- Ready to learn about four strategies for agency growth?
- [Audience Members] Yeah.
- Cool, yeah, thanks for coming out.
Pretty good turnout.
Let's do this.
I'm Alex Berman, I run this company called Experiment27,
and what we do is marketing for digital agencies,
so we only worked specifically with digital agencies so far.
In the last couple of years, I've sold 6.5 million
in B2B sales, and our company's generated over 35 million
in leads, mostly from the Fortune 500, for agency clients.
So here today we're gonna talk about four proven strategies
for generating leads as a digital agency.
And I ordered them, there's four strategies
and I ordered them in terms of how quickly
they turn around leads for us and for our clients.
The first one that we do is enterprise outreach.
So first I'm gonna talk about what we learned
about B2B sales after sending a million cold emails.
The first one is subject lines matter.
So I'm gonna show a bunch of subject lines
that you guys could use here.
There's four strategies that I like to use
when I think about a cold email subject line.
By the way, the slides are gonna be available after, so
you don't have to worry about taking
too many notes or anything.
So there's the referral or fake referral.
And I organized these four subject lines
in terms of how difficult they are to do at scale.
So this is hey <Name>, found you
through <Mutual connection>.
It takes the most effort, but the way you do this,
if you don't know somebody at the company,
you can also say hey <Name>, found you through <Podcast>.
Google around for an interview that somebody on the team
has done and reference that podcast interview.
You can say congrats on the news item.
It's the second one, so hey, congrats on the new hire
or congrats on the funding round.
And we're gonna start with subject lines,
and I'm gonna go through all the copy and everything
so it's all in here.
The other one is generic, but customized.
So hey, you know, about our company and your company.
Here's what not to do as well.
If you are starting to send cold emails in bulk,
if you don't clean your data, you end up
with something like this, so you know,
Max is all capitalized, there's an extra space over here
by the LLC, it's a mess.
And then the final one and the one that I like the best
is fully generic, which allows you
to send the same sort of subject line
to a bunch of people without having to change it too much.
Hi from Alex is the one that actually got me
my first job in New York like three years ago.
So that's a good one, and then subject line (no subject)
is actually pretty good for getting open rate.
The thing to know about cold emails besides
the subject line thing is that you don't wanna be a robot
when you're sending cold emails.
Meaning customization's best, talking like
you know them is best, and in order to
do that, you research into each prospect.
And the more targeted and personal your engagement,
the more successful it'll be.
We're starting general and then we'll get specific.
Cold emailing at its core is about sending a message
that people are gonna connect with
and wanna book a call from.
And in order to do that, this is the framework
that I found that works best.
So starting with a customized first line,
then moving into what you do, work you've done
in their industry, results you've got.
Come up with a relevant idea they might benefit from,
and then saying that you'd love to explain further.
Asking if they'll send over a couple of times
to hop on a quick call.
The purpose of a cold email isn't to actually get a sale,
especially with a Fortune 500 company,
it's to get a meeting on the calendar,
usually with the right person.
So these are actual cold emails that have worked
with our clients, two agencies in New York City.
Actually, this one is an agency in LA, over 50 people,
and the other one's an agency in New York City with
100 or so employees, both targeting the Fortune 500.
And these are emails that worked for them.
So came across your name while looking
for contacts at <company>.
Definitely a fan of what you do!
I'm with this agency - a Los Angeles based
full service agency.
We're worked with company, this is a company
in the industry that we're targeting,
so for this one, we're targeting hotels.
So let's say it was like Holiday Inn
that we reference there.
Yeah, cool.
Custom e-commerce.
Reaching out because we've helped several great companies
similar to <company>.
So when you're cold emailing enterprise companies,
what I found works best, what most agencies don't do,
is calling out a specific case study
for their exact industry.
What a lot of people try to do, and if you've seen
any spam emails from other companies emailing you,
it's a lot of bullet points, so basically
I'm from this agency, I do UX/UI development,
Node.js, web development, HTML, iOS development,
it's just like a big list of bullet points.
And that doesn't work as well as something like this,
that almost always ends up in the spam box.
Here's another email following that framework,
this is from the New York agency.
This one has generated them meetings.
Their niche was restaurants.
And not regular restaurants, but like big restaurants
like Chipotle or Qdoba.
Things like that, this got them I think nine meetings
in the first week, something like that, which is crazy.
So director of business development of this company,
an established mobile agency where we've worked
with <company> in their niche.
Let's say, for instance, they built a Starbucks app,
they built something around there,
I can't say the exact app 'cause of an NDA.
But we've worked on mobile projects with many companies
similar to this company.
Basically, an email like this is what gets you
in the door with these larger enterprise companies,
what they want to see is the customization,
they wanna see that you've done work in their industry.
And what that does is it takes the risk away
from working with your company.
One of the big things that these enterprise companies
don't want, especially because they're not
small business owners, right, so they own the budget,
but they don't really take the money out of
their own pockets, so their jobs are more on the line.
So if you can take that risk away
and show them that you've done work very similar
to the work they've done in the past, it helps.
So how much time should you spend on each email?
Normally, I will spend about two minutes on research.
We've outsourced a lot of it to Upwork.
So basically, if you saw that past email,
there was a lot of things that could be swapped out.
Part of creating a scalable cold email strategy
is finding what you can scale and what you can't,
so for us at Experiment27, when we're reaching out
to agencies for sales, one of the things
that we like to comment on for customization
is a project they've done in the past.
So for Upwork, we'll go through the agency website,
we'll find a project they did in the past and say hey,
I really like the work you did on let's say Power Rangers,
and put that in the email.
So you can do something similar for your emails.
So we spend two minutes on the email,
and how many emails to send?
I'll get into that and how you should do the math on that
in a bit, good rule of thumb is start small.
