Get Offshore Leverage
It’s amazing what $2,000/mo in talent costs can do for you
I love hearing stories from the road from fellow founders/CEO’s. This week’s newsletter has some nuggets of wisdom I picked up from my annual Powder Highway ski trip. Thanks Sujan Patel, CEO of Mailshake for inspiring some of these ideas.
What will we cover in this newsletter?
- $2,000/mo with a six (6) person marketing team launching “Content Domination”.
- Project-based .XLS macros and financial proforms for $100-$300.
- SaaS marketing platform scaling digital sales reps for $2,000/mo in Columbia.
- Scale power move – cluster your talent in a region.
$2,000/mo with a six (6) person marketing team launching “Content Domination”.
My company Pipeline Signals has grown, and needed to scale a full-stack marketing team to execute against our ambitious content marketing goals.
Challenge = I’m a bit jaded from scaling my marketing team at Sales for Life five (5) years earlier, that resulted in a $800,000 marketing budget (for a $2,500,000 agency). My Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) skyrocketed, and acquiring new customers was unprofitable.
Resolution = after offshoring marketing in both Sales for Life and Pipeline Signals at sub-scale, it’s time for us to go big at Pipeline Signals. But we needed to find the right team at the right cost/ROI. We found that team in Bangladesh.
Think of the leverage:
- Pipeline Signals average sales price (ASP) per deal = $2,500/mo
- Our entire marketing team cost = $2,000/mo + $2,000/mo for a fractional CMO
- Our “Payback Period” for acquiring one (1) customer = < 2 months.
This is incredible leverage!
Project-based .XLS macros and financial proforms for $100-$300.
Data is the new oil. We knew that the sales community would want to make sense of sales intelligence years ago, but we didn’t have the money or technical capabilities to build software. We leveraged UpWorks to find an .XLS expert with financial modeling experience. Over the years we’ve kept that relationship strong and have cranked out all kinds of spreadsheets (in .XLS or Google) either internally or externally for customers.
The best part – they are built in my sleep!
Step 1: I build a light working model of my vision (could be as simple as a drawing).
Step 2: I make a short video outlining the vision, details, etc.
Step 3: 24-hours later I’ll receive version 1.
Within a few days we have a finalized product. The ROI is staggering. Our 1st Signal Report for customers at Pipeline Signals was on a Google Sheet and it generated $500,000 in revenue, and cost me $275.
SaaS marketing platform scaling digital sales reps for $2,000/mo in Columbia.
On my ski adventure this week, Sujan Patel, CEO of Mailshake (and a portfolio of other companies) talked to me about his offshore team in Columbia. While I have leveraged the Philippines as my “customer-facing” location of choice, he has chosen Medellin, Columbia. His sales and customer success team is there, working as a collective / cluster. This is a best practice as the team can grow together, translate corporate culture into local culture as a unit, and celebrate successes offline together after hours.
Similar to my company Pipeline Signals, he is able to build a Digital Sales team that engages customers using LinkedIn and email, at a fraction of the cost of North American SDR’s / BDR’s. This allows for a much faster Payback Period and profitability per customer.
Scale power move – cluster your talent in a region.
As mentioned in the above story, if you are building out a team (like Marketing, CX, DevOps, etc.), I highly recommend that you build that team in one (1) region, one (1) culture. As an example, at my company Pipeline Signals, the marketing team is in Bangladesh, whereas engineering is in India.
- Better connection within the team.
- One geolocation to fly into for live meetings.
- Cultural connections. The team becomes friends offline.
- You can insert a localized manager (either virtual or live).
- Talent recruitment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your own team starts to recruit their friends and past colleagues (saving you tons of time / money).
Don’t Forget – Benchmark your team against offshore talent.
- 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!
