How to REALLY get more clients in 2019 (Live Q+A)

All right, guys, we're live. And the cool thing is you can see me 1, 2, 3 times— 4 times actually, because we are using my little owl. Too bad you can't see it right now. But while we wait for some people to come in, please behold, this is a new podcast setup we have going on right now. And let's see, you can see this mic over here. There's another mic over there. Camera, you can't see right there. There's lights over there. Maybe I should turn the lights on. I'm gonna turn the lights on just for fun. But by the way, as you guys join right now, let me know where you're coming in from. Start dropping your marketing questions, kind of what your challenges are with getting new customers or getting new clients right now. And we will jump right into it. Manav, good evening to you. It's gotta be like 1:00 AM for you. Thank you for joining today. Hi, Eric. Hopefully you were able to connect with my team member. Jeremy says, I'm in Vegas. Great, love Vegas. I don't know if it's raining over there for you right now, but it is raining over here pretty hard. And then we have Henderson, Kentucky, Justin. Then we have Tom coming in from Boston, currently 5 degrees. That's so crazy. I think it was like -51 degrees in Chicago the other day. And then we got some questions coming in, so I'm gonna start answering the questions. But first, let me turn the light on real quick, and then so I can look a little better. By the way, if you guys can't tell, I'm a little sunburned right now, coming back from Mexico yesterday. So yeah, totally, 5 degrees is nuts. It's raining over here, by the way. I'm gonna open the door so you can see, like, maybe you can see the thunder real quick. We got -23 degrees near Green Bay. That is nuts. Dynamic Designs. I don't It's crazy. Today, earlier this morning, we were doing our standup and then we had kind of this Brady Bunch setup because Thursday, Fridays we work from home and then there are some people in the office. But basically the lightning struck and then 2 people got disconnected. Their lights went out and they got disconnected. So it's pretty nuts over here as well. So guys, start dropping your marketing questions in, in terms of client acquisition. I'll start giving you some tips as well. I'm gonna turn the light on like I said. Give me a second. And then how do I turn this thing on? Right here. There we go. So hopefully I look a little better now, maybe a little shinier. But yeah, okay, so I just came back from Mexico. Um, I left Sunday Sunday, came back Wednesday, which is yesterday. And what are a couple things that I learned about customer acquisition? I learned from one of my friends that he talked about the deal behind a deal, right? So, you know, let's say you end up buying a company, or let's say you end up investing in a company, right? And he said one of the things you can do is if the company that you invest in, you might have a special deal set up where, um, you've negotiated with, you know, certain payment processors or certain banks or whatever to get a really good deal. And you could negotiate a deal with these other companies because you know that the startup that you invest in, they need to use banking services, they need to use payment processing services, right? So if they need to use that, I'm going to look at the, the camera over here. If they need to use that stuff and you negotiate a deal, maybe you could get some type of affiliate commission in the back end, right? So that's just another way to kind of make the most of the customers that you have. But if you want to talk about customer acquisition, kind of what's working in today's day and age, and also client acquisition too, I've talked about how the breakdown of our agency clients is 50% come from SEO and content, and then 15% come from podcasting, which is also content, and 35% come from referral, which is like networking, or it could be referrals, or it could be at conferences. All of that to me is just content marketing. And from there, we're able to scale up, right? And I remember the other day I was talking to someone, it's like, we want to do what you're doing because relying too much on paid media can be a drug and then your whole business can go under. And I actually talked to a guy that runs about an $18 million a year business. His entire company is based on Google, right? On paid media. So if Google decides to increase their cost, whatever, or decides to shut them down in one day, they are completely done, right? So the lesson here is to not just talk about SEO or content, but think about how you can diversify your baskets as soon as you can. In the early days, you don't want to diversify too much because you're going to lose focus, but as soon as you get something working, start to diversify and then figure out what to do from there, okay? So I'm going to start looking at the questions right now. So let's see what we got. Tony Ferguson says, what cold methods or funnels do you use, Eric, for filling your funnel? Okay, so for cold methods, what I can tell you works really well is if, let's say you go to a conference, right? And maybe you're not speaking at the conference, maybe you're not sponsoring the conference, but what you can do is you can find a group of the speakers, people that maybe fit your ideal client profile, right? And then you can put the dinner together. So you can organize the dinner, you just have that one kind of key draw. So let's say the key draw might be like, let's say you go to your sports agency, right? And Kobe Bryant happens to be a speaker. If you get Kobe Bryant at the dinner, or Michael Jordan, whoever it is, I guarantee you getting anybody else is gonna be easy because you have that one core person. And then you wanna throw a dinner, maybe 9 or 10 people or so. And I talked about that in, I think in videos, I also talked about it in the Marketing School Podcast. So that's a cold way of doing things. Look, it might seem unscalable, but when you're building relationships with people, It goes a lot further than just cold emailing a bunch of people, right? I'll tell you, like, I got cold emailed a couple weeks ago, and I get cold emails all the time, right? But there's only one that stood out to me, and I actually ended up signing a deal with him that day because the price was really good and the cold email made a lot of sense. Because basically what he did was he reached out to me and he said, Eric, you know, big fan, right? And it was really simple. He said, you know, fan of your podcast, and he specifically talked about a couple of things in that podcast episode, so he showed me that he actually listened. And he talked about something that would be relevant to me, and then that got my attention. And then the price was really good too, so we got a deal done that day, okay? But that's few and far between. I get so many cold emails, and my open rate right now on email is like 3 to 4%, so it's pretty bad, okay? So let's see, Jeremy says, looking to scale my business and get more appointments for my appointment book on a shoestring budget, okay? So kind of similar, Jeremy. I think when I was starting out, I remember in the early days, I would always reach out. You can use a tool called Vidyard, and I'll put that in the chat right now. I don't know if my team's around, but vidyard.com, that's one. And you can use loom.com too and send people these customized videos and just be like, hey, look, I found so-and-so's— something's wrong with your website or whatever. And it might take you like 5 minutes to make the video, right? And you do that every single day. You just keep pounding. You keep pounding the pavement. You keep pounding the pavement. Eventually you're gonna get some people that bite. and you're gonna get some clients that way, okay? And there's no easy or like fast or sexy way to do it. Sometimes you might get lucky, but you keep doing the same things over and over. You do the right things the right way over and over, and eventually you're gonna get, you're gonna start to see success, okay? I remember in the early days when I started, I was only getting, I was spending 20 minutes per video, and this is before Vidyard, before Loom, these kind of cloud recording, video recording softwares were out there. And, you know, I was lucky if I even got one response, right? And I would spend my entire day doing that and it was a lot of hard work, but it worked out because I would get one or two clients from it, right? And it just depends on the niche that you're in too. You gotta think about that. And by the way, guys, I'm gonna talk about this throughout this kind of video training, but if you guys wanna learn how to get more clients and then we actually do have something for that, you can always apply for a call with us. You can talk with our team directly and then we'll figure out how to, you know, make the most of what you have. and see if the program's a fit for you. You can go to singlebrain.com/live, and I'll talk about that a couple times during this live video. So that's another thing, right? These live videos are kind of like a test too, but in the live videos, you don't wanna wait to the very end to make an offer. You can make the offers kind of throughout the lives as well, okay? So let's see what else you got. Just a sales guy for a digital marketing agency. Lots of cold calling and cold emailing. Struggling to get my intro and pitch down. Getting cold people interested in our services. Okay. So that's very similar to kind of the answers that I gave earlier, but here's another thing you can do, right? What you can do is figure out how you can stand out to people. So I'll give you an example. We had a sales guy before, and what he would do was really get to know kind of what the other person was interested in. So let's say I go to that person's Twitter and they are a Green Bay Packers fan, right? So I'm I might buy them an Aaron Rodgers jersey. Okay, so that's the quarterback of the— or the leader of the Green Bay Packers, which is a United States football team. So that's a really good way of getting someone's attention 'cause it shows that you thought of them and it's something that they would wear, something that they would use, and something that they would think of you when they wear that thing, right? Or I'll give you a better example. This knife over here, I haven't opened it. You can see this was from a friend of mine. He gave me this knife. It's a Cutco knife, right? But the knife actually has my name on it. So if I actually cooked, I would be using this every single day and he'd be getting free impressions every single day, right? So really thoughtful gifting is something that could go a long way, right? So I recommend reading the book Giftology. I don't know if I have it behind here. I do not have it behind here, but I'll type that into the chat as well, okay? So Giftology. By the way, guys, I don't think it's giftology.com, just Giftology book. By the way, guys, if you're finding value from this, I think there's a share button. Share this with your friends out there, right? Share this with your friends if you think they get value from it. That'd be great. And then Jethro says, how do I get or develop cold script or good scripts? Having tough time getting my first client in Dr. Digital Marketing. So everyone, it seems like we kind of have a trend here, right? So everyone out there is sending cold email. Everyone out there is doing something. So how can you zig where, or how can you zag where everyone's zigging, right? Everyone's going in one direction. Why don't you go in a different direction? So that's why like a video could be a little different. It can be novel, right? It can be customized. It shows that you put thought into it. It shows that you care about the person. But when you're sending the same cold email over and over, let's say you're using a tool like Outreach, which is what we use, or let's say you're using like Yesware or Mixmaxx or whatever. The tools are a means to an end. It's not just use the same message over and over. I would recommend that you customize at least 1 or 2 sentences for each and every outreach that you send out. And I guarantee you it's gonna go further than just sending the same thing over and over because people can see nowadays when you're sending a cold email. This is why I'm so good at filtering out. I'm sure you guys are too. And seeing that, like, that's a cold email, that's a cold email. Eric, I'm gonna have to— do I need to call the doctor because you're gonna get, you know, maybe I'm fearing that you got run over by a bus or you're just not interested anymore. Like, they're just copying other people and it's not original. So you gotta think of something that's original. and relevant to the other person, okay? What else we got here? So Ashley Taylor says, East Tennessee, we cry when we just hear the word snow. I do too, coming from California. What is the way to pitch a client when you have no testimonials? Okay, so when you have no testimonials, this is when I offer to work for free, 'cause I have no experience. In the very beginning, I offered to work for free. and I say, hey, if I do good work for you, will you write a testimonial for me? And who's gonna say no to that? It's like there's more benefit to the other person to write, to have you work for them for free, and then sure, they'll do a testimonial for you, right? In the very beginning, you gotta get the experience, work for free, okay? Ashley asks, what is your advice on how to utilize the social media platforms for more effective B2B marketing? Guys, If you look at my LinkedIn, so just look for, by the way, add me on LinkedIn, ericsiu@linkedin. And what I would say is you can see the key now is what I'm doing a little differently is I'm asking questions, I'm engaging with people, I'm responding to the comments. I wasn't doing that last year. Same thing with my Instagram. I'm actually asking people questions like the live event I'm doing with Neil. We're probably aiming for April. I'm asking questions, guys, if you're interested, let me know if you want an application, right? Everyone's like me, me, me, me, me, right? And then the algorithms love that. They eat it up, and then respond to each and every one. People are liking it. People are sharing it, just like you guys are sharing this right now. So you know that this channel is getting more reach. That's gonna go a long way, right? So that is what I recommend for B2B marketing. The key is engagement, and even if you have nothing going on right now, you have to start somewhere. It's a long hill. It's a long road up. It's very tough in the beginning, but there's a reason why. most people don't get to success. It's because it's hard to get there and most people just give up too easily. And I just keep saying it over and over. If I can do it, you can do it too, okay? What do you know about geofencing events and/or competition? Have you done any of this? Has it worked for you? We're just getting started with this. So Dynamic Designs, I can say we have limited experience with geofencing. We have done that for clients when they geofence around like an event, geofence around like a birthday party or like a conference. We don't do a lot of it, but we also do geofence around our Google AdWords campaigns. We're now Google Ads. Basically what we do is we target Los Angeles and then we'll target digital marketing keywords. Or we might target someone that types digital marketing Los Angeles. We'll have these 2 different types of buckets, but we do geofence around that. Wish I could be more helpful there, but that's the limited experience we have around that. Manura says hello from Fort McCurry, Alberta in Canada. Hello, hello. Manura says, how do you get traffic to a forum? Okay, that's a good question. So, and by the way, all questions are good. And so when you think about a forum, okay, it's how much are people actually— again, the keyword here is engaging, engagement, right? How do you get people to engage? How do you have interesting topics where people are just kind of contributing more and more user-generated content? so search engines can find it, right? That's how you're gonna grow a forum at the end of the day. If you have good content on there, it's engaging, people are gonna share it, people are gonna link to it, it's gonna grow by itself, okay? This is why Reddit is so powerful. They have so many forums out there, people are passionate about what they're talking about. The name of the game there is engagement. If you don't have something interesting to talk about, don't bother making a forum, okay? That's what I would say. Sorry for the slurping, guys. The water's a little hot. Jaibo Chat Brazil says, what are the best ways to get quality affiliates for reselling B2B SaaS that sells to SMB? Direct contact them and show them business opportunity with the benefits of the product to their clients. Lucas, hello. Connecting with me on LinkedIn, that's awesome. So look, if you want to connect with affiliates, I would hit them up directly. Actually, today we're doing this for our SaaS product right now, which is B2B. We are hitting up people that we know have a large audience and we're just— because basically I'll say, look, we have this product out here that makes sense for your audience and we'll give you a nice affiliate commission too. Would you be interested in talking about it? We keep it very simple, direct, to the point. And what happens from there is they respond or they don't. And fortunately, we've gotten some people to respond and we're working out some affiliate offers right now. Actually, 2 affiliate deals that I'm working on today just from direct reaching out to people, and it's gonna go really far. I know one of the best affiliates in the world. His name is Syed Balkhi, so I'll drop that in the chat. Good friend. I saw him the other day, actually yesterday at Punta Mita War Room, and he runs WPBeginner. He runs OptinMonster. He is one of the world's biggest WordPress affiliates, so he knows that game in and out, and I recommend checking out some of his posts on affiliate marketing in there. Marketing Teardown says hello from Costa Rica. Sally, my Wi-Fi is not fast enough for the stream. That sucks, but you can watch the stream later, okay, because this is going to be on the YouTube channel, all right? Do you have any examples of a small business, not a huge budget, effectively using YouTube for awareness building and lead generation? Okay, trying to think about this right now. I mean, let's use us as an example, right? 