Asking for help isn’t always easy, especially in the business world. Owners and executives probably look at their companies as their babies, and they are naturally hesitant to share important “parenting” responsibilities with outsiders.
Often, though, eliciting outside assistance makes the most sense. Expanding or relying on your own inside sales team might be tempting, but when it comes to generating and nurturing leads, outsourcing to an experienced lead gen and appointment-setting firm could be the smarter option.
Maybe you’re struggling to find the right leads on your own. Or maybe you’ve got too many leads, and don’t have the time or bandwidth to pursue them.
Whether you hand over these duties on a fulltime basis or treat them as an extension of your own outreach efforts, there are multiple reasons to consider hiring an outside partner. Here are five of them:
1. Management
Managing an inside sales team isn’t as easy as lining up a few employees and turning them loose on the phones. It’s a lengthy and never-ending process—from hiring, to training, to monitoring performance, to coaching, to juggling vacations and sick days … to starting all over from scratch when team members inevitably leave the company, move to a different department, or are let go.
And that’s just the human element of the job. There are also countless material challenges, most notably ensuring that you have the right tech-stack and current best practices to optimize the productivity of each and every internal team member.
A well-qualified outsourced sales partner alleviates all those headaches in a matter of weeks. They provide the people and resources to do the jobs you and your team might not have time for, whether it’s cold calling new leads, following up with warm leads, touching base with existing clients, or whatever else your needs might be.
2. Production
One minute, your production is humming along nicely. Your inside sales team is on fire, and your pipeline is filling rapidly. But then your top callers are promoted to full-time sales positions, and other team members decide to leave. Just like that, your inside sales team’s performance has gone from very strong to very weak.
Using an outside partner eliminates those drastic swings in production. The best lead gen firms will consistently provide you with a dedicated team of callers, ensuring business as usual regardless of whatever chaos might be occurring within your company at a particular time.
This doesn’t just apply to personnel changes. Outside partners can be utilized during any adjustments to production schedules, such as special projects or new product launches. Whatever the circumstances, they’re a perfect complement to your existing salesforce.
3. Scaling
Scaling your business is never easy, especially when dealing with human resources. But as the above scenarios illustrate, it’s often a necessity.
Scaling upward can be a challenge for a lot of reasons—knowing exactly when to do it and how much to invest, adapting your management structure to match your growth, etc. Scaling downward, meanwhile, can be even more difficult, because it involves firing people.
But with an outside partner providing the personnel, scaling up or down is as easy as making a quick phone call. The best lead gen firms can adapt seamlessly and scale their teams to match your needs at any time.
4. Data
According to various studies, at least 20 percent of a business’s contact data is inaccurate in some way. Chasing after inaccurate data is, of course, a waste of time and resources, and attempting to clean that data can be even more time-consuming for your team.
By outsourcing to a lead gen team capable of rectifying those issues through its own list enrichment tools, including information-gathering survey calls to prospects or existing clients, you’re able to get those errors corrected and solidify your records without exhausting additional time and effort.
5. Cost
This one actually applies to each of the four other items on this list, because every one of them will likely cost your company more if you go at them alone than if you hire an outside partner. Worse, the cost of flying solo can be wildly unpredictable, making it difficult to budget.
At VSA, we’ve worked with companies who handled things inhouse for years but could never quite achieve the desired results. Now, they’re outsourcing to us because it’s much easier to have a partner handle the heavy lifting—the management, the technology, the human resources, the data, and anything else that’s necessary for a successful calling campaign.
Obviously, there’s still a cost, but it’s a much more productive cost. You pay an onboarding fee and a weekly rate, but never have to worry about expensive unpleasant surprises such as broken equipment or sudden staff turnover.
Conclusion
Even the best lead gen and appointment-setting firms will never know your business as well as you do. After all, it is your baby.
But the right partner will do everything it can to help you address specific challenges and achieve your goals. For 20 years, VSA has been that partner. Whether you need us to build a process from scratch or fill gaps in an existing campaign, we can work strategically with you to meet your needs—whatever those needs might be.
Just give us a call. We’re always happy to help.