Sales is a finicky bet. One fine morning you might have an overflow of leads, and experience a dry patch over the next few days. Moreover, with 8 calls wasted to reach a single customer, it’s financially and operationally challenging to determine if it’s time to upscale your operations with an outsourced sales team or not.
Sales outsourcing is the practice of handing over some or all of your sales operations to a third party or an agency. These operations may include lead generation, brand awareness, handling calls, or all of them. The external agency is responsible for taking input from you, dedicating their teams to the job, and reporting back to you.
The scenario around B2B sales outsourcing companies has been changing lately. In the past, it was frowned upon to employ an agency to conduct sales operations due to the lack of transparency and oversight. Which, thanks to technology, has changed a lot.
Now, many small and medium businesses that can’t afford to invest in building their own team are relying on sales outsourcing.
Thus, it’s not a necessity to hire a sales outsourcing agency if you have a sales team already in place, or don’t have the budget to sustain an external agency. Although sales force outsourcing may be a cheaper alternative, it can add up to the cost if you can’t generate enough leads with your budget and strategy.
Let’s discuss how to outsource your sales and what to ask yourself before accepting a quote.
Do You Have a Sustainable Marketing Strategy
Sales outsourcing is the result of either a decreased revenue or an upscaling potential. You can be successful in achieving both if you plan your strategy around outsourced sales carefully.
But determining what your objective is, is most critical. If you don’t know where your company is headed, it might be best to wait until you’ve ascertained it.
A sales team is only effective when they have leads. Although most sales outsourcing agencies offer lead-capturing services, not having enough leads would bring underwhelming results. And to bring leads, you need to have a robust marketing strategy in place.
Ensure that you have a sustainable marketing strategy before committing to outsourced sales support. You would know that you have a proper marketing strategy in place and need to outsource sales by observing how busy your sales representatives get once the day starts. If your sales reps are being overwhelmed by handling calls or are having trouble closing deals due to their lack of experience, it’s time to outsource sales.
Can You Generate a Better Return on Investment
Return on Investment (RoI) is referred to as the percentage of net income generation per dollar. Suppose that you spend $10K on your sales team every month. If you generate a revenue of $20K through them, you have a 200% RoI. It’s just a simple example that doesn’t consider the rents, establishment costs, salaries, and other factors.
However, when you perceive sales outsourcing, you must consider these things and determine if you can outbid the costs to generate revenue that’s ample and sustainable. In most cases, you can.
The fundamental reason a company hires an agency is to curtail the costs. Hiring, managing, and retaining employees take up a lot of investment that can be utilized elsewhere more productively like developing a better marketing strategy and hiring an HR.
If you’ve established the fact that you can generate a better RoI by outsourcing sales, it might be the time to relieve your sales executives from calling prospects and make their time more worthwhile by developing better strategies.
Do You Lack an Experienced Team
The second most essential reason that you might need to outsource your sales operations, is the lack of experience. To train and retain a team of experienced sales executives is a costly affair and most small businesses can’t afford to retain expert employees who can bring them massive sales figures. But, the sales agencies can.
They handle employee management for you and empower you with a sales team that is experienced and capable. It’s a win/win for both of you. You get a team of sales experts at your disposal, and the agencies utilize their assets in multiple projects, making their salary more practicable than you employing them.
When you proceed with sales outsourcing, you shift your employee responsibility to the agencies. You don’t need to be involved in the hiring, training, or retaining aspects of the operations. Moreover, your only obligation is to assess the outcomes and pass creative inputs about the projects.
However, if you already have an experienced team that’s providing you with a positive value, it might be wise to develop a better sales strategy with them than making them obsolete and hiring an outsourcing sales agency.
Does Your Company Have a Recruitment Strategy
The issue with recruitment, onboarding, and training in a small business is considerably more exposed than in corporations. The lack of defined HR roles, recruitment teams, and training, exhibit complications that delay the sales operations and engage the resources to somewhere where they aren’t able to make money for you.
In a sales outsourcing agency, the employees that are issued to you are trained specifically for your requirements, and the key members are replaced immediately when necessary.
If you were to replace a key member, in addition to your business being hampered due to the absence of the member, you’d suffer losses due to other resources being involved in the recruitment process.
If you lack a predefined recruitment strategy, considering sales outsourcing is a wise choice.
Are You Considering a Quick Upscale
Sales outsourcing is considered when a company needs to upscale faster than they can match the bandwidth with recruitment. As you aren’t responsible for your sales operations anymore, you can upscale anytime without ever worrying about physical or operational space.
Moreover, if your need subsides with downscaling, the same logic applies. You aren’t responsible for your team and you certainly don’t need to keep sacrificing your business operations to sustain them.
If you need a quick and rapid upscaling, maybe even for a few months, sales outsourcing can be a viable alternative to hiring a permanent team of sales executives.
The Bottom Line
Outsourcing sales is more than receiving quotes and interviewing the agencies. It requires self-assessment. If you wrongly assess yourself as worthy of sales outsourcing, it may do more harm than good. Ask yourself if you have a marketing strategy; if a dedicated sales team can improve your RoI; and if a more experienced team will solve your sales shortcomings. Only then can you determine if you can upscale at a rate that doesn’t overpower the rate of recruitment. If deemed negative, you need sales outsourcing.
