We get it. It’s tempting to bring your lead generation activities under the one in-house umbrella to help drive down expenses and maintain control. But before you race out and start recruiting, there are two things you should consider:
1. What is the actual cost of having internal resources that you pay week in, week out?
2. What is the measurable value of building up an in-house lead generation team?
Cost – an internal resource vs. outsourced resource $ checklist
The table below identifies all those costs that are easy to forget about. It’s never just about salaries. Anyway, do the math for yourself.
| INTERNAL RESOURCE | IN-HOUSE COST (PA) | OUTSOURCED RESOURCE |
|---|---|---|
| Recruitment costs, including training, and initial downtime until resource is up to speed | $ | None. Included in hourly rate. |
| Benefits load (average of 17% of salary) | $ | None. Included in hourly rate. |
| Facilities – rent, power, furniture, internet, kitchen, and bathroom, cleaning, etc | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| Training and certification | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| Management overhead – including time taken by managers and sales teams to coach and improve the performance of team members (often at the cost of other sales opportunities)/td> | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| Hardware – phone, computer, monitors, etc | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| Software licensing – CRM, productivity software, telephone system | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| Sick leave and company healthcare schemes | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| Paid parental leave | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| Annual holidays and paid public holidays | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| TOTAL COST PER YEAR | $ | None. Included in hourly rate |
| TOTAL COST DIVIDED BY 2000 WORKING HOURS A YEAR | $ PER HOUR | $ PER HOUR |
Once you’ve run through this checklist, we’re pretty confident that you’ll find running an in-house team is going to cost you more.
You may be paying for 2000 hours of lead generation activity a year, but can you guarantee that each and every hour is spent on driving sales and nothing else? What if only 75-80% of those hours are productive? How does that impact your cost of sale and bottom line?
But focusing on just costs can be misleading.
Let’s talk about value
Value isn’t about cost. It’s about the return on investment (ROI) you get for all the hard work that goes into building a successful, motivated and high-performing team who generate consistent and predictable telesales results.
It’s about the times between campaigns when there’s not a smooth transition to the next project, and your team is sitting around, trying to look busy and keep morale up. And the wasted hours you’re paying for when they aren’t working.
Or the effort of ramping up your full-time and part-time resource recruitment programme to tackle an extensive long or short-term campaign, and the expense and heartbreak of downsizing your team if you change sales strategies.
And then there’s the boredom factor. While you may find your own company and products endlessly fascinating, focusing endlessly on the same subject can be exhausting for staff, and burnout in these circumstances tends to be high. The results of burnout include increased absenteeism, waning commitment, falling productivity and effectiveness, more conflict with co-workers, and even disruptive behaviour. It’s not surprising that recruitment is a constant activity for some companies!
In a nutshell
We recruit, train and manage lead generation professionals, so you don’t have to.
Due to the variety of projects we undertake, our people are continually learning, so they remained challenged and interested – and stay longer. We provide real economies of scale, so you can run a campaign that spans weeks months, or even years without increasing your own staff overheads.
And most importantly – we make every dollar count. If you pay us for 2000 hours of effort a year, that’s exactly what you’ll get.
