Two additional challenges of building inside sales and lead generation internally are career path and turnover.
Inside Sales is a tough role to fill. The rep must be knowledgeable, competitive, driven, a self-starter and have the ability to adjust quickly to tough questions and objections. All those characteristics are typically found within a candidate that wants a defined and aggressive career path. Companies that identify those quality candidates struggle with keeping them. Some sales environments are lucky enough to have a tiered sales team that offers a career path for the entry-level person joining the lead generation or inside sales team. However, that isn’t the case for many companies. Often times, there is a very large gap in knowledge between the inside sales team and managing the entire sales process to close. In those settings, the driven and successful inside sales person gets burned out and takes that talent to a new company because there simply isn’t another role that makes sense for that person.
Thus, turnover is a serious issue for many companies. If the company chooses to pursue young talent, then it must also be willing to invest in training necessary to cultivate that young talent in the basics of professionalism and business. As soon as the company makes progress and begins to reap the benefits of a trained and successful team member, that team member is getting bored with the redundancy of making 80+ calls per day and is looking for a new challenge.
LeadJen has been able to identify a strong niche of talent by using a part-time model which appeals to a more experienced candidate. Those experienced candidates are productively extremely quickly because they already have a strong business acumen. Also, the schedule flexibility reduces turnover which helps team members grow and evolve with client projects over time.