Let's Talk About Language, Baby

All right, positive power-up this morning. So for me personally, I had a really good weekend and I just sort of unplugged and didn't work over the weekend, which is a big deal for me. We went to Disney one day, and one day I honestly just kind of laid around and did nothing. Isn't that crazy? I spent my Saturday getting nothing accomplished. Zero, zero accomplishments. It was very good for me. Passing it forward to Kai.

Um, yeah, I had a good weekend, same as usual. I would say one thing that happened last week, I did really well on one of my midterms that I was really nervous about. So when I saw my grade, I got an A. So that was really good. I'll pass it on to Natalia.

Okay, so for me, I believe, is the, the meeting we have. I'm really excited to, to GlobeNet meeting. I got it. Yeah, I believe is it. We will have a good meeting.

Natalia is killing it. She's our marketing resource and she set the first meeting, so she's beating the sales team. I don't know, she's killing it.

Thank you.

Um, Stephanie, positive power-up, just one win from the last week.

Well, I, I held a client appreciation event this weekend and I got some new prospects for my other business and actually connected with someone who kind of does things similar to what MKC does. So he said, hey, send me an invite on LinkedIn. So I think it was a good connection to make.

Yeah, awesome. Sometimes it can be. A lot of times agencies will outsource back and forth to each other. It's not unusual for us to have like a partnership agreement where we share things back and forth. Um, so last week I sent a message asking people to bring their outbound messaging to this call. Did anybody bring a message that they want to review? If not, I'm just gonna run through a different framework for this. Okay, so I will share a framework, and that buys you guys a month to come with your messaging. So this is just kind of a what's called a sprint builder. So we talked last week about this part right here, which is identifying. I should probably stop— take this out of editing mode. So identifying is understanding who we're talking to. That's our ICPs and our personas. Your ICP is your ideal client profile. So this would describe the types of companies that you work for, whereas personas is going to describe your buyers. But then in here, between identifying and engaging, is empathy. That's where you need to deeply understand the problems and aspirations of your buyers. So these people, the personas here, where you got to go deep and understand what types of problems are they dealing with and what do they want for the future of their company. In our case, since everybody here is MKC, That's gonna be like founders, primarily owners, and their problems are usually they're stretched too thin. They're trying to do too many things, and their aspirations are usually around their own time and their revenue. They wanna make money, and they don't wanna be too crazy busy all the time. Then engagement is going to be email, cold email, personalization, cold calling, and sequencing. So sequencing is like all of it, right? That's connection requests, LinkedIn messages, calls, emails, whether they're warm or cold, everything. Then in between engagement and conversion is some objection handling. This objection handling piece is how you scale from being an SDR, someone who just sets meetings, to being a salesperson, someone who closes revenue. Then conversion is all about effectiveness. Now that effectiveness goes back to empathy. It is how effective we are at solving their problems and getting them closer to their aspirations. Ultimately, this whole chart is about value. It is, can you bring value to your target? And that's what it all comes down to. So then in terms of building these ideal client profiles, personas, and understanding empathy, it's knowing kind of the pipeline movement. So pipeline movement is like, Right here in box 1, you'll see qualified rate is less than 66%. Um, so that means like you're having trouble identifying the right person. So if you're, if your qualification rate is less than 66%, that's typically gonna mean that you're not doing a good job in identifying your ideal client profile. That's like a symptom of the problem. The problem is your ideal client profile isn't tight enough, but the symptom is that like you're not, you're meeting not everybody's qualifications. A 2 would be you're moving more into like a qualified rate of 67 to 90%. That's good. It's not excellent, but it's good. And then a 3 would be if your meeting qualified rate is greater than 90%. That means you're rocking it. You're doing a great job. You've got this nailed. Personas, you could be doing a 1, a 2, or a 3. In 1, it means that you can't identify them. You don't know what you're looking for. 2 is that you understand the titles, but you might not have the ability to anticipate where everybody sits in the chain of command. So in a 2, it's like, you know what the titles are, but you don't understand how they map. Are they a buyer? Are they an influencer? Are they just a champion? Who are they? And then 3 is like, you get it, you get your personas. The empathy scale, you got 1, 2, 3. Again, 1 is you're not clear with your prospects what their problems are or why they should see value in your solution. 2 is that you can speak to your prospects' day-to-day responsibilities and problems as they relate to your solution, but you might not quite be able to like map it all. And then number 3 is that like you get it, you get their business. And you know how to map all of that to our solution. Um, and then you've got a rating system too for cold email personalization and cold calling. Um, so number 1 with cold email, it's like you're writing each email from scratch every time, taking up a lot of time. And then a 2 would be that you're getting response rates between 1 to 5%. Uh, you have some templates, but, um, They might not all work. And then number 3 is like you have templates for every cold email you've ever sent, you're consistently landing great meetings, and you have response rates greater than 5%. So you can see like all the way through kind of how you're rating things. And I'll send this to you guys. Um, you're supposed to rate yourselves so that I can help coach you on your weaknesses and better understand your strengths. That makes sense to everybody? Cool. I'm gonna drop it into chat right now so we can move on.

