Episode 8: 10 Steps that will make or break your prospecting campaign – featuring Ryan Welmans

There are many agency owners (myself included) who have a difficult relationship with lead prospecting.  No matter how much we believe in our services, we find engaging cold leads inherently uncomfortable. 

Indeed, the business of lead prospecting is fraught with potential challenges and pitfalls. When you’re struggling to get your call to action heard, it’s enough to make you want to give up in frustration or don the black hat to get results quickly— whatever the cost.

Luckily, in this latest episode of the Kitchen Table Community Podcast, we’re joined by a master of the art of lead prospecting Ryan Welmans, co-founder of the multi award-winning email prospecting agency SoPro. Among the topics we discuss are the little things that can make a big difference to your outbound marketing, the importance of persistence, and the danger of unintentionally having your emails dismissed as spam.  

If you’ve long grappled with the intricacies of generating and converting new leads, you won’t want to miss this episode!

Chapters

• 0:07 Introduction – Ryan's background and SoPro
• 4:05 Step One – Give your campaign the time and attention it deserves
• 7:48 Step Two – Ensure deliverability
• 14:45 Step Three – Compliance Management
• 20:42 Step Four – Categorise responses
• 25:58 Step Five – Be smart about personalisation
• 30:22 Step Six – Use chasers effectively
• 33:16 Step Seven – Add the personal touch to email copy
• 38:17 Step Eight – Monitor your performance metrics
• 44:04 Step Nine – Understand the risks posed to your brand when you go “black hat”
• 49:39 Step 10 – Pace yourself

Transcript

 0:07 Intro

JA: Welcome to the KitchenTable Community Podcast. Today we're going to talk about one of those subjects that many small agency owners struggle with. And that subject is how to approach potential clients, also known as prospects. Now approaching people cold can feel pretty uncomfortable, a bit like approaching a stranger in a bar, maybe. And for that reason a lot of us don't like to do it. But if you have ambitions to grow your agency, then this is something you're really going to need to master. And speaking of masters, luckily for you, we have a master of the art of prospecting with us today. His name is Ryan Welmans, and he's the co founder of SoPro, which is a brilliant email marketing or email prospecting company.

Ryan, a very warm welcome to you.

1: 08

RW: Hey John thanks very much. Great to be here.

1:10

JA: Now this is actually the first of two podcasts that Ryan is recording for us. This first one is available to all, but he's also very kindly going to be doing a members only master cast on the art of email template writing. Those emails that go out to your cold prospects. And in that he'll be expanding on some of the topics that he's raised today. You really shouldn't miss that. So if you're not a member of the community, then sign up today at kitchentable.community. 

Anyway, Ryan before we go on, tell me a bit about yourself and about SoPro.

1:49  

RW: Thanks John. Yeah we'll do so SoPro is we're, we're a prospecting agency, first and foremost. I founded SoPro with my business partner Rob about five years ago. And we've grown pretty quickly. We're about 100 people in the business. Now, we've ever closer to 1000 clients on the books of all sizes and shapes. We've got... essentially we are we're providing the first line of the sales process to businesses, small, medium, large companies across most B2B sectors we've probably got about 50 different B2B sectors across the spectrum that we support. 

So a real mix of different products and services and sort of sales scenarios that that we work in. We tend to work closely with sort of commercial stakeholders marketing teams. Sometimes, sort of, yeah the owners and founders of smaller businesses. 

And, yeah, we're here to help with sales. We have a sort of neatly packaged service that marketing teams can put in place just to ensure a flow of leads runs into the sales team and keeps the pipeline moving.

 2:54

JA: So essentially this is, these are, you're going out to prospects cold, you're doing the email approaches. Your proposition is ‘Fill your inbox with qualified leads’, so when, when people respond positively to those emails, they go directly to the inbox of the sales team or whoever's handling new business, and then they can pursue that and hopefully convert that prospect into a client.

3:19

RW: Absolutely. And I think we moved from ‘fill your inbox’ to ‘flood your business with with qualified leads’ because it's you know it's a really scalable thing that actually once you've got a format that's working it's very it's then very easy to just turn up the volume, and kind of really get things going.

