Lead Generation Agency: Why you struggle to get results for clients...

Hey, hope you're having an amazing day. My name is Jimmy Fung. I'm the founder of a lead generation agency called Salesway I.O. and in today's video I'm going to be explaining, I'm going to be walking you through over a live consulting call that I recently had with one of my clients talking about service delivery and how to make sure that you are getting results for your clients from your point of view. Right. And in this video it's not going to be a very specific step by step as in write this, write, write that, click this button, click that button. It's more so video talking more about the strategies and the overall way that you want to approach it, the overall way of thinking. And here are the things that I've learned after running my own lead generation agency for the last year and a half. Working with 50 plus clients, generating them over $2.5 million in additional revenue, you know, sending over a million plus cold emails and booking thousands of of sales costs. So hope you find this video valuable. If you do, make sure you drop me a like, make sure you drop me a subscribe and hope you find this video valuable and I'll see you in the next one.

How much money would you say that you have made or you're on track to make so far?

I would say I'm at, well two was the first one and then the second one was 1000 up and then 750 on the first lead, 750 on the second, 750 on the third lead. So they were kind of like, look, I'm willing to pay you up front but you don't have any case studies. But I'll make it worth your while. If you can get me lead leads, I'll pay extra. And then after that fourth lead will be 250. So kind of a good deal if I can generate some leads for them. So. But yeah, I mean the next couple guys I want to start doing 2500. It's probably like I'm going to start upping that, that limit just because maybe even three grand. I don't know, I'm just going to throw out some higher numbers. But I would say this month my goal is to hit 6k. I would say that would be like in my first month. That'd be pretty sweet. So I think it's possible, I think I got a couple more calls I'm cranking on. So. So now that we're on this side of it, just want to get some tips from you man, on how you've Seen like where have you seen the best results? I mean, obviously it's probably the same formula at least on the back end on how you set this stuff up, which I've been doing my clients that at least the first one, his emails are warming up. I've gone through, you know, the whole stage of buying the domains and getting everything set up. So that's good. But now we're moving on to the outreach part and so that's kind of where I'm at. I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about your best tips for retention and how you've seen like now getting them leads, recruiters leads, if you had any tips on that side, just on how you do your outreach or you know, what converts the best, you have them shoot a video. Should I just make a deck, like a sales deck, you know, all these things. So kind of work that.

That's awesome, man. So I think when it comes to retention, there's a couple of different things. I think it's nuanced because the. So, okay, so the way it is is I think it's very dependent when it comes to outbound prospecting. So whether that is cold emailing, which is obviously what we're doing, or whether it's cold calling or cold DMS or even ads, whatever this specific channel is. Yeah, it's very offer dependent. And what that means is if like it's kind of like if no one wants it, like no matter what you. I wouldn't say no matter what you do, but 80% of the success is does someone want what you have? And I think part of what makes lead gen as a service relatively simple or relatively. I don't want to say easy, but you get what I'm trying to say, right? As a. So bad is because business owners see the correlation. So what I realized is when it comes to working with clients, it's a lot of your success is attributed to your client's business. Meaning.

I love that. Yeah.

End up working with a client and you know, their business is just not the best. It's built on a foundation of sad. You, you sending them cold emails is not gonna. It's not a miracle. Right.

