How to Nurture Your Leads... The Right Way

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can get infinite leads. And I'm also going to talk about the one thing that's holding your business from becoming elite. So my name is Eric Siu. I have an ad agency called Single Grain, and I do 2 podcasts. One's called Marketing School, other one's called Leveling Up. And I'm going to go through what sparked a memo from a founders retreat that we did recently. And this memo is called The Missing 60%. So usually we write these memos for my company and then I write all the thoughts out and then people can leave comments and people can also write their thoughts, their ideas in the appendix as well. And so basically this retreat happened and I was talking to a handful of my friends there and some have sold their companies for 9 figures. Some are doing 9 figures in revenue. Some are doing very healthy 8 figures or so. Point is everyone's doing really well. And I brought up one of our challenges, which was That we drive a good amount of leads each month, about 500 to 600 or so. This was back then, right? Of the leads that we get, only 10% of them are qualified, right, to work with us. Now, one of my friends, he's the guy that sold his company for about $250 million or so. He said, well, you know, what we did at our company was we didn't only just focus on the people that were ready to buy, the people that were in market, but we really focused on nurturing the rest of the audience. That wasn't necessarily ready to buy. And so the reason why I call this document the missing 60% is because let's assume that maybe the top 20% of people are ready to buy, 20% of people will never buy, but then you have the 60% of people that you can nurture and try to move them or continue to engage them until they're ready to buy. And that might take 3 months, it might take 6 months, it might take 12 months, it might take 24 months. But the point is that you're staying top of mind. And given all the content that I put out with The podcast, Podcast 1, Podcast 2, and even doing these YouTube videos and the newsletter that we do and the speaking that happens. And we just try to share a lot of stuff. And I tweet as well. So there's a lot of knowledge sharing that we try to— education, I should say, that we try to pass on to the public. And it's been very helpful to us over the years. And then we continue to work on our SEO. So that would be another piece too. For us, we're very good at driving people to the point of sale. But the reality is a lot of the people that come through, I think it is actually fair to say that 95% of the people are not in market and you can work on that 95%. You can call it the missing 60%, whatever. That's just what we call it. But bottom line is how are you going about nurturing your audience? Because most people in your space, especially in lead gen, they aren't ready to quite make a move. Same thing with e-commerce too. You might have, you know, 1%, 2% conversion rate, but what about the other 98% of people? How do you continue to nurture them? How do you continue to keep them alive in your funnel? And that's, I'm going to talk through a couple ideas through this memo, and this will hopefully get you to think about it better and hopefully help you grow your business. So for us, well, there's a couple things. Let's say, for example, someone watches one of our webinars. And so a webinar would be a free training that we do. We might drive paid traffic to that training. Well, what if we sent them an email afterwards and say, hey, I saw that you checked out this webinar. What did you need help with? And that's something— this is something exactly that my friend Patrick Campbell does. And look, the text is even over here. So, hi John, noticed you downloaded a thing. What were you trying to figure out? This also goes into a shared inbox. So you can use something like Front, you can use something like Help Scout. There's also a tool called GrooveHQ that you can use as well. There's a lot of these different help desk softwares that you can use to have a shared inbox where you can collaborate with other people on your team, right? So just simple stuff like that. If they downloaded a resource, let's say it's an ebook or let's say they downloaded a webinar, they watched a webinar. What's something that you could send? And maybe it's an automated message that goes out and you set an automated trigger for every single resource that you have. And then whenever they respond, it automatically goes to one of the BDRs on your team, right? So if you're in lead gen, you might have a business development rep. Development representative, or let's say you're selling e-commerce products at scale. You might have it go to someone on the, you might have a sales team, but you might have a customer success, you might have a customer support team, and maybe you can incentivize them to do something about it, right? And so that's what I would say. Our BDRs are more incentivized to focus on driving qualified meetings. So that's what it is at the end of the day, right? So you got to figure out, okay, well, What are some other touchpoints where we can hit people up but not spam them? So again, a resource download is perfect. Or perhaps if they interacted with your content on Twitter, if they interacted with your content on LinkedIn, if they look like they're very qualified with your ideal client profile, which is also known as your ICP. So let's say the company, you want to work with companies that are doing over $10 million a year and they're only in e-commerce, right? And