How Flex Resources Cut Source Advisors’ Sales Support Costs by 81.5% [Webinar]

Source Advisors is a 40-plus-year-old specialty tax firm based in Arlington, Texas, that partners with CPAs, real estate advisors, and business professionals on strategic tax solutions built around current IRS tax law. As the company grew, its 30-person sales team was losing a significant chunk of its selling time to CRM upkeep and administrative work.

Sheryl Nazzaro, director of sales support at Source Advisors, joined Chris Hartenstein, practice director at Consero, for a conversation about how a four-person Flex Resources team took that work off her reps’ plates.

Nazzaro walks through what changed day to day for her sales team, how she scaled a one-to-one support ratio into a four-person team covering 30 salespeople, and the number that surprised her the most: building the same function in-house would have cost Source Advisors 81.5% more than the Flex model does today.

Watch the full conversation below.

Why Source Advisors Looked Beyond an In-House Team

Source Advisors’ Flex Resources engagement started with staffing and senior accountants, then expanded into engineering, Salesforce development, IT, FP&A, marketing, and customer success roles as the company’s needs grew.

The sales support team is the newest addition, and it grew out of the same pressure every growing company feels: keep the business model lean enough to protect the bottom line while the company scales.

“I think it starts when our company, trying like every other company, [was] trying to maximize with the minimum. So you’re growing and growing and you need to have the leanest business model possible so that you can maximize your end dollars. So that’s when we decided that we needed to look outside the box.” — Sheryl Nazzaro, Director of Sales Support, Source Advisors

Freeing Salespeople From Admin Returns ~10-15 Hours per Week

Before the Flex team, Source Advisors’ sales reps were sinking somewhere between 30% and 40% of their time into CRM entry, follow-up, and the administrative steps needed to get a deal across the finish line. Handing that work to a dedicated support team let reps get back to sales.

“It lets them focus on what they’re good at. You have them in the sales role for a reason. They’re good at talking with people. They’re good at negotiating. They’re good at closing deals. The support that we’re providing around Salesforce and your CRM takes that burden off of them to where they can do what they’re good with.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

Scaling From One-to-One to a Four-Person Flex Team

Nazzaro’s team started as a one-to-one match, one support person for one sales rep. As Source Advisors added reps, she brought on Flex hires one at a time, each shadowing her most senior support person until they understood the full process before working independently.

That team now stands at four people supporting all 30 salespeople — a ratio that only holds up if the support function is built to scale alongside the business instead of growing headcount in lockstep with it.

“If you were trying to train 30 people on a process change, it would be a nightmare. Where the support folks’ focus and mindset is on the process and what’s needed next, we just move along and pick up, and nothing gets left behind. It’s good to have them focus on what they do, and the salespeople can go focus on what they do: closed deals.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

Consistent Process, Faster Deals

Without standardized processes, inconsistency becomes a recurring problem with sales admin split across a large team. Every rep enters deal information a little differently, and whoever picks up a file later has to reverse-engineer what the last person meant.

Nazzaro’s Flex team standardized how the group logs activity in the CRM, which took the guesswork out of picking up a deal mid-cycle and shows up directly in how fast proposals move.

“Right before we got on this call, I had a salesperson reach out and his proposal had gone out the door, signed, and come back in so quickly, and it was already processed and sent off to engineering, that he was like, ‘Do you guys get that?’ I think that’s pretty cool.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

The Real Number: 81.5% in Savings

Nazzaro attributes remarkable cost savings to the Flex Resource model:

“The in-house annual outlay was approximately $390K a year. Using the Flex team saved us $318K a year. So that’s 81.5%. Not that 75 wasn’t good, but 81.5 is always better. I think the number itself, it’s a no-brainer. We’re saving money, we’re getting the job done right, and we’re allowing our salespeople to get out there and sell more, bring more in, and grow our company.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

The number tracks with what Consero sees in the broader cost of building and staffing a finance or back-office function in-house, where the savings usually come from paying for skilled, trained talent without the fixed overhead of a full build-out.

Quality Talent, Not Just a Lower Bill

Nazzaro was careful to separate the cost story from the quality of the people doing the work. Her team of eight, four Flex and four in-house, trains side by side under the same sales directors and runs the same processes, and she doesn’t distinguish between them day to day.

“Lower cost, use that as your benefit, but never think about it, because my team is phenomenal. I cannot go forward without them. My Flex team knows everything the senior salespeople do. They were trained side by side. The people you’re hiring and bringing in and training are exactly equal to the people you have in-house.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

Sales support is the newest function Consero has built out for Source Advisors. An earlier engagement scaled the company’s technology organization from five people to nearly 40 using the same embedded-team model — read that story here.

Taking the Hiring and HR Burden Off Source Advisors’ Plate

Beyond the dollar savings, Nazzaro pointed to recruiting, training, and staff continuity as areas where the Flex model removed real weight from her job. When she took over as a newly appointed director, Consero had already screened candidates down to a shortlist that matched the role, leaving her to focus on finding the right personality fit for her team.

“The best part was that you all went through all of the resumes and only gave us the ones that were absolutely matching. All we had to do was find the one that had the personality fit with the rest of the team. I was new, and it made life so much easier.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

That coverage extended to staffing gaps, too. When one of her team members took maternity leave, Consero supplied resumes for a temporary replacement, trained that person alongside the outgoing employee for about 45 days, and had them fully cover the role. Source Advisors liked the fill-in enough to keep him on as a permanent fourth team member.

“Who does that in-house? If your person goes on maternity leave, all of the co-workers who are already there take a piece and overburden their day. With Consero, you’ve got someone to come in and take that up for you, which was amazing.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

Integrating Flex and In-house Teams

Nazzaro was direct about how she manages the blended team: there’s no distinction in how Flex and in-house staff are treated, trained, or looped into the culture of the group.

“We are a total team. I make it a point that there is no us and them on our team. We are all one. We do the same job, all of us, even me. Literally the only difference is the pay.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

Flex Resources vs. In-House Build Cost

Nazzaro estimated what it would have taken to build the same capability entirely in-house. She drew on her own onboarding, nearly five years earlier, when she and another new hire spent months shadowing a single senior employee between that person’s other meetings and sales calls before they could contribute independently.

“It was taking months before we were actually able to contribute enough to make you feel like you got out of bed for a reason. I feel like the Flex team is much more streamlined, structured training, and they were contributing from day one.” — Sheryl Nazzaro

She credits an early Flex hire with working out the kinks in the onboarding process itself, which made every hire after her faster to ramp.

See What Flex Resourcing Could Save Your Team

Source Advisors built a four-person sales support team that costs 81.5% less than an in-house build, runs on consistent process, and gives its sales floor its time back. Consero’s Flex Resources model works the same way across finance, engineering, marketing, and customer success roles:

Consero handles the recruiting, training, and staff continuity, and the client’s team gets talent that works alongside them like it was hired in-house. Talk to our team about what a Flex Resources engagement could look like for your department.