How to Outsource Virtually Everything

How to Outsource Sales

It’s not for everyone – rarely works in service or relationship-oriented industries – but for business-to-business sales, outsourcing the sales function can be a cost-effective path. The Florida-headquartered Acosta Sales and Marketing Company has Western Canadian offices, including a pad in Calgary. Direct Sales Force is a Toronto-headquartered company focused on intercept marketing and sales, with branches in Calgary and Edmonton.

Why outsource sales? Sales Focus Incorporated, a Maryland company, argues that an outsourced sales function results in more effective prospecting, a shorter selling cycle, less discounting and higher activity per sales representative. And it puts responsibility for sales staff turnover and training in the lap of the outsourcer.

Appealing? Here’s the downside. Someone else is building relationships with your customers. Think hard about that.

How to Outsource Governance and Strategy

“As a small business owner, you’re really accountable to nobody,” says René Sloos, founder and president of Compu-Consult, a Calgary information technology services company. “And you have to wear so many hats. You can be very good at what you do – in our case, it’s delivering IT services to small business – but that doesn’t mean you are good at building up a business.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get some help? Hire a CEO? Have a board of directors to push you, challenge you, advise you… perhaps even discipline you when you get crazy or lazy? That’s exactly what Sloos got when he hooked up with Powerhouse International, a Calgary company that builds peer advisory boards for SMEs. Powerhouse targets owner-operator companies with revenues under $2 million and fewer than five employees.

“Their owners usually feel very isolated,” says Taunya Woods Richardson, Powerhouse’s founder, president and CEO. Powerhouse connects them, creating boards of six entrepreneurs and one Powerhouse facilitator. And it provides an intensive, hands-on course in governance and strategy, during which business owners hammer out their financial strategies, marketing strategies and overall business plans, while serving as each other’s sounding boards, critics and supporters.

Want something more one-on-one? Corplan Advisors is a two-partner company that will “assume the role of CEO” for a client, for a period as short as two days while they do what co-founder Brian Hamilton calls “a fresh-look assessment.”

Want an entire management team? The Osborne Group is pleased to oblige. It is an outsourcer of executives from a variety of backgrounds: human resources, finance, sales and marketing, information management, all the way up to the CEO level. It’ll fill interim executive roles while helping companies search for full-time, permanent personnel, or it’ll happily become your CEO, CFO or COO permanently – on a part-time or “as needed” basis.

Remi Schmaltz, manager of corporate development at DynAgra Corporation, an Alberta agricultural products company, has drawn on the expertise of about seven executives from the Osborne Group for several years. Osborne principal Mark Olson has consulted with DynAgra for so many years, “he has a Dynagra business card and we think of him as our marketing manager,” says Schmaltz. Other work with DymAgra employees on “a very casual basis.”

That’s the beauty of the outsourced executive model, says Olson. Clients can use it as intensively or “fractionally” as they need to.

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