You Can’t Be Great at Everything: Let’s Fix Your Focus

Amanda Quinn 0:00
Welcome to Build a Better BPO, the podcast where we help business process outsourcers break free from the one size fits all approach and build stronger, more profitable businesses.

Milan Batinich 0:10
If you're a BPO leader looking to improve margins, reduce employee churn, and create long-term client relationships, you're in the right place.

Amanda Quinn 0:18
I'm Amanda Quinn, principal at Quinn Growth Advisors. I help BPOs refine their positioning, market their expertise, and move beyond the outdated labor arbitrage model.

Milan Batinich 0:28
And I'm Milan Batinich, CEO of Milan Motivates. I help BPOs and CX leaders build stronger, happier teams by improving employee engagements and retention.

Amanda Quinn 0:38
Each episode will bring you insights, strategies, and real-world examples to help you stand out in the BPO space, attract better fit clients, and build a more sustainable business.

Milan Batinich 0:49
We're cutting through the noise with actionable takeaways. No fluff, no vague theories, just proven strategies from industry experts and BPO leaders who are making it happen.

Amanda Quinn 0:58
So if you're ready to build a better BPO, let's dive in.

Milan Batinich 1:29
So we're not at like our home offices, which is really unique. So today's title is You Can't Be Great at Everything. Let's Fix Your Focus. So what Amanda's gonna really help you understand today is how to find your focus for your BPO and figure out how to niche down and really focus in your growth strategies.

Amanda Quinn 1:50
Helping you find better fit clients.

Milan Batinich 1:52
Yeah.

Amanda Quinn 1:53
Yeah, let's dig into it.

Milan Batinich 2:02
All right, perfect. So, Amanda, you know, you've talked to BPOs, I've talked to BPOs, we worked in the BPO industry, and you know, I hear it over and over again. People are like, well, if I niche down or if I focus, then how you know I'm gonna lose out on other deals. It just seems risky to just focus on one specific industry or market. So because that's the perception of people that it feels risky, explain to us how it really isn't risky by niching down.

Amanda Quinn 2:34
Yeah. I I say think about your own buying decisions. You want to go to an expert. You want to choose the surgeon that has done this surgery over and over again. You don't want to go to a general surgeon when you need your shoulder replaced, right? You want to you want to go to someone that you know can fix your problem. And the more that you in your firm stay trying to cater to everybody, every vertical, doing lots of different functions, the more that it's gonna be harder for the buyer to be convinced that you're the right firm for them. So as a result, you staying broad, it's costing you longer sales cycles, it's costing you poor fit clients that you may end up winning the deal and then churning out because you're not that good at doing the work for them. And your team is gonna be constantly trying to learn new things, they're not gonna feel satisfied, they're not gonna feel like they're improving. It's just this recipe for stagnation and bad results. And so, what we're here today to do is help you get more leads and the right kind of leads. And that only comes from figuring out your focus and where you can win. And I should put a caveat around this too, because I'm not advocating that the Alorica of the world change and only focus after one industry. That would be dumb. I'm talking about challenger BPOs, those that have a hundred, you know, have some campaign history, a hundred to three thousand seats, let's just say. Start you need to start somewhere. You can add other verticals and other focus areas as you go, but you need to start to grow fastest and the most profitably, you need to be really tailored and dialed in. Yeah, that makes sense.

Milan Batinich 4:23
And it's uh you had a great point about stagnation. Because even thinking about how it would affect your operational capacity and your operations team. If operations is so used to, okay, we have a hundred agents and they've all been in one industry, and that's what operations knows, and then now all of a sudden you start bringing in all these other industries. Now it's almost like they need to start over and start learning their job all over again. Not the operations piece, but that specific industry, because each industry is run a little bit differently.

Amanda Quinn 4:51
All the different KPIs of every industry, every function, the vernacular, there's so much that comes with adding a different capability or different focus area. And if you're not mindful of that, you're adding a ton of extra load and burden on your entire org from your sales team and your marketing team to your client services team, to your operations team, your recruiting team, your learning and development. Every function in your company will need to know how to do a lot of different things, but they're not going to know it that well because it's impossible to be that dialed in when you're spread really thin.

Milan Batinich 5:31
Yeah, it would be interesting to know for BPOs that have had a niche and then try to bring in clients outside of that niche how how high their uh client insurance has been. Because I would imagine it's a lot higher outside of their area of expertise, to your point.

Amanda Quinn 5:47
Yep. Yep. And that's not to say that those BPOs that have found a niche, because I'm having a lot of these conversations with BPOs that have found a niche, and have felt like they've now saturated it and they're ready to move on and add another niche. Those people that are coming to me are aware of how calculated they need to be about that next move. So they're thinking really strategically about where should we go? How do we test this? How do we learn? How do we not just pivot and make kind of a gut decision on something that we can start gathering data on. And so, yeah, I think my my long-winded way of answering or just kind of adding on to what you said, Milan, is that you can be successful in adding additional niches if you test it smartly and you think strategically about how you want to move from there.

