Is This an Example of Succeeding or Failing at Inside Sales?

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated keynote speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and expert on all things sales and selling.

Yesterday I was in the office, preparing for the formal introduction of Objective Management Group’s (OMG) award-winning, new and improved, fourth generation, Sales Candidate Assessment (view the 25-minute Webinar here) when the phone rang and I answered.

Not only was it a cold call, but it was one I could write about – the best kind!

The salesperson was from Oracle and wanted to know if I was aware of and had seen their CRM software demonstrated.

It’s bad enough when companies move to the demo too quickly, but it doesn’t get any faster or more transactional than when they ask you if you’ve seen their demo with their very first question. But hey, give him a break. At least he asked a question instead of telling me he wanted me to see a demo…

I explained what my company did, and that we would normally be recommending CRM to our clients and he repeated his question – did I want to see a demo? I repeated my statement, that among other things, we recommend the appropriate CRM solution to our clients, and don’t need to see a demo. His response was that he was from inside sales. In other words, “I’m not supposed to figure out what you’re trying to explain to me – I’m an inside salesperson!”

He said he was making a notation in the file (in Oracle’s CRM application?) and he thanked me for his time.

Of course, if he was not an inside salesperson, he could have asked any of the following questions:

• Do you recommend Oracle?
• How many of your clients use Oracle?
• Can we get you to recommend Oracle more often?
• Which CRM applications do you recommend?
• Why do you recommend those?
• What do you think is the most important feature?
• Why is that so important?
• How do you think Oracle handles that feature?

On the other hand, his job was to schedule demos and I wasn’t going to become one, wasn’t going to count toward his quota, wasn’t going to count toward his bonus, and wasn’t worth another minute of his time.

From an inside sales perspective, he actually did his job because he cut his losses and moved on to the next call. But from a practical, business development standpoint, he completely blew his opportunity to become aligned with a major influencer to the vertical into which he sells!

There couldn’t be a better example of just how consistently misguided some of the inside sales experts are. I just set myself up for two weeks of nasty tweets and comments from the entire inside sales community. Most of them hate me for my opinions. Most of them can’t see the forest for the trees and the top of the sales funnel is represented by the first row of trees in the forest.

Speaking of inside sales, Dan McDade wrote a great post on everything that’s wrong with inbound marketing and how it is causing inbounditis! It’s a must-read.

What is your opinion about the appropriate role for inbound and inside sales?

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