MarketStar Blog | Articles (13)

Key Insights

• In order to bounce back from the disruptions caused by the pandemic, organizations must work out a plan to ensure that their business model remains flexible and agile

• Remote outsourcing solutions can help accelerate the process 

• A remote outsourced partner can help shape business results and culture 

• Remote outsourcing can provide a more outcome-focused strategy for businesses to scale up and stay relevant in this ever-changing business landscape

Every organization wants to see its business grow. 

While you would want to be hands-on with business operations, the scenario will be different as you grow your customer base. 

By contracting work to other companies, you not only clear your own resource pool from tedious and time-consuming tasks, you also cut, at least, 70% of your labor costs. 

Virtual outsourcing solutions have never been as important as they are now, against the backdrop of multiple lockdowns and a switch to remote work setup. 

In this current socio-economic climate, most teams are looking at virtual outsourcing solutions. The pandemic has opened the eyes of many businesses, helping them to realize that an in-office team is not a criterion for success.

What Does it Mean to Outsource Work?

Outsourcing is when a company is said to have given certain positions or jobs to a third party for completion.

Take, for example, a company that requires assistance with customer service.

It can cut costs and improve process efficiency by contracting third-party workers to help answer calls, send emails, and operate live chat features.

In the current business landscape, work-from-home outsourcing continues to grow. In fact, a survey by Clutch highlights that more than one-third (37%) of small enterprises are already outsourcing a business process. 

How Does Work-From-Home Outsourcing Differ from Remote Staffing?

While both remote outsourcing and remote staffing involve taking jobs that are typically conducted within the office and sending them to a distant location, there is one differentiator.

They differ in the management-worker relationship.

In simple terms, a company that outsources jobs simply sends work to contractors. Remote workers, however, are never actually employees of the company.

What are the Benefits of Remote Outsourcing Solutions?

While the pandemic has become a norm, many companies have long been practicing remote work setup.

With advances in technology, it has become even more popular today.

If you are still not sure about what work-from-home outsourcing can do for your business, check out these benefits!

1. Cost-Savings

One of the most important benefits of WFH outsourcing is the potential savings.

Employing virtual outsourcing solutions can help you eliminate the need to pay the traditional expenses of having an office and other factors such as utilities and rent.

Remote outsourcing can help lower your tax burden as well.

A report by Global Workplace Analytics shows that US businesses compatible with remote work have the potential to save almost $11,000 per employee each year.

2. Scalability

Outsourcing and work-from-home make the perfect combination.

With remote outsourcing, it is easier to add additional team members, when necessary, without worrying about workstations or compensation.

With additional tasks being handled by a third party, your existing team will not feel burdened, giving them the time and space to focus on the larger business goals. 

3. Outsourcing’s Remote Understanding

Whether it be accounting and payroll services or customer support and contact center operations, numerous companies trust remote partners, some onshore and many offshore, to oversee their vital back- and front-office solutions.

The remote outsourcing industry is equipped with deep expertise when it comes to overseeing, motivating, and measuring distributed teams.

From offshore specialists in far-off time zones to onshore yet off-site teams, successful outsourcing programs require balancing knowledge, workloads, and personnel across often-distant locations.

Companies providing work-from-home outsourcing solutions have proven expertise in such matters.

4. Improved Productivity

A study by Airtasker (a gig economy platform) revealed that remote workers put in an additional 1.4 days of work or three extra weeks per year compared to office employees.

In other words, they tend to be more productive.

This might be because remote workers feel more fulfilled owing to better work-life balance. This has a direct impact on revenue generation.   

 5. Global Talent Pool

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, it is becoming critical for business owners to access talent from around the globe. 

Instead of depending on staff who live within commuting distance, remote outsourcing can help you tap into the abilities of some of the best experts in their fields. And with a wider talent pool to choose from, you can quickly find someone who is truly cut out for the job. 

The Way Ahead

If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is that remote work is a viable option for many companies. Businesses across the globe are allowing employees to work from home with some even letting go of their offices completely, 

With outsourcing remote work being beneficial to both employers and employees, it is time to look into the many returns of remote outsourcing. 

