EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Intro
If you’re running a software development agency, it shouldn’t be too hard to grow. Welcome to Managed Coder Podcast. Tune in every week to find out how to grow your software development agency and help you to solve your day-to-day problems with 20 plus years’ experience running an agency. Please welcome your host, Shahed Islam.
Shahed Islam:
Hey, Nick, welcome. I have known you for some time through Twitter and other social media. Introduce yourself to our audience.
Nick Abraham:
So, my name is Nick Abraham. I run a B2B lead generation agency called Liebhard. I also run multiple SaaS companies in this outreach space such as Quicklines, Scrubby [sounds like 00:48], Inboxy, and a couple of others that I just can’t think of off the top of my head. But everything sales, B2B sales is what I’m about.
Shahed Islam:
The reason I contacted you, is I’ve been talking to many agency owners who have grown to one to five, naturally. They get a lot of their clients through referrals and then they get stuck, a lot of them. They don’t know how to get more clients. And that’s where B2B sales generation or lead generation comes in. So if you were starting an agency, software development, or web development, what are your three pieces of advice to start with? Where do people start? Because a lot of people don’t know where to start with B2B lead generation and outbound sales.
Nick Abraham:
So the space is always changing. And I think that’s what causes a lot of people to not figure out what to do. And so, the best way to go about it is really three things. So first, figure out who your ideal customer is. And so, you got to really map it out. And then the second thing is, what is it that you can sell to this ideal customer that solves their pain point? You can’t be a one-stop-shop, you can’t provide website design, Facebook ads, Google ads, and SEO. That doesn’t work, especially when you are doing lead generation B2B. Outbound needs to be one service, one offer, one market. And if you can do that, and you can write a very easy conversational email that doesn’t…. whenever you’re doing outbound don’t be all salesy and have a huge junk and talk about so many different things. Be very conversational, be very direct with one product, one service, and then one market. And if you can do that, then your cold emails will work, and they will actually stand out. And you’ll actually be able to get responses, which will lead to meetings, and in the actual meeting itself is when you can actually pitch them, and hopefully, close the deal. And so, I think a lot of people come into this persona of I got to make the message super long, I got to make it look very professional and then I need to tell them my pricing on the email. That’s not the case. You want to be very conversational. You want to see if they’re a good fit, you want to get them on a call, and then you want to close the call. And so, that’s how you want to approach B2B lead generation.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you, Nick. And I think the ideal customer is something which I have spoken with many agency owners and they struggle with. Because they’re doing [unintelligible: 03:12] development, Magento, or they get confused and offering them too much. So let’s talk about the approach, how do you go about it? A lot of people even don’t know that their CRM is in Moscow for an agency. In order to maintain your current customer forget about outbound. So, what is your recommendation if somebody is starting with an outbound campaign? What is step one, now they have decided on the ideal customer, they know what to do? Now, how do they implement it? How do they go about it?
Nick Abraham:
So you’re speaking like what’s the next step after they decided they want to do the outbound. Okay, so there are a lot of tools out there where you can build a list. And so, most enterprise customers will go after zoom info and use their database to build a lead list is what we call it. And so, there are so many other databases out there. So, what I would recommend is whatever vertical you’re going after, your ICP is in, so let’s say, I’m a marketing agency, and I want to target doctors, or let’s say, real estate agents because it’s easy. You should probably Google up the real estate agent database, lead database, something of that sort. And you’ll probably find a huge list of very niche databases. Get access to that database, you’ll be able to get a lot of contacts. And so now you have your contacts. And now, the second part is actually launching the cold emails. And so, when you’re doing lead generation, outbound sales, whatever you want to call it. There are so many different channels. There are cold emails, there’s LinkedIn, and there are outbound calls, so you want to figure out which channel you want to use. In this example, let’s use cold emails. And so, with cold emails, there’s a little bit of a technical aspect to it. And so, the best way to go about it is to learn how to buy a domain and set up a demark record. And this may all sound confusing but you can Google it, there are so many videos on it, and an insane amount of YouTube videos that’ll help you understand this. But you want to buy a domain, you want to set up your demark record, and you want to attach it to a warm-up tool to make sure that the email is going to be warm whenever you start doing the cold emails. And then you want to use some kind of sales engagement platform. There are so many out there, once again, figure out which one’s the best fit for you. And then all you’re doing is simply taking your list of leads that you got from that database, putting it to the sales engagement platform, writing some kind of engaging copy that once again, is one product, one service, one market tailored, and then you’re going to launch that cold email. And then from there you simply sit back, and you look at the metrics to see if it’s going to actually work or not.
So, multiple listeners are mostly technical people. They don’t even have a sales team. They sometimes are a one-person sales team, the CEO probably started doing sales. So, what would you suggest to them if they need it, I mean, I have seen that Fiverr is a good place, for other places where you can hire people who will write down the sales email for you. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Even the tools are available, just as you said. There are a lot of tools, HubSpot, or any other. So, what are the three tools you can suggest or places where people can hire some content writer to get some sales email done?
