As a business owner, you want to grow your company, you want to increase your sales and marketing function and you want to build your sales pipeline. However, should you outsource this to the experts or try and do it yourself, in-house? As a topic that is discussed by businesses on a daily basis, the debate between outsourced vs in-house sales is rife. It’s important to note that outsourcing your sales and marketing is, on paper, no different to outsourcing your recruitment, accountancy, HR, IT and so on. We know that all of the above, as well as sales and marketing are specialist areas which are needed within a business to ensure a smooth operation. We also know that all of the above require time, expertise, resources and dedication and that is exactly why you should outsource, to take the pressure away and allow you to focus on what you do best. If you’re thinking about outsourcing your sales and marketing or hiring an internal team, there are quite a few elements to consider, before making that final decision:

• Do you have the office space/capacity/management structure to manage new team members internally?
• Are you fully up to date with GDPR compliancy? Are your systems and processes GDPR compliant?
• Do you have a call recording function? Can you record calls for training purposes?
• Do you have a system for recording transactions?
• Do you have in house data analytics? Do you know what you’re looking for when it comes to reporting and data analysis?
• Have you thought about recruitment costs? What happens if the first few aren’t performing for you? If you let them go, have you thought about the cost of re-hiring?
• What about sickness / holiday impacting productivity and dialling?
• Do you have a quality assurance team?
• Do you have in-house expertise when it comes to creating and managing an outbound calling campaign?

With the costs, time and resource strain associated with hiring internally, most companies eventually decide to leave it to the experts. Of course, this comes at a price, but the value and return are usually far greater than trying to do it in house. Not only that, but the flexibility of outsourced providers can be far more attractive than the rigidity of an in-house team. Let’s look at the benefits of outsourcing to us and why companies decide to use Air:

• We are GDPR compliant, offering expert advice, systems and processes.
• We have access to UK based data providers at reduced rates.
• We manage the agents, we manage the entire recruitment process and we take the pain away when it comes to finding the right talent for your campaign.
• We have the resources to cater for sickness and holiday time to prevent it impacting productivity.
• We have purpose-built systems and processes which feed directly into a live time portal, where you can see exactly what we are doing on a daily basis.
• We have a team of in-house data analysts who can spot trends and provide feedback.
• We are experts within our field and have a proven, open questioned and permission-based scripting structure – designed to engage in high level conversations with key decision makers.
• We have a GDPR compliant call recording functionality, all calls are recorded and can be accessed by the client.
• We have an in-house Quality Assurance team who provide valuable feedback to the diallers/campaigns and improve quality and productivity.
• We have an in-house learning and development team to ensure the quality of work we produce is as high as it can be.

Certainly, there are a few things to consider before making your final decision but most of the clients that decide to work with us have either tried it internally and it hasn’t worked or, they want to benchmark their internal performance alongside the experts. If outsourcing is your preferred solution, then we can help. We position ourselves as an extension to your sales team and everything we do is totally transparent. In short, we position ourselves as part of your team, we aim to replicate your corporate identity and we see ourselves as a true partner, being honest and proactive with everything we do whilst taking the pain and hassle away from managing this internally and allowing you to focus on the bigger picture. If outsourcing your B2B sales is something that you’re interested in discovering more about, why not get in touch? Call: 0345 241 3038, or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk Opinion Piece by Marco Alfano-Rodgers, Client Services Director, Air Marketing Group