Kadoya

The Inside Sales Division that I oversee is responsible for both inside sales operations and customer success initiatives. 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 improve customer satisfaction among 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. We subsequently transitioned the department's scope to inside sales in 2003. 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. Before implementing uSonar, we were purchasing data from other providers on an ad-hoc basis, but that data was organized by individual business location. Consequently, 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 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 branches 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 uSonar's commitment to customer service, which they have maintained since before the term "Customer Success" even existed, 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 the client company during web inquiries by approximately three hours. We are now able to 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 actively utilize "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 like "Companies Hiring New Graduates" or "Companies Increasing Employee Headcount," we can identify businesses that are actively recruiting. Being "actively recruiting" implies that the company is growing, which allows us to form hypotheses such as the potential for increasing account numbers for SaaS-based products or the need to restructure office Wi-Fi environments.

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 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 been able to reduce the man-hours required for selecting new target prospects by approximately 80%.

Furthermore, in addition to utilizing Stories, when we perform targeting using the uSonar "Mixer" function, 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 prospect list, which has reduced the time required to create new prospect lists to about one-seventh of what it used to be.

Sumiya

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

We also utilize Live Access from the perspective of churn prevention.

When monitoring Live Access, we sometimes see existing clients viewing our terms and conditions or cancellation pages. 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 we have successfully avoided churn in many cases using this method.

Sumiya

We believe that sales activities utilizing intent data will become increasingly prominent in the future. In addition to the features we currently use, we intend to further leverage tools such as uSonar's Interest Sign to drive more high-probability sales activities.

Furthermore, maintaining approach logs is critical in inside sales. However, as younger generations are often 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 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 the business unit within our group that conducts AI development research to design our own prompts for summarization, thereby improving accuracy.