Milan Batinich 6:33
Okay. So, Amanda, what makes a good niche?

Amanda Quinn 6:37
Yeah, some of the things I would say like key ingredients are does your team have proven success in that area? Do you have case studies? Do you have client client examples that you can turn to to help give that credibility when you enter a new sales conversation? Does your team have secret sauce in a certain area? Do you have knowledge? Do you have processes built out, technology relationships? You know, what does your team know and do better than most? And then the last kind of area to think about is is there market pain? Is this niche, this function that you're talking about, is that in demand? Or are there tons of other players in that space? But really, like, is there an urgent problem that needs to be solved or something that you can strategically start to kind of latch on to and see a gap in the market that that you can address your buyer's pain and kind of enter conversations more easily that way?

Milan Batinich 7:36
I love that. Um, is there an urgent problem that you're trying to solve? I I think so many organizations say we have a solution, but then they find out that their prospects or clients don't actually have that problem. So they build out the solution, but they can't sell it to anyone, they can't service anyone because there really isn't anyone with that problem. It's really identifying that problem. Like what's that urgent problem? What's what's keeping your prospects up at night or they're losing sleep, and then providing a solution around that?

Amanda Quinn 8:06
100%. Absolutely. That is such a great point. You need to be client focused, you need to be thinking about your buyer and not about yourself. What do they need? Mold your business to your buyer, especially if you don't have um a track record or experience in that industry. You need to really be attuned to your buyer.

Milan Batinich 8:28
Right. And it kind of makes sense. You identified an urgent problem in the BPO industry as a whole, and that's where Quinn Growth Advisors kind of was born, because you identified the urgent problem, what's keeping people up at night, and then here you are, you built the solution, and that's what you're providing now.

Amanda Quinn 8:48
Yeah, absolutely. I saw that that the way that most BPOs were growing was, you know, very relationship-driven, which is great, but it's inconsistent, it's not reliable, it leads to these feast and famine cycles. Right. And the way that they were kind of filling those gaps would be, you know, relying on brokers, relying on third parties to introduce them. None of those things are in a BPO's control. And I thought about it and was like, you know what, there's a better way to do this. If we give BPOs the tools to position themselves, market themselves, sell themselves better and more um resonant with their target market, they can win. They don't need to rely on third parties. And so, yes, you're right. That's exactly what I'm trying to do.

Milan Batinich 9:31
So it's funny because yesterday at this expo, I was speaking with uh an executive leader, a president of a BPO, and he talks about how he uses a lot of relationships for selling. But then at the end of that conversation, he said, but it all comes down to timing. He said, even though I have, say, I have a relationship with you, that's great. But if your timing isn't like, oh, hey, we're with the current BPO and our next RFP is 18 months out, they're not gonna change that timeline just because they have a relationship with you. So he's like, so to your point of feast or famine with those relationships, you gotta think about like the timing. It's great that you have a relationship, but it's not going to be sustaining in the long term. And you still have to wait for the right timing, even with those relationships. So, how do BPOs uncover the right focus area?

