Learn about Sales Outsourcing in the UK....

[TargetSell]

Good afternoon UKBF users,

I've had quite a number of emails from other users asking me to take a little time to explain exactly what Sales Outsourcing actually is, and how it helps various companies.

Sales Outsourcing, whilst a relatively new concept in Europe, has been used greatly in the US and also Japan. In the US its often refered to as the Rep-System, where professional sales people, offer their services directly to product makers, on a free lance basis. They are then only paid for the activity they produce. The same system also exists in Japan. In both countries however, sales is seen as an art form.

In Europe sales as a career has a tarnished image, and as such good quality sales people do not recive the same social position as they would in the meritocratic USA. The approach to sales people in Europe tends to be hit and miss. Many companies hire and fire constantly, trying to keep activity targets high and the blood fresh. In Europe, more than anywhere else, we need a different way to maximise the skills of our sales people. One of the best ways to do this, is to split up the sales process, aligning people with the best honed skills, to the various stages of the process.

Why put someone with superb face-to-face skills, on a telephone in an office, for 2-3 days of each week? Why ask someone who is superb at product introductions, to struggle with closing sales? Why take a brilliant account manager, with highly developed people skills and force them into heavy selling situations? The truth is, all of these examples are typical of Europe-wide sales systems, even in the largest of sales organisations. With sales outsourcing, we can truely maximise the effect of each type of sales professional. We should be using successful telephone-agents for appointment making, hard working product openers for multiple end user meetings and experienced inhouse sales closers for getting those sales completed.

No fully in-sourced sales environment can make full use of their sales resources, but combine insourced sales and outsourced sales (as TargetSell do with all their partners) and very quickly, sales resources are fully utilised and efficient.

There is probably not enough time to describe the many ways in which outsourced sales campaign operate, but we are happy to talk to anyone with questions or direct requirements.

We look forward to being able to assist those who feel that outsourced sales may be an option for them,

With kind regards,

[ebonybailey]

How many is quite a few emails from other users consdering you only joined today, I feel a sales pitch me thinks. And your stuff above does'nt make it easier to understand what you do day to day at all, so infact you have wasted your time.

[Hayles]

Glad it wasn't only me that read it all and still didn't know what he/she was offering apart from a sandwich filling.... :wink:

[Bev]

Are you looking for outsource Clients as we can out source our IT services.

[Kemble3]

Who said that a sales career in the UK or Europe had a tarnished image….I would be very interested in reading more about this, so please quote the author.

If sales Outsourcing was such a good idea, why hasn’t been taken up by UK based companies? One reason maybe you need detailed product knowledge and technical know-how to sell most products or service. This sometimes take years to perfect and a freelance sales personal would simply not be equipped with the knowledge to successfully sell or account manage.


Your post was very ill conceived, read as if it was copied from some article and pasted on this forum. It also made very little sense plus was also very patronising and derogative to the many thousands of UK/European based sales professionals. But obviously your background isn’t in sales, otherwise you would realise the quality of most sales people in the UK is extremely high. If this was just a sales pitch, I would suggest you find a proper marketing company to prepare your documentation in the future as on the evidence of your post, you don’t really know what the hell you are talking about.

[Bev]

I think that people who copy quotes out of books should actually get out into the real world and try out sourcing there business or selling as its not that easy when your starting out if there is a lot of competition.

[Mark Nagurski]

I'm disappointed.

Having spent too many years working in the sales sector I do feel that there is plenty of scope for quality outsourced sales services. BUT I don't think the above post does anything to enhance the reputation of the thousands of quality freelance agents or dozens of reputable firms that operate in this sector.

I'm disappointed because I honestly believe that outsourcing your sales operations is potentially a fantastic solution for some business - although it won't suit all - and deserves a well thought out argument to state the case.

So quick suggestion - if you really have something to say about outsourcing that you think is worthwhile then create a nice simple white paper explaining your position and offer it through your forum signature. That will serve to enhance your reputation avoid the negative impact you've had here.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

[Bev]

Hi Mark i agree with you there is just people tend to copy text from books instead of researching. There are lost of companies asking you to pay £199.00 to go on there sites so people can come to you like we were conned with u find us. As we have a a program that tell us who as visited and we only appear to have two hits from u find us not like they keep saying you have had 150000.

