The CMO Manifesto: A 100-Day Action Plan for Marketing Change Agents by John Ellett

Author:John Ellett [Ellett, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2012-11-06T18:30:00+00:00

TO IN-SOURCE OR TO OUTSOURCE?

So what’s the role of your internal organization and what’s the role of your virtual organization of external partners? It’s clear you have options. You can rely on advertising agencies, interactive firms, market research firms and call center service providers to produce marketing services without actually having to develop them internally.

What should stay inside the organization and what can be delegated to an outside specialist?

Frequently the role of the outside firm is to bring a new level of expertise that is difficult to build internally. Advertising firms bring creative talent that is hard to hire (and keep) internally. Some of these activities will always be better left to outside specialists. In the case of Walgreens, the printing and production systems were optimized outside. Or take a website development project. You may not want to staff internally for the peak of a big project like that. It may make more sense to hire an outside firm that can manage projects that involve a great deal of short-term staffing and specialized skills.

By contrast other activities can eventually be brought inside. If you are trying to roll out new approaches and you aren’t sure what will ultimately become standard operating procedures you can use outside specialists that excel at those disciplines while you figure out what is going to work the best. Over time you can operationalize these activities and bring them inside. One example is social media work. There are people who understand how to do that very well and if you are just dipping your toe into the world of social media you may initially want to rely on an outside specialist. As progress is made and the work demands become clearer you can begin to hire people internally to take on the role on a day-to-day basis.

One area where questions of in-sourcing versus outsourcing get interesting is in the contact center. Many companies have come to the conclusion that they can reduce costs by outsourcing customer service and other forms of customer contact — often sending these activities offshore. What they may have missed is that these customer interactions represent an opportunity to build customer value — even up-sell and cross-sell complementary products. Whether you ultimately decide to keep these activities in-house or rely on specialists, it’s become apparent to a growing number of marketing leaders that such forms of customer contact are not something to be treated in an unserious manner.

Dell, which took a serious public relations hit in the mid-2000s when it outsourced customer service activities abroad, has since brought many of those activities back in-house and, in many cases, back onshore. The company was not about to outsource if it meant undermining the customer experience — a core factor in its brand reputation.

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