to Your Business

A sales cycle is indispensable to your business because it:

• Guides your B2C or B2B sales team on the specific steps they should ideally follow while selling
• Simplifies the training process for new sales reps since all the sales steps and best practices are compiled together in a structured format
• Provides insights on the effectiveness of your sales operations and shows where you can improve

Essentially, a sales cycle helps ensure that your entire sales process is organized and repeatable.

But what’s a sales cycle like?

Let’s take a look at the different stages of a typical sales cycle.

What Are the Essential Stages in a Sales Cycle?

As I mentioned earlier, the B2C or B2B sales cycle of a business is usually unique. It depends on the product or service you sell, the industry or niche you cater to, and so on.

However, most effective sales cycles include the following seven essential stages. They might not always be strictly sequential, and there might be overlaps between stages. We will talk about that in a minute.

Stage #1: Find Leads for Your Business

Identifying potential customers (aka lead generation) is generally the first sales cycle stage.

However, before looking for a potential client, you must first understand what your product or service does and how it benefits your existing customers. This knowledge will help you determine the type of people or businesses who make up your lead lists. This, in essence, is your target audience.

Now for finding these potential leads, your salesperson can leverage:

• Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, etc.
• Subscription forms on your business’ website
• Trade shows and conferences
• Referral recommendations from existing customers
• Inbound marketing, and more

And fortunately, with the right lead generation tools, the process of finding potential leads across multiple channels becomes a lot more streamlined.

Looking for excellent lead generation software?

Check out the top eight lead generation tools available today.

Stage #2: Reach Out to Your Leads

Once you’ve created your lead lists, it’s time to make contact with your leads.

But first, you’ll need to decide which communication channels you’ll use for the first contact.

You can approach leads via:

• Cold calling
• Emails
• Social media
• In-person meetings, and more

However, I recommend that you start by emailing leads.

Why?

Emails are non-intrusive compared to cold calling, more professional than social media messaging, and a lot more convenient than in-person meetings.

Moreover, with the right email marketing software, you can scale, automate, and monitor important metrics of your email outreach campaigns with minimal effort.

But regardless of whether you use emails, phone calls, or social media messages to approach leads, you should:

1. Let the potential customer know who you are.
2. Determine at what stage of the buying process (or buying cycle) the potential customer finds themselves. To do this, you can ask about their pain points and whether they’ve considered any solutions, and so on.

Stage #3: Qualify Your Leads

During the outreach sales cycle stage, you may realize that not all leads you’ve been talking to are a good fit for your business.

Some of these leads:

• Can’t afford your solution
• Struggle with pain points your product or service doesn’t address
• Won’t purchase your offerings at the moment because of bad timing, etc.

Fortunately, qualifying your lead lists based on your ideal customer profile and buyer personas can quickly highlight good-fitting leads.

What’s an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile represents the essential criteria a lead must satisfy to become your customer.

For example, the lead must:

• Belong to a specific industry, like fintech
• Have revenue between $1–5 million, and so on

What’s a buyer persona?

A buyer persona mentions the additional characteristics your lead should ideally have to become a customer.

For example, to fit your persona model for your service, the lead might need to:

• Belong to their company’s marketing team
• Live in California
• Be 25–30 years old, and so on.

If a lead matches your ideal customer profile and buyer persona, they’re likely a good fit for your business and represent an excellent sales opportunity. Such a lead is known as a qualified lead or sales prospect.

Note: Based on the sales intelligence gathered by the sales team, some companies may qualify leads before reaching out to them. The lead generation and qualification stages can be combined into a single sales prospecting stage in such scenarios.

Want to learn more about the intricacies of sales prospecting?

Read my ultimate guide to sales prospecting for everything you need to know.

Stage #4: Pitch to Your Prospects

As soon as you detect a viable sales opportunity, try to schedule a meeting with that qualified lead or prospect.

During the meeting, you can deliver your sales pitch or sales presentation.

Usually, the sales pitch is the most crucial sales cycle stage since it can have a massive impact on whether the qualified lead will move forward with their purchase decision.

But to do it right, your sales representative must be well-prepared for the meeting.

Ask the qualified lead or prospect about the stakeholders who will attend the meeting and have your sales rep create a personalized sales pitch accordingly.

And during the sales pitch or presentation, your sales representative must:

• Explain how your offerings directly address the specific customer’s pain points
• Establish what makes your solution different from the competition and better able to enable the customer’s success
• Cover your proposed scope of work, features, pricing structure, and more

Remember not to be pushy during the sales pitch or sales presentation.

Instead, help prospects visualize the positive implications of using your solution and the negative consequences of not addressing their pain points. This makes it easier for prospects to realize and accept “why” your solution is the excellent choice for them.

Stage #5: Overcome Prospect Objections

No matter how well your sales pitch went, some prospects could still struggle with uncertainties.

For example, common objections include concerns about the:

• Features offered
• Pricing structure
• Competitors’ offerings
• Contractual terms and conditions, etc.

Without adequately addressing these objections, your sales professional won’t be able to close the sale.

How to overcome objections

When prospects voice their objections, actively listen to what they’re saying and try to empathize with them.

Next, consider how you can overcome objections voiced by the prospect. Then, see if you can make any adjustments and discuss that with the potential client.

However, if you’re unable to accommodate a prospect’s objections, be upfront with them about it. When you convey your limitations genuinely, they might just consider making some compromises on their side.

Stage #6: Close the Sale

Once you’ve properly conveyed the value of your offerings and managed their objections, it’s time to focus on closing the sale.

You can now create the final sales proposal and negotiate the final details.

But here are some things to keep in mind during this sales activity:

• Ensure that your prospect is in a good mood before making your sales request — approaching them when they’re irritated or distracted can compromise your sales conversion chances.
• Remind your prospect how your solution is uniquely positioned to address their pain points. This helps in cases where the prospect experiences last-minute jitters.
• If the prospect is still not ready to close, consider walking away for a bit and giving them space. Let them know they can get back to you anytime with their final decision.

After this, it’s entirely up to your prospect: you’ll either win or lose the sale.

If you win the sale, move the customer to the next stage of your sales cycle.

And if the sale doesn’t go through, don’t abandon the prospect just yet. Instead, assign them to your marketing team for additional lead nurturing.

In time, they may end up becoming a new customer, ultimately contributing to your future sales.

Stage #7: Follow Up with Customers

Most sales cycles mark a “sales close” as the final sales cycle stage.

However, an excellent sales leader or sales manager understands that it’s not enough to just sell your solution to a customer.

You’ll also need to:

• Ensure that the customer’s needs are being adequately addressed
• Check with the support team to make sure the customer has a fantastic customer experience.
• Gather customer feedback to see how you can be of further assistance

That’s why your sales professional needs to follow up consistently with existing customers to see how they’re doing.

When following up, if the customer says they’re happy with your service so far, the sales professional can look for cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Moreover, they can ask the existing customers for referral recommendations to help with your future sales goals.

However, if the prospect mentions they haven’t had a great experience using your offerings, you’ll need to make amends. You should determine what’s troubling them about your solution and then adopt suitable remedial actions.

Now that we’ve covered the essential stages of the sales cycle, let’s see how you can maximize the efficiency of a properly defined sales cycle.

Not Necessarily Sequential

Stages 2-6 are not necessarily sequential. For example:

1. Multiple stakeholders

When you sell to companies with more than 20 people, there will usually be multiple stakeholders involved in making the buying decision. Therefore, you might have several meetings where you interact with different people — each of whom might have different objections.

Here, the objection handling would have to be done at different stages.

2. Qualifying

You need to keep qualifying your prospect at every interaction. For example, if you are selling project management software, your initial contact might be a project manager who is very interested. But the CTO might have unreasonable expectations about customer support levels and pricing.

