Smart Sourcing for the Customer Journey

Field sales outsourcing

Field sales, or “door-knocking” in layman’s language, happens in both residential and business to business environments. However consumer tolerance for sales people knocking without an appointment has waned in most industries and geographies. Business sales continues to thrive, on the other hand, as small business owners often prefer a face-to-face interaction before purchasing goods or services. The telecommunications, technology and energy sectors in particular have adopted outsourced field sales as a way to approach the SME market.
  

Retail sales outsourcing

Retail sales outsourcing typically takes the form of one of these four services:

·         Kiosks – this is where the outsourcer runs a kiosk branded in your company’s name inside shopping centres, train stations or other high-traffic spots. The outsourcer may provide value-added services such as negotiating favourable leasing rates with mall operators or commissioning the production of the physical kiosks, in addition to recruiting, training and managing the kiosk staff.

·         Event promotions – sporting or cultural events are excellent opportunities to sell merchandise or services to loyal fans or community members. When outsourcing sales at cultural events, it’s particularly important to select an outsource partner with the requisite multicultural/multilingual capability.

·         Store-in-store sales. Imagine leveraging a large store’s prime real estate and foot traffic by renting out space inside it from which to sell your company’s products or services. Department stores, supermarkets and bookstores are examples where this scenario is common.

·         Mystery shopping. An outsourcer can provide you with a team of mystery shoppers who visit your retail environments in disparate locations and report on the quality of the customer experience and sales effectiveness.

Reseller management

For some companies, the main channel to market is resellers – for example convenience stores, newsagents or petrol stations. Outsourcers can manage this network of resellers on your behalf, including account management, stock management, debt recovery and merchandising.

Why outsource sales?

There are many scenarios where outsourcing sales makes good business sense. Here are the main ones:

·         You have a great formula for success but you don’t have the bandwidth to hire, train and manage a high-performing sales force to scale your offering.

·         You don’t have a physical presence in all the territories where you want to sell, and it doesn’t make sense to set up a presence directly.

·         Your core competency is something else – eg. engineering or product development – and you need to tap sales experts to bring your products to market.

·         You need flexibility and agility to ramp up and down with different sales initiatives – difficult to manage internally.

·         You don’t want to bear the fixed cost and risk of recruiting and retaining a sales team.

·         You need speed to market, and outsourcing is faster because it leverages existing assets, offices and management.

What to look for in a sales outsourcing company

There are three key ingredients that sales outsourcing service companies should have:

·         Sales culture

·         Quality and compliance framework

·         Track record.

AboutMatch screens for these qualities in all the sales outsourcers we work with.