Almost every aspect of a modern day business can be outsourced. Consider all the ways you rely on outsourced resources for your business already. Do you outsource legal and accounting work? What about recruiting? I’m sure you’ve outsourced shipping needs to FedEx or UPS on occasion, right? Tens of thousands of businesses rely on outsourcing to support back-end business functions and operations; and yet, it’s still hard for many business leaders to consider the benefits of outsourcing sales and marketing.
Many believe that essential functions responsible for driving revenue must be housed internally. This is a common misconception. Take logistics: Why do you choose to outsource to FedEx and UPS? Logistics is their core competency. They specialize in providing reliable shipping services with consistent results. Now, think of what it would take to build out a logistics team on your own. You’d need to purchase a fleet of trucks, then hire drivers and coordination managers. Instead, you outsource to a team of professionals who already have the experience and equipment to fulfill your objectives. It severely cuts overhead costs, and minimizes your risk of failure.
Outsourcing sales and marketing is no different.
Unless sales is a core competency of your business, it should be outsourced to a team of seasoned professionals who can deliver consistent results, increase profitability, and significantly reduce your overhead costs.
Below, we’ll look at what it takes to build and sustain an in-house team, and dive a little deeper into the reasons why outsourcing sales and marketing is the shortest path to success.
People
Keeping it in-house:
Consider the true cost of hiring, onboarding, and maintaining an in-house team of marketing and sales reps. It's a job seeker's market; so, if you’re a sleepy, middle market firm with lackluster presence and culture, you’re going to have a hard time finding qualified talent for your company. What ends up happening? Many businesses end up settling for mediocre players that will accept a mediocre compensation plan and produce mediocre results.
Every CEO can attest that recruiting, training, and compensating a sales and marketing team is a major long-term investment. Plus, you take on all the risk of making a bad hire. Simply knowing where to look for top talent is hard enough. Factor in the budget and time needed to attract and train a team that will consistently execute against a plan and meet quotas, and the odds are against you.
Let’s break down the average investment required to build and sustain an in-house team:
- It will take 30-90 days to hire and onboard a new sales rep
- 42.5% of sales reps will take 10 months or more to become profitable
- After those 10+ months, only one-third will consistently meet quotas
- Within 12-30 months, the majority of your reps will churn
You’ll spend upwards of 200% of your sales rep salary to repeat the hiring cycle and find a replacement.
Outsourcing Your Sales and Marketing Team:
By outsourcing sales and marketing, you can avoid the hefty investment and vicious cycle of sourcing, hiring, and replacing an in-house team. A credible partner provides a fully vetted team of marketing and sales professionals who are ready to execute on highly targeted campaigns that fit within your budget. Outsourcing also eliminates non-revenue producing activities by aligning sales and marketing goals.
For example, in-house marketing professionals tend to get sucked into designing collateral that only ends up being used by sales 30% of the time because it is not relevant to their prospecting efforts, or does not support their sales goals. And yet, 88% of missed opportunities could be avoided if salespeople had the right internal resources and collateral to leverage. By outsourcing, you’ll benefit from a team that proactively aligns marketing and sales campaigns to consistently execute against specific goals to drive revenue for your business.
Platform
Taking it In-house:
FullFunnel audits marketing and sales infrastructure of companies across industries on a near-daily basis. Here’s what we’ve found to be true of the majority of those companies relying on in-house sales efforts:
- 95% of companies with misaligned sales and marketing infrastructure have poorly managed CRM and Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs).
- The 5% of companies that do have functioning systems defer to third-party consultants to manage them and still fail to see a desirable return.
Outsourcing for Improved Business Systems:
Marketing and sales automation is only as effective as the people managing it. By outsourcing sales and marketing, you’ll get a team that is fluent in marketing automation and CRM optimization. That team will be ready to hit the ground running to build a suitable program that fits your budget and business model, or to optimize current systems to finally drive a positive ROI on your sales and marketing technology spend.
Process
Taking it In-house:
Let’s say you decide to take on the challenge of optimizing your sales and marketing operations internally. You purchase Salesforce, HubSpot, or other sales and marketing tools, and you hire a small group of sales and marketing professionals to keep it going. They take the necessary certification courses online and break for lunch. Now what?
Most of what makes for a successful sales and marketing engine is not visible on the surface. It is ALL reliant on solid processes. Completing a few certifications for your CRM or MAP is important, of course. But without understanding how to implement and operate these tools to prospect, nurture, and engage in a systematic way, your company’s program cannot flourish. A team that does not have consistent and scalable sales processes that make them effective will ultimately end up relying on relationship-driven team members who deliver inconsistent results. This will dilute your company’s ability to scale.
Outsourcing Sales and Marketing Processes:
Properly aligned sales and marketing can increase revenue threefold.
Outsourced teams of marketing and sales professionals specialize in a consistent process: building campaigns around revenue-producing activities that fit within your budget to acquire new customers and drive recurring revenue. And like FedEx and UPS, expert sales and marketing outsourcing firms are versatile. Because they’re consistently presented with opportunities to learn across many different accounts, they’re able to optimize efforts much faster than an internal team. This allows for the creation of truly scalable processes that are tested across many scenarios.
From the top of the funnel to the bottom, an outsourced team will consistently target qualified leads, drive inbound traffic, convert leads, and nurture prospects to close. Reevaluate your current infrastructure costs as they relate to your revenue generation. If you’re unsatisfied, then outsourcing sales and marketing may be right for your business. Request a consultation and learn how outsourcing sales and marketing can help your organization achieve the results you desire without the costs you dread.
The original publication date of this article was May 27, 2017. It has been republished in order to ensure that the information provided is the most accurate and up-to-date.