So when I first started doing cold emails,
I was sending about 40 a week.
And then ramped up to 200 a week.
And now our team sends about 10,000 a week.
So is buying B2B data or leads worth it?
If you're trying to find email addresses
for your cold emails, there's three services I like.
Email Hunter is basically free,
I think they're super cheap or free right now.
That's hunter.io, I believe.
I'll send a link if you guys email me or you want it.
But what that does is you plug a domain into that,
and it'll give you the email address
for anybody at that company.
So it's super useful.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is what we use to find leads
a lot of the time, so you can just type in
a company name or a role, and it'll just list out
all the people at that company.
There's no limits like regular LinkedIn.
And then ZoomInfo is actually my favorite lead gen tool.
It's a pretty expensive, relatively expensive tool,
it's like 400 bucks a month, but it's like the combo
of both of those on steroids where
you plug in any company, any criteria,
and it'll give you emails, phone numbers,
the name of the people at the company, news,
everything you want from ZoomInfo,
so I really like that one.
And the way you think about, so here's how we think about
how many cold emails to send and how many closes
we should get, and it's all about lead versus lag measures,
there's this book I really like called
Four Disciplines of Execution.
And what that books talks about is
there's two different types of goals that you could set.
A lag measure is a goal that you
don't really have power over, but it's like a final goal.
So for instance, a lag measure is like sales.
Because for sales, you get them,
they eventually do happen, but you can't control
when they're gonna happen, and there's a lag in time
between the action and the goal itself.
Lead measures are measures where there's no lag
between the action and the goal itself, so for instance,
the lead measure here would be cold emails,
and the lag would be sales.
So our goal, and we're coming up with this for
our own company, X27, our goal was five closes a week.
So lead versus lag measure, you can't really do that.
So I went a step back, right, what's
the lag measure on sales?
Is it the number of calls that I'm on with a customer?
So I worked back, I'm like one quarter of our calls
turn into sales, so 25% of our calls turn into sales,
for 20 calls, we'll get five sales.
But you can't really control the amount
of discovery calls that you're on,
that's also a lag measure.
So you take a step back, and we found out
that if 10% of our cold email turn into discovery calls,
then that's 200 cold emails we have to send every week,
and that's how I came up with that number before.
So it's all about finding out what works for you,
focusing on the lead measure, and then eventually,
you'll achieve your goal of booking some meetings.
So it's not about that initial though all the time.
There's also a follow up strategy.
So I'll show you some real emails and then the actual
follow up strategy we use to get clients right now.
So there's a few different types of follow ups
you can use, follow up is actually the key
to getting a lot of these meeting,
especially with enterprise companies.
They're not gonna respond to that first email,
but if you call and you email and you call and you email,
eventually they will meet with you.
We've had a few companies, a med tech company
just booked a meeting with one of our clients last week.
And the reason they booked the meeting
was just 'cause we kept emailing them,
they talked about on the call, but that did end up
going to proposal, so it's worth it.
So hey, here's the personal connection follow up,
he said he was in LA, and basically I'm saying
check out the haunted house at Universal Studios.
Some very customized thing.
Also, check out the haunted house
at Universal Studios, it's pretty cool.
So here's some more versions of this.
I was emailing this guy and I asked him
if he still rooted for the Cowboys
'cause somewhere on his LinkedIn page
he said he liked the Cowboys.
And he got back 'cause I guess he moved to New York
or something, he said he loved the Jets instead.
But this did get him to respond, and
it did get him to send his target criteria.
Here's another one, hey, how's Miami,
hope you're doing awesome.
And this is actually a cold email that's fully customized.
If you guys wanted to use something similar,
asking how Miami is, reading into the background,
and talking just fully customized, first couple of lines.
And I'm talking about here something that I'm gonna mention
in a second, which is saying you're super excited,
which is another strategy I'm gonna talk about in a bit.
And then another one, which is right now.
So the excitement follow up is another one.
And I really like this one, because if a client
goes cold on you, and you wanna just kind of like push them
to buy or to get to the next steps,
one of the easiest ways to do that
is to kinda play nice here, so hey,
I've got your word that we're starting
this week, right, smiley face.
Looking to get things started so we can get
your company name out there.
And this guy had been cold for maybe two weeks, three weeks.
And as soon as he saw this, he got back one minute later,
literally one minute later, and he closed
by 8:36 a.m. right there.
The way we do closes at X27 and the way I recommend
to agencies, we always do it over credit card.
We use chargebee, which is a billing processing thing,
and we're selling six figure deals,
so it works even with six figure deals.
I like it because there's no billing,
there's no collections, we got,
we have two clients right now in ACH
and the rest are on credit card.
And it's just always a huge hassle
for our account managers having to track down
those ones that are not paying.
So here's another one, so hey, just got back
from speaking with the team about this and I'm confident
that we can find as many qualified leads as you need.
Would love to catch up and review next steps.
Otherwise, please let me know what works.
And then I followed up here.
Would love an update, when's the presentation
with the department heads?
The team's excited to get his going.
Please let me know if you have any more information.
So takeaway from this one, say you're exited
and people will be excited as well, I guess.
So here's, the next one is a news item follow up,
which is similar to the news item subject line,
but with this follow up, any news item to reach out to
is worth reaching out to about.
So for this one, it's their one year anniversary.
So I wrote this normal email here,
and I linked them to the package
that they could buy right away,
then congrats on the one year anniversary,
let's make year two even better at the bottom.
Here's another couple.
So hey, I read the blog post on how the Superbowl
impacted on-demand services.
Interesting to see how much alcohol was sold,
so this was, they wrote a blog post,
I commented on the blog post.
Bottom one, hey, just got the numbers back from
one of their competitors.
So this clients we talked about, it was a live chat plugin,
and we were working with another huge large chat plugin.