Amanda Quinn 10:18
Yeah, great question. Um of the tactical steps I would recommend is starting to look at your own past client wins. You know, look for patterns. Where do you have the most success? What types of types of clients or functional areas do you feel like your team is consistently doing well at? Or were there any more psychographic things or personality things about the person that you worked with that made it a more successful relationship? Just kind of step back and remove yourself from the equation and just look analytically at your client base and those relationships and see if you observe anything that would make you say, okay, I think we're seeing a cluster of potential opportunities here, or these are all similar. Maybe this is a potential area to go into. So that's one way. Also, I would talk to your team. And this is something that that I do with my clients a lot. You really want to understand what your team, everybody from your salespeople to your client success, the client services, and to your operations team, what do they know? What are they seeing? What are they feeling? What are they observing? Because they're the ones that have the closest pulse on those conversations and those prospects and those clients, and they're going to be able to give you good insight about what they feel like you do really well as a firm and makes other potential clients bad fits. And so, kind of marrying those two of like where are your clients maybe the stickiest, what uh functions or or industries, like if you could get it on paper from a profit perspective, you would copy and paste and have those all day long. And then marry that with what your internal team is saying about what they are observing and feeling. Also, then start looking at if you're getting referrals from different sources, like where are they coming from? Are they coming from strategic partners that have relationships in a certain space? Are they coming from technology vendors that tend to work with a certain type of client? Those can be good indicators. If you have those channels and those channels are working, like leverage them. Think about how you can kind of go deeper potentially with those channels. And then look at your competitors and not just your regional competitors, think bigger than that, but you know, if you're thinking about, let's just say your hunch from those kind of first two items, first three items are we really think that medical billing and and scheduling appointments is our special sauce. We're really good at it. We have a lot of relationships there, we have a lot of client wins that we can turn to. What other BPOs are serving that space? And what aren't they doing? Or what are they doing, but what aren't they doing? And are there opportunities for you to potentially kind of to the point that you raised earlier, like, are there pain points that they're not addressing? And I always recommend you get out of the building for those conversations, talk to prospects, hear from them about, you know, you're working with my competitor, no worries, I'm not gonna sell you, but what are they doing for you? What are you happy about? What do you wish that they did for you? And those insights can all kind of help you coalesce around what your niche could be. And at this point in this conversation, you don't have to choose this forever. I just want to say that. Like, this is a hypothesis. This is what we're gathering data, we're coming up with a hypothesis, we think we've maybe narrowed it down to two or three areas we think. So then, like, go test it. Go start running some outbound campaigns to test it. Go test it, run some marketing, see what works. Um, go to some conferences, start working on that, the messaging around that, and see what you're coming back with. And in those conversations and in those efforts, you'll probably get more conviction around a certain area and just keep going, just keep going with it until you start losing steam. But once you start going down that path, you're gonna start learning things and uncovering things that are gonna be such light-bulb moments of, oh my God, I can't believe others aren't doing this, or no one has figured out that this is the big pain point that they're talking about butts and seats to call for medical billing. But what this buyer really needs is XYZ thing. And so we're gonna start talking about that pain point. Um, it's it's really powerful. Once you start kind of collecting the data and opening your eyes to the new way that your business could operate, you're gonna start getting some of those like exciting entrepreneurial bolts of electricity of like, yes, we're on to something. We've we figured it out.

Milan Batinich 14:58
Definitely. No, that's uh that's awesome. And being able to ask those prospects the questions to learn. And you mentioned something earlier in this uh uh when I had asked you this question about you know finding out from your operations team. And I I feel like so many BPOs have everything so silo where sales is doing their own thing, marketing's doing something, and operations managing the clients, right? Client services is managing the client, operations is managing the agents and managing the KPIs. But really, if if operations know so much, they have so much knowledge, and it's sales should be leaning on them because they they understand what's coming up, what the pain points are for each of those clients. So they know even better than sales does, because most BPOs operate in a way that once sales closes a sale, then it gets handed off to an implementation team. But then sales isn't continuing to learn, like, okay, what are the other hot button issues or what are the other pain points that implementation is uncovering, that operations is uncovering, client services is uncovering over time. So I think that's great, and uh I think it's really important, like you said, to be interviewing prospects because then you'll be able to learn uh so much. So now, Amanda, what about when you think of like leadership teams at a BPO? Um, what what do you do or how would you recommend if leaders aren't aligned? You know, I've worked for throughout my career, I've worked for a few BPOs, and there's been times where you know you have a CEO that wants to go one direction, but then the presidents wants to go a different direction, and then or you have sales and operations, sales and marketing, uh, you know, you have these executive leaders that want to go in separate directions or they're not aligned. So what can do that?

Amanda Quinn 16:42
It's that's really it's a good, great question. It's hard. Um, that's a tough, tough spot to be in. If you're hearing this and you're wanting to do this for your firm and you feel like you have one of those um kind of an in an important stakeholder in the company that is going to be resistant to this, I would advise you to think about what would that person need to hear or know to be convinced. You know, are they a data person? Are they a social proof person? Like what do they need to know? Be aware of that, and then give it to them. You know, there are examples of niching down, and you can look to other industries if you're not looking at the BPO, but you grow faster when you niche down. Either sales and go to market will be so much more efficient, and you can spend your budget so much more wisely when you are clear on who you're going after. So if that's the case, if you can like rationally make that argument and that will work, that's helpful. If they're fearful, which I totally understand because a lot, like we talked about at the top of this, a lot of BPOs are nervous about saying, we're already strapped for leads. Amanda, like why would you tell me to say no to potential leads? Remind them that what this strategy advocates is not saying no to referrals and leads that come in. If they come in organically, great, and and they're good fits for your business, great, take them. All we're talking about is your go-to-market and how your sales team and your marketing team is orienting and how your operations team is going to be aligned, you know, to best serve your operations team, right? So maybe you position it as a pilot. Why don't we test this? Why don't we give me a bit of time? I believe this is the area. Give me some bandwidth, maybe a little bit of budget to test this and test it with those outbound campaigns. Like I was saying, like maybe you do a landing page to test it. Maybe you drive, do some digital marketing to drive leads to that landing page, see how that works. Maybe you test putting out some um lead magnets around it, some some white paper, some thought leadership around the topic. See how that starts resonating. And that might start giving your nervous leadership a little bit more comfort that you're we're not betting the house on this, right? Where this is a uh strategic test, and if the results pay off, then okay, we can make a decision then.

