Sales force outsourcing is not a new idea. It has been a dwelling practice in small and big businesses alike. Sales agents, distributors and resellers are the most common set ups in sales force outsourcing.

This industry however has been threatened with the rapid rise of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) forcing Sales Force Outsourcing to be strategic alternative to indirect channels and sales agents.

Two models of sales force outsourcing:

There are two models of sales force outsourcing. They are sales agents & distributors resellers and BPO solution of Sales Force Outsourcing.

Sales Agents

A sales agent is someone who is self-employed and is the person who sells products in behalf of a company. Most often than not, the terms of payment, is on commission basis though there are instances wherein a sales agent has basic salary.

When delving into retail or manufacturing, sales agents usually carry multiple products and have established contacts. One may think that sales force outsourcing is a good option as solution. Yes it is a viable solution but this too has its own limitations.

Help desk outsourcing may perhaps sound like an unusual concept.

Then again, by subcontracting some of the phone calls made to your company’s help desk, you can considerably drive down IT expenditure.

In point of fact, research has revealed that roughly one out of three calls received by the help desk is related to forgotten or lost passwords.

For such instances, companies are required to pay for employee downtime as they attempt to access the system. On top of that, more important issues may need to be put off as the technicians struggle to make system access available to clients.

The basic elements of this type of service are the following request management, incident management, resolver group monitoring, reports and analytics, and global sourcing.

The highlights of help desk outsourcing:

In help desk outsourcing, productivity is undoubtedly protected. Your employees, as well as your company as a whole, also become more efficient at providing quality services in help desk outsourcing. Aside from that, you can also rest assured that your end-users will get the support they need whenever, wherever.

Outsourcing, specifically offshore outsourcing is growing at a promising rate every year and shows no signs of slowing. Although some organizations have apprehensions on taking on this venture, it has not stopped the development of offshore outsourcing.

However, just like with anything else in the business world, there are always risks entailed with every endeavor and offshore outsourcing is not an exception. There are quite a few risks that organizations which, practice offshore outsourcing or those who are planning to, should know about.

Risks in offshore outsourcing:

Data Protection

Security practices differ from country to country that is why it is a must to check whether the vendors you have partner up with has the kind of protection and security practices that your company requires. When working on international business, the risk of security leakages is high.

Although this is not really that much of a major concern in offshore outsourcing, data protection and security should be implemented as much as possible.

Cost-Reduction Expectations

Organizations automatically assume that they will be able to save a lot basing on a man-to-man comparison. This should not be the case since there are hidden costs that underlie in different offshore outsourcing models.

The definition of outsourcing is to assign certain functions or processes of a business to a 3rd party organization that provides services related to that specific function.

This is done by the virtue of an agreement manifested by a contract that indicates the terms of services, which includes the scope and limitations.

In this contract, the service provider gets to make use of the resources of the client company while the client company acquires the services from the provider company.

The history of outsourcing goes a long a way back. Modern outsourcing started with manufacturing outsourcing, which in the past involved big company names such as Coca-Cola.

It outsourced supply chains so that they may be able to have more time to focus on the marketing aspect of the business. From this simple beginning, outsourcing has gone a long way since then.

Today, Business Process Outsourcing is growing at an enormous rate. It encompasses back office functions being outsourced offshore. These functions include HR management services and accounting services.

These past few decades, outsourcing has gone through a lot of changes. From doing simple tasks and functions, service providers nowadays are given more serious and critical jobs related to the company.

About 15 years ago, the concept of outsourcing was fairly unheard of in the business society.

As of today, it has become a widespread custom that allows companies, both big and small, to focus on income-augmenting activities and core competencies.

Then again, like any other field of business, companies will surely come across a number of outsourcing pros and cons.

These days, “outsourcing” has become a standard term in the media. This is mainly because of the fact that numerous big companies are reaching out to countries like China, India and several other nations in order to take advantage of low-wage employees.

Although various types of businesses have resulted to large sums of saving by subcontracting activities to overseas workers, the majority of outsourcing endeavors are not worldwide in nature.

Companies typically outsource a wide array of functions. Some of the commonly outsourced business activities include human resources and payroll management, call center operations, technology, public relations and marketing, and housekeeping services. Most of the time, tasks that call for special skills, legal know-how, or regulatory expertise are well suited for outsourcing.

Outsourcing was once the playground of big players in the economy. With the dawn of the Internet however, the smaller fishes have been given the chance and opportunity to take part in the outsourcing business. “But what is the big fuss about outsourcing anyway” Outsourcing, in today’s economy, can provide companies, big or small, benefits.

Here are the benefits of outsourcing:

Cost Advantages

It is one of the benefits of outsourcing. This can be done through outsourcing to other countries, such as the Philippines and India. You can avail of services at a lower cost without sacrificing the quality since they also provide the same level of quality, sometimes even higher, to outsourcing services in the United States.

Examples of the services that are usually outsourced in other countries are teleradiology, call center services, and medical billing. By doing this, companies can cut down their costs to as high as one hundred percent when outsourcing. This is probably the best benefit companies can get when companies outsource.

Huge amounts of savings

It is one of the benefits of outsourcing. Savings does not just pertain to money. When outsourcing, companies can also save on time, effort, manpower and infrastructure.

When you were just starting out with your business, everything seems to be very simple. You only concentrate on the core business activities. But as your business grows, things get more complicated. Instead of being able to focus on the main business, you become more swamped with other aspects of the business, which can be considered as non-core functions – time consuming and sometimes irrelevant. One of these is the payroll outsourcing.

Payroll:

Payrolls, even for the experienced business proprietors, dealing with payrolls can be a tasking job. Keeping track of payroll changes and regulations in withholding tables and calculating amounts can be a time consuming and tedious job.

Doing the payroll, while working with the business’ core activities, will sometimes easily lead to mistakes. Another function in preparing payrolls is the preparing of local, state and federal taxes.

For small and starting out companies, it is not unusual for owners to spend two to eight hours preparing the payroll this is if it is done manually. Mistakes are also uncommon given the fact that you are multi-tasking.

The consequences of these mistakes are costly. An employee receiving checks with errors will result to decrease morale of employee, and may hold grudges against the management.

Outsourcing has different dimensions. On one hand, it could mean obtaining talent, skills or information not present within the company.

It could also be defined as reallocating the management and operation of a business activity to a different service provider.

Some also define outsourcing as subcontracting non-revenue operations to consultants and professionals. Note that all the descriptions seem to involve a movement of services from one group to another, which is what outsourcing basically is.

Here are the different types of outsourcing:

There are different kinds of assistance and tasks that can be outsourced. Some of the more popular ones are Information Technology (IT) Outsourcing and Human Resource (HR) Outsourcing. Another kind would be Application Outsourcing. Each of these provides a number of advantages to the client organization; however, there can also be certain drawbacks.

Application Outsourcing

Application Management involves the support, preservation and development of existing services. When a company has activities that provide no revenue, or has problems with regards to productivity or the quality, predictability and responsiveness of a service, enterprises turn to Application Outsourcing. Application Outsourcing is actually one of the first types of outsourcing.

Everyday the economies of the world are become more and more interdependent.

Businesses all over the globe have gone through a lot of changes over the last few years.

The rise of the information superhighway has paved a path for the outsourcing industry to grow.

Through this, more and more business processes are being outsourced to destinations beyond the national domain of the main companies.

The effectiveness of outsourcing as part of a business model has proven to be feasible and is directly related to growth and productivity.

Why India?

Productivity and growth can somewhat be called the teaser benefits of outsourcing and the country at the number one spot that provides these two is India. All over the United States and the United Kingdom, India is the preferred destination for outsourcing assignments.

In recent researches, forty four percent of the world’s offshore outsourcing back office and software services are in India. It has also been noted that as many as 400 of the Fortune 500 companies have their own branches in India or are outsourcing to India utilizing Indian technology companies.

Outsourcing is a normal part of today’s modern economy. Companies and organizations hire services of other companies to do specific works. Not just that, there are a lot of books, articles, literatures and seminars with outsourcing as the topic.

Outsourcing garners both positive and negative feedbacks. It has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, most of the time, the advantages or disadvantages depend on the situation.

Pros of outsourcing:

Outsourcing has been the source of many debates and discussions by both workers and the media, especially in developed countries. These kinds of discussions however may only be temporary and may die down in the near future as the perspective of people mature.

One way of looking positively at outsourcing is the mere fact that it can help companies and organizations cut cost as well as it can give them the edge over other competing companies. Outsourcing also provides opportunities for other people to showcase their skills and talents in producing high quality products.

Basically, the main advantage of outsourcing is in the facet of finance. By outsourcing several functions of a company, operational costs can be cut down. In fact, operational costs can be cut down to as high as fifty percent when outsourcing.