March 25, 2024 | Contract Sales

3 Signs You Need Sales Force Outsourcing

Sales teams are the driving force behind a medical or pharmaceutical company’s sales success. Without a strong and capable sales force, it’s hard for companies to maintain existing relationships with customers or add new customers to their portfolio.

However, recruiting a top-notch sales representative, let alone a whole team of them, can be incredibly challenging. Many companies might struggle to bring in qualified talent and experience a number of issues because of this problem.

In this article, we’ll detail some of the challenges of building a sales force from scratch internally, the warning signs that you might need sales force outsourcing, and how to start with contract sales.

The Challenges of Building a Sales Force

Why is it so difficult to build a medical sales team? Some of the basic challenges include:

  • Finding Qualified Talent. Medical sales teams need specialized knowledge for a variety of reasons. For example, sales reps need to know how their products can be integrated into a client’s business, the rules and regulations governing how they can interact with prospects, and effective sales strategies. This is why having a degree of some kind is often a requirement for sales positions. However, it can be hard to find someone with the requisite knowledge and experience before they get snapped up by some other company.
  • Limited Recruitment Areas. To make the search for talent even more difficult, many medical and pharmaceutical sales industry businesses have to pull from a relatively small pool of talent in the area near their offices. This may keep them from finding qualified talent that lives well away from their main office location (or spending money on incentives to cover the cost of a move).
  • Outbidding Competitors to Recruit Talent. The medical sales industry can be intensely competitive when it comes to recruitment. Great sales reps will often receive lucrative offers from multiple employers to work for them. This means that benefits and pay package costs for some medical sales companies in highly competitive areas can quickly balloon out of control as companies work to one-up each other to attract a limited pool of sales talent. Offering “competitive pay” and other incentives is common for trying to keep ahold of valuable talent. Also, prospective applicants may try to negotiate higher wages and better benefits for themselves if they know you’ve been struggling to find a qualified sales rep for a while.
  • Keeping Employees Up to Date on Training. Even after hiring new team members for the sales force, the worries don’t end. Sales training is a critical resource for keeping sales team members up to date on new sales techniques and regulations they need to know.
  • Setting Aside Time to Vet New Sales Team Members. Vetting a potential new sales force member can be an exhaustive and time-consuming process. It takes time for interviewers to fully assess an applicant’s skills and make sure that they’re a good fit for the organization personality-wise. Adding the wrong team member can sometimes be worse than not hiring someone at all—especially if their bad attitude drives away other hard-working sales reps!

These are just a few of the potential problems that medical sales companies might face when trying to recruit new sales talent.

3 Warning Signs You Need Sales Force Outsourcing

Now that we’ve discussed some of the challenges of recruiting a sales force internally, what are some of the warning signs that you might really need to outsource your sales force right away?

Some of the major warning signs that you should consider sales force outsourcing include:

1. High Rates of Sales Rep Turnover

Turnover is an almost universal issue for any company and job role. The costs of turnover can vary depending on the specific role, but a commonly-cited statistic states that the cost can vary between one-half to twice the employee’s annual salary (Source: Gallup).

There are many factors that contribute to a high cost of turnover—the cost of recruiting a replacement, losses in productivity between when the old employee leaves and the replacement is sufficiently comfortable in the role to meet performance standards, and the potential loss of accounts when the employee leaves.

While some turnover is unavoidable since sales reps will eventually retire, find new job opportunities, or even decide to switch careers, excessive turnover could be an indication of a problem with the quality of new applicants (whether people are leaving voluntarily or are getting terminated for cause). If there are problems with the quality of new hires, then it might help to turn to a contract sales organization (CSO) to have them conduct more in-depth employee vetting so you’re only presented with high-quality sales reps.

2. Low Sales Performance

Everyone has the occasional slump in performance. However, when sales reps continuously struggle to meet easy sales goals, it might be time to switch to a new sales force. Low performance can be the result of many factors, such as employee burnout, a lack of training, or sales team members feeling unmotivated to perform.

Here, turning to an outsourced sales team can help you find highly qualified and motivated sales talent quickly.

3. It Takes Too Long to Find New Sales Reps

How long is the typical sales rep recruitment cycle in your business? After recruitment, how long does it take for a sales rep to reach “competent” or “top-performer” status? These are important questions to answer, as they may affect how readily you can replace sales reps after they leave.

For biotech and pharmaceutical companies, it’s pretty normal to take about 28.1 days to fill a position, while companies in the health services industry typically take about 49 days to do the same (Source: Workable). This is a long time without a productive person in a role.

If your average time-to-fill for sales rep positions is much longer than the average, it might be time to consider using a CSO to fill your medical sales representative openings faster. In many cases, a CSO will have a pool of talent that they can draw on immediately to fill a position quickly.

Outsource Your Sales Force with Axxelus

Are you struggling to find qualified medical sales talent in a timely fashion? Consider outsourcing your sales force with Axxelus!

Axxelus is a contract sales organization with a proven track record of pairing highly skilled and motivated medical sales reps with companies where they can put their talents to the best use. Companies in the medical sales industry rely on Axxelus to provide talent that isn’t just skilled, but will prove to be the right fit for their company culture so they can focus on generating success instead of wasting time trying to integrate a poor fit candidate.

Are you ready to transform your medical sales team for increased efficiency and results? Reach out to Axxelus to get started!

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