Meet MKC's Newest Faces: A Fresh Wave of SDRs Ready to Make an Impact!

Hey guys, how is everybody today?

I'm well, how are you?

I am good. All right, I like to start off every meeting with what we call the positive power-up. We use this for 2 reasons, really. One is we just like to start meetings out with positivity and set the tone for the meeting. And secondarily, gives people time to funnel in without missing any really important content. So I'll kick things off. My positive power-up this week is that my kids are kicking off their second week of school, and there were no tears today when leaving to go to school. Passing it forward to Stephen. What's something great that happened this week, personal or professional?

I started reading Challenger Sales again. I only got a chapter in the first time.

It's a good one. It's a good one.

Yeah.

How about you, Austin?

Um, it's been a pretty, pretty basic week. I'm starting this training, so I guess that's a power-up, huh?

That is.

How about you, Steph?

Um, I got a new car.

I saw that on Facebook. Congrats! Very exciting. It was your birthday too. Happy birthday!

Thanks.

How about you, Megan? We're just doing positive power-up. One good thing from this week.

Hold on. I got— it's like going— I don't know what's going on. Shit's going crazy.

Give me a second. Zoom, always chaos, especially with this many note-takers in the meeting.

Oh, there you are.

Hi.

Hi. So one good thing from this week for you.

I had less panic attacks than last week.

Hell yeah, that's a trend we love to see. I saw that you and your boyfriend went out and you guys did a deprivation tank. Did you like it? Or no, it caused yours?

No, it was so beautiful, and they had speakers in the water, and You float effortlessly.

Everybody wanted to know this much about Megan. No, I wanna know.

All right.

Awesome.

So who here knows a little bit about what we do? Anybody? Okay.

Just what I saw in the videos.

Okay. So based on like your, your research, what you know, if you could just say like one thing, one service, what do you think like our primary offering is, Stephen?

You target technological companies that don't have any type of marketing. They have like 0 to 1 people.

That's, that's accurate. How about you, Austin?

Oh yeah, I was gonna say digital marketing solutions.

Okay.

Stephanie?

Yeah, I was gonna say you focus on B2B and the small tech companies. Like, even I hired you guys for a logo.

Yeah. So we, we kind of segment our audience into a couple of different ICPs. If you follow me on LinkedIn, the primary one you'll have seen is B2B tech. That's my background. I spent 15 years in B2B tech sales loosely, and I've done $500 million in revenue in B2B tech. So we definitely focus there, especially on the LinkedIn side. Our Facebook content strategy is more targeted on another one of our segments, which is small businesses. That audience came out of— well, honestly, it served you courtesy of my mental breakdown over the winter where I felt like— and those of you I know, Austin, you're in tech sales. So I got to the point where I was just like, I'm so sick of making rich people richer, you know, like I had made a— I'd helped people buy second yachts and that just didn't feel like it was fulfilling my need to elevate people and help people make more money that actually need it. So the small business offering came out of me having a little bit of a mental breakdown. People who sell for me typically do not focus on that segment because there's not a lot of money in it. We have really small profit margins. Sometimes we sell things for actually less than it costs us to get them done on the small business side. But If you have like friends, colleagues, whatever, that have small businesses and are looking for work, you can always run it through the agency and potentially make yourself a little bit of money. But at the very least, help them out with lower cost offerings. In terms of the overall, just like background of where the agency came from, I started a consultancy a little over 5 years ago and I just had my twins. Who, who here's a parent? I have 2 kids. Okay. So just imagine having 2 premature babies at once. I at the time was working for Ericsson on their UDN project. I was overwhelmed with being in the boardroom, traveling to California all the time, and I decided to consult. Absolutely loved it. I don't think I've ever really been happier in my life than when I was full-time just consulting. But what happened is my clients were regularly like, hey Megan, this is a great plan. Love this strategy. Who's gonna do it? And so the agency over time grew out of having freelancers, consultants, other agencies we leveraged to help clients deploy the tactics that we developed for them.

Right?

And over time we built more internal employees. We built out more freelancers, more consultants, and more agencies that we worked with to the point where we do almost everything in-house now. That said, it doesn't mean we focus on everything, right? So if a client comes to us, an existing client, someone we're already working with, and they're like, hey, we need social media marketing, we can help with that. We need any type of content, we can help with any type of content. We need, um, SEO. We're gonna white label somebody else's solution because I don't know the first thing about the tech side of SEO. And I just don't have the time to research it. So they'll give us a strategic plan and we'll help fill in the content for that. Same thing with like website development, website design. 90% of the time when a client comes to us for website work, the actual web development is gonna be done by another agency that we're white labeling. And in-house we're doing like the copywriting and the content in terms of our go-to-market strategy and what we really, really focus on. There's sort of 3 things that we push in-house that we're good at. We know we can deliver on, and we do a good job with. The first one is my consulting. So we package that a bunch of different ways, right? And I would say 80% of our customers, because this is a service-based industry, 80% of our customers end up in something custom anyways, regardless of what they come in for. They end up in a customized plan. But we sell sales processes. Um, 30, 60, 90-day marketing plans and fractional CRO are our main focuses on the consulting side. And then we do lead generation in a variety of forms. Uh, raise your hand if you saw Outbound Engine as one of our offerings when you were doing research. Anybody? No. Okay. Um, that is our top-selling product right now, in large part because it's relatively inexpensive. It's like a $4,500 onboarding. And then they're paying less than $2,000 a month to maintain it, and it's giving them a combination of us setting up a CRM for them, doing some upfront consulting to define their ICP and their UVP. Everybody know what ICP is? Okay. Anybody confused about what ICP means? Okay. ICP is ideal client profile. Meaning we're like not just defining their target audience for them, but who really an ideal customer is. And when we're unpacking that, we're usually doing it from the perspective of which customers are like the most profitable for you, cause you the least amount of headache. You actually want more of them. How many people have heard of the 80/20 rule?

Yeah.

So 80/20 rule is this concept that like 20% of your activity generates 80% of your revenue. But it's also 20% of your customer base generates 80% of your revenue. So we— and it's not always 100% to that statistic, but it just means that there are customers that pay you a lot more for a lot less, and you want more of them. We help our customers figure out what that is, and then we help them figure out what makes them better than their competitors. Why do those people buy from them? And we put together a strategy for them That includes cold calling and cold emailing, and we deploy it in a new CRM for them. And that's the outbound engine program. And then it just costs them a little less than $2,000 a month to keep that running for as long as they want to. And the way we sort of pitch it is you don't have an outbound engine today. Like most of these customers, these clients, they have a ticketing system, usually ConnectWise, Autotask, Halo PSA. But they don't have a traditional CRM. And so they don't have a place that they're tracking like deals, prospects, who they're getting traction with. And we build that all out for them. And then we use that first 6 months to figure out if it's even worth it. Should you be doing cold email? Should you be doing cold calling? Because the truth of the matter is not every ICP responds well to either of those things. Sometimes we deploy that and at the end of 6 months I'm like, hey, listen, you need a channel sales strategy, or you should be doing like video outbound on LinkedIn, or you should really be getting into like the Discords and Slack channels that your clients are in because not everyone is gonna buy from cold outbound. And within 6 months we know that. I know a couple of you guys have been in, in like traditional sales roles before. Austin, Candace, who— anybody else been like in a sales job? Y'all know sometimes you get handed a target list and it's the worst target list you've ever had in your life. Who here has spent like hours and hours cold calling to not set a single meeting because the list was just bad?

Yeah.

Yeah. So if you do that for 6 months, You know full well that target profile, not receptive to cold calling. Have you been screamed at during a cold call? Like, fuck you for calling me. How'd you get my cell phone number? And God forbid you tell them how you got their cell phone number. That's a rookie mistake, right? Nobody likes to hear that. So we figure that out and then we pivot and we make some changes. Under lead gen, we also have this fractional SDR program, which is much more flexible. So fractional SDR. Is where usually someone has come in under Outbound Engine and they used it for a little bit. Maybe it was a little bit successful, but it didn't get them where they wanted to be. They need something more flexible. And that's really why you guys are here. Outbound Engine and Fractional SDR is you guys selling yourselves. With Fractional SDR, somebody finds someone inside the MKC agency team that they're like, I vibe with them. I feel like they can represent my brand well. But I wanna have a little bit more control over the outbound activity, right? So in that outbound engine program, it's 200 contacts. We cold email, we cold call them, and it's very inflexible because at the price point, we're very, very close to not making money on it. Fractional SDR, we're charging a similar amount of money, but I'm just saying, um, hey, you want access to Megan for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, or you want access to her for 10 hours a week. Whatever their contract looks like. But maybe you want that activity to look like she's doing the research by hand, because if you know, if you've ever worked a bad list, you know that if you spend, you know, an hour researching that list, it becomes a better list. So maybe they want that. They want their SDR to do more research before they cold call. Maybe they want more qualifying criteria. They want us to go beyond the 2 or 3 questions we ask before setting a meeting. They want to have like a specific Qualification protocol. Maybe they want you to do some LinkedIn outbound. They want you to connect with, with a prospect and do some outbound. And it's a 2-way conversation that happens between the, the client, myself, and the SDR, right? So like if someone came in and they're like, I want Austin to be my SDR, but I want him working from like 11 to 1 every day. And Austin, you were like, that does not work for me. I would give them the choice like, do you, do you really want Austin? And these are his hours that he's available, or are you— those hours are what's important to you and you want a different SDR? Similarly, another one that comes up a lot is like whether they want you to represent them on LinkedIn. I know some of you have other jobs, so it's not possible for you to go and switch up what your LinkedIn says and say like, you know, I'm an SDR at this company or whatever title they want you to put on. So those are the things that we negotiate, and then it's a custom plan for them. And then the third thing that we do is the marketing agency stuff. Stereotypical in there. The thing that we focus on the most is content marketing, because it's what we know that we can do in-house and do well, and we consistently have the team to do it. I don't have to go hire any new resources or open up any new contracts to get that rolling. But we also do all the other You know, marketing agency stuff that people look for if they want SEO, if they want a website, if they want social media marketing. We do not currently have a partner that we are confident in doing paid ads. I say that because paid ads has kind of gone to crap. Anybody here like worked for a company that's using paid ads? Using some.

It's horrible.

Yeah. Anybody seen a decrease in inbound leads cuz it, the paid ad channel is, it's noisy and there's not a lot of conversion off of it right now. So we went, we like took that thing that we were doing and we said we're not doing it anymore because we can't offer people results and we don't wanna burn our overall relationship with a client on one thing that we're not confident we can do well. So it's much better for us to say, no, we don't do that, than say, oh yeah, we can do that, and then they lose confidence in us and all the other things that we could have done really well for them. Okay, that information. What questions does everybody have?

I have a question. Um, so the things that you're gonna be having us do to find the clients is kind of like what you just described we would be doing for them if we got Associated with them?

Yes, very similar. So at first I go into HubSpot where you get a seat, um, or Apollo.io, either one, whichever tool you're more comfortable with really. And I assign you people to call that I already know are qualified, right, from my own. I personally, the reason I started to hire SDRs is because I have 9,000 tasks in HubSpot that I need to complete that I have not completed. Because when I started selling, the amount of like leads that I put in there that I could reach made sense when sales was kind of my full-time thing. And then we got clients, and I had to manage them and fulfill things, and all of a sudden I didn't have the time for the sales activity. So I have tons and tons of leads in there that I've had like either some type of interaction with, or I just know that they're qualified because I've stalked them previously. And I assign those to you in the beginning. And then after like a couple of weeks when you're more comfortable, then you can go out and hunt and find your own leads based on what you know about our ideal client profile. Awesome.

So question about The payment structure whenever for the fractional SDR role. So for this, like for you, you mentioned, I think it was what, like $15 an hour plus commission or something like that? And then, so let's say we become a fractional SDR, is it, are you still gonna be paying us at all or is it just the company that hires us?

Typically I still pay you. They pay me, I pay you.

Like how do you pay like that $15 per hour?

So usually it's whatever, like it's a monthly contracted rate.

Gotcha.

So if you're doing 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week for somebody and you're not quote unquote proven, the starting rate is $600 a month for that 10 hours a week, right? It's roughly still $15 an hour.

Mm-hmm.

Once you've serviced a client and I can put together a use case for you, And say, hey, this is Austin. He sets on average, you know, 12 meetings a week based on 10 hours a week, whatever that comes out to for our clients. Then I can go and I can list you for more and be like, you know, because then when we send our proposals out, I say this is what it costs for you to have like a junior SDR, a mid-level SDR, or senior SDR. And we used to have a really good bucket in each of those where I had lots of new people. Lots of mid-level and lots of senior. But those of us that have been in sales know that once you're proven, you can make a lot more money and you get a lot more job offers. So we've struggled to retain talent as they scale up. And while it's a struggle for the business on the back end, I'm really proud of that. I'm extremely proud that my SDRs go off and do great things with their lives and go make more money and are happier. Like, that's wonderful. But on the flip side, it also means I have to go back to my clients and be like, you know that SDR you loved? Either you have to pay me substantially more for them or they're going to go take this job. So as you, as you go uphill, we also charge more and you can make more. And it's just a matter of like keeping negotiations open. Clients usually set, sign a 6-month contract. So you're kind of stuck making what you make for 6 months. But then at the end of the 6 months you can be like, you know, I'd love to renew my contract, but I need to make more money. And if you're doing a good job, I mean, most business owners, if you're setting them qualified meetings that are turning into deals for them, they're gonna want to pay more to retain you. And that's sort of why we sign that 6-month contract, because in my experience, that's how long it takes our clients to start seeing a return.

Mm-hmm.

Because you have to set the meeting, then they have to do a qualifying call, usually discovery call. Some of them also have demos before they submit a proposal, and then they have this negotiation period they go into. So it takes about 6 months for them to start closing deals and being like, oh fuck, Austin's rad. I can't believe he brought us this much money. And that gives you a better place to negotiate than just saying, well, I can set meetings. Because if those meetings aren't converting and turning into revenue, small, mid-sized tech companies, they don't care. Because they, they need the revenue.

Gotcha. And so with that contract, you said, you just mentioned, I'm gonna throw this number, $600 per month. Does commission, is commission involved in that? Like, so like, let's say we set a call that closes, like we get that, we get a percentage of that, correct?

Yep. So there's a couple different ways we do it in the Outbound Engine program. Anyone who's doing Outbound Engine that's using US-based SDRs and they're choosing they want US talent, they have to agree that after their first 4 meetings in a 6-month period, they're going to pay $100 per meeting commission. And that goes direct to the SDR. So you make that paid to you. Sometimes they pay me and I pay you and it takes longer. But usually what I recommend is that they just Venmo you or Cash App you or whatever, which can cause potential problems for them if you set a lot of meetings, because then they need to be able to count it in their taxes. But we figure that out as we go.

I'm gonna just ask about the $100 per meeting. Would you say about that?

That's what the outbound engine Clients are agreeing to. They're gonna pay $100 per meeting after the first four.

That's you that close or that qualified meetings? Got you, got you, got you.

So as long as they're BANT qualified for outbound engine, because that's like a very strict one where it's like this is what you're agreeing to. BANT qualified. We don't do any additional qualification in outbound engine.

Got you.

For fractional SDR, it is a negotiation. So we sign off on what your monthly stipend is gonna be from them, what your contract is. And then additionally in that contract is whatever the negotiated commission plan is.

Mm-hmm.

I do not allow them to come up with complex commission plans. It has to be pay per meeting. At the very least, they can additionally compensate you on deals closed if they want to. I recommend it to them. I'm like, listen, I pay commission on closed deals because I think it better aligns the SDR to the end goal, which is revenue.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, but if you just want a bunch of meetings on your calendar, just pay 'em for meetings and who cares if it becomes revenue? But we know that like if we're paying an SDR on revenue, that y'all will go out and reengage somebody who went and ghosted, you know, like you set the meeting, they took the meeting and then they didn't make it to demo. You'll go make sure they get on the demo because you want that revenue money that's recurring forever. But it's a negotiated commission plan with the fractional SDR because that's always— it's very custom.

Gotcha.

Cool.

Any other questions about the plans themselves?

Okay, cool.

So we target a couple of different ICPs. I mentioned that we've got B2B tech, small business, and then we also do cannabis, but we haven't done any of that in a while. Really not focused on it, even though that website is fire. It's probably the best website of all my brands.

