This blog is to help companies thinking about sales outsourcing to improve the long-term results and effectiveness.
Gabriel Sales is an sales outsourcing company in the truest sense of the word. Sales outsourcing is not necessarily cheaper (at least in the short term). It’s about making your investment work harder and smarter. Sales outsourcing should make you more effective. You get access to shared tools, sales and marketing expertise, sales management expertise and processes required for success.
Companies don’t generally come to us because they are wildly successful on their own. They come to us because they want to close more business faster. In most cases, that requires consulting upfront. This blog is designed to help you be as honest as possible about how much consulting you might need prior to starting a sales outsourcing relationship.
There are a multitude of options for companies to drive sales other than of building their own internal team. Wikipedia has great overviews of your options -from channel sales, to resellers, to manufacturer rep to outsourced sales companies. When discussing outsourcing sales, where we like to start the conversation is the word “outsourcing” itself:
Outsourcing involves the contracting of a business process – previously performed in-house – to an external provider.
Outsourcing = Process previously performed transitioned
By this definition very few companies are looking for pure sales outsourcing, which is why we define ourselves as a sales execution, sales consulting and sales content marketing company. We execute while we consult.
During our initial conversation with potential clients looking for “outsourced sales”, what we discover with a little back in forth is some of what they are currently doing works and some of it does not, so we separate the issues. We quickly discover what they really need is a combination of 2 to 5 of the areas below:
- Sales scripting
- Outsourcing lead generation
- Outsourcing lead nurturing
- Outsourcing sales qualifying
- Outsourcing sales closing
- Sales Consulting
- Commission only reps
- Contracted Sales Reps
When someone is looking for a contracted rep or commission only, they are not really interested in a repeatable sales process which means by definition it’s not outsourcing (at least our definition).
When we talk to most companies we work through a formal process to identify how much consulting they need, so we can figure out how fast we can start executing to fill their pipe. Generally we can start executing and consulting concurrently. We have a formal process called the Gabriel System™ that makes this easy for our clients. We can generally get through this discovery process within the first week of launch and be on the phone filling the pipe within two weeks. What follows below is an abridged overview of what we extract during Gabriel System™ discovery process. Unless you are a pure start up launching from scratch, something you are doing is already successful. It’s our aim to figure out what is working, so we can improve on that for exponential growth.
Our first set of questions surrounds how mature that sales function and process really is:
- What is the historical sales cycle?
- How accurate was last years forecast?
- How many meetings does a typical sale take?
- What is the material presented in each one of those meetings?
- What digital content is being consumed are part of the sale?
- How many cold calls does it take to put a prospect into the pipe?
- How many prospects are currently in their nurture pipe?
- What are their typical conversion metrics? (Including: lead generation to sales qualified prospects, sales qualified prospects to sales proposals, sales proposals to closed sales, closed sales to upsell)
- Do they have cold call script? Do they have first call scripts?
- Is the pricing model fixed? When was the last time it was changed?
- Who are there top three direct competitors? Who are there top three indirect competitors? Why do you win? Why do you lose?
- What markets have you targeted? What is the market size? What decision maker do you sell to in that market? Why do they buy your product? What is there Return on Investment?
- What technology platforms are you using for sales force automation, marketing automation, direct marketing, cold calling, database providers, list management, webcasting, video?
- Do you have a creative agency and how will we collaborate with them? Is marketing an internal function?
Our second set of questions (really just one question): How much of this is documented?
- If its fully documented you are ready to outsource
- If its not you need some sales consulting too
Our third set of questions is specifically about each stage of the discrete part of the sales process -happy, not happy, needs improvement- grouping them as follows:
- Lead Sourcing and Targeting?
- Lead Generation?
- Sales Qualifying?
- Sales and Marketing Alignment?
- Sales Engagement and Sales Pipe Velocity?
- Sales Metrics?
- Sales Closing and Sales Upsell?
Our final set of questions is about how message and content readiness:
- Do they have a positioning document
- Do they have a messaging document
- How much collateral do they have and what type of collateral
What does this all boil down to? The more honest you are upfront with an outsourcing sales partner the faster they will be productive. We encourage you to be honest and clear about what is broken that you need fixed:
- Be clear if you are happy with specific sales processes. If you you are happy your process and your process is documented, then you are completely ready to outsource with no consulting
- If you want to improve specific sales functions or specific tactics to compete more aggressively, then you may need a little consulting in specific areas
- If you are looking for an overhaul, you probably need full sales, sales process, and/or sales message and content consulting upfront
The value Gabriel Sales brings to the table as a sales outsourcing partner is that we don’t wait to start executing. We lead with execution and support with consulting. We execute to fill the pipe to shorten your sales cycle, while we simultaneously consult to improve your strategy. Doing both simultaneously gives everyone the hard data, metrics and qualitative insights required to create a winning and competitive sales machine without costing us valuable time getting to the market. We execute and consult simultaneously because Gabriel Sales generally works with teams that want to win and want to double sales growth year after year, so we understand:
- Unless you are on the field taking shots on goal you don’t get 2X growth and…
- If they are bad shots on goal you don’t get 2X growth
If you are interested in getting to the market with speed and would like to learn more about how we can get you into the market fast with the right sales strategy please CONTACT US for a free pipe velocity review.
