The Takeover with Tim and Cindy

How We Get 100+ Sales Appointments a Month Using $6hr Setters

• Episode 46

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Imagine never missing out on engaging with potential clients, whether they're reaching out through your website's contact form, social media DMs, or showing interest in your content. From inbound to outbound, we’ll double down on how you can utilize your virtual assistant’s skills and arm them with the right tools and tactics to create a streamlined process for your lead generation!

This is Part 4 of our Virtual Assistant series. In this episode, we'll explore how VAs can take the lead generation burden off your shoulders, allowing you to focus on what truly matters. 

We'll introduce you to the Rule of Process, a step-by-step guide to setting up your VA for success, complete with measurable KPIs and a system for accountability that rewards excellence. Whether you're a solopreneur or a seasoned business owner, you won't want to miss out on these game-changing insights.

We'll talk about: 

  • 02:26:  Exploring two key aspects of using VAs for lead generation
  • 04:18: Our decision to utilize VAs versus our US team for outreach
  • 06:42: Overview of our outreach process
  • 14:57: Why you don't need to do it all alone
  • 19:22: The "Rule of Three" for hiring VAs
  • 27:24: How do you ensure your VAs are hitting their KPIs


If you missed the last 3 parts of this helpful series, check them out here: 

Part 1 - Tapping into the Power of Virtual Assistants to Supercharge Your Business

Part 2 - How To Get 90% Show Rates By Leveraging Virtual Assistants (Part 2)

Part 3 - $6/hr Virtual Assistant to replace a $100K Social Media Manager (Part 3)

Download The Free Outbound Sales Playbook:

  • Master cold outreach, close more deals & drive revenue to your business using The Outbound Sales Playbook. Battle-tested on over 1,000+ businesses and proven with over 100M data-points, this Free E-book will give you the tools you need for predictability and scalability in your marketing and sales efforts. Disclaimer: Only download if you want more customers!

Join The Takeover Community:

  • Sign up for The Takeover newsletter and get the latest marketing tips, sales strategies, and business insights delivered straight to your inbox. Join a community of entrepreneurs & high-performers dominating all areas of Sales & Marketing. Sign up for the newsletter.

About The Hosts:

  • Tim & Cindy Dodd are the Co-founders of PEMA.io, based out of Miami, FL. Connect with Tim and Cindy: Instagram

About PEMA.io:

  • PEMA.io is a Inc 5000 Outbound Marketing Agency specializing in Enterprise Sales & Appointment Setting. With over 7-years and 1,000+ clients served in the industry, PEMA is the leading agency for cold outreach appointments & systems. Learn more about PEMA.io here: www.pema.io/discover

Cindy (00:02):

If you can sign clients over video calls and need sales meetings, we'll set you up with the same ad free outreach strategy that we use to get an extra 100 meetings a month. And a loan has contributed multiple seven figures to our revenue. Look, I can't promise you that you'll get those exact same results. There's a lot of over promise, over hypey guarantees out on the internet today that really work and always have a catch. But the reality is, ladies and gents, how you operate your business, your market environment, your offer, and how well you implement the strategy may be different from ours. What I can say is that if you need sales meetings, this will work. You'll be able to use this to get meetings month over month and you'll know exactly what to do to scale up your volume of meetings as needed. This is not a fly-by-night strategy. We've been using ad-free outreach for the last five plus years. So if you're looking for something that is proven reliable and has stood the test of time, this is it. If you want to see how this can work for you, click the link in the show notes. You can learn more about this ad free outreach strategy and if it makes sense, book a call with our team.

Tim (01:22):

Welcome back to the Takeover with Tim and Cindy today. I'm really excited because we're gonna talk to you about how to get more meetings for your business so you can get more customers. We're gonna talk to you about how to do that using a VA for lead generation. If you're unsure what a VA is that is a virtual assistant, it's generally somebody in another country that your ongoing costs are significantly lower. We've been able to leverage VAs to get thousands of meetings for our, for our company and for our clients. And we use it to get hundreds of meetings every single month. And it's just such a powerful tool that you may have hired a VA before and it was a bad experience. You maybe have heard of the VAs. I'm really excited because we have currently at the time of this recording over 20 on our team. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we've, we've hired hundreds of them for our customers, trained hundreds of them. And so if you've had any bad experiences before or whatever kind of experiences we're gonna come in, we're gonna break the myth because this can work and it will become a core, essential part of your business if you're open-minded and really get good at leveraging it. So yes, let's go ahead and jump into examples of ways that VAs can help with lead generation. Cindy? Yes.

Cindy (02:26):

Let's dive straight in. So I'd like to think about it in two ways for using VAs for lead generation. And anytime you hear us say VAs just virtual assistant there's two ways, right? On the one hand, you can use a VA to respond to incoming or warm leads that are drawn to your business, right? This is potentially people that interact with your company from a form, maybe your website incoming calls, people that engage with your content. We'd consider these warm leads or warm prospects 'cause they know about you, they're reaching out and you can use a VA in that arena to essentially respond to any of those incoming requests. So I always think about speed to reply is so important in lead generation. There you when somebody responds to you or somebody is reaching out, having another person engage with that lead as soon as possible Yes.

Cindy (03:20):

Increases the likelihood that the person will take the next step. So somebody has sent a message or through the form on my website, and I'm taking seven days to respond to them because as an entrepreneur, I'm, I'm super busy. I will probably lose that lead. Yes. Right? Yes. But if I have a VA that the moment somebody sends an inquiry through my website and they can go in and grab it, respond immediately, that is going to increase the likelihood that I can get that lead engaged, right? So that's one area responding to incoming warm leads or prospects on the other end. This is where we utilize VAs a lot. And this is where we're seeing so much success with outreach. This is doing outreach to new prospects to schedule appointments. Mm. So new prospects are people that don't know me or don't know about my business just yet. And I wanna walk you guys through what our outreach process is. But maybe before I do that, Tim, you can talk a little bit about how did we even start using VAs for this specifically? I mean, you know, you and I are super busy, so this is not something that we would do necessarily, but how did we kind of get to the point of utilizing VAs to facilitate cold outreach versus say maybe somebody on our team doing it?

Tim (04:34):

Yeah, I, I think it's a great question because if we kind of go way far back, when I first started using VAs and when we first started using VAs, we actually had a team of US people that were doing the same work. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And the quality actually wasn't good. These, these were college educated, had experience before it was hit or miss. And so we said, Hey, why don't we try some to get some VAs in to do this? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And you know, we'll create a grow good system, we'll create good process, we'll oversee them. And we actually got better results with VAs. It was like they were more committed. This wasn't just like an entry level job to them. They were so excited to do this job. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they got such great results that, I mean, I think it just built from there. And I mean, we've been obsessively perfecting the process and the how do you build great culture, B culture, remote culture since Yeah. But it yeah. Really started with the fact that the performance of of us team we had <laugh> wasn't performing great. So like we said, Hey, why don't we try diving into the VA scoring that was, yeah. Some years ago.

Cindy (05:32):

It was. And I think what it allowed our US team to do is focus on front facing with the clients. Yes. More client success and strategy so that our VAs and internally we call 'em appointment siters or account managers could focus on being inside of the outreach day-to-day. So wanted to give some people context behind why we utilize VAs in that area. But specifically what we're using VAs for in cold outreach, and we have an entire process dialed in for this, but the overview essentially is we create a target list of people that we wanna reach out to. We then use an automation tool to send out that initial contact with the person, right? Whether it's a connection request on LinkedIn or that initial cold outreach message. The moment that somebody responds back to that initial touch, the VA then goes in to take over the conversation. So this is where the human aspect of it comes in. So when somebody asks a question in responds to one of the messaging or the messages that we've sent, the VA can then respond with a custom reply with the ultimate goal of booking appointments. Okay. So that's our goal when we, when we're doing cold outreach, is to book appointments. We also keep track of everything. Everything. Don't we Tim? Everything

Tim (06:45):

Ev every, it's insane. Yeah. It's the data that we have for every single lead that comes in for ev, everything is insanely tracked.

Cindy (06:54):

Yes. I've heard some people say they'll use a VA to just go in and respond to the messages, but nothing is being tracked on the backend. Why do you feel like that's setting the VA up for failure and the outreach?

Tim (07:06):

Yeah, I mean because outreach, it's not easy. It's like easy to do and hard to do well. Mm. Right. So anybody can buy a, a freaking software and send out messages. Yeah. Most people have tried and have been unsuccessful. Nine outta 10 clients that come to us have tried four or five other lead generation companies that failed them. And we get it to work every single time we get the meetings to work every single time. So why is that? It's because of process. Mm. We like, literally every piece of the process is dialed in so that the VA knows if the, this message, if somebody responds, Hey, gimme some more information, or Tell me more about that or follow up with me in a week. There is a custom built response for every piece, every one of those. And there is also tracking on that.

