Quick Links

5 Things SMB’s/SME’s should Outsource

  • By ProcureDesk
  • April 05,2017
  • 10 min read

5 Things SMB’s/SME’s should Outsource

SMB outosourcing

Like large businesses, small and medium businesses (SMBs) can strategically use SMB outsourcing techniques for reducing their cost and find partners who can help support the growth of the small and medium business.  As a stable source of job creation, small and medium businesses make an important social function by absorbing surplus workforce in processes of transition and transformation state and social businesses.

I hope you find next five tips helpful in a determination of  strategy for outsourcing the key support functions of your SMB.

1. Payroll

Payroll is one of the most outsourced operations in the business world for a long time. Many large corporations’ titans such as Paychex, Inc. and Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) can be held responsible for cutting checks for businesses large and small for years.

However, as SMBs have increasingly plucked out market share from the big corporations, large payroll firms have had to advance their service to meet the needs of these smaller clients. Simultaneously, technology progress has led to feasible payroll software solutions, and vendors have to meet the needs of SMBs who feel underserved by the payroll beasts.

As a result, today’s SMBs have a wide range of payroll options. First, we have in-house administrators who usually employ payroll software to do the work. Second, we can find large, traditional payroll services—and a bunch of smaller competitors striving for their piece of the outsourcing pie.

Payroll is one of the largest expenses that SMBs have. It can also be the company’s enormous headache if it isn’t done correctly. Whenever is your payroll done by a member of your team or a service provider, he or she must understand the relevant tax laws and regulations-they alter remarkably from state to state. It can be an administrative disaster, and that kind of mistakes could mean a phone call or visit from the IRS.

2. Accounting

When we are talking about outsourcing, finance and accounting (F&A) are one of the first processes that are under consideration.

As the market develops, SMBs are constantly seeking for fresh ideas and hoping to find new answers to streamline F&A processes. They are spreading outsourcing to new areas F&A, and new industries.

Today, a vast number of SMB’s are outsourcing the all-important in-house inspecting function. These shifts are outgrowths of their desire to overstep from elementary transactional processes, accounts payable (for example) to even greater and centralize functions such as prognosis, budgets and internal audits.

There are two pointers, which indicate that your SMB is competent and capable to handle F&A processes:

the capability to simplify
the ability to standardize
These crucial implementations provide profit that is multifarious. There is an inflow of the money, service, and information. With the reduction of F&A processes, SMBs have realized that they are well placed to bring down the cycle necessary to close books. Even more, they are in a favorable position to evolve upgraded benchmark and standard financial processes that enable them to meet the necessary regulatory requirements.

As mentioned, amplifying the boundaries of outsourcing can boost benefits. For example, F&A industry experts say that if a SMB outsources either accounts payable or receivables, its benefits are making the most of the money at its disposal, and there with advancing the company’s internal processes.

Enterprises across the world are looking for new and improved ways of leveraging data, so as to harvest the benefits from them. In keeping with this goal, SMB s are employing the outsourcers who have exceptional skills, combined with technological resources.

Transformative technology and tools that would help improve SMB business performance, reporting, insights, process efficiency and limpidity are essential for SMBs. New generation F&A outsourcing supply the company with capability to access add-on tools, which will improve existing technology and take advantage of new technologies such as mobile, cloud, and  robotics automation. With these tools, SMBs. are in a position to achieve much better insights and upgrade productivity, and all of that during working within the parameters of their existing systems.

3. IT Infrastructure Management

The most common reason why SMBs outsource their information technology needs is that they experience fewer problems. Of course, this is an oversimplified and extracted incapacitation of a complex issue. If you want to make a proficient business decision regarding whether or not to outsource your SMB’s IT, you need to back it up with supporting information.

An IT department is made up of a composite environment of hardware, software, and computer networks, which allow you to perform crucial business functions and work flows such as customer relationship management (CRM), accounting and financial processes (ERP), email, and document creation.

Your SMB’s success depends on it being able to use these actions reliably and efficiently. For example, it is imperative for companies to receive and send emails to communicate with partners and vendors, employees, and clients, in order to fulfill product and service orders. How long can your company operate without such an essential function? Additionally, you need to be able to access financial data and customer information to run your business. So, if you want to protect these processes, you need to perform many back-end functions, including server monitoring, data backup & recovery, security, and antivirus protection.

With this large and fundamental undertaking, is it achievable for an SMB to totally take-on the tasks and responsibilities mandatory to run its own IT department? All of mentioned could not be done without a enormous commitment and investment in IT infrastructure, talent, money and time. Training IT employees, maintaining IT devices and keeping technology cutting-edge are huge responsibility for most SMBs.

