From Zero To Onboarded In 14 Days

Foreign. Welcome to the Transform Sales podcast where forward thinking business leaders come to share their experiences and ideas, learn from each other and amplify their results together.

All right, guys, welcome to another session of the Transform Sales podcast service review. Today we have Brian Sampson from Plug Technologies. How's it going?

Hey, Dave. Super excited to be here.

Awesome. Awesome. So guys, today to get you guys excited, we're going to talk about how Plug Technologies go from zero to onboarded in 14 days. And this is going to be an interesting topic, so pay attention. So, just so that we can get started with your offering, what were some alternatives that customers usually will go for before considering your agency?

Yeah. So generally speaking, if a company's opted into hiring remote, you're in the right place talking to Plug. And generally, offshoring is where a lot of companies have originally started. It's mature, going over an ocean. But there's a trade with that.

Big.

Gap on time zone alignment. So you know, you're staying up till midnight doing calls or you know, you get this like quick 15 minute overlap and then you know, you're off to bed and they're starting their day.

Absolutely.

So a lot of companies would, would look to offshoring first or maybe they, they'll use their own recruiters to try to find people. San Francisco, New York, Austin, you know, kind of wherever their offices are. And then near Shoring is using Latin America and that's where we come in. So full workday overlap, full time zone alignment, and our recruiters can jump right in to help you out.

Awesome. I did see something on your LinkedIn that I found very interesting is why pay 200k, right, when you can easily find somebody nearshore, Right. Whether in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I've got a friend who is a CTO of a series B tech startup in San Francisco. And this really happened during COVID I want to say it was like May of 2020. So two, three months into, no one leaves their apartment. We're all wearing masks to go to the grocery store, and my buddy sends me a text, hey, Brian. So I'm spending like 200k on my dev to work from his house in San Jose, California. Like if they're going to work from home, I might as well, you know, get some cost savings here. We only have so much capital from our fundraise. Yeah, you know, I told my friend, well, yeah, you came to the right place. Let me help you out. So we introduced him in a couple days to some pretty senior developers from Argentina. And on the map it looks like Argentina is kind of way out to the right. Yeah, but, but culturally, if you've ever been there to Buenos Aires, you're eating dinner, you know, at 10, 11 o' clock at night. So the workday is almost identical to Pacific hours. And more importantly, the talent is off the charts. So we introduced him to a couple developers from Argentina. Massive cost savings and no difference with workday overlap or skill set. And he was blown away.

What would you say was the percentage of performance increase, for example, or you felt like they were equal in terms.

Of so equal performance. But some byproduct attributes were really interesting. Now if you look at a country like Argentina, but I think this goes for not all of Latin America is equal, but every country has their own nuances. But there is volatility in the region, whether it comes from governments or inflation or things like that. Now that's scary when you're in the States, but if you're in Latin America, often this is just daily life and there is an advantage to this. So if you just read what the media writes, you might be nervous to do business in these countries, but think about what that does for a population that's constantly trying to navigate this. It creates a workforce that's able to overcome adversity. Flexible, gritty, scrappy, creative, just true problem solvers. And I can't think of a single hiring manager that doesn't want those traits. So they get the same technical skills in English and time zone overlap as they get with the developer in the US but then they get all these extra things and that is where the magic happens.

Awesome. Awesome. And so I did see that you hired over 500 LATAM engineers in the past five, five and a half years. If I'm not mist, what is something or that truly stands out when you're vetting this candidates that makes buyers just want to just go directly with you guys.

Yeah. So there's really, I think three things that give us a key advantage. The first is like you said, Dave, we've been there before. You know, it's like, you know, if you're playing football and you score a touchdown or a goal, you know, if it's soccer, you hand the ball back to the referee kind of, hey, I've done this before, I don't need to make a big deal out of this.

Right.

So hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hires. We know how to do it. The second is we've got a lot of first hand knowledge. I've lived in Argentina, my business partner Reuben has been an expat in Mexico and Monterey, Mexico. So there's this advantage we have of being able to share firsthand experience, excuse me, first hand experience of tree lined streets and steak dinners and currency manipulation and governments and getting hardware in and out of the country so we can share all this firsthand knowledge to help advise and guide our customers on the best country, the best talent pocket, all of that. And third, we've got a really developed white glove service. One of our customers compared us to the Ritz Carlton of nearshoring. So we go easily the extra mile. Everything from getting that special custom hardware delivered door to door, to onboarding, bilingual support so our developers can speak to someone in their native language and we kind of catch the small issues before they become big, timely payments, all the stuff that really matters. We make sure that our customers and our candidates are well taken care of.

The main thing I get from this is that you're focusing on the long term relationships, right? Correct. Because that's what buyers see like in our, in our case. Right. I'm obviously here in Colombia, Medellin, so when I see talent obviously from here and I see how strong they are, obviously it puts us in a position to best recommend the top short list of candidates. Right. So this is awesome. I know you also mentioned some of the challenges in the beginning, but what were some other challenges that those customers came, were dealing with? Right. Because a lot of those people, like you would, you were saying they're doing it offshore, they come with a lot of pain points, they come with a lot of challenges they face. They come with a lot of budgets burned. Right. So how do you, how do you turn that into a positive situation where they could just focus on your long term solution?

Yeah, I think that's a great question, Dave. We're really in the business of giving our customers arbitrage. That means significantly more value than they're paying for. We're never going to beat Asia in terms of cost. But I think by now Asia is so mature as a talent region that customers understand there's a trade. Whatever you save in cost, you might make up for in late night calls, you might make up for in cultural misalignment or like lots of hierarchy. So maybe you've got to share your feedback with one person at the top and it filters down to like seven people. And it's always like a body problem. They're behind on a deadline. It's never let's find smarter engineers, it's let's find more engineers. So whatever you're Saving on cost might come back to bite you later and you'll pay more. But you know, really that being able to do business in real time, collaborate on Slack, jump on a video call, text on WhatsApp, being able to communicate with somebody where it doesn't feel like a wooden script. They might speak English, but is it your kind of English? And are they watching the same Netflix shows? You are in American style English? Are they conversational? Does it feel unscripted? All that stuff matters, you know, and it's not talked about a lot, but it really makes a difference.

No. Most of these people are in product. Like it will suck to spend so much time in building and then once it gets to the engineers, they. It's like a broken phone. Right. And that's something I definitely seen. And then they have to spend more budget to rebuild and it just constantly become a bigger headache. Right. But this is awesome. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to display your screen. I want you to kind of walk us through your website, show us some key features of your service so that you know those that are looking for your specific services, they know exactly how to overcome the situations they're dealing with. That'd be okay?

Sure, Absolutely. Let's do it.

Awesome.

All right, so this is us. We're a service company, we're staffing. We don't try to over complicate it, but what we do is we take the staffing model of finding contractors, whether they're short or long term. And we apply all the best practices to doing this in Latin America. So we'll introduce you to great talent quickly. Usually in a couple days, you'll get a short list of qualified people. We've got a deep network, many different talent pockets around the region. We go through interviews, background checks, offers. We've got a very high offer, extend to offer, accept, conversion rate. And you can usually get somebody in the seat quickly, but fast is only good if the quality is good. And that's the secret ingredient that we have. I can get you somebody poor tomorrow. That's not, that's not, that's not hard to do.

Yeah.

The harder thing to do is get somebody high quality in your seat in 14 days. And that's where our magic happens.

Awesome. Awesome. One of the things that I wanted to ask you is do you bet most of these candidates directly from LinkedIn? Because what we found as a B2B marketplace is sometimes most of these candidates are not on LinkedIn and they'll surprise you. They'll crush they're just super low key. They don't have an account on LinkedIn. So it's very hard for us to validate because usually we'll use it as the first source to validate. But sometimes we see candidates that come in, they don't have a profile and they're just so good that if they have a profile, I just can't imagine. Right. The opportunity that they'll be in front of. Right. Has that happened?

