“Why should we go through the effort (make that time and expense) of developing our own in-house sales department? Can’t we just outsource it?”
We’re often asked this by our prospects early in our sales engagement and it’s a fair question. You may have asked yourself this in the past? It’s a fair question; let us share our answer with you.
Some propositions, especially commodity products, are bought, not sold. Companies operating at this end of the product lifecycle benefit from setting up low cost (usually web based) order processing systems to make it easy for their customers to buy from them, without contributing to the price.
Distributor / agent agreements can help product sales slightly further up the value gradient though managing these relationships can be frustrating. Often, a product listing in a trade catalogue may be all a distributor can evidence as their contribution to the sales process.
And for more complex propositions? Well for starters, it assumes there is an outsourcing option available. Yes, you may be able to find a non-competing channel partner (pre-supposing you want such a relationship) but a team of sales professionals committed to selling your proposition at maximum margin?
When companies invest in developing their own sales departments, they do so expecting:
So whether it’s driven by a genuine desire to out-source non-core business activities (actually we believe that sales is highly “core”), or sheer frustration with the work required to get a sales process working optimally, we firmly believe that sales capability is best developed in-house.
Which is, of course, what we do.
These are a collection of our views about the world of selling, though please feel free to disagree and share you own views with us.
Simply add your view to the comments box below each story. We’d be delighted to engage with you…
“CPV have taken the mystery out of the sales process and shown us how to do it for ourselves, now I feel much more in control of our business” – PW, MD Financial Services SME