What is Inside Sales?

As your business is growing, you'll need to start building your sales operations if you expect to be able to maintain strong revenue growth. As you've already found out, building an inside sales team is going to get expensive. The average salary for an inside sales representative is almost $45,000, excluding commission and tools they'll need. It also takes time. You'll want to spend a couple of weeks assessing candidates, vetting their skills, and figuring out who will be a fit for your team. Many companies don't consider outsourcing their inside sales, as it's an unknown area.

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But, over a third of companies in the US are already outsourcing. It's a powerful way to fuel your growth. If you're considering scaling up your sales operations but aren't quite ready to build an inside sales team, outsourcing could be for you. In this article, I'll walk you through some of the top reasons to outsource your inside sales team.

By the end, you'll have a clearer picture of whether it fits your scenario or not.

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8 Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Your Inside Sales Team

1. Free Up Sales Time for Revenue-Generating Activities

If you're considering outsourcing your inside sales, it's worth noting that you can still hire some internal sales reps. However, the typical inside sales rep only spends 35% of their week selling. The rest of the time is spent on repetitive tasks like building target account lists, prospecting, and doing admin work.

Your outsourced sales team can spend time generating pipeline, and your inside sales team, who know your brand better than anyone, can stay focused on running product demos and closing deals with qualified leads.

Your inside sales team can work directly with your outsourced team to pass on:

• Tactics that are working well
• Information about your ideal customers
• Best practices and workflow for cooperation

Your sales team can be the first point of contact for your outsourced team, and they'll be able to free up time they were already spending on time-consuming activities to focus on closing deals with key target accounts.

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2. Go To Market Much Faster

If you're scaling up, an outsourced sales team will help you quickly enter your market and start closing new business faster. The average time to hire is 36 days. That's over a month before your new sales rep even steps in the door. By outsourcing your inside sales, you can drastically reduce that time to activity. Most outsourced sales programs will have an onboarding phase, but you'd have that with a new employee as well.

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3. Outside Perspective on Your Business Growth

You will always know more about your business than an outsourced team will. That said, they may have insights into your market from working with other companies that you may not have considered before. You can tap into their years of expertise and learning in the market, and use that to help fuel your growth. If you hire an inside sales representative, they'll bring experience with them as well, but there's only one of them. When you outsource your inside sales, you'll be able to tap into the expertise of an entire team and different inside sales techniques.

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4. Your Success is Their Success

A common problem with outsourcing is that you risk hiring a team that doesn't care enough about your business. Ideally, you'll be able to read case studies and testimonials from their customers before you onboard them. In most cases, any good outsourced sales team will be invested in getting results for your business; arguably, at the same level an in-house employee will be. The sales reps working for your brand will have their own KPIs to hit, often based on helping with your brand growth.

If they deliver results, you'll keep paying them. If they're not delivering, you can get rid of them at any moment (assuming you're not locked into a long-term contract).

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5. Keep Overheads Low

If you're looking to grow but don't have the cash flow to hire and train several new sales reps at once, an outsourced sales team is a great option. 59% of businesses that outsource work cite reducing expenses as a reason for doing it.

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When you outsource an inside sales team, you avoid the upfront costs of having to hire several new team members, buying software, and dealing with other associated payroll costs. Outsourced teams have economies of scale, and you won't need to pay the same as it would cost you to hire as many sales reps as they have.

If the team you're working with needs to hire more sales reps to scale up your program, that's on them. That cost will already be factored into their pricing, and you won't be hit with a massive invoice. They'll also have all the tools you need to run content syndication campaigns, source B2B data, and manage large outreach campaigns.

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6. Knowledge of Sales Best Practices

If you don't have a sales team already, you should know that it's going to take time to ramp up your activities. Even if you hire five new reps today, you'll still need to plan out your campaigns, learn best practices, and figure out what works for your business. You can use an outsourced team to help you leverage your own time, and get more done. 24% of businesses choose to outsource primarily because of that efficiency increase. Let them handle the sales operation while you focus on closing deals with qualified leads they send your way.

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7. Sales Legal Compliance Built Into The Process

GDPR, CCPA, CAN-SPAM... Are you willing to keep up with new rules and regulations, and consistently update your sales process to ensure compliance?

If not, consider outsourcing.

If you breach any of these privacy and anti-spam laws, and you risk:

• Large fines
• Legal issues
• Annoying your prospects

If you're building your sales engine in-house, you'll need to verify that you're compliant and likely need to hire a lawyer or consultant to verify that your outbound campaigns and data sourcing practices are legal. If you outsource your inside sales work, good vendors (like Internal Results) will have compliance built into their processes already. If they didn't, their entire business model would be at risk. They'll be up-to-date on best practices in markets they work in, so you won't have to worry.

Any good sales outsourcing team will be happy to answer any questions you have about their compliance with local laws.

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8. You Can't Find Sales Talent

If you're struggling to hire sales talent then outsourcing is a valid alternative.

You could struggle hiring for reasons like:

• You're based in a smaller town or city
• You sell into a different market than where you're based
• You don't have the budget to build a team yet

Finding an outsourced team will enable you to grow your sales pipeline, without having to spend weeks to months, and potentially hundreds of thousands hiring new team members to build your sales machine internally.

Your outsourcing partner will have a team of proven sales talent with expertise in the market you're targeting. You can get results with your outsourced team, and slowly hire an internal team to eventually take the reigns.

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Outsourcing Your Inside Sales Team: A Recipe for Success?

There are lots of reasons you may not be ready to build an in-house sales team. However, most B2B companies need a sales team once they hit a certain level of growth. You need sales reps sending outreach campaigns, having conversations with potential customers, and closing accounts. Outsourcing your sales work is a shortcut to get the results you need, without the massive investment of hiring four or five inside sales reps.

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