General.

Stop sharing. There you go. Okay, so that's like your grade yourself. Format to let me know where you're at. Then we're gonna kind of like jump right back to where we left off last week, which is drafting your cold emails, right? So we've already worked through all this where we, we now know our prospects, right? We get them. We understand drafting that cold email is all about this framework here. Which is attention, getting the prospect's attention with relevant results. So that looks like the customer going from, what could be in this for me, to this looks interesting, I want more information. What you need to do is focus on the results that our solution creates for our customers and the problem it solves. So let's talk about the problems We solve for. If we're talking to the owner of a B2B technology company, what types of problems are they having in their day-to-day basis that they might want to talk to us about?

It's difficult to them to speak with people that know tech.

Okay, so they might have So let's pull up problems. They may have used an agency in the past but didn't get tech. Absolutely, that's one.

Probably like getting, um, the relevant— their relevant, um, customer base to their website to See their services in the first place.

Yep. So the types of problems we're talking to people about is often going to depend on where they are in their own cycle, right? So when we talk to startups, one of the most common problems we have is They don't have a GTM at all yet. They just have a product. They know there's a market.

GTM?

Go-to-market.

Okay.

They just have a product. They know there's a market, but they haven't defined it, and they certainly don't know how to attack. So that's like early stage, right? Whether they're a startup or they're just kind of like an early stage company. Then we've got this other one that's like, um, like mid, mid-launch. So I would define these as profitable but not scaling. Uh, these guys have an idea. Of their market, but they aren't capturing it. So if we're talking about things we can look for, they have too many social accounts, not enough content. These are the companies that are on like Twitter and Pinterest, but their LinkedIn, when you go look at it, they've got like one post a month. And they have no following. You're like, what the fuck? What are you doing? It looks like that a lot.

Irrelevant content too.

Yep. A lot of irrelevant content. So you probably have seen a lot of these companies, right? Where they're posting on social, but their social posts usually look a bit like, it's Employee Appreciation Day. It's, Bring your cat to work day.

Yeah, like it's not relevant to what they're actually doing.

Right. So more often than not, you see this and you can tell that they have some content calendar that's giving them ideas, but those ideas aren't relevant to their industry. Um, this, this is where we do the absolute best, is coming in with these companies that are like, they know what their product is, they know what their market is, they just don't know how to go to market yet. This is where we really kill it. We do well with startups too. And then in enterprise, which we do enterprises, but for an enterprise to qualify for us, for them to be good for us, they have to be overwhelmed. They have to have like too many products. Or like too much going on and not enough resources. These are kind of like the 3, the 3 business sizes and stages that we deal with, and they have different challenges. So startups often have a challenge that is like they can't define it, they don't know where to start. Um, they've had bad experiences. They almost all have this one. They've had a bad experience with paying for marketing that didn't work. And this is the number one reason we have to nail our onboarding call. Like, we have to own it. We have to do a great job. Um, but this is really, really common one that I hear. Natalia's been on enough of my calls with early customers to hear this. Like, managed service group was like, oh wow, we feel so much better being on this call with you because it seems like you know what the fuck you're talking about. Um, they've had bad experiences. People have sold them crap in the past and they've gotten nothing. Um, mid-launch, and this is, this is actually pretty consistent of all of them, is busy founder slash owner who's doing the marketing themselves. Sometimes they think they're good at it. Just like a note for you guys to have, we want to be a little passive-aggressive with our messaging to them. We want to point out that it's not as good as it could be, but without really insulting them and being like, this is just shit. Right, because a lot of times these founders, they want to feel like they're, they're doing a good job. So we usually want to start at a place that's like, you're doing the best you can as a busy founder, but your marketing would be 10 times better if someone were dedicated to it. So that's another one. They have no dedicated resource for marketing. So then mid-launch, This is usually— they might have one marketing person, usually an outsourced person. This typically looks like a graphic designer, web developer, content writer, but they aren't owning the strategy. Founders still own strategy and they still suck at it. Again, they're doing the best they can as someone spread too thin. So at the core of what we do is a theory about unique ability. Raise your hand. Oh wait, most of you have your video off. So who knows what unique ability is?

I don't know. I'm sorry, who knows what?

Unique ability. We're going to switch gears really quick because I have just MKC people today. So this is at the core—

Is that like bringing your own, like, like your own unique take to your sales?

So unique ability is a strategic coach concept, which is that— let's see if I can find the scoring thing. There's a— this is a whole rabbit hole we're not going to jump all the way into right now, but I'm going to see if I can find my scorecard without logging in. Find out. No, see if I can log into my Strategic Coach so you guys can see. So the concept is basically that you can't be good at everything all of the time. It actually will kill your business. Thinking that you can do all of it will kill your business. So if we go into my tools here, There is unique ability in here somewhere. There's a lot of tools. These are tools for entrepreneurs. And yeah, here we go. So when we look at this PDF, which I need to switch to show you. The MKC social has a lot of stuff on this. But what it looks like is at the top left you have unique ability activities. These are things that you have superior skill at, that you're passionate about, that fill you with energy, and you're constantly improving at. So for me, that is lead generation and content writing. Those are— those were like my original 2 unique abilities that I've had for the last 6 or 7 years. I now also put leadership in this category, but management is actually in my competent activities list. Do you guys know the difference between leadership and management?

I believe leadership is inspiring people to do the best and be there to help if they need, and another points. And management is to be able—

Yeah, correct.

To be able to manage the project, to manage the idea, to make the thing happen?

Yep. So the cheat code, right, is that leaders lead and managers manage, right? So a leader is someone who inspires and aligns their people to a common goal. It's that person that, like, when you talk to me, if you walk away feeling empowered and with energy, I feel like I did a good job as a leader. Because you are, you feel encouraged to do your job. A manager is someone who kind of gets down into the deep end of the criteria. You might not always walk away from a meeting with me feeling like your job is any clearer. You should walk away from a meeting with your manager feeling like you know exactly what you need to do. That's a good manager. A good manager makes you feel like you know what you're doing. Whereas a good leader just makes you feel like, no matter what, I'm gonna rock this because Megan trusted me to do it, right? And so I feel like I'm good at leadership, but I suck at management. Not suck, I'm competent at management. It's not, it's not in my unique abilities. Now, an excellent activity is one where you still have that superior skill, you're good at it. You have a reputation for it, but there's not really any passion. And it requires some teamwork. So for me, this is like full cycle sales, like closing deals. It's, um, most of the general marketing stuff. Um, so more like graphic design, templatizing, outreach, cold calling, those all fit in my excellence basket. Competent activities are activities where you meet the minimum standards. There's quite a bit of competition. This is where the anxiety starts to creep in. It's where, like, when you have to do it, you feel like, oh, this makes me nervous. It makes me a little bit anxious. I don't feel like I'm the best person for the job. Like, I can do it, but I might not be the best person to do it. Most of the people we talk to, marketing sits in competence. But they probably need to outsource it. It's either incompetent or incompetent. And it feels very repetitive. So it's something where like every time you do it, it just feels like, is this Groundhog Day? Am I just living the same day over and over again? Like, I don't love it. Then incompetent activities feel like failure, conflict, frustration, and stress. For me, video editing goes in incompetent. I would rather throw my computer through a window than edit another thing of video ever again in my life. I Outsource that to other people. Other incompetent activities for me include deep, complex graphic design, web development. That's why I have other people that do those things. So the whole concept of unique ability is that this is— this top left, this should be 80% of your time. 80% of it should be spent right here. 15% of your time should be spent on excellent activities, and you should either commit to improving or outsource. So here you commit to these, own them. Do not outsource. And the most important thing here is actually passion and energy. Because when you're passionate and energetic about something, it doesn't drain you. Your company gets better all the time because you're doing this. Then excellent activities, 15%. But you have to either commit to get better, be the best, or commit to starting to outsource.