I need to talk to you about that cuz I have a potential client, so I wanted to really talk about that.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's, it's not that we're like not doing it cuz we don't care about it. We're not doing it cuz the go-to-market in it is very noisy right now. Everyone has decided they wanna do cannabis now that it's spreading and becoming increasingly more legalized and less stigmatized. People who were afraid of saying the word weed before now are super comfortable saying it. But it's still something we've done and something we can do again. The ICP that we do the best in right now is managed service providers. Who knows what a managed service provider is? Okay, so a managed service provider is an IT service company that does outsourced IT for businesses. So in terms of clients we have that are managed service providers, we're working with Tailorworks. Which is a local Longwood-based MSP. I'll drop their websites into the chat so you guys can kind of take a look. So these guys are a client. We're working with C Solutions IT, which is another one that is in Orlando. Usually I try not to have multiple clients that do the same thing in the same market, because it's kind of a conflict of interest. To have them deploying the same strategies. But with these 2, I was very like upfront and honest that it was happening while we were going through it, and I just told them they couldn't have the same ICP. So Taylor Works is heavily going after like legal and medical. So C Solutions is not allowed to go after either of those industries. Managed Services Group was a client last year. They're also in Orlando. And then we've got Comprise. They're in Connecticut, but they support remote, which not many MSPs do support remote. We've got Blue Cotton Tech. Some of these URLs I might be guessing and they might be wrong, but Blue Cotton is in the Washington, DC metro area. ServIQ was one that we did so well that they're no longer a client anymore because they got acquired. That was the same thing with ThinkTech. Both of those were customers of ours that their goal was to be acquired, and we helped them get the revenue they needed to be able to get acquired. Anyways, so that's a good example. It's a good sample size of managed services, although we do have more. And then another industry that we do a lot of work in is telecom. So we're working with these guys right now. Telecom One. And then like we work with these guys and these guys, and then we work with a lot of MSSPs, which are like managed service service providers, which sounds ridiculous. Yes, I know. But there are companies that support the managed service provider community. So this is one of them. Compliance or Skyo. TechStack Advising is another one, although you might now consider them to be a telecom company, but they do telecom and a couple of other things. They're like an aggregator that helps compare tech services for clients. They help you buy things. They started out doing Salesforce and pivoted, and now they do telecom and they're making more money doing that. So we love that for them. We also do quite a bit of SaaS. We— I don't chase SaaS customers. Who here has worked for a SaaS company? Austin, you work for a SaaS company right now, don't you?

Yes.

Yeah. Do you love the culture?

Um, not, not great for right now.

Yeah. So there are things I love working in SaaS. Usually there's a lot of money in it, right? Uh, typically they've raised a decent amount of funding. They have money to spend. They wanna spend it. That's great. Um, but there's a lot of cultural differences between our agency and what we consider to be our core values and the average SaaS company. So does anyone here know what the agency's mission is?

Okay.

Our mission is to prove that ethical marketing is as scalable as traditional marketing. SaaS companies love traditional marketing. They're very attached to it. And authenticity is not always the name of the game. And so like when I hear things in, in a meeting that are like, this is what we want to project out to the world. And it's like, you know, DEI, they want to project that they're diverse, ethical. And then on the back end, it's like, but all of our board members are white men. I have a really hard time representing those companies. And so we don't chase them. But Often the SaaS companies that align with what we do, they come to us because they see me on LinkedIn. When you guys join the team, if you're posting content, they'll see you on LinkedIn, they'll see the brand and they like it and they come to us. So like one of those companies is Clickify. We've been working with these guys for about 6 months. We do a lot of copywriting and content for them. They are extremely ethical and they actually have drank their own Kool-Aid and practiced what they preach. And so I'm more than happy to work with SaaS companies, but I have no interest in, one, the insanely long sales cycles of SaaS companies that have a board of 50 people that make decisions. Like, I'm not presenting to a board to get them to sign a contract. That's not happening. And I just am not interested in being involved in a go-to-market plan that includes lying. And then we've also— we work with these guys, useposeidon.com. They're actually a tool that you guys will learn about later on, but they do LinkedIn automation. Has anybody used LinkedIn automation for sales before? Really? Okay. Well, we're gonna— we'll learn about that later, but Use Poseidon kind of gives us free use of their tool in exchange for some of the things that we do for us, and then sometimes also money changes hands, but Honestly, the free tool is is better for us in most cases. We also work with Harmonize.ai. I think that's it for what we have for SaaS tools today, but we have worked with other SaaS companies in the past. So to recap, MSPs—that's our top target. That's most of our clientele today. Anybody have a guess as to why we do really well with MSPs?

Stephen? They're probably introverts, and they like technology. Yeah, talking to people, not the greatest.

Megan, are you here, or are you hiding because of your kids or something going on at your house? No, I'm here. Sorry. How do we feel about IT directors? Do you love them?

No, I hate them.

They suck.

They're terrible people.

And as I always say, I wish they step on a Lego every morning.

So when we started researching IT directors, because that's one of the targets that Megan's going after right now, we asked in a Slack channel, you know, why won't IT directors talk to us, basically? And the answer was— we got a lot of different answers, but my friend Alex said, IT directors hate salespeople because they think it's black magic because they can't do sales. And most MSP owners come from like one of two backgrounds. Either they were the, the tech guy and they figured out how to make tech their business, which major props to them. Anybody who can make the thing that they're good at that was like their job into an actual business, that's the magic, right? Like if you can do what you do, but do it on your own time. Amazing. So most MSP owners come from that background, like they were an IT director or a network security guy, and they figured out how to make that their business. Then there's the other MSP owner that's like the business guy. They have a business background, they saw a need in the market for IT services, and they started to fill it in their market. We work with both, but the reason that we kick ass with MSPs is because they're just not doing it today. So, uh, Stephen, I think you said that like the best people for us to work with were people who like didn't have marketing today.

