When you outsource sales and marketing to help transform and modernize and scale your sales and marketing operations, one of the greatest benefits you will realize in the short term will be the outsourcing of your marketing automation systems.
First let’s look at the benefits of hiring an agency to implement your marketing automation platform vs. hiring a full time employee (FTE). Hiring an FTE to implement and manage a marketing automation platform used to mean that you had a person sitting in your office available right next door. However in today’s business environment odds are that one or both of you are working remotely, so that’s no longer the upside it used to be. Also, hiring a single FTE would mean they would have one or two key strengths and skill sets – it could be systems integration, copy writing, content management, content production or sales messaging. Successful sales automation requires all of these skills sets to have the greatest impact. When you outsource sales and marketing, you will have access to a blended and dedicated team experts in automation with both depth and breadth in marketing automation, content marketing, databases management, CRM and sales. So you will be accessing a wealth of insight, strategy and skill.
So your next concern would be that this blended team will be more expensive than an FTE. That’s not the case because the costs of hiring that one employee with the limited skill set can go as high as $120,000.
Let’s start with simply finding that person. Marketing automation as a discipline is in high demand so you will need to start by advertising, hiring a recruiter, and interviewing. Your employee hasn’t even started yet and you’ve already spent weeks or months on the search and $1000s of dollars.
Next they join the team. You’ll have the regular salary, and benefits package that will be between 25% to 40% of their income including typical benefits like insurance, dental plans, paid vacation etc.
Once established in the office, you’ve got to allow time for ramp up; which takes an estimated 20 weeks for professionals and 26 for executives. One survey of CEOs in Harvard Business School estimated that the average mid-level managers require 6.2 months just to offer break-even value.
Simply stated you’re paying out long before you will start to see a return. Even more detrimental is that only 50% of hires pan out the first time, so you could be out twice that investment.
So now to the kicker when it comes to marketing automation and ROI. Marketing automation requires that you also invest in software. Marketing automation typically takes 3 to 6 months to start producing a more consistent set of leads. So while you are also waiting for your new FTE hire to:
- Implement the system
- Create the content use to fuel the system
- Generate the leads to put into the system
You are burning through valuable resources and delaying the net return on your investment by not getting the tools and system as productive as quickly as possible. When you outsource sales and marketing along with marketing automation you will have sales ready leads before an FTE will even have your engine off the ground.
Bottom line, when you outsource sales and marketing in combination with outsourced marketing automation you will hit the ground running, with no training costs or ramp-up period required.
Having a blended teams collective experience, tactics, best practices and expertise at your disposal will give you access to a marketing automation and lead scoring brain-trust no single FTE can match. Especially when you consider that this blended team will have the collective experience of over 20, 30, or even 40 implementations under their belt to cross-pollinate best practices and set benchmarks from their past implementations.
So yes, when you outsource sales and marketing you will get all the benefits detailed above. But when it comes to building an automation system, the return will be even greater because ultimately all the investment will be returned even faster when your new and improved marketing automation program delivers a higher ROI faster because your blended team put the right skills behind the technology.
Gabriel Sales provides sales consulting & outsource sales and marketing automation services to companies committed to modernizing that sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our outsource sales philosophy and how we can help you build a sales and marketing revenue engine from start to finish, please visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
