Creating a Scalable Outbound Marketing Campaign with Scott Bywater

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Welcome back to the Business Systems Summit, and in this session we are going to be chatting with Scott Bywater. He is a marketing strategist who has generated millions of dollars for his clients in over 126 different industries. He uses these unconventional direct marketing strategies and tactics to generate really big returns for his clients. We were having a little bit of a chat and he was telling me how he believes outbound marketing is just so underrated. Particularly in the business-to-business space, because what it does is it enables you to target your ideal client. It's going after the 80/20, finding the ones that are most likely to respond and really crafting your offer and language to that specific person. So I've known Scott for many numbers of years now, and we've been to different conferences and workshops together. We've even spoken on the same stage at a couple of conferences before, and his approach to systems and the way that he does his marketing, it's really quite unique because it's the combination of online, offline, and very excited to hear the session he's going to take us through, which really is a direct marketing strategy. And I'll get Scott to tell you a little bit more about it, but it's with great pleasure that I'd like to welcome Scott Bywater to the Business Systems Summit.

Yeah, great to be here, David. Thanks for having me. And I think there's some interesting points that you make there because The world is very inbound operated at the moment, you know, like everyone's talking about inbound and it's very, you know, it's very sexy and it's very hot. But even if you look at companies like HubSpot, they have an outbound marketing team. So the outbound sort of side of things is very important because, and this is the thing to think of if you're in business to business, is to look through and go, who are my best customers? And if you find like, many of my clients do, that they might be the larger businesses, but they may not be the people who are searching under certain keywords in Google. They can be often people who— because let's just take Google as an example. By nature, it's getting everyone to look through it, so it's a fantastic medium. But if you're after that sweet spot of clients, sometimes outbound is a way to— is a far better way of doing it because you get to pick and you get to choose who you're going to go after. So with that in mind, I want to take you through this process and basically, you know, the stage— step 1 of this process, and I think this is where it all comes from, is getting very, very clear on who is our target market, who is it that we want to actually attract. So we want to build that list of dream clients, whether it's 100 whether it's 500, whether it's 1,000, whatever that number is, but we want to mine into it and go, well, who are the 4% of clients? The way to do this is, who are the 4% of clients right now? What are their qualities? What industries are they in? What's the size of their business who are bringing in a large proportion of my business? So if we break down the 80/20 to 80/20, it's like 4% brings in 66% of our business. Your numbers may be different to that, but you're going to be slanted in one way or the other. Now the second thing which is really critical is to create an attractive offer that sets you apart. And I think this is more important today than it has ever been. And the reason why it's more important today than ever is because you probably noticed that there's no shortage of people vying for business out there, and there's no shortage of content out there. So what we want to do, we want people to say when they get our message, we want them to say 2 words. And those 2 words that we want them to say are, "At last." We don't want them to say, "Another bloody accountant trying to contact me to get business." We want them to say, "Finally, someone is giving me what I'm after. They're solving my solution." So how do we do that? How do we actually position ourselves as different? Well, there's, there's a book out there and it's called The Pumpkin Plan, and it's actually really good. And this is where I pulled these 3 questions from, and I've helped a number of my clients with this. And basically there's 3 questions. It's, it's what do you hate about your industry? So you go to your best customers, you go to your best clients, and you ask them these 3 questions. What do you hate about the industry? What frustrates you the most? Okay, so you find out what they hate about the industry. So if you could ask for anything and receive it, what do you wish people like us would do for customers like you? And then how would that make your life better? How can we make your life better, easier, more relaxing, all that sort of thing? And what comes back as a result of that is we get crystal clear on where are the gaps in the industry, what is frustrating people about the industry. So that gives clarity because when we send that email, when we send that LinkedIn message, when we send whatever we're sending to people, whatever that message is, we want it to cut through. And we want to find, we want to go, what are our strengths? What are the needs of the market? What are the bleeding neck? And bring all of those things together really, really, really, really sweetly. So I'll take a breath now, David, and just see if you've got any questions or anything that that I've missed in what I've been saying so far?

