Mitigate Risk and Drive Revenue with Outsourced Inside Sales

The organizations that outpace their competitors all have one thing in common: they close more business, faster, without taking unnecessary risks that could stifle growth.

The biggest factor in achieving this velocity is effective pipeline management, or how well your combined marketing and sales efforts generate, nurture, and convert high-quality leads.

So, how do you align your marketing and sales efforts and ensure your sales team is staffed with top performers? Mitigate the significant risk and long-term expenses of hiring sales development employees.

Your sales team has a 56% greater chance of reaching its quota if you use sales development reps (SDRs) to prospect and qualify leads — and outsourced SDRs produce far greater value.

Five Ways Outsourced Inside Sales Helps You Mitigate Risk and Drive Revenue Growth:

The global outsourcing market doubled in size in the 2010s, with “leading practice organizations using outsourcing to drive transformational change and improve business results.” According to Deloitte research, nearly 60% outsource to cut costs or focus on ROI, while another 47% rely on outsourced labor to address capacity issues.

While there are numerous benefits to outsourcing inside sales, perhaps the most significant is how this approach allows you to overcome the risk factors that can make or break your business.

1. Employee Turnover

With an average tenure of only 12 to 18 months, entry-level sales roles are notorious for high turnover. Add in a ramp-up time for new hires ranging from 90 to 120 days and your sales team may find itself in constant flux, afflicted by heavy churn and poor productivity.

It’s no secret that building your own team can be time consuming and expensive, with resource and financial expenditures in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, new-hire orientation, training, salary, bonus and benefits.

When an SDR departs, you’ve not only ‘wasted’ this money and effort, but the business must face:

• Tangible costs of severance pay and vacation accrual, as well as replacement recruiting, orientation, and training
• Transitional revenue loss
• Weakened employee morale
• Potential turnover snowball effect, with other members of the sales or marketing team vacating their position
• Customer dissatisfaction

In fact, the cost of hiring a replacement SDR can reach upwards of 200% of the employee’s annual salary.

With outsourced inside sales you avoid the overhead costs and disruption, while the vendor:

• Takes on the burden of hiring, training, management, oversight, and compensation
• Ensures your sales team is always working at full capacity

2. Employee Skill Level

When you hire a new SDR, you don’t know how well they’ll perform until you’ve invested the time and money into training them. Inside sales outsourcing companies, on the other hand, employ career SDRs with a proven track record of sales cycle expertise, well-honed multi-channel customer acquisition techniques, and the experience necessary to handle high-pressure prospecting.

When you work with a great sales partner, you can rapidly launch and grow sales programs staffed with focused, full-time sales teams that are fully prepared to represent your brand and deliver qualified leads.

3. Cross-Team Collaboration

Almost all (94%) top-performing salespeople believe their success can be attributed to receiving better leads, and 43% of sales and marketing people said “lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects” was the biggest challenge to aligning sales and marketing.

Communication between the sales and marketing teams can significantly impact lead quality and the direction of future messaging and product development, in turn impacting future sales efforts.

Outsourced inside sales reps are specially trained to optimize all phases of the sales cycle, including soliciting and sharing key feedback from prospects. This is often a missing or lacking component of the sales process between internal sales and marketing teams.

4. Scaling and Pivoting

If your sales leaders are responsible for hiring, training, and managing their own sales reps, scaling or pivoting can take months. This can lead to transitional revenue loss and expose your  business to increased risk from faster-moving competitors.

Conversely, third-party sales development teams are built to scale and pivot quickly. Career SDRs are experienced in adapting to changing needs and outsource partners can easily add or remove resources and personnel for your campaigns.

With the right vendor, you’ll be able to quickly and seamlessly scale up or down, expedite speed to market, and pivot to new markets, products, or messaging.

5. Data Management and Analysis

As Entrepreneur explains, “data analytics can help drive sales for your business” in a variety of ways, including:

1. Segmentation, which allows you to target your messaging, as well as assign priority based on profitability
2. Product development, through customer and prospect surveys and A/B testing
3. Agility, or being able to adapt to customers’ and prospects’ changing needs, anticipate problems and pain points, offer solutions and adjust strategy
4. Innovation, which is “key to market domination in this new disrupted world”

While a novice sales team may forgo or limit data collection and analysis as it struggles to keep up with quotas, an experienced outsourced inside sales team understands the value of data. They’re pros at collecting and reporting everything from updated contact info to who’s making purchasing decisions to buying triggers and purchase intent.

Accelerate Your Growth Today

Whether you’re looking to upshift for a specific initiative, compensate for inadequate performance, or scale to hit elevated growth goals, partnering with an outsourced inside sales team provides greater velocity with less risk and lower costs.