How to hire for your lead generation agency (live call)

Hey, hope you're doing well. In today's video, I will be breaking down a live consulting call I recently had with a bunch of my current clients who are all building lead generation agencies and getting to 10k per month in their own businesses. Right? So in today's video, it's a group call that I had earlier today actually where we talk about a bunch of different things that will allow them to scale to 10k per month and beyond. Because a lot of the content that I put on my YouTube video is, is a lot of structured content talking about strategies, tactics, techniques, all of that stuff. But a lot of people as they are building the businesses, they run into a bunch of different problems that strategies is not the answers for, right? Learning how to send emails isn't the answer for how you will scale past 10k per month. So in today's live consulting call we talked about a lot of stuff. Everything from crafting offers on how to fulfill for your clients, service delivery, and most importantly, how to hire team members, where to look, how to train them up, and make sure that your team members are set up, your business is set up so that your team members can help you win. That's the most important topic that we talked about in today's consulting call. If you do like this video, make sure you drop me a. Like, make sure you drop me, subscribe, make sure you share this video with your friends, your colleagues, your partners, everyone else and hope you find this video valuable. So if you are building a lead generation agency and you're interested in scaling from 0 to $10,000 per month in the next 90 days, if you're interested in scaling past 10k per month after that 90 days, then please book a time on my calendar, it's in the link below. And on that call we'll chat about how we'll exactly do that. We'll put together a personalized roadmap for you. But hope you enjoyed this video, hope you find it valuable. I personally think it's really valuable because it's a live call where people are just asking me different questions about their business, about how to grow their business, the challenges they have while growing their business, and hope you find this video valuable. Thank you. See ya. When you say it's been rough, how do you mean by that so far? Like what's, what's been going on over the last last few weeks with the business?

I mean I'm making a lot of money, let me put it this way. But I mean you just have to put in the effort. Let me put this, this way, if you don't act, if you don't really figure out a unique way on how to really, you know, improve cold emails, I mean not only cold emails, but you have to really, to sell, you need to learn how to communicate, you need to read books, you need to really get in and you know, get to know how sales works. If you can't sell, your business is a hobby. Not, not a business. It's a hobby. Alright. You just do it and just, you know, you need to practice these things.

Mm, A hundred percent you. No, I, I agree with you. I think sales is a very important part, especially for this business. But it sounds like you've, you know, you're making money with, you know, got, got some clients, things like that. Happy for you man. That's awesome.

Yeah, thank you very much.

All right, awesome. For sure. We're gonna, we're gonna move to toms. Do you have any questions or anything you want to talk about?

Like a new strategy and new types of email sequences of the messaging that I would need to change, like including some more personalization and you know, just trying to be more relevant with the message.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right now I'm at work and I will set the script, everything I have going for, for my clients at the moment so you can take a look and maybe get what I can do better. So I would be able to make a success out of the campaign that I'm running at the moment.

Yeah, for sure, 100%. And I think what I think personally is I think delivering services. So whether as a, as a lead generation agency, the service itself is relatively easy to sell. Right. And the reason why I say it's easy to sell is because business owners see a direct correlation between you doing cold emails and them making money. So once you have a client, assuming they're not like, you know, they're not like another lead generation agency, they're like a recruitment agency or marketing agency or software development agency, the services they sell is not necessarily as tangible, if that makes sense. And how you want to test it is like for those type of offers you really need to sit there and think about why would someone work with this client over something else. So for example, as a recruitment agency, right. I think a really good way to think about it is if you're reaching out to really large companies. All of these companies are reaching out to companies like Google, like Microsoft. All of these guys, they are spending a lot of money on in house recruiters, right. They are paying these guys like six figure salaries. So why would they want to work with a recruitment agency. Is it like. And the answer isn't because the recruitment agency gets better candidates and faster, because that's literally what every single other recruitment agency says. Right. But the reason that they'll work with the recruitment agency, is it because it's cheaper to do so? Like, does they incur less hiring costs to work with the recruitment agency? Is it because they're saving time? How much time? Right. How much effort? So you really want to think about these things, right? Why would someone, why would these companies work with a recruitment agency over hiring candidates in house? And that's kind of how you want to think about it. And that will give you ideas or tangible outcomes that you would leverage as part of your offer. If that makes sense. Toms.

Yeah, that makes sense. Also dimensions is like reaching out to these big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon or whatever.

Yeah.

I would like to know how you guys are bypassing their fan filters or external like inbox filters. Does that make sense? Because when I included the companies that had like for example, 505,000 employees, the open rate were really low. And yeah, the campaigns with the higher company headcount were not performing as well. And yeah, I, I see that you have book meetings, for example, with Stripe, which is a huge company, I assume, for your clients. And I am curious to know how were you able to make a, a successful campaign for, for these big companies? Is there like anything specific that you do to like bring yourself attention in this big, big company?

Yeah, for sure. I think for big companies it's okay. What you really need to be aware of is yes, they are more strict on filter. So be okay. So the open rates will be lower on larger companies. That's just a fact.

Right.