Yeah, you're absolutely correct. You know, I think generally if it's your first time hiring in Latin America, you're a tiny company, maybe, maybe try Upwork, you know, see what happens. But I think you'll, you'll see a quality difference. And the big thing is because of like Upwork and Fiverr, their models are really for people that just want to get like a quick task done. And these platforms take a huge percentage of the fee. So if you're a really talented individual, you don't want to give Upwork or Fiverr or all these other platforms so much of your money, especially if you don't have to. So.

And especially when it takes so long to pick up on another project. It was like, hey, where's my profit? Now I have to use part of that profit to invest in ads within Fiverr and now I don't even have profit. That's what I hear a lot of people. Right.

So we're in the business of getting long term projects, giving our talent long term projects. And sure, we use LinkedIn, but just because a developer has LinkedIn doesn't mean they're going to respond to you.

Yeah.

So, you know, we're able to use a lot of interesting marketing techniques to build engagement.

Nice.

More importantly, Dave, referrals. Referrals are huge. So we might get somebody from LinkedIn and then get five of their friends that are also highly qualified because good people know good people. Those other five are not on LinkedIn. So that's how we built our database and really move the needle for our customers.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome. Do you have any use cases you want to share with the audience? Because I want to make sure that they also feel connected. Right. Yeah. With your industry, do you have anything you'd like to share with us within your same website?

Yeah, there was a mid sized tech company that was based in Atlanta and not only did we find one developer for them, we built a whole team. So we had developers qa. You know, I think there are five team members in this case. We put everybody together in Argentina and all senior level, they Became super embedded. So it wasn't like they were outsourcing, it was an embedded team.

Yeah.

So you know, they got to know each other's like families and pet names, you know. And you know, that leader was based in Atlanta but he said, you know, it felt just like these guys were on his team and he loved it. The culture was super aligned. They moved the needle, they got products out the door quicker than they expected. Notice I haven't said anything about cost savings, but the cost savings is real.

Yeah.

The differentiator I think with Latin America is the quality is so high that companies aren't going here for cost savings but they'll celebrate the cost savings at the end.

Yeah. 100. Yeah. You took the words out of my mouth. One of the things that I realized like working with Latam audience is that they're like, you know, this crush it. I was gonna bring more opportunities, more people that we know are gonna get hired and it just becomes like a community of everybody looking to crush it so that better opportunities keeps coming every year. And I say this on my background, right? When I started as a customer support rep, all the opportunities that came along after that everybody started looking for SDRs, account executives now for like manager roles. Now they're looking for C levels. And that's a transition I got to see. And we when I started seeing all this talent arising from Argentina because a lot of people come to us for engineers. Right. And Argentina is the first one I hear every time. Right. And the fact that it's a little closer. Right. You don't have to go to apac, you get to, you get to visit your team, you get to bring them on board. You know, that kind of brings a little extra touch to it. But I feel very familiar to what you're saying and I know this is something that's going to continue growing, there's going to be more quality of candidates and I'm just very excited, honestly.

That's great.

Awesome. So I wanted to ask you something. When it comes to the tasks, deliverables and people who are involved. So let's say if I decided to go for you guys, what does that look like? You know, what is the typical ramp up time? How long would it usually take for me to be fully onboarded? Can you give us some information on regarta?

Yeah. One thing that I'm very proud of is despite our scale, I'm still involved. And my partner Ruben, who's the day to day president for Plug, who also has the expat story, our customers know who we are. And I think that's a huge difference from working with other ones. When the key founders, the key executives are involved as your vendor, you know, you matter and our customers matter to us. So we'll, you know, give all the advice, make sure that they're set up for success. There's a director of customer success that's involved. So you know, they're navigating the, the actual solution, ensuring they get the right candidates. We have recruiters that are very senior level in Latin America. So all of them are involved in the short list, the interview scheduling, the vetting of the candidates, the pre closing, everything that you'd want or you'd expect. Just like us staffing and then a real secret sauce is our operations. So like offer, offer, accept to the first day, the first week, all the, you know, getting hardware from New York to Miami is one thing, getting hardware, getting like a very specific machine to Lima, Peru is a whole other thing, right?

