Sales as a Service

Maintaining the Sales Machine

If you are involved in sales in any way, as a chief executive, vice president, sales manager, or sales rep, you know that there is increasing pressure to “make your numbers.” Sales quotas continue to climb, but the resources remain the same, so every month is a scramble to meet higher goals. The sales team is being driven harder to perform, but sales goals don’t always map to the company’s long-term business objectives.

What many of today’s organizations lack is a sales model that delivers consistent, predictable, and scalable results. The sales program needs to be part of the strategic plan for the organization, providing a foundation for growth and generating the revenue to fuel that growth.

In order to remain nimble, competitive, and ready to respond to changing market conditions without wasting time or adding burdensome overhead, more companies are outsourcing their sales program. Our Sales as a Service® solution takes over internal sales tasks, provides strategic consulting, and works side by side with your sales and leadership teams to achieve the desired results.

"The sales program needs to be part of the strategic plan for the organization, providing a foundation for growth and generating the revenue to fuel that growth."

What We Mean by “Sales as a Service”

The concept of Sales as a Service has somewhat different meanings for different stakeholders. Most of today’s as-a-service business models relate specifically to cloud-hosted technology such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Storage-as-a-Service, and even Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). In all these cases, the customer is leasing cloud-computing services, tools, and technologies that are delivered over a high-speed internet connection. The customer benefits by outsourcing the hardware, software, and maintenance to provide those technology services, cutting operating costs while gaining resources that can be added virtually on demand. These types of services are highly reliable and readily scalable, and ultimately, the customer is buying an outcome rather than an actual item (“I need space to store my stuff, but I don’t want to buy a new hard drive”).

MarketStar’s Sales as a Service model applies hands-on expertise and the ability to work as a seamless extension of your current sales infrastructure. When you outsource sales to MarketStar, we build with you a dedicated, high-performance sales team that can deliver deals in a fraction of the time it would take to hire and train an internal sales team. MarketStar’s Sales as a Service offering is designed to deliver fast, comprehensive services and processes to help you quickly ramp up your sales volume.

"The MarketStar Sales as a Service business model takes full advantage of big data analytics, emerging sales technology, and recruiting and training top sales performers on your behalf."

Harnessing Data-Driven Sales

There was a time when you could set your sales goals based on gut instinct, how sales were last year, and how you thought or hoped sales would be this year. With technology advances, today’s sales executives are making data-driven decisions, using metrics and analytics to guide precision decision-making. Every sales decision needs to be guided using insight gained from analytics, and every sales outcome should be measured and analyzed.

Once the right big data processes and technology components are in place, forecasting and performing “what if” analytics becomes much easier. Using plug-and-play data reveals different outcomes to inform decisions about changes in staffing and business processes. We rely on our tech stack for ongoing analytics, creating a feedback loop that continues to generate insights into new ways to refine sales processes and continually improve sales performance.

"At MarketStar we don't just recommend the right analytics tools; we have core competency in setting up and administering data mining and analytics resources."

Defining and Redefining Sales Processes

Delivering predictable and consistent sales results requires well-defined and proven sales processes that are also adaptable. Successful sales teams create a structured framework for execution and reporting across the entire sales process. That way you generate metrics that provide insights into performance on a macro level, as well as for individual accounts, products, and sales reps.

MarketStar applies the best data science techniques, enlists the best professionals to do the job, and relies on their competency to not only improve sales performance, but to inform the activities that make the sales processes successful. This approach allows us to use performance metrics to continuously refine and improve processes for optimal sales performance.

Our mission is to develop sales methodologies and processes that are transferable. This provides consistency across our organization and our client companies, promoting closer collaboration between the MarketStar team and our customers’ in-house sales teams. It also improves training and onboarding of new sales talent and shortens time to productivity.

"MarketStar applies the best data science techniques, enlists the best professionals to do the job, and relies on their competency to not only improve sales performance, but to inform the activities that make the sales processes successful."

Creating a Culture of Sales Achievement

People are an essential component of any sales effort. People are responsible for selling and closing deals, and people have to use their interpersonal skills to connect with customers. Sales is a tough profession, so to recruit and retain the best sales professionals, we have created a work culture that celebrates professional achievement.

Even though we have created our own culture built on sales success, we also understand the importance of being able to adapt to our customers’ business cultures. That’s why MarketStar also rewards collaboration, integrating our best practices and values into those of the customers. It has been our experience that by creating a work environment that celebrates achievement, we often have an impact on our customers’ culture, challenging them to match our enthusiasm and success.

By creating a work culture built on recognition and collaboration, we continue to improve team performance across the board.

"MarketStar creates a work environment that celebrates achievement, often having a significant impact on our customers’ culture, challenging them to match our enthusiasm and success."

Coaching to Improve Sales Performance

Coaching is an essential part of any successful selling culture. Most sales environments set goals and objectives, but too often sales management asks the team to achieve the goals without the necessary tools and techniques. Rather than focusing on more supervision and empty platitudes, we use coaching as an effective tool to show reps not just what is expected, but also how to get there.

At MarketStar, we use a variety of coaching techniques to help improve our sales team. Sales training and support is individualized, and all salespeople are equipped with customized documentation that evolves with their training. In addition to established performance metrics and milestones, coaching includes self-assessments to make sure that the coaches and the sales reps are working together using the same criteria. 

Training sales managers is as important as training the sales team. Management training is structured to draw on sales executives’ experience, sharpening their leadership skills and showing them how to adapt what they know to specific situations, including applying coaching techniques for knowledge transfer. In many ways, sales management training is about showing managers how to coach themselves, adapt their skill sets, and improve their personal performance, as well as teaching them how to share that insight with the sales reps.

"At MarketStar, sales training and support is individualized, and all salespeople are equipped with customized documentation that evolves with their training."

Bringing it all Together

MarketStar has been refining the Sales as a Service business model since our inception. We have found that that this completely integrated approach is the best way to create effective and profitable sales processes. Combining the best people, data, technology, and training creates sales methodologies that serve as a gold standard for our team and our customers. Our sales processes ensure optimal, repeatable results that can be measured, documented, and shared, and that can be readily adapted to accommodate new market and sales conditions.

Drawing from decades of sales experience across multiple markets, MarketStar has been refining this sales model to ensure it delivers quality and consistency. MarketStar’s Sales as a Service® offering meets the challenge that today’s B2B sales managers face by providing a growth-oriented sales model that can become a reality more quickly and more affordably. MarketStar maximizes sales without the added pressure of hiring and training an in-house sales team. We also provide scalable, adaptable resources that can align sales processes with changing corporate objectives, delivering data and metrics to measure progress along the way.

In this climate of rapidly changing market conditions and new technology, it’s becoming harder to build and maintain a competitive sales force. Many successful organizations have realized that outsourcing to Sales as a Service is more efficient and more profitable than trying to keep pace with the rapidly changing market landscape. Partnering with MarketStar lets you scale your sales effort without losing control and allows you to build new sales processes and successes with little or no investment in added overhead or sales infrastructure.