Selecting an Outsource Sales Company

Selecting an Outsource Sales Company

 

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.

 

Picking an outsource sales company

There are multiple reasons to consider an outsource sales company for lead generation and lead qualification to help you grow your revenue and shape your company’s growth strategy.

For example, a tech start up that has a proven product may need to accelerate its sales efforts prior to a round.  Or an established business may need to test a new market. Employing an outsource sales company will help you get to market faster – an experienced sales outsourcing and marketing firm enables the startup to hit the ground running with an experienced sales team, rather than wait six months or longer to recruit and train an internal team.

Another typical reason involves testing a new solution or a new process or strategy. An outsourcing team can take on the blocking and tackling of generating leads and sales opportunities for the new product. This allows your existing sales force to stay dialed in on the established product line. With an outsource sales team, you can fine-tune your process for the new solution, document the process and lay the groundwork and infrastructure for a full-scale roll out with your existing team.

Sales outsourcing can also immediately improve a company’s targeting capacity, cold-calling efforts, email marketing tactics and inbound lead generation approach.  All this will increase your capability and capacity to identify qualified leads and drive deals into the sales funnel.Integrated Outsource Sales Process

 

So once you’ve decided hiring an outsource sales company makes sense for your company, here are 3 tips to help ensure you make an intelligent decision about which company is right for you:

Evaluate the outsource sales team’s credentials

When choosing any vendor, it’s important to understand who they have successfully worked with in the past. Most sales outsourcing companies will have case studies online and will also have testimonial videos available.  And before you make the final purchase, they should be OK with you checking references from other clients.  Ask questions about the specific sales and marketing gaps you would like them to cover.

Determine if there is a strategic fit

A solution only works if the vendor’s capabilities meets your organization’s needs. When you outsource sales this means different things to different companies. Ask direct questions about their areas of strength. Some focus primarily on lead generation.  Some focus end-to-end sales services.  Others, like Gabriel Sales, build modern sales and marketing operations that can be transitioned over to the company.  It’s also important to consider a firm’s flexibility in adapting to changes in your sales needs. Will they transition teams or systems to you?

Examine processes expertise

Take a close look at what they are best equipped to service. Can they help you implement a process for pure transactional sales?  Are they experts in solution sales where a senior rep needs to manage the close of the transaction? Examine how they report on sales metrics and if they can help you forecast. Will they share data or hide data? Do they help you grow your business? Or do they just put deals into your pipeline? Do they do both?

Assess the sales outsourcing and marketing technology stack

An outsource sales firm’s technology capabilities and expertise is now a key factor in the selection process. What type of demand-generation technologies does the firm employ? Are they using marketing automation? How will it make use of CRM and analytics to achieve your objectives? Are they tied to a set of platforms or are they flexible?

Other factors when selecting an outsource sales company

Other issues evaluate a potential an outsource sales company:

  • Experience in your industry
  • Experience with your decision maker type
  • What type of feedback do they provide?
About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Solution

Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations to help small businesses and start ups build a consistent and sustained flow of qualified leads. To learn more, please visit our outsource sales approach page.

How an Outsource Sales Email Campaign Works

outsource-salesStaged Process to Get the Most from an Outsource Sales Outbound Campaign

One of the challenges facing most businesses trying to scale their sales and revenue is having too few leads in there automated nurturing campaigns. This is especially true for small businesses where cold calling and Google Adwords is extremely competitive or simply too expensive. This is why we often create leads with an outsource sales email campaign to help ramp our client’s sales funnels.

In most cases, email can be the fastest way to ramp a sales funnel. But simply buying a list and then blasting that list is no longer effective. Can-SPAM laws and Google blacklisting make this a high risk tactic.

Below are six steps you can take on your own or steps an outsource sales company will take to fill your top of funnel with a successful email lead generation campaign.

1) Define your goals

An outsourced sales company will help you define your goals. How many leads do you need? How many leads can you handle? They will also work with you to understand how quickly you need these leads and set the proper expectations of what you can expect a campaign to produce:

  • In the short term – immediately after the campaign
  • In the mid term – with nurturing
  • In the long term – once outsourced sales reps start to follow up

2) Target Your Ideal Audience

After defining your goals, an outsourced sales company will be able to approach multiple third-party vendors to develop a campaign that hits the right audience at the right price. In most cases, this will include both decision makers and influencers because the best email marketing campaigns target the widest audience possible. This is because more and more decisions are now not make by a single decision maker but by decision making units that include:

  • A business buyer
  • A technical buyer
  • An end-user

3) Build your campaign engagement plan

After you identify your target audience, an outsource sales company will help you prepare the copy and create the landing pages for the educational content offers you will be using as part of your campaign. The most effective campaigns are typically run in a series of three messages that will resonate with all the different types of buyers and influencers in your target audience.

4) Deploy your email campaign

An outsource sales partner will then deploy the campaign through the third-party vendor. This includes managing the tests and the best times to deploy. Typically the best campaigns includes testing messages on the first two parts with A/B split tests and then using the best performing offers and messages in the final campaign.

5) Measure KPIs

Identify the most relevant KPIs for each campaign and be sure to track results and performance. This also includes prioritizing what are the best leads to follow up with first if you do not have a nurturing campaign or if you are under immediate pressure to bubble up some early stage opportunities.

6) Move them into a nurturing campaign

In most cases, an eProspecting Email campaign is only the first step in a lead generation campaign. Once you have generated the lead, you will need to move them into your marketing automation campaign. An outsource sales company can help you with this as well.

About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Services

Gabriel Sales help companies generate a sustained flow of leads using multiple tactics as part of modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our page that discusses our integrated sales philosophy and our 20 years of history of helping companies scale sales with outsource sales services.

How to Outsource Sales to help with Lead Generation

How to Outsource Sales to help with Lead Generation

Time is money-the time to outsource sales is now!

Lead generation is the critical first step in sales. A great sales person highly skilled at closing business may not have the time, and in some cases the skills to generate leads. In most cases it is not worth their time or effort to focus on many of the daily tasks required to generate leads. That is especially true in this day and age when the majority of buyers prefer to learn about new products and services with a quick call and a follow up email that explains the problems your company helps the buyer to solve. Hiring a company proficient in outsource sales could prove extremely beneficial.

Below are the four ways you can outsource marketing and sales to help you generate more leads in 2017.

One – Craft a comprehensive approach

Far too many small businesses do not have a systematic approach for producing new leads. Most small businesses sporadically send out emails and have their sales reps make phone calls when they have the time. The result generally gives credence to the old adage – Fail to plan and plan to fail. Success now requires a systematic and comprehensive strategy for generating leads.

An outsource sales and marketing company will be able to help you craft a repeatable and systematic process that will help build a consistent flow of leads into your closers sales funnel. At Gabriel Sales, our  lead generation solution typically entails a combination of email marketing, cold calling, follow up call, google campaigns and social media out reach.

The most effective lead generation approaches allow you to reach the buyer multiple times. This requires multiple tactics, and you need to build a plan and then stick to the plan.

Two – Lead generation require content

According to multiple studies, the majority of buyers that are not immediately looking for a solution now prefer to learn about a new product or solution through a quick phone call followed up by an email that shares educational content. You now need content for effective lead generation.  This content doesn’t need to overproduced, but it should be professionally done and it should be educational. Early stage lead generation should not sell. It should educate. Then, you need to support the development of the lead with additional content.  Here is a link to a blog post that explains the type of content you will need and how it should be used. This explains the graphic below in a little more detail. You can start a successful lead generation program with as little as two or three simple, well done and educational pieces of content like checklists, webcasts, blog posts and explainer videos. An outsource sales and marketing company can help you to quickly product them.

Three – Use multiple tactics

As we touched on the topic above, you need to use multiple tactics. The days of throwing bodies at the telephone to just smile and dial are over. You can no longer depend on just one tactic to generate leads.

Once you have your content created there are multiple ways to reach out and share that content. We recommend that you keep it simple, but that you also use multiple approaches simultaneously. The goal is to get that educational content in front of as many buyers as possible multiple ways. An outsource sales company will be able to help you do this with emails, phone calls, mailed packages, Google retargeting campaigns and social platforms. We typically recommend using 3 to 5 approaches. When you use multiple approaches, you will triple your chances of getting your message to buyers.

We also recommend that you use a marketing automation platform to score buyer engagement. You can learn more about how and sales and marketing outsourcing company can help you do that that in this quick blog post .

Four – Set realistic goals and stick to your plan

Unrealistic goals can quickly destroy your momentum. When you work with an outsource sales and marketing company they will be able to help you benchmark what you can expect. Then, you need to set a 90 degree strategy and stick to it. Lead generation is a grind, but it is worth it. It is also a discipline that is like training for a sport; you need to do the same things daily and weekly to produce results. An outsource sales and marketing company will ensure that these daily and weekly blocking and tackling takes place and they will measure and report on results with regularity

Gabriel Sales specializes in help SMBs and Start Ups launch modern sales and marketing operations and to build successful and custom best practice strategies for lead generation. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services we invite you to visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.

When to Outsource Sales if You Are a Small Business

When to Outsource Sales if You Are a Small Business

The Right Time to Outsource Sales

When you outsource sales and marketing this strategy can be a significant competitive advantage if the timing is right and your business is prepared for it. However the decision to outsource is not always the right option for every business. Below, we outline several items and issues that should be considered.

In general, the time to outsource sales makes sense when:

Speed to Market is Important – For startups, new businesses or established businesses that are changing their business model or going through new product launches, an sales outsourcing team provides a very quick path to both a fully trained and managed outsource sales team, and an experienced marketing team for one cohesive sales and marketing team that can provide turnkey support across the entire lead generation and buying cycle.

Your Executives Have Grown the Company and Bandwidth is Tapped – Many small businesses generate their first 500K to 2 million in sales on the backs of one or more of their owners or a single rock star senior sale executive. Companies at this stage typically need these resources to continue to focus on closing so the early stage sales funnel starts to suffer. You can start to outsource sales by leveraging an outsourced sales partner to fill your closers sales funnel with increased real sales opportunities. As your outsourced sales team learns more about your business the can continue to take deals deeper into the funnel.

You Are Ready to Implement a Repeatable Process – If you outsource sales, you will get the best production if you can sell your solution through the same staged process in a repeatable way. If you are confident that you are successful selling your solution in a similar way the majority of your time you can then expect your allow your sales outsourcing partner to document and script the process for methodical results.

Lack of Time or Resources to Build a Team– Many small business do not have a full time recruiter or HR professional on staff. A sales outsourcing company will have both the existing talent in place on the sales and marketing side. In many cases you will get access to a blended team of sales, marketing and executive talent for the price of one to two individuals.

You Need a Part Time Experienced Sales Executive – Many small businesses are started by founders with natural sales skills and closing abilities. But these same founders have also never built, managed and led a sale and marketing team. If you outsource sales executive to manage your account is typically part of the package. This will remove the need for founders developing the skills set and learning the systems required to manage a sales team.

You Have Not Invested in Technology or Infrastructure – Early stage lead generation and development now requires a suite of tools to score leads (marketing automation), and manage leads (CRM). If you have not invested in and implemented these tools, a sales outsourcing team will be able to provide these tools and leverage best practices to implement them at a fraction of the cost of launching them on their own.

Gabriel Sales is a full service marketing company that is adept in sales outsourcing. To learn more about our philosophy and approach, we invite you to visit our Outsource Sales Page Services and About us Page.