Product Roundup: Outsourcing for Growth
Thousands of growing businesses are outsourcing such areas as Payroll, Information Technology (IT), Web/E-mail Hosting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Human Resources (HR).
You can maximize your benefits by picking an outsourcing partner who:
- Is one of the leaders in the specific field of service.
- Has a stable record of growth, and sufficient resources to weather economic ups and downs.
- Has a well-established program to serve your type and size of organization.
- Follows the most stringent security practices and standards.
- Has a solution that is scalable to fit your anticipated growth.
- Is ready to maintain a level of communication that is in your comfort zone, and offers management features that will enable you to control important aspects of the process.
Some industry experts call this kind of high-touch outsourcing "out-tasking" to emphasize the executive-to-expert nature of this relationship.
Outsourcing Pays
One pervasive form of outsourcing that is almost invisible is the offsite preparation of paychecks. ADP provides turnkey payroll services for hundreds of thousands of businesses, eliminating the need to track and manage many of the details involved in this essential but time-consuming task. ADP serves both large and small organizations, but its Emerging Business Services (EBS) focuses on the needs of smaller businesses (from 1 to 49 employees).
Outsourcing of sales automation and CRM has also seen tremendous growth. Salesforce.com now handles these tasks for thousands of large and small organizations. Its Team Edition (less than $1,000 per year for 5 users) provides a shared system for customer information that lets sales, marketing, and support staffs share up-to-the-minute information, activities, and events from any Internet-connected computer. The low administrative overhead and the ease-of-use of this application make it easier to get consistent user "buy-in," the lack of which has been the Achilles' heel of many CRM deployments.
Rule Your Domain
A Web site domain and e-mail addresses based on your company name or brand are powerful marketing tools. A domain such as "yourcompany.com" makes it easy for customers to communicate with you and your employees, and provides a big company presence online for growing organizations. Register.com, for instance, lets you provide geographically dispersed employees with a company-specific e-mail address (e.g., sales@yourco.com) without the hassle and expense of maintaining mail servers and remote access. This service costs about $55 a year, including domain registration.
Kick It Up a Notch
More complex applications can also be outsourced to provide access to software that would be difficult to manage in-house. Velocity Outsourcing, for example, combines the technical resources of Verizon IT with the business savvy of Lawson software to deliver rapidly deployable, scalable, industry-specific solutions to rapidly growing companies in professional services, retail, and other areas.
As a smaller organization grows toward enterprise status, it can also call on the vast expertise of companies, such as Mellon HR and Deloitte Consulting, to help it manage assets and increase productivity.
Register.com: Launch Your Web Business
Register.com (NASDAQ:RCOM) specializes in helping companies build Web businesses to reach the millions of prospective customers in the expanding Internet marketplace. Our industry-leading customer support and intuitive management tools enable our clients to create and control their own sites without advanced technical skills.
Register.com can help you find and register your own unique Web address (domain name), build and manage your Web site, set up professional e-mail services, and even find new customers through popular search engines. We offer clear, step-by-step instructions to make it easy to launch your Web business, and our expert support technicians are always a toll-free call (or click) away in case you need a hand.
If time or budget constraints have delayed your plans to offer products and services in the online world, please visit www.Register.com today to find out how easy it can be to launch your Web business.
