Outsourcing sales could be the answer.
April 2008
Most business people feel fairly confident about talking about their products and services to a prospective customer face-to-face. But how do you get those appointments? One of the most effective ways is making calls to a target audience – unfortunately, this happens to be one of the most difficult ways. Getting to speak to the right person is a highly skilled job – handling objections, getting past the ‘gate keeper’ and making the valid points to the decision maker is no mean feat. It also involves a high level of rejection, which a lot of people find soul destroying. It’s a job that not many people are good at, and the ones that are, are highly sought after and can earn large sums of money. Needless to say, these high-performing individuals tend to get snapped up by the large corporates who can entice them with attractive remuneration packages. Not good news if you are an SME.
However, when sales is taken out of a traditional business model, and outsourced, it’s a completely different situation. Andy Dickens, Managing Director of Virtual Sales Limited, explains,
“There’s no two ways about it, sales is a high pressure job. For that reason, you get quite a lot of people who, for family and work/life balance reasons, want to step away from the relentless slog of a corporate role. However, many carry on selling part-time and begin a new career as a ‘virtual’ sales person. By outsourcing all or part of their sales operations, SMEs can get the benefit of highly talented sales people, for less than the fully loaded costs of actually employing them directly. Moreover, they don’t run the risk of sales people leaving their company and taking with them a lot of Intellectual Property.”
So how does outsourcing sales work? Well the idea, is that to the potential customer, the ‘virtual’ sales person is an employee of the company – they will have a company email address and phone number, and it will look seamless to any prospect. In actual fact, they will be working remotely, although they will have been thoroughly briefed on what they are actually selling.
Prior to an outsourced campaign being launched, there will be an all-important preparation period culminating in a ‘kick-off meeting’ when all the virtual sales people are thoroughly briefed. During the research of a campaign, the value proposition of the product/service will be discussed, and who the sales campaign is going to be aimed at. This could be based on a geographical area or a vertical market, and sometimes a combination of both or example, financial services companies in the South-East.
Then the database of potential contacts is researched, and if there is not sufficient information held, then high-quality data will be purchased. Once this is in place, the campaign will be discussed with the ‘virtual’ sales people and they will be thoroughly briefed.
Andy Dickens continued,
“We only use very experienced sales people with a good track record, and they never work from a script. Generally speaking we have to deliver a fairly complex B2B message, so the ‘call centre’ approach is totally inappropriate. Our clients basically get all the advantages of having a top sales person, without the hassle and expense.”
Once the calls start, a good ‘virtual’ sales person will reckon to make 75 calls a day in a typical SME campaign, which will actually result in them speaking to 25 people and getting one appointment as a result.
Andy said,
“In a lot of companies, a sales role is combined with a management role, for example a Managing Director will go to meetings with potential clients. But there’s no way that an MD has the time (or inclination) to make 75 phone calls a day. By outsourcing the sales effort, a constant stream of good quality leads can be filling the pipeline, whilst the full time-staff get on with running the company.”
Author: Andy Dickens
Company: Virtual Sales Limited
Telephone: +44(0)1798-875040
