Prepping For Outbound Messaging 101

So we ran through most of this last week, and Kai has been through it before, so I will try to move quickly. But basically for us, the ideal customer is B2B technology companies that have at the very least very small marketing departments, but we prefer kind of smaller companies. Usually in that like 15 to 50 employee range where the founder, owner, CEO is still very involved with day-to-day operations. Um, truly talking about ideal customers, we are looking for companies that are already profitable but not leveraging a ton of sales and marketing to get there. So managed services group has been by and large our number one best customer. We love working with them. They are so grateful for everything that we do. They're great to work with. They're very responsive. And all of that really boils down to, they're already making money. They have good internal culture. They already have leaders defined inside the organization. And they are currently scaling out of SMB. So, they're a small to medium-sized business. Very localized in their business, and they've never really done any real marketing before. It's all been word of mouth. They know their product is good. They know they do a good job, but they don't know how to reach people, how to rank for SEO, how to get their website really well done. Those things evaded them. That's why they're an incredible customer for us, and it helps that their business model is similar. They're an outsourced technology company. We are an outsourced marketing company. They get it in a way a lot of other customers will not. We get the most wins definitely from inbound demand generation from people who find me on LinkedIn. I am really, really looking forward to helping you guys replicate that with your own personal brands. For me, I have influenced over $500 million in pipeline. At least 90% of that has come from LinkedIn, really like 99%. In the beginning, I was generating money on LinkedIn by outbounding, like hitting people in their inbox. And I did a good job with it, but LinkedIn was new, so there weren't a ton of people doing that yet. I actually did not have to be as good with my messaging then as I am teaching you guys to be today. Because at the time, getting a message on LinkedIn was like getting an IM. And people were like excited. They were like, ooh, somebody messaged me. Opened it, and even though it was kind of spammy, they didn't recognize it was spammy yet. So going down, companies that have the shortest sales cycles are always the people who know me. If they know me, they've worked with me in some capacity before, They one-call close. And it will probably be true for you guys too, with the exception of like Natalia walked us into Globenet and she knows them really well. They have a whole procurement team, so they can't one-call close. But those people that you've worked with before who know your work ethic, who trust you, they're going to be the fastest to close. We're B2B. We primarily work in the tech industry. When I say technology, we have the most experience in CDN, telecom, managed services, infrastructure, IaaS, so infrastructure as a service, anything network. But we also do have some experience with startups and with SaaS. Niche, like just kind of getting deeper into that, we're looking at like— I hesitate to use the word small business because I don't mean like a mom-and-pop shop. But I mean low headcount, under-resourced. We're looking at under-resourced companies. There are a lot of reasons that companies choose to hire internally for sales and marketing. We are looking for the companies that aren't ready to do that yet. Departmentally, usually if there's more than 2 people in marketing, We're not going to be an easy win unless they have a whole bunch of marketing jobs listed that they can't fill. Kai and I talked about this in our one-on-one a few minutes ago, which is why you guys saw some new info drop into the general channel. Um, but essentially, like, if someone has 3 or 4 marketing jobs listed and the time to hire is 45, 50 days, for their industry, we can come in and get started tomorrow, especially if those are key marketing hires. So let's say we're looking at a company that has, say, 5 marketing headcount and they don't have a graphic designer today. And you go look at their LinkedIn and you're like, oh wow, there is no graphic design. Like, this is terrible. They don't have the branding down. That's a perfect opportunity for us to come in and be like, just let's Let us do it. Let us take it over. Geography, we do not have anything limiting our geographic reach. However, we do best in English-speaking countries. So US, UK, Australia, those are the big ones. All of our current customers are US headquartered, but there is no reason that they have to be. Locations, it doesn't really matter, but if they have more than 5, they probably are too big and too complicated for us. Defining the personas, we talked about this last week, but essentially we are looking at director and above marketing or C-level. We are talking owners, founders, presidents, CEOs. What are they worried about? Always revenue, and sometimes also productivity and brand. So this is where I think we left off last week. Kye and Natalia, is that right? Did we leave off here?

Yes.

Mm-hmm. So one of the most important questions that I ask myself before I dial, if I'm cold calling, what's the most likely thing I'm interrupting? So if you are calling, like direct dialing a cell phone for a CEO, what do you think the most likely thing you're interrupting is?

