January 2004              return to the newsletter contents page

SEDA Produces Advanced Inside Sales CD

Inside sales has moved a long way from our industry’s traditional “customer service model.”  It’s happening throughout distribution.

In Georgia, a distributor assigns an underserved market segment to its inside sales department, and within six months the gross profit produced by that segment makes inside sales the second most profitable salesperson in the company.

In Ohio, another distributor creates a selling system where outside sales sets the customer up, and inside sales closes the sale, providing the highly technical and very specific information required to complete the sale.

In dozens of companies, inside/outside sales teams are dividing up sales tasks not according to the salesperson’s functional area, but according to how their company can best serve the customer.

Because the role of inside sales in member companies is changing and becoming more complex, SEDA is cooperating with twenty other distribution associations to create a CD-ROM-based training course to teach inside salespeople new skills to meet the challenges.

"In a lot of companies in our industry inside sales is moving from a passive “customer service” role to a more aggressive sales role,” said Heidi Levitt, chair of SEDA’s Program Committee.  “Since we are expecting our people to do new things, we need to provide them with new skills. 

“Many of our people have learned to do the basic things — solve problems for customers, and provide information — very well.  But for our companies to compete effectively some of them need to move to another level.”

The Advanced Inside Sales CD, created for SEDA by Atlanta-based Corporate Strategies, Inc., contains three courses:  Pricing, The Complex Sale, and Quantifiable Value Added Selling.  According to Chuck Holmes, president of Corporate Strategies, the skills taught in the three courses will be useful to inside salespeople in a wide variety of selling environments.

“In some companies the responsibilities of inside salespeople are becoming more like those of outside salespeople than of the traditional customer service model.  They are expected to look for and take advantage of opportunities to grow accounts, to diagnose changes as problems or opportunities and deal with them, and to continuously improve the company’s relationship with the customer.  In other companies, inside salespeople have made large steps in that direction, but are still primarily reactive.  In either case, the skills taught in Advanced Inside Sales will help them do their jobs better.”

The contents of the course include:

• Pricing — the impact of pricing on profitability, pricing from both the customer’s and the company’s perspective, and discovering opportunities for pricing improvement.

• The Complex Sale — Identifying purchasing influences and buying motivations, information gathering, and defining “win results” for the customer and the company.

• QVA Selling — The concept of quantifiable value added, identifying opportunities for QVA, methodology for quantifying improvement suggestions, QVA presentations, and QVA documentation.

The Advanced Inside Sales CD will be released in March, 2004.  In addition to the three courses, it includes a Resource Center, which will provide additional information on pertinent topics, and a final examination for each course.    

Look for information next month on how you can order the Advanced Inside Sales CD from SEDA.