So I mentioned hey, just got the numbers back
from that plugin.
We've been working with the team over the last two months
to drive free trial sign-ups.
And I was getting them really excited
'cause I was talking about a company
that's almost exactly the same as their company.
That's the follow up sequence.
Sometimes though when you're sending cold emails,
people just won't respond at all.
That last follow up sequence is usually when people
are going a little cold on you after you've talked to them.
This is the actual cold email sequence that we use
to get clients at Experiment27.
So talking about mobile app, oh, so actually,
this teaches a bigger point here.
So I run Experiment27, marketing agency focused
on mobile app and web development firms.
But then this next part, there's a ton we can do
to get Mad Mocha more leads - two ideas off the bat
are reaching out for strategic partnerships
or optimizing your profile on Clutch.
How would you feel about discussing further?
So you read this email and it seems like something
that I wrote just to this guy.
But these two ideas are the same ideas
I'm sending to every agency that's listed on Clutch.
Because I know they're interested in optimizing on Clutch,
and I'll talk about lead buckets and all that stuff
in a while, but I know they're gonna be interested
in this sort of thing because they're on a site like Clutch
where they're trying to market themselves.
So for your cold emails, when you're trying to come up
with ideas for clients.
If you think very industry-specific,
let's say you're targeting just soda companies or just CPG,
you can come up with two or three ideas
that match almost all of those CPG companies
and send them out, and you won't have to customize too much.
So it's better for sending at scale.
So here's another follow up I sent him,
he didn't respond to that one.
So I said when would be a good time for you to discuss,
and I linked to Calendly, which is my booking tool
that I like to use.
I'm a big fan of tools that get rid of email back and forth.
And then he didn't respond to that,
so I said at this point, I'm gonna assume
improving your marketing is not on your timeline.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions
about generating more leads for your agency.
And he got back the same day after not responding
to four emails in a row.
So hey, sorry for the delay, it's been busy,
and then he had questions about what we offered.
So a lot of the times, when people aren't responding
to your cold emails, it's because they're busy,
it's not because they don't like what you offer.
Or a lot of the times, it's because
they don't understand what you do.
Based on his question, I don't think he really understood
what we offered, but he did get back.
That's cold email.
The next thing I wanna talk about is more on the sales side.
So here's the exact outreach system we use
with our team members for tracking their cold emailing work.
It's a custom Google doc that we made, animated
or color coded things based on how much work they're doing.
I find this very helpful for getting the sales team
to actually work, 'cause you can run through this
every single day, it's basically the process every day,
everything they're supposed to be doing
with a color coded target based on each one.
All lead measures, so you know, sent the initial emails,
sent the assignment over to the VA.
On Tuesday, it's following up on the email,
following up on the call, checking in with the VAs.
Very simple there.
And if you email me after, I can send you that doc as well.
Here's our initial targets that we like to use per client.
This is per client, our sales guys work
on four clients each.
So for your sales teams, you'd probably wanna do
four times this.
So anywhere between 100 and 200+ emails a day.
And we've got our notes right here.
And then this is a breakdown, a close review of what
that Excel doc looks like for each one of the four clients.
This was taken on a Monday or a Tuesday, I think.
And this, for each one of the four clients,
they've got docs to fill out so that they can stay on track.
So how to automate cold email outreach?
Right, we talked a lot about how to customize it.
How to automate it, it's basically a few steps.
One, like we were mentioning before,
is identify lead buckets.
And what those are, they're lists online
or they're places online where people
that are interested in what you would sell hang out.
So it might be job boards where people are posting
about iOS development if you wanted to sell to developers.
It might be, actually, one of the most ingenious was
we were trying to sell to manufacturing.
And we just listed out the top, we found a list
of like the top 500 manufacturing companies in the world,
and we basically opened up the web sites of each one
of the manufacturing companies.
And we just used the list to find
which ones had terrible websites to email.
So that's another example of a lead bucket,
think about where your customers would be
if they're interested in your sort of service.
The lead bucket I like to use for Experiment27,
and actually, the way some of you came to this event is
going where agencies like to market.
So for instance, a lot of agencies have to try
to market themselves.
They create a Behance account, a Dribbble account,
and almost always, if they're a little bigger,
they create a clutch.co account.
So by going where agencies are
when they wanna market themselves,
it allows us to sell more effectively to agencies,
you can use that same thought process to find partners,
and you can use that same thought process
to find your clients.
So identify lead buckets, hire and train your team
to build lead lists, I've got a bunch of YouTube videos up
that kind of go over this in more detail.
But it's training the team to go through all the tools
that we talked about a second ago.
Write a custom email drip based on what we talked about,
and that's it.
So here's another cold email example
that we used to book with a non-profit,
Global Footprint Network's the top 20.
One of the top 20 biggest non-profits.
I said I'm very impressed with them,
very impressed with Network's mission
of making more business use of the ecological footprint.
Especially the ecological footprint calculator.
My name's Alex Berman, I help non-profits, and I named
Ashoka, which is another huge non-profit,
and University of Oklahoma, which isn't a non-profit
but it's a school so it's kinda close.
Improve their digital strategies,
I have a list of ideas you could use
to streamline processes.
Would you like me to send them over?
And they said yes, and I sent over the ideas.
And I met with the director of social, I think, over there.
The other thing I wanna talk about, so that's cold emails.
That's cold emails.
The other way that we book meeting is cold calling.
This is another New York agency,
another pretty big one, actually, they're about 150 people.
And we worked with their sales team
and booked these six meetings in six days.
We'd been booking even more for them after that.
The way we like to do it, the first question to ask
if you're trying to go after the enterprise, is to think,
you know, is your company actually ready for the enterprise?
Usually what that means is before you scale
an enterprise strategy, you wanna make sure you have,
at minimum, a case study for an industry
that has Fortune 500 companies in it that you can scale.
So something at scale.
Let's say you're trying to go after like beverage companies.
You want to at least have some soda,
maybe a small soda company on your case studies
that you can reference.
Alternatively, you wanna have another Fortune 500 company.
That's ideal, but that's at minimum.
So the way to find the Fortune 500 leads,
or your lead gen strategy, 'cause I always recommend
going after one industry to start,
is to pick a Fortune 500 company based on a case study
you wanna replicate, this is School of Thought,
they're an agency that we work with out in LA.
They built the Red Bull app.
So they built the Red Bull app, and from that,
we decided we should go after another soda company,
so we decided to go after the biggest one, Coca Cola.
Here's Coca Cola's goals for 17, 2017.
So for researching the company, I was like searching goals
for whatever year, because a lot of the times,
they'll come up with a blog post like this where,
this is the 2015 year in review for Coca Cola
where they literally listed out everything
they were looking at, it was like five strategic actions.
One of them was like apps for their employees,
something like that.
And then the final thing is to, oh,
two more things, actually.
One, find the marketing director on LinkedIn.
You can do that by just searching
marketing director Coca Cola, very simple.
And then cold calling till you get through.
Here's a screenshot of the video where I did this,
I talked to the director of marketing at,
I think it was Powerade inside Coca Cola,
something like that.
And the way I got to him was, I couldn't find
a number online, so I called the Coca Cola main number,
got to the customer service, they transferred me over
to like the vendor number where you call, I guess,
if your soda machine is broken.
And then I asked them for this guy's number
and they just transferred me right through.
And he picked up on like the third ring.
So that's cold email, cold calling.
Next one is agency partnerships.
So for agency partnerships, there is three types
of strategic partners to look for.
At a high level, agency partnerships are basically
going to people that have the type of clients you want,
reaching out to them, getting them to pass clients to you
so that you don't have to go find them yourself.
So there's three types of clients to look for.
One of them is people with a high number of users,
so I'll have examples for all these in a second.
But people with a high number of users,
a good example of that is SaaS companies or coworking spaces
where they have just a lot of people
that might be interested.
Number two is an agency selling to the type of customer
you sell to.
A lot of the times this takes,
this looks like maybe you're a hardcore dev company
and you reach out to like a UX or
a product development team, so when that product team
gets leads, they send it over you to develop.
It could also go the opposite way,
you work with a development company.
When they get somebody who has heavy UX needs,
they send to you as well.
And then at the very top of the funnel,
there's innovation companies.
A good example of one, I think they're based
in New York, is called What If.
And what they do is they just take ideas
and turn them into products for companies,
but they always need agency partners to fulfill
those ideas that they're creating.
And then the third one is an agency selling
the same service to a larger audience.
This is going after like the WPPs of the world.
But you don't have to go after a top five
multi billion dollar agency.
Usually what I like to target here
is an agency that charges about double what you charge.
So let's say you charge 150 an hour,
this is an agency charging 300 an hour,
a lot of the times, those are more niche agencies.
So like there's a real estate agency
that I know of here that does like 330 an hour.
But they only do drawings in mobile apps for real estate.
So if you're more of a generic agency,
let's say you charge 150.
You go after an agency like that,
and I'll talk about how to find those in a second.
So a couple of examples, number one is coworking spaces.
Coworking spaces like, actually like WeWork.
If you can plug in, you can get a good partnership here.
Or Galvanize or any of the other WeWork competitors
that I'm probably not allowed to mention.
You can go and get a partnership with them.
SaaS selling to the same type of market
you want to enter, so let's say you want to enter fintech.
And you find a SaaS for fintech,
they're by definition gonna have a lot of fintech clients,
either to send you or to get in front of,
especially if they do custom integrations
and you're a dev company.
And then finally, large agencies,
there's a lot of niche specific agencies.
So if you search, you know, like New York
pharmaceutical agencies, there's a lot
that just focus on the pharmaceutical industry
or they just focus on fintech, like
they're super niched down.
And if you can find those, those make really good partners.
So that's how you find, it's the criteria,
how you go after the partners for your strategy.
There's four steps to building a lead list of companies
for partnerships as well.
So the first one is to define a goal for the outreach.
What do you actually want from the partnership?
So do you want a larger agency to send you projects,
do you wanna go co-pitching on projects?
Whatever the goal is for the outreach.
Define a client profile based on what we just talked about.
So what sort of clients do you wanna go after,
what sort of partner's gonna be the best.
And then finally, go to LinkedIn and build a list
of contacts, same exact way.
Here's the way we send partnership emails.
Most of this strategy is cold email, by the way.
Three of the four are cold email.
So framework for a partnership email.
So I came across your site.
It's amazing attention to detail, love the Nevardas
case study in your company culture page.
Looking through your clients list,
I noticed many of them could more effectively
sell their products with explainer videos.
So this is a cold email from a video production company
reaching out to, I think it was user experience agencies
to help them sell their explainer videos.
You know, have you tried upselling your videos to clients?
We've done it for this client, this client and this client,
and have case studies that show improved ROI
from the content that you could potentially use
and while labeling our services.
Does that sound interesting, let me know
and I can send over a few times.
Again, the goal here with these emails
is kind of the same as the goal with the last emails,
which is to remove the risk.
So if you have case studies, and also remove
the work for them.
So if you have case studies that show improved ROI,
it's basically a no brainer, right,
especially if they're a user experience agency
that maybe has thought about selling video in the past,
but has been burned or hasn't figured out how to sell it,
so if you're selling it for them, it's basically,
it's a no brainer for them.
Here's another one we use, this one generated
three clients for Sean who's the guy
who sent this email out.