Tim (07:52):

So which message a B did they respond to? Which, yes. Which follow up snippet did they respond to? What got them to book? If they say yes, now there's a whole process with, well, once they've said yes to a meeting, now we've gotta get 'em booked. What's step one? What's step two? What's step three? So not only do we have that process laid out, we actually track it. So the VA number one knows what it looks like to win. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they, you know, if I do these, their job is to just do the process with excellence. And your process has to be so dialed in that if your VA does a process with excellence, it will produce a result. Yes. And then when you're tracking that, when you're actually having the VA keep you up to date on every single deal stage, because you've built a good process for them, now you can know if results are down, I would say 19 outta 20 times, if results are down or we we're having a struggle, all we have to do is go look in and the the VA missed some steps. Yeah.

Cindy (08:42):

The process wasn't a

Tim (08:42):

Followed, the process wasn't following. We gotta, so I think that's where people make a mistake is they, they try to hire a VA thing. The VA is the magic. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But the systems, the processes, the, your team, your culture, that's the magic. And then the VA is what allows you to execute on a super like high scale, like low ongoing cost.

Cindy (09:01):

So good. So good. So in that area, what we are having our VAs keep track of, we do it in Google spreadsheets or in Airtable. Airtable is great, but you can always result to Google spreadsheets. It's really easy. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, they're keeping track of every lead that comes in. Yes. Right. Every person that says yes to a call, every person that shows interest, every person that asks a question, they are keeping track of that person and that person's details in that spreadsheet. And they're also doing consistent follow-ups, which is such a critical part in successful appointment setting or lead generation. How many touch points have you had with that prospect to get them to actually follow through on booking a call? Right. Because I may get a cold outreach message and it's Monday or 3:00 PM and I'm super busy, but I see it and it sparks my attention or interest.

Cindy (09:49):

And I say yes to the call. I don't book just yet, but I may forget that I even said yes to this call. Right. Life is busy, <laugh> life happens. Yes. And if somebody can follow up with me every, you know, two to three days and just keep consistent, I'm gonna follow through and book the call. But yes, if you just gimme one touch point and then you don't follow up, I'm not gonna be the one to go back and reach back out to you to say, oh yeah, I remembered I still need to book that call. So follow ups and doing that consistently Yeah. Is critical for success. And we have our VAs do very, very tailored and strategic follow ups on certain days, which get results.

Tim (10:24):

Yeah. We made up the term lead to books. So it's L to B, <laugh>,

Cindy (10:27):

L to B, lead to book. How many leads do we get to book a call? Yes. another way our VAs are scheduling appointments is also calling leads where necessary. Right? Yeah. So sometimes we'll have leads start our qualification forms and then not finish, not follow through to book, but we get a notification every time somebody starts that form. And then within five to 10 minutes, if they don't book a call, we have our VAs call them. Yeah. And that has significantly also increased that lead to booking ratio.

Tim (10:55):

Yeah. And that works in your ad funnels. That works on your lead generation for email for what forever. And I think a lot of people are like, well what, what about the English? Like, well you recruit for the right person. You know, like that's like being like, I hired a US person in there and they weren't very professional on the phone. Like, well, okay, you

Cindy (11:14):

Vet for that

Tim (11:15):

Upfront, you vet for that. Yeah. From like when you're interviewing, if you want this person to be able to do calls, then actually do interviews. You know, we do group interviews with VAs and you can say, Hey, we're interviewing for somebody who can do a setting and calling. And if they sound bad on the, in the video call, they're probably not gonna sound good on the call. So, exactly. But when we have people on our team that are just like, oh my gosh, there's a couple names, I'm not gonna say 'em, but there's a couple names I'm thinking of that are just like, they're so energetic and so happy and like so good on the phone. I'm like, they're so dang good on the phone. They will, they will, they'll

Cindy (11:46):

Call somebody else,

Tim (11:47):

They'll, they'll smoke so many I I'm not bashing the us. They'll smoke so many, many US cold callers 'cause they're just so energetic and clear and positive and like, man, I don't even like, just love hanging out with 'em. So I think you gotta, and make sure you're interviewing for that for sure.

Cindy (12:04):

Absolutely. And then I'll say the last area that we have our VAs execute on with cold outreach is just giving us weekly reports on the work that's been done. And we're gonna talk about specifically KPIs and metrics in a moment. But it's so important to get those reports so that we know yes. What's the work that's been done? What are the results? What, what are areas of opportunity and improvement so that we can further dial in the outreach because it's a consistent learning process. Yes. And it's a consistent process that needs innovation and optimization. So with ALT three, just not just one time that you set it up and it runs forever, every week you have to be reviewing and seeing what are the areas that we can adjust? What are areas of opportunity that we can get more results? And just having those weekly reports from our team has helped us not only innovate the process, but ensure that we're getting good results week over week.

Tim (12:52):

And not, not just us as like, oh, the results we are gonna get or you're gonna get for your business with the va. The behavior to result awareness that the VA gets from doing these reports. Right. Well, what's the one phrase that you do not accept in a report meeting? <Laugh>. That's funny.

Cindy (13:10):

Say it. And somebody says they were not interested, the lead said they weren't interested. That phrase is not allowed in any of our weekly reporting meetings. They

Tim (13:18):

Just said we're not, they're not interested.

Cindy (13:20):

I like everybody knows you cannot say that.

Tim (13:23):

Well of course they said they're not, but why were they not interested? Yeah. So what you wanna really make sure is you're not just getting data reports. You're getting quantitative. Yes. Here's the number of leads, here's the number. But you want to get qualitative. Like if the lead rate is, is high, why is the lead rate high? If the lead rate is low, one people saying low mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, why is it low? If people are saying not interested, are we following up with them? Okay, no worries. Just curious. Why are you not interested? And you're starting to get, so you wanna get the quantitative, like the numbers and you wanna get the qualitative and you wanna get your va, you wanna start teaching your VA to be aware of these things. Yes. Because guess what happens when somebody comes into our team and they might get away with saying that one time, oh, they're not interested.

Tim (14:02):

And then everybody in the room knows like, oh, you just made a bad mistake. But then after that it's like, okay, I've got it now. Instead of the person just being like, I'm doing my job, doing my job, they're thinking, okay, well I know when I talk to, like Cindy's called CAP at our team, captain <laugh>. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, when I talk to CAP this Friday, I better know why people are saying I'm not interested. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so now you're training your teammates, which I, this actually works with every part of your team, not just VAs to actually have awareness around the metrics. And then all of a sudden what'll happen is they'll start having input, they'll start having ideas, they'll have start having creative. So, hey, we noticed that they're not interested because of this. Our thoughts were, why don't we try, try doing a follow up message like this. What are your thoughts? Ka. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And now we're creating a productive meeting. Yes. Where week after week after week after week, we get better. And these meetings are super fun when like people are coming with the right ideas.

Cindy (14:55):

Yes, absolutely love that. But Tim, there's some people that will say like, that sounds great, but I can do all of this myself. I don't need a va. I could message people, do the follow ups. Like why do I need to hire a teammate or a contractor, a virtual assistant to do it all?

Tim (15:09):

Yeah. You could do everything yourself. You could fix your teeth yourself, <laugh>, your cavities yourself. Go to school for that. You could clean your house, you could change your oil, you could do everything for yourself. But as an entrepreneur, successful entrepreneurs, they understand where there high leverage activities are and where their low leverage activities are. So number one, this is a low leverage activity for you. Why is that? Because one hour of your time could be spent managing an entire team for the week. Mm-Hmm. Like I can spend one hour with my team on Friday going over the reports, maybe two or three as they're ramping up. But once they're dialed in one hour a week, I can have them managing my whole entire team's account. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that's what's called leverage. Smart entrepreneurs do that, number one. Number two is that, and I think I said two things, but I'm gonna give you three.

Tim (16:01):

Number two is that if you're doing anything in your business, if you're, let's say you charge, you would charge $200 an hour for your service. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And if you're doing something that you could hire a VA to do $6 an hour, you're literally trading your time for $6 an hour. Yes. And as we move into the number three point is, number three is you're a busy entrepreneur. You are not gonna consistently show up every day at the same time doing the same thing over and over and over again because life is busy as an entrepreneur. Yes. So the nice thing about a VA is they're gonna get to do a better job. They're gonna cost you way less. You're gonna be able to leverage your one hour, two hours a week to get a ton of work done through VAs. And the actual outcome is going to be much better. 'cause They're gonna be there every single day. Every single shift. Yes. You know, some sick days every now and then. But that's, it's just, this is what smart entrepreneurs do.

Cindy (16:50):

Absolutely. And this is also something we hammer at home with our clients too, right. A client will be like, I could just go in there and I could do the responses and you know, I'll do a better job of like responding to the leads 'cause I know my service, I know my clients. And it's like, that's not the goal, right? Yeah. The outcome that we're looking for is a process that somebody can follow consistently to get the output. So yes, upfront you may have to do a lot of back and forth with your va. So like when somebody responds and ask for more information, give this reply when somebody says not interested, give this reply. And it is gonna take you a little bit more time upfront to dial in the process. But the ultimate goal is to remove yourself from doing the lead generation so you can focus on more higher leverage activities. And then you have a system that any VA can come in, see the system and execute on without you having to go back in and doing the lead generation. So highly, highly recommend that you follow the process with getting a VA to execute on it for you.