Because at larger companies, any external emails coming from quote unquote, unknown sender is going to get flagged as an unknown sender. So it's obviously going to be lower. The industries where I've seen are most impacted by these filters is banks. Right. Insurance companies, like financial services basically. Right. Because hospitals too, like medical, medical related companies. Those three are very serious about cybersecurity. Right. So it's, there's a lot of filters there. Um, aside from that, I would also make sure like just be aware that because you're reaching out to corporate people, Right. These are people who are probably working between the hours of 9 to 5 and while they are working they have a lot of different, like there's a lot of stuff going on essentially. Right. Like if you are a recruiter at Google, right. You're probably recruiting for multiple roles. You might be working on some random, like random, random projects that your manager might be telling you stuff like that, right? So they have a lot of stuff going on. But make sure you are sending in between those working hours, making sure you're following up a lot. But also be aware that they just might not check it. Right? Because I know a lot of, like, even when I was an intern, right, I worked with a lot of people. I was working at IBM, right. And I. There's a lot of people I worked with who like the inbox, have like a thousand unread emails, right? Like stuff like that. Because that's just the nature of reaching out to bigger companies. But that's what I would say, if that makes sense.

Absolutely.

All right. All right, awesome. For sure.

Piggybacking off of that. When it comes to bigger companies, who are we mostly targeting in terms of decision makers? Is it like marketing officers? Is it like who exactly are we trying to get in contact with?

Good question. I think, I think the answer, that question comes down to the specific offer. Because to answer your question, if you are selling marketing services, if you're reaching out to big companies, you need to be reaching out to someone from the marketing department. But it could be tricky because obviously if you're reaching out, okay, you're selling, I don't know, ads as an example, right. To smaller company, then you know that the decision maker, from 0 to 50, like employee headcount size, it's probably the founder, the CEO, the CMO, the owners, stuff like that. At really large companies, so over 100, over 500, it's not likely to be like the CEO or the founder. It might not even be the CMO, right? It might be the director of marketing, the marketing manager, those type of people, right. At really large companies, so thousands of employees, it's definitely going to be somewhere. The marketing manager, the director of marketing, the challenge is at those type of companies, right? Let's say you're reaching out to a company with like 5,000 people. There might be like 10 different marketing managers, right? Like there might not even be just one. So you want to include that as part of your cold email searches. Like when you're emailing people, that would be the marketing offers, right? If you're doing recruitment offers, there's always two types of roles that I, I try to email those. The first one is obviously the people from the recruitment side of the business. So head of recruitment, head of hr, those type of people, recruitment managers. But if, let's say My client is hiring for software engineering roles, then the hiring manager, the guy who would do the interviewing, aside from the HR person, is going to be a software engineering manager or whatever that role is. So you need to make sure that you're including that as part of, as part of your search as well, if that makes sense. So it really comes down to the offer, but more likely than not it's someone who is managing that role, but it's very size dependent, if that makes sense.

May I ask something?

Yeah, for sure.

So you're mentioning these big companies, you're talking about these big companies. You know the tricky part is you need a really good case study. You need something. They are not going to work with you if you don't have a case study. I'm telling you because I've tried it myself, like how can I mention, it's just, you know, I've been working with like different industries. I've been more on the software development side, but I've moved on to SaaS. And these people are extremely like, how can I say, they're thinking twice before moving on with you. And especially if you're targeting big companies, they want that you have some type of background story. And it's for me, my perspective. I believe it's better to start off small, get those case studies as soon as possible and then later target those big industries.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think like you said, right, you kind of need case studies to work with larger companies, kind of to get their attention. The other thing that I found too is I talk a lot about using BSLs, right? So the call to action, using a video sales letter, it's most effective for companies between the size of 0 to 50. That's what I found. Because if you're reaching out to large companies. So this is why for a lot of my recruitment agency clients, I test it, right? So obviously I split test it with a vsl. But what I also do is if they're reaching out to just these corporate companies that are super large, the marketing manager at Google as an example is not going to spend 20 minutes watching a YouTube video talking about recruitment, right? Like that's just not how it works. So the entire pitch comes from what you're saying. And a very large component of what you're saying is obviously the offer and the case study. And what I have found for all my clients who have booked calls with these large companies is the call to action has always been if this is something you're interested in, then you know, let's set up A quick time to chat. Right. That's always been the call to action for really large companies. But Arthur, I do agree with you. Like you just really need a. You need a lot of case studies and I think that applies to any company size to be honest. So that's why it's the hardest to go from zero. So when you're first starting towards signing a client because there's. You just don't have any case studies. Right. And it's really hard to. You're essentially convincing strangers like these random people on the Internet to pay you thousands of dollars. And it's really hard to do that when you don't have case studies. And obviously as you accumulate that portfolio. Right. It becomes a lot easier. Right. So I agree with you Arthur, for sure.

Cool. Yeah, as you mentioning, as you mentioned vsl, you know one way that I also found effective, I've tested it. You can actually create a doc, just a five sheet doc that is very short and precise that you know, you need to drop value if you don't really want to show your face. You can really make a doc and make a call to action. Of course a soft cta, not a hard CTA and just you know, quickly pitch them to actually check out the doc which what I've included is just how we set up everything. What are the expenses? For example, we use Apollo AI, we use Smartly AI, we use million verifier, how the meetings work, you know, things like that. They already get this overview and they are also most likely to going to jump on a call with you for sure.

