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Sales Outsourcing: Challenges and Prospects
Date
July 21, 2022
Category
Author
Sunny

Sales Outsourcing: Challenges and Prospects

Sales outsourcing is a technique that can reduce personnel costs, improve interaction with customers and free up time for other business processes. This organizational solution involves the transfer of non-core functions of the company to outside organizations. It also includes:

  • searching for and attracting customers through various advertising channels;
  • expanding and updating the contact base;
  • providing information support to clients.

Outsourcing can be narrow, partial or complete. The selected type determines the scope of the service. There is also partner outsourcing when the cooperation is carried out by friendly companies.

Challenges

Work with outsourcers is accompanied by certain risks, most of which can be predicted, which allows you to protect yourself with the appropriate conditions in the contract. These include:

  1. Getting into dependence. When there is no competition, the outsourcer can lower the quality of services, and you simply have no one to replace him.
  2. Inconsistency of output and sales. Sellers are always fighting with executives or production workers in the company. The first want the best service/goods at the lowest prices in the shortest possible time, the latter always want more time and more money. This is normal because there is truth at the intersection of desire (sales) and opportunity (production). However, when the production people are from your company, and the sellers are from someone else’s, you should put yourself in the position of the general director and try to take an objective position.
  3. Business processes in a partnership between two companies. Many businesses in the B2B segment need clear work in the link “production-sales”, the promotion of UTP, coordination of terms of shipment and delivery, reconciliation of terms of reference, making individual decisions.  In any case, the attitude to an employee of a third-party company is completely different and it is almost impossible to rigidly fix this relationship.
  4. Lack of funding for sales channels. Real outsourcing of sales requires tangible investments. The outsourcer makes investments in workplaces, remuneration of labor and sales channels, while the manufacturer does not invest a penny. This means that for him, it is a secondary task to facilitate the outsourcer’s sales efforts.

These are the most basic difficulties that can occur. However, outsourcing is only possible if certain conditions are followed.

Prospects

Direct sales outsourcing helps you save money, in particular the savings extend to labor, time, and budget. With the help of outsourcing, it is also possible to enter a new market or launch a new product, change strategies and decide to build your own direct sales channels.

It is possible to reduce resource costs, which the management of non-key processes requires, as well as free up additional time and energy of the HR team. Outsourcing allows you to minimize potential mistakes and their associated contingencies. It makes it possible to reduce the scale of capital expenses. Saving is reached due to the fact that the outsourcing company has already constructed all infrastructure, and the company-customer can use already ready capacities and experts for realization of its plans. Another saving factor is the “co-sharing” of specialists, the possibility for the contractor to use them in several projects simultaneously. 

If the main goal is to save money on outsourcing, you can try to calculate this on the example of one of the most common requests – to support the operation of an online store (a variant of billing). The most costly components of such a project would be the organization of the call center and other channels of communication with customers, fullfilment and courier delivery.

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Date
July 21, 2022
Category
Author
Sunny

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