Sales pipelines are crucial to identifying your growth opportunities. If you are using a lot of internal resources to fill your sales pipelines, it might be time to make a change.
When you are assigning your sales team tasks such as targeting prospective markets, you could be wasting time and money. By outsourcing these business development processes, you can take advantage of external experts and let your employees focus on closing sales and increasing company profit.
If you are interested in boosting business morale, revenue, and growth, then you have come to the right place. Here, we will tell you when to outsource and why it might give you an advantage.
What is Business Development?
What is Business Development?Business development is the process of providing value to your company. This is done by identifying effective market development strategies for growing and maintaining your relationship with the market and your customers.
Through this process, you assess business performance and how it can be improved.
Business owners’ ultimate goal is to develop, or grow, that business. You probably have a unique set of skills specific to its development like quality communication, mastery of the sales process, marketing savvy, and project management. It can be hard to tackle so many things at once, though.
For example, honing your skill set to better serve your company while ensuring your team is seeing business development all the way through from start to finish can be overwhelming.
Even though business developers and sales team members work closely together, there is a difference between them, which is easy to overlook when you have a heavy focus on all of those aspects at once. Your sales team should be zeroed in on customer relationships so that they can close a deal. Business development, though, directs attention to potential leads.
In other words, both parties maintain the client relationship all the way through to end in profit and long-term success. Business development is the bite that takes you there.
Business development professionals also have a specific set of skills that establish them as the best of the best in their industry. This way, you know that they will provide you with results to better your company.
First, they have sales skills. They will understand your target audience and know when to capitalize on opportunities. Relationship skills and sales skills are closely related, so they can grow professional relationships in the context of closing a deal. They can see what customer will form the most strategic partnership with your business so that everyone benefits.
Secondly, they have communication skills. They will be strong speakers, writers, and listeners. Not only should they be proficient at communicating with prospective customers, they should also excel at communicating with your internal employees. Additionally, successful negotiations require successful creative thinkers, so they should be able to provide value in both fields.
Thirdly, they have marketing skills. At the least, they should have a basic grasp on marketing fundamentals, but top business developers know the ins and outs, especially if your internal employee core does not have a full-blown marketing team. They can work on brand promotion and expansion, to name just a couple.
Fourthly, they have business intelligence skills. This consists of constantly generating new information circulating around the market. They should always research your business and that of your competitors through data collection and analysis. The end result should be a deeper understanding of your target market.
Fifthly, they have returns on investments tracking and data analysis skills. Another important data scraping skill, ROI tracking means they have to keep a close eye on the ever-changing sales data and its consequent needs in the industry.
Finally, they have project management skills. Project management can be cumbersome, so whether they are providing support as an acting marketing manager or through business administration, they are providing overall support to your growth.
Why Do Some Companies Outsource Sales?
When you utilize an external organization for sales duties, it can lead to increased product development and subsequently boosted profit.
It also helps you to create a successful sales pipeline more quickly and effectively. Additionally, outsourcing sales gives you a chance to use new information and resources that you might not have with your existing employees.
Those benefits combined with the money saved by not hiring or training your own development team are just some of the reasons companies might outsource sales.
Below, we explore in more depth.
When to Do Outsourcing For Business Development Processes?
If you are curious about outsourcing or you think that it might be for you but you have some qualms about if it would help you succeed, then you are in the right place.
It can be daunting to think about making such a big decision, especially when the idea is new to you. That is why we go through some concerns you might have before making the leap.
Do You Believe the Benefits Will Not Outweigh the Costs?
If you have already done the research on the cost of hiring an outsourced firm, the numbers might seem staggering, especially if you are a small business. A lot of people share those same concerns.
On average, the starting price of external business development firms is thousands of dollars per month.
However, you actually do end up saving a lot of money in the long run when you outsource these professional services.
Regardless of how you decide to undertake the success of your company, it is a simple fact that you need to focus on business development. So when you spend money on training and development or simply hiring in-house development managers if the idea of outsourcing is too intimidating, you end up spending far more on the salaries and benefits of in-house employees.
On average, business developers earn 47 thousand to 62 thousand dollars annually, and that is often just for novice developers. It also takes almost a year to train internal employees in the craft. So instead of focusing your time and efforts on actual strategy development, you spend an excess of time and money on the in-house team.
