SEO spells opportunity for solution providers

It seems that outsourcing has become de rigueur these days in
just about all business sectors. And the solution provider or system integrator
community is set to benefit from latent areas like sales enablement outsourcing
(SEO) in the coming months.

"This is one area where there is a lot of potential that
will be unleashed in the coming months. The concept of SEO will benefit the
overall ecosystem including solution providers or systems integrators who
typically bundle different applications to form a single solution for their set
of end customers," informed Harsh Vinayak, VP-Business Operations, Keane
Worldzen, which is the BPO-focused arm of Keane Inc.

The concept of SEO, though still in its infancy, is
continuously being fanned by companies trying to do better with their sales
efforts. There is a distinct advantage in outsourcing part of a business
function to focused organisations that specialize in a particular aspect of one's
business.

India is already considered to be a global hub when it comes
to getting outsourcing work done. With SEO opening up, more solution providers
would be required to weave different customer facing applications into solutions
that can help in terms of easing out different parts of a sales process for
their set of end customers, in a better way.

"The number of things that demand a salesperson's
attention is almost unbelievable. Prospecting for new business via telemarketing
could be a full-time job. Then, of course, there is maintenance of different
accounts, building relationships with existing clients, keeping up-to-date files
and conducting sales calls on prospects. All these things typically form part of
sales enablement outsourcing," Vinayak added.

So in order to get more sales companies are just about
starting to outsource big chunk of their sales enablement to various agencies.
"In order to bring in more profitable business, we first need to know who
to target for getting business. The overall objective of SEO is to inject
business intelligence within the sales operations of a company," he added.

In addition to lead generation, some companies also provide a
variety of sales activity functions, such as database cleansing, sales missions,
trade-show follow-up services, direct mail follow-up programs, customer
satisfaction surveys, customer opinion polls, internal employee surveys and
mystery shopping as well.

ZIA ASKARI