Business

5 Business Functions You Can Outsource to Work Smarter

When starting a business, many entrepreneurs choose to be self-sufficient and handle most of the business processes themselves, trying to save their funds only for the most necessary and inevitable costs.

However, more often than not, they lack the skills needed to manage these tasks efficiently.

Outsourcing certain business processes is a way to increase your available expertise and stay competitive, as you can hire top talent to do the job they are skilled in, at affordable rates outsourcing customer service pros and cons.

Here are five business functions you can easily outsource so that you can work smarter and make your business thrive.

1. IT Services

Being highly specialized and technical, it’s no wonder IT services are among the most commonly outsourced business functions. 

By outsourcing IT-related tasks to a third-party, small business owners and their employees can focus on the matters that are within their core expertise and that are bringing profit.

When it comes to IT services,  here are some of the tasks you can outsource:

  • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)  – there’s no need to build your infrastructure, purchase expensive hardware, and hire technical staff for maintenance when you can just pay to use it on a subscription basis.
  • Website design and updates – You might be capable of creating a seemingly functional website yourself, but if you want it to provide top-notch user experience, attract and keep your customers, it needs to be technically perfect. Unless you’re a coder and a website designer yourself, all website-related technicalities should be outsourced.
  • Cybersecurity – reports show that 60% of the small businesses that suffer a cyber attack will shut down within six months, so cybersecurity is of extreme importance. If you’re working with highly sensitive data, think about outsourcing these services to professionals.

2.Finance and Accounting

Besides IT services, finance and accounting are the most commonly outsourced business processes. Because of the specific set of skills they require, 37% of small businesses choose to outsource them.

The negative consequences of mishandling business finances on the future of the company make it vital to acknowledge the importance of timely and adequate financial expertise from early days, before any problems arise.

Unless you’re a financial expert yourself or have one hired full-time, tasks such as budgeting, preparing financial statements, forecasting cash flow, tax compliance, and making sure all accounting regulations are met, can be quite burdensome and take up a lot of your time and energy. 

Not to mention all the other finance-related business expert advice you may need help with, such as pension and insurance advice or retirement planning. All these decisions are vital for ensuring the proper functioning of your business, as well as making sure that you’ll be able to achieve your personal goals in the future. 

3.  Marketing

You need to build your brand and reach out to your target audience and keep them posted about your product and their services. 

With all the business opportunities digital marketing brings nowadays, you don’t need an expensive marketing campaign to target and reach your potential customers. You can do it successfully by optimizing your website for search engines or running campaigns on your small business Facebook account.

However, for your digital marketing efforts to be efficient, the online presence of your small business needs to be managed carefully, offering your customers superb content that resonates with them and fits their needs.

Outsourcing digital marketing tasks to a marketing firm can help you position your business on the market quickly. They can help you build your brand image, as well as offer their support with content creation, ads, and social media posting. 

By properly optimizing your website for search engines, expert digital marketers will make sure your offers are visible in business Google searches, as well as in the” businesses near me” section, thus bringing you more local traffic.

4.  Customer Services

Small businesses that operate online could benefit from outsourcing their customer service to an outside call center or a chat service.

With the rise of digital technologies, customers’ expectations have changed too, especially when it comes to the quality of customer service. Customers want an immediate response from the company they’re doing business with. Moreover, they expect that their problem is solved almost instantly. 

Having trained and dedicated staff available to solve customer complaints and issues is not always viable when you’re operating on a shoestring budget, so outsourcing these services to a contact center can make things much easier while boosting your customer satisfaction.

Of course, this will also allow your human support reps to focus on more complex queries.

5. Sales

Similarly, a small business may not have dedicated inhouse personnel with the expertise of placing sales calls, setting up funnels, or warming up leads. 

Closing deals is a skill of its own, and until you have a professional who can dedicate their time fully to achieving sales KPIs, outsourcing this task to skilled individuals outside of your company will bring in more business.

By outsourcing the business functions that are not integral to your core service, you will be able to work smarter and focus only on what you do best. A platform like Deskera can help lighten your workload in many of the areas mentioned above.

Jennifer Wilson is a writer at Qeedle.com She knows business processes and operations management inside out. As she understands all the challenges of running a small business firsthand, it’s her mission to tackle the topics that are most relevant to entrepreneurs and offer viable solutions.