Top Common Misconceptions About Outsourced Selling
May 2008
“Outsourced selling may be alright for some, but it’s not the right for model for me because……”Rapidly increasing in popularity amongst SMEs and corporates, Outsourced Selling is all the rage, but there are still a lot of commonly held misconceptions about it and how it works. Andy Dickens, Managing Director of Virtual Sales Limited, explains how the business works.
In theory, Outsourced Selling can work with any kind of a business from smallest start-ups, to established SMEs through to some of the biggest international organisations. However, people often misunderstand what it is and how it works, and think that it won’t work for them. Here are some of the objections that I hear to a company outsourcing its sales operations, and why they are wrong!
• We’re going to recruit our own in-house sales team
Really? Good sales people can earn large salaries and even larger commissions, simply because selling is very skilful, hard work and not many people have the aptitude for it. Top sales people naturally gravitate towards the top jobs on offer from the big corporates where they can earn six and even seven figure sums. However, working at that level is very stressful and every year some of those top people step away from the ‘front line’ for family or ‘work life balance’ reasons. A good outsourcer will recruit from this pool of people and so offer you a top notch sales person with a proven track record that you can have working for you from as little as a day at a time. Trying to recruit these kind of people directly is nigh on impossible, and the alternative is to employ a person with less experience who is still likely to cost you a hefty salary plus 25% on top for recruitment fees – not to mention that six months down the line you might find that even after all your training and efforts, they are not actually performing that well, and you have made an expensive mistake.
• I already have my own sales team
It’s common for an SME to have a couple of sales people who are expected to do all the sales related work: they generate their own leads, have to go out of the office on calls and close the sales too. This can be a moderately successful model, if you have found good people to work for you, but typically sales go through peaks and troughs. The sales person makes lots of calls and generates appointments and then as he/she is out on appointments they cannot be generating more leads!
We recently did a campaign for a company called Teleroute who have an on-line bulletin board service that matches freight forwarders with hauliers and vice versa. They had four sales people based in the UK and they were expected to generate their own leads and follow up and close. We did several campaigns for them and delivered over 164% leads from the first campaign based on our target. The sales people were very happy indeed and closed significantly more business as a result of the appointment setting campaign.
So just because you have your in own in-house team, don’t assume outsourcing won’t work for you. Adding some ‘virtual’ talent to your strategy can help transform your sales figures.
• I want to build my brand and not the brand of the Outsourcer.
A good outsourcer will help to build your brand. They will take time and trouble to get to know your company and the products and services that you need promoting. They will also assume your corporate identity, and introduce themselves as being part of the company – they will even have a company email address. The service should fit seamlessly into your company activity, and the prospective client will have no idea that they are not actually sitting in your offices making the call.
• I don’t want to lose control over the sales function, and surely this is inevitable with Outsourcing.
Good communication lies at the heart of a good outsourcing service, and when you are in discussions, this should be one of the core issues that you should investigate. As far as I am concerned, communication is one of our key value added functions and we do this in a number of ways. We give feedback using the preferred method that the client wishes such as Excel Spreadsheets or via their own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System in addition to regular calls and emails. Our philosophy is that we would rather over communicate! All our clients are advised at the beginning of the project when the caller will be working and they will receive regular feedbacks by phone, email and spreadsheet to show what calls have been made and summary outcomes of all the calls made on a day.
• We don’t need someone full-time
One of the main advantages of Outsourced Selling is its flexibility. You might start off needing as little as one day a week – but then you might want to launch a new project, and suddenly want a lot more resource. This can be arranged with very little notice, and reduced back down again afterwards. This kind of flexibility simply isn’t possible with PAYE staff and you certainly don’t get the correct level of skill with a temp.
Outsourcing Selling is the ultimate ‘add on’ for any business. We work with the most modest of start ups, and Microsoft has been a client for years. So whatever your set up, Outsourced Selling is worth investigating to make sure that you hit your sales targets, whilst taking the minimum amount of risk
Author: Andy Dickens
Company: Virtual Sales Limited
Telephone: +44(0)1798-875040
www.virtual-sales.com
