Understanding Sales Outsourcing and Leadership

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Welcome back to The Sales Focus Podcast. My name is Tony Horwath. I’m the President and Founder and CEO of Sales Focus. Today, I want to talk about what is sales outsourcing. 28 years ago when I started this business, my idea was: how do I help companies grow? How do I help people implement a process into their sales organization that will allow them to get to the next level? I talked a little about my history. A long time ago, I was a computer engineer, and then, I transitioned into sales and marketing. It’s not a traditional path, but I enjoyed the side of interfacing with people, asking questions. I had an inquisitive mind. I wanted to know how things worked, but I also had the background of understanding and knowing technology, so it allowed me to be very successful in sales. As I escalated in positions in my history and in my career, my last position was as an executive vice president for a company that was doing IT outsourcing. When people hear IT outsourcing, what that means is we would take over their technology, whether its a desktop, midframe, large organizations, small companies, but it was always just about the technology. In the mid-to-late-90s, BPO, Business Process Outsourcing, started to be talked about a lot more. What’s the difference between IPO and BPO? It’s very simple. BPO means the people, the process, and the technology, so you’re actually taking over entire departments. That’s when a lightbulb went off for me when I thought about starting the first sales outsourcing company, or sales BPO company. When I wrote my business plan in 1997, the model was simple: how do I help companies grow? How do I implement process into their sales organization to allow them to be successful? As I mentioned earlier in the mid-90s, late-90s, it was a very limited amount of technology to implement or process to implement in sales organizations. CRMs were just getting started, and in a lot of organizations, it was gut. People just went on how they felt, and sales people were really based on relationships completely, and there really wasn’t a way of, a great way, for managers to really track, to really look at KPIs, to see how sales funnels were being built to manage. Those types of tools really weren’t in place. The original CRMs were strictly for communication and tracking of contacts. You know. When is someone’s birthday? How many kids do they have? Let’s get information about that individual, so when I’m communicating back with them, I have that ability to have the knowledge about the previous conversations, but it really didn’t talk about process from the start of a conversation to the end to the next steps to qualifying to discovery calls and all the other things that went along. But as training developed, as technology developed, all of things became much more sophisticated, and it allowed organizations to really implement a process. So, when I started the organization, we were the first sales outsourcing company in the U.S. 1997, launched in 1998. The model was simple: building sales organizations or taking over sales organizations for technology companies at that time, only technology companies. But even today when I go out and I talk to someone, whether it’s at a social environment or I’m being interviewed or I’m doing a speech, and I say sales outsourcing, some people know what it is, but a lot of people still don’t know what that means. What does sales outsourcing mean? What does that mean to give up your sales team or to take over your sales team? The other thing I’ll tell you, when you say sales outsourcing, even today when I have conversations with people, I usually get the deer in the headlight look. I get that look like “oh” but that really means they don’t quite understand, and then I explain to them what we do is build and manage dedicated sales teams for our clients, and most people go “oh.” But eventually, they typically go “wow, that’s a great idea. I didn’t know it was available.” Well, sales outsourcing, as I said, has been around almost 30 years, but there are a lot of people that have, or understand it to be something different from what we actually do. A lot of people when they hear sales outsourcing or outsourcing in general or BPO, they always think about offshore. Right? They think about technology companies offshore. They’re doing outsourcing too, or customer service organizations, or lead generation companies, or telemarketing companies, and there is a million of them offshore. That’s not who we are. Our model is U.S.-based true sales outsourcing, so when we say true outsourcing, that means we take over. We represent your brand in a face-to-face model, meaning feet on the street, door-to-door, business-to-business, or even inside, where we have a call center, or sales center we refer to it as in Charleston, South Carolina, where all of our sales professionals are contacting business on your behalf. So, how does that make organizations better? How does that make them more effective? But, let me talk a little bit more about what is sales outsourcing. What is the difference between IT outsourcing and sales outsourcing? As I mentioned earlier, BPO, business process outsourcing, is taking over the people, process, and the technology, and in sales, it’s exactly that. Taking over the people, the process, and the technology. Now, most instances we’re not actually taking over an entire sales organization. We’re supplementing a sales organization. We’re complimenting a sales organization. Small companies, we are. We are taking over their entire sales organization. We’ll be doing top of the funnel work of lead generation. You know generating interest, digital marketing, whatever it takes, all the way to execution, but a true outsourcing model, which is what we focus on, is generating revenue for our clients. What does that mean? Generating revenue? That means meeting with your clients face-to-face or on the phone and walking them through the buying process based on what your value proposition is and your brand and getting them to say yes or sign a contract, meaning generate revenue for your organization. So, our focus as an organization has always been for 30 years truly sales outsourcing. Building, managing, dedicated salespeople for our clients. What makes us unique? It’s our process. We have a trademarked process called SOLD – Study, Organize, Launch, and Direct. It allows us to work with any size organization, whether you’re a relatively small start-up organization that wants to get passed a million dollars in revenue, or whether you’re a Fortune 500 enterprise organization, and you need sales people quickly in multiple territories around the country or perhaps you’re launching a new product, and you don’t want to get your