Kadoya

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

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

Kadoya

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

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 operational efficiency.

Kakuya

The uSonar corporate database, LBC, organizes and covers information on corporate group structures, as well as headquarters-linked offices, branches, and store locations. I believed that by developing our proprietary SFA/CRM system based on LBC, we could resolve the aforementioned issues and improve sales efficiency, which led to our adoption of LBC.

Another deciding factor was the people at uSonar. The sales representative who first approached us provided clear and attentive support toward solving our challenges, which encouraged our decision to implement the system. Furthermore, regardless of which representative we interact with after implementation, they always provide an immediate response. I believe uSonar's commitment to customer support—a perspective they maintained even before the term 'Customer Success' became common—is something we should emulate.

Kadoya

In practice, we have significantly reduced the man-hours required for data matching. We have managed to reduce the time spent identifying target companies by approximately three hours when handling web inquiries. This allows us to dedicate the saved time to profit-generating inside sales activities, which has also improved our follow-up speed with customers.

Kadoya

We utilize "Story" extensively for targeting. Since LBC is integrated into our proprietary SFA/CRM system, we can combine LBC's "Story" attributes with information collected by our inside and field sales teams, leading to more effective sales activities.

For example, by utilizing stories such as "Companies hiring new graduates" or "Companies with increasing employee counts," we can identify companies that are actively recruiting. "Active recruitment" implies that the company is growing, which allows us to hypothesize that there is a higher potential for increasing the number of SaaS-related accounts or a need to restructure office Wi-Fi environments.

Additionally, there is a story for "Companies headquartered in redevelopment areas," and these companies have a high probability of relocating at some point. This provides us with an opportunity to propose our services at the time of their relocation.

By utilizing stories in this way, it provides us with new insights before we even have to think about them. Using this as a hint, we have reduced the man-hours required for selecting new approach targets by approximately one-fifth.

Furthermore, in addition to utilizing stories, when we perform targeting using the uSonar "Mixer" function, we can extract lists filtered exclusively for non-transactional companies. Thanks to this, we have eliminated the manual work of excluding existing customers after creating a new approach list, which has reduced the time required to create new approach lists to about one-seventh of what it used to be.

Kadoya

We can identify which companies are viewing which pages on our website, which means we can know in real-time "what they are interested in right now." As a result, compared to other new approach lists, the closing rate for business meetings acquired based on Live Access information is higher. This confirms that companies extracted via Live Access are highly effective targets for our approach.

Additionally, we also utilize Live Access from the perspective of churn prevention.
When monitoring Live Access, we sometimes see existing customers 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 customer, and there have been many cases where we have successfully avoided churn using this method.

Kadoya

I believe that sales activities leveraging intent data will become increasingly prominent. In addition to the features we currently use, we aim to further utilize uSonar's Interest Sign to drive more high-precision sales activities.

Furthermore, maintaining approach logs is critical in inside sales. However, as many younger employees are less accustomed to PC operations, logging can be time-consuming. I believe generative AI is effective for voice input and summarization. That said, since many generative AI tools currently available are designed for general-purpose use, there are likely limitations to the accuracy of their summaries. Therefore, we plan to collaborate with the business unit within our group that conducts AI development research to design our own prompts for summarization, thereby improving accuracy.