Inside Sales Market Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Inside Sales market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Promotion market. Buyers are moving towards longer contract durations and strategic partnerships with suppliers to benefit from value-based discounts, integrated services, low renewal cost and lesser expenses on contracting activities.

Price rise in certain essential assets and supplies required to deliver Inside Sales is making a significant addition to the supplier's overall expenditure. This could have an inflationary impact on buyer's procurement expenditure in the Inside Sales market.

In recent years, the market has witnessed a significant number of strategic collaborations, mergers, and acquisitions. Such developments have enabled the suppliers to expand their portfolio of offerings, geographic presence, and value chain. Moreover, suppliers have also gained access to new technologies and resources.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Inside Sales procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Inside Sales. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, While engaging with a service provider, buyers should procure creative services from a tier 1 creative agency and outsource the production work to a local agency to reduce billing rates.

It is customary for service provider to charge buyers on a project basis. The project costs are often based on payroll costs incurred by service providers on the various levels of personnel involved in the project. In a bid to derive higher profits, service providers may allocate more senior staff than required. Therefore, buyers must scrutinize the staffing needs of the project and limit the presence of senior staff to not more than 30% of the total allocated staff. This, in turn, providers buyers' advantages such as enhanced cost savings, streamlined execution, and faster delivery time.

Buyers should ensure that service providers use digital asset management tools for storing and retrieval of digital assets such as photographs, video graphs, music, animation content. Buyers can use these tools to increase their brands consistency and optimize their workflow.

Inside Sales procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Inside Sales procurement. Some examples include: