1870 – Manufacturers’ secrets with Kristiyan Uzunchev of YOUNGCAESAR

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0:58with us right now christian uzentjeff christian you are the founder of young caesar you're found on the web at young caesar.digital christian thank you so much for joining us thank you thank you for having me josh i excellent all right so i think this is a first i don't get too many folks that work in manufacturing or work in the manufacturing to serve the manufacturing world But tell us a bit about who you are and what you do. Yeah, sure. So my name is Christian, in short, Chris from Bulgaria. That's in Europe for people who don't know. I started my business journey when I was 15. I was still at high school.

1:37I started with digital marketing. I think it went up pretty fast and pretty well. By the time I was 16, I was able to drop out of college because business was going pretty well. And basically school is just holding me back from like working and taking too much from my time. The fact that I dropped out of high school didn't mean I had bad grades. By the opposite. I just told it I have to take the leap and just go outside the traditional like journey. So the rest is history. I mean, we've been building this business for a long time. We work with hundreds of thousands of customers through all over the world.

2:15Our journey started on Fiverr, where we used to be number one in the online marketing category with more than 80 ,000 happy five-star reviews from happy customers. Then at a certain point, we quit Fiverr and we started working specifically with industrial manufacturers. Think about companies doing from$10 million per year to billion dollar corporations. and yeah, our focus is just to like help them digitalize because most of these companies are still living in the old times where they only rely on trade shows and referrals and all the old school approaches. So we help them digitalize and get a lot of new customers every month predictably.

3:01That's pretty much it in short. Why do you enjoy working in manufacturing? Kind of more of the industrial, kind of B2B, you know, behind the scene? Yeah, sure. So it was more like a strategic approach. Throughout my career, we worked with probably every niche that is out there. But in the manufacturing, I saw a huge opportunity because, you know, their machines are very expensive. Some projects go up to 1 million. And it's much more impactful to a company to sell them one or two machines for a million each, then help e-commerce businesses sell 1000, let's say, perfumes or something like this. Another point is that there is not so much competition in this field.

3:46No, that's a big reason we're able to get results much faster. Another thing is also that these companies, they have big budgets. So if you work with small businesses, usually they work with you for a month or two, and then they just disappear. And especially in our case, where we do mostly SEO, which takes time to show results, probably like three to six months. Most small businesses don't have the budget and the time to wait for those three to six months to see results. So with industrial manufacturers, it's much easier to work. They're professionals. They know what they're looking for. And we're able to bring them the results that they're after.

4:25So Christian, tell me about what the typical sales and marketing world is like in manufacturing. How do they normally do business, acquire new sales, that sort of thing? Okay, so normally they still rely on trade shows, these big gatherings that probably everybody is aware of, and referrals, which are like big networks of existing customers and who are just referring them to new customers. Of course, there are some manufacturers who are trying new approaches like SEO, paid ads, and so on. But from my experience, in most cases, they don't really get good results. And that's because they work with agencies that don't really know the industry and cannot bring them decent results.

5:13We had many cases when we met a prospect and when we evaluated what they were doing, they didn't have any results. They were just paying but weren't getting any results. And we step in, we fix everything, and they start getting the results that they should be getting. Yeah. So it sounds like, again, typically in manufacturing, there's an advantage to move beyond just the trade shows. So, you know, another thing with the trade shows, I'm thinking of the sales team, you know, it's like they've got their lead pool or whatever that they're working on. I would imagine other than that, I mean, they could cold call.

5:51I'm sure there's plenty of that going on. How effective do you see that? It's kind of effective. Not everybody's doing it, But in most cases, they don't get very decent results. At least the people I speak to, let's say they get two to three decent qualified leads per month out of doing the cold calling. And with our approaches, the results are usually like 20x because we are able to reach out to a lot more people with the outbound and with the inbound, we acquire also a lot of people who are already searching for the solution. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. So typically then what Young Caesar does is you're running ads and you're targeting those ads to those buyers.

