2.2 - Scaling with a Growth Team Past 7 Figures

⚠️ → Don’t forget to duplicate our Onboarding Framework by clicking here: 👤Outbound Prospecting Specialist Framework

Watch the video on this Training:

In the last 60 days, I’ve been able to double our monthly revenue (from 70k/month to $140k/month) because of this one insight & my goal is to share with you the reasons, processes, and systems to build a growth team. If you master this one thing, client acquisition will never be an issue for your service business ( agency or coaching/consulting biz).

Chris Hernandez, an agency owner who’s part of our program built a growth team, made up of 2 growth specialists and went from generating 2-5 meetings per month, to now being able to average 2-5 meetings per day!

In today’s training I'll be covering the following topics:

• Why leverage Growth Specialists Instead of VAs?
• Why would another entrepreneur join your team as a growth specialist?
• Who should you look for?
• Where can you find the talent to join your growth team?
• The Energy Required to get people to apply.
• Hiring & Onboarding Process
• Ramp up process.
• Accountability systems
• Incentive structures

When should you think of leveraging growth specialists instead of VAs?

• When you’re looking to scale big.
• When you have good margins and can afford to give a small % of the pie, in order to make the size of the pie even bigger.
• When most of your booked meetings are conversational
• When you’re looking to be consistently generating 50k-100k+/month
• When you’re ready to remove yourself from the grind of appointment setting.

WHY SHOULD YOU LEVERAGE GSs INSTEAD OF VAs?

The main reason behind using growth specialists instead of VAs is the difference in Talent and effort required to manage & ramp up your growth team. If your goal is to grow your business then your #1 focus should be to acquire talent, I don’t know any billion $ company or trillion $ company that leverages virtual assistants to handle the most crucial part of their business which is business development & sales.

Am I saying that it’s impossible to scale past 50k/month with VAs? NO! I’m simply saying that it’s much easier to scale with people who already have an understanding of your business/industry and who can manage the whole sales process.

The key thing to understand is that your goal should be to achieve success fast, you only have one life to live.

Why would another entrepreneur join your team as a growth specialist?

The same reason why some of the smartest people work for Google, Apple or Tesla.

They want to make Good Money, Learn amazing new skills while on the job and they want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

If you can’t offer:

• A good compensation plan
• Amazing new insights
• A vision in which they can see themselves grow in

No one will want to join your growth team.

Your focus shouldn’t be to try to retain these specialists forever, your focus should be on being able to attract them at first. Worry about retention down the line.

The easiest way to attract talent is to start putting yourself out there and sharing your mission, vision, and also what you’re building.

In the same way, you need content to sell prospects, you’ll need content to sell strangers into liking you and wanting to be part of your team.

Who Should You Look For?

In order to build a really great growth team, you need to onboard people within your niche.

They can be your ideal clients or other service providers.

Example:  If you’re an agency owner targeting E-commerce brands.

• Your growth team can be made of fellow agency owners in the E-commerce industry OR brand owners who have yet to see some success.

If you’re a coach or consultant:

• Your growth team can be made of other coaches & consultants who are getting started or who are having an issue scaling their own biz.
• You can also onboard agency owners or freelancers who are targeting coaches & consultants

It’s best to find people who are already in your world, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t look outside of it!So if you know or find someone who comes with amazing outbound skills but they used to work in a different industry…HIRE THEM.

Their skills will help make up for the time wasted ramping them up on your industry/offer!

Where can you find the talent to join your growth team?

• FB FRIEND LIST OR FACEBOOK GROUPS.

I won’t be recommending other sources of candidates because there won’t be better channels to leverage when finding these candidates.

If you’re really struggling with finding people, then you can make job posts on Upwork or other freelancer websites but make sure you start with Facebook groups.

• If you’re part of a paid community, you can make the growth team opportunity in that community and attract people who may be starting out.
• If you don’t have access to paid communities, simply make a list of 10 groups where you can find people who are on the same journey as you and make your job post.

I have over 4000 friends on Facebook, so I rarely ever leverage other people’s groups, instead, I prefer to leverage the people on my friend list since they already know me and trust me.

Example of a job post:

Hey everyone,

I run Clientacquisition.io, 7 figures consulting business helping service providers scale past 50k/month. I’m currently looking for 2 new growth specialists to join my team and help us take it to 8 figures in the next 12 months.

If you’re someone who wants:

• To learn new skills around outbound prospecting and be able to generate 25+ meetings per week
• To learn about the acquisition structure of a 7 & 8 figures online business.
• To be in an environment of superstars who are building amazing solutions.
• To earn between $5000-$10,000+ per month
• To be part of something bigger than yourself
• To learn what hard work is

Then please shoot me a Message and I’ll send you a video going over more details about the role.

The Energy Required to get people to apply.

You will need to make this post every day in different groups until you generate enough attention & onboard 5 growth specialists.

DON’T STOP looking for growth specialists until you have 5 of them ready to be onboarded and trained.

Why?

Because from experience, you need to onboard 5 Growth Specialists to find that one Superstar!

DON’T STOP MARKETING THIS ROLE UNTIL YOU HAVE 5 SPECIALISTS!

Most people fail at growing a growth team because they don’t respect this rule.

HIRING AND ONBOARDING PROCESS

1. Create your Hiring VSL: funnel + google docYou don’t want to be getting on 1-on-1 calls to explain the role.
2. Ask Candidates to make looms/ short video recording going over why you should pick them
3. Schedule 1-0n-1 interviews with the ones you see potential in. The interview shouldn’t be anything fancy, since the only way for you to know if they’re good, will be through the work they do NOT what they tell you on a zoom call. I like to ask them the following questions:Are you ready to work 6 days a week What other ventures are you working on at the moment? I then establish if it will be an obstacle, if it is, I ask them if they can take a break from it, if they can’t. I don’t onboard them unless they seem like great talent!

• How soon can you start working? I want them to start working in less than 48 hours.
• Can you work on my timezone and make it to the daily training sessions.
• I let them know of the two weeks trial period where they have to generate results in order to fully be part of the company.

Once you feel like the candidate is good and they meet all requirements, get them onboarded!

1. Onboarding process: Click here to access our onboarding framework and make a copy of it:👤Outbound Prospecting Specialist Framework

• Create a checklist of things they need to get done in order to be ready for training and work.
• IMPORTANT: Onboard 5-10 people at once, never rely on one or two candidates to become superstars. Most people who join a growth team will not be able to perform, therefore we onboard people at scale and let the real superstars deliver and stick. From what I’ve seen, every 5 growth specialist that I onboard, I will find one superstar, So Keep it in mind when you’re onboarding 1 or 5 specialists, expect that 80% of them won’t be able to generate you results.

RAMP UP PROCESS

• Schedule daily training sessions of 60-90 minutes for the first two weeks. You need to record every training session as they’ll be used to train future candidates. These training sessions should cover:
• Product/service training
• Setting up the prospecting assets ( profiles, content, etc)
• Intro to the outbound prospecting workflow
• Daily reporting
• Your Sales process
• CRM intro
• Daily KPIs and standards

Once you’re done sharing everything they need to know to be successful in the role, your focus will shift to making sure they generate results.

How do you do that?

• 1-on-1 sessions with each growth specialist
• Shadowing sessions: where you look at what they’re doing and most importantly show them how the work is done.
• Review booked meetings
• Review bad conversations

The more reference points they get about what success looks like, the better they’ll get at replicating it!

IMPORTANT: If you don’t do a daily training session with your team, you will fail. There is no way around this.

Accountability systems

Growth specialists will be earning most of their revenues from commissions, therefore, it is your utmost responsibility to make sure they take the right actions daily in order for them to generate the right results, so you can pay them handsome commissions.

If you don’t push them to perform, they don’t make money, if they don’t make money, they quit.

What systems and processes have we set up to keep people accountable:

• Weekly targets automation
• Daily goal target automation
• End of day reporting:NEW OUTREACH: 100 CONVO STARTED: 7FOLLOW UPS: 60 VALUE VIDEO SENT: 2 BOOKING LINK SENT: 1 MEETINGS BOOKED: 1 VALUE IN GROUPS: . COMMENTS REPLIED TO: . LEVERAGED STORIES: Yes LEADS INVITED INTO GROUP: . LEADS ACCEPTED INTO GROUP: . NOTES: One account got restricted went too heavy on em. Convo started are not that good from Consulting Accelerator but need more data on it.
• New meeting booked automation
• End of week report

These reports and forms to fill out keep people engaged and focused on their goals!

Incentive structures

This is probably the most important aspect of making a growth team perform.

If you don’t create a compensation plan that allows your growth specialists to perform and earn as much money as they can, they will leave!

If they don’t generate results & earn money in the first 2 weeks of being part of your team, they will leave. This is why I let go of anyone who doesn’t perform in the first two weeks.

THE BEST COMPENSATION STRUCTURE FOR GROWTH SPECIALISTS IS:

• Base salary + commission per booked call ( to protect ourselves we pay them a commission on booked calls that show up!)

Clientacquisition.io incentives for the growth team looks like this:

• 1k CAD base
• $50 CAD per Qualified booked show.
• The base salary doesn’t get paid until they passed the two weeks trial and booked 15 meetings.

If you can’t offer a base salary, you should offer a higher commission per Qualified booked appointment that shows up.

• $50 up to $100 is a good commission.
• If your closing rate is really bad - let’s say 10%
• You’ll be paying $500 - $1000 to sign a new customer!

Leveraging Competition & Bonuses to motivate your team

I try to run one competition every month to get the Growth Team excited to perform.

Some of the most recent ones:

• If a Growth Specialist booked 20+ Qualified appointments in the last 15 days of April, they’ll get a $1k Bonus On top of their base + commissions.
• Whoever books the most about of qualified meetings during the month of March, gets a $500 bonus.

The goal is to associate these bonuses with an outcome that makes it unreasonable for you not to win BIG.Example:

If I get 20 qualified appointments, it’s unreasonable for us not to close 25% of the meetings. - 4 Customers X $8,000 = $32,000 in revenue.

← PREV: 2.1 - Scaling Labour

NEXT: → 2.3 - Hiring Systems