When to Outsource Sales and Marketing for a Small Business?
Outsourcing is growing and it is no longer uncommon to outsource sales and marketing for a small business.
When many small business founders reach their bandwidth capacity and contemplate growth they have two choices, they can build their own team or they can outsource sales. If you are considering outsourcing the sales and marketing functions and you understand your basic direct sales process, here are three reasons why outsourcing makes sense.
When to Outsource Sales and Marketing for a Small Business
There are three top reasons to consider outsourcing any function: saving money, freeing up time to focus on core strengths and more mission-critical functions, and gaining access to specialized skills.
When you outsource sales and marketing you first need to decide what it is you need. In most cases we find that the founder or business has plenty of time to close business. What they lack is the time to develop and qualify leads. So when you outsource sales and marketing it’s important that you don’t think of this has simply replacing one internal hire with another internal hire. Instead you need to think of it as replacing one hire with a blended team that has experience in both sales and marketing.
With that stated let’s look at each of these three reasons to outsource sales and marketing:
Outsource Sales and Marketing for a Small Business can Save Money
Expense is the primary reason why most companies consider outsourcing over hiring sales reps. If the current market for a quality business development rep is, as an example, a total compensation package of around $10K to $12K per month then outsourcing at $8k to $10K per month will be a substantial savings.
Instead of looking at this as one full time employee (FTE) vs. another outsourced employee you can look at it as getting a team of multiple employees that are part time. An outsourced sales and marketing company will provide phone reps, content marketers, database marketers and management. Most small business could not afford to staff and manage a part time team (let alone full time employees in all these functions). So depending on your lead volume, needs and growth targets, a blended outsourced sales and marketing team often represents a substantial savings.
Outsource to Focus on Core Functions
Beyond the core business operations and services a small business delivers, there are two goals and support functions in most small business: gaining clients and adding value to those clients. Most of the remaining support functions of finance, human resources, and information technology are the obvious candidates for outsourcing. We also believe that introducing the business to new prospects is also a function that makes sense to consider outsourcing. This is true now more than ever because the decision to outsource sales and marketing for a small business success requires understanding:
- Inbound lead generation tactics
- Outbound lead generation tactics
- Phone skills
- Automation technology
- Content marketing
Outsource to Gain Access to Specialized Skills
Most companies’ closers have specific domain knowledge and sales expertise. There is no way this knowledge (especially domain expertise) can be easily replaced. However a seasoned outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to extract this knowledge and add their expertise in the marketing tactics mentioned above to allow your organization to automate and increase the volume of conversations you are having through digital channels and over the phone.
Gabriel Sales specializes in building moderns sales and marketing operations for companies that already understand the core steps in their sales process. We help small business build scalable engines that address the new digital buyer. To learn more about how we work with companies to build these engines we invite you to reach out today.