So can I ask a question really quick? So is the difference like Unique ability and excellent activities is unique ability is one where the passion lies, whereas excellent is where you're good at it, but you're not just as passionate as your unique abilities.

Yep, exactly. So it's like those things exist. These 2 are the ones that I think take the most time kind of like sitting and reflecting with yourself to understand which bucket it's in. Because I feel like a lot of the time when we're young, And we're told we're good at something, we almost like, we become passionate about it because we were told we're good at it. But when you strip away the reward, you're not really passionate about it. So ask yourself, like, if you could never get paid at it, if no one ever told you you were good at it again, would you still want to be doing that thing? If yes, it's a unique ability. If no, it's just an excellent activity. You could still do it. But like, don't let it take up your whole life. Then competent activities, these should be about 5% of your time. And again, you should either be committing to get better at it and move it into this excellent activities place, or committing to outsourcing it and moving it to incompetent activities. You don't want to let things sit here too long. And then incompetent activities are the things that you're not good at. Outsource them immediately. This, this is one of those ones that, like, if it's just an incompetent, it needs to be gone like yesterday. Like, don't do it anymore. It's wasting you. It's pulling you away from all of these other things that you could be doing that you're good at. Like, Natalia is here because I had things that sat incompetent and incompetent that I needed her to come do because I'm not good at them. Like, right here, incompetent activities is anything that's organize or operate. Anything organizational or operational, I can do it with enough time. I'm not good at it. It causes me anxiety. It feels repetitive. I don't like it. Natalia is great at that stuff. Fantastic. She can organize and operate. Yeah.

And I love it.

Yes, it's your unique ability. So you should do those things. I shouldn't. And this This theory is where MKC comes from. This is why I exist. I exist because founders have a whole bunch of shit, incompetent and incompetent, that they need to outsource. And we can do some of it. Not everything. I can't take over their accounting. You know, I don't really wanna take over their CRM, but we might be doing that cuz Natali's good at it. But it's one of those like, let's take the things that are on your plate that are stressing you out. And get them off your plate. So that brings us back to here, which is like, what is the problem we solve for? Ultimately, regardless of what size they are, the problem we solve Is that marketing is not most founders' unique ability, and they should be focused on what they do best to scale their business. You cannot scale, we cannot scale, no company can scale until the visionary entrepreneurial head of the organization is focused on running the business and not everything else. We have to outsource. And so that is ultimately the problem we solve. It looks like all these different things. These are symptoms. Everything else here, it's a symptom. The disease is that the founder's doing too much shit. And they need to stop. And that's where we come in. Does that make sense to everybody? Okay. Yes. So grabbing attention is this, what's in it for me, right? Which means focusing on results. Now we can do this by sharing work that we've done, and I can give you guys access to help you do that. We've got tons of logos, videos, Websites, all sorts of stuff that we have done in the past. But ultimately, the result is like for Cashfly, when I took over their marketing, they scaled revenue 350%. Why was that? How could they scale 350% just from marketing? Well, it wasn't just from marketing. It was from marketing belonging to marketing and the founder being freed up to do what he does best, which is come up with new products and services because he's a visionary. And now the marketing belongs to somebody else. I also took over their sales, increased business, but it came from growing existing accounts by having the time to go look at how we could grow them. What are they doing? Why haven't we talked So, so for example, like when I joined CashLive, Roblox had been off contract for 3 years. 3, 3 years. Their number one company, the number one business had not been on contract because they hadn't had time to go look at it and figure out how to add value to an existing customer. When I came in and I took over sales and marketing, the account team suddenly had time to go look and say, oh, okay, this is an existing customer. That's paying us millions of dollars each year? How could we grow them? How can we get them back on contract? The business, when spread too thin, it takes from everything. So what we don't do is talk about features or benefits. Does anybody know why we don't do that in the attention-getting piece? No. So it's because we need to talk about them, not us. Until we've already gotten the attention, they don't care what we do. They don't care about our features or our solutions. They don't know us. We're just some other company in their inbox trying to tell them about us. We don't, we don't matter yet. At this stage, we don't matter. So then we're jumping into feeling, which is again empathy, right? It's understanding their business. We need to feel like we are speaking their language. We get them, we know their business, we know what matters to them. So this often looks like talking about revenue. Talking about scaling, talking about industry challenges. So for example, let's say I'm messaging a company that I noticed that they had a couple of live events or e-conferences, and it doesn't look like it went too well for them. So my messaging might say something like, are you sick of wasting your marketing budget on these digital events that never pay off? Take up the entire marketing team and keep you in cycles of building for months only to net you a couple of leads that never convert? Oh my God, I'm speaking their language. I get it. That's what they've been struggling with. Then you wanna lead with their pain points, frustrations, and challenges. This requires first doing the groundwork to know what those are. Right, so it takes a little bit of research to say, okay, like Natalia, when you brought me Globenet, the reason we got that meeting was because you went in already knowing what their challenges are. You were like, these guys, they need help with graphic design, their graphic design team sucks, they need help with these other things because they're under-resourced in their marketing department, right? They looked like the enterprise one.

Right.

It's like they're— they have a marketing team, but the marketing team's overwhelmed. Too much going on and not enough resources. But you already knew that, which is what made you so successful talking to them. If we don't know their prospects, their challenges, we need to pay really, really close attention during discovery. But the problem is getting someone into a discovery call when you don't already know their challenges is going to be like trying to climb a mountain without gear. You have to kind of know the challenges first. That's why we have to do research. Then target typing, which is providing context and showing that our research was intentional through personalization. So if you go and you like Google sales, like sales tips, you'll see a lot of talk about this word here, personalizing, personalization. And there's a lot of bad advice out there that's older. Usually these, these pieces of advice come from 5, 10 years ago when sales automation was new. What was like really impressive that we could send one message 25 times by changing out the name and company. That level of personalization isn't impressive anymore. What is impressive Is understanding that this outreach was intentional. You are talking to me, Megan Killian, the CEO of Megan Killian Consulting, not just some random prospect that you're using canned language for. So this is saying something like, "I saw your recent article about X. Loved your point, but wanted to add." And then add a little bit of value. This works really well on those like enterprise size customers where they already have a marketing team, but you can see that there's holes in their marketing. So you're like, I loved your article about email outreach, but I noticed you guys don't have any major LinkedIn presence. I'm wondering if that's on purpose because There's, you know, X amount of prospects on LinkedIn, and most of them log in every day. Have you considered doing more LinkedIn outreach over email? I think it would be really successful for you guys. That makes it seem like you've reached out to that person on purpose. You didn't just send them a canned message. You looked into their current strategy and provided some value. And then the extreme focus part. This is hard. Okay, this was the part that was the hardest for me when I first became an SDR, because it's like, okay, I did all this research, all of it to get these 3 pieces. I looked at their website, I looked at their LinkedIn presence, I figured out who all of their executives were. I spent hours on these people. And now I have to put that all into a couple of sentences. Because if your message is too long, they're just not gonna read it. They're busy people. So how do I follow what I call them the 3 C's, right? So it's got to be concise, compelling, clear. Clear, concise, compelling, right? Clear means that there's no way I could misunderstand your message. This is really, really hard when English is your second language, and it takes practice. Lean into Grammarly and Hemingway to give you insights about your writing, right? So Grammarly will catch if you have grammatical or spelling errors. What Hemingway does is it tells you if you're writing above your prospect's head. So like for Kai and Nathan, who've both been through college, you're gonna wanna use Hemingway because it's gonna tell you when you're writing at like a college level instead of the recommended like 4th or 5th grade.

Level.

