Random Acts of Sales Are Killing Your Pipeline (Fix It in 8 Touches)

So it's Sunday night, 9:47 PM. You're lying in bed, should be relaxing, but instead you're doing math. You closed 2 clients last month, one of them from a referral that you weren't expecting. The other one, you can't even remember how they found you. Maybe LinkedIn, maybe that networking event, you're really not sure. But this month, it's the 23rd and you still got nothing. Not a single qualified lead. The pipeline is empty. So you're thinking, okay, tomorrow I need to do what? Cold call, go back to the next chamber meeting, post more on LinkedIn, buy another list, try that email campaign thing you saw. Then the real thought hits you. You've got no flipping clue what actually works. So if you've ever been sitting there on a Sunday night feeling that panic, this episode is for you. I'm going to show you how to create a repeatable sales campaign process that you can execute every single month in your payroll business or any other professional services business. So stay tuned for this episode of Payrollin'. My name is Matt Vadie, and thank you for joining us.

Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now here's your host, Matt Vadie. Let's go.

So I call this random acts of sales. You know, you come back in January, you've got big energy after the holidays, you make a list of 50 companies to call, you got that New Year's resolution, you're going to make big sales progress. You call some of them, you start to fall off, you get some bad responses, and then you just quit altogether. So look, whether you're a sales professional, a sales leader, or a business owner, I'm gonna talk through some of the ways we've used campaigns effectively for the last 20 years to create repeatable results for your sales process. Now, the only time these don't work is when you don't follow and execute on the plan. I literally, every time I've taken a campaign, brought it from creation to completion, we've seen closed one deals flow through the pipeline. So this stuff works. It's simple, not, easy. So if you're looking for the easy button, this probably isn't the video or the conversation for you. And if you're tuning in on Spotify or another podcast platform, then just know I'm going to be sharing my screen here in a moment. So there's probably some valuable stuff you can see there on YouTube. Go and check out our YouTube channel. But if you're listening along, I'm going to do my best to provide as much context as possible for the listener. So I'm going to walk through our repeatable sales campaign process that we've used. And again, this is for payroll service bureaus traditionally, but this would work work for, if you're selling IT sales, if you're selling any tech-enabled or professional service, I could see a variation of this working because what we've got here is really not a problem of you can't get sales. It's just that you don't have a repeatable method for getting sales. And what actually happens is you have a systems problem. When you've got what I call random acts of sales, you have those feast or famine pipeline, right? So like you get the pipeline full, like we described earlier, where you go out to a few events, you maybe get a couple of referrals from a new partner and then things dry up as you start spending time and energy with those people. And then, you know, you take your eye off the ball when it comes to prospecting. So this also where I want you to be thinking about this process as we're going through it is how am I going to execute in a repeatable fashion? So for example, if you're the business owner, are you gonna be able to take time every month to set up and execute these campaigns? Or do you need maybe the hands of a virtual assistant? Or do you have somebody on your CS team who can support? Or if you have a salesperson, Who's gonna support them? Do you want them spending the time setting up campaigns? I know for us, I've got highly paid salespeople. I don't really want them spending the time setting up campaigns in our CRM and setting up the automations around it, which I do highly recommend as we start to get into this, you automate as much as possible while also personalizing it as much as possible. So there's a lot of variables to consider here, but I promise you, if you go through and you take the time to do this, it becomes much more repeatable over time. So one of the examples I gave in our recent conversation with Scott Goldberg from Dominion Payroll,, which I highly recommend, really highly rated episode, heard a ton of great feedback from people. If you're interested in sales and sales process, make sure you check out that episode next. But we talked about back when I was at ADP working for a big company, every single month we would have a campaign in place. And Scott said he goes so far as to plan these for the upcoming year. So he's already got here in October his 2026 campaigns ready to go. So it's October 2025. I know what the typical flow of business is, what things I want to talk about throughout the year, so I can be setting set up now. And you can have a whole ton of different types of campaigns. So the one I'm going to share today is a little bit of a focus on your local market, but you can be going up against one specific competitor, you can be focused on one specific product or vertical. So you can do a lot of different things to make these campaigns where you could run a different one every month. And then the, the results of the previous month's campaign can still be trickling in. You're never doubling down on the same audience. So whether you're putting 100 people through it or 1,000 people through it, you're going to see results if you follow each of the steps in process. And so that's where we're going to go ahead and dive in here. I'm going to take a look at my screen and I'm going to put a link to this document that I'm sharing here in the comments. So you can go ahead and use this and customize it as you see fit for your organization. But this is a very basic sort of standard 8-touch sales campaign. For us, this one was meant to build our payroll bureau as a local alternative. And again, I updated some of this language on here so that you can take this, make a copy of this Google Doc and use it for your payroll company or whatever it is your business does. We wanna build relationships, create consistent value throughout the process. And this is gonna be executed over a 4 to 6 week period. All right, so the first thing is we want to know who we're going after and what we are talking to them about. So we wanna clearly define our ICP for this campaign. So the target account profile for this particular one, we were talking to companies with 20 to 100 employees and we had good reasons on why we were going after that group. For us right then, we were selling some payroll and HR related support. We wanted them to be large enough to need the support, but small enough to understand the value of a local provider. We had dialed in a few industries here that we were going after, professional services like accounting, legal, consulting, marketing agencies. This one is a little bit broad in terms of, of what you would do here because we were just focused more geographically than vertical. I really prefer a geo and a vertical tied together if I can. So for example, nonprofits in Columbia, South Carolina with between 10 and 50 employees, if I could get enough of those together, then I would to just target them because then my messaging gets tighter. When I'm using social proof, I'm using customers that look and feel exactly like them, that experience the same exact pains and came to us from maybe the same providers. And then we even put on here industries to avoid. So for us, when we start to put this into the marketing team, they're going to be pulling lists for us. They're going to be gathering the information. We want to make sure they don't pull in any of the industries we are trying to avoid here. So for us, we use a geographic focus, which was our local market. So last time we ran this for payroll specific, We ran it in Columbia and in Charleston. And so we had two different cities and we had a couple of different verticals within those cities because we had different reps running it in those markets. And then we have required contact information. If you don't have a way to get contact information, I know a valuable tool for us has been Apollo. I think it's Apollo.io. I don't think it's overly expensive. I want to say we spend $150 a month on it or something. You know, the cost of these lists and honestly, Apollo does a million other things. We use it for some cold email, which is probably a whole other conversation altogether. Don't just start start firing cold email off of your domain at scale without, without really doing some, some pre-work on that. That's probably a whole other conversation. If you're interested in me going deeper on cold email, we do have a really sophisticated cold email program set up internally. Leave a comment that just says cold email on the video, and I'm happy to go deeper into how we manage that. I'll bring in Chris from our marketing team to go through how we manage cold email. But that's a scale play. We're talking tens of thousands of emails to be sent to get a handful of appointments versus this is a little bit more of a sniper shot. We're not really praying on this. We're getting very targeted with the group we're going after. So we've got the required contact information we want, and then we've got a theme for it. So for this one, it was, we're really doubling down on the local piece. Why on earth would you partner with a national company who's taking all the money out of our community when you could work with somebody local like us? I know for most cities in most states around the country right now, this is a high priority item for a lot of small businesses. They would prefer to do business with a local provider. So this one really resonated well. We pulled quite a few deals through this campaign and and did well with them. And you know, it's why send your payroll dollars to a national company when you could partner with somebody in your community? So we want to first lead with emotion. Most people, as you know, will buy for emotional reasons more often than logical reasons. And this goes for B2B sales as well. So we want to make sure that we are, you know, make sure we're leaning into that emotional response of partnering with a local provider. It's something that means a lot to us. It means a lot to them. It matters. It matters that our customers can stop by our office. It matters that we can swing by their office. It matters that we're going to see them. Them at happy hours and events in the community, at the local chamber events. Those things matter. But we're going to lean into a little bit, you know, from the FOMO perspective, the frustration of calling a 1-800 number and dealing with a national provider. And then we've got a list of key differentiators we want to emphasize during the campaign as well. So what are the things that we know when we're going