How To Make $10,000/mo Lead Generation Agency (For Beginners)

All right, so in today's video, I will be walking you through a step by step timeline to starting your own lead generation agency and getting it to $10,000 per month. Because on this YouTube channel I talk a lot about the specific strategies and what you actually want to be doing, but I don't think I made a video yet talking about the specific order of things and in terms of the timelines at which you can expect to start your cold email campaigns, sign your first client, and eventually scale to $10,000 per month. And that's exactly what we'll be tackling in in today's video. So I actually put together this lucid chart. There are roughly 10 or so steps. And basically when you are starting your own lead generation agency, here are kind of the 10 steps that you want to follow in order to start your own lead generation agency and sign your first client in the shortest amount of time possible, right? So the very first step that you want to do right after you decide that you actually want to start your own lead generation agency, the very first step is setting up your email accounts and domains. Obviously what we're doing is, is we're using cold emails to email business owners to pitch our own services. And obviously once we sign up as a client, we're doing the exact same thing for them. But the very first step is you need to be setting up your email accounts and domains. And the reason why you need to be doing this first is because there's a 14 day warm up process involved. Right? You can't just set up a bunch of email accounts and start blasting emails. From day one. There's a warming period where you're ramping up these email accounts and it does take 14 days. So the longer it takes you to actually set up the email accounts to, the longer it'll take you to actually start sending cold emails and the longer it'll take you to get replies, take sales costs and sign your first client. So everything starts with setting up your email accounts and domains. That should really be your very first step. Here's some general math that you want to keep in mind. For every one domain that you get, you're able to set up three email accounts. I personally use Microsoft Outlook Business Basic accounts. I set up three email accounts per every one domain. And for every one email account you set up, you're able to safely send somewhere between 25 and 30 emails per day. So that should be your very first step. Step one, for most people, especially if you're doing it for the very first time, it might Take you a little bit longer to learn how to actually do it. But once you understand how it works, you're essentially just clicking the same buttons over and over again. And for most people, this will take somewhere between two and three hours to actually set up. But you're setting it up one time for your own cold email campaigns once you're done doing that, and you should be doing that on the very first day as step one, the next step is picking a niche, right? So obviously when you're picking a niche, you need to undergo a research process to understand the pain points of your niche. You need to understand how they get paid, you need to understand how that business model actually works. And most people, they get kind of tripped up about the niche. I get a lot of DMS, a lot of comments on my YouTube videos every single day from people asking me about the best niche. And the reason why those people are messaging me and asking me those questions is because this might seem very overwhelming. But really, when it comes to picking a niche, this should be something that you're able to do within an hour to two hours, including the research process. It's very important that you actually do the research process because if you don't do the research process, then your cold emails might not work, your VSL might not convert, and even if you do book sales calls, you might not be able to close them because they're not coming across as relevant. You might, you're not asking good questions. So the next step is to pick a niche. This should probably take you somewhere between one and two hours to do. You could probably do this in day two. So the day after you set up the email accounts, step three is crafting an offer. So this is essentially a quick one liner sentence telling people what you do and how you can help them. And it's very important again that you're using what you learned in the research process to craft pain points for your offer, right? You understand the pain points and you're using that to craft your offer. So here is an example of kind of a generic template or generic sentence of what you want to talk about in your offer. You can say something along the lines of we help X. So this would obviously be your niche is what will go in X in Y situation in specific pain points. Achieve or solve a desired outcome by using your unique mechanism. Now obviously your unique mechanism is going to be your cold email services that you're selling through lead generation, right? And obviously the outcome that you want to talk about, if you're leading with the right outcome, which again, it really does stem back from the research process. Which is why the research process from picking a niche from step two is super, super important. Because if you don't do the research process or you get lazy and you skip that step, then you won't be able to craft a relevant offer and you're not going to be able to dominate your specific niche, you're not going to be relevant and you're going to struggle to make money. But if you do do the research process correctly and you're, and you're talking about the right things in your actual offer, you're going to be able to dominate really, really easily. You're going to be leading with a hyper relevant message and you're obviously going to be making more money with your own lead generation agency. So that's step three. Step four is crafting your cold email campaign. This is kind of the meat of the actual lead generation agency, the meat of what you actually want to be doing. So again, you want to be taking the offer that you created in step three. So you're using your offer, you're using the pain points that you created from the research process in step two to craft, you know, again to craft your offer and you'd be using that offer as part of your cold email script. And generally what I like to do is for my own cold email campaigns, I like to send five emails in total. The first email is an initial cold email. So you'd be crafting the initial cold email script. You want to craft multiple versions of it so that you can split test document specific version and see which one resonates and works best with your target niche, your target audience. But you also want to be creating follow up emails because there's actually a saying which is the money's in the follow ups. You will not succeed if you're only leading with one cold email and you're calling it a day. You need to be making sure that you're following up with your prospects for the people who you're emailing who don't reply back to you, you need to be following up with those people. So you want to be crafting your initial cold email scripts, you want to be crafting your follow up scripts and you also want to be creating your inbox management scripts. So what the inbox management scripts are is once you're sending these cold emails and you're getting people who reply back to your cold emails, they're asking for your vsl, they're curious to learn more, they're asking you a very Specific question. You want to create a process where you're able to consistently reply back to these people without having to sit in front of your computer and type away and manually write out these replies. You want to create scripts for the most general questions. So, for example, what you will realize after you start sending your cold emails is most people, 90% of replies, they are asking the same few questions. They're asking you about, obviously, they're asking to see your vsl, they're asking about what you do. They're asking for how does this work. They're asking for timelines, they might be asking for price and how much you charge. So it's very important that you create these general templates that you'd be able to use as part of the inbox management scripts. So then you're not spending a ton of your time just replying back to people. And you're able to kind of just use a script where you're able to plug it in for each specific scenario or each specific question that people are going to ask you. Step five is scraping leads. And this is actually a pretty simple process. Really. Scraping leads will take you maybe like an hour to do. Max, what you want to do is you want to find directories of the niche that you're looking for. So there's a couple of really good tools to do that. I use a lot of Apollo I.O. to do that. I have videos on my channel talking about how you want to scrape leads and filter people through Apollo. You could use LinkedIn, I think I have another video on that. And you could use Crunchbase as well. Those are really the big three tools that I personally use at my own lead generation agency to scrape leads. You're going to be using these tools to find individual leads, and you want to scrape the individual leads off of these tools. So for example, on Apollo, you're going to be pressing some buttons to filter for, let's say marketing agencies and founders of marketing agencies. And you want to download that as a CSV file, so like an Excel sheet or a Google Sheets so that you're able to actually see those individual people. Once you do that and download that as a CSV file, you want to upload that to a tool like Million Verifier to verify your leads, because you can't just be sending the cold emails directly off of that lead sheet because it will absolutely tank your deliverability. So you want to verify your leads using a tool such as Million Verifier. And obviously you want to format your leads because when you do get your leads. You will see, for example, some of the company names are like Marketing Agency llc. Marketing Agency Inc. And when you're reaching out to people, you don't want to say, hey, Saw, you're the founder of Marketing Agency llc. You just want to say, hey, Saw, you're the, you're the founder of Marketing Agency, right? So you want to call out the specific company name and you obviously want to format the leads just to make sure that you're not including like the inks or the LLCs or any of those things. The next step, step six. So again, scraping leads, it'll probably take you around an hour to do. And all of these things, aside from setting up the email accounts, these are all things that you're able to do within one to two hours because these are all the individual tasks and you're able to do them pretty quickly, to be honest. Right. So step six is the backend setup. So it's pretty simple. Over here, this step, you want to set up your calendly. So you want to set up a calendar link. So once you're sending cold emails and people want to book a time with you, you're. You're able to just send a link and people are able to seamlessly book a call directly with you. So set up your calendly, set up your landing page, set up your agreement. So this would be the contracts and set up your payment processor. And a lot of people, they really get tripped up. And actually what I see is a lot of people, they would do things such as the landing page or the agreement or setting up the stripe, the payment processor as the very first step. And the thing is, each of these things are not really that important. If you go onto my website Salesway IO, my landing page isn't the most beautiful website out there, but it works. It converts. And it converts really, really well because it's just very, very basic. So when you're creating a landing page, don't get tripped up about including all these fancy images, animations, videos, things like that. Just keep it simple. And these are things that you'd be able to do within an hour, basically, right? It's the back end setup after that is step seven, which is the VSL creation. This process in step seven is it might take you a little bit longer, especially if you've never created any form of videos or any form of contents, or you never created a VSL before. But essentially what you want to do is you want to script your initial vsl. So just open a Google Doc or