Where to find sales outsourcing for insurtech in Europe

Cormac Repman
7 hours ago
5 min read

Where to Find Sales Outsourcing for Insurtech in Europe

If you're building an insurtech company in Europe, you know the problem: hiring B2B sales talent is expensive, hiring it locally is slower, and hiring it remotely means managing timezone friction across multiple countries. Most insurtech teams I've spoken to tell me the same thing: "We'd rather focus on product. Can someone else handle sales?"

The challenge is that sales outsourcing in Europe is fragmented. You can hire a traditional agency, bring on freelancers through marketplaces, build an in-house team, or work with a performance-based model. Each has real trade-offs on cost, control, and results. Here's what you need to know to find the right fit.

The Real Cost of Going In-House

Before exploring outsourcing options, understand why you're looking outward in the first place. Hiring a single full-time B2B sales rep in Germany, UK, or France runs 45k-65k EUR annually in salary alone. Add benefits, equipment, training, and management overhead, and you're at 70k+ EUR per person. For an early-stage insurtech, that's often 2-3 months of runway.

Worse: it takes 3-4 months to find a good sales hire in Europe. You'll interview 30-50 candidates, deal with notice periods (often 1-3 months), and then spend another 4-8 weeks onboarding them before they close their first deal. By then, you've spent 6 months and 20k+ EUR on recruiting costs alone, and you still don't know if they'll hit quota.

That's why most growing insurtech teams look outside.

Option 1: Traditional Sales Agencies

This is the default path. You hire a sales agency, they manage a team, you pay a percentage of contract value closed (typically 15-30%) or a fixed monthly retainer.

The appeal is clear: you hand off the hiring, training, and management burden. The agencies often have existing networks in financial services and know the compliance angle.

The catch: traditional agencies are slow. They staff cautiously. If they have 200 clients and can only handle 15 active campaigns at once, you're in a queue. You'll wait 4-6 weeks before they even assign capacity to your market, and most agencies don't specialize in insurtech specifically. They'll pitch you an insurance broker or a generic fintech playbook.

Cost is also front-loaded. You'll negotiate 18-24 month contracts with minimum monthly fees (often 5k-8k EUR), even if you're unsure about the market.

Best for: Large rounds (Series B+) where you can absorb the 6-month ramp and longer contracts.

Option 2: Freelance Sales Reps on Marketplaces

Sites like Upwork, PeoplePerHour, or local European networks (Freelancer.com, Fiverr) connect you with individual sales reps who'll work on commission.

The advantage is speed and flexibility. You can hire someone in 48 hours and scale headcount up or down weekly based on performance. No long contracts. You only pay if deals close.

The problem: quality is inconsistent. A freelancer who closes 2 deals a month for a SaaS company might completely struggle with 90-day B2B insurtech sales cycles. You'll spend more time filtering bad fits than you would training an in-house person. Plus, they're juggling multiple clients, so your deal is competing for their attention against 5 others paying higher commissions.

I've seen this work for very specific use cases (one client hired a freelancer to cold-call a list of 500 brokers in France), but it's not a growth engine. It's a one-off labor solution.

Best for: Tactical, short-term campaigns (3-6 months) with clear, narrow targets.

Option 3: Performance-Based Outsourcing Marketplaces

A newer model is emerging in Europe: performance-based outsourcing, where you don't hire a single agency or freelancer. Instead, you post your sales challenge to a marketplace (like Glencoco), and multiple sales teams compete to book meetings and close deals. You only pay per result: per qualified meeting booked, or per customer closed.

This model flips the incentive structure. Teams are only paid if they deliver. No retainer, no long contracts, no queue. You can start with one team, add a second if you like the results, pause either one instantly.

The catch: you have to be very clear on what you're buying. "Book qualified meetings with EU insurance buyers" is specific enough. "Get us to cash" is too broad. Also, not every product is suited for marketplace outsourcing. If your insurtech is highly technical and requires a 10-minute explainer, a remote team in a gig marketplace might struggle.

How it works: You define your ideal customer profile (ICPs), the type of meetings you want (discovery calls, product demos), and your budget per meeting. Teams bid on the work. You pick the ones that match your market. Within 5 business days, you're getting live calls booked.

Typical metrics from our clients: 8-15% connection rate on cold calls, 25-40% meetings scheduled from connections, average 2-4 qualified meetings per rep per week.

Best for: Early to Series A insurtech companies who need repeatable sales motion fast, without long-term commitment.

Option 4: Build a Remote, Distributed Team

Some insurtech founders hire 2-3 sales reps directly, but hire them remote across different EU countries to reduce salary pressure. A sales rep in Portugal or Poland will accept 35k-40k EUR for the same quality you'd pay 55k+ for in London.

This keeps the flexibility of hiring and firing, but you still shoulder the management, training, and timezone complexity.

Best for: Founders who want control and have sales management experience.

How to Choose: A Decision Framework

Ask yourself three questions:

1. How much time can you invest in sales management? If you can't spend 5+ hours weekly on sales ops and rep coaching, outsource it. If you have a sales background and want hands-on control, build in-house or work with one trusted partner.

2. What's your ideal customer concentration? If you're targeting, say, 200 specific insurance brokers in Germany and France, a marketplace or freelancer can execute that in weeks. If you're trying to find 50 different buyer personas across 10 countries, you need an agency with structure and reach.

3. Do you have proof that your sales motion works? If you've already closed 3-5 customers through cold outreach and you know exactly what works, outsourcing scales fast. If you're still figuring out your pitch and ICP, spend time building your own sales skills first. You can't outsource what you don't understand.

The Nurturance Approach

We run real cold calling teams for B2B companies in fintech and insurtech. We're built on the marketplace model: you define your ICP, we book qualified meetings with decision-makers across Europe, you pay per meeting. No retainer. No long contract. Our teams average 3-5 qualified meetings weekly per rep, and our clients typically see a 12-18% conversion rate from our bookings to closed deals.

We specialize in insurtech because we understand the longer sales cycle, the compliance questions, and the buying committee (usually underwriting, tech, and finance). We're not a generic agency; we're built specifically for fintech and insurtech outbound.

If you want to explore whether marketplace outsourcing makes sense for your insurtech, book a call. We'll audit your ICP, estimate how many qualified meetings are realistic in your market, and show you exactly how we'd price it.

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We focus on results. You should too.