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You won’t see an inside salesperson winning over a prospective client on a golf course — but you will see them leveraging technology to close deals.
Surpassing the bounds of in-person prospecting (also known as outside sales), inside sales models drive modern business success. But what are inside sales, exactly?
Read on for a definition of inside sales, a discussion of how it’s different from outside sales, and the three skills inside sales personnel need to win and retain business.
What are Inside Sales?
Inside sales refers to remote sales workflow, or sales processes without in-person, face-to-face interactions. Cold emailing sequences, virtual product demos, and video conferencing-driven rebuys are all examples of inside sales workflows.
B2B, B2C, and B2G organizations all use inside sales. It’s one of the most prevalent sales models, initially driven by widespread digitization and accelerated by COVID-19.
Key Differences Between Inside and Outside Sales
Inside sales representatives sell remotely, whereas outside sales representatives sell in person.
Traditionally, inside sales focused on high-volume, short-cycle deals while outside sales targeted complex, high-value prospects. But today, whether organizations prioritize inside sales, outside sales, or both depends entirely on the end users’ needs. Many organizations still value in person prospecting, but business relationships of all deal sizes, sales cycles, and industries increasingly take place online.
Businesses opt for inside sales models because they offer:
Global scalability: Inside sales is a facilitator of economic globalization. Because inside sales representatives can reach global prospects without travel constraints or significant costs, organizations can scale cost-effectively beyond global markets.
Revenue predictability: Inside sales technology tracks all prospective and existing customer touchpoints. This gives sales personnel and AI systems extensive data to work with, whether for revenue forecasting or process optimization.
Workflow automation: Outside sales processes are usually manually intensive and time-consuming. Inside sales models streamline certain processes (like prospect research) and completely automate others (like nurture cadences) to centralize information.
Role specialization: Inside sales models have opened the door to new and effective areas of specialization. Professionals are building careers around specific stages of the sales cycle, from prospecting to customer success, instead of juggling multiple clients across every stage of the pipeline.
3 Skills Needed to Master Inside Sales
Inside sales requires a unique set of skills. Remote rapport-building, market and product knowledge, and technical proficiency are key.
1. Remote Rapport-Building
An inside sales representative's success hinges on their ability to build rapport and maintain relationships remotely. A representative who’s skilled at face-to-face relationship building may struggle to replicate that success digitally.
On call, businesses expect inside salespeople to demonstrate the same interpersonal awareness as outside sales personnel. This includes interpreting body language and tone, spotting buying signals, catching micro-agreements, and identifying unspoken objections. The trust-building playbook stays the same, even when interacting online.
The challenge is that prospects and clients commonly see digital interactions as less personal, regardless of the connection made. It’s easier to build trust and communicate value in person than virtually. Inside sales representatives must face this barrier across sales lifecycles — from generating cold email interest to virtually communicating a rebuy’s value.
2. Market and Product Knowledge
All sales representatives must know their product and end user inside out. However, inside salespeople must be able to go one step further, translating this knowledge into targeted virtual communications. Across the sales lifecycle, inside salespeople must communicate end user and product knowledge in an optimal way for online interactions.
For example, consider how a salesperson can respond to in-person and email objections. Face-to-face, a sales representative can read buying signals, pivot the pitch, and handle objections live. Over email, the rep must not only digitally interpret intent signals, but deliver responses that preempt objections and advance the deal — without real-time back-and-forth.
The ability to communicate product and end user knowledge digitally requires strategic anticipation, clarity, and precision.
3. Technical Proficiency
Inside sales roles are technology-first. Technical mishaps carry risk for these professionals, since something as simple as a broken video call link can sidetrack a deal. An inside salesperson must be proficient in technologies like video conferencing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and email platforms.
Depending on the scope of the salesperson’s role, they may also need to master:
Workflow automation: Designing, implementing, and managing automated sequences.
Data hygiene: Deduplicating records, verifying contact data, standardizing field formats, and removing inactive leads.
Artificial intelligence (AI): Predictive analytics, conversation intelligence, and generative content drafting.
Analytics & reporting: Building custom dashboards, segmenting pipeline data, monitoring pipeline velocity, and conducting win-loss analysis.
Beyond internal technology-driven processes, inside sales reps must also be able to work with a prospective clients’ technology. They may need to demo products in the prospect’s sandbox or submit quotes through the prospect’s portal to prove integration.
