Building effective inside‐outside sales rep dyads: A collaboration perspective

Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-023-00960-4

Outside sales involves selling products and services face-to-face in an office, showroom, or a convention. Outside sales (OS) representatives are responsible for building rapport with the prospective customer, demonstrating the value of the product or service, clarifying customer questions, and negotiating the price, all in person. Inside sales involves selling products and services through digital channels, such as phone calls, email, and online chat. Inside sales (IS) representatives must communicate the features and benefits of their products or services in a manner that resonates with each prospective customer.

Many companies choose a configuration that combines an IS rep, who provides sales support via remote interactions, and an OS rep, who drives sales revenue via in-person interactions. However, pairing the right IS and OS rep to achieve a seamless customer experience is challenging. In some cases, an uncoordinated IS-OS pairing can harm the customer experience rather than improve it.

Sales managers hold divergent opinions on how to pair IS and OS reps to effectively serve customers. Some prioritize individual attributes–such as the possession of customer industry knowledge or the presence of a highly competent OS rep who can take the lead role–and some focus on dyadic attributes of both IS and OS reps such as the mutual understanding of each other’s knowledge, the sharing of common goals, or the fit of the two reps in general. Managers must utilize objective data and criteria in evaluating, assigning, and reviewing sales performance, which will help them maximize the benefits derived from the effective implementation of IS-OS co-selling.

A working paper helps Chief Sales Officers understand how observable and manageable attributes in the IS–OS dyad influence customer-level sales, and how customer characteristics moderate the sales impact of those attributes.

The authors posit that customer sales depend on:

1) The length and intensity of the collaboration experience within an IS-OS dyad, and

2) The diversity of product knowledge among the IS and OS reps. This diversity is a result of the knowledge that is exclusive to each rep in a dyad, which was obtained via the rep’s selling experience outside the dyad.

The authors also find that as customer relationship tenure increases, the efficacy of the IS-OS collaboration intensity and product knowledge diversity is undermined. However, when the complexity of customer product needs increases, the sales efficacy of the IS-OS collaboration length and intensity is enhanced, and that of product knowledge diversity weakened.

The study offers the following lessons for Chief Sales Officers:

– IS-OS dyadic attributes are important in predicting sales and matching dyads to achieve desirable levels of these attributes may lead to increased sales

– For customers with short tenure, companies can assign dyads with high collaboration intensity

– For customers with short tenure, companies can assign dyads with high level of product knowledge diversity

– For customers with complex product needs, companies can assign dyads with long collaboration length and high collaboration intensity