Agencies should get 70%+ of their new net revenue from referrals but that does not mean you shouldn’t have a concerted new business effort as well. When you count on referrals and referrals alone, you are beholden to accept whatever client walks in the door. They might be too small, too big, out of your industry expertise or a jerk. You need to be cultivating targeted leads and opportunities so you can be choosy on the referral side.
My podcast guest Alex Berman believes that he and his team at Experiment27 have cracked the code for agency biz dev efforts. They’ve experimented with many different lead generation channels (cold calling/emailing, directories and sponsorships, agency partnerships, meet-ups and in-person events) to help put more wins in the agency’s new business column.
Hear what Alex and his team are doing for their clients and explore if you think the tactics might work for you as well.
- The massive opportunity outbound marketing provides for agencies
- How to know if your marketing strategy is the right marketing strategy
- What to measure with your tracking software to make sure your leads are working
- The best lead generation channels for capturing leads
- Tailoring cold calls to the target
- Why cold emails need to be short and to the point
- Partnering with other agencies to take on overflow work/give away your overflow work
- How to capture leads at meetups/in-person events
- Making yourself memorable by connecting people
- How to do the follow-up right (it differs if you’ve actually met them or not)
- Why you need to set a KPI
Alex Berman is the founder and SVP of Operations of a marketing and lead generation firm Experiment27. Alex is responsible for generating over $2.5 million in B2B sales and over $50 million in leads for his clients. He also creates weekly videos to help agency owners grow their businesses and bring in more revenue teaching them how to optimize B2B sales cycles and put inbound marketing strategies in place.
Alex was also Chief Marketing Sumo at InspireBeats, a company valued at over $100 million, former Director of Marketing at three time INC 5000 company Dom & Tom. He is also a network video partner for Entrepreneur Magazine.
To listen – you can visit the Build A Better Agency site (https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/alex-berman/) and grab either the iTunes or Stitcher files or just listen to it from the web.
If you’d rather just read the conversation, the transcript is below:
Table of Contents (Jump Straight to It!)
- Where Agencies Make the Biggest Mistakes when Chasing New Business
- How to Know if You Have the Right Marketing Strategy
- How Many Lead Generation Channels Should You Be Running?
- Alex’s Top 3 Lead Generation Channels
- What this Outbound Email Model Looks Like
- How to Make Biz Dev a Daily Priority
- Some of the No-Fail Lead Generation Channels for Agencies
- Why You Need to Connect with Prospects Before Trying to Sell Them
- The Mistakes Agencies Make with their Lead Generation Channels
- Why an Agency Wouldn’t Use these Lead Gen Tactics
- Immediate Action Steps for Improving Your Own Biz Dev
Drew McLellan: Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. It is early in the year, and I am hoping that many of you are thinking about sales. We think about that all throughout the year, but I think particularly as the new year comes by, we start sort of recommitting to the marketing and sales for our agency.
We’ve set new goals, and we’re chasing after those goals, and that’s why I think today’s guest is going to be really, really relevant for all of you, so let me tell you a little bit about him, and then we’re going to jump right into the conversation.
So Alex Berman is the founder and senior vice president of operations at a marketing and lead generation firm called Experiment27. He is responsible for generating over 2.5 million in B2B sales and over 50 million in leads for his clients. They also create some great weekly videos to help agency owners grow their business and bring in more revenue by teaching them how to optimize B2B sales cycles and put inbound marketing strategies in place, and we’ll dig into all of that.
Alex was also the Chief Marketing Sumo at InspireBeats, a company valued at over $100 million, and has served as the former Director of Marketing at three-time Inc. 5000 company Dom & Tom. He’s also a network video partner for Entrepreneur Magazine, so Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Alex Berman: Thanks for having me, Drew.
Where Agencies Make the Biggest Mistakes when Chasing New Business
Drew McLellan: So you talk new business and Biz Dev all day with agency folks. Tell me, where do you think the biggest mistakes lie in the way that they pursue opportunity?
Alex Berman: So the biggest mistake, and it wasn’t really obvious until I started talking to a lot of agency founders, is, most of them don’t have a solid outbound strategy, so at least like for marketing agencies, maybe they do, but my experience is iOS, Android, and then design agencies.
Most of them, they’ll have a sales team, but the sales team is only handling inbound leads or doing account management, so selling and then working on the accounts. So I think there’s a huge opportunity just by adding an outbound channel, and then looking through inbound. That’s the biggest blind spot that I think most agencies have.
Drew McLellan: Well, my experience has been a lot of agency owners, when you talk about Biz Dev, their natural response is, “Well, we get so much work by referral, we don’t need anything,” but the truth is, then, what that means is whatever comes through the door, you have to take, whether it’s a good fit or not.
Alex Berman: Right, and it’s cool to leverage inbound.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: Right? There are some agencies, I was just talking to an agency out in Boston that grew to $20 million just on referrals, and they weren’t dealing with marketing, and they didn’t even have a CMO or anything like that, which it’s amazing that that’s possible, but there are clients … The reason a lot of people get into agency work is to do the work they want to do.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: Right? So it’s kind of the exact opposite to then sit back and wait for people to come to them.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: You should be out there pursuing the dream type of projects, the projects that will really get your teams going.
How to Know if You Have the Right Marketing Strategy
Drew McLellan: Absolutely, those sweet spot clients that you love working for that love the work that you do for them. Yeah, absolutely, so if there’s an agency owner who’s listening now and saying, “Oh, that’s not me. I have not said to Drew,” which they all have said, “I have not said to Drew the cobbler’s children have no shoes. We have a marketing strategy.”
How do they know if it’s the right marketing strategy?
Alex Berman: How do you know if it’s the right marketing strategy?
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: You have to look at … I mean, basically, you have to look at where you want to be as a company, right? Most agencies, I know on one of the other episodes of this podcast, you said most agencies get about 70% of their deal flow through referrals. I’ve seen about the same thing, so if you’re getting more than 70%, let’s say you’re getting 100% of your deals through referrals, and you’re not doing any networking or any outbound at all, I mean, it’s definitely a good time to look at it.
If you feel like you can grow your business at all, and you feel boxed in at all by the number of leads you’re getting … So basically, if you’re not getting way more leads than you can deal with I’d say it’s time to look into your marketing.
Drew McLellan: And so if they have a strategy, how do they assess its appropriateness or if it’s right for what they’re trying to get to? So, okay, let’s say I have a clear idea of where I want my agency to be, and one year, three years, 10 years, and I have what I believe is a marketing or Biz Dev strategy, how do I make sure that those two things match up?
Alex Berman: Okay, so if you’re a marketing company, I’m assuming that you’ve got Google Analytics set up, maybe you have conversion tracking and all this stuff, or actually, maybe I’ll cover that real quick.
So first, as a baseline, you want to make sure you have some kind of tracking software on your site that measures the number of contacts that are coming in, whether that’s HubSpot or even Google Analytics has good contact tracking.
So the piece of data that you want to look at is the source and then, which sources are converting the most, so when I sit down with an agency, the first thing I always do is dig into their analytics, and I’ll go back as long as the website’s been around, so whether it’s like two years old or three years old or eight years old or whatever, I’ll pull it up, and I’ll pull up conversions for that entire timeline, and the one thing that I like to look for is, what are the sites that have a very high time on site, but not a high volume of people?
And a good example of this is when I was CMO, when I was Director of Marketing at Dom & Tom, I reviewed their analytics, and I found that Quora, the question and answer site Quora had generated two leads over the course of like two years, right? Like nothing, but of those leads, there was only a total of maybe it was like 10 pieces of traffic, so something on Quora drove 10 visitors, and two of them converted.
That’s a 20% conversion rate, so based on that, I went out there, and we leveraged Quora. We read a whole bunch of Quora answers, did a whole breakdown, and we were able to drive that number up. After 30 days we were getting 40 inbound leads a month just from Quora based on just looking at your analytics, seeing what those underperforming channels are, or those gold mines, and then leveraging those channels.
How Many Lead Generation Channels Should You Be Running?
Drew McLellan: Okay, and how many lead generation channels for an agency, typically, how many channels does it make sense for them to be really tracking and really having an active strategy to drive more people to and through?
Alex Berman: So I think it depends on your bandwidth. I know when I was building up Experiment27, I tackled two channels at the same time, so cold email outreach was my go-to strategy. That’s the one that we use to get most of our clients to this day, but at the same time, I was doing cold email. I was doing YouTube and content, and that also generated leads, so that’s the type of strategy you can work at the same time. Right?
Because when you’re sending outbound emails, you have that blocked out, then you’ve got like some dead time, so in that dead time, I would film videos, and then by the time the videos were done, people had responded to the emails. So I’d say you can do one or two at the same time, prove them out. Normally it takes … Well, it depends on the channel. We can actually break down … I’ve actually found eight channels that almost always work for increasing agency leads, but each channel has a different amount of time to ramp up.
Usually it’s about 90 days per channel so I would try something for between 60 and 90 days. If it’s not working, drop it. Otherwise, once that’s set up in 90 days, then you can start looking at other channels. You can outsource that channel.
Alex’s Top 3 Lead Generation Channels
Drew McLellan: Okay, so of the eight lead gen channels that you find are most reliable, tell us about the top two or three.
Alex Berman: Sure, so the number one is cold outreach and cold calling, and I didn’t actually have cold calling as part of this until about a month ago, but we started leveraging cold calling for our clients.
And the thing that really blew me away was, we were going out towards the Fortune 500, so big companies, and I have this woman on our team named Latisha, and she was cold calling these companies using a strategy we can talk about if you want, and she booked six enterprise meetings in six days with like Morgan Stanley, Publix, and Adidas, like Dunkin’ Donuts, like these giant companies.
Six of these big meetings in six days, which really sold me on cold calling. So before that, I was totally against it. I was like, “All right, just do cold email outreach,” so now that’s one big channel. It’s the number one.
Then the number two is actually directories and sponsorships, so sites like, getting on sites like Awards, or TheyMakeApps, which is dead now, or dying. Clutch.co is a big one, or leveraging Behance and Dribbble.
All of those directories and sponsoring your way to the top, that’s just the second large channel, and that’s actually, if you were going to run two channels concurrently, I’d recommend doing directories and sponsorships, because that’s more of a quicker play. Your leads are going to shoot up immediately, because you’re basically paying for the most sponsorships while outreach has a chance to ramp up.
Drew McLellan: So the listeners will kill me if I don’t circle back around and say, “Yes, I do want to hear about the strategy that allowed your employee to land six enterprise meetings with the likes of Morgan Stanley and Publix,” so yes, tell us about that.
Alex Berman: Sure, so the way that most people do cold calling is, especially agencies, if you’ve ever … Have you ever gotten a cold call from like a random agency?
Drew McLellan: No, probably not, because most agencies don’t target other agencies, but I certainly have talked to other agencies who either have tried cold calling and it’s not gone well, or, like you, like you said, before last week, you were, “No, we’re not doing that.” Their attitude, I think, is that that won’t work.
Alex Berman: Yeah, and so the thing is, with actually all of these lead generation channels, most people think they won’t work because the initial gut reaction that agency founders have, like the initial assumption, is almost always the same, and it’s always wrong for, actually almost for every one of these channels.
So the initial assumption that I found with agency founders when they make cold calls is, “Hey, I’m going to call these guys, and I’m going to pitch what I do as an agency, so I’ll call you and I’ll say, ‘Hey, I do iOS and web development, and if you have any work, let me know,'” basically.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: Or they’ll send cold emails with a bunch of bullet points that just outline stuff. What I found actually works for the Fortune 500 is, Latisha will go and first will make a list of the type of companies we want. We’ll niche it down by industry, so for instance, one of our clients right now, Dom & Tom’s still a client of ours, so we’re doing cold emailing for them right now, and one of their case studies, their strongest case study, is in the university space. It’s this project for University of Oklahoma.
They redid the student onboarding process, and they built this custom application, and now their student retention rate is up, and they’ve got these analytics and things to back it up, so what we did is, we made a list of the top universities. There was about 408 or something like that in the United States, and now Latisha is going in depth on each one of these universities. Right? She’s researching sports teams. She’s researching goals for the year, and the whole …
Basically, she’s trying to create a picture of each one of these agencies, and then when she cold calls, the way she opens the call is saying something like, “Hey, I’ve been researching your goals for 2017. I realize you might be working on new student retention because of this press release. Do you have a couple minutes to talk? I’m with Dom & Tom. We just built an app for University of Oklahoma that’s increased their client, their new student happiness, or new student retention, by 10%.”
And that’s the kind of thing that, if it is something they’re actually working on, they’ll listen to. Right? Because you’re coming with a specific idea rather than just saying, “Hey, we do iOS development.”
Drew McLellan: Right, right. Okay, so we’ve got the cold calling, and that makes perfect sense to do that. How long does it take her to do that research per target?
Alex Berman: So it really depends. I try not to have her spend more than like 10 minutes on each target.
Drew McLellan: Okay.
Alex Berman: Unless you’re doing full account-based sales, so like for the universities, since there’s 408 of them, the best way to do it is to break down each one and try to do, yeah, like 10 minutes of research on each one, then try to cold call them. If you get through, you can try the pitch. Right? Because you’ve got the research.
If you don’t get through, or if they’re not opening the emails, then it’s worth doing another round, so doing another 10 minutes on each that hasn’t responded or hasn’t opened the email, and finding some other hook, and wondering like, “Hey, is there some other contact that would be better? Is there a different part of the university I should go with? Should I not pitch student retention? Should I talk about sports? Where are the budgets?”
So basically, it’s kind of like a Lean or like an Agile model, right? So you’ll spend as little amount of time as possible.
Then you’ll try to reach out to all of them to get the low-hanging fruit. Then the ones that don’t respond, that’s when you start doing more and more research, because basically, you don’t want to spend more time than you have to.
What this Outbound Email Model Looks Like
Drew McLellan: Yeah, absolutely, and so is your outbound email model kind of the same, where it’s, you start with some research, you open the email with something specific that you know that is on top of mind for them? And then talk about how you’ve helped someone else do that.
Alex Berman: Yeah. Yeah, basically, so the way that I like to send cold emails, I always like to have a pretty generic subject line, because it gets them to open, so like “Question about University of Oklahoma,” or “About University of Oklahoma and Dom & Tom,” just like something very generic that’s going to get them to open so they actually see the email. And then it’ll say something like, “Hey, Mark. Obviously, a huge fan of the Sooners. Congrats on the game.” Like something very customized to their university.
Drew McLellan: Right, right, right. Yeah.
Alex Berman: Just like a sentence or so. The actual email I try to keep under five sentences total, and then you move into something like this, like, “My name’s Tom. I’m the founder at Dom & Tom. We do iOS development and digital strategy for universities, so we actually just built an app for University of Oklahoma that has increased their student happiness by 10%.” Looking at, let’s say it’s Caltech, “Looking at Caltech’s goals for the year, it seems like that might be something you’d be interested in improving as well,” and then, “I’d love to have a quick chat and go over what we did and see if there’s any value. Does that sound interesting? If so, I can send over a couple times. Thanks. Tom.”
Right, so it’s very … The only thing that really needs to be customized is that first sentence, but if you noticed, the whole email is also very university-specific so that goes back to the first point about digging in and figuring out a case study that you want to clone in different industries. Right?
Because if you send out … The way I like to look at it is, if you have somebody cold calling or cold emailing like the Fortune 500, just in general, you’re going to hit … There are so many industries you’re hitting, right? Like 20, 30 different industries, so each one of those is going to have a different customer … They’re going to have just different needs. They’re going to have a different vocabulary they use.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: So if you just target based on one industry, you can write an email that looks super customized, but it’s really just a template, and it’s niched down, so that’s why we’re only targeting universities with this batch, and then the other, we’ve got a couple other ones going on, one for financial institutions, one for healthcare, things like that.
Drew McLellan: Well, it’s interesting when you say the email should be no more than five sentences, because I think that’s something that agencies struggle with, so even though it’s the exact same advice they give their clients, “Brevity, brevity, brevity,” they’re not great at that themselves. They want to sort of tell the whole story, and your example is a great reminder that all you’re trying to do is to get to the next step, and the next step is to have some sort of exchange.
Alex Berman: Okay, so, what you know through working with agencies, based on what you know, why do you think that is? So why does a marketing agency who has built out marketing strategies over and over again probably in B2B for dozens, or even hundreds, of clients, why can’t they see that their own marketing is not up to par?
Drew McLellan: Well, I think it could be a couple things. One, I think oftentimes they try and get it done really fast. They don’t give it the attention it needs. Number two, a lot of times they shove it down to a junior person because all their senior people are busy taking care of clients, so you don’t have the level of experience. I think some of it, too, is, they suffer from the same human foibles that their clients do, which is, “I’m afraid this is my only shot at talking to them, so I have to tell them the whole story,” and I also just think in general, it’s just like their clients need to hire an agency to do marketing. I think it’s difficult for agencies to clearly see the outside of the bottle from inside the bottle, right?
Alex Berman: Yeah, and I think we’re on the same page there.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: There’s a reason … I think the first point and the last point you made are key, right? It’s not that clients don’t value marketing or they’re not good … It’s not that they’re not good at marketing or they don’t know what to do. It’s the amount of time that they’re willing to invest in their own marketing pales in comparison to the amount of time that they’re investing in clients’ marketing.
Drew McLellan: Absolutely.
Alex Berman: The way that I’ve gotten around that at Experiment27 is hiring dedicated people, like I’ve got a guy, and his only job is to do marketing for us, so he works on the YouTube channel. He reaches out to podcasters. He tries to get us on the front page of Reddit. He does cold emailing for, not for Experiment27, but we have a sales team for that, so having dedicated people and taking those resources and investing them in yourself, or hiring a consultant to point out the flaws, is hugely important.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: Actually, I think that’s one of the main values that we offer at Experiment27. Yeah, we do the execution, right? Like we’ll go through, and we’ll do all these marketing and lead generation channels for agencies, but the actual biggest … The biggest value is that initial month’s review, right?
Because one of the things we do is, we’ll look through the analytics, right? We’ll look through all the cold emails that you’re sending and point out the flaws. Where are your partnerships breaking down, or what directories are you not leveraging?
And one of the biggest value adds is, if nobody’s running marketing, it’s usually on the head of the founder, who’s got no time, so yeah, if you hire a consultant, even someone like you, if you hire, like even if someone hires a consultant like you or like me to look through that, the value’s going to be tremendous.
How to Make Biz Dev a Daily Priority
Drew McLellan: Yeah. I think the challenge is, for a lot of agencies, is, they cycle through, right? So they are a little light on work, and so they scramble and do a bunch of new business activity. They get a client or two, and they’re so busy servicing that client that they sort of drop the new business activity, and I think one of the biggest challenges for agencies is, how do you … Again, it’s ironic, because it’s exactly what they talk to their clients about, but how do you make marketing and Biz Dev something that happens every day, no matter what else is happening that day?
Alex Berman: Yeah, and part of it is implementing the systems. The easiest way, I’ve found, from a founder’s point of view, to actually make sure stuff gets done is to hire people to do it.
Drew McLellan: Yeah. Right.
Alex Berman: Like I know I’m not going to sit down and send 40 cold emails a day, right? I’ve tried it in the past. I used to do that when we were first starting out, and it sucks to send cold emails. It’s a trudge, but there are people that love doing it. Our two salespeople love sending cold emails. You know?
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: The person in charge of sending client outreach, he sends it, so yeah, hiring people and putting them in those roles … It’s the same thing that you’d do if you wanted to have a design project done. You’d hire a designer. You wouldn’t, as the founder, do the work yourself unless you’re really just starting out, and you haven’t stepped outside the business yet.
Some of the No-Fail Lead Generation Channels for Agencies
Drew McLellan: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to dig into some of the other channels that you alluded to early in our conversation, so let’s do that, but first, let’s take a quick break.
All right, we are back with Alex Berman, and Alex, you had mentioned that there are eight, almost, cannot-fail channels for agency new business. We talked about two, so let’s, tell us about a couple others.
Alex Berman: Sure, so the other one, we can go in order by what I’ve seen in terms of ROI.
Drew McLellan: Great.
Alex Berman: So the first one was outreach. Second one was directories. The third one is agency partnerships, and this is a two-sided one, right? Because some agencies will say, “Hey, yeah, we do partnerships,” and they go south or things like that, so there’s two sides to agency partnerships.
One is reaching out to larger agencies that charge about double your hourly rate to send you overflow work, and the other side of agency partnerships is reaching out to smaller agencies that charge less than half of what you charge to send your overflow work to them, and this, that lower side of agency partners is actually one of the quickest ways to … If you feel like you have too much work, or you have too much busy work, one of the quickest ways to get that off your plate and on to another company so that you can focus on some other stuff in your business.
Drew McLellan: So what does that conversation look like, on both ends? So if I’m reaching out to a larger agency, and I’m looking for their overflow, which I have several agencies inside the AMI family that that’s what they do, they think of really big box agencies, and they are their sort of go-to for project work, so what does that initial conversation look like, and who do you … If I’m the smaller agency, and I’m reaching out to the larger agency, who in that larger agency should I reach out to?
Alex Berman: So I found that cold email is actually a really good way to do this. Cold calling also will work, but cold emails is fine, and you could actually … You don’t even have to customize the email very much. You just have to make sure that it’s not too long, so what I found is an email about five sentences long, similar to the other one, and then the person to reach out to, I try to reach out to about three people.
If it’s a gigantic agency, I might reach out to a director of projects or a director of project management. Otherwise, maybe director of client services, or if they have a director of partnerships, so a lot of these bigger agencies do actually have a director of partnerships, which is probably why the cold emails work so well.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: Like they have budget, or they have projects, and they have a person whose only job is to test out agencies with small projects, so if you hit those, if you hit those type of people, those director of partnerships people, up, you can quickly get some new business in the door that way.