A meeting of some type?

Yeah, could be interrupting a meeting. Um, it could be, could be a meeting. Um, a lot of times it's management related, right? Like they're, they're trying to keep up with people, they're trying to lead. Uh, sometimes it's finance, especially these size orgs that we talk to. So like, I'm still deeply involved in our finances every single day. Gods, I wish I were not, but we're just not there for me to have budget to outsource that task yet. So like, finance is a big one, and it's a headachy one. So it's actually ideal situation when we call a CEO and they're in the middle of like trying to figure out finances, because our conversation is going to be relevant and they're happy to be interrupted. Um, When they are the happiest. CEOs, it's literally like anything, something new happened. So like acquisitions, new deals, new products, new markets. CEOs love new. Entrepreneurs love new. If we didn't, we wouldn't do what we do. How they accomplish their job. And what skills they need. So what tools are they using? This is an interesting one to ask ourselves in relation to tools, especially when it comes to relevant tools for us. So like if we are talking to a marketing decision-maker, today most of their work might be happening in Canva. That's a cool thing to know, because one of the things that we can do for companies and that we do for them when they sign with us is we build a bunch of Canva templates so that they can quickly create content on their own. And then we start building out a database of unique graphics that they can reuse in those Canva templates. So are we making ourselves redundant? A little bit. But it's a really cool value-add we do from the beginning. So like if they were on a 1-year contract with us, by the end of that 1 year they are going to have a huge database of Canva content that they can use. Other tools they might be using, there are a million when it comes to sales and marketing. But some that we look for are HubSpot, because we now sell HubSpot. So if they are using HubSpot already in like a low level, like one of the free tiers, that's great for us. They might be using some kind of outbound tool. There are a million. Poseidon is our partner and we can resell them. And I am always open to other partnerships like this, but I won't partner with direct competitors because I just think it's a conflict of interest. So like if we know somebody in network that we think would be really great for something we don't do today, I'm always open to those convos. The skills they need are primarily like leadership. For us. Some marketing depending on who we are talking to. Where they spend their time. Anybody know the answer to this million-dollar question? I preach about it all the time. I hope you all know.

I was going to say Reddit, but I don't think that's right.

I mean, it could be for some of them. Some of them might be on Reddit. LinkedIn? Yes, they are all on LinkedIn. I'm actually in the middle of a LinkedIn post about LinkedIn, so I happen to know the answer to this. 40% of LinkedIn users are DMs, business DMs of some kind. They have 722 million members back in 2020, so they have grown since then. 50% of those users are active each month. And LinkedIn is the most widely used social media platform among the Fortune 500. Nearly 90% of Fortune 500 business decision makers are on LinkedIn. And business DMs consider LinkedIn to be 3 times as trustworthy as other social networks. Only 1% of LinkedIn users are sharing content daily, less than 1% actually. And only 0.001% of users, that's 1 million out of 722 million, have published an article of any kind on LinkedIn. But 45% of LinkedIn article readers are high-level decision makers. That's all. Suffice it to say that LinkedIn is a motherfucking gold mine, guys. It is a gold mine. And that is where they are. If, if there's a social media platform they're on, that is it. There are also some on Reddit, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram. But for our case, it's LinkedIn. Like, just heavily bold that word LinkedIn, man. What are they interested in? Outside of work. What do we think that CEOs of B2B tech companies are into? Non-work related.

Sports.

