The Scaling Up Business Podcast is all about how a FEW companies make it … and why the REST don’t.
Verne Harnish is the founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 14,000 members worldwide. Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 180 partners on six continents. He’s the author of the bestseller Mastering the Rockefeller Habits which is translated into 9 languages; his latest book Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) has won eight major international book awards.
In his Scaling Up Business Podcast, MyOutDesk is FEATURED on Remote Work + Health Crisis with Bill Gallager.
201: Daniel Ramsey — Setting up for Remote Work During a Health Crisis
Companies now have everyone working remotely. If you don’t have it yet, you’re about to. Remote work is becoming the new normal and most of us are not set up for it! This episode is all about ways you can optimize your working-from-home situation.
Daniel Ramsey is the Founder & CEO of MyOutDesk, a virtual assistant provider for businesses looking to take their needs offshore. Daniel has over 13 years of experience helping clients manage remote employees and has a quick checklist of all the tools, systems, and processes clients need to succeed.
MyOutDesk can save you up to 70% on employment costs Claim a free business strategy consultation & Thrive Guide
Daniel started his business in 2008, during the economic downturn, and had to think quickly about how to serve his clients. He helps his clients in four key areas, sales, administrative support, operations support, and marketing assistance.
In Daniel’s checklist, the first step is to understand who your audience is and what are the different things that matter to them. This could be your employees, clients, and vendors. Once you understand who you need to be talking to, the next is to develop a remote checklist.
Find your communication hub that everyone will use. Start your day with to-do tasks and end your day with a report on how those tasks went. Over-communication is critical at this time. Use video conference calls when chatting about important topics because that face-to-face interaction is critical.
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Whether your current business is large or small, you must understand two things before beginning to scale: where you are and where you are going. You’ll learn that and much more in Scaling Your Business With MOD Virtual Professionals:
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There are about 28 million businesses in the United States. According to the US Small Business Administration, all but about 20,000 of those are small businesses—that is, they have fewer than 500 employees. If you want to stand out from the pack, if you want to grow beyond that 99% of businesses ever achieve, then you need an action plan to get there. This book is that plan.
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It has often been said that if you don’t have an assistant, you are one. In most businesses, this rings especially true.
Ninety-nine percent of businesses in America today are considered small businesses, and eighty percent of those are lone operators.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, of those small businesses with employees, only 4% manage to net $1 million a year.
If you are in real estate, go ahead and slash those odds in half.
That’s right, only 2% of real estate businesses ever reach the million-dollar mark.
Why is that?
One reason could be that many entrepreneurs are natural solopreneurs — accustomed to being compensated by commission. These are go-getters who know how to work hard and network but not necessarily delegating responsibility to others.
They are used to doing everything themselves, from prospecting all the way to closing the sale.
While not every jack-of-all-trades is necessarily a master of none, becoming stuck in that mindset has an inherent opportunity cost. Without a team, it is next to impossible to scale your business.
The reality is: you can’t do everything yourself.
If you were to survey every top-performing business in the country, the one thing they would all have in common is multiple virtual assistants, each with their own strengths and closely connected areas of responsibility. To draw a phrase from Michael Gerber’s The E Myth, the owners of these businesses have grasped that the key to becoming a million-dollar company is to not just work in your business but to work on your business.
You can do it too—and it all starts with your first hire.
Hiring a virtual assistant is an important first step toward rising out of the weeds of the day-to-day operations of your business and becoming a true CEO. A talented virtual assistant or two can save you time, generate more revenue, or even both—leaving you free to concentrate on high-value tasks that only you can do.
The most difficult part can be knowing where to start.
Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. Here are six steps to hiring your first virtual assistant the right way.
Step One: Take Time to Analyze Your Work Patterns
The biggest mistake a budding entrepreneur can make is to hire a virtual assistant without having a clear idea of what they want that person to achieve. A great way to avoid that issue is to start by analyzing how you spend your workdays and where others can alleviate pressure and make you more productive.
It might just blow your mind when you do.
At our company, MyOutDesk, we help business owners analyze their time by giving them our Sticky Challenge. In the course of the Sticky Challenge, business owners use sticky notes to inventory the tasks they spend their days on—every minute of them—for a week or two. At the end of the challenge, they categorize the tasks they completed into dollar-productive activities and non-dollar-productive activities.
Most business owners are shocked to find that they can spend up to 80% of their time performing non-dollar-productive tasks that others can easily perform with little training.
Delegating to grow your business isn’t just a decision you make once; it’s an art you must master through practice. A part of that is deciding what unique value you bring to your business and what you are truly talented at.
For every other real-estate-related task, whether it be it prospecting, generating referrals, or bookkeeping, there is someone out there who can rock it for you!
Step Two: Hire Only a True Match
To make the most out of your investment in a virtual assistant, take time to ensure that you choose someone whose strengths offset your weaknesses. For example, if you are not detail-oriented and have a hard time staying organized, hire someone great at keeping track of all your projects. People with those attributes are out there in abundance, just waiting to partner with you.
At MyOutDesk, we use the Marketforce personality profiling system for both the hiring and potential virtual assistants to ensure a good match. That might seem a bit overzealous to you. You might think, can’t I do a search on Upwork or Fiverr and pick someone who I think complements me well? The answer is that those websites are the dating sites of the working world. We are a marriage site. That is why personality matching is so important to us. We were hoping you could hire a virtual assistant who will stay with you for the long term and alleviate the need for the constant retraining of new virtual assistants.
Step Three: Thoroughly Vet Your Candidate
If your personality is aligned with your potential hire, you can begin the vetting process. Start with what we like to call the 3 E’s: Employment, Experience, and Education. If you want to hire a prospector, for example, you should verify that they have a track record of employment in your industry (or similar), experience with prospecting, and relevant training that is fully documentable.
We always take the additional measure of performing an FBI-grade background check, something that every country in the world has an equivalent of. Naturally, therefore, your potential virtual assistant should have good standing in their community.
It is also critical to double-check that your candidate has good access to technology. Any virtual assistant you hire should have a reliable internet connection. We require proof of a 5 Mbps primary connection and a 2 Mbps backup connection.
It is also important that you have a video interface with your assistant to have face-to-face meetings. It will help exponentially in getting them up to speed on your business.
Having time-tracking software that captures screenshots of your virtual assistant’s work will give you additional peace of mind as they begin working for you. We have our own proprietary software to track what our virtual assistants do, and both our clients and the virtual employees love using it.
Step Four: Define Measurable Outcomes for your Virtual Assistant
Traditional job descriptions have their place, but they can be a bit dangerous too. When you invest in a virtual assistant, you want to feel the impact of their work, and you should let them know exactly what you want that to look like.
For example, it’s much more powerful to give an assistant the goal of “increase our company’s referrals by 10%” than to tell them, “Call all our clients and ask for referrals.” The first is a measurable outcome, while the second is merely an assigned task. Outcomes are much more empowering and productive for everyone involved.
Your outcomes for your virtual assistants should aim to achieve one of two things: save you time or generate more revenue. For example, it may be that you need more people on the phones, which will grow revenue. Or, you may need someone to save you time, so you can step into a CEO role while others take on more of the minutiae of day-to-day operations.
Whether time or revenue is the outcome you are looking for, remember that what you do not measure, you do not improve. For example, one of our clients in the Northwest, John, has a two-million-dollar real-estate business. Yet, when we consulted with him about becoming more productive, we learned that none of his employees were on a centralized phone system. Some used landlines, some cell phones, and some used services like Mojo Dialer. As such, he had no way to measure the time his employees spent on the phone. Once we put a centralized system in place for him that emphasized time accountability, he was amazed at the growth and efficiency his team achieved.
Step Five: Remember That Your Money Is Well Invested
One of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur can make is fretting about the cost of hiring a virtual employee. If you think of hiring someone as an expense rather than an investment, it might be tempting to put it off and continue doing all the work yourself.
As any top-performing business owner can tell you, however, having an assistant provides a return on investment of at least three to one.
In our globally connected age, we have the additional benefit of leveraging the principle of currency arbitrage to reduce the cost of hiring an assistant. The difference in our currency compared to a country like the Philippines means that it is possible to hire someone in another country to increase your productivity at a reasonable cost and still know that you are paying that person handsomely.
At our company, MyOutDesk, the average cost of a virtual assistant to businesses is $21,000 per year. The cost of the average traditional employee in the United States is $76,000. That’s a savings of more than $50,000 per employee! In 2018 alone, we saved businesses $55 million this way.
Although we would love to say we’ve cracked a big secret about the global talent market, this is something all large, successful companies are in on. As you can see from the chart below, America’s biggest companies employ more global talent than you might think.
Step Six: Remember That Your Time Is Well Invested Too
Another worry that you might have as an entrepreneur might is that training a virtual assistant in their business will be so laborious and time-consuming that it won’t be worth the trouble. You might think it would be faster and easier to do the work yourself.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. So take a look at the long game.
We frequently see what we call the 30X rule come into play. For example, it may take you 30 hours to administer the right training before your virtual assistant can do their first independent hour of work for you. But once you do, you will see a 733% return on that time investment.
Albert Einstein is said to have referred to compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world, saying, “He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t… pays it.” We use that concept to describe what we think of as “compound leverage.” Once you have given a task away to a virtual professional and properly trained them, you are going to get that time back forever.
One of the keys to scaling is to remove yourself from your business’s administrative activities and focus your time on growing your company. Having a VP tackle operations and administrative outcomes for you can go far beyond what a traditional assistant does, like answering phones and keeping your calendar. There are many more ways a VP can help you administratively. Here are some concrete examples of my favorite things administrative VPs do for our clients.
Lead Management
Figure 18, from early 2018, shows what MyOutDesk has in place so that sales and marketing can know how we have handled a hotline, a webchat, or an email campaign lead coming into our CRM.
When someone comes to MyOutDesk interested in working with us, we have a script and a completely outlined lead process in hand. While all salespeople need to embrace those standard operating procedures, they don’t necessarily need to be the ones who own those documents; you could have an administrative VP who acts as that owner and keeper of these essential procedures and processes. You will be amazed at how having someone do this will keep you from getting bogged down with the sales side of your business.
Lead Reporting
One opportunity many business owners overlook is taking advantage of all the reporting and business analytics virtual professionals can provide. For example, here is a report prepared for one of our clients. In it, you can see a lot of information: where revenue came from during this reporting period, how many deals were closed, what expenses there were, and what conversion rates looked like. Numbers like these can be prepared to know where to spend your marketing dollars best and how you can be most effective in closing deals. (See figure 19.)
Net Promoter Scores
Another thing your VPs can do for you is to keep track of net promoter scores. Whenever we have asked clients, “How likely are you to refer colleagues and friends to our service?” and the answer is “Very likely,” or, “Not likely,” we know that those who say “not likely” are clients we need to focus on. They are, in a way, raising their hands and saying, “Hey, we are not 100 percent happy,” and finding out why yields useful information. A VP can track both the “likely” responders and the “unlikely” over time to see if the same issues keep coming up and to report back to you about how more customers can become likely to give you a referral. Many companies don’t have a quality score around their service or product. Having an administrative professional to survey clients, employees, and vendors is a great way to get the feedback you can use to implement long-term structural changes.
Recruitment
I’m an employer, and we have thousands of folks who work for MyOutDesk. I know from experience that sorting through all the applications we get is a big challenge and not necessarily the best use of my time as an entrepreneur. We had had years when we had over thirty thousand applicants for only five hundred jobs. As you would imagine, the process of narrowing the field to the two thousand or so viable candidates we would want to interview is daunting. It is your job to interview and find talent as a business owner, but posting jobs and screening the multitudes are not. This is something that an administrative professional can handle for you when you give that person a clear idea of what your criteria are. This will save you time and energy while allowing you to focus on revenue-producing activities.
Agile Project Management
Agile project management is a great way to use your virtual administrative professionals. Following is an example of a spreadsheet that could represent project management for anyone on your team. On the left side, you can score the importance of the task, starting at 1,000 and going down so that the highest tasks go to the top and the lowest goes to the bottom. You can assign objectives, due dates, the person(s) who will handle it, documentation needed, and completion dates for each task. These can all be housed in one spot.
If you are running a big organization and you have as many events as MyOutDesk does (for example, we might have a birthday party this week, a client event next week, and a team-building event coming up next month). All the related details have to be tracked as a project. The flights, the hotels, the venue details, and schedules…and all of this can be managed by VPs. Many of our clients and VPs use the Basecamp app to run complex, multifunctional projects. Some still use a simple Excel spreadsheet, like the one I share here. Others use a kind of software that is specific to project management. Whatever you use, you can give it to a virtual professional to run it for you.
Performance reporting is another role that virtual administrative assistants can assume. Here is an example from several years ago of our incoming leads, where they came from, and how many converted across different departments. A VP compiled that information and maintained it over time to have access to that data.
There are many different access points VPs can have for this kind of data. If you have a phone system, there is a back end for that phone system from which data can be pulled. If you have a CRM, there is a back end for that from which you can extract how many leads came in and what the activity looks like. If you have some delivery software in which you are running projects, you can pull that data out of the back end. If you have financials, you can tie the operations of your business back to those financials. These are all examples of performance reporting. A VP will have to be given resources to do this; this person won’t jump straight in and know how to do it. But once it is set up and you have introduced the process, your VP will maintain it for you and report back in a consistent format.
Customer Support
In chapter 3, I mentioned Chris, a VP at MyOutDesk who has been supporting our client, Knolly William’s technology company. The technology is a CRM. A few years ago, Knolly hadn’t been sure what he would do with his tech company. He was going to either ditch it or move forward with it. It had an inexpensive price point, so there were many potential users, and it was a recurring source of revenue for him. The problem was that he was tired of working on it himself as a business owner. So I told him I could get him, somebody, to help.
That’s where Chris came in. He is the customer support touchpoint for all inquiries, sales, and operations. The only things he doesn’t handle are speaking engagements, writing about the CRM, and working with the tech people to maintain and develop the technology. Knolly does all of that. But Chris handles everything else, from onboarding to helping someone move their CRM from an old system. Chris feels like a partner to Knolly, and he loves his work. He is a great example of an administrative VP who has made a business come alive.
One virtual marketing coordinator role that will benefit your business is repurposing content. When you create a blog post, for example, and put it on your website, you can have someone repurpose that content and multiply its effect. You can tweet about it. You can put it on LinkedIn. You can send video content to YouTube. There are so many ways your unique content can be proliferated out in the world when you have someone to do that cyber-legwork for you. If there is a call to action to schedule a consultation, to subscribe to a newsletter, to get more information, to download something, or to do whatever your lead-gathering strategy might be, your marketing coordinator can put more eyes on it. This is a tried-and-true driver of new business.
Events
I love client referral events. Having your VPs track referral events can be a huge part of your growth. If your business is operating well, you probably have 25 to 50 percent of your business coming from referrals, but tracking them is not necessarily something you should be spending your time on as an entrepreneur and business owner. So ask a VP to do it for you.
Social Media
Social media has gone from being a useful business tool to a critical and mandatory focus in recent years. Every social media platform has a different format, and that means it takes time, energy, and effort to create different content for those formats. However, there is a medium for every form of content, and we have VPs who are experts at optimizing your exposure through those platforms for you.