so maybe that's your ideal client profile. And so anytime your team sees people, they can actively monitor your LinkedIn inbox, they can monitor your Twitter inbox as well. And if they see someone engage, you can just say, hey, notice that you reached out or notice that you engaged. And you can ask them to have a conversation or you can just show them a really interesting offer, a no-brainer offer versus trying to hard pitch them, right? Because again, most people just aren't ready to buy. But if you can understand what their challenges are and you can start to nurture that relationship, a lot of people aren't willing to play the long game and that's why they fail. That's why a lot of companies fail because they're just focused on converting that initial 5% or so. But if you look at the other 95% of people that aren't necessarily in market and you spend the time trying to convert those, your customer acquisition costs are going to come down quite a bit because you've managed to shake the tree a little bit and you've managed to Get the people that other people weren't ready to work on. And again, a lot of things I see are, it's often the first person that they think about. And so just the other day we got a lead and someone asked in a chat for a group that I'm in said, hey, who's really good at SEO? And they're like, oh, you should talk to Eric's agency. And there were 2 or 3 people that recommended me. That's the type of stuff that happens behind the scenes. Where when you spend a lot of time branding and other people will speak up for you, okay? And someone just needed something at the right time and someone jumped in. So this was someone that was in market that wasn't necessarily in our funnel, but my branding efforts with these other people, the goodwill I've created with other people, there was a ripple effect there. Because again, it wasn't one person, wasn't two people, but it was three people that actually spoke on my behalf. And it's not like I told them to do so. People will often like, I remember when I would go to events, I'll speak at events, It's like, oh yeah, we actually need this right now. We actually need this right now. But again, how many people actually need your solution right now? Not many people. So I wanted to take a moment to share with you the Ahrefs Evolve Conference. This is a marketing conference happening in Singapore. This is October 24th to the 25th, and it's going to be 2 sunny days in Singapore, 500 digital marketing enthusiasts, 18 of the top speakers around the world. And Ahrefs, they really know how to do it up. I know Alayda Soles, I know Bernard. These are all people I hung out with in person. James Norquay over here. Tim, I've hung out with in person as well. They're all amazing people. Same thing with Victor. They know their stuff when it comes to SEO. They know their stuff when it comes to content marketing. And there's a whole host of other people here that I'm familiar with. And Lily Rae, she tweets amazing news around the latest updates and she's usually on top of things and I really enjoy her content. So I would highly recommend all of you to go check this out if you're interested in SEO. And content marketing, this is probably going to be one of the best conferences you can go to in 2024. And all you have to do is just search for Ahrefs Evolve Conference. You should be able to find it that way and they'll take care of the rest. The other thing that your team can do too is look at your email service provider and look at who's engaging the most. Who's the decision maker at an ICP type of company, ideal client profile company, and how heavily are they engaging with your content? If they're opening every single email that you're sending, And you see that they're actually consuming a lot of content around SEO, for example, you might just reach out and say, hey, look, I noticed that you consume— you're consuming a lot of content around SEO. Would it be helpful if I sent you this free resource over here to help you more? It's like, oh my God, yes. And then you can hit them up later and say, hey, like, was that resource helpful? Is there anything else that you're challenged with right now? How else can I be best helpful to you, right? So that's all I'll say. And I'll continue to move down this memo over here just to keep the ideas rolling. So for example, let's say we go speak at an event or we do a partner webinar with somebody else. So what we'll do after the webinar is that we will, usually the partner will share the attendee list and then we'll hit up the attendee list and say, hey, hi John, our CEO spoke about AI marketing at event. You can download the slides over here just in case you missed it. By the way, if you needed help with marketing, you can just book a call with us here. Let's walk through a— so basically that's it, right? So there's another handful of solutions down here, but The point is you're just trying to say, hey, like here are the slides over here. By the way, like what are your big— you can say, by the way, what are your biggest challenges right now? Business challenges. Or you can say, if you need marketing help, you can just book here. I actually prefer the first one more because you're trying to generate a conversation versus saying, hey, oh, here are the slides. And like, oh, by the way, come buy our stuff. The more you can take a long approach to it, the more you're going to be successful, the better outcomes you're going to have, right? And by the way, this is probably a video I'll send over to my sales team for training for the next, I don't know, couple