Such a model provides you with opportunities for growth and innovation. Your virtual outsourcing solutions partner will equip you with the right technology and resources to help your team adjust better. At the same time, you enjoy a specialized remote workforce in your most badly hit departments. 

Key Insights

• With consumers spending more time online, we see an increase in expectations for a more personalized and seamless customer experience

• When not managed effectively, online advertising is often viewed as a negative disruption in the consumer’s overall journey. This limits engagement as well as ad performance

• Fortunately, there is a way out of this–Customer Obsession!

• A customer-obsessed business model can help the industry not only create ads that inspire shoppers but also reach them at the right time

• Such an approach will help businesses stay true to their vision while achieving online marketing goals

Everyone in the ad tech industry strives to beat the competition, focusing more on features than anything else. However, it takes more than features to win the hearts and minds of customers.

Your success rests on your complete understanding of your prospects. This is how you will be able to ensure a seamless customer journey while serving your prospects with relevant content at any given time.

In other words, you need to know how to be customer obsessed.

What Do We Mean by Customer Obsession?

Customer obsession is the very core of customer experience.

Customer-obsessed organizations are always thinking of new and unique ways to understand their clients better. Such business ventures apply their knowledge and data to produce products and services that solve their customers’ problems.

Customer-obsessed businesses will focus on adding value to the customer experience.

They collect feedback regularly and ensure that client needs are a priority in every business goal. They’re more concerned with retaining and delighting existing customers than acquiring new ones.

The goal is to increase customer loyalty, leading them to become more reliant on your brand. Your customers may believe that your company is looking out for their best interests, which boosts their chances of making repeat purchases. 

Why is Customer Obsession So Important?

More than anything, customer obsession refers to a type of mindset or business model that focuses on prioritizing customer needs above everything else. Amazon and Alibaba are great examples of this type of approach.

In Amazon, for instance, customer obsession is not a responsibility that falls on any single team, such as customer service. It falls on every team. Every department needs to be customer obsessed. And that ripple effect starts from the top down.

Customer obsessed businesses:

• Prioritize retention over acquisition

• Focus on quality over quantity

• Align every department with customer success

• Analyze customer data frequently

What are the Strategies for Becoming Customer-obsessed in Adtech?

Customer obsession has never been as vital as it is now for AdTech. The industry is in a resurgence. Despite languishing in investors’ bad graces over the past few years, AdTech has suddenly shot up.

Luma’s Q2 2021 Market Report shows how AdTech deals have drastically increased year on year by more than 500%. 

Notable examples include Mediaocean’s acquisition of Flashtalking for a reported $500 million and AdTheorent Inc. combining with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to go public with a $1 billion-plus valuation.

When it comes to value, the answer is simple: Programmatic advertising or ad tech works. Publishers are in a much better position to incur additional revenue now than what they generated in the pre-programmatic era.

As the industry prepares for the future, key players must shift their focus on becoming a customer-obsessed brand and how this facet will go a long way in improving customer experience.

After all, the ad tech industry is expected to grow tremendously. The backbone of the internet advertising industry is set to grow from $438bn in 2021 to $1 trillion in 2030, as per the forecasts by Global Data.

Let’s explore a few strategies that will help you establish a mindset that is customer-obsessed:

1. Role of Data

Data should be your key pillar behind effective online marketing to provide a seamless customer experience.

With better technology available to assist us in accessing big data, the market is growing at an astronomical rate, reaching a value of $103 billion by 2027 (Statista report).

Real-time insights from this data will help businesses to create meaningful ads.

Start with combining location data with business, consumer, and contextual information to ensure that relevant ad content reaches the right audience at the right time.

2. Focus on Content

Content is equally important.

Marketers must have the ability to determine which ad is the right ad to show to a specific user without overexposing the consumer to their ads.

Predictive bidding, which leverages the power of data, can be of tremendous advantage.

This type of approach develops and implements algorithms to analyze the individual before the ad is displayed. This ensures consumers are being served the ad that is most relevant to them across their devices.

3. Speak Your Purpose

Improving customer experience will be incomplete without brands being true to their purpose. Your customers want to know what your business stands for and its driving mission.

