Business growth is your goal, but sales is holding you back. Sound familiar? When companies struggle to expand their revenue and scale their business, it’s not always because they lack opportunity, but often because their in-house sales team can’t keep pace.
Based on what we have seen in our more than 30 years of experience in the outsourced sales industry, companies that scale an in-house sales team often take upwards of eight to 12 months to ramp up their small team into a thriving, productive operation. On the opposite end of the spectrum, augmenting your sales team with a Sales as a Service® company, like MarketStar, that specializes in delivering turnkey sales teams will give you the same results of scaling with less cost (most companies report a 15 to 20 percent savings) in about half of the time (full ramp can happen within six months) to manage growth.
What outsourcing your sales gives you is scalability, speed, and focus. This team is a dedicated resource, 100 percent committed to bringing in revenue for your company from all customer tiers—especially the elusive SMB space. It gives you a faster ramp to revenue, because it eliminates time-consuming steps like in-house recruitment, on-boarding, and training.
Here are six real advantages that Sales as a Service will bring to your business:
1. Speed and Flexibility in Hiring
According to a lead generation B2B marketing survey, the greatest barrier to internal hiring success is a lack of resources—including staff, budget, and time. With a dedicated sales provider, you remove those barriers, while also lessening the impact of critical issues such as sales rep turnover.
Using a time to fill metric that measures when a job req is opened to time of offer, MarketStar is 39% faster than the national average.
When you engage with a provider like MarketStar, you get experienced professionals who have perfected processes in on-boarding new sales reps (their specialty is ramping up reps quickly to maximize revenue on your behalf), and you increase revenue without adding internal headcount and all of the extra expenses that entails.
2. Technology-Enhanced Selling
You need advanced sales technologies to drive revenue acceleration. Outsourced sales organizations leverage cutting-edge technologies such as AI, big data, and machine learning to optimize sales performance and deliver tangible results. For example, when AI software is used to monitor sales calls, it can identify cues and phrases that can help or hurt the deal—providing a guide for sales reps to better understand target customers and giving marketing more insight into what resonates with prospects.
Technology-enhanced selling not only saves time and effort, but it also provides data for detailed analysis that can give managers real-time actions to help reps get better with every call. Using the right technologies can give you a real market edge.
3. Risk Mitigation and Proven ROI
With an outsourced sales provider, you can have multiple engagement models, including fixed fees and pay for performance. Revenue sharing makes your outsourced sales contractor a true partner, sharing the risks as well as the rewards. They bring proven ROI to the table, delivering revenue against a quota, and the revenue is trackable and attributable, often outperforming in-house sales quotas.
Any worthwhile sales as a service provider will offer terms of engagement where they share in the risk of fully-burdened costs because they’re confident in their ability to deliver results.
4. Scalability
Market agility matters, and you need your capacity to scale sales to keep pace with ever-changing market opportunities. With a sales provider, you can turn the volume up or down as needed. For example, you can start with a dedicated team of five reps and scale to 100 within weeks to gear up for a product launch, anticipated demand, or a fully realized segment push.¹
Your sales as a service provider does one thing and one thing only: They sell. This is particularly valuable when you need to capture revenue in an untapped market segment or in a new geographic area.
5. Expanded Revenue Streams
Outsourcing your sales team will accelerate the shift to a more cost-effective sales culture. Beyond the savings that your company can see in hiring an outsourced sales team, your perspective shifts from “how much can we save by outsourcing sales?” to “how much more revenue can we drive?”
Sales as a Service teams focus on lowering acquisition costs and increasing the lifetime value of their clients’ customers by taking advantage of every possible revenue stream, including up-sell, cross-sell, and renewals. It’s also a low-risk approach to innovation by testing new motions, entering a new market, or opening up a new region.
6. Hire for the Expertise You Need but Don’t Have
Understanding your expanded funnel of opportunity is key for generating the most revenue. Corporations traditionally are hard at work in the enterprise space, leaving the mid-market or SMB spaces as a forgotten niche with great opportunity for growth but no active pathway to capturing that growth. Most companies struggle with understanding how to sell to these spaces, as well as maintaining the expertise and rep type needed to be competitive and fluent in the SMB world.
By working with a sales as a service outsourced provider who has expertise and a pulse in the SBM space you do three things:
1. Generate new revenue in a space that largely goes untouched.
2. Introduce multiple types of sales reps, each of whom build in lifetime value with an intelligent cross-sell/up-sell approach (e.g., solution engineer, customer success managers, SMB partner recruitment reps).
3. Free your company to do what you do best. Let the experts manage lead intake, establish sales targets, and manage the sales process in order to deliver profitable and loyal customers.
According to recent research, the B2B space is expected to reach $8 trillion by 2020. To stand out, keep up with demand, and hit a new plane of growth, include an outsourced sales team as part of your forward-looking revenue plan.