years or so, because this is something that you should be drilling into your team because oftentimes salespeople are just focused on what's in front of them. It actually makes the sales team lazy when all they're focused on is just the things that come in. And I remember this happening in the past where once the in-market leads that are ready to buy right now, let's say it goes into a down market or a down economy, Then they don't know what to do anymore. It's like, well, I'm not busy right now. You know, hey, I'm not busy right now. Well then why don't you do something about it, right? If you're looking to continue to grow your sales, if you have a sales team, you want to look for people that are proactive. You want to look for people that would do things like this, that are willing to drum up conversations with people, that are willing to engage with people or proactively engage with people that have engaged with your content. Because here's the thing, if marketing is out there creating content, they're doing webinars or speaking at events or hosting events, then sales needs to also carry the load too and make sure that the attention that they're garnering isn't going to waste. Because marketing 101, marketing is bringing people to the point of sale. Sales is closing. Part of closing to me is actually, you know, getting your tentacles out there and trying to generate these relationships with people, right? Because it's hard to generate relationships at scale. You can do so with the community. That's another thing. So we have a school community that we have. We're about to create a new community as well, which is completely free. But through community, you can actually foster relationships at scale. But even then, it's not quite close to a one-on-one situation, which is why I think BDRs are going to continue to be valuable, especially the ones that know how to generate relationships and know how to hold a conversation. So I'm going to go through a couple things here from this memo. That might also be helpful for you. For us, we're also constantly trying to reinvent our funnel. So right now we have people that will come through our funnel and they'll fill out a bunch of information and then we'll prequalify them, right? So what else can we do to optimize the funnel? Can we reduce the number of form fields and enrich them using a solution like Clearbit or using a solution like Apollo? We can certainly do that. And if people come through our email list and they look like they're qualified, Can we automatically enrich our email lists and then use something like Clay that will automatically reach out to people saying, hey, they noticed whatever event, whatever big recent event that happened for their business, and then try to reach out to them to try to get them on a call or try to send them a free resource, right? Based on whatever content they visited on our site. And that's something that we do currently on our site that I wouldn't say that we're doing perfectly right now, But what we do try to figure out is, okay, does this person fit our ideal client profile? And if they do, this person that just recently joined our email list or visited our website, actually, we can identify those people using a software called Retention B2B. We have that pixel on our website and let's say you're a VP of marketing at a Fortune 500 company. Okay, that looks like a good fit. So we'll automatically send you a message saying, hey, X, Y, and Z, what we did before was we noticed you were visiting this page over here. What did you need help with? That didn't work at all. Now we're actually trying to send offers to people to see what will work. So instead of saying, what did you need help with? We say, hey John, we are willing to do 5 landing pages for you and we're guaranteeing a 10% lift in conversion rates. And if we aren't able to do that, we'll just give you your money back, right? So we're looking for no-brainer offers that are foot in the door. That way, once we close them on an offer, then we can move them into something that's recurring, right? So your offer matters a lot too when you're reaching out to people. For example, a good offer would be, a no-brainer offer would be, hey, if you get on a call with me, I'll give you $1 million, right? So that would be a stupid offer for us to offer, but they would also be stupid not to take it, right? So then you can work backwards from, okay, that's a no-brainer offer. So what can we offer them? Can we offer them, let's say, can we offer them a $100 Amazon gift card to get on a call to talk about their marketing strategy, right? Yeah. That might be a better example because I've seen in a lot of cases people able to book in 1 out of 10, every 10 emails that they send surrounding the gift card, they might be able to get 1 booking, right? And that's actually pretty good. And even to this day, that's tried and true. So you can send them an Amazon gift card if they're in the United States or wherever you're listing from. So that's certainly an option, right? So what is a no-brainer offer that you can craft and get people's foot in the door to ideally, ideally you're building trust because the problem with the gift card is, okay, they're just coming for the gift card, right? What if they're not interested afterwards? Yeah. You can certainly try the gift card. But if you say, hey, like I'll do this for you for $1,000 or $2,000 and I'll give your money back if it doesn't work, that's pretty good because there's not much risk on their side and you have to make your offer really understandable. And hopefully it's