No, I think you hit the nail on the head on a few things. I'll just add one or two things. This particular process— because everybody will have access to the process underneath your video, so they'll be able to download and go through this as we're going through it— and we were talking even before we started recording, this idea of what this problem or this process tries to solve is that the, the problem that a lot of business owners have, which is How do I get more leads into the business rather than just the inbound and make it scalable? And then I know you identified a few of the issues around just handling inbound leads. And also when you get clear on who those dream clients are, and I know some people may have heard the idea of these dream clients, and we talked about it offline about Chet Holmes. He talked about building your dream 100 list and then really very specifically targeting those, particularly if you've got higher priced products and services where there is a bit more margin built in, you know, you're not selling a $5 widget here. It's not like some just e-commerce type business where you want to try and scale up your lead generation to a very specific audience. And that's really what this process that Scott will actually take us through, how we can get in contact with them, grab their attention. So once you've got the list of those people, that was another thing we find that a lot of that target audience isn't necessarily engaging on Google, doing a Google search, or maybe on Facebook, how a lot of people are running ads. Whereas the strategy you're going to take to, particularly if you're targeting, you know, high tier people, you know, like your, your directors or different department heads using something like LinkedIn, once you've mined that data to get the right list, that dream 100, then, okay, what is that real sweet spot? Step number 2, what is the sweet spot offer that is going to really grab grab their attention. So yeah, just wanted to round out one or two things, but I mean, you're right on point here.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's really clear. So it's getting your sweet spot and you may need to test a couple of things within it because we don't always know exactly, even if we do these questions, but we want to be really thinking in the back of our head, how do we create this so that when they get that message from us, they're not like, not another message, they're thinking at last. So, so once we've got that attractive offer, then we go through and we obviously do the search and we find the contacts on LinkedIn and that sort of thing. And following that, you know, we make a follow-up phone call. But, you know, once they've accepted the request, we'll send the details to an assistant or whatever to make that phone call and grab the mailing address. So that way we've got— we're not just— because this is a multi-prong strategy, you know, 20 years ago it was very difficult, you know, it was sort of like, it was mail and phone call were really all we had. Now we've got social media, we've got mail, we've got Facebook ads, and we've got all of these sort of things so we can come at things and be omnipresent. So, to our target market, and you don't need a million-dollar budget to be omnipresent because you're only trying to be omnipresent to 100 people or 200 people or 500 people. Who are right in the sweet spot, and that's what we really want to— what we really want to achieve. So, so after we make that phone call, yeah, we, we go through, and I've got a script there for the phone call, you know, just a very quick script there. We connect on the other social media platforms. So there's a little tool called Discoverly, and if you use it, it'll tell you— and you've connected with them on, on LinkedIn— it will also tell you if they're on Facebook or if they're on Instagram or if they're on whatever other social media platforms there are, and then we can connect with them on there as well. So once we've connected with them on there, if we look at step 7, we can create 10 pieces of content for Facebook.

I'll add in some bits here as well because I know we've talked about this and I've been experimenting with some of these things in the background for some of our little campaigns. So for Melbourne SEO and Video, we identified that franchise, stores and big franchises are really good clients for Melbourne SEO and video. So we started off, found some, a guy on Upwork and there's loads of them. You look for data miners and you say to him, right, here is either the list of the names or the companies or give them some sort of seed piece of content. And then I actually found someone based in the Philippines and for $5 an hour, he went out and did all the research to find out who the main company owner was or who a particular position holder was, found their best mailing address for head office, found contact numbers, and then found LinkedIn profiles as well. So for— worked out to be a couple of hundred bucks, he got me a list of top 100 franchises here in Australia and then compiled a list for contact information. So these first 6 steps could very easily be outsourced and you jump in once you've actually got that list done. So I've done pieces of Scott's strategy here and I think what I'm going to like about going through this process is he's going to kind of tie it all together.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's beautiful with the data miners and being the outsource king, you know, you've got that nailed. So I'll have to check that out. So in terms of the social media platform, so then we connect with them on the social media platforms, and we create that content. And that content we're going to use in more detail further down in the, in the sequence. But then what we can do, so that when we're listing things on Facebook, if someone becomes a friend with us, so that we can segment it, we can actually create a friends list just for the people who are in this particular group. So when we put content out, we can say just for those people to see it by creating a new list and just sending that content to that list. So that's an organic way of getting content out just to those specific people. And if you were going after, for example, if you're a Melbourne SEO and you're going after franchisors, and then you might have a few different avatars, you could have different lists made with different content that you could be, you know, could be potentially posting out there. So from there, we go into the LinkedIn and phone follow-up process. So message 1 is a, you know, "Hey, thanks for connecting. If I can help you in any way or introduce you to anyone, please let me know." It's just a very simple sort of message. And then we have messages that take people from unaware, you know, so where they're unaware of your product or service into when they're now aware and we take them more to where they might be ready to make a decision. So the first one is, I thought you'd find this article interesting, take a look, and obviously taking into account your particular target market and what's going to interest them. And then a soft call to action in the PS, which might be say, hey, you know, I've got something else I want to chat with you about, which I thought you'd find interesting. If you want to jump on a call, let me know. We would also follow up because I think it's important that we don't just, you know, Despite what Gary Vaynerchuk says, I still believe people do answer their phone. And my experience is, when I get on the phone, I make money if I'm calling the right people and reaching out to the right people in the right process. So, there may not be as many people who answer the phone, but people are definitely answering the phone. And it's a great way to cut through, and there's no higher level of engagement if you're calling the right people. So, then we would have a phone call. Now the important thing to mention here is what you wanna have is you wanna, maybe you'll start off doing this yourself, but eventually you wanna have, and Salesforce talks about this, they've got a couple of books, I think Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting, but that's how they built their company was with this outbound strategy. And one thing they say is you need to have dedicated prospectors as well as dedicated salespeople. Because if you've just got salespeople, they naturally tend towards the deals that are likely to close soon, is their focus. But then the new blood starts drying up because all you're doing is focusing on here and you're not focusing on the long game where I get a lead in today and it might take 60 or 90 days for them to close. But as soon as you stop selling this prospecting, you're setting up a future problem. Is basically what you're doing, whether that prospecting is inbound or outbound or whatever, as soon as you let the focus off there, you set up a future problem. So anyway, the phone calls, we have phone calls where we leave a voicemail and then we have phone calls where we don't leave a voicemail so they don't feel like we're hassling them.

So question, so at this point, like we've made our Dream 100 list, we've started to connect socially so that we've got different ways to engage with them. We've then done the LinkedIn connection where we're first doing a little bit of a soft, "Hey, we just want to help and hear something interesting." At this point, when we get to the phone calls, what is it that we're looking to do on that phone call? Is that something where we're trying to then at that point pitch the service, or are we still just connecting or yeah, I'm just curious to know the purpose of that phone call.

I think with the phone call, if we get them on the call, I would be going for the appointment. So I would be making it, I'll be making it quite short in terms of the phone call, but going for the appointment and not in a sort of a sleazy telemarketing sort of bulk sort of thing way, but saying, hey, do you experience this problem, which you've identified as their bleeding neck, and then go through, I sent you a report the other day, you know, did you get a chance to read read it and say, listen, we can actually help you solve that problem. So that's what I would be focusing on with those telemarketing calls. And the key here is relevance. That's really the key, is making sure when we make the approach that it's relevant. It's not someone going out there like— I get emails all the time, and I'm sure you do too, David, and they're like, I can improve your SEO ratings, or I can improve you, we can get you more leads, all that sort of thing. But they know nothing about me and they haven't really done their research. So the key here with everything to get the cut-through is making sure it's super, super relevant. With that in mind, so we have these— so then message number 3, we're creating, you know, after 10 days, we're going to that, yeah, aware to interested prospecting message. So we might have a checklist to send them, or something, some other data information to send them. So in the— Gary Vaynerchuk talks about the jab, jab, right hook. We're doing the jabs with the messaging and we're going for the right hook with the phone calls as such. And then message number 4, as we go through that, is I just went to your website, I'm hosting a private call. So we're trying to get that, we're looking to move our prospects and potential clients, you're onto a bit of a private call, onto a bit more of an engaged sort of setting. And finally, we would follow up with a breakup type email where it's like, hey, I've tried to connect with you, let me know whether you're not interested, whether you're interested. So it's more of a takeaway sort of sale that sort of completes that mini sequence in terms of in terms of the LinkedIn, and then I think we want to just step away, give our target market a bit of a break, and then move into another medium, like in this case we're going to wait 14 days and then go into Facebook ads. Any questions so far or anything you want to elaborate on?