Yeah.

100 customs and you know, different things. So we know how to do that and we know how to think through compensation and currency volatility and USD and payroll infrastructure, Slack and WhatsApp and all the different cultural nuances to really ensure that it's a long term success story. Right. The placements aren't just bouncing, you know, for the next offer for a dollar increase, you know, that they're, they're happy. Everybody's set up for success for the long haul.

What I get from this is that you, you don't only focus on the buyer, but you also focus on the seller and that's what keeps that connection extremely strong. Right. And I feel like that's, that's what's going to keep people for long term opportunities. If I got the right equipment, if I have the right software, if I have everything in hand for me to do my job and me as a buyer have all the ease to make this happen. And top of that I'm getting costs. A cost effective solution I think is a no brainer, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Awesome. So what are the KPIs ideal customers use to evaluate the success with your service and what is the quantifiable outcome? I know we reveal the 14 day onboarding, but when it comes to the acceptance rate, do you have like a, like a number in mind? That tends to be a question they a lot of our buyers.

Yeah, I, I think there's maybe three things to talk about here. First, you know, the first is that we don't want to waste time. We're not a body shop. So if you have an opening, we're not going to send you 50 candidates tomorrow, right?

Yeah.

Ideally, you're gonna get three, and from those three that are carefully vetted, you'll get your winner that really aligns with you. Okay. That's, that's what we're truly focused on. High quality.

Okay.

The second is we work for the referral. So the most important KPI for us is that our customer refers us to their network. And that's how we've gotten in most of our customers.

Yeah. Nice. Perfect. Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. And when it comes to, like, support channels, I know you mentioned slack, you mentioned WhatsApp, but, you know, I have a lot of buyers. They usually interact with the chatbot on the website or via email. They, they want to stick in their channels. How do you go about that? And what is the strongest channel to keep that communication effect? Yeah. And you know what? Something you. I. There's two things I want to mention, because in the chat, what I notice is that sometimes they don't describe the issue as big as it really is. Right. Next thing you know, you have a conversation with them and they need so many other things that obviously for us is, is a, is a win. Right. We, we get to offer a suite of solutions. Right. And then the other one is regarding the engineers, right? I, I read a staff from lovable that said 0.23 are engineers. So obviously the pool is not as big as SDRs, account executives, and it' a role you just, you know, let's go for that and see what happens. You got to live by this. You got to enjoy this role. So for engineers, it makes sense because at first I didn't understand that, right? Because I had buyers come to us like, hey, I need a, a volume of engineers so I can have a good talent pool. But then it was very hard to achieve that. Right. So that kind of piece together, what's your take on. Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people just want to jump on the boat, let's get AI in there, right? But they even haven't, they haven't even updated the articles. So it's like sometimes you're just being thrown in these articles that are from last year. The links don't even work. The POCs on the, on the bottom of the, of the post, they're no longer reachable or like they, they changed jobs. So, like, now you're hurting your domain. So, yeah, I had that experience. I realized that with LinkedIn, if you want to get chat support, you have to spend ads and then they'll kind of give you a little bit of attention. But that would be a different topic. But I think this was a great session. I did open the listing for a reason. This is the listing that buyers tend to see so that they could get fully informed on your solution. Right. I left all the details. So who's watching this? You get to see who's the ideal buyer. If this falls into your specific requirements, you know you have Tim to support you. Make sure you get the. That human touch. I will leave the listing in the description below. But, Brian, I feel that this was a very interesting topic that we covered. Anything you want to say before we go? Let's do it. That's definitely going to be the way to go. All right. Catch you in the next session. I know we're going to have more sessions coming up so that we get to display all the services you offer. Sounds good. Take care, Ryan.