My Adventures in Outsourcing: My Mistakes, Unexpected Wins, and Lessons Learned.

3 years ago I was a robot at my desk, eyes glued to the screen, my hand frozen solid at the mouse...copy, paste, scroll, scroll, copy paste, repeat...I had found an effective way to source leads, find points of contacts, reach out to those contacts, and follow up. And it worked. I was doing well, perhaps better than I had ever done in sales at that point in time. But it was also soul crushing...and wasn’t scalable.

It was a system 2 years in the making after having the “Ah ha” moment that cranking out 100 cold calls a day to continue to grow my book of business wasn’t possible anymore. Not  if I wanted to hang onto my current customers. I had learned the lesson the hard way and very early on that service is everything. And a sales person’s job doesn’t end when you close the sale. That is when it begins. Handing the account off to a rep to service was the wrong way to do it. True service. Amazing service. Service that kicks your competitors in the rear is based on one principle: Serving your customers best interests and working your a$$ off for them 24/7. Being available 24/7. Responding to your customer within a minute of every email no matter the time or day of the week. Being obsessively service minded at every turn. Showing your customer that you care about their business just as much as they do.

But to care about current customers, meant sacrificing growth. I couldn’t keep growing by cranking out cold calls. So was the answer to stop growing and hang onto the customers I had and hope for the best? No, the answer was find another way.

After stumbling on some articles about the success of email campaigns for B2B selling, I decided to give it a shot. And after 2 years of figuring out the most effective way I could source leads, find points of contacts, send targeted emails with personalized subject lines and messages with a high response rate, I felt I had finally done it...I had found another way...I was able to service my customers with the same obsessive attention as ever, while still growing my book of business ...but I had still reached a dead end. I could only do so much during the day. I was growing as fast as I could based on what I alone could do in a day. It wasn’t scalable. It was soul crushing, monotonous work. And that’s when the second “ah ha” moment hit me...Salary workers should only be doing salary tasks. I was right to be the one person interacting with my customers. This was an invaluable salary employee task. I was right to talk to warm leads on sales calls, conference calls, meetings, etc. This was an invaluable salary task. I was wrong to perform data entry tasks. This was a waste of the company’s money they were paying me. And not just me….I’m no God’s gift to sales by any means...this was any sales person that was a salary employee. This was any salary employee period. Why were they a salary employee? Because they had skills that weren’t easily teachable, innate abilities to connect with customers, develop relationships, etc.  Robotic, monotonous work should be for robots or independent freelance contractors. And so my outsourcing journey began.

I realized early on when outsourcing non-salary tasks overseas, that out of 1,000 overseas freelancers, 900 of them will be terrible. We’ve all either experienced a frustrating call with a Comcast customer service rep from overseas or an overseas rep chatting on a website (almost as frustrating as a chat bot) But these experiences that taint our view of overseas freelancers doesn’t mean all overseas freelancers stink. They don’t. What became very clear early on, was 2 things: 1. I had to make sure the training I provided was air tight and idiot proof. 2. Some freelancers did stink no matter the training. So creating a way to score each freelancer on each assignment was key. I had to know who my top performers were: what they were doing, and re-working the training so to instruct them on every single step of the process. And knowing who the worst performers were, so I would never use them again.

I routinely eliminated the low performers, hired new ones, re-trained, fired, and re-hired and after a while...voila...had my all-star freelancer team together. The best part was that the top performers always performed well on each and every task. I didn’t have to check up on them. They were always hungry for more work. They always did their very best and could crank out quality work at an incredibly low cost.

And so here was the exciting part. Matching up apples to apples what I (or any rep) could produce by themselves versus what a team of top overseas ( Bangladesh) freelancers could produce at an absurdly low cost. It wasn't even close.

Working after hours (after my customers had gone to sleep and I was free to grow my book of business) I could generate around 30 quality leads per day. Find 30 points of contact, and set up the e-mail drip campaign for the week. So assuming 5 business days, 4 weeks, I could reach out to 600 new prospects per week with sheer grind and determination.

With a team of 8 freelancers, our cost was $30 per set of 100 leads. They would complete 100 leads every 3 days, with detailed information such as location, industry, job titles, e-mails, direct phone numbers, probability of interest, etc. And they worked 7 days a week, not the measly 5 I was willing to commit to. So thats 7,200 new prospects per month. $2160 total cost for the month. That is 12X the output I could produce on my own with moderate success, for a cost less than a full-time employee.

Was it a replacement for a salary worker? No. It was making our salary staff more efficient. It made our sales staff happier. We were providing them with a system to succeed. They had 0 excuses not to succeed.

We did this for a while and enjoyed a lot of success. We were setting up new customers at a rapid pace.. Our salary employees had more time to invest in their customer base and developing old and new relationships. We weren’t asking them to do montous robot activities anymore, so they were not only happier employees, but more productive and focused on salary employee tasks.

One day, we had a new rep start, who sat just across from me. (I have never had an office nor would I ever want one. Sitting out on the floor with everyone is always the best way to get a pulse on how things are going, what’s working what isn’t, etc) Anyways, a new rep started and was doing something we had all but given up doing: Cold-calling. It was something I thought was dead. Wrong! He was killing it. Granted, it was unsustainable. After a short while, he built up a customer base and could no longer cold-call. He then relied on our system to generate business at his point. But it left me thinking...was cold-calling a salary task? Was I holding back this new rep from reaching his full potential? Potentially…

I had experimented with outsourcing this task overseas...no, not having people with thick accents in foreign countries calling potential customers...I had experienced solicitation calls from these sources and it was never a good experience. I had also read enough articles showing the success rate of an american accent versus a foreign accent: it wasn’t even close. Cold calling with thick foreign accents seemed like a waste of time. So I stumbled upon a customer that used soundboard technology (similar to the idea behind prank calls) with pre-recorded audio of American accents. The overseas freelancer would press buttons based on what the voice at the other end would say. The key was having a large array of options, a friendly user interface for the soundboard, and excellent training for the freelancer. Shortly after convincing my brother (luckily a super smart programmer)  to build this soundboard software, recording the voiceovers, and training our overseas staff on the button pushing….the practice was determined to be illegal. It was new legislation that passed just after we got it up and running for testing: All phone calls needed to be between 2 people unless the receiving party gave consent...and that was the end of that chapter.

Luckily, our pursuit of figuring out the cold-calling outsourcing dilemma didn’t end there. I determined there were 2 steps to the process. 1. Finding out the likelihood of a contact responding positively to a cold call. (An overseas freelancer could do this step) 2. A well-spoken US freelancer who either A) Was a retired salesperson/investigative reporter/journalist looking for extra cash working from home or B) a driven college student looking for extra cash. It worked great. We got appointments set for our salary sales staff so they could do the closing and relationship building. Our team of overseas Bangladeshians, retired sales/investigative reporters, and college students worked like a charm. We followed what we had learned form before. Excellent fool-proof training system. Scoring each freelancer by job. Hiring, firing, re-training than keeping our all-star freelancers happy and working. Below is the cost breakdown and effectiveness of salary cold calling versus freelancer cold calling:

An above average salary cold-caller with zero existing customer base. 100 calls per day. 2 new potential customers looking for quotes. 5 where a customer would give email to keep us on file and transfer to our drip campaign. (NOT INCLUDING COMMISSION $40k salary, $166 per day)

Team of 2 US based callers, and 1 overseas level of probable interest generator. 200 calls per day. $130 total per day. 5 new potential customers looking for quotes. 14 calls where a customer would give email to keep us on file and transfer to our drip campaign. $130 total per day.

It wasn’t the 12X ROI we had for email campaigns. But a 2X return to continue to cold-call and gain a larger % of the prospects we were going after, seemed like a win. Overtime, the key to gaining a 3X and even at times 4X ROI in the cold calling arena, has come with with some better predictive analysis as to the probability a prospect will be receptive to a cold call.  

It has been a fun ride and hope to learn more. It has been mostly trial and error so please comment or PM me with any outsourcing or AI tips and tricks you have come across!