One of the biggest pitfalls that anyone who is looking to outsource can fall into, is having a set and forget mentality.

Topic – Busting the outsourcing myths

Mentor – Mark Engelmann

• The education system is delivered in English
• The company you partner with is critical
• It is not set and forget

Marketing Monday – What to send and when to send to people on your database

Transcript:

Kevin: Good morning and welcome to another week. I’m Kevin Turner. Welcome to today’s show, produced in association with Beepo, PropertyTree from Rockend, PrintForce, LockedOn, and View. Take us with you on your morning walk or listen on your way to work. You’ll find us at Facebook and Twitter as Real Estate Uncut. Property Tree, of course, is the secure cloud based property management software designed by Rockend. It’s gonna save you time and take the stress out of your working day. Let’s get on with today’s show.

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Kevin: So you’ve got a database. Now you need to decide what you gonna send to the people on your database. The best way to look at that is look at creating an email nurture campaign. Now, like the term implies, you got to be nurturing a relationship. And to do that you need to give them relevant information. Look at it this way. If they’ve attended an open house, well it would be logical that you’d send them a list of other open homes in the area. If they attended maybe a home buyer’s seminar you might consider sending them an e-book that details the 10 things that every new home buyer should know. If during your conversation with them, they’ve talked about financing, you might want to work with a broker to send them some financing details. So to nurture that relationship, always make sure that you deliver content that will help them take the next appropriate step, and in so doing they’ll rely on you when it comes time to take that step.

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Kevin: More thoughts now from this week’s mentor.

Normal businesses, of course, are now looking at outsourcing and the popular place to do it is the Philippines. We’ve been outsourcing to the Philippines now for a couple of years, very successfully to, I’ve got to say. So I want to deal with a few of the myths this week about outsourcing, and joining me to do that, Mark Engelmann from Beepo, a well-established outsourcing firm based in the Philippines. Mark, thank you very much for your time.

Mark: Thanks for having me today, Kevin.

Kevin: Yeah, I want to talk about some of the … what I find as the myths about it, and one of the things that struck me. I’m now talking from personal experience and I’ve been through this a number of years, but the staff have poor English skills is one of the things that I’ve heard people say.

Mark: Yeah, and it couldn’t really be further from the truth. You know, in the Philippines has two official languages. The first one is Tagalog, which is obviously their native language, and the second language is English. So their whole education system is delivered in English and business is conducted in English, so for any Filipinos that want to get a professional type job in the Philippines, then they need have fantastic English skills. And what we’ve seen at Beepo is that is certainly the case. We test all of the applicants that apply for jobs with us as well, so we test them for their ability to read and understand English and speak the language as well. Because there’s no point in having an outsource team if the people you’re working with can’t understand what you want them to do.

Kevin: In our experience, our RE Uncut and Real Estate Talk, the onboarding experience was quite exceptional because we had the ability to actually speak to these people, hear what they sounded like, give them a test which was all part of that employment process. But I think in our case, Mark, we had about three people we needed to talk to, and you could have given all three of them a job, to be quite frank. They’re all very well qualified and had been well vetted.

Mark: Yeah, and that’s, if you’re working, looking at building an off-shore team in a place like the Philippines then you need to find someone to partner with that’s really going to help you through that recruitment process. It’s not just a matter of telling the off-shoring supplier the skill set that you need; the supplier should actually come to the table as well with a proper recruitment process and a proper screening process to make sure that they are giving you someone that does have the skills and experience that aligns to the role that you’re looking to outsource.

Kevin: One of the other things that’s impressed me too is that once we did the on-boarding, and we started, and we did the training, there’s then a period of time when they’re constantly being reassessed. You know we’re giving feedback and we’re getting feedback back as well, so it’s not as if employment happens and then everyone just forgets about where we go from there.

Mark: That’s exactly right. That’s one of the biggest pitfalls that anyone that’s looking to outsource can fall into, is having this sort of set and forget mentality, where you might be a business owner and you create an off-shore team. You create all the processes and then you expect that team to go and do that forever and ever and the rest of eternity without any hiccups. When you have an outsource team, they should be considered as part of your existing team in Australia, and you should treat them that way as well. That means regular catch ups, regularly reviewing their output and their work. I think the outsourcing provider as well, again, has a responsibility to ensure that the staff that are working for you as the client are being productive and that they’re doing all that they can to ensure that the customer is getting the best result.

Kevin: Yeah, cause the Internet’s allowed us to have some great tools at our disposal to monitor how people are working and how we’re communicating with them as well and those tools are freely available, so it’s very easy to monitor this.

The myth I want to talk to you about tomorrow, Mark, is that quality standards could be compromised. I’ve got a personal experience on this, I want to talk about it because it’s a two-way street. Mark Engelmann is my guest, Mark is from Beepo. And by the way, too, if you’re a little bit curious about outsourcing, there’s a study tool coming up on June 12 and 13 that will take you to the Beepo office in Clark, in the Philippines. All you’ve got to do is just click on the link, the Beepo link on any one of the pages on RE Uncut. That will take you to a landing page that gives you all the information you’ll need to know, so check into that.

Mark, we’ll catch up again tomorrow morning. We’ll look at myth number two. Thanks for your time.

Mark: Thanks Kevin.

Jet: Thomas Watson says, would you like me to give you a formula for success, it’s quite simple really. Double your rate of failure. See, you are thinking of failure as the enemy of success, but it isn’t at all. You could be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can, because remember that’s where you will find success. I’m Jet Xavier. Have a great day.

Kevin: Thanks Jet. That’s it for today. Thanks for your company. We look forward to catching up again tomorrow morning.