It’s an uncertain economic world right now and knowing the best routes to market, locations etc. is a challenge. But every business needs to grow, and Account Executives (AEs), who drive customer acquisition and growth, and Channel Sales Managers who build crucial partner relationships for indirect revenue, are expensive but key to this effort. While traditionally sales is managed in-house, a growing trend involves outsourcing these functions to increase flexibility against hiring directly and to gain from the experience of the service providers. Here are four key benefits:
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Drive Down Direct Hiring Costs
Internal sales teams carry significant and so often underestimated costs – recruitment, salaries, benefits, training, technology, and management all add up. Outsourcing moves these high fixed costs into predictable, sometimes lower, variable or operational expenses. This means a clearer ability to map actual cost to revenue reward, paying for outcomes and results rather than the infrastructure. I have read potential reductions in customer acquisition costs by 25-30%. 1 It also reduces the risks associated with hiring mistakes and employee turnover – the latter may be inevitable in either model but in the outsourced, the responsibility and admin overhead sits with the provider.
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Instantly Access Sales Talent & Tools
Hiring and training top-tier AEs and Channel professionals is always a challenge. Outsourcing provides access to a pool of sales experts, often with deep industry knowledge and existing networks. As a by-product, can bring proven sales methodologies and best practices, so ramp up can be quicker. Plus, you can have the option to leverage someone else’s investment in the latest CRM, analytics, and automation without incurring additional or direct capital cost. The opportunity to deploy expertise and tech quickly allows you to focus on the bigger picture rather than tactical sales management.
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Scale Seamlessly Based On Demands
Outsourcing offers increased ability to scale sales operations up or down rapidly or to change product or geographic focus fast, in response to new opportunities, or like we have currently, rapidly changing economic factors. This is hard to achieve at pace with internal teams due to HR considerations, team location constraints and importantly for new product/market launches, a need to keep the current team focused and existing forecast protected. The reactive nature of outsourced models allow businesses to react to market changes, grabbing opportunities and minimising risk in uncertain conditions. Pricing models also allow for scaling of time allocation while testing these new opportunities versus the all-in approach of hiring – and some providers will allow the hiring of the team after a period of time too.
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Accelerate Growth & Market Penetration
Ultimately, outsourcing these roles can be growth fertiliser! By leveraging specialised, scalable teams, you can achieve significantly faster speed-to-market – potentially 40% faster than relying solely on internal teams.1 Access to the broader networks in the outsourced partner wider team and expert execution can mean demonstrably better results. Indeed, 79% of companies using sales outsourcing report faster growth, which is an opportunity to double down on successful campaigns.2
So…
The outsourcing option is not a cost-saving tactic but should be seen as a strategic enabler, even if not a long term plan. It provides you with cost control, immediate access to specialised talent and tools, operational flexibility, and a model to accelerate market penetration and growth that could be repeatable in a broader expansion. Key to this is finding the right provider, with the skills and experience and the right terms for you to engage e.g. the option to hire the team. Solve that, and this is a real opportunity to reduce risk.