Building a sales and marketing team in-house from top to bottom is a huge undertaking, and it can be very costly. This is the inevitable conclusion that many founders and executives come to after attempting to build a team on their own.
The question is not whether you’ll outsource some part of your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. It’s which parts and how to do it without putting your entire revenue engine at risk.
One option is to hire strong sales and marketing leadership and then outsource roles that report to them. Another option is to employ average leadership and support in-house and add specialized help through an outsourced partner.
Either way, you end up with a combination of in-house and outsourced staff, which can be a problem. Where most companies misstep is that they don’t outsource sales and marketing together.
Companies with deep sales expertise don’t typically have the same level of marketing expertise, and vice versa. Therefore, they only outsource their weaker function. Outsourcing both together is less common because it feels like you are putting all your eggs in one basket.
However, sales and marketing aren’t separate functions that can be optimized independently. They’re two sides of the same revenue generation process. When you treat them as disconnected efforts, you end up wasting resources and stifling growth.
In this article, we’ll demystify the process of outsourcing sales and marketing to help you build an intelligent GTM strategy. You’ll learn:
- If outsourcing makes sense for your business (complete with a 5-point readiness checklist)
- Why many agency partnerships don’t work out
- What questions to ask when evaluating vendors
- How to navigate the process of outsourcing sales and marketing together
- What the investment options are and what ROI expectations to set
- How to bring your GTM strategy back in-house when ready
Is outsourcing a smart move or a costly mistake?
Rushing into an integrated sales and marketing partnership without the proper foundation is one of the fastest ways to waste six figures and six months.
Before you start evaluating vendors or mapping out a strategy, you need to assess whether your company is ready.
Should you outsource? A 5-point readiness checklist
Here’s our 5-point checklist to help you decide if outsourcing both sales and marketing makes sense at your current stage:
1. Structured sales organization
Does your company have the bandwidth to take on new business and maintain a structured sales process?
You probably do if the founder is dedicating 10% of their time religiously to the marketing pipeline and sales process or you have a professional sales team handling it.
Having a structured, professional sales operation is a good sign that you’re ready for outsourcing. If your sales process is chaotic, inconsistent, or non-existent, no amount of marketing support will fix that problem. You’ll end up generating leads but not deals.
2. Leadership vision
Do you have either marketing or sales leadership that can drive the conversation forward? Someone with a vision and the ability to bring it to life with external support?
Outsourcing doesn’t mean giving up responsibility. It extends your capabilities. If you don’t have someone internally who possesses a clear definition of success and can articulate a vision for growth, an outsourced partner may struggle to deliver meaningful results.
3. Sales process maturity
Do you have a mature sales process? Meaning, a repeatable way of moving prospects from first contact to closed deal, with clear stages, definitions, and handoffs.
This overlaps with the first point but deserves its own emphasis. A mature sales process doesn’t necessarily mean a large team or complex tech stack. It means a well-organized one.
Without a developed foundation, you can’t measure what an outsourced partner is contributing. You won’t know if problems stem from having poor-quality leads or a failure to convert them to sales.
4. Long-term investment approach
Do you have a long-term investment plan and understand why you’ve developed that strategy?
This is the most important factor on this checklist because outsourcing sales and marketing isn’t a quarter-long experiment. It’s a strategic decision that requires commitment, iteration, and patience.
If you’re looking for immediate results or expect an outsourced partner to magically solve fundamental product-market fit issues, you’re not ready. The best partnerships are built on realistic expectations and a willingness to invest in the relationship over time.
5. Stakeholder alignment
Are you prepared to bring all stakeholders on board, including the salespeople, the marketing team, and the executives on both sides?
Even the best-designed partnerships falter when there’s internal resistance undermining them. If your sales team sees an outsourced marketing function as a threat, or if your marketing team negatively views outsourced sales, you’ll likely deal with constant friction.
Alignment doesn’t mean everyone has to be enthusiastic from day one, but it does mean everyone understands the rationale and is committed to making it work.
In-house vs. outsourced
Once you’ve decided to outsource, be sure to balance internal and external resources.
The typical distribution of funds for sales and marketing is based on the industry. For example, in professional services, it’s commonly 50/50. If you spend 10% of your revenue on client acquisition, then 5% should go to marketing and 5% to sales.
The balance between sales and marketing resources matters more than most executives realize. If one of them is growing and the other is not, you’re going to have problems. You’ll either have a hungry sales team with no leads, or you’ll have lots of leads and a sales team that isn’t equipped to close them.
You don’t need to follow an exact split, but you do need to think about investment distribution. When you outsource sales and marketing to a single partner, you’re investing in an integrated approach that you hope will be efficient enough to justify itself.
That bet pays off when the partner can create tight feedback loops between marketing and sales. It fails when you lose visibility. If you can’t identify where the bottlenecks are, you won’t know how to allocate resources between sales and marketing.
Why many partnerships fail
Outsourcing sales and marketing together isn’t easy.
It’s difficult to:
- Strike an intelligent balance between risk and restraint
- Effectively evaluate vendors
- Think in terms of both numbers and philosophy
- Maintain the commitment and focus required to make the partnership work
Most partnerships don’t fail because the agency was incompetent or the client was unreasonable. They fail because of mismatched expectations, poor planning, and a lack of alignment on fundamental issues.
Most common missteps between companies and agencies
Starting too big
One of the biggest mistakes is fully outsourcing both sales and marketing from the get-go. You need to grow into it.
Companies see the promise of a fully integrated revenue engine and may want to flip the switch immediately. They sign a contract that covers everything — demand generation, content creation, SDR outreach, sales enablement, paid advertising — and expect it to all happen smoothly within 30 days.
Integration takes time. Systems need to be connected. Messaging needs to be refined. Processes need to be tested and iterated. Trying to do everything at once creates chaos, not revenue.
Poor vendor evaluation
The second mistake is not spending enough time evaluating the right partner. This isn’t about checking references or reviewing case studies, although those do matter. It’s more about:
- Understanding how the vendor actually operates
- What their real capabilities are
- Whether they have experience with companies at your stage in your industry
Too many companies treat vendor selection like a purchasing choice rather than a partnership decision. They optimize for price or speed instead of fit. Then they’re often surprised when the relationship doesn’t work out.
Lack of stakeholder alignment
During the evaluation, most companies don’t bring all the stakeholders on board, which creates problems that compound over time.
It’s not just about getting people in a room and asking if they are on board. You need to make sure everyone understands what success looks like, their role is in supporting the partnership, and what they’re committing to in terms of time and resources.
Numbers over marketing philosophy
Another mistake is trying to evaluate the numbers before aligning on a philosophical, more fundamental level.
Everything eventually comes down to numbers — what you do, how you do it, how much it costs, and what the timeline is. But if there’s no alignment on the fundamental philosophical level, those numbers won’t matter.
If the vendor doesn't align with how you want to position your brand, how you think about your customers, and your approach to the ideal customer profile (ICP) and messaging, the collaboration will struggle no matter how attractive the pricing is. You need a partner who understands your marketing philosophy.
Project management failures
To integrate sales and marketing into a full-funnel motion, you need great project management capabilities on both the client and vendor sides.
This seems obvious, but it’s where many partnerships break down in practice. Without clear ownership, timelines, and accountability, work falls through the cracks. Approvals get delayed. Communication becomes inconsistent. And the partnership loses momentum.
The commitment paradox
Companies hire an external partner when they don’t have the internal capacity, but then they often fail to allocate resources to support that partner.
They think that once they outsource and integrate the partner into the sales and marketing function, it doesn’t require ongoing commitment.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how outsourcing works.
Your partner needs your expertise about your product, your customers, and your market positioning. They need timely approvals. They need access to internal data and systems. They need regular strategic alignment.
