The Benefits of Leveraging an Outsourced Sales Team in Healthcare

Many companies in the healthcare industry struggle with scaling their sales. From multinational pharmaceutical conglomerates to solo care providers, healthcare businesses of all sizes might find themselves needing the occasional boost in their sales efforts.

Today, outsourced sales teams are frequently being used by many companies in the healthcare sector. Why should you consider using sales outsourcing services? What are the benefits? Why are many other companies leveraging outsourced sales teams?

What Are Outsourced Sales Teams?

In the medical sales industry, an outsourced sales team is an external team of sales representatives who are hired to sell medical products, services, and/or software on the behalf of their clients.

Outsourced sales teams can vary in structure. For example, Axxelus uses two different types of outsourced sales solutions based on the specific needs of the client: Full-time and part-time outsourced sales teams.

1. Full-Time outsourced sales teams. These sales reps provide customers with a more dedicated, long-term service commitment. They work from 8-5, have a higher availability than part-time reps, and are Axxelus employees with benefits.
2. Part-Time sales solutions. These sales representatives work part-time as 1099 contractors. Instead of having a set schedule, these medical sales reps have specific process and performance goals that they are responsible for.

In either case, the sales representatives from Axxelus work like a part of the client’s own organization—they wear the client’s name badge/uniform, use the client’s business cards, and present themselves as part of the client’s organization when traveling to meet prospects and customers to build business relationships.

These sales reps are on Axxelus’ payroll and are provided continuous training by our company. This way, your organization can reap the benefits of having a well-trained sales team without the hassle of developing and facilitating all of the necessary training and incentivization programs.

Why More Healthcare Organizations Are Leveraging Outsourced Sales Teams

According to data cited by smallbizgenius.net, it is estimated that roughly 300,000 positions are outsourced every year, the global market for outsourcing was $85.6 billion, and that 59% of businesses use outsourcing to reduce their expenses. While not specific to the medical sales industry, these statistics do highlight the usefulness of outsourcing key business processes such as sales and marketing.

The big motivator for many of the companies that use sales outsourcing services is that it helps them save time and money on acquiring, training and managing a sales team. Instead of having to internally recruit qualified sales representatives and provide them with training, healthcare companies can simply have an outsourced sales management service provider take care of everything.

Even without the time and money savings of using outsourced sales services, many companies may turn to outsourcing their sales processes simply to minimize the management burden!

Pros of an Outsourced Sales Team Vs. an In-House Sales Team

Of course, for any sales outsourcing solution, there are pros and cons to having someone else handle key sales tasks. Some businesses prefer to have their own sales team and forgo the benefits of contract sales services altogether.

Which is right for your company? Here’s a quick look at some of the pros of having an outsourced sales team versus the pros of keeping everything internal:

• Saving time and effort on staff management. When a company uses a sales outsourcing service, they can offload tasks like recruitment and training onto their outsourced sales partner. This frees up the company’s leadership to focus on other value-added tasks like product/service development.
• Getting instant access to a large talent pool. Many companies in the healthcare industry, particularly smaller businesses or healthcare practices, rely on the talent in their immediate geographical area to find suitable sales reps. Using a contract sales organization opens up access to a deeper pool of sales talent—providing access to highly-qualified sales staff who might otherwise have never come to the business’ attention.
• Saving money on staff management. Recruiting, training, and incentivizing internal employees is not only time-consuming, it’s expensive. Setting up payroll, employee benefits, and other critical internal processes for staff can be a significant variable cost that is difficult to account for. With voluntary turnover rates in the sales industry being 16% on average and average sales rep tenures being 1.5 years or less (source: xactify), it is likely that companies will have to continuously spend money on recruitment and onboarding. Depending on the contract sales organization (Axxelus being one such example), these expenses can be skipped, and the company can have a more predictable monthly expenditure for sales staff.
• Increasing flexibility/scalability of sales teams. As a business grows, it will naturally need to increase its sales staff to keep up with the ever-growing list of clients it has. Not having enough sales team members to keep up with a large pool of clients can lead to poor service (and thus, lost accounts). By using an outsourced sales management service, companies in the healthcare industry can quickly and easily scale their sales teams to accommodate a larger client list. In times of reduced demand, it’s also easy to scale back the outsourced sales team to reduce expenses.
• Outsourced sales services provide access to exclusive tools. Many sales outsourcing services have access to a wide variety of sales and customer relationship management tools—and can provide their clients with the best tools for their specific needs and goals. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology can be a key differentiator for medical sales negotiations.
• Outsourced sales solutions can provide fresh strategic insight. It can happen to anyone. One day, their sales department is making big moves and getting results, then their sales reps become focused on tasks rather than results. Stuff gets done, but no progress is made. Bringing in fresh outside talent to manage sales processes can provide a company with new insights on how to meet sales goals, shaking things up so real progress can be made.

Is outsourcing your sales staffing and management to a third party right for your company? Reach out to Axxelus today and schedule a meeting to find out!