Three Ways the Vacuum Cleaner Model is Killing Inside Sales

There’s no doubt that inside sales will continue to grow and replace many traditional field sales approaches. Even complex B2B sales cycles can be completed without expensive feet on the ground, which saves companies money and, often, increases the number of sales made.

In this environment, several companies have famously made significant strides by building inside sales teams using large, inexpensive forces of young folks who are tasked to aggressively make as many phone calls as possible to convert leads into sales by following a phone script. This model is touted by proponents as both cost-saving and beneficial to the market, and it’s understandably attractive to companies seeking better ways to penetrate new markets.

Unfortunately, it’s also killing the reputation of inside sales.

Bear with me for a moment as we take a trip back a couple decades. If you’ve been around that long, you probably remember a time when a vacuum cleaner salesperson showed up on your doorstep and offered to clean your home for free. You may even have accepted the offer. You might even own an Electrolux to this day.

This sales model worked effectively for companies like Electrolux for many years. It put a large sales force to work making unsolicited calls and drumming up sales by providing aggressive “education” to the marketplace. In essence, using exactly the model that many companies now tout as an effective inside sales approach, minus the literal door-knocking.

Companies who switch to this model may do away with their expensive sales people, and replace them with a massive army of recent graduates. They put them through a fast but intensive training program, and set them loose on the phones.

In the short term, the model appears to work. Expenses go down, sales go up, and everybody’s happy.

What’s not to love? Lots.

What’s Not to Love #1: The Approach Exploits a Temporary Weakness in the Algorithm

Do you remember when researching online meant wading through five or six keyword-stuffed sites with a thousand links offering to sell you a bridge in Costa Rica? In those days, a lot of companies made a lot of money by exploiting a weakness in search engine algorithms that ranked sites according to how often they mentioned the search term. SEO experts touted the value of inexpensive “back links” through these “farms” to increase search engine exposure and cheaply gain more site traffic.

Today, those sites are gone, and the companies who used them are either dead, dying, or have found a way to undo the damage. Once the search engines closed that weakness in their algorithms, they promptly blacklisted all the sites that exploited it, creating a mad scramble to find the next big strategy.

Hiring an army of inexperienced sales people to handle B2B inside sales is a lot like a keyword farm, in that it exploits a short-term weakness for quick gains, while setting companies up for long-term set-backs.

What’s really happening is exploitation of a temporary weakness in the system: When a product is new to the market, buyers may not know enough to know that they have options, or to ask the right questions in order to differentiate one option from another. In this environment, an army of inexperienced sales people making outbound calls may provide wildly impressive short-term results.

The down side is that the weakness won’t last. In some cases, where the product is complex and the sales cycle involves multiple decision makers, it won’t work at all and attempts to exploit it will represent an expensive failure. As the market becomes generally more educated, even the less complex market opportunities will thin out, leaving only educated buyers in the market… and that’s when #2 comes to play.

What’s Not to Love #2: It Kills Future Relationships

A colleague recently told me about a call he listened to from a company that wanted to pitch a sales enablement solution. The sales guy—a kid, probably fresh out of college—started in on his script:

“Did I get through to Jane? Good, my name is … and I’m wondering if you have any projects going on with sales development?”

The sales director answered, “Actually, we’re planning to let go 1,000 salespeople this year.”

The kid said, “That’s awesome. Let me tell you about how we can help with sales enablement...”

You’ve probably received calls like this yourself, where the salesperson’s inappropriate response to your answers left you scratching your head—and scratching that company off your “to do business with” list.

Once these salespeople run through the list of companies that will actually buy based on an inexperienced, scripted call, the company will be left scrambling to attract educated, empowered buyers. In complex B2B markets where the pool of potential customers is limited, the danger of getting marked off the short list is even greater.

What’s Not to Love #3: It Commoditizes Your Solution

As any market matures and more options become available, buyers look for one or all of three things: The cheapest solution, the one that provides the greatest value or the one with the lowest risk. In complex B2B sales, value communication and risk minimization are critical to avoid the trap of selling on cost alone.

Unfortunately, an army of inexperienced inside sales people operating off a script provides the opposite of value communication. It communicates that the offering is a one-size-fits-all commodity, the highest value of which is that it has a sales force willing to knock on your virtual door to tell you about their product features.

Especially with complex B2B solutions, this approach ultimately fails, because an inexperienced sales force simply can’t communicate and deliver value across the sales cycle to modern educated buyers.

How to Save Inside Sales from the Vacuum Cleaner Curse

When was the last time you thought, “I wish someone would knock on my door and sell me a vacuum cleaner”? The model is failing, even for the relatively simple product represented by a vacuum cleaner. Buyers are more educated than ever before, they’re in control of the knowledge resources, and they don’t have time or patience for anyone who isn’t bring value to the table.

While a new product may benefit from aggressive outbound education, once the market matures, buyers turn to their own research to educate themselves. At that point, what they want from a sales team is not more general education of the sort that a recent college grad had a crash course in. They want to know what the specific company can bring to them in terms of expertise and customized solutions.

An inexpensive frontline sales team has an important role to play, but it must be part of a larger system with a process in place to pass prospects up to an experienced inside sales team that knows how to handle the complex sale. Companies that continue to succeed will be those who develop strategies that honor the complexity of their solution and align their sales with an understanding of the buyer and all the buyer’s influences. Finally, they will integrate the inside sales process with the right training and tools to support effective execution.