So what you're doing is you're putting it on a Google Doc and we're basically sending that as I guess like a PDF or as a link as opposed to a video, correct Arthur?

Not exactly. I mean actually a presentation, A presentation in. How do you call it in Google and Outlook? I don't know, just presentation, just with images. You can of course do Google Doc but a nice presentation in a PDF or something is very good. It really makes you stand out instead of these vsl because a lot of people don't want to watch videos. They don't care.

Really.

They don't care. It's just really, it's just the reality and they just prefer to really go quickly over the dock. All right, is this interesting or not? And they can move on with their business.

Right, I see.

I got an infographic, right Arthur. Kind of like an infographic, right. Where it's like just very visual. It's not necessarily like a link. It's just like graphics word and like blueprint as to what they could expect.

Yeah, no, you don't want to share your entire process. I mean you want to leave it for the sales call. I mean don't reveal, not like never reveal more information than you have to. Because if you real, if you reveal too much information, if you like say one aspect too much, they're not going to come in the call with you. So whatever you put into the document, especially vsl, you need to really carefully think about it. Because my first VSL was ass. But I mean I, I think Jimmy remembers actually my first vsl. But yeah, like you mentioned. Yes, you need to really drop value. Like for example. Let me just take an example. What I would do like what I did is I just explained the setup process, alright, what will cost? Like what do we use? Things like that. How does this work? How does that work? What will happen afterwards? What are the next steps? Because people are confused. They don't know you. You are a scammer to them and this is really something you can do as a beginner.

Exactly. I think there's a certain, like, I guess there's a certain strategy that you want to approach it because on one hand you need to prove that like you know what you're talking about essentially. Right. But on the other side you also. This is still marketing, this is still sales. And in a way you need to give prospects a reason to jump onto the call. Right? Because if you, it's kind of like for an email, right? It's like if someone replies back to your email and they're asking you like, oh yeah, so how does this work? What's the pricing? Have you ever worked with a B2B manufacturing company and you reply back with like a paragraph, right? Explaining like answering every single one of these questions. They're not going to book a car. I've never had a single person book a call after I've done that. And the reason why is because there's no reason for them to now jump on the sales call because they have all the answers they need and there's just no reason, right? Like there's a way. What you want to be doing is you want to be balancing you to want, giving value because you don't want to come across like you're gatekeeping certain things and not being truthful. So you want, so you need to be giving value. But on the other side you also need to lead them in a way with more questions than answers.

Right?

And I think if you are able to do that effectively and do that well, then the VSO is just going to cook.

Right.

Because now they have a lot of questions. Right. You answered a lot of the original questions. But by answering the original questions, now they have more questions which is where you come in and where you're able to position your services to then solve it for them. Right. And I think there's a, there's a balancing act for sure.

Yeah, 100%. I agree. They want that they actually talk to human to a human because I've seen a lot of replies that they are sick talking to ChatGPT messages, you know, because most of the messages that we make are chatgpt alike. But you want to of course, sound as, you know, human as possible. And a VSL is doing a great job because they already know. All right, I'm talking to a human and they, you know, want to talk to a human, you know, you know where I'm going at.

Yeah, yeah, I do. I completely agree. But cool. So, yeah, so Jay, I know, I know you. We recently started, I think we have a call tomorrow. I think a one on one call between you and I but glad you were able to make it to this group call but how's every everything going for you, man?

Pretty good, man. I pretty tech savvy. So I feel like I'm picking things up quick. I've already set up all the domains, all the users and now I'm just kind of loading it into smart lead AI and just going through that whole thing and then I'm going to start warming it up. Today I did have a question in regards to the setup on the tech side when I and this might be, you know, an answer you can give. If not, it's fine, I don't care. I just purchased extra users just in case.

Right.

But when I was setting up the Outlook stuff, the initial email that I had to use was one of the, one of the 15 domains instead of the main domain. So it was like one of those domains.Microsoft.com, whatever. And so when I did the whole setup, I didn't know if that was going to make a big difference. But the reason I did was because I had to transfer over a domain from namecheap. And so because of that whole transferring like I had to just use a different domain to do the whole setup. Not sure if that matters. Does that even matter? But I wanted to make sure that the main, you know, dot com was, you know, what I was going to be using for everything. I might be overthinking it like I always do. But does that matter? I'm guessing it probably doesn't. Right?

It doesn't matter. You're, you're referring to like the, the, I assume like j.whatever@onmicrosoft.com that domain, correct?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was just like one of the extra. One of the 15 domains for sure.

Yeah.

So it's just like missing a letter. It's just like missing a letter and it's just.Microsoft.com.

Yeah. What you could do actually is because when you first create the admin center, it gives you like this default Microsoft login user. And what you could do is after you set up all of your domains From I guess Namecheap or Pork Button or GoDaddy whatever, right. You have them all set up under the Microsoft Admin center account. You can remove the default admin login account. It's just very important that you assign the admin rights to another user so another user you have set up so that you're still able to log in. Because I remember when I first did it, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, right. And I didn't assign it and I got completely locked out of the Admin center account and then I had to call them and you know, all of this stuff. But make sure you're assigning the admin rights to another user and then you can remove the default one, the ATS on Microsoft.com 1 and you'll be good to go. And that way you won't be paying for like, like you won't be paying, let's say $10 a month or whatever.

Right.

For that admin login that you won't be using for cold emails.

Yeah. And then last, last question. So I, I have, I have the license under that one. That is pretty much where all the DMARC, DKIM everything is, is going through the, the.Microsoft.com I have everything kind of programmed through there. So if I remove the license from that, from that one, since I won't be using that specific email and I, you know, assign the admin to like, let's say j@you know, whateveragency.com would that be fine? If I like take off the, the Microsoft, the, the, the user license from the main thing that I'm setting up all the programming and tech technical side stuff from, since I won't be using that as an actual email, I'll be using my actual like domain email.

That's right. So as long as you assign the admin rights to another user on the admin center account. So under that. Yeah, exactly. So as long as.

Right.

Because if I delete it, I feel like that code that's being set up into everything, the C name, the dmarc, everything might just go haywire. And I don't, I don't want that to happen.

Yeah, honestly, it's fine. Because that's more so just the, it's more so just the login credentials. That's personally what I have found. As opposed to it like being like the master account or anything like that. It's just more of the login credentials as long as you assign it to another user. Because the biggest risk is that you just get locked out of the, you know, you just get locked out of the account as a whole. But I haven't found removing the license from that to impact like anything else, if that makes sense.

Cool. Yeah, I figured. All right, thanks man. But yeah, other than that, everything seems super clear. I'm starting to like kind of go through your whole process and write my own process for when I do have to hire out and, and make people do this stuff for me. Instead of them, me sending them your videos, I'm just creating like documents already just to free up time and delegate for when that time comes. But yeah, everything is super clear, super straightforward, a lot of, you know, nuggets and yeah, just flying through it and trying to, trying to close my first client within the next couple weeks. I have a lot of sales experience, so I feel like I'm going to be able to do pretty good. Yeah, my goal is to 25k a month in the first, you know, 60, 90 days. But we'll see what happens. For sure.

For sure. Jay, you got this. You got this, man. And we could talk more about that tomorrow as well for our, our one on one call. But yeah, glad, glad you're glad you're liking it and glad it's good that you have sales experience because I think, I think that's also relatively important in this. I think it's, you know, you can learn it. But obviously having sales experience is a massive value add for this specific thing. Because if you think about the nature of what we're doing right, is we're selling a service to business owners. So obviously if it's like, if someone has like never sold anything ever, it's not likely that they'll be able to close like a $3,000 deal like right off the bat. Right. Like there's going to be some work, but if you have experience there, more comfortable with it and it's just a lot easier. I, I think, I think that's the overall premise of it. Right. But obviously that's also, it's a learned skill. Right. And there's other people who's, you know, never closed deals before, who, who practice it over and over and over again. And we've all been there at one point. But yeah, I think you're good, man.

Yeah, I'm stoked, man. If, and if, and, and if anyone watching ever needs to, you know, pick my brain when it comes to sales stuff, more than happy to. I'm currently in a full time position doing sales and my goal is to eventually let go of it and just go full time on this shoot.

Nice. Well, what do you sell?

Lead generation for contractors.

Oh, nice.

So I was thinking about going into that industry, like the home improvement industry, but then I was like, that's not really B2B. So I'm, I'm good on that. I gotta pivot a little bit and go into maybe like education companies or like crypto or the blockchain or I don't know, something there.

You know, if you're so good at sales, you should, you just should hire an inbox manager to take all of the stuff for you. Because if you're really that talented, you should really take all your energy and devote it to this one skill. Like you're gonna cook, man. If you really just, you know, get everything automated with smartly, you know, these emails, perhaps hire a person to really scrape everything, you can really cook this, this business.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Thanks, man.

Yeah, for sure. I, I kind of agree, right. I think if you think about the business there, you could break it down into a lot of individual parts that you can hire for. So what are those things? So obviously the guy who sets up your emails, right? Like I think down the line you probably don't want to be spending five hours of your, of your night just pressing buttons on Microsoft or Pork button setting up email accounts because it's a pain in the ass. So that's an easy role to hire out for. Inbox managers are really hard to, really easy to hire out for. I think the roles that are slightly harder to hire for are obviously closers because there will come a point as well where you probably don't want to be taking like sales calls anymore. You know, that's kind of what I did too because I think the issue with taking your own sales calls is you're too like, you're, you're in the trenches, right? So you're too close to it. So, for example, if you take five calls in a day and all five people tell you that you selling your service for $2,000 is too expensive, what happens is because you're too close to it and you just hear it over and over again, you start thinking to yourself, are these people right? You know, maybe 2K is too expensive. Let me sell it for $1,000. Right. But that's because you're. You're too close to the trenches.

Right.

And that's exactly what happened to me. And then once, you know, I hired a closer like two, three months ago, and now I've never heard a single, yo, this is too expensive. And it just doesn't impact my decision making because I also think the truth is, is $2,000 is not, you know, it's not expensive at all. Not for lead gen services, for sure. Right. But I think that's also the downsides of, of being. Of taking your own sales costs. I think it's necessary because you get market feedback, you hear what people are talking about, the problems, you're able to add those objections into your VSLs, that type of thing. But I think there also comes a time where you probably just want to hire a salesperson or a closer.

Right.

Because it's just not worth doing it yourself anymore. But I do agree that a lot of things in this business could be very relatively easily outsourced. For sure.

Yeah. Can I say something?

Yeah, for sure, Arthur.

You know, you need to be very careful if you hire people. Because one of my biggest mistakes, I did not listen to Jimmy. He told me specifically, do not hire too soon. And I've ignored it. And I hired a person and I went into debt and it was stressful and it was like the person did not know what to do. And I lost money and even lost a couple of clients. Just saying. Because he did not know how to reply in smart lead. And the words you are saying in your mails are extremely powerful. For example, if you are saying you are a professional ROI focused marketing partner, or if you say you are a. Or like just say you are a professional marketing partner or say you are marketing partner. You see the difference? It's like, you know, it's just the words that are. That really matter. And just back to the. How can I mention, how can I say, you know, hire too soon? It's just you need to be very careful who you hire and the person needs to know what to do.

Yeah.

Yeah. Jimmy, you also talk about this not just knowing, knowing how everything works and Doing it yourself first so that when you do hire, you have a good understanding of just overall, like the whole process, right? And then that way when you hire out, you can guide them properly and give them the right, you know, SOPs and, and, and you, you know, what works and what doesn't. So.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I guess in the online business world there's a couple different schools of thoughts about this because I think on one hand, what we are all trying to do, right, everyone on this call, including, you know, everyone here, we're all trying to build our online business. Why are we doing that is obviously to make money, right? To buy back our time so that we don't have to like, do this, do that, you know, like. You know what I mean? Right? That's what we're all trying to do. So on one hand, a real business has like, you're not doing everything yourself. You're not like a glorified freelancer, right? So there's a lot of people online talk about just hiring people right off the bat from, from the get go. And they're not like, wrong. It's just also on the other side is I think as a beginner, as you're starting your business, you want to keep that in mind that you don't want to be doing everything yourself. But in the beginning, you kind of have to. And what I mean by that is because if you just start hiring like random people like a week into the business, you don't even know how things are being done. So as a result, it's very easy for other people to take advantage of you, right? So let's use that example of building a social media marketing agency. You're running ads, right? Because I see a lot of people talking about this, right, where they say, just hire a media buyer. But if you hire a media buyer and you don't know how to run ads yourself, you have zero clue if that media buyer that you're paying money to is ripping you off or not. Things probably won't work right away, right? Like, like everything else in business, things don't always go as planned, right? So three weeks later, three weeks pass by of your media buyer doing all this stuff and things are not working, what do you do, right? You talk to your media buyer and he just, he just bullshits you, right? So the issue is because you just don't know what's going on. And I think inside business the best way to do it. Well, I wouldn't say best, but I personally think a really good way to doing it is understand how things work at a high level. Like, obviously you don't need to be like the expert at scraping leads or anything like that, right? But at least understand how it works, right? Get some experience, get some reps under your belt. And once you're able to hire someone, it becomes really easy for you to, number one, understand what they're doing, what they're struggling with. If they have questions, you're actually able to answer it. If they're doing something wrong, you're able to, you know what they're doing wrong, but you're also able to train them up, right? Because there's also two types of people that you can hire for people who already know how things are being done. So when I hired my salesperson, I didn't really have to train him that much because I hired someone who closed like a million dollars in sales, right? So he really knew what was going on. But obviously that's more expensive than if I was to find someone who, you know, who's never done sales before and they're trying to do it for the, for the first time, and you got to train them up, right? So for a lot of roles, I think for like, stuff like inbox management, like the systems integrators, like the guys who set up email accounts, you want to understand how it's done. Record SOPs so that you could find a fresh person and train them up that way. But certain roles, obviously you can't. Right? Like if you're trying to hire for a closer or a copywriter, right. It's going to be very hard to take them from zero to hero, essentially. Right. But yeah, for sure.

What's a good minimum amount of time or like average or even like max amount of time that you should be considering hiring?

Yeah, that's a really good question because I think some of the people on this call know, but it's kind of hypocritical because I'm saying to, to start by yourself. But I know when I started my business, I started on October 2022, and before I had my first clients, I hired an inbox manager, right? I hired a VA because I was like sending emails on my own for like, maybe like three weeks or something like that. And I was just fed up of replying back to people. So I just hired an inbox manager right away. She was from the Philippines. I think I was paying her, I think, like $4 an hour or something, right? So it wasn't, it wasn't anything too crazy, but. And obviously everything worked out so Looking back at it, I don't know, I don't regret it. I'll do it again. But had things not worked out the way it did, I'd probably be like, I'd probably be pretty pissed off, right? Like, I'll be stacking more expenses than I did. So personally, my answer now is wait until you have at least a client, maybe two clients. Like, basically whenever you're fed up of inbox management, because it's not hard, it's just kind of annoying, right? Like every single day, logging into smart lead, replying back to people, spending like 30 minutes an hour, like whatever the case is. But I'd say after your first client or two, for sure.

Yeah, I have.

I'm so sorry. Where do you guys like finding people to hire?

You know?

Like, where do you. Where?