Do You Worry About Losing Control Over Your Sales Development Activities?
Do You Worry About Losing Control Over Your Sales Development Activities?If you have spent an immeasurable amount of time building your company in the hopes of watching it succeed, then of course you might feel iffy about just handing over control to an outside agent.
You may be asking yourself: do they care as much as I do? Will they hold themselves to the standards I set forth in my business?
So if you do decide to outsource, it is possible that you would want to stand over their shoulder while they work to make sure they are living up to your expectations. This would not be beneficial, however.
Are you personally supervising every single one of your internal employees to make sure they are up to par and completing all of their tasks? Probably not, because you vetted them to begin with or made sure they were properly interviewed and trained before they joined your business.
Luckily, whatever firm your business development manager came from did the same thing when they hired them. Their company did not want to hire an incompetent worker, just like you. Their professionals set out to represent their company and their success, so they want the same for your own.
Professional agencies keep tabs on their developers through data on their completed and ongoing work, especially since most of them are independent, self-managed workers.
Do You Think Your Business Model Will Not Work?
If you are worried that your business model will not succeed with outsourced developers and you use a B2C, B2C2B, or B2B2C model, that could definitely be cause for concern. Your product prices in any of these models are not usually a good fit for outsourced sales.
If you favor a horizontal market or short sales cycles within your organization, then outsourcing also might fail to benefit you.
But if you use any of those business models and you still really want to try your hand at outsourcing, there is still hope. You can outsource for marketing and advertising, which are both elements that that kind of business needs anyways.
Benefits in Outsourcing Business Development Teams
We have addressed your concerns. But what are the outright benefits of outsourcing? As it turns out, there are plenty.
You Get Instant Access to a Team of Experts
As you read above, hiring and keeping up with an internal team of business developers takes a vast amount of time, money, and resources.
Outsourcing, though, gives you direct and immediate access to an entire firm of specialized experts, their know-how, and their business development finesse. They use all of that promptly upon hire.
Outsourced Prospecting Efforts Result in Better Leads
As far as leads go, quantity is not always synonymous with quality. When you outsource for your business development, in turn, you receive better-quality leads.
Since your professional developer is working so closely with your sales team, you are getting important information and lead qualifiers both internally and externally.
Your sales team will provide your developer with the necessary information to inform their leads and your developer will offer outside knowledge to your sales team that they had not had before.
All of that information is combined to create a comprehensive pipeline, which leads you to better leads. Quality leads bring you to customers who are likely to close with your internal team.
You Will Increase Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Increasing customer satisfaction and retention is a benefit of outsourcing that is not as commonly known by businesses, but you definitely shouldn’t forget about it.
Since your in-house employees will not be overloaded with the whole process of tasks that go all the way from prospecting to closing, they can spend their time working on what they are actually there for. Namely, they can focus on customer care with dedication and follow-through.
Additionally, when your employees are not stressed with so many other tasks, they are happier. Happier employees equal happier customers and a better business environment.
You Can Generate New Opportunities
Bringing on an outsourced professional means that you bring on all of the knowledge they have gained on their own time and within their own agency.
Their sales team will have an abundance of working knowledge about data from other markets and companies. With this knowledge comes the potential to approach new markets and their subsections within new regions.
Otherwise, without an external agent, you risk losing sales and revenue by trying to access that information yourself. Also, the new quality leads that your sales team and developer come up with can be used in the future for increased opportunities in the market.
You Save More Time and Become More Flexible in the Long Run
Were there any parts of your business that may have fallen to the wayside when you did not have this external help? If so, you will now have time to return your attention to those matters that only you can deal with.
You also will not have to waste your valuable time on training internal employees to work on business development or spend your money on that process.
This leads to every party saving time and maintaining flexibility.
If you go this route, you also have more flexibility to expand your business through new programs, like digital business and sales marketing. Your developer can help you with this, too, by using existing resources for those new programs, ideas and ultimate profits.
At the end of the day, outsourcing business development processes gives your business a clear advantage and competitive edge with tools you can continue using to grow your company.
If you want to explore these possibilities and benefit from an outsourced team, book a call with us today.