Like, I love that. Like we're not magicians. Right. Like we can't. So actually I've had two clients who wanted to get on a call and I, I didn't tell you about these calls, but I just, I actually one of them, I just said, look man, I actually told him what he needs to do. Just straight up, I gave him free advice I said, look, you're not ready for this. At the end, you need to fix your digital presence. Your website is terrible. I said it in nicer words, but I said, look, man, you gotta. You have to step that up. That's your digital handshake. And if it's not ready, like, I'm not a magician. I can't just magically make. If I send you people and they go to your website, they're not gonna take you seriously. Right. And so you're not gonna be able to convert. And he actually really appreciated that. He was like, man, no one's ever said that to me before. And I gave him some free resources. I said, go, here, fix this up. You could do this in about two weeks if you really wanted to and fix your website up. So actually he's like, let's get on a call, man, in a month from now. So I just scheduled it just for kits and giggles, I guess. But I would agree. I would say these first two clients, I have really good websites. Like, really good. I would say even niches. One guy's in tech, so he's in SaaS, which is maybe that's not the greatest. They're struggling right now, but at the same time, he has a wider Rolodex and he has 20 years in. He has 20 years working on the other side of it, which is kind of like my career. I have about 10 years working in biz, dev and apparel. And then I became an apparel recruiter. And I've. It's just like what we talked about. Experience has been really. It's key to my success in recruiting as well, because when I talk to people, they're like, oh, he understands apparel brands. He's not just like a random guy. So he has that factor. And his website is super clean, super clean. And so I like that about him. And the second candidate or the second client, same thing. They have a reputation, been around for 15 years, good website, they both carry themselves well on the call. And I'm like, okay, these guys can do well. So is that kind of what you're saying? Like, they have to have that. They need that presence. Right. Or they need that?

I think it would be ideal. Okay. So I think cold emails work best if you are working with a business that is already seeing success, have a very specific need, something to do with cold emails.

Right.

And amplifying the success. And I think in that same way, it's the same with clients. It's not necessarily the strategies is the client's business. If their business is Kind of shit, for lack of better words on the come down the failure rate. Sending cold emails might, you know, might help them to a degree, but it's not going to magically make them, you know, double the size of the business or, you know, solve all the issues, right? And I think that's the biggest thing. And I think when you're, when you're in the beginning, because you don't have case studies, you don't necessarily have that, that luxury of choosing the best clients, right? That's just a given, right? Because obviously, yeah, businesses, they would work with the best people or people with, or, you know, this or that. So I think in the beginning there's always that process where the strategy I like to go about it is you're just sending notes, you're trying to get as many clients as you can, right. Even if, you know, like that's not to say just businesses, but if you, it's good to just see a lot of things and get a lot of experience, I think that's the best way to explain it. And then over time, as you do get better at what you do with the coding of stuff, you have proof, which is the case studies, you're able to do a couple of things. Number one, able to charge more, you know, charge higher prices. This is, you're able to get your clients better results, meaning you also make more money. Third thing, you have case studies and you're able to then work with businesses that you know for certain you're going to get great results, right? Because I think in the beginning, when you're first working with businesses, let's say you're taking on a client, you don't know for sure that you're able to get them great results. You might have a hunch we were to give it a number, which obviously doesn't always work like that. But Maybe you have 60% confidence or 55% confidence, let's just say, right? Because there's something about that client's business or that client's offer where you're a little bit iffy about, but you're like, you know what, let me just take a chance and see how it goes. And then down the line, once you have that luxury of choosing all the clients, you bring on, you know, with like 90, 90% plus certainty that what you're doing is going to work.

Right?

But obviously in the beginning you don't necessarily have that luxury choice. So I think working with good clients is, and good offers is 70 to 80% of it. Obviously, the things you want to look out for is similar to what you said. Do they have a decently looking website? They have a website from 2004.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If they don't necessarily have a LinkedIn presence, which is very large, very important space, you search up the name, you.

See nothing or hard find or yeah.

Whatever it is, bad reputation. If the recruiting in certain industries where you know for a fact it's a little bit slower, it's going to be harder. Right? Because I think this is one of the things that is harder for even for me to teach people is because a lot of people, they come into this program, they see me with success, recruitment, they see some other people and they're like, you know what? I'm just go into it. But there's more nuance into it, as you know.

Yeah.

Not every single industry is in the same demand, not every single role is the same. Right. So having that insight is very important. So for example, if you talk to a guy who's recruiting and just strictly tech, right. Obviously slower now than two, two, three years ago, and you ask them, okay, so you're hiring these engineers in these tech companies. Are you open? Are you interested in the idea of maybe hiring engineers in actual companies?

Or you know, you lead the conversation a little bit. Right. If they're struggling, you kind of, you kind of help them to open up their offering and. Or I would say another part of an offer that's important to me at least when I'm looking at these two first clients. Are you willing to work on contingency? That's like a big deal for me. Right, because if you are, that's helpful because then that's a win win for both the, the people I'm reaching out to. And then if they've never heard of them and it's just good timing. And then I say, hey, look, by the way, you know, we're working off contingency, so we don't win unless you guys hire from us. That's a big part of offer that they need to have for me. Because if they're not willing to do that, and there's a strictly retainer, that's a lot harder to convert. Even if you have good, you know, case studies and stuff, it's just harder to convert right now.

I would say, yeah, absolutely. And I think as we are talking about it right now, you know, it makes sense. But I think one of the largest things I learned is because this is of, you know, like any other service business, you're just dealing with people, you're going to come across people who just don't see it from that perspective are like they're just I guess in a way stuck in their ways and they're not open to pivoting. They're not open to adding these things into the offer. They're not, they, they, they're just not open to doing all these other things and experimenting it. But that's what I mean. Right. That's kind of like the best type of client. So I think focusing on those things are very important with the right type of clients. I guess in terms of strategies, one thing that I'm seeing works really well that's a little bit different from your own lead generation campaign is focusing more so on intent based. So for example, a recruitment agency, if they are hiring account executive roles, you can scrape indeed.

Right.

Or whatever open job boards and reach out to those companies because you know there is intent to. Obviously you have to figure out who those decision makers are because if you're reaching out for account executive role, you, you might need to reach out to the direct hire, maybe a sales manager, maybe someone from the HR or recruitment side as well.

Right.

Case studies, again, very important.

When you say you do that for the LinkedIn part because that's what, that's what most agencies do. Right. Like do you do that manually or do you have a system that is able to scrape job boards? Do you use that client scraper that we do and then you. Okay, so you literally use that for.

I use the thing that I put inside the program.

Okay.

Okay. I wouldn't say it's an automated. It's 50 automated because there's still some manual work. But you're not, you don't need to go and copy the role, copy the company name and then manually search it up on like LinkedIn or Apollo. It's relatively automated or as much as you can. Basically that's personally what I do. What else? I'm trying to think case studies is a very important part which leads to the BSL because the type of offer you want to make is. Let's say you see a company hiring for an engineer. Right. The type of messaging I use is hey John, I saw your company obviously calling up the company. Hey John, I saw your company has an open account executive position. I did has this position to build. Question mark. Reason why I'm reaching out is because we specialize or we specialize in working with tech companies hiring engineers. Recently we worked with Microsoft where we find, where we recruited three engineers for them, blah blah blah, something like that. But obviously that's very case study. Put together a quick video running through how we did this for Microsoft. Can I share this with you? And obviously in the vsl, you would be. What I do is I strip it for the client. So because if you think about the vsl, there's two components, right? There's the visual presentation and then there is the actual video presentation, like the guy talking about it, right? A visual presentation, it could be similar to yours. It could be on anything. It could be a Google Slides, it could be a PowerPoint, it could be a Google Docs, it could be a notion, it could be a million other things. A flowchart. What I do is I create that for my clients. I run through it with my client. Like I hop on a call, make sure they understand what we're talking about and then they present it. What BSL or that presentation is talking about is even in. If you think about your own bsl, you're talking about it from a very first person point of view. We are a lead generation agency for blah, blah, blah. This is what we do. These are our five key steps that we take for all of our clients. For your own clients, if you have cases, and even for your own agency down the line, you just position it a little bit different in a much more powerful way. Rather than we do this, we do that. These are our five steps. We recently did this specific thing with this company, AKA case study. For us to do this. The very first thing that we did was before working with us, this company, our clients struggle with boom, boom, boom, boom, pinpoint, pinpoint, pinpoint, pinpoint. What we do after that is the very first thing is the step by step process. So it's very similar to talking about it as we help our company, we help companies do xyz.