And this was on a send of I think about 100
out in Singapore.
So just came across Versdesign, your ad caught my eye,
love the targeted placement.
Also impressed with the content and copy in your portfolio.
We handle copywriting.
I'm working with several agencies
to handle overflow work, specifically these competitors.
And the feedback's been good, especially
on the e-commerce clients.
So he's talking about specific clients,
other agencies he worked with, and a specialty that he has
which is e-commerce.
And now also the PS has a customization down here.
So when you booked your partnership meetings,
there's a few things that you want to have ready to go.
The first is a four or five sentence background
on your company.
I always like to start off
the partnership meetings this way.
It's usually about a 30 second pitch, the one
for Experiment27 is just like our story compacted down.
So I'll basically say that I used to work for an agency
back in New York City, which is actually
where we are right now.
So I used to work for an agency back in New York City,
and we had a sales team of six people
that were sharing 14 leads a month.
I was a junior sales guy there.
My goal for sales was like 750,000 for the year,
and I knew I wouldn't be able to hit it
with traditional means, just taking these inbound leads.
So I started researching marketing,
trying to figure out what's going on.
And eventually I kinda cracked the code
and we went from 14 leads to 40 within 30 days
of me trying this.
So the founder gave me a contract to start doing marketing.
The contract wasn't enough to sustain myself
without hiring other clients, getting other clients.
So I started getting other clients,
we started building the company,
and from there, we started X27, which is a marketing company
focused on only generating ROI and leads
for digital agencies.
So that's like a 30 second pitch,
that's what I tell the clients.
And you could use something similar,
maybe talk about your holistic development or
why you started, why you do the things you do,
four to five sentences.
The second thing is your approach to what you do.
How do you approach projects, what is that,
is is a four step process that starts with discovery.
Why do you do a discovery, that sort of thing.
And then the final thing is to have
one solid case study, again, to remove the risk.
Know that most agencies that pitch
either go in with way too many case studies,
or they go in with case studies that just don't look good.
Having too many case studies is also as bad
as having no case studies.
Because basically, if it's an agency,
and let's say they only focus on fintech
or they only focus on pharma, and you show them
case studies from the startup that you did,
that actually distracts them.
Whereas if you only showed them the pharma case studies
or the fintech case studies you had,
they'd be a lot more interested in partnering.
So that's what to say during the meetings.
The next thing I wanted to talk about was
a quick side note, which is managing
a high performance sales team.
Base is a sponsor of this event,
that's why the tickets were free today.
I actually use it inside this company, X27.
There's three metrics you should track with your sales team
to make sure they hit the numbers,
it's back to those lead measures and lag measures.
One is every day I like to check
on the number of emails sent.
And then every week I like to check on the number
of meetings that they're booking on the calendar.
Now, those are the two metrics you don't wanna
lose track of, and then the third one
is more of a lag measure, which is number of deals closed,
but that could take three to six months, right,
if they're bad.
For us, our sales cycle is about 30 days.
So here's actually how we use Base.
Base is actually pretty good CRM.
It's got a feed of what all the sales guys are doing
inside of the app.
It's got our total pipeline here,
and then forecasted is how much we think is gonna close
let's say in the next like three months,
I don't actually know how it's measured,
and then it has an organized sales pipeline
so we can see what are the incoming deals,
what deals are on hold, what meeting do we have
on the calendar, how many of those are qualified,
how many are contract sent and then how many are closed out.
This lets us visualize it a lot easier
than an Excel spreadsheet.
I've been using Base basically since I started the company.
Oh, and that's getbase.com, I feel like I have to say that.
So how to run an effective sales meeting
in under 20 minutes?
This is the way I structure the sales meeting
with our internal sales team.
And it's two things that I wanna look out for.
So we have two meetings per week,
one is on a Monday, the other one used to be on a Friday,
now it's on a Thursday.
'Cause there usually wasn't too many updates
between Friday and Monday.
Two minutes per week, it's usually about 20 minutes,
and we run through each deal in Base,
so we go through, I look through,
the project's about to close and I just ask them
for an update on each one.
Normally they have a lot of notes there.
And then the second thing I want to do
is I ask for current status on outreach.
So I wanna know how many emails did you send this week
and how many calls did you make.
And then they just tell me.
But the ideal thing is to get a specific number,
so if their goal is 200, a lot of the times
they'll just say I sent 200 emails.
But if you dig down and you ask him
how many did you really send, and you look into their stats,
sometimes it'll be like two or three,
or it'll be like 198, so I'm always trying
to get that exact number, so that makes it harder to lie,
and it's the same thing for cold calls.
So that's agency partnerships, it's how to manage a team,
those are the two most effective.
Third most effective is directories and sponsorships.
The reason why directories are so powerful
is if you search mobile app development firms,
like for instance, I searched this, this was in Florida,
by the way, this isn't even New York,
but you notice it's almost all New York agencies,
a couple of our clients are on here.
Clutch.co is the number one search result on Google,
and they're also the number one search result
up here in this top box that somebody knows
the name of but I don't.
So how do you reach number one on directories, right,
'cause directories are super important.
Some of our clients, like the one you saw up there
in the number one spot, they were getting
about 150 leads a month, big projects,
McDonald's came through there,
Boston Consulting Group came from there.
All from being number one on this directory.
So how to reach number one on directories in general,
'cause it's not just Clutch?
Number one is sponsoring, so paying to be
at the number one spot.
The other one is getting reviews, showing activity.
One new review a month, most people
will set up their profile in a directory
and just won't have any reviews.
It's actually similar with Behance and Dribbble.
Like, how many of you have had
your clients comment on your Dribbble profile?
Nobody, all right, cool.
Yeah, your clients exist, you know, you can have
them comment and leave testimonials in your Dribbble.
So what do the top profiles have in common?
This is also something to study.
I have a YouTube video where I broke down
the top profiles on Behance and Dribbble.
Anyone can do that in like 20 minutes, just look at what
do all the profiles that are the top of this directory
have in common, and how can you use this,
maybe not copying them, but seeing what they did right
and then using it to influence your profile.
And the final thing is relationships with account managers
at the directories.
A lot of the times, these account managers
are just kinda sitting around not really doing much
'cause it's an SEO focused business.
So they'll answer calls, they'll answer emails,
and you can just ask them questions.
A lot of the times, and I'll talk about
how I got to number one on Clutch in a few cities
in a second, but it is basically just calling
and asking them stuff.
And then the final thing, or two more things,
one is the average rating.
So trying to keep your rating above like a 4.7,
right, 'cause a lot of them are star ratings.
And then a high amount of activity.
So a high amount of profile changes.
A lot of these directories rank not based
on just clicks or not based or anything scientific.
A lot of them base their ranking on how many times
you log into the directory backend,
or how many times you change the wording on your page.
So that's general directories, I have a section
for Clutch specifically, because Clutch right now
is the most powerful directory.
If you're on top of New York Clutch,
I mean, it was worth millions for the client
that I was working with.
So one, get on clutch.co.
Create an account there, I think it's free.
Email your account manager immediately,
send them another review.
Have at least 10 reviews at the minimum.
And have one focus over 50%, if you guys
have Clutch profiles, what a lot of people will do
when they set them up is they wanna kind of capture
all the leads, so they say like I do iOS development,
web development, basically the same thing
as those bullet points.
But what Clutch actually recommends and what works for us
is having one focus over 50%.
So let's say you really want iOS development projects,
you say I do 52% iOS and then the rest is like UX design.
That helps way more than having everything on your profile.
And then the final thing's be above the fold
with your description.
Clutch has like a one or two sentence description,
and then everything else over there.
Emailing your account manager.
The way that I found this out is I was just kinda
sitting there in a meeting one time
creating our Clutch profile, and I was kinda mad
that we weren't number one, we were like
number four or five, so I just kinda got frustrated
and called him, and they literally told me
almost this, step by step, like how do you actually
get to number one on Clutch.
And so we did it, and it worked.
So that's the bigger lesson.
And then the final thing is make one small change
on your profile per week.
What I like to do is just change like,
if there's a word and, I'll change it to an ampersand
or I'll just get rid of like a space or something.
And that's usually enough to keep us there.
The final thing is sort of what you're attending right now,
meetups and in-person events.
I used to run a meetup in New York called
Meetup for Brand and Marketing Managers, had 2,500 members.
We used to do these drinks every single month
that had like 110 people at each drink.
I would just go around, meet everybody,
pitch the app development company I was at.
And I would always leave with about 50,000 to 60,000
in new leads just from doing that,
and I'll tell you how to do that.
So here's the screenshot of the meetup that I ran.
This is the actual copy here.
Meetup's still around, you know,
a lot of people forget about meetup.
Does still exist, events are a very strong way
to generate leads.
How do you structure a meetup,
I like to structure a meetup just as a simple drinks.
Normally I don't do these talks,
I just like to kinda go to bars and,
the meetup that we did in New York
was at the art bar downtown, there was no RSVPs or anything.
Everyone would just rush in there on like a Tuesday
and the bartenders, they actually hated me for some reason.
The bar was too small to accommodate.
But no need to RSVP, no need to do anything crazy.
To do an event like this, it's a little tougher,
but I've got a YouTube video that breaks it all down
that you can check out later.
How do you promote a meetup?
Basically, Google <industry> events in <city>.
So brand marketing or brand manager events in New York City.
Whoever your target is, and I'll talk about
how to identify the right events to go to all this stuff
in a couple slides, but like brand manager events
in New York.
And you find a bunch of these directory sites.
And you post on them.
So on all of these directory sites, it usually says,
"Don't see your event?
"List your even here."
And you just list it, the directory site
for events that I like the best is Gary's Guide.
Actually, he's there to promote this event
and paid for a sponsorship.
Got on the first page of Gary's Guide,
like right up at the top in a banner,
and it was like 150 bucks, so pretty cheap for that.
And also cold email, if you guys were in touch
with Rinaldo at all, this is the email
that he was sending you guys.
This one I think drove 60 or 70 RSVPs.
- [Female Speaker] I got so played.
- (laughs)
It's not played though, you saw the customization,
it spoke to you.
So talking about the free event,
talking about how you guys are gonna meet
a bunch of agency owners, it's all in there.
This email actually did extremely well,
I think it was like a 10% response rate
or something crazy high for a scalable email like that.
So how to get and ROI from meetups an events?
The biggest hack that I've actually found for meetups
and events is the next day, emailing people
a simple email like this after you meet them.
Almost nobody emails the next day after events,
it's super weird, and if you think about it yourself,
if you go to a meetup, you're always collecting
business cards, but how often are you sitting down
at your computer and seeing the emails come in
from everybody you met?
It's almost never.
So I usually used to be the person
that would have the stack of business cards, put it down
and just send a simple email, so like hey,
great seeing you at the meetup.
Let me know if you're around for a call or a coffee
to keep talking about the app idea.
And most of the leads come from this,
'cause you're not gonna really,
sometimes you can book meetings at the event itself,
but most of the time, you're gonna book on the next day.
So how to find the right events to attend?
The first think to think about is who is
your target audience and are they gonna be
at the actual event itself.
So for you guys, if you're at this event,
you're here to learn, which is cool,
but if you're here to sell, maybe this is the right event
for you, maybe it's not.
