Many small businesses reach a point in their growth where the owner and/or founders of the small business have:
- Established an effective business model
- Have gained traction with a product or solution
- Have run out of bandwidth to continue to both sell and run the company
- Simply need capacity help and expertise to ramp their sales efforts
This is when many small businesses will start to evaluate if an outsource sales organization will make sense for their business and growth goals. They will measure this against the costs associated with hiring, recruiting, training, and managing their own team vs. going with an outsourcing company that can immediately build modern sales and marketing operations.
Once you have made the decision to outsource sales you will then have a variety of different types of companies to work with. This article will give you some less obvious tips to address what you should consider when making a final decision on what outsource sales company you should work with. In many cases, these issues are intuitive, but they should not be overlooked as a conscious part of your final decision.
Here are tips for selecting an outsource sales company
Decide what part of the sales funnel you want to outsource. Sales outsourcing can entail many functions. You can focus on new awareness campaigns, outbound lead generation campaigns, opportunity development, and appointment setting and closing.
Choose complementary sales partner. Once you have decided what stage of the sale funnel you want to outsource, it’s important to find the right fit. To short list, its important to understand what types of sales processes the outsource sales company has experience in. SaaS sales that can be completed online with no involvement from a sales rep requires a different type of expertise than more complex sales that require a sales rep to manage the transaction of the sale. Short sales cycles function differently from sales cycles that are 90 to 180 days. Understand what type of experience the outsource sales company company has, to ensure you’re making the right decision on your sales partner.
What technology do they have experience using. One of the keys to long-term success is getting the right sales and marketing technology stack in place. At a minimum, this now requires a CRM and marketing automation technology to stay top of mind with buyers not ready to purchase immediately. It’s important to understand if the company will be:
- Using systems
- What systems they will be using
- Will you have access to these systems during the engagement
- What happens if the partnership ends – will they transfer the system or will the system go away?
Are they willing to start slowly and build gradually? Outsourcing all of your sales and marketing activity can be high risk immediately. Costs can quickly run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars if you staff marketers, lead gen reps and closers immediately. As discussed above, you should find out if the sales outsourcing company is willing to start with developing the front end of the funnel, and then as the volume of leads increases, are they willing to add resources as needed. This will allow your business to establish relationships and build the working rapport to grow the partnership organically within your organization.
How will you monitor and evaluate your progress? Once your sales outsourcing activities begin, depending on your sales cycle, it can take months or even a year to evaluate how many deals it produces to measure your true ROI. It is important to keep track of meaningful measurements prior to this to understand the relative short-term success or failure of your sales outsourcing strategy. It’s important to understand how and at what frequency your sales outsourcing will provide these metrics – what they will be measuring and why?
About Our Outsource Sales Services
Gabriel Sales helps small business and start-ups build modern sales and marketing operations.
If you need assistance scaling your company’s revenue, building modern sales and marketing automation or just need to put more sales qualified leads in your closer’s sales funnel, Gabriel Sales may be able to help. To learn more about our approach to outsourced sales, we invite you to check out our sales outsourcing services page.