In that case, walking away from the deal might be a better idea than trying to negotiate.

5 Actionable Tips to Improve Your Sales Cycle Efficiency

Here are five no-nonsense tips to help you improve your sales cycle performance:

1. Refine Your Sales Cycle Regularly

Your sales cycle workflow will need some tweaks from time to time to ensure a smooth buying process for your customers. And one metric you can use to gauge sales cycle effectiveness is the conversion rate.

What’s the conversion rate?

The conversion rate for a specific sales cycle stage shows the percentage of leads who advance from that stage to the next one in your sales cycle.

By calculating the conversion rate between two stages of the sales cycle, you can determine where your leads are falling through and which sales cycle stages require more attention.

Additionally, to refine your sales cycle, check your sales cycle length and compare it to your industry or niche’s average sales cycle length.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a longer sales cycle than the industry average.

Your sales leader or sales manager should evaluate your long sales cycle to understand why it’s longer. Then, they can look for ways to transform it into a shorter sales cycle.

But why?

A short sales cycle would essentially allow your salesperson to close leads quicker. This would give them time to pursue more sales opportunities, adding to your business revenue.

2. Leverage Social Proof to Better Convince Your Prospects

Social proof can come in handy when you reach out to leads, present your offerings to them, or overcome objections raised by them.

By social proof, I mean:

• Testimonials
• Case studies
• Recommendations
• Reviews, and more

Essentially, social proof is anything that showcases the positive outcomes you’re able to achieve for customers.

Social proof makes it easier for prospects to trust what your sales representative says and helps them see how your solution is genuinely beneficial. It also nudges the prospect to purchase your product or service without much hesitation.

3. Request Small Commitments from Your Prospects

Adopting a “foot in the door” technique can speed up your sales cycle and help your sales team achieve their sales goals.

Here, you ask prospective customers for small commitments now and then.

For example, in one of your outreach communications, you could ask for the prospect’s permission to send them relevant resources to help overcome their challenges. If they agree, you could share helpful content (like case studies or whitepapers) and request that they go through it.

After that, you could ask them to tell you about the stakeholders involved in the decision-making process and see if you can get in touch with those decision-makers.

Such small commitments can help you build rapport, stay top-of-mind with them, and ease the prospect into the idea of buying from you. As a result, when you finally ask the prospect if they’d like to be your new customer, it wouldn’t come as a surprising or inappropriate suggestion.

4. Train Your Sales Team Well

To fully utilize the potential of a properly defined sales cycle, you’ll need the right sales team members. Your sales reps should be eager to help your prospects and be aware of the best practices to convert a prospect into a customer.

But how can you empower sales reps to bring out their best?

As a sales leader or sales manager, you can:

• Coach every sales rep to help them amplify their strengths and overcome their weaknesses.
• Conduct workshops to teach your sales team your business’ sales strategy that they can leverage to close sales.
• Create a sales playbook your reps can follow for better guidance on the sales process, best practices to help them achieve their sales goals, and more.
• Encourage your sales reps to role-play sales conversations to identify opportunities for improvement.

By providing extra support and additional resources to your sales team members, you can empower them to take up and manage various sales cycle tasks effectively.

Want more guidance on managing your sales team?

Read my sales team guide for handy pointers.

5. Use the Right Software to Manage Your Sales Cycle

Managing your sales cycle can be challenging.

You’ll need to:

• Constantly track where a potential customer is in the sales cycle.
• Send several follow-ups before you can convert a sales opportunity.
• Coordinate with your marketing team consistently to ensure that you’re using the right content (for example, case studies) to attract your potential leads.
• Monitor your average sales cycle length and the effectiveness of your sales operations.
• Engage in a lot of data entry, scheduling, and other administrative tasks.

However, with the right software to help you, sales cycle management becomes so much easier.

What software can you use?

