In case you’re still not familiar with the term, upskilling is commonly defined in business as the practice of training one’s in-house workforce to have additional skills. For accounting, this can be an advantage during times when job requirements do not match the skills of the general population. Another advantage could be expanding the range of specializations of your accounting services by increasing the skills of your current employees. On the other hand, doing so should also be complimented by adding variety to the way you generate accounting leads.

For example, if you’ve only been using telemarketing so far then you can either try and upskill if it’s in-house or outsource to a company that is already in the midst of upskilling their call center agents. And yes, they’re out there. Besides, the costs of training could be high and it could still take time just for your own accounting personnel to learn the new skills. You wouldn’t want the cost of your services to skyrocket as a result because your raised up the costs of your own accounting leads.

Now with regards to upskilling itself, here are a few things that marketing can teach you:

• Make sure the basics are covered – Be careful about just upskilling anybody. Start first with those whose current skill set can match the new ones you’d like to add. It’s only common sense that if you’re going to add variety to the accounting skills of your work force, that work force needs to know accounting basics.

• Pick skills that give you an edge – Be aware of current events as well as the current state of your target market. Use market research to help you predict new demands for a certain type of accounting service. After that, you’ll now know which kind of skills you’ll need to invest in.

• Keep an eye on costs – Naturally, you have to make sure that upskilling doesn’t eat too much out of your finances that they’ll raise costs. A rise in cost might not work to your advantage if a lower one was supposed to be your main selling point.

Another thing you need to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily have to market these new skills. Despite how you’ve predicted a rise in demand for certain accounting services, not all businesses have any real need for them. Don’t present them with too many options that aren’t relevant to their more immediate needs.

Now with that said, it’s now time to see how you (or an outsourced provider) can upskill your current telemarketing service. It can arguably be a lot simpler compared to upskilling your accountants because it’s just about integrating additional forms of marketing:

• Email marketing – Some telemarketing firms are already integrating the use of email so that it can offer support to telemarketing efforts. For example, emails can be used to request permission to call instead of calling directly first.

• Social media – The telemarketing industry has also begun to use social media to a certain degree. The online engagement can be considered as a form of qualification before taking it into the next phase of actually talking with the prospect on the phone.

• Websites – Managing websites and optimizing their content can attract more calls but it takes additional IT-marketing skills to completely succeed.

As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life so upskilling to increase the variety of both your services and B2B lead generation can be a good idea. Outsource though if you want to play it safe.

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