Episode: 2 — How to Delegate: Non-Obvious Outsourcing
When I first started Odetta, an online SaaS platform that empowers women from developing economies to work on digital projects remotely, I took on everything. I started without a CTO or technical co-founder and I chose to bootstrap rather than pursuing investor funding. These choices were reflective of my personality– I’m independent and I like being in control of the mission and direction of Odetta. But pretty soon, I realized the need to outsource the work and find team members who could help with the list of tasks that were growing with the size of the company. I distinctly remember speaking to our Enterprise Sales Advisor, Bob, who asked me, “Well, are you leveraging your own team to handle your day-to-day?” I told him I hadn’t even thought to outsource the stuff that I was so good at – things like personal emails to get meetings. And thus began my love affair with my two Virtual Assistants, both Masters Students from Pakistan, who operate like virtual chiefs of staff at Odetta. They have learned over time to become me, and are literally me all over the web, doing what I would do (but better and more thoroughly), if I had the time. They help with virtual assistance, prospecting, LinkedIn outreach and chat, advisor updates, marketing content, and customer relationship management (CRM) updates.
Virtual Assistants
Imagine having several of you. This is the experience of having a Virtual Assistant (VA). I trained my two VAs without a single phone call. They just started following everything I did in my email, my calendar, my team meetings, and slowly took over. Now they are much better than me. I get lazy and forget to write follow-ups. They keep everything tracked, and jump in handling all sorts of sensitive tasks. They even received an introduction from a high ranking Minister from one of the countries we work in, and coordinated the perfect reply, responding swiftly when I was busy. That's the thing I love about having delegated tasks like this: I feel like I can take a day off, and it won’t impact business at all. I used to work non-stop because it felt like I was the only one who could handle these tasks. When I would stop working, our revenue would drop. Now, with an expanded Odetta team, I feel like I have ten Katharine Wolfs all doing different tasks probably faster and better than me.
Prospecting
We started selling the creation of prospecting lists before we ever used them for Odetta. And now after 2 years of doing this for other companies, I can honestly say that I think this is where we shine. We now have access to 10+ databases to secure the best emails and phone numbers, and we build all sorts of creative ways to get data, and deliver high-quality leads in a world where most lead lists suck. The thing about prospecting is that it's very often about persistence. Most people don't reply to me until the third time. I have found this is true across the board. On the 5th outreach - all well-timed and not aggressive in nature at all - they tend to respect the persistence and just jump on the phone. I would never be able to personally do as many follow-ups without my team of Sales Development Reps (SDRs). Also, many times, our SDRs will outreach to people who I would have a panic attack about writing to - like they are way too high profile, and then our team will follow-up until we get a close. It just works!
LinkedIn Outreach & Chat
If you are not sending the daily cap of 70 outbound LinkedIns per day (the free connection requests, not InMail), you are definitely missing out. We have a list of priority leads, organized into 25 tracks with templates per track. An example of a track might be Data Science Managers at AI Startups in SF with 10-50 employees. Once the lead accepts our invite, we engage in conversation chat, answering questions about Use Cases, and scheduling meetings. I used to do all of this work, spending 2-3 hours per day on LinkedIn. Now I do none of it, and only get tagged for questions on how to answer certain leads. I wake up every day to 4 to 8 demo calls that I did not schedule myself. After each demo call, I score them 1 to 10, and track our conversion to become our client, and then we try to find similar leads that convert. The templates are a bit of an art, and it took 9 to 12 months for us to earn more than we were spending on this lead generation effort, but now we can literally just make a calculation to invest 2x and get 2x leads. It's amazing math. Also, I really wouldn't personally trust hiring any sales and marketing agency that has not managed to use their own service to scale themselves.
Advisor Updates: Newsletter Contacts and Campaigns
Do you want to keep certain people in your world updated on your company, but just don't have time to keep track of who? Why not have someone manage your Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) and define who gets these updates, and then administer the content creation of the newsletter and kick off the campaign? Since delegating Odetta’s CRM management– something I used to do completely by myself– our newsletters and campaigns are tighter and more effective in sharing relevant information and generating new project leads.
Blog Writing, Social Media Posting, and Messaging
All last year, I wanted to write blogs. It took me 3 months to write about being the only girl in a quadruplet and how that experience is part of why I started Odetta. My issue was that I could write the first ten sentences, but not enough to make it into a long piece of interest. Then we kicked off a process to hire writers and turn around content. My ideas are expanded and clarified by our writers, allowing me to focus on other critical tasks. We also built a program for content generation for social media, and a team to reply on our Instagram. I used to rely on myself solely for all these things.
Customer Relations Management (CRM) Updates
This last one is big. We use Airtable as our CRM and database. In the beginning, I was in spreadsheets with filters. Then, we built a team to manage our CRM, and now we can keep it enriched, and leverage it for sales and marketing. About a year ago, a company asked us to do this for them, and since then it's been one of the most popular things we do.
I began a company where clients could outsource data, sales, recruiting, and operation needs externally, but I quickly realized the importance of outsourcing internally. By delegating within the company, I’ve been able to focus on delivering successful projects on data annotation and data scraping for startups in the time of COVID-19. Without delegation, Odetta would not be where it is today, with 100+ clients, thousands of delivered projects, and 200+ talented women from the Middle East and South Asia (MESA) on our team. For more on how delegation works at Odetta, check out part one of this post, How to Delegate: Non-Core Parts of Your Business? or contact us.