Once upon a time I was a SDR at a unicorn tech company – and I was miserable.
Making 80-100 cold calls per day was not my forte.
I’m a strategist at heart – I love building systems and processes to achieve goals, and the sales position I had taken for the lucrative benefits and high first-out-of-college salary was proving the theory that I should probably focus on work that I loved over just money.
My brain struggles with inefficiency – and so I couldn’t comprehend why I was being paid around $34/hour to do things I knew others would do for a lot less.
So I got to work. Here’s how:
I was introduced Virtual Assistants through Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week – which is on my top 8 list of favorite business/self-help books of all time.
Ferriss talks about the principle of outsourcing work that others can do just as well or better for less.
If you’re being paid $20/hour to do something, and someone can do it better for $10/hour – outsource it!
I thought I could do better than $10/hour in my situation.
One of my key jobs as a Sales Development Representative was to “prospect”.
Essentially, find people that fit a certain criteria we could sell to, and do research to personalize a message so that if I did get a hold of them, it would be likely they would agree to a meeting.
So, I made a list of the criteria and things that I would look for if I was prospecting myself, and made a “How To Guide”. It wasn’t anything special, I just put it on a google word doc.
This is the first key of outsourcing.
Anything you outsource you should have mastered already yourself. If you try to outsource figuring out how to do something, you will most likely fail.
Then I went to Upwork.com. Think of it as the “Uber” for Freelancers.
I posted the job –
“Find me 50 people everyday that meet xxxx criteria for $.10/lead”
Soon I had people requesting to do the job from all over the world. Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and the Philippines were the most common.
Here were my criteria:
- No brand new freelancers (they must of shown previous experience doing similar types of work).
- Must speak enough English to understand an email with basic instructions or a how-to video I would send.
That was it. A lot of them had access to Linkedin SalesNavigator as well – which helped a lot!
I would then take the top 3-4 freelancers, and assign them a “test”:
Find me 50 people that meet the xxxx criteria I had outlined. If they did it well, I would hire them for 2 weeks, than a month, than 3 and so on.
This protected me from wasting time on bad hires as well as making sure the work was high-quality (as good or better as I would do it).
But I wasn’t done there.
A common misconception when most people begin outsourcing is that you won’t have do anything anymore around the activities you outsourced.
Wrong. You’ll just have to do less. You are now managing.
This means you should have 1-2 ten to fifteen minute meetings with your outsourcer to make sure things are going the way you want them too, as well as verifiying the work is high quality.
You’ll get what you tolerate.
Here are a couple other things that I learned:
- If your Virtual Assistant Freelancer does something wrong, it’s probably because your instructions weren’t clear.
- If you don’t give a deadline, the freelancer will use that to their advantage. If you give a deadline, stick to it but be reasonable.
- Screen shares or recorded videos are super helpful to show your VA how to do something the way you would.
(Note – It was important for me to protect the company’s data – so I never used the company’s name with my virtual assistants, or granted access to anything only an employee should have access to. I even used a pseudonym to hire others. It required more work on my part, but I didn’t want to break the law or my duty to the company as an employee. I also never recorded phone calls I didn’t make personally for credit. Integrity is still important when you outsource!)
The beauty of this is that I could focus on things that really only I could do, like preparing for meetings, and finding ways to set up more, because my time wasn’t eaten up by prospecting anymore.
Present Day
I now have a VA (who’s probably reading this, thanks for what you do!) that manages all of my social media comments, messages and so forth. I pay her $10/hour.
That’s how I stay so consistent across 3 platforms. She emails me messages so that I can reply to them personally, but don’t waste time scrolling on LinkedIn or Facebook without being intentional, and manages my email.
You don’t have to be in sales or an Entrepreneur to outsource. Find repeatable daily tasks that you don’t have to be the one to do, and have a VA do them for you.
The time savings will be immeasurable, and you can focus on the things that will really make the difference.
Get a VA – and accomplish what you really want and need to do!
If you like my thinking around Virtual assistants, you’ll love how we think about money and budgeting. Come to our our next Free LIVE Budgeting Training – “The 4 Budgeting Mistakes Most People Make and How to Fix them to Achieve Your Financial Goals Fast”.