Allegis Group’s MarketSource sales services unit refreshed its leadership team last week by appointing Jessica McNelley as president. Boardroom Insight caught up with the executive on the occasion to find out what’s new in the business-to-business sales ecosystem. We were particularly curious about the work of revenue teams in the IT industry, where McNelley worked for more than two decades before joining MarketSource.

Allegis Group is a professional services firm with over 24,000 employees across ten subsidiaries. Alpharetta, Georgia-based MarketSource employs more than 5,000 of those staffers. Its main focus is making companies’ sales operations more effective. In the business-to-consumer market, MarketSource helps retailers with tasks such as training salespeople. It has also a sizable business-to-business group. The group provides outsourced inside sales services, helps companies with account management and performs related tasks.

McNelley is taking up the top post at MarketSource after more than 25 years at TEKsystems, another Allegis Group brand. TEKsystems offers professional services that help companies modernize their IT infrastructure. It also has a unit that assists managed service providers with talent sourcing. Before joining MarketSource, McNelley led that unit as TEKsystems’ vice president of managed service programs. 

MarketSource likewise has a presence in the IT market. While TEKsystems’ MSP unit works on the service provider side of IT channel partnerships, MarketSource has a channel sales team that works on the vendor side. That team helps IT vendors find channel partners who can support their sales efforts. MarketSource works with vendors to define an ideal partner profile that contains relevant business requirements. From there, it can find partners who match the profile and manage the onboarding process. 

Shortly after her appointment as MarketSource’s president, McNelley gave us a look at the state of play in IT sales. She says the ecosystem is currently seeing three different trends that are changing how market players go about client acquisition. The first trend is partly driven by macroeconomic conditions. “Instead of casting wide nets, successful IT companies are using data to identify which prospects are actually making decisions despite market uncertainty, as they’re likely doing so out of necessity,” McNelley told Boardroom Insight.

Some vendors are taking it a step further. In addition to adapting their own sales operations to market uncertainty, they’re helping their partners do the same. “They’re strengthening channel partner relationships through tighter collaboration and shared risk models,” McNelley explained. “Partners want certainty too, so providing more support and clearer communication has become essential.”

According to McNelley, upselling programs are also becoming more important. The executive say that successful IT firms are “mining existing relationships for hidden revenue opportunities, rather than exclusively chasing new logos. This means deeper customer conversations that address immediate pain points. One vision we have at MarketSource is to use data to identify existing accounts with the most likelihood for growth or – better yet – dormant accounts that have slowed, or are no longer, buying by going to a competitor. These ‘win-back’ campaigns have worked well recently in several industries and not just IT.”

MarketSource provides its business-to-business sales services alongside a sizable line of business-to-consumer offerings. In the retail sector, the firm helps store operators recruit salespeople and train existing staff. MarketSource also assists business-to-consumer clients with certain auxiliary tasks. For example, the company can lend a hand with facility maintenance and inventory management.