Sometimes, yeah, sports are occasionally. Let me, let me give you my 15 years of doing it. They are into Marvel. And superheroes. And comics. I cannot tell you the number of calls I've been on with these guys where directly behind their heads there's something nerdy as hell directly behind them I can comment on. Also heavily Star Wars. A little bit of Harry Potter, especially as millennials are getting up into this decision-maker level. Guys, millennials are 30 years old now. They are making the business decisions, and they love Harry Potter. Almost everywhere that I exist is my Ravenclaw house. It is part of my brand because it connects with them. Video games is huge. If you don't play video games, I don't want to force you to be into something you're not into, but if you do happen to play video games, gold mine for building rapport in the tech space. They love them. Talk about them for hours. A lot of them, especially like the C-level, personal development. I would say that 50% of my calls with C-levels, I can see in the background, like you can actually see in my background, you see those books back there? They're all personal development books. They almost always have books like this in their office. Networking is big for the C-suite. And then also some of these trend lines become very popular. So trend lines I've been watching lately that have been taking off are the metaverse and NFTs/crypto. Which also answers to like when they aren't working, what are their hobbies? See above. When they are working, What's their least favorite part of their job? What do we think, like, the C-suite hates doing? I could say actually do the thing. They are visionaries. They think, they have the idea, and tell someone to do. Yes, so CEOs don't like implementing things. They like thinking about things. Yes, that is absolutely true. So for them, typically the thing that they get stuck doing, I mentioned one of them, right, finance, administrative work, any like individual contributor work. Some of the CEOs, I would actually say it's about a 50/50 split in the C-suite because it depends if they come from a sales and marketing background or they come from a technical product background. But technical product C-suite hate selling. The marketing and sales C-suite background hates operations. So we're going to just split this in half, which is like the sales/marketing CEOs Hate ops. That's me. I'm a sales and marketing CEO. I hate operations. I hate finance. If it includes numbers, please go away. I don't want to do analytics. When we're talking about the product and tech background CEOs, they hate sales and marketing. And a lot of them, Will tell you they don't need it. I can't tell you how many calls I've been in with these CEOs that come from technology backgrounds that are like, "Oh, I don't need marketing. My product is really good." You know, night remembering me something. I didn't hear it about marketing, but the most unreal thing that I listened in my life was, I don't need sales team. Yeah, I don't need salespeople. Okay, well, if you don't think you need it, I don't know if I can help you yet. Um, so knowing the prospect, talking about situational challenges, specifically that MKC solves for, right? So situational challenge. What do you think is a situation or challenge that we solve? Something that somebody would come to you and be like, I'm having a lot of trouble with blank, and you could insert MKC.

I'm sorry?

So a situational challenge would be like, So I'll give you the one that Kai— I'll give Kai full credit for this. Hiring sales and marketing resources. This is actually a huge opportunity for us right now because salaries are on the rise. I am currently trying to source 8 ISRs, which is the same thing as an SDR, for StackPath. They want to pay $45,000 to $55,000 a year. And they can only source brand new to the field people. Anyone with any experience will not take that salary today. 5 years ago, that was like a, hell yeah, here's my resume. What would you like me to do? I'll come dressed fancy. And today, there are SDRs getting placed at $60,000 to $90,000 a year base. So the salaries are high. The time to hire, in 2020 before COVID hit, time to hire on average was 20 days in the technology field. It is currently 80 days. That's 4 times as long to hire someone as it was 2 years ago. That's crazy. If you need to scale revenue, if it is mission critical that you scale, and it's going to take you 80 days to get the person in the seat, probably makes more sense to just bring us in for less. So there's 2 things we do that solve for this, right? You've got the UPick 2. So like this fits basically any seat can be covered by the UPick 2. They can just outsource it to us. So this is like any key marketing seat. And then outsourced marketing. Or fractional CMO. If they're trying to hire the leader. Or I actually do recruiting. So they can also recruit through us. Benefits, there's a lot of them, right? You pick 2 is a huge cost saving. Average salary in general, Is $50K a year right now. The average cost of employing that $50K employee is $22K a year. So, you're looking at $72,000 a year to hire one person. The U-Pick 2, which realistically is 2 seats, Is $54,000 a year. So on a single seat, $18K savings. On 2 seats, you are looking at $90K savings. And that is just for YouPick too. That is not outsourced marketing where we are kind of taking it off their plates entirely. And then outsourced marketing, again, like the savings on this, we just did a white paper, can be up to $1.8 million a year if they are looking to save money. Then recruiting is just faster hiring. And lower chance of churn. The relevant results are the same as hiring the employee. So if they are trying to hire a graphic designer, clearer brand. If they are trying to hire a content writer, better conversions. You are just mapping back to The whole point of hiring the person. What's another situational challenge that you think we solve for?

I know you said we don't focus on it, but SEO?

Yep. So the problem is customers and prospects Can't find us. Right, so it's like, um, this is actually— this is how I got Managed Services Group. We do a whole lot more for them. A teeny teeny tiny piece of it is SEO. But essentially I reached out to them and was like, hey, I'm in Orlando, I'm familiar with the Orlando managed services scene, and I've never heard of you guys before. What's up with that? And they were like, oh, what's up with that is we don't do any marketing. And I was like, cool, let me help you with that. So if they can't be found, SEO is one of the ways that we help with that. We do content SEO which is basically like blog posting and rewriting their website content. We don't do technical SEO, but we do have a partner that does. So we can bring someone in if we need to. A partner we work closely for on technical SEO if they are a telecom or infrastructure company. And then also, social media is a huge piece of this, being found. When we talk about SEO, there are a lot of misconceptions about what it entails. But when we say SEO, we mean search engine optimization. There are companies that spend billions of dollars a year to rank, like Pinterest, like Facebook, like YouTube. You are not considering social part of your SEO strategy, you are fucking up. Because you can ride the tailwinds of somebody who is already spending all of that budget. All you have to do is be there and be posting about the terms. Because when I go and I Google something, go look at like the top 3 results when you Google literally anything like sports memorabilia or a new video game that just came out, or a service that you are looking to buy, the top rankings are almost always these websites that rank for everything. I think Pinterest has been my number one response on things for the last year consistently 80% of the time. Like if I Google something, Pinterest is on that top page almost every single time. because they spend so much money with Google to rank. And all you have to do is be there. Same thing with Etsy, all of these platforms. And it depends what you sell, but ultimately social media is part of that help me get found mentality. Partner sites, so we don't do the outbound to partner sites for our clients currently. Because it's administrative. But we definitely will help them create a list of sites that they should be partnering with. So for us, our targets are agency finders. So like Agency Spotter, Design Rush, these organizations that help you find a marketing agency. Upwork.

The benefit—

Help prospects find your solution. Right. So at the end of the day, most of the organizations we try— like we work with, they have a solution to a problem. They just don't know how to get that solution found. So let's use StreamGuys as an example. Their product that I'm the most familiar with is ultra-low latency streaming. And right now if I were to Google sub-second latency live streaming, because that is what I want to do, I want to— they are not ranking. Veo Player is. Millicast is. Limelight is. CashFly was when I was working there, but they've lost their ranking. So StreamGuys isn't here. That's something we could focus on with them is like, how do we get ranking for that term? And the relevant result is more traffic on the website. Now in an ideal world where we are working on outsourced marketing with a client, this actually equals more conversions and more leads. But if all we are doing for them is SEO and social, I cannot promise them conversions and leads. I can promise them more traffic for their website if they are not letting me work on the website. Which brings me to another one that is obviously here, right? Not enough leads. This is the most common, best talking point you can take when you are talking to a VP of Sales. VPs of Sales are great for us. In orgs where there is no marketing. Jason, you have been on sales teams. Have you ever worked on a sales team where there was no marketing?

No.

Okay. People who have worked on sales teams with no marketing are hella frustrated because they need materials and they can't get them. Because they need leads and they have to hunt them all themselves. So if you see a company out there that has at least 2 salespeople but no marketing staff, those salespeople are frustrated. And you can get them to open a door to the CEO for you by saying, I would love to get you more qualified leads. And then support you in winning those deals with marketing resources. Right, so not enough leads. We actually do lead gen directly. We do automated outbound sequencing. We do sales copywriting. Like if they want to keep deploying their own systems, but they want their messaging to be better. We do web design and web development. We do advertising, so we do PPC. Basically everything that anyone would do to get more leads, we will manage for somebody. The best solution is always some combination of these, right? Like honestly, the more omnichannel a company can be, the better. But regardless, like we can help them get more leads. So obviously the benefit is more leads. But the result is more revenue. And now we are really cooking with gas because that is what CEOs care about is more revenue. Which brings us into the next one which is like not enough revenue.

Uh-oh.

So sad. We do sales training. We do sales sourcing, so we will hire new salespeople. We do all the marketing, like literally everything under marketing would relate to this. And we also are currently working on getting better at automation for ecommerce brands. So companies that want to be able to make the buyer process easier. And this is one of the things that I'm running into the most in the general space is SaaS companies seem to think that their process needs to start with not telling anyone their pricing and making them have a consultation before they reveal pricing. You've experienced this, yes, Jason?

