should-you-insource-or-outsource-inside-sales

Should You Insource or Outsource Inside Sales?

A High Tech Company’s Guide

About This Book ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

About memoryBlue... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

The Inside Sales Big Picture .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Insourcing Disadvantages: Considerations Before You Go it Alone .. . . . . . . . . . . 8

Outsourcing Disadvantages: Potential Pitfalls when Straying from Home ... . 14

Insourcing Advantages: When the Ball Should Be in Your Court .. . . . . . . . . 19

Outsourcing Advantages: Think Outside Your Office ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

Our Take: Gut Checks, Careful Consideration, and Decision Time ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27

Bring in Blue .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29

Takeaways .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

© 2012 memoryBluememoryBlue.com2

About This BookIs This Book Right for Me? You’re an accomplished professional in the high tech industry, and now is the time for your company to start ramping up an inside sales effort to grow faster.

You might be close to a decision on whether you’re going to grow your inside sales program internally or bring in an outside firm for help, or you might not know where to start.

You’re in the right place.

Know, however, that if you are looking for a universal answer to whether you should choose an outside provider for sales or develop your own inside sales program—an answer that is right in every instance—this book is not for you. When asked whether it makes sense to outsource or to insource, our answer will always be: It depends. Every situation is different.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all answer, what follows is a set of considerations that you can use to make the best decision for your company’s specific situation, resources, and goals. You know your business. This guide gives you the tools necessary to decide how to promote sustainable growth in a cost-effective way through either insourcing or outsourcing inside sales.

Why This is ImportantIf you are projecting growth but want to make sure that this growth is timed correctly, sustainable, and consistent with your business model, the insourcing/outsourcing question is essential. Where do you see your company next year at this time? Five years from now? How are you going to get from here to there?

If you make the wrong decision, six months or a year down the road you will be out time and money and back to square one. Not to mention, your company’s brand could suffer.

memoryBlue has consulted hundreds of high tech clients on inside sales and has guided many companies through this decision—or in some cases, come in after a misfire.

Read on: This guide will equip you to make the right choice for your situation.


About memoryBlueBefore We Start, a Word about UsmemoryBlue is an inside sales consulting firm based outside of Washington, D.C.

Visibility, flexibility, accountability, and continuous high tech sales training is the cornerstone of our operation. Over 150 high tech clients have trusted us to fuel their growth.

We’re passionate about helping high tech companies grow faster and more profitability by maximizing the effectiveness of inside sales, while at the same time advancing the careers of stellar inside sales professionals. We believe the two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

Why We Wrote this Book

We answer the “Outsource or Insource?” question all the time in conversations with prospects, clients, and candidates.

We’ve been in the business long enough to know that a five minute answer in conversation is nowhere near long enough to cover all the ground that goes along with this important decision. Every situation is different, and the wrong decision can slow you down.

Read on for the factors you should think about when you are deciding whether to insource or outsource your inside sales efforts.

If you’d like some advice from the authors, or to find out more about memoryBlue, head to our website or page 25 to contact us.

HinT: Skip to page 30 for a one page summary you can print out and take back to your team.

http://memoryblue.com/?utm_source=eBook&utm_medium=eBook&utm_campaign=eBook


The Inside Sales Big PictureSurging Growth Want to take a stab at how much inside sales grew between 2009 and 2011?

What would be a reasonable guess?

30%?

60%?

Try 124%.

Plus, lead generation jobs have increased by 59% (source). We don’t think this is going to slow down any time soon. To see this trend explode before our very eyes is exciting; watch it pass you by at your own peril.

This Growth is No SurpriseSuccessful inside sales programs are proving themselves as one of the most profitable sales channels in high tech. So many of the problems and costs that have plagued sales in the past can be minimized by establishing an effective inside sales effort.

2009–2011 Job Growth

“Inside Sales” Jobs “Lead Generation” Jobs

Up 124%2011

2009Up 59%2011

2009

http://www.bridgegroupinc.com/inside_sales_hiring.html?hsCtaTracking=3dac1234-fe62-4b6f-952a-31f16b733a40%7Cd59dc5aa-9cc3-448a-bfe8-92c9e6e07410


Inside sales programs are more effective than alternative approaches because of a combination of the changing economy, advances in technology, and new training models. An inside sales effort is simply more cost effective and efficient than sending another team of reps out in the field. With inside sales, you avoid the risk and cost of additional field reps and gain an efficient, lean, and revenue-generating group of sales professionals.

The industry’s massive shift toward inside sales is proof positive that the older models pale in comparison to a well-designed inside sales strategy.

Persistent ChallengesInside sales is accompanied by some unique obstacles, some of which it has grown out of, some of which persist. A few that are still lingering include:

Identifying, Developing, and Retaining TalentInside sales is a different type of position than other sales jobs, and not all candidates are going to be able to step in and be effective at this job. The first challenge you have to tackle is identifying who has the potential to do this job really well. You may have to look in places that wouldn’t immediately occur to you, or give that untrained but ambitious college graduate an opportunity. They won’t have any bad habits or preconceptions about what sales is about or how it is done. But they’ll be green.

Which brings us to the second step—training.

In order to develop that raw potential, you have to devote sustained time, energy, and thought into a training program. For those of us who have been doing this a while, this task is getting more and more refined. For example, at memoryBlue, we have a program to develop rookies into pacesetters over a relatively brief period of time. Hiring people and just throwing them in the fire for the first month won’t be produc-tive, even if they are ambitious and talented. With the proper training, your new hires will become critical resources.

The Inside Sales Big Picture


Third, it’s hard to hang on to those trained hires that have developed their sales skills. If you’ve done your job right, they will be talented, driven, and versatile employees that are ready to move up or move out. The number one reason inside sales people leave is for career advancement (source). Finding ways to keep your best reps happy, productive, and at your company is up to you and your management.

Battling Traditional AttitudesEven as recently as a decade ago, field reps and execs marginalized inside sales reps—they disrespected their role in the company and questioned their value. The prevailing attitude was that these inside sales reps were there to serve the field reps, who were in “Big Boy” sales. This resulted in many companies treating inside sales reps as glorified assistants for the field reps rather than letting them do their jobs, squandering a valuable resource.

This has started to change, especially after seeing the broad success companies have enjoyed when they have deployed inside sales effectively. But there are still plenty of instances of the old guard believing in handshakes rather than phone calls and business lunches rather than GoToMeetings. For them, inside sales will never be an asset. Our challenge is to continue undoing those narrow perceptions of what inside sales is about and what it produces.


Survey Results: Motivations for Employees Leaving(excludes layoffs and financial motivations)

Career advancement 23%Perceived company demise 17%Hired for one role, assigned another 17%Desire for more voice/visibility 14%Solutions not competitive 11%Too many strategy/direction changes 9%

Conflict with Mgr. 9%

http://www.bridgegroupinc.com/inside_sales_hiring.html?hsCtaTracking=3dac1234-fe62-4b6f-952a-31f16b733a40%7Cd59dc5aa-9cc3-448a-bfe8-92c9e6e07410


Evaluating your OptionsSo you’re an inside sales believer. But you’re still faced with a choice:

Should you build your own inside sales team, or bring in an outside firm?

The good news is that you’re weighing your options, which is further than a lot of companies get. The bad news is that there is no simple answer.

There are a lot of variables to consider before you decide to commit one way or another.

The following pages will help prepare you to make that decision.



Insourcing Disadvantages: Considerations Before You Go it Alone

If you’re like most high tech businesses, your first inclination is that you didn’t get where you are by letting someone else do your job for you. Sales is no different, right?

Maybe. But before you decide that you’re going to take this thing on by yourself, don’t you think it makes sense to figure out what obstacles you’re going to encounter? Depending on where you are in your company’s development, building an inside sales team internally can present some real challenges:

The Need for SpeedInsourcing means more than just hiring people to be on the phone; you have to build the infrastructure to house, train, manage, and maintain your inside sales team. All of this takes time. Can you afford to devote that time to take the do-it-yourself route? Your first step is figuring out your timetable for growth and deciding whether you can wait around long enough to build your own inside sales team.

even if you do have the time, do you have the patience?

Difficulties Finding and Keeping the Right People Even if you do have the time (and the patience), there isn’t an unlimited supply of qualified salespeople that are ready to step in and immediately hit the phones. It’s a major challenge to find the right people at the right price point for inside sales.

Even when you do find strong talent, their shelf life is short: if they’re strong, they’ll want to move up—or out your door—to more significant roles. If they’re weak, they’ll be a burden rather than a resource. Sure, you could poach people from your competitors, but their top performers are likely looking for a vertical career move or significant increase in earning potential. The right people for the job aren’t around long enough to fulfill your needs because they’re moving into higher positions.

Can you invest the resources it takes to develop a program that will identify, attract, train, manage, and retain an effective inside sales team? do you want to invest those resources?


Lack of Metrics You may think that you know how to gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of your inside sales program. You may have even thought about it and estimated how many dials are needed to get to the right conversations, which will eventually lead to some qualified leads, which may ultimately produce sales. But do you really know what calculations will actually help you generate better results?

as it turns out, many companies don’t know what those metrics should be.

If you have no idea what is involved for each step of your sales cycle, how can you make pragmatic hiring decisions and assign quotas? It takes more than making sure your people have a phone on their desk and seeing how many calls they make per week. If you don’t have any idea what the metrics are, you’ll struggle to get your inside sales team firing on all cylinders.

Pulling Industry Baselines out of Thin AirYou may be the expert on your company and your solutions, but if you aren’t well-versed in inside sales industry baselines, chances are you’re way off.

For instance, how many hours do you think inside sales professionals should be spending on the phone each day?

Seven out of their eight hours a day?

Six?

Think again. The actual industry baseline isn’t anywhere near that mark, but hovers around two and a half hours a day on the phone per sales person. And that’s just one metric you might be missing on.


http://www.sales20book.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/2010InsideSalesMetricsSnapshot_080810.pdf


Most of an inside sales person’s time is spent doing research, building lists, sending follow up emails, tackling administrative tasks, and, in general, making sure the calls they do make result in progress towards a sale.

If you have no idea what the industry baselines are, you may be tempted to cut the ‘slackers’ on your team that are only on the phone for three hours a day. Really, you should be looking at call counts, quality call counts and several other metrics together so you can pinpoint problems and address them. It can be hard to make heads and tails out of all of this data without outside help.

Take a look at your sales goals and metrics and think about what you might be pulling from thin air—and how your guesswork could be limiting your team.

Lack of Meaningful TrainingYou may think that you have a well-trained sales team when what you really have is a sales team that knows a lot about your company and your solutions.

When you discover the difference between the two, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitors.

Even if they’ve been there for years, your sales people may have no idea how to do the only job they’re hired to do: sell! They have to be trained to sell, not to memorize every aspect of your product lines. Selling is all about strategy and tactics—skills that can be developed if you have the right training program in place.

The quintessential A-players can move from product to product, company to company, and will always outperform their peers. It comes down to being quick and to the point, asking impactful questions, demonstrating credibility, advancing the sales process by identifying next steps, and following through—performing the art and science of selling. Without these skills, all of the product know-how in the world won’t help you grow.

The Wrong EnvironmentIt’s amazing how important a proper sales environment is and how little this environ-ment is considered. You may not be able to logistically foster the right type of environ-ment for a vibrant sales group in-house.



For example, the last thing you need is for your well-intentioned but overzealous developers to chime in with “useful” information while your salesperson struggles to have a sales conversation in the next cubicle.

On the other hand, if there is a whole group of people working together, they support each other, understand and sympathize with the challenges involved in sales, and strategize to make each other more successful.

Environment plays a crucial role in the success or failure of your sales team; if you’re unable to provide this environment, your inside sales will underachieve.

Demands on Management Time and FocusIf your management doesn’t have the resources to keep close tabs on your new inside sales employees, your inside sales program will almost always underperform. All sales professionals—but especially new hires—require significant time and attention from management.

You don’t want your struggling inside sales team to become neglected because management has bigger fish to fry. Is holding a rookie’s hand the highest and best use of your sales leaders’ time? If you don’t have a manager to dedicate to your inside sales team, you will be distracting others from doing their best work, and you will be fighting a losing battle.

Tech Challenges and CostsTechnology can streamline and enhance your sales, but only if you know what kind of tools you need and how to use them. Yes, you need phones that will do your call recording and call accounting, but you might be missing out on knowing what technologies you need and how to use them.

For instance, you need to take advantage of the way lead lists are built and acquired. If you were to go the outsourcing route, the company that you hire will have access to lists generated through sites like DiscoverOrg, Jigsaw, Inside View, and ZoomInfo, because they’re able to spread the costs of these lists across all of their clients. Trying to acquire lists yourself may be cost-prohibitive—not to mention you have to know how to use the tools to get a valuable list. You could also consider technology like ConnectAndSell, and MonsterConnect, which combine software and services to exponentially increase live conversation time.



Of course, you can get burned by an outsourced provider who uses a bad list or a bad technology. But in general, your job is to bring revenue in and optimize your team. It’s not the highest and best use of your time to constantly scout for new inside sales technology.

Does your insourced sales team have the tech firepower to compete with an outsourced firm’s resources?

Covering Indirect CostsHave you really figured out how much insourcing inside sales will cost? The time to determine all of the indirect costs associated with developing an inside sales team is before you invest in that team. Make sure you factor in all of the indirect costs: benefits, training, office space/rent, health insurance, and management time.

Management time is huge: Who is going to manage the day-to-day activities of these employees? Often, inside sales professionals take more management time than other employees because they’re inexperienced, and their job takes a lot of initiative. Will you have to hire an experienced manager to guide this team past call reluctance and hold them accountable? What will that cost, directly and indirectly?

Think ahead so hidden costs won’t pop up unexpectedly after you’ve already invested more than you want to into your inside sales program.

Bad Closers? It may seem in reverse order at first, but your inside sales people won’t stick around unless they have good people closing the opportunities they surface. Underperforming closers shrink the already brief shelf life of your inside sales reps, and can poison productivity. No one wants to work their butt off all day just so someone higher up the food chain can drop the ball. Your best inside sales people will end up going someplace with stronger closers (or where they can close themselves) and leave you holding the bag. Each component of your sales team is interconnected, and you need everyone pulling their own weight if you want a successful inside sales team.

If you outsource your inside sales team, however, they will likely have performance incentives tied to their performance—and not the performance of your sales team as a whole. You’ll get the same output no matter the morale at your company.

More on this in the outsourcing advantages chapter.



Second Guessing Insourcing Inside Sales: Take Home MessageWhether you are gung-ho about establishing your own inside sales team or struggling to figure out why your already developed sales team is underperforming, a few of these considerations should ring a bell. Building your own team is difficult. Most companies do a poor job of it unless it’s their primary focus.

If you want to do inside sales right, you have to dedicate time, allocate resources, and exercise patience. If it’s not worth it to do it right, let the specialists take it off your plate so you can focus on the rest of your business: the highest and best use of your energy.



Outsourcing Disadvantages: Potential Pitfalls when Straying from Home

Before you decide to punt inside sales to a third party, there are a few things to consider. You’re counting on someone else to handle an important aspect of your business. Let’s make sure you stack the cards in your favor before exporting your inside sales to an outside provider.

Outsourced Talent Can Leave Something to Be DesiredThe people service providers hire might not be the cream of the crop. Most people want the prestige of an Oracle, so inside sales providers are fighting an uphill battle. To level the playing field, they can offer effective sales training programs, connected networks, and a more agile model, but they still might not be able to land top talent. Many providers’ standards won’t be quite as high as you would hope. Plus, because they’re not in your office, you won’t know until your sales suffer.

There’s more on this in the insourcing advantages chapter.

Hard to Keep ControlThe advantage of outsourcing is also its disadvantage. Sure, you won’t have to over-see every detail for your inside sales effort, but you’re also signing away a degree of control to people who don’t work for you. You’ll have to rely on a group of people you don’t know, or have only met in a few meetings, to handle an important part of your business. If you have trouble ceding control, this option might be tough for you.

Control freak? If so, you might prefer taking your chances—for better or worse—on your own terms over giving the reins to a stranger.


Mortgaging the FutureFor companies that know they’ll need an internal inside sales team eventually, out-sourcing is basically mortgaging your future for the short term. Evaluating the costs of internally implementing internal sales means doing the math for the short term and the long term. If you have the budget to do it now and it fits into the model of your business, it makes less sense to outsource your sales. If you don’t have the budget now, but will in the future if sales head in the right direction, just realize that you’re using a stop gap measure until you have the cash to do it yourself.

People are Assets: Are They Yours?

When you build an inside sales force, you are injecting smart new people into your company who will serve you well in their current roles, and then go on to move up through the ranks as your company grows. If you have the patience, time, and resources now, it may be wise to invest in these people. If you don’t, your only clear option is to outsource this function and resign yourself to—at least for now—forego developing the asset of an internal inside sales team.

You Don’t Own the Processes or ByproductsOutsourcing is a good way to take advantage of the processes and best practices that third party suppliers use, but these critically important processes (and the lists in which they result) are not yours.

no one wants to plan on a break-up, but if you want to get engaged with an outside sales supplier, you may want to draw up a prenup. Most firms are ethical and will not burn you, but it’s still prudent to find out whether or not the lists, contacts, processes, and other byproducts all stay with the third party if you leave. Find this out before you start working with them.



For example, if an outsourced firm is working with their CRM system, not yours, all that data may stay with them. The upside for them is that they’ve spent your money developing a great contact list that they can use for a similar company. The downside for you is that you have nothing to show for the asset you paid them to build.

Different firms have different approaches on this. Some will not hand over anything. Others, like memoryBlue, will work within your CRM system and even arrange for you to bring our employees onto your team if you’re ready to bring inside sales in house. Plan ahead, and be aware of who owns what you’re building together in case you decide to go a different direction.

No Control Over TurnoverTurnover is bad enough when it’s in your own office—at least you can identify the problems and work to limit them. If you use an outsourced company, you won’t really know what it’s like to work for them. A 30 minute weekly meeting won’t give you a real window into their company culture, potential problems, or incentive structures.

If you outsource, you won’t have the ability to make the situation right for the out-sourced employees. Instead, you’re at the mercy of their management, which may not handle a looming turnover problem in the same way you would. When you don’t have proximity to the sales team, you can’t identify small problems and prevent them from manifesting into big problems. You’ll have to trust someone else to do that.

Warning: Resistance AheadHere’s where another advantage may prove to be a disadvantage: outsourced inside sales providers have probably worked with many other businesses like yours. If you’d like an outsourced provider to try an experiment and their experience indicates it will likely fail, reputable providers will put up some resistance and try to steer you in another direction.

Additionally, the outsourced provider will probably have a uniform system for handling each client, and this system may not be the one you’d choose. As opposed to most aspects of your business, where you could just tweak to your liking (though not always without cost), many outsourced providers will stick to the way they always do business.



As we’ve stated earlier, outsourcing sales requires ceding control. If you’re the my-way-or-the-highway type, you probably want to go the insourcing route.

Clashing SystemsDoes the thought of someone using your CRM make you shiver? Can you hand over the information an outsourced provider will need to be successful? Working with an outsourced provider requires flexibility and releasing information you may be used to keeping internal.

Conflicts of InterestYour provider’s loyalty to you and your company might not extend beyond the check you cut them. Their priority might be always signing more clients, even if those clients are your competitors. It’s unrealistic to demand that the provider avoid working with anyone remotely related to your field, but it does make sense to outline a few direct competitors that should be out of bounds. Keep in mind, however, that your employees are just as likely, if not more likely, to work for a competitor if and when they leave your walls.

An ethical firm ought to be able to address any conflict of interest concerns in advance and figure out a deal that makes sense for both of you, but if you are extremely sensitive about competitors, handling everything in-house might be your best bet.

Misaligned Success

When you insource your sales team, everyone’s job relies on the success of your company: if you fail, they’re back in the job market.

When you outsource, the risk of your failure doesn’t have the same motivating factor to those handling your sales. They’ll get assigned another client and move forward. You’re the one that’s going to be up a creek.

This is especially true when the outsourced company is thriving and you’re struggling; they won’t be too worried that your company is taking on water if they have a few dozen others that are doing exceedingly well. A sales team within your walls would recognize the dire situation and do everything they could to avoid failure. You won’t get that same productive desperation from the barely-connected strangers at your provider’s office.



Bottom Line: How Much Control Do You Want, and What Stage Are You in?If the thought of someone else making sales calls on your behalf is tolerable only insofar as you can micromanage them, outsourcing is going to result in more paranoia than profits. If you know you’re going to need to insource inside sales eventually, you don’t need a fully geared up team immediately, and you can spare the time and resources to build a team on your own, internal inside sales will be an asset that serves you well in the long run.

Yet if you don’t have the time, resources, or patience, building a team internally might be a luxury you can’t afford. Sure, doing it yourself might save you dollars, but it may also end up resulting in your mess for less.

If inside sales is a core function of your business and you aren’t at least considering how to develop the team yourself, you may be kicking yourself a few quarters down the road.



Insourcing Advantages: When the Ball Should Be in Your Court

You should always be suspicious of an outsource provider that tells you confidently you should always outsource your sales. After all, they don’t outsource their sales—their internal salespeople are the ones pitching their company to you. Inside sales makes perfect sense for them. It might make good sense for you, too.

