subject: An Alternative When You Need Sales People [print this page] Whether you are experiencing sales staff turnover or just natural growth, it is likely that you need sales people. Unfortunately getting new sales people can be both costly in terms of both time and money. It takes a tremendous amount of time to find, hire, and train new sales resources.
And all of that time is very costly whether the costs are being incurred by recruiters, trainers, or salaries going to the new sales resources. One alternative that a business can use to avoid these costs and secure resources is to look toward sales outsourcing.
What is Sales Outsourcing?
Sales outsourcing is to essentially pass off part of business' sales responsibilities to a service provider. Basically, the services provider becomes an extension of a business' sales organization and handles the tasks and responsibilities of some portion of the sales cycle. The sales outsourcer pays and manages the sales resources and then passes that cost along to the client in the form of a monthly or unit cost.
Of course the arrangement is completely transparent when the sales resources are out meeting with prospects. They represent themselves as being part of the client's organization and are just simply managed and paid by a different organization.
Many business that need sales people will outsource the very first portion of the sales cycle out to a sales outsourcer. The early or first part of the sales cycle is often cold calling, lead generation, or appointment setting and this is a fairly easy and straightforward portion to pass off to an external service provider.
Pros to Sales Outsourcing
There are some very clear benefits to using sales outsourcing when you need sales people and those are below:
Speed of expansion
Hiring new full-time sales people can take a tremendous amount of time. When outsourcing sales, you can have new sales resources in place and being productive often in less time.
Lower cost
If you look at the cost for services from a sales outsourcer you may think costs are high. But when you look at costs for hiring in-house resources like salaries, benefits, equipment, real estate, software, management, administrative, etc., it can often be less costly to outsources some of the sales function when you need sales people.
Better effectiveness
There are scenarios where a sales outsourcer can sometimes be more effective than a business. Of course, a business will know their products and industry better than a sales outsourcer, but if cold calling or telesales is being outsourced, the service provider may actually be more specialized in that area than that client and have better training, processes, tactics, etc.
Less of a headache
Early stages of the sales cycle can often be a headache for a sales organization. Nobody wants to cold call and it can be difficult to motivate and train resources how to effectively do this. By using cold call outsourcing, you get rid of that headache.
Less commitment
When you hire full-time sales resources, you are making some amount of a commitment to that person and investment. Sales outsourcing agreements are less of a commitment and can usually be scaled up and down according to business needs.
