An interesting topic, what’s the trend in B2B sales team’s composition?

Once you have a sales team, the debate around the composition by function is one that needs serious consideration. Here are some of the factors to consider:

ACV Considerations:

The sales dilemma, do I invest more in Inside Sales or in BDMs (Business Development Managers)?

The answer lies in the value of your Annual Contract Value (ACV).

Many surveys of Private SAAS companies have indicated a clear trend in sales investments, the higher the ACV, the more they invest in BDMs. Makes sense, a product with an ACV of $200,000 per year requires more time selling face to face, customer stakeholder management, longer sales cycle than a product sold via the web with a lower ACV like $1,000 per year.

In low $ ACV environments, the trend is more Inside Sales staff mainly working on converting trials or appointment booking.

Lead Rich or Lead Poor

If you have an abundance of leads, use Inside Sales to drive initial qualification for BDMs. In a lead rich environment, you will want more effort applied to qualifying prospects, booking appointments for these leads and then allocate the lead to a BDM.

What you don’t want is expensive BDMs spending time on outbound calling, preliminary qualification and appointment setting.

Take a close look at your Inside Sales utilization and capacity. Are some leads not being attended to, are the BDMs overrun with leads. The answer lies in utilisation of your existing resources plus the trend in lead growth.

If you need more leads, please refer to the article on B2B Growth Hacks.

Secondary Funnel Success Rate

You should have two Funnels that Inside Sales work on to drive conversions. The first is the Primary Funnel which is hot direct inbound leads for Pricing and Demo requests. These require high speed responses, defined qualification techniques and queue management.

The Secondary Funnel is normally comprised of four categories:

• Close Lost opportunities – Opportunities that went no where for various reasons
• White Paper requests
• ROI Calculators and Tools interactions

For inside sales to be effective, you need to monitor and track:

Success Rate for each of the categories above – where do you get the most effective conversion to meeting rate.

Inside sales utilization and assignment. Monitoring of each of the secondary funnels is critical to ensure Inside Sales is constantly addressing each category

Summary

The mix of Inside Sales to BDMs is not a guess, its based on ACV $ value, complexity of the sale, Lead Rich or Lead Poor environments, Inside Sales effectiveness and your Marketing Funnel generating increasing amounts of leads as your grow out the Secondary Funnel.

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