Intuit's recent purchase of DemandForce, which provides a variety of outsourced services to small businesses, raises a question. What's next? Outsourcing is a time-tested way of handing off duties that a business does not want to handle
The DemandForce deal raises the specter of outsourcing everything except core skills. DemandForce performs a variety of front- and back-office services for businesses. This includes running social media campaigns and measuring results, dunning clients for payment, developing customer referrals and sending out appointment reminders. DemandForce also conducts reputation-building efforts.
Let's leave it to the individual's conscience about whether it can believed that using the Intuit-owned operation, to use the language of the DemandForce website, ensures "effortless marketing bliss" and that its customers can sit back and "watch the results come in."
In business discussions, it's often said the entrepreneurs have skills that propel them to form companies and they get stuck having to perform all these other functions that they may not have a talent or time for. Whether it's DemandForce or another entity offering these services the model suggests that the web can enable small operations to outsource everything except those customer-facing functions they perform well.
If some outside party can produce a stream of clients that these business people can service instead of spending time not ib these services or providing them with product, it would be a worthwhile expense.
Whether this is Intuit's direction or not, it looks like a possibility.
Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards. Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that. A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind
