The hidden costs of an in-house sales and marketing team

Have you ever looked closely at what your sales & marketing budget goes into? Normally there are many hidden costs which take money away from growing your business:

  • Cost of equipment, housing & managing a team
  • Cost of following up on leads
  • Cost of experience

 

The cost of cold calling

As they spent all their money on offices and staff, some companies save money by limiting the marketing budget. This is usually done with the assumption;

 

“If a sales person is good enough, then they should be able to get sales without marketing!”

 

That may be true if you have got a particularly talented salesperson, but it’s a big risk you’re taking for that to be the case. Further if you’ve hired a salesperson, the risk your taking is with your money

 

If you really simplify it down, part of a sales person’s core job is to make you as much money as possible. To make best use of their time, you need to have sales people speaking to as many interested people as is possible. This is why marketing exists:

 

Marketing – finds the people who are interested

Sales – converts interested people into customers

 

If you ask your sales people to cold call, then you’re asking them to do both of the above; find the interested people and then convert them into customers!

 

Whilst this is possible, it stands to reason that they’ll get you less sales than if you had done the marketing. Why? Put simply when you cold call, less of a sales person’s time is spent speaking to people who are actually interested.

 

 

Cost of equipment, housing & managing a team

You need to dedicate the time/resources to:

  • Planning the campaign
  • Selecting the right sales person
  • Housing them/equipping them
  • Training them
  • Monitoring performance and coaching

 

Hiring sales people is too rigid to meet your needs

You can hire full time or part time sales people. That’s it. These fixed options may not be appropriate for smaller companies, fast growing companies or companies where more flexibility is required

 

At Park Row Marketing, we have a UK based agents as well as a global network of talented sales people who enjoy working flexibly. We help you to make best use of your budget by helping you to be flexible with your sales team, starting from just 1 day per week

 

Not the best use of your sales team’s time

If a sales person is very involved in the client post sale, then this may not be the best use of their time. Using an agency like Park Row Marketing allows us to focus on generating the money and you to deliver the service

 

Cost of experience

You likely can only hire one sales person per job, so you are putting a lot of faith in a particular sales person to have the right skills to do the job

 

Check out our other blogs

We have lots of other blogs focused on the challenges of growing businesses. Check out some of our other blogs below