6:35What is it like advertising in that world? Because that's a pretty narrowly defined audience. You don't want to be advertising to people that are just irrelevant. How are you able to target in that regard? Sure. So, for example, Facebook and Instagram ads don't really work because there you can hardly target the right people. We mostly rely on Google ads because by knowing the keyword, you can identify the search intent of the person who is searching. So if somebody is searching for, let's say, water jet machine, then most definitely they're doing their research and searching for a provider of that type of machine.

7:17So like I said, we rely mostly on Google ads and also LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a good source for finding the right people, the right B2B audience. And Facebook and Instagram we use only for retargeting. So whenever a targeted visitor visits our website, we show them ads on Facebook and Instagram just to remind them about us so they can get back to the website. Yeah. How is the advertising world on LinkedIn lately? I haven't been paying attention much to that. It's pretty hard. I mean, it's very expensive. It is. And it doesn't bring very good results. But once you get certain settings in place and you start seeing ROI, it's pretty good.

8:00But it's hard to get it up and running, if I can say that. Yeah, I can see that. So tell me about Young Caesar as a company and how you acquire customers. Sure. So we mostly rely on outbound. So for example, the approach that I use is I make a list with all the companies that I want to work with in terms of industry. For example, laser makers, CNC water jet manufacturers, CNC plasma cutting machine manufacturers, CNC tube vendor manufacturers, and the list goes on and on. And then for every category, we go online, we go to Google, we find all the manufacturers of those specific types of machines.

8:42Then we use different tools to find the LinkedIn profiles of the decision makers, also their emails. And from there, we start running customized email and social media campaigns. Also, sometimes with a cold calling. And that's pretty much it. I mean, with this approach, I've been able to acquire billion-dollar companies and smaller companies as well. It works in every vertical. So in terms of your direction then, where do you aim to go over the next three to five years? Well, I want to get this company to a certain stage where, I mean, our main focus is the quality. For me, the most important thing is to make sure that our clients are happy and that we bring them tremendous results.

9:33If they spend$10 ,000 per month with us, I want to bring them like 50 times return. And usually that's possible because their machines are very expensive. And where we want to go, we really aim to offer a boutique service. It's not like I want to work with 1 ,000 companies or 500 companies or something like this. I just want to make sure that all the operations internally are running very smooth and that we have a way to basically to acquire a customer in every industry that we're targeting. And from there, I would like to focus on creating a software, some kind of software for the manufacturers, because I think this will be very beneficial.

10:15And also work on a personal brand, again, in an industry manufacturing industry. Yeah. Do you see, like looking in your crystal ball, do you see any trends in manufacturing, particularly on the sales and marketing side of things? Like if you were to look ahead a couple of years or a few years, for someone who's in manufacturing, sales and marketing, what would you say? Yeah, you're going to want to pay attention to this or this is absolutely trending right now. Trending, I wouldn't say there's something trending, but I see that outbound is doing very well for B2B, especially for manufacturers.

10:51And when I talk about outbound, I mean, basically the process of manually creating a list with your ideal prospects and reaching out to them with custom specific emails that talk about specific problems that they might have and how you can solve them and provide a solution. If that makes sense. Sure. So Christian, someone that may be listening to us, let's say that there's someone who's manufacturing sales and marketing. They're looking to drive sales. They're doing some research. They've come across this podcast. Now they've heard our conversation. Where do they go from here? And what are those initial steps typically look like?

11:30I see that you offer free audits. What's in an audit? Well, basically, if they go to our website, everything that we've done for our customers, everything that we use to bring them results, I packed it in an ebook, in a physical book, and also some video courses that they can use absolutely for free to replicate the exact same strategies that we're using for our customers so they can do them in-house. Great. Okay, cool. So your website, youngcaesar.digital. Again, to our friend that's listening, we've got the link in the show notes. Just kind of click around. You can find that. Christian Usenthev, again, you're the co-founder.

12:08Again, your website, youngcaesar.digital. Christian, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for your time, Josh. I hope that people will find this available.

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