Checklist for Building a Sales Pipeline

Cost is naturally an important consideration for generating B2B leads and building a sales pipeline more effectively. That discussion usually involves a debate on whether to get more qualified leads for sales by internally building and managing a team or outsourcing. What factors would you have to ponder in order to determine the real cost of insourcing vs. outsourcing lead generation? We came up with a check list for you to think about:

• Construction, augmentation, refinement, and maintenance of databases


• Inbound inquiry response routing


• Time required for new hire training and ramp


• Sales Force Automation tools implementation and use for tracking and management of opportunity


• Dedicated Account Management


• Weekly status meetings


• Expandable staff for events and specialized campaigns


• Aggregated resources – All assigned resources should carry customer quotas


• Analytics to provide real time understanding of where you are successful

When you consider doing these activities internally and compare it to having them provided by experts who specialize in driving revenue, with outsourcing, the savings are considerable:

• You incur no in house database administration burden


• You do not have to locate, hire, train, manage, equip, and pay for internal staff


• You extend capabilities and remain flexible

Most organizations need to have an environment which can provide both inbound and outbound support. Whether the team is internal or outsourced through a sales partner, the goal or measurement is clear although sometimes misstated – quickly building a sales pipeline as large as possible.

Rather than having your sales team invest a significant portion of their time on business development, your outsourced sales partner will design and build solutions that support the revenue generation effort by:

• Prospecting to provide well-qualified prospects – sometimes as support to the outside sales force or channel partners


• Filtering inbound requests to uncover real prospects


• Following up on events and marketing campaigns to qualify prospects


• Selling products and/or services to new or installed base customers

By outsourcing business pipeline development, your sales team can provide maximum results from quality pipeline while taking the burden off of your organization.

In addition, here is a free articleon the qualities you should be looking for when comparing outsourced sales companies.

Photo by Olivier Tacke

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