For example, let’s say you have five thousand Facebook friends. How do you know that these are the best five thousand to have? You can have your virtual professional put them through a process where people you’ve engaged with are coming up more and more on your screen. As a result, you’re driving more and more referrals through your community and creating posts in return. Seemingly overnight, you are a bit of a local celebrity! But again, you don’t want social media to consume your own time so that you can delegate it to a VP.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a huge deal and is a vital aspect of scaling along with the 7-Figure Business Roadmap. Everyone at the They Do It stage has some marketing automation in place. Running a marketing automation system involves a lot of work inputting information into a CRM application, setting up email campaigns, and setting up drip campaigns. Luckily, all that can be done virtually as well.
Impressed with what our sales and marketing virtual professionals can do? Wait until you see how operations and administrative professionals can transform your business.
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. So 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 talent we provide (which allows them 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 personally, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be systematized. A referral strategy is something that many substages 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. 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 recommendations on your website and social media pages to bolster your company’s public image. It would help if you always were 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 pursuing 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 to share those reviews. Once you generate great reviews, they have lasting value; they are viewed repeatedly by potential customers, driving revenue back to your business.
We have a process in place so that when someone says that our VPs amaze them, 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 3Rs and 4Ps are so important that 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. 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 ensure that what is paramount to every employee is to get and keep customers, with no exceptions directly. 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.
If I were to ask you what presenting involves, what would you say? Your answer would probably be something like, “I start by telling them about my product or service, point out why they should choose me and not someone else, and tell them how customers think my company is stellar in its niche.” And there is nothing wrong with that. But what I want you to remember is that presenting should also involve focusing on what is in it for them, the clients. What is their best outcome? We often ask our clients, “If you could have one win out of this call, what would it be? If you could walk away with one thing of value, what is it?” In other words, we help them focus on determining what would be a win for them.
We train our virtual professionals to focus on this. In fact, one of our core values is having a servant’s heart. We want to serve our clients and vendors we are in business with. Our perspective is that when you add value to people, it will be reciprocated. So focus your presentation on the end users, make sure they are your focus, and help them with their dreams and goals.
Scale Framework: A company mission (what you do), vision (where you are going), values (the standards you collectively hold), value proposition (why clients choose you), and positioning (how your company is different or better) are required when you reach the We Do It stage and can be folded into story mode while presenting and prospecting to a potential client.
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. Of course, that warm opportunity would include a sales meeting, and if all goes well, a sales quote. Preparing virtual professionals to succeed with this outcome 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. Unfortunately, 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 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. Once you have articulated this clearly and documented it transparently, your VPs will be able to advance that message. They will communicate it 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. Please 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 repeatedly hear 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 it. 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? Could you help them to anticipate these issues?
Have a Positioning Document
A positioning document expresses how your product or service fills a need that competitors don’t, so this is a critical piece for a sales development rep to know. For example, at MyOutDesk, our positioning document has expressions along these lines:
We have helped over five thousand clients grow their businesses.
We make sure that every virtual professional you interview is exceptional and MOD-certified because of our thorough vetting process.
We have been in this business for twelve years and built an industry around serving medium and small businesses.
We provide Market Force™ personality profiles to match talent accurately.
We provide medical benefits, microloans, vacations, and conferences for our virtual professionals.
MyTimeIn is our proprietary software that helps track outcomes and provides daily task oversight.
We have a Chief People Office in the United States that personally vets our virtual professionals.
Your partnership with us benefits our Charity Impact Movement (503c). We give away thousands of dollars every year to impoverished communities.
These are points on which none of our competitors can compare. Anyone who tries to stack up against that will have a huge challenge, and the only way they can win is through offering a lower price and lower quality. MyOutDesk is the price leader and has the highest quality available, so this is exactly where I want our competitors to be (a lower-priced alternative). If they offer lower prices, we can say, “Look at all the value we have to help your business scale. If you are looking for the cheapest, that’s not us. If you are looking to scale effectively while ensuring a great end product that gives value to your customers, we know how to do that.”
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:
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?
The number of calls: How many calls did your virtual professionals make to those leads?
Leads converted: How many of those calls went from being just a lead to an actual opportunity to sell?
Speed to lead: This is a metric that really matters. How much time elapses between when the lead comes into when the call goes out and converts successfully? For example, a lead might come in at 1:00, and they get a call five minutes later.
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.
Avoid These Failure Points
What I have described so far are the things you need to do to succeed in scaling with your virtual SDRs. Based on my vast experience, I’d also like to give you some common pitfalls to avoid.
You don’t have enough leads: I like to have five hundred new leads a month, but your number will depend on what industry you are in and what your sales cycle looks like. I always like to have three to five salespeople behind our virtual SDRs. An SDR’s job is to convert a lead into an opportunity. And the salesperson’s job is to turn that opportunity into a client. It is important for the SDR to feel like they are on the same team as the salesperson and vice versa. Having enough leads and enough salespeople allows you to test who is closing and who is not. We once had a client come to us because he was upset his team wasn’t converting enough leads. It turned out that the salesperson wasn’t immediately calling the leads once they got converted into an opportunity instead of letting them go for two or three days before calling. So you must have enough people and measurement for speed to lead for both the VP and the salesperson here in the United States.
You aren’t doing daily and weekly meetings: I like a daily morning meeting with a little music and a little coffee so that everyone can talk about the wins. Everyone is talking about where their energy is and how they are feeling, and we are putting positivity out early in the morning so that feeling can be conveyed through the phones. Weekly meetings are for making commitments to sales and conversion goals.
You aren’t tracking conversations: Someone who has forty or fifty conversations per day will have a different result than someone who is having ten. You want to set concrete goals for the number of conversations and share those in your daily and weekly meetings.
You don’t have activity-level measurements: Your system for measuring results should include everyone on your team. For example, how many calls did each person make? How many times did each person try? How fast did each person handle the opportunities in front of them, and how often convert? These are important metrics to have for each individual.
You aren’t going after the 3Rs: As I mentioned in chapter 11, referrals, recommendations, and reviews are critical to your business. It is astounding how many businesses fail to harness the power of these three things. We chase them ruthlessly at MyOutDesk. In fact, we get referrals all the time from people who have never even done business with us. There is a woman in Texas who has sent us three or four clients. I had only one conversation with her five years ago, and she hasn’t bought from us, but she keeps sending us people because I had a great conversation with her. If you aren’t pursuing the 3Rs with your team, you are missing out. As you can see, my prevailing message about how to set up your virtual SDRs for success is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Assume nothing, and document everything.
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:
Business and sports provide very similar experiences for people who want to be champions and win. There’s a coach and per- haps a couple of assistant coaches in any high school sport, a workout discipline, a required practice schedule, and matches to test your team’s ability against the competition’s. In business, the same systems exist. You can have a coach, a workout discipline, and daily practice routines, and then you get to be in front of clients fighting for the business.
The 7-Figure Business Roadmap describes, for business owners, what is equivalent to the differences among competing in high school, college, and the pros. It’s a clear articulation of the player’s landscape: the challenges, key drivers, and team member rosters. In addition, the Business Roadmap will help you focus on the things that matter at different revenue and team size levels. So if you dream about playing in your industry’s version of the NFL, get the 7-Figure Business Roadmap, so while you’re in college or even high school, you can practice like you’re going pro.
The “I” Do It Stage
There is a lot of excitement in the I Do It stage. I Do It entrepreneurs are new to an industry and have a hunger for learning. Their business is indeed their baby, and they think, “I built it, and it works for me.” Which is fine in the beginning. Most of the time, they are solopreneurs, meaning they do the work themselves. They are also often learning how to solve a problem and be compensated based on how big that problem is (the market) and how well they solve it (the value proposition). They are really in the process of “becoming.”