existing sales team out of focus on what they’re currently doing. So, it really comes down to different models for different organizations, but the structure remains the same. When we talk about sales outsourcing, it’s about building dedicated, trained sales professionals that are representing your brand. A lot of organizations are nervous when you hear outsourcing, and then, they really get nervous when you talk about outsourcing sales. I know many times, when I started the organization, and I would talk to people about sales outsourcing the replied I’d typically get was you’d have to be crazy to give up your sales team. That’s your inface with your customers, and I would always explain it is your interface, but our job is to be an extension of your company, so yes my salespeople are my employees. They’re W-2 employees of Sales Focus, but they carry the business card of the client, so if I’m out there representing my customer, Customer A, my business card is Customer A with my name on it, so if those clients are calling me, they are calling a representative of that company. We are trained by the client. We represent that brand with the highest level of professionalism and sales ethics, and we make sure our job is to fulfill all the requirements of the contract. We’ve had relationships with some of the world’s biggest companies, and we’ve represented small organizations from all over the globe. We’ve had 500 companies from outside the U.S. who want to get into the U.S. market. We have companies that want to expand globally. We have enterprise organizations that are launching a new product, or perhaps a pharmaceutical company that has a new drug or a new product that they don’t to disrupt their current team. We have in the broadband industry teams that need to get out quickly, so we can launch a team in 45 days or less, and that’s part of everything we do for every organization. So, if you think about sales outsourcing, yes, you are transitioning your people and your process to Sales Focus, but we’re operating as an extension of your organization. It’s not a third party who’s remote, ya know in some offshore office who’s making phone calls. That’s not what we do. We represent you as your brand. All of our salespeople are W-2 employees. They’re not 10-99 commission-only working multiple jobs just trying to get a commission. Our people are sales professionals that are hired specifically for every program, trained specifically for every program. We do background checked and drug testing. They’re trained specifically on product, the product that they’re representing, and then, they have to go through Sales Focus training to make sure they understand the methodology and process that we implement. And then, we utilize our client’s CRM, so every bit of information that we capture, whether it’s sales, customer information, competitive information, marketing information, goes directly to our clients, so if there is separation between the organizations, you already have all the information. Customers only know your brand. All your contracts are signed as your company’s name on your paper. Every bit of data that we’ve captured is within your CRM, so there’s never a time where you cannot walk away from the relationship. Now, of course, we’d like to have contracts forever, but we also know that’s not true. Things change. Sometimes, people want to bring their sales team in-house, which we’ve done multiple times. Sometimes, people have a change in direction or change in decision, or they have a new person who’s in charge, and they want to bring the sales team inside. So, we’re always helpful in making sure that transition happens very cleanly and very transparent to everything that we do. So, when we take someone through our SOLD process – again Study, Organize, Launch, and Direct – it really is focused on building that plan, that strategy, the marketing plan, the sales plan, the sales process that aligns perfectly with what our clients are trying to do. So, most clients come to us with an idea. Right. “Hey, I need a sales person. I want to target this industry, and I want to focus X number of revenue that I want to generate in the first 12 months or 24 months or 36 months.” Some clients come to us, and they have no idea. Right. Smaller organizations that have never had a sales team before, or they’ve had salespeople, but they just haven’t effectively been able to hire and train and manage them, which happens quite often for particularly smaller organizations. Our job is to really understand your business, and then, we’ll even work with you to establish those KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. We’ll establish revenue goals. We’ll establish everything that needs to be done prior to what we call launching the team. So, we go through the recruiting process of hiring people, W-2 employees. We go through the training process where our trainers are going to do all the sales training. We’re going to look for our clients to do product training because you’re experts on your product, but then, we’re going to launch that team, and we’re going to manage that team every single day. And typically, almost 90% or 100% of the time, the information that we capture and the requirements that we have are much more stringent than the organization does internally. So, they may have a sales organization that operating in one way, but it’s not necessarily the Sales Focus way. When we launch a team the Sales Focus way, we know we’re going to have professional salespeople. We know they’re going to be trained properly. We know they’re going to be highly ethical and professional in what they do. We know that they’re going to understand selling and process selling and to make sure they understand developing funnels and managing people and how to do callbacks and reply to people because different sales take different skillsets, transactional selling, strategic selling, residential selling. They’re all a little bit different. They’re all a little unique, so our organization has that ability to build that sales team with our training department, organize, hire the right people with our recuiting department, and then make sure we manage them very closely. The part that we commit to with all of our clients is the reporting back to our clients, so I mentioned earlier, it’s not just about revenue, and I know everybody cares about their revenue, but it’s also finding out why people are saying yes and as importantly, why are people saying no. Getting that information early and adjusting your team and direction is key to the success of any sales outsourcing program. So, I appreciate the time today. Check back in with us for the next Sales Focus podcast where we continue to give you tips and tools to make you more successful and your team more successful. Thank you for today. Bye now.