Sales goes beyond face-to-face offerings, On the Web

Patricia Sims spent most of the past 20 years on the road, launching software products. Two years ago, she traded frequent flyer benefits for a work based on the meetings of the Internet and social media to woo new customers. “When I started in sales, anyone who makes internal sales was thought of more as a telemarketer, someone who would appeal to consumers and disturb people eat dinner,” said Sims, 51 , who now works for Charlotte ON24 sell services such as webcasting companies. “As time and technology progressed, it just makes sense to do virtually great presentation.”

hawkers plying the Yankee United States after the Civil War Dale Carnegie bestsellers on art sales techniques, American capitalism has often been driven by advances in twisting goods . Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, located in the heart of the occupation the American middle class and its desire for social mobility. “In the mid-20th century, the seller is really at the center of what the country is all about and becomes a sort of American archetype,” says Walter Friedman, author of Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of sale in the United States and Director of the Initiative business history at Harvard Business School.

Companies

software vendors and health care manufacturers are radically remake the model from field staff cost for cost-effectiveness of employees who use phones and computers to reach customers. Inside sales pitchmen which maintains the road, growing much faster than sales person and according to some estimates, it is 10 times cheaper.

U.S. will add about 1.9 million sales and related occupations in 2020, including at the retail level, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its predictions most recent job growth, released last week in March. Although the study does not distinguish between sales inside and outside, according to the report of the wholesale and manufacturing-areas where sales are within financial sense, take about 223,400 other representatives alone.

Steve Richard, co-founder of Vorsight, company sales training whose clients include Verizon Communications (VZ) and Rosetta Stone (RST), says his data show that for each person hired from today for a role outside sales, 10 are being brought within the sale. “It is absolutely changing,” he said.

virtual meeting software like WebEx and GoToMeeting.com, communication tools like Skype, social media sites Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn it became easier to sell with little or no face-to-face, says Ken Krogue, co-founder of InsideSales.com a Provo (Utah)-based company that provides technology for commercial services to within companies like AT & T (T), Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Dell (DELL). “definition [of a seller] evolves,” said Krogue.

Shawn Naggiar, chief officer of marketing products online company Act-On Software in Beaverton, Oregon, says employees need to understand the business and be comfortable with technology. “It is sometimes difficult to find the right person with the right skills,” says Naggiar, who heads a department of 44 people who sell marketing systems for small and medium businesses.

It is easy to understand why companies are tweaking the traditional model of selling, full compensation expensive company cars and a lot of man-hours lost while employees are all flights between those. Industry estimates of each contact with a seller within a company could cost $ 25 to $ 30 compared to $ 300 to $ 500 for a person with field staff travel costs, said Mike Moorman a principal in the Chicago office of ZS Associates, which helps the sales force organization.

cuts during the Great Recession helped galvanize a movement already enabled by broadband Internet connections and Web-based tools, Anneke Seley says founder internal sales consultant now called Reality Works Group. She changed the name of the phone works last year to reflect the reduced role of the phone as the Internet has become more central to the sale. Seley said she began working in a group inside sales at Oracle in 1985, before the Internet was widely used to sell programs for companies to use on then-emerging personal computers. The department has identified a first time customers only and does not close. Subsequently, hundreds of millions of sales at Oracle have been made without the people on the ground, and now many companies are more concerned with sales outside Seley said.

general change is not new in sales. Harvard Friedman said vending machines were once expected to eliminate the need for tellers and advertising led to the hypothesis that people get their information from advertising, not vendors. “There’s always the idea that sellers will disappear,” he said. A radical change is that, increasingly, inside sales staff is not even in the office more. Approximately 46 percent of these employees are at headquarters, about 37 percent work both in the office and at home, and 17 percent work entirely at home, according to data compiled by consultants Bridge Group. Inside sales employees have an average salary of $ 53,000 base and total compensation of $ 98,000, according to data Bridge.

“This is a huge challenge” in hiring employees for these jobs, said Larry Reeves, who helped form the American Association of Inside Sales professionals three years ago to coordinate training and implement formal accreditation. Distance selling often requires more specific skills (understanding of the product and its use by clients) and less of others (entertain clients).

Technology

was one of the reasons Sarah McMahan said she was easily able to pass turnover within two years ago, after six years of field sales in Visions of business, working with companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and General Electric (GE) to improve sales. McMahan, 40, said she returned to work after the birth of her third child two years ago. She was offered a job helping to develop more sales leads, replacing frequent trips to the East Coast office in Incline Village, Nevada, with virtual meetings and phone calls. “I can pick up my children at the end of the day, then log in later to check appointments waiting,” she said.

Web

sale can work even for suppliers of certain products unlikely. Eugene Ulrich last fall launched a sale within the family business, Ulrich Barn Builders, which operates seven stores selling barns, warehouses and halls in Texas. Ulrich said he closed approximately $ 60,000 in sales last month as he himself has developed the new system, it is the formation of a seller at each location of the company to sell its construction services on the Web at Using photography and other online materials. For Web clients, the installation of the barn can be “the first time they will put a face on any representative of Ulrich Barn Builders,” he said. However, the brick and mortar sales has its place: “From time to time I get a customer,” he said,

“who really wants to feel the wood.”

The bottom line: the economy grows online sales. Handling a sale via the Web can cost as little as $ 25, while a traditional sales call can cost up to $ 500.

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