10 Essential Questions to Ask When You’re Evaluating Inside Sales Software

Choosing an inside sales acceleration software provider can be one of the most important decisions that you make. There are a lot of concerns to address when evaluating solutions. How well will the software integrate with your CRM? How does it make more productive? Will it give your inside sales managers the insight and predictive analytics they need to ensure that reps meet their goals?

We thought it would be helpful to provide you with a list of 10 questions that you should ask when evaluating new solutions. By answering these questions, you can not only assess your company’s individual needs, but prospective solutions’ ability to meet those needs.

1. What are the short-term and long-term goals that you want to accomplish with sales acceleration software?

Try to imagine the results you hope to see in 30 days as well as in, say, 6 months. For example, in 30 days you might simply want to ensure that your reps are connecting with more leads and that all of your call activities are logged in Salesforce. But in 6 months, you might have specific revenue goals that you are hoping to meet by investing in a solution.

2. How much visibility in Salesforce do you currently have into sales reps’ activities?

Are you able to see a record of 100% of calls in Salesforce? How about call recordings? Can you see which reps are on calls in real time? Can you view call dispositions to discern the outcome of those calls? Do you have reports in Salesforce set up to gauge each rep’s success? If you are currently lacking visibility, make sure that a solution can provide you with real-time insight into your reps’ activities.

3. Are your reps spending time manually logging data in Salesforce.com? If so, how much?

Logging call data in Salesforce automatically can save your team hours every month. Not to mention that requiring reps to manually log call data opens the door for human error. It can be advantageous to ensure that a solution can capture call data without requiring effort from reps.

4. How many voicemail messages do your reps leave in a day?

While prospecting, the average inside sales rep spends around 25 hours a month just leaving voicemail messages. This time can be radically reduced with voicemail automation technology that enables reps to leave prerecorded, yet personalized, voicemails with one click.

5. How many decision makers are your reps connecting with daily?

Sure, dialing velocity is important, but it can be even more important to actually connect with decision makers. If your reps aren’t connecting with enough key decision makers daily, it can be crucial to invest in a tool such as Local Presence, which can automatically enable reps to connect with 57% or more deicision makers daily by dialing from local area numbers.

6. Was the solution built specifically to integrate with Salesforce.com?

There are a lot of inside sales software solutions that claim to integrate with Salesforce to varying degrees. But if your company is using Salesforce, you may want to inquire whether a solution was specifically built for Salesforce users, or if Salesforce integration was an afterthought. For example, some of our customers have told us stories about using other solutions, with bolted-on Salesforce integrations, that actually slowed down their Salesforce org.

7. Does the solution provide pre-made Salesforce reports and dashboards?

Tracking the right metrics in Salesforce is vital. Unless you have some all-star Salesforce admins on your team, you might want to choose a solution that provides powerful, real-time reporting in Salesforce right out of the box.

8. Are you interested in software that can help align Sales with Marketing?

Every time leads click on ads, fill out forms or download content, your marketing team should be capturing a wealth of data about those prospects. Do you feel that providing your sales reps with this real-time contextual data about prospects help them have smarter conversations and close more deals?

9. Are you interested in an inside sales platform with intelligent call routing functionality?

One of the keys to maximizing inbound conversion rates is routing calls to the best available rep. You may want to consider investing in inside sales software with an intelligent call routing and IVR component.

10. Do your reps ever make and take calls from mobile devices?

We’re seeing more and more companies moving toward 24-hour sales cycles. When your reps are away from their desks, do they have a way of easily providing managers insight into their activities? If not, it can be valuable to invest in a solution with a mobile app that can log key activities in Salesforce while reps are selling on the go.