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As a marketing leader tasked with driving sales and revenue, how you integrate with the Sales team and support their responsibilities seriously impacts your success. No surprise there.
But here’s a question worth sitting with: what if supporting a single Sales team really means supporting multiple teams at the same time?
Traditionally, there are two distinct approaches to sales — inside sales and outside sales. To muddy the waters a little, these simple names can mean different things to different people:
- Inbound vs. outbound. People who field inbound calls and demo requests, vs. those who “hunt” through cold-calling, emailing, or knocking on doors.
- In the office vs. in the field. People who work in the office (or remotely), vs. those who work outside the building and regularly visit their customers.
The line between those two worlds isn’t what it used to be. Over the last several years, the way buyers research and buy has shifted online, and the two sales models have blurred right along with it. We’ve seen huge swings between inside and outside efforts — and inside sales, in particular, has grown faster than ever.
This doesn’t mean outside sales reps have stopped relying on their interpersonal skills to engage customers… they absolutely still do. It does mean, however, that even outside teams now lean harder on winning content and a strong social media presence to open the door in the first place.
Outside sales has gone from shaking hands in person to running outreach from the couch. More often than not, the conversation happens online first — and only if that first interaction goes well does an in-person meeting follow. It’s a completely different process. Potentially faster. And often more qualified.
What’s certain is that there’s no going back to the old playbook. The struggle to support both teams — inside and outside — is still very real, though. A lot of it comes down to having the right content and the right sales strategy for how your team is designed, and making sure the foundation is in place before you scale.
Still managing sales assets the old way?
So what’s the best way to support inside and outside sales today? Let’s start by lining them up side by side:
| Inside sales | Outside sales |
|---|---|
| The customer approaches the business, looking for answers to their problem, need, or pain. | The salesperson makes first contact with the prospect to offer the product or service. |
| The prospect does research, reads blogs, attends a webinar, and schedules a free consultation. | The salesperson cold calls the prospect and works from a solid persona template and product messaging template. |
| The prospect signs up for a free eBook, an infographic, or a tool — or requests a demo or quote. | The prospect is sent brochures, whitepapers, or blogs to encourage a purchase. |
| The prospect contacts or emails them. | The sales rep contacts or emails the prospect. |
| Prospects are generally more informed and engaged, but may not always fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). | These prospects are less aware and less engaged, but should be the right target — since sales would have already researched who best to sell to. |
Let’s explore each model and its process so you can decide what works best for your product or service.
What Is Inside Sales?
For inside sales to work, marketing has to generate a lot of qualified inbound leads. Lead quality will always vary, though, because you won’t really know whether a lead is qualified until you speak with them.
That’s why the most important job in inside sales is quick qualification — figuring out whether the prospect is in your target market and actually has the ability to buy. An effective inside sales process maps out what the buyer’s journey looks like for your customers, so a sales rep can provide the right support at every stage.
The Inside Sales Process
The inside sales process generally breaks down into four stages:
1. Qualify your leads
The process starts the moment an interesting prospect reaches out as a result of your inbound marketing efforts. This is where you interact with them to either disqualify them or convert them into opportunities.
2. Engage with your leads
By now you’ve cleared the first hurdle in turning website visitors into sales — you’ve educated them on their problem and asked whether you can help. They’re weighing their options against their goals, so you’ll ask a series of qualifying questions to guide the prospect further into the sales process.
3. Identify the concerns and opportunities
You open a real conversation to build trust and get a deeper understanding of their challenges. The goal is to see whether your product or service can genuinely meet their needs, and to surface the opportunities where it can.
4. Offer advice on a solution
Once you’re confident your product meets your lead’s needs — and you’ve earned their confidence — you offer expert guidance on why it’s the best answer to their problem. Remember, this is your sales pitch, so put your best foot forward to convert those leads into customers.
What Is Outside Sales?
Outside sales has the advantage of targeting exactly the right audience and reaching out to them even when they aren’t actively looking. It’s a great complement to your marketing, and in some industries it may be the most effective approach you have.
This doesn’t mean outside sales has to feel aggressive or intrusive… it really doesn’t. It does mean being thoughtful about how you reach out — especially as more buyers turn to the Internet to take control of the sales process themselves. Done well, outside sales is particularly useful (and often the norm) when there simply aren’t a large number of people out there searching for your solution.
The Outside Sales Process
The outside sales process generally breaks down into five stages:
1. Identify your prospective audience
Narrow down your target market and segments, and prepare your team to contact that specific audience.
2. Generate your list
Now that you’ve narrowed in on your audience, you’ll need their contact information — whether through your in-house lead-generation BDRs (business development reps), a database purchase, or an outsourced lead-gen partner.
3. Contact and qualify your leads
The team reaches out to the list by email or phone to determine whether each contact is a suitable fit for your product or service. If they are, you move on to the next step… if not, you remove them from the list.
4. Give your best sales pitch
Once cold outreach has scored you a qualified lead, your reps schedule a meeting or demo where the prospect gets hands-on with your product or service. This is the right moment to make your best case — talk through the benefits, show how you’ll deliver value, and address their pain points head-on.
5. Close the deal
By now you’ve hopefully impressed the prospect. If that’s the case, it’s time to close the deal, make it official, and work out all the specifics.
Inside Sales or Outside Sales: How Do You Decide?
Some businesses feel pressured to pick one or the other, but neither is inherently better. The ideal approach is frequently a mix of inside and outside sales, because both are strong tools in their own right.
How much weight a business puts on one or the other will differ based on the industry, the type of company, the average sale size, and how aware your customers already are. Combined thoughtfully, inside and outside sales become a powerful growth driver.
There are no hard rules for exactly how much attention to devote to each. There are, however, a few variables worth weighing — along with some common tactics that tend to suit each approach.
Lean on inside sales when:
- There are a lot of people already searching for your product online.
- The purchasing decision doesn’t take very long.
- You’re already creating content that attracts your target audience.
- Cold-calling or buying lead lists doesn’t work well with your audience.
Lean on outside sales when:
- You sell to business customers and the product is expensive.
- Your product requires elaborate demonstrations or a lengthy sales cycle.
- You have the margin to pay commissions to outside reps.
- You have a very narrow, precise target audience.
How Content Camel Can Help
Whichever way your team leans, you still need to enable them with the right sales enablement tools. That’s exactly where Content Camel comes in.
With Content Camel, it’s much easier to organize, tag, track, and report on the collateral that helps Sales close deals faster. When content is organized by funnel stage, content type, and tags, sellers can browse and search for the right asset at the moment they need it most — whether they’re fielding an inbound demo request or following up after a cold call.
And if you’ve ever run a sales content audit, you know how hard it is to wrangle assets, keep them current, and make sure reps are sending the right content to the right prospect at the right time. Content Camel takes that weight off your plate so both your inside and outside teams are working from the same, up-to-date foundation.
Final Thoughts
The old, tidy split between inside and outside sales has largely dissolved — buyers research online first, and even your field reps are leaning on content and social proof to start conversations. This doesn’t mean you have to choose one model and abandon the other… it does mean building a content foundation strong enough to support both at once. Get that right, and the inside-vs-outside question stops being a tension and starts being a growth lever.
Ready to support both your inside and outside teams from one place? Start free with Content Camel.
