Companies often lack the necessary resources to upscale their sales effort by hiring new sales representatives.
They take external help from dedicated organizations that offer convenience without the hefty initial investment.
Statistically speaking, your sales representatives lose almost 70% of their time either filling worksheets or traveling to attend meetings. This time can be utilized to do productive things like selling if you appoint an agency to take care of it.
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What is Sales Outsourcing
In the B2B buying process, at least seven decision-makers get involved even before the sales representatives could reach them.
Sales outsourcing is the practice to hand over a portion of the sales operation to a third party who manages your lead capturing strategy, outbound marketing, inbound calls, and so forth. An outsourced sales team enables a company to reach potential clients faster and influence their decision-making process.
However, sales outsourcing is not something that every other company needs or can afford. If your company already has a sales team in place with defined job roles for each employee, recruitment shouldn’t be a problem.
Let’s find out whether your company should outsource sales or not.
Do You Need Sales Outsourcing
Before you book your first appointment with a sales outsourcing company, let’s discuss some points as to whether you even need the solution.
The discussion of sales outsourcing often arrives at the board meetings because of 2 events. It happens either after a huge layoff due to decreased revenue or after a prediction of sharp upscaling potential.
If you aren’t certain where your business is headed, outsourcing may not be a viable alternative for your sales team.
Sales outsourcing can lower your costs. But if you lack a marketing strategy or don’t need to invest more in back-office efficiency or upscaling operations, sales outsourcing is futile. It would just be a waste of dollars that you could use to develop a better marketing strategy.
However, your company and sales team can be overwhelmed with queries and meetings. In this case, sales outsourcing could be the best option for you for now while you grow your team.
In addition to saving a lot, outsourcing sales operations should be beneficial for you when you need to focus on your upscaling business operations. This includes processes like production, distribution, and QA. Sometimes, upscaling these operations is more important than focusing on sales.
If you still are skeptical about how sales outsourcing can help you, let’s visualize the benefits it can bring to your company.
Why Your Company Needs Sales Outsourcing
Sometimes, you are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of leads, required to upscale your sales operations, or shrink down your budget. In these cases, sales outsourcing is an effective alternative. Let’s understand the fundamental benefits of sales outsourcing.
Greater Return on Investment
It takes eight calls a day to reach a prospect. Hiring an agency to manage your sales operations may seem expensive. But after considering the cost to hire, manage, and retain employees to facilitate the sales operations, the solution would seem very practical.
The costs associated with bringing up an in-house team are:
- Employee salaries and liabilities.
- Software and tools subscription
- Management executives
- Infrastructure costs
There are instances where your team is constantly generating more leads. Your sales representatives can also be having a hard time juggling their time between selling and managing themselves. This may be due to the lack of a defined managerial position.
In situations like these, sales outsourcing would be more economically viable than growing your sales team overnight.
Since the initial costs are minimized, you can utilize the hours and money to develop a better strategy with your existing sales team. You can also use the money to hire a management executive.
Hiring fresh faces isn’t the only hurdle in your upscaling journey though. Their experience in your domain and product is also an important factor to consider when hiring or retaining.
You Get an Experienced Team
With outsourced sales support, you get an experienced team specially trained to handle your products from the start.
You don’t need to engage your resources to train the employees. You don’t need to actively participate in the outbound sales operations. And you certainly don’t need to manage your representatives with a sales outsourcing service.
An experienced sales representative comes at a hefty price. The price of knowledge on the market, specialization in the industry, and client handling are considered gold standards in sales operations. The reps, who are well-established in the industry, are hard to come by and are expensive investments.
With a sales outsourcing approach, you’ll get a team of experienced representatives. This also means that you don’t have to cater to the demands of each of them individually. The third party will be able to bring much more to the table in terms of experience than you hiring freshers. This is of course given that they have substantial experience on their sleeves.
Save Time on Hiring, Training, and Onboarding
Interviews, negotiations, training, and employee retention eat up a sizable time from your calendar, especially in sales.
Your in-house team missing a key member might take days to fill the vacancy with a suitable candidate. The sales training and knowledge transfers can even stretch the onboarding process to months. Throughout this period, you lose business not only due to the key member but also by engaging other members to conduct the onboarding process.
Sales outsourcing service is much more agile in onboarding. They work in a team in most cases. The projects are shared between a team of 5 or more depending on the complexity and volume.
A member from your assigned team leaving doesn’t affect the operations as their teammates replace them immediately. A dedicated recruitment team is moved onboard and running an effective and efficient sales onboarding process allows you to get the best out of your brand new personnel or new suitable candidates immediately.
Your Company Becomes More Scalable
Scalability isn’t the best choice of word. A sales outsourcing company empowers you with the flexibility to scale up or shrink down depending on your obligations.
In this dynamic market and uncertain times, your company will need to hire more sales professionals to scale up. But parallelly, if needed, you also need to shrink down your operations at a rapid rate.
B2B outsourcing sales enable you to scale your business as much as needed. It also allows you to do so without ever delaying the appointments and fearing the prospects being pivoted towards your competitors.
However, the best results in sales often come with a side effect. The abundance of leads demands an overwhelming operational upscaling that you might not be able to handle. In that case, you can pause the cooperation with the agent for some months and resume when the back-office responsibilities are handled.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, we could make you understand why you should outsource sales and what happens when you do. The major benefits of outsourcing sales include an increased RoI, a pre-assembled team, flexibility, and saving time.
But before you appoint a third-party sales agent, consider analyzing if it’s for the best. If you lack a robust marketing strategy, hiring a marketing agency would be much more viable than outsourcing sales. Consider weighing your budget and requirements before making the jump.
Good luck!