[profitxchange]

One has to question Targetsell's communication ability as so few have actually undertsoog what he was no about, and it was the best part of an a4 page. He needs to get his elevator pitch working then he might have a chance.

Sorry but I think he has shot himself in the foot.

[nguarantee]

It seems to me like TargetSell looks down upon a salesperson's job. Being in the sales sector is very challenging, everything he/she does or says reflect the products, the company, and the image.

So why outsource? Hire someone who has no ties to your company or your product has a low probability of executing the perfect salesperson for that company.

It's also better to come directly to your customer instead of using someone else. If you do it face to face, it gves the impression that you are sincere in making that sale. Do it with a third person and the customer will think your product's not worth your time.

[AandP]

Maybe I have got the wrong idea with these forums but I thought pitches like that usually get flamed for being blatant advertising.

To quote Stephen "sales is seen as an art form" and I would have to agree. It is about persuasion and influence, not about bludgeoning people into buying. Unfortunately a post like Stephens is a long way from being a work of art.

Stephen, feel free to respond to all the warranted criticism above if your purpose is to genuinely start a discussion. We look forward to reading your repost.

Andy

[TargetSell]

Good afternoon,

I do hope everyone is doing well in their respective realms of business? Thank you for the open and constructive input from various company representatives on this forum. Since our original post on this site and others, we have received a superb level of interest from companies in the technology space, wishing to launch existing and new products into the UK market.

TargetSell has had the wonderful opportunity to expand and employ greatly increased numbers of phone and field sales consultants. We now have 16 part time telephone consultants and 8 full time field sales consultants currently representing 18 ongoing client campaigns. The most wonderful thing for us, is that we have had to invest little to nothing into online or print marketing for our services. Our clients have found us through forum overviews, business directories and via our own website. When they had questions, they came straight to our website and asked them, which is great.

We undertook a short 3 month google adwords campaign last Autumn, which brought in a huge amount of enquires. As discussed by others above, UK businesses have been the slowest to take up outsourced sales services. We currently have Israeli, Indian and US companies as our largest clients, all launching their services and solutions into the UK corporate and SME areas. It is a wonderful thing to see foreign companies selling their solutions so successfully into the UK market, and ourselves enjoying strong margins whilst doing so. The UK companies that do use us, tend to have a requirement to expand into new geographic areas quickly, or have a new solution which they quickly wish to bring to market.

The strength of the pound continues to mean that companies, both based in the UK and abbroad, see the UK as a huge opportunity. For TargetSell and other sales outsourcing companies, this is important. Even as markets get harder, the need to sell more cheaply and more effectively in the UK increases, meaning that sales outsourcing is here to stay.

So with ongoing success, many excellent case references and further expansion on the horizon again in Q4, what have we learnt since our last post on this forum? The UK sales environment is extremely different from that of our foreign clients, so much so that we often have to employ consultancy services to assist with amending product features or marketing to best suit the UK end user. Our international clients want a huge amount of outdata from ongoing campaigns, as they don't wish to feel isolated from the sales process. We provide daily reports generated by field sales people and campaign managers, which keep our clients ontop of their sales pipelines.

We've continued to find that technology sales DO NOT require a top level sales person from the first telephone call to final sales close. The sales process can and should be split into its various component parts. Calling through vast numbers of end users to explain a new solution in brief (obviously detailing the USPs and business benefits to the client) is a tedious task, best suited to part time telephone consultants, rather than expensive full time sales people. Our clients denote exactly what level of interest must be gained during a call before an appointment is made, as such we experience very high levels of quality face to face appointments as a result. Our field consultants are all superb sales people in their own right, with a broad knowledge of technology solutions and business verticals they apply best to. Our field consultants are picked because of their ability to pick up a product and work with it quickly. They are trained by our campaign clients directly, always concentrating on a key group of products or solutions, rather than full portfolio. They are superb when they get face to face with end users, applying their product knowledge alongside the SPIN sales system we encourage. They push the solution forward, generate a business requirement and move the client into a position where they wish to receive a second pre-sales-technical call, or a full proposal. On some campaigns, our senior sales people have the opportunity to close deals and receive strong comission benefits, on other campaigns, the client wishes to close the business themselves once a proposal has been sent. We are happy to provide both routes to sales closure.

