Every company struggles with the same constant questions: how do we increase our number of sales? Sales is one of the hardest jobs in most businesses. This is where sales outsourcing comes in. Whether your company is struggling to hire qualified employees or looking to ramp up your lead generation, sales outsourcing can be a valuable resource.
In the following few sections, I will breakdown how sales outsourcing can be utilized or work as an alternative to parts of your current business model. I will cover how a specific part of the sales cycle can be outsourced, how it can help you access a larger talent pool, and how it can allow you to hire more people.
Outsourcing a portion of the sale
Every company has a different sales cycle and structure. Sales outsourcing can encompass the entire cycle or could be broken down into specific roles such as cold calling, appointment setting, and lead qualifying.
1) Cold Calling
First, hiring individuals to perform cold calling to existing leads or new leads is one of the many ways that sales outsourcing can benefit a business. According to SmallBizGenius, 63% of sales people state that cold calling is the worst part of their job. By outsourcing this part of the sales cycle, there is the possibility of increasing your sales employee happiness by reducing or eliminating the number of cold calls made daily.
2) Appt Setting
Second, does your business sales model revolve around setting appointments or making introduction to other business that you could network with? Do you need someone to do the initial outreach to set appointments with referrals or potential partners? Outsourcing your appointment setting eliminates that initial call from your sales cycle and opens up your time to have more appointments with potential clients.
3) Responding to Inbound Leads / Initial Qualifying Calls
Lastly, some businesses have lots of inbound leads via their online forms or partner websites. Many sales people may not have time to go through and qualify all of these leads. With sales outsourcing, an outsourced employee can reach out to these inbound leads and qualify them. If they are a good prospect and worth connecting to you, they will set the appointment or gather the necessary information to move the sale forward.
Access to a larger talent pool
Unemployment numbers are low creating a competitive job market. So, what does that mean for your business? It means that hiring the right sales people that stay at your company may be hard.
Thus, expanding your talent pool outside of your physical office location is a benefit of sales outsourcing. It allows you to access a larger talent pool and find qualified employees for each step of the sales process.
Ability to hire more people
With sales outsourcing, the cost per employee is lower. If your main goal of outsourcing is to reduce cost than outsourcing accomplishes this. If you are not looking to lower your monthly cost but would like to hire more people to increase productivity, then sales outsourcing is the correct solution. For every one sales person in the United States, at an average starting salary of $50,000, you could hire two sales people in El Salvador. This increases your productivity and the number of leads that are able to be reached out to at any given time.
A key piece to remember is that this outsourced employee does not have to be reading from a script. These agents can be trained, sales professionals who have worked in sales for many years.
Things to consider to determine if sales outsourcing is right for your business
Before you look to outsource your sales, it is important to ask yourself these 3 questions:
- Does my sales cycle, cold calling, or lead generation require an agent to read from a script or an agent who can collaborate and create need?
- Do you want to managed and train your outsourced sales agents or do you want them to be given a template and trained by the third-party company?
- How long do you hope to have this employee in the position with your company?
In conclusion, sales outsourcing can be a very beneficial alternative to traditional hiring and roles within a company. When considering a company for sales outsourcing, you should evaluate a few different things. Are you hiring a company to perform a set operation such as telemarketing where the agents will be reading off a script? Or, are you looking for an outsourcing solution that allows you to hire an individual to work specifically for your business, learn your product, and not need to read from a script? Different sales outsourcing solutions will come with different level of involvement from the third-party company and will yield different results.
