Sales Outsourcing Definition

What is sales outsourcing, and how can it help you and your business?

This process involves hiring an external team to help you sell your goods or services. Companies engage in this practice for a variety of reasons, such as:

Rushing a product or service to market.

If you've been a student of “lean business,” you know that one of the keys to building a business is to get moving, ASAP. First, you create and test a minimum viable product; then you get feedback; and then you adjust your strategy based on that feedback. By outsourcing your sales processes to a competent partner, you can get things up and running faster.

Avoiding the hassle and headaches of building an internal sales force.

If your goal is to obtain an ROI, as soon as possible, to fund business activities, you want to avoid getting dragged down into the slow, laborious and expensive business of vetting, training, and improving an internal sales force. Going "out of house" lets you shortcut this process.

Using sales outsourcing to test new product or service inexpensively.

Perhaps you already have a sales force, in-house, but they're busy with critical projects. But then you develop a new service or offer that you feel may resonate with your market. By cheaply and quickly outsourcing to an outside sales team, you can check the viability of this new concept or offer rapidly without distracting your sales team.

Distinguishing Between Marketing and Sales Outsourcing

Note the profound difference between sales outsourcing and marketing outsourcing. Sales can be easily outsourced; marketing, not so much! To understand why, let's review definitions. Marketing is technically the process of bringing your clients to desire your services or products. Or, in the famous words of Peter Drucker, “the aim of marketing is to make sales superfluous.” Sales, meanwhile, is all about sealing the deal -- making sure the value propositions work. The point is that, if you do a really good job with your marketing -- and you gin up genuine, passionate interest in what you have to offer -- you will find it measurably easier to find a competent sales outsourcing team to close the deals you need to make to be profitable.