You can start with a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM software) like Salesforce or Pipedrive. The CRM software forms the core of your sales cycle management tech stack, helping you manage all customer info in one place.

You can also consider incorporating prospecting tools like Datanyze or Leadfeeder to gather sales intelligence on your potential customers.

For scheduling meetings efficiently with a potential customer, you can use a tool like Calendly.

And for reaching out to and professionally engaging with a potential customer, you can rely on robust email marketing automation software like GMass.

GMass is used by employees in tech giants like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google. However, it’s not just large companies that can benefit from GMass. It also works great for sales professionals, small business owners, solopreneurs, casual email senders, and more.

With GMass in your sales toolkit, you can:

• Create workflows to send automated follow-up emails to maximize prospect engagement.
• Send automatically personalized outreach emails at scale, including the images, attachments, links, paragraphs, and more.
• Monitor the deliverability metrics of your email outreach campaigns through analytics reports to determine which marketing or sales strategy works best.
• Schedule your bulk outreach emails to go out at the right time.
• Automatically send behavior-based campaigns to your prospects based on how they responded to your previous emails.
• Save any of your emails as templates to repurpose them effortlessly in later campaigns.
• Access powerful email marketing and automation capabilities from your Android device with the add-on for the Gmail mobile app.

To get a trial of GMass for free, just download the GMass Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account.

Final Thoughts

Your sales cycle refers to the different steps involved in closing a particular potential client, from finding a new lead to closing the deal and following up with them.

But with the many stages involved, sales cycle management can get complicated.

Use the tips I covered to manage your B2C or B2B sales cycle with ease.

You can use CRM software to organize lead or customer data, a prospecting tool to gather sales intelligence, and a powerful email marketing and automation tool like GMass to manage your prospect outreach and engagement.

Why not try GMass today and maximize your sales cycle effectiveness?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

A sales strategy describes the plan of action your sales team should follow to crush your revenue goals.

By implementing a well-thought-out sales strategy, you can ensure that your sales efforts stay focused, efficient, and profitable. But without one, it will be almost impossible to achieve your large and small business goals consistently.

In this article, I’ll cover what a sales strategy is and its two main types. Then, I’ll explain how a great sales strategy is beneficial for you and mention eight actionable tips to help you build an effective sales strategy.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections.)

• What Is a Sales Strategy?
• 8 No-Nonsense Tips to Create a Successful Sales Strategy
• 3 Ways an Effective Sales Strategy Helps You

Let’s jump right into it.

What Is a Sales Strategy?

A sales strategy covers what products or services you sell, who you’ll sell them to, their pricing, and how you plan on selling them within a specific period.

Having a well-crafted sales strategy plan allows your sales rep to position your product or service better and to the right people. This, in turn, helps you bring in new customers efficiently, increases your revenue, and allows you to build better customer relationships.

However, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to developing a successful sales strategy.

You’ll need a different sales strategy depending on your:

• Product or service
• Pricing model
• Business size
• Business’ sales methodology
• Sales cycle length
• Revenue or sales goals
• Target market demographics and other factors

Generally, you’ll come across two types of sales strategies.

2 Main Types of Sales Strategies

The two main types of sales strategy are:

A. Inbound Sales Strategy

An inbound sales strategy comes in handy when B2C or B2B buyers actively look for products or services similar to what you’re offering. Here, you don’t try to push your solution but instead focus on helping the potential customer solve their problems.

Usually, an inbound sales strategy is used in tandem with your inbound marketing efforts.

What’s inbound marketing?

With inbound marketing, you create and share relevant content that potentially attracts your target customer to you.

By relevant content, I mean:

• Blog posts
• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Infographics and more

Then, using your inbound sales strategy, you try selling to the leads generated through inbound marketing.

When should you use an inbound sales strategy?

An inbound sales strategy might be right for you if you’re selling a product or service that many B2C or B2B buyers search for online. But you’ll need a well-crafted marketing strategy and a great content marketing team to support you.