head-to-head with ADP, Paychex, Paycom, Paylocity, we're going to bring to the table to make sure that we differentiate? So again, if I'm planning this campaign, let's take a step back. I want to, I want plan. I don't want to have random acts of sales. I don't want to cold call somebody and then field objections on the fly. I want to field objections up front. One of the best things we can do in our copywriting and in our sales campaigns, whether that's written or verbal, is to overcome an objection before it happens. I always like to use, you know, one of the greatest pieces of copywriting you'll ever see is lose 10 pounds in 30 days without giving up pizza. So I've got a clear transformation. I'm going to lose 10 pounds. I've got a time period that it's going to happen within, 30 days. And then I've overcome overcome my biggest objection, and that's that I'm gonna have to give up the foods that I love. So anytime we can overcome objections with our copy or proactively with our marketing, we want to do that. It's a great way to go ahead and create trust and just overcome that first hurdle in their mind about making that next move to you. So for us, you know, it is almost always responsiveness. People think in terms of, hey, if I'm going to call a 1-800 number, I'm always going to get somebody. So they'll never come out and say this, but they'll, you know, they're thinking in their head like, yeah, that 1-800 number, while it's awful, it creates some security. I know that person's always there. If I'm calling your little tiny office Am I going to be able to get somebody? Well, you've got to have some data around how quick you respond and what your support metrics are so that you can back that up. And there's a bunch of other things if you're reading the screen, you know, going through your community investment, your social proof, your scalability. And then maybe, you know, we've got listed on here some David versus Goliath style positioning of being the scrappy local player and the stuff we're willing to do that doesn't scale, that the big companies can't do. So you really want to make sure again, so we've got a clear audience, what our message is to them, and then we can start to get into what do the plan assets look like for the campaign. So we're going to want to touch these folks at least 8 times over the period of that 4 to 6 weeks. And, you know, there's a ton of graphics. You've all seen them when you're reading about sales, you know, 75% of the sales happen after the 10th touch or whatever. And I think those, you know, listen, I think that's a misleading number because what they don't say when they flash those numbers up of are how many of those touches happen after you've already landed the first meeting. Right? So like, what are they accounting for there? Yeah, of course there's a ton of back and forth after I send you a proposal, then you have a question. And then so a little bit misleading. They make it sound like nobody's getting a first meeting until that 10th or 12th. That's not the case. Like if you're not getting meetings by the 5th through 8th touch, it's probably time to move on, right? It does take people some impressions to take a meeting, but at some point you're just getting stalkerish. So we want to make sure we are being conscious of both the person we're trying to communicate with and the fact that there's so much coming at people that it is hard to cut through the noise. And so we want to make sure we do that in a handful of ways, which is why I like to have my campaign segmented into multiple different phases: physical, via phone, in-person, and electronic touches. So if you can do all four, so send something to their office or swing by their office for higher dollar volume accounts. So if you're somebody that sells upmarket, you know, again, go back to my National days, I sold anywhere from 50 to 1,000 employees depending on the period of time I was there. When we started getting into the bigger, higher higher dollar volume accounts, I would show up in person and drop some stuff off and just say, hey, look, I'm not here to ask for a meeting or anything. If they're here, I'd love to hand it to them in person, but I just want to leave this and make sure they know I stopped by. I would not press for the, you know, like the small business services. If it's 5 employees and the owner is sitting in the first office when you walk in the door, then you might press for a meeting. If there are 150 employees and the CEO is a real CEO, you know, no disrespect to the CEOs like me of small businesses, but I don't really consider myself to be much of a CEO compared somebody that's running, you know, a $50 million company. So I would be a little bit more respectful of their time and make sure they know, hey, I just want them to know I took the effort and the energy to show up out here at the door so that when I call, they understand like, oh, that's the dude that stopped by my office the other day. It's the act, not necessarily the reward of the act that I'm after. So but in this example, we're sending a direct mail package. We like to send physical mail and some of these things because it just cuts through the noise and especially if you can personalize it. So for this one, we were using mail merged letters. So our CRM allows allows us to, you know, have a typed letter that had some value-based stuff in it. A— we were thinking this one, if I recall correctly, we had a QR code to our 42 free HR templates. So we were taking it from physical to digital. A big thing that we tried to do was we