Milan Batinich 19:17
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I I had a leader once who told me um, because he wanted to focus on a specific niche or industry, and I had uh and he would tell me I would be excited because I'm like, I have this lead, I've met with this prospect, they want to move forward to next steps, and then he would say, Milan, is good business or is that a distraction? So I think the whole concept or the idea of you know using like a scientific method to be able to outline everything to your points about well, based on what the leader needs, if they need that type of input or that type of data, like build that out, get that information, because I think that'll help. And for me, it was always like you know, a light bulb going off, thinking about okay, is this gonna be a distraction for operations? Will this be a distraction for implementation? Or is it good business? Because he's like, you can say no to business. It's like I won't be mad if sales says no to business, it's okay.

Amanda Quinn 20:09
I love that too. Like that concept of a distraction, that's such a good way to frame it that your boss was smart in that way. Um, what I would say is if you can get this in writing from your boss, because I've I know you've experienced this, Milan, uh probably multiple times, multiple firms, I've heard it from others. A lot of BPO leaders are their own worst enemies and get very excited about a new idea, a new vertical to go after, a new potential prospect type. If you can say, okay, let's rein it in, maybe for this quarter, we're gonna test X being our focus area. Let's write it out somewhere. Put it in your Teams chat, put it in your weekly agenda, put it on the whiteboard that you guys walk past so that when your CEO comes to you with the inevitable, what about the cannabis industry? What about, you know, like I feel like that's that's the one I hear a lot.

Milan Batinich 21:14
Um and that was so specif specific because that was actually one of the industries that I was hit with at a previous firm.

Amanda Quinn 21:20
Like, hey, why don't we try this?

Milan Batinich 21:22
The cannabis is up and coming. Like Milan, just sell the cannabis. Yeah. We have no experience, we've never done anything like this, but let's just do it.

Amanda Quinn 21:28
I feel like during COVID, it was a lot of like, okay, we gotta we gotta work on all the telecom or all the technology comp platforms that are powering digital connections, like let's go to them, and we gotta go to the governments that are trying to like just a rapid pivot to try to like seize opportunities. Those are distractions. So getting them to have that like consistent, like place to point to, say, I know that's a great idea. Let's think about that next quarter. This quarter, we agreed we're gonna tackle focus on this thing. I think that can just be helpful to tame some of those more erratic and excitable moments that I think a lot of um entrepreneurs naturally have, right? You you wanna be, you wanna be hustling, you want to be making more deals, but it can lead to a lot of internal whiplash. And that's the whole point of this. We're trying to reduce that whiplash, we're trying to give everybody consistency. Your internal team, your prospects. We want the market to know what you stand for, what you're good at, what you guys are about and do really well. And that's not gonna happen if you're bobbing around like you're being attacked by a shark in the ocean.

Milan Batinich 22:40
Um, yeah, and as an entrepreneur, you want to grow as quickly as possible and as much as possible, but you want to do it the right way.

Milan Batinich 22:47
Because you'll actually think of like the whole hockey stick, you'll be able to grow even more if you have that niche nailed down and you're an expert in that industry, versus like I'm just going to take it all as much as I can, every industry, even though I have no clue, I have no idea anything about cannabis or whatever it might be. Yeah. Um, so many so this has been great information, very informative. So, what would be like the next steps or the next step for a BPO?

Amanda Quinn 23:12
I'd say you think we outlined a lot of different tools for you to start this process internally. If you feel like this is something you want to do, but you want to have outside help or resources, reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn, quinngrowthadvisors.com. I'd be happy to help give you some coaching, give you, you know, consulting around it. If you if you want that extra uh assistance and especially that having an outside person to kind of be nudging your team and holding you accountable can absolutely guide you through that process. But if this is resonating and you want it and you know that your firm needs to get more clarity around what you do really well and who you're focused on, just stay the course, stay the course and commit to it and start just being that voice of change and that advocate because it will work. You'll find traction. And if you don't at your current firm, there will be other firms out there that are willing to hear you and listen to you and know that you're you're on the right path. So thanks, Milan. I'm glad we had this chance.

Milan Batinich 24:14
Yeah, this has been awesome. Every single episode, I always learn something new. So this is this has been great. This has been helpful. I hope it's been helpful for all of you watching and listening. And uh make sure you follow Build a Better BPO podcast. Make sure you listen to it, watch it, and we'll be back with a new episode soon.

Amanda Quinn 24:34
Bye.