not a big lift on your side. But again, once you build that trust, once you're able to get some results, that's when they're more interested in signing up to a recurring service with you because you've built that trust. Because trust is hard to come by. And again, people are very busy. And so you got to figure out again, how can you hook people in? And usually an offer can do a good job with you. And that's the other thing too. When you're reaching out to these people, I like to call this warm outbound because these are people that might have visited my website or they might be on my email list already, or they might have engaged with content so that they're at least a little familiar with me. And if we reach out to them with a no-brainer offer and we just keep doing this over time, our response rates are going to be a lot higher because They're also going to respect us because nobody else is really doing this stuff, right? And so that's what I would say. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. We're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Now, what else do we want to do? So we talked about reimagining the funnel a little bit, but We want to focus on generating conversations that lead to meetings, right? We want to focus on downselling and upselling people too. We want to focus on all these things. And let me just talk about that real quick. So let's say again, we sell them on a one-time offer. Well, we want to quickly figure out, okay, how can we upsell them? And then if they don't want to move into a recurring service, can we downsell them into perhaps another one-time offer to try to build more trust with them? And then maybe we can set them into a nurture sequence, check back in with them every 2 months, 3 months or so. Continue to send them helpful content. That's going to be important, right? The other thing that we want to figure out too as a company is how do we go about surfacing relevant content to them at the right time? Because on my podcast, we record 90-minute sessions. We talk about the latest marketing news, but can we have an AI that will automatically clip a certain area and then send it to the people that are interested in that area? So for example, I might be talking about sales. Well, then anybody that's visited content around sales, this AI will automatically clip that and send it over to them and say, hey, it's been a while since we talked. I know you're interested in sales, so check out this piece over here. Let me know if you ever want to talk about your marketing challenges. Always happy to see how I can be helpful or how I can point you in the right direction. So you just want to be a person of service. You want to be a person that's helpful. And most BDRs don't think like that. They just think, I want to book meetings. I want to book meetings. I want to book meetings. But rightfully so. But instead of just thinking about, hey, I need to book meetings, I need to book meetings, why don't you think about, I need to provide value first. I need to provide value. I need to provide value. If you can do that and have a long view on things, I guarantee you, your results are going to be compounding over a long period of time. And so that's what I can say about that. And the other thing we want to push ourselves to do, and again, this is our memo, so you can take what you want from it. Is we want to push ourselves to do a product/service launch every single month. And this is something that Patrick Campbell said, that's what they did. They always figure out, okay, each month to stay top of mind, there's another thing they're shipping. That's another thing they're shipping. Oh my God, these guys are really on top of it. Here's a new service that they're shipping. Here's a new product that they're shipping. And so that's what I would say. And not a lot of people think like that. And doing stuff like that keeps you top of mind. And you never know when people are ready to buy. It's like, oh, you just shipped this feature over here on SEO, but all of a sudden they're interested in paid media. Okay, time to start the conversation. And maybe they weren't ready again 12 months ago, but they're ready now. And I also want to say that not enough companies focus on providing valuable case studies, ebooks, just resources for their audience to consume. And so I believe, at least for us, when I wrote this memo, I said, hey, we're missing cornerstone content around the things I've been working for So AI-assisted SEO, programmatic SEO, case studies from stuff that's been working well for us. And there's a period of time where we got 15 million views on social media in a month. Can we share that? What else can we share? Can we share some CRO teardowns, some conversion rate optimization teardowns? Can we do co-white papers with companies like HubSpot or SimilarWeb? Can we do co-webinars with them where we share our audience with them, they share their audience with us? And these things go a long way. And a lot of these companies are down to collaborate. You just have to go out there and you have to ask and you just have to make sure you do a good job. And if you don't have an audience yet, you haven't been out there speaking, so I would encourage you to just go out there and start doing it. Get the suckage out of your body and that's how you're going to get better, right? By sucking initially and then figuring out because that actually means you're learning. And from there, you're going to be able to get these collaborations. It's just people say, oh my God, they're big companies. I'll never get to them. Oh, you know, I'm no big brand. I'm boring. I'm bland. Don't get me wrong. I like staying at home. I'm a pretty boring guy myself. I don't really like going out. I don't like partying. I don't like drinking, right? I'll turn to social media when I need to turn it on. But fact of the matter is I learned how to play the game over a period of time. I'm an extroverted introvert. So I'm actually introverted, right? But the extroversion piece came from me learning the game. And that's something you're going to have to figure out. Yeah. How to do if you don't know how to do that. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. Now I'll give you a couple more things. So you want to help your BDR team more. So this is all under this missing 60%, missing 95%, whatever you want to call it. But if people opt into your email list, have a 20 to 30 minute blitz sequence where every 5 minutes you're sending something about you guys. Because there's that honeymoon period when they first opt in where they're down to open anything that you send them. And whatever you do, that 30 minute sequence is going to build— you're trying to build a lot of trust. Don't spam them with buy stuff from us. Just like, oh, here's our YouTube channel for this one. Second email in 5 minutes. Here's our YouTube channel over here. Okay. Here after that, oh, here's our blog here. And then, oh, by the way, here are our 2 podcasts over here. Here's a webinar that we did on AI over here because it's a very hot topic. And you're just trying to be as helpful as you can. And after that, because after the first 30 minutes or so, people aren't going to care about you as much. And at least you get a good chance. You get one chance to make a really good first impression. So hit them with that initial email sequence, right? Hit them with that blitz. It's going to be good and go from there. I'll also give you one more. Those of you that are a little savvy that get traffic to your websites, you can have a back button tracker. And what that means is you can set Google Analytics events when someone clicks the back button on their browser. You can treat it as a cart abandonment and then you can show them a better offer, right? So you can have an exit popup that shows up. And you can also retarget these people as well. You can also do the same for people that click off your main lead form, right? And I keep talking about events. You can do virtual events, you can do live events as well, but events go a long way. And I found that anytime I've done a live event and maybe a customer has attended, they end up staying longer, they end up paying a lot more, and they're a lot less of a headache because they know, like, and trust you. And so leverage in-person where you can, even if you can't afford it, try to get a sponsor. And then eventually when you can afford it, you can just cover the bill for people. And that's what I would say. So there's a lot of different things that you can do, but the main takeaway here is that you want to focus on that missing 95% of people that aren't necessarily ready to buy right now. And the 5%, I'm assuming you have a pretty competent sales team, you're jumping on those leads immediately. But when things get tough, when the economy slows down a little bit, what about the other 95% of people that aren't quite ready to buy? What do you do about those? And you don't want to wait for the economy to get bad. You don't want to wait for things to slow down. You want to keep that machine going because then that becomes a habit. It's almost like when you eat good food, when you go to the gym all the time, it becomes a habit. When you build the habit so much that it feels wrong, you feel really upset when you aren't doing that habit, like you aren't going to the gym, that's when you know the habit's correct, right? Where it's like, oh man, I really forgot to to build relationships with people today. And I would say those of you that are BDR sales, set aside some time, 1 hour, 2 hours a day just to build relationships with people, just to nurture relationships with people, just to look at what marketing is doing, see who is engaged, see who's in the funnel and do your best to reach out to those people and not just reach out, not tell them, hey, come buy my stuff, but offer to be someone of value. And when the timing is right, they'll remember, oh, by the way, Sam, we actually really need marketing help right now. Do you know who can help? Oh, that's actually what we do, right? So you want your ask-to-help ratio or more so your help-to-ask ratio. Maybe it's 4 to 1, maybe it's 8 to 1. So for every 8 helpful pieces of content that you provide, maybe there's a light ask. Maybe it's to attend a webinar or something like that, right? But it's not always to buy something. And I really encourage you, if you're sending out emails to people, try to keep it a 2-way conversation. Ask them questions. What did you need exactly? What are your biggest challenges right now? And I'll see if I can point you in the right direction versus saying, hey, I know the solution already, because that basically implies that you didn't listen and you're coming in like a know-it-all, right? So that's what I would say. I know it's, you know, rambled for a little bit on this one, but if you want to take your business to the next level, you want to get infinite leads, This is how you go about doing so. And in future videos, I'll talk about how we go about this from an outbound standpoint. But you get this right, your business is going to grow a lot faster. And yeah, let me know when you actually do it.