The way companies sell products and services has changed at a record pace, especially in the B2B space. 2020’s COVID19 Tsunami created an even deeper chasm for many brands. Now in 2021 90% of all sales teams are predicted to miss their revenue targets in the first quarter. The reasons are many, but the solution may be very simple. What was once a basic step-by-step process for B2B sales teams has become a tech-rich operation that dives into ideal customer profiles, social influences, and endless amounts of data. For many brands outsourcing their sales team will help them overcome a plethora of operational constraints. With a sales outsourcing authority like Leading Edge Connections, brands can get far more expertise and efficiency than they would by hiring and training their own team, or a team of third-party sales consultants. Outsourced sales services are fully managed and include multiple layers of sales enablement and support that can shorten times to competency, eliminate many hard costs, streamline internal resources and ultimately yield a stronger ROI.

Outsourced sales companies, like LEC, provide a full array of services and solutions to fuel their clients’ business, from expanding awareness and lead generation, to closing deals and analyzing metrics. They can customize services to propel specific projects, augment their internal team, or simply engage a comprehensive sales and marketing arm.

Based on a brand’s goals, their ideal outsourced sales partner will collaborate with their existing team to co-create a dynamic sales strategy, leverage leading-edge tools, throttle-up human capital and consistently use analytics to optimize and improve results.

We wanted to share six ways a real outsourced sales team will grow your business.

1. Expanded Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the level of consumer consciousness of a company. It measures a potential customer’s ability to not only recognize a brand image, but to also associate it with a certain company’s product or service. Brand awareness is best spread through both inbound and outbound marketing efforts. When competition in an industry is high, brand awareness can be one of a business’s greatest assets. Building brand awareness is as much about consistency as it is reach. Every marketing piece and communication needs to reflect the voice and tone of your company. How many remarkable products or services have died slowly, unable to penetrate the market because no one knew about them? An outsourced sales team will put the right message on search engines, social platforms, and into their email marketing to build brand awareness as potential buyers research products and services. They may even leverage content automation tools and programmatic channels to help create hyper-awareness in for the product/service’s ecosystem. Truth be told, every brand needs a team of people telling the company story loud and proud.

2.  Lead Generation Velocity

Integrating marketing and sales efforts creates a real-time collaboration that drives both teams to be more effective. A leading-edge sales and marketing team won’t miss an opportunity to capture customer information. If lead generation is a high priority for your business, your outsourced team can help you add landing pages, create special offerings, build custom content, creatively drive your SEO, grow social media, and much more. A healthy pipeline of high-quality leads keeps your sales experts experiencing peak performance. Although multiple channels exist within lead generation, one major gap for many B2B companies is solid content marketing. Generating the best quality and quantity of blogs articles, postings, videos, white papers, case studies and sales collateral to direct your audience with adequate calls-to-action is time consuming. Keeping up with changing SEO demands is damn near impossible unless you are an expert, or have a team inside handling it, something an outsourced sales partner offers.

3. Sales Dev Experts

Sales Development is fundamental in building a sales pipeline. These activities are far too important to leave to overburdened sales staff who are already struggling to generate new qualified leads while managing other responsibilities. Lack of initial activity and steady follow-through equals lost opportunities for any business. In 2020 we saw activity requirements soar. The average number of times a potential customer needed to be touched before a real connection or conversation happened went from 12 to 21. That’s massive! Outsourcing trained personnel who are dedicated to sales development is an easy way to streamline the sales process. They can leverage multi and omni channel approaches to drive the activity necessary for sales executives to meet and exceed monthly quotas. If appointment-setting, demo setting or pipeline building is vital to your business, the outsourced team and existing team should collaborate. Internal Sales teams can “stay small” and focus their efforts effectively.

Sales Dev in 2021 is a real artform. It’s not for the weak of heart, or those who love to sit back. For that reason, more and more organizations are leaning into outsourcing to cover this base for them and stack the odds in their favor.