For example, a SaaS company selling B2C email solutions can easily employ this sales strategy.

B. Outbound Sales Strategy

On the other hand, you reach out to the potential customer when using the outbound sales strategy.

Why?

Sometimes, inbound leads won’t be enough to sustain your business — you’ll need to reach out to many people or companies and directly convince some of them to buy from you.

Here, you can approach a potential customer by:

• Cold calling
• Cold emailing
• Cold social media messaging (usually in the case of social selling), etc.

The goal is to let your prospects know about your product or service, pique their interest, and then persuade the decision-maker to purchase your solution.

However, you shouldn’t just reach out to every person or business you come across.

But how do you decide who to approach?

You’ll need to approach B2C or B2B buyers who belong to your target audience — those who are most likely to be interested in your product’s or service’s offerings.

When should you use an outbound sales strategy?

An outbound sales strategy might be right for you if you’re selling a type of product or service not many people look for online, more expensive products, and so on.

For example, a SaaS company selling complex CRM marketing software to enterprise clients can leverage an outbound sales and marketing strategy.

Irrespective of whether you prefer inbound or outbound sales, having an excellent B2C or B2B sales strategy is crucial to your business’ sales success.

Now that you understand what a sales strategy is, I’ll share some actionable tips you can use to create an effective sales strategy.

8 No-Nonsense Tips to Create a Successful Sales Strategy

Here are eight actionable tips to help you develop a successful sales strategy for your business.

1. Identify Your Target Audience and Cater to Their Needs

No product or service is capable of catering to everyone’s needs.

That’s why you’ll want to serve people or businesses who can benefit most from your offerings. These people are your target audience.

But who’s in your target audience?

Your target audience essentially includes people or businesses matching your ideal customer profile and buyer persona.

The ideal customer profile lists the bare minimum criteria a lead should satisfy to become your customer. On the flip side, a buyer persona highlights some specific behavioral traits, demographic details, job titles, and more that would characterize your ideal customer.

In addition to the ideal customer profile and buyer personas, you can analyze your existing customer base data for more insights into your target market.

Determine:

• To what industries or niches do the current customers belong?
• What kind of pain points do current customers share?
• What do current customers use your solution for, and what do they find most important?

Once you’ve identified your target audience, your salesperson can position your offerings as uniquely addressing the target audience’s requirements. This way, you can better align your product or service with the target market and improve your conversion rate.

2. Determine Which Channels Work Best for Your Target Audience

You could use a variety of channels to connect with people and businesses in your target audience, like:

• Social media
• Emails
• Phone calls
• Web forums
• Conferences or trade shows, and so on

To maximize engagement and build better customer relationships, choose channels where your potential customers are most active.

For example, if yours is a B2B service, messaging on a social media platform like LinkedIn might be the best choice for you. Social selling on this platform works because close to 50% of B2B buyers rely on LinkedIn to make informed purchase decisions.

And by messaging those buyers via LinkedIn, you could maximize your chances of getting responses as well as improving your conversion rate.

However, in most professional settings, email is usually the preferred channel for communication. This is because emails are non-invasive, reliable, and cost-effective.

Additionally, if you use email marketing software, you can:

• Scale up your sales outreach and communication efforts quickly
• Keep track of your communications with potential buyers, and do so much more

3. Use Lead Scoring for Prioritization

There are only so many leads your sales team can pursue.

That’s why you must filter your lead pool to give your sales team only the best leads to pursue.

But when you’ve got too many leads in your sales pipeline, identifying which leads to pursue vigorously is tricky. Fortunately, you can systematically determine which leads in your sales pipeline are most worth pursuing by implementing lead scoring.

What’s lead scoring?

Lead scoring is a technique used to rank the leads in your sales pipeline. Usually, with lead scoring, you assign points (usually on a scale of 1 to 10) to different leads based on:

• How much revenue they would potentially bring in
• How likely they are to convert

And then, you rank leads based on how many points they score.

For example, let’s say your salesperson is pursuing two different leads: the first one is a C-suite executive at one company, and the second is a junior employee at another company.

Here, the C-suite executive could have a higher lead score since a C-suite executive usually has a stronger influence on the decision-making process than a junior employee. That’s why, in most cases, the C-suite executive would be assigned a greater lead score and ranked higher.

4. Be Genuinely Helpful to Your Prospects

Many salespeople simply push their offerings on potential customers.

However, a successful sales leader knows that the best way to convince someone to buy from you is to help them first.

But how do you do that?

To help out your potential B2C or B2B buyers, you can:

• Share helpful resources.
• Help them understand the true nature of their pain points.
• Guide them on weighing the pros and cons of different solutions.

Being of real help to a potential customer will present you as a trusted consultant or advisor and not a pushy salesperson simply trying to boost their sales metrics.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you should just forget about revenue targets or business goals.

Helping prospects solve their problems (as in the case of solution selling) makes it easier for prospects to trust you and make a purchase.

Want to learn how you can help customers and still sell more?

Check my article on consultative selling for some valuable pointers.

5. Craft a Compelling Value Proposition

When making a sales pitch, it’s tempting to talk at length about the features you offer.

But modern buyers are usually well-informed — they might already have done some research on your product or service, the alternative solutions available, their corresponding pricing structures, and more.

To convert such buyers, you’ll need to offer a compelling value proposition in your sales pitch.

Your value proposition should highlight:

• “How” your solution uniquely addresses customer needs
• “What” gives you a competitive advantage in solving their problem
• “Why” you’re the best choice for the prospect’s success

And to make your value proposition even more convincing, you can include social proof that highlights your unique strengths and expertise. By social proof, I’m referring to testimonials and referral recommendations from your existing customer base, case studies, and more.

Adding social proof to your value proposition helps cement your business’ credibility and gives prospects a sense of what to expect when purchasing your product or service.

6. Consistently Follow Up with Your Prospects

Simply cold calling your prospects once or sending a single sales email isn’t enough to close a deal.

To close deals, you’ll need to stay top-of-mind with prospects.

But how?

Consistently following up (through sales calls, emails, etc.) can help you get a definitive response (even if it’s a NO) from your prospect.

Moreover, following up can clear up any uncertainty you might have about the customer. It will also allow you to understand the prospect better and showcase how you can be of assistance to them.

But remember not to bombard your prospects with follow-ups.

Go overboard, and you may come off as pushy, which could hurt your sales conversion rates. Ideally, limit your number of follow-ups to five or six.

As for effective following up, I recommend using emails.

That’s because, with the right email marketing tool, you can quickly scale up and automate your follow-up efforts to stay in touch with many prospects.

7. Delegate Your Sales Activities Effectively

For a sales team to be successful, the sales manager or sales leader should delegate sales activities properly.

The sales manager or sales leader must:

• Define the different sales activities (for example, prospecting) under your sales process.
• Assign different sales activities to various sales reps.
• Specify the exact sub-tasks reps need to undertake to complete each sales activity.
• Define the expectations for each sales activity, and more.

To give you an idea of how this works in the real world, consider the example of prospecting.

When delegating sales prospecting, the sales manager or sales leader can describe which channels to use for finding new leads, what criteria to consider when qualifying new leads, how a salesperson is supposed to reach out to a qualified lead, and so on.

Essentially, delegating your sales activities effectively can provide your sales organization the much-needed clarity and direction, helping them achieve their sales goals or business goals smoothly.

8. Make Use of Sales Enablement and Automation Software

Sales management is not easy.

To do it the right way, you’ll need to research heavily, constantly keeping track of interactions with qualified leads, and sending tons of follow-ups.

And without the right software toolkit, things get complicated quickly.

Fortunately, incorporating sales enablement and automation tools into the B2C or B2B sales strategy of your sales organization can make your life a lot easier.