What Do Inside Sales Reps Do?
Inside sales encompasses all remote sales activity, covering a broad range of sales functions and responsibilities. For one business, an inside sales representative may manage the full sales lifecycle, from initial prospecting to renewal deal closure. The role of another inside sales rep may be narrower.
There are three common inside sales roles. Here are their responsibilities and how they interact:
Inbound sales representatives (ISR): ISRs engage leads who initiate contact (warm leads), qualify interest, and may advance opportunities to account executives.
Outbound sales representatives (OSR): OSRs proactively identify, contact, and qualify cold prospects, before transferring them to an account executive.
Account executives (AE): As senior sales personnel, AEs own the sales process from qualified opportunity through deal closure, managing client relationships and negotiations.
Sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRs) are two other specialized inside sales positions. They’re traditionally outbound, although SDRs and BDRs sometimes handle inbound leads, too. SDRs qualify inbound leads and set meetings for AEs, while BDRs identify new business opportunities through strategic outbound prospecting.
Here’s a hypothetical workflow, demonstrating how these professionals interact:
An SDR qualifies a webinar attendee and books a call with an AE. The AE demos the product, sends pricing, and enters negotiation. A BDR targets a similar firm, secures interest, and hands the contact to the same AE. The AE leads both negotiations, closes each deal, and coordinates onboarding.
4 Crucial Tools Used in Inside Sales
Here are four central tools that inside sales use and how they fit into daily workflows.
1. Customer Relationship Management Platforms (Think: Rox)
CRM platforms are centralized databases that store and organize information on prospective and existing customers. CRMs are central across sales lifecycles, from lead generation and prospect nurturing to deal closing and ongoing retention efforts.
AI is changing the scope of CRM systems in real-time. While AI-driven platforms like Rox broadly fall under the CRM or Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) umbrella, their capabilities far surpass traditional systems. From automated prospect research to predictive forecasting, AI is helping inside sales professionals do more in less time.
Advanced, AI-driven CRM systems also effectively align inside salespeople and other key internal stakeholders, like marketing professionals and product managers, by syncing information seamlessly across teams. This reduces siloes that traditionally produce lead leakage and delayed deal cycles.
2. Video Conferencing Solutions (Think: Zoom)
Inside sales teams have used video conferencing since the early 2000s. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated adoption. Platforms like Zoom and Google Meet facilitate hundreds of millions of business relationships worldwide, and are the primary medium for remote sales interactions.
Video conferencing platforms have evolved beyond simple video functionality to become comprehensive sales enablement tools. Providers offer features that support — and even solely facilitate — sales processes, such as live screen sharing, searchable meeting transcripts, and CRM integrations.
3. VoIP Software Solutions (Think: 8x8)
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It's a technology that lets inside sales representatives make and receive phone calls over the internet, rather than traditional phone lines. VoIP software is scalable, cost-effective, and — because of AI — smart.
Traditional VoIP solutions rely on four core features: automated call routing, IVR menus, call recording, and real-time performance analytics. AI-powered systems build on these features by:
Analyzing calls as they happen, and providing real-time sales guidance
Detecting prospect sentiment
Summarizing conversations to update CRM records instantly
Deploying virtual assistants to handle routine inquiries
Routing calls based on live insights
4. Email Automation Tools (Think: Omnisend)
Sales teams rarely operate using generic email service providers (ESPs), like Gmail and Outlook. They more commonly rely on purpose-built email automation tools that extend beyond basic send‑and‑receive functionality.
Email automation platforms give inside sales teams a direct, data‑rich channel for nurturing leads — at scale. These solutions provide actionable insights (like open-rate patterns and click-through performance), dynamically personalized email templates, and trigger-based campaign automation.
CRMs and SEPs are increasingly integrating AI-driven email automation functionality, too. Rox, for example, integrates automated email workflows and intelligence into its broader AI-driven Agentic AI sales functionality.
Mastering Inside Sales for Business Growth
Inside sales drives modern business success — and so does Rox.
Rox leads the way in agentic AI. By automating prospect research, delivering real-time pipeline analytics, and applying AI across the entire sales lifecycle, it empowers inside reps to excel.
Secure and grow your most essential customers. Learn more about Rox today.