In or Out?

Finding the right approach to sustainable lead generation is crucial for market growth while still achieving short-term, more tactical objectives.

Many businesses, especially in times of budget cuts and rightsizing, turn to outsourcing to reduce overheads and improve efficiency of certain aspects of the business.  These may be areas that aren't core skillsets held and/or require significant management time.

Three main options stand before budget holders: in-house, outsource, or a hybrid of the two. Each path has its merits, but too often they aren’t properly assessed or integrated into existing systems and processes, leading to unnecessary silos, barriers and challenges.

Here we take a closer look at the alternatives:

1. Building your foundations in-house

With the facility in-house, you have the autonomy to construct your marketing campaigns exactly as you envision them it. However, like building a house yourself, it requires significant effort and resources to ensure a sustainable and effective marketing program along with an associated budget that isn’t withdrawn if revenue forecasts dip.
This approach demands constant attention and skilful management to stay competitive and deliver meaningful results.

Building a house from scratch requires solid foundations, just as in-house demand creation forms the basis of your marketing strategy. By handling all marketing activities internally, companies retain a level of transparency that’s essential in today's digital markets.

2. Insource, outsource, hybrid

In contrast, outsourced demand creation is akin to hiring professional contractors to build your marketing house. Companies can choose to partner with a multitude of service providers to boost performance in certain areas of the funnel such as content writers, telemarketing agencies, social media experts, event teams and so on. This is similar to hiring a team of individual experts to handle everything from plumbing, electrics, bricklaying.

3. 100% outsource

This can be appealing to new market entrants/start-ups who may not yet have ‘feet on the street’ and looking to supplement a sales head or two. But buyer beware. Whilst this can be appealing as you don’t have the hiring or office costs, you are buying disparate services which are a headache to manage and if you’re not skilled at providing a proper brief, deliverables end up being vague and disappointing.

Making it work

In an ideal scenario if outsourced services are used it should be a seamless integration betweem all parties expertise. Just as the best houses are a harmonious blend of structural integrity and architectural finesse, a combination of in-house and outsourced sales/marketing can yield remarkable results.

Prioritise seamless handover to sales:  No matter how much budget/effort is put into creating the leads in the first place they are worthless without proper sales engagement. This seems obvious, but the most opportunities are lost in the ‘last mile’ – due to non-engagement by sales teams.  So many times, businesses seek siloed sales and marketing suppliers who, if are not working as one seamless team, will not be performing to achieve optimum results.

Suffice to say, with marketing automation at the core, the two approaches can work hand-in-hand, ensuring full visibility and transparency. The transparency offered by in-house marketing is retained, while the expert resources and technology of outsourced demand creation can enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Control and accountability: A critical factor is finding the right balance between control and accountability. Managing your sales and marketing efforts internally gives you full control over every aspect, ensuring your vision and objectives are followed meticulously. However, once you bring in outside resource it can be challenging to maintain control and properly evaluate each component.

It's vital you either have the systems and processes internally to fully manage and control outsourced deliverables, or you choose a company that takes ownership of the lead “number” and is responsible for everything needed to achieve that.
An outsourced team’s entire focus should be delivering success – that’s what you’re paying them for.

Who should be accountable?

Marketing and and sales need seamless reporting of what's driving the buyer journey and where they sit in the decision making process. Without it carries the potential of vanity metrics, where individual activities appear to perform well, but don’t go on to deliver an uplift in the sales number. This is because it can’t be/isn’t being measured as part of a whole buying journey.

Outsourcing demand creation should bring new levels of accountability to the table that may not already exist internally. This should be considered a massive benefit and not a hindrance to success. Just like professional building contractors are responsible for meeting construction targets and health and safety standards, these sales and marketing services businesses need to take ownership and responsibility for outcomes.

The added complexity of a 2-tier sales channel

If you’re a vendor with a sales channel your house can fall into disrepair very quickly if you don’t have the same level of visibility throughout the building of pipeline. It would be like trying to manage a housing estate-build multiple times over, remotely.

The quarter may get you the required number of attendees at an event, but what visibility of the progress will you have of the majority of those contacts a year down the line?

Final thoughts

The choice between in-house and outsourced demand creation depends on the unique needs and objectives of each business. It is essential to strike the right balance between control and accountability while leveraging the best-in-class technology and resources available.

If outsourcing any element of demand/lead generation you either need the systems and processes in which to inject their individual outcomes so you can evaluate how successful their part was in the whole programme – not just as an individual component.

The alternative is to choose a supplier that will be accountable for the end-to-end process and sign up to SLAs and guarantees with an agreed ROI up front.

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Author: Max Sherwood, The Amigos Network
Email: max.sherwood@theamigosnetwork.com

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