Another mnemonic I’d like you to remember that will help you and your team stay firmly in the dollar-productive zone is the 3Rs: Referral Strategies, Recommendations, and Reviews. Why is this important? Recently we began to ask our clients via text and email this question: “What is the one reason you choose to do business with MyOutDesk?”

We received several different responses. We next asked everyone to choose one from the top three responses we’d received. Overwhelmingly, our clients reported that they choose us because of the quality of tal- ent we provide (which allows our clients to scale). The two runner-up reasons were that we are the price leaders in our industry and that they know and trust MyOutDesk because of our ten-year history and client track record.

How do we know this? Because MyOutDesk cares, and so we asked our clients. Because we listen to our clients. Because of this strategy: the 3Rs!

Referral Strategies

We have already discussed the importance of referrals in scaling your business to the seven-figure level. It’s about building relationships on a personal level, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be systematized. Having a referral strategy is something that many substage one, two, or three business owners have never considered before, but it is such a crucial aspect of the 7-Figure Business Roadmap. Our team has systemwide, automated referral reminders built into the client portal. We also have specific virtual professional and client touchpoints that remind them how much we value referrals. We expect our clients and virtual professionals to refer three people to MyOutDesk within the first ninety days of doing business, and this expectation is set from the start of the sales process.

Recommendations

Having a system around recommendations is a powerful scaling tool in our internet-driven world. You can use testimonial-style recommenda- tions on your website and social media pages to bolster the public image of your company. You should always be nurturing your online presence, and the great news is virtual professionals can do much of this work for you. MyOutDesk has an automated touchpoint that generates recommendations. It regularly surveys our clients and virtual professionals for net promoter scores (a management tool that can be used to gauge customer relationships), produces client/virtual professional video testimonials, and creates focus groups as part of our Because We Listen and Deliver pro- gram. We have a robust reporting structure around the 3Rs and can use it as a predictable statistical data set.

Reviews

Reviews are vital to just about any business today. Reviews drive so much business, and you must have a process surrounding how yours will be systematically gathered for you and posted online. Your VPs can be pursu- ing reviews in their communications with clients. There are also automated email tools that can ask for reviews with a quick “Hey, give me a couple of sentences. Tell me what you think.” Your VPs can help you manage sharing those reviews. Once you generate great reviews, they have lasting value; they are viewed over and over again by potential customers, driving revenue back to your business.

We have a process in place so that when someone says that our VPs amaze him or her, we point that person to an area to do an online review. There will be specific sites you will want to be well represented on. These days, you can pick up your iPhone and ask Siri, “Who’s the best real estate agent in Yorba Linda, California?” or “Where is the best restaurant near me?” Siri and other search tools gather that information from sites like Yelp and Google, so you have to make sure you have a presence on those tools to the best possible degree.

We Are a Sales Organization

The reason the 3Rs and 4Ps are so important is that in order to take the next step on the 7-Figure Business Roadmap, every employee you have must somehow be involved in the identification, attraction, and retention of customers. That is the path to growth and scaling. What we do at MyOutDesk isn’t just selling the services of virtual professionals; we are selling you the ability to close more business in a year. We are selling an opportunity to fast-track the growth of your company and scale.

Even though taking on virtual professionals may seem like an increase in overhead at first, every dollar you spend on virtual professionals will add at least three dollars to your bottom line (some of our clients have said the return is as much as eight times each dollar spent). Once your team is in place, you should work to ensure that what is paramount to every single employee is to directly get and keep customers, with no exceptions. If you allow your team to focus too much on all the little details and take their eyes off getting and keep- ing customers, that is precisely what you will get: everything but customers.

About 50 percent of the virtual professionals we place with clients are fulfilling clients’ sales development outcomes. That means about two thousand five hundred of the five thousand virtual professionals we have introduced to clients have been working in sales. Through that experience, we have garnered a lot of evidence about how best to prepare virtual professionals for sales—and we have created a concrete system to ensure that you have success with yours too.

Virtual professionals can help you and your business enormously when it comes to generating and converting leads, that is, taking a potential customer who may have an interest in your business, or even may never have heard of your business, and turning that lead into a warm opportunity. That warm opportunity would include a sales meeting, and if all goes well, a sales quote. Preparing virtual professionals to succeed with this out- come is one of my favorite things to do because the path to having your investment in sales development reps (SDR) pay off in terms of revenue is clear-cut and highly measurable from an outcome basis.

When I say pay off, I’m not speaking merely of an increase in sales. In business, I like a three-to-one return. If I’m spending $5,000 to put someone in place, I want to see a $15,000 return. Your top concern about onboarding a virtual sales team will probably be “How do I do this?” Well, you could just put someone in a seat and say, “OK, now go sell for me,” and ask that individual to be accountable for some metrics you have made up in your head. In fact, as an entrepreneur, your go-to mode is probably that you jump right in first and worry about the how later. That is classic entrepreneur behavior, and in general, it’s a great attribute. In this instance, however, I’d like you to resist that and reframe your thinking.

This is a situation in which having a concrete plan will pay off in real dollars. Think about onboarding an SDR as if you are running a relay race and you have a baton in your hand. You’re fully committed, and you’re killing it at Usain Bolt speed. As you approach runner number two, she holds out her hand expectantly to receive the baton. But instead of passing it to her, you throw it to her. It misses its mark, striking her in the head, and she stumbles. Not smart, right? You have just set up your talented teammate to fail. And that is the biggest mistake that people make when they hire VPs: They chuck the baton rather than smoothly hand it off. So, all you need is a recipe for a smooth handoff.

Have Bulletproof Scripts

Scripts are in the virtual professional’s arsenal. Here are the elements you should painstakingly document in written form for your new sales team members. Of course, the content will vary depending on the type of business you are in, but for the moment, I will give you examples based on what we use at MyOutDesk.

A Clear Elevator Pitch

Know your elevator pitch. The base formula for a good elevator pitch is “I serve [who] to do [what], so they [get this result].” Ours is: “We instantly scale growing companies with virtual professionals.” That is what we do at MyOutDesk, in a nutshell. The elevator pitch is such an important piece for you to craft and for your VPs to absorb. You all need to be on the same page as you communicate your company’s value, and once you have articulated this clearly and documented it transparently, your VPs will be able to advance that message. They will communicate it in exactly the way you would.

Know Your Value Proposition

This might seem a bit obvious, but many business owners think their value proposition is just that—obvious—and they fail to document it concretely for their virtual sales reps. Give them the information they need to be clear in their conversations about why your clients choose you. What is the benefit they see? We hear time and time again from our clients that they are overwhelmed, and alleviating that overwhelm is where we add massive value. They are so busy, and we are the “easy button” for finding talent to help them. There is no way they could find five people to interview in forty-eight hours…but we can. We have already vetted them. The MyOutDesk value proposition: “We provide indispensable VPs to growing businesses.” If you can articulate your value proposition clearly to your virtual professionals and have that in written form somewhere they can refer to, you are hitting one out of the park from the outset.

Have a Process for Handling Objections

When you give your virtual professionals your value proposition, you are giving them the ideal outcome. But you also have to prepare them for the challenges they’ll encounter. Document all the objections that a potential customer might have for your product or service, and your virtual professionals will wear it like armor in their conversations with leads. They will be ready to answer potential customers’ objections in a friendly way. Why might a customer say no? What answer could your virtual professionals give that might turn that into a yes? Help them to anticipate these issues.

Have a System for Measuring Results

You and your sales virtual professionals will know you are scaling the business when you have clearly defined processes for measuring the following:

1. Leads received:This is the number one thing you must track. How many leads are coming into your business every single day, week, and month?
2. Number of calls: How many calls did your virtual professionals make to those leads?
3. Leads converted: How many of those calls went from being just a lead to an actual opportunity to sell?
4. Speed to lead: This is a metric that really matters. How much time elapses between when the lead comes in to when the call goes out, and does it convert successfully? For example, a lead might come in at 1:00, and they get a call five minutes later.
5. New clients/sales: How many new clients resulted from this process? This is the bottom line. Have a system in place that tracks all these things in a way that is easy for everyone to understand.

SDR Example Calls

Here are a few snippets from a call being made to a seller lead:

 

Here are a few snippets from a call being made by one of our Real Estate ISA VAs to a Buyer Lead:

 

Here are a few snippets of a call being made to an Expired Listing Lead:

The process of documenting your procedures virtually is something we call Play, Pause, Do. This is where you take a written standard operating procedure and record a screen share that shows you actually doing the activity. Now not only are you seen doing the activity but you can talk to your employees about it and answer questions about why you are doing it.

Play, Pause, Do requires a video to be associated with the written documentation for every standard operating procedure. Play, Pause, Do allows an employee who may have gone through two weeks of training several months ago to go back to the procedures and be able to complete tasks more successfully.

The great thing is that once you have a video recording of something, it lives forever. You have crafted it, and it can be set on a Vimeo or YouTube account and played back as much as is needed. These accounts can be set to “private” so that only people with company email addresses, for example, can access them.

Why is all this documentation so important? So little of human communication is fully understood in a single iteration. Only 55 percent of face-to-face communication is fully understood. That means that 45 percent of the time, people don’t correctly understand you, even if you are standing right in front of them! What’s more, only 37 percent of nonvisual verbal communication and 17 percent of written communication is fully understood. Isn’t that astounding? Quite literally, 83 percent of the time you can expect your emails to be misunderstood. It is a natural human failing that can be overcome only by repetition and clarification.

Accept that, because going throughout the world thinking, “Well, I told them,” will not help you scale. The onus is on you, the business owner, and chief communicator, to provide clarity if you want to be successful.

One of the hardest pills I had to swallow was understanding that my adult learners need to hear something, on average, seven times before they fully can appreciate and implement a new change inside of a business. You might be thinking, “Well, I don’t hire average, Daniel,” and perhaps that’s true, but even if you get someone twice as adapt and intelligent, you’ll need to make sure there are several reminders, perhaps three to four reinforcements, of a new concept. To be perfectly frank, while this book is to help our clients learn best practices, it also serves a purpose for our internal team here at MyOutDesk.

It is a reinforcement point in our understanding of our company’s vision and mission.

When you are a business owner in the weeds, so to speak, it may not seem like a good use of your time to document all this training. You might be thinking, “This is a lot of work!” But trust me when I say you will be glad you followed the process to the letter. Once it is done, it can be replicated a thousand times. And it might not even take up as much time as you think. You can record yourself as you go about doing the tasks you want to delegate, like making sales calls, for example. Rather than spending three hours concocting a dummy training scenario, record a video of a real call. Then it doesn’t become a lot of work for you and, overall, is less burdensome.