4. Sales Gurus

When outsourcing Sales Experts, or Gurus as we call them at LEC, brands get highly trained dedicated sales reps who can handle the full sales cycle from prospecting to closing deals. Most options for this are more transactional or on vendor size bite. That said, LEC decided to offer outsourcing services that encompass talent all the way up to enterprise level, high end closers. Now brands with long sales cycles and high ACVs can outsource the entire process as well. It’s not just for the lower quadrant players anymore. Strong outsourced teams give a large or small organization instant access to trained and experienced professionals with tools and equipment already set up, ready to sell. Their new outsourced sales team will start by learning about their TAMs, SAMs, SOMs, ICPs, product or service, promotions, sales goals, and best practices. Together, any brand can now build an effective sales strategy using proven processes, leveraging experience and expertise from cross channel, cross vertical or cross industry successes. More importantly, the outsourced sales gurus will continually apply behavioral data to improve it. Dedicated sales teams operate as an extension of the existing business. If your business has a large database that needs mining, you can direct your outsourced sales reps to focus there. Alternatively, the team can prospect for their own leads, which includes cold-calling. The sky is really the limit.

5. No CRM Headaches

Without a stellar customer relationship management (CRM) platform, customers will undoubtedly fall through the cracks. It happens all the time, in companies all over the world. As a business grows, it becomes more and more difficult to see the full picture of customer activity and the buying path. Using and properly maintaining a CRM is the foundation for a scalable, high functioning sales and marketing program. A good CRM provides a consolidated view of data that supports sales, operations, and analytics used for evolutionary success. Used properly, a CRM can strengthen customer retention, provide segmentation activity, and help anticipate buyers’ activity. A strong Sales outsourcing provider will work with their client’s team to optimize their current CRM workflow or can recommend a reputable platform based on the client’s goals, sales cycle, and the needs for prospects. For sales teams, the outsourced sales managers can monitor individual and team progress through each stage of the sales cycle. CRMs require data scrubbing, regular updating, and administrative oversight to operate, all of which should be supported by the outsourced sales partner. At LEC we’ve gone as far as to become vendor partners for a number of CRMs and DaaS provisioners to assist our clients in streamlining the process of selection, implementation and ensuring continuity within the data flow and sales processes that assist in shortening onboarding times, and times to competency for the sales teams.

6. Revenue Generation

At the end of the day this is the statistic that matters most, as Grant Cardone would say. All the other items and activities add up to this one. Show me the money! If its marketing pushing traffic to a site or channel it’s all about conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO is a proven tactic to increase the effectiveness of your paid advertising by improving the conversion rate from lead to opportunity, and ultimately opportunity to close. If it’s enterprise level sales it’s overall conversion, Customer Acquisition Rate (CAR), Average Contract Value (ACV), and Total Monthly Revenue just to name a few.  Companies spend thousands of dollars acquiring leads, but then neglect the conversion process. Improving conversion rates generates more revenue from the same marketing expense by turning clicks, calls, chats, and emails into converted customers. Leading Edge Connections uses data analytics and proprietary best practices to identify conversion opportunities. Once identified, the team implements a regular testing strategy to keep abreast of market changes and evolve the process.

Outsourcing sales functions is truly an agile and customizable solution. You can quickly provide your business with an experienced sales team to increase your overall revenue. If you’re bringing a new product or service to market or facing staff attrition, you can gain traction without investing time and money in hiring, navigating software, and training. Sales outsourcing allows business leaders to hand off management and payroll responsibilities that might otherwise distract from their primary mission.

At Leading Edge Connections, we know improving sales is part of an integrated effort from lead generation to close, and beyond into customer retention. Whether your business needs to increase brand awareness, generate new leads, or convert more leads into sales, we already have the people and the tools to add functionality and growth to your existing business. It’s time to move your brand to the leading-edge of what’s possible by outsourcing your sales and marketing needs.