Why Outsource B2B Sales to a Partner?
Managed sales organizations are singularly focused on one thing: selling. They give organizations speed, agility, and expansion capabilities that many companies don’t inherently have—which is why companies often give outsourcers their most challenging projects. And they absorb the risks associated with hiring, retaining, and optimizing outperforming sellers.
Whether you’re looking to launch a new product, ramp up a sales campaign, or reactivate a group of dormant accounts, expanding your sales capacity through outsourcing can help you achieve your goals.
Managed sales organizations are singularly focused on one thing, and one thing only: selling.
When you outsource a sales channel (direct or indirect), you’re augmenting your existing sales organization with a team that’s focused on achieving your goals, whether that’s greater revenue generation, more profitable growth, risk reduction, market expansion, improved revenue velocity, or all the above.
If you’re ready to expand your team’s effectiveness and your sales without putting added pressure on your resources, a managed sales partner could be just what you need.
When to Consider B2B Sales Outsourcing
Many B2B revenue leaders are scrambling to adapt to B2B consumerization. Doing things the same way they did even a few years ago won’t support today’s buyer expectations and habits. If they do, they put revenue at risk.
B2B organizations must be nimble. They must be able to quickly scale up or down when market conditions demand it. They must ensure that they are leveraging critical sales channels. And they must be ready with a team that can demonstrate razor-sharp selling skills, supported by technologies and processes that give sellers maximum selling time, minimize wasteful administrative time, optimize every stage of the selling process, and elevate the customer experience.
This is why many B2B companies turn to managed sales partners. A managed sales partner is prepared to help your organization…
- Get to market faster
- Launch new products
- Open new markets
- Reactivate dormant accounts
- Reduce churn and improve retention
- Expand share of wallet among select account segments
- Manage indirect channel partners and partner revenue growth
- Scale to meet changing demand
- Flex to mitigate risk and adapt to market dynamics
- Adapt to changes in sales focus, territory, product, and team structure
What You Should Expect from a Managed Sales Partner
A strong managed sales partner extends your capabilities. The demand for managed B2B sales has increased steadily in recent years, as companies have recognized that expanding their sales channels drives improvement of their revenue engine. It’s become an advantageous option, particularly as digital sales and marketing have skyrocketed. Here are the key capabilities to look for in a B2B sales outsourcing partner:
Channel and Vertical Expertise. To get targeted recommendations with a significantly higher probability of success, your revenue growth partner must have experience in your industry and understand how targeted personas and accounts select and buy your products.
Speed to Market and Scalable Delivery. Your sales partner should be able to scale and pivot with your business. They should have the flexibility to swiftly modify their sales focus in response to changes in market dynamics, territories, products, and/or team structures.
Sales Enablement Strategy. A strong sales partner uses documented methodologies with rigorous processes and technology that define and measure mutually agreed-upon metrics and goals (you can only manage what you can measure!). Business process engineers, instructional designers, and certified sales technology and enablement experts should closely monitor your performance, and drive effectiveness and efficiency to ensure high standards are continuously met.
Robust Tech Stack. Imagine being supported by a team whose only job is to evaluate dozens of new sales technologies each year, pilot them, and integrate those that demonstrate results into your tech stack. And imagine that this team is working continually to optimize these technologies to eliminate wasted time in sales processes, automate processes to give sellers more time to sell, and help sellers improve their skills and acumen. This is a component of the ideal B2B sales partner. They will have at hand a range of sales technologies that enable data sourcing, enrichment and hygiene… customer engagement… training and coaching… prospecting… segmentation… and cadence development. In other words, your managed sales partner will provide you with a tech stack that is purpose-built for selling.
The overall effect is automated processes that eliminate waste, increase seller skills and acumen, and deliver a measurable, positive impact on the business. Read more on what your partner’s tech stack should do for you in How to Build a Kick A$$ B2B Tech Stack >>
Continuous Improvement and Innovation. Your sales provider should be obsessed with continuous improvement in everything they do, always working to reduce sellers’ red time and increase their green time. Business process engineers analyze and evaluate every step of your sales processes, looking for ways to improve productivity and eliminate wasteful steps. Instructional designers identify which skills and acumen are needed to keep sellers outperforming.
Database Development and Health. The ability to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and targeted personas are table stakes for any revenue growth partner. They should be able to identify, source, verify, and append your current and new prospect contacts. This, combined with providing targeted persona buyer intent data, is a formula that stimulates demand and builds a qualified pipeline of winnable opportunities.
Timely Business Intelligence (BI). A B2B sales outsourcing provider should continuously analyze data and deliver actionable reporting solutions. Supported by large-scale analytics and data warehousing, this will drive better outcomes.
Just as every sales organization is unique, so are the sales processes that underpin it. To achieve each client’s sales objectives, MarketSource starts by understanding the company’s sales approach, then reimagining it in a way that optimizes its strengths, eliminates gaps, and improves on inefficiencies. The outcome is a highly refined, custom sales process that empowers our sellers to achieve the client’s goals.
We start with the big picture, then ask questions that go deep. We gain a thorough understanding of your existing sales environment—value proposition, sales velocity factors, channel partner business proposition, go-to-market and route-to-market strategies, tech stack, and much more.
We conduct a multipoint assessment to gain a comprehensive view of issues such as the competitive outlook, brand value, buying personas, and success measures. We look at the dynamics of the client’s target market, personas, average deal size, new business pitches, and metrics.
We sit side-by-side with your sales team, observing your salespeople in action. We document our learnings and chart every step to achieve a thorough map of the end-to-end sales process.
Finally, we reimagine your processes through our lens, a perspective based on our years of experience and success designing sales processes for the world’s most iconic B2B brands. For a deeper dive into choosing your right-fit sales outsourcing company, our Definitive Guide to Choosing a Managed Sales Partner can help.
“Our culture of improvement permeates our organization and how we serve our customers. In the business review meetings we hold with every client each quarter, clients consistently share that they’re stunned to see all the levers we’ve tweaked to evolve their program and achieve incremental improvements in their results.”
– MarketSource
What B2B Managed Sales Isn’t
Since there are many misconceptions floating around about outsourced sales, let’s start with what it is NOT.
It’s NOT low-value, offshore call centers. While these kinds of companies do exist, a managed sales team consists of precisely selected, highly trained sales professionals who treat your business as if it was their own. The right sales partner gives you a high-value, protect-your-brand sales channel with a savvy team of well-trained sales experts, who are aligned with your corporate culture and your brand image.
It’s NOT a replacement for your sales team. Instead, regard a managed sales team as an augmentation of what you already have in place. A specially focused sales team has the staff, resources, strategy, and technology to make a B2B company’s current sales motions more effective.
It’s NOT focused solely on sales volume. Another misconception is that managed outsourcing is merely about making 100 calls a day and filling the pipeline with a ton of leads that your sales team will convert. Managed sales is so much more than that. Professional sales organizations managed by a revenue generation partner address all aspects of the sales cycle, converting prospects to opportunities, and opportunities to sales, and managing current accounts to reduce churn and expand share of wallet.
Managed Sales: The Bottom Line
A dedicated managed sales team can quickly and easily expand your sales team without infrastructure and software costs, and without adding internal resources. As an extension of your sales staff, they bring a deep understanding of your customers’ purchase journey, have the tools to identify and address any problems or barriers at each stage, and—under the direction of skilled sales strategists—help accelerate revenue growth.
Of course, not all outsourced sales organizations are the same. And you want to partner with one that has proven experience, innate expertise, and state-of-the-art technical processes to meet your objectives.
Ready to talk?
Author: Karen Salamone
Karen is Head of Marketing for MarketSource. She is a transformational B2B and B2B2C leader with a history of building marketing organizations, content teams, and demand generation centers of excellence from the ground up. She is recognized for delivering meaningful insights and fresh approaches and for earning best-in-class content, design, and multi-media awards.
