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Virtual Sales Ltd (VSL) has many years experience in working with both direct and indirect channels for IT based companies. For direct please see our range of lead generation services.

If you are considering selling your product or solution via a partner network then we could be the people you need.

VSL has over 50 man years’ experience of setting up channels for IT based companies.

We understand how to maximise the opportunity in the channel and are very comfortable working as part of a classic push pull strategy.

We recently received an email from Steve Mills offering a free download of his ebook The 10 Biggest Lead Generation Mistakes (click on the link to get yours for free) and the lovely @shaungisbourne agreed to review it for us, so here’s his review:

In this comprehensive yet far from exhaustive guide, and with some real examples backed up by cold hard numbers, Steve Mills brings into focus core sales and marketing truths, introducing concrete actions for future-proofing your business. Focusing on the measurable and repeatable actions of sales and marketing that any self-respecting organisation can and should put into practice, Mills pulls no punches as he delves into his own mistakes as well as drawing on the experience of others.

Most of us have experienced the phenomenon that is call reluctance. We've covered the topic before on the VSL blog, and mentioned how some people would rather make tea or even clean toilets than pick up the telephone to a stranger. If you suffer from call reluctance, here's a tried and tested idea that may well help you to combat that feeling you get in your stomach when you really feel like doing anything but calling, especially cold-calling: Take the "cold" out of the cold-calling equation and give yourself a warm-up.

A guest post from Catherine Yaffe of Cat Creative Multimedia

As a business owner it’s imperative to keep feeding your sales pipeline. Whilst no one likes it, cold calling is an essential element. Outsourcing can be costly, but the following basic rules should help you or your staff to get past any nerves and give you the confidence to pick up the phone and start calling.

1. Do your research on the company / individual.
2. Be relaxed and enthusiastic.
3. Tone – the MOST vital characteristic of a telephone conversation, you can say it all with tone.

The last post in our series of blogs about the reasons people give for not wanting to outsource their telemarketing campaigns.

You can find the others here: #1 / #2 / #3 / #4

We don't outsource our sales because:

We don’t need someone full-time

One of the main advantages of Outsourced Selling is its flexibility. 

You might start off needing as little as one day a week – but then you might want to launch a new project, and suddenly want a lot more resource. 

Continuing our series of reasons people give for not wanting to hire a telemarketing companyd, today we have:

I already have a sales team

It’s common for an SME to have a couple of sales people who are expected to do all the sales related work: they generate their own leads, have to go out of the office on calls and close the sales too.  This can be a moderately successful model, if you have found good people to work for you, but typically sales go through peaks and troughs. The sales person makes lots of calls and generates appointments and then as he/she is out on appointments they cannot be generating more leads!