Face-to-Face Closes 2.5x Better, But Inside Sales Makes 7x More Calls
19 March 2010 — Ken Krogue
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I just got a tip from John Sutton, a friend of mine at Sendside, who read a survey on a United Airlines flight last week from the United States Travel Association that found business leaders estimate face-to-face selling converts 40% of prospects to customers, while virtual selling (Inside Sales) converts 16%.
That means face-to-face selling closes 2.5 times better than remote selling. We found roughly the same ratio at Inside Sales about four years ago. Our current ratios place remote closing ratios around 18.5%, so the gap is narrowing.
Inside Sales teams cover way more ground in terms of prospecting than true face-to-face salespeople. In fact, very few face-to-face salespeople actually prospect in a face-to-face mode any more, so the here is where the numbers skew.
Almost all face-to-face (Outside) sales reps have switched to an Inside Sales model for their prospecting, and they pick up the phone to set their appointments.
We have found that lead generation reps (with power dialer technology) make 7 times more prospecting calls than manually dialing.
What does this mean?
It points […]
I first heard of ‘Web 2.0’ from Chris Knudsen and Dave Beisinger, at a vidcast company called 10SpeedMedia. They were helping us make micromercials to test web video as a new lead generation media. They told me enough to get me very interested.
As my research about Web 2.0 began on Google in the summer of 2006, I started with Tim O’Reilly’s landmark article ‘What Is Web 2.0’ and expanded from there. I read Paul Graham and Andrew Keen and dozens of others and was enthralled and amazed at the point and counterpoints surrounding the Web 2.0 buzz.
I wanted to see how all of this related to sales. I immediately wondered what ‘Sales 2.0’ would look like. I knew someone espousing Sales 2.0 would be close behind.
Sure enough. I soon found that everybody out there had come up with their version of ‘Something 2.0’: Call Center 2.0, Business 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and Small Business 2.0 to name a few. The common thread was that they all linked back to the disruptive change brought about by the Internet.
It was August of 2006, I couldn’t find a thing on the web about Sales 2.0. I bought the domain Sales2-0.com to have a way to communicate our thoughts.
I didn’t […]
As always I want to make things clear, and today I’ve set my sights on some acronyms that are used a lot in remote sales: B2B and B2C. What do they stand for? ‘Business to Business’ and ‘Business to Customer’ respectively.
Some may argue (and do if you read some of the blogs out there) that there are virtually no differences in the sales processes targeting these to groups. B2B and B2C become arbitrary classifications to these people. Instead of tallying up the many ways they are the same, I want to highlight some of the key differences between the two categories and explain why that warrants a different sales tactic.
Quantity: There are two major differences in quantity between B2B and B2C markets: a difference in number of clients, and a difference in size of their budget. There are millions of individual customers while some B2B operations struggle to have customer bases creep into the thousands category. But what businesses lack in shear number they more than make up for in how much each individual customer is able to spend. Because of these differences each sale to a B2B customer has more […]
