Chapter 9
Sales Outsourcing
If you look back through the past few chapters, you'll start to pick out many tasks that are menial and tedious. This is a why a virtual assistant (VA) becomes useful in any organization, no matter how small that organization is. You should be leveraging these inexpensive, but qualified, workers.
At Udemy, we employed a lead generation team of 12 virtual sales development reps (SDRs). They did everything from generating leads to sending batches of e-mails and setting up meetings. Eventually, they worked throughout the entire company, doing everything from website bug testing to instructor support.
I have a team of three to four VAs working at all times. They're such an asset and can do anything in the sales process. If you can nail this piece of the process, it's to your advantage as a salesperson or a sales organization.
Here are a few tasks VAs can do:
- Use Import.io or Kimono Labs; they just need links to lists
- Get leads by using any of the lead generation tools with the lists they've built
- Do lead research by uploading lists into any of the tools in the lead research section
- Segment and de-duplicate lists based on your orders.
- Upload lists into sales automation software and even set up sequences
VAs can do tasks in almost the entire SDR process up to the actual phone call. You need to come up with an ideal customer profile (ICP) and addresses, give the VAs the links, tell the VAs how to segment the lists, and then craft the content.
Preparing to Hire Virtual Assistants
The first thing you'll want to do when you are getting ready to hire a VA is to draw out the current process for everything you would like to hand off to the VA. Once you draw out these tasks on paper, you'll be able to see what you can cut, if anything. Most of what you do in your business is likely busywork. This is Pareto's law at work: 20 percent of your work leads to 80 percent of your results, whether those results are in customers or revenue.
Find out what your bread and butter is—your 20 percent—and either cut or delegate the rest. If you can't get organized and draw this out for yourself, then you're probably doing something wrong to begin with.
Hiring Virtual Assistants
You can hire VAs for all sorts of things. I'm going to break down the right ways to hire VAs and the right areas to hire them from (both Web services to use to hire them and where in the world you should hire from).
Upwork
Upwork is an innovative platform that connects employers with virtual freelancers. It has a fully stocked marketplace of great talent. You can find some of the best VAs there at a bargain.
The back end is robust as well. Upwork boasts having the best time-tracking and payment-tracking tools of any outsourcing site, which makes it best to use for managing overseas employees who are working alongside you. I've had my VAs logging 40–60 hours of work per week and usually working during our hours. It's very easy to build a full team on Upwork. You set the price at the beginning, and that's what you end up paying per hour.
Suggested Projects:
- Lead generation and link building
- Customer support
- Quality assurance (QA) testing engineer
TaskUs
We started using TaskUs at Udemy early on and found that they employ extremely high-quality virtual assistants who can do tasks throughout an organization. TaskUs gives you a fully managed back end and helps you hire the team. All you have to do is train and manage the team. This is a pretty good scenario if you don't want to deal with any logistical headaches like finding talent and paying through the Philippines. Services like Upwork do take a big fee (11 percent). So, for getting good talent and not having to deal with the back-end logistics, TaskUs might be worth using.
TaskUs works with big technology companies such as Udemy, Eventbrite, and AdRoll on anything from sales development to customer support. Suggested projects: everything, but TaskUs is a little pricier than Upwork: about $10 an hour more. They're good, though.
Strictly Sales Development Support
LeadGenius
LeadGenius couples proprietary data and technology with a dedicated team of outsourced sales reps. It works with your sales development team to feed higher-quality leads into your company's existing sales funnel, no matter how you have it structured. LeadGenius's core offering is higher-quality customer data.
In addition to the outsourced SDRs, LeadGenius helps existing teams prioritize marketing qualified leads (MQLs), identifies buying signals for previously untapped audiences, or segments existing marketing lists for more intelligent targeting. It can also manage e-mail outreach for clients who do not have that element built into their sales funnel.
Predictable Revenue
Aaron Ross is the author of a book called Predictable Revenue that describes the process that built sales development at Salesforce in the early 2000s. He's a cofounder and partner of the new Predictable Revenue product.
Salesforce will help you fill the top of the funnel by figuring out your ICP and then finding those leads and other low-hanging fruit across the Internet. Salesforce has an internal sales team that reaches out on your behalf and activates the prospect. Once the prospect replies, the sales team introduces you.
Think of it as sales development as a service.
ConnectAndSell
ConnectAndSell allows you to easily ramp up your cold calling by doing the dialing for your team and connecting you to warm leads that want more information. Automated dialing is done by a mix of technology software and a team of outsourced reps. ConnectAndSell can do this while allowing your internal head count to stay the same. If cold calls are working for your team and you have endless leads, ConnectAndSell might be good to try out.
Fiverr
On Fiverr's website (yes, that's two “r”s?), you can hire people to do all sorts of weird and unique things for just five dollars. If you want something done quickly, or more of it, the extra charge is in five-dollar increments.
You can use Fiverr to find someone who will do small projects or build small e-mail lists for five dollars per task.
You can choose whom to hire based on reviews and whether the person can do your project. Physical location doesn't matter very much on Fiverr. Don't bother bargaining; it's only five dollars!
If you have a long process like an entire sales pipeline, you may want to try breaking it up and hiring multiple virtual assistants for it. I've found that it's best to hire for the exact thing that the person does instead of teaching the person a lot of different things. You can test this if you wish.
You can pay more and have someone do the entire process or pay less per VA and have a few VAs do parts of the process. You can also limit their hours so that you don't get charged a huge amount. However, with more VAs comes more management. Play around a bit, and figure out what works best for your process. My advice is to hire one “rock star” to begin with and train that VA on the entire process. Get the VA really good at it. Then he or she can go off and train and manage new VAs.
Figure 9.1 Contractor Hiring Machine
Here's a sample job posting for a lead generation task that I put on Upwork.
Title: Full-time Filipino Lead Generator/Researcher
Job Description:
About Us: Our company xxxxxxxxxxxx
Where You Fit In:
We are looking for someone to help generate leads for xxxxxxxxx
- Should be proficient in Excel and comfortable working in Google Docs
- Must have solid Internet connection 24/7—we mainly communicate via Skype and e-mail, and expect you to be online and available during the day
- Must be able to communicate in English
- Past researching or lead generation experience is a huge plus
- Must be able to work Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, as we are based in San Francisco
- Please send me a link to your past work.
We work with a few other tools/sites:
- Rapportive in Gmail
- Google Docs
- Salesforce
- Web scrapers and Import.io
- ToutApp
You should be able to pick these up quickly or have prior experience with them.
Task Example
We might ask you to find people with Twitter followings or Facebook fan pages of over 20K likes/followers. We will want them in personal finance, personal development, business, or technology verticals.
Your job will be to find these people and create a lead list with their names, community size, type of vertical, link to their company, and e-mail address. We will also have you check our database for duplicates.
Pay
We will offer between $3 and $5 per hour depending on experience and candidate selection.
If this seems like something you will be amazing at, please apply to this job post, take this brief test, and fill out the test form below.
Test:
Find the names, number of Twitter followers, and e-mail addresses for ten people on this list: www.link.com/peoplethatareawesome
Test Form (I use Google Forms or Typeform):
Thanks and we look forward to working with you!
Skills Required
English, Microsoft Excel, lead generation, Internet research, data scraping, keyword research, data mining, salesforce.com, Google Docs
Notes on This Job Posting
- Some people like to give an exact direction in the description to test if the applicant actually reads the posting. For example, your description might say, “When replying to the post, please send a cover letter and make the first line read, ‘I'm a rock star lead machine, and I am ready to rock!’” This is supposed to show the employer that the applicant has read the post and pays attention to detail.
- Most VAs will work during your hours.
- I start VAs at 40 hours, and then I usually increase the number of hours to 60 per week when they've earned my trust.
- I like to insert a form into the job description. It's easy to do and time-stamps their response. Make sure your first question is “Name as it appears on Upwork” so that you know who responds. I use Google Forms.
- Mention the software you use so that they know what to expect.
After about 12 hours, you'll likely have between 25 and 50 candidates. I usually pick the top few and ask them to Skype with me before I hire them. This is when I give them a timed task, which is the most important part. We know how many leads per hour is good for us, so a 20-minute sprint test is a good way to see if they can keep pace.
Figure 9.2 Sample VA Lead Generation Test
Training Your Virtual Assistants
When you are training your VAs, you must give them exact directions and set goals that are easy to track. This is the only way to make sure you've selected a good VA. If you hire more than one, you'll have a sample size and will know what to expect.
The best way to start is to do the task yourself and see how long it takes. If you're having the VAs do lead generation, you can set up the process and the pipeline, and do the task yourself for an hour or until you hit a certain number of leads. Time yourself, or count how many leads you've generated in an hour, and that's how many leads you should expect a good VA to generate.
For example, if it takes you an hour to collect 100 leads, then you now have a frame of reference. If it takes your VA two hours to collect 100 leads, then the VA probably is not very good. It's not unrealistic for you to expect the VA to be as good as, or even better than, you at this task, especially if the VA has done this before.
Giving the VA a task to do will also allow you to create solid directions to document the process. Take screenshots or screencasts with Jing or Skitch as you go. I like to create a step-by-step training manual that has everything the VAs need to know, as granularly as possible. This manual should have all of the logins and passwords that they'll need to know.
If the test and the manual are good and the VAs have been doing a similar job in the past, you shouldn't need to train them very much. I like to just give them the information and the task and let them get started. I encourage them to ask me questions in the beginning. The first few VAs you train will help you refine the process to the point where future VAs won't have many questions or, if they do, one of the other VAs should know the answer. That's why I advise you to get a “rock star” as the first VA.
If I have multiple VAs working for me at the same time, I can invite them to a group Skype chat or Google Group in order to answer their questions. By doing this, I might not even have to answer their questions because another VA will know the answers; or, if I do have to answer, the VAs will all know how to resolve the issue.
Make sure to have one-on-one sessions with the VAs from time to time. Matt Ellsworth, former vice president of Growth at The Storefront, likes to do an exercise called “Stop, Start, Continue” with VAs. It goes like this: Stop doing X, start doing Y, and continue doing Z. This is a good way to give feedback to any employee, but it especially works well with VAs.
Visit www.SalesHacker.com/library for more information on hiring, training, and managing virtual assistants.