140 | How C-Suite Leaders Can Master AI-Enhanced Outreach: 5 Pillars for Scalable Growth with Garik Tate

0:00Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shows practical ethical ways to leverage to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we have an interesting show for you today. You heard me say this before, if you've been listening to this podcast, you can run your business without HR, without finance, without marketing, without a sales team, without operations. It's not great, but you can do it without all of those. You cannot run a business without clients. If you don't have clients, You can run a nonprofit, but you can't run a business because then money is not coming in.

0:36And that's the whole point of a business. Now, there's multiple ways to get clients. One of the maybe least sexy ones that a lot of people avoid because they don't really know how to do it and they feel weird is called outreach. The reality is called outreach is a very effective way to get new clients if you know what you're doing. So to know what you're doing is this fancy mix of art and science, right? And if you have a system in place on how to do this properly, you can get a lot more clients, which is something every business wants. But the trick is, how do you do this? What's the process?

1:15And that's why I'm really excited about today's show, because Garrick Tate has a VA agency in the Philippines for years. And one of the services that he's providing for multiple companies is doing cold outreach on their behalf. Now, that means he has a solid system. And in the past year, they've obviously found ways to infuse AI into the five steps that they're using in order to do effective outreach. And they now, beyond the fact that AI allows them to do it better, it also allows them to scale them a lot more. And he's going to share with us exactly this, the five steps that they're using for good cold outreach and how to use AI in order to scale and improve each and every one of those steps.

1:59Very exciting for me, hopefully very exciting for you as well. And hence, I'm really excited to welcome Garrick to the show. Garrick, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Matis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

2:52Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm looking forward to this. Same here. So let's dive right in, right? I think people understand your background. You have an agency. You've been doing this for a while. It's not your first time doing cold outreach. And I really am curious about A, your process and B, how are you using AI in it? So I'll let you follow your steps and I will try to make it as interesting as possible. I find this stuff endlessly interesting. So hopefully your audience does too. to make a cold outreach campaign that works. And when we're talking about cold outreach here, we're talking about, you can do it multi-channel.

3:26So that could be email plus LinkedIn plus text messages, plus et cetera, et cetera. You can kind of get as fancy, as multi-channel as you want, or the core of it is still email. Ultimately, I don't think email is going anywhere. People have been saying for the last 10 years that this is the last year of email and it's still around. And just saying sales is dead. No, it's still around. So that's what we're talking about. Email primarily, but this can, apply really across multi-channel. When you're building a cold outreach campaign, and I've built initially our first few companies on the backs of cold outreach, and then now we take clients and we add AI to it to supercharge it.

4:00You need five ingredients as five pillars, and your growth is really going to be limited by whichever pillar is the weakest. So I think of it almost like an algorithm, A times B times C, whatever is the smallest number, that's going to be your constraints. Big fan of the goal by Eli Goldratt, if you know that, the theory of constraints. But the five pillars are going to be, number one is your product market fit. Number two is your list, the list that you're contacting. Third is your deliverability. Are you actually getting in people's inboxes and are you doing that at scale? Fourth is the copy that's written, what people actually read when they first engage with you.

4:39And then fifth is your inbox management, or really that's just your ongoing conversations, basically your sales, your back and forth in order to actually book the appointments. And then from there, you have a lead and you have a booked appointment. So those are the five pillars that cold outreach done well is built on top of. No, I think it's amazing because I think a lot of people go to this thing, oh, I'm going to send emails to people and see what happens. And if they respond, I will try to follow up as good as I can. And what you're describing is obviously much more in depth and goes way beyond just the sending the emails and responding to the emails, which is just one aspect of everything that you define.

5:18So let's really go one by one and kind of see what companies need to do in order to perfect each and every one of those steps and how they can use AI in order to do that step better, faster, cheaper, maybe all of the above. Yeah, AI is a massive passion of mine. I'm building pretty much our entire portfolio of companies on the back of it. I had actually done a lot of cold outreach before ChatGPT, before a lot of these tools came out of the market. And the problem was I loved the designing side of it, like the architecting the system. But I hated treating people like machines. I hated having to set quotas and monitor people and make sure everyone was hitting their numbers.

