Balancing resources: do you have the right people in the right areas to achieve your targets?
As your business grows and changes, your existing team might find themselves overwhelmed with the sheer volume of work required to keep up with delivery. Balancing resources effectively is challenging for start-ups and established businesses alike, and leaders find it challenging to navigate who to hire, where, and when?
A good hiring strategy considers your overarching business strategy and your existing teams’ skills and current delivery challenges.
What are your goals and ambitions?
If you’re planning three new product launches within the next year, it makes sense to expand your product and technical teams and add the necessary resource to ensure you achieve your roadmap. If your goal is growth, you need to maximise existing customer value and ensure your sales team can close enough new business to hit those targets.
Say you want to improve customer experience. You need to invest in your marketing and digital capabilities and customer service teams to create a consistent customer experience that inspires long-term loyalty.
By analysing your plans for the future, it becomes easier to map the skills you already have against what you’re going to need. It would be best to consider your existing challenges and how resources support or constrain your efforts in each area of the business. If you’re always falling short of your sales target, you need to examine the reasons why and decide whether you have the ability to ramp up internally or if you perhaps need to outsource parts of the process to an external expert. Equally, if you’re already experiencing IT challenges and plan to grow your staff by adding new team members to specific departments, how will the IT team cope with the additional demand posed by these extra users overloading the system. So, it’s important to consider the “downstream” impact on other departments of adding new resources to the company.
Where are your current skills gaps?
Suppose you’re already struggling to deliver for your customers due to a shortage of skilled customer service representatives. Business growth will only exacerbate this issue as you add new customers and develop new products and services, putting additional pressure on your customer service team to deliver to a growing client base and across a broader number of sales products or services.
If you have a small customer service team that is successfully hitting their SLAs for 10 out of 12 months of the year, it doesn’t make sense to hire additional team members for the other two months as they will either be twiddling their thumbs outside of your peak demand months, or you will be laying them off as call volumes drop back to normal levels. In this scenario, outsourcing to get the cover you need during those two months is a great option, allowing you to scale up flexibly, when you need to, while preserving high customer service standards.
What are the critical roles you need to protect?
There are some businesses with a loyal, core team that is willing to wear many different hats. These talented and flexible individuals prove that attitude and passion are vital to getting the job done, but their focus can become too broad as your business grows. It’s unfair to expect them to keep delivering in areas where they are not an expert. If the pressure became too much for them and they decide to leave the business, this could harm delivery and productivity. Retaining your best talent requires some forethought, and it’s a vital part of futureproofing your business.
By investing in resources in their business area, you will allow them to focus on their core responsibilities and lead change rather than getting bogged down with delivery.
Why building your sales team is not a luxury:
For technical business leaders, it’s tough to see the value of sales when the focus during the organic growth phase has been solely on developing the product, service or app. But the fact is that even the best product in the world will only take you so far; there will come the point in every business’ journey where you need to seriously consider the outbound sales strategy. That means investing in a dedicated sales team who can bring in consistent new business to allow the company to keep on growing. Building a high-performing sales team doesn’t happen overnight. Still, companies that want to trial expert sales resources and see the impact on their sales numbers will benefit from working with an outsourced sales partner, especially one who already has the engine room to deliver against ambitious targets.
We can help
Forrest Contact offers a full range of contact centre services across Australia, including telemarketing, lead generation, appointment setting, inbound and outbound customer service, customer engagement and outsourced sales solutions. We help leading brands in Australia and overseas bring their sales ambitions into reality. If you are looking for an outsourced partner to help you ramp up your sales resource, get in touch today by calling 1300 396 888 or sending us an email at enquiries@forrestcontact.com.au.