 3:37

JA: Well, it's an absolutely brilliant service is SoPro. My agency Write Arm has been using it for about three years now and it's been insanely good. We roughly quadrupled the number of warm leads that we were getting. And I should say if you're a KitchenTable Community member, you can get 5% off your SoPro campaign which Ryan's very kindly agreed. But not everyone has a marketing budget. Do this podcast is meant to help those of you who want to do a Do-It-Yourself prospecting campaign. We've therefore called this programme 10 Steps that will make or break your prospecting campaign. So Ryan, without further ado, let's look at the first of those 10 steps.

4:05 

RW: Okay thanks John. Well yeah I'm gonna run through 10 steps that from our perspective will make or break a campaign every time. 

I didn't want to run through all of the traditional steps of a campaign. I think there's a lot of things that everybody knows that we need to get some data, everybody knows we need to get a messaging platform in place and, yeah, there... there are a set of things that we see time and time again that need to be taken into account. And if you don't do these you know the campaign forms will often be zero or near-zero so those are the points that I wanted to run through today.

And the first one is really around sort of setting up and managing the campaign, and actually putting some time aside yourself to sort of take this seriously as a...it's a... it's a marketing function that isn't…. It's not an afternoon's work and you sort of set and forget. You do need to really treat this as a project and there’s a... Yeah, we've got about, sort of 30 points that needs to be worked through every set up. It takes over about three weeks and that's a team of people to set a campaign up properly to get everything in place. 

And to do that as a, as a smaller agency with perhaps one or two people involved, you've got to dedicate the time, and it's very difficult to do that well, when, you know well, when you know if you've got sort of five minutes here and five minutes there so do take time to carve out some time. And that's for the setup but also on an ongoing basis, just make sure that you've got you know those, you know, probably a half a day a week at least to really give your campaign the love and attention it needs the, you know, for the optimisation and the understanding of performance and, yeah, making sure things are being tweaked appropriately.

And, yeah, we've got a long list, I'm happy to provide that it's on our site if useful. But yeah, that's really the first thing just to, to actually take it seriously and dedicate the time that you're going to need to because it isn't... It's not a five minute job.

6:20

JA: Yeah, and it's not, we also have to bear in mind that not necessarily instant returns is it? This is your…. You're sowing a seed that you harvest in future rather than it being like a transaction you you invest your time in, then immediately you get a return.

6:33

RW: Yeah, so the the sales that, that are the activity that we're running internally and this is true for a lot of our clients. We typically think that the prospecting that we're doing today is going to be dropping in as new clients in about three months’ time. That works for our deal cycle and he might have a slightly longer or slightly shorter deal cycle. But even the campaign itself, if you consider that most campaigns nowadays, you're going to be putting a sequence of messaging in place for each prospect that might run over, let's say a four-to-six week period. 

You know the prospects that you're engaging for the first time at the end of month one, they're not even going to finish that that engagement cycle until you know potentially midway through the third month of your campaign and really that's when it's your campaign is fully up to speed.

And you can take it... in a way it's like a PPC campaign for example, you know. It will always, you'll start slow and it will scale up and it will then become... In a lot of cases the lion's share of new business coming in. But yeah it does take some time. 

7:40

JA: Yeah… So that's that's obviously this is the, you know, you got to put in the groundwork. What comes next, then?

7:48 

RW: Number two is deliverability. So fundamentally, we are... our prospecting campaign is in place to put our messaging in front of prospects that we've identified in the brief. So, we take an approach that email is by far and away the most effective format to deliver messages to prospects. It certainly is right now. I mean you have other options you can send your LinkedIn connection requests for example it's a pretty ineffective format overall, compared to email. So I'm going to talk about email deliverability, because that's strongly our recommendation. And there's a couple of ways that we mentioned that. So, first and foremost, we're going to get into the actual, the mail server needs to accept the email that we're sending, and that requires all sorts of things. 

It requires things like having the correct data. You can purchase a list, and sometimes an old database might be 50 to 70% out of date if it's... you know people change jobs every, every couple of years nowadays, and the half life of a data set is…. Yes, it’s not much more than 12 months.

Yeah, the, so having that data, accurate is, it's such a no brainer when you think about it. But it is, you'd be amazed how many businesses, sort of fail at that at that hurdle so you know for example if you're if you've got a CRM system with 10 years worth of data. If you start running a prospecting campaign on that it's not gonna work. 

Within email deliverability you've got the recipient mail server, checking your DNS settings. Is your sending mail server set up appropriately? If it's not, you've got a few settings to get your DKIM, your SPF your DMARC records all set up in just the right way and if any of those are not quite right. You're, you're not going to... your message is either not going to be received it's going to be rejected by the recipient mail server or kind of best case you're going to be in a junk folder somewhere that is highly unlikely to be, to be read. 

And then, so let's say you're, let's assume you've got those in place. The next thing you're, you're going to need to be doing is the, the actual content of your email itself the way that the message is constructed, you’re going to make sure we avoid... We have something like 450 terms that just can't ever go into an outbound prospecting email. Things like ‘free’ or ‘cash’ or you can imagine the kind of terminology that is most commonly identified within spam emails and it's just-

10;30

JA: A few years ago, it would have been Viagra.

10:32

RW: Oh, absolutely. And yeah, we've got, we have some amusing examples that I don’t think I could mentioned on this podcast. It's very amusing examples of brand names that that's within the brand name there's a term... Quite unbeknownst to business that is being rejected and actually needing to change their, their web domain for that reason. Yeah, there's, there's a very long list and you just have to do a step because again you know if you've got one or two of these terms in your, in your emails, you're going to be rejected, and you're not going to know why. 

And so yeah we have, we have a process where we run every email through this, you're actually having an awesomeness checker that’s on our sites. It's quite a useful tool, and just picks up these things, and there's always one or two. Nobody can remember the whole list, you just have to run it through a checker.

So yeah once we're... so then we're the contents of our email is more or less okay we got it, there’s nice things like the word counts that are gonna make a difference. And then there's also the actual construct of the email.

How is the… sometimes a mass email, let's say, a mass marketing, email, platform like MailChimp, for example. The construct of an email that has been built within a MailChimp is very easily identified, or identifiable by like a Google Business email server, but then those it's very likely to be to be a marketing, email. So yeah we just need to have the format of those emails to be sent in a way that just is reflective of somebody sending a one-to-one email. So we typically send ours with a Microsoft Office HTML wrapper. So they'll come through as sent from Microsoft Outlook. And that's yeah that's the way that we do that. 

And then, yeah, you'll need an e marketing platform in place. There are plenty of free ones and obviously…. Yeah, depending on budgets there's some sort of mail server providers that you can even fairly quickly set up and use and just sort of import your, your templates, most of them have got API's if you're going to be doing this at scale. 

So yeah deliverability make or break, and really got to it's worth having a if you've got a technical contact to kind of loop in. Yeah, that's because it can get a bit, a bit tricky but yeah there's a decent list. And in terms of targets, you want to be aiming for 97 and a half percent deliverability to recipient. If you start having more than 5% of your emails not delivering, you're going to start up a risk of blacklisting your domain, and that's a very serious outcome. But yeah, so if you can maintain 97 and a half percent.

And then, in terms of delivery to inbox. You want to be seeing about a 40%, open rate. The open rate is the best indicator of how many of those messages are going in to inbox. You will notice straight away if your emails are not reaching the inbox, you're going to see two or 3% open rates on something, anything less than 10% and you're almost certainly not getting to the inbox.

14:04

JA: Yeah, I mean I think the advice for those who are bamboozled by all these technical terms, perhaps, bring in somebody who knows what they're talking about. Hire them in for a few hours just to sort you out and then you'll save yourself a lot of headaches for the future.

14:21

RW: I think so, yeah, especially if you're if you're non-technical. You know you can battle with this stuff trying to figure it out for weeks. It's just, you will definitely know somebody, even if you've got to buy them dinner. It's gonna be… They’ll sort these things out in two hours and it might take you a lot longer.

