I remember reading Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat and thinking, "Oh so that's what we do" ;-)

There seems to be so many different labels in this sector I thought it might be worth exploring a few to see which is the best to tag us with.

We fit into "Outsourcing" as companies use us to fulfil a business process which they would normally handle in-house: namely, business development, lead generation and appointment setting. There's nothing new here, people have been doing this for some time and outbound telemarketing was probably one of the first to be outsourced.

As a company that works on an associate model, most of our people would fit with the "Homeshoring" label, that is, they work from their own homes.

And on some projects needing qualification of a large number of companies (or a very detailed and lengthy qualification process), we offshore that process ourselves to our partners in India.

The reality is that, we mix and match these services to deliver exactly what's needed for each client. Sometimes a project will start with myself to profile the target market and refine the process. Once I've done that I may use associates to help scale up the project, or offshore the project to leverage a lower cost base.

This is what they call "Bestshoring", finding the most appropriate resource for each stage of the process. Or you could just call it common sense ;-)

Labels: sales outsourcing