And for once, it was nice to see that something we’ve been evangelizing for a while now is coming to fruition: that hosted telephony and call center services increasingly provide value for companies who want to save costs on customer service and support, but want to keep reps based in the U.S.

The article states that the primary reason for the shift back from international call center outsourcing to U.S. domestic is very simple: it increases customer satisfaction, leading to longer-term customer loyalty and higher sales.

“With calls perceived to handled within the U.S., [customer satisfaction] was more than one-fifth [20 percent] higher than with calls perceived to be handled outside the country.”

The other huge benefit of hosted, distributed call center technology: scalability.

With access to a broad pool of potential agents, and very simple hardware requirements (most distributed call center reps only need a PC, a standard hard-wired phone line, and high-speed Internet), the cost-per-hire goes down significantly.

In some cases, the cost of training goes up slightly, and even with the lowered costs that distributed call center technology provides, a customer service rep in the U.S. is still more expensive than an international counterpart.

But as the article states, in some areas “workers in India are making only about 15 percent less than workers in Nebraska”—and that lower customer satisfaction, combined with the “pain in the neck” factor of having to manage an overseas operation have brought companies to the threshold where they “start thinking about whether it’s worth it to hire an American worker instead of a foreign one.”

In his mind, it was not always the content of the message that mattered, as much as the the method in which it was delivered.

For example, a television set can deliver a broad variety of messages through the media of video and sound—sitcoms, “reality” shows, newscasts, the NFL, talk shows, cartoons, full-length feature movies, and Shark Week. However, we often forget what TV can’t control—the fact that the recipient has to receive those messages under a very specific set of conditions.

The viewer has to be in front of a television screen, tuned to the right channel, able to hear the audio portion of the broadcast, and have a minimum level of outside distractions.

Have you ever considered just how much time, money and energy we dedicate to having a “maximized TV watching experience”? If the “medium is the message,” based on its use conditions, the message of the TV medium is that it’s a big deal. An investment. An experience compelling enough for us to plan our living arrangements around its very existence.

And here’s the kicker:

A sales phone call is no different.

It’s been a part of our culture for so long now that we forget that the telephone is, in a fact, a communication medium, and has a set of use conditions that constrain how it works.

The “use conditions” of a successful sales call requires the recipient to actually pick up, be in a circumstance / location that allows them to talk, and to have access to information related to the product or service being offered, whether it’s their own internal data or new information provided by the rep.

It’s so transparent that we frequently don’t recognize that the “use conditions” of a sales call create a high level of necessary engagement—a commitment of time, and a “space” that allows the recipient to derive some benefit from the conversation.

Is it any wonder, then, that it takes between 6 and 8 call attempts to make a real contact with the average new sales lead?

(As a side note, have you planned out phone calling scripts, or “plays,” depending on where the prospect is currently located, and how likely they are to be able to access information? Do you have sales collateral tailored to the delivery method on which the prospect is going to see it? In the future, creating different sales content to be delivered on a computer vs. iPhone vs. iPad, etc. is going to be a very real consideration.)

In the end, the “message” of the telephone medium is that unless it’s about picking up baguettes at the local grocery, a sales conversation requires a very real set of conditions to be productive—and if a sales rep ignores that reality, they’re literally and figuratively hurting their prospects.

Aside from the sheer hilarity of some of these ingenious ways to screw up a sales call, I noticed a surprising trend:

Even in this incredibly small sample, the caller often still closed the sale, in many cases because of the “screw up,” rather than in spite of it.

Why? Because the blunder showed the prospect that the caller was human.

Now obviously I’m not suggesting that sales reps make a social faux pas on every call to increase sales. But it does demonstrate that all of us, in every profession and vocation, respond to something real, something relatable.

We don’t like talking to automatons. We don’t like getting “pitched.” Insincerity is about as valuable as a useless management meeting. We’ve been to too many bogus sales conferences, heard to much schlock, that when we hear or see something truly genuine, we gravitate to it.

It’s four years old now, but one of the best articles I’ve ever read on this idea is the Trusted Advisor’s “Stop Trying to Close the Sale.”

As author Charles Green states, when we close a sale, it’s not because we’ve “rationally met” every objection our client can throw at us. It’s because we’ve made them feel comfortable with their decision to choose us as a vendor.

At InsideSales.com, we relentlessly champion the need for immediate, powerful, process-driven lead response management. Our products and services are designed to give sales reps the technological (and in some cases psychological) advantages they need to successfully maximize every opportunity they have.

But the technology is useless without reps who understand how to successfully approach the clients in the first place.