And it’s a short email, so like, “Hey, question about WPP,” for instance, would be like a good subject line. “Hey, Mike. Huge fan of WPP. Love the work you did on the Power Rangers campaign,” or whatever, just a specific campaign, just to show that you’ve done some research.
Drew McLellan: A little bit of homework, right.
Alex Berman: Yeah. Now, I’ll use Dom & Tom as an example again. “So my name’s Tom. I’m the founder of Dom & Tom, a 50-person … ” Actually, there are 98 people, “98-person mobile app development company in Chicago. We’ve worked with Tyson, Power Rangers,” list out two or three projects. “Would you be open to discussing partnerships? We’re vetting some new agency partners, and our in-house team could really add some value to WPP.” It’s just that simple, right?
Drew McLellan: Right, right.
Alex Berman: That simple and that open.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: Because the thing is, with agency partners, you don’t really have to play around too much, right? Because you’re plugging into a system that already accepts partnerships, and as long as you’re not … I don’t know how to phrase this correctly, but as long as you’re not an agency from a country that they don’t work with you’re going to at least get a quick call.
Drew McLellan: Okay, so that’s a great channel. What’s channel number four for you?
Alex Berman: Channel number four is meet-ups and in-person events, so there are … Actually, when I was at Dom & Tom before I was Director of Marketing over there, I was a salesman, and I was the top salesman in my first year there, beating out both founders and the Director of Sales and the entire sales team. And my secret for that was, I had a monthly meet-up for brand and marketing managers in New York City, and like 60 to 70 people would come up, and we would generate about $100,000 in new business just from those meet-ups, and nobody else on the team would ever come on over, stop by.
Drew McLellan: So basically, you were hosting a meet-up of a group of people who would want to network with each other, and you were just there as the conduit.
Alex Berman: Yeah, exactly, and it wasn’t like a fancy meet-up with like speeches or anything. It was, I didn’t even reserve a bar space. It was just an open invite. “First Monday of every month, come by. We’ll all have drinks, and we’ll just network with each other.” Yeah, it was just straight-up networking for brand and marketing managers.
Drew McLellan: And in that, your role was really just to chat, chat, love your hat, work the room, while those people were there, right?
Alex Berman: Exactly, and yeah, what I would do is, I’d just get like a drink, and I’d just walk around from group to group and try to figure out why everyone was there, make sure they’re all having a good time, and, yeah, just facilitate the conversations.
When I found somebody who was interested, I would talk to them and basically ask them about their business. The goal of the in-person events is, well, there’s two different types of in-person events. We’ll cover the second one in a second, but with the meet-ups, the goal is not to sell immediately.
It’s to get their business card, and the reason … That sounds super soft, right? Like, “Oh, just get their business card,” but what I found is, even just in a normal networking scenario, if somebody hands you their business card, almost 100% of the time, I would say 99.999% of the time, everyone that they’re handing their business card out, nobody is going to actually email them the next day to follow up, so if you’re the one person the next day, I used to just come in and just have a stack of business cards, and I would actually email each person individually, and I found that most people don’t actually do that.
Drew McLellan: Well, I find it staggering, but even when someone goes to all the expense of having like a trade show booth, and they do a giveaway where they’re collecting email addresses, or they get the scans from the trade show, or they collect business cards, whatever, even in those cases when they’ve paid for the privilege of collecting those names, they don’t do anything.
Alex Berman: Yeah.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: Exactly.
Drew McLellan: It’s crazy.
Alex Berman: Or they’ll send out, or if they do do something, they’ll do something lazy like send out the same email to everyone else, or to everyone, with no customization on like an HTML5 template or something.
Drew McLellan: Or they won’t have thought about it at all, and so they don’t do it for two months.
Alex Berman: Yeah.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: So what I found is, the quicker you can follow up, the better.
Drew McLellan: Sure.
Alex Berman: I’ll do it, usually, first thing in the morning, or maybe, if I’m super busy, later that day, but always same day, and what I’ll do is, when I’m actually at the event, I’ll try to come up with some kind of keyword or talk about something that’s like memorable, so maybe we talk about wine.
And I used to carry a pen in my pocket, and I would write just one word on the business cards to call back an email, so I’d say like, “Hey, Matt. It was really good meeting last night. Thanks for coming out to the meet-up. It was awesome to talk about wine,” and if they’re a contact, I’ll say, “Would love to talk more about the mobile app project that we were going back and forth on. Would you be available at any of these times?” And then just link to my Calendly, and that got a surprising amount of meetings.
Drew McLellan: Yeah. Right.
Alex Berman: The only reason why I think that worked is because nobody else is doing it.
Why You Need to Connect with Prospects Before Trying to Sell Them
Drew McLellan: Yeah, I think so too, and another strategy I like around that is not only reaching out to them, but I think one of the ways we can become memorable to someone else is to connect them to other people that they need to, they want to meet or know, so to be able to say, “Hey, Matt, it was great meeting you. Blah, blah, blah,” talk about the wine was awesome, “Would love to get together with you. Also, I would love to introduce you to so-and-so, who I think you would find really interesting or helpful on that thing we talked about last night.”
Alex Berman: Yeah, I used to do that a lot too.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: As long as you’re doing two-sided intros, it’s fine.
Drew McLellan: Yeah. Right.
Alex Berman: So just make sure you get buy-in from the person you’re introing them to before you cc them in an email.
Drew McLellan: Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh, yeah. Right. Absolutely. Otherwise, you’re going to get unfriended very quickly.
Alex Berman: Yeah.
Drew McLellan: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that was the one kind of meet-up, and then you said you had a second.
Alex Berman: Yeah, the other one’s in-person events, so paid events where people are hearing you speak. The most successful paid event we did was when I was a CMO at InspireBeats. We sold lead generation and cold emailing software for B2B SaaS companies, so we reached out to WeWork New York City, and we asked them if we could use their space for an event. They said yes. We didn’t have to pay anything.
They had a projector, so I sent out this email. It was like, or this event. It was, “What We Learned Sending One Million Cold Emails.” $20 a ticket, and I didn’t promote it at all via cold email. I only promoted the event … I set up an Eventbrite page, and I posted it on all of the “Things to do in New York” lists, so basically if you search like, “Networking events New York” or “Things to do in New York” or in whatever city you’re in, a bunch of these other directories will pop up.
So in New York it’s like AlleyNYC or Gary’s Guide or anything like that, and most of them have a “submit an event” box at the top, and they’ll literally post anything as long as it’s relevant.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: And so I would post these up, and every event we did, so we ended up doing about five events in New York City over the course of six months, and every single one of them sold out. And again, I think it’s just because nobody’s using these directories.
Like Gary, the guy who runs Gary’s Guide, he needs good events or else people aren’t going to follow the guide, so submitting to those is really important. And yeah, basically, we went in. We gave a speech on what we learned sending a million cold emails. Afterward, a bunch of people came up to ask me questions, and we had one of our sales guys in the back to basically try to pull them off, or try to get next steps, and we actually ended selling, so of 100 people, we ended up … It was, like, five retainers we sold that day at $800 a month, and then we ended up probably selling about 10 or 15 more over the next 30 days, just from that one event, so that’s about, what is that, a 15% close rate?
Drew McLellan: That’s a pretty good ROI.
Alex Berman: Yeah.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: Exactly.
Drew McLellan: Absolutely.
Alex Berman: And we made money on the tickets, so it was positive ROI originally.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: And the reason why you want to charge for these in-person events is, I actually learned this doing the free meet-up, if you have a free event and you get 100 RSVPs, about 30 people are going to show up.
Drew McLellan: Exactly.
Alex Berman: But if you have a paid event, even if you charge like five dollars almost 100% or even more than 100% of people are going to show up, because people are going to bring their friends.
Drew McLellan: Well, and the commitment level is just different if they’ve had, as you say, even pay five bucks. Now it’s more of a priority.
Alex Berman: Yeah, and we tested the five-dollar strategy. We did, we needed to recruit at Dom & Tom one time, so we did an event at Stack Overflow all about, “How do you use Sketch in your business?” Sketch is a design tool and I introed one of our designers to do the speech, and yeah, we had, it was like 120 people showed up. The Stack Overflow office was completely full, and we were only charging five dollars, and that many people still showed up.
The Mistakes Agencies Make with their Lead Generation Channels
Drew McLellan: Yeah, I think that’s true. So as you think about these lead generation channels, what are some universal truths about how we kind of muck that up? What mistakes do we make? Regardless of the channel, what mistakes do we make?
One of them I’m hearing you talk about a lot is the follow-up, the, however you bump into someone, whether it’s intentional, through cold email or cold phone calls, or events, there’s got to be a next step, and that next step has to already be planned out and ready before the first interaction, right?
Alex Berman: So for any sort of sales thing, yeah, I’d say there’s two points. One is followup, people don’t follow up nearly enough. They’ll send one email, or maybe even they’ll send two emails, but … I had a list of people that I would reach out to every single month that I really wanted to work with, at Dom & Tom, and I did that for maybe a year, and a bunch of them turned into meetings, just because I kept emailing them.
Drew McLellan: Right. So, let’s say on reach out, four or five, so they’ve heard from you three or four times and, odds are, have not responded, what does that look like? What does your fifth reach out look like?
Alex Berman: Okay, so it depends on whether I’ve talked to them before or not. If I haven’t met with them, I’ll only send four emails, so it’ll basically be a five-sentence email, like we talked about. Then it’ll be a little bit longer pitch, so that’s … The second email’s normally like the bullet point email, or one where I’ll give them specific ideas on their business.
So when I’m sending out to agencies a cold email for Experiment27, my two go-to ideas are the agency partnerships thing that we looked at that we just talked about on this podcast. Then the other one, I’m talking about how to optimize your directory profile, so like, “Hey, we got Dom & Tom, and four of our other clients are on the first page of Clutch, and it’s generating 100 leads a month. We’d love to run through that with you,” so specific ideas. Third email is normally just a super short call to action, so like, “Hey, I wanted to make sure this didn’t get buried. Do any of these times work for a call?”
And then the fourth email, when it’s cold email, is a breakup email, so like, “Hey, I realize this might not be a good time for you. Feel free to reach out if you need anything. Otherwise, it’s good. Good meeting you.”
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: And that one gets a bunch of responses, actually, more than our third email is getting. Most of our responses would come on our first email, and on our fourth, on our breakup email.
Drew McLellan: So that’s interesting, the psychology of that, of, “I have not responded to you in any way, but if you’re breaking up with me, then I better respond to you.”
Alex Berman: Well, that’s the thing, and the bigger meta point that I think covers all channels, which is what you were asking about before, is, you have to get inside the mind of the person you’re emailing, right?
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: Let’s say you’re emailing … So for me, I’m emailing agency founders. These guys are, they’re too busy to even do their own marketing, right?
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: They don’t even have 30 minutes to commit to doing marketing every week. Why would they respond to this? They’re obviously super, super busy, so if I don’t establish enough value, or even if I don’t just keep emailing them, they might not get back. I try to think about Dominic, who’s the CEO of Dom & Tom. He would try to get to inbox zero like every two weeks, and so he would just let emails stack up in his inbox, and then he’d sit down and maybe have like 300 emails in his inbox, and he’d just try to plow through them all as quick as possible.
