Outsourced Sales & Marketing: Managing Multiple Vendor Environments

Managing Multi vendor environments can prove to be a herculean task and will not always yield the desired results. Organizations globally invest huge amounts of resources to manage vendors to derive the best ROI from them. Not always does it actually result in improved ROI. The typical challenges that Sales & Marketing teams face when outsourcing to multiple vendors are

Inconsistent Service Delivery Levels

Every vendor has a different level of service they provide. When outsourcers face issues with the level of service provided there needs to be a well defined escalation matrix to fall back on. Given the maturity of the Outsourced Sales & Marketing space, not every vendor has it that well defined. Added to this, often there is no mechanism to check whether the issues raised have been resolved or the service levels expected have been met.

Lack of Business Intelligence

One of the biggest challenges that a multi vendor environment poses to organization is retaining Business intelligence. Data is spread across vendors and it’s hard to get an overview of the Sales & Marketing organization’s activities. Outsourcers often receive very different reports from each vendor and data aggregation & analysis becomes a time and labor intensive process.

The key to managing the multi vendor environments effectively is to use a combination of technology (centralized data), metrics definition, tight looped monitoring & best in class engagement models.

Nitin Pangam

Director- QEDbaton

Outsourced Sales & Marketing: Vendor Selection & Management

In a recent survey we conducted, we asked respondents about the factors that governed their decision to outsource Sales & Marketing activities. An overwhelming, 70% of the respondents mentioned that the top reasons for going with a vendor were that

• The vendor brought fresh views & objectivity to the activity
• The vendor had knowledge of best practices, better defined processes & technology

The ones that were not in favor of going with the vendor reasoned saying that

• They had lesser control over the outsourced activity
• Vendors had a problem with delivering complex pitches
• In house resources helped retain knowledge within the organization

We have come a long way in the Outsourced Sales & Marketing (OSM) space. Today, technology enables outsourcers to retain control over the vendor’s activities and ensure that they institutionalize the intelligence that the vendor’s teams are capturing. There are a variety of vendors specializing in activities across the spectrum. Leveraging the right set of vendors in executing your Sales & Marketing strategy goes a long way in deciding the outcome of your activities. Selection criteria play a huge role. Over the years of having worked with multiple companies in this space, I have seen that the top criteria to consider while outsourcing Sales & Marketing activities are as follows

• Does the vendor understand my Sales & Marketing strategy for the year?
• Does the vendor have the knowledge of the best practices of these activities?
• Does the vendor have well defined processes for every activity?
• Does the vendor have the right measurables to measure the success of every activity?
• Does the vendor have the right tools to measure them and report?

You might find that not all vendors will score on all fronts across activities. This gap will lead you to choose multiple vendors to manage your Sales & Marketing activities. Vendor Management emerges as a problem. Read about how to manage multiple vendor environments for Sales & Marketing activities in my next post.

Nitin Pangam

Director- QEDbaton