'Cause a small business is anything that's under $50 million a year. So if you look at our YouTube channel, we're just like a couple, like 2 years ago, we only had 2,000 subscribers or so. And we just slowly, slowly grew up to where we are now, which is okay. It's not huge. It's about 16,000 subscribers. So I appreciate each and every one of you watching. By the way, those of you that aren't subscribed, feel free to subscribe to this because we do videos like this and other videos all the time. And it just takes time to get going. And the other thing I'll say too is if you're gonna do any type of live videos or YouTube Lives or Facebook Lives, those are great because Facebook especially, because you could run ads towards it and maybe spend like $50 or $100 per live that you do. That's not a lot of money. And that can get you going. And so that's a good way to get started, and that's a good way to add value, and you can then retarget those people. Excuse me. As a matter of fact, I mean, I talked about this in the last training. I think that going live is a really good way to get started just 'cause these platforms right now, they love live videos 'cause they're very engaging and they keep people a lot longer on the platform. And they— the ultimate objective of YouTube and Facebook ultimately is to get you to stay on their platform 'cause they are advertising Businesses. It's their incentive to keep you on the platform. All right, cool. So guys, keep dropping your questions in in terms of acquiring new clients, new customers. By the way, guys, if you want, if you want to learn from kind of our team, we can talk to you guys about kind of building that client acquisition client acquisition system. We do have a solution that can help you solve that problem. Just go to singlegrain.com/live forward slash live L I V E and. And you can also book a call with our team and then we'll have a chat with you and see if it's the right fit, okay? So, Jivo Chat says, that's cool, thanks Eric. We're actually building a team. You're welcome, by the way. We're actually building a team for recruiting, engaging potential affiliates here. Still not sure how well it would work though. So look, I mean, at the end of the day, you just have to give it a shot. I think the cold emails are gonna work better on the affiliates because they wanna make more money. So you gotta look for those affiliate managers for— look at the world of hosting. Hosting is a really good example of a very affiliate-driven world. Same thing with WordPress as well. Hosting is a good example. WordPress is a good example. The affiliate world, it sounds dirty, but if you can find the right affiliates, that's the important thing. I recommend reading the book Affiliate Manager: One Hour a Day. It's a very thick book, but you'll get through it and you'll learn how to kind of manage your affiliate marketing program. John Castle says, how to generate with a small budget lead generation for merchant services? John, I think I need a little more details from you in terms of how big that budget is. So maybe if you can define what a small budget is. Hey, Yudi here. Do you have any tips on getting first customers for my B2B SaaS? Hand-to-hand combat. So for our B2B SaaS product, it's a lot of hand-to-hand combat. Sending emails out in the beginning. And what I do is I ask for feedback. I say, hey, and the tool just says feedback from so-and-so company, right? And I'll say, hey, big fan of your product, and we have something that might be of interest to you. It basically does this, right? And you might customize it a little more in the beginning. I really love what you do, really love the podcast that you're on right here. But I would say, hey, would you be open to giving us some feedback on this software right now? It'll only take 5 to 10 minutes for a chat. If not, no hard feelings, right? That's a really good, easy way to get conversations going and get your first customers for B2B SaaS. As a matter of fact, we got a customer just from cold emailing. We got some big enterprise companies just from cold emailing by doing that. Proof of New Sales says, Josh, whenever budget is a concern, all you have to do is put in more time. A big budget is a great tool for being productive while saving time. When you don't have the money, you need to do the work. That, Proof New Sales, thank you for that. That is, you said it better than I could have said it. That's exactly what it is, right? In the very beginning when you're starting out as a newbie, okay, let's just call it, we all start out as newbies, you have more time than money. But as you become more and more, your business becomes more and more successful, you have less time but you have more money. And then you might be in the middle ground, right? So you just gotta figure out how you can allocate that. If you don't have money in the beginning, You got to put in more time. There's no substitute for that. It's just every single entrepreneur out there has done that, okay? So same thing for you. What's up? I love your Marketing School Podcast. Thank you. Thank you for all the education support. You rock. Thank you for that too. What should be entry-level services I can provide on a low price to acquire customers as a marketing freelancer? Okay, so Manav, what I did in my early days to acquire clients was I just put myself on Upwork. And I did like SEO audits, SEO strategies for free. That got my foot in the door and that allowed me to eventually get them booked for a retainer, okay? So that's a good way to start with freelancing. Kyle Pullen says 2 things. Number one, any recommendations on finding a joint venture opportunity as a digital marketing agency with those in a region? Kyle, I think this is really good. Partnerships with other agencies is great because the way I look at it with other agencies is There's so many customers out there and I'm not trying to really kill other agencies. I'm actually pretty friendly with a lot of the agencies that are our quote unquote direct competitors. So you can reach out to them, have a conversation with them, but I also recommend joining local entrepreneur groups too, like Entrepreneurs Organization, Young Entrepreneurs Council. That's a good way to get started. And then there's also like, if you go to Clutch, clutch.co, or there's a lot of these agency types of sites, you can go there, reach out to the other agencies and see if they're interested