My firm offers outsourced sales, marketing and business development services. One of these services is outsourced prospecting, where our clients turn over top-of-funnel activity to us and we hand over prospects to them. The notion of outsourcing this aspect of the sales cycle to 3rd party professional firms is gaining popularity, but there's still tremendous, and unfounded bias against the idea.

The biggest resistance to outsourced teleprospecting is a basic corporate cultural bias. I worked for a VP Sales who once told me, upon hearing my plan to hire a teleprospecting firm, that he had a problem with sales reps that couldn't pick up a phone and make a cold call.

I was able to prove to this manager that it wasn't about will or desire, but about time. In order to hit the numbers this manager had assigned, the reps would need to be deep into the deal process and would have less than 10% of their work week left to cold call. That's the world in which we live-big objectives, little time, and few resources.

Others tell me that they're grooming their cold-calling inside sales reps for future, and allegedly higher positions. This notion is laughable. I've made a career of hiring inside sales reps that are chained to a rock dialing for appointments, when what they really want to do is sell.  And given the opportunity, they'll leave your company to do just that.

If you want to develop sales people, teach them to sell.

There are those who are just flatly opposed to sending anything out they believe they can handle in-house. Even good data can't persuade them-they just can't grasp the concept or they're too invested in a dying paradigm.

Finally, many managers simply misunderstand the message. It's not that inside sales is dead. It's that the notion of hiring and managing people to prospect instead of sell is dead. Inside sales is actually a positive and growing trend. I call it "Sales Inside". You'll read more about "Sales Inside" in the coming weeks.