Can you crowdsource a sales team? Yes. | Hacker News Reader

Can you crowdsource a sales team? Yes.

zdnet.com

34 pointsprayag24 comments

It's the second time I read about LeadGenius on HN and I'm still not clear what they do. A simple example would've gone a long way here.

"Here's this company, Abc, and we helped their sales process by furnishing/prequalifying/cold-calling N leads, of which M has been closed as sales". Something like this.

We do lead generation, lead qualification and email (and phone) outreach.

where do you source the emails from? opt-in? what steps do you take to ensure your approach is inline with a company's vision and existing marketing messages? what kind of quality checks go into lead response and handling?

Yes, I understand that.

Can you give an example of what this translated to for one of your clients?

Here are a couple of case studies on how this works for some of our clients. http://files.leadgeni.us/CaseStudyCaviar.pdf and http://files.leadgeni.us/CaseStudyZenefits.pdf

Would this work for a band, by chance? I spend an inordinate amount of time hunting down, calling, and following up with club owners, HR people (for corporate gigs), and 'regular folks who just want live entertainment for a party'. I would LOVE to be able to outsource this drudgery to someone else, so long as they can get the same or better results than me doing it myself.

There is no reason this won't work for a band. Your use case is actually pretty exactly what most startups use it for. If you fill this form out someone will get in touch with you on Monday. https://fairtradework.wufoo.com/forms/thanks-for-contacting-...

Done. I'm always looking for ways of making drudgery less hateful :-)

The biggest issue that I see with crowd sourcing your sales team is that you lose control of interactions with your client. How can you ensure that your temp sales team isn't making long term promises that you can't fulfill? They don't care because they are already thinking about their next gig.

In all fairness, I've never worked anywhere with a staff of less than 20 where the sales team weren't compulsive over-committers, leaving engineering / development to pick up the slack between what was promised and what was delivered.

That said, I agree with your concern, specifically as it relates to the customer engagement process. We get so much of our feedback from our sales team as to what features potential customers are looking for, what features are selling new business, and what missing features are making the sales process harder.

A good salesperson (and sales engineer, and contract person, etc.) keeps the relationship two-way, and might make it harder for the engineers in the short term, but generally lead towards a much easier to sell product. Outsourcing any part of that engagement seems ... I dunno, I can't quite bring myself to call it 'bad', or 'naive', but I think it should definitely not be decided lightly.

Leadgenius is not designed to replace your sales person. You can outsource everything via leadgenius except the final deal making. We will get the client on phone with you and after that it's your gig.

How is this different from affiliate marketing? Does this involve offline sales too? Is this just a sales rep jobs board or a hand holding affiliate marketing site (at a flat fee)? The use of the word virtual is a bit confusing here and I am not really sure what it means. Honestly in reading the article all I saw were a bunch of buzzwords.

Well yeah, as he says, he uses his own services. This is a sales pitch and making it simple to understand makes it easy to pick out flaws and have potential customers actually think about it in terms they understand. He doesn't want that: by throwing in all these buzzwords he's trying to get potential customers to stop thinking so hard and just 'give it a try'. It's a good tactic, one of the most used in selling financial and IT infrastructure products.

I really don't understand what he is doing wrong. The reporter asked him about the service and he gave him the whole spiel. This is exactly what that question was for so they can dig deeper in later questions.

This is simply a way to add a virtual sales staffers to your sales efforts. Different staffers are specialists in different aspect of the sales pipeline including leads finding, targeted outreach and sales calls. You can hire these staffers by the hour (minimum 20hours/week) and they will help you run the entire sales process.

I hope this explains what leadgenius does.

So are you outsourcing to these individuals or are they on your staff? Is there a technology behind the management of it or are you simply providing the human resource much like a temp agency would? I if you had to fill in the blank(as much as I hate this it helps understand) what would it be: "We are the ____ of sales"

This takes the definition of the word 'crowdsourcing' to a new level.

This is actually classic crowdsourcing. We find different sales experts in the crowd and place them in small and medium organization to help them do more sales.

Actually, it sounds more like outsourcing unless my 20hrs is coming from 20 different people in the crowd. Is it?

It's actually just outsourcing - but I see that crowdsourcing is the buzzword of the year so I understand why you'd use it. I'd prefer the outsourcing approach with one or 2 good guys who know my product over a factory style team any day!

The difference is that people who work with us are actually contractors who pick their own hours and work from home. They can come and go as they please but we still ensure quality using our technology and processes.

that sounds great - but it still doesnt make it crowdsourcing in the truest sense of the word. I dont care where the guys are sitting - I care that they produce good leads!

OK, I think I understand what they do now. From the FAQ: "LeadGenius is a service from MobileWorks" Then to the source (https://www.mobileworks.com): "We recruit workers, run interviews, and ensure projects are done with the highest quality – automatically."

So, basically Lead Genius is an inbound marketing channel for Mobile Works for the sales customer segment.

yup that sounds about right. looks like they're allowing to you hire partial FTEs for sales support.

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