Making impactful sales calls is still a daily task of every sales rep on the planet, but the trick isn’t to create “false sincerity,” the trick is to be real in the first place.

How soon after a new Web lead comes in does a sales rep make the first contact attempt, and how long after it came in did they actually make contact? Every single piece of data we’ve ever researched shows that for Web-generated leads, immediate response is crucial.

The highest opportunity to contact new Web leads is within the first five minutes. If you can’t make contact within five minutes, you then have approximately 20 hours (1 day) to contact that lead before you start hurting your chances of doing so. Our research shows that after 20 hours, every attempt you make at that point actually hurts your ability to make contact and qualify the lead.

Considering that most companies respond to a new Web lead between 39 and 44 hours after it was generated, they’re already blowing a significant portion of their ability to contact and qualify their inquiries.

How many times was a lead actually called before it was “thrown away”? Our statistics show that most sales organizations call a lead an average of 1.7 times before it gets tossed, either into the garbage bin, or into a long-term “drip” campaign.

The bottom line—this isn’t enough. When you’ve got 20 hours to reach a lead before you’re tangibly hurting your chances to do so, you’ve got to call a minimum of four times the first day, and somewhere between five to eight call attempts the first day isn’t out of the question.

If you aren’t tracking this, or don’t have the dialer software to manage this metric, I can almost guarantee that you are throwing away leads and marketing dollars.

Inside Sales is “remote sales,” most lately called “virtual sales,” or professional sales done remotely. Where Outside Sales or traditional Field Sales is done face-to-face.

Taken in this context, the majority of all sales is done remotely, and the numbers are growing. A recent study done by SKKU and MIT, in conjunction with infoUSA, found that over the next three years, Inside Sales is growing at a fifteen times higher rate (7.5% versus .5% annually) over Outside Sales, to the tune of 800,000 new jobs.

More evidence: if you don’t believe it, grab a list of 10 traditional or “Outside Sales” people and call them. 7 out of 10 will be sitting in front of their computer, working in their cubicle, office, or home office—just like the Inside Sales people.

The term “Inside Sales” originally came about in the late 1980s as an attempt to differentiate “Telemarketing” (or “Telesales in the UK) from the more complex, “high-touch,” phone-based business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) selling practices.

Telemarketing is often believed to have begun in the 1950s by DialAmerica Marketing, Inc., reported to be the first company dedicated to telephone sales and services. By the 1970s telemarketing was a common phrase used to describe the process of selling over the telephone. It often included both outbound and inbound, but later became much more synonymous with the types of outbound calling we’re all familiar with—large-scale “blasts” to lists of names to try and drum up quick sales, usually while the family is sitting around the dinner table.

By the late 1990s/early 2000s, Inside Sales was the term used to differentiate the practice from Outside Sales—the traditional face-to-face sales model where salespeople went to the client’s location of business to engage in the sales process.

Companies found the new channel of Inside Sales to be undeniably effective, but often didn’t know what to do to solve the conflict between the younger, disruptive, more technically savvy upstarts who sold over the phone, and their more senior counterparts who wielded incredible political power in their organizations as the entrenched source of revenue for nearly a century.

For years Inside Sales has been relegated to generating leads for the more senior Outside Sales reps or merely closing the smaller accounts. This is now no longer the case. Many companies are already using a hybrid form of Inside Sales, with reps calling from their company’s home office, then traveling occasionally to client locations and merely calling it “sales.”

By Marc Benioff’s own admission in his book “Behind the Cloud, salesforce.com “grew their company for the first five or six years with a telesales or Inside Sales model.” They added Outside Sales or Field Sales to go upmarket when they wanted to sell to Enterprise-class companies, but the company still does a majority of their sales work remotely.

Another way of defining “Inside Sales” is to also state what it is not.

Inside Sales is not Telemarketing.

Let me repeat: Inside Sales is NOT Telemarketing. Telemarketing is a scripted, single-call-close, almost always targeting a small-ticket, business to consumer (B2C) model.

Inside Sales is not scripted. It requires multiple calls or “touches” to create a sales close, involves medium or large ticket goods and services, and targets business-to-business (B2B) or high-end business-to-consumer( B2C) transactions.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely. It is not the mindless “phone drone” that calls at dinner time and won’t hang up until you have said “no” seven times.

Inside Sales is also not Customer Service. Though Inside Sales frequently involves an element of inbound call handling like a customer service department, in its pure form it is not customer service.

Some companies erroneously describe their inbound call centers as “inside sales,” but this does not fall within the boundaries of our definition unless the agents’ primary function is selling.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely . . . it is remote sales.

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