Yeah, basically, yeah, for sure. So for these type of roles. So I guess any role you want to hire for, identify the scope of work under like. And what I mean by that is, try to think about it is, is this something that is really easy to do where if you record a video and. And they follow that video, they'll be able to do the same job, Right. If it is. So a guy who sets up your email accounts, a guy who replies back to emails, you're able to hire VA's to do that? Personally, I use a combination of upwork and my online jobs ph to do that. Make a job posting and explain your role. I think for certain roles there's very specific requirements. So as an example, the guy who sets up your email accounts or your domains, you probably want someone who has a pretty decent Internet connection or a pretty decent computer. Because if you're paying them by the hour and their computer is kind of slow, it's going to take them like triple the amount of hours to do what you could do. Right. And as a result, you're paying them a lot more than you need to. So. So for that specific role, find someone who has a decent Internet connection, decent computer, stuff like that. Who. For the inbox manager, make sure you're hiring someone who understands English, right? Like, is able to communicate relatively well over text messages, over, like reading messages, things like that. Those are very specific things to look for. But I use. I use a lot of my online jobs ph to hire virtual assistants. And I pay them somewhere from four to $6 an hour. And then as they progress in the company, I pay them a little bit more.

Right.

But that's how I go about doing that. Awesome.

Thanks.

For sure.

Pedro.

Yeah. One of the biggest Mistakes you can do as well when hiring people is hiring your friends. You should never hire your friends in the business because they have not really the will to work in your business because you know each other, you know, you kind of more relaxed on the other side. And if you hire people from an external source like, you know, Philippines, they will put in the work, they are more energetic and they, you know, they need the money. And, you know, your friend might not really care, but if you really have a person, a partner that has the same soul, like the same drive, that really wants to be successful, that really wants to blow this marketing agency up, you know, this will. If you have a person next to you, you found a gold mine for sure.

I think a lot of it comes down to how you incentivize them. Because like anything else, everyone is self motivated, right? And whether that's for money or for, you know, popularity or for whatever, whatever the case is, right? Everyone has a motivating factor, and a lot of it comes down to how you incentivize them. So as long as you could get your team members to think about it in a way where by them performing well at the role they're going to win, then they'll be really motivated to help you win as well. Right? Because I think that's more so about like building a team and stuff like that. Because, you know, if you look at the largest companies, there's a reason why companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, they pay their, their employees like half a million dollars. Like, there's a very legitimate reason, right? They're not just doing it because they're just rich, right? They're doing it because they understand that their employees, their best employees, are motivated to get rich themselves. And if you can make them rich, they'll make you rich.

Right?

That's the, you know, obviously there's more complexities behind that, but that, that's the overall idea, right? And I agree. But Pedro and I know you, you said something, but how's everything going for you, man? Maybe he stepped away. Franco, how's everything going for you, man?

You asked me, you had somebody else.

You. You, man. Franco. Yep.

How you doing? How you doing, man? Doing good, man. Doing good. So I'm obviously working with the client right now. One of the questions, before I forget, have you ever thought about actually hiring a sales team? Because I've been looking at this. I want to complete the whole funnel into, you know, delivering the clients meetings and stuff. So I've been thinking in the future to just hire a sales team that will Go ahead and actually sell the meeting for my clients as well. Not for me, but for my clients. Have you ever thought about this? Because that will definitely, you know, obviously improve the amount of money that we're going to go ahead and actually got, gather from them. Because I've been thinking, man, I mean, even though, like, we do our process, we sell our things, we're going to have a certain amount of money. If we still constantly be earning 250, 300 clients say, and they don't, you know, start selling, then at the end of the day, you know how it is with clients, they'll go ahead and say, hey, yeah, you put in this. But they're not closing. It's not working for me. The ROI is not enough. So have you ever thought about actually implementing a team for them that's trained specifically for the niche that we're working with? That way you actually can, you know, perform the sales or at least put them exactly where they need to be so they can just do the second and third call with the clients, for sure.

So more of, like, you're placing a salesperson inside your client's business, and that person that you place is going to take their sales cost, essentially, or at least a discovery cost, Correct?

Exactly.

What's funny is I did look into it because there's a guy in the space, his name is called Cole Gordon. I don't know if you guys know him, but he's really big, and he makes like 4 mil a month, right? Like, placing salespeople. And at one point, I think it was like March last year. I guess I got, like, shiny object syndrome. And I was like, all right, let me pivot, let me pivot and, you know, place, like, salespeople and stuff like that. And I think it could work. I think when you're placing people, there's a lot of operational complexity because what you need to do is you. First, there's going to be a couple bottlenecks when you're placing talent. The first one is recruiting talent, Right. Where do you find talented, let's say, salespeople? The second one is training them up. Right. So obviously not every single person that you find just like, on. Indeed. Or something, right? They'll be able. They're good at their jobs. Right. Most salespeople are not. So you got to train them well. And then once you place them inside the business is how do you integrate them into the offer? Because I think for your client, like, I think it's relatively easy if you wanted to hire a salesperson for your own business. It's not going to be that hard assuming you find a guy who's actually good at sales because you understand everything about your offer. When he has questions about your pricing, his questions about your scope of work, you're right there to answer him. You could tell him who you sell for, but it's not always that simple when it comes to your client. So I think there's a lot of operational complexities. And if you're placing a lot of salespeople, like, if you're doing like one a month, it's, you know, I don't think that's that hard. But if you're suddenly doing 10amonth or 20amonth, it could become pretty challenging. But obviously there's a reason why Cole Gordon charges like 15K for his service. Right. Because he understands that and it's hard to do. Right. It's not super simple, but I think if you're able to do that, you're going to be solving more than one problem. And as a result, you're able to charge in proportionate to the value that you're providing. For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, for certain. But you should be very, very careful who you hire, because imagine if he, like, let's say, up the sales calls, then you're not going to make any money.

Yeah, that too. Right. So I think that's the other thing as well, is when it comes to services, people think about it in results, so people don't necessarily care about. So I think this is one of the things that I realized when I was taking my own sales calls. Well, now I don't take my own sales calls. But right before I hired a salesperson, I realized that one of the biggest things that I did that I should not be doing anymore is kind of talking too much about the granular details with the lead. So on these sales calls, I'll be like, oh, yeah, I'll be generating you 10 meetings, 15 meetings, like 20 meetings. But what I realized is, as clients, they don't necessarily care about the specific meetings. They care about how much money they make. So if they. If you make them $50,000 in revenue, they probably don't care if it took them five calls or six calls.

Right.

Like. Like the. The specific details don't matter because they're working with you because you can help them make more money. And in the same way, if you are generating them 50 calls, let's say that's a very extreme example, but let's say you're generating them 50 calls and they don't close A single person. That could also impact you as well. Because at the end of the day it's, you know, everything's kind of like interrelated. And even though it's not directly your fault that they couldn't close deals, people will associate that fault with, with you as the lead generation agency owner. Right. So those are definitely things to think about for sure. But. But yeah.

How soon did you hire your first salesperson?

Salesperson? I think, I think if you are. I think the thing with salespeople is you. They need to be. They're not going to work for someone who doesn't have a lot of calls. So if you're only getting like three calls a week, they're not going to do it because the way closers or the way salespeople in this space are paid is based on commission. So for example, my guy's 15%, but if I only give him like two calls a week, even if he closes out to, he's not going to make money. Right. Like, he's got issues paying like bills and stuff. So before you hire a closer, you want to make sure that you have a packed calendar of at least 10 to 20 calls a week, like consistently. Right. Otherwise they're not going to work for you. I think the other thing is you also need to be making sure you're charging high prices. Because if you're only charging 500 bucks, $1,000, 15% is 150 bucks. Right. Like that's like two tanks of gas in Canada. Right. Like it's, it's not that much. Right. So you want to make sure you're charging a relatively large enough money so that they actually want to be working with you closing your deals, if that makes sense. So I would look at it more from that point of view of getting consistent meetings. But yeah. And I think that kind of leads me to my next point. That's just kind of very important for, for everyone here as well. Right. And that's the. Because I was just taking a call like right before this, and it's about prices, right. So I think understand that when we're selling this service, right. People could. People have a lot of money because we're pitching business. We're not, we're not pitching consumers. Right. If we're, we're pitching just regular people, you might not be able to charge three or four thousand dollars because most people, you know, statistically, most people don't have that in their bank accounts. Right. But we're talking to businesses. So as long as they're able to prove value of return, people could pay money, right? Because if you're pitching a business that is only making, let's say $5,000 a month, then obviously you want to be able to charge them 3k. Right? But if they're able to. But if you're pitching business owners that are making $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month, then 2-3K is actually very, very low. Like they probably pay more in stripe fees, you know what I mean? So I think make sure that you are making money upfront because the guy I was talking to right before this, he wasn't. He was, I think he did it for like 500 bucks. And the issue that he's running into now is he doesn't have enough cash to feed fuel his business. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have enough cash flow coming in, then you know, everything else will just stop from there. Right, but it's just very important to just charge, you know, charge high ticket. Right. But obviously you, you can't just come onto a sales company like, yo, this costs like $7,000. Right? Because you know, like, that's obviously not how it works. But, but just charge, charge high ticket is, is what I would recommend for sure. Hello, Dylan. How's everything going?

Yeah, all good. I've just been doing some work for some clients. I did have a question. Yeah, it's not on topic as what was being said earlier, but do you have any tips on scraping leads for hiring companies? Specifically for say for recruitment companies, My current clients, for sure. How to go about getting clients that way.

Okay, there's two ways you want to go about. For recruitment offers, there's two ways. The first way to scrape leads is called intent. Like it's more intent based. So what you're doing is. Okay, let's, let's say for example, they're hiring software engineers. You want to find intent of them looking for software engineers. So for example, you might scrape, indeed you might scrape glassdoor like these job boards of software engineers. You're going to scrape it and then you're going to reach out to people at that company. So recruitment managers, head of recruitment, software engineering managers, right. Being like, hey, I saw on indeed that you had an open job posting for this software engineering role. Is it still open? And then you want to pitch them your services. So that's the first way to doing it. The second way of doing it is if you are working with a client who doesn't have, you know, a large tent. Right. Like they don't have a lot of companies, you want to go a little bit more broad. So if they're your clients, they recruit for healthcare companies, you could reach out to health care companies as a whole. But obviously the KPIs will be a lot lower because not every company is hiring. Right. Like that's just a fact. But I think the intent based way is the most efficient. But if you can't do that, I would pair it up with a more broad strategy if that makes sense. Man.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Thanks very much.

