3 Reasons Why Your Company Should Outsource a Sales Development Program

When your company is looking to generate more revenue, consider a professional sales development program to generate leads and set up the sales team for success.

What are the benefits of this program? 

• Increased ROI
• Higher Efficiency 
• Faster Response Times
• Better Relationships with Prospects
• Improved Marketing

Those benefits alone should make you consider a professional sales development program for prospecting.

You should also consider the truest thing I have learned in 20 years of leading sales teams: Even the very best and most well-meaning salesperson will find anything to do to avoid prospecting. There is always something that at the moment seems more important to a salesperson than reaching out to prospects.

So, what should your organization do to ensure potential new customers are being introduced to your solution? A professional, dedicated program will ensure that a team of highly trained and motivated individuals is focused on the specific function of prospecting.

By removing the prospecting function from the sales team, your company’s salespeople would be able to focus on referrals, qualified inbound leads, their networks, cross-selling, and upselling to their customer base. These are all things that increase the revenue of your organization, but it does not require reaching out to cold prospects.

You need a team of highly skilled and focused individuals to handle the prospecting function to create more revenue opportunities for your company.

Now that you know why you need a sales development program, let me also explain why you should outsource this function to a firm such as ProSales Connection to ensure that quality leads are generated that the sales team can act upon.

1. Time to Launch Drastically Reduced

The time to launch a professional sales development program is drastically reduced if the function is outsourced to a firm that specializes in prospecting.

In our experience, what it takes to set up an internal program are unique systems, tools, processes, managers, and trained individuals. It is our belief that it is more effective and efficient to contract to an outsourced firm that already handles this unique set-up and has a track record of generating results for clients, as opposed to building this function internally.

By outsourcing, the time to launch goes from months to weeks to even days because the outsourced firm is ready to start prospecting. Additionally, your company saves money and increases efficiency by not trying to set up an internal program.

Companies that try to start this program find out soon enough that it’s difficult to manage. What happens is management believes the sales development representatives (SDRs) they hired are not doing their job properly, so reps are released, creating turnover and delays to getting a positive return on investment.

Then, management determines that the team is not the problem, so they hire a different type of manager. And that leads to more turnover. Soon enough, management is overwhelmed trying to figure out how to set up and run a proper sales development program.

These additional costs and headaches can be avoided by outsourcing to a firm that is built for the sales development function and can quickly start working the phones reaching out to prospects.

2. An Outsourced SDR Program Is Flexible

Another benefit of outsourcing the program is that a firm can adapt quickly to requested changes. This removes the burden of recruiting, hiring, training, and managing an internal team that is not as flexible to adapt to changes.

Forming a team is the most time-consuming and costliest part of the process. However, that can be completely avoided by hiring an outsourced firm that has already recruited, hired, and trained SDRs whose sole function is reaching out to your company’s prospects.

When the reps are managed with clarity around their activities, conversion metrics, and key performance indicators (KPI), it leads to a successful prospecting function.

And, if there are significant changes to your program, such as reaching a new market, the outsourced firm is prepared to make those adjustments. Remember, this outsourced team launches new client programs on a regular basis. They have seen it all and can make changes with little effort and almost no time delays.

Conversely, an internal sales development team might struggle to adapt without as much experience reacting to changes in the market. That could also lead to costly mistakes for your company.

3. Outsourcing Reduces the Cost of Mistakes

When you outsource the sales development program to a firm, the exit strategy is much easier if a mistake is made.

Whereas, if you house the SDR program internally, a mistake in hiring or direction could have a long-lasting impact on your bottom line. All of a sudden, you have to let go of employees or re-assign individuals to other functions, which costs your company money, morale, and productivity.

With an outsourced firm, though, a mistake can be corrected with a simple phone call to change or end the program. Or, you could cancel a program with one firm and try to find another firm to achieve better prospecting results.

On the other end of the spectrum, what is often the case is the program works beyond expectations and you want to expand the scope. Again, it’s just a phone call to the outsourced firm. This is much more efficient than having to hire more SDRs as the program expands, which is a slow process requiring recruiting, hiring, and training costs.

In contrast, when you make the call to an outsourced firm to expand the program, most firms are prepared to scale up in days or weeks to support your business objectives. This is much easier than having to manage internal employees that you made a long-term commitment to.

By outsourcing to a firm that specializes in prospecting, it is easier to turn up, turn down, or turn off your SDR program.

How to Sell the SDR Program Internally

By now, you should be convinced that (a) your company needs an SDR program and (b) you should outsource to a firm that specializes in this function. Now, you need to sell this idea internally in your company.

The key is getting buy-in from stakeholders such as the Head of Sales or even the CEO of your company. The sales leader in your company may push back because the prospecting function is “what we do” as part of sales. Or, the sales leader may claim that his or her salespeople are the best at what they do and their leads should not be sent out to an outsourced firm for someone else to prospect to.

The reality is that salespeople will not consistently prospect. Your argument is they need to be focused on their job of using their sales abilities to close more deals; let someone else handle the prospecting to set the table for the sales team.

It is about putting your resources in a position to add the most value possible. For most organizations, that is placing their seasoned salespeople in front of qualified prospects, not in the office on the phone making cold calls.

Therefore, to grow revenue, your company should outsource prospecting to a qualified firm that is built to make phone calls that lead to real sales appointments and eventually more business for your company. To find out how ProSales Connection can help your company grow through a high-quality, professional sales development program, contact our firm today to get started.