Are your top sales executives sitting idle? If sales are happening at a snail’s pace, it is usually down to two factors:
- Insufficient lead generation
- Low conversion rate
If you have a great sales team in place, but you are struggling with lead generation, it’s time to look outside.
Yes! We are asking you to ‘Look outside for Inside-Sales’!
Outsourcing a core business function like lead generation may seem like a shocking move, but doing so can lead to some surprising benefits.
1. On-Demand Capacity
There are times when you need more people on your inside-sales team and that too on short notice. Having an inside-sales services company on your speed dial will help in situations when you need to add capacity at short notice. Such situations may crop up due to attrition, budget limitations, or due to other unforeseen causes.
One such case, we came across was when we got called to hire out a 4 member inside-sales team that could start working the next day! The Client was conducting an expensive direct mail campaign and realized there were discrepancies in the data. They needed more people on the team to quickly clean up the old data and to append new data. Outsourcing may be the only option in such situations.
2.Scaling
Hiring in-house resources takes time and effort. You will need to do job postings, screen prospects and conduct interviews to find the right persons for the role. Once this is done, the new hires must be inducted and trained to perform their tasks well. But when you are dealing with an inside-sales or lead generation company, you can ramp up or scale down your team as required. All you need to do is ask for resources to be assigned or removed. This flexibility is particularly advantageous for companies that have a seasonal pattern of sales, with periods of high sales volume and off-seasons. Outsourcing also insures you from attrition risks. For example, if an employee leaves, you need not worry about losing time while you are scurrying to find a replacement.
3. Access to Good Talent
Outsourcing inside-sales function to specialist firms helps companies procure the best talent to work on their business. Specialist firms are well-versed on strategies that work and those that don’t due to their experience working with several clients. Such firms develop best practices that enable them to pursue the right strategies to fetch results quickly.
4. Focus on core competencies
Inside-sales requires a team that is continuously generating new ideas to create or widen the sales pipeline, executing lead generation campaigns, and is tracking and monitoring the success of these efforts. If you are reluctant to expend organisational time and effort on measuring the contacts made every hour, lead qualification rate etc. outsourcing is your best option. Outsourcing saves time spent in hiring, training and managing resources. If product development is your company’s strength you can focus on it and contract an outside firm for lead generation and selling.
5. Cost savings
Talent and experience never comes cheap. To build a Rock-star inside-sales team you will need to offer competitive pay and benefits besides providing an excellent work environment. Licensing the best software and all the other equipment a sales team needs is going to further add up to costs. Outsourcing may help you avoid this investment and is cost effective. If cost savings are an important objective, try offshore outsourcing to reduce costs by as much as 50%.
6. Trial Runs Are Easy
Outsourcing gives you the flexibility to explore newer markets and/ new sales tactics. You can have the outsourcing partner assign resources to do trial runs of these markets or techniques to see if they are worth pursuing. The learnings from these trials runs can be a valuable input for your main campaigns and techniques.
Is it For you?
“To Outsource or Not?”, the answer to this varies as per context and situation. Outsourcing works for some and doesn’t for others. The better question: Is it For you? You should ask yourself if outsourcing “Inside-Sales” in your current situation will bring you the results you need.
The answer to this question depends on the length of sales cycle, deal value and technical complexity of inside-sales tasks.
Outsource, if :
Type of Tasks : cold calling, customer profiling, list building, identification of key decision makers, appending and cleansing data, setting appointments etc.
Complexity: If products and services offered by your company are not too technical and service doesn’t call for high degree of customization.
Sales Cycle: Short
Deal Value: Not high
Keep it in-house, when :
Type of Tasks: When tasks require high level technical and industry knowledge.
Complexity: sale process requires tech-heavy sales conversations and in-depth technical reassurance to buyers and sale needs customization of the sales process for each prospect.
Sales Cycle: Long
Deal Value: High
There are other ingredients that are needed for outsourcing to work, but these are the primary ones you should consider before you decide to outsource.
Outsourcing the inside-sales function has faced resistance particularly in the technology sector. IT companies are very skeptical about the capacity of outsourced teams to have the tech-heavy conversations necessary to put across their value proposition correctly. But the trend is slowly changing, and the IT sector is slowly waking up to the fact that their current sales-processes are not very cost effective. In-house inside-sales teams with a techie focus are not sufficiently sales, i.e., they don’t focus much attention on progressing the sales cycle quickly and on improving sales productivity. An outsourced inside-sales agency on the other hand will be able to deliver much better sales productivity by adopting a more results-driven approach.
The inside-sales services market has now developed to a point where companies can comfortably outsource their inside-sales to an outsourcing partner.