The upside for I Do It is their overhead is low, and most of the revenue the business makes goes right to them. At this stage, there are no or few employees to provide for. I Do Its need to learn how to get a deeper understanding of their industry, generate revenue, who their clients are, and what their value proposition is out on the market.
The “WE” Do It Stage
At MyOutDesk, we help many businesses scale through the “We Do It” stage because the We Do It has begun to focus on hiring people and creating efficient systems and processes, which is our forte. If your business is at this stage, you have already hired an assistant and perhaps another salesperson or whoever is a producer in your world. You are also trying to pinpoint how you’ve become successful, extract that from your mind, and put a system or process around it so that others can duplicate that success.
At the We Do It stage, there are a lot of small and tight-knit teams. You might rent an office at this stage and start building a name for your- self. You might become a little bit of a local celebrity along the way. You are networking a lot and have begun to impact your local community at a higher stage.
I tell people that becoming an I Do It entrepreneur is like getting a four-year degree in terms of difficulty. Moving to the We Do It stage is more like getting a master’s degree and a Ph.D. all at the same time. It’s not easy, but you are truly building business value and a future asset worth selling on the open market once you do it.
The “They Do It” Do It Stage
As you scale, your business will shift to the “They Do It” stage. It is an exciting place to be. The big difference between the We Do It stage and the They Do It stage is that at the They Do It stage, the company’s production is no longer reliant on only you, the owner. Freedom is born here. A They Do It entrepreneur can take a day or two off (or a whole month), and the business continues to sell and move forward with the systems in place.
This is not to say that you are no longer selling at this stage. You are still selling, but at this point, you are focusing on only the most major, game-changing deals. You’re creating a channel of sales opportunities and strategic partnerships, and your employees are handling the day-to-day, transactional business.
Another big difference at this stage is that you are no longer chasing business. You have created a name for yourself and may even be well-known in your community, and that recognition for your name and company draws business into you.
What sets the We Do It, and the They Do It’s apart is not just the size of the company or the number of employees but rather the creation of independent company culture. You will have given your employees a feeling that they are doing more than simply putting money in your bank account by working for you. Your employees will believe in your mission and vision, including giving back to your community and the world.
Within your scale framework, when a virtual professional makes a mistake, there must be a process for determining why. As an entrepreneur, you might tend to be upset when someone makes a mistake. You might think, “How could my virtual professional make such a needless mistake? This isn’t working. You made a bad experience occur for my client, and I can’t believe you did that.” An entrepreneur tends to blame the employee because we believe we would have done things differently.
The first question you should ask yourself is, “Do I have a written process in my standard operating procedures on how to do this task (or confront this issue)?” The standard operating procedures (SOP) should be sufficiently complete with guiding your VP through everything to be touched within the business, even if it is as trivial as answering the phone, where to store documents, or what to put in an email signature. Then, when someone comes on board, that new employee has a reference point for everything about the job.
The second question you should ask yourself is, “Did I conduct formal training on how to do that?” You can’t simply give someone a written procedure and say, “Here you go. Good luck.” You must help the person understand why the procedure is to be done and then further clarify by answering any questions.
If you answer yes to both those questions, you can go back through that documentation with the employee and show how you covered that scenario in the training process. This allows the employee to say, “Gosh, you are right. I do remember that in training. It’s my mistake, and it won’t happen again.” Tell your employee, “Great, I’m so glad that we are clear about this. I appreciate your commitment that it won’t happen again.”
With all your documentation in place, you can put the onus on the employee to realize the mistake, and by asking yourself the right questions, you avoid making unpleasant and counterproductive assumptions, like “They should have known that.” Plus, you enable a future where that mistake won’t happen again and again and again.