Don't write above your prospect. And then Grammarly catches when you just make silly mistakes in your writing. So that's the clear part. Make sure what you're saying can't be misconstrued. Concise— cut out any filler. Don't use words you don't need. Keep your word count as short as humanly possible. If it doesn't need to be said, don't say it. Then compelling— That question is just like, would I take action if someone sent this message to me? The concise and compelling piece also means that you are making your call to action obvious. Don't make people guess at what you want them to do. Like, okay, I liked this girl's message. Now what? What does she want from me? And there's some cool ways to do that, right? So like, I've moved away from asking for meetings. I just don't do it. I ask for meetings in like my 4th or 5th message in a sequence. And using that method, more often than not, people ask me for the meeting before I ask them, which is a very different place to come from. When someone asks me for a meeting, they're likely to show up. And they feel like they're asking me for my time. Jedi mind trick, guys. I didn't ask them for their time. They asked me for mine. That's way better. It's a way better place to be. So instead, I do things like say, um, if you found this message interesting and you want me to send over a bit more advice, reply funny. Or I usually try to find like my code word to be something relevant to their business. So I'll be like, reply semiconductors, or reply pop infrastructure, whatever it is, like I try to make it like a cute play on what they do. And then you'd be surprised how many people reply with your code word because they just, they want to, all right, sure, send me another email, give me some more value. Um, one that's been really successful that I've shared with you guys before is offering to record a video for them. Um, Natalia, you could probably do this today for a lot of companies. Just say like, would you like me to send you a 3-minute video on what I would change about your website? And then you just do it. You record a 3-minute video on what you'd change about their website. Um, if you're new to marketing, You can ask if they'd be interested in having me record a 3-minute video. You can say something along the lines of, my CEO is doing 3-minute videos for the first 10 people to reply to us. Reply marketing insights to secure yours. And then they reply and they get a video from me. You can go straight for the meeting. There are lots of people that do. I don't really recommend it because it's putting the cart before the horse. You guys are in a bit of a safe zone because you know that I'll get on meetings with you right now. But you set yourself up for failure when you get on the meeting too early, when you just like ask people to take time with you and you haven't looked at their website yet. Like, do the work first, then ask for the meetings that when you get in the meeting, you have something to say. And you know what questions to ask them and where to dig deeper. Is all of this making sense so far?

So can I ask, like, so like for messaging, for the initial message, is it better to not— so it's better to offer more information than firstly offer a meeting?

Yes. So think of it this way, right? Let's say I'm trying to talk to you about something you don't know very much about, like your plumbing. Okay, Kai, I'm trying to replumb your house. If I asked you to just like let me into your house to see your plumbing, it's probably going to make you a little bit anxious. You're like, especially hypothetically, if I'm like a dude in my 40s, which is what most plumbers are, right? Dude in my 40s knock on your door, hey, can I come in and take a look at your plumbing? Uh, no, I don't know you. I'm not giving you my time. I'm not letting you in my house. But if instead I come and I knock on the door and I'm like, hey, Kai, um, you're in a 3-mile radius of the local water salinization plant, and most of the buildings in this radius can only last 15 years on their current plumbing. I looked up all of the, the building permits for this neighborhood, and your house was built 25 years ago, and you haven't had any plumbing updates in that time. So it's really, really likely that your plumbing is very rusty, has a lot of buildup, and your toilets aren't flushing like they used to. Can I just ask you— When you flush your toilet, is it taking a really long time to flush right now? And then you say, yeah, my toilets have been getting clogged all the time. And I, as the plumbing guy, and I'm like, yeah, that's because of XYZ reasons that I already researched. Would it be okay for me to come by another day and do like a 1-hour home inspection? And I'll find all the problems with your house and give you a quote for fixing them. Would that be all right?

How—

like, you are so likely to take that meeting, right? If I come in and I tell you something, I already did the research, I know there's a problem and I want to solve it for you, why wouldn't you give me an hour?

Yeah, makes sense, makes sense.

So it's just like that, only in B2B marketing, right? So we're telling them we know what we're doing first and then letting them set the meeting. And a lot of that is because there are all these marketing companies out here That don't know what they're doing and they're ripping people off. Like, they're like Instagram influencers that are just like, I can make you $8 million because I have never done that before. That's, that's what we're up against. So we have to prove our value. And then the last one, this is so huge for me.

Respect.