So if I was Dom, what I would do if I got a sales email like that, is I would either mark it for later, or I would just delete it. I would probably delete the first couple, just to see if they were actually good at what they did, like if they cared enough to follow up and then, at that point, yeah, I would … They would have to hit … The email would have to come when I was in the mood to respond to a bunch of emails.
Drew McLellan: Well, I think your point is an interesting one. I do think that agency prospects do sit back to see how badly we want to talk to them, and what is our followup like, and so where we’re thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to keep bothering them,” right? “I don’t want to be a pest,” they’re thinking, “How persistent are you?”
Alex Berman: Right. I think they’re looking for two things. One, it’s, “How persistent are you?” And then two is, “Am I on a list, or does this guy actually care about my business?”
Drew McLellan: Right, right.
Alex Berman: And-
Drew McLellan: And, “Is it automated, or are they talking to me about stuff that’s only relevant to me?”
Alex Berman: Yeah, and the thing is, you can automate stuff that’s only relevant if you niched down like we talked about before, right? That agency drip, or, I mean, that university drip that we’re sending out is super relevant to all these universities because they all have similar problems.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: It wouldn’t be relevant at all to somebody in the industrial business, or car sales, or something.
Drew McLellan: Yeah. I preach the whole idea of niching. I think it’s super important. A, I think you develop a depth of expertise, and B, I do think it allows you to automate more of your new business activity because you’re talking to birds of a feather.
Alex Berman: Yeah, exactly.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: And you can get super deep.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: There’s stuff that a car sales, that an owner of a car dealership cares about that a person who runs an agency … Or actually, yeah, the person who runs an agency, let’s say you’re selling to agencies, has never even heard about, right?
So if you try to send a cold email that appeals to both of those, you’re going to end up getting super general, and then you’re going to end up sending a cold email that looks like everyone else’s that gets deleted or looks like it’s automated.
Why an Agency Wouldn’t Use these Lead Gen Tactics
Drew McLellan: So when you are talking to agency owners and you’re helping them understand the value of some of these tactics, what’s the pushback you get? Why wouldn’t an agency do some of these things?
Alex Berman: So the pushback, actually, I wouldn’t even call this pushback, the main thing I hear is, “Yeah, that sounds awesome.” Like, “Yeah, that sounds awesome. This is all stuff we need to do but we’re not doing,” and the pushback is similar to what you said before, about them just not having time, like alright, yeah, we’d love to hit all these channels, but we just don’t have time,” or, “We have a Director of Marketing, and they’re not doing any of this stuff,” so I’d say, when I cover these channels, almost always the only reason that they can’t work with us is a budget issue.
Drew McLellan: So when you are engaging with an agency, let’s say they do have a Director of Sales, or the agency owner is driving sales, are they doing things that they shouldn’t be doing? So let’s assume that they’re doing something, so let’s cross the ones off the list that are doing nothing. But if they’re doing something, if they believe they have a marketing strategy, are they doing things that they shouldn’t be doing?
Alex Berman: Yeah. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen revolves around events, and it’s sending your people on trips or events with no goal. So for instance, almost every agency I know wants to, either wants to go to South by Southwest or they’re there.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: But if you’ve ever gone to South by Southwest, if you go there and you don’t have like a meeting goal, you’re going to come back with nothing. Yeah, it’s too crazy. Like if you don’t know who you want to meet, what you want to do, you’re not going to get a ROI from it. So whenever I go to an event, I always set myself a goal. I try to go with between five to 10 meetings booked per day, so literally, I’ll have Calendly, calendly.com. It’s a free, I think it’s free, maybe it’s like $10, it’s a calendar booking tool.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: So I’ll have that with my availability, and I will do the exact same thing I did at the meet-up in New York. So I’ll talk to people, try to figure out their needs, and yeah, hammer the pavement, treat the event like I’m cold calling, basically, run each conversation like a cold call. I know that might not be the most empathetic way to do it, but if you want to get an ROI from an event, you need to grind as a salesperson or as a founder until you get that ROI, and then you can have fun.
Drew McLellan: Yeah, I think a lot of people go with the idea of, “Oh, I’m going to meet a bunch of people,” but without targets in place, or without, as you say, a number of meetings per day set up, or whatever goal, and then they come back three … Well, especially South by, they come back three or four days later with nothing but a hangover.
Alex Berman: Right.
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: General networking with no goal is basically worthless right? If you’re talking to other … If you meet another agency founder and you’re doing partnerships at all, then you have something to talk about, right? Try to establish a partnership. There’s a good ROI. If you’re talking to somebody at a company, yeah, talk about your marketing services or what you can do for mobile apps. Get info on them and actually, yeah, be that sleazy guy that’s running around selling to people at the conference until you get that ROI. Then you can treat it like a vacation.
Drew McLellan: Well, and I think the way you’ve described, which is really having a conversation about stuff that they care about, it doesn’t have to come across as sleazy. It just is your, you are interested in their challenges, and, oh, by the way, you’ve helped other people like them solve that challenge.
Alex Berman: Exactly. I don’t think it comes across as sleazy, but I’m thinking, I’m trying to think of the internal barriers to …
Drew McLellan: Yeah. Right.
Alex Berman: One of the reasons why people wouldn’t do that is because they don’t want to appear like that sleazy networking guy.
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: But that networking guy does make money, right?
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: Right? That guy usually is very successful.
Drew McLellan: Well, and I think the sleazy comes from talking about yourself all the time, so if you actually go with the intention of learning more about the prospect or the person that you have met, whether you knew they were a prospect or not, and you really are genuinely interested in, “Can we be helpful to them,” and again, whether it’s a, “Do I know someone that they would mutually benefit from knowing each other, and/or have we done work that would be relevant to them, that they could learn something from?” That actually feels pretty good.
Alex Berman: Yeah, and the other thing that I found is super valuable, especially if you’re an agency that’s been around for a while, is to talk in case studies. So basically, when I’m at these meet-ups, I’m trying to tell stories based on the projects we’ve done, so if somebody says they’re at a university, then I … If I was Dom & Tom, I could talk about that university case study and talk about what I’ve done. But it’s not me talking about me. It’s me sharing my insights for them so they can improve their business, and that works for anything you’ve done, so long as you, as long as you’re legally allowed to share them, obviously.
Drew McLellan: Yeah, it’s a great … That’s a great point.
Alex Berman: If that makes sense.
Immediate Action Steps for Improving Your Own Biz Dev
Drew McLellan: Yep, great point.
So I’m hoping that everybody’s been listening, and have been taking notes, and they’ve been, sort of, recommitting to building out a Biz Dev program that is assertive and consistent.
So if that is true, and they’ve been hanging with us for the whole hour, what are some things that, as you know, the audience for this podcast is agency owners and leaders, what are some things they can do on their own immediately to up the ante in their Biz Dev work?
Alex Berman: So the thing to do is set a KPI. Set a … You ever read the book 4 Disciplines of Execution?
Drew McLellan: Yeah, it’s great.
Alex Berman: Yeah, so in that book, there’s that whole thing, lead measures versus lag measures, right?
Drew McLellan: Yep.
Alex Berman: And the basic definition is, lead measure is just something that’s in your control, versus a lag measure is something you can’t control or that is influenced by the lead measure. So the lag measure for you, let’s say your goal is to increase sales. The lag measure for you is revenue, right? Closed business. The lead measure for that, take one step back, it’s number of meetings booked, right? The close rate. One step back is the number of outreach done. So set a KPI that your salespeople or your marketing people can do immediately that has some lag measure attached to it, so for sales, what I do with my sales team is I say, “150 cold contacts a week per person, whether they’re cold calls or cold emails,” right?
Because they can do that, and then every sales meeting, I can look back and I can be like, “Hey, how many cold calls did you do?” And they’ll tell me, well, they’ll always say like, “150,” and then I’ll be like, “How many did you do exactly?” And then …
Drew McLellan: Right.
Alex Berman: … they’ll say like, “153,” or something like that, I don’t know. For marketing, it might be, “Email 20 people to try to get the founder on their podcast,” or, “Email 10 agencies smaller than us to try to get partnership meetings.” Yeah, that’s the first thing I would do, if you were an agency founder, and you wanted to start improving your marketing, is set a weekly KPI with your underlings that is directly tied to revenue for your business.
Drew McLellan: Yeah, what, you measure what matters, and what you measure ends up mattering.
Alex Berman: Right, and you’d be surprised. I know it sounds super straightforward, but you’d be surprised how few either don’t have those KPIs set, or they have them set as lag measures that people can’t control, like sales per quarter. I know most sales teams have those quotas where it’s like sales per quarter, versus the number of outreach that they do.
Drew McLellan: Right, right.
Alex Berman: Or marketing teams that aren’t tied to any KPI, because the founder doesn’t want to think about marketing, or they’re tied to KPIs that aren’t influential to revenue, so like number of content pieces generated, or things like that.
Drew McLellan: Yeah, I wouldn’t, sadly, be surprised, because I see what the agencies do, and you’re right, most of them don’t have … They do measure things, but they measure outcomes rather than activity that leads to outcome.
Alex Berman: Exactly …
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: … and yeah, 4 Disciplines of Execution is super boring, but the insights in there are incredible …
Drew McLellan: Yeah.
Alex Berman: … for pretty high …
Drew McLellan: Yeah, it’s not a fun read. It’s not one of those business fable sort of reads, unfortunately.
Alex Berman: Yeah.
Drew McLellan: Yeah. Okay, so, Alex, I … Boy, we could talk about this forever, but I need to wrap things up, so couple things. One, how can folks track you down if they want to learn more about your business and the work you do? And also make sure you give everybody the URL to your YouTube channel, because your videos are really helpful, and by the way, everybody, those will also be in the show notes, and you’ll be able to find the link there as well, but tell everybody how they can get to you, Alex.
Alex Berman: Sure. You can either send me an email, [email protected], or at experiment27.com, the website. There’s all our services and a bunch of free resources on there, and yeah, like you were saying, Drew, the YouTube channel’s free. There’s a bunch of free sales training and everything on there, and the URL for that is b2bsalestraining.org. It’ll redirect right to the YouTube channel.
Drew McLellan: Okay, awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time today, for sharing your expertise. I am sure you’re helping a lot of agencies have great success. I’m grateful that you so generously shared what you know, so thanks.
Alex Berman: Thanks for having me.
Drew McLellan: All right, gang. Hopefully, this inspired you to notch it up a little bit with your new business efforts. Whether you try one of the lead generation channels or a couple of the channels, just make sure that this is the year that you do things a little differently, a little more consistently, and with better metrics in place, as Alex talked about, making sure you’re measuring the right things so you know that there’s enough activity to deliver the outcomes that you want. I, of course, will be back next week with another great guest who will help you build a bigger, better, stronger agency.
In the meantime, you can always track me down at [email protected], and as always, if you are finding value in these podcasts, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any of the weekly episodes, and I will catch you next week. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.
