Mastermind Dinners: LeadGen That Actually Works in 2024

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so. And you'll get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you wanna learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode. All right, who's got a question? Who's got a challenge in here? Go ahead and shout it out if you got one.

You want to just call out? I'll raise my hand, I guess. Or do you want to put it in the chat?

That works. That works.

Yeah.

Both work.

I'm curious. So, uh, like I said, up until recently, my, uh, Castaway has been a side hustle for me. I had a full-time job, so I was immune to this a little bit, but, uh, for those who have been through multiple cycles, do you normally see a slow, a slowdown, a lull in the summer? And do you proactively try to address that? Or is that something that you just kind of buckle down and endure and then hope to pick things up back in the fall? And then end of the year is probably another lull, right? So there's kind of like 2 peaks, 2 valleys. Yeah.

So there definitely is a lull summertime for us. I don't know why this one so far our MQL has really picked up. I don't know why, but I guess we're not really into summer yet, but it will slow down. But I wouldn't let that slow you down. I think that's a time for you to control what you can. And because at the end of the day, you can't really control the outputs, but you can control the inputs. And so you can really shore up Um, when everyone's taking a break right now, you can really take these next 2, 3, 4 months or so, um, and really build out a more predictable, um, engine for you. Cuz again, like you said, you started it, um, you went full-time on this how long ago?

Just at the end of the year or the beginning of this year, basically.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I, I would use, I mean, if you're all in on right now, then like, yeah, absolutely. Uh, how many of you want bigger clients, bigger brands? That's everybody, I think.

Right?

Uh, so, so You know, again, like I think it was like a 45-minute call with Neil this morning. So he, we were just talking. And so at least what we were talking was, yes, there's acquisition talk on companies, like a company he's backing out of. But one thing that sticks out is when you're looking for the really big deals, it comes down to a lot of RFPs at the end of the day, right? And keep in mind, when we're talking about RFPs with like a L'Oréal, for example, they're international. And so they want to know that you can do the work in Brazil as well as Japan, right? They want, they want you to have an international footprint. So that's That's at least, you know, we're talking big leagues there, right? Um, now what I, what I would say, and, and Brendan's not here on this call, um, because we've kind of, um, we, we last week we did a call with Brendan on the call, so he's in the—

I am here.

Oh, you are here?

I am.

Brendan, you should talk about this then. What works well for Brendan, and we've done this for years on our side too, is the dinners, right? So, um, Brendan, do you want to go through your, your little, your, your dinner hack again? I think it's a, it's a nice strategy.

My philosophy is unless you want to sit through an 11-month sales cycle, don't sell into big organizations. But yeah, I could talk about the dinners. Would that be helpful?

I think so.

Okay. We're recording a video of our next one. We hired— we're doing one in Barcelona next, in 2 weeks and hired someone to record it. And I can share that with y'all if y'all want to see what it looks like after. But we'll just do like, I will, one of the things that we can attract, like I just invited the CMO of Carnival Cruise Lines. We work with travel and tourism specifically. But the thing that it's like building relationships with the people that could be the right fit that are senior at large organizations and just having those relationships in place for when they have a need has been our strategy. And it's generally like a year after we first built that relationship that there's a need. It's never immediate. So, and then the sales cycles with larger organizations have been just crushingly long, like to where it's not even worth it at some points with what we've been doing. And it's just like, we can go spend the same amount of time and acquire the same amount of revenue, but do it much more quickly. But the dinners, we don't charge anything. We spend about $200 per head and have this like roundtable dinner for travel marketers. And it seems to be really well liked. We do it at conferences typically. That's the best way to get as many people as possible in the same room. And we'll have between 25 and 35 people at our one in Barcelona. But it's just a, it's a quick way to really make some strong relationships and be thought of as a giver. And like when you look at it from a client acquisition standpoint, if you have a client that's, for instance, $5,000 a month and you've got 55% margins, that's what, like $3,000, $2,500 a month in margin you're generating on them. And if you do that on average for a year and a half, that's $50,000 or $60,000. So why would you not spend $200 on a head for 25 people that could be that person? Yep.

