Welcome from Stephen Strelczak, MD - TargetSell.co.uk

[TargetSell]

Good day Teneric users,

it would be a pleasure to introduce myself as a new user. My name is Stephen Strelczak and I'm the MD owner of the outsourced sales provider, TargetSell.

I have a keen interest in the sales and marketing worlds, along with a wider interest in assisting good companies to develop beyond their existing limits.

Having worked for the likes of HP, Compaq and Canon, before setting up TargetSell three years ago, my background was routed in the tech industries, but my real loves reside with sales and marketing in general.

I put together TargetSells successful model for UK sales outsourcing, after spending a year in the US and Japan, where sales outsourcing already thrives. In Europe we are only just seeing sales outsourcing gaining popularity, but TargetSell has been there since the beginning, with a long list of very happy partners.

As I realise the area of sales outsourcing is still quite young in the UK, I am very happy for other users to contact me directly with any questions they may have. This is my speciality, and I hope it can be of use to some of your users.

Look forward to posting messages on this subject shortly, and please feel free to contact myself directly at any time,

With kind regards,
_________________
Stephen Strelczak

Managing Director
TargetSell

Phone - 0870 4141 480
Email - info@targetsell.co.uk

[Rick Stally]

Good Afternoon Stephen

Welcome to the forum, I have foudn it very interesting here and I hope that you will to.

I have to ask, what the bloody hell is it that you mean by "sales outsourcing"?

Does that mean you could get me sales or leads or what?

Let me know cause it's bugging me now...

Best Regards
Rick Stally

[bwglaw]

Welcome...do stick around for any advice from me and others

[Ian J]

I have recently come across sales outsourcing in the factoring industry where a group of ex factoring company sales people have banded together to offer an outsourcing service for those factoring companies that are in need of such a service. The industry is monitoring their efforts with great interest

[TargetSell]

The first question TargetSell always gets asked -"What is sales outsourcing?"

Sales Outsourcing isn't as unusual as you may think, its really the logical progression of splitting up the core skills of the sales process, so that parties with those specific skills, can handle just that part of the sales process.

From the outset, lets state something very important. Sales Outsourcing is not designed to replace an existing sales force. Every company, whether they adopt sales outsourcing or not, will need a sales manager/director, internal/external account managers and inhouse staff with deal closing ability (this could be the sales manager or any one of the directors). The key to success with sales outsourcing, is making sure that every individual, is fully utilised, and that you are making the most of their skills and time resources.

Take the average company with a sales function: you have a team of sales people, and a sales manager. The sales people will typically follow a standard job role. They cold call, create appointments for themselves, attend appointments, demonstrate a knowledge of their market/portfolio, write appointment reports, update a CRM system, create proposals and attempt to close pipeline business. They may get thrown the odd direct marketing created lead and/or quotation request, but 60-80% of a sales persons business has to be created by them.

This utilisation model of sales people, is set against a backdrop of minimal sales training (this costs money) and low staff retention (sales people are only at one company till they get a better offer elsewhere. Sales as a profession does not hold the "respect" that it commands accross the pond in the USA, where a successful sales person will be highly regarded. Most sales people in the UK feel they are overwork, under utilised and underrated. Are they lazy? No they just aren't being used in the best way for their skills.

In the Sales Outsourcing environment, the outsourcing provider cold calls, they create appointments based on product/market criteria. Most sales outsourcing providers will (or should) concentrate on 1 or 2 core markets. For instance, TargetSell concentrates on the Technology Market and the high value Lifestyle Product Market. Once aapointments have been generated with interested end users sales outsourcing can stop there, or it can continue. TargetSell has a team of sales people based throughout the south of England, provide field sales services. We attend the appointments made for your company, purely to discuss your portfolio or specific product. All active opportunities that are generated are passed on to your sales managers for passing on to your sales team as active account, or to close themselves. It could stop there, or you can continue further to a point where external field sales consultants, also close business, based on a standard percentage of GP.

What is the advantage of all this? In TargetSell outsourced sales environment, our partners are only charged for activity that has already taken place and been reported. Only when an appointment has been made and passed on to your company, is an invoice sent. Only when an appointment has been visited in the field and your product fully explained to an end user, is an invoice sent. Invoicing can be monthly or weekly, but your company always has their hand on the accelerator and brake.

At the start of a campaign, a minimum activity level is set, this is normally equivilent to around 30 end user meetings. A percentage of this minimum level of activity is taken as a upfront payment, at the campaign start. Once the minimum level of activity is reach (ie all appointments have been attended and reported) then the account can turn to monthly invoicing. Some of TargetSells clients have up to 120 appointments a month, created and attended, to represent their products. It is truely a very scalable and flexible system for sales growth.

This is just the most basis and brief of introductions to sales outsourcing, and I will be providing further articles over the next couple of weeks. At all times you are welcome to send emails or call TargetSell directly, where our consultants will be happy to talk you through our campaign approaches.

Look forward to speaking to some of you in the near future,

With kind regards,

[Rick Stally]

I tried to PM you but you have turned that option off or you cannot receive PM's.

The message read:

OK

So here I am, based in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. We're an IT company who specialise in becoming the off-site (dare I say outsourced) IT Department for SME's.

We're looking for 2 things:

1) Appointments to quote for computer network hardware and IT Infrastructure sales & support.

2) Appointments for a qualified MCSE engineer to attend site and perform a Computer Network Health Check.

Another thing that would interest us greatly is maintenance contracts for computer network support services.

So what's the cost of you setting up appointments for engineers to do FREE Health Checks and Sales Staff to quote for Networks for IT Buyers and Decision makers in Essex?

Regards
Rick Stally

Tel: 01702 333 399

[TargetSell]

Good morning Rick,

a great deal of the partners working with TargetSell are from the tech industries, specially the IT reseller and distrbutor markets.

We can work in two specific modes for IT resellers. We can either generate appointments with suitable SME end users, within a predefined geographic, which your salespeople then attend; or we can produce appointments which are then attended by our sales consultants based out of London. The second approach has two main benefits, it allows your sales people to continue visiting their own appointments (which could also be generated by our telephone-agents) and it applies a fixed price resource to finding out the true requirements of an end user, onsite.

At this stage it is most important to assess what level of internal resource you are currently using, and if this could be improved further. In all sales teams, there is a minimum level of inefficiency, caused by a single sales person handling appointment generation, appointment visiting and proposal creation. As mentioned before, our successful partners, split up these activities, which makes resource management much easier.

TargetSell do not charge by the amount of time taken, or by the length of a contract period. We only charge per-engagement at a fixed cost. We do not charge for database rental or purchase. We ask that our partners locate the data which they wish to work with, and purcahse their own license for this data. TargetSell is happy to assist with the location of suitable data, but is not allowed to purchase the license directly. All data added to a database during a campaign (end users will sometimes refuse an appointment at that time, but may suggest a better time in the future and reveal up coming requirements) is logged back into the database and supplied back to you.

My personal email is stephen.strelczak@targetsell.co.uk ; the first stage of assessing how best TargetSell can help your company grow its business, is by looking at the number of appointments you perceive you would like to produce on a monthly basis, and whether you wish to attend these yourselves, or add in TargetSell sales consultants to visit some of those on your behalf. Our consultants essentially become your sales peopel during onsite meetings, and are pre-trained on the portfolio you wish to put forward.

We are the only organisation in our market to offer fix-cost appointments and onsite engagement costs, which makes your forward business planning a great deal easier.

Let's start by assessing the level of activity you would like to generate. I am in London during today with current partners, but tomorrow I will be free to discuss this with you at length. Is it fine to call you at your offices during Friday?

With kind regards,

Stephen.