Spanning the test of time, an article in the Harvard Business Review from March 2005 stated that while companies have long outsourced creative, right-brain marketing activities, such as advertising and promotion campaigns, the “smarticles” at HRB predicted a fundamental change was under way, that increasingly, firms are farming out tactical marketing operations and analytics as well, what they refer to as “left-brain marketing activities.
Guess What? They were right…
Their prediction was also supported by other analytics:
- Forrester Research survey of 650 B2B marketing executives found that 53% aimed to outsource more than half their marketing activities in 2004.
- Forrester also projected that CRM outsourcing in the United States will quadruple to $4.6 billion by 2008.
- They were right btw…
- The British firm Astron Group forecasts that customer database and lead management outsourcing is growing 10% annually.
- They were wrong, it grew by a larger %…
In the article, HBR begged the question: What’s going on?
Their research identified a two-part answer to this question:
- Outsourcing can save time, money, improve quality and consistency.
- Outsourcing can provide increasingly critical “left-brain marketing expertise” that many companies lack to perform tactical duties, such as:
- sending newsletters,
- email campaigns,
- customer database management and
- analysis.
Marketers and law firm leaders, as they should, tend to be “right-brain creatives” with a fondness for making rain and developing mass-marketing campaigns when what’s needed are the “left-brain doers”, so critical in getting the job done on a consistently, consistent basis.
ProfessionalWORX was founded to support this process. Please contact us here to discuss how we can support you in growing your business.