Why a growing business should hire Remote Sales Talent

How has Sales transformed in the last couple of decades 
 
Gone are the days when Sales was all about knowing your own product and making sure your potential client knew it too, and in fact, was never able to forget it thanks to repeated follow-ups from you. 
 
"Today is all about Solution Selling instead of Product Selling"
 
With an increase in service businesses, especially led out of software, it is important to know your potential client’s problems and offer your product as a solution that would help solve those problems. This means needing to listen to your clients far more than talking to or at them, and as a salesperson, understanding the applications of your product or service really well. 
 
"What you see is what you get’ has become ‘what you visualise is what you get"
 
With the products and services of today harnessing the power of the internet and digital technologies, the sales mantra has transformed from ‘what you see is what you get’ to ‘what you visualise is what you get’. And good salespeople need to be able to help potential clients visualise how they can use these products along with how their organisations will be more efficient, how their costs will be lower, and indeed, how their lives will be better. This is called ‘Concept selling’ and is arguably a few degrees more difficult than simple product selling. It needs the salesperson to know their product/service and its applications, use cases, examples, visualisations, demos as well as how all of these compare to competitors and existing technology, to be able to sell. 
 
How can start-ups get all of these skills given their tight budgets
 
A start-up is usually worst hit when it comes to sales: they have to create awareness and understanding of a new product or service while operating on thin budgets and low branding. A constraint on money means not being able to afford the best sales talent, not being able to use paid targeted advertising, etc. We see a lot of them hire freshers or use 100% target-linked payout models to make it work. These methods don’t always work, because for nuanced selling you need people who have the right skill-sets and experience. Good sales people are a tribe, they are personalities, honed over time with multiple experiences of handling rejections, indifference, competition, low-streaks, uncertainty, and not just about anyone can do it well. Fully variable models can work for some products, especially those that have huge upsides in terms of incentives, but most selling requires some investment of time and effort from both the salesperson and the company, and fully variable models do not ensure that accountability. 
 
So how does one go about hiring good sales talent but not breaking the bank in order to do that?
 
Consider Inside Sales
 
Inside Sales is a form of remote sales used in multiple scenarios. For those products/services where the purchase decision needs information more than relationship building, or for start-ups looking to optimise their costs and use the first sales touch-point only to set up meetings with the right stakeholders, a remote team of Inside Sales professionals works for both. Moreover, they are usually experienced in the domain and can do some very targeted selling for startups that boosts productivity and RoI. 
 
At FlexiBees, not only do we offer Inside Sales professionals, we also use them for our own selling. With geography no bar, we have been able to put together a great team, whose only commonality is that they are experienced b2b sales professionals who want to work flexibly. 
 
 
While we offer all three of these models, in terms of number of hours, clients prefer part-time vs full-time, as it additionally helps in cost optimisation while getting really productive talent. 
 
So if you are looking to expand your business, start a new line of products or services, consider a remote sales team that will give you that sweet spot of talent vs cost of that talent. Moreover, it will open up a whole new talent pool to you, of driven, dedicated and experienced women who want to return to work and do their best!