If you’ve ever wondered whether you can outsource sales and marketing, this post is for you. Being Outsource School, our answer is, of course, YES! Not only can you outsource sales and marketing, but we think it’s a great idea.
What Does Outsourcing Sales and Marketing Mean?
Outsourcing is hiring an outside company or entity to manage certain business tasks or processes. When you want to outsource sales and marketing, this means that you are allowing an out-of-house team manage these functions. This hiring can be done directly through freelance marketplaces or via an agency.
Marketing involves creating and implementing strategies to attract customers. Lead generation is their main focus. Sales, on the other hand, centers around turning those leads into paying customers.
While these functions are related, you do not necessarily have to hire an outsourced team to handle both. You can outsource sales and marketing functions that you think freelancers can handle and keep the ones that you think are better managed in-house. You can also hire two separate outsourcing teams from different agencies if you wish.
However, because these two departments have a close-knit relationship, you need to make sure that both teams are able to work and communicate effectively with each other and with you. Make sure they are aligned with your business goals as well.
What Are The Benefits of Outsourcing Sales and Marketing?
1. Less Costly
One of the main draws of outsourcing is how much you can save on overhead costs. Maintaining an in-house team does not come cheap. This is especially true when you take into account paying for worker benefits. Outsourcing to other countries that have lower costs of living typically means paying lower rates for the same quality of work.
2. Access to Wider Talent
Often, hiring locally can mean that your options are limited. This isn’t to say that local talent can’t get the job done. However, you cannot deny that dipping into the international market opens you up to a vast pool of talented individuals.
3. Access to Experienced Professionals
Outsourcing can connect you to teams and individuals who have been in the space for years and have worked with multiple clients. Their valuable experience and knowledge can be brought to your company at a fraction of the cost.
4. Enable Your Current Team
Like we mentioned earlier, you can outsource sales and marketing without sending entire departments offshore. You can outsource for specific tasks that may not be core business activities. Often, this is done so that current team members can use their unique and valuable talents to further business growth. This is preferable to them being bogged down with menial tasks. Outsourcing allows space for your team to do what they do best (and what they were hired for in the first place!)
5. Faster Processes
When you combine expertise with years of experience in the space, you get a more efficient machine. Allowing an outside company to bring in their tried and tested procedures and processes will always be faster than building your own processes from the ground up. Not only that, but you won’t have to invest in all the software, tools, training and other infrastructure needed to get your team to the same level of efficacy and skill.
What Tasks Can I Outsource to the Sales and Marketing Team?
Commonly outsourced marketing and sales tasks include:
- Graphic Design – This includes the creation of posters, ads, brand logos, etc.
- Web Design and Development – Your website is a crucial part of your branding and a well-built site will encourage more conversions.
- Email marketing – This includes cold email marketing
- Social Media Marketing – There are billions of people using at least one of these platforms. Some of the most common ones are Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok.
- Search engine marketing (SEM) – Increase your site traffic through marketing on both organic and paid search.
- Paid Campaign Management – Probably the most well-known form of paid campaigns are PPC campaigns on search engines like Google and Bing. This may also involve managing paid social campaigns.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Your ranking on search engines dictates how much free organic traffic you get to your site. PPC and SEO campaigns are typically run simultaneously.
- Digital Strategists and Analytics – Data gathering and analysis is critical to the development and implementation of marketing strategies.
- Market research – This involves target audience research and evaluating the competition.
- Sales development representative – These people are responsible for reaching out to potential leads, prospecting, and qualifying those leads or making sure that they are the ideal customer who has the desire to make a purchase.
- Content creation/ content marketing – Curate content that is valuable, quality, attention-grabbing and SEO-friendly.
- Copywriting – This is all about drawing people in with the language you use in your advertisements. This is also termed as your “ad copy”.
- Project management – These managers oversee the marketing and sales tasks, including all the ones mentioned above. They make sure everything is running smoothly.
When Do I Need to Hire Someone to Help with Sales and Marketing?
There are several factors and considerations that go into making the decision to outsource sales and marketing.
You may consider hiring an outsourced team when you:
- have a business that is growing fast and you need the extra help.
- need expertise but would rather not go through the tiring, tedious, time-consuming and often costly process of hiring an experienced in-house team.
- want marketing and sales solutions but don’t have the budget to maintain an in-house team.
- need the guidance and advice of professionals who have been in the space a long time and have worked with multiple clients.
- want to free up your team members so they can focus on core business operations.
Where Can I Hire From?
1. Marketstar
Marketstar has decades of experience in the realm of outsourcing sales and marketing. They adapt to the needs of the client and have been frontrunners in the space with their creative outsourced sales solutions.
Marketstar’s sales as a service model is what makes their outsourced sales an effective solution. They focus on 4 key areas: people, data-driven insights, technology (tools and platforms), and process and training.
Their comprehensive solutions and processes takes the weight off your shoulders. They can handle all of your sales and marketing needs.
2. Fiverr
Fiverr is one of the largest freelance marketplace with over 500 categories of digital services including digital advertising, marketing and sales services. With Fiverr, getting connected with the talent you need is simple and fast. Payments for projects are only released once you have approved of the project.
The base version of Fiverr does not come with a guarantee of the quality of the skill or work of their freelancers. Fiverr Pro solves this. Hire from a pool of carefully vetted freelancers with verifiable experience and expertise.
3. Thrive Agency
Thrive Agency is an internet marketing agency. They offer a range of digital marketing services. Some of these are web design, SEO and PPC, and social media. This agency boasts a team of marketing specialists that you can tap into for your needs. You might need technical SEO for your website or social media management for your eCommerce business. Whatever it is, they can help.
Thrive Agency has a large team of experts with experience in a variety of marketing fields. This means that they are fully capable of handling just about any area of marketing. This gives you added versatility if you are dealing with a bunch of different marketing campaigns. This makes them a great choice when you want to smoothly outsource sales and marketing. They also have a great reputation among their client base of thousands, and in the industry at large. They generally charge more than other sales and marketing companies with less under their belts, but that’s because they deliver high-quality results.
How Much Does it Cost?
The cost of outsourcing marketing and sales tasks varies depending on the specific task or function being outsourced.
For a few examples, a really technical task like SEO that requires experience and expertise could cost you upwards of $10,000 per month. Something like graphic design could cost $30-70+ dollars hourly. Depending on the type of content, specialized knowledge required, and word count, writing could cost $40-200+ per article. Then again, if you’re looking for entry level freelancers you can train yourself, it’s possible to find someone to hire for as low as $5-$15 dollars an hour.
Aside from the task itself, pricing also varies depending on the country you outsource to, the skill level of the individual, the marketplace or agency you hire from, and the scope and length of the project.
Conclusion
Do not hesitate to outsource sales and marketing. We know that you have most likely heard some horrible stories from others who have tried it. The thing is, they probably did not have the right processes for hiring international freelancers and agencies. Outsource School exists to help you make sure that you are searching within the best marketplaces and making the best choices when it comes to online talent. We have many years of experience hiring online for multiple businesses, and we’d love to help you out!
