How to outsource marketing / sales

First off, understand that "sales" and "marketing" are two very different things.

Sales is in the present - right now - selling your product.

Marketing is more about the future - devising plans to create demand - understanding where the market is going or trying to direct the market itself.

A person good at one is not usually suited for the other.

I'm guessing you're looking for a sales guy - someone to sell the product and follow up with customers. What I would probably do is try and hire someone strictly on commission. How many units do you expect someone could sell in a good month? How much commission can you give them per unit? Do those numbers work out to $8-10k? That should be reasonably compelling for a salesman looking for work. The best part is you should be able to afford as many of them as you'd like since they only get paid if they sell something.

If you're feeding them the leads and all they have to do is follow up and try to make the sale maybe you can get away with lower commissions and find a young person looking for someone to take a chance on them. Just be prepared for turnover if they can't figure it out relatively quickly.

I would take the time to find someone you think will do a good job representing your company because this person will be the face of your company as far as your customers are concerned.

Okay first of all, make a script for how you personally handle sales calls and then hire and train a Virtual Assistant with great phone skills to take over the tasks of making these calls on your behalf. The goal is not necessarily for them to sell to the prospects, it just to warm up these leads so that you can take over the call and then make the sale. Have the virtual assistant listen to several of these calls and over time he/she will be able to do exactly what you do or even better.

This is the quickest way for you to get results without going out to hire an expensive sales team.

On my blog, I have a free video interview with a successful Entrepreneurs titled "How to Market and get Clients for your Business by means of a Virtual Assistant"

Check it out because I am positive you will be able to learn something useful from this interview.

If you are simply looking for a temporary hire-on with those stipulations:

• Many people are on Craigslist looking for a post offering up a part-time, telecommute/work-from-home position. You might consider posting in this format to your local Craigslist in order to be able to interview them, and be able to develop an at-arm's-length relationship with them.

• ODesk and similar services also have a posting service for limited contract employees/employers. You need to work through their service for discovering employees, however, and I am unaware what stipulations are placed on employers (the different services may be more or less cumbersome in this respect).

Trada.com lets you crowd-source (therefore out-source) the creation of online ads (ie Adwords). Perhaps that fills part of what you wish to outsource.

Google is an investor in Trada.

Fx,

It would be impossible for anyone to give you specific advice as to what you should be doing. I would suggest that you speak to a few local organisations that specialise in Marketing, Sales, Business Consulting and see what they have to offer.

Your question is one that we get asked every week… hence we started here in the UK offering just this kind of service.

Be under no illusion.. companies will offer you a meeting or two for free… on the hope that you will use them if and when you are able to. however, these meetings should help you get a clearer understanding of what your needs are for now and the future.

It will save you time, effort and money if you try and plan the right steps now.

Outsource to odesk.com, elance.com or freelancer.com.

I formed my team of web developers and virtual assistants from oDesk. Instead of hiring locally, I was able to hire three VAs for the same price, then picked the better VA and gave her a raise.