Outsourcing sales as a startup, Is Your Business Ready?

If you are a startup, then I am sure you might have considered the option of outsourcing sales. But to actually take up the option, is a common dilemma among many companies, especially the startups.

However, should you really consider outsourcing sales process? The simple answer is "YES". Being a startup, you don’t have the luxury of making mistakes. Outsourcing sales process makes absolute sense as you get to work with an experienced sales team. To make sure that the outsourced sales process is effective, you should do it only when the time is right and adopt the right process. The next obvious question is – So, how do you know when is the time right and how to know the best process? What does that mean? So here it is-

Stage

When it comes to adopting the sales process, your business can be in either of the two stages. The first stage of the sales process is the Exploration Phase. The second stage is the Execution Phase.

Sales Exploration

What does sales exploration mean for a specific product or service? It means that you did not figure out the sales yet. You don’t know all the little details well. You don’t know exactly how many leads you can acquire or where you’re going to get them from (digitally/offline), and most importantly- how you are going to convert the leads into qualified opportunities. You may not know how many sales agents you would need and how much would you pay them. If you don’t have answers to all these questions, then you’re in the sales exploration mode.

During this phase, you should be in the lookout of individuals who are experienced in helping out startups to rise from their base. The knowledge of your domain and audience can come handy while projecting your business to the audience. In this phase, you’re essentially going out in the market experimenting and trying things out, looking and analyzing the results, and making adjustments until you arrive at something that really works for you. In this phase, it’s crucial for you as a business to do the groundwork as nobody in the world will know your business better. But a partner in sales who is relatively seasoned to handle the audience and target them with the required tone and attitude would certainly help. Outsourcing sales at this point of time will not only help in sales but would also help in getting the market feedback and analysis of your product or service. So this is a chance to engage safe and better experiments and learn faster to make better judgment calls. You would be able to figure out what didn’t work and why it didn’t work and back up the sales team with a developed product.

Sales Execution

At the sales execution stage, you will have all the basic answers to the simplest questions of sales. You probably must have either tried to set-up your in-house sales team or must have had tie-ups with a couple of sales-outsourcing companies. Still you must wonder on what processes to outsource. A good sales outsourcing company will have all the structures of the sales process. A strong volume of sales team backed up by an experienced team of digital marketing guys assures the quality of lead generation and sales structure. A versatile app/web development team collaborating with the backend team helps in maintaining the data and in keeping a track of the sales agents and the sales conversions. All the nitty-gritty of the sales process shall be taken care of by the sales team. For instance, how to generate leads, how to qualify them, how to close that deal, how much time does it take from initial lead generation to closing a customer, how much is that deal worth on average, how much time does it take us to get there, how to set targets for the sales agents, how to track them?

In conclusion, before you outsource your sales, you need to get to the ground and study the market and target audiences. Outsourcing sales with the right partner can help you in business growth.