Take Verizon for instance. The company’s vision is to deliver the promise of the digital world by enhancing the ability of humans, businesses, and society to do more and do better. It defines why they are here and who they are here for.

Once these are aligned, customer-obsessed companies must understand their customers’ needs — even before the customer has articulated them. Customer conversations and survey feedback can help you kickstart this process.

4. Being Multichannel

When customer obsession is the foundation of all your customer experience strategies, make use of multi-channel marketing to get the word out about your promotions.

You can utilize email to generate excitement about your promotions early among your current and most loyal customers.

Social media is another powerful tool for you to promote your offerings. This will also enable you to interact with customers and gather information on customer sentiment.

5. Keep Advancing

Technology and media are industries in constant flux.

To stay ahead of the competition, ad-tech ventures must keep abreast of the changes. And while successful startups keep up with changes, the most successful are always two steps ahead.

The key is to be nimble and innovative to turn challenges into golden opportunities. This will not be possible if companies don’t dream big. Allow your teams to contribute to the creative process.

6. Integrating AdTech and MarTech

Adtech and Martech do overlap but have primarily remained distinct from each other with a common goal—to provide better customer experiences.

Such disconnected systems add unnecessary complexities, making it hard for companies to know their customers well. Integrating AdTech and Martech can solve this challenge.

This type of integration helps advertisers by optimizing advertising investments while creating a 360-degree view of the customer. Additionally, companies can make use of Martech data to improve their ad targeting initiatives.

Looking Ahead

There has never been a better time for brands to leverage the new opportunities of digital advertising. And infusing a customer-obsessed mindset can help you take your digital ad campaigns to millions.

From how you handle customer complaints to the details that bring them joy, each step must be focused on how it might be perceived by your buyer.

Finally, a customer obsession focus will help you create a better stream of repeat customers who know they will get a quality product or service with top-notch customer service.

This is the second installment in our series on Customer Obsession where we look into the benefits of having a customer-obsessed mindset and how it will help businesses understand what’s motivating their customers.

Head over to our blog, On-Demand Delivery Services: 6 Key Steps to Customer Obsession and explore the six leading strategies that customer-obsessed companies can employ to recalibrate their model to deliver a smooth last-mile experience.

Do give it a read, if you haven’t, till now!

Direct sales have been a staple of business. They offer your business a strategy to sell products—as it sounds—directly to customers without intermediaries. Your success is linked to the direct sales tactics you put in place in your business. In this article, I will cover three proven direct sales tactics to transform your business.  

Nobody ever said enterprise sales was easy. Enterprise tech sales is one of the toughest types of sales jobs, no matter whether you are engaging in enterprise software sales, hardware sales, or cloud services. Another industry term for enterprise sales is complex selling because there are so many variables.

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One universal truth of enterprise sales is that deals take time to close. Enterprise applications tend to be business-critical, with a lot riding on the success of the deployment. As a result, there are lots of stakeholders, each with unique criteria and success factors. There also tend to be extensive discussions about compatibility, integration, customization, and value, making sure the solution will more than pay for itself.

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There is a lot about enterprise sales that has changed, especially since the pandemic. Buyers have come to prefer the digital sales process, and more B2B sales are being handled remotely. According to McKinsey, between 70 percent¹ and 80 percent of B2B decision makers prefer self-service or remote sales transactions. 

Key Takeaways:

In the midst of a rapidly changing business environment, Software as a Service (SaaS) has witnessed a boom like never before.

Key Takeaways:

While it is easy to think that they work in silos, both the customer success and sales teams have quite a few overlaps in their day-to-day activities. What binds them together is their ability to nurture relationships with their customers.

This past year, we have all been rubbed a little raw. Expectations have been changed and what’s “normal” continues to change. Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? As salespeople, we have needed to adapt to a new level of being personable, understanding, and authentic. For many of us, it will take us back to our dating days. 

When I first got started in Customer Success (CS), I was over a large US-based organization where we had roughly 60 Fortune 500 companies as customers. These customers represented a large recurring revenue stream for our organization, and it was imperative that we retained more than 95% of our revenue (ARR) and it was more important that we retained logos.