Every day.

Do customers like it? Do customers like it?

Oh yeah.

Oh, they love it, right? No, customers don't like having to get on a call before you tell them the price. So one of the number one things I push on my clients is transparent pricing, even if it's a range, even if it's a range, okay? Just give them a range, let them know, because what is super frustrating— Jason, you set appointments for AEs, right?

Yes.

How pissed do they get when you waste 30 minutes of their day on a prospect that is not qualified to buy because they don't have the money?

We, we give ranges, so we do have that part of our ban, but otherwise it's more so on our side setting appointments. Like, people will just drift us and they'll be like, hey, I just want to know pricing. And if we don't say it, they just go cold.

Of course they do. I am asking you a very direct, straightforward, easy-to-answer question. If you can't think about this from just like a business perspective, right? I, as a CEO, someone who makes business decisions all day long, why should I trust anyone who can't figure out the price of their own friggin product? And how Like, how nervous do I get as the decision maker? Because what's the reason companies don't give you pricing?

Because they want to sell the product to you. They want to make sure that they have an opportunity to provide that value proposition.

Some of them, but more often than not, when I'm in these high-level strategy meetings with the exec team, they want you to have a discovery call because they want their AEs to get the most money out of you that they possibly can. And the best way to do that is by giving you the price after they've built a whole value case and then give you the pricing. It's better for the salesperson. It's better for the organization. It's better for me, the owner, to not give you the pricing because then I can build out a whole use case and price it as high as possible and come down if I need to. If my pricing is transparent at the website, so for example, like the $4,500 a month you picked too, Will we ever sell you Pick Two for $6,500 a month? Could we? If we took the pricing off the website and we just did discovery calls with people, could we sell that same thing for $6,500 a month?

Yes.

Oh, absolutely. So it would be better for me, but it's not better for the person out there on the procurement team or the C-level that's trying to make a decision, who's researching and trying to.

Mm-hmm.