The thing that I like to think about is who is,
what events are my target audience gonna be at,
most of the time it's gonna be highly paid events
'cause I'm going after, if I was going after
enterprise companies, it would be events that are paid
or events that have some kind of super specific niche,
so like, maybe it's like a Node.js meetup
that costs like 50 bucks.
'Cause only the company's gonna pay for that,
so you get a lot of people that can afford
that 50 dollar fee.
So who's your target audience, what event
they're gonna be at?
Which job titles do you go after?
Which will help you pick the type of event.
So if you're going after brand managers,
there's a lot of brand manager meetups,
if you're going after product managers,
a ton of product manager meetups.
What job title would be the best fit for you?
And then young agency owners.
What I found here, this little growth hack,
is to ignore other young people at the meetup.
So basically, what I found is a lot of young people
will come to the meetups and they'll just talk
to other people their same age,
when a lot of the times it's like the gray haired people,
even like the weird dudes in the corner,
that have a lot of the power, the decision making power.
Yeah.
So how to find the right events to attend?
In New York, it's perfect 'cause you've got Gary's Guide.
And if you look at this event sheet,
there's a couple that are good here.
And the way that I kinda look at it is
this free event, From Detection to Response,
it seems extremely boring and it's free,
so no one in your target market's probably gonna be there.
But Rise of Robots, that's robotics,
it's a 35 dollar events, so corporate companies
that are thinking about building hardware
are most likely gonna be at an event like that.
Product Analytics Summit, 150 bucks,
nobody that's not a decision maker.
Or nobody that's not at least working in this sector
is gonna be at that meetup, so it's a really good meetup
or event for you to go to.
Raising Seed Funding, 5 dollars,
not a good meetup, bad meetup.
So choose what's right for your agency,
wrapping down the presentation now.
But basically, these are the four that have worked
consistently for us.
But ideally, you wanna identify the goals for your agency,
then work backwards to see what has to happen
to reach these goals.
Some target markets don't respond well to cold emails
and you have to do events.
Some target markets love cold emails.
Other ones really like PR and going on podcasts
are the best way to reach them.
So it's all about testing, all about studying,
those are the four that we found out, so that'll help you
hopefully start off your marketing testing.
If you want YouTube videos, free stuff,
B2BsalesTraining.org.
I'll email this presentation to everybody
that RSVPed on Eventbrite.
And if you need to ask me a question, alex@experiment27.
If you look behind you, this guy Mike does our PPC.
But he's also gonna be booking meetings
if you guys wanna talk business after this.
So thanks a lot.
(applause)
Cool.
Q&A, any questions?
Sure, so the question is, what are the strategies
for cold calling?
The main strategy I like to use
is pretending to be the assistant of the person
I'm calling for.
So for instance, let's say I'm working
with a digital agency, and the CEO's name is Mark.
I'll call and I'll say I'm Mark's assistant
and we do mobile app development,
I'll talk mobile apps but you can kinda use this
for your own thing, and I'll say I do mobile app development
and we have this case study here,
and we'd love to talk about it further.
And the reason why I frame myself as the assistant
is a lot of the times, they're either gonna ask you
to email them, which means they're gonna read the email
the second time, or they're just gonna book a meeting.
And the assistant's not meant to know
a bunch of technical stuff about the app,
so you can have your sales guys do it
without worrying that they're gonna botch something.
That's my main cold calling strategy.
I usually like to use a combo of emails and cold calls,
so I'll send a super detailed email,
then I'll call them to ask them if they got the email.
Because almost always, especially if you're going for
more expensive products like that,
the decision maker is not gonna be the one
answering the call or really responding to email,
a lot of time it's the secretary.
So if you call somebody and you ask them
to look at the email, almost always that email
is gonna end up forwarded to the right person,
which is really what you want.
So the question was, yeah, so the question was,
how do you decide what things do use,
do you use smiley faces?
(background noise)
Well, no, no, my answer to that is just keep testing.
So for instance, a lot of the times,
or for a long time, we used a cold email
similar to the one that I showed you
for booking our meetings, and what I actually found,
and I didn't realize this till last week,
and I'll tell you how I found this out is almost,
is the email was appealing almost 100%
to agency owners that were men.
And the reason why I found this out is
my new sales guy, Billy, wrote a new email
with exclamation points, like with smiley faces
and all this stuff, and we booked meetings
with almost exclusively female digital agency owners.
Whereas before, for the last year and half,
I hadn't met a single female agency owner like
in the 30 or 40 meetings I was taking every month.
Which, it's kinda odd, but that's the type of stuff
that I guess people respond to.
So for you, I'd say if you are afraid
of losing your own voice, you don't have to change it.
But some things do appeal to different types of people
of different backgrounds.
Any other questions?
Yeah.
Sure, so what titles do we contact was the question.
It really depends on the size of company.
So I found that if it's under like 150 employees,
usually the CEO is the one with decision making power,
but you have to go through someone underneath them.
So it really depends on what you're selling, right.
Director of biz dev is usually the best for us
'cause we're selling marketing.
For selling tech, it's usually the,
it's usually product owner.
Like, that sort of stuff, so whoever runs the team.
Like, if you look at a company like Coca Cola,
there's not just like one guy that runs like
all of Coca Cola.
There's a director of marketing for,
let's say vitamin water, and then he's got
like five people under him, and all of them
might have marketing budgets, and then it's like
people under them with budgets.
So there's a lot of people inside the tree.
So I wouldn't really worry about just going after the CEO
unless you were going after a small company.
If you're going after a super small company,
you usually can just email the info at
or the CEO directly and get them to respond.
- [Male Speaker] Would you blanket
the whole team with emails?
- No.
What I normally like to do is I'll target
one person on the team.
So let's say I, first I'll make a list of five people,
and I'll order them in order of who I wanna talk to first.
I'll email the top guy, we'll go through an email drip,
usually I send about four to five emails
that take about a month to go out.
