B to B business concluded by telephone, from finding prospective customers to making proposals

The software giant SAP Japan Co., Ltd. (hereafter SAP Japan) introduced a new type of “inside work” selling style in November 2006. Their Inside Sales Department is the division that has overturned the conventional practice of sales through “legwork” and performs sales activities for products such as ERP packages and high-end solutions through “inside work”. This unprecedented attempt has lead to outstanding results since the first year it was started, and subsequent results are continuing to show ever increasing improvement.

The key feature of inside sales is that business processes, such as presales, closing, follow-up and seminars by marketing and sales engineers, are consummated on the telephone and through the Internet. This has optimized business resources and dramatically improved business effectiveness. By analyzing and verifying the data and knowledge accumulated every day through this process, improvements are made to increase the accuracy of the PDCA cycle, and performance continues to be raised on a daily basis.

Not only are SAP solutions of several ten to several hundred million Yen “proposed and sold by phone and on the Internet”, but nearly 400 new business proposals were already generated in the first year. This model which is revolutionary in every way, for example contributing 46% of sales for all related sales departments, is receiving a great deal of attention from other companies and businesses in other fields.

Performs precise communication in the upper levels of business processes

Since the early days of this inside sales department, transcosmos has been providing telemarketing support. In what may be called the front line in a set of processes, our major role is to contact companies by phone and to turn over prospective customers to inside sales. As a result, cooperation between marketing, inside sales and the sales department has been dramatically strengthened.

With the telephone approach, a dialogue is required that is more definite and precise than having real communications (meeting and discussion). In addition to fully utilizing telecommunication skills accumulated over many years, we have striven to generate prospective customers with a higher degree of certainty through measures such as staff training and thorough information sharing with SAP. As a result, we have tripled the number of prospective customers and have succeeded in doubling the generation rate of prospective customers. Furthermore, we have realized a reduction in the cost for each prospective customer by implementing operation improvement projects several times.

Model of inside sales that is in the process of evolving even now

The performance and growth of the inside sales department have been remarkable from the establishment of the department until 2009. In the current harsh economic environment, not only have the numbers of prospective customers found, new sales proposals developed and companies covered in the market risen, but also the number of contracts concluded have increased dramatically. The department staff has also expanded more than five fold since the department was established.

All of this indicates how revolutionary this inside sales method is, but even now, the potential of this model has not been fully realized. In the same department, this model is being applied not only to software sales, but also to service areas such as consultation and maintenance, and with that, it is aiming to further increase its level of contribution to the company as a department.

In the future, while we at transcosmos continue to provide the necessary support for an even more sophisticated inside sales business model, we will respond flexibly to the continually changing SAP strategy and support the company-wide development of SAP.