You have a business to business product and are looking to start selling or grow your sales. Whether you are a small business just getting started or a growing business with established sales channels, there are many sales and marketing outsourcing benefits to consider. The question often comes up about how to do it.

You have two main alternatives to consider:
1. Hire a full-time sales person
2. Outsource your sales efforts

I am biased given the nature of what VA Partners does, however I would also argue that there are a number of compelling outsourcing benefits to help convince you to outsource your B2B sales efforts to a trusted third party.

Lets look at the key outsourcing benefits when engaging a B2B sales and marketing service provider:

Lets You Focus on What You Do Best

Successful owners and managers know that focusing on what you are best at is what drives success. If you are a great product development or engineering company and you have no expertise in sales nor do you have the time or resources to build out a sales organization, then sales and marketing outsourcing benefits trump doing it in-house.

Focus on your strengths, leverage an outsourced sales service to get things rolling, develop the sales strategy, messaging, process, sales methodology, infrastructure and do the actual work of selling. Outsourcing benefits include lower costs with less risk than having you try to lead the sales effort blindly. Like anything though, choosing the right sales outsourcing firm is important so be sure to do your due diligence.

Helps You Grow Faster

Many owners and senior managers wear multiple hats so their time is stretched as it is. You are the solutions expert, the finance head, the client success manager and the key sales person. You are busy and what typically happens is that as you get busy, the time you allocate for the sales effort dissipates. On of the compelling sales and marketing outsourcing benefits is that you can rely on a team to work on the outbound sales process for you. This fills that void and helps to drive fresh leads and new customer wins. Oftentimes, an outsourced firm is built to provide you with a measure of flexibility. So in many cases these firms can scale up or scale down to meet you budgetary needs. Remember, in the B2B sales world it takes 6 to 18 months to close anything of significance and it normally takes 8 to 13 (or more) touches to close a deal.

Eases Talent Acquisition

A lot of business owners and entrepreneurs are not sales people. So one question to ask yourself is how experienced are you at hiring and managing a sales person if you do not have a proficiency in the position? It is easy to hire someone, just hard to hire someone good.

Hiring the right sales person, just like any other key position can take a significant amount of time. So if you are not experienced in the role or have had success in hiring for the position before it leaves a lot of room for risk. Also, your sales person will need a sales infrastructure in place to help support them in their sales role. Do you have expertise in sales CRMs? Do you know how they work? What reports you want? What the expectations should be? Have you managed a sales funnel? What are the expectations for daily activities and how they roll up into the larger revenue targets? Do you understand conversion ratios and average job size and how that plays into your targets and the likelihood of achieving them?

Allows Flexibility

An outsourced sales resource is typically more flexible in their engagement model with you. An outsourced sales resource should provide the ability for their clients to scale up and down in hours per month as well as flexible commission structures where needed to ensure projects in competitive sectors are closed.

Is Cash Flow Friendly

Outsourcing a part-time B2B sales person can be much less expensive than hiring a full-time person. In addition to a lower cost per month, additional benefits including no employment burdens, vacation pay or health benefits.

Gives Continuity

The largest challenge many owners and senior managers face is that they have so many hats, sales gets forgotten until they are in dire need of revenue. Then the work and time it takes to drive new sales is often a killer. Utilizing a part-time B2B sales resource can provide a level of consistency required to achieve long-term sales success. As I mentioned earlier, it takes 6 to 18 months to close anything of significance and upwards of 13 touches. Without an ongoing commitment to following up and pushing to close at each step, the sales opportunity will be lost.

Ultimately, the main reason for bringing on a B2B sales outsourcing company is to engage a specialist to help you more effectively than you could do yourself. If you’re looking for outsourced sales and marketing assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us. For great insight into sales and marketing, feel free to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.