14:40

JA: Yeah. All right, so next point. Let's move on to the next one.

14:45

RW: So, the next point is. So, this is the order of seriousness that will yeah that it's not necessarily the order of setup but we have compliance management as a kind of number three.

It's very important that compliance is taken seriously, sort of post GDPR. And it was a headache for everybody, but it is something that has as sort of quite serious implications in the marketing world. And that the downsides of kind of failing to comply, they just are really serious so it's one of those things that’s just not... you know there's no options here.  You have to take compliance very seriously, and when it comes to prospecting that means... It means a few things. It means knowing what data you're allowed to store, what data you're not allowed to store, the legal basis that you're allowed to store because you will need to communicate to data subjects periodically. And you will need to explain the legal basis on which you're holding their data. In most cases, you will have I mean marketing… it's a bit of a catch all.  So you'll have what's called their legitimate interests assessment. There's a pretty standard form for that. You can find it online. It's worth filling that out in reference to any campaign you're going to be running because it will force you to ask the questions that you need to be asking around why you're storing certain data. And there’s certain data that you might not need, so just make sure you don't have it stored. You don't need some of these. You probably don't need somebody's personal mobile number in connection with a prospecting campaign you're going to be running.

16:28

JA: You’re on safer ground presumably if you just have their work email address because that's not personal data under the terms of the GDPR. 

Or is it?

16:37

RW: It's... Yeah, it actually is. But it's personal data that you can legitimately hold. And yeah you know you can justify having it. It’s stated that people are not going to be wildly surprised that you would have... and there is a there's a balancing check that, that is done within the legitimate interests assessment form. So you can have that and nobody's going to be overly surprised and you just need to make sure you're storing where you got it from. For example, maybe you found it on their company website. Maybe you purchased a list. Yeah, maybe you've got a switch tool that seems to find that information for you. And through various nebulous avenues online that you know I would like to get into. But, yeah, wherever that's coming from you need to be able to, there's got to be an audit trail you need to be able to document it to prospects. 

And also having... It's not just about the data. It is about a resourced... You need a data protection officer that you can... that is going to be named within your online terms and conditions, your privacy policies and sort of data policies online need to be updated to support the activity that you're running and those will require routes into your business in connection with components. Somebody, somebody has a subject Access Request or a request to erase or modified data, how do they do that? 

All of those things are going to be what's immediately checked for if you're ever speaking with the ICO in connection with your activity so…

18:08

JA: The ICO being the Information Commissioner's Office. They police the GDPR and Data Protection Act.

RW: Yeah. 

JA: And if you're a one person agency, then you need sort of generic terms and conditions and you put yourself or your, your main agency email address as the contact right?

18:28 

RW: Yeah, so it's a good shout, because most agencies won't have a full-time data protection officer. And actually... So, even at 100 people across the business we don't have an internal DPO we actually have an external partner that provides that as a service. They're the point person that's just on a monthly retainer and essentially, you know, pretty, pretty cost-effective. These… the cases are so few and far between that it's just, you know, it would never be cost effective to have somebody full time so it's going to be either you put yourself down, you'll deal with these things when they come up or actually, you know I'm happy to recommend ours. You know, if you want to get in touch with me I can make the connection. 

And, yeah, just a basic retainer as and when needed, and they'll deal with it with any compliance matters.

19:16

JA: Okay, so just just one subsidiary question with the compliance, that you talk about here that you must meet. That applies if you're using an email list would it apply if you're just doing emailing people manually, as it were just sort of doing them one at a time?

19:39

RW: It does apply, because it is concerned with the storage of their data, and the processing of their data. In reality, you’re… businesses tend not to take that side of it seriously because a prospecting campaign, John, would typically be working at an order of magnitude or perhaps two or in some cases three orders of magnitude higher in volume than than anybody is realistically going to be doing themselves. If they're just kind of emailing one, one after the other. So you might have a campaign running at a thousand or a few thousand prospects per month, being contacted. And those kind of rates, you might find that once every few months, somebody gets in touch and says, “Where did you get my details from?”. 

