Talent, Partners, Providers Relationship

During these times of economic downturn most of the organizations around the world are worried about profitability and efficiency, especially when it comes to optimizing their costs structure. Moreover, these companies are wondering how to keep the productivity of their current resources high.

Here’s one of the most discussed topics, should I use my internal resources or should I contract them from outside? There are plenty of reasons why companies decide to go in one direction as opposed to the other one. In Sales & Marketing outsourcing also called Growth Process Outsourcing (GPO) you can contract a partner to take over a process or part of it while focusing on those activities where you have in-house skills and are driving the biggest portion of revenue. Another reason to involve a partner is when in-house is not possible to achieve the same results in the short run, in this case, an outsourced partner can be crucial in achieving fast growth and delivering expertise in a certain field (i.e. PR, demand generation, sales development, inside sales, etc).

One of the biggest concerns of the last years post-pandemic is talent sourcing and management since we’ve assisted to a great recession on a vast scale. With such a form of outsourcing, companies will not be worried about hiring, training, and retaining sales and marketing talents since the partner is accountable for that aspect (for more reference we recommend reading “How does outsourcing help grow your business?”). Furthermore, the same applies to non-people-related resources, which means technology and tool licenses, the same applies to these since a partner can provide a set of highly specialized IT resources, business database and applications.

If outsourcing is a viable and more profitable way, you should think of what setup can suit your current processes and culture since that will most likely affect the success rate of the cooperation. The tighter the process, culture, and knowledge are integrated between the two groups, the higher the chance the project will work well. To achieve that, the contracted teams may better be dedicated or “white label” rather than shared on different projects and even better if it includes management support.

If there is a great benefit in partnering with a strategic provider this is usually the opportunity to rely on that partner for several tasks and get the full flexibility of upskilling and reskilling the team based on the business priorities.
Once the above seems a good ground for success, you may want to make sure the business scope entails clear expectations, KPIs and SLAs, and eventually ROI. This way it will be much easier to justify the strategic choice across your organization and get long-term buy-in.

A recommended approach for a healthy and long-lasting partnership is to define your 3-5 years strategic growth goals and design a plan even before starting to contract a specific partner. By having the requirements and timeframe clear, you could prepare an RFP to onboard the most suitable partner and plan a 2-3 years cooperation while every one or two quarters you can open up to new innovative ideas and test some pilots.