handwrote their name and address on the outside of the envelope so that it got through to them because oftentimes— so we could have used a mass mailer for this or even just typed mail merged all the envelopes. Even that alone, that little act is going to increase your conversion percentage. And when you're talking about 100 envelopes adding the handwritten on the outside, you know, what are you talking about? An hour maybe. And again, it's like if you've got staff on site, you got an intern or somebody on CS, you can do it between calls. Like there's ways to get this done effectively and then put real stamps on it so that you're going to get a better open rate there. So that was our first touch in this campaign. And, you know, listen, now here's where I'm going to put a little bit of caveat in my own campaign here. I got my mind blown a little bit by Jeb Blount at the last IPPA conference when he said, said, hey, the first touch in every one of our campaigns is a phone call. Because if they answer the phone on the first call and they tell us yes or no, why would we take any of the other steps? And dang, right? Like, how can you disagree with that? If the first step is a phone call, they pick it up and they say, that sounds great, I'd love to meet with you. Now I've wasted a bunch of time putting together all these letters. So there's something else to think through in terms of what your first step should be. I traditionally have operated under the let's soften the beaches, then make the phone call. So there's going to be a letter, email, whatever before the phone call. That way they're expecting it, you know, whereas a straight up cold call, you know, the counterargument to Jeb's point would be, yeah, well, I mean, it's a cold call. They're not expecting it at all. You haven't earned anything. You've just come at them with a cold call. They're going to— your likelihood of getting a no is much higher. My likelihood of getting a yes is going to be a little bit higher here because I've taken the time to again soften the beaches, make them aware that I'm calling. I've effectively warmed it up. And that's always been my thing is how much can— how warm can I get a call before I make it without necessarily having to know the individual. And sometimes even this, you know, by the time I get to step 3, 4 in this campaign, I'm looking them up on LinkedIn. I'm name dropping shared connections. I reach out to people that may know them and ask if they'll make an intro. So it depends again on the value of the account and how much time and energy you want to spend on it. But you definitely do not want to run campaigns like this for your smallest accounts. Run them for the highest order accounts you can, because if— why wouldn't you? Why would— first of all, the data may be wrong in the system or you might have some bad profiling data. So if I think I'm reaching out to a 50-employee company and it turns out they only have 5 people, All right, well, you know, if they meet, great, that's wonderful. If they don't, also wonderful. And now I've got better data, which is a really important point if I forget to make it later, is get something out of every call, every interaction that you have along the path of this campaign, whether that's simply updating your CRM with the accurate provider, accurate headcount, you know, any information you can get. We've got a golden circle of information we try to get over here on every call, and I think it's later on down in this campaign guide, so we'll get to it when we get there. If not, it's in in the sales playbook that I shared, which will also be available on the Payroll and Page. So if you're looking for that, go to thepayrollandpodcast.com and check that out. I talk to founders in the payroll, HR, and accounting industry every single day, and they all tell me they need more of one thing. It's not more money, it's not more AI tools, it's more time. How do I get more time? Well, I hired a virtual assistant through OutsourceScale.com that helps me manage my inbox, manage my calendar, handles administrative tasks for me, helps support my marketing efforts, and much, much more. The cool thing about Outsource Scale is that they actually train the virtual assistants on the latest and greatest AI tools to make sure that they can't only do that administrative work for you that you need to get off your plate, but they're doing it in the most efficient and effective ways possible. I've been so happy with my assistant from Outsource Scale that I've actually added multiple other teammates to our other companies through them. Their pricing starts at only $7.99 a month and they make it super easy to get a new teammate onboarded and part of your team very quickly. Check them out today at outsourcesscale.com. So touch one, physical touch is always my favorite there. Touch two, email. You know, 3 to 5 days after mail only, only going 3 to 5 days from the time we send it so that it gives them time to actually get it in their hands. You know, did you receive the package I sent? I put some sample copy in here. Use copy that makes sense for you. But I will say a couple of things. I've always, whether it's a cold call, cold email, anything cold, I'm trying to do a couple of things. I'm trying to create the obvious understanding that I can solve a business problem that you might have right now. And I've done it for people exactly like you. So for example, on a cold call, I've opened nearly every every cold call I've ever made the same way ever since Tom McFatter taught me in 2005. Like, hey, this is Matt from Guru Calling. I work with companies like ABC and XYZ, helping them to solve problem ABC and XYZ. I'd love to see if we could get some time on the calendar to see if we can help you solve those same problems. And just get it out there. Give them the opportunity to object. Give them the opportunity because overcoming objections is where all the money's made, right? Like, nobody just says Oh man, that sounds great. I loved your cold call opening. I'm so happy to sit down and meet with you. That crap doesn't happen, dude. You've got to give them time. Again, that's on the phone. You maybe give a little bit more context in an email. But, you know, the longer I'm in the game as an executive on the other side of receiving things, I can tell you that brevity is king. Nobody is reading your long emails. You can simply understand this by checking every response you get from an executive. Is it long? No, it's typically incredibly brief. So why would you communicate in a fashion that they don't communicate? Most responses I get or give from executives are, okay, this sounds great, you know, and hey, here are the 3 bullets of things I'm concerned about. Net it out, make it as clear and obvious what you're asking for, and try to provide some value, especially on this first touch, right? If you have that thing that's going to provide value, then make sure you bring it out. All right. So in this example, we're going into touch 3, LinkedIn connection requests 1 week after the original mail. And again, like almost every CRM has a way to set this up in it. So we use Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM is a little bit clunkier than most in terms of like using their blueprint feature for this. Their blueprint can only have so many actions. This is one of the things I hate about it. We'll often use our other CRM, HighLevel, that we get through our marketing agency, Underdog Digital, to manage these things because it is much better at it. It has a lot more automation on it. And even going back to Apollo, if you're going to go down the Apollo trail, one of my only regrets about— you just heard our tech stack there. We've got Zoho CRM, HighLevel CRM, Apollo. We've got far too many tools for the job, but they each serve a purpose and needs to do their thing. And we've tried multiple times to merge them together. And I'm looking for— if you know a CRM just guru, no pun intended, who is just has all the best automation set up at their company and they are doing it at scale and they're doing it wonderfully, I'd love to have them as a guest on the pod as a side note. So drop me a note if you have somebody you think would be a good fit for that. I'd love to talk to them. All right. So TouchTree LinkedIn connection request. Actually, I would— I'm going to like— I don't use any note on the first connection request. This is old. We used to. This is best practices from a couple couple years ago, I would not use any note in the connection request. And then you're, you're going to have a later touch in here where you're going to actually send them a note. But people are accepting requests much more frequently now without a note. Don't give them a reason not to accept it, which is what you do when you put a note in there usually. All right. So for phone call, 1 to 2 weeks after mail, you know, again, you're looking at the dates you mailed this out. So your CRM should be sending you a task at this point now. And, and really you want kind of a 2 to 3 day cadence of business days between each touch. So you're not driving the person crazy, but You're staying top of mind. If you wanna call them, I've got a script in here. Use your scripts, use this script, adjust and adapt, but pick up the dang phone. Ask some discovery questions. Don't drive 'em crazy. Provide a little bit of value during the call and try to get a call on the books. You gotta remember, your only goal at this point, you're not trying to sell them anything. You're trying to sell them on the value of meeting with you. Why should they meet with you? Let me just, hold on. Stop. Double-click on this point. You are not trying to sell the value of your services. You are trying to sell the value of meeting with you. So one of my old bosses, David Trot, love him, Trotsky, hope you're well, brother. He said, everybody should feel like after they get out of a meeting with you, they would've been willing to pay for that meeting. Let me ask you, when's the last time you feel like a prospect would've been willing to pay you for your time? Or did you just sit in there the whole time trying to pitch them and trying to do discovery questions and then give them nothing back in return, right? We're all guilty of doing a bunch of discovery and then providing no value at the end. Like, I want to come in backed with resources, backed with things I can give them. You know, we just had a prospect call yesterday. He had a simple W-2 versus 1099 question. I was like, dude, let's have a call outside of the sales process where we just talk about your W-2 versus 1099 guy. Like, in 15 minutes, I can talk you through whether that person should be a W-2 or a 1099. I've seen enough of them. So think value first. First, but more importantly, you're only always selling the next step of the process. So here we're just trying to sell that first appointment. All right, so we've got past, you know, I've got some overcoming objections things in here. I've got some discovery questions in here. I've got some voice— man, don't sleep on voicemails. You know how few people leave me voicemails nowadays? Like, I