subject: Use Sales Outsourcing To Achieve Growth [print this page] Just about every business is focused on growth and increasing sales. And one of the key factors that limits the growth businesses are able to achieve is size of the sales organization and number of front-line sales resources they have.
With sales resources being expensive from a hiring, training, paying and retaining standpoint, it is not uncommon for a business to not have a sales organization that aligns with the desired growth plan. That being said, one way to resolve this misalignment is through the use of sales outsourcing.
Outsourcing sales can take on many different shapes and colors, but the ideal scenario is for a business to always maintain core internal sales staff but to outsource certain tactical areas to augment its existing footprint. For example, outsourcing cold calling is a common way that companies are looking to shift certain tactical tasks off of their internal resources so that they can work on more strategic activities.
Below are a few benefits of outsourcing some sales functions:
Speed
It is fairly time consuming to recruit and train the right resources. You could post a job and take the first to apply quickly, but to find the right resources that fit in with the culture, map well to the job, and are worth investing in can take a tremendous amount of time from both a recruiter and management perspective. With sales outsourcing, a service provider will typically have resources that are ready to be trained and take on the workload helping to drastically increase the speed of growth.
Lack of commitment
Staffing up an organization is a significant commitment in terms of infrastructure, investment, and resources. If the business environment or corporate strategy changes, it can be very difficult and costly to walk away from the commitment. By leveraging a sales outsourcing model, a business can typically scale up, or scale down, the services as needed and with more flexibility.
Headcount avoidance
Sales outsourcing allows companies to grow with headcount avoidance. This means that company will be able to do more and technically have more bodies working and do this without increasing headcount. This can be beneficial for many different reasons.
Specialization
By outsourcing some of the tactical sales functions, like cold calling for example, a business can create and leverage more specialization. If cold calling is taken off the plate for seasoned sales executives and transferred over to a cold calling service provider, the sales executives can become more specialized in strategic activities like account planning, presentations, proposals, etc. and the business can leverage the already existing specialization in cold calling that the service provider has.
Cost
A business can stand to either decrease cost or grow with less incremental cost through sales outsourcing. From a recruiting, training, compensation, benefits, and overhead perspective, sales resources are fairly expensive. And when you breakdown that cost to get to the true cost of a cold call, it can be expensive for seasoned staff to perform some of the tactical sales functions.
