Digging Deeper Into the Value of Outsourced Business Development

We recently explored three benefits of outsourced business development for companies that have been struggling with the common challenges facing manufacturers today. These included:

  • Sales teams are tasked with more responsibility that is outside of sales itself
  • Finding and retaining marketing talent to help you get your message to market
  • A lack of intelligent automation and reporting for analysis and decision-making

If any of those issues resonated with you, it’s likely that you’d stand to benefit from working with an outsourced business development partner to streamline the sales process. And while manufacturers struggle with many of these challenges, they aren’t the only issues preventing companies from achieving their revenue growth goals.

Here, we’ll dive into a few more needs — along with corresponding solutions — that we’ve heard from our customers and the broader industry to help you experience the value of working with an outsourced business development partner.

More Challenges That an Outsourced Business Development Partner Helps Solve

1. A Lack of Sales Coordination

Does your sales team tend to focus only on new leads? Are they not keeping up with past quotes or open opportunities? Changing the shiny new object is a common habit, but if your sales team is doing this you’re likely missing out on significant revenue. This is where sales coordination comes into play.

With an outsourced business development partner, your sales team doesn’t have to individually manage every past or open opportunity. A team of front-end sales specialists assists with managing the pipeline, supporting the sales team in meetings, coordinating quotes and communications, and more. The result is a more compressed sales cycle, more efficient pipeline management, and more.

2. No Proactive Marketing Outreach or Support

If you’ve ever met with outsourced business development partners before, you likely learned that not all of them provide a proven marketing foundation in addition to their sales assistance. The right partner understands that marketing supports sales and provides the capabilities needed to keep the sales machine running.

Outbound is an incredibly important part of that process. It proactively puts your business in front of key target prospects to educate, inform, and engage them. Often, it’s the best way to increase new business quickly while other marketing solutions ramp up. Learn more about outbound marketing and how it differs from other avenues here.

3. No Clear Return on Investment

With any outsourced effort, you need to know that you’re getting what you’ve paid for — and that it has a positive impact on the bottom line. The right outsourced business development partner will not only relentlessly pursue new opportunities for your business, but they’ll also tell you what their impact will be financially.

With just a few bits of information, your partner can take current lead flow metrics, conversion rates, and other sales data and generate an estimated ROI for you based on similar performance for related companies. Learn more about how this works here.

Work with Athena to Remove Every Barrier to Growth

Whether your sales team lacks motivation or experience needed to drive results, or the business simply doesn’t have enough sales resources to scale up, our team is here to support you. Every day, we work with manufacturers nationwide in a variety of industries to help them remove obstacles toward growth, fill gaps in their current sales capabilities, and support their sales teams with new business development strategies.

Our proven front-end sales approach utilizes the division of labor concept to help your sales team spend more time focusing on what they do best while our team handles many of the early administrative tasks — nurturing, qualifying, and more. Along the way, we’ll support the team with each new quote, providing guidance and follow-through until we reach a resolution on every opportunity.

Connect with us today to learn more about our process in a private overview.