Before I give you my time to research pricing and get a feel for where we are? No, it's not good for them. So for me, it's like, let's try to make it good for the buyer, and then we're building reputation. It's a whole thing. Anyways, all of these things add up to more convertible leads, which means more revenue. There are a lot of vanity metrics. This is just a talking point for you guys when you are talking to decision makers. They will talk to a lot of companies that are obsessed with vanity metrics, companies whose KPIs look like traffic volume, clicks, open rates, those types of things. In all honesty, we are not a hugely analytical marketing agency. The only number I really care about is revenue. Did we help you make more money this year? That's it. The other stuff we go look at when things are broken, because something is wrong. What is wrong? Where are things going wrong? When the funnel doesn't look the way we expect it to, like a funnel. When it starts looking really wide here, but really small here, we get wondering like, where are we losing people? Where are things falling off? But until then, the only thing we care about is scaling revenue. And those vanity metrics ultimately don't matter, because what matters is that you're actually converting the customers. And this is one of the things that outsourced marketing agencies get wrong the most, because they don't have insight into what's happening after the lead gets passed off. So most marketing agencies look like this. I can tell you how many people came to your website, how many of them clicked into a lead form, and how many of those we sent over to you and your sales team. And then I lose insight. And I don't know what happens. Do they close? Do they not close? If they aren't closing, why aren't they closing? I don't know that. So when we work with companies, we want that insight. One of the first things we ask for is access to their CRM. Show us what's happening once you get a lead. Because I want to know what makes a lead good. What do your salespeople say are the reason that these leads aren't closing, especially if you've already got this stuff going? So a lot of times we come in and they already have a website. The website is already generating leads, but all the leads are crap. This is like the conversation I have with StreamGuys is like, okay, how many leads are you getting? They're like, oh, 10. And I'm like, okay, well, how many of those are good? And they're like, none. Then you are not really getting 10 leads. You are getting 10 form fills, 0 leads. So we want to get 2 leads, and I don't care how many form fills we get. It's irrelevant. All that matters is that you are getting leads that you can close. And that will come up a lot. It will come up a lot in your conversations, because that is how historically marketing agencies have worked. because they don't have the insights. Any other challenges you guys want to cover before we move on? All right, we've got enough to work on some cold emails here. So this is very, very basic cold email structure, right? Hey, do some personalization, use your empathy, talk about results, and have a CTA. Okay? So Hi, I saw something. This is a great time to insert a link to their stuff. Like, I saw that you listed a job. I saw that you had a new acquisition. I saw that you are launching into a new market. I saw that you are launching a new product. Try to find a piece of news. Google is great for this. What really stuck out? And this is what you have to do to make this not spam. If you just do the first sentence, you are spammy and they hate you. If you add the second sentence, all of a sudden maybe you are their friend. What really stuck out to me was? Find something that matters. Now I will give you my secret sauce for finding what matters. Google the company and their vision. Company name vision. What's their vision? What's their mission? And find something in there that sticks out to you. So when I outbounded recently for StackPath to Hulu, Hulu wants to make high-quality entertainment available globally. What a gold mine for StackPath. It's a global CDN that can get content into any country on the planet. What really stuck out to me is that you are trying to deliver the same high level of entertainment into every country. And then you are going to talk about it. So for us, it would be things more like what your brand is. What's your brand? And then kind of putting a little bit of pressure on maybe if they are not being true to their brand. One of the things that has converted the highest for me my whole career is calling people out directly. Your mission statement says this. Your job listing says this. I'm confused. I don't actually love this sentence structure here. This is from my good friend Jason Bay who I love. He's a genius. He's great. This sentence has gotten really, Overused. Have you guys gotten messages that are— Okay. So one of the things that's important in sales is pattern interrupting. If you find that you are becoming the receiver of more than 1 or 2 messages with the same format, you have to stop using that format. Find something you've never read before. So rather than formatting this way, I usually try to skip over the I've talked to several and I go with something more like this. Company is missing out on opportunity. Would result be relevant? I like even better, would it be crazy to talk about results? Like something along those lines. Is this another alternative to the one below? Super key in sales to just A/B test. See what works. And I am not the end-all be-all of truth in this space. The messaging that works is the messaging that works. When I was an SDR 6 years ago, I actually got in trouble for sending emails with the subject line, stop, collaborate, and listen. Or as Vanilla Ice would say, stop, collaborate, and listen. My CEO at the time didn't think it was on brand. So I stopped using it for their brand and pivoted and used it for my side hustle. And it was my highest open rate email that I sent because I was targeting people in the same age bracket as me and a little bit older who knew exactly that reference. No one was missing my reference. Everybody knows who Vanilla Ice is. Stop, collaborate, and listen is a popular phrase from one of their favorite songs. If your messaging works, I will never give you a hard time about it. So if you want to be ridiculous, be ridiculous. If you want to be really professional, be really professional. If you want to be very analytical, be very analytical. Find what works for you and your brand and use that messaging and double down on whatever is working. In the beginning, try a lot of things and whatever works, do more of that. If you are open to it, would love to share what is working well for our clients' customers interested in chatting further. So the name drop. When we have a similar brand, this makes a lot of sense. I name dropped Managed Services Group when I was talking to another local vendor management company, and it got me the meeting. I would not name drop Managed Services Group to an infrastructure company from Illinois, they will have no idea who they are, and it's not relevant. We could use StreamGuys when we are talking to anybody else that is in the video industry. But I wouldn't use their name anywhere else, because nobody is going to know it. When we are talking to CDNs, we can talk about CacheFly. We can talk about Adjuno. No, we cannot talk about Adjuno, because Mehmet will get mad. We can talk about Cashfly. We can talk about HighWinds. We can talk about StackPath. We can talk about Erickson. Erickson is our biggest, most well-known client that we've ever had. I'm not currently consulting for them. It doesn't matter. I have open access to use their brand for anything that I want. So That's one that you can use that has some leverage. But most of the time, if the social proof doesn't connect, it's to our detriment. So if it's not really close, like if you are talking to AT&T, talk about Erickson. But if you are talking to a small company, Erickson makes it sound like we are too big for them. And if you are talking to a big company, you don't want to talk about a small company. You get the idea. I also don't love interested in chatting further, because it's ambiguous. I like some very specific act of can I send you more information? Can I send you a video? Can I send you a white paper? Can I send you a case study? Is it okay for me to follow up, basically? And I like that because I like that you're asking for permission. And that the ask isn't, give me your time, person I don't know. If I walked up to you on the street, Jason, and you didn't know me, we've never met before, and I was just like, hey bro, you got 15 minutes?