"Sales is an art form" - it certainly is, but it is an art form which can be approached in many ways. The modern sales process can and should be controled with precision, efficiency and speed. Sales people should be face to face with clients as much as possible, this is where REAL human business is done. To get sales people there, you need to control their appointments, regional placement and portfolio very tightly. You need to ensure that data is fresh and relevent on the database you utilise. Never waste time on luke warm prospects, ensure that you know intention and requirement from the first telephone call with the end user, make sure you have those details available to your field consultants. Don't try and present a huge portfolio to a client, work on three relevent, interesting and up-to-date products at the most. For instance, if you are a web development company, specialising in solutions for the Hotel Industry, concentrate on SEO, Dynamic Booking and 3rd Party Rate Adjustment - rather than on a portfolio of 7 or 8 services. Press the right buttons at the right time, and the business will reveal itself from a very early point in the client relationship. This saves time, and produces much ealier indications of the prospective sales pipeline for a sales manager. A sales person in 2007 should have mobile GPS, email access and database access, either from their car, or from service stations or city centres. We average between 4-6 appointments per day for our field consultants, and with the technology we apply, they can create client appointment reports, proposal requests and updates, between appointments. Finally, the only way to achieve high appointment density, is to ensure that appointments are created in a sensitive geographic manner. The best way to do this is by creating a pool of appointments during the telephone consultant day, and then allocate them at the end of the day. In allocation to sales people, you can ensure even geographic distribution. On a green ANTI-carbon emission note, (not to forget the fuel cost note) the better the geographic concentration, the higher the number of appointments and the fewer times a sales person has to return to the offce, the smaller the fuel and carbon emission output. You can undertake large amounts of face-to-face contact with new and existing clients, and still minimise cost and environment impact.

Essentially therefore, sales is still and will always be a face-to-face process, but how we get to that point is changing. A sales team of three people, sat on the phones two days of the week, doing two appointments a day the other three, is not modern business. Sales Outsourcing is one choice, the other is to update a companies internal sales approach so that it replicates the efficiency and directness of the outsourced approach. We often apply our knowledge-base in this area as consultancy for companies wishing to overhaul their sales process.

TargetSell want to see UK companies (especially smaller companies) getting the most out of the sales resouces and marketing funds they have. The UK is a wonderful opportunity (even with the huge amount of red tape) but you have to ensure that you are using the best approach. Taking a little time to see where comments from my first article came from, I notice a number of sales orientated companies. For the record, TargetSell encourages sales training, the improvement of the sales ability within a company and the employment of multiple marketing methods - BUT, when a company wishes to quickly claim a slice of a new market, or needs to beat a competitor to market -NOTHING compares to fast, effecient application of direct sales capacity.

For those that still wish to understand a little more about sales outsourcing in the UK, please do not hesitate to take a look at TargetSell.co.uk , we look forward to your questions.

With kind regards,

TargetSell UK.

[telemax]

Hi

Ok If you can really average between 4 to 6 appoinments per day I'd be interested !! It's a bold statement you make!!

I've heard it all before, I've seen hundreds of sales people come and go in the last 10 years at various companies and only 4 stand out with those kind of abilities but I'd give you a chance.

If your that confident I'm sure that you would be fine to be paid on a per appointment basis. PM me and I'll give you a call. I'd want either you or one of your employees to close me into an appointment on the phone. If you can do that then maybe I will be interested.

Jonathan

[Money Whisperer]

I know of at least 30 large UK bases companies that regularly use outsourced sales teams, and are perfectly happy with this solution.