Tim (17:46):

Yeah. Otherwise you, you're just gonna be your own bottleneck. 'cause <Laugh> you can only do so much lead. What are you gonna do? Lead generation for you and your whole team? And, and no, come on. And then what are, what are, how are you gonna do that? Are you gonna be on a vacation with your family and still doing your lead generation? There's no

Cindy (17:59):

Way. I'll even say, don't have anyone on your team do it either. And this is something I hammer home with our clients as well. Do not have one of your account managers or client success managers in there doing the lead generation. It's not their highest leverage activity. Yes. Either. Right.

Tim (18:14):

And they'll drop the ball too. They

Cindy (18:16):

Will. Absolutely. 'cause I mean they have, and we see

Tim (18:17):

It, it happen a lot.

Cindy (18:19):

They have so much on their plate. So it's, it happened with our team, right? Where we had initially client success managers doing the appointment setting. It just didn't, it didn't work. 'cause There's so much other things, more higher leverage activities that your team can be doing. So don't pull one of your teammates into doing this day-to-day. Have a virtual assistant to execute on this for you.

Tim (18:38):

I love that. So I know we talked a lot about making sure they're set up the right systems and processes and, and, and all that. What do you look for when hiring a VA for lead generation? Because I, I think a lot of times, you know, we, we just help a close friend of ours, not even a client, just a close friend and started doing some VAs for his company. And we just gave him a few pointers and tips. And he had tried hiring VAs before and had really bad experiences. A few little tips that we gave him. I mean, he, he text messaged me the other day, like, with some explicits in there, oh, my f this is effing awesome, man. Like, this is so cool. Like this is, this is a game changer you guys. I can't believe I've never done this. And that was just us showing him how to do the hiring process. Right. Yeah. So what do you, what do you look for when hiring a VA for Legion?

Cindy (19:25):

Hey there, we're going to be coming out with a lot of new content to help you level up in all areas of life in business. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you're listening, so that you get immediate updates as soon as a new show is released.

Cindy (19:42):

Yeah. There's a few things I like to look for. One, how familiar are they with the tools that I'm having them use? So this could be things like LinkedIn sales navigator, other automation tools that we use internally. So you wanna look for, are they familiar with the kind of tools that you're gonna have them use? Mm-Hmm. And it may not be the exact tool for our outreach. We use automation tools to do the initial connection and messaging. Maybe they've used a similar tool, not the exact one that we're using internally, but that tells you that they're familiar with the kind of lead generation that we're gonna be doing. So maybe write out a list of the tools that you guys use internally for Legion and you'd wanna add that to the job description. Like familiar with 1, 2, 3 type of tools that just eliminates the learning curve of having to teach somebody a new tool from scratch.

Cindy (20:29):

Some tools are really easy to use, but that's something that I like to look for upfront. Hmm. The second thing is how proactive and persistent are they? So one of the things I ask in the hiring process actually is, and we talk about this, right? Like they're not interested. If somebody says they're not interested, what do you say? So I ask this in the interview process. When a prospect says no or not interested, what do you say? <Laugh>. And if the VA says, I'll just like, you know, wish them all the best and tell them I'll reach out at a later time, probably tells me that they're not persistent and they're not proactive and they don't really understand the kind of legion that we do. Yeah. If they give me a response, like, well, I'll ask them why they're not interested, I'll give them more information, I'll try convert that no into a yes. That shows me that they have that proactive and persistent attitude and they're gonna be relentless in getting somebody booked on a call. So I want that person that is persistent and proactive and is gonna turn nos into yeses. That's, I mean,

Tim (21:28):

Those, those qualities aren't valuable. That's what's, there's no like, well my client's different. I don't like to bug my people. Look, if if you're scared about bugging people, you ain't gonna get meeting <laugh>. Yeah. <Laugh>.

Cindy (21:37):

Correct. Especially not with cold outreach, you're, you're

Tim (21:39):

Not gonna win in this marketplace where it's so loud and there's so many options out there. You have to have, and this has always been true, but more so now than ever, you have to have somebody that's creative, persistent and looking for a path to Yes. Because guess what? It's a knee jerk response. Not interested. It's a knee-jerk response. Yes, no thanks, not interested. They probably didn't even read your message. It just saw a little No, no thanks, there's no no other thing. So it's like digging into that, the reason behind that and, and maybe even people don't understand what you said, so it's like, oh hey, no worries. You probably get, you get a message this all the time just to clarify, do you even need help with your social media clients or whatever. It's like having somebody that's willing to be creative like that makes such a big difference. And I love that you use that as a question in the interview process to

Cindy (22:21):

Really Yeah, absolutely. Separate for sure. The next thing I'm looking for is excellent written communication. So of course they are going back and forth with prospects through these outbound messages. So they have to have really good English grammar, have excellent written communication. So what we actually do in the interview or hiring process is we have them write out messages. What is like an outreach message for a coach who offers X, Y, Z look like, how do you respond when somebody says no? How do you respond when someone says yes? So we give them this like quote unquote written test upfront and they don't have to get this perfect, but what I'm looking for is how good is the grammar? How good is the writing? And here's a key tip, make sure that you mention do not use chat GPT for this. Because we've seen some people use it. It's very clear when it's a chat GPT message. And with chat GPT, you

Tim (23:11):

Always can actually, you can always hear chat GT's tone in everything. Yes,

Cindy (23:14):

Absolutely. And you can actually reverse engineer. So you can put the message in chat GPT and ask, did you write this and chat GPT will let you know. So that's cool. <Laugh>, we just put that in the application process when we say, do not use chat GPT to write your messages because your application will be immediately denied. But I wanna know that this person can write really well. And if I'm gonna have them call prospects, you wanna make sure that they have great verbal communication as well. And this is what you're gonna vet when you do like a zoom interview. Maybe it's a group interview or one-on-one. See how they communicate, see how they speak, ask questions in that hiring process to get a feel for, you know, their verbal communication. So you can see that'd actually be a good fit to do calling as well.

Tim (23:54):

And then I think also just we learned early on how important good computers are and good internet. It, so we literally, we had a couple that were awesome people and then, but their computers and their internet were just constantly like being a bottleneck. Yes. So we even set a standard, like you have to have, I, I forget what it is, but there's a certain internet speed, there's a certain like ram and, and Yes. And processing power your computer has to have, 'cause that, that is definitely a thing. You, you would, you don't wanna have your VA half their time, like the computer's loading. Yes. You're paying them for something where half the time it's loading or half the time their internet's not working.

Cindy (24:28):

Absolutely, yes. That's so, so, so important. And it's a remote environment, so you can just ask for screenshots of it. That's what we do in, in that application process. Ask for screenshot of the computer specs, screenshot of the internet speed and just make sure that it's something that can be reliable and consistent and that they have backups, right? Yeah. If power goes out or internet's out, what is the backup so that you can ensure your lead generation is always consistent and it does have no downtime. Yeah.

Tim (24:54):

Especially if you're hiring in like the Philippines where there can be big weather like power outages and stuff. You wanna make sure and, and the internet goes out. Your VA can have backup power, can have backup internet. Yes. and, and if somebody's a a legitimate, like really this is what they do as, as they're a va, the more and more of this stuff they're gonna have, they're gonna have a good computer, they're gonna have internet, they're gonna have backup internet, they're gonna have backup power. And these are all things that are accessible to them, but a lot of people are not gonna have them. So just make sure that your teammate does

Cindy (25:22):

For sure. So vet upfront, and we spoke about this in part one, which is the rule of three. Meaning you hire two people to train under you. So you are the top of the triangle. You have two people under. You hire two VAs using this process, vet them upfront and then give a trial period, one to two weeks. See who does better, who's better at tracking who books the most calls, who asks better questions. You can compare and contrast and see what it's like to work with the two people, maybe who do you enjoy working with the most? And then hire the, you know, the person that you select for full time or for however many hours you decide. But it makes a big, big difference. And trust us, this is from experience. Yeah. we're not just saying something that we, we haven't done. We've trained and hired so many VAs, but the rule of three helps us so much. We

Tim (26:09):

Do that, we do that with every hire, every wrong client. Success managers in the US sells salespeople every role in the company. We hire two people for that, for that role always. And if you're gonna spend the next 60, 90 days getting 'em trained, and if you have two people, you're gonna have really clear contrast on on how they perform and Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And so you have a clear baseline as well as, you know, a little bit of healthy competition. They know they're on a trial. Absolutely. And, and you know, worst case scenario is that at the end of the day, you have two that are really good high performers and maybe you find a find a fit for somebody or you just, hey, right now we need a, we're gonna put a pause on until we have more demands. And you go with the, the better one. But the, what you don't wanna do is go through three weeks, six weeks, 60 days, 90 days of training. Yep. And then have somebody leave or they're not a fit. Whereas if you get two, you're gonna have a high, high, high likelihood that one of those two's gonna work out really well.

Cindy (26:59):

Absolutely. If,

Tim (26:59):

If you did the interview process properly

Cindy (27:01):

For sure. Yeah. But that's served us really well doing the, the rule of three.

Tim (27:05):

Okay. So we've gone over a lot about what you can use a VA for, how to use VAs, how to make sure they're set up with success generally. And then how to recruit and hire a VA. Specifically, how can we ensure that our, our VA is successful with lead generation? What does that look

Cindy (27:23):

Like? Yeah. So we did speak a lot about process, right? And in the previous episode, part three with social media, I spoke about the rule of process, which is essentially the success and failure of your virtual assistant is not gonna be on how much skills they have or how good they are. It's gonna boil down to do you have a clear process that they can follow that's going to ensure success? Hmm. And are you holding them accountable to that process and to certain KPIs. So if I'm thinking about a virtual assistant for outreach to produce leads and booked calls, I wanna give them a process to do that, right? So essentially I wanna give them, here's the target list of people I want you to reach out to. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, here's the exact messaging you should use to reach out to them. If they say yes, give them this response.

Cindy (28:10):

If they say no, give them this response. Compile your leads here. So this is where, you know, we call it internally a lead tracker. This is where you're gonna put all the information on the leads. If somebody wants to schedule a call, send them this calendar link and then I want you to give me daily status updates or daily reports and weekly reports. So essentially what I've done is in a very simplified version, I've given them a process to follow. And it doesn't have to be a completely dialed in process upfront, but it's a process that's good enough that they can go in, follow the process, give you a report, and then you and your VA can optimize and actually increase those KPIs over time. And kind of the second part to that rule of process is having clear ways to measure success. So how do you know if your VA is doing a really good job and how do you know if they're not so upfront?

Cindy (28:59):

You can have very clear KPIs. For example, if you reach out to 500 people, you can book five booked calls. You have to have that baseline for success. Yeah. And I know people will say, okay, well where do I get that baseline from? How do I know what those minimum KPIs should be? I recommend you can do that yourself at first. At first, right? So maybe you spend a week doing the outreach, you go through the process, you book the appointments and you see what your baseline KPIs are. And then from there you hand over the process and you say, Hey, I was able to reach out to 500 people and book five booked calls. That's your minimum KPIs. 'cause I know that that's at minimum how much we should be doing with X number of outreach. So every company, every business, every industry is different.

Cindy (29:43):

But how can you boil down minimum KPIs for your VA to hit? Because that way you can actually hold them accountable to hitting and surpassing those KPIs. And here's a bonus tip, you should reward your VA based on surpassing KPIs. Yes. So what we do internally is we give our team a monthly bonus if they hit their KPIs, and guess what? They actually perform a lot better, way better because they're motivated to hit the goal. They're motivated to surpass the goal because there's an incentive on the other side for them. So if they're low on bookings this week, guess what? They're gonna get creative. They're gonna find new ways to follow up with past leads and actually do whatever it takes to get to the goal. But if they don't have a goal, if they don't have a KPI, they don't have a metric that they need to hit. There's nothing that you can really track from. Right. And there's no way to actually measure their success. So rule of process, making sure that they have a process and holding them accountable to KPIs is how you ensure that your VA succeeds with legion.

Tim (30:50):

Yeah. And I know when we implemented the bonus on hitting KPI, some people will say, well, their job is to hit KPI. Okay, that's great in theory. But when you put whatever your KPIs are, that this could be, Hey, we need a minimum amount of X leads. That could be one of your KPIs. You know, X people that say yes to a call and then we need X amount of people that actually book the call. That's your minimum. If you hit your minimum, you get a bonus. And some people be like, oh, whoa, why am I hitting a, giving 'em a bonus for minimum? I promise you. Like you're rewarding them for doing their job is a good thing. And you can give them another bonus for over deliver. Like for our team internally that the book, the meetings for, for our closers, if they hit minimum KPI, then they get a percentage of all the deals that the closers close that month. Yes. Can you imagine how much that's gonna motivate your teammate that's working their tail off in the Philippine

Cindy (31:42):

S quantity and quality. Correct.

Tim (31:44):

On the quantity and the quality. So now they're invested in not just getting the number of meetings they're invested in, making sure they're getting the right meetings so that they can close. Because guess what, they could double their income in a month just by getting enough meetings. Yep. That that are Yeah. They can easily, and, and then we have that happen and that's life changing for the teammates. So this actually goes into all rules of the company. You should, every, every role there should be a KPI that's attached to what's helping produce more growth and revenue in the company. And then everybody, if you hit those numbers, everybody gets to share in the spoils as a word. And yes, we, we saw our numbers go skyrocket way up. Oh oh. Like literally within one week of implementing this. Like just skyrocket.

Cindy (32:25):

Absolutely. Because there's a direct incentive tied to that metric for success. So that's how you ensure your VA succeed. Ladies and gents give them KPIs, give them a process. And I would say just remove all assumptions that you have around hiring remote teammates on hiring remote contractors, virtual assistants. We have an amazing team. And again, we're doing this every day Yeah. For our clients hiring and training virtual assistants to book the sales meetings and appointments. Yeah.

Tim (32:55):

It's just so powerful. And, and, and obviously if anybody wants to do the VA thing, there might, there's gonna be a learning curve there. 'cause You have a cultural learning curve of, of the not just the country that you're dealing with, but also just like you have to understand somebody who has left the corporate world. Let's say, let's just talk about the Philippines. 'cause That's where we hire a lot. Somebody who's like left their corporate world making $3 an hour, half a drive to work. 'cause A corporate is safe, safe for them. They can get the job, but it doesn't pay much to saying, Hey, I'm gonna go be a freelancer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'm gonna go get my own customers, as it were. It's a different kind of person and it's a different culture altogether there because you have somebody that's kind of gone off and they're, they're just trying to hustle and, and get clients and, and make five or $6 an hour versus $3 an hour.

Tim (33:40):

But they're, they could be jumping from the job to job. And so there is a lot to understand that it is, you're gonna have incredibly, incredibly, incredibly talented people, but you just have the different country that you're dealing with. Different culture. Even though the business language in, in the Philippines, for instance, is English. So if you're going to business school, which a lot of 'em have, like, they're doing English and, and so they're very familiar, but you still have a different cultural difference. And you have a, the virtual assistant freelancer is a subculture within that as well too. So don't expect them to be the exact you like your exact culture. Like there's gonna be a couple dynamics you're gonna have to learn and get comfortable with. And I'm sure you know, we'll talk about in other episodes in a little bit more detail. But once you dial it in the processes, the people of the system, this will, your life will never be the same. I could not imagine trying to build and scale our company without VAs. Like how can people even do it?

Cindy (34:31):

<Laugh>. I know, I know. Once, once you start using VAs, you're gonna see how how powerful they are to really accelerating your growth as an entrepreneur. So if you are looking for ways to get more sales meetings, if you're a coach, you're a consultant, you sell your clients over Zoom calls marketing agencies, our team can help. Essentially what we do is we build the outreach or outbound system, it's ad free and we'll essentially hire, recruit, and train a virtual assistant to execute on a proven system for outreach to get you sales meetings week over week, month over month with your ideal clients. We've done this for over 700 companies. Actually lost, we checked Tim over 900

Tim (35:19):

Hundred. Yeah. So

Cindy (35:19):

We need to update that over 900 companies that we have done lead generation and appointment setting for. And we want to help you, if you resonate with this episode, you're like, I want a VA in my company, but I dunno where to start. Get in touch with our team. Yeah. We have a proven process. You don't have to figure out the process for yourself will literally place a proven outreach system in your company that already works and will recruit and train a VA that ticks all the boxes that we've mentioned in this episode to execute on this for you. I mean, it's, it's so powerful. You could check out our reviews, our testimonials, all of that good stuff. But in this episode, you can go to the show notes, click the link, book a call with our team, we'll build you out a custom strategy. We wanna meet you, we wanna learn more about your business and see how we can actually help you get more sales meetings this year. Yeah.

Tim (36:07):

And then it, it is like literally if you, the, the KPIs we, we've, we've done just millions and millions of outreaches. So we do millions of outreaches every month. Yeah. And so we have all the data, all the KPIs, you know, which audiences are responding and buying and how, what offers match. It's so just super dialed in. So if you just want like the fastest path to getting this to work and being able to get on meetings and it's just super quick and having a system that can scale and get you meetings month over month over month, way after our engagement. Like definitely talk to our team. Yes. Whether or not we decide to work together. It's definitely worth scheduling some time with our team. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> walking through what this could look like for your business. Maybe you're fit, maybe you're not, but if we do work together, one thing I'll promise you is that this will work. You'll get meetings and you'll have a system that you can use to scale month over month to help you acquire clients. For long, long, we have people messing in just like years. Yes. After they, they hired us saying, Hey, the system's still working, still growing, still scaling.

Cindy (37:07):

Yes. Had my biggest revenue month because of the system. It's, it's so cool. So yes, connect with us. The link will be in the show notes and we're excited to learn about you and your business and see how we can help. Again,

Tim (37:16):

This is the takeover with Tim and Cindy and Cindy. This was one of my favorite episodes today.

Cindy (37:20):

I love this episode

Tim (37:21):

Because I, I just think 'cause how much impact it's had on us and, and like hundreds, 900 plus clients that we've, we've done this for. So a lot of value here. And just remember, domination is not a destination. It is a way of light. Stay winning.

Cindy (37:36):

Stay winning. See you soon.

Tim (37:37):

Bye for now.