5 Questions Everyone Asks About Inside Sales

We talk a lot about inside sales here at Kudzus, and that’s because it’s one of the first and fastest teams to grow when a company is going through fast growth.

It’s also often a place where many careers have started out, only to accelerate through the rankings.

But, there’s a few common questions that get asked about the role, so we pulled together this FAQ of sorts for inside sales.

What do inside sales reps do?

The nature of services offered by SaaS companies is often a fairly complex sell – it requires a relationship beyond traditional transaction.

The inside sales model focused on doing much of the ground work on the phone, freeing up time by essentially putting some of the leg work i.

Inside Sales reps focus from bottom up, not top down – speaking with the people who would use a product everyday rather than the c-level decision makers.

Daily tasks usually include lead generation, cold calling, prospecting, helping customers through the sales process, closing deals.

What tools do inside sales people use?

CRM is the biggie here, because it leads to collaboration and that’s pretty crucial for an inside sales rep.

But there are also lots of tools out there that can help with sourcing and juggling leads:

Ebsta – LinkedIn and Gmail integration for SalesForce specifically.

Datanyze – A predictive lead scoring and discovery solution that uncovers the best leads.

Sidekick – Yep it’s a Hubspot tool but it offers email tracking, and gives live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one of your emails.

SalesLoft – Prospector and Cadence. Prospector pulls email address from LinkedIn by matching against a company domain and called Cadence summarizes how many times you’d expect to reach out to someone to make contact.

Infer – Infer can accurately predict which leads are most likely to convert using multiple data points from your CRM, product usage, purchase history, etc It uses historical data from your CRM.

ScheduleOnce.com – If you book a lot of meetings and want to cut down on the back & forth, you can use this service to let your prospects pick a time that works for them.
Rapportive – As a prospect becomes a warm lead (or a client), there is value in connecting with them via LinkedIn. This plugin lets you do it with one click.

Is inside sales a long term career?

Inside Sales is probably on of the best launch pads you can get. Within a SaaS company, there’s normally a great progression path from here on up the sales chain.

Let’s take SalesForce as an example. Check out the inside story here.

What job title do inside sales reps have?

The role can be slightly different form company to company in the way the sales team is structured and supported. For this reason inside sales can often have a few different variations. Here is but a few:

Account Manager, Account Executive, Account Development Representative, Business Development Representative, Business Development Representative, Business Development Manager, Sales Executive, Cloud Executive, Inside Sales Executive, Sales Representative, Inside Sales Executive, Product Specialist, New Business

How does the pay work?

The cofounder of echo sign, recently broke down the comms for inside sales within a SaaS organisation, highlighting the even split between base and comms,

A inside sales SaaS rep with experience will be looking for a competitive comp package of from $50k base/$50k bonus to $75k base/$75k bonus or so (first number is base, second number is bonus for hitting their number), potentially more if they have a lot of experience, with accelerators and other options to exceed their OTE (on-target earnings – the sum of the prior two numbers) for exceeding the plan.

The better the SaaS company they last worked at, the higher their last-job OTE, in general – the best SaaS companies expect more, but they also pay more, at least in theoretical OTE. So if you are hiring someone that performed decently at a top 50 SaaS company in their last job, expect to pay toward the top end of all ranges.