Outsourcing Sales Development: What Your Work Looks Like Now, and How It Could Look

Running a business is like being a parent. The kids think you have all the answers, but if they’d just done what you asked them to do in the first place, you wouldn’t need to have any answers! 

To continue this theme into sales development, think of your sales and marketing teams as argumentative twins. They love each other and recognize they’re part of the same family with the same goals, but they often clash because they have conflicting personalities. 

The sales twin is confident, goal-oriented, and impatient. The marketing twin is more reflective, analytical, and meticulous. Sales want results immediately. Marketing wants the time and space to do the job until it’s done right. They try to compromise; they want to get along, but the relationship is inevitably unstable. 

Moving away from family analogies, let’s play out a familiar scenario. Your sales team complains it doesn’t have enough good-quality leads; your marketing team claims that sales never follow up on the leads they generate; sales responds by saying the leads marketing sends are substandard. They both make a good case, but you don’t have time to arbitrate their Mexican standoff - your focus is on the money coming into the business and, right now, the numbers are wildly inconsistent and frustratingly unpredictable.

You have a sales development problem. 

Here we’ll run through the following:

• What your sales development problems look like, and what they mean
• Outsourcing: what you can achieve and potential issues you may face
• Avoiding mistakes and achieving your sales development potential

7 B2B Sales Development Challenges and What They Mean for Your Business

1. Not Having a Consistent Sales Pipeline? No Predictable, Reliable Source of Quality Leads, Leading to a Boom and Bust Sales Cycle

If this is your number one headache, you have the classic sales development problem. Both your sales and marketing teams have proved they’re capable of hitting targets when conditions are right. If the conditions aren’t always right, something needs to change.  If nothing changes, you’ll always be where you are right now.

2. No Quality Leads - Inability to Identify Companies who Have the Problem you are Solving

This is a huge, potentially existential, challenge for your business. Assuming you’re confident your sales and marketing teams are competent, and doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, you have - guess what - a sales development problem. As you know, a sales development representative (SDR)’s role is to act as a bridge between your two key functions here. If the bridge isn’t there, or unable to perform as it ought to, you’re stuck where you are.

3. Qualifying Prospects.  Prospecting: The Activity Diverting Marketers from Marketing and Salespeople from Selling

The truth is that anybody in a marketing or sales role should always be keeping an eye on prospecting; on finding ways into target markets and companies. It would be surprising if your guys didn’t have this attitude. Another truth is that prospecting is a drain on the time of people you’re paying to use their sales or marketing skills. If you’re not using dedicated SDRs in this role, you’re not using your resources efficiently.

4. Recruitment - No Talent Pipeline for Recruiting and Upskilling SDRs

If you’re having problems with sales development (and it seems you are!)One of the biggest obstacles to solving them can be the SDRs themselves. If you have them, but they’re not performing, as the boss, some conversations need to happen around training, and the consequences of underperforming.

If you don’t have them in-house, it’s difficult to find and retain good SDRs. People with sales skills, and experience in performing SDR functions for themselves, will want the commissions commensurate closing the big deals. If you recruit an enthusiastic but inexperienced SDR, who thrives having been trained (on your time and money), they’ll soon be looking for a promotion or a sales role elsewhere. And so the process begins again. 

5. No Proper Data! Your Marketing Budget isn’t Being Efficiently Used Because your CRM isn’t Optimized

An astonishing 66% of businesses feel they are receiving little or no advantage from the data contained within their CRM. Have you seen how much it costs to buy data?! Data that has nothing to do with your business - what is the information you have gathered specifically for your business worth? It must be worth more than anything you can buy from some online company you don’t know and doesn’t know you. If all the data you have used to generate maximum value, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Optimizing your CRM is a laborious task, and requires consistency and buy-in from your employees to adjust their previous ways of working. But you won’t regret it when you see the results.

6. Hooked on Easy Wins - Your Business has become Too Dependent on Referrals

Referrals, like birthday presents, are wonderful to receive, but they’re special because they don’t come to you too often. And at least with birthday presents, you have some idea of when they might arrive!

