You have a complex product, service, or solution and you need to get qualified leads into your sales pipeline.
The current state of your sales team does not have the bandwidth to support your lead generation efforts – or you don’t have a dedicated inside sales team at all.
Should you outsource your B2B lead generation efforts or expand your internal sales team? This is a common question and the answer is different depending on your organization, budget, needs, and current situation.
Below are a few questions to ask before investing in either outsourced B2B lead generation or building up an internal team.
Outsourced B2B Lead Generation vs. an Internal Team
1. How much time and money do you have?
Building a solid internal sales team requires a significant budget and investment in time. For complex B2B sales, it is not enough to set up a phone bank and hire entry-level inside sales reps to make scripted calls.
Complex sales require peer-to-peer conversations, and callers need to have experience and the business acumen required to handle those conversations. With easy access to information and digital marketing materials from any screen, the role of a sales caller has changed, and customers and prospects expect more in exchange for their time.
An internal sales team will require the time it takes to hire and train them, in addition to any other overhead expenses that come with employees. If you have the time to invest in training, onboarding and managing your team, this option may be right for you.
Outsourcing to a reputable firm with a proven track record will give you callers that require very little training before getting started. This eliminates the kind of cost and time even an experienced sales rep would require.
2. Do you have the capacity to manage a sales team?
Any good sales team will have a good manager at the helm. The manager is there to understand the metrics, monitor what is working and what is not, keep the reps motivated, and step in if a member or members of the team have gotten off-track.
Is there someone in place who has the experience to monitor and manage a new or expanded team? If there is no one with management experience, have you factored in the cost of hiring one or assigning these new duties to a current employee?
With an outsourced team, the management comes built-in with established benchmarks and checkpoints to determine progress, create and assess messaging, and evaluate results.
This should be established at the outset and be a significant factor when researching and hiring an outsourced firm. The benefit is a fully managed calling team and regular progress reports that do not require the time and effort of your internal staff.
3. Will your sales needs be changing?
Why do you need to increase your sales team? Is this a result of steady business growth or do you need to increase sales capacity because of a new offering or opportunities in a new area of industry?
The ability to scale up and down depending on your sales cycle or the industry you are targeting can be helpful and cost-effective. Hiring full-time employees limits the ability to increase or decrease your team depending on demand.
Outsourcing offers many flexible options if your business or organization experiences fluctuations.
Whether you are outsourcing inside sales or want to add to the internal employees you already have, it opens up many options and flexibility and doesn’t require the long-term commitment or expense of a new hire in a typically high turnover task.
Jim
