The issues brought up in the original post are valid. Building an internal sales force is difficult. Failure rate for the first round of internal sales is in excess of 90%. Challenges range from recruiting (successful sales recruiting requires professionals trained to do so using metric based systems), to sales management (50% of your production is sales support and management — it isn’t all rep driven) (sales management includes ongoing training, metrics to track production, and solutions to improve the problems identified by those metrics), and analysis skills from trained professionals.

If you hire a “head shop” that is pure variable and just puts anyone on the street, your effort will likely fail. If you want to outsource — look for the people that will have the solutions that you don’t. The top sales outsourcing firms have the systems and processes that outperform the industry (including the Fortune 500). They are specialists that treat sales as a science, not an art. The downside is that it isn’t free. If they are investing in you, you will need to pay fair market for those services.

Good luck. Advertising sales is challenging but still lucrative in this market.

Fred Kessler
Sales Partnerships, Inc.