in potentially partnering up. Obviously, you have to offer them something of value first, 'cause they get these, like, people are trying to hit them up all the time. So think about how you can partner up with these people, but be creative at the same time, right? We're attending an expo next week. Should we offer something specific, or what's a good offer or way to get people's attention of other business vendors and those who are attending? Okay, so, So when you go to an expo, we tried this a couple months ago. We put a massage booth out there and that was different from all the other booths, right? The trouble with the massage booths is everyone just wanted a massage, right? So that didn't really get us leads. That was kind of one creative way of doing it. But think about this. Is there a way you can throw an event like, for example, you go to the expo and you say, hey guys, whoever's into fitness, why don't we go to SoulCycle or Barry's Bootcamp? These exercise classes in the morning. We'll get a group together at 7:00, 7:30, get together, and then you build relationships with people. Think about outside the box, think about things you can do that other people that might be like-minded as you, where you can start to build relationships where you are the leader, you are the organizer, and you get something going on the side. People are going to remember you, you're going to be able to get clients in the long term, okay? How do you make sure the human element comes through in all your digital marketing and communication efforts? That's, to me, The beauty of podcasting, the beauty of what we're doing right now is that you're getting to know me, my mannerisms, how I talk, what I'm interested in, what I find funny. And then I'm also like, you're building rapport with me because I'm answering your questions too at the same time. So that goes a long way and I can do this at scale, right? This is like a group call. And so this is why I really like podcasting because even when they listen to you, it's intimate. They get to know your mannerisms even through your voice and video too. So video and audio, I think those are a way to go. Blogging as well, but blogging is just so much more competitive now. So that's the struggle, right? Because there's 4+ million blog posts being published every single day. So it's very hard to stand out. It is gonna take time. I still recommend blogging, but just keep that part in mind, all right? Hello, Raj, good to see you. Scott says, for B2B, do you have a CRM that you recommend? Scott, if you're starting out, I would just recommend you using something like HubSpot. It's free, it's easy, and then you can always upgrade later. Kyle says, The Power of Broke. I think that's Daymond John's book, right? I haven't read it, but sounds like a good book. So Tom says, Tom Grave, he says, several of my clients, tech startups, are looking to me to book qualified customer meetings for them. I'm thinking of pricing this on a per-meeting basis. Any experience doing this? Any tips? So Tom, I think if you're gonna book the qualified meeting, the customer meetings for them, I don't know about that business model because I haven't heard of anybody doing that really well. I would say focus on your core competencies, and if you're good at booking meetings, just focus on booking meetings for yourself. That's the way I look at it because if you have the skill already, build your own stuff. This is why we have our agency, but we build our own stuff too. We build our podcast, our education stuff, we build our software too because if we have the superpower, you have a superpower to do something, eventually you want to use that stuff for yourself. And then you're gonna build a lot more leverage that way, 'cause the clients, at the end of the day, they can decide they wanna cancel on you. So I'm not saying get away from the client business. I'm saying use that to build up kind of your dreams, but also realize that you wanna build leverage for your business in the long term. And we can talk about that later. We actually do talk about that in the client acquisition system that we have. And if you wanna learn more about that, if you wanna see if it's a fit for you, just go to singlegrain.com/live, L-I-V-E. You can check that out, and you know our team will reach out to you and see if it's a fit. And so I'm going to continue on through here. Spermium bomb explosion, Scabor Motoron. Thank you for that. Manav says, "What is your outbound strategy?" So Manav, my outbound strategy is kind of what you're seeing right now. But I will say what we're doing in the future. 'Cause we have about 223,000 people visiting our site per month right now. And what's going on with that is we are able to basically pull all the IP addresses of the people visiting our site, and we can find out what company they're coming from. And then we can enrich those people, find all the emails of people on their marketing team, and our team will then reach out to those people that have visited our site and see if they're interested in our products, our services, education, right? That's outbound, but it's a little warmer outbound because they visited our site already. And then we're doing account-based marketing. All right, so I'll type that into chat right now. Justin Newcomb says, thanks for hosting and sharing your wisdom. You're very welcome. Guys, keep dropping your questions in here. Whatever your challenges are with acquiring more customers, more clients, I'll just continue to answer your questions for as long as I can. And then Manav says, marketing funnel for physical e-commerce products. Okay. So the way I see it, when you do a marketing funnel for physical products, you gotta start with the ads too, right? 