Yeah.

And it's just like that, but on the sales side, it's like, what is the easiest way for us to look like absolute rock stars at sales is we come in and they were doing nothing. Which is not to say that we can't come into a situation where someone's doing something and make them do it better. Absolutely we can and we have. But guaranteed positive ROI is like, oh, you aren't doing any outbound today, no sales activity whatsoever, and we come in and we do that. Obviously you're gonna get something out of it that wasn't there before. Even if it's not a huge difference, if they were doing nothing and we do 6 months of cold calling, there's gonna be more in the pipeline than there was before. So if it's like 0 deals to 2 deals, That's incredible ROI versus like, oh, well, there were 5 deals and now there's 7. That doesn't make us look as good. The other reason is my personal experience. So I've worked directly for 2 MSPs, uh, one being Tailor Works, who's a client, the other being Managed Services Group that was a client. Um, so I've actually walked the walk of selling managed services. Another reason is that their business is similar to ours. We allow people to outsource their sales and marketing. They allow people to outsource their IT, which means they already understand the basic premise of our value proposition. Anybody wanna take a guess at what that premise is? You should do what you're good at, not what you suck at. Right? Anybody here heard of the concept of unique ability before? Okay, so unique ability is like you list out everything you do and you figure out which quadrant it goes into in the I'm good at it and I like it all the way back down to I'm bad at it and I hate it. So when we talk about outsourcing, the first thing you're supposed to outsource is the I'm bad at and hate. And the average MSP owner, sales and marketing is bad at and hate. So we know that that's on their top list of things to outsource. Whereas like MSPs, if they're talking about IT outsourcing, there are gonna be companies that maybe IT they don't hate. So we help them kind of reverse engineer that back to like, well, who hates, say, who hates IT and is bad at it? Let's go find those companies, right? Uh, so like dentists are not good at IT and they hate it, but like engineers think they're good at IT, but they're not. So it's a very different sale. So they already understand the premise and they understand the, the concept of paying for it. So we charge roughly $2,000 a month. The average MSP is gonna have a bare minimum of like 10 seats for them. And if they're a $200 a month per seat MSP, that means their average deal size is about the same size as what we are charging them. So they really only need one deal to break even on paying us. And that's really, really important when we're talking about like positioning pricing, because a lot of people hear lead gen and they just wanna pay commission basically. Like they wanna pay for qualified meetings that are set. And completed. They don't want to pay monthly because they think that that's how sales works. And it's a process of having to explain to them that you have to pay for like the human labor that goes into it. MSPs kind of already get that. They understand the cost of labor. They've probably tried to do something in the past and it didn't go very well for them. And telecom is very similar. Most telcos are run by older guys who want to be done. So the average telecom company that we talk to, the owner founder is somewhere between like 45 and 65, and they've been doing this for a long time. They know the space really well. They're highly technical. They speak almost exclusively in acronyms. And they just, they don't wanna be doing it anymore. They've been like the sales guy, the main sales guy for like 20 years and they want someone else to take that over. And typically they've hired someone, but that person doesn't know what they're doing yet because they tend to hire people who speak their language. How many people have bought something because the acronym just really spoke to you? No, no, you don't buy it just because someone throws letters at you and don't, doesn't explain what they mean. That tech jargon doesn't do it for you. Most telecom owners, they hire that sales guy that like gets what the acronym means, but not the sales guy that understands sales process or sales methodology or buyer psychology or any of those things. And they think they can train someone else to do it, but they've only ever done owner, owner-led sales. So Austin, that company that you work for, how long have they been around?

Um, I think like, uh, 3, 4 years.

Okay. So before they started a sales team, who was doing sales?

The CEO.

And when, when they first hired a sales team, was there a little bit of friction? Because there's a huge difference.

I wasn't there, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't know.

You should ask your leaders, ask them what it was like to build a sales process away from the founder, because this is like a really big thing you run into in the tech world. Is that founder-led sales is completely different than salesperson-led sales. So like the way that I cold call has to be completely different than how Megan cold calls and how you guys will cold call. Mm-hmm. Because when I call, I, I'm the product. I know everything. I can make decisions on the fly. If someone's like, well, could you do it for this price? I can be like, yeah, no, whatever. And I can also come up with whatever I wanna say. And most the leads I get are inbound. They came to me. Because they'd heard of me. Mm-hmm. Not necess— like, I don't think we've ever closed a deal at this point in our journey where someone has been, I've heard really great things about MKC Agency. They say, I've heard really great things about you, Megan. And so we're at that point where we're trying to scale away from that and create it to be like, I've heard good things about MKC Agency. I've heard good things about your sales team. Not about me anymore, but it's a rough transition, especially for tech companies, because the CEO has all the knowledge in their head, and historically they're really bad at getting it out on paper and documenting it so that you can know the answer. So I've sold for a lot of tech companies where, like, during the sales process, when someone asks me a question and they're like, oh, well, can your tool do this? I have to be like, one second. Well, I Slack the person who built it because I don't have a list, you know? And that's where most MSPs are at, where they've been really, really reliant on founder-led sales. And that honestly, when we do really well with SaaS companies, that's where they're at. When they're trying to make that transition, that's where we come in and we can be really helpful. Not that we can't help substantiated sales teams, but there's just less pain points to iron out. We've got what, like 15 minutes left? Yeah. All right. I'm gonna open it up for you guys' questions. Think of this like if this were a sales job interview, right? And you— this is a 2-way interview where I'm asking you questions about your experience. You're asking me questions about the agency. What would you wanna know to make sure you could be successful in a sales role here?

How much the average person makes over 10 hours or roughly a month.

Yeah. So they make their hourly, so they're making the $600 and then usually set 4 to 5 meetings in a 10-hour call block. That is typically like between 4 and 6 meetings in that, like a week, 10 hours. If they're doing the majority of their research outside of their booked hours. So if you're like booking your calling hours, but you're kind of doing the research separate, 4 to 6 meetings. If you're counting your research towards your hours, that's your prerogative. You have every right to do that. But that's usually like 2 to 3 meetings. So you can kind of double your volume of meetings by doing your research the night before.

So 16 to 20 meetings, 2%, depending on the deal.

So I would say count it by the spiff because you get that much faster.

Yeah.

So that's roughly like another $500 in a, in a 10-hour block. If you're doing 5 meetings that are $50, that's $250. If you're doing 5 that are $100, you're doing $500. It usually takes 2 to 3 months for something to book and close. So that you're gonna get residuals on it. Not that I don't do a one-call close now and again, but it's unusual. Yeah. Candace.

Real quick, whenever you say your research, I'm guessing you're gonna give us a list the day before and we can, we go and like look them up in their company and like what they do and just kind of get a feel for what they, you know.

Yeah.

So I always say find an in. Yeah. You know, like if you can't within 3 minutes of looking at someone's website, find a reason that they need help, they might not be an ideal contact for us.

Mm-hmm.

So if I assign you a lead and you look at their website and you're like, I don't know, it seems like a really good website. Everything's super clear. I bet they have tons of leads coming in. They're maybe not an ideal client. Skip to the next one. But I would say like 99% of the time you pull up their website and you're, there's gonna be immediate things you notice that you're like, well, yeah, I can't tell what you do.

Yeah.

Go to their LinkedIn and you're like, there's no content. They've never posted on LinkedIn. Like their, their LinkedIn like company page is just like not branded. You read through it and it's just a bunch of jargon. Like, you know, you look at it, you're like, oh man, there's so much to fix here. You just pick one of those things to talk about.

Gotcha.

And you generally make sure that they're like within, within, like you wanna know what you're gonna call them about. I think is the biggest thing, because there's a lot of different things you can position and sell here. Um, the outbound engine is definitely the easiest to sell, but you wouldn't wanna call, say, like a SaaS company and position outbound engine because it's literally built for MSPs.

Yeah.

So that's the research. It doesn't take a ton of time, especially owners of MSPs. Like, what you're looking for is there right away. As you kind of scale up and you're trying to go after more money because the like $8,000 a month marketing plans make you more commission than the $2,000 a month lead gen plans, then things get a little bit more complicated cuz there's usually, there's more decision makers you're trying to map and figure out who to talk to. You know, there might be like a marketing director and like a sales guy that you also might wanna loop in and try to talk to.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, it's usually not a ton of research. I, When I'm cold calling, I cap it at 3 minutes. I tell myself that if I can't find a really good hook, a really good opener within 3 minutes of researching, it's not worth my time because we have a huge total addressable market. There are like 7,000 MSPs in the United States. So we don't need to try to sell to the ones that aren't gonna buy from us.

Yeah.

Gotcha. Candace, do you figure out— there we go.

Can you hear me now?

Yeah, I can hear you.

So it seems like you guys have a— it's kind of a no-brainer compared to what I was selling most recently. Um, so what is your biggest pushback when it comes to, uh, you know, actually getting somebody on the phone and then agreeing to take an appointment?

I think the number one that I come up against, and I'll let Megan chime in with what she comes up against too, but the one I get the most is, we've done this before with someone else and they didn't do anything. Yeah. We've wasted a shit ton of money doing this in the past and we didn't get anywhere.

And then what do you say to them?

I mean, essentially you didn't do it with us. And then I, I always ask them, who did you use? Yeah. Because I wanna be able to tell you what we do differently. So like, we know who our biggest competitors are. We've got like Arsenal, Revity, Managed Sales Group, and a couple others that we— people are using most frequently. And so I kind of ask, you know, do you know what their methodology is? What CRM are they using? Do you own that data? The big one, particularly when we're calling about the outbound engine. It's theirs. They own it. They're not paying us to cold call leads, and then when they end our contract, all that data belongs to us and they can't have it. It's all getting put into their CRM, which most often is integrated directly into the ticketing system they're already using. So even if they stopped using the CRM, they'd still have the data. They're gonna have all those call notes. They're gonna know who we talked to, what we talked about. And they can keep things rolling. So they could go hire an internal salesperson. We allow them to proposition our salespeople. So like, if they want to hire you directly, they can do that. There's conversation that needs to happen, but we want them to be successful, and we're willing to be flexible in doing that towards the end of that contract. So the fact that they own the system is like the really biggest differentiator we have. And then the other one is just that we're proven. you know, we've worked with a lot of other MSPs, and we do the upfront consulting to understand their ICP and their unique value proposition. So I was talking today to BL King Consulting, and he does— he's an MSP, but he works for like government contractors exclusively, because he can do the cybersecurity and compliance that they need. And he said he's been working with this agency that's been doing outbound for him for 3 years. And he's never sold a deal out of it.

Oh.

