It’s a new world out there, and the traditional office is a thing of the past. These days, employees working for organizations across every industry are often working remotely, scattered across the globe. It’s a great way to optimize resources and ensure the best possible levels of expertise in your teams. But how can businesses continue to function as a cohesive unit in this kind of chaotic operating environment?
The key is to make sure the technology solutions they use are unified, even if the locations are not. So teams may be dispersed around the world, but everyone is using the same solution to collaborate and coordinate. And a simple way to make sure people and processes are fully integrated is to provide a single, full-service solution that everyone can depend on to get their projects done.
Full-service solution providers offer a variety of services designed to help businesses run more efficiently. To distinguish themselves from one another, they often partner with specific brands that focus on a particular facet of the business process. There’s no end to the variety of services these types of vendors can represent, including:
- Customer acquisition and customer relationship management (CRM)
- Web design and development
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Mobile application development
Such solution providers offer marketing automation support, and often provide training and consultation for their service areas as well, so businesses can focus on their own industry rather than having to develop expertise in entirely new areas. The full-service provider can have many other distinguishing factors in addition to their choice of partners. Some serve niche markets like open source, and many choose to distinguish themselves through outside activities, like offering business advice to new clients or by targeting specific audiences, like VCs.
But what the solution providers do that’s often the most important service of all is to take the work out of managing processes in the business environment. A full-service vendor is capable of integrating several solutions into one cohesive program and recording every interaction in one convenient location. The better vendors also offer customization capabilities, so you can work with them to build solutions that don’t come standard.
Imagine a world where you have one contact to call when you need help with your marketing automation tool. One place to go for a mobile app redesign. One team to consult when you want to launch a social media campaign. One request to make when you want to connect the results to your CRM. Workflow is streamlined, ROI increases, and time-to-market accelerates rapidly.
Thinking about using a full-service vendor? Check out Act-On’s partners to find a solution provider that can help you get all of the benefits of marketing automation – while also helping your business thrive in this new business world.
Lauren Katz is a public relations and communications specialist with experience across a multitude of industries. She is the communications manager for OSSCube, which delivers integrated enterprise business solutions to organizations around the world including industry leaders like Intel, Google, Yahoo, Trend Micro, LinkedIn, and Bigadda.com. You can read more of Lauren’s work at osscube.com/blog or follow her on Twitter @LaurEKatz