Hodgson

CEO

Hire outside sales support?

Have just completed creating a consumable product that accompanies medical devices. We only have a couple of sales guys internally and I am wondering whether hiring a external sales resource a cold calling company or a company offering sales reps is the best way to go to hit the ground running? or should I just slowly but surely build internal capabilities and hire my own guys?

If the former, what are people's experiences with outsourcing sales?

🧠 Advice

🏋️‍♀️ Leadership

💉 Medical

15 comments

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Sunbunny31

Arsonist

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Can you focus on building partnerships with those other medical device companies your product supports?

Hodgson

Valued Contributor

CEO

That is the longer term strategy, but need to start generating sales in the short term

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Having them bring you in could be very beneficial, particularly in the short term. They already have the ears of the purchasing people - if they're incented somehow to add on, it can help kickstart.

Hodgson

Valued Contributor

CEO

Nice thank you! I’ll get to it

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

What do other players in the space do?

Hodgson

Valued Contributor

CEO

I see a lot of internal teams in the industry however a lot of them took years to build any traction.

FinanceEngineer

Politicker

Sr Director, sales and partnerships

The hard part with external SDRs is that they tend to only work if the product is very commoditized. Once there is nuance or a long sales cycle, they kind of lose their value.

GDO

Politicker

BDM

Yeah difficult cycles or prospects are not a match for that model

President

Outsourcing sales can work, if going to GPO's and distributors in the medical device world. But you have to manage them. Also, I just helped a medical Lab build a sales team organically, that worked out pretty well too. So, depends. Timelines, revenue goals, budgets, etc....

Beans

Big Shot

Enterprise Account Executive

You're always better off scaling internally.
But channel partnerships would be a strong second move.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

I agree with your take here Beans.

Hodgson

Valued Contributor

CEO

Thanks @Beans and @CuriousFox ... Maybe instead of having direct sales resource external, I should do more on the marketing side to help lower barriers to entry and raise our profile for the small team I have? What do you guys think?

Beans

Big Shot

Enterprise Account Executive

What is your product? Be vague if you'd like.
I spent 3 years in biotech/med dev with a point of care PCR startup that's emphasis for revenue was repeat business through consumables/reagents.
Might have some deeper insight with some context.

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

We hired external company but it never worked but it’s for saas space. I have worked in a similar space and what helped most was sponsoring events, participating and/or visiting trade shows, networking with associations approving these sorts of products etc

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

ERP Sales

Maybe take a meeting with Bravado Flex