Whether you’re just starting a company or you’re growing faster than you thought possible, you need to consider outsourcing. Every business has an area of expertise. And the best businesses know to play to those strengths and outsource the rest.
If you want to grow your business in a market more uncertain than ever before, you need to consider outsourcing these five areas. Failing to do so could impact your growth trends and put your business at risk.
Marketing
Many businesses have a marketing department. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they manage all of their marketing efforts in-house. Instead, plenty of large organizations will develop the core strategies and campaigns in-house. But, they’ll leverage vendors to create assets, manage ad spend, and provide detailed reporting.
Why?
Marketing agencies build systems around time-consuming tasks to scale their marketing efforts. They can work faster than designing these systems from scratch in-house. Plus, businesses that outsource their marketing efforts don’t have to worry about the costs of staffing an entire marketing department.
Customer engagement
Gone are the days where people looked at call center outsourcing as a cheap solution that put your customers at risk. Instead, a combination of technology and better call center practices has led to outsourced call centers out-performing their in-house counterparts.
It’s often cheaper to work with a vendor than trying to set up an entire call center in-house. Best of all, you don’t have to go abroad to find an affordable vendor. There are many onshore call centers with competitive prices.
If you’re worried about losing the line of sight on your customers, don’t be. With the right training, speech analytics, and live monitoring, call centers have grown more transparent. And you can work with your call team, coaching them on how to handle any customer situation. The end result is better customer service without managing the high costs of running a call center.
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Application development
People expect more. Think about it. Whether you’re in manufacturing, health care, or construction, people have the same expectations they have when they turn on Netflix or log into Amazon. They want their needs met in the least intrusive way possible.
And automation is the best way to make that happen. But to automate, you need applications that integrate your disparate systems. That meets building systems designed to help your business exceed customer expectations.
But, IT budgets are far from cheap.
Most enterprise organizations have tech budgets in the seven and eight figures (or more). Those expansive budgets mean that bigger businesses have the bottom line to build apps and systems that better serve their customers’ needs. Sadly, small businesses struggle to keep up with those demands.
The solution is to work with low-cost application developers. To find the most affordable developer, you should work with those who build apps using low code. These platforms allow users to build apps faster and cheaper than traditional application (from scratch) development.
How much faster? Days and weeks instead of months and months. And the costs are dramatically cheaper, too. Best of all, these are SaaS services. So, costs scale with use.
Administrative tasks
While it’s important for executives to be involved in the growth of their business, it’s not essential for them to be involved in every task to make that happen. That’s where virtual assistants come into play.
The need for virtual assistants has been increasing since the initial craze of the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Harris.
Virtual assistants can handle everything from appointment booking to email responses. They can conduct research for reports, build-out project roadmaps, and handle the day-to-day menial tasks of running your business.
And that will free you up to focus on core business activities.
Process improvement
Every business faces the burden of trying to scale systems with growth. Sadly, many leaders struggle with it. No one starts a business with the goal of it being inefficient. Instead, they use the tools and budget at hand to build workflows that work. But most of the time, these workflows rely on spreadsheets to store data and employees to work as bridges between systems.
The solution is to continuously look at how your business functions and design better ways of working. It starts with whiteboarding your workflows to find bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Next, you’ll need to work with your staff to identify the root causes of the issues. Finally, you’ll need to build and test better solutions.
The challenge here is that process improvement is very time-intensive. And if you’re trying to grow your business, it’s not easy to pause on those efforts and focus inward.
But, it’s necessary.
Without better systems, employees face burnout trying to use unscalable systems to match business growth. Customers will grow unhappy as the initial level of service or product fails to meet growing expectations. And the end result is that the business is left constantly trying to find new employees and new customers to fill the gaps left by those leaving.
Outsourcing process improvement is a simple solution. You work with a vendor to identify slowdowns, bottlenecks, and waste. They build better workflows that scale with your business. And they work with your employees to onboard these new systems. Plus, they know what tools and systems work and what mistakes to avoid.
In the end, you’ll get a more scalable business that keeps customers happy (so they stick around longer) and prevents your employees from being overworked. All without having to stop working on growing your business to make it happen.
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The overall benefit of outsourcing
The Pareto Principle dictates that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts. There is a select, unique range of products or services your business offers that benefits it the most. The rest of your time, efforts, and resources result in minimal returns.
By outsourcing other tasks, you end up with more time and resources to focus on the core value of your business. You’ll increase your business agility.
As a result, your business grows dramatically. Focus on what your business excels at. Outsource the rest. And let the ROI speak for itself.
