Outsourcing Revenue Growth: Scaling Revenue with an External Sales Team
A key part of managing your sales team is knowing when and how to scale it – making sure rightsizing your team ensures you capture market growth without overextending your employees.
But scaling up can take time and be expensive to get right. Permanent employees take a long time to hire, train, and onboard, and if you didn’t choose the right candidate you might have to do the costly process all over again a few months in. This is where flexible workforces can come in extremely handy.
External teams, freelancers, and consultants can all be valuable additions to your organization – they can jump in and get up to speed quickly, and they’re often less expensive in the long run than scrambling to hire new permanent staff.
Plus, they can be a great solution in situations where adding more permanent staff isn’t necessarily the right move, like in temporary crunch-time scenarios or when you need help penetrating specialty markets or just need an extra administrative hand.
Of course, if you’ve never used an external workforce in your sales strategy before, adding one to your team can seem intimidating. It’s ok. We’ve done it and we’re here to help. Below are our top strategies for knowing when you need to scale your sales team, where to direct your resources to scale most effectively, and how to make sure your flexible workforce hits the ground running.
Understand Your Team’s Capacity
The best way to know when to scale is also the simplest: have a clear understanding of your team’s bandwidth. Then you’ll be prepared to make the decision to scale.
If everyone on your team is working at capacity or just below it, and you have a new product launch coming up or you want to break into a new market, adding freelancers or other external workers will reduce the risk of burnout.
But capacity doesn’t just refer to energy; it can also refer to knowledge. Especially if you’re looking to penetrate a new market, hiring a consultancy with niche expertise can help you optimize a sales plan in less time than dedicating a portion of your permanent team to researching and strategizing on their own.
A client came to Prime 8 for help boosting their sales of a tech solution. With our consultants’ expertise we were able to rework their sales framework to improve the resources around this solution’s niche, and the company experienced a massive improvement in sales as a result.
Assess Your Specific Needs to Figure Out Where to Scale
The kind of external help you hire has a lot to do with where you need to scale. If what you need is skills or knowledge outside that of your internal team, then a consultant who specializes in the niche you’re aiming for is more useful than a handful of freelance sales agents.
If you know where your team is lagging or needs a boost, but you’re not sure how to improve it, this is a great time to bring in a consultancy. Business strategy consultants bring fresh eyes to your capacity plan and sales playbook, something that’s difficult to do from inside, and help you maximize your current sales resources. We did this with a recent client, bringing in partner managers to improve their partner channel sales, which increased their sales revenue by 67%.
On the other hand, if you need help managing volume, as happens when there’s an influx of new leads or a new product launching or a crunch to hit a goal on a tight deadline, temporary teams can pick up sales slack. These employees are hired, onboarded, and employed by the temp agency, so you don’t need to worry about the overhead you’d have with a permanent hire.
Set Your Flexible Workforce up for Success
Whichever type of external workforce you bring on board, you’ll want to get the highest possible return on your investment, which means doing the legwork ahead of time to enable them to get up to speed quickly.
Make sure you have plenty of resources ready to educate new freelancers on the products or services you’re selling and your team’s sales strategy – this might include training programs, best practice documentation, and FAQs. It’s also a good idea to designate resources to manage and guide freelancers or temp workers until they learn the ropes.
Similarly, if you’re hiring consultants, prepare for their involvement by getting clear on what your goals are for the partnership and gathering all the information and data they might need to tackle the problem you’ve hired them to solve.
However you choose to incorporate external team members into your sales strategy, tapping into a flexible, fast, experienced workforce is a great way to scale your team without the cost and time commitment of adding more full-time employees.
Prime 8 Consulting takes a programmatic approach to helping companies build high performing teams. When building a solution for you, our holistic framework considers all aspects of team and people performance including team norms, governance, process improvement, change management systems, operational optimization, and learning programs to build high performing sales teams. We’d love to hear more about your needs. Reach out to our experts today for a free consultation.