'Cause ads are part of the funnel. And the ads, you might, let's say you're running Facebook ads, YouTube ads, let's say you're running Google ads, you run them to a landing page first. Maybe they get an offer, maybe you give 'em a free sample. And then after they put in their email address, maybe you have a drip sequence, right? Which it might be like an introduction, and then you might offer them some helpful tips. Maybe the first 3 or 4 emails are just value. And then you have a super signature at the end of each email, which is like, hey, if you wanna learn more about this or not sure where to go from here, here's what we do. Here's our social channels. Here's all the stuff we have. And then every email you send has that super signature. But email number 5, you start to throw offers at them, right? You say, hey, let's say you're selling bedding sheets, right? Then the 5th offer might be like 20% discount off this. We're doing this offer. It's gonna expire here. That's how e-commerce typically works. And then it's all about creating really good offers, discounts at opportune times during the holidays as well, and then making sure you're just optimizing your ads funnel. So hopefully that helps. Jaibo Chat Brazil says, what are the best acquisition channels for single grain right now? Okay. SEO and content, that's number one for us, all right? And then number 2 for us is referral, right? But that's a bunch of different things. That's me speaking at conferences, that's word of mouth from other people, that's us maybe showing up to a conference. So that's a couple different things, and me throwing dinners. The third one is podcasts. So podcasts work really well, and it's a 50/50 split between the Marketing School Podcast and the Growth Everywhere Podcast. Chris Brooks says, are you a fan of LinkedIn Sales Navigator? I am a fan of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and the fact that you can plug it in with tools like Duck Soup. So I'll plug that in here, Duck Soup. So Duck Soup is great because it allows you to utilize LinkedIn Sales Navigator and then you can visit profiles and it automatically visits profiles that you kind of specify. And then you can also message those people as well. So you can kind of do a bunch of things and it kind of automates the process a little bit. a little bit, all right? Have you had success asking current clients for referrals to new potential clients? We have, it does work. Here's the thing though, I remember talking with my friend when I was in Mexico the other day and he gave me a referral to someone. He's like, make sure you don't share him with anybody else. So the problem is when you find a really good freelancer or an agency, you're not going to want to share it with other people because What happens with an agency is that as you grow, the service gets worse and worse and worse because you have to keep adding people, right? So this is why in the program that we have, the client acquisition program we have, if you go to superbrain.com/live, we talk about my dream ultimately is to continue to have the agency, but ultimately also build out other services and products where we can scale too. Because if you keep trying to scale with people, it becomes very difficult. And then what that allows us to do if we have scalable revenue Is it allows us to be much more selective with the clients that we have on the agency side of things? So hopefully that makes sense. Da da da da da da. Kyle Pullen says, "Don't have money to invest in the agency accelerator right now." That's totally fine. Look, guys, if you can't invest in the agency accelerator, I don't think you guys should. Don't try to force it. Don't try to get a loan to do it. That's not a good thing, right? I want you guys to be comfortable, and when the timing is right, do it. But look, consume free content like this. Consume free content like the Marketing School podcast. consume content like the Growth Everywhere Podcast, our YouTube channel over here. Just watch that stuff first, and if that's enough for you, great. But if you're looking for more support, the Agency Accelerator program, that might be more of a fit for you, all right? So no kind of like forcing there. Maybe in a couple months after deals come through, but really wanna get involved so I can generate, accelerate my sales and growth at agency I'm with. Appreciate that, Kyle, but no need to force it. When the timing's right, the time is right, okay? Scott, yes, the dinners have been amazing. I would recommend, maybe I can talk about the dinners another time. By the way guys, don't forget to share this too with other people that you like. And Super Sister Fitness says HubSpot or Infusionsoft? Here's why I would pick HubSpot. And HubSpot actually, Infusionsoft actually rebranded to something else. Infusionsoft is struggling right now, okay? They raised over $100 million. HubSpot is a publicly traded company, so you got more support on that end. They're doing the right things the right way. Infusionsoft is struggling because their software, they kind of just, the support has dropped off, right? They canceled their user conference. Not many people talk about Infusionsoft anymore. It's complicated to use. So if you're looking for a CRM, get started with HubSpot. I'm not a HubSpot, we don't use HubSpot, but I think it's easy. I'm sorry, on the agency side we use Base, which is now Zendesk Sell. And then on the other side, HubSpot, We use HubSpot for our SaaS tool ClickFlow and it's free to use, okay? Everyone talks about standing out in the market, but how do you find those standout pointers when you are just starting out? Manav, when you're starting out, and it's 'cause we talked a couple of times already, when you're starting out, nobody knows you, okay? You're not that good in the beginning. You don't really deserve to stand out in the beginning, but when you actually find that you are actually starting to get good, people are starting to talk about you, people really appreciate your work, maybe you're getting some referrals and you find yourself just like, you know, you're starting to get traction, that's when you know it's time to start to earn, right? So Mark Suster, he's a venture capitalist, he says this. Let me get a sip of water real quick. Or it's tea, I guess, not water. But there's a time for learning and there's a time for earning, okay? So in the beginning, you're learning, you're not ready to earn yet, okay? But when you've gotten better to the point where you're like, I'm pretty good at this. That's when it's time to earn, that's when it's time to stand out. 'Cause I'm sure you're impatient, I think we're all impatient, we want success tomorrow, but it just takes a long time to get there, right? And as I get older, I'm still impatient right now, but as you get older and older, as I get older and older, I'm starting to realize, look, it's just about, hey, how is your day-to-day going? Is each and every day a good day, right? And when you wake up in the morning, it's a good day. And when you get to work on what you wanna work on, It's a good day. And when you end the day, you think about the good things that happened, it's a good day. Usually, like we talk about happiness and everything, this is all mindset, right? And when you're able to operate in that capacity, no matter what you do down the road, you are gonna see success 'cause it's just gonna happen. I haven't seen anybody that's tried, that continues to iterate, I haven't seen anyone fail, all right? Anybody that's watching this right now, I just feel like it's impossible. If you're motivated, you're watching this right now, I just don't think you can fail, right? That's for each and every one of you, all right? So let's look at this. What is the Agency Accelerator? Glad you asked. The Agency Accelerator is basically our program on how you can acquire more clients, acquire more customers for your business. You can go to singlegrain.com/live if you wanna learn more. You can book a call with our team and we can tell you more about the Agency Accelerator, all right? I should probably stop saying all right and okay. We'll figure out a way to stop that. But anyway, Manav says, Super Sister Fitness, I would say ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is also great as well. We use Drip. Chris Brooks says, I like the tip you said earlier about using Upwork and doing things for free for a low price initially. He says, one of the strategies that I've heard from a few people that do digital marketing is offering kick-in-the-door offers. At a very low price point in order to form the initial relationship. Are you a fan of this? Absolutely, I'm a fan of that because other people are going to charge their high agency prices, but you can come in, you can undercut the other agencies and say, look, I'm more vested, I have more time to do this for you right now, I'll do it the right way, believe in me, give me a shot, low commitment right now, let's do this offer and let's see how it goes. Chris Lambros says, any free alternatives to BuzzSumo? Not for myself, for proactive clients. Client who creates a lot of content. BuzzSumo, I don't think there's a free alternative, but I do know that BuzzSumo provides the first 5 snippets or so. I think that's good. If you're looking for keyword research, you can use Ubersuggest. Neil just came out with one the other day. Super Sister Fitness says, wow, thank you. Any tips for switching over? We've used Infusionsoft for over 6 years and good Lord, there's a lot to switch over. So the tough thing is your switching costs right now. I honestly, we used to have Infusionsoft a long time ago and then I jumped off of it. But if you find that Infusionsoft is being a pain right now, it might be good to just rip off the bandaid instead of letting the technical debt build up. Because if you keep building and building and building on top of Infusionsoft, it's gonna get harder and harder to rip off, right? So you gotta go do the surgery right now, get rid of it. And then move on to something better. All right, Tom says, what are your tips for using LinkedIn messaging to connect and build rapport with potential clients without spamming? So again, it's the same thing with cold email. It's how do you hit someone with something that's relevant to them? Big fan, that feeds my ego, right? And saying, oh, you actually listened to so-and-so, this part of this podcast. That's a customized outreach thing. Keep it short, sweet. Maybe three or four sentences or so. Try to see if you can get their attention, and what you want to do is try to generate a conversation. That's all you're trying to do. Sayed asks, "Hi Eric, do you think hello? Do you think YouTube ads are good for gaining subscribers if we test different ads and more targeted ads? I've seen your podcast with Neil Patel and the lecture with Kong. Any thoughts?" I don't think so. We have ran ads. We still run ads for YouTube right now. They're not good for subscribers. They almost never generate that many subscribers at all. YouTube ads, you wanna try to generate them for a direct response, for an action. Collect an email, to watch your webinar, whatever it is. Poofnail says, thanks for all the value every day, Eric. You're the man. Thank you so much. Poofnail Sales. Yeah, so yeah, don't— I would say if you're trying to get subscribers, do live stuff like this, add value, be consistent with your content. It's gonna take a very long time. It was painful for me, but I just knew that it's the same thing. It's the same story over and over. Every time I stick with it, every time I keep doing content, eventually it starts to succeed, right? Like, we're just starting to hit our stride with YouTube right now. This is still early days, but I have no doubt we're gonna get 50,000, 100,000 subscribers, 500,000 subscribers. I just keep doing it, we're gonna get there. How are you then able to charge a regular price after you offer such a price for the kick-in-the-door offer? So Chris, what I would say is your kick-in-the-door offer, You do an audit first, which is like a one-off. Maybe the audit takes you anywhere from 2 to 5 hours to do. You charge a one-time fee for it, okay? And then after that, what you do is you say, hey, you go over the audit with them and you say, okay, what'd you think about the audit? Here's what I think we should do in terms of next steps. How about we get started? That's a really easy way to get going and get them on a retainer. By the way, guys, if you wanna learn more about these kind of trips, trips, these kind of tactics and kind of the strategies and tricks that we do, In terms of gaining more clients, I'm losing my breath here, go to singlegrain.com/live. You can learn more about our Agency Accelerator program and see what we can do to help you on that. By the way, you see how I'm doing that? So I probably made that kind of mini offer 4 or 5 times on this live. You can do lives, they're like little mini webinars, and then like every like 10 minutes or so, I'm throwing that in there. By the way, guys, by the way, guys, right? So, Carla says, hi Eric. Hello. I've been using Klaviyo for my client's email marketing. However, they failed on customer support and Mailchimp migration. Do you have any experience using Klaviyo? Do you have any other suggestions? Unfortunately, I do not have any experience with Klaviyo. I would recommend if you're gonna migrate, if it's not gonna be too painful, Infusionsoft from SuperFit sounds a lot more painful. It's not gonna be that painful. Just go ahead and do it. Because when we migrated from Infusionsoft to AWeber and then from AWeber to Drip, It took time, but it was worth it at the end of the day. Asked a few of my questions today. Thanks so much for taking the time. You're very welcome. Says check out Sixth Division. I work with them. They are good at tech. They may help you with switching, but we only do Infusionsoft and ActiveCampaign. Manav, Sixth Division is good to work with. I'm glad you're working with them. Hello, Jim. What are the pitfalls of aiming for startups going through funding phases? Are they good? Lead opportunities. So if you're gonna work with startups, I recommend that you have a criteria set up. You say, I'm only gonna work with startups that have raised over $1 million, they're only in this specific industry, and we're only gonna focus on them. Because if you work with every single startup, maybe they haven't raised any money, you're gonna— A, they're gonna be much more needy. B, you're gonna be all over the place 'cause it's gonna be all different niches, they're all different sizes, they're not gonna be able to do the things that you want them to do. It's just more of a headache, right? So you have to have criteria that are set up. All right. I'll have a couple more minutes here working towards wrapping up on this one. By the way, guys, share this with people. If you guys wanna see more of these, just type live into the chat if you guys would like to see me do more of these. And Jivo Chat says, did you already test running ads on YouTube? Any interesting results? Yeah, YouTube's great for us. I mean, our return on ad spend is positive right now, and we've only been running our ads for a short couple months. And by the way, when you test YouTube ads or any type of video ads, it might take you weeks or months to get it positive. It's okay to be negative as long as you're getting better and better over time, as long as you're patient with it. Thank you for your reply. What do you think about the future of YouTube compared to Facebook, Instagram, and podcasts? I think YouTube's here to stay. I mean, they're the second largest search engine in the world. Google owns them. Google's not going anywhere. I think Facebook and Instagram, podcast. I think podcasts are gonna get stronger and stronger. Instagram and Facebook, I think those are gonna die down a little bit. But YouTube right now, any of these social platforms, to be honest, anything that that tries to garner your attention, there is a risk that they are gonna start to go down over time. It's just how it is, right? Because the attention shifts somewhere else, and there's only so much of our attention that we can give. Netflix, look at the hours we're watching this. The live that we're doing right now, look at how many hours you spend watching this. I can tell you, when we do a live like this, we're talking this is like over a day's, a couple days' worth of watch time, right? Just from you guys engaging with me, and I'm really grateful for you for doing that. Thanks, Eric. Marketing School Podcast is a gem. Really appreciate that. By the way, guys, we are doing that live event in downtown LA that's gonna happen in April. So look out for that. We actually have an application for that too. Go to singlegrain.com/dtla if you wanna fill out an application for that. Because we just need to get a really good handle on who's coming and who's not. All right, so what else we got? Manav says, any books that are specifically related to marketing agencies? I would suggest one, Accelerator Agency by Jason Swank. Jason Swank's a great guy. Tom Gray says, definitely keep doing these, this is awesome. Thank you, thank you, Tom. And Kamal says, can you talk about social media management tools? Okay. So we use Sprout Social to do scheduling for us to blast everywhere. There's also a tool called Direct Heroes. That's like an Instagram messaging bot. BuzzSumo is a really good one too, B-U-Z-Z-S-U-M-O. That's for looking at content that performs really well. And let's see, what else do we use? Those are just a couple of things that I can think of. Social Blade is a good one to look at how follower growth is going with Instagram, YouTube, and a couple other channels too. Thank you, Carla. I will do more live, and I'm gonna answer this final question over here, or maybe 2 questions. Chris says, any new platforms, social platforms on your radar that you think may have legs? We're gonna approach Twitch. It's not new per se, but it's still kind of growing. We are gonna play games on Twitch, and we are gonna be streaming on there. Chris Brooks says, are you a big fan of hosting live events even if you're starting out? If you're good at hosting live events, sure. If that's kind of your background, sure. I wouldn't do it, it's not my background, but once you start to get better, I would do live events for sure. Manav, we will be doing a recording of this event as well. No worries, I would recommend if you don't spend a lot of money trying to get to the US, just watch the recordings for the Marketing School Live. All right guys, that is it for today. Go to singlebrain.com/live if you want to learn about our program that helps you acquire more clients. More agency clients as well. It's singlegrain.com/live. L-I-V-E. Check it out. Let them know that you were watching this live. That's how you heard about the program, and we'll see if our team can can help out. And if not, no worries. We'll point you in the right direction. That's it for today, guys. Thank you so much. Don't forget to share this with all your friends, all your loved ones, and I hope you have a good rest of your evening and a good rest of your day. And see you later. I can close the stream. I'm still here. Well,