And it goes a long way too, because people start to look at you as the connector and not this— there's kind of a— when you introduce yourself as like this agency owner, people start to kind of shy away from that a little bit. But when you're just a connector and you're just trying to give as much value as possible, people do tend to see that. And then eventually they like you more because you're just trying to add value all the time, right? That's what I've learned. Um, and you can test this when you go to networking events, try introducing yourself in different ways. And you'll see how they react. I've tried all the different angles, right? You can try, um, you could try the software angle, you can try the agency angle. Um, people tend to shy away from the agency angle the most is what I've seen. Um, and then the other thing I'll say too, keep in mind, like, I've, um, the, the Leveling Up podcast, which I've had for 11 years now or 12 years or so, like, when I first started it, all I did was interview, um, CMOs or marketing leaders. And that did really well in the beginning, right? And even, even to this, it's not necessarily a new idea. Like even Neil's thinking about just interviewing CMOs, right? Because that does get business at the end of the day. Because once people start listening to you after a while, they're just like, oh dude, I listen to him so much. Like, why don't I just try to do business with him? And that makes the sales cycle a lot shorter and the lifetime value of the customer is longer too because they know, like, and trust you. So that's a little bit of a longer play. But if we're playing this content game and marketing's getting harder, then, you know, better now, better late than never, right? All right, everyone, quick message from the agency owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency. Enrique, go ahead. And then I want to come back to Matt's challenge, Matt Walter's challenge in a second, but Enrique, go ahead.

Yeah.

So from the first time I was in here, I said I was going to mainly work with home services and I was trying to broaden horizon, broaden business to get to hit a bigger TAM. But I just had a question because we just wrapped up on a contract we're renewing with one of our bigger roofing clients. And we brought them an additional $4 to $5 million in bottom line revenue with not as much ad spend as you'd think with the power of, you know, search engine marketing and PPC and SEO. And I was wondering like, how would you guys, how would you take that, that case study and kind of push it out to, because I don't want to run, because when I'm running ads, I'm gonna run them broad, but I'm not gonna run a full site, like a roofing campaign targeting roofers. Got it.

So are you— is your, is your question more around you're trying to figure— you did really good for this client and now you have this case study and you want to push it out?

Yeah, for specifically roofing, but I wanted to keep all my ad budget dollars to go broad. Um, I just know I could pick up more roofing clients, um, with that, with those case studies pretty much.

I don't know. And anybody else can feel free to chime in because we haven't done that a lot. What we do typically is we will take the case studies and we'll just share them organically on LinkedIn and we'll try to talk about in different angles and we'll do the same same thing on Twitter as well, if our audience is hanging out there. For us it is, 'cause e-com and SaaS. But I think if you are gonna push a case study, depending on who you're trying to reach, for us when we do it for clients, I know LinkedIn document ads work really well for at least enterprise SaaS, but again, longer sales cycle, higher LTV. So I can't, anybody else can feel free to chime in, raise your hand on this one, but we don't really do a lot of that, so I don't wanna just make something up. Because again, like Enrique, the organic reach on like LinkedIn and Twitter is really good. And so my thing is, if you're going to go spend on these, it's your— I'd probably only for this case study, I'd probably be targeting lookalikes or retargeting at max. But we just in general, when we've done this in the past over the last— I'm not saying this will never work, but whenever we've done it, it just never worked for us.

Gotcha.

Yep. Um, Matt, so the, the challenge you had, do you wanna repeat when you're doing your intro what the challenge was and maybe you can try to address it?

Yeah, so I mean, first of all, I mean, we work in an industry, we're typically working with a lot of like engineers, right? And, um, first of all, they, they all hate marketing, right? Like, so there's that. But, uh, and so it, it requires that when you're speaking to them, you have some domain knowledge and you have some understanding of their industry, their problems, right? And you you can kind of speak their lingo. And so for us to build a team, it requires that our team has some understanding of the industry and can speak their lingo if they're going to be interfacing with our clients, right? And so it's challenging to find those people, right? It's very challenging to find people who are passionate about the industry that we serve and can make our clients feel comfortable, right?

Yep.

And so, you know, lately what we've kind of been doing is, you know, doing more contracting and less hiring of direct employees. And also, you know, obviously leaning on AI agents and things like that as well. And us being the ones that are still interfacing with the clients, you know, I know, Eric, you've talked a lot about how, you know, founders can't leave that position. Like you need to be the one that's, you know—

Not for a while.

Yeah. So, so that's been our challenge is, you know, scaling, growing our, growing our team. And because that's part of our pitch, right, is like, you know, we, we're gonna be with you for the long haul. We understand your industry, we understand your business, you know, And so bringing in people that don't is not a good look.

Yep. So is your, is your challenge around how do you get more of those people that understand the industry?

Yeah.

Yeah. So, um, and I, I, I've shared this example and, and welcome back, um, Guy, we're gonna do your intro in a second, but, um, welcome back Mario and Brendan. Um, shout out 7-figure agency owners spending time helping here. So I'm, I'm grateful for that. Um, so, um, So, okay, let's look at Neil's agency has this VP of sales and I'll say our, one of our head sales guys right now. The thing that they both have in common is that they both worked in paid media and they're both practitioners. Whenever we've tried to hire salespeople that don't understand marketing, because, you know, for us it's much more of, I think for most people here, it's more of a consultative sell versus a solutions-based sell or a sale. All the people we hired, they used to be superstars in SaaS sales or SMB sales. They just couldn't crack the nut over here. Um, and then whenever we brought someone that was a practitioner that came in, like instantly they, they built trust like 10,000 times faster than other people, right? So I think you can't hire, like, I don't know what role you're trying to hire for, but at least for sales, um, it's gotta be someone that, that actually knows the game. And then like, then you have to incept them into like doing the role, right? It's like, hey, like I'll give you some commission if you do this. And all of a sudden they realize they like it. And then you can start to have something that's, that's more, more ongoing. Um, because the guy we have doing it right now, he's like, oh shit, I really like this. I want to do more of it. Um, and he, he, even though he was in client services before, he's like, hey, I'm really warming up to this because I'm super competitive. I'm like, great.

So.

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. 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. So it's 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. All right, Scott, you have a nice setup. Go for it.

Thanks, Eric. Follow-up question to what you said about your YouTube podcast channel. You mentioned that you obviously do a lot of video interviews, right? And that has resulted in business for you over the long term. Now, when you do interviews, in my experience, when you watch interviews with other people, you're not positioning yourself as an— as a subject matter expert.

It's a guest.

So do you recommend when someone is launching a brand new podcast and whatnot, is it better to go educational route and it's all about you educating others and that results in higher number of leads and potential MQLs and whatnot? Or is it to bring guests who have a bigger audience to grow your audience? Do you know what I mean? Like it's a trade-off, it seems to be happening there.

Great point. So we're actually switching more to like 70, 80% just me. And then 20, 30% podcast, right? So on one end, I'm trying to milk the audience from, um, you know, I'm trying to have great conversations, of course, but also like if someone has an audience, that, that's, that's a big benefit. And so that should help. Um, and then, cuz here's the thing, at the end of the day, everyone here, you have something interesting to talk about. There's interesting experiences you're going through right now. Like James, you just, you just kind of, uh, started. Nathan, it's 100 days in, right? So, you know, I wonder what that journey looks like if you guys document that journey for the next couple years or so, and then you guys break. 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, maybe even 9 figures, right? Um, I think that's just really fun and people can follow around and you can share your lessons. Um, but going back to you, Scott, I would just say like, you're, you're like, we've done, we've talked about this on the Marketing School Podcast, Neil and I. It's like the problem with interview podcasts is that you're positioning them and you almost become invisible. But if you, you have more of a conversation, you tell the guests ahead of time, hey, this will be a conversation. It's not going to just be me asking you questions and, you know, you looking up to them basically. And obviously you don't want to say that. Um, then I think they'll respect that, right? Because a good example of that is, um, you know, I did my interview with Gary Vee recently that came out this week, right? The problem with that one was that, um, I wasn't exactly a known entity to him. And so he went— he was, he was very Gary Vee for that call, right? Whereas when he did it with My First Million, he kind of knew the 2 guys, and so they were kind of chopping it up more. Um, and so you just gotta keep that in mind, I think. Just say, hey, we're gonna have a conversation here. It's not gonna be like a normal interview podcast. Is that okay?

You're good.

Excellent stuff.