And I was like, okay, well, we, we like unpacked that together. And at the end I was like, well, you don't know your unique value proposition, so they can't know your unique value proposition. So how would they position you to be able to actually sell? And then I also talked to him about some things about like, because he said a lot of times he's going into meetings and it's very obvious that they only took the meeting to be nice. And I was like, yeah, that can happen. You know, the cold caller calls, they like you, they book the meeting cuz they like you, and then someone else shows up to the meeting and that rapport is immediately lost. So we do a lot of fact finding in our early cold calling to get data that helps them sell when they get into the meeting. Like, are you using an MSP today? Are you happy? What are you unhappy with? How long's your contract? What are they doing well? What are they not doing well? Where are they located? Where are you located? All of those fun things. Megan, did you wanna chime in on what, what the most common pushback you get when you're cold calling is like to— they don't wanna book a meeting. Why?

Uh, I would probably have to say they feel like what you had said initially is that they wasted money. Like I, I had a guy tell me one time, he's like, I've dumped tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing and nothing ever worked. I don't even believe that you just started cold calling. Call me back if you want a real job. Like it was like, it was pretty harsh. And then like that was the main one that I get. The other one too is that you can ask if they, who they're working with, you can kind of weasel your way in for an answer on that. But a lot of the times they won't give that to you unless if you have like this friendly conversation with them before they feel like they're divulging information. And then from that point, you can research the other company. The other pushback that I get is that, you know, that they had just hired somebody already and that they are not currently looking for anything. So I still will send them an email, and I'll just say, hey, I appreciate you even answering my call. I know that you already have somebody, but here's a lot of information that I can give you about, you know, our products and services, our consultation prices. And then if your marketing company is lacking in any of those ones that we can pick up, we're not trying to take over someone else's in-house marketing team. We're trying to work alongside you guys so that way you grow. We're not trying to overstep. We're just here to help grow.

And then we just put those people into nurture campaigns based on what we know. Like, we put them into a list in HubSpot based on— like, I have one that's just like definitely MSP owners, and we send them, you know, like I would say once every 2 months, once every month, we send something highly relevant out to those lists to continue to nurture them. And if it's your lead and you've logged cold calls for them, and you're the one that put them in the list, and they reply to that email, even if it's coming to me, and they're like, All right. Yeah. Let's set a meeting. You're still gonna make your commission on that. Like I commissioned Megan on a meeting that I cold called and got, but I cold called because she, she told me to call them. So like, don't, don't feel like you won't get paid if you put something in like a nurturing campaign or you're not directly setting that meeting on my calendar. Just make sure you do a good job in logging. In HubSpot. All right, any other questions, guys?

I have a question.

Yes.

Um, so I've never had a typical sales job, and, uh, cold calling is kind of frightening to me. It did not work out well for me when I tried it in real estate. The only experience I've had is selling basically myself as a photographer on the phone calls because I know my process so well. They've already seen my gallery, so like they already know what my results are. I'm having to sell them on the Experience with me. Um, are you gonna kind of help coach us up being a better sales, like just on the phone? Yes.

And I'm, I'm, I'm gonna piggyback on that real quick. Is there like a script or like a frame that you, that you all give us?

We don't use scripts cuz I hate cold calling scripts.

Yeah, that's why I said, or frame.

But yes, there is a framework. Um, so when we get to the cold calling, we'll do at least one session on cold calling, but probably like multiples cuz I think that's where The biggest focus is gonna be. We will talk about positioning, we'll talk about frameworks, and we'll also talk about why it's all bullshit and none of it works, and how actually you just wanna call people like you're calling your friends and figure out what your voice is. So I'll show you all my frameworks, the ones that I've worked— used, the ones that I've coached on. But really what I'm gonna do is work with you in those sessions to build your framework that works for you. So like Megan sets a shit ton of meetings by being self-deprecating and funny. Like she just calls owners and she's like, this is a cold call, you can hang up on me, like I'm interrupting your day. And that works for her. If you are not self-deprecating and funny, that's not gonna work for you. It's just gonna come across strained the same way it would come across strained if Megan tried to cold call and be like, like hyper professional and technical, because that's just not Mm-hmm. Not that she can't be both those things, but that's not her personality.

Gotcha.

And it's why like founder-led sales is so different than what you're gonna do. Like Stephen, I know you're reading a ton of different methodologies and stuff, and they all, if you compare like SPIN, Challenger, Sandler, you put those all side by side, the fundamentals of what they're saying are all the same, right? It's stuff like ask questions. Like, okay, okay.

So their product.

Yeah. Pain, solution to the pain, you know, like those types of things. But the biggest thing for me in sales is that you absolutely have to be authentic to who you are and you have to figure out what works for you. Mm-hmm. Typically, like when I go into like a hiring class for a client that has hired me to build their sales team, I wanna hire for other people's weaknesses. So usually on any given team, I wanna have a really strong cold caller. I wanna have someone who's really good at copywriting cold email. I want someone who loves to do video messaging. I want someone who's a really good social seller, and then I want those people to build on their fundamental strengths back and forth together. So Austin, Candace, I know you guys have both done sales before. What's worked really well for you?

For, for what exactly?

Like selling, like what is the most consistent way you can set a meeting?

Um, so I mean, we have a, we have like a, a frame, like a, you know, a frame that we follow and just, um, following pretty much just following that frame. And after, you know, kind of time doing it, you pick up on, you know, what, what part of it is that frame.

It works for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you're, uh, is it primarily cold calling?

Uh, so it's inbound, it's leads, it's paid. We run paid ads and collect leads. Um, however, these real estate agents click on a bunch of them, and so most of the time, like, they might have an idea or they might say like, oh, I clicked on a bunch of those, I don't know who you are, or whatever. So, you know, it's inbound leads, but it is kind of— and then call.

