10 Reasons Why Inside Sales Organizations Fail

Last week Adobe announced some restructuring in their sales organization and many talented field salespeople were let go. The good news is that their restructuring efforts will be focused on setting up a robust inside sales organization out of San Francisco. Good move. Adobe isn’t the first to do this, we will see a lot more of this in the coming year.

Setting up an inside sales organization isn’t as easy as it sounds and unfortunately many well-intentioned high level executives tend to set up inside sales organizations to fail. Here are some common traps to watch out for:

1. No defined structure- How will the organization be structured? Will there be Lead Development, Inside Sales, Renewals teams? What is the hand-off and sales process?

2. Not taking a stand- There is power in numbers and many don’t set up teams but individuals and keep them disbursed throughout the country. You must have continuity and uniformity.

3. Lack of respect from the field- If the reps in the field are weak, they rely too heavily on the inside team for the wrong reasons. They insist on half-baked leads, or cancel appts with well qualified leads, or ask the inside to help them on brainless admin tasks they could do themselves.

4. Long sales cycle- Inside sales team members need easy wins to keep them focused on the daily grind of pounding out calls. It’s important for the inside to have an easy low-cost solution to provide early adoption opportunities for their prospect. Product evals are a good vehicle and can convert to a potential sale.

5. New messaging = new confusion- When the product focus changes so much, it confuses the inside teams and this keeps them from positioning it effectively.

6. Who should buy it? Back to basics on who actually should buy your product or be a coach on buying your product.

7. Set unrealistic quota goals too late- It happens all the time, inside sales waits to get their quotas assigned and then they finally come around two quarters late and they are much higher than expected. This impacts their productivity and their focus. 

8. Marketing is disconnected- Marketing is off doing their own thing, blasting out to thousands of disqualified leads they never bothered to scrub and expect the inside teams to follow-up. When leads are so bad, this affects the lead conversion process and the inside gets blamed for it.

9. Providing training that is field focused- Skills training is great when it is most appropriate to the team receiving it. Inside sales requires a very different skill set than field sales and training that is appropriate makes more sense.

10. Too much- Before this group didn’t have enough and now they have way too much. Too much technology and tools can paralyze and create ways to avoid what they have been chartered to do. Picking up the phone and selling is a good start.