Outsourcing all of part of the B2B sales process is on the rise as more companies realize the power of outsourcing to increase their sales.

According to the 2019 Marketing Mix Report published by Sagefrog Marketing Group, 63 percent of B2B companies were expected to outsource sales and marketing in 2019. In fact, 67 percent cited increasing sales leads as their top priority for the year, and 35 percent said their top priority was converting leads.

Investing in an outsourced sales development team makes sense when you consider that 63 percent of leads won’t buy for three months and 20 percent won’t buy for 12 months. Using sales development reps also can increase your close rate by 22 percent.

However, maintaining an in-house team is expensive: salary, benefits, selling tools, data resources, and more. Outsourcing lead qualification and sales development continues to be more cost-effective, low-risk way of doing business, and allows companies more market agility.

More focus on agility

A key advantage of outsourced sales is market agility. More companies are embracing the idea of trusting an outsourced sales partner to tap new markets, test new product strategies, and scale to a global footprint. Additionally, many B2B companies who are focused on their Enterprise and mid-market accounts, yet, want to see success in the SMB space, look to a sales partner to become an extension of their sales team.

With fast-paced changes in market conditions and new demands to enhance customer experience, successful companies have learned to master the art of the pivot. Adaptability means having a competitive advantage, and that includes being able to scale and focus your sales resources. Building new teams from the inside takes time and resources, whereas outsourcing to a sales partner is faster, more efficient, and less risk.

Engaging new markets requires more capacity and more infrastructure. Whereas it can take months to hire and train more sales reps and scale operations, an outsourced sales partner can meet the need in weeks. Here at Marconix, we can scale a new sales team of up to 100 reps in less than 4-6 weeks, offering global reach. Smaller teams are ramped and ready to go in 2-3 weeks.

Adopting sound sales strategy that delivers the elasticity needed to pivot and compete requires thinking differently. There is a reason why the trend of outsourcing is growing and projected to continue to do so. For example, almost 54 percent of companies are already using third-party customer support and 93 percent are adopting cloud services to facilitate outsourcing.

Increase in sales efficiency

One of the reasons that outsourcing to partner has become so popular is the growing need for sales automation married with a sound sales process. The tools in the sales stack continue to mature, and rather than buying more software and training sales reps in new technology tools, B2B companies find it easier to turn to their outsourced selling partners to who’s core competency is sales, to research, implement, and maintain the sales stack.

Sales automation is becoming a bigger part of the sales rep’s job and opening up more sales time. According to a report from InsideSales.com Labs, 63 percent of the sales rep’s time is focused on activities other than selling, and only 18 percent of their time is spent using customer relationship management (CRM) software, which is where critical customer data resides. By outsourcing all or part of your sales funnel to a sales partner, i.e.lead generation and qualification, sales reps have more time to dedicate to closing and customer care.

The big trend in sales automation has been increased investment in artificial intelligence (AI) for sales process recommendation and guided selling. AI will be supplanting CRM as the next big area of technology investment; The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that investment in sales AI would hit $1.45 billion in 2019.

Marconix is a pure play B2B sales outsourcing partner, with 10+ years experience in developing teams backed with results using the Sales Service model.

To keep pace with the growing need of outsourcing sales in 2019, Marconix has seen some of its own changes in the past year; changes that have put the company in a better position to compete and expand its Sales Service offering.

As we enter a new decade, you can be sure that some of these trends will continue, and new sales strategies trends will emerge. What won’t change, however, will be the need to adapt to continually changing market conditions, which is why smart companies will continue to look to Sales Outsourcing Service to give them a competitive advantage.