Inside Sales Manager

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Sales Leadership & Revenue Growth

• Own Inside Sales revenue, gross profit dollars, gross margin percentage, and customer-growth objectives.
• Establish clear individual and team sales goals and hold the organization accountable for achieving them.
• Develop a highly proactive sales culture centered on outbound customer engagement rather than reactive order taking and drive consistent month-over-month and year-over-year revenue growth.
• Increase share of wallet within existing customers through category expansion, cross-selling, upselling, and penetration of additional locations and departments.
• Build a disciplined new-customer acquisition strategy focused on converting prospects into active, recurring buying customers and identify inactive, declining, and underpenetrated customers and develop targeted strategies to reactivate and grow them.
• Drive transactional opportunities that generate incremental revenue. Pipeline & Opportunity Management
• Build and maintain a healthy, actionable Inside Sales pipeline and conduct regular pipeline reviews focused on opportunity quality, next actions, expected close dates, probability, and revenue potential.
• Coach representatives to aggressively move opportunities from identification through quotation, close, and revenue activation and ensure Closed Won opportunities translate into actual customer purchases and sustainable revenue.
• Identify opportunities where revenue can be accelerated or brought forward.
• Develop strategies to convert outstanding quotes and proposals into purchase orders.
• Ensure representatives consistently ask for the business and understand what is preventing a customer from buying.

Customer Acquisition & Development

• Build structured prospecting programs targeting potential customers within defined markets and verticals.
• Leverage customer data, market intelligence, lead lists, digital tools, AI capabilities, and prospecting platforms to identify opportunities.
• Establish expectations for outbound calling, prospecting, customer meetings, follow-up, and opportunity creation.
• Develop campaigns around targeted products, verticals, customer segments, promotions, and excess inventory.
• Coach the team on effective discovery, value-based selling, objection handling, negotiation, and closing.
• Ensure representatives understand customer operations and identify opportunities beyond the customer's historical purchasing patterns.

Sales Management & Coaching

• Provide hands-on daily leadership, coaching, and performance management and conduct regular one-onones, call coaching, pipeline reviews, and performance discussions.
• Develop individual performance plans based on sales results, activity, pipeline development, conversion rates, customer growth, and margin performance.
• Listen to customer calls and provide real-time coaching and feedback.
• Recognize and reward strong performance while quickly addressing performance gaps.
• Recruit, onboard, develop, and retain high-performing Inside Sales talent.
• Create clear career-development opportunities within Inside Sales and across the broader commercial organization.

CRM, Data & Sales Technology

• Establish strong CRM discipline and ensure customer interactions, opportunities, activities, and next steps are accurately captured.
• Use CRM and BI reporting to manage the business based on facts and actionable data.
• Monitor leading and lagging indicators, including outbound activity, customer contacts, quote activity, pipeline creation, conversion rates, sales, margin, new customers, and customer retention.
• Leverage AI, automation, market intelligence, and sales-enablement technologies to improve productivity and selling effectiveness.
• Identify opportunities to automate non-selling activities so representatives can spend more time engaging customers.
• Partner with Sales Operations and BI to develop dashboards and reporting that enable effective sales management.

Commercial & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner closely with Field Sales, National Accounts, Sales Operations, Pricing, Category Management, Supply Chain, Marketing, Customer Service, Solutions, and other functions.
• Maintain pricing and margin discipline while ensuring the organization remains competitive and responsive.
• Help resolve barriers preventing sales representatives from closing or activating business.
• Ensure seamless customer transitions between Inside Sales, Field Sales, and National Accounts when account needs or potential warrant a different coverage model.
• Provide leadership with regular insights into customer trends, competitive activity, lost-business reasons, pipeline quality, and emerging market opportunities.

Key Performance Indicators: Success will be measured through a balanced set of commercial and activity metrics,

including:

• Revenue growth
• Gross profit dollar growth
• Gross margin percentage
• New buying customers
• Existing customer growth and share-of-wallet expansion
• Customer retention and reactivation
• Closed Won revenue activation
• New customer acquisition
• Outbound sales activity and customer engagement
• Sales productivity per representative

EDUCATION, QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS & ABILITIES

Qualifications

• 5+ years of progressive B2B sales experience, preferably within industrial distribution, MRO, Safety/PPE, Metalworking, manufacturing, construction, or a related industry.
• 3+ years of inside sales leadership or sales management experience preferred.
• Demonstrated success leading an Inside Sales, business development, or high-velocity B2B sales organization.
• Proven ability to grow revenue, develop salespeople, build pipeline, acquire new customers, and expand existing accounts.
• Strong understanding of pricing, gross margin, quoting, customer segmentation, and commercial decisionmaking.
• Experience managing sales performance through CRM, BI, and sales analytics.
• Strong coaching, communication, leadership, and change-management capabilities.
• Experience with HubSpot, SAP, Power BI, AI-enabled prospecting platforms, or similar technologies is highly desirable.