Outreach Secrets: Winning Tactics to Engage Decision Makers

0:00If you're looking to hire additional marketers for your team, there's no better place to look than hiring nearshore, hiring offshore. sure. And we found that we've hired amazing creative people. We've hired amazing people that can help with execution in the marketing side, whatever it is that you're looking for. Exactly. We are helping with that. We have recruiters from our side. All you have to do is go to marketing school.io slash hire. Once again, it's marketing school.io slash hire, fill out the information in terms of what you need. And then we'll have our recruiters reach out to you to help you with the placement.

0:32And it should be great for you at the end of the day, because you're going to save a lot of money and you're going to get the help that you need. So you're going to get help from a cost standpoint and also an execution standpoint as well. So again, marketingschool.io slash hire, and we'll see you inside. All right. So we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in agency space, you are a services business. This is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call.

1:01It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so. And you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency. Hope you enjoy the episode. Explain your challenge. Hi, everyone. I'm Dave Fox. I own a branding agency. We also do some digital marketing, some search engine optimization, some content writing for a lot of small businesses. I'm trying to get away from the solopreneurs and the very small budget, small clients, and get into some mid-market or just large SMBs. getting through to the decision maker is pretty challenging.

1:38They're pretty well gatekept. And just aside from nagging them and friending them on LinkedIn and spamming the crap out of them, I'd like to hear some tried and true methods for getting through the gatekeeper to get an audience. Yeah. So Adam, you're muted, Adam. Yeah. Go ahead and jump in. Thank you. So I'm just big on LinkedIn. And what I do is like, they kind of call it near bound. It's kind of like, it's like you have the person and then you have the circle of other people who also make it. So we also find that the person at the top, maybe the CMO, the director is probably not going to answer your LinkedIn message.

2:22But if you start to, well, you know, I use LinkedIn Navigator because it kind of maps out who's in this company in the marketing department. And so then I just kind of get my list of those six or eight people that are circling around there. I start there first, liking their stuff, commenting on their things, getting familiar, and then go in for the director and say something interesting, insightful about it, non-selly. And then I hit up the director with something that's interesting or related to what they've had said. Now, the challenge often is if for you guys, I don't know, you could tell me, but the marketing people are on LinkedIn quite often because we're kind of a showy bunch, all these brand marketing folks.

3:12So they're often showing off on there. So I have the opportunity to kind of connect with them. Now, if you're trying to reach a CTO or whatever, what I hear is that they're not on there or not checking it. Marketing people are at least on there once a week, a lot of them, but the other folks, not as much. So I don't know what to do about that. So you're establishing yourself as a connected expert or at least contributor, and you're becoming familiar. You're warming yourself to them sort of in a stalker sort of manner. Exactly. But, you know, I also think about it like myself, like when someone likes my post, I'm always sometimes I have eight likes.

3:54Sometimes it's 24. But whoever is doing it and I haven't seen them before, I'm checking them out. So if I'm checking out the people liking my stuff, I'm sure that they're doing the same thing. So you want to kind of make sure that you're obviously your profile has a call to action and all these other things. But it's just like human nature, I believe, that if someone says something interesting or complimentary or contradictory, you're going to go check out who's saying this. Who is this person? So that's what I kind of believe, but I'd love to hear anything contrary. Here's my two cents on it, at least from what I've experienced over the years, is that it's all about trust.

4:35So you've got that gatekeeper. And gatekeepers aren't the admin these days. The gatekeeper is the digital marketing manager or somebody along those lines. And at least from what I found, if I'm able to establish trust with that person, that person is usually that person that is usually going and saying, yeah, I need your services. And so they're going to then take that to the person with the budget and say, I want this. This is why I trust this person. and then they're going to make that introduction to you. So those gatekeepers, I don't find them to be gatekeepers as much anymore, at least they are in the marketing world.

