The Age of Outsourcing and Sales and Marketing. Today, now more than ever, companies need to go outside to find partners, consultants, inter-management solutions, and service providers who can help them to cover the range of their needs of sales and marketing. As new rules have been invented regarding lead generation, the internet, and more complexity has come into the sales and business development and marketing model of most companies, it’s very difficult for you to keep up with all of the skill sets that are required in order to be on the top of your company’s game and maintain best practices across all of those functional areas. So, companies are looking increasingly to bring in outsourced service providers who can provide them with fractional management or contract personnel or ongoing outsourcing and consulting to cover the needs that they’re not capable of keeping in house or cannot justify to have on a full time basis.
Outsourcing covers a range of different types of functional areas, including search engine optimization, pay per click management, and product management / product marketing. Many companies go through launch phases of new products or product requirements or definition in new product planning cycles that require having those resources around. But they don’t need them on a permanent basis once a new product has been defined, built, launched, and handed off into the sales force. Copywriting is another area where a lot of companies look to outsource that capability in the marketing side for creating new brochures, collateral, web design copy, etc. Many companies would love to have a graphics design and internet marketing capability in house, but they simply can’t afford or justify doing that on a full time basis, yet this does work perfectly in an outsourced model, where you have a full service web design company that can build your online web site pages, conversion mechanisms, landing pages, microsites, etc. and deploy those for your company. So, these are just some of the many examples of areas where companies need to consider outsourcing in order get all their work done.
At the management level, many companies can’t justify having a full time VP of Marketing or a Director of Business Development, but what they can justify is having an interim management solution or fractional management solution. Some companies that are trying to get to the next level would love to have that top executive on the marketing side but it’s just simply too expensive and they can’t afford it. So what do they do? Often times, they do nothing, and as a result, are not capable of moving their business forward in their target markets and really executing a proactive marketing strategy.
This is a perfect example of where fractional management or outsourcing of a management function or interim management of that function can make a lot of sense and can be done without bearing the full cost of a full time employee. Smart companies are using fractional VPs of marketing who are top marketing professionals to come in and help them plan and execute their marketing programs even if they’re not on a full time basis. This provides a wonderful solution: a company can get a part of a senior marketing manager without paying full time for it. So if you’re company is thinking about how to get its sales and marketing to the next level, you might want to consider what your outsourcing and fractional interim management strategy is and how you can put new resources to work for your company on an interim or part time basis, or on a project basis that will help you to round out the skills sets of your company and accelerate your sales.
Of course, there are some positions in your company that you simply cannot afford to outsource and you need a permanent hiring or recruiting solution for those positions. A good example of that is your VP of sales. Very few companies would consider outsourcing their VP of sales duties to an outsource company. When they do, of course, there are fractional management solutions that are available from companies like ours. But, a more common notion is that a VP of sales has got to be somebody who is really dedicated to full time, permanent or regular position inside the company. In those cases, it makes perfect sense for you to find a recruiting company to help you search for, screen, and find a top sales leader to come into your company and help you build and execute your sales strategy.
A lot of times a company is on sort of the edge of where they’re not sure if it’s time for them to have an in house solution on a permanent basis or if they could go with a fractional solution. Part of the issue is how core the function is to your long term strategy as a company, and how strategic it is really for the execution of your business model. But there are many functions inside a company that cannot be outsourced and must be kept in house. And in those cases, finding a partner who can help you to recruit those resources and bring them into your company is absolutely critical to accelerating your sales and generating top line growth, transforming your sales, and growing your business.
When does it make sense to outsource part of your management sales and marketing or business development management functions to an outsourced service provider? One of the examples is, if your company has a tactical marketing team of marketing communications specialist, doing advertising, internet marketing, direct mail or organizing trade shows, but you can’t afford a full time manager inside the company, you still need somebody who can provide planning, oversight, and leadership to that team. If you’re a CEO, who is an engineering, operations or finance oriented person, you’re probably not the best person to guide this team and bring best practices into the company and marketing.
That person can participate in your quarterly management team meetings, in your company’s planning cycle, including doing strategic marketing planning, developing your go to market strategy, segmenting and maintaining your updated competitive analysis, doing those kinds of projects, or at lease overseeing them at a high level, and helping your company to provide top level oversight of the execution of your marketing programs. That’s a perfect example of where having a fractional VP of marketing, on an outsourced basis from a consulting or service provider, can make a lot of sense. Another example is, when you’ve brought a new product to market and you’ve realized that the best way to bring that product to market is through third party distribution channels and you already have a channel management function set up for system integrators, VARs or OEMS, but what you want to do is you want to deploy a new channel for this particular product line.
This is a perfect project to outsource to an interim VP of business development or interim director of business development…a rainmaker who can go out and research, target, identify, screen, and select a new channel of distribution for your new product line. Or, perhaps your company has already got a system of integrators providing a technical solution that bundles your product into a full turn key solution for your clients, but you’ve now come up with a shrink wrapped, office shelf product that can really be sold with less value added and less integration and you have a channel organization that’s set up to run your system integrators but you don’t have anybody who’s capable of going and finding OEMs or more traditional VARs for that product. Here, you can easily bring in an outsourced or fractional or interim VP of business development to set up that channel for you, get it going, make sure that it’s running smoothly and producing the sell through that you’re looking for, and then handed over to your normal channel management organization.
About Cube Management:
Cube Management provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results.
