Taskforce BPO

If you have watched the movie The Wolf of Wall Street (based on a true story), directed by Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the main role, you have seen some of the crucial techniques of becoming a true entrepreneur. The express climb up the social and business ladder is not as difficult as some may think, however, it requires knowledge, acquaintances, focus, luck and a high-quality consulting agency.

Watch the video to see the basic skill that anyone in the sales business should have:

1. Create a Solution for a Problem or a Product Which Will Satisfy the Client’s Needs - Otherwise, You Won’t Sell Anything.

The above given motto is the number one mistake that most of the businesses make. According to Grant Cardone (2015), an entrepreneur and international sales expert:

“People and companies buy things only in an attempt to solve a problem. Sales people spend too much time on the offer rather than assuring the buyer that the product, company and individual will solve the problem. This typically results in presentations that are too long and prices that are too low. Focus on how your product and the company can solve the three most critical problems your client is trying to solve.”

While many entrepreneurs make a huge mistake by presenting a product that won’t solve a client’s need or problem, Cadrone advises them to be practical and realistic. Having an objective attitude towards the situation on the market is important in order to get the most out of it. If you are offering a service that nobody needs, your business will definitely fail.

Therefore, it is quite important to thoroughly research the market before starting a business. If not, paying a decent amount of money to a consulting agency to do it for you and help you, is also a good idea. At Taskforce BPO (www.taskforcebpo.com) we have already established teams who will be with you from the very start and help you achieve the goals you dream of.

The 10 Biggest Mistakes in Sales: 

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/242296

2. Inability to Seize the Moment and Not Being Urgent

Beating around the bush instead of presenting your product or idea directly and clearly, will just unnecessarily take all the valuable time and attention of the client. Not making a point from the beginning and prolonging your story will create impatience and anxiety among the listeners. Therefore the most important thing to do is to cut the long story short.

Being confident and emphasizing the urgency for making a deal, may sound a bit risky, but it is the best way to get to an answer.

3. Over-Emphasized Persistence and Over-Confidence are a Major Drawback!

Paying no attention to feedback and stubbornly going into something which definitely doesn’t interest your clients, is a major mistake. Your mindset, which instead of presenting something new and interesting, rather bores the clients, is not going to bring you anything good. Keep in mind that you have to respect the client’s time and personal space, in order your persistence not to come off as nagging.

Being self-confident and believing in yourself is extremely important for you to succeed and be accepted in the highly-competitive world of business. However, having in mind to be yourself and not over exaggerate things is also crucial. It is for the best to have a positive attitude revealing your confidence and success, while at the same time making the client say yes!

Motivation is the Key!

One final thing to inspire you, is the following video from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leonardo Di Caprio (Jordan Belfort) gives a motivational speech. Nevertheless, those who are willing and certain to succeed, will do so despite the many obstacles that others can’t surmount.

If you want your business booming, there are quite a few techniques you could follow. When it comes to outsourcing, it takes a significant effort before the final sale can actually happen. It’s important that you work efficiently so that you can generate some high-quality leads while not paying tons of money or losing tons of time. Don’t be discouraged if connections aren’t turned into sales quickly – be patient and remember that you’re growing your audience and network dramatically!

1. Creativity Is King!

We all get drawn to eye-catching and appealing things on the internet, right? Your Social Media presence should be complete and engaging – make your networks and audience want to follow you. First impressions are truly everything when it comes to attracting a potential lead.

“Of all the major social platforms currently vying for the top spots, LinkedIn is the most B2B-centric. It is also considered the most effective in the sales cycle. According to Content Marketing Institute’s ‘2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends for North America,’ 63 percent of marketers report positive results in that area.”

“Another report found that 80% of B2B marketers want to increase their LinkedIn use. The same survey said 45 percent of respondents said think their Facebook efforts are ineffective.”  