If nobody responds from the team,
then I'll send to the second guy.
And we'll basically drip out that way.
If you are gonna send multiple emails
to multiple people, some companies really hate it,
make sure you write completely different scripts.
Because they will just get passed around.
- [Male Speaker] Yes.
Thanks.
- Yeah, no problem.
Any other questions?
Yeah.
Sure, so typical agency closing times
from initial contact to close, it really depends
on the deal size.
But anywhere from a month to six months.
Normally what I'll do is that initial presentation
will have the deck, a lot of the time
I don't even use the deck.
That initial call is just asking them questions
about what the project's gonna be about,
getting basically bullet points that
I can put into a proposal.
And then the next, the takeaway from that call
is to either book another meeting to go over the proposal,
or I'll say hey, I'm gonna email you to set up times
to go over the proposal.
I don't send the proposal until like an hour or so
before that meeting.
And the reason why I do that is almost every time
that I've sent somebody a pricing sheet or something
before we've talked pricing out loud, they always go dark.
So the easiest way to get them to show up to a meeting
is to do the proposal, is to send the proposal
right before the meeting.
And then from there, you go to contract negotiation,
it really depends on how many people are in the company,
but the sales cycle I like to do is initial contact,
discovery call, like 20 minutes,
then proposal, then if they have more questions
on the proposal, send the contract.
I like to do my proposals with signature boxes at
the bottom, 'cause sometimes they'll just close right away.
And then from there, there's just legal back and forth,
negotiation, and then close.
I always try to optimize a cold email till it gets
a 10% positive response rate.
And usually, that means about a 25% response rate in total.
For our clients, it really depends
because there's a lot of different factors.
The biggest factor I found is your website, actually.
It's not even the content of your email,
it's not your subject line or anything.
It's does your website actually speak to the client?
We've had some clients where we sent the same niche,
same type of email, but a different website,
and that tanked for one of them and succeeded
with the other one.
And then the second one is the content of the email,
rewriting the subject line so it gets opened.
Basically working backwards through the analytics, so
nobody opened your email, so rewrite the subject line.
People open the email but they're not responding,
so go line by line based on the criteria,
the framework that I like to use, and make sure, you know,
is the first line turning them off,
am I saying something super weird that's not relevant?
Does the pitch actually portray what I'm trying to say,
you know, does it actually show what's up,
and does the email actually have a next step
at the bottom of it that ends with a question mark?
'Cause a lot of emails don't have a question mark.
- [Male speaker] So of that 10%,
how many deals get closed percentage wise?
- Industry average close rate is about 25% for an agency.
It really depends on the sales team and everything,
but that's the average, about 25%.
Yeah.
So I think I put it, there's a hole in my presentation,
no, 'cause I actually use Yesware,
and I didn't even mention that.
So Yesware is our cold email sending tool.
And I think it's like 15 bucks a month,
and basically what that does is it lets you
write your email drip out.
Where it'll send the first email, and then if
they don't open or they don't click on that email,
then it'll send another email three days later,
and then another email, then another email
basically as it goes down.
- Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's like automating it.
I like to think of it, like I used to play World of Warcraft
in high school, and I like to think of it
like botting in World of Warcraft.
Like trying to get, like the emails are sending
regardless of what you're doing.
I don't know if that resonated at all.
Yeah.
Sure, so there's two main targets here.
One is agency owners over two million dollars in revenue,
that's our core client for Experiment27.
And then the other target market that's here,
agency owners and freelancers under
two million dollars in revenue,
and the reason why they're here
is that's the target market for the YouTube channel,
trying to build up more YouTube subscribers,
and then we also do private coaching
that's a lot cheaper than what we charge for Experiment27.
So how do you know if you should give up
on a deal if they're asking for a lot of information?
The easiest way to get through that is to automate
the follow ups, so use something like Yesware.
What I'll do is, if somebody's like chasing me down.
One, I mean, why would you give up on the deal, right?
Hire a sales guy if you really hate it that much.
Chase down every single deal.
But if they do go dark, automating emails
that go out every week, every two weeks, until they respond.
That's one of the reasons I have the YouTube channel,
is to send random videos to people that they find valuable.
But you can also send blog posts, you can send case studies,
any of that stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, there's a ton of people
that say they're not interested or unsubscribe.
I just ignore them.
Actually, when I ignore them, it kinda hurts,
I try to just pretend they never happened.
And then the second thing is, if they do have more
than just like unsubscribe, I'll ask them for feedback.
A lot of the times, I'll cold call them,
and I'll say hey, what was it about this email
that you didn't like, like what actually turned you off?
And we've tweaked a lot of our stuff based on that feedback.
Yeah.
Oh, how do you avoid getting marked as spam?
Yeah, so the easiest way to avoid getting marked as spam
is to write an email, two things,
one, write an email that looks customized
and looks like it's being sent by a human.
Which is basically no HTML, plain text, kind of like that.
With very few bullet points, like something
you would actually sit down and write.
Let's say something that would take you
like six or seven minutes to write
is a good enough email to send, and then the second this is
use an email tool that sends through
your Gmail mail servers.
So for instance, one time I lost the domain
'cause I had ToutApp.
And ToutApp's default sends through ToutApp's mail servers,
which have been marked as spam.
MailChimp or any of these other ones that you're using
as well, if they're not signed onto your list,
it won't send through those servers
or you can get marked as spam that way.
So Yesware sends through the mail servers,
I think close.io does as well.
Like, there's a few email tools that send through Gmail.
And if you do it that way, there's no way that,
unless somebody marks you spam, Google will figure out
that you're mass sending.
Let's do one more question.
Anyone?
All right, we're done, thanks, guys.
(applause)
- [Female Speaker] Great presentation.
- [Alex] Thanks.
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