Sumiya

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.

Sumiya

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.

Kakuya

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 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 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 attributes like Story with information collected by our inside and field sales teams to drive more effective sales activities.

For example, by utilizing stories such as "Companies actively hiring new graduates" or "Companies with increasing employee counts," we can identify businesses that are actively expanding. The fact that they are "actively hiring" implies that their workforce is growing. This allows us to form hypotheses, such as the potential to increase the number of accounts for SaaS-based products or the possibility that they may 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. 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 been able to reduce the man-hours required for selecting new target prospects by approximately 80 percent.

Furthermore, in addition to using Story, 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 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

It allows us to identify which companies are viewing which pages on our site, meaning we can know in real time what those companies are interested in right now. As a result, 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 pages related to terms and conditions or contract cancellations. 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 plan to further leverage tools such as Interest Sign from uSonar to conduct even more high-precision sales activities.

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