Sometimes there are tasks that come along that can definitely be done by you or members of your team. Unfortunately, these types of tasks may eat up time that you could be spending doing other things. These things may trickle down to other members of the team that have the time, but they may grow large enough to be a hindrance but won’t be large enough to justify hiring another team member.
In some cases, there are even tasks that are absolutely essential that still pose a challenge for you and your team to execute. There just never seems to be enough time to get everything done. Eventually, certain tasks take a backburner, every task seems to be delayed, and other priorities need to get cut out entirely. You can’t meet the timelines, quality standards, or level of attention that you really need.
In other cases, you may just be looking to get things done more efficiently while managing the costs of your operations.
There are loads of reasons why you should consider outsourcing some of your tasks, and here are a few of the best reasons below:
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Manage your time better. Sure, you might be able to do everything yourself by just extending your working day by a few hours – but that’s not sustainable. You can better manage your time by delegating tasks to a trusted vendor.
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Leverage dedicated talent. You can become more efficient by working with vendors that are experts in what they do. An executive, a programmer, an art director, or a marketing executive working on customer support tickets might do the job, but a designated agent is usually a better fit to tackle this task.
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Dedicate resources on tasks you are good at. Outsourcing has a lot of benefits, but one of the largest benefits is that it allows you and your team to take the extraneous tasks away from you so you can dedicate time to your area of expertise.
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Find new ways to grow your business. You hopefully have a lot of opportunities to grow your business. Unfortunately, you might not have the resources to take advantage of all of your opportunities. Working with an outsourcing partner can give you more flexibility and allow you to look into new avenues of growth.
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Manage your expenses better. We’re putting this at the bottom of the list because it should not be your number 1 reason for looking into outsourcing. Yes, you will almost always save by working with a vendor. You pay one flat fee that is a fraction of the cost of hiring your own employee. This flat fee includes employee benefits, training, management, hardware, utilities, and any other cost that comes to adding a new team member.
In case you aren’t sure about what avenues of outsourcing to pursue, we’ve put together a handy list to get you started. Please check out our list after the jump to see what you can outsource.
You should outsource to the Philippines
1. General Administrative Tasks
This is the stuff that you need to do, but you don’t need to necessarily do it yourself. This can be a range of different things, from making booking travel arrangements to scheduling to other things that need to be done, but are not technically a part of your core business.
In many cases, these tasks can be delegated to a third party to take care of it. You can deploy a virtual assistant to take care of these tasks. What’s even better, a virtual assistant can be deployed for work-related admin or even personal admin.
Virtual assistants can be great allies to help reduce your workload and allow for you to focus on other tasks.
2. Customer Support/Success
For many companies, the first touch for many customer support operations comes from external vendors. Customer support outsourcing is widely outsourced to third-party vendors and it’s become full-on industries in countries like the Philippines and India. The reasons why an organization outsources its customer support can vary.
For some organizations, outsourcing customer support operations is a matter of smartly dedicating resources. Customer support isn’t a task that can only be done when you have the time. If you set up a customer support team in house, that comes with all of the investment into an entire department of your organization. By working with a vendor, you can take advantage of their operational capabilities by deploying the bulk of your agents with them while reducing a significant portion of the customer support workload with your in-house escalation leads.
For other organizations, outsourcing customer support is a matter of finding expertise where your own team is lacking. When customer interactions are handled well by a good support team, it garners a higher reputation for your company and more loyalty from your audience. Poor customer support, on the other hand, can damage your relationship with your customers. While your team may be the best at understanding the product, a good outsourcing vendor is a pro at managing operations for customer support.
3. Human Resources
Whether you are trying to find people for your in-house team or staff to work remotely in a different region, a human resources agency can be a great option for leaner teams. If you work with a small team or don’t need a dedicated HR manager quite yet, you can work with a vendor to help manage all of your HR tasks instead of hiring a full-time employee. Furthermore, these firms have a lot more resources at their disposal to help you get what you need – these firms often can dedicate time to advertise and screen potential team members. These HR services can also help you manage employee benefits and help you understand best practices and navigate through employment laws.
4. Bookkeeping and Accounting
Working with a firm to help you with your numbers is a great idea whether you’re a large organization or a small company (especially if you’re a small company). There are a number of organizations that you can partner with to provide financial services like bookkeeping and invoicing. These firms can assist you in your financial planning, analysis, and reporting as well. By partnering up with a company, you can save a lot of time and energy on these tasks. By outsourcing your payroll processing, you can save a lot of time and money.
5. Lead Generation and Sales
Sales, particularly cold outreach, are more successful with higher volumes. More calls and more emails generate more warm leads. This task can be time-consuming and difficult to accomplish when you have so many other priorities to take care of. This is why establishing an external team to take care of generating leads and initiating contact with potential partners is a great solution to kickstarting your sales efforts. When you work with a vendor to take care of these initial tasks, they can then escalate any warm leads to your team to begin the negotiation process. A vendor can deal with grinding through the volumes, while you can focus on closing the warm leads that come from their outreach.
6. Marketing
Marketing can sometimes be put to the wayside when you put other things at the top of your list of priorities. Unless you have a dedicated marketing team, these tasks can be considered secondary to your other efforts.
Good marketing drives how your brand is perceived in the marketplace. When you work with a consultant or firm, you can get a fresh view of how you are approaching your brand awareness. You can also partner up with third-party vendors to provide skilled copywriters that can provide high-quality content to improve your marketing pushes. You can enlist individuals to craft your website and graphic designers to create your marketing collaterals without needing to keep full-time staff on hand at all times. You can also enlist a team to help you manage your communities on your social media channels. You can even work with a vendor to help you with your search engine optimization.
7. IT
No, we’re not talking about Pennywise the Clown (shudder). In-house IT operations can be cost-prohibitive for a lot of small and medium businesses. While this role is crucial, it’s also difficult to have someone dedicated to this task. IT team members need to maintain their systems and correct any rising issues. Unless your core functions revolve around highly technical tasks, you may not need to have dedicated team members for this.
Long Story Short
You don’t need to expand your internal team to handle every little task. There are a lot of great outsourcing options available for you to maintain a lean team while expanding on your operational capacity.
Drop Process Ninjas a message to see what we can do for you.