Mastering Inside Sales: Essential Tools, Skills & Speed for Closing More Deals

So you think inside sales is just admin work or babysitting the CRM? Stop. What if I told you it's actually the single fastest way to explode your company's revenue? If you can master just one thing, speed. Because the difference between closing a deal and losing it could be 60 seconds. Literally 390% more deals just by answering faster. Sounds wild, right? Let's break down what it really takes to crush inside sales. Because it's way more than clicking around HubSpot. I'm going to show you the exact tools, skills and little speed hacks you'll need to dominate your pipeline and become that teammate every outside sales guy depends on. Let's get into it.

As inside sales, there are things that you're responsible for which is new client intake and appointment setting, post presentation, follow up. So after the roof's been quoted, you're doing the follow up, not the outside sales pipeline management and reporting on sales. So you're responsible for the pipeline of business from from lead intake through to the being a sold roof, you're the one reviewing that pipeline and reporting on the success of your activities. So you have to align to the sales and service goals of the company. So you have goals in how much you're going to sell and goals and how well you're going to service our customers. And finally, you're a force multiplier for the outside sales role. We have to define what inside sales is and is not. You're not a task chick, you're not a CRM babysitter and you're not a sales assistant. You are a teammate who needs to be competent and also needs to be incentivized to be that force multiplier to help the outside salespeople make more money for the company by contributing to that and giving customers better experience. So there's skill sets that you have to have to be capable of performing these responsibilities. This is where you're going to look and say, do I have these skills? Do I need to develop these skills? So using HubSpot, this is your customer relationship management software. This is the hub for everything that is the business. It's a single source of truth for everything. So that's where you're going to spend a lot of time in this career. You have the potential to make 80, 80,000, 120,000, $160,200,000. Just it depends on the market, it depends on the leads, it depends on your abilities more than anything. And so one of those abilities is knowing how to use this tool. There is no such thing as a waste of time. When it comes to learning how to use this tool, you should know it front to back, not just how to push stuff through it, but you should know how it works. It's kind of like you can understand how to drive a tractor or you can understand how to take a tractor apart and put it back together in maintenance and service. Right now, Sumoquote is your configure price code tool. That's how you configure the price and provide a quote to your customers. Arrive is your field service management tool. So this is how you manage field service out there with the people who work out in the field that are not sitting in front of computers with fast Internet and usually only have a phone. Then there's phone and email tools. You can email through HubSpot and you can see your emails in HubSpot, but you probably also have a Gmail or an Office 365 account. You should know how that email tool connects to HubSpot. Same thing with your phone, right? You probably have just Call or Kixie or Air call, one of these voice over IP phone systems that you can use to call and text. Then there's the software, soft skills, effective communication and active listening abilities. The best closer is the one who listens more than he talks. And then when you talk, you have to say the right things. These are your sales skills. Learning how to position value and how to overturn objections and then having an understanding of how to report on the success of those activities. This is why learning HubSpot is so critical. It's learning how to look at your information and be in there. Because there's people who are maybe fantastic at sales and you know, doing the kneecap to kneecap, hard close, but maybe they don't have that great of abilities to manage the CRM. This is one of the reasons why this role has bifurcated into two people. And then there's attention to detail. Everything you say goes over an email, over a call that's recorded, over a text message. So everything you do is in writing. So you pretty much have to make sure that you're always paying attention to those details. Because it's not like when you're sitting down in front of the customer, you say something and it's does the homeowner remember? And above all, you gotta be a team player, right? And the same goes for the outside sales. They have to be a team player because this is a sales team. So now let's talk activities. These are the actual activities that you do as your job, the first one of which is lead intake, the one who handles all the different places where leads can come from. And you intake those leads and get them ready for sales activities. So first thing is you're going to answer that phone or call the lead back within five minutes. That's a tall order. We have to design everything we do around this because there is a study that came out where it compared the closing rates from a 20 minute response time and compared that to a 5 minute response time, a 20 minute response time compared to a 5 minute. There's an 81% increased likelihood that you close the deal. From a 20 minute response time to a 1 minute response time, there's a 391% increase in the likelihood that you close the deal. There is an enormous amount of power that comes in. Now remember, this is spread across a lot of industries. Like there's industries like mine, you know where I probably have a higher quantity of lower quality leads, right. A roofer downloads some PDF from our website. They're not saying hey Adam, build me a CRM that's a lower quality lead. Then when you have somebody say hey, I have a leak, can you come fix it? So the jump might not be as significant. But the important piece of information to see, see is that when you call within five minutes compared to 20, big jump, when you call in one minute compared to 20, massive jump. So the exact differences could be different from industry to industry. But the argument that faster response times has a strong impact on your close rate is irrefutable fact. So then you're going to create the deal using an automation. In HubSpot, there's an automation process that we build into your CRM that automatically creates the company cam, creates the sumo quote, creates the arriving task, creates the building, creates the deal. It does all this stuff to make sure that we get a proper data model structure. This process would take like 15 minutes to do on your own. Happens in about a minute and a half. Then while that's all happening, you're performing a lead intake using the built in playbook. And the goal here is to take the customer out of the market and demonstrate competence. So it's not about checking the boxes of filling in the information, it's about building a relationship with the customer. So then you set the appointment in arrive and the goal here is to minimize travel and maximize sales time. And so going back to my other screen here, so if I look up Columbia, South Carolina and I look like this and I look at the map, I don't live here. But I'm pretty sure that that bridge, and particularly probably that bridge is a nightmare to travel across in the middle of the day. And at 5 o' clock if we have to come into town somewhere like it is an into town road, probably this one, this one probably gets busy. Maybe these on ramps get backed up. Maybe there's the zipper lanes that are right here that get all messed up. So you're trying to maximize the time that outside sales can spend on site. If we know that our sales is a direct relation to how many appointments we do per day, we want to make sure that our outside salespeople are have as little stre less as possible and get to as many houses per day so that they're in the right mindset in which to sell a roof. So that's why we use a rivi to minimize the travel time and maximize the sales time. Then you're going to order the roof measurements from Eagle View, get them into the Sumoquote software. The idea is to try and get the sales guy ready to sell so he has everything he needs to do his job. So there's skill sets that you got to have to be good at. This one is you got to be able to type quickly. You got to be able to create a deal in HubSpot. I say type quickly because a lot of people try and pull the 58 year old receptionist or the accountant out of the dusty corner in the back and try and make them an inside sales rep. And then what happens is they go, I like to write everything down first and then type it into HubSpot. And it's like, no, now you just took all the efficiency gains of the system and just took it out. So don't do that. You need someone who can type quickly. And then you got to create your own HubSpot. You got to understand your phone, you got to understand the layout of your service area. This is why every customer always wonders, man, can I get somebody in the Philippines to do this inside sales thing for like $7 an hour? Well, you could, but the problem is they don't know anything about that bridge. They don't know anything about that school zone. They don't know about that like coming into town road that gets bog down. So then what happens is they constantly set the outside sales up for failure. We don't want that. So it's like you have to have somebody from the Philippines who also lived in Columbia, South Carolina. And then you got to know how to use arriving Sumaquis.