Around the globe, the market for Sales as a Service continues to grow. Today, some of the world’s most successful businesses, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, are augmenting their in-house sales teams with an outsourced model to drive revenue.
But what exactly is Sales as a Service? The term can feel a bit ambiguous, so we want to take a closer look at what exactly it means and how companies can leverage it.
Defining Sales as a Service
Sales as a Service is a term derived from today’s other as-a-service business models, such as software as a service or storage as a service. Most of these service offerings relate to cloud-hosted technology; the service provider owns the hardware and/or software, which the customer leases in order to avoid large capital expenditures.
Sales as a Service works in a similar way, but it goes well beyond simply hiring off-site sales reps. Here are the core elements of a successful Sales as a Service offering:
A dedicated sales force
Sales as a Service provides organizations with a dedicated sales force, staffed with highly experienced sales professionals who focus solely on sales. These sales reps fully learn the client’s brand and products so that they are qualified enough to act as a true representative of the client’s company.
Outsourcing your sales force eliminates the work, expense, and time required to recruit and train your own in-house staff. It also allows your team to focus on core business and enables you to quickly and effectively scale into new markets, segments, and geographies.
Big data analytics
In our digital world, data should inform nearly every sales decision. However, gathering and analyzing relevant market intelligence can be costly and time consuming.
A Sales as a Service partner can take on data gathering and analysis, empowering your business to track important trends, analyze loyalty, and assess your entire sales outreach strategy. These insights have proved invaluable for companies looking to expand upon previous successes and open new markets and regions.
Emerging sales technology
Utilizing Sales as a Service is a cost-effective way to optimize your sales process with cutting-edge sales technologies—including CRM, voice AI, and automation—without having to invest in the tech yourself. An outsourced sales team will also use real-time analytics to continually improve the performance of each rep.
Value for Your Business
Next, let’s explore some ways that Sales as a Service adds value to your sales team:
Highly specialized talent
Believe it or not, your products or ideas are not the sole influences on your sales. Behind every successful sales team is a dedicated group of people. Stellar customer experience is vital for organizations to drive sales. And Sales as a Service teams are built with highly skilled individuals who understand the importance of creating great experiences and building lasting relationships.
An outsourced sales team includes highly specialized professionals with powerful skills, such as engineers, high-tech field reps, Customer Success managers and technical partner managers.
These and other specialty sales reps can offer deep knowledge of your products and services and expertise in sales and analytics technology, as well as technical support and sales development skills. Sales as a Service provides your organization with connected, engaged reps who are empowered by data. Through predictive analysis and screening tools, it augments internal teams by providing the professionals who best fit your sales culture and embody your brand.
Powerful technology
Your Sales as a Service partner should utilize a powerful sales technology stack to ensure your company benefits from best-in-class sales resources. This means your team benefits from technology platforms such as Salesforce, Gong, Outreach and Dialpad without having to invest in the tech yourself.
Data-driven insights
By leveraging the latest sales technology and tools, Sales as a Service provides visibility into what is and isn’t working. It also provides analytics and reporting to assess program needs so that your organization can make intelligent business decisions that produce predictable, repeatable results.
Time and cost savings
Sales as a Service also significantly improves speed to market, saving your team time and streamlining the sales process. It enables organizations to deploy a highly effective workforce without investing in costly and time-consuming infrastructure.
Hiring an in-house sales team can take months. Sales as a Service allows companies to create and manage a reliable sales force without recruiting, hiring, and training reps. In the time it takes to hire one senior sales person, outsourcing can provide companies with access to a full team of dedicated sales professionals.
Flexibility and minimal risk
Moving to a Sales as a Service model provides companies with optimal flexibility, since they can deploy and scale a sales team quickly, on an as-needed basis. Also, since all the hiring and technology investment is done on the side of the SaaS provider, your company takes on a very low level of risk.
Getting Started
The evolving sales landscape has prompted a shift away from traditional, in-house sales teams. What hasn’t changed, however, are your aggressive sales goals—even in the face of a global pandemic and incredible economic uncertainty.
As a result of COVID-19, today’s sales organizations are being challenged in ways they never imagined. In the midst of this unprecedented time, Sales as a Service is a reliable way for organizations to cost-effectively bolster their sales, shore up their existing customer base and grow at rapid speed. And as you look forward to a post-COVID world, outsourcing part of your sales functions will help you to deploy a dedicated workforce in a fraction of the time, while also leveraging the best talent available.
This blog was originally published on February 6, 2017 and updated on September 14, 2020.