5:57I just hated that part. But once AI came out, it's really possible to scale something quite effectively, quite ethically, without having to treat people like machines. And so I'm a huge fan of adding as much automation and AI into this as possible. So let's just take the first one. Yeah. So product market fit. That's what you said. So product market fit. So this is essentially the idea that if you are selling snow to an Eskimo, you're going to have a hard time. Doesn't matter if you are in front of them. Doesn't matter if you're the best salesman in the world. Maybe you can pull it off, but it's just going to be challenging.

6:34versus if you're selling, I think the famous example is hot dogs at two o 'clock in the morning, just as the bar closes or toilet paper during a lockdown or what have you, that's going to be something very easy to sell. So there's really two parts to that. One is that you have a product that gives a lot of value and you have access to a market or in this case, the market that value is given to. And I was actually talking with you about this before this call. In my mind, this is something that can be incredibly in depth on, but I hadn't actually thought about how to add AI into it so much. For me, it was a lot more about talking to your customers, asking them questions, but you actually had talked with me about how you use AI to kind of make this a little more supercharged.

7:16You want to share that? Yeah, I love this. You're now interviewing me. That's fantastic. But yeah, so one of the things that I do for myself and for my clients is build a content, a very well-defined content calendar, if you want. It's not really scheduled the topics we want to talk to based on the specific audience that we want to hit. And the way I actually start is I actually start by a list of links from social media. For me, my main channel is LinkedIn. So I take 10 LinkedIn URLs off the profiles, off the people that I'm either already serving that are my best clients, the one that stayed with me the longest, that are paying me the most amount of money, that are doing the most amount of activities with me, my dream clients, or the people I want to have as clients.

8:02He's the perfect profile. I know he's the right size of company and so on. And I literally just copy and paste them into ChatGPT. And I ask it to explain what is in common for them and build a detailed ICP, which is exactly what we're talking about, right? How do I define my ideal client persona? And it does an amazing job in it. And I give it, the prompt is detailed, right? talks about psychographics and geographics and age and sex and blah, blah, blah, blah. But it finds ways how to aggregate all of these things. And it creates a page and a half of a very detailed definition of your client. And then what I do is I go ahead and add my stuff to it.

8:46So here's what I want to focus on. Here's the value that I bring. Here is the e-things that I think are the pain points of these people. And then I ask it to do another cycle and I ask it to synthesize what is probably the key messaging aligned with the key pain points and dreams and wishes of these needs of these people. And so this is how I help companies build a solid product market fit because it helps them identify who the market is based on who their actual successful clients are. And some people, they don't even know, right? Some people are like, I don't know, like I can sell this to anyone, which is the worst answer you can give.

9:29But if you do, if you go through this process and you really think who are your current best clients, or if you're getting started, who do you think are your dream clients and why, then AI can really help you together with actual links of actual people, because LinkedIn is a goldmine of data. Where people are from, their seniority, how many roles they have, they know the size of the company they work for, How many people work with them? So many different things. Education, right? All this stuff is available over there. So LinkedIn can build a very solid profile and then you can use it to build a messaging, which we can talk about in your next steps.

10:01So yeah, that's how I do product market fit with AI. I love that. And it sounds like what we're talking about here is using AI as your brainstorming buddy, as your second brain in a way to reuse that old term, to do the research to make sure you have a great product market fit. I'm somebody who thinks about everything in frameworks. And so just to dial in for your listeners, the way that I define product market fit is that you have a high delta between the perceived value, the perceived value, the price, and the cost. You have as high of a delta as possible between those three variables. So you can imagine that the perceived value is as high as you can possibly make it.

10:45And that's perceived value, of course, because sometimes you give amazing value, but it's hard for people to perceive it with where they're at in that moment. So you want as high of a delta, you want as big of a difference between that and your cost as possible. Simultaneously, you want the cost to be as big of a difference from your cost to your price. Yeah, I can't reverse the terms. No, no, but I totally get it. If you're selling something that people think is$10 ,000 and you're selling it for$1 ,000 and it costs you$100 to do, then you're running a very solid business, right? Because people are going to pay you$1 ,000 every day to get something they perceive is worth$10 ,000 and you're still making 90 % margin on each and every one of those things.

11:23So I totally get it. I think it's a great way to look at it. Exactly. And if your deltas are good across those three, then your conversion rate is going to be extremely high, which is that's just living life on easy mode. There's a lot of companies out there that succeed way better than you. And you wonder like, why are they succeeding where I'm not? It's probably because their deltas are higher. And the reason why I think the rich get richer largely in business is that their lifetime value per customer is higher because they figured out how to upsell across a longer funnel. So their delta between their price and the cost to get those customers is higher because they monetize them over a longer period of time.

11:59This is just the advantage of being in business longer, of adding more to your business. But if you can hit that product market fit, it's one of the things that matters the most in your business. You can't, and you can't shortcut it. But let's move on now to the other pillars. Yeah, no, by the way, I love this framework. I never heard it before, and I think it's spot on. I love it. I stole a lot of those ideas from Alex Ramosi. I think he's an amazing guru. If your folks follow him, some of the ideas might be recognized. So the other pillars are your list, the deliverability, your copy, and the inbox management.

12:30So the next one is the list. Once you know your product market fit, and you have the product that has a value, you have the market then that you want to advertise that to, the question is, where do you find them? And so this is something that has definitely gotten easier as better and better tools have come out there on the market. So the primary three that I think most people can get started with, but there's really three plus other. So I'm going to go through four examples. Number one is LinkedIn. So there are great tools out there that allow you to gather data from LinkedIn. If you have Sales Navigator, I highly recommend you can create a very detailed filter set to then list all your ideal client profiles.

13:13Now that you've defined them by the amazing methodology of using AI and you define them, you apply that to the filters in LinkedIn, and you're going to get a great list. You can scrape that using tools like Phantom Buster. There's a lot of tools out there that actually let you scrape it. The challenge with most of them is that they're going to bottleneck using your account. So LinkedIn will notice if you scrape more than I believe right now, the best practice, this can change from time to time, I believe right now the best practice is less than 2 ,500 scrapes per day. So if you want to do more than that, you're going to need to look for some other tools.

13:46Some tools that you can do is you can rent third-party LinkedIn accounts through a store like Accountify, although I'm not affiliated with any of these, but these are some things that your listeners can look into. So you can rent one and then just plug that in with Phantom Buster or another scraping tool. Or the only other tool that is out there on the market, and which I would say is, frankly, at this point, it's not super well polished, but it does solve this problem really nicely. So your audience can contest with it. It's actually Goldenleads. I can't really say I recommend them because like I said, they're not super polished, but there's somebody that lets you scrape a large data set from LinkedIn without having any bottlenecks because they have their own farm of LinkedIn accounts that do some of the scraping.

14:25So that's probably going to be where most people should start. I want to pause you for just one second, because I think the question people ask themselves, also on these tools, Funtumbuster is definitely the gold standard from my perspective, and I've used multiple of these tools in my past. It's the most expensive by a big spread, but it's also the most solid and with the most amount of capabilities. Who do you scrape? I'm like, okay, I can scrape context from LinkedIn. How do you know which one you want to scrape? Yeah, so for that, then you have to get the best filters. So you start with Sales Navigator and then build the filters and then do it this way.

15:02So again, I want to add to that as well, something that I'm doing and you, anybody can do as well. I scrape anybody that is in connection with me, right? So anybody who comments on my posts, anybody who likes my posts, anybody who reaches out to me through direct messaging, anybody who comes to my live events that I do every Thursday. So these people immediately get on my scraping list. The cool thing is, so I, okay, I have a fair following and a pretty large and a pretty engaged audience. So people are like, okay, that's not fair. What if I'm just getting started? If you're just getting started, you can do the same thing with your competitors, right?

15:37The people in your field, in your niche that are posting regularly, and they get hundreds or thousands of clicks and comments and so on every single post. you can scrape their audience and then filter it out. And I'm sure we're going to talk about this afterwards, so I'm not going to ruin that. But there's ways to then take this raw list and then filter that out based on the audience that you want to focus on. Yeah. No, that's absolutely where people will get the best results upfront from we specialize and then going from that point then like scaling into 10X, 100X. But if you're just getting started, that's absolutely the best place to get started.

16:15And how, because each one of these pillars I can go in with a significantly more level of detail and a lot more tactical. Is this a good pace we're going through? Do you want me to dig more into the list and some other tips and tricks for generating the list? Let's dive into generating the list. Yeah, I think people want to know how. Perfect. On the list, if this is your first time doing this, the way you do it is you create the filter set and then you take the search URL and you plug that into the scraping tool like Phantom Bus or Golden Leads. The main challenge that most people have there is if they want to be scaling their campaign is each search URL, you can only have about 2 ,500 results.

16:52Most people have some silly ways of trying to break down a larger campaign. If you have 10 ,000 results in your search, like you have a very large targetable, total addressable market, TAM, the way that you break those down should primarily be geography. So there are 50 states in the USA. So if you have 100 ,000 from there, then you just do each state individually. If you have one state that's too big, you just hit that state minus the major cities in the state and then just hit each one of those cities separately. And this is super easy because you're just building a spreadsheet of 50 links for the 50 states.

17:24You then plug all that in Fanbuster and you're off to the races without really throwing away any data. It's a very easy way that I don't see enough people talking about. So that's LinkedIn. Honestly, Apollo is very similar. It's the same kind of a thing. And if your audience doesn't have Apollo, the two primary ways that you can scrape Apollo is one, they do have API tokens where you can scrape data directly, but that can be pretty expensive because they limit you to only a thousand for their basic plan. If you want to hit 10 ,000 or above, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be using a tool like Instant Data Scraper.

18:01That's probably the most popular one. It's a Chrome extension where you then make your search. And this is something you should really get a VA to do or someone else. But you make your search similar as the LinkedIn, divide it by geography, make sure it's 2500, same principles. And then you just turn on Instant Data Scraper. First, you have to save it to then get all the emails out of it. But then you run Instant Data Scraper on that saved list. And then that will scrape everything for you. You copy and paste it on the spreadsheet. If you don't want to do that, you don't have a VA, there are other tools out there on the market.

18:30Enrich IQ and Export List are the two that I'm aware of. You can test which one works best for you. They just work differently. But you can hand them the Apollo link, and then they'll give you all the leads for really pennies on the dollar compared to a more expensive Apollo subscription. So that covers Apollo for Google Maps. To be honest, for most people's campaigns, at least for our clients, this doesn't come up as much. But there are a lot of tools out there that work very similarly. We create searches and then plug them in tools and it scrapes you the results. Much better if you have a more mobile and phone number-based campaign versus an email campaign, but it can still be really helpful for email campaigns.

19:08So I want to ask you an interesting question here. So you're talking about pretty large numbers here, right? So you're talking about getting thousands from LinkedIn every single day, thousands from Apollo every single day, thousands from other sources every single day. what is a good scale for and i know that's a very broad question because it depends on the product depends on the service depends on the pride points depends what is a good starting point if i have 20 leads a day to do a cold outreach is it even worth doing like where does it become interesting enough to say yes our con because you've done a lot of these like what's the average conversion going from completely cold outreach to an actual sale?

19:50So is it one to a hundred? Is it one to a thousand? Is it one to five? And again, I know this is a very broad question and I know the variation is high, but I'm sure there's ballparks where this thing starts working and below that it's not worth doing. I love this question and I'll never dodge a question like this. The answer is it depends. Here's how I think about it always. There's actually two ways I want to answer. The first I'll give is some principles that are worth keeping in mind. And the second is just real numbers. So a couple of principles to keep in mind is that generally speaking, this whole tree pretty consistently is that the cheapest way to get leads is going to be earned media because there it doesn't cost a lot of money.

20:30So earned media is just social media posts, content, two videos, LinkedIn posts, stuff like that, that and essentially warm leads, which warm leads are essentially just networking. That's what we call networking. So those are the two cheapest ways and earned media scales very effectively. But you have to give tremendous value for free for a long period of time before it starts to pay off. But if you're playing the long game, nothing beats on ROI basis, but it takes a lot of time, a lot of energy. So time is money. But that is number one. The second cheapest is cold outreach. The third, then the most expensive is paid ads.

21:05So for most people, what I highly recommend is that if you're going to be in a space for a very long time, you should do earned media. If you're testing out a space, you should do earned media. You should not do earned media. You should do cold outreach. You should send out, let's say, 5 ,000 emails, see what the responses are, see who's interested, tweak the products and add another 5 ,000. And to be honest, 5 ,000, probably more than you need. We'll talk about numbers in a second. But that's a good way to test a market. If you're committed to a market, you want to earn media and maybe cold outreach, if this is a channel that you want to engage with, but then earn media is really the way to go on top of cold outreach.

21:45And earn media, just final note on this, I'm sure a lot of people can relate, is will increase your conversion rate for whatever other marketing channel you do, because people will Google you and they're going to see your content. So earn media is never a bad idea if you have the bandwidth and the skill for it. So that's some principles of how I think about this. But now to go into like just real numbers, biggest caveat in the world, 100%, it depends, it depends really on your product market fit, which is why that comes first. But for most people, an industry average is 1000 emails for one fully engaged, qualified leads.

22:22So think of that as like a booked appointment. That's industry standard. Now, industry standard is brought low by the fact most people suck. If you're really, so if you're quite good, you should be aiming for something closer to, let's say 300, a one, one qualified lead per 300. Some people can do significantly better, but that's something that if you have a decent product market fit and you're on top of things, that's something to be aiming for. Truly 300, like 370 would, I've heard most experts speak in those ranges. We aim for 300 in our campaigns. So now I want to add something that is highly related to what you're saying.

22:54And then I want to continue back to the next steps of the list, because I think they will connect very well. I think the biggest trick, and maybe I'm wrong, you've done this more than I did, the biggest trick is making the cold outreach as warm as possible. Meaning, today with AI, like all these tools that we just talked about, collect information, that's all they do. The more information you collect, the more personalized you can make the outreach, the more related to that person you can make it, the more that person feels that you actually are helping them versus annoying them, bugging them, trolling them, whatever you want to call it.

23:28So if you can reach out to a person that is really your target audience, when you really understand the problem, where you know a lot of stuff about them, the company they work for, their current role, the place they are in the world, the customer they service and what the issues they have with them, the more this feels less, hey, we've been helping 50 other companies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, come and work with us. Nothing about me. How do you even make that assumption that I want to work with you? And so I think that's where AI plays a very big role, right? Because it knows how to take a lot of that data and turn it into a message that sounds very personalized.

24:04And if you collected the right information, if you have the right product market fit, you can actually make this warmer. But yes, that's like my two cents. But let's go ahead. I want to hear the rest of your process. I love that. And let's actually skip to number four. So I typically put deliverability after the list, but let's talk about which is a copy and then we'll head back to deliverability. So I want to share some high-level thoughts on this first before we're going to tactical about what this means. So on a high level, I agree with what you're saying 110%. I want to add in two nuances in this.

24:36One is that there is a difference between personalization and relevancy. And you'll settle for personalization, but you want relevancy. So personalization would be, hey, I saw that you went to this college, go Lakers or what have you. You went to Pennsylvania. Amazing. Buy my stuff. It's better than saying buy my stuff, but it's not as good as saying, hey, I see that you're in this space. Did you know that people in this space benefit from X, Y, Z? That is significantly more relevant. So relevancy is showing how relevant your product market fit is to them. It's showing the product market fit part.