Outsourcing

Growing Your Offline Consulting Business By Expanding Your Sales Force

Many people in the internet marketing world are waking up to the significantly under-served opportunities available in the real world – selling online marketing services to offline brick and mortar businesses. Talk about turning bricks into gold! For those who have been engaged in this arena for some time however, many eventually find the growth of their offline consulting business limited by the constraints on their own personal time.

The obvious solution to this problem of course is to hire a salesperson. Unfortunately, while the solution may be obvious, the time spent, risks, and costs of actually hiring the right salesperson for your offline consulting business are not so obvious. Today we are going to take a look at three different options for expanding your sales force, what their advantages and disadvantages are, and which circumstances are best suited for each option.

The three options that we shall discuss for expanding your sales force are as follows:

1. Using commission only sales agents
2. Outsourcing your sales activity
3. Recruiting sales people

A commission only sales agent, or salesperson, is an independent contractor (not an employees) who usually represents or promotes more than one business/product. The big advantage to using a commission only sales agent is the low cost and low monetary risk, since you do not pay this salesperson any money at all until they actually close a sale for you. They only get paid when you make money, so there is no upfront cash outlay for your business. There is also no base salary or employment taxes to pay, nor benefits to provide, nor employment paperwork to file.

The downside though is that you can only influence these sales people, but you cannot control what they do. If they decide to focus their efforts on other products or businesses and make your services less of a priority, then there isn’t much you can do about it, so you may not want to rely solely on this kind of an arrangement for your sales force, but use it in connjuction with either or both of the other options below. Additionally, using a commission only sales agent most often works better for selling products rather than services, so you may need to spend some extra time training this kind of salesperson and familiarizing them with your offline consulting services.

Our second option of outsourcing your sales activity can really be done in one of two ways. You can choose to either outsource only certain functions (like cold-calling, telephone follow up, or managing a direct mailing campaign), or outsource the entire sales process. These may be good options for you if you need something done quickly, and the partial outsourcing option in particular may be ideal for complementing the efforts of your sales force.
However, with partial outsourcing, you still don’t have the whole job covered, so you may still need to hire a salesperson.

If you choose to outsource every part of the sales process, it will free up quite a bit of your management time. However, it is extremely difficult to do this on a commission-only basis (especially if you have a very long sales cycle). You will most likely need to agree to a shared-risk payment structure that includes both a day rate plus a commission payment.  This means you have to pay for their work even if they never close a single sale!
Another significant disadvantage to outsourcing your entire sales process is that you lose the opportunity to build relationships with your customers, making this a poor long-term choice.

For maximum control of the sales process, the best option is undoubtedly to recruit your own sales people (i.e. hire your own employees). In this situation, you get to dictate where your sales people focus their efforts, and even how they should do their job.
The big problem with this of course is the risk, time and effort required, and the relatively high cost.

In this case, you do need to offer some base salary, pay employment taxes, consider providing employee benefits, and file all of the necessary employment paperwork – and all of this only after going through the whole recruiting process! And even then, you may find that you’ve hired someone who simply cannot deliver the increased sales to pay for their employment.

Most certainly there is no sure-fire solution to finding exactly the right salesperson for your offline consulting business. But if you’re currently a maxed-out, stressed-out, one-man sales force, then you should not let the potential pitfalls of hiring a salesperson stop you from doing just that. Simply think things through beforehand and make sure you’re choosing the right option for your particular situation. Keep realistic expectations of what can be accomplished when, and remember, if it does not work out, you can always make a change.

Consultants: Outsource Or Die

There is not the slightest doubt that consulting to offline businesses is the market niche to be in.  It is a major growth industry.  The potential clients have a wide variety of needs that need to be met.  Anyone who has some experience in internet marketing will be capable of meeting these needs.

However, consider for a moment the extent of the needs that you are likely to face.

• Your client will require a well designed web site that is properly optimized for the search engines.

• Your client will require an auto-responder and associated email messages

• Your client will need articles submitted on a regular basis to the article directories.

• Your client will need  video on the sales and contact pages.

• Your client will need a continuing program of education and support.

