Over the last month, we’ve been exploring the results of our recent survey on why customers chose Virtual Sales Team (VST) as ‘the trusted extension to their sales and marketing team’. Our survey findings revealed that four words were consistently mentioned, these were – certainty, momentum, trust and flexibility. Today we’ll be looking at flexibility and why it’s always so high on peoples ‘reasons to outsource’ list.

So what do we really mean by flexibility and why is this reason always cited so often? Here are a few ‘real life’ examples from some of our customers on what it means them:

The freedom to turn activity up and down

“being able to ‘ramp up and down’ with VST has allowed me to cover the 9-month maternity leave of one of our sales people”

Sales Director Events Industry

Lowering staffing costs via flexibility

“Having a resource that we can flex up and down as required has really helped solve the problem we have around seasonal peaks and troughs. You’re really helping us flatten out our year without us having to hire permanent headcount”

Marketing Director, National Haulage Firm

A service that will grow with your business 

“I really liked the fact that I could come to you and dip my toe in the lead generation water and then as my confidence grew I could turn your hours up gradually. It was also great knowing I can reduce them too if I couldn’t handle any more leads”

MD, Video Production Company

A strategic campaign partner, when you need it 

“Having a UK sales team of 32 Business Development Managers (BDMs), the challenge is always helping them be as productive as possible. Quite frankly we don’t want to see them in the office, we want them in front of customers and prospects. This service has been fantastic for us as we have been able to turn regions up and down as they have needed an injection of meetings, the BDM’s now love VST!” Commercial Director, Waste Management. 

These are four great examples of how our customers use an outsourced sales service like ours – flexibly

So, what’s the secret to a successful, flexible and mutually beneficial business partnerships?

As our previous blog in this series explains,  trust is a key element. Secondly, you need the volume of work to be high enough to keep the outsourcer –

1. Interested and engaged.

2. Experienced and familiar enough with your products or services to keep their staff trained.

It takes a long time to become a trusted extension of an existing sales team, to become an expert and build comprehensive knowledge and expertise. As soon as you turn off the service, your original team will be dispersed across other clients and projects. This may well cause you inconvenience if you are wanting to start things again quickly when your old team are no longer available and a new team needs to be trained.

So, in summary, our advice to you to really maximise a flexible relationship with your outsourcer in whatever industry is keeping the work flowing even at a trickle if need be…but do keep it flowing. Retain the experience and knowledge so you don’t need to keep starting again from the beginning.

In other words…’turn the tap up and down’ not ‘on and off’.

I hope you found this useful and as always, we’d be interested to know how flexible your partners are and how you get the best out of the relationship. Drop us a line here (line) or connect with us on social media.

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