Unlocking Sales Growth: Balancing New and Repeat Business with Field and Inside Sales Teams

In many B2B industries, firms’ profitability growth is driven by the performance of their field sales teams.

When your firm hits on an effective sales model for a quality product and then you send your teams out on the hunt for new customers, sales growth can happen at a dizzying pace… for a while.

It’s common for firms to notice at some point (and probably sooner than they’d have liked) that sales growth is stalling. Whereas before there seemed to be a tidal wave of new customers, now it’s only a trickle. Too often in this situation, firms assume that their sales teams have captured all the new business that’s out there for them. But an examination of the work their sales teams are spending their time on can often reveal that something very different is going on.

A slowdown in sales growth may actually be happening because the field sales teams have become overburdened with servicing repeat business coming from the customers that they had brought on board during that phase of galloping sales growth. The more time sales teams have to spend reacting to these customers’ queries and requests, the less time they have to do the one thing that’s always guaranteed to drive sales growth: sealing deals with new customers.

Simply instructing your field sales teams to put less effort into attending to the needs of your existing customers isn’t the solution to this problem. If you go down that path, you’ll probably find that those customers will become dissatisfied with the pre- and post-sales experience they’re receiving from you. Then they’ll take their business elsewhere. Now you’re in a situation where any growth that comes from winning new customers is wiped out. You’re just pouring water into a bucket with a hole on the bottom.

So how do you make sure your field sales teams can keep getting you new customers at the same time as you keep your existing customers happy?

One really effective solution that Mensana has applied to help its clients is to reorganize their sales units so that much of the maintenance work to be done with repeat customers is cleared from the field sales teams’ plate.

The critical first step in this approach is to better leverage or set up an inside sales team that takes charge of handling all the operations involving repeat customers that your field sales teams have started to get caught up in—answering queries about delivery arrangements, placing new orders, checking in to make sure the customer was happy with their most recent order, and so on.

And in parallel to setting up this team, it’s essential to develop mechanisms that connect the inside team to its counterparts in field sales, as well as processes that clearly guide new customers towards the inside sales team so that the day-to-day can be handed over from the field sales reps.

A year or two ago, we ran this very play with a multinational chemicals company that had been created through the acquisition of several smaller firms. When we were brought in, we saw that because all the original firms’ sales teams had a sizable tail of longstanding customers, they lacked the bandwidth to target the new strategic customers that we had identified. So we redefined and aligned the remit of the inside sales teams and set up a process that let the field sales teams redirect these long tails to inside sales. 

Within just a few months, the field sales teams were dealing almost exclusively with new clients. And that’s what they’ve been doing ever since, with none of the stalling that most firms encounter.

We can help you to run this play, too. Just contact our team to find out more.