Are you struggling to attract and develop new business in 2023? Let’s fix that. Boost lead generation creatively by cultivating a high-ticket offer, determining minimum advertising pricing, using cold outbound and creative direct mail follow up. I’m Dave Valentine, founder of the InWork Guild, and I want to tell you everything I’ve learned so that we can all thrive. Affiliate link: https://quickmail.io/?via=david96
Dave Valentine 0:07
Hey, welcome to the InWork Podcast releasing on Wednesday. And you know, that means it is time for agency only or agency specific content. And I really love getting to do this because agency people are my people, you are my people. And one of the things that I have found is I continue to have conversations with agency owners, the same thing keeps coming up in all my conversations, as we get deeper into 2020 30. And here's what it is. People are starting to struggle to get to develop new business, they're like, Man, I just can't, my leads are drying up new businesses drying up the feelings of a recession. If they're not happening, I'm starting to feel them or I just keep hearing more and more often, hey, we're going to do this in house, we're going to take it in house. Okay, great. Let's talk about some ways to overcome that scenario right now. So number one, if you're struggling with lead generation, I have two items, they're going to be incredibly beneficial to you. Item number one, you need to create an outrageous offer. Okay, I talked about this a lot. I've gotten outreach software workshop, you can join, get in on. And if you want to join my newsletter, you'll actually get an eCourse on it for free. If you want to go through and create one with me, there's a spot on the site to do that. But that's not the point of this creating an outrageous offer is something that sounds too good to be true, and actually helps your agency grow and scale at a fast rate. So it's going to be a high ticket offering that you can convert people to easily right. One of the ways that you can do this is start to think about what are the objections you get, as you have sales conversations, what are the things that prevent people from saying yes to working with you, when I owned an ad agency, one of those things was, I need a return on adspend. Guaranteed, like I need to have something guaranteed. So what we would do is we'd say listen, we're gonna give you a guarantee. But we need two things from you. This is called the conditional guarantee, right? So hey, there's two things that I need, I need free shipping for everyone. I also need to have the ability to go down to map pricing, or 20% above your cost, and then do add ons in the cart to make it so that we actually increase the cart value. If you give me that I'll give you a quarterly return on adspend guarantee. Now, why did I say those two things, we had done a lot of research. And what we found is that 48.4% of the time, people did not purchase a product on a website. Now because they didn't trust the product claims, not because they thought it was too expensive. Not because they didn't want it. But because they didn't get offered free shipping, the free shipping, increase their sales by 48.4%. If they just offered it now, here's the reality, even though people said, I want to buy for 8.4% of time, the reason why I'm not buying is free shipping, we actually found that in practicality, it was about 32%. But that's okay. It was a 32% increase in comparison to their sales previously from new customers in particular. All right, so thing number two was the minimum advertised pricing, right? And we asked for that, because we need to be able to discount something at such a deep rate that entices eyeballs, that gets people to say, Wow, that's really cheap for that great product. I'm in, let me see if I can purchase it. So these were the two things that we actually required people to do in order to get a guarantee. In addition to that they had to pay their bills on time. So I said, Hey, listen, you can't just be like late on paying us. And you also can't say, Hey, I'm gonna give you $20,000 in ad spend, and then only give us 10 You have to give us what you say you're gonna give us month after month. This is what protected us and allowed us to offer guarantee, we got lots of new clients and I was able to charge a premium for our services that helped us grow, scale and sell. Are you an agency owner that's tired of being tired. You're trying to find the next client, make sure that your client success team is actually doing their job and generating results for clients. And you can't keep going. You haven't taken a vacation while you're tired. And you know, this isn't sustainable, but you're not sure what to do next. If you're ready to grow and scale your agency without killing yourself, and to actually enjoy your life. Go to dream agency quest.com and check out the dream agency quest program. The Dream agency quest program is designed specifically for you by yours truly. I've done this with multiple agencies now over the years. And as you all know, I've built in grown and scaled my own agencies with great success. It's time for you to experience the same when I was in your shoes I remember hearing similar pitches from different people. And I didn't believe it. The thing that I didn't realize was that even though I was a really smart person, there were some things that you can only learn through wisdom and experience. Now, I've been doing this for 10 plus years, and I want to give you everything that I've learned. The best part is, it's not just the courses or being a part of a mastermind, it is all those Plus, we're actually going to write your cold email outreach, cold LinkedIn outreach for you. And we're going to show you the very same tools that the STR agency that I own, actually uses to book its own meetings for their clients. If you're ready to grow and scale and then find operational efficiencies so that you can exit and work as little as possible in your agency, go to dream agency quest.com and click on the Schedule a console button for more information. Some of the other things are going to be really helpful for you. So outrageous offer is number one. That's one example. I've also coached agency owners on how to create other outrageous offers as well. And again, you can get the ecourse for free. If you join the inward guild on Dave valentine.co. It's free to join or you can check out the outrageous offer workshop. The second thing is using cold outbound. Listen, I know it's hard. Most agency owners I talked to they love inbound. A couple reasons for that HubSpot told us, it's the best way to sell. Second reason is, you know, we're creatives, we don't want to sell anybody, we don't want to come off as sleazy or slimy or what have you. The reality is you can do outbound in such a way that it's actually going to benefit your bottom line, and you can do it in a way that's not going to come off as sleazy, slimy, or as a salesperson. The way to do it is short, sweet emails, make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your LinkedIn outreach, right? Make it easy for people to engage or disengage, simplify your messaging, too often, what ends up happening with a lot of my clients is they have so many services that they can provide. And then need is to reduce those services to a central service, one service, perhaps two. And if you're going to provide a whole bunch of services, then then you need to have a singular service that every customer gets in through. So this may look like a roadmap session, it may look like consulting, it may look like a wireframe or design, it may look very different based off your particular niche and service offering. Nevertheless, you're going to need to have something that's easily accessible for your new clients to engage with. And when you do that, you're going to have lots of success and your cold outreach. Currently, for my STR company, we're doing cold email outreach, LinkedIn, follow up voicemail drops, there are some different ones that are out there that you can actually drop a voicemail doesn't ring them. It just lands on their cell phone or lands on their landline and you can pay just for what lands. The last thing that we're doing is creating direct mail, follow up handwritten AI robot notes that look like it's from a person, or pin Jada's in the mail. And yada grams is who we use, they're fantastic, I can't recommend them highly enough, going to need to make an impression. So as you do these things, you can have lots of light touches, you can make it light and fun. But you're going to need to do it at scale. My recommendation, if you're going to be using any sort of LinkedIn outreach is to use expanding.io, you can go to the website and check them out. If you're going to be using any sort of email operations, you can check out quick mail.io links at the bottom will give you a discount on the show notes page on the website. But those two in particular are going to be very, very helpful. In addition, I've got links for discounts for periodic grams, and for Ignite posts, who does our air written newsletters anytime you want, again in the shownotes. So I hope this is helpful. You're going to have to do this in volume, you're going to have to find people in volume. And if you're like Dave, I need a buy list. Great. There are lots of places where you can purchase lists or have a subscription. One of the ones that I've seen that is easy for any entrepreneur to access is LEED for one, one apollo.io or seamless.ai. All of those have affordable plans that you can start running with my recommendation. Get at least 50,000 contacts unless you have a very small niche. Because the more contacts you have, the more bets you're gonna have. That's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed the episode. If you have shared with somebody that you know, maybe someone else can stop struggling with lead gen and start building their agency at a better level. Until next time, have a kick ass day.