To optimise costs and boost performance you could hire a remote sales team. Here are some of the ways it can benefit you and your business.
Sales is the lifeblood of any business. Without it there literally would not be one. However, many businesses are choosing to hire a remote sales team. To some, it’s a way to optimize costs, access new expertise, and scale up operations. To others, losing control of one of your core functions. If you’re considering it, you’ll need to take many factors into consideration.
Why hire a remote sales team
In a world in which business is becoming more footloose and agile, a remote sales team makes sense for many reasons. Technology means location is less important than it used to be which means you can widen the scope of your sales team. It can open up new markets, streamline costs, and provide flexibility and scalability to your teams.
Some companies choose to hire a completely remote sales team, while others will adopt a hybrid approach with teams based both on-site and out there in the field. Each approach has its pros and cons.
Types of remote sales team outsourcing
You can hire a remote sales team in several ways.
• Individual freelancers: You could choose to supplement your in-house sales team with individual freelancers and contractors. They can provide specific expertise or area coverage that your existing team can’t cover or help with special projects.
• Field sales: Hiring remote sales teams in other locations can widen your geographical footprint. It’s a good way to take advantage of sales professionals with specialist local market knowledge that can open up new opportunities.
• Lead generation: The top of the funnel requires highly skilled people with the ability to whip up cold leads from out of thin air. This may involve working with a specialist agency or building up your groups of remote teams.
• Appointment sales: If you have a large number of potential leads, you might want to outsource the process of appointment setting. This process takes those leads and turns them into prospects willing to set appointments and meetings.
• Internal sales team: Outsourcing your sales function can be a good way to access more resources. It’s a good option if you’re a small business with limited facilities and resources.
• New market sales: If you’re expanding into a new country or market, it can be useful to hire a remote sales team to help you gain a foothold. A sales team with dedicated knowledge of the local market conditions and challenges can provide dedicated sector-specific knowledge that your domestic sales team can’t match.
Depending on your strategic objectives you may choose one or a blend of these approaches. Whichever options you choose it’s worth taking time to understand what you want your sales team to achieve and what factors are motivating you to shift existing operations.
Advantages of hiring a remote sales team
Common advantages of a remote sales team include:
• Cost-effectiveness: Hiring a remote sales team means you don’t have to worry about office space or equipment. It can allow you to downsize your own office and enjoy the benefits of a larger sales team without having to spend additional resources.
• Increased talent pool: A remote team enables you to stretch out beyond the immediate vicinity of your business and work with a wider pool of talent. This can be particularly useful if you’re a small business with limited internal capacity.
• Scalability and flexibility: If you’re a small business a remote sales team allows you to scale your operations up and down as required. This can be particularly useful if you’re a seasonal business experiencing common fluctuations in your sales and marketing activities. For example, if you’re focused on summertime activities, you can organize short-term campaigns to generate business over a short period.
• Broadening your footprint: A remote sales team can widen the geographical range of your operations. For example, if you want to have regional sales teams across the country you could engage with separate cells linking into a common sales repository.
• Expanding into new territories: A remote sales team with dedicated knowledge of a new market can be crucial to the success of any expansion. Even the world’s best-known brands have struggled to adapt to the requirements of a new country. Different market conditions and customer profiles will require a different sales strategy. Without local market knowledge that can be impossible to replicate.
Disadvantages of hiring a remote sales team
For all the benefits there are some disadvantages including:
• Lack of control: Outsourcing the sales function relinquishes a portion of control over your sales operation. You’ll be relying on them to function autonomously.
• Lack of product knowledge: The great thing about an internal sales team is that they know your product and services back to front. That knowledge gives them the extra passion and knowledge required to make a connection with potential customers.
• Lack of engagement: Having your own dedicated sales team is a great way to build a relationship with customers. This can be crucial in generating repeat leads, improving retention, and turning cold leads into loyal long-term customers. Outsourcing to a remote sales team can loss that connection.
• Cyber security: Whenever you move data to remote teams you potentially expose yourself to a range of vulnerabilities. Any data in transit is vulnerable to interception. Third-party operations may also not be as secure as your own. When handing data over to third parties you surrender control over it, but you retain legal liability.
• Regulatory challenges: If you hire remote sales teams in different countries you’ll need to make sure you comply with all labor regulations in that territory. Without local knowledge, it can be difficult to understand the nuances of the law or keep up with regulatory changes. Unintentional breaches can be common.
Ultimately, whether a remote sales team is right for you will depend on the nature of your business, your business structure, and how you approach it. For example, product knowledge can be gained with extensive training. The longer you build a relationship with your sales team the easier it will become to gain a high level of knowledge and familiarity with a product that can help your team generate leads and build lasting, profitable, relationships.
Hiring remote sales teams overseas
With modern digital communications becoming faster and more agile more and more businesses are outsourcing sales operations overseas. This can be a chance to reduce costs by taking advantage of lower labor costs in some parts of the world. When choosing this option there are a few factors to consider:
• Language: What are the language skills of your destination country? English is widely spoken around the world, but if sales agents in the country have a strong accent it can be difficult to make themselves understood or build fluid-lasting relationships.
• Culture: We live in a global society these days but cultural differences can have an important influence on the success of sales teams. A good cultural match will make it easier for sales teams to build a rapport with customers leading to more lucrative long-term relationships.
• Time zones: If your remote sales team is going to be speaking with customers in the UK they need to be in a reasonably close time zone.
• Skills: Sales is a highly specialized profession. When hiring a remote sales team you’ll need people with good levels of experience, education, and qualifications.
• Infrastructure: The country in question will need good IT infrastructure to facilitate communication to domestic customers. Any glitches in communications can lead to costly delays, miscommunication, and lost opportunities.
For all these reasons and more, South Africa makes for an excellent location. Its language and culture are a good match for the UK. So is the time zone with only a couple of hours time difference. The workforce is young, diverse, and highly educated with multiple skills across a range of disciplines.
On top of that, a series of government incentives and grants for foreign companies investing in South African jobs can make the return on investment even better.
When hiring South African remote sales teams, you may choose one of several options.
Set up a subsidiary: The direct employment route will require you to set up a subsidiary. This is potentially a good idea if you’re hiring remote sales teams to support an expansion into the South African market. This can be expensive and time-consuming. You’ll have to set up a business, hire a sales team, and support staff to manage the employment.
• Employer of Record: A lighter-touch approach is to use staff through an employer of record (EOR). This is a locally based business that acts as the legal employer of all your South African staff. They will handle everything including PAYE, holidays, tax deductions, and compliance with employment law.
• Professional Employer’s Organization (PEO): A PEO shares the role of an employer with you. They will handle the administrative duties while you manage the day-to-day employee management. It’s a lot like having your own locally based HR department.
• Agent of Record: An AOR is useful when managing freelancers and contractors. They handle details such as onboarding and worker classification and make sure you comply with all labor laws.
Each of these options can provide dedicated expertise that can help you meet all your obligations to your South African workforce. They can lighten the load, provide expert local knowledge and free you up to concentrate on doing what you do best – building your business.
At Future Teams we have an excellent track record of providing expert EOR services to companies looking to outsource. We can help with recruitment, legal compliance, and ongoing management. For more information download a free PDF guide today.