For sure, for sure. But yeah. Anyone else have any other comments, questions, anything else that you guys want to share?

This is a question for maybe everyone here, primarily you, Jimmy, but anyone can answer. What were some of your biggest like aha moments, I guess after getting your first client or working with multiple clients or just little things that give you like a light bulb switch where either things either clicked or things became more effortless or I don't know. Obviously it's not an easy journey, right? You got to put in the work. But I know that we all have different moments in our journey where we just have like a, you know, we get struck by, by something where things change or, or things just start becoming more effortless or. But obviously that comes with automation, delegation, you know. But aside from that for sure.

I think there were two really large ones. The first, the first one was, is thinking about leverage and leverage in the sense where how could the business continue growing without me actually doing the stuff? And what I mean by that is because if you think about, okay, I guess for cold emails, okay, there's three main ways that any business can go about acquiring clients or acquiring customers. The first way is cold outbound. So cold emailing, cold DMs, cold calls. The second way is paid ads. So running Facebook ads, running Google Ads, right, running ads, TV ads. The third one is content. So organic, organic content. And the most leveraged channel of all of them, it's definitely content because if you think about cold emails, the second you stop sending cold emails is the second your calls will stop coming in, right? So you know, if you, let's say for example, you run out of funds or, or Microsoft goes down or Google goes down, whatever smartly goes down, you're not, you're not going to have any meetings, right? Because it's very unleveraged. You get one, one input equals one output, right? That's just how cold emails is. And for me, I booked a lot of meetings strictly off of cold emails for the longest time. And then around last year, I think around September, October, I started pushing YouTube really hard. And obviously I'm selling a couple of things, right? Obviously there's like this stuff, like the consulting program, but also for my agency. So even a lot of my content, even though it's geared towards building a Legion agency, I get a lot of calls inbound of people being like, hey, Jimmy, I saw this YouTube video where you're talking about cold emails. I'd love for you to run my cold email system for me, right? So imagine how much more efficient it would be if all my content was specifically geared towards selling cold emails as. As a channel, right? And I'm probably getting like two to three calls a week minimum inbound of just people watching my YouTube videos being like, hey, Jimmy, run. You know, help me. You know, help me run the cold email system, right? So it's just super. It's just super powerful. And those people are really, really warm as well, because they actively searched for. For you, or. Well, maybe not for you, but I actively searched that topic on YouTube and they just randomly came across the video talking about cold emails, talk about deliverability, talk about subject lines, whatever the case is. And they came to the conclusion that, you know what you're talking about, you're probably somewhat trustworthy and they want to see how you can help them, right? So they're very, very warm leads. And it's just super leverage because I could stop sending emails tomorrow and I'll still be getting somewhere between, you know, two to five calls a week minimum from just YouTube ch. YouTube videos alone, right? So very leveraged. I think the second one is pricing, right? Obviously, increasing pricing has been a. Has been a very big one. I think I had a lot of limiting beliefs about charging a large amount of money, but then, I don't know, it's just coming. I don't know how, but I just came to the realization that $2,000 is very little amount of money. $3,000, same as well. Like last month, I actually started working with a YouTube ads agency and I paid them like 20k, right? So that's as a comparison, right, where 2k is nothing if there's someone else in the market charging 10k, 15k, 20k, right? And I think that's the realization that I've come to. And the more money you can charge, the more money you have to fuel your business growth. I think that's just the easiest way to put it. But I think those are the two biggest realizations, for sure.

Yeah, that's massive.

A little Bit Jay to that, man. I started with. With Jimmy, maybe like two months, three months. Jimmy. I made the video. It doesn't happen. It's almost at 100 views. And, man, the other day I got a lead from the video. I've been talking with three people on this company, a huge recruitment agency company, and I'm about to build like 2 or 3 actually systems for them. So in one video, didn't. Didn't reach. Didn't do anything, man, that they just reached me out. They're basically closed. And it's the. Is the cute thing about it, man. It's the cute thing is basically they just. They sold themselves. So I just have to go ahead and ask for. Ask for the money and, you know, explain them a little bit about my process. But they already saw it, so don't sleep on that. One question that I actually texted you, Jimmy, on. On Discord, is what camera do you use whenever you can? Because I know we're hopping off.

Yeah, It's a Sony EV10, I think. Right. I personally use that, but I think I use that to film my YouTube videos and like, for like, basically everything outside these calls. But I know for a bit I just used my phone. So, like, I just bought like a phone stand and position my phone like this, like with the back. Back facing me. And that's what I did for the longest time.

And.

And then I just bought the Sony camera. So that's what I use. The Sony stuff, good stuff. That's all I need for sure, man. But yeah, that's pretty much. Pretty much this group call today. Hope you guys found it valuable. Hope it answered some of your questions. I'll see you guys on. On the next group call and on the one on ones that you know, if we have any. But. All right, thank you guys.

Thank you.

Yep, See ya later.