Why Outsourced Sales Management Works!

Fractional positions, even senior positions like CFO and COO have become prevalent recently and invaluable to small and mid-size organizations. The cost of employees these days has made the services extremely cost effective.

 Outsourced sales management provides the same level of value to organizations but due to common challenges with W2 sales managers, outsourced sales management has additional benefits.

 Studies show that about 43% of sales professionals achieve quota or the sales goals assigned to them. There are several actions an organization can take to positively impact the sales team: 

·       Hiring: some organizations think simply hiring the salesperson is the solution. However, finding an individual already well versed, trained, and self sufficient in sales is costly. What is the incentive for them to leave their established presence to move to your organization? More than likely, any new hire will need to be trained, coached and managed.

·       Training: another quick solution for organizations is training. Studies by Gartner show that most sellers forget or no longer utilize tools from training after 30 days. Successful training requires constant reinforcement and practice, requiring a manager that understands and can coach the training tools.

·       Coaching: this is where the real value sales management comes into play. Coaching works. Every study shows that sales rep ride alongs, pre and post call reviews, and other coaching tactics can impact behavior and achieve meaningful success. Mindtickle’s studies show that coaching should be done at least monthly and top producers usually receive 3 coaching sessions per month.  

Since coaching is shown to be effective, organizations hire sales managers, someone that understands the process to be coached and has the experience to do so. So the question then becomes, why doesn’t every organization with a Sales Manager have a “coaching culture”? 

The problem is inherent in the existence of the sales manager and how the organization gauges success of the program. As I mentioned before, with only 43% of salespeople achieving quota, the sales manager is expected to either increase this number or hit their own quota, which is simply the aggregate of all the salespeople quotas. So most sales managers engage in the activities that get them the quickest results in which they are judged upon, sales success.  

This is not a new problem. The Harvard Business Review has articles of the importance of Sales Managers managing and not selling dating back to 1964. Mindtickle’s 2022 report on sales and sales management states that almost 30% of sales managers aren’t coaching because they are too focused on selling.  

This is exactly why outsourced sales management is effective. Outsourced sales managers have only one metric, the management and development of the sales team. It eliminates the multiple pulls on the sales manager in other directions and time spent on activities that don’t lead to successful sales management. 

Narrowing sales management to a laser focus on coaching creates an environment suitable to fractional sales management instead of a full-time hire. Utilizing fractional services is substantially more affordable than the salary of an employee and also eliminates the added employee costs of benefits, payroll, HR, etc. 

Plain and simple, outsourced, fractional sales management can save an organization money and resources while at the same time, increasing sales professional performance. It positively impacts the top and the bottom line.