Outsourcing is a term that is often affiliated with the workload that enterprises delegate to an external partner to cut costs, or to address internal skill gaps. Since the inception of outsourcing, this model has been evolving and is undergoing significant transformation in the digital era.

It all started with companies like EDS outsourcing their enterprise IT Operations to IT partners for different “swim lanes” such as desktop, data center, network, service desk, etc. With the rise of digital, enterprises are forced to reform into a technology-dependent organization. This technology pressure led to limitations in in-house workloads and thereby expanding the outsourcing business boundaries.

While the expansion of outsourcing boundaries might sound great for service providers, they must realize that enterprise decision-making has become tougher too. New age CIOs view towards outsourcing partnership matured from workload support partner to transformation journey partner.

Technology Service Providers that have realigned their value proposition to become a full-scale transformation partner for digital enterprises are the ones that are winning huge deals. Here are a few trends that are changing the landscape and setting new guidelines for outsourcing business:

Understanding the skill challenges

Companies are hunting to acquire the right skill sets, but unfortunately, these skills are in shortage, and even when they are available, they come at a premium cost. Companies don’t want to delay their product development citing skill shortage and began outsourcing their development workloads. Technology Service Providers need to understand the critical skill-gaps of their prospects and pitch their value proposition around it for successful sales enablement.

Strategic Alignments

Traditionally, cost savings was the main reason to outsource. But the view towards cost and ROI changed in the digital era. A clear vision for the future, backed by well-aligned investments today, is the strategic roadmap for sustainable growth.

Every digital intention has a back-end ROI vision that enterprises expect their partners to be aligned with. So, a cost-driven business proposal could easily go-down against a solution/value-driven proposal that was framed with their client’s digital intentions in mind.

Data is everything

Companies can only reap the benefits of digitization by decoding the growing volume of big data. Data getting siloed is every enterprise’s challenge and demystifying this challenge will open new avenues for SPs. Cleaning up big data to create meaningful data lakes/warehouses that can mean a portfolio of use-cases is key for digital transformation.

Automation is Vital But what to Automate

Be it manufacturing or a back-office process in Insurance, automation has its way to penetrate especially with new-age technologies like RPA, AI/ML, etc. But enterprises fail to understand that Automation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Breaking down the workloads of a job role like Claims specialist into individual modules and taking an agile approach to automate critical modules can reap better benefits.

Technology SPs that help their clients crack the process automation code by looking at a job-role/process level rather than trying to fit a readymade automation solution are the deal-winners. It is important to empower the enterprises with the alignment of AI/ML and RPA based on the need rather than solution availability.

Outsourcing is not limited to technology

Significantly, outsourcing in this digital era has expanded to a process-driven approach from its traditional approach. This approach facilitates the outsourcing of various crucial business functions in finance, sales, and marketing rather than being stringent to technology. Technology SPs are tailoring solutions for enterprises looking to strengthen their other key areas to achieve business growth and sustain in the market for the long term.

Digitization has directed the companies to fast-forward their business processes to achieve success, making outsourcing one of the crucial activities. Leaders choose their outsourcing partners with their strategic roadmap and ROI on the mind.

It’s imperative for the outsourcing companies to set their guidelines to address these challenges faced by organizations. Some of the key sales enablement pointers that they need to prioritize while building their value propositions are:

• Identify key digital skill gaps and frame service/solution offerings addressing those gaps
• Value-proposition aligned to the ROI vision of the enterprise enable long-term deals
• Being a data enablement partner paves the path to become an end-to-end transformation partner
• Identifying the critical process for automation sets the benchmark rather than integrating readymade solutions
• Process-driven approach rather than a cost-effective approach strengthening other business functional areas

Our AI-driven sales enablement platform, Draup empowers sales executives of major outsourcing companies with comprehensive account and stakeholder intelligence to enable microtargeting. With more than 2500+ unique data attributes of global companies covering Vendor and Partner Relationships, Technology and R&D Footprint, etc. Technology SPs can gain a deeper understanding of their prospects.