Hiring an outsourced sales company can be an ideal strategy for small businesses seeking to grow. Many companies today are growing as “virtual corporations”, choosing to outsource many functions within their business including choosing to outsource sales.

From web services to manufacturers, the decision to outsource sales often comes down to four core reasons:

1. Conserve capital
2. Reduce risk
3. Lower management overhead
4. Enjoy your business more

This article examines each of these reasons to explore how you can outsource sales to grow your small business.

Conserve capital
Hiring sales people can be one of the most high-risk and costly experiences for any small business. Recruitment costs, which can be up to 30% of the annual salary package, take a large slice of cash, plus other up-front costs including equipment and company car. For many small businesses, and particularly start-ups, the cost to get into the game can be prohibitive.

Rather than committing large capital sums to hire in-house people, business owners can access an outsourced sales resource through a specialist outsourced sales company.

An outsourced sales consultant will be provided on a flexible contract to fit with your budget, and on a results-focused model that includes commissions. The outsourced sales agent will already have their own vehicle and equipment (as they’re effectively self-employed) and there will be absolutely no recruitment fee.

This means that you can engage an outsourced sales consultant for between 3 to 6 months before you exceed the up-front costs you would have paid to a recruitment agency.

Reduce risk
In addition to saving huge up-front recruitment fees, many small businesses choose to outsource sales to reduce their risk. Getting a sales hire wrong can be a very costly mistake. It’s not just the wasted recruitment fees and employment costs; failure in hiring the right sales person can lose customers and destroy reputations.

By working with an outsourced sales company, you can engage with an outsourced sales consultant on a flexible, pilot basis. This could be a small project to see how things go before you scale up the operations, with the ability to terminate the relationship (without any employer obligations) at short notice.

For a small business, the ability to reduce risk by using an outsourced sales company is a big attraction.

Lower Management Overhead
For business owners without experience of running a sales team, using an outsourced sales company will dramatically lower your management overhead.

Why?

Outsourced sales consultants are not employees, they are self-employed. An outsourced sales company has its focused on delivering results; it’s their business model after all.

Rather than chasing employed sales people to find where they are, developing processes to control their activities, and then wondering why they are not performing – you contract out the entire management overhead to your outsourced sales company.

Your outsourced sales company will have its own reporting systems, CRM, sales processes, etc. They will be experienced at sales operations and bring many years of sales management expertise to the table.

Enjoy your business more
This brings us to the final compelling reason why small business owners choose to outsource their sales.

It may be heretical to state, by not every company wants to be (or can be) a global market leader. Some entrepreneurs want to build a profitable business that enables them to enjoy a particular lifestyle.

Even business owners with greater ambitions want to grow at a pace that they can control or focus on the aspect of their business that they enjoy.

Often, the most attractive reason to partner with an outsourced sales company is that you just don’t want to “do sales”. Even if you enjoy selling, the whole aspect of prospecting and managing the sales process may leave you cold.

If this is the case, finding an outsourced sales company that can take your business and run with it is the best solution. Outsourced sales companies exist to sell. They are run by people who will look at your business and see an opportunity to make money.

Many entrepreneurs find this liberating as they can get back to what they enjoy, be that product design, technical development, or whatever, and leave the sales to someone else.

If you are a small business owner or start-up entrepreneur looking to grow your business without the costs, risk and hassle of hiring your own sales people, partnering with an outsourced sales company can be the answer you are looking for.

This article brought to you by the number one magazine for wholesale merchandise, Retailers Forum.