Outsourcing Your Sales Dept.

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 8:45am

Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power released an editorial titled Should You Outsource Your Sales Force? He starts right off with a statistic I have not heard:

A few years ago, outsourcing a sales force was a novelty. Today it has become a trend that enjoys a 20% annual growth rate.

I’ve always been a skeptic of this approach mainly due to my sales background. I cannot wrap my simple mind around the idea of a person from another company owning the relationship with the customer. Leveraging a better ROI is one thing, placing a degree of separation from your customer (read: revenue) base seems like Russian roulette. What if you become dissatisfied with the outsourcing company’s performance? If they own the customer relationship, you are jeopardizing your company’s vitality.

Some of those concerns are explained in a quote from the editorial:

Says Polson, “We have perfected the art of the one-call close.”

One-call closes screams of a dinosaur approach to me. The person who is quoted was referring to their outsourcing activities for an office supply store so perhaps it is appropriate. Whenever I hear that phrase, I immediately think of a web store. If you really want to lower your customer acquisition costs and you are in the proverbial one-call close business, why not move to a web-based model? The money invested in salespeople and/or outsourced sales could be redirected towards marketing and website development.

Our customer base is primarily composed of relationship sales models. We have a couple of customers who have typical sales cycles of over 12 months. Outsourcing sales may be an option for a lightning fast sales cycle, but I am skeptical of a relationship sales model excelling in an outsourced sales program.

That being said, I do have to close with this impressive statistic from the article that flies in the face of my previous paragraph: