Inside Sales Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for aligning inside sales with field sales?

Need more information to answer the question. When you say align inside sales and the field are you referencing a team selling environment? Or, is each channel selling to unique buyers or markets? Are they selling the same product or different products? What is the average deal size and sales cycle?

Completely different alignment strategies based on the answers. Sorry to be a pain Craig. Bob gave great responses for team selling btw!

I'll let Trish take the long answer. Mine is a quick 1.2.3:

1. Make sure inside sales and sales have an SLA between them that defines leads, what happens to leads, or other functions they share process with

2. Have comp plans aligned for both performance and similar long term goals

3. Get them together. Encourage them to build solid working relationships with each other

Bob's points are excellent. Please view my three points as complimentary:

1. Form an SLA between inside sales and field sales. Besides the previous points, include things like rules for rescheduling meetings and expectations for calling prospects within 5 minutes of filling out a web form. Research shows that you want the inside rep to strike while the iron is hot. You are 21x more likely to qualify a lead if you call within 5 minutes of a prospect filling out a form. This is clearly an alignment best practice.

2. The hand off doesn’t need to be a one-time event. Leads and/or opportunities can go back and forth between inside and field several times as is best suited to the needs of the prospect. Field reps who are flexible about their qualification criteria end up with more at bats with prospects that may not fit the bill now, but still have implicit needs that the field rep can develop in the meeting. Hand those back to inside for nurturing and you end up with a gem 3 months later.

3. Have inside and field meet early and often. I’ve noticed that there is a hierarchy of communication deterioration that looks like this: face to face is the best, then video conferencing, then phone calls, then email, then IM, and the bottom of the barrel is cell phone text. I see tons of problems arise between field and inside sales when they only communicate over email and IM. So many issues go away when they have a chance to meet each other at least once a quarter. Partnerships tighten, collaboration increases, and revenue goes up.

This is a great question and the answer isn't as straight forward as it seems. There are some basic priorities and responsibilities that need to be clear up front to ensure a smooth and profitable working relationship between the two teams. Here they are:

1) Define the compensation and, more importantly, the specific duties of both the inside rep and the outside account manager. I've managed too many teams of inside sales reps and heard petty complaints such as, "I brought him the deal and he got all the compensation!" or "That's his job to pursue it once I identify it." And so on. Once again, petty, yes. Common place? Also yes. Easy to avoid? Yes, if the duties are clear in the beginning.

2) Give proper (and consistent) recognition to the inside rep. Too many times, the glory (and compensation) go to the outside rep who closes the deal. But many times the hard work and perseverance it took to get to the right prospect and to develop rapport and proper qualifying goes unacknowledged (to the inside rep). This breeds resentment and, once again, petty grievances and creates an unproductive working environment. Put a solid recognition program into effect early on.

3) Get the teams together at least once a month. Many times the outside reps are too busy flying around the country/world meeting with clients and rarely spend much time at the home office. When they do, they usually are busy catching up and don't have time for the inside reps. Once again, it's easy for the inside rep to feel ignored or even discarded. Easy fix here: Have a bonus luncheon that combines both teams, and recognize the contribution of each.

By staying on top of these basic relationship themes, you'll ensure a steady and mutually beneficial relationship between your inside and outside sales team.

I agree with both Bob and Trish! Bob is right on target; he's basically stating that you want ALL contributors to focus on identifying and then landing customers who look as much as possible like your Ideal Customer. So the various sales contributors are all working a piece of the sales challenge: Inside Sales is either generating demand within a target market that has potential to become ideal or doing after-market sales/service with existing customers to KEEP them as ideal; field sales account execs are cultivating the right customers, and so on. All customer-facing functions operate with an eye toward getting and keeping Ideal Customers.

Trish is on target because HOW you craft the alignments is likely to differ according to lines of business or other distinctions.

And then, Nick is really on to something as well. To make your alignment strategies work, you've got to have access to the right data at the right time in the right way.

Yes, it DOES really work!

Integrated Account Management, or Integrated, data-based sales-marketing-service,is the proven approach to maximizing return, and there is something of a textbook to this under the same name.
This approach has been wildly successful in B2B: start by defining a customer, across 3 dimensions: i.e., a customer is someone who buys X-$'s of Y-Products over X-duration. Now if you take Access or simply a Business Intelligence app like "business objects", you can begin by doing simple needs-based segmentation modeling; followed by a stack-rank, decile analysis. With that same set of data-cubes, your analyst can watch acquisition, assimilation, defection, etc.Then you will want to align your inside sales force using the integrated account management model. [In this ioperational model, the inside, your call center, becomes transformed- ideally - into a customer management center. this approach takes you through a 3 step process: target/segment/grade: then operationalize. The academics might call it a resource allocation model. It will, when properly implemented create a cascade of "virtuous effects":
Sales go up
More products are sold into the same account (penetration)
Cost to sell and service goes down
Customer Satisfaction goes up
Employee Satisfaction goes up
Increased margins
decreased cost-to-serve

it really , really works.