How Outsourcing Your Inside Sales Function Reduces Your Costs
When you think about the topic of outsourcing in general, reducing costs is one of your primary expectations. Unfortunately, executives at many organizations don’t look at outsourcing their inside sales function as a way of reducing costs.
Let’s breakout some of the major costs associated with building and maintaining the infrastructure of an inside sales function. This exercise will help you understand why outsourcing can result in tremendous cost savings while adding value to any organization.
Recruiting Costs
Recruiting costs can be steep, regardless of how you approach the process. Perhaps you are recruiting directly through websites such as Indeed. In addition to the costs of using those platforms, you must have a staff person who is exclusively dedicated to that role. That’s because hiring a sales professional is different from hiring someone for any other position in your office. It takes a certain type of expertise to weed through the field of applicants who call themselves sales professionals. So, you must factor in overhead costs for your recruitment person.
If you are using a placement firm, your costs are defined by your contract. A typical rate charged by a placement firm is 20 percent of the first year’s total compensation. Let’s say that you’re paying your new sales professional a $35,000 base salary plus $10,000 in benefits. That means you must pay your placement firm $9,000 for the privilege of using their services. If that sales professional leaves your organization in the sales industry average range of 12 or 24 months, you’ll need to pay another $9,000 for their replacement.
Payroll, Benefits, & Bonuses
As you know, an experienced inside sales professional doesn’t come cheap. Offering a competitive base salary, benefits, and bonuses add up to a serious outlay of capital for each person you hire.
Onboarding Costs
Then there are onboarding costs involving the actions and processes of integrating your new sales professional into your organization. While these costs are the same for every new employee, they are still an expense that must be added to the overall cost of operating an inside sales function.
Training & Development Costs
Beyond the traditional onboarding costs are training and development costs. Regardless of prior experience or sales success, each sales professional must be trained how to sell your product or service. And, to develop a top-notch professional, this training must be ongoing. All of this takes time and effort.
Management Costs
There are also ongoing management costs. These costs include the overhead associated with hiring and maintaining a sales manager—someone who administers your inside sales infrastructure.
Sales Tools Costs
One area of costs that is often overlooked in the calculations most organizations make is sales tools. You must add up the costs each sales professional needs to do their job effectively. That includes a phone, computer, software, like CRM licensing, and other employee-related overhead costs.
Opportunity Costs
Although opportunity costs are difficult to quantify, they can be steep. You can attempt to build out your inside sales functions and, using trial and error, make costly mistakes along the way. For instance, you can hire sales professionals who are unfit for the position and must fire them and hire new people. That costs money and time. Being in this situation also causes you to lose sales.
Additionally, you can make mistakes that cost money and time when it comes to formulating your sales strategy, setting up the technology to match that strategy, training and developing your sales professionals, managing your sales professionals, and fostering a culture and environment that supports your sales function.
Acquirent Helps You Reduce Costs
It’s easy to think that it’s too expensive, or that it takes too much work, to outsource your inside sales function. However, the reality is that it is easy to spend much more money and more effort trying to build the surprisingly expansive sales infrastructure that you need to operate your inside sales function.
When you outsource with Acquirent, you are tapping into a team that provides you with an array of services that replace your need to recruit, hire, train, develop, and manage sales professionals. You also don’t have to incur the expenses associated with payroll and benefits, and support items such as CRM licensing. Instead, you get the benefit of our full-time recruiters, managers, CRM experts, and marketing and lead services professionals.
With Acquirent as your partner, you can keep your sales-related costs to a minimum. Not only do you pay a fixed percentage of the sales Acquirent sales professionals make, you only pay for the services that you need. It’s time to look at outsourcing your inside sales function as a way of reducing the overall costs of operating your organization.