Market competition is one of the driving forces for a constant need to find new solutions in order to increase your European sales. One powerful tool for boosting sales volume successfully is sales outsourcing. It enables you to put in a whole new team or additional sales agents — or other sales functions such as B2B lead generation — into where you have chosen to scale. It’s a good place to start when you build out a new product or service to a new and presently unknown market. Or maybe you’re testing out a new vertical or customer persona.
Outsourced sales and marketing teams will usually have niche, product-centric expertise in your chosen foreign location. There are lots of ways to look at outsourcing, it’s not an all-or-nothing decision. It’s a case of doing it ‘your way’. Vertical sales specialization will push efforts and drive specific products on a national level to specific end-users, while simultaneously establishing strong business relations and working only with prospects that are likely to become customers and building your brand abroad.
You may ask yourself whether outsourcing is the right option for your business and your products? Moreover, is the outsourced sales model a good fit for all industries or just some?
Simply put, if you lack the time and workforce to set up or expand your sales functions in order to meet demand in Europe, then sales outsourcing is a generally a good option for you to consider. As Peer To Peer Marketing succinctly put it: “Sales outsourcing provides you with a team of skilled professionals, with access to powerful software and technology. It also gives you the freedom to grow and shrink the areas of your business you want to focus on, as quickly as you need to. It even costs less and is more effective!”
Let’s look at some specific industries that favor and reap the benefit of an outsourced sales model.
Your innovative tech organization can be helped in order to extend your first foray — or perhaps further reach — into Europe, by availing of a sales agency that provides an expert sales outsourcing service. It’s an efficient and effective alternative to hiring internally, as training new staff and obtaining the appropriate local contacts can be time-consuming and therefore expensive. And risky, investing before you know if you’ll have traction in a new market.
You should be able to then benefit from outsourced sales with sales agents who will already be familiar with the corporate culture and backgrounds of their prospective customers as well as being experts in their (your) field, working seamlessly and efficiently on your organization’s behalf in Europe. Inside sales are popular within B2B tech for the outsourced sales and marketing model, as they nurture leads and build relationships with potential customers, often remotely. Requiring a deep understanding of your products, they leverage tools like phones, email, video, and virtual meetings to connect with potential customers and they have the ability to explain the functionality and value of their product to customers during a cold call, if need be, as detailed by our partners, Hubspot.
For examples of tech companies in Europe who already successfully use an outsourced sales team, look to Tallarium, a London-based startup building a centerpiece SaaS platform for commodity trading assisting companies to make better-informed trading decisions and maximize their trading opportunities. Mila, in Switzerland, Germany, France and the U.K., offers trusted technical support to global brands including Google, Samsung, Bosch, Swisscom and Axa Insurance, and believes in the outsourced sales model. Universal Avenue, headquartered in Stockholm, offering digital solutions to small and medium-sized businesses through international sales representatives, might also agree that the outsourced sales model is a good fit for the tech industry.
To build or not to build a B2B outsourced sales team for your telecommunications organization? The evidence says yes. Local, outsourced sales and marketing teams will be able to close deals more quickly, keeping your closest competitors from the door. Hiring sales and marketing employees for the telco industry is no mean feat, as so much of this industry is based on long-term customer relationships.
Telecommunications is one of the most profitable segments of the IT industry. Knowing that, speed is of the essence in such a competitive space and when it comes to employment in Europe you don’t want the negative impact of a bad hire — or of transplanting an otherwise great sales rep who doesn’t know the language or culture. Harness the power and experience of a reputable sales agency and lessen the risk on your bottom line — that makes perfect business sense.
Examples of telecommunications companies in Europe that believe in outsourced sales include American Interop Technologies, which looks to reduce the complexity and risk for operations and communication service providers, and Madrid-based KDPOF, which offers innovative cost-effective high-speed optical networking for harsh environments.
Cybersecurity has been a priority among business owners for quite some time now, as hackers become more invasive and the attacks keep on coming. The European cybersecurity market is estimated to reach $22.67 billion by 2027 from $8.56 billion in 2020.
Take our client Zivver, for example, with offices in London, Amsterdam and Berlin, as well as the U.S., who is working against data leaks in business communication and ensuring compliance at the time of GDPR and CCPA. They’re proof that the outsourced sales model is a good fit for the cybersecurity industry. Or look at Fidelis Cybersecurity, another American company who in recent years opened a new U.K. HQ and now also covers northern Europe. French software security firm Verimatrix specializes in content security for digital television services around the globe and is another security company who believes in outsourcing part of their sales functions.
Wherever you find banking or financial institutions, or any business interested in protecting their communications, you will also find cybersecurity companies providing solutions to those organizations, there to identify, minimize, and remediate threats. Outsourced sales and marketing models for these same cybersecurity companies allow them to get to know the local markets quickly in the local culture and language and maintain a steady flow of business, with the ability to quickly scale up or down in response to new markets.
It’s important also to have the retail relationships in place for European channel sales for electronics like our big-name clients eero by Amazon and SumUp. SumUp can be seen all around Europe empowering small businesses now able to buy chip-and-pin payment devices where they're shopping anyway, like big European national brands Metro France, FNAC-Darty, Boulanger, Carrefour, Auchan, CDiscount, LDLC, and Retif.
What do each of these European retail brands have in common? They are a part of rather fragmented markets, with lots of national retailers, where existing relationships in the local language matters, and local partnerships with local branches are key to getting your product featured and to creating awareness in your brand. Country-based and regional marketing partners are also essential for brand, messaging and advertising localization.
An outsourced sales model is a good fit for many industries, plus it’s fast to set up, low-risk because you can scale up or down at any time, and it’s affordable compared to the cost of hiring in-house. Looking for sales agents with learned disciplines with the right skillset — leadership, confidence, training, specialist knowledge — is only half the journey when it comes to setting up a salesforce in Europe. “The decision to outsource business services is typically taken at the top management level, aimed at reducing costs and improving return on assets as part of a wider corporate restructuring or renewal programme” as per Mari Sako from DIME (Dynamics of Institutions and Markets in Europe).
Choose to outsource your entire sales function or simply extend your existing team. Outsourced sales agencies like ours can help you overcome language and cultural differences while at the same time allowing you to work with local sales representatives and all of the other sales functions with the right skillset — it’s financial common sense and easily-sourced expertise at your fingertips.
