article thumbnail

The Growing Power of Inside Sales

Harvard Business Review

I''ve seen companies investing to create new inside sales teams, adopt advanced analytics to measure and improve productivity of those teams, realign inside and field sales to optimize market coverage, provide value-based selling tools tailored to inside sales, and upgrade their inside sales customer engagement processes and skills.

B2B 8
article thumbnail

What Apple, Lending Club, and AirBnB Know About Collaborating with Customers

Harvard Business Review

Lower marginal cost : Your customer co-creators bring an entirely new set of assets to the company, at a very low or near-zero cost (see Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society ). They may be willing to share their opinions, skills, relationships, and even their real assets (cars, apartments, etc.)

CRM 8
article thumbnail

How to Fund Indian Start-Ups

Harvard Business Review

They lack the experience or skills to mentor entrepreneurs and teach them what needs to be taught. Using IT services to generate cash and develop customer intimacy, it is entirely possible to build products. They promise seed funding to naïve entrepreneurs who, more often than not, are entirely unfundable.