Respect people's time, respect their opinions. Make sure that you're making the prospect the hero instead of yourself. It's not about what we do. It's not. It's about how much better they could be if they had our help. It's about how much easier we can make their job for them and how much more vacation time they can take and how impressed their boss is going to be. That's what it's about. At no point in time is it about us, our revenue, what we do. It's about them, and we should always respect their time and their inbox. So if you say something, send somebody 2 or 3 messages and they're not responding to you, the best message you can send is like, hey man, I don't want to waste your time. If you're not interested, can you just reply leave me alone so I don't keep wasting my time and yours, right? Be respectful with your outreach. Don't ask for too much too soon. Value their time. Acknowledge that their time is worth something, and you'll do great.

It's a little bit difficult because I I never sell nothing in my life.

I'm always. I think you'd be good at it, Valia.

Thank you. And when I did my first, I sold I sold in shopping. Stores, and when I was young, but B2B, as you are doing here, I never did before. And when I sent the message for the company I was trying to bring to MKC, I was really anxious to receive the answer, but I already be on the other side. So, I received a lot of emails offering me things, so I thought that maybe I could wait a little bit more, but it's difficult to wait when you are anxious to do a deal.

So, this is actually probably my biggest challenge is timing of follow-up. Because I'm super ADHD, so I forget about people if I don't do it when I'm thinking about it. Um, and it's this balance, right, between being super hungry and like reaching out right away and waiting too long and it not being relevant anymore, right? So the best thing for that is scheduled follow-up. So utilizing HubSpot to set a reminder For when you're going to follow up with this person rather than an automated outreach. This is once you've got somebody to respond to you, right? So, um, it's different when you're just reaching out without a response, like you're just kind of sequencing, hey, what's up? Hey, what's up again? Touchpoint. You can schedule that. But as soon as someone responds to you or indicates their interest or interacts with you in some way, which like with GlobeNet, you have an existing relationship. You want to be sure you don't burn that by being too hungry and too in their face. So what you did, and this was Natalia, you did this naturally without any coaching from me. You were like, I'm not going to follow up on Monday because there's a holiday. I'm going to give them until this day because that's a reasonable amount of time for them to have to like read the message. And respond to me. And then on that day, I'm gonna reach out. That's exactly what you should do. Tell yourself how long it reasonably takes for someone to read your message, talk to whoever they need to talk to, and respond to you, and then set a reminder. And your reminder should say something along the lines of, touch base with Carl at G2G to chat about his earlier response. Right, and that's perfect. Um, usually I say 3 days is an average follow-up time. It can be anything from next day to 2 weeks, depending on what they tell you. And then another big part about respect is respecting other people's timelines. So if somebody tells you Like you reach out to them, you want to do something now, and they're like, hey man, everything's frozen until the new year because we've got some new hires coming on, and we, we don't, we don't know our heads from our asses right now. We gotta figure some shit out. Let's talk in January. Set that notification, that reminder for yourself in HubSpot for January, because that's when they told you to talk to them. Now, Good objection handling would be, I totally hear you. You're sorting some stuff out. You're not going to have a final answer till January, or you're not going to really have a feel for things until January. Would it be okay for us to reconnect midway through December so I can just get a feel for where you are in your process and maybe I can help? That's good. As salespeople, we should always be trying to move Move people a little bit closer to us. Like, if they say January, we should pivot and be like, well, what about November or December when you've already gotten a little bit of a feel? And it's also different in like how you approach it should depend on your background, right? So Natalia, given your role at MKC, I don't expect you to do a ton of outbound. What I see you doing is outbound to companies where you see like a real value we could bring to the team, like you did with GlobeNet, where you're like, we can help them. I know that we can help them. So you should just be on the lookout for those companies, right? Where you're like— I would say a really good ideal fit would be South American companies that want to go global, or global companies that want to get into South America. That would be where, like, obviously we can help them. Um, for Kai and Seth, where you guys are in more of a sales role, you should be more persistently outbounding to a larger threshold of people where you might not know if we can help them yet, but you're hoping we can. Um, it's just slightly different perspective based on your role. Right. Um, okay. Does all this make sense?

I think with me, like when researching, I'm like, Like looking at the companies, like, um, right now, like through LinkedIn and stuff, like to see like what resources or like what, like stuff, if they have any, to see like if they need, like if they would need MKC, like why not?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to send you my scheduling link, Ty. Schedule a one-on-one with me and we can look, we can talk through some of the things that you can look for. are kind of like the, the flags that we're like, oh, we could definitely help.

Yeah.

Just for the— this— for this meeting, I'm gonna show you guys, because we're almost to the end, we've only got 6 minutes left. I'm going to show you guys a really quick thing that I do. So pick something that is B2B technology that you think you know a little bit about. Natalia, Kai, Steph, one of you. Something you know a little bit about that's B2B technology.

I'm sorry, Mega. My connection broke down here.

You're okay. So for Natalia, what I would say, like let's say Brazilian infrastructure internet, right? Natalia knows about the internet in Brazil. So we are skipping the first page of results. We're not helping people on the first page. They know what they're doing. We're going to page 2. All right, so Mason's Encyclopedia looks like it doesn't matter. Routers, maybe. Marsh McLennan, maybe. Oh, this looks good. Nick.Brazil. Oh yeah, these look like somebody we would definitely want to talk to. So that's prospecting. Then we go down. World Bank data.

Let me share one thing with you. NIC is the regulation organ about internet in Brazil. They are the most important, uh, about internet.

So yeah, so we would want to more so follow these people and talk to the companies that interact with them, less them themselves. But we definitely want to like watch them to see who cares about infrastructure in Brazil, right? This one might be interesting. Nothing else interesting. Go to the third page. So it looks like we need to get better. Search. So like best Brazil internet. We want to skip page 1 again, jump to page 2. We find this is going to be a construction company, but construction companies are sometimes B2B, so they might be good for us. Uh, Autodesk. Actually, Autodesk could be a great contact if they're trying to build their footprint in Brazil. They're a software company, and they're a well-known one. They're enterprise, but then we'd go look at their website and see if maybe they have some things that are not going as well. Maybe they need help with a specific product or a specific region. Uh, what's this? They look like they're just like a— this is like a blog site. It looks like these guys are paying, right? They're paying, but they're still on the second page of Google. So this would be one that we'd probably find worth reaching out to. These guys, data center construction. This is really rapid without me doing a ton of research, right? But this is a method, a tactic I use to find prospects. I find something that like, so Managed Services Group, Natalia, they came from me looking for managed services in Orlando. And I was like, huh. And I messaged everybody on pages 2 and 3. Bayshore is another one I reached out to. I used to work for this company, Taylor Works. I talked to IT On Demand. I talked to these guys. I talked to these guys. I'm pretty sure Managed Services Group is on the 3rd page. But this is a really good way to do it, because you, you make the search something you feel like you can help them with. And so you just kind of pick the thing you want to do a little bit of research about, then search for that, and you can reach out to companies that are on like page 2 all the way through to page 5 or 10, depending on how robust that search is. So the more niche the search, the less results there's going to be. And keep in mind, what companies really want to be is the first 3 non-advertised results. So 96%, I think was the last stat, or it might be 80%. Look up those stats for your messaging. But These 3 results right here, the top 3 results on page 1, that's where 80% of internet traffic comes from. Search traffic, global internet search traffic, are the top 3 results. 96% stay on page 1. So they don't make it past page 1. If you're on page 2 and you can get to page 1, that means you're getting 10 times the search traffic. Um, so that is one really good way to find the prospects. And then once you do that, you go to their website and you find a couple of things you can critique. So like, for example, let's say we were going to Managed Services Group because I already did their website review. When I got here, I was like, hey guys, you don't have a call to action above the fold. Um, the results come out every year, like what the stats are on this, but it's like 70% of visitors to your website don't get any further than this if there isn't a clear call to action. And most people click right to a pricing page if it exists. If it doesn't exist, they might click to about, but without a clear call to action here, nobody is going to do anything. They're just paralyzed. Like, I don't know. What am I supposed to do? All right, guys, has this been helpful?

Yes, thank you. It helped a lot.

Awesome. I'm going to paste this framework and the problems we talked about today into the chat so you have it. Anything else you guys need from me?

Um, can you send me like your scheduling?

Yep, I dropped it to you directly.

Okay.

All right.

I have a quick question.

Um, I have a company that I was looking at, it's kind of local, and I was trying to figure out how I could find value for them. Can— should I like just like message you later for your opinion on that?

Yeah, send me their website.

Okay.

All right guys, yeah, send me their