Don’t pay by the hour. You’ll get construction workers and lawyers.

Compensation dictates behavior.? Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.

Here is what we’re going to explore in this newsletter:

1. Don’t pay by the hour.? You’ll get construction workers and lawyers.
2. You’re ready to scale offshoring when you can Replace, not just Add talent;
3. Document projects before hiring.? Think vivid vision of outcomes 1-year into future;
4. Sales support story – completing Territory / Account Maps in days.

Don’t pay by the hour.? You’ll get construction workers and lawyers.

It can be tempting to want to pay someone for a project by the hour.? Here’s what you get…

The same speed-to-outcomes as city construction workers.? Pay someone by the hour and they drive their outcomes towards that compensation model:

• Drag their feet;
• Stretch timelines;
• Become the definition of the Cupboard Theory.

What’s the Cupboard Theory?

Imagine you have a home with 4 cupboards, filled with pots and pans.? You decide to buy a new, larger home – with 8 cupboards.? You move in, and miraculously when you set up the kitchen, the pots and pans fill the entire space.? How can this be!?!? It’s because you spaced everything a few inches apart unnecessarily.? You made space where space doesn’t need to be.

Pay by hour people do this all the time.? What could be done in 24 hours, is done in a week.

So your outcomes are protracted so they can justify making the income they need,

Fixed Fee talent isn’t worried about stretching timelines, they are looking at speed-to-impact.? They are getting you outcomes quickly.? All while feeling secure about their employment situation.??

They are even willing to ask for competitive rates that create you more margins to trade for that guaranteed monthly income.

You’re ready to scale offshoring when you can Replace, not just Add talent.

You have a database issue.? Or you need someone to post content on social media for your company for the first time.? These are common starting points for offshoring, This is Stage 1.

I’ve been asked by multiple customers “how do I know when I’m really to scale offshoring across my organization”?

In my opinion, it’s a Mindset and Financial Analysis moment.

It’s a moment when you:

1. Recognize there is a project, program, initiative that needs tackling;

AND

1. You look at your existing team and realize they are not the best fit to tackle this challenge/opportunity

AND

1. You consciously analyze the opportunity cost of an EXIST talent, and question why you aren’t Replacing that talent with a more capable, less expensive resource.

It’s because at that moment, you are entering Zero-based Budgeting.

What’s Zero-based Budgeting?

You have your list of expenses:

• Software
• People
• Office Space
• Etc.

Imagine coming to a line-item category like Lead Development Rep or Sales Operations.??

Rather than moving the existing expense over month-over-month, you actually $0 out the expense.? Like it never existed!

Next, you have to argue and objectivity justify:

• Should I even have ANY expense?
• If so, how can I rethink this budget completely?

It’s in that moment that you realize that you have opened your mind to profitable scale, regardless of geographic location.

This is your moment to scale offshoring.

Document projects before hiring.? Think vivid vision of outcomes 1-year into future.

A few recent customers have repeated this mistake I’ve advised them not to do.? Don’t try to invent on the fly.? These customers saw the main project/initiative they needed to tackle right at the type of their nose.? That was easy.? The Founders / CXO’s got comfortable with their new offshore teammate, and they went back diving deep into their business.? Then the offshore talent finished the project/initiative, and that same offshore talent seemed like a pest asking for more and more projects.

It’s a big mistake to hire someone for a specific project assuming your “find” more projects in the future.? We just get too busy too quickly, and we can’t slow down to analyze where all the $5/hr administrative tasks are loitering around the business.

What should you do?

1. Strategically envision outcomes in your business being cleared away.? Think about Time being bought back for you and your CXO’s / ELT team.? Think about more leads coming in from marketing because of your marketing support programs.

1. Then, document all the steps, processes, tasks it would take to get you there.? Specifically, think of the $5/hr tasks that everyone hates, loathes, and doesn’t want to tackle.? Think of the tasks that are bogging down your team.

Now you start to develop a long list.? I’ll give you an example:

Goal = More sales productivity from the SDR team by increasing their lead flow.

Tasks =?

• Territory Map the list of Accounts
• Identify the Contacts
• Enrich that Contact database with emails, LinkedIn profiles, phone numbers
• Ingest list into CRM
• Build the messaging campaign / cadence
• Maintain weekly productivity reports on the SDR’s engagement, accounts to add/subtract from list

Now all of a sudden you gone from one (1) project to a full-time offshore sales support rep.? This is continuous work for months and months.

Sales support story – Territory / Account Maps completed in days (project lingered for months)

Our customer came to us with a massive project for their Sales Support rep:

Capture every CXO / VP on LinkedIn that has tagged their LinkedIn profile with a specific Interest, and enrich that database with email, phone and LinkedIn Profiles.

The customer had been sitting on this idea for months.? This is an excellent project for a Sales Support rep:

• Too busy
• Too boring
• Too mechanical
• Too repetitive

Too much a $5/hr task.

Our Sales Support team had this list extracted from LinkedIn, enriched, and in their CRM within days.

Now the customer has 1,000’s of leads in their CRM to prospect.? It would have taken way too long, way to laborious to ask their onshore revenue operations team to execute this.

Don’t Forget – Benchmark where your internal talent is spending time on $5/hr Tasks, and how you can Centralize Offshore.