Stay in the Driver’s SeatWhen you choose to insource inside sales, you get to maintain control over how that sales team is trained and how it performs. Each step of the process can be monitored and molded to fit your company’s idiosyncrasies by you, the person who knows the company best.

You get to oversee the hiring and decide when to cut an underperformer. In between, you will see what time your employees come in, gauge their attitudes, listen to their calls, coach them, structure their day, review their lists, teach them good habits, and cater performance improvement plans to the team. If something’s not being done right, you’ll know about it and you can do something about it. You can also recognize who has a big upside even if they’re underperforming at the beginning. You have a greater ability to make changes on the fly in order to avoid problems.

Develop and Stockpile TalentIf you do it correctly, the advantages of insourcing inside sales go beyond lead generation. As you train your employees, you’ll be able to recognize who has the skill, drive, and potential to move up into other positions and elevate the entire company. You will basically have a reserve of people who can step into many different roles. They know the company and have been trained by your program, so you can be confident in who they are and what roles they can play.

insourcing inside sales can build a farm system that grooms new hires for your major league team.


Everyone on the Same TeamInsourcing gives you the ability to develop and foster a team mentality with your employees. You can have your thumb on the pulse of what everyone is doing profes-sionally (or even personally), which offers you a serious advantage. And, when you develop an electrifying company culture and each person feels that they are an important part of the team, your team’s success will be greatly improved.

Cost Effective Big PictureTake stock of what your company looks like now and what you want it to look like in the future. If your need for inside sales is small, say up to the equivalent of around 4 full time employees, you will likely save money by outsourcing because of the indirect costs and management resources you would need for an internal program. With a team this small, you also won’t have the critical mass you’ll need to generate metrics that are meaningful.

See the insourcing disadvantages chapter for more on this.

But if your need for inside sales is big enough that it would merit building a manage-ment team to handle strategy, training, infrastructure, and all the day-to-day concerns, it might make more sense to build your team internally. That way, you can turn your investment in inside sales into a lasting asset.

Get Answers Now, Face to FaceChances are, you know how often sales professionals need a quick question answered by a sales engineer, product manager, or exec in order to respond to a prospect’s question. If everyone’s in the same place, they can just walk up to the right person and get the answer quickly and efficiently without an email barrage or the misunder-standing that comes from not being able to ask clarification questions.

Not only are you training your sales team more effectively, you’re also cutting down collaboration time for everyone and making it difficult to ignore sales professionals when they need a quick answer.



Prestige!

You’re a high tech company. That’s just plain sexy.

If you’re established, A-players are going to want to get your name on their business card. If you’re up and coming, A-players are going to want to be part of the thrill.

Your prestige is going to help you recruit quality people in a big way. After learning the ropes in an inside sales role, those people can become pacesetters throughout your company’s ranks. Outsourced providers don’t have the same prestigious allure, so when you outsource, you might not have the same caliber of inside sales reps as you would internally.

However, outsourced providers may have better training and retention systems. If you insource inside sales and you don’t provide incentives and career opportunities for your standout talent, they won’t stick around long. Are you willing to invest in not just attracting, but retaining, talent?

Inside Sales: Step Inside My OfficeIf this section just made you want to crack your knuckles and get ready to rumble with your very own inside sales team, that’s great—you know what it will entail. If this section made you a little nervous about whether you’re ready to take this monster on, don’t panic—the next section is for you. At the end of the day, doing inside sales is a phenomenal choice if and only if you have the time, resources, patience, and where-withal to do it right.



Outsourcing Advantages: Think Outside Your Office

You owe it to yourself to explore the benefits of outsourcing your inside sales program. There are dozens of cases where attempting to go it alone will be a recipe for disaster, and an outside sales provider could really fit the bill. They use their specialized expertise in inside sales for your benefit while freeing you up to focus on the strategic responsibilities that are the highest and best use of your time. Here are some elements to consider.

True Sales EnvironmentUnless you’ve spent as much time thinking about creating a sales environment as the outside providers who specialize in this kind of thing, you probably won’t be able to compete on those terms. For example, at memoryBlue we installed white noise makers in the ceiling to kill background noise and ensure our salespeople can focus on conversations with prospects and clients. These are the types of minute details that outsourced providers have thought of and implemented, which give them a leg up on you. They specialize in anticipating and addressing obstacles that you haven’t even though of yet.

Expertise and Leadership

The fact that you’re good at sales does not mean your company should automatically develop an inside sales team. Inside sales reps generally require massive, and specialized, management time and focus. Because this is the specialization of the outsourced provider, sales leadership and management expertise is always a priority. Trying to do it yourself might mean a distracted set of executives and a neglected inside sales force.


A specialized outsourced inside sales force with a clear focus will outperform an internal inside sales team that is neglected, distracted, or lacks the resources that an outside company can provide.

Ramp Up Quickly, Break Up EasilySometimes you have a short window for when you need to increase your sales numbers. Choosing an outside provider minimizes the time it takes to generate those first sales. You can ramp up quickly and easily through an outside company without having to worry about management, training, or oversight.

As importantly, you can part ways with minimal pain if it becomes necessary. You insulate yourself from risk of litigation and don’t have to worry about firing your own employees. You gain plenty of flexibility in the size of your sales force when you outsource; insourcing can result in your hands being tied by HR.

Metrics and Industry BaselinesAgain, you can take advantage of the expertise that a specialized company has developed. Outside firms will be intimately familiar with all of the metrics and industry baselines that maximize sales performance. If you start from scratch internally, it would take years to learn all of the lessons that they have picked up, and you lose time that could have been spent on something more important.

Passion and IncentivesWhen you work with an outsourced team, the company’s leadership will be passionate about not just your success, but inside sales as an industry.

Can you say the same about anyone on your team?

Working with an outsourced firm means you’ll be dealing with people who devote every day to inside sales excellence. They’ve dealt with the problems, and risen up to the challenges. And they love the ride.



Moreover, maximizing your inside sales success is how this outsourced firm feeds their family. They’re invested in your inside sales effort as if it was their own because their company will only survive if their clients are successful. They’re going to work hard to find talented people and set up effective processes. If someone isn’t working out on their team, they can find someone new. If there is a problem developing, they will take care of it quickly or risk losing income. Plus, all this happens without you having to deal with it yourself.

Technology and ToolsAs we discussed in the Insourcing Disadvantages chapter, this is what the outsourced provider specializes in. They are going to have a war chest of the latest inside sales tools and technology, which can be an enormous benefit to you. They have spread the costs of investing in these tools and technology over a portfolio of clients, making it affordable. It may be cost prohibitive for you to buy hardware or pay for software-as-a-service subscriptions yourself, but as a client, you can avoid lengthy term agreements and really take advantage of your provider’s investment.

A good provider will have the latest in phone technology, which includes call tracking and call recording. But they will also be paying close attention to the tech developments that are right around the corner. Their success hinges on staying ahead of the curve. If you don’t have as much of an incentive as they do to do this homework, it’s probably best if you leave it to them.

Recruiting and RetainingA good outsourced provider will have a refined strategy for identifying, signing, training, and retaining the right talent for high tech inside sales. This takes more than seeing if they have a good handshake. A sophisticated evaluation system can help identify who will succeed and who will fail—before they get hired. An outsourced firm will also be familiar with the high level of turnover inherent for inside sales employees, and will likely have a strategy to either minimize turnover or ensure that it won’t hurt performance.

Plus, the outsourced firm will handle training, which has been streamlined and improved over hundreds of clients prior to you. It is difficult to compete with the training and recruiting engine a good outsourced firm will have running if you are trying to do it all on your own.



Minimizing Management TimeWe’ve stressed this in other chapters, and we can’t stress it enough. Inside sales reps inherently require more management focus than other roles. A lot of these folks are young, and their job requires the ability to do something that many people consider terrifying: cold calling busy and powerful executives. Managing inside sales rookies involves intensive care.

By outsourcing, you remove a huge portion of responsibility from your plate. You can focus instead on the aspects of the business that require your expertise while the sales issue takes care of itself. Where is your time best spent: Hiring, training, managing and evaluating your inside sales force? Or could you be doing something more important that would be in the best interest of the company’s long-term growth?

Cost and ThresholdCalculating the costs of outsourcing versus insourcing is usually more complicated than it seems. Outsourcing may seem expensive on a per-hour basis until you realize how much management goes into inside sales. Ultimately, you have to find your threshold for when it makes sense to develop your own inside sales.

As an analogy, a startup’s first hire is not an attorney.

Startups outsource legal counsel until the hours needed grow to the point that it makes sense to keep someone on staff. Outside counsel may seem expensive when you look at what they bill by the hour, but it makes financial sense to outsource this expense until you are big enough to necessitate having full time legal counsel on your payroll.

The same goes for inside sales.

