The Benefits of Outsourcing

Someone told me flatly at a networking event that he would never outsource his sales, because it meant handing over control and admitting his own team could not cope. I hear a version of that a lot. It is also almost exactly backwards, and I spent the rest of the evening quietly changing his mind.

So let me start with what outsourcing actually is. It is hiring another company or team to run some of your business processes for you. The word has picked up an unfair reputation. Say your sales department is outsourced and some people will assume the business is inefficient, or that the service must be inconsistent, or that you have somehow lost control of your own operation and watered down your identity. In practice it is very much the opposite.

What you actually get from it

Outsourcing any part of your company can pay back handsomely, and the first dividend is time. You are hiring experts in their field, so there is no specialist training to run. When Hayward Miller takes on a new client, the thing we care about most is understanding the whole company, not only how it operates but its values, its culture and its vision, because that is its personality and that is what its customers meet. No customer of ours ever notices a difference between us and the client’s own salespeople. They just remember dealing with knowledgeable people who gave them a great experience. We look after our clients and their customers alike, because continuity is everything.

Time is not the only saving. Money comes with it. Think about what you have spent training an employee, not just the cost but the hours you or your people poured into it. That is not to say you should outsource everything. But if time and money are precious to you, and they always are, it is a genuinely serious option. And yes, the example does not fit every business. You could instead hire one more capable, better-equipped individual to run sales, but that person commands a premium salary, weighs heavily on the company, and takes months before you even know whether they are any good.

The team you did not have to build

Here is the part people miss. Outsourcing usually means taking on a whole team, not a single hire. For the price of one sales manager, you can bring in a team of sales experts. And beyond the obvious benefit of more expertise, there is the collaboration effect. That team already knows each other. They already work well together, already share a solid work ethic, already have the tools and the systems they are fluent in. They arrive with ideas and solutions, ready to go. What you get is a professional, communicative team that delivers results. Your own sales team, in every way that matters, without the years it takes to build one.