How Outsourced Lead Generation and Sales Take On New Markets

‍Thank you to Rick Pizzoli for this contributed blogpost on outsourced global sales. Rick brings more than 30 years of experience in European business development for tech companies, founded Sales Force Europe in 2003. Since then, it’s provided over 500 tech companies with outsourced sales development, lead generation, strategy, channel sales and country management.

Congrats! Expanding into new markets is an exciting milestone. It’s your opportunity to reach new customers, increase sales and grow your brand. However, it can also be a daunting task. There are a number of challenges to consider, from understanding local regulations to building a sales team from scratch.

Companies choose our partners GEOS because setting up an entity in a new country takes time and money — and a lot of regulatory and legal knowhow that varies per location. But even before considering setting up a business abroad, you need to be sure that the new market is really open to you. 

One way to mitigate these risks and to test the waters before making a full commitment is to leverage outsourced lead generation and sales agents. This approach allows you to tap into the expertise of local sales professionals without having to set up your own business entity.

How to Get Started with Outsourced Lead Generation and Sales

If you’re considering using outsourced lead generation and sales agents to enter a new market, here are a few steps to get started:

1. Define your target market: The first step is to define your target market in the new country. Who are you trying to reach? What are their needs and pain points?
2. Develop your international sales strategy: Once you know your target market, you can develop a sales strategy. This should include your value proposition, your pricing strategy, and your messaging.
3. Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP): You need to know your product market-fit and ICP to be able to properly talk to and target the decision makers at your hopefully future customers. Be sure you can answer: What type of companies in the past have brought you the most success? What do they all have in common? What strong and obvious attributes made them such a good fit?
4. Find a reputable outsourcing partner: We at Sales Force Europe have been offering outsourced lead generation and sales services in Europe since 2003. It’s important to find a reputable partner with a proven track record in your target country. Be sure to ask any outsourcing candidates about your target audience in your target country, and make sure they are knowledgeable about local regulations. (For example, across Europe, GDPR is key.) 
5. Track your results: Once you’ve started working with an outsourced partner, it’s important to track your results. This will help you determine whether or not your outsourcing strategy is successful.

Besides Step 4, these are the same steps you should follow with any global expansion. You will find that sales teams work the same whether in-house or outsourced. You will find success with the right management and the right measurements.

KPIs for Measuring Success

Before you look to bring your business abroad, you need to reflect on your home market. Unless there is a specific competitor with a large market share in your new target country market, the new market will mirror your first one. You just have to do the math.

Some of the most important KPIs include:

• Number of generated leads: This is a basic metric that will help you track the volume of leads that your outsourced partner is generating.
• Lead quality: Not all leads are created equal. It’s important to track the quality of the leads that you’re generating. How many of these are actually your ICP? If lead quality drops, it’s also important to revisit your messaging for this new market. 
• Sales conversion rate: This is the percentage of leads that result in a sale.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): This is the cost of acquiring a new customer.

While the CAC may vary a bit, the other numbers line up as you go country to country. Before looking abroad, you should already know how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) it takes to turn into a sales qualified lead (SQL). Then, how many SQLs you need to get Deals. 

These ratios line right up, whether you are setting up an entity or using outsourced BDRs and sales agents. 

Also by openly talking about these numbers and tracking key sales metrics, it enables transparency for any outsourcing partnership.

Sales Territory Management for Optimal Performance

Once you’ve started to generate leads and close deals in a new market, you’ll need to develop a plan for managing your sales territory. This includes assigning territories to your outsourced sales agents and tracking their performance.

If you’re ready to scale abroad, you probably have sales representatives in your home market that you’ve come to rely on. It can be tempting to transplant them to your new market. But that comes with it’s own risks. They don’t likely have an existing network there and they don’t likely have a grasp on the language and culture. That means you risk taking a great sales rep and setting them up to fail.

With outsourced sales this can be simpler because you usually partner with whoever has the most experience selling to your ICP — a mix of local language, network and vertical knowledge. Partnering with local sales agencies can help you get on the ground faster to test out the market. 

Here are a few tips for effective sales territory management:

• Understand your customers: In order to create a successful sales territory plan, you need to understand your customers. This includes their location, needs, and buying habits.
• Define clear territories: Once you understand your customers, you can define clear sales territories to reach them. You can’t reach Germany from the UK or the US. The more local, the more successful you’ll be.

What’s most important — especially when you are working with external partners — is your international territory management. It can feel like you’re losing control when you decide to lean on outsourcing. That is a bad sign. At Sales Force Europe, we rely on our longstanding country managers to provide both coaching and support of our BDRs and sales reps, and to make sure you feel connected with the entire operation — even when you’re an ocean away.

The Benefits of Outsourced Lead Generation and Sales

There are a number of benefits to using outsourced lead generation and sales agents. Here are a few of the most important:

• Local expertise: Outsourced agents have a deep understanding of the local market, including the culture, business practices and regulations. This can be invaluable when trying to reach new customers and close deals. And unless you are reaching out to the handful of countries where English is the first language, you simply cannot do sales or customer support in English. Native mastery of the local language is a requirement to global expansion.
• Cost-effectiveness: Outsourcing can be a more cost-effective way to enter a new market than setting up your own sales team. You don’t have to worry about the costs of recruiting, training and managing employees — and setting up a business entity before you’ve proven traction in the new market.
• Scalability: With a single contract, you can easily scale your outsourced lead generation and sales efforts up or down as needed. This gives you the flexibility to adjust based on market response. This could be rapidly expanding your team or quickly shifting your focus to a country market that has more interest in your product or service.
• Reduced risk: By outsourcing sales and lead gen, you can reduce the risk of entering a new market. You don’t have to make a significant upfront investment, and you can learn from the experience before making a full commitment. When you’re ready to set up that permanent footprint, it still won’t be simple — but you can partner with GEOS global entity setup as a service to make it easier across over 100 different markets — only once you’ve proven your market.

In the end, be wary of any sales agency that is promising too much. Specialism is better. At Sales Force Europe, we have been providing sales outsourcing and lead generation services for over 20 years now, specifically helping tech companies expand into and across Europe. It helps us build long-term, local tech buyer networks. And it helps us understand often deeply complex enterprise technology. This, in turn, helps you scale your tech business in Europe faster and with less risk.

How can GEOS help?

At GEOS, we’ve mapped out the entity setup & maintenance processes in 100+ countries and packaged it into a convenient platform/service. We also provide ongoing services like Resident Director, Registered Address & Tax/Accounting to help clients through the process of employing regional teams with their new entity.

Schedule a consultation with us here. 

This article does not constitute legal advice.