2051 – Unveiling the Keys to Successful Lead Generation with LevelUp Leads’ John Karsant

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

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1:05with us right now it's john carson john you are the founder and ceo of level up leads you're found on the web at levelupleads.io john it's great to have you thanks for having me on josh appreciate it yes for sure well give us an overview of the work you do yeah so we're we're a sales development agency so we work with uh small to mid-sized companies helping them with sales development prospecting appointment setting. So our clients have more sales opportunities. Yeah. Well, give us just a bit of an overview of that world, like what's going on, because this is a topic I talk about quite a bit. And, you know, today's lead generation strategies, as it were, probably a little bit different than they were five plus years ago.

1:55So there have been some really great platforms, I think, that have been abused pretty badly by a lot of the amateur lead gen world. So, John, what is working well today? Yeah, so what was working five years ago does not work today. Let me take a step back. Yeah, yeah, please. You can't do the same stuff. It's never a changing space. So you kind of always have to be ahead of the curve. And so I think one of the issues is it seems like, well, one, there's so many tools these days. And then now they added on an email component to it. So you have so many people have access to email automation platforms and data.

2:32And so I think the email channels become tougher. It certainly was my strongest channel about five, six years ago. And now it's actually cold calling. So cold calling has been working since I've been alive. I don't think that's ever going away. and one of the benefits there is you get to have human to human conversations. You get to understand quickly, hey, am I talking to the right person? Hey, is this relevant to you? Okay, why? Why not? And it's just much quicker feedback loop and it's much harder to ignore, assuming you get them on the call. Whereas email, I think, I'm not trying to bash it.

3:05We still use it and we're a proponent of it, but it's much easier to ignore an email than it is to have a phone call when you're on a conversation to answer some of those questions. And sometimes they're good questions. Sometimes they're questions that may be a pain point for whoever we're speaking with. So there you go there. You're sparking some interest right there. Yeah. What do you see working well in initiating that, that kind of that very, very top, that, that initial awareness? You know, because, again, I think if you're dealing with decision makers that are, that are pretty savvy, that are really busy, you know, I don't know, I don't, I think of like my own time.

3:45I pretty much use ChatGPT for a lot of questions I need answered. But I guess at the end of the day, folks do need services. And so are you generally looking for people that are very actively looking for solutions and that's who you hope to kind of intercept? Or are you just looking to, well, I don't know, I'll let you maybe kind of fill in some of the gaps there that I'm trying to understand. Yeah, I mean, it'd be great if we knew who was actively looking. That would make our job easier. So now there's tools like that have intent and they kind of give you some insights, but it's a little hit and miss on that.

4:23If that was so perfect, everyone would be using it and everyone would be crushing their sales. And it's not. It gives you a little bit of insight, this intent. But it's essentially when we work with a company, we need to understand what what are they doing now? What's working? What's not working? Have they gone to any conferences and just better understand who's their ICP? why are they, who's likely to respond or who have been the champions in their previous sales and better understanding that. And so that's really helpful moving forward because company to company, it's going to be different. Everyone, every company is different, even within the same space, you're going to have potentially different price points.

5:01Just the offer is a bit different. And so it's about understanding who are our clients and who their ICP is. And then from there, we can create strategies that together we make sense, that together we think make sense. So it's a collaborative approach. And we've come up with strategies that, hey, this is going to give us the best chance of success. Sometimes it works right out the gate, and sometimes it doesn't. So sometimes you need to make adjustments. Yeah. John, what are some, to our friend that's listening, what are some maybe misconceptions? Or we've already touched on email a little bit.

5:40But, you know, again, I think in the past, it's, you know, now with AI, cheap labor, I mean, there's just so many things that I think that you can do for lead gen. And I think a lot of it is pretty sloppy and messy and creates just more noise. And unfortunately, I think many of us who are pretty good at what we do, like if we want to initiate those conversations, it's not our fault that marketers have ruined a lot of things. Are there any other kind of general trends that you're seeing or maybe pitfalls that you would say, yeah, be very careful with your spend around X or just anything come to mind there?

6:23Yeah, it's funny. I actually posted about this today on LinkedIn. if a company doesn't clearly have a defined ICP, ideal customer profile, it makes everything else so much harder because you're essentially doing discovery for clients on the fly. And it makes the partnership a little bit more challenging unless they're very aware and they realize that, which at the end of the day, a lot of companies, they want to see results. So that is probably the number one thing I look for. And a lot of the other challenging thing is companies will say they know their icp and then they send over the list of contacts or titles and it's like this huge list so you you need to uh do you know do a little digging with them and understand okay which titles can we eliminate let's start with a campaign targeting these one or two titles and then we from there we can better define that icp um so that's that's the start now from there once you have that defined there's there's a whole lot there's other things that need to be addressed and try to understand what's working what's not working it could be the channel could be the messaging, could be the titles.

7:24I could go on, but that is the most important part, the ICP. Right. And so level up, are you pretty much just kind of focused on kind of generating the names, the quote unquote leads or whatever, or do you also kind of get into some of the sales conversation or some of the sales processes or systems? So our clients don't hire us to do the sales. So what's important is that we're gauging interest when we get people on a call or any of the other channels. And then we're piquing their interest, but then setting up the meeting for our client. Because our clients are going to know how to pitch their product a lot better than we can.

8:06Right? So it's about understanding it enough. We have scripts we follow. And so we have common questions and objections and things like that. Interesting. But it's important that we can follow that, take interest, and then ultimately set up the meeting for our clients so they can run them through a call or a demo. Yeah. And again, you know, when you're initiating a phone conversation, that's not the first step. Like that phone call, or is it like this person who's receiving the phone call? Is this the very first time they've ever heard of company XYZ, your client, or do they already have some familiarity built up?

8:45Well, it'd be great if they already had familiarity. That makes our job that much easier. If there's some brand awareness and people are aware. So it rings a bell when you do get them on the phone or you are sending an email. They do recognize that. But no, there's research that goes into it, right? So we're researching the contacts. It all has to do with the strategy, the campaigns we're running. And so there's research that goes into it before we write the scripts. And then ultimately, scripts are approved. And then we're making those calls. Now, there's a chance they don't know. A lot of times when you are doing cold calling, they don't know who you are.

9:17So you need to explain to them. Typically, you want to talk about pain points first. And then you can explain to them, hey, this is how we solve that. This is what we do. Rather than just leading about, hey, this is what we do. We're so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that just doesn't work. Right, right. Right. And John, what are things that that a company could do or a founder could do that even before engaging with you that would make your collective job easier? And I'm thinking about, you know, maybe it's defining their offer. Maybe it's how they present their authority or their branding or their website or just, you know, some of those other things that are going to be used as assets or part of the decision making for any potential introduction or lead.

10:04It's a great question. And you touched on some of the important ones. So you mentioned website. That's just one example. So a client might have a great service or a great product, but think about it on the people you're reaching out to. Like if I receive an email and it kind of piques my interest, I go look at their LinkedIn page. I go look at their website. And if it's not a good website, it's a bit of a turnoff. And so you might be losing people if you don't have that at least decent. And you'd be surprised some of our clients don't have good websites. So that's just one example. Other things would be having good marketing materials, recordings of previous demos, case studies, just to name a few.

10:48Obviously, if they've done outreach before, they have some, hey, this is what worked. This is the messaging we had. We can kind of use that as a base. And then we can build off of that. What should I be asking you? I feel like you know a lot of things, but I don't want to keep siloing into an area that I'm interested in. I know you know some good stuff. Well, it depends. Like, let me walk you through some success stories that we've had recently. And I think one of the challenges of, there's some pros and cons of working with a sales development agency. And there's a reason why it's actually, it's taking off.

11:31We see business increasing, and I'll explain some of that right now. And part of it is just that prospecting is one of the most challenging parts of the sales process. No one wants to do it. Less and less people want to get on the phones and make cold calls. And it's expensive if you're doing this in the States. If you hire somebody, you've got all sorts of additional costs on top of the salary, benefits, increased tech stack training, on-ramp. uh, get them ramped up. You've got costs potentially in hiring. And then there's also no guarantee that works out. And so what you have to do is you have to do that process all over again.

12:10So by working with an out outbound agency, it significantly lowers your costs and lowers your risk and speed to market. So it doesn't mean it's going to be a fit for everybody, but there's, there's a ton of reasons why there's a lot of companies out there that are doing sales development. And there's a ton of reasons why it makes sense. Now I say all that, uh, not to say we replace SDRs. That's not actually what we're trying to accomplish. Actually, a lot of our top clients have SDRs. So we work alongside them and help them in setting up appointments. Okay, but a few success stories. So one thing that really helps is, we touched on this earlier, but having a brand presence and having product market fit.

12:53So if you don't have product market fit, it's going to make it so much harder when it comes time to do an outbound. And that has to, whether it's you hire a VP of sales or someone internally or someone outsourced, like a company like mine. Because you could, you could, hey, I want you to, I have these goals, I have these KPIs for you. But if you have competitors and it's a crowded space and they have a better offering and better brand presence, it's just not realistic that it's going to work out. So those are some of the things you have to look for is product market fit. But also what we found in terms of some of our most successful clients is having that brand presence.

13:35But also we started going up market because we realized it became much easier. Up market meaning bigger companies. So we do have a few that are publicly traded companies. They're over 10 ,000 employees. And so one of them, I should say, we were able to start with them, beat KPIs by actually 3x, and then they added on additional SDRs because they saw it working, and now they want to start going worldwide. So part of that is that they have a really, really well-known company. I'm not going to say their name, but you guys would probably all know them. um and two we hired people specifically that uh in assigned sdr specifically that had backgrounds in what they offer specifically sales engineering and so that's not easy to come by and so um you put some of those things together with good messaging uh you have a brand recognition you have good sdrs on the phones you have good scripts and typically leads to good results and so we actually were able to sign them to a six-month extension after three months uh and they added on at SecondSDR.

14:40So those are some of the points we've seen that work really well, having case studies, brand presence, having a defined ICP. So I know I'm going on a bit, but those are some of the things we've found to work really well with some of our current customers. Yeah. A lot of times people find this podcast because they're searching for you or they're searching for this topic and this episode has kind of come up for them. And so now they're listening. And let's say they've gone through this and like, okay, okay, this is all very interesting. What would you recommend next steps be for someone that's kind of in that research phase?

15:17Maybe they're not 100 % sure that level up would be good for them, or maybe they should go a completely different direction. Maybe they're not ready. How can they figure this out? Oh, I'm sorry. I may have broken up there. Let's say someone's researching level up leads right Now they're listening to our podcast episode and they may or may not be ready, but they'd like to find out. Like, what would you recommend? I don't know if you've got some resources you'd recommend for them. You know, obviously, you know, grabbing a call is, I would imagine is likely part of your process. Yeah. So I think one of the most important things here is giving it enough time for things to play out.

15:55So if you haven't already proven this out yourself and you don't have a proven sales process, you can't expect me or anybody else on this planet to get to come in, in two months or three months and hit home runs. That's just not how it works. So you have to get you give yourself a runway of four to six months to let things play out. It's not like every time, every campaign you start with is always a success. Sometimes you need to make adjustments along the way. so that's that's what i'd say yeah i john i want to just share i appreciate your energy um unfortunately there was a i think in the past historically there's been a lot of broy energy uh when it comes to lead gen i don't know what it is you know kind of the whole sales funnel world but i just want to say it's been it's been a really great time chatting with you uh your website is levelupleads.io.

16:53What would you recommend people click on? What do they do next? Yeah, the best way to inquire, there's some buttons there. You can set up a call. You can learn more. Also, you can write me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there trying to post once a day and my DMs are open if you have any questions. All right. Love it. Levelupleads.io. John Karsant, thank you so much for the conversation. I appreciate it. Thanks, Josh.

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