The costs of outsourcing may seem high, but if you are a small company or inside sales isn’t a central focus, you may save time, money, and a headache by offloading the sales responsibilities to the pros. If, one day, you do have a plan to grow aggressively, you can revisit that strategy and decide when it makes sense to bring the function in-house.



Independent MoraleIn the Insourcing Disadvantages chapter, we talked about how bad closers can really poison your internal inside sales team’s chances at success. Your inside sales team will be miserably unproductive if the qualified opportunities they worked weeks to surface are routinely fumbled once they’re passed off to field reps. When an inside sales rep’s compensation is tied to a weak field rep’s performance, morale plummets.

When you outsource inside sales, you don’t have that problem. At an outsourced firm, inside sales reps are rewarded for their competency, not a client’s. This means that no matter what is going on at your firm, they will keep delivering their best work.

Takeaway: That’s Why I Do What I Do, and You Do What You Do

You know what your strengths are. You know where your time is best invested. Outsourced providers specialize in this stuff—why wouldn’t you let them run with it while you focus on the highest and best use of your efforts? Having your center bring the ball down the court rarely makes sense; give it to a guard and stick to your role in the paint with your back to the basket.



Our Take: Gut Checks, Careful Consideration, and Decision Time

If you’ve made it this far, you already know what our take is on making this decision:

Every situation is unique.

There isn’t a definite, general answer because companies aren’t cookie-cutter clones. You have to evaluate the risks and benefits of structuring your sales in one way or another based on where you are, your strengths, and what you want to accomplish. You don’t want to make a decision without carefully considering the risks.

If you decide to hire a team and go it alone, you’re investing in them. You’re devoting your resources not only to their paychecks, but your time and energy training them. They become a lynchpin for the success or failure of your new inside sales program. Best case scenario is that they are great—talented, ambitious, and coachable. As they grow, they can move up through the ranks of your company.

But what happens if you can’t find the right people, or your management can’t devote enough time to the program, and the whole thing flames out after six months? You’re back to square one, and your back is closer to the wall.

If you don’t have the resources, tools, time, and patience to truly develop a topnotch inside sales program, the risks of experimenting with it might outweigh the benefits of possible success. Insourcing your team will present some very serious challenges for you, which you shouldn’t underestimate.

If, on the other hand, you decide to outsource, you can feel confident that you’ll be seeing some progress in the near term. You won’t be starting from nothing. You will have trained and motivated sales professionals performing under committed leadership. An outsourced firm will have concrete returns that they’ve produced for several other clients. They’ll do the same for you.


Yet when you outsource, you’ll never have the control you would enjoy with an internal inside sales program, and you’ll be missing out on the opportunity to bring smart, ambitious people into your company.

It comes down to this:

If you do it yourself, make sure you do it the right way. If you aren’t confident you have the time, patience, or resources to do inside sales right, outsourcing is your best bet.

Still not sure what to do? Scroll to the very last page for a summary of all of the factors you should be considering.

memoryBlue created this guide because we are passionate about inside sales. Whether you’d like to insource or outsource your inside sales program, we can help.

We’re happy to share ideas.

Our Take: Gut Checks, Careful Consideration, and Decision Time


Bring in BlueQuestions? Comments? Have an inside sales challenge for us? Sweet!

Contact us to find out more about how we can help your company grow through inside sales—outsourced or insourced.

703-778-5765 [email protected]

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TakeawaysAlways remember: deciding to insource or outsource inside sales depends on your company’s situation.

disadvantages• Demands on management time and focus • The wrong environment • Difficulties finding and keeping the right people • Lack of metrics • Pulling industry baselines out of thin air • Covering indirect costs • Lack of meaningful training • The need for speed • Tech challenges and costs • Bad closers

disadvantages• Outsourced talent can leave something to be desired • No control over turnover • Hard to keep control • Mortgaging the future • You don’t own the processes or byproducts • People are assets: are they yours? • Misaligned success • Conflicts of interest • Clashing systems • Warning: Resistance ahead

Insourcing Outsourcing

advantages• Develop and stockpile talent • Cost effective big picture • Everyone on the same team • Stay in the driver’s seat • Get answers now, face to face • Prestige!

advantages• Ramp up quickly, break up easily • Recruiting and retaining • Minimizing management time • Metrics and industry baselines • Expertise and leadership • Technology and tools • Passion and incentives • Cost and threshold • True sales environment • Independent morale

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