Every startup needs a strong sales team. Building a successful sales team depends on knowing who to hire, when to hire, and how to hire the right talent. An understaffed sales team means stalled growth and lost revenue. Hiring a sales team too soon is a sign of premature scaling, which can kill your startup before it even has a chance in the market. However, hiring the wrong sales team burns capital resources in compensation, training, and lost time. Outsourcing your sales function can be a cost-effective way to scale your startup sales team, create new relationship opportunities, accelerate revenue growth, and establish your reputation as a legitimate business.
Let’s dive into understanding the benefits of hiring an outsourced sales team for your startup.
Quick takeaways:
- Employing an outsourced sales team gives you more control over costs
- Outsourcing sales functions provides greater flexibility for your business
- Creating partnerships and leveraging the expertise of your outsourced sales team enables you to grow your business more effectively
Benefits of Hiring an Outsourced Sales Team
As a startup, it makes a lot of sense to employ an outsourced sales team. While many companies prefer to control their sales processes and who sells their products or services, there are three key benefits to hiring temporary sales personnel and outsourcing some sales functions.
Control Costs
Growth is a key goal for startups but premature scaling can set back growth and derail the entire business. Startups must stay on top of their expenses, especially payroll costs. Hiring permanent salespeople, whether they are junior or senior level, can be expensive. In addition to their salaries, you must consider government taxes and benefits, office, computer, and equipment costs, cell phone bills, and other ongoing expenses. The time and costs involved in training and onboarding new hires can also be a drain on your resources.
An outsourced sales team enables you to manage your human resources expenses. External and temporary sales professionals can cost half as much as a full-time salesperson. You only have to pay outsourced salespeople when needed, and they spend all their paid time selling for you. Outsourcing sales teams ensures you do not hire employees too quickly before your startup is ready to grow, as you cannot easily recover these investments.
Increase Flexibility
Employing an outsourced sales team provides greater flexibility as you can increase or decrease the number of sales representatives based on your needs. You can ramp up when launching a new product or entering a new market, and scale back during seasonal slowdowns or when current sales needs are being met. Avoiding long-term commitments to permanent sales teams gives you the flexibility to apply resources to areas with the most need.
Working with outsourced sales teams allows you to experiment with new markets and offerings. Rather than employing a full-time person for a specific market or product, you can outsource the sales to a firm that specializes in that target market. You can cost effectively test a new product or market; if the test succeeds, you can work with the outside sales team to expand their efforts or train internal salespeople to take over the accounts.
Leverage Expertise
You are skilled and knowledgeable in your business and industry, and your employees are experienced at doing their jobs. You are probably working with outside bookkeepers, IT professionals, lawyers, and other specialists to provide the expertise you lack internally. Similarly, you might not have experienced salespeople on staff. Many sales outsourcing firms possess methodologies and best practices that make them effective at selling. They know how to create a sales funnel, use a sales CRM, make cold calls, pitch prospects, and close deals. You can leverage their expertise to move the sales process along faster. You can also deploy your current resources to other areas of the business.
An outsourced sales team can do more than sell your products or services. They can act as channel partners, providing you with expertise and knowledge of the industry that would take significant time and effort to accumulate on your own. Partnering with an outsourced sales team that knows your market, and that learns your business and value proposition, can work with you to develop a plan to get your products or services into the market and grow your business.
Building an Outsourced Sales Team for Your Startup
Working with an outsourced sales team can make good business sense for your startup. It enables you to keep tight control of your human resource costs. It enables you to be flexible in how many salespeople you need at any given time and what markets you enter. It also provides you with expertise you lack and a partner who can help you to grow your business.