Developing and Marketing International Talent

In this post, we’ll discuss our plan to build our company by contracting international quote-to-cash talent. AscribeIT’s management brings a wealth of experience working with individuals outside the US, and we’d love to share some of our strategies and successes with the marketplace at large!

Developing International Talent

Regardless of what skillsets you hired for, you need to sit down with your employee and discuss their professional goals. It’s very likely that you both have different ideas of career goals, and until you align on this, you can’t map an effective path to get there. In the US, we have a very basic and linear development path for our technical employees, with solution architect (SA) as the goal. In the marketplace, recruiting for the SA role has become the end-all be-all of job sourcing – if you get an SA, they can do it all, so they must be the right fit. In our experience, they rarely are the right fit, and more importantly, aren’t often motivated to “do it all.” In these cases, the SA is expected to be the delivery manager, the technical lead, the BA, and sometimes the main implementer. Having one person responsible for all these roles rarely drives project success, because it’s hard for one person to play all those roles optimally. Rather, bringing on an SA to do it all is a kind of insurance policy for Salesforce partners and customers, and ultimately a crutch to avoid approaching project staffing with a more creative and critical eye. We find that people are way more complicated than this, and thus so are our project roles.

Developing international talent is necessarily more complex than the US “happy path” to SA, and we’ve tailored our strategy to meet these challenges. Approaching professional development from a personal perspective led us to recognize new roles to pair with unique skillsets. We have brilliant technical architects who can manage personnel but aren’t interested in interacting with the customer or maintaining a broad understanding of the use cases or requirements. They have a critical role to play in our projects, as long as we equip the project with a BA or a hands-on delivery manager. We have lead consultants who can drive a project from build to completion with little to no oversight, but aren’t comfortable leading discovery sessions; in such a case, we would ensure that the sales rep would stay on in order to drive discovery meetings and transition the project to the build team. As a result, our projects have roles like the following: managing product specialist, non-managing technical architect, non-technical business analyst, etc.

Marketing and Celebrating International Talent

Among much of the Salesforce marketplace, there is a stigma about working with talent based “offshore.” At AscribeIT, we have a team of consultants and we don’t care where people sit, we care about what they can do. We do not use the term “offshore,” and we try to avoid terms like “resource/resourcing,” because we want to affirm that we’re working with human beings at all times. Part of our marketing strategy is to celebrate this as a differentiator, and so we are transparent with our clients and partners about the nuances of our available roles. We are also transparent about our consultant availabilities, so that we pre-empt some frequent objections to working with international consultants.

Many of our partners and customers have restrictions against working with non-US employees, and when that’s the case, we recognize when we don’t have a fit, and move on. However, many simply don’t want to navigate the complexities (and risk/reward) inherent in working with international talent. At AscribeIT, we try to anticipate this type of objection and make it easier for our customers to make a strategic staffing decision, free from preconceptions. We do this by presenting a resume profile that includes, among other things, the consultant’s daily availability for client calls (i.e. their overlapping availability with the traditional US work day). When you review a proposed AscribeIT team, you get the full picture of each individual, and how they fit into our vision of a successful project team.

At AscribeIT, our international employees are among our most talented and effective consultants, and we’ve built incredibly successful teams around them. We recognize and appreciate the huge rewards possible when you look internationally for your quote-to-cash solutions, and we’re here to help you navigate the path to get there. Send us a message if you’re interested in reaping the rewards as well!