Building a professional, dedicated sales team is crucial to expanding business, particularly into a new market such as the UK or Europe. And outsourcing sales and lead generation to a specialist team could be a cheaper, faster alternative to trying to recruit your own team of local sales reps with knowledge of the area.
The debate over sales and lead generation
High-quality leads, backed up by an effective sales pipeline to turn potential contacts into paying customers, is what drives sales orders and generates revenue.
Situated, as they are, on the market front line, lead generators can also provide invaluable insight into your potential customers: who they might be; where to find them; their needs and preferences.
Refining your sales process also ensures that customers have a positive, hassle-free interaction with your brand. Getting this right offers additional advantages such as cost savings, scalability, access to specialized skills and expertise, increased efficiency, access to market trends information, and more.
However, for almost as long as sales has been studied as a serious subject in its own right, there’s been a heated debate over how to build a sales team; whether it’s best to build or expand an in-house sales force or to delegate all or part of your sales activities to an external third party, ie outsourcing your lead generation and sales functions.
The pros versus the cons of outsourcing lead generation and sales
Companies have understandable concerns around entrusting an outside party with such an important and potentially sensitive job, including guaranteeing data security, the feeling of losing control or the suspicion that a third party may not be so dedicated to your success. Set against that, though, is the challenge of finding the right talent, or even create a whole new team, and usually under time pressures.
And both options come with actual or perceived spending implications; against the obvious costs of paying a monthly retainer when hiring an outsourced sales company you have the internal budgetary demands of recruiting, increasing your payroll and providing the in-house resources needed to get your own team up and running.
As for motivating your sales force and controlling their efforts, concerns here can be overcome from the start of a partnership by setting smart objectives for a shared vision of success. Any contract can also define KPIs, robust information flows and regular reviews, along with a system of rewards and penalties.
And with no shortage of outsourced sales teams to choose from, you can interrogate candidates to find which one aligns best with your goals, work practices and values. You may also enjoy benefit of avoiding any inter-departmental politics, power plays and personality clashes that can arise internally.
Looking to the future, with an outsourced team maintaining specialist skills, adding new skills and upscaling or downscaling when required are no longer your problems either.
Indications that you may need specialist outsourced sales support
Have you noticed any of the following issues in your own organisation?
- The quality of your current leads is sub-par and not generating revenue. You may love networking and meeting potential clients but be honest – along with all your other duties are you able to spend sufficient time and effort to build up the leads you need and then follow them up? An outsourced lead generation team focus on nothing but getting quality leads and hitting your sales targets.
- You’ve noticed erratic workflows that deliver orders some months, but then go for a while before you get more new business. If you are lacking leads altogether, or your lead generation is erratic so that you don’t have a consistent lead stream, then you aren’t alone. Again, your marketing may be too reliant on you, so that when other demands make you take your eye off the sales ball, you get periods of feast or famine. With a dedicated outsourced team which isn’t being pulled in other directions by priority changes, a planned schedule of activities across multi-discipline marketing will ensure a reliable flow of leads so that you and your team can focus on delivering your products or services.
- You don’t have a sound system to organize and manage your leads, turning them into regular and reliable paying clients. Even if you have some great leads, without a process for following them up consistently and in a timely way, sales opportunities will slip between your fingers. A team of experienced lead generators will bring with them solid processes, supported by specialist software, to identify the leaks in your sales funnel and stop them. A structured lead scoring system and data collation will prevent you from wasting resources and efforts on poor leads which will cost you money over time.
- You don’t have enough meetings with prospective clients to generate the sales that you need to grow your business into a new market. Do you know what your closing rate is? Have you set a sales quota? Building and managing an effective sales pipeline comes down to hard statistics. It’s been estimate that on average only 1 in 50 meetings lead straight to a sales, so you need to be realistic about the resources you need to feed enough leads and meetings into your sales pipeline to ensure a sufficient level of sales each month. This may be beyond your own resources.
If you recognise any of these issues, then you may need to bring in some outside help to focus purely on lead generation and sales activities.
The next step
An effective outsourced sales team will be able to bring a suite of expertise to work in partnership with businesses of any size and in any sector, streamlining overall processes and increasing efficiency. By relying on the expertise of professionals, your business can achieve the sales results you need to grow and expand into new geographical areas while you free up your own team to focus on other important aspects of your business.
If you would like to know more about the outsource sales services, please visit our page