Uh, who are you?

Yes, correct. For some reason, for the last For 20 years salespeople have been told that that is not the case and that we should just ask for people's time right out the gate. That's it. Go for the call. Go for it. Go for the gold. I have had much better luck asking for a call in a 3rd or 4th step of a sequence. That first step of the sequence is all about getting somebody to tell me it's okay to follow up with them. Also, one that I really love, especially for you, pick 2, would it be okay for us to send you a free graphic? Is there something you are working on that you could use some graphics for? We would love to provide you a free graphic to show you the quality of our work. Free graphics, free blog posts, give those out like candy. Those are the 2 things that you have my full discretion, give them away for free. Let people know it will be about a week because we are going to put you behind the paying customers, but that we really want to show the quality of our work. If you are going to go with, can I show you what is working well for our clients, offer to give them that in a format that isn't, let's jump on a phone call for 15 minutes. Offer to send them a video telling them what works. or offer to send them one of the case studies or white papers that we have. And anytime you need something that you don't have, let us know and we will get it turned around for you. All of these things are actually true for us. So these are very common problems that we get. They may have used an agency in the past that didn't get technology. This comes up all the time. They're having trouble getting relevant targets to their website to see their services in the first place. This one, oh my God, every day. Their website doesn't describe the problem they solve. Whew. Let me tell you, I look at a lot of websites every single day. And they are very often like I don't even know what they sell. You ever looked at a website and been like, what do you do? What what do you do? Either it's too ambiguous, like they worked with a marketing company that didn't get tech, so like it's too ambiguous and it's like we help you make more money. Or it's like way too granular and they're like our. Super smart AI does all of these things, and you're like, okay, but what's the results? Like, what do you it? So like Harmonize, which is the company that we work with, when I met them, their website was like, our software scours the internet to get reviews in one place. And I was like, okay, I'm a marketer, so like I can put A and B together and be like, okay, well if I can get revenue. reviews from everywhere, I can make more actionable insights. But I was like, let's rewrite this to Harmonize helps customer success with more actionable insights to make customers happy. Harmonize helps customer success teams make customers happy with actionable insights. There you go. That's what you do. I don't need to know all the platforms that you work with, or how you scrape web information. Like, no one cares. Startups, this is a great thing. Is that the same thing as the call to action, or is that something else? So the call to action thing comes up a lot. It is a little bit different. A lot of websites don't have a call to action at all, or if they do, they are all learn more or contact us. Contact you why? Learn more about what? Those are just like, they are not compelling calls to action.

I see.

Startups don't know what they are doing. So that's like basically they have every problem. Startups have every problem. If they are funded, they have a lot of money to solve those problems with. I love to get in with startups right before they get funded. So I like to start doing my outbound when I think they are about to get funding, so that I am already at the table. Mid-launch is profitable but not scaling. That would be where managed services group is. And that is definitely like, that's our niche niche. And then enterprise, they are overwhelmed. So like Globenet is a huge enterprise company with lots of employees. and a pretty hefty budget, but they are overwhelmed because they don't have enough people in their marketing department. So this is a framework for emailing that I love which is about getting their attention. So this is like your pattern interrupt. Right? It's like how you get them to keep reading. It's the hook. You have to have a good hook. Whatever that is. This is usually where I insert stats. So like if you go to my LinkedIn profile, my heading says that I've influenced over $500 million in pipeline. That's my hook. That's why you should talk to me instead of somebody else. The what's in it for me is $500 million in revenue. Feeling, that's empathy. Show that you get it. Make sure that they know that you are not sending this message to everyone else. If I read an outbound message from you and you could have sent it to anyone, it's a bad message. I want as the reader of your message to feel like it was written for me. Because think of it this way, right? If you are asking somebody for their time, and in our space, You are mostly going to be talking to CEOs. Their hourly rate probably looks like about $300 an hour or more. It's a little rude to be like, give me your time, but I couldn't even take 2 minutes to make this message about you. I could have sent it to anyone. Not a good look. So show that you empathize. You understand their world. Speak their language. I'll talk in another meeting about tools that you can use to learn linguistics, like the lingo that these companies use. But you can actually psychologically, you can make a lot of impact by just changing the semantics of your email. And instead of using words that they don't use, use words that they would use in like a team meeting. Target type, this is just all about personalizing which I was talking about. Make it clear that it's not a marketing email and it's a sales email. Be extremely focused. So this is the concise step. Get to the point. Don't waste their time. Okay? The worst thing is like you are getting a sequence from somebody and you are not even sure what it's about until the 5th message. They are like, oh, oh, you are trying to sell me WordPress development. I didn't know that until email 5. I would have unsubscribed. Respect is my absolute most important thing when I'm outbound. It's key to my brand. So I use permission-based openers, and I make my messaging about the prospect and not about me. I show respect for them and their time. There is a lot of balance between things like social proof and hooks and being respectful. You can come off really egotistical in messaging on accident. So do your best. Use your best judgment here. We'll jump into part 2 another day. What do you guys have for questions for me?