remember everybody that leaves me a voicemail because I just don't get that many of them. I get more and more sales calls. I feel like people are listening to this podcast where I'm complaining about— I'm not complaining, but I'm saying not enough people pick up the phone and then Lately I have got a ton of sales calls, but they're not very good. They're typically operating under some fake guise of like acting like they know me or whatever, and they're not tied to anything else. They're just completely cold. I'm not seeing the mailer, I'm not seeing the email, I'm not getting the LinkedIn connection request. Like I tell you, if you send me a piece of mail, send me a LinkedIn connection request, an email, and call me, I'm going to at least give you a minute on the phone, dude. Like you've worked your tail off. That's a lot of work. And now touch number 5 in this campaign, we went with a video email. Now it's interesting because we started with custom custom videos for every single person, and then we realized what a total nightmare that was going to be, and we just created one and we linked to it in each of the video— the same video in each of the emails. And so it saved us a little bit of time. We could see the views on it by using Loom. We could see people were clicking on the video. Obviously, out of 100 people that you run through the campaign, you're not going to get 99 clicks on it, but you're going to get some. And so make sure you have a good, you know, video sales letter. I would say an easy way to create this would be to search video sales letter template and then say, hey, I'm trying to cover a 60-second, you know, this is where you want to use ChatGPT or Claude to help you just develop an outline, not necessarily the copy, but I'm recording a 60-second video sales letter that's gonna go in an email to a prospect. Here's the rest of the campaign that I put together. Help me write the outline for this. 'Cause in 60 seconds, you gotta be concise, you gotta be at the point, and you gotta be scientific with what you're saying. Don't just say stuff just to say stuff because you think it's good. Video sales letters, man, don't sleep on video sales sales letters, y'all. Again, probably another episode that needs to be done, but video sales letters are a fantastic way to create value for people, but also lead them directly towards what you do as the solution for that problem that they may have. So as we go forward, we're going into a phone call next, we're going into another email, and then we're finishing up with a final phone call. So I think the biggest point here that you can see is the persistence that it takes, the tools of tracking it, and just the organization. But once you get this down, this first one's going it's going to take you 4 to 8 hours to get it set up from an administrative perspective. It's going to take some time and energy to get it set up. But then once you go from there, now you're, you're CRM, you're going to be able to copy that campaign and just make updates to the scripts and the emails. You're going to be able to, you know, put on repeat. It's going to, it's going to be clunky the first time you try to do a mail merge, but then the next time you've got an SOP, maybe you recorded a Loom of you doing it. You can give it to your offshore assistant. Like you've got the chassis built to repeat this thing over and over and over. And that's where it really starts to pay dividends. So this, again, Plan is not for the weak and not for the individual who needs quick sales tomorrow. This is for the company that's trying to build a predictable sales machine where you can make sure that you can track things over time and then you can start to find all of the areas where these things are winning. So now I start to get metrics-based. I have open rates for each of these emails. I know if the subject lines are working, I know which ones are not. I know if people are referencing the direct mail when I talk to them, I can put notes in there. I can understand what the value is of that part of the process or whether or not anybody's touched it at all. So tracking and optimization Optimization is very, very important. You've gotta make sure that you know what's working and what's not working. And as you start to scale these, you can then layer in some paid ads over top of it because now you're gonna start to drive, you can drive people to links with pixels on them where you start to retarget them after they click the link. And if I'm running these campaigns every month for 12 months and I'm sending people to specific links, then I've got a great retargeted audience that obviously showed some interest because they clicked on that link. So paying to retarget that audience is a wonderful, wonderful use and investment of time, money, and resources. So I hope this was a helpful episode, but like I said, the first one's gonna be really hard. It's gonna take some time. You're gonna build this campaign from scratch, but by campaign number 2 and 3, now you just copy and pasting and it becomes part of your normal cadence. And so take some time and get rid of these random acts of sales, create a repeatable sales machine for your business and see what happens to take things to the next level. If you enjoyed this conversation today, please make sure you subscribe, hit the like. I know it's super cheesy. I don't wanna ask for it, But we've been watching the subscriber count grow steadily this year, so super grateful for that. I appreciate you sharing some of your time with me today. Have a blessed day.