It's very, it's ambiguous in the beginning, right? And then you narrow it down to like a client that you actually did it for, which makes it that much more real.

Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so for example, another way to explain it is even in this consulting program when I, if I was to start again without, without any case studies, I'd say something along the lines of we help people looking to build a business build a lead generation agency. The first thing we do is we pick a niche and then we craft an offer. Let's say you are my case study, right? I'd say something along the lines of I help regular people build a lead generation agency. Recently we worked with Jordan, who was a recruiter, to build his lead generation. The first thing we did for Jordan was we helped him identify his niche. His niche was recruitment agencies. After that, what we did with Jordan was helping craft the coding. So you see how.

Yeah.

Framing it a little bit different. We're using that case study but the overall messaging is the same. It just makes it more powerful. Right.

That's great. It's great advice.

Okay. I do one thing I would recommend I put it in the discord chat is even once my clients don't, you know, don't turn off your, your email campaigns because a lot of it is momentum based. A bit of a, I think I like to call it outreach lag. Where like results you're seeing today, the replies, the book meetings might be attributed to actions or the emails you sent maybe like a week ago or two weeks ago. So if you turn it off, you lose all of that momentum. If you feel overwhelmed, I would just put a wait list help people that hey, we are kind of at max capacity right now. We'll have a waitlist for the next few weeks. Is it cool if we hit you back up once we are looking for more clients? Right.

I like that. That's a great idea. Rather than turning them away. Right. You're saying like put. Because it adds scarcity kind of to your service. People go like ah shoot. He won't even accept me right now. You know, I think which makes you look better. And in the recruiting world like for example, when we would. If I got three requisitions today from a brand, I would tell em like thank you, I appreciate it but I just wanna take your hardest one. Give me the. Give me the. Give me the most difficult role and let me perform on that and then I will take on the other two. And I think that that creates at least for us when we do that. People go like oh shoot. Most recruiters are just like yes, give me all three. Like this guy actually like halted the process a little bit. I don't know. I think that that works.

Bingo. And I think a large aspect of it is similar to what you mentioned. Right. A lot of these guys like these guys are. They're not stupid. Right. Like the sales call that you generate with them like to sell your own service. That's not the very first sales card they've ever taken. They probably spoke with 20 plus other.

Yeah, both of them said that like I get these all the time and they're like the first. The second guy, Jimmy is hilarious. I think my wife was listening downstairs.

And it was like the guy hopped.

On the phone and they both were like super serious. And I was like, you know, I was like. Right away, he's like, all right, give me the pitch. Tell me what you do. And I was like, okay. And so I think I just kind of massaged him, got him warmed up. And by the end, the guy was like, you know what, Jordan? I get these calls all the time. You sound like you know what you're talking about. I like you, let's do it. And it was just funny how, like, it started off very. You know, they've taken these calls before for sure. And so it just comes down to likeability. Same thing in getting hired. In the real world, if they like you, there's just. You have a lot better shot, right?

Absolutely, man. I think, I think the overall idea is having that wait list that also adds to your sales positioning, right? Because again, right, these guys, they're just used to jumping on these sales calls, listening to these people aggressively sell them high pressure strategies, you know, this or that. So when they hear you say, oh yeah, we could probably help you, but not right now, right, because we're full, right? They're like, yo, I'm. You know, this is rare, right? Maybe, maybe they've heard other people say it, but it's not as common, right? That helps as well. But yeah, man, I think the overall idea. Oh, yeah. For client service delivery, what I realized is a very important aspect of it is not necessarily the specific result you're getting. Now, obviously that's a given, right? If you are assigning these clients for $2,000 and you know you're getting them zero, they don't even make back a dollar. Obviously it's not, you know, not, not a good look for you. But I think the other thing in terms of delivering results for your clients is people will work with you because they like you. So this is a long term thing. Because what you will find is in any service, not even lead generation, if you're selling ads, you're selling, you know, all these other things. Once business owners figure out it works and they feel like they understand it, where they feel they might not, but they feel like they understand it, they might be like, all right, it might be cheaper for us to bring it in house. Or while they're working with you, understand that they're still getting pitched left and right every single day. They're still getting five to 10 cold emails every single day of people pitching all these other things, including lead generation services. And if a guy, let's say you're charging $2,000, right? You're working with them the second month in your client, they get a cold email from another lead generation agency being like, we'll do this for 500 bucks, right? They don't like you. There's literally nothing stopping leaving. Right. And saving fifteen hundred dollars in the process. But they like you. That is a moat that people, other people can't replicate. So I think that's a very important part. Client communication, very important thing. Very, very, very important thing. Because one of the things I realized as well is because you're selling the service as done for you, meaning you are taking care of the entire process in a way they don't have to lift a finger, right? No way. So what that means is let's say you sign a client, you're setting up all of these email accounts, you are scraping all of these leads, you are writing all of these cold emails, you're doing all of these different things. You know that you're doing the work, you're spending hours doing it. But your clients doesn't know that, right. They're concerned. You collected $2,000 from them and you haven't done shit.

Yeah, you dipped out.

You're feeling on a beach, right? Like a margarita or something, right. They know that's what you're doing. So it's very important to keep them in the loop. Just send them a simple message. Hey John, we just set up 20 email accounts for you. Hey John, we just scraped XYZ leads. Hey John, we just did boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's very important that you do that. Very simple message, nothing too crazy, just so that they know that you're actually doing the work right. And not just, you know, cutting with the money. I think that's the, you know, those are some overall, overall tips I would, I would recommend for sure.

Okay, I appreciate you. Makes a lot of sense. Let me just ask some randoms that. I mean, they're, they're kind of all related to this, but just stuff that I've come across. Question for you. If we have a client, let's say I'm getting him four to five leads and he's very happy with it. And let's get to that place where he's like, whoa, I need to slow this down. Actually, is there a way to pause the emails, even on the outlook side so you don't lose the whole campaign? Or do you, do you just have to bite that bullet and keep paying for the emails and you just pause the campaign on like the smart lead level? Do you know what I'm saying?

I do understand So I think it's a little bit of nuance because it's very situation by situation. So if your client comes to you and say, Adrian, you're getting us phenomenal results. We just can't take on clients. I think the first thing you want to understand is how long.

Right.

Like, obviously. Right. Like, because if they only want to pause the campaigns or to the end of the month, a month is not that bad. Right. But it's more like we want to pause this for the next quarter, the next half a year. Well, realistically, what I found is it's. They're probably not going to resume that.

Okay.

Like, it's just highly unlikely.

It had. You haven't seen that yet, where people are like, okay. And then they leave for six months and come back say, hey, Jimmy, ready to go again? Like, it's very unlikely. It can't happen.

Yeah, I have seen it. But it's not likely. As in, like, if the chance of. So let's say you have a client and he says, hey, Jordan, I'd like to pause the campaigns. We're dealing with some stuff in the business right now. You ask them. All right, no worries. I completely understand. In your opinion, how long do you think this pause might look like? What does that timeline look like? And they say, well, it's kind of indefinite. Maybe three to six months. Well, if you were to take a bet, yeah. They're not going to come back.

Right. So cancel that. In the worst case, if they do, you just set it up again. Right, is what you're saying. Exactly.

However, if it's more of a. Hey, Jordan, we're getting great results. You generated us, you know, seven calls. We have three job orders. We are, you know, we just don't have any more capacity right now. If we take on more clients, we have to hire more recruiters.

Right.

And you ask them, they're like, awesome. So you're making a ton of money. Right. When do you think you'd be good? And they say probably within the next few weeks. Maybe like two, three weeks, maybe a month. That's a little bit of a different story. Right? But yeah.

Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. Just a random. So if I category someone on smart leads to not interested, does it email them?

Still does.

That's okay. It stops emailing them. That's right. Okay. Okay.

Just want to make sure.

So people are so funny. They get so upset. Like you guys. So funny. Okay. Okay, tell me. I guess my well spend. I want to finish the call talking about Josh, the guy today. Just kind of understand a little bit more about him. It's the guy you sent in the group, the SEO guy. It's just back to lead scraping. So I'm about to go into that part and I've been doing what you said. I built a Slack channel for my first client and I'm keeping him posted every step of the way. I say, hey, hey. Just bought the emails and I put the emails in the Slack. Hey, dude. Just finished dkim setup, took three to four days. Hey, dude. And he's been awesome. He's been like, this is great. Thanks, man. So he really appreciates the updates. I'm getting into the lead part, scraping. So would you say 60% you still scrape from Apollo? Like, let's say he wants to focus on tech companies. You would still go to Apollo, scrape that main list, and then the rest are you filling just by intent, like talking about, like going to LinkedIn and seeing, like, all right, you know, filtering by tech jobs and doing that whole, like, I've watched that video and so I'll, I'll start doing that side. But you still plug it into Apollo at the end of the day, right? To get the emails.

Yeah. Apollo or LinkedIn sales navigator. I use, actually, in my own business, I use a bunch of different databases too, as well. I use stuff like Zoom Info or Play, but obviously for the nature of what we're doing, you know, I think database tools are actually very expensive. It's probably going to be probably one of your largest expenses in this business. Especially down, maybe not right now, but down the line when you make more money and you think about reinvesting your profits, the number one thing, it's going to be database or more email accounts. Right. So database tools are pretty expensive, but obviously I can't in good, good ethics be like, tell people to, when they join, hey, go and spend $6,000 a year on Zoom info. Right. So I personally use a bunch of different databases as well, But Apollo and LinkedIn sales NAV are really good. Um, I think lead scraping is probably a third of the success of Codinos. Uh, I probably, I would set higher, but then I was thinking about it and I think deliverability is important and the offer is also just as important. So I'd say 30% of it. Because at the end of the day, if you're reaching out to just the wrong people, you're not going to get results either way. I think when it comes to recruitment, it is a little bit of, it is a little bit different because if you're Selling marketing services. You know who those decision makers are.

Right?

You know, it's a cmo, if it's a larger or the founder of the CEO. I think when it comes to recruitment, because you are, let's say hiring a software engineer, it could be hard to tell who that decision maker is because.

Is it the talent team? Is it the HR person? Is it the, yeah, the VP of the discipline, whatever it is. Right, I agree. So you kind of target a little more broader on that. Rather like when I reached out for recruitment agencies, I'm targeting presidents, CEOs of recruitment brands, VP. You know, I mean, I hit the high level. You're saying it's a little more broad with, with the reach out here as far as the titles and who those decision makers are.

Okay, exactly right. Because you wouldn't know who those decision makers are. Or I think another example would be, let's say you again, back to example engineering roles. But this time you're hiring for enterprise level companies where there are literally thousands of employees. Viewer is going to be the manager position, right? Engineering manager or whatever that position is. There might be hundreds of those engineering managers inside a company. Inside a company like Microsoft or IBM or Apple or whatever. Right. So that I think is the part of what's challenging about recruitment. But you know, I think every single niche has its own individual nuances. But I think that's, that's the biggest thing for sure.

Okay, yeah, we'll give this a go. Obviously, if I have some questions as I'm, I'm cruising along my opinion. But yeah, that makes sense.

Like, I think, I think it's kind of good too because now that, you know, whenever there are. Because I, you know, my, my business, we talk to a lot of people every single day and we don't, we aren't able to work with everyone. And I think it is very, I, I, I like being able to just feed some of these leads.

Yeah, it's a cool, that's a cool thing that you can do for your group that you could say, look, I even, you can even talk about that on your YouTube, right? Like, hey, I even give, you know, you join the group and I'm giving people clients. So it's cool. Little.

Yeah, exactly, man. Exactly.

All right, brother. Well, I appreciate you, man. I know we gotta call at 8am I'm gonna try to join this call here. This team's calling 20 minutes. So I appreciate you, Jimmy. Thank you very much, man.