Sales Management Outsourcing is in sight

Not so long ago, sales as a profession was  looked at as an art;you “had it” or you did not “have it”. Sales people were mostly trained internally. Xerox, IBM, DIGITAL EQUIPMENT and so on were training their new hires extensively both on their products and on how to sell them. And there was only one way to sell - their way. 

Then slowly, as time went by everyone agreed that whatever industry you were in, sales was also a process, a science, a numbers’ game. You had to make a proposal in order to close a deal,  you had to have a first appointment in order to start a sales opportunity, you had to prospect to get a first appointment, etc...Then suddenly a whole new world opened: 

You could start measuring and influencing the effectiveness of the process. How many appointments did you need to close a sale? What was your bid/win ratio? Why was this opportunity outside of the length of your usual sales cycle?

You could start developing your sales people by looking at their ratios, identifying their strengths for each step of their process : farmers/hunters profiling began, external sales training companies started to train on sales skills, on the sales process and on sales reps assessment. 

Finally, because processes can be measured, because we can define the inputs and outputs of a process, companies started looking at cost effective ways to  completely outsource some of those processes to outside experts who could do it cheaper, better and faster.

Lead generation and appointment making companies became the outsourcers of the prospecting activity for their clients. With a good script related to your business, the right metrics for appointment generation and skilled people trained on cold calling/ marketing, you could totally outsource the first step of your sales process. 

Now what if what was possible for sales people then is becoming possible for sales managers now? what if your front line sales managers could also follow a process instead of just “winging it.” 

What if we were able to actually identify the best practices of successful sales managers and understand what it is that they do that makes them consistently blow past their number. What if we could track on a daily basis the effectiveness of their habits? what if we could reverse-engineer some of these habits and turn them into processes with clear inputs/outputs and  metrics (sales manager productivity metrics). 

Then a whole new world would also open to sales managers and to small business owners who could outsource some of the SM processes that they neglect to an “assistant coach” - a part time sales productivity manager, who could make their dream of having everyone making goal becomes a reality.

I see this happening already, it's only a matter of time and of processes...