Nick Abraham:
So, one thing I always tell solo founders or solopreneurs, is you have to prove the sale yourself before you can start delegating it out. So, a lot of people that come even into our agency, haven’t really gotten their first 10 customers. They got one guy because their friends, moms, and aunt gave them a referral. And so, they haven’t proven their offer. And so, when they come to us we can’t help them, we really can’t. And so, if you’re listening to this, and you’re a solo founder go and figure out how to do it yourself before you try to delegate it to someone, otherwise, you’re just going to be wasting a lot of money and time. But let’s say you have proven that your offer works to a cold audience and you’re really looking at is basically scale that up, that’s when you want to delegate this stuff out. But if you’re in that process of trying to figure out what that offer is, and what that marketing product works and trying to combine it all together, the stuff that I would recommend so if you’re going for a database I would go at UpLead. I think UpLead has the best B2B database, it is a little bit more on the expensive side. So, if you’re low on a budget I’d look at Apollo or Adapt. Those are my three favorite databases that I would go after. And then if you’re looking at a sales engagement platform to send out emails, if you want to do LinkedIn, for example, I would probably use either WEConnect if you’re on a budget, or go for Expandi, they have a better UI, and it’s a better team. I would go for those two if you want to do LinkedIn. If you’re looking for email only, you’re trying to do a lot of emails, I’d look at Mailshake, which I think is probably one of the better ones out there. But if you’re looking for something that could do a little bit more bulk, probably our email platform called Emmi is what I would do. And then if you’re looking to warm up your emails I would only use Inboxy. The reason why I say only and I do own Inboxy but it’s the only one that has a private seed network. Everyone else is using a public network and that’s not good for deliverability. And so, those are all the tools that I would recommend to build out that tech stack.
Shahed Islam:
So, what I understand is that you cannot just go ahead and say, oh, there is a tool I’ll just get it and everything will be taken care of. It is almost like programming. Just like I’m doing a website and I’m building an application, sales became so competitive. You cannot just go ahead and say, you know what, I’m just going to dump an email list on software and everything would be done. There are so many components out of it. Is it becoming more complicated because of the competition?
Nick Abraham:
I think it’s a mix of the competition as well as how the space is changing. Back in the day, there weren’t as many settings and as many filters to block out cold emails. Now there is. And so, back in the day, if you were to send cold emails in 2005, I have mentors that would just load up an IP, get a list, and be able to blast a million emails with perfect deliverability off of one IP. That’s not the case you could do anymore now. You need multiple IPs, you got to warm those IPs up, and then even then you have a very hard chance of making sure that it will actually land in the primary inbox. And so, the space is always changing but there are a lot of tech founders out there that are always adapting to this space. And so, an outbound lead generation it’s going to be here forever but it’s just going to get more and more competitive. But if you can stay on top of it, you make stuff win.
Shahed Islam:
So, one of the things I have seen with those people who are growing their agencies and want to multiply their revenue in a few years or they have some goals, they are reluctant to spend money on sales and marketing. I mean, sales, marketing, forget it they don’t even go there. What kind of investment do you think they should make? Because I have learned the hard way that if you don’t invest money you are going to maximize your referral network. And eventually, I think after a million-dollar revenue it is very hard to go to the referral, you probably have to get some revenue through outbound marketing or getting new leads from a different industry or new industry. What is your suggestion for any agency owner who is trying to grow from a team of 5 to 10, or 10 to 20, or revenue from one [unintelligible: 10:30 plus?
Nick Abraham:
So, I always recommend as soon as you start your agency, whether you’re getting your clients through inbound or referrals, whatever it is, you should always figure out how to build out the outbound sales function that has to happen. I mean, obviously, the second your sales start to stop is the day your business starts to die. And so, I think creating the outbound helps to make sure that your pipeline never gets empty, and then that’s very key. And so, in terms of money spent it really depends on your budget. When it comes to B2B outbound lead generation there’s no way you can get a cheaper cost per lead, if you look at it like that. And so, in terms of money, I would say if you’re starting out put aside a budget of $500, and you can make that work really well. $500 to just spend on tech stack, as well as maybe have a VA on hand that could help do some smaller data entry stuff here and there. But I think $500 a month is going to be more than enough to put a good amount of leads into your pipeline. And then from there, you got to focus on nurturing the pipeline and making sure that the deal goes into an appointment, the appointment goes to close, and so forth.
Shahed Islam:
So, if I want to build a business development or sales team, what would be my structure? [Inaudible: 11:51] of, let’s say, 50 people or 30 people?
Nick Abraham:
So, you always want to start off with SDRs. So, I think founders should be taking sales until, I don’t know, depends on what you’re selling but they should be able to….because here’s the thing, a lot of founders will hire salespeople before they even know how to do the sales. And so, whenever you’re trying to train someone on something that you couldn’t even do is just a huge fire. It’s literally happened to me before. And so, I think you should have an SDR that focuses on booking the appointments for you. And so, they’re doing, whether it’s cold calls as your channel or cold emails, or LinkedIn, or maybe it’s all of it. And so, you should have SDR that focuses solely on filling your pipeline up. And then if you’re the founder, and you haven’t proven sales yet, then you should be taking all the sales calls and focusing on everything after that call is booked. So, presenting the demo, see if they’re a good fit, and then following up as well as nurturing that contact. And so, you want to do all that manually, probably for the first bit. And then after you have proven this process, your close rate is steadily around 20, 25%, you’re booking a quality amount of appointments, that’s when you want to go to someone, you want to get a commission-based closer. So like a good example would be closify, for example, which is another company I’m involved in. You can hire a commission-based closer to take those calls that are being booked in. And so now you have your SDR booking calls, you have what we call is an AE, account executive closing the calls. So now you’re starting to build out that outbound sales function. And then depending on what you can handle, and what the volume is, is you want to start adding more SDRs, more accounting executives and eventually, once you have, I don’t know five people on that side of the team, you want to hire a sales manager to make sure that everything is moving forward, people are hitting their KPIs. And so, now you’re removing yourself completely from sales because that entire side of the team is just being completely owned on its own, there’s a good system in place. And then from there, you might need to hire a VP of Business Development once that starts to really grow out. But I think with the word agency specifically, most agencies should just start off with that SDR and account executive and there’ll be good from there. Because most agencies aren’t built to take on 100 customers tomorrow just because it’s a little bit more custom work. But if you’re doing like a SaaS, for example, then you probably need to sort of look into hiring a sales manager and really growing that out. But that’s how I would look at it.
Shahed Islam:
So, we all receive a lot of emails every day from all over the world, sales emails become very common. We touched a little bit about the sales in an ideal customer, and what is your message to the customer. How does somebody who is starting out, or maybe they have been doing it for a while, and they never got responses from outbound email because a lot of people I talk to they’re like, oh, outbound email doesn’t work. But I follow you for a while and you are a true believer that it does work. That’s the only way. It used to be the cold call now email is the new communication. What would be your advice to them? [Crosstalk: 14:52] maybe more in-depth they need to look into or maybe invest more information.
Nick Abraham:
So, what I’ve noticed with the cold email is if your deliverability is good, you’re getting steady 60 to 80%, open rates, and you’re still not getting any responses, it’s a high indication that what you’re selling probably doesn’t have product-market fit. And this is with a lot of agencies. They’ve built their entire book of business completely on referrals. And so, when you’re getting business from referrals it doesn’t mean that you’re the best guy out there, it just means that you have built a very strong network. And so, when you start to do the cold outreach, referrals don’t matter. It’s really about your product and your service, and what the offer really is. And so, if you’re having high open rates and your offer is not there, the best way to figure out why your offer isn’t really converting is honestly to just pick up your phone and call some of these guys on your lead list and just simply ask them, hey, what turned you off about this email? Why didn’t you respond? What is it? I’m just trying to gather data and figure out why aren’t they responding back. And it’s typically going to be because, hey, I don’t need this because x y and z. And that kind of helps you understand, okay, maybe this isn’t the market I want to go after, maybe my solution is better for another market because this doesn’t solve enough of a pain point. Or maybe it’s even an indication that what you’re selling is just out of date and there needs to be some kind of new revamp of how it’s presented, how it’s pitched, or what it even does. And so, that’s just how I look at cold emails. But that’s kind of what I do. And then, as I said, you just want to make the email very conversational, you don’t want to be too salesy, you’re looking for a response. And honestly, the best cold emails that I’ve got, the best campaigns I’ve ever written are less than five sentences long. And so, keep the [unintelligible: 16:47] very short. No one wants to read an email, or even spend time doing it. So those are my tips. And then once you’ve proven that it works, you do need to scale the outreach outs or use something like Quicklines, for example, which is another company I’m involved in, which will just personalize the email for you. And so, now you’re sending custom-tailored personalized emails at scale. And so, that’s kind of what I do.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you, Nick. Very nice talking to you. We ran out of time but I would love to welcome you. How do people contact you? What is the best way to communicate with you?
Nick Abraham:
So the best way is probably either Twitter or LinkedIn. So, you can find me on Twitter, I think my username is Nick Abraham12. I forget but I think that’s what it is. And then on LinkedIn, if you just search up Nick Abraham Liebhard, it’ll probably come up.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you, man. Very nice talking to you.
Nick Abraham:
Thank you so much for having me.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you.
Outro
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