Look for tools that help you:

• Organize your sales funnel better
• Streamline your sales cycle stages
• Reduce the administrative work your salesperson must undertake while selling
• Simplify email marketing, social selling, etc.
• Align your sales team and marketing team toward the same business goals, and so much more.

But what tools should you use?

To store and manage your prospect and existing customer data, track sales success, and monitor your sales funnel, you can use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software like HubSpot Sales Hub or Salesforce.

And for sales cycle activities like finding leads, you can leverage lead generation software like Leadfeeder, OptinMonster, and Voila Norbert.

As for outreach and follow-up with qualified leads or prospects, it’s best to rely on a tool like GMass.

GMass is a powerful email marketing and sales email automation tool that works entirely inside Gmail.

It’s used by employees in large companies like Google, Uber, and LinkedIn. But GMass isn’t just for tech giants. The tool is also perfect for you if you’re a sales professional, marketer, small business owner, solopreneur, and so on.

With GMass, you can:

• Auto-personalize your outreach email campaigns to prospects, including names, images, links, paragraphs, attachments, and more.
• Send behavior-based campaigns customized to how qualified leads have engaged with your previous emails.
• Create workflows to send automated follow-up emails to prospects until they open your email, click on a link inside, respond to it, or take similar action.
• Schedule your email campaigns to go out at the right times to reach prospects when they’re most likely to respond.
• Evaluate your email outreach metrics and marketing strategy outcomes through detailed campaign reports generated in your Gmail inbox.
• Save any email as a template that you can modify and reuse in the future.
• Access email marketing and automation capabilities directly from your smartphone using the GMass add-on for the Gmail Android app.

To start using GMass, just download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account.

Now, let’s go over why doing all this work to craft a sales strategy is worth it.

3 Ways an Effective Sales Strategy Helps You

A proper sales strategy is critical to your business’ success since it can help you in three crucial ways.

1. Improve Sales Performance

Crafting a sales strategy plan encourages you to take a closer look at your sales process.

This way, you can identify which sales tactics and activities contribute the most to your business’ revenue or sales goals. Additionally, you can determine any bottlenecks that might be slowing down your sales success or conversions.

Based on this knowledge, your sales manager or sales leader can adopt appropriate corrective actions to improve your sales process. And this can boost your business’ sales performance.

2. Solve Customer Issues Effectively

Your B2C or B2B sales strategy will outline the best practices and processes your sales rep should follow at each stage of the buying process.

For example, if a lead is still in the decision-making stage of their buying process, your sales strategy could mention:

• The specific content and resources to send to convince that lead
• How often you’ll have to follow up with the lead (via sales calls, emails, etc.)
• When it’s the best time to request a meeting for your sales pitch or presentation
• What sales tactics to use to close a new customer, and more

Essentially, the B2C or B2B sales strategy highlights the best way to help potential buyers address their pain points and achieve their business goals.

3. Hire Better Sales Reps and Train Them More Effectively

Without the right people on your sales team, your sales leader or sales manager will have difficulty closing deals.

However, if you’ve got a proper sales strategy plan in place, you’ll have a better grip on the different sales activities your salesperson usually undertakes. You can use this knowledge to identify people from your candidate pool who’d make a good fit for your sales organization.

That’s not all.

After hiring, you can conduct sales training sessions to help a new sales rep understand your sales strategy thoroughly. This can help them come to grips with the processes and best practices that allow them to close new customers faster.

Final Thoughts

Sales strategies help you serve prospects better, improve your chances for sales success, and allow your team to meet their revenue or sales goals.

However, creating a new sales strategy and implementing it can be challenging.

Fortunately, with sales enablement and automation software, executing sales strategies and sales tactics is no longer troublesome.

You can use a CRM system to manage your customer data, a lead generation tool to find leads and gather sales intelligence, and an email marketing tool like GMass to reach out to and engage with your prospects.

Why not start by trying GMass today to implement your sales strategy the right way?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob