Kadoya

The Inside Sales Division I oversee is responsible for both inside sales and customer success operations. In our inside sales capacity, we focus on generating sales opportunities for our field sales team. As for customer success, we work daily to promote the effective use of our services and enhance customer satisfaction for our existing clients. Our mission is to expand our company's total revenue and operating profit through these efforts.

Our telemarketing department was established in 2002, following the launch of corporate fiber-optic internet connection services by USEN ICT Solutions CORPORATION. We subsequently transitioned our operations to an inside sales department in 2003. I have been overseeing this department for over 20 years, from 2002 to the present.

Kadoya

Our business primarily involves approaching the information systems departments of our clients. In most cases, this means we need to approach the headquarters of each company. Before implementing uSonar, we were purchasing data from other providers on an ad-hoc basis, but that data was organized by individual business location. As a result, we could not effectively link headquarters and branch office data, leading to situations where multiple sales representatives from our company would approach the same client, resulting in complaints regarding our lack of internal coordination.

From these experiences, I keenly felt the importance of consolidating information at the corporate level. I realized that visualizing the group structure of target companies and the relationships between headquarters and branch offices would also improve our operational efficiency.

Kadoya

The uSonar corporate database, LBC, organizes and covers comprehensive information on corporate group structures, as well as headquarters-linked business locations, branches, and retail outlets. We decided to implement LBC because we believed that by developing our own SFA/CRM system based on this database, we could resolve the aforementioned challenges and improve sales efficiency.

Furthermore, a deciding factor was the "people" at uSonar. The sales representative who initially proposed the solution was clear and attentive in addressing our challenges, which encouraged our adoption. Moreover, since implementation, every representative we have interacted with has provided immediate responses. I believe the attitude of uSonar, which has prioritized a customer success perspective even before the term became mainstream, is something we should emulate.

Kakuya

In practice, we have significantly reduced the man-hours required for data matching. We have reduced the time spent identifying companies during web inquiries by approximately three hours. We can now utilize the time saved for profit-generating activities as an inside sales team, which has also improved our follow-up speed with customers.

Kakuya

We make extensive use of "Stories" for our targeting efforts. Since LBC is integrated into our proprietary SFA/CRM system, we can combine LBC attributes—such as Stories—with information gathered by our inside and field sales teams, leading to more effective sales activities.

For example, by leveraging Stories such as "Companies currently hiring new graduates" or "Companies with increasing employee counts," we can identify businesses that are actively recruiting. Being "actively recruiting" implies that their workforce is growing, which allows us to form hypotheses—such as the potential for them to increase their number of SaaS product accounts or the need to restructure their office Wi-Fi environment.

Additionally, there is a Story for "Companies headquartered in redevelopment areas." These companies have a high probability of relocating at some point, and that timing provides us with an opportunity to propose our services.

By utilizing Stories in this way, it provides us with new insights before we even have to think about them ourselves. Using this as a hint, we have been able to reduce the man-hours required for selecting new target accounts by approximately 80%.

Furthermore, in addition to using Stories, when we perform targeting using the "Mixer" function of uSonar, we can extract lists filtered exclusively for non-client companies. Thanks to this, we no longer need to manually exclude existing clients after creating a new outreach list, which has reduced the time required to create new outreach lists to about one-seventh of what it used to be.

Sumiya

It allows us to identify which companies are viewing which pages on our website, meaning we can know in real-time exactly what those companies are interested in. As a result, compared to other new outreach lists, the closing rate for sales opportunities acquired based on Live Access information is higher. This confirms that the companies identified through Live Access are indeed highly effective targets for our outreach.

We also utilize Live Access from the perspective of churn prevention.
When monitoring Live Access, we sometimes notice existing clients viewing pages related to terms and conditions or contract cancellations. Since viewing such pages suggests a high probability that they are considering cancellation, we can detect churn risk at an early stage. Once that risk is detected, our sales representatives can follow up with the client, and there have been many cases where we have successfully mitigated that risk using this method.

Sumiya

We believe that sales activities leveraging intent data will become increasingly prominent in the future. In addition to the features we currently use, we intend to further utilize tools such as the Interest Sign from uSonar to drive more high-precision sales activities.

Furthermore, maintaining approach logs is critical in inside sales. However, as many younger employees are not accustomed to PC operations, logging can be time-consuming; therefore, we believe generative AI is effective for voice input and summarization. That said, since most generative AI tools currently available are designed for general-purpose use, there are likely limitations to the accuracy of their summaries. Consequently, we plan to collaborate with our group's AI research and development subsidiary to design our own prompts for summarization, thereby improving accuracy.