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. As 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 corporate fiber-optic internet connection services by USEN ICT Solutions 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 focuses on approaching information systems departments. In most cases, this requires engaging directly with corporate headquarters. However, before implementing uSonar, we were purchasing data from other providers on an ad-hoc basis, which was only available at the individual office level. As a result, we struggled to effectively link headquarters and branch office data, leading to multiple sales representatives approaching the same company and receiving complaints regarding our lack of information control.

These experiences made us acutely aware of the importance of consolidating information at the corporate level. We realized that visualizing the group structure of target companies, as well as the relationships between headquarters and branches, would significantly improve our operational efficiency.

Kadoya

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

Furthermore, the "people" at uSonar were also a major factor. The sales representative who initially proposed the solution was clear and attentive in addressing our challenges, which encouraged our adoption. Even after implementation, every representative we interact with provides immediate responses. I believe uSonar's commitment to customer support—maintaining that perspective even before the term "Customer Success" became mainstream—is something we should emulate.

Kadoya

In practice, we have significantly reduced the man-hours required for data matching. We have successfully reduced the time spent identifying companies during web inquiries by approximately three hours. 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 make extensive use of "Story" for targeting. Because 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 "Story" categories such as "Companies Hiring New Graduates" or "Companies with Increasing Employee Counts," we can identify businesses that are actively recruiting. "Active recruitment" implies that the company is growing, which allows us to hypothesize that there is potential to increase the number of accounts for SaaS products or a need to restructure their office Wi-Fi environment.

Additionally, there is a "Story" category for "Companies Headquartered in Redevelopment Areas." These companies have a high probability of relocating at some point. That relocation timing provides us with an opportunity to propose our services.

By utilizing "Story" 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 target prospects by approximately 80%.

Furthermore, in addition to using "Story," when we perform targeting using uSonar's "Mixer" function, we can extract lists filtered exclusively for non-client companies. Thanks to this, we have eliminated the manual work of excluding existing clients after creating a new prospect list, which has reduced the time required to create new prospect 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 those companies are interested in right now. Consequently, compared to other new prospect lists, the closing rate for sales opportunities acquired based on Live Access information is higher. This confirms that companies identified through 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 our terms and conditions or cancellation pages. Since viewing such pages suggests a high probability that they are considering cancellation, it allows us to 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 driven by intent data will become increasingly prominent. In addition to the features we currently use, we aim to further leverage tools such as the Interest Sign from uSonar to conduct even 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; therefore, I believe generative AI is effective for voice input and summarization. That said, since many of the generative AI tools currently available are designed for general-purpose use, there are likely limitations to the accuracy of their summaries. To address this, we plan to collaborate with the business unit within our group that conducts AI research and development to design our own prompts for summarization, thereby improving accuracy.