Running a sales department is hard work and finding the right personnel to do the job isn’t as easy as it may seem on the surface. If you decide to use a company that’s dedicated to sales and selling to handle all or part of the sales process on your behalf, you’ve outsourced sales. While using an outsourced sales team isn’t particularly unusual these days, many business owners aren’t sure about how it would work in practice, so just knowing the outsourced sales meaning might not be enough for you. Let’s unpack this together.
Who Needs an Outsourced Sales Team?
When you started your business, managing everything yourself wasn’t too difficult. But as your business grows, you and your staff just don’t have the capacity to cope with the volume of work. You could expand your team, but that’s costly since you must select, train and resource a larger number of employees. Meanwhile, sales volumes just aren’t what they could be and you aren’t reaching all the possible markets your business could serve. You know it could be so much better!
If any of these scenarios resonate with you, it’s time you gave sales outsourcing some serious consideration. Managing the entire sales team could be as simple as dealing with a single person, and with advanced software to help you monitor the results, you can still keep your finger on the pulse.
Benefits of Sales Outsourcing
Apart from reducing the amount of time you spend on managing a sales team, sales outsourcing has many additional benefits. To begin with, it’s actually quite cost-effective, but that’s not where the benefits end.
Consider your own line of business. You’re passionate about it. You’re an expert. That’s why you’ve been so successful. Now, imagine a company that has that level of skill, experience, and expertise, but that is absolutely focused on sales and selling. Sales force outsourcing means that you’re using a company that’s absolutely focused on delivering results by improving your sales, and they have all the expertise to do it because it’s their speciality.
Almost all businesses have quiet times and busy times. When you outsource selling, you can scale up or scale down at will. Hoping to make the most of the Christmas rush? Give your outsourced sales team the green light, and they’ll train up more salespeople and put them to work. Inclined to find January a tough time to make sales? Decide whether you want to make a big effort to overcome that or would prefer to deploy fewer people and wait it out. With an outsourced sales team, you can scale sales and selling to match your needs.
Things to Keep in Mind Before You Outsource Sales
Before you take the plunge, it’s time to put on your thinking cap. Choosing the right company to do your selling is vitally important. Your customers will form opinions on your business based on the salespeople with whom they were in contact. As a result, it’s important to evaluate the quality of the service you can expect to receive and the methods that will be used in making sales.
Besides that, outsourcing isn’t the same as relinquishing all control. You need to know that the company you choose will keep you in the drivers’ seat and you still need to know your customers. You’re looking for excellent communication, regular reporting, and insights into customer perceptions and behaviour. Find out how this occurs in practice and ask for examples.
Finally, you are looking for improvements. The company to which you’ve outsourced sales should begin by working as well as your in-house team can and should then quickly progress to doing even better. Find out about their client-base and ask for some hard facts about their performance.
How to Outsource Sales
When outsourcing sales, you’re taking a very big step. Making sure it’s a step in the right direction means ensuring that the capabilities of the firm you choose are aligned with your expectations or exceed them. And, even if sales management is your least favourite thing, playing an active role in the partnership will be essential. Your marketing team, whether in-house or outsourced, will also need to be involved so that the messages your customers receive from marketing and sales are consistent.
With a high level of cooperation being key to successfully outsourcing sales, your meetings and negotiations with potential service providers are all-important in making good choices. Begin by investigating your options. Then, it’s time to engage. Don’t accept generic proposals that don’t acknowledge your company and its goals – and do expect the company to be good at selling itself. If it isn’t, it won’t be good at selling for you.
Ready to Get Started?
If you want to supercharge your sales and you’re eager to get started with sales outsourcing, you’re in the right place! Our London-based outbound sales team has delivered outstanding results for major companies, and yours could be next. We love what we do, and we do it well. Let’s get together and talk business.