Get offshore leverage

In a sub-scale company (>50 employees), we as Founders are super-heroes.  We can either use time as a super-power like Popeye’s spinach, or time can be the vampire that drowns us.

Founders are recognizing that a Virtual Assistant can be a super-power.

Here is what we’ll cover this week:

1. Virtual Assistants are your gateway into more Revenue growth.
2. Where the English Proficiency Index matters, and where it’s a Legacy Bias.
3. Leveraging BKash to make collecting easy, quick payments for your Bangladesh team.

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Virtual Assistants are your gateway into more Revenue growth.

What percentage of your revenue lies on your shoulders?  If you’re a scaled organization, it’s most likely very little.  But if you are subscale like us here at Get Levrg, we founders are the CEO “Chief Everything Officer”.  

I’ve mentioned Dan Martell’s book “Buy Back Your Time” as an eye-opening toolkit to help founders explore their own time management practices.  In the book, the Level 1 within the “Replacement Ladder” is an assistant.  I’ve also mentioned before that a world-class option for us sub-scale is an offshore virtual assistant.

• The talent is affordable.
• The ROI is immediate.
• Work can happen during your office hours, or outside your office hours as you sleep.

I’m a huge believer that talent is talent anywhere in the world.  If you need email, calendar, travel, task management, project management, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) development / maintenance… you are in the right place.

How does this positively affect revenue?

Because YOU ARE the revenue.  Time is your weapon.  You can either harness it, or it ropes you and drags you into a pipeline creation hole you don’t like.  Trust me, I’ve been in this situation.

At my company Sales for Life, we grew 50% Compounded Growth Rate (CAGR) for years and years.  We went from $0 to $3,000,000 rapidly.  But with that great growth came extensive business travel for speaking engagements around the world.  I woke up one day and realized that 50% of my life was on a plane and in a foreign country.  At that time, I didn’t have a virtual assistant so tasks like email, scheduling, travel arrangements, project mapping, etc. would just – PILE UP.

Prospecting had to take a back seat… and you NEVER want prospecting to take a back set.  The train will (and did) eventually derail after 4 years straight of “prospecting” part-time as the CEO.  At that time, we had so many inbound Sales Qualified Leads (we were creating 1x SQL per day = 250 per year) that we actually didn’t need to prospect outbound, but we couldn’t keep up with pipeline coverage follow up.  It’s the same thing.  No follow-up on prospects meetings / demos is like not prospecting at all.

Get in front of this.  Make sure your time isn’t vampired away from the most critical parts of your business.  Get a virtual assistant offshore.

Where the English Proficiency Index matters, and where it’s a Legacy Bias.

A major Legacy Bias to offshoring is a language barrier (whether internal communication or external with customers).  Unfortunately many times when I hear language as a concern, I help founders understand the root of a Confirmation Bias.  A Confirmation Bias is when you or someone experience an instance one (1) time, thus it must be true.  Example – your friend was sick at Red Lobster one time.  The next week you walked into the restaurant and saw the lobsters swimming in the tank and assumed “Red Lobster sucks, terrible quality”.  That’s confirming a belief that’s not actually valid.

A prospect shared this great article with me – where can you sell INTO using English.

B2B SaaS Sales in English: Where Can You Sell in 2023

The reason this was shared is we were discussing offshoring in a sales capacity.  Where I had to make a correction is we need to segment the process of “selling” into various sub-processes.  The reason this is important is because offshore talent provides INCREDIBLE arbitrage in specific sub-processes.

“Sellers” don’t just sell, they execute the following:

1. Identify accounts to target
2. Identify the key stakeholders in those accounts
3. Build prospecting campaigns
4. Prospect (but within various mediums.  Sometimes cold call, sometimes email, LinkedIn etc.)
5. Run discovery / demo calls
6. Build buying committee consensus
7. Review proposals and contracts
8. Win the deal

There are multiple sub-roles within these sub-processes.  Many companies will have roles like Business Development, Sales Development, Lead Development, Inside Sales, etc.

The reason this is important is all you want are… OUTCOMES.  You want sales.  Your “sales team” needs to reverse-engineer from closing new opportunities; what are the steps that are:

$5/hr tasks

Vs. 

$500/hr value creation

Tasks such as:

1. Identify accounts to target
2. Identify the key stakeholders in those accounts
3. Build prospecting campaigns
4. Prospect (specifically via email and LinkedIn)

These are tasks that a $100,000 seller is typically now interested in, willing to do, or can’t do (due to time constraints).

English proficiency then is wildly different for these $5/hr tasks.  You now have an offshore team collecting data, finding sales opportunities, prospecting in written form (not speech).

This is where the magical opportunity lies!

Leveraging BKash to make collecting easy, quick payments for your Bangladesh team.

Let me paint the challenge.  A lot of your talent you acquire over time will not come from UpWork (great place to get started, not where to scale) or have an UpWork account.  OR, the talent you acquire wants to immediately turn their payments into cash without delay.  Check out BKash.

At my company Pipeline Signals, we have a SOP that each teammate in Bangladesh has:

• An up to date UpWork account (as backup)
• Have BKash mobile app.

Think of a mobile Western Union for your team.  Easy access to cash for their families and avoids (sometimes lengthy) payment processing times.

We are in the midst of testing Deel.com as our payment platform of choice in Bangladesh.  These other solutions will make payment processing a great back-up alternative.

Don’t Forget – Benchmark your team against offshore talent.

Access it here.

• What is the profit increase you could expect?
• What is the sales relief / reprieve you could expect to generate the same profit?

Get ready to be shocked!