(Source: http://www.b2bnn.com/2015/08/10-linkedin-stats-every-b2b-executive-needs-to-know/)

Creative social profiles allow you to stand out from the crowd of thousands of competitors. Whether you need a ‘clean and professional’ or ‘quirky and fun’ appearance, take the time to customize the public’s perception of your business.

2. Outsource Extras, Not Essentials

Outsourcing your work will allow your business to focus on its core values, but not all outsourcing is the same – it’s important to find highly-experienced individuals who can seamlessly transition into your company to achieve your goals. To achieve actual access in entering new market areas will not cost you tons of money, instead, outsourcing will cut down your costs and allow your employees to focus on their core tasks. You might be thinking to yourself “What about freelancers?” Keep in mind two things: consistency and loyalty. While freelancers can provide a ‘quick-fix’ solution in times of need, outsourcing provides a stability for you to build your business upon.

Increase Your Company’s Efficiency

Reduce Costs

Improve Compliance

Through outsourcing, your employees will be enhanced in a cost effective way by enabling them to remove tedious and time consuming, non-revenue generating tasks from their desks and improve their productivity and effectiveness.

3. The Good, The Bad, and The BEST Leads

Identifying your best leads can be quite a daunting and time consuming job, however, it is not impossible. Therefore, we’ve highlighted two key metrics based on CoBloom’s article to keep in mind: 

Choose The Right Marketing Tools

A large number of analytic and functional tools exist, both free and subscription-based, that could provide insight and operations such as form building, e-mail marketing, lead generating and tracking, and so on. Finding the appropriate tool for your business is essential as there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution; every business requires a unique marketing strategy!

Score Leads

Knowing which potential leads are most likely to convert into a sale is very difficult and requires a keen eye to predict. Though no lead should go ignored, it’s important not to ‘waste’ valuable time! The math doesn’t lie, so some key points to consider are:

Number of website pageviews

Number of website visits

Number of emails opened

Number of emails clicked

Number of forms submitted

While checking the top leads active in the last 30 days, paying attention to the bad leads and reducing them is just as important as identifying good leads. Your inbox can get clogged up with ‘junk’ and phishing messages which are crucial to avoid. It can easily become overwhelming without a proper structure in place to funnel leads into sales or non-sales.

4. Be One With The Blog

Engage into creating a blog where you can present your ideas and inform the readers, which will grow your presence as an expert or thought leader. Establish yourself as an industry leader in order to improve the credibility of yourself and your business. Once the reader is interested and gets valuable information from your blog, they can, for example, sign-up for your newsletter or follow you on Social Media. If you are working with an outsourcing agency, they can create the content for you and save you some time, while offering excellent writing techniques. If your blog is successful, you can later turn it into something greater, such as an e-book which will further grow your audience and encourage the readers to follow the path of your success while gaining professional advice for their own businesses.

SEO optimization is extremely important when considering content creation! Don’t underestimate the power of a strategically placed word. Not only do we want the reader enthralled in what they’re reading, but search engines will rate and rank what they pick up from your articles, so keywords can’t be ignored – nor can they be thrown around willy-nilly. The art of SEO is truly difficult to master yet crucial to every online marketing strategy.

5. Catchy Videos To Catch An Audience

We all agree that the whole marketing process takes up resources, like time and money, which might be a major drawback or restriction to your start-up business. YouTube is a great resource which often gets under-utilized by small-to-medium sized businesses. There are easy ways to turn simple videos into marketing gold in the eyes of your potential customers. Don’t let these opportunities go to waste – come up with short, simply, and fun ways to engage your audience outside of a blog, website, or Social Media platform!

In the business realm, most people are likely familiar with the terms outsourcing and offshoring. However, being able to make a clean distinction is crucial in order to make the right decision; should your business outsource or offshore?

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is obtaining certain services or a product from a third-party (e.g. accounting, HR, manufacturing, etc.). The location of the outsourcing company is not important (when determining the definition) and therefore can be on the same street as your company, in a different city or in a different country. Outsourcing is done in order to save time and money, so instead of dealing with non-essential work in-house, companies redistribute tasks to a third-party so that they can focus on their core business issues.

Why Choose To Outsource?

Cut Down Costs

When the non-essential work is being outsourced, your company can realize a significant cost reduction. Some key cost-benefits include:

Limit infrastructure to support a larger workforce and facilities (capital expenditures);

Employees focus on core-efficiencies, improving productivity;

Save on employee training;

Eliminate the need for upgrading to more expensive software/hardware

You can outsource virtually any aspect of your business, whether it’s IT services, finance, logistics, or simply various administrative and back-office tasks. Finding the appropriate competitive partner to delegate such activities to can greatly improve any business’ economic health.

Labor Benefits

In many cases, companies do not have access to in-house experts for certain activities. Lets face it, hiring the right employee for a specific job is not always an easy task. However, outsourcing companies often feature a lot of highly educated and trained individuals who can achieve desired results at a higher level than any of your employees who may not have training and are required to multi-task. Paying full salaries for an in-house accounting team, for example, can quickly become expensive; requiring additional workspace, supplies, and more. If a sales expert is required to manage CRM on top of traveling, cold-calling, and maintaining relationships, their productivity and efficiency is being greatly reduced.  On top of specialized employment, outsourcing labor is almost always cheaper than hiring locally.

Flexibility

Outsourcing provides flexibility for the buyer by ensuring them more directional and overall control of their company. Let your professional outsourcing partners handle managerial responsibilities over their tasks while you are overseeing the results. Gain productivity by delegating work; don’t lose time and energy focusing on the details, rather create the strategy and watch it provide results upon execution. Additionally, avoid the burden of employment contracts, employee benefits and other HR logistics when outsourcing often offers favorable conditions for change of employment or termination of contracts.

Offshoring

If you are outsourcing your work to a different country, where a branch office is established ‘offshore’ or the infrastructure of the company is moved to another country, you’re offshoring. For example, a business based in the US could offshore their work to a contractor in South-Eastern Europe (SEE), gaining access to international talent not available locally for lower costs, while also gaining access to favorable business environments.

Why Choose To Offshore?

Labor Benefits

Similarly to outsourcing, a main reason for offshoring includes the opportunity to produce a product or deliver a service from a different country, expanding your pool of specialized employees and benefiting from different economic, cultural and legal work environments. Depending on the requirement of high-vs-low quality employees for your business, a company can take advantage of competitive salary discrepancies to match their needs. No matter which labor force you target, if you offshore to a regions such as India and China or  South-Eastern Europe, you will save on employment and overhead costs.

Tax & Tariff Benefits

In countries with more lenient or favorable tax laws, businesses can realize a great financial relief and gain the ability to obtain additional savings or tax returns.  Various countries offer very favorable benefits to foreign investors, such as reimbursement on employment costs, extraordinary tax benefits, cheaper land acquisition and more.

“In October, Drucker reported that Google had saved $3.1 billion in taxes in the past three years by shifting the majority of its foreign profits into accounts in Ireland, the Netherlands and Bermuda using financial techniques called “the Dutch Sandwich” and “the Double Irish” arrangement. Basically, he says, Google credited its Irish office with the majority of its non-U.S. sales revenue — and then shuttled that money through various subsidiaries located in Ireland and other countries to save billions in taxes.”(www.npr.org)

Google’s example of large savings through outsourcing can be scaled to nearly any size and industry, so don’t be intimidated by daunting numbers! The offshoring model can be customized to your needs with proper planning.

Higher Level of Control

Offshoring may be an alternative for the businesses that wouldn’t like to give up control over the production process to a third party. For tasks which are time dependent, not delivering the work precisely on time could lead to major drawbacks to both the business and the agency doing the outsourcing work. Having your team on the ground abroad would allow your company direct access and the ability to monitor over the production or manufacturing process.

Outsource or Offshore?

