Sales Services are a group of services that support the sales team with key administration and general sales help. They streamline the sales function by allowing the delegation of non-core tasks to a third-party team. The Sales Services provider is also often in a better position to provide some services as they sit outside of the team and brand, and they will be experts in the sales area.
Who Provides Sales Services?
Sales Services are often provided to larger organizations or to small and fast-growing businesses, to replace or augment sales administration tasks that can be performed quicker or better by a dedicated provider.
The Sales Services provider is therefore often a boutique business with a depth of knowledge in sales and sales administration. Viewpoint Analysis is a great example of a company operating in this space. The team has decades of experience in sales and a large network of former sales leaders and operators at our disposal.
What Services Does a Sales Services Business Offer?
A Sales Services business tends to offer sales-related services that a business either doesn't have in-house or where they believe that an external provider can free up internal resources to concentrate on higher-value engagements.
The services offered by a Sales Services business tend to be packaged to fit specific areas, but they also regularly provide bespoke packages of work to address a specific need. Examples include the following areas.
Account Research
Account Research is a very popular area to outsource to a Sales Services business because it tends to be a key requirement to underpin sales and marketing efforts, but consumes a significant amount of time - either from the account team or marketing team.
Account Research takes many forms - it might support Account-Based Marketing or Deal-Based Marketing, or it might see the Sales Services team construct account plans on behalf of the sales team. It very much depends what the business is looking to achieve.
Another area within this research is 'contact finding' - it's generally part of the account research work. It is probably the number one complaint for most sales and marketing teams - their contact information is either thin on the ground, or cluttered.
CRM Contact Cleanse
If your CRM has too many contacts and you know that the majority are outdated and no longer useful, a CRM contact cleanse is definitely in order and a great example of a simple Sales Service. Having a spare pair of hands to look at the contacts and work out which have moved on, and to where, and which need to be archived/deleted - is so valuable and saves so much time and expense. Once we have cleansed the CRM record for an account, we can load the new contacts and get moving with a much better targeted approach.
Competitor Research
What do you think is preventing your sales from hitting the heights that you expect of them - in most cases it will be your competitors. In most of those cases, it will be your two or three largest competitors. But the question is, do you know much about them? Have you studied them?
Competitor Research is one of the quickest ways to start to improve win-rates. The challenge is finding the time or having the skills in-house to really go and look at the competitors and to research where they are weak, or how you can improve.
Win Loss Analysis
The largest impact on any sales team's performance is learning why they are losing key deals, and making changes to ensure they win similar deals in the future. Win Loss Analysis or Loss Analysis is a great way to uncover the problems and start to build back better. It's a great area to instruct a third-party Sales Services business to help - because when they interview the client, they can do so without the baggage of working for the vendor.
Partner Research
When was the last time that you interviewed your key partners to find out what they thought of your team, and how you could improve? Running a 'Partner Audit' can be a great way to quickly assess this key lever of sales success.
Market Perception Audits
Do you know what your target market thinks of you? Do they know anything about you at all? Sitting in the sales and marketing team can often be difficult - we know who we want to market and sell to, but we have no idea if the messaging is landing and we can't really ask the customer directly without tilting the tables. Having an external provider survey the market and ask the questions can be a real benefit of a Sales Service. Find out more about how the Viewpoint Analysis team does a Market Perceptions 360.
Account Plan Builds
Why would you have your sales team spend time and energy looking internally when an external agency can build the fundamentals of an account plan for them? They only then need to add the secret sauce to it. It's a particularly useful service for 'new business' sellers as they likely only understand less about an account than an account manager. At its heart, building an account plan is based on researching a client - so a simple process for an external provider to help with.
Disqualified Leads Service
Most sales teams have a regular flow of leads coming through the system - mainly based on the hard work of the marketing team. Often, a large percentage of these leads are rejected and sit in the 'disqualified leads' pile - causing consternation across the various teams involved in creating those leads.
A Disqualified Leads Service takes on the job of looking at these leads and auditing the process. Having a separate team do this for you is important as it takes the politics away and gives an impartial viewpoint on the situation. It's a great little service as it also brings back lost pipeline or means that you can do something with those disqualified leads.
Sales Troubleshooting
One of the most popular areas for external Sales Services is to provide general 'Sales Troubleshooting' services. These can take the shape of almost all of the areas that we have discussed so far - Win Loss Analysis, Account Research, Deal Mediation and many more. It's a wide area and a great places for an external company to help. At Viewpoint Analysis, we simply bundle the services together to meet the customer need.
Conclusion
More and more businesses are turning to Sales Services firms to help them reduce internal administration and headcount, and focus on the items that really matter. Marketing Services businesses have been around for decades, but Sales Services is a new category that we expect to grow rapidly in the future.
Find out more about Viewpoint Analysis and our Sales Services or for a broader set of services, please check out our sister business Sales Team Services.
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