All organizations cherish referrals. Referred customers are more likely to buy, more likely to be loyal, and more likely to refer to their contacts. But how often do they come along? If your sales development isn’t constantly delivering a pipeline of high-quality, qualified leads, your pool of potential referrals is dwindling every day. If you want more people coming to your parties, you need to keep making more friends!

7. Doing Too Much. You’re Juggling Running the Business and Maintaining Revenue Growth

You certainly are. You have more to worry about than just sales, marketing, and sales development. The whole business depends on you being over everything that happens, from building maintenance to IT. If you feel like you’re spreading yourself too thin, you probably are.

And despite, all your other responsibilities, the business will continue to experience trouble for as long as these sales development issues are in play. If you could introduce productive harmony in that sales and marketing relationship, having processes in place so they essentially run themselves, just think how much time you could devote to building maintenance!

Outsourcing: Will It Solve Your Problems?

It absolutely could! 79% of businesses have reported positive experiences of outsourcing sales functions. We’ll take a closer look at the positives shortly, but it’s important to acknowledge that outsourcing isn’t a panacea.

The biggest threat to your future success would be to choose the wrong outsourcing partner. The vast majority of the companies offering these services are legitimate, professional, and driven to do their best work for you. But that doesn’t necessarily make any of them the right fit for what you need.

The simple fact is, if you choose the wrong partner, you’ll make your problems worse.

There are some common concerns that businesses have around the concept of outsourcing:

Each of these is an understandable worry for any business. And not just understandable, but - if you’re working with the wrong partner - they’re almost guaranteed to happen.

What Does Good Sales Development Outsourcing Look Like?

This of course varies from organization to organization. But let’s take the problems we identified. Something that solves each of them would be a great start, right?

A reputable outsourcing sales development partner will take the time to get to know your company’s problems, and they’ll collaborate with you to agree on a plan that’s going to deliver for you.

It will quickly identify your issues with sales cycles, lead consistency and quality, and contacting relevant clients. Your great outsourcing partner will do these things as a starting point, the beginning of the process, not the end.

The right partner for you will have transferable experience in sales development, with a high-performing framework and a pool of talent (including trained SDRs) to achieve results repeatedly.

Your partner will be able to raise or reduce staffing levels on demand. Revnew has 30% of staff available to be called up or redeployed depending on your business needs, and it can take your recruiting headaches away by using its own skilled, pre-vetted colleagues.

There isn’t a single one of your big seven problems that a dynamic, effective, highly-regarded outsourcing partner like Revnew couldn’t solve. And in a quick, efficient, cost-effective bespoke agreement that will deliver the results you need to see to close your dream clients.

How Will Your Work Life Look When You Outsource Development Sales Functions?

Well, as we have seen, that depends on who you outsource to.

One thing is clear: you can’t continue having sales development problems. Because a sales development problem isn’t a sales development problem - it’s a problem for your whole business. If you’re not maximizing revenues, human resources, or expansion opportunities, you’re being hobbled. There’s a good chance some of your competitors have already solved their problem and are reaping the rewards.

So you have three choices: 

1. Solve the problem yourself through training, hiring, firing, and redesigning your sales and marketing processes. It sounds expensive, time-intensive, and a hell of a lot of work. And all the while you’re attempting to fix it all, yours and several others’ eyes are off the main prize: making sales.
2. Outsource. Google the problem, and pick a solution. It might work. It might not.
3. Partner with an outside agency with specific, relevant industry experience. One that will learn and adopt your goals, strategies, and values. One that’s helping businesses like yours every day. One that will help you achieve your goals through dedication, expertise, and a deep commitment to achieving your mutual goals.

What will your work life look like after that? You’ll have a lot more time to spend hearing how the IT division needs a bigger budget, and reception needs new plants. But at least those unruly twins of yours will be getting along better than ever!

To get a fuller picture of what your life will look like after working with a great agency like Revnew, get in touch.