4. Procurement of Goods and Services

Procurement outsourcing for SMBs is created to help the small business owner take advantage of many of the strategic assets larger corporations have been using for years. In fact, a large percentage of all big companies plan to increase their usage of outsourcing. Entrepreneur.com recently said, “Entrepreneurs have long seen outsourcing as a strategy reserved for big business, but technology has made it a more accessible tool for small businesses.” Times certainly are changing.

The most of the SMBs have very limited procurement support, which is usually a mutual resource to other departments as well. Procurement leaders already know that they can expect large talent gap in the near future due to baby boomers retiring and small companies will be the most because they have limited resources to attract talent. Procurement outsourcing can solve this problem by allowing access to industry experts on demand.

Adding additional inventory for SMBs represents a major risk because of the fluctuations in business. More employees often mean more risk. Having procurement outsourcing can help with cutting down the risk since you get the gain of the service without the further overhead expense.

Any small company can use increased purchasing power, but how can they create negotiation leverage on their own with limited purchase volume? This is an enormous benefit to using procurement outsourcing. There is strategic collaboration in place to provide prompt savings across many goods and services, which most small companies are already using.

In addition, procurement outsourcing allows SMBs to tap into competitive assets most of their competitors are not using. Many good and creative solutions can come from association with the supplier network, which is exactly the place where the procurement outsourcing lives. Therefore, new product development, exclusive distribution, packaging, inventory solutions, and financing are all fields that can help to separate small companies from the competition.

Using the best methods often can help with driving cost savings. The cost savings can also come thanks to current solution providers without the additional overheads. Needs and technology change over time and services from providers are continuously changing but most contracts stay in place costing SMBs huge amounts of money simply because they don’t localize these changes. In most of the cases, procurement outsourcing even pays for itself through cost saving divisions creating no risk for the small company’s owner.

There has never been a better time for SMBs to take advantage of procurement outsourcing in order to develop the best solutions, which can help separate them from the competition and increase their cash flow. These principles apply to practically every industry. Procurement outsourcing allows small company owners to get approach to many benefits that larger companies use without any risk.

5. Lead Generation for business

The sales leads are the lifeblood of new business development for SMBs. All companies require a reliable and consistent stream of business leads. The most common options are outsourcing the lead development process to lead generation companies, requiring sales team to create and qualify their own business leads or developing a lead generation department within the company.

The two internal options can create their own problems because lead generation lies outside of the core aptitude of most companies. That is the reason why outsourcing your lead generation to lead generation companies can make the most sense for your team.

There are two main types of lead generation companies:

  • Major account lead generation companies
  • Small sale lead generation companies

Major account lead generation companies usually look for the clients that sell “complex” B2B products or services. That targeted crowd used to generate business leads incorporate the high-level “decision makers” C-level contacts and VPs – upper management of the company. The sales chain on these business leads are mostly long and require various sales calls over a certain number of weeks and months. The style of selling is professional, oriented to solutions, and generally focused on return on investment (ROI) and the possible value to the customer’s business. This target market usually buys items with the higher price, than the accounts served by the small sale lead generation companies, and the amount of these major account B2B sales leads is important.

Small sale lead generation businesses target smaller purchases, mostly under $10,000. The target audience is still B2B but their sales chain is much shorter. In fact, since the dollar figure is lower there can be little or no sales chain at all because this type of “commodity” purchase cry out for an easier “yes” or “no” approach of making decisions. Often the level of contact can make the buying decision because the product or service is not affecting various departments.

Before choosing a lead generation company, you need to do some research and even interview a few different lead generation companies in order to see which solution is the best fit for your needs. Figure out which company is most similar to your target market, overall sales style, and company’s culture. Every lead generation business needs to serve as a logical extension of your company considering the competence, customer service savvy, and professionalism, which you would expect from your own internal sales force.

Conclusion

SMEs are already the foundation of most domestic economies. With the right tools and support, they could well become the foundation of sustainable economic growth too.

Basic characteristics of small and medium enterprises and entrepreneurs, with is primarily of their size, flexibility, propensity innovative and risky ventures and greater opportunity for specialization, enabling these companies to be much easier than big business the system adjust to continuous changes in consumer demand and business conditions in the global market. In this way, small and medium encourage enterprises to strengthen competition that results in improving the quality of products and services and lower prices, the development of innovation and new technologies and economic growth of the national economy in general.

What you should do now

Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways we can help you scale your purchasing and Accounts payable process.

  1. Claim your Free Strategy Session. If you’d like to work with us to implement a process to control spending, and spend less time matching invoices, claim your Free Strategy Session. One of our process experts will understand your current purchasing situation and then suggest practical strategies to reduce the purchase order approval cycle.
  2. If you’d like to know the maturity of your purchasing process, download our purchasing process grader and identify exactly what you should be working on next to improve your purchasing and AP process.
  3. If you’d like to enhance your knowledge about the purchasing process, check out our blog or Resources section.
  4. If you know another professional who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter.