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Running a business is hard enough and as your business grows, no matter how talented your staff, a time will come when you need to consider outsourcing some tasks to a third party. Most outsourcing is focused on activities that your company doesn’t usually handle so you can get on with running your organization while letting others take care of the problems.
Outsourcing in this manner will cost money, but if done carefully could actually save in the long run, or in the case of marketing, earn you more.
Telemarketing and Sales
We have all had the cold call from hell. It’s usually at the wrong time, on a poor quality line from a person with a barely understandable accent trying to sell us something we neither want nor need. But that is a poor representation of telemarketing and one that has become an unfortunate stereotype.
But for every bad cold calling agency, there is a good telemarketing company, with highly trained and professional staff that can tailor a package around your individual business requirements by analyzing both your product and your target audience.
Employing a full-time in-house telemarketing team would be highly inefficient and extremely costly which is why telemarketing is a perfect example of what outsourcing can do for a company. The staff of such companies are proficient at getting to know a brand and developing product awareness that can last through various campaigns leading to increased sales and new customers.
Managed IT Services
Being connected to a network is an essential part of any modern business but networks can be very expensive to install, never mind maintain and run. Expensive infrastructure such as servers, cables, and switches need to be purchased and then installed by trained professionals. Depending on a business’s needs and size this can cost well into the thousands and employing a full-time network administrator is another expense on the wage bill.
Fortunately, there are many managed IT services that can run all of this for you. Operating from cloud-based systems, MITSs will provide 24/7 support, cybersecurity, network monitoring, data backup and recovery, user management, and much more.
All of this is done for a fraction of the cost of purchasing, installing, and running your own network which not only requires qualified professionals on a high salary but space to do so, expensive server software licenses, and regular compliance inspections for certain business types.
Debtor Accounts and Collections
Having a customer not pay for your services is a fact of doing business that has been around forever. Unpaid invoices can have a crippling effect on small businesses that can cause them to remain stagnant in terms of growth and acceleration or collapse altogether.
A recent survey found that if small businesses were paid on time they could hire additional employees, keep a sound inventory and invest in new equipment, but a lot of them can’t because they are chasing debtors.
Contracting debt collection agencies is a growing trend and a very successful method of getting the money owed to you. A collection agency will charge a small fee, which is usually a percentage of the debt owed, in return for chasing and collecting any monies owed from debtors.