When it comes to making a choice between outsourcing and offshoring, time is not an enemy: think twice before rushing into something which may cost you time and money. Therefore, consulting with experts in your field (e.g. business process and tax system management) will give you better insight to make a quality decision before taking your first steps. Whichever your final decision will be, it is crucial to manage either outsourcing and offshoring well.

At the conception stage of a business, an important question that arises is whether a business should collaborate with an outsourcing agency or not? It is quite difficult to get to the right decision on what should really be done; however, there are a few things that should be taken into consideration to ensure the best choice is made. Doing research beforehand will certainly help. Nevertheless, according to experts, no matter which part of the life cycle the organization is in, for most businesses it is never too late or too early to start outsourcing.

However, when businesses are in their early stages, most of the entrepreneurs are doubtful about collaborating with an outsourcing agency. For that reason, they should answer the following questions:

Why should I outsource?

What is the first thing that needs to be outsourced?

Since the answer to these questions depends on the individual, it also infers that the actual use of a helping hand or not would be in accordance to the growth and development of your own business. The ability to set a goal is quite crucial and an important step for your business. Having no direction in which your business will flow might create confusion that will definitely be counter-productive.

Prior to every decision, whether it would be better to outsource or not, performing a time-cost calculation would be quite worthwhile. By following the 5 criteria that we have pointed out as the most important, you will have an easier time evaluating whether or not it is a good decision to outsource at this stage. Here are our 5 most important criteria to consider:

If the activity is not central to generating success, it can be outsourced. Work that is core to your business, should be managed in-house. All the other non-core jobs, for example, HR, marketing and administrative support, should be sent to an outsourcing agency. This will make your work easier and ensure quality products. Shifting your focus on higher goals rather than going into small and unnecessary details will lead to success.

If the job is simply a daily routine that wastes your time and money, do not think twice about letting an outsourcing agency do it for you. Certain work that will waste resources and drain your productivity could be easily managed by affordable outsourcing agencies.

If you have recurring tasks that are necessary yet done in cycles, outsource them! STOP putting a lot of energy into short-term projects which may be an additional obstacle or set-back for your employees to completing their core work.

If the job is less expensive for someone else to do it, give it to the person who would be able to do it for you for an affordable amount of money. When it comes to business, it is important not to throw away your money for services which can be done professionally at a lower cost.

If you have a pile of work normally done in-house, but is draining your resources – Outsource it! Investing all your resources into a concrete pile of work may be a large drawback, so consider a delegating all or part of it to an outsourcing agency. For example, if you have various regional databases to sort through, think about assigning a team leader to assure quality over the outsourcing agency who has taken on the task for you.

Another thing that you should always pay attention to is the difference between paying your employees and paying an outsourcing agency to do the work for you. If paying a regular salary to a set of employees is a more affordable alternative, then do all the business in-house. On the other hand, businesses which find outsourcing a better and more financially-efficient alternative, can outsource part of their workforce right from the beginning.

How do you know which task should be outsourced? Here are some of the most commonly outsourced business tasks:

Social Media Marketing/Content Marketing

Websites and Blogs

Market Research

Office Administration/Data Entry

Nevertheless, for those of you who would like a more scientific and detailed approach, we have included a deeper statistical analysis into the field. Please take a look at the table below to get some insight into the tasks that are most likely outsourced:

(Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/06/11-jobs-most-likely-to-be-outsourced/58388/)

Simple logic is what drives most business decisions. Keep in mind that any type of investment is a risk but whenever you consider outsourcing, you’re doing it to save money. Often times it’s best to outsource from the very beginning and look towards the long-term benefits that outsourcing will provide; higher savings, faster growth, and so on. In cases where your salary cap is tight and you have a need for additional employees, whether to meet new business opportunities or maintain a higher quality than the competition, outsourcing can be the pill to alleviate your pain. In our opinion, it is never too early or too late to outsource your work, as long as there is work to be outsourced!