Yeah, no, no, this is good. We've done some variations of this, and I think what you've got here is a nice framework for someone to start, and then what they'll do is they'll customize and then make it their own based on what suits for them and their audience and what they know. So we do something similar where, as I mentioned, we're even testing some stuff with the Franchisers where we'll— you start with something that's easily scalable and something that can be delegated down, and you try and have a multi-touchpoint to try and get them to stick up their hand and say, "Yes, I'm interested," or have some form of engagement, and then you have the phone call point. So it's almost like you kind of want them to show some interaction, and then you go, "Ah, okay, now let's— we know that you've got— we've got your attention now. Let's now double down and then have a little bit of engagement." So I think that idea works quite well, and really having a set sequence, something potentially that could be delegated down to a prospector or a salesperson where they try and shake the leads loose. I think the prospector example is a good probably thing to think about because you have someone who shakes the leads loose to the point at which we know, "Ah, this person is now ready or warm or hot," and then they would hand that to the salesperson who really then focuses in on the close. So, the aim of the game is you've always got someone just like you said, Salesforce does, always have someone who is shaking loose new potential leads and warm leads, and so that way your salespeople are spending their time focused, because your salespeople, you know, it's probably not the best use of their time to be doing the prospecting. They're adding most value when they're in their sweet spot, which is the closing spot. So, and then I know you move into, well, let's try and hit some other different angles as well. We haven't even got to the direct mail pieces as well, so I can see that a little bit further in your process here.

Yeah, and I think the thing to keep in mind is this is sort of an overall process, but every industry is going to be different and you're going to go out and split test it. And you may find that direct mail works brilliantly for you and LinkedIn doesn't for whatever reason, or the cold calling doesn't, or the cold calling does. So this provides a bit of a framework, but every industry is going to be different. So you want to obviously adapt it as you go. To your industry and your situation. So, yes, sorry.

Yeah, and I think the big takeaway or the aha moment someone will get from this session is if they crafted something, a set process like this in their business, that they could have someone take the first 20, 30 steps before you even get involved, and there's actually an outbound process for identifying potential target clients and then having engagement, then what you can do is actually, you know, turn up the volume or turn down the volume depending on how busy your business is. If things are quieter, okay, well, we need to go for our Dream 200 list here of new prospects and let's start farming those. Whereas, ah, we're really busy at the moment, well, let's pull right back down to our, our 50. And it makes it something a little bit elastic, which then gives you the right lead flow for the business that it also isn't so dependent on just leads falling into your lap, which is what most businesses tend to do. They just go for that inbound, you know, where does a referral come from? They might do a little bit of outbound, maybe if you consider something like Google AdWords outbound, but this is something that breaks the mold and enables you to get to someone who might not be in those places that your competition is advertising.

Yes, and it's the control. And I think the other benefit of it is as well, because even though inbound leads all should be, you know, should be better in theory, but when you go outbound, you go to a specific client, which makes it better. But also, he's not going on Google and let's say going, I'm going to contact 3 people, and then you're competing against 3 or 4 people. You're going out there with a specific solution that nobody else in the market, if you're doing it right, maybe not nobody, but you've picked a niche in the market and you're going out there directly to them. So you're one person who's got the edge. So from here, what we can do is we can upload our custom audience into— so if we can get there, this is all dependent on the fact that we can get there, we can maybe call them. And this is something we didn't mention before with the phone call. We also want to get approval, or within what we're doing, maybe get them to subscribe so we can get their email addresses. This is critical because then we can upload those email addresses into a custom audience and we can advertise on Facebook just to these people. But not only just to these people, but we could also test doing a lookalike audience. So let's say you're after you know, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and you get a group of 300 of these email addresses of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, if you can do a lookalike audience of them, odds are you're going to get a very high lookalike list, which is a larger list than just if you went to the generic, you know, advertising via industries or business owners on Facebook. So That's something to keep in mind as well.

