From insourcing to outsourcing, offshoring and onshoring, when added to the dizzying never ending list of corporate buzz words it’s easy for one’s eyes to glaze over in confusion. But recent US labor policy talks surrounding the matter make it impossible to ignore.
Insourcing, the opposite of outsourcing, is commonly defined as the “delegation of operations or jobs from production within a business to an internal stand-alone entity that specializes in that operation.” In lay man terms, it’s the act of delegating a task or project to another party while keeping it in-house.
The uptick of such activity point to a recent trend among US manufacturers. Their choice to bring operations back and invest in the States has led insourcing to become a favorite example of burgeoning economy for the White House.
But it’s not just manufacturing firms who employ insourcing methods; many other industries have found insourcing to beneficial for their business as well. The key attribute responsible for insourcing’s wide embrace is control and the ability to maintain it. In outsourcing schemes, control of production or competencies is relinquished to an outside party which can lead to a number of complications, whereas with insourcing those complications are avoided. Other benefits of insourcing include:
For us at ELEVATE, insourcing is the best of both worlds. Our insourcing model for clients combines the flexibility, on-demand scalability, and lack of fixed overhead of outsourcing with the in-house control of strategy and decision making, without the necessity for day-to-day management.
This method allows clients to retain complete control over strategy and decision-making. Insourcing a tailor-made team of ELEVATE’s business development specialists means instantly hiring a team of five, 10 or 20 with the skills required to meet specific challenges like:
What does insourcing mean to you? To learn more about how insourcing with ELEVATE can you help you achieve results please email Nick Miles at nick.miles@thinkelevate.com.
In today’s market – we are constantly bombarded with more and more marketing – so much noise that we have become immune unless the message really resonates with us.
The key to really making an impact is to make the message really personal to the challenges that person is facing- It makes it relevant.
All too often, we see content that is trying to be “all things to all men” –in reality the Head of Finance has a completely different set of needs than the Head of IT, even regarding the same service offering.
If you segment your message based on the role of the person you are targeting the results are more improved because it’s about them, it’s about their pain, it’s about their challenges – ITS ALL ABOUT THEM.
And the stats show it – The email marketing benchmark guide by MarketingSherpa highlights that open rates for segmented versus non-segmented email campaigns are as much as 20% higher .
It’s not just all about the message either.
There are two fundamental building blocks to any successful campaign Data Quality and Database Segmentation.
1. Data Quality
Whilst you may have an up-to-date database of clients with opt-in email addresses, understanding how their role differentiates from their title may make a big difference in what messages you send them. Just because someone has the title of Chief Marketing Officer, doesn’t immediately flag that the person has responsibility for Sales or Product Development and would be interested in your marketing collateral surrounding those areas of your expertise. You may be missing out a whole segment of your database here. Complete and accurate records for each contact in your database will enable you to slice and dice your data like a Japanese sushi chef.
2. Database Segmentation
Beyond a database of accurate contact information, it’s fundamental for each record to be tagged accordingly based on their area of interest. Too often we see marketeers attempting to build campaign target lists based on a job title match. Ensuring your CRM system is correctly set up to capture data segmentation points such as role, gender, area of interest. No longer will your senior executives and marketeers have to troll through excel lists searching titles, but quickly report on these segmentation fields.
Has your organization adopted segmented messaging across its marketing function? Have you seen shorter relationship building times as a result? How important do you rate having a well segmented database for your sales and marketing campaigns?
-Nick
It used to be so straightforward.
24 months ago, times were simpler, decision makers made decisions on their own – budgets were plentiful and everything had a steady flow – then kaboom everything changed!
Decisions started being made by committees – no-one wanted to make a decision on their own
Every Dollar, Pound or Euro of budget needed to be signed off by senior executives, but only after huge scrutiny.
People you had never heard of started popping up and blocking the process.
Does this sound familiar as it relates to you as a buyer and also as to how your organization is trying to keep up with the ever shifting marketing and business development lifecycle?
It’s no secret that things have changed – the challenge is how organizations are responding to it. One of things that’s often missed by marketing and business development teams is that the number of people that they now need to influence has dramatically increased.
Its not that the decision makers you normally target have changed, it’s the people who you never saw before who are having a significant effect on the whole buying process. These are the people who have the power to “Veto”, but not necessarily the power to say “Yes” – generally known as the Technical Buyer.
As a result, the various members of these newly formed committees need to be influenced – they need to be courted as much as the normal suspects – and thus alleviate the risk of rejection from these additional technical buyers in each committee.
The key to overcoming these challenges is making sure that you are broadening your horizons and getting to all of the people that will be involved in the decision making and purchasing process – long before you are into the sales cycle.
The questions to ask yourself are:
To find out more about ELEVATEs approach to improving your data accuracy, and increasing revenue, visit www.thinkelevate.com/data_transformation.asp
-Nick
A name is just a name – right? Well, it is until you get it wrong – and this may have critical impact on your brand without you even knowing it.
We have all had mail where our name is spelt incorrectly, wrong salutation, wrong title or even worse when it was addressed to our predecessor at a company that left years ago.
How does this make you feel? How does it make you view the company that’s sending the information? It doesn’t instill much confidence does it?
The importance of getting someone’s name and title spelt correctly along with making sure that you have their gender correct is the first step in building a trusted relationship.
Sounds simple right?
You’d think so, but in far too many instances, people assume information and that can be extremely harmful when reaching out to an executive you are looking to build a strong bond with, and it’s the little things that count!!
Below are just a few examples of how things can go wrong
Jerry or Jerri – male or female– well believe it or not most people assume it’s a man, without even checking the gender.
Steven or Stephen, White or Whyte – it’s the little things that can really elevate your profile in an instant.
Many companies believe the information they find from web based research is correct – however with over 15 years experience having conducted 5,000+ business development and marketing projects, we have seen this is certainly not the case.
All too often corporate web sites are out-of-date and have miss-spellings, along with job roles and titles being inaccurate – all starting the cycle of brand and relationship damage – before it’s even started.
The most accurate way to ensure you have this information correct is by personally talking to the company in question, the next step is ensuring that your CRM system is set up to capture these data points accurately, so that it is easily accessible when conducting your marketing and business development outreach.
So if you want to build trust and credibility – the first step is getting the name right!
To find out more how ELEVATE can help you build your trust and credibiltiy with accurate contact details for all your key decision makers, visit www.thinkelevate.com/data_transformation.asp
-Nick
-Nick
Total Domination! No it’s not the latest Hollywood Action Movie to hit the DVD stores, we’re talking about 100% conversion rates of your Business Development campaigns.
Whilst traditionally a marketing campaign with the objective of New Business Development might see results of 10 percent of the number of companies marketed to. We have recently run campaigns that have tripled, even quadrupled the number of teleconferences and meetings set, compared to the traditional approach. How? We don’t give up until we get definitive results with every company. We call it: Total Domination!
To find out more about ELEVATEs Lead Nurturing capabilities and approach to Total Market Domination, visit www.thinkelevate.com/lead_optimization.asp
-Nick
As most firms focus on hitting the quarterly numbers – one question that is repeatedly being asked by the Service Line / Business Unit leads is “what is marketing doing to generate actual revenues?”
I was recently discussing this with a CMO from one of the top 10 consulting firms, in particular, how the role of the marketeer has changed over the years and how the demands being put on the marketing function to justify their role in generating business is increasing every day!
Based on this and other similar discussions, I believe that in the next year of so – Marketing Leads will be targeted with actual revenue figures as part of their objectives. Will those who meet these objectives be heroes? And those Marketeers who don’t be a thing of the past?
How do you see the role of marketing changing to meet the revenue demands of the business in a more justifiable way?
To find out how ELEVATE can assist with optimizing leads that actually drive revenue to your organisation, visit www.thinkelevate.com/lead_optimization.asp
-Nick
We all know how to determine our target market – its simple – “we are targeting all the Fortune 1000 companies with 1bn plus turnover and we are connecting with C-suite decision makers” – right?
Correct – however in reality, when you really start to look at the information that you have – is it really complete, accurate and everyone accounted for?
Are you confident that you can touch every single company at the level you require to convey your message correctly?
Based on our experience over, most firms are missing over 37% of their total available market, in addition to this they don’t proactively update their database on a regular basis.
The impact that this has on your marketing efforts is huge – not only is the firm NOT connecting with all the relevant decision makers, the number of these decision makers are constantly diminishing – reducing even further the impact marketing has on this target market.
The key to reaching your Total Available Market is twofold.
- Firstly, identify every relevant organization and decision maker, and
- Secondly to make sure it stays that way – updated
I would be delighted to learn your experiences identifying and reaching your target available market.
If you would like to find out more how ELEVATE can help you in these goals, do not hesitate to contact me directly.
-Nick
As Marketing Automation technologies start to gain momentum in sales and marketing functions, will it actually add revenues to the bottom line or just highlight sales and marketing inefficiencies?
Several people in my network have been boasting their increased pipeline activity since implementing marketing automation as well as the justification that marketing can now make on the revenue it provides to their service line or business unit. Now, they can directly demonstrate the value and secure a greater budget to focus on key revenue generating activities.
On the flip side, the increased visibility shows the vulnerabilities of marketing and client teams. I just received an email this morning from a Service Line Lead – asking how he can fix the problem of his teams not following up hot prospects fast enough – he was furious that all these key targets were being left to their own devices.
We would like to hear your thoughts and experience on using Marketing Automation technologies, what value they bring and also how much or little you know about the benefits and downfalls.