5:13They're the digital marketing managers or directors who don't have signatory approval, but they're the ones that are championing you to the people who can sign off on the budget. And hopefully then, of course, they will make an introduction. Everybody can get on a mutual call. But I don't even try and get past the gate. I don't even consider anybody being gatekeepers anymore in the traditional sense. It's more gaining that trust so that I can have those conversations internally when you're doing account-based marketing like that. But it's all about the trust. If you don't get that trust, you ain't got nothing.

5:47All right, everyone. Quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing six figures, seven figures, eight figures, even nine figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads. We share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions. Their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase.

6:13The good news is that there's no long-term commitment. So you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. Just to chime in to that is, I also believe you should be posting LinkedIn once a day or every other day. I don't do it on Fridays. Don't do it on sometimes Mondays. But just because that's the other factor of trust is that you're active, you have interesting ideas. And what I found that sometimes I get zero likes on stuff, but then other people on a phone call or something will say, yeah, I like what you've been saying on LinkedIn.

6:51I'm like, how come you didn't like anything? Because there's just more lurkers and people are not. they're more like introverts and worried about what people are going to say, or maybe they're worried that I'm going to DM them and try and sell them something. So I would just try to also be active. I think that's related to trust in some way. I like it. Abhinav, you want to jump in? Yeah. one thing that's worked for me and it's still panning out but it's a lot more work is I started a podcast six months ago and I'm able to get people in the room have a conversation an hour long conversation that's a lot deeper than any like cold outbound channel that I've used before and it is a longer play it's a lot more work but I've seen it pan out where I'm able to get folks in the room that would normally not even engage with me on any social platform.

7:51And because I do them in person in Austin, I have 30 minutes before the interview, 30 minutes after, and we just talk shop about whatever they're working on, if there's any way I can help. And so that's worked well. Now, I don't have a lot of data to back this because I'm only 40 episodes in, but I've landed two deals just from two of the guests I've had on and people love talking about their story so it's not always a hard sell but that's that's something that's worked for me personally i think the only thing is some folks who are higher up at bigger companies start gatekeeping where they do interviews so some people have said hey once you get to 100 episodes let me know i'll be happy to jump on after that so that's the only other downside to this but it is a much more longer brand play and just establishing your credibility but that's worked for me in the product and development space.

8:44Hey, what's the pitch there? How do you ask them to come? Are they existing clients or potentials? No, pure cold. Like a lot of the guys I'm talking about are just pure cold intros. I have a decent network in Austin. So if it's very high up person, I ask for a more intro. My podcast is called Funds and Founders and it's sort of generically brand for entrepreneurs, investors, talk about their journey of wherever they are in life. And so it's not that hard to call DM people. I just call DM people, link them to two or three episodes and say, Hey, I'd love to talk about your early days at XYZ company and talk about how you went from zero million to 10 million or whatever that particular person's story is.

9:29And I send a couple cold dms every day and i'm people come on um i book out two three months but when you talk want to talk about their story their journey it's not that hard to get some response i don't know that answers your question though it does i mean so for me something i'm thinking about uh to do this right to do basically brand building and get inbounds versus doing outbounds uh is basically interviewing the clients right now. And, you know, instead of doing podcasts, actually put posts on LinkedIn. So mainly because it does a couple of things. One, it builds you as a brand like, oh, okay, these guys are working with David and probably buying from them, from him, right?

10:20and two the for me podcasts uh high commitment right so you know it takes a while to listen to all of it but if you can just basically tldr it and you can you know you we provide tldr more with you know the the publishing format right like basically just a short article um within linkedin then you can distribute it there maybe it even gets more then you know then leveraging off your idea like once this is there right it's always like the the the conversation is always interviewing a client right that makes it easy to just you know keep going for content and content and content right like what are the things that you make successful what makes you think the marketing things that can make you different that type of thing then you can just parlay that to you know hey would you like to can i do an article for you uh on the things that you've learned so i could publish it on our on linkedin right then maybe be that that way you build your brand and and get your inbounds makes sense yeah i mean similarly to that you could also start the group yourself right like there's a lot of linkedin groups but you could be a member but what if you basically um are the moderator right then you just control everybody who comes in and you should ensure quality and just not like 10 000 people in there I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency.

11:47So NP Digital. So Neil Patel Digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Great ad, David. Anyone else? John? Sure. So David's question was very account-based marketing focused, but I reread his question and it's kind of a little bit broader than that, which leads into my question was, yeah, I'm a six-figure agency. I don't have special talents.

12:27We're a good agency. Our customers love us. But beyond that, there's very little awareness. As we all know, there's just tons and tons and tons and tons of marketing advice out there by amazing, amazing people. And I don't have access to my own data platform to really do a whole lot of custom stuff like that Neil does from Ubersuggest. So what I'm interested in is more broader. How do I build myself up? I'm not in a particular niche. How do I build up awareness about our agency when I can literally probably throw a rock and hit another agency a few doors down from me? How do we build that awareness to attract people beyond my own network?

13:13That's the struggle that I'm having because we do good work. We've got well-known customers of all sorts of different sizes and all sorts of different industries. How do we build that awareness that people say, oh, yeah, okay, yeah. You want awareness or leads, John? Well, awareness to generate the leads. Got it. This is building up people who know our – everybody's agency is here. How do we build up that awareness of more people outside of our own personal network have heard of us? um what we kind of i mean we do this for our clients too but um have you heard of ida a-i-d-a um it stands for awareness interest desire action yeah it's a it's a funnel you know kind of thing but whether it's you know ads or you know you do need an aspect of awareness that you can't just go after the if we could just go after the bottom of the funnel we'd be sitting on an island somewhere.

14:17But what I've found is more leading with the foot in the door strategy than trying to sell the whole agency. Because I think it's like an elephant, how to eat an elephant one bite at a time. And a lot of business owners just don't know what an agency does or what your agency does. Everybody's agency is different. So some kind of foot in the door strategies we utilize is AI chat bots. Like right now we have an AI voice, SMS, email, chat, all in one, like a personal assistant for a business owner. So we use that as it's new. It's very powerful. I mean, it's not just a shiny object. It's something we could do.

15:06It's something I could introduce to them for free, you know, kind of thing if I needed to, but it just opens the door to a conversation. And then I can solve their problems, start understanding their problems more. It's really, it's getting to know. And then the good thing is we're a full service agency. So we can solve most, you know, start crawl, walk, run, we call it, you know, how do we crawl first? SEO, we might start with ads first as a crawl strategy to generate some revenue, some leads for them. They like it. They see that. Then we go, Hey, invest in SEO. You can't always eat junk food.

15:43You need to eat good food too. And so that's kind of how we do it. We kind of start small. Like we try to create awareness about our agent. We, I've tried that in the past and it just takes a lot more money, a lot more time, a lot more effort. Public relations is good for that. Like just creating awareness and industry publications that you're targeting, things like that. We, we do press releases and then we'll set, we'll send them out directly to publications that were like an insurance agency publications or medical, like where we're trying to reach certain audiences. They don't always pick it up, but you start developing relationships over time.

16:25And that, those are just some of the ideas. I don't want to consume all the air oxygen in the room here, but those are some ideas that we've used to get, create awareness about our agency. and uh john the other thing you said is that your clients love you and uh if they're that's i don't say that's rare uh but it's a great thing to build upon so whether it be testimonials or you know talking to them interviewing them i don't know podcasts is the way to go but something is there. You can work on if you have that positive thing. I mean, what attracts customers are often referrals or other people saying good things about you because we could all say great things about ourselves.

17:18That's one thing. But when someone else says it, it means something different. So I don't know what you can do with that. But if they truly are really happy, they'd probably be more glad to help you out in some way. You just need to find out what the ask is.