Will we have this available in Dropbox?

Yes. The other one should also be available in Dropbox, but let me get them both in there for you. This is 110. I'll actually update this one with all the relevant stuff and then get it in Dropbox for you, and I'll share it in the general Slack as well. Any other questions?

I've got a framework that I've been working on, obviously from my other position. Do you mind if I post it in the chat quickly and you just do a quick rundown?

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to.

Do you want to do it in Zoom or in Slack?

Either way is fine.

Okay, I'll do it in Slack and then everyone else can see it.

Then we can reference it later. Yeah.

I think with a 5-liner it's a little long, but it's trigger-based. This was Office expansion.

Yep. Are you getting good responses to this?

Uh, decent. I mean, it's— I change up the first line to whatever the trigger is: expansion, funding, this, that, um, job postings, just like you were mentioning. It's more like, because the— what did I use for the subject on this one? Subjects is usually Like a two-three word. I've experimented without capitalization, with capitalization, but you know my metrics are a little bit all over the place because it also ties in with SalesLoft and the other cadences.

So okay. So here's how I would test it and always test one messaging against another, right? So. Rather than curious to know, I would go with, with company's constant office expansion, are your recruiters reaching enough prospects on the phone to fill the positions you are hiring for? This is a subtle word change. But I would make it because the curious, like starting it with curious, that's a very you-centric message, right? Like I'm curious rather than like talking about them, right? You may want to know more. I would add one sentence here after, if you have a lead list of 10,000 or more, you may want to know more, that explains the more you can help with.

Okay.

So just, and I don't know exactly what it is, but I have worked with dialers that know, they do like a predictive index on whether the phone line will answer. That's one of the ones I've seen. So like, what do you wanna know more about, right? Just like one sentence. If this isn't a good fit for recruiting, do you know a sales director that could benefit from a robust platform? Where does this fit in your sequence? Is it the first message?

This one is the first.

I might switch out the CTA here.

Okay.

Because asking for a referral this early is like you haven't even really proved yourself to them yet before you're asking for an intro to the next person. And it's almost like you're kind of giving up early because if you send another message after this, you already asked if they weren't interested. I always want my last message to be the, are you not— if you're not interested. Messaging, right? After I've already like tried to get them a couple of times. So I'd probably change the CTA here to some version of, can I tell you more? Okay. Um, like, do you guys have a short demo?

Uh, no, it goes straight to AE and they handle it from there after the meeting. That's why I don't like—

If you can get a short demo, um, or record one yourself, like you guys use the dialer, right? Record your own demo, whatever. It can't hurt anything. And be like, hey, would it be okay for me to just send you a 1-minute demo of what I'm talking about? And then that's permission-based, and it's really short. Like if you are talking about 60 seconds of somebody's time, no big deal.

Uh-huh.

And I would try that. Let me insert that. Would it be okay? For me to send you a 60-second demo of what I mean? And that's what I would do. I also might— so I've had really good luck with, how have you been? At the beginning of my conversation.

Okay.

So you can try that one. And I would test this out against what you've been using and see, see if it helps or if it doesn't. All right guys, I gotta jump. I have a meeting with Stream Guys. It has been a pleasure as always. Ping me if you need anything. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye.