The 'organic' sales pitch!
Exact conversation with the CTO of a Billion Dollar company:
CTO: We don’t care how much we pay but working with an outsourcing or staff augmentation company helps us in the ‘pre-hire’ stage with screening and interviewing folks, especially in large, asymmetric talent markets like India
Me: Ok I get that you don’t want your team to invest hours interviewing 20 folks to hire 1. But do you realize that the good talent doesn’t apply to outsourcing companies anymore, no matter how premium they try to project themselves…
CTO: But there are thousands of people working at these outsourcing companies. If you say the so called 'good talent' is not there, then where do they go?
Me: Funded startups, work directly for product companies, and in the new post-COVID world, work remotely with any global company
CTO: But how do I find them? It's too much work…and we don't have that kind of time
Me: How much are you paying the staff augmentation or outsourcing company?
CTO: $70/hour…
Me: … which roughly annualizes to $135k/year - And what do you think the outsourcing company pays that same person?
CTO: Has to be lower and frankly, even if its half of that, I am still saving ‘talent finding’ time so worth it
Me: The talent is probably getting paid less than $50K – so I get that you don’t care for this delta, but the talent does! And that’s why, either they don’t want to work at outsourcing firms or find the first opportunity out of there to work directly with a company instead of sharing 50%+ of their potential worth ($135K) with a middleman so to speak…
CTO: I get that I can hire better folks and save a lot in the process if I hire directly but frankly, how do I find and hire these folks?
Me: Kaamwork Pitch!
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Such a conversation is a dream for any salesperson:
– starts off with an organic dialog around a potential client’s genuine problem: in this case, finding good quality talent at speed,
– then culminates naturally into aligning that the current alternative being deployed has deficiencies, and that,
– sets up the pitch!
This conversation also pointed me towards something a bit deeper though – for long now, inefficiencies in older business models have been disrupted by new business models. In cases like Uber, the disruption is purely technology driven whereas in cases like Amazon – its technology-enabled but then also driven significantly by macro events such as increased internet penetration over the years and behavioral shifts like the consumer's acceptance of a new idea – buying stuff online!
Double clicking on the Amazon analogy, feel like the post-COVID world is driving a similar macro + behavioral shift towards remote work and that will potentially disrupt several existing models like staffing or outsourcing.
And unlike Amazon, don’t think there is a singular solution – outsourcing companies in newer, adapted avatars, curated platforms, EORs, as well as fullstack models like Kaamwork will be the change agents but the real driver will be the talent itself! The talent’s desire to engage directly with full transparency will organically create new models…