In that case, time to respond. Is gonna be a huge differentiator. Yeah. Yeah. Right. If they're, if they're putting out bids with a whole bunch of people, you wanna be the first one back.

Yeah.

Also too, Stephanie, I was, I've never cold called. I've never done sales. I've never done any of it. And during the training, on my own accord, I went on YouTube and I just hit cold calls, B2B tech, and I was watching All of those schmucks on there who are like, you know, can I ask you 2 questions? And they're like, sure. And you're like, all right, second question. You know, that just didn't work for me, like the lingo and the jargon. But hearing how all of those people did all of those things, I was able to pick certain things from those and then use it in my voice, in my sense of humor. So it was like And the best one to look up to just all around in general is when people like rejections and like flat out like nos. Now I highly suggest, and Megan will also tell you too, if someone tells you no, don't be like, but listen, you know, like you have to respect what they're doing. But at the same time, go back and do an email and be like, I totally understand and respect your objection. I just want you to know that I wasn't able to fully tell you what I wanted to call you for. So here's some information, you have my info. And a lot of times people will actually— you can see how many times people click and open those. They're not 100%, but you could see it. And then you can be like, well, they seem interested. So you can do a follow-up with that in like a week and be like, hey, I noticed that you probably, you know.

What about you, Candace? What has worked for you in the past with sales?

So I I'm pretty good at turning a cold call into a sale. Like how at my last job, it was one call close. Yep. When you're dealing with larger companies, it is harder to do that because of, you know, other people involved.

You're not even gonna get the decision maker. You gotta get through a gatekeeper first.

Right. But I am really good at email. So basically, if I have time to listen to like What if you can give me something that I, where I can hear how they need to be spoken to, I can create an email to make them call.

Because you're really strong on copywriting, right? Yeah. So that's what it's— yes, there's a framework to answer that question, but I really coach on not following it because what works for me, what works for Megan, what works for you, it's all gonna be different. And I really believe in like coaching the fundamentals and getting you guys a really deep understanding of the messaging and the personas so that on the fly— because the thing too is like, if you've ever cold called anyone, you know, they almost never respond the way that like you were prepping for them to respond. Wouldn't it be so easy if like in life people just responded the way we prepared? for them to respond. I'm hella autistic. So like, that's forever putting me into loops when like I prep for something and then people like, they don't respond the way I wanted them to respond. And I'm like, sorry, I have to shut down and think about this social interaction for a while before I can come up with a new response. So you have to be willing to just on your feet change things. We do have kind of like a cascading— I'm sure you've seen, Austin, you've seen like the waterfalls that are like, if this, then this.

Mm-hmm.

We have those that are like, well, if they say this, then you can try this. Yeah. If they say this, then you can try this. And you can try that for like a week or two. But what we've seen be the most effective is just like leaning into what you're good at and your experience too, because almost everyone starts in selling lead gen. So you're really selling you. So the more you can make that cold call feel genuine and feel like you did a little bit of research, you get them, then they turn around and they're like, well, yeah, I want this guy to cold call for me because I felt like I was just talking to my friend.

Mm-hmm.

And the same thing with like any other methodology. Like Stephen, you sent me a video. That's always a great added touch. Like when you're doing outbound, um, people respond to it because it's, it's so much harder. The number one thing today that's working against us as salespeople is automation because there's just this volume of crud out there. I mean, there's literally, I don't know if you guys have seen any of this, but there are AI cold callers now.

Wow.

Yeah. And they're pretty good. Like not better than a good salesperson, but better than a bad salesperson. You know? And so that volume of just like automated AI crud makes people so much more like close to their chest. They don't wanna talk to you. They don't wanna respond to a message. Video is very, very hard to automate. It requires like a customized thought and message. And so like if we look at email open rates, which industry standard is like 25%, cold email, not warm, cold email, 25% open rate. The open rate on cold video is like 78%. So that's a really big difference in just getting your message seen, getting it heard. So yeah, to answer the question, we do have frameworks, but ultimately we kind of like throughout the training process, my goal is to really figure out what each of you, what your unique ability's gonna be, what you're gonna be good at. 'Cause we're gonna do like trials of all these things. We're gonna role play all of them. So we'll role play cold messaging, we'll role play cold calling. And when we're doing that, I'm gonna pretty quickly be able to spot out and be like, oh man, you're gonna be so good on the phones. Versus like, you should probably be writing cold emails versus, you know, maybe you should be doing some LinkedIn prospecting and what's gonna work for you. But I will say that in terms of just what works in the industry right now, I was never a cold caller like in the past, and I did— I was an SDR first. That's how I came up into my career, and I was never big on cold calling. I always thought it was stupid and took way too much time, and I could do volume on email and LinkedIn much faster. Cold calling is the best way to make money in sales right now, in my opinion. And I think you'll see that opinion reflected a lot of places because email and LinkedIn are just so full of just noise. Like everybody here is on LinkedIn. Yeah. You get messages. Yep. Yeah. And you're just, and like, they're bad, right? Like you're just like, What? Who wrote this? Do you get the ones that are like 8 paragraphs?

No, no.

Yeah, I agree, Hunter. Big same. All right, cool. We are out of time. If you guys have questions, comments, concerns, email them to me. I'll see y'all in our next session, which is about prepping— or no, no, we're gonna do targeting and building an ICP. Um, next. And what's cool about this is this, this will help you across sales anywhere. It's not just for us, but it'll help you better understand like how you do that.

Awesome.

Bye. See you tomorrow.

Have a great one.