open Up a notebook. If you prefer to write it out in pencil and pen and just jot down some notes, come up with a general generic framework of kind of what you want to be talking about in your vsl. I have videos on my channel talking specifically how to do that. But come up with the general talking points and you're scripting. The initial VSL of this might take you somewhere between one and three hours, depending on how quick and how efficient you are with this process. But you really just want to sit down and just jot down some general notes and follow the generic framework of how you want to create a video sales letter. After that, you want to create the VSL presentation. So some people, they like to create a presentation like a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation. I'm seeing a lot of success using Google Docs or even using a flowchart such as the one that you're seeing right now. You want to actually create the VSL presentation and make it somewhat aesthetic, make it presentable. Obviously, this is a video sales letter. The goal of the video is to sell your actual service. And you don't want to make it look like that. You spent like 20 minutes creating the VSL. You want to make it look professional, make it look professional. And obviously the next step is filming the vsl. Usually the filming of the VSL is pretty quick, and especially if you're creating your VSL presentation with the actual talking points on it. Some people, they've never created content before, so it might take them a couple of retries to actually film the vsl. But filming the VSL should be a pretty quick process. The bulk of the hours is spent in this section of the VSL creation, which is scripting the initial VSL and creating the VSL presentation. And obviously once you've done that, you might want to do some light editing. I personally don't really edit a lot of my videos because that's not really what sells. Making really pretty videos isn't gonna sell people. What sells people is creating a video sales letter with actually good content. And once you've done that, I literally just trim the video, remove some of the dead silences, things of that nature, and I upload that video sales letter onto YouTube. And this process of a video sales letter, this usually takes most people one to two days to do it, because again, these two steps, the scripting and the creating of the actual vsl, it generally takes people a few hours, especially for the first time. And. And some people, they're very busy. They have work, they have school, they have all these other roles and responsibilities. They're not able to do that all in one go. Usually the creation of the video sales letters might take one to two days to actually do. Once you've done that, the next step is to set up the test campaign. So over here, by step eight, your cold emails or, sorry, your email accounts might not be ready to send, but you want to set up a test campaign, a dummy campaign where with your own email accounts, just to make sure that your cold emails will actually send and deliver. Because what actually happens, a really big mistake that people make is in step one, when they're setting up the email accounts and domains, maybe they didn't set up things the right way, they didn't set up the right keys. And what actually happens is when people are sending the cold emails, whether that's through Smart Lead instantly or they're manually sending the emails, the emails just doesn't send out of the inbox at all because they haven't set up the. The keys are configured to inbox the right way. So what we want to do is we don't want to wait for that to happen when we're actually trying to send the actual cold emails. You want to send a test campaign, use your own email accounts, find four to five of your own personal email accounts, send a cold email to it out of your own email accounts that you created to make sure it actually sends right. This will take you maybe like 10 minutes max. But essentially they're verifying the infrastructure setup. Step nine is the cold email campaign creation. This process might take you one to two hours to do, but you're essentially taking the scripts that you created over here in step number four and you're moving it into step number nine or the leads list that you're scraping. And you're setting up in Smartly AI, which is the automation tool. Because obviously we're not going to be sending cold emails by manually typing away every single day. We're automating that process and we're using a tool called Smartly AI. So you want to move the scripts into Smartly AI to you want to move your leads list onto Smartly AI. And while you're doing that, you want to make sure you're spin taxing your message so that your messages don't get flagged. Because if you're sending a thousand cold emails that are word for word the same, you will get flagged by the algorithm. And you want to be using a strategy called spin taxing so that you're able to use the Same messaging while using different words. So the specific words you're using would be different, but you're still saying the same thing. You want to be spam checking your cold email copy because certain words will get flagged by the algorithm. So for example, if you're using words like free, if you're using words like money, those are words that will get flagged 100% inside your cold email copy. So you want to be using different websites to spam check your email messaging and if it does get flagged, you want to rewrite your specific cold email to remove that specific words. You want to set up a sub sequence. So a subsequence is basically a follow up sequence for your cold email campaign. So for example, once people reply back to your cold emails, they want to see the video and you send them over to video sales letter and they kind of just go ghost, they disappear on you. You need to be making sure you're following up with those prospects, but obviously you don't want to be doing that one by one. So you want to be setting up something called a subsequence where you're able to automatically follow up people. You're able to set that up in smart lead. You want to set up your inbox management. So the scripts that you created earlier for the inbox management scripts that you want to move that into the inbox management setup. And obviously you want to upload your leads list. This part of the process will take you probably one to two hours to do. And step 10, which is launching the actual cold email campaign. So again, this process does take 14 days because you have to wait until your email accounts that you set up in step one to finish warming up. So if you're 10 days in, you don't want to be just sending the cold emails just because you have all the other nine steps completed. You actually have to wait for the 14 day period to finish. But the good news is you should be able to tackle step two all the way to step nine in between those 14 days, right? Each of these things. If you're allocating one to two hours a day, every single day for 14 days, you will have all of these steps completed. And the people who are able to make money quickly with their own lead generation agency, they're moving efficiently and they're actually doing all of these things. And in between that 14 day window, while other email accounts are warming up, right? So you don't want to stretch out these things because the longer you stretch out each of these individual things, the longer it will take you to actually launch your cold email campaign and the longer it will take you to actually start making money. So you want to make sure that you're set. You're doing all of these nine steps in between the 14 day window, right? I laid these nine steps out very specifically so that you're able to do this in a timely manner and it's not going to take you half a year to actually see some results. So you want to launch a cold email campaign in step 10, you're essentially just scheduling your campaign and pressing launch. And Smart lead will do 90% of the work for you. Because again, smart lead AI, it automates the sending of the cold email. So if you're reaching out to 1,000 people per day, it automatically emails those 1,000 people every single day. And you're not doing that manually yourself. You want to be split testing your messaging and finding your winners. So it's very important you do this. A lot of people, they struggle with cold emails because they're only writing one cold email script. But, but it just so happens that that one code email script is not that relevant or it doesn't talk about relevant things and obviously it's not going to convert that well. So whenever you're writing cold emails, you really want to be split, testing three to four different variations. And once you're sending the cold emails, you want to let the data tell you which of those cold emails will perform the best and from that you will allocate your sending towards the winners. Once you launch a cold email campaign, within one to three days, most people will start receiving replies, positive replies, again, people who are asking you questions, asking you how much this cost, how does this work, what's your pricing? You will start receiving replies and you want to use the inbox management scripts that you created to reply back to these people. Again, you don't want to be spending your time creating these custom replies at every second of the day. You want to systemize that process and come up with generic scripts that you're able to use to answer general questions that you are getting. Obviously you're going to get very specific questions or very specific replies and, and in that case you're going to have to manually type out a reply. But again, 90% of all total replies are more of the generic and general questions you want to send them your vsl. And most people within one to seven days after they launched a cold email campaign, after they start receiving the replies, they're going to start booking their own sales calls. And obviously, especially if you don't have any sales experience. It's very unlikely that you're going to close the first ever sales call that you take. For most people, it takes anywhere between one and 10 sales calls to close their first client. Because obviously the walking through that sales process for the very first time, the very first time you do anything, you're probably not going to be that good at it. It's very important that you actually record your sales calls. That way you can play back the sales call recording and you're able to identify different aspects of where you can improve, ask better questions. Maybe the prospect asks you a question and you answered it in a poor way. You want to make sure you're reviewing your actual sales calls. That way you're able to actually get better. So, but again, most people are able to close their first sales close their first client within the first one to ten sales calls that they take. Signing the first client and again, one client. As a lead generation agency, they're usually able, you're usually able to charge them anywhere from 1500 to $3000 for an upfront setup plus 2 to $300 per call if you're going for a performance model. And again, one of the best parts of a lead generation agency is, is you only need somewhere between three and five clients, three to four clients to get to $10,000 per month because they're charging anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000. Obviously, the more you charge, the less clients you need in order to hit that $10,000 a month mark. Most people, after they signed their very first client, they're usually able to get their second, third and fourth client within the next two to three weeks because they understand how it works. And now they have the momentum and they understand exactly everything they need to do. They have a proven process and they're able to repeat that process to get to three to four clients. All in all, for most people, if you're doing each of these steps and you're doing it in a timely manner, aka you're doing all of these nine steps in between the 14 days of the setup, in the first 14 days. So by the second week they're sending cold emails, in the third week, they're getting replies and they're starting to book the very first sales call. And usually most people are, are able to sign the first client within a month. And usually if they're able to repeat that process, they'll be able to sign multiple clients, usually within that second and that third month mark. So here's an example of a Real world example of someone who was able to start their lead generation agency and execute on all of these steps that I outlined in this video and a specific timeline. So we have Sydney, who started her lead generation agency around the middle of August. Obviously the very first thing she did was set up the email accounts. And then the next step is she did the email scripts. And then obviously she started with creating her video sales letter, which is her sales asset, which is titled how to book five to seven Demos a week. And obviously if you look at the dates, this is August 20th. She finished her VSL, she did all of those things. And I asked her, I obviously said, so have you filmed other videos before? It seems very natural, all of these things. And she mentioned that she actually filmed content before. So the VSL process was somewhat seamless. She set up like the calendar links, all of that stuff. And then after a while she started talking more about like the actual sales call, right? So she launched her cold email campaign beginning of September and she started getting replies to people, right? And obviously she was a little bit unsure as to how to actually reply back to people in an efficient way, which actually booked sales calls. And she reached out to me, I gave her some advice on how she can actually do that. I'm obviously asking to set up a time with her because she's working with me one on one, we're setting up these calls, stuff like that. And then after a while, by September 12th, so literally this is around one month in, around her fourth week mark of starting her lead generation agency, she started getting sales calls. And obviously I asked her to record the sales calls so that we could review them together. I jumped on a one on one call with her and we reviewed these sales calls together. I gave her some feedback, I recorded these voice memos. I think I was driving in traffic in Los Angeles while I was listening to her sales call recording. And. And I gave her some feedback on that. And basically she got another sales call right after that. I think this is like a day or two later. And she was able to do that. And to give you some better context inside the WINS channel, this was actually Sydney on September 17 where she was able to sign her very first client for $3,000 a month plus $500 per call. So this is monthly, this is even a setup thing, right? And this was her very first client. We also see, right where another guy called Brian who hit $24,000 a month was only Generation Agency. But I'm not talking about Brian in this video, we're talking about Sydney. Right. And as you can see, she launched her very first cold email campaign and got her very first sales call on September 12th. And literally a day or two later, she signed her very first client. After we reviewed her sales call together and talked about what she could do to improve that and ask different questions and things like that. But Sydney is a real world example of someone who was able to start their own lead generation agency and start it, do all the steps in a timely manner and succeed and actually make money. Within roughly a month of starting, she made $3,000 as her very first client. And it wouldn't take very much work, it wouldn't take much more work, I'd say, to sign her second, her third, and a fourth client, because getting the very first client is the hardest by far. So that's what Sydney was able to do. And hopefully this is a much better example just to show you how she was able to do this. Now, obviously she worked with me. We worked together one on one, where as you saw even in the messages, as she was going through the process, as she had questions, she was able to reach out to me, right? I was able to review her vsl, I wrote her cold email scripts actually, and she was able to make some edits and she was able to start her cold email campaign and basically just get replies right away because I understand how it works. She sent her BSL and it just kind of worked right away because we built that out together. She took the sales calls, we reviewed the sales calls together and she was obviously able to close her first sales call. I think her third sales caught in her third sales call, she closed her very first client for $3,000 a month. So if you're watching this video and you want to start your own lead generation agency, make sure you go through all of those steps that I just outlined in today's YouTube video. Make sure that you are doing this in a timely manner. Because the biggest mistake I see is, is people are doing the wrong things and doing it in the wrong order. And after you start doing these things, it's probably not going to work for the very first time, especially if you're doing this yourself. If you never sent a cold email before, don't expect the very first cold email you ever write to convert right away. Don't expect the very first BSL that you ever create to work right away. Don't expect to be like Sydney and close your third ever sales call because those are just unrealistic expectations. But if you do want to expedite the timelines in which you're able to do this, then the first link in the description is a link to set up a time to work with me. And you'd be able to work with me just like Sydney, where as you're going through this process, I'm going to keep you accountable. So I'm going to reach out to you to make sure you're doing the actual work in a timely manner. And while you're doing it as you do have questions or you get stuck somewhere, you're able to reach out to me, we're able to jump on one on one calls to talk about what you want to do to get over that road bump and you're able to see success sign your first client and get to $10,000 per month in the next 90 days. So if that's you, then the first link in the description is a link to set up a time to chat. But if you want to do this yourself, that's completely fine as well. Make sure you're actually taking action. But that's pretty much what I wanted to share in today's video. Make sure to drop me a like make sure you drop me a subscribe and I'll see you in the next video. See ya.