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Introduction
Initiating a buyer–seller relationship today seldom mirrors Hollywood depictions such as those in Wall Street (1987) or Mad Men (2007-2015), in which a salesperson meets a buyer over an introductory extended lunch. Today’s business-to-business (B2B) relationships may also be launched and sustained through e-mail, telephone, social media or virtual meetings (Insidesales.com, 2016). In fact, the need for face-to-face interactions now occurs much later in the B2B sales process (Mantrala and Albers, 2012), if the buyer and salespeople meet in person at all. As salesperson–customer interactions become more digitally intermediated, the ability to maintain a strategic advantage by generating “superior market sensing, customer linking and channel-bonding capabilities” (Day, 1994, p. 41) leads to an increased reliance on the inside sales force (Zoltners et al., 2013).
According to Krogue (2013), inside sales are professional sales conducted remotely, while outside sales are accomplished primarily face-to-face. The inside sales toolkit includes telephone, video conferencing, Web chats, text and e-mail. A key differentiating factor between inside sales and telemarketers in call centers is that telemarketers typically have highly script-based roles and are limited to a selling-only function (i.e. asking for the order after a brief product discussion) with no expectation of relationship development. Conversely, inside sales personnel engage with customers and prospects in highly adaptive exchanges and have additional responsibilities not typically found in a telemarketing role, such as post-sales service, customer relationship management (CRM) and relationship-building. The rapid transformation of the inside sales role makes it an important weapon in the chief sales officer’s arsenal for B2B selling (Krogue, 2017).
Financially, research estimates that firms achieve a 40-90 per cent cost reduction from using inside rather than outside salespeople (Zoltners et al., 2013). Not surprisingly, the inside sales industry is experiencing an average growth rate of 7.5 per cent, compared with 0.5 per cent for outside sales in non-retail positions (Oldroyd, 2013). Thus, insights gleaned from the changing nature of the inside sales role and the individual capabilities required for success are important for both academics and practitioners.
Despite the increasing focus on the inside sales force as strategically important in practice, recent academic research on the topic is scarce. Early work centered on tactical differences between the inside and outside sales roles (Marshall and Vredenburg,...