When you take too much time to get approvals, or when you’re not committed to spending enough time and resources working with partners, you create bottlenecks that undermine the entire engagement.
The best partnerships recognize that outsourcing doesn’t eliminate internal work — it changes it. You’re trading the work of doing everything yourself for the work of being a strategic partner.
12 questions to ask a potential partner before signing a contract
An understanding of common missteps helps you avoid them. Use this guide to ask smart questions during the partner evaluation phase. Here are some that we’ve developed to predict partnership success.
Strategic alignment questions
1. How do you approach ICP development, and what role does our team play in the competency mapping process?
This reveals how the partner thinks about foundational strategy work. If they tell you they’ll figure it out on their own, that’s a red flag. If they describe a collaborative process that extracts knowledge from your team, that’s a good sign.
2. What’s your philosophy on sales and marketing budget allocation for companies in our industry?
You’re not looking for a specific number here. You’re looking for evidence that they’ve thought deeply about how different industries and business models require different investment patterns. Generic answers suggest a one-size-fits-all approach.
3. How do you ensure alignment between what we want to achieve with our clients and what kind of brand we want to build?
This is about philosophical alignment. Listen to how much the outsourcing company emphasizes understanding your vision versus pitching their process. The best partners see their job as bringing your vision to life, not imposing their playbook on your business.
4. What does your bottom-up validation process look like during the first three months?
Early validation is critical. If they can’t articulate a clear process for testing assumptions, gathering data, and making adjustments based on what they learn, you’ll waste months pursuing strategies that don’t work.
Operational execution questions
5. What project management system do you have to support full-funnel sales and marketing?
This isn’t about which tool they use. It’s about whether they have a real system for coordinating work across multiple functions, tracking dependencies, and maintaining momentum.
6. How much time commitment do you require from our internal team?
Be wary of outside partners who say they need very little from you. It suggests they don’t understand the commitment paradox. Look for honest answers about meeting cadence, approval timelines, and access to internal resources.
7. What’s your approval process, and how do you handle delays?
Delays happen. What matters is how they’re managed. A good partner will have a clear process for escalating issues, maintaining progress on non-blocked work, and communicating impact.
8. How do you integrate with our CRM and existing sales processes?
Technical integration is often underestimated. If your partner can’t work within your existing systems or requires you to change fundamental aspects of your sales process, that creates risk and friction.
Risk mitigation questions
9. What are the most common failure points in sales and marketing outsourcing engagements?
This question separates experienced partners from inexperienced ones. Anyone who’s been in this business has seen partnerships fail. What matters is whether they’ve learned from those failures and can articulate how to avoid them.
10. What early warning signs indicate partnership issues?
This is about ongoing monitoring. A good partner will be more worried about catching problems early because they know that’s how they protect the relationship.
11. How do you measure success across integrated sales and marketing efforts?
You’re looking for a multidimensional answer that includes both leading and lagging indicators, and that acknowledges the interconnected nature of sales and marketing metrics.
12. What does your graduation process look like for eventually bringing capabilities back in-house?
This is the question most companies forget to ask. The best partners aren’t trying to create permanent dependency. They’re helping you build capabilities that eventually live inside your organization, even if specialized functions continue to be outsourced.
The execution blueprint: Models and integration
Once you’ve selected a partner and aligned on philosophy, the real work begins. Here’s what a well-structured collaboration typically looks like over the first year.
Phase 1: Foundation and alignment (month 1)
Integrating sales and marketing starts with two major steps:
- Aligning with the client on the ICP
- Creating buyer personas
A good partner will run a workshop where you work together to identify your best target industries, then break them down into sub-industries.
Evaluate those sub-industries based on how easy they are to sell to, how interesting they are to sell to, their potential market growth, and other relevant factors. Then map out the buying personas.
Next, create the buying persona journey or buying cycle, then indicate their research patterns, their pain points, and the solutions your company provides.
This isn’t busywork. This is the foundation that everything else is built on. If you rush through this phase or let the vendor do it without deep involvement from your team, everything downstream will suffer.
Phase 2: CRM integration and testing (months 2–3)
The next step is looking at your CRM — whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, or another platform. A good partner will want to look at your existing client list, your pipeline, and how new leads they generate will flow through your systems.
This is where the bottom-up strategy comes into play. You validate everything during the first three months of the campaign to see whether the buying journey and the industries you chose are actually good ones. There’s a lot of refinement happening as a result of this validation.
What you’re looking for in this phase is data. Not opinions, not assumptions — data about what messages resonate, which industries respond, what objections come up, and how leads actually move through your pipeline.
Phase 3: Marketing integration (months 4–6)
When you have refined the ICP and messaging, and validated the right go-to-market approach, then you can work with your client’s marketing team to build the pipeline bottom-up.
This might start with working together to create a workshop, live event, or conference that you can promote to leads. It might include white papers, market reports, articles, or thought leadership content.
The key is that marketing activities aren’t happening in isolation. They’re designed to support the sales outreach that’s already generating data and conversations. This is where the integrated approach starts to show its value.
Phase 4: Full integration and scaling (months 7–12)
In months 7–9, you’re adding more marketing channels, cycling through the lead list again, and getting more meetings. In months 9–12, you’re moving to another stage — working with that pipeline, building touchpoints, and measuring engagement. You’re looking for intent signals that you can use to create more targeted, personalized one-to-one outreach.
Across all the stages, you’ll see growing conversions. Not just at one part of the funnel, but across the entire journey from first touch to closed deal.
Integration benefits: How sales and marketing work together
One of the great benefits of outsourcing sales and marketing is that you can create a lot of alignment.
For example, when you do outreach for clients, you increase the effectiveness of that outreach by also helping with video content. You might create testimonials, explanatory videos, or ads. These assets support the sales outreach directly.
This lets you stick to initiatives that increase lead conversion to appointments. Everything is aligned toward the same goal, and you can measure how each component contributes to the whole.
Pricing models and realistic investment expectations
Let’s talk about what this actually costs and how pricing typically works.
Retainer-based model (primary approach)
Before diving into pricing models, it’s important to understand sales outsourcing costs and how they relate to ROI. In marketing and sales, when you’re talking about more complex projects, most vendors work on retainers.
A big part of that pricing is baked into the retainer that covers either a specific number of hours or a plan. Usually, it’s a plan with specific deliverables within a certain timeframe.
Then there are variable fees depending on any additional requirements, paid ads, conferences, content, or sponsorships.
Investment ranges and expectations
The range starts at $15,000 to $20,000 a month and can go up to $50,000 a month, depending on whether it’s a full GTM team outsourcing or partial.
If a customer is paying $20,000 a month, which equals a $240,000 per year contract, the partner can really get inside the process. They can leverage not just outreach and sales, but also marketing.
If you’re looking for a solid figure to cover different aspects of outsourced sales and marketing, $20,000 a month is a good baseline.
What’s included at different investment levels
At $20K monthly, you’re typically looking at social and general content creation, webinars, ads, website updates, ICP strategy development, and other related activities.
Above $20K, you have more for extra ads, content, events, conferences, partnerships, technology tools, and increased SDR capabilities.
The key is understanding that different price points represent fundamentally different scopes of work and levels of integration.
Bringing GTM in-house
Any company can outsource sales and marketing if it makes sense, depending on the budget, stage, and growth strategy. But just because you can outsource doesn’t mean you need to do it forever.
The best outsourcing partners try to establish their footing with one initiative and then gradually grow to a more full-funnel option.
When it’s time — when the data is there, the process is in place, and both teams are comfortable with it — you can start transitioning capabilities in-house.
The best partners develop internal capabilities while maintaining support for specialized functions. They don’t focus on creating dependencies. They recognize that some functions make sense to build internally while others are better outsourced as your company grows.
The graduation process to in-house sales and marketing requires evolving to match your company’s changing needs and capabilities.
