How to sell IT talent remotely?
Is it even possible?
Yesterday I’ve attended one very interesting conference called «RUSSIAN STARTUPS GO GLOBAL 2017». Not only those, who have been succeed, but those, who invested in global expansion but failed, participated on this conference. Moreover, international stars were also invited on the meeting — Marvin Liao as a Partner at 500 Startups, Amrit Dhir as a Global Campus Operations Manager in the Google for Entrepreneurs.
I decided to ask our respected experts as they count, how to sell a service in IT outsourcing on the US market
After this I made the similar introductory part for each of expert.
Eulerr.com is a platform, where you can find highly specialized agile team and get first delivery even in 2 weeks. If you need a team with expertise in the blockchain, fashion, advertising, we will provide the teams with relevant experience. All teams work in clearly structured process with two-week sprints. We work at a flat rate of $30 and $50 USD in an hour.
The answers I got:
- Amrit Dhir said that we needed to hire a professional sales team in the USA because there is no sense to sell outsourcing remotely. To my comment about an increase in the cost for the final consumer, Amir didn’t say anything. As for me, it is a bit strange that Amir knows nothing about projects such as Toptal.com or Crew.co.
Some words about these companies. Toptal.com and Crew.co are companies, that provide freelance software engineers, designers, and finance experts to projects and startups.
Marvin Liao said that we should focus on B-Series startups. A-Series startups haven’t enough money to buy IT outsourcing’s service, while C-Series startups have their own development team. According to him, the strategy should be the following: we need to make a project for one B-Series company, earn its trust and show to others our competence. I argued that the market doesn’t contain many B-Series companies, but Marvin smiled at me and said that it is enough for us.
Try to analyze points of view of Russian experts
Tokovinin Michael is co-founder and managing partner of AmoCrm — the largest CRM system in Russia. Michael started the company as a US company, even spent several years in Silicon Valley but it can’t be considered that the project achieved the success in US. AmoCrm has several thousand clients of representatives of small- and medium-scale business in the USA. In Russia it more by ten times, but his experience seems interesting, anyway.
Michael recommended to use lead generation platforms, such as Comission Junction, Get App and Capterra. Each project should choose suitable for it. In a private conversation Michael advised to interact with prominent opinion leaders. According to him, it is impossible to sell a PR. He offered to make PR by covert techniques. He proposed to do the list of opinion leaders in design and software development and ask then to share their opinion on the product. Even if they decline the proposal target the Facebook ads on those opinion leaders. Great idea, I will try it, definitely!
In the end, I would like to say a word about lecture’s Alexey Pelevin, co-founder of the portal Pravo.ru. This service develops and sells his product to the largest law firms in the USA right now. Alexey said that if you do not have $1 million and effective economic model in other markets, there I no sense to enter the US market. Moreover, he said that the basis for sales in America is «small talk». Personally, I was surprised that people pay for B2B services by credit cards. Everyone, who sells B2B, Alexey was advised to contact the agencies who can arrange C level meetings. We will try it.
Summarise:
Why have I written that? You probably realize that there’s no magic pill for sale increasing. One company manage one thing, other companies manage other. Of course, listening to the advices of people who have done something by themselves is more interesting than people, who tell common knowledge. The only way to become successful is to constantly try and not to be afraid of making mistakes. Everybody, who believes that large investments are guarantees of the success are mistaken. I want to remark, that’s not true, because money without efforts just paper. This is what we plan to do in Eulerr: to convey the value of highly specialized industry of software development with time&materials.
