Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Very interesting questions! I'll take on three:

1) Would I be replacing myself?
Absolutely zero chance of that (and coming from a statistics professor, that means a lot :-)). Besides the fact you need to set requirements for eg lead quality, check and manage the delivery of outside vendors, your time can now be better spend on more strategic questions such as: 'how can I really move the needle on lead generation?', 'does our product fully fit the needs of the intended audience'? 'how should we expand our product line / target market'? etc

2) Where to start – research to make sure we go after the right prospect or lead generation?
I agree: it is crucial you clarify exactly what you want an outside vendor to accomplish - similar to an advertising brief, you should specify how many leads you want, but more importantly the quality of these leads and how this quality will be judged

3) What about the fact we really don’t have a sales team to follow up on the leads if we get too many?
很作的tant issue: in the long run, you may be able to increase your salesforce if you can show a lot more qualified leads. In the short run, getting more qualified leads you can handle is a huge problem, because highly qualified prospects may get upset when it takes forever to follow up with them. So ideally, you would want to hire salespeople now based on your expected number of qualified leads in the future.
How to get that budget approved: talk to your bosses about how much more revenue/profits they would like to make next year. Deduct from that how many more customers you need to acquire and, using a reasonable prospect-customer conversion rate, how many more qualified prospect you need. Using your current number of how many leads your single salesperson can handle, you can now come up with how many salespeople you need.

The benefit of starting with the performance goal: when the calculated required budget increase appears too high for your bosses, you can ask them whether they are willing to live with the lower profit you can make...after some give and take you will probably get away with a budget increase and a much better shared understanding of reasonable performance standards

Hope this helps

I agree with the comments above regarding whether you would put your position at risk - outsourced marketing doesn't provide the product and industry knowledge needed for a company. Certain functions can be outsourced, but there will always be a need for someone inside who is the expert and can control the process.

That said, I would figure out what you want as a goal for your business, and how much you would be willing to pay, before talking to any of these outsourcers. ow much additional business do you want, and how much of that additional income would you be willing to spend to get it. Then you will b able to listen to the sales pitches of the outsourcers and see what may make sense.

One area that varies greatly with software is who makes the decision to buy and where do they look. Not all software marketing/sales are appropriate for the web. Depends on what type of software you have and what your market is as to what will make sense for you.

Don't want to pile on here, but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

I work for a firm that generates quality sales opportunities, market intelligence, and multi channel campaign metrics (performance and tactical).

I WOULD NOT engage with your organization. I'd run for the hills! Without a solid transition process to a world class sales team, there's no way to justify our ROI. An engagement like this would end in misery for both parties and would damage our reputation. Be VERY careful in dealing with firms that beating down your door right now.

The great news is that your current process has a lot of merit. Your role as a diagnostic qualifier, while remaining on the marketing side, allows you to have real contact with your customer base which will help you craft future messaging and execute more targeted programs. Furthermore, that data is your lifeblood. Too many Marketing departments turn all their data to sales, and cross their fingers. Your in the unique position of owning the data and the follow up activity. DON'T LET IT GO!

As your organization grows, develop a marketing development team (or Business Development team as we call it) that continues working under this model. Or wink wink; outsource it. A good rule of thumb is to have no more than 3 Sales reps to 1 Biz Dev Rep.

In the short term, you might want to consider some of the software solutions that assist in prequalifing and prioritizing your inbound hits. That will allow you to manage your time effectively when you begin your calling efforts (which should NEVER be replaced).

One alternative is to consider an outside sales channel.
There are a growing number of sales agencies who may be able to successfully follow up on some of your smaller potential sales.