Outsourced Sales For Startups, Is Your Business Ready?

If you are startup then I am sure you might have considered the option of outsourced sales. This is a common dilemma among many companies especially the startups. Should we outsource sales? The simple answer is “YES”. Being a startup you don’t have the luxury of making mistakes and the outsourced sales makes absolute sense to work with an experienced sales team . But, remember you cannot simply outsource your sales. To make sure that the outsourced sales process is effective, you should do it only when the time is right. The next obvious question is – So, how do we know what is the time right? What does that mean? so here it is.

Sales Process:

When it comes to 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 is sales exploration for your specific product or service? It means that you cannot figure out the predictable and repeatable sales yet. You don’t know all the little details well. You don’t know exactly how many leads you need, where you’re going to get them from, how are you going to convert the leads into qualified opportunities. You don’t know how many sales reps you would need and how much would you pay them. If you don’t have answers to all these questions, then you’re in sales exploration mode.

You cannot outsource the sales yet because what you’re essentially doing is you’re going out in the market experimenting and trying things looking and analyzing the results and making adjustments until you arrive at something that works. 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. The outsourced sales would start making sense, once you know how to do a great analysis of your product or service because the outsourcing companies lack the context of your business. So nobody’s going to make better experiments and learn faster to make better judgment calls than you. You would be able to figure out what didn’t work and why it didn’t work.

Sales Execution:

At the sales execution stage, you will have all the basic answers to the most simple questions before you think of outsourcing sales. For instance, how do we generate leads, how do we qualify them, how do we 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 and what kind of sales reps and employees we have to hire to get that job done well and how much does that cost, how much time does it take us to get there. Are the lead sources that we have scalable?

Once you have basic answers to most questions, not all 100% of questions. Practically, it is not possible to get 100% answers to all questions? So, lets set the threshold at 70%. Once you have 70% answers to those questions you kind of have a model and you are ready for sales execution.

Once you’re there that’s the right time to think about outsourced sales for your business. Before this time, sales outsourcing will only lead to a waste of money and time. Because of a lack of knowledge, contacts, and experience, you probably would have made a bad decision because you outsourced your basic work to somebody to figure out your sales model.

In conclusion, before you outsource your sales, you need to get to the ground and study the market and target audiences. Outsourced sales do work.