Superhuman Resources
When to Use Sales Outsourcing
Some tips for evaluating whether your business is ready and capable to move forward with outsourcing your sales processes.
Is it the right time to use b2b sales outsourcing?
Statistics show that organizations that partner with other companies in the global business landscape have a better shot at increasing their profits.
Outsourcing can remove the headache from any part of your sales strategy. It is also one of the most effective ways to cut hiring, training, and technology costs that can quickly diminish your budget.
Sales outsourcing can lead to new perspectives, a stronger sales pipeline, and more freedom in your business, allowing you to spend more time focused on the activities that provide your business with higher revenue.
Below, we provide you with some of the best tips for evaluating whether your business is ready and capable to move forward with outsourcing your sales processes.
The highest performing lead generation strategies have clear and consistent messaging and focus on providing the best customer experience. Your goal is not just to sell, but to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.
Table of Contents
What is Sales Outsourcing?
Sales outsourcing is the process of hiring or delegating a third party to create, implement, and monitor specific business functions.
Your outsourcing partner should be seen as an extension of your team. You remain in full control of your goals, with an expert team managing the tasks, and reporting the campaign metrics.
But before you can choose an outsourcing partner, it is important to know which parts of your sales strategy are best to outsource. In B2B sales, activities like market research, list building, cold emailing, appointment setting, and cold calling are most often outsourced because they require large amounts of research, creativity, and technology – which take up large amounts of time and are often seen as repetitive in a daily environment.
B2B sales outsourcing allows you to increase flexibility within your organization by giving your team more time to focus on the activities that produce higher revenue – like closing deals and building relationships.
Key Benefits to B2B Sales Outsourcing
Outsourcing in general, has gotten a bad reputation over the years, generally from the stereotype that companies outsource to foreign vendors that take away jobs away from local workers. It’s important to note the differences between outsourcing, offshoring, and how it relates differently in every industry.
Outsourcing was officially defined as a business strategy in 1989, when subcontracting, consulting, and service providers expanded the market and outsourcing became a more traditional practice. Outsourcing expanded into all industries as business leaders realized they could increase their volume while reducing operation costs with fewer resources and less risk.
From startups to enterprise organizations, there are plenty of reasons why outsourcing your sales processes can benefit your organization.
- Reduce Costs
- Gain Expert Knowledge
- More Time to Close Business
- Better Technology & Resources
- Less Overhead Costs
- Improve Customer Focus
- Minimize Pressure on Team
- No Extra Recruiting, Hiring, or Training
- Faster Time to Market
- Consistent Growth
- Rapid Ramp and Scale Ability
- More Efficient Metrics, Notes, and Reporting
What Activities Can I Outsource?
Someone very intelligent once said, “Master your strengths, outsource your weaknesses.”
Sales outsourcing can help with any sales activity that moves your prospects down your sales funnel. That’s why it is critical for your business to consider the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing before deciding which activities to perform or delegate to your partner.
Below, we list several sales activities that can be effectively performed through outsourcing.
- List Building- One of the most important aspects of a lead generation is making sure you have an accurate prospecting list with the correct names, data, and information. Otherwise, your campaign is sure to fail. Expert and manual researchers can help you find those harder to reach contacts.
- Lead Nurturing- Outsourcing can help you stay more organized by better tracking and nurturing relationships with your leads. And since 40%-70% of leads aren’t ready to purchase right away, nurturing them is an important part of a sales strategy that often falls behind.
- Cold Calling- Most sales staff feel burnout and stress over their cold calling duties. A one-on-one phone call is the most direct and effective way to meet your prospective clients. If you don’t have a solid cold calling strategy, you should think about outsourcing this activity. It is important to have a well-thought-out script with next steps and goals in mind. Your outsourcing partner should be able to produce quality conversations, metrics, and reports.
- Appointment Setting- Who doesn’t want to wake up to a calendar filled with prospects who are ready for your solution? (This is exactly what appointment setting does.) It allows you to focus your attention on your prospects and closing deals. Your partner should be sending your quality appointments with little cancellations.
- Confirming Appointments- Too many appointments cancelling? This could be a sign you don’t have the target market, or it could be a sign you need help confirming appointments. Your future clients are busy. We’ve found that a reminder helps eliminate no-shows and ghosting. Your outsourcing partner will be able to confirm and reschedule appointments for you, if needed.
- Cold Emailing- Not every target audience wants a phone call and that’s okay. That’s why other forms of technology exist. But if you’re sending thousands of mass emails, you may want to consider outsourcing. Intention is very important when it comes to cold emailing. Your outsourcing partner can work with you to develop a personalized strategy that works with your brand and goals to build better relationships with your prospects.
- Social Selling- Creating connections on social media sites can target appropriate prospects and build trust through brand awareness. LinkedIn is a great channel to showcase your expertise by sharing relevant content, as well as networking and engaging with potential clients as a thought leader.
When to Outsource Your Sales Process
Choosing the right outsourcing partner requires relationship management to make sure all parts of your sales process are being conducted in alignment with your company mission, vision, and brand values.
You must be able to trust that this partner will act in your best interest and allow them to guide you through the process. You must also be willing to work with them to establish the fundamentals of your project or campaign. As long as proper expectations are established and communication is frequent, outsourcing your sales strategy will be an added benefit and investment for your company.
So, when should your company start to outsource?
- When You Have Limited Resources:
If you lead a B2B company, you know one of the hardest challenges is keeping your sales pipeline full of quality prospects and leads. If you aren’t devoting the sufficient time needed to run your sales strategy, you won’t see much success. It requires experience, knowledge, and talent across multiple disciplines to create an effective sales process. You need the most accurate data, contact information, and market insights to successfully move leads and prospects down the funnel.
So what happens when you can’t afford to get that new tech stack or spend every minute training your team of sales development reps? You outsource it!
By outsourcing, you can gain more resources that can provide a better understanding of your ROI, target audience, and your positioning in the market. These conclusions can be hard to understand without the proper data and resources, which can require a pricey sales tech stack or other prospecting tools.
If you don’t have the capabilities to understand internally, outsourcing might be the best option for your business. Your outsourcing partner should have all of the resources and capabilities to exceed your needs and expectations and should be able to scale quickly and efficiently through a repeatable sales model.
2. When You Have Little or No Team Expertise:
Your outsourcing partner knows all the necessary tools and is automatically leveraging them to produce better results for your company. The time and effort it takes to perform these actions to the highest standard will cost you more in the long run.
To move forward, you need an expert partner that can help take over these tedious tasks and provide you with real-time tracking and reporting. Your sales process needs to remain agile and be constantly monitored for adjustments or improvements.
Not up-to-date on the latest sales methodologies?
Your outsourcing team already has multiple strategies and teachings they use on a daily basis to have more quality sales conversations. Use their knowledge to gain a better understanding of your target audience.
Or maybe your team just isn’t great at cold calling. Maybe they are spending too much time on administrative tasks – outsourcing is a great way to solve these problems.
3. When You’re Entering a New Market:
Outsourcing parts of your sales process can help you realign your value proposition and evaluate your position in the market, based on your ideal customer profile(s) or buyer persona(s). An outsourced team can spend more time revealing real customer pains, looking for solutions, identifying opportunities, and tracking competitors.
Cold calling, for example, is great for evaluating product-market fit because it gives you direct insight into the mind of your potential customers. Getting feedback can be tough, but working with an outsourced partner can make it easier. They can spend more time focusing on discovery and learning more about how they use your product or service. They can also help you calculate your total addressable market, a metric that can provide critical insight into the growth and revenue potential of your new market.
Working with an outsourced sales partner allows you to gain important feedback on your offering, giving you the ability to make more strategic and long-term decisions.
4. When There is a Lack of Budget:
Employment taxes, health benefits, payroll costs, computers, phones, hardware, software–these are hard costs that are unavoidable when hiring. Not to mention, the sales industry is known for high-turnover. Sales Development Reps (SDR) have one of the highest in the industry, mostly due to the stressful and fast paced work environments.
Recruiting expenses in addition to the time it takes to interview, can end up costing your business a small fortune. Just one SDR can cost your business over $160,000. What happens if you hire the wrong employee? By that time, you could have saved that time, money, and effort by outsourcing.
Outsourcing any part of your sales process seems like it could cost your business a pretty penny, so you might be surprised to learn that outsourcing is an affordable and reliable way to expand your team and resources.
When outsourcing some of your functions, you can maintain a smaller team size while dialing up or down your outsourced sales expenses on an as needed basis. According to Sales Hacker, outsourced sales professionals charge around $1,000 to $5,000 per project, but if you’re looking for a dedicated extension of a larger sales team, you could be looking at $8,000 to $15,000 per month.
We ran the numbers for hiring a sales development rep here, but a quick breakdown of costs looks something like this:
- Average salary of a sales rep = $60,000 (plus benefits)
- Average salary (plus benefits) of sales management personnel = $120,000
In-house Costs = ($60,000 x Team Size) + $120,000 + Commissions + Bonuses + Tools
For roughly the same cost as adding an in-house sales manager to your team, you can get a full sales team taking care of the functions you outsource to them.
5. When You Want to Accelerate Growth:
Having an outsourced partner is like an extended sales team that helps you generate more revenue at a faster rate than an in-house team.
- You save time and money internally, which can lead to better business investments and innovations.
- You allow your employees and leadership to concentrate on more productive activities like marketing, networking, new business ideas, or new strategies that can lead to higher revenue.
- You reduce the high turnover rate your business might suffer from the high pressure of the industry.
- Your customers get more attention, which makes them happier. In return, they stay loyal to your brand and business.
- You learn more about the market, your positioning, and the solutions you provide to better tailor your future offerings to your ideal customers.
Ultimately, each of these aspects of outsourcing can lead your business to accelerated growth and outsourcing can lead the way.
Is B2B Sales Outsourcing Right For Your Business?
With our technological advances and remote capabilities businesses are looking to expand into new markets without the costs of hiring and managing an internal team. Sales outsourcing is changing the landscape of how B2B companies manage their sales processes.
Whether you are looking to outsource one sales process or your entire strategy, you might face some challenges associated with high expectations, low results, or lack of transparency. This is why finding the right outsourced sales development partner for your business is critical. Be patient and trust in their expertise.
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