Yes, a really good way to do that, which we've been testing, is thinking about what's right at the front of that funnel. So once you've identified the target audience, and then let's say you've started to do a little bit of prospecting, you might even lead with direct mail first and then have the cookie to— as we've got a mutual friend who's another one of the speakers, Nick Thakralal, and he leads with quizzes and decision trees, and they can be a great way to engage someone from direct mail piece to get them to answer a series of questions to get a specific result that they're looking for. But in that process as well, that's a great time to try and extract some further information, including the email address, and then get someone into, you know, your either email campaign or using that data to build the lookalike audiences or segment lists on Facebook.

Yeah, and I think I love Nick's software and I think that could be really good to integrate within this process as well. So once again, it's a testing and measuring thing, but you know, in one of the— in your emails you could have something, you know, we've created a quiz for you which will show you exactly how you can get your set, you know, exactly what you need to fix in your CRM system to to boost your conversion rate by 20% and fill out this quiz or whatever the particular angle is and then we get the email address plus we get 10 or 15 points of data which we can use for targeting. So yeah, I agree, I think that's really powerful. With the Facebook posts, what we're doing is we'd be rolling them over every 4 days so we don't get that ad fatigue as such. 1 to 4 days can be a content-based blog post, 5 to 8 days can be a content-based video because people are— you're obviously hitting on all the hot points, the bleeding neck, etc., etc., and the problems. So we're touching on the problems. Then we're looking into next the case study. So we might have one case study from one angle, another case study from a different angle, hitting on different pain points or issues or benefits that the clients are after. And then from 17 days to 34, we're going more with, yeah, a direct pitch. And then not just pitching, you know, a particular service, but we might— or we can go on 3 different benefits. And what I mean by that— so at the moment I'm working with a client and they sort of, you know, they do sort of calling for school halls and that sort of thing. So one benefit might be that this particular device is really tough, so we might touch on that benefit. Another one might be that it does cooling, and another one might be that it does heating. So you're looking at pulling out the 3 benefits of your product and focusing on each one individually within different Facebook ads, because obviously different people have different issues or different things which mean more to them. So, and then you, you can close off From there, that sort of covers step 10 as such. And then I would see from there the drip feeding of the content on social media platforms, where we're going out and we're doing the one piece of content every 7 days, so that to the readers who are following us or that we've connected with on the social media platforms. So any questions or anything I've missed there, David?

No, I think it's good there. And then Dru, drip feeding that, that makes sense. I'm almost imagining what we've done here as you're going through it, you're kind of giving almost like little building blocks and someone could just imagine this customer going through a journey and thinking in terms of how do we first capture their attention? How do we then keep them engaged? And then how do we start to build that trust enough that they end up taking an action? And doing it multi-pronged, so we get very clear on who we're targeting and then hitting on multiple different ways. So it's that seemingly we're in front of them quite a lot, and because you've got multi-touchpoints, very quickly they bond to you even quicker because now it's not like I've just seen one ad and there's always— that research people talk about, you know, you need to have between 7 and 10 touches before someone even considers you on their radar or might consider your products and services. So this is a way to compress that very specifically to a very specific audience, but it all starts with identifying that right audience and then starting your marketing to that. And the way I like to think about it is, yes, we are doing something to get someone to raise their hand and then say, I am interested. I'm interested, and each step is progressively getting them closer. So when we used to own the Rock and Roll Clothing music store, someone would come in and they— our process, the next step after they came in, they looked at something was to get them into the change room. Once they finished with the change room, then we would try and get them up to the front counter. And then we would suggest, you know, the upsell of some stickers and patches and those sorts of things. So we had a mapped out process that we were taking them through this journey. Now, that wasn't to say that if someone didn't walk in and they go, "Oh, I want that AC/DC t-shirt," and then they walk straight up to the cash register, we wouldn't say, "Oh, wait, wait, you got to jump in the change room first. That's our next process." So, we map out a process and that's what we imagine everybody will go through. But if someone then jumps, you might find in this process that Scott puts together or that you end up crafting, they might actually engage you after step 2 or 3. but you're designing a long enough funnel to give yourself a really good chance throughout that entire sequence. And then finally, you can put them into, assuming they've taken some action or stuck their hand up, you could put them into a warming sequence. If they still haven't taken action, well, maybe they go into your monthly newsletter or something like that, and you try and reactivate them a little bit further down. And I know one of your last steps or near the end is also then really integrating direct mail. So I actually think having all of those processes intertwined, trying to have the low-cost methods or the very scalable methods front-loaded in this process, and then it's almost like a filtering-down process based on someone taking action. But yeah, I think this just gets people thinking on the right track and very differently to the way a lot of people market.

Yeah, and the important thing here as well is because we're coming out of it from a multi-pronged approach, there's a book called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus— I think it's Marcus Sheridan or Marcus Buckingham, but very good book. And one of the things he talks about there, one of the examples he gives there, is he talks about when he owned a pool store and the average conversion rate was 10% if people— if you went out on a sales meeting to sell a pool. Guess what it was if they read 30 or more pieces of content?

I'm assuming like a factor of a good few hundred increase, percent.

800%, because he could track it. He was using HubSpot, so he knew if someone read 30 more pieces of content, it went up to 800%. So then that's where it's really powerful. It's like if we just send them bang, a sales letter, that has a certain amount of power. But if they've seen 6 videos of us before that sales letter hits them, the odds of them picking up the phone and contacting us skyrocket. And that's where combining hard-hitting sales copy with the content, I think, is the ultimate, and becoming omnipresent on multiple mediums. And whether you decide— when each one of these mediums can work alone, But once we combine them all, it just makes them that much more powerful.

We had a similar client actually, the Compass Pools swimming pool client, and we did the authority content process with them where we generated a whole lot of content for them, and their lead salesperson actually told a story about them going out and visiting a client, the client feeling like they already knew them and even referenced a few times that, "Oh, it was great to see you again." And when he queried them on it, they couldn't distinguish between the fact that they'd watched a video versus thinking that they'd spoken to him. So they'd really just watched about 15 videos on the website of him answering frequently asked questions, and that was before he ever stepped foot through the house. So what this process does, especially if you combine really great content, not always pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, like I mean you talked about jab, jab, jab, jab, then right hook, having that layered into this process, I think you start to create a very systematic marketing approach that's very scalable and can then hand really warm leads over to your salespeople. So it's, yeah, I think, I mean, we've run through it in quite detail. I don't know if you've got any final points you wanted to cover off on?

I think the main thing, I mean, this is an outbound strategy and it's really important to acknowledge the the power of outbound because outbound has sort of almost become the forgotten child in the new world, if you like. But I mean, at the same stage, outbound, it's not about outbound or inbound. This is an end sort of thing. Like if you've got a toolbox, you don't just have a saw in the toolbox. You have a saw, you have a hammer, you have— I mean, I'm not much of a handyman, but you've got a lot of different tools in there. So that's what we've got in there. So it's using, it's going, well, how can I use outbound? Is outbound right for me? And I think when outbound is right for you is if you find that you've got, if you're in, let's say, business to business in particular, and you've got really big clients who make up a disproportionate amount of your business and you want to get more of them, then it's the right tool for the job.

Yeah, perfect. Well, maybe we'll wrap it up there. I think that the notes that you've got I will have that linked beneath. If people want to find out more about you, because I know that's what you do, you build these multi-pronged approaches and customize them based on the business that you're working with. What's the best way for people to get in contact with you?

Yeah, so I mean, they can either look me up on LinkedIn, I'm under Scott Bywater, or just go to my website, which is probably the best one, is scottbywater.com, and you'll be able to find out all about me. Probably 1,000 or 2,000 articles on that scottbywarden.com if you want to dig in and find out more.

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being really generous with your time, and great to have you as part of the Business Systems Summit.

Yeah, likewise. Great to connect, Dave. We'll talk soon.

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