The advantages of near-sourcing: freeing up your people to focus on the things that matter

One of the key preoccupations of any CMO or Head of Marketing is ‘have I got the right people focused on the right things, am I really using my people to best effect?’. Marketing near-sourcing can help to answer this question by providing a means to tap into a talent pool that, until now, has been difficult for marketing leaders to access.

The workload imposed on marketing teams across the asset management industry has never been higher and this, at a time when resource levels are stagnating or declining. In all but the best resourced teams, we see employees stretched thinly, trying to fulfil both the execution and maintenance of existing marketing collaterals and the development of strategic initiatives that will help ensure the profitable growth of the business. Now more than ever, it is critical to be sure that your resources are focused on the right work and are doing it the right way.

From personal experience, we know that it is quite easy to skim over this simple question, as a negative response is often to open a can of worms. However,we would argue that it is likely to be critical to the future success of your team, and to really come to a balanced point of view, you need to reflect objectively on the following 5 questions:

1. What are the right skills and experience needed to undertake a specific task?
2. Do I have enough of that skill and experience to meet the demands of the business?
3. If not, am I allocating over- or under-skilled team members to cover the need?
4. If they didn’t have to do that work, would I prefer them to work on other tasks?
5. If they did, would this add greater value to the firm?

Marketing near-sourcing is a viable solution for many marketing teams facing these issues and provides a means to tap into a talent pool that, until now, has been difficult for marketing leaders to access. The comparatively low cost of these services opens the opportunity to exploit near-sourcing as a strategic option allowing managers to consider outsourcing often-repetitive, executional work that until now, has been executed inhouse or with relatively high-cost outsource partners in the home-market. Tasks such as desk-top publishing, layouting, design, presentation beautification, updating web pages, social media execution and monitoring and so on, can be deployed to a near-source partner in a low-cost location that offers the skills, professionalism and quality equal to those available on the ‘home’ market and at a highly economic cost.

In here’s the crux: deploying executional tasks to be managed by right-skilled team members in a low-cost location allows you to free up the time of home based, highly skilled and experienced resources, to focus more time and effort on strategic initiatives and activities that will help drive the growth and prosperity of your firm.

Put simply, it’s about allocating the right work to the right skills-set in the right location at the right price, while increasing the motivation of your team by focusing them on work that really has a high value impact on the business.