[wucharn]

I am an exporter. Global business is a litter difficult to run.
We need to believe ourselves.
Best wishes for everyone

[myland]

As an outsider to the Sales field I think that yeah TargetSell's post was spammy, but probably due to this, members maybe overlooked that the post could have had some valid points. Sales I believe is well respected in the US at least. In UK, by & large it is not. Maybe not by industry professionals, but by Joe public, it is often little short of hated. Sorry but it's true. I've been on many courses when a guest speaker is announced as being in Sales & you can feel the resentment rising. This does not appear to apply to any other occupation. The role of Sales could do with some image improvement. Maybe training could be generally of a higher standard. I think much of the problem lies with the type of Sales Managers who encourage their sales staff not to take no for an answer due to pressure with targets, when they should be developing more creative means to meet targets such as expanding theit typical client base. So maybe we have too many saes managers who are not creative or strategic, they were good at selling, that is how they have come up & that is all they understand to pass down.
I don't mean to offend anyone, but I believe many companies treat Sales in precisely this way - pressure & targets & do not want to think outside this box. And so Sales gets a bad name.

[davidregler]

Sales outsourcing has definitely been gaining ground in the UK & Europe. If you look at the companies in this field they are mainly working on market entry for technology vendors.

The standard model seems to be a monthly retainer plus a commission on revenue, which makes sense.

Below the sales outsourcing firms there's a ton of independent sales consultants, freelancers and interim sales people who can facilitate market entry.

For companies seeking to establish a beach-head in the UK before committing resource or recruiting it's a good model.

David

[QCert]

Q Cert Ltd is a company that wants to separate its sales team and to appoint another company to sale on our behalf.

If possible, please, tell us what are the possibilities for this

For more information on our occupation, please, visit our web site qcert.co.uk and contact us 24/7 on tel: 0447751731645

[dan74uk]

not a great start when your website when asked to send you a request cant do that
please check your ask for info page because it does not let u send requests

[Birclay]

That's a good point but not really practical for every business. I would love to have the time and the opportunity to travel the country promoting our goods to retailers. However, in the real world this is impossible. Personally I think that a good sales representative is worth their weight in gold but I also believe that it's the business' owners responsaibilty to vet independant agents carefully before putting them on the road to represent their products.

[kate1]

Sorry but this is just blatant advertising.

[lewcrippen12]

Howdy,


Hey...guys....if u r looking for outsource SEM services
then u may visit here for finding best services as i have used it for my business & really got best services so i m satisfied with that.


Thanks

[captaincloser]

Further to previous comments about OP's original message and second one... the first thing to say is that these messages were not cut and pasted from any sales book.

No publisher over the age of 6 could have used such bad English. Also the website has typos and several clues to overseas ownership. Nothing wrong with that but they should have made their pitch using an English national for the translation. I initially thought it was from the Phillipines.In fact they are German with a London address.

The original message was a pitch which slipped through the UKBF net I guess and has enraged the good folk on UKBF. I am all for that..anything to rattle the forum.

They are 100% on the money with several comments about the US and the state of sales in the UK.

Now you know they are a German company too...anything to add folks ?

[captaincloser]

My dog has just noticed the original thread is 3 years old. That'll teach me to post late at night after attacking the cooking sherry,:D

[maxine]

Ha ha... hope it was good sherry :)

[teeney]

I'm disappointed.

Having spent too many years working in the sales sector I do feel that there is plenty of scope for quality outsourced sales services. BUT I don't think the above post does anything to enhance the reputation of the thousands of quality freelance agents or dozens of reputable firms that operate in this sector.

I'm disappointed because I honestly believe that outsourcing your sales operations is potentially a fantastic solution for some business - although it won't suit all - and deserves a well thought out argument to state the case.

So quick suggestion - if you really have something to say about outsourcing that you think is worthwhile then create a nice simple white paper explaining your position and offer it through your forum signature. That will serve to enhance your reputation avoid the negative impact you've had here.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

Mark, as a business owner who has and continues to struggle somewhat with the sales side of marketing, I have to agree with you that outsourcing could be a fantastic solution for me. Providing a close working relationship is maintained to ensure the sales always stays in-line withe the business ethics, values and culture I see no reason why it wouldn't work for mutual benefit. We use specialists for all other aspects of our business, so why not for sale?

Food for thought.

C