You may well think that you can provide these services on your own, if you have all the necessary skills.  That scenario may work out for your first few clients, but then you will find yourself shouldering an increasing burden.  The consequence of doing that is likely to be disastrous.  Your clients’ needs will not be met in the most timely and efficient way; you will start missing deadlines and making mistakes.  The long term implications of that are obvious.

Outsourcing is therefore a very sensible – indeed, necessary approach to take, right from day one.

The secret of success with outsourcing is to do your homework.

There are a large number of resources available to you, depending on what tasks you wish to have performed.

Let me use web site design as an example.  Determine the size and basic layout that is required for your client’s site, then get three sites designed.  It may cost you a little at first, but in the long term it will help you provide a consistent and reliable service.  This split-testing approach will enable you to gauge quality, turn-around time and interpersonal relationships.  It will also enable you to negotiate a good price for continuing work.

The same will apply for other areas of your client services such as article writing and video production.

In order to have long term stability and effectiveness in your consultancy services you will need to outsource as much of your work as possible.

So….outsource or die!

DIY or Outsource: which one is best for your business?

When the economy gets tough, a lot of business owners (especially small businesses) look carefully into cutting back on their expenses. The things that get cut down the most, before everything else, are the efforts and budget they devote to marketing and staff.

With the same number of tasks to do and fewer employees to perform the work, those business owners are then often forced to try to do a lot of the work themselves.  With this added load, there is no time left to build their business. They end up spending their time working IN their business and not ON their business.

Is this the best way for them to save their time and money?  Are there any alternatives available that they can use?

Let’s look at several things business owners can do to continue to keep growing their business, especially in tough economic times.

The first thing that can be done is to market their business creatively, thinking outside the box so to speak. Using their business cards more effectively is one way of creative marketing.

Taking their offline brick and mortar business to the cyber world of online business is another cost effective way to market the business.

Here are several other cost effective ways to market a business:

• Joint Venture marketing, where two or more businesses gets together to promote each others’ businesses.

• Affiliate marketing is a way of marketing where businesses let other people’s to promote their business and services and get paid based on their performance. Meaning businesses only have to pay their affiliates when they make a sale.

Outsourcing is a great option for business owners that feel like they do not have enough hours in the day.  It offers an alternative resource to do all the tasks they know need to be done. Several tasks that you can consider to be outsourced include repetitive works that do not directly impact the bottom line such as cold calling, follow up calls, and data entry. Most businesses outsource their accounting chores.

Outsourcing is a logical extension for other tasks that may be more efficiently accomplished by specialized assistance. Creating a professionally designed and optimized web site for an offline business for a small one time fee is also a great and effective way to outsource for specialized services.  This can prove to be very profitable over the long term.

Creative marketing and outsourcing are only two of many examples of what businesses can do to grow and increase their profits effectively and efficiently. There are many other ways available.

All that must be done is to think creatively and be willing to learn from other successful business models.

Multi-Tasking Does Not Work

Do you multitask?

Trying to do several things all at once with the intention of getting a lot of things done in as little time as possible? You feel exhausted at the end of the day; but have you ever noticed how many things you really finished?

You might have looked busy all day long, trying to work on one thing while working on many others simultaneously.  Possibly writing a report while talking on the phone, or talking to your friend while sending sms through your iphone. Do you actually feel that you accomplish what you intended to do…to the best of your ability and get the best results you possibly could?

Here are some reasons why multitasking is totally over-rated:

• It reduces your ability to focus on the task on hand. It also affects your ability to think creatively and critically.

• It negatively affects the quality of all your efforts.

• You can’t focus on the conversation you have on the phone while you are writing a report. People on the other end of the conversation can sense your lack of attention and may feel that you are not taking them seriously.

• Your mind can only focus on one thing at a time so you end up wasting time and energy trying to work on several things at once.  You have to constantly switch your focus, lose momentum on work you’ve built, and you never complete any tasks.

So what is the solution?

The best way for multitasking to work effectively is to assign different tasks to different people. You have to delegate the tasks to your team members. Another option is to outsource the tasks to people outside of your company or commonly known as freelancers.