If you're doing it yourself and getting 10 messages out a day... You could run for a few years without anyone even... You know, the laws will change faster than you'll need to know them. So, technically yes you will need a compliant data processing set up. But you know it's something that is highly unlikely to come to the fore.

20:37

JA: Good. That's nice to know. So, point number four, please.

20:42

RW: So, we take categorisation of prospecting responses to be one of the things that actually differentiates a campaign working and a campaign not working. 

And it's, it's one of those things that you would think is…. It's easy, you'll know, you know you've got a... you know, you might be prospecting from your own email address the responses are going to be coming back to you. You're going to know if it's working, right? You're going to know if it's, it's either successful or it's not you're going to be pretty tuned in. 

But actually, once you're… so for every mature prospecting campaign you've always got to cross this, this step of actually getting reporting working so you can understand, which sections of the market are proving to be successful in which sections of the market are not. And even though, you know that segmentation of the market… You need to be... It relies on data. 

So, I'll give you an example. We look at lead conversion rates by industry, so you might be prospecting into 20 different industries. Everything from financial services to recruitment companies or, you know, maybe even other marketing agencies. The performance is always going to be wildly different across those different sectors. Sectors is obvious. But it's also going to be wildly different based on company size. And you're also going to be getting totally different responses, based on the job titles that you're approaching. You might be approaching four or five different job titles in your pool of prospects. Some of those are going to be providing 80% of their responses and some of them are going to be totally unresponsive. 

And you only get to see that information. If you start categorising and recording your prospecting responses, by type.

22:44 

And it's not just... it's not as simple as just storing the leads either. So it's worth going as granular as, you know, storing “that was a polite decline”, “that was a deferred interest”, that was a, you know, perhaps – a deferred interest would be somebody that says, “Yeah, sounds great but yeah give us a shout in three months time because we're, we're pretty stacked at the moment”. Or internal referrals again are another type of lead that just tells you something else. 

If you're getting a lot of internal referrals. If most of your leads are coming back as internal referrals, you might have a great lead rate. But actually, it's pretty obvious you're, you're contacting the wrong people because you're forever being forwarded to the right people. So you're going to adjust your targeting, and you're going to double your response rates overnight when you do that. 

Likewise with the, you know, perhaps the deferred interest if you're, you've got a lot of people saying “Get back in touch with it at a different time”, then you're, you're probably better off adjusting your messaging to say, “I appreciate this it's probably not on the radar for a few months. Or maybe six to 12 months but yeah just wanted to catch up to kind of give us a give you a bit of an intro in the, in the meantime, so when it is relevant, we kind of know each other”. 

And then you're going to, you're going to start getting responses straight away. So, it's just having the categorised reporting for every response that you get that really makes a difference every time because we... when we run a campaign well you know this month to double the performance of month one. And likewise, we'll double it again in month three. Just by using this intel and tweaking things like the targeting and things like the messaging. It happens every time but you just you're running blind without that data. So, again, it is make or break. 

24:33

JA: And how would you, how would you recommend that you store this data? Would you just create a spreadsheet or what was what would be the most efficient way of doing this? 

25:00

RW: You can write it on your.... No no you can't write it on your hand but it really doesn't matter. It's wherever your, your CRM is, you know, if you're using Excel, as your, as your data, and you're kind of working off that basis, then storing you know it's a column in your Excel spreadsheet. A lot of businesses are using HubSpot or PipeDrive perhaps for the storing of the data and I think it's pretty easy to those that they're pretty well customised off the bat, but you can very easily add fields to any different contact, just to store these, these things and then you can quickly report on them and kind of graph out trends based on them. 

So, yeah, just wherever your data is it just needs to be added in there. And then it should be reportable pretty easily once it's there. 

25:54

JA: Yeah, good. Okay.Well, let's move on to the next point I think we're on number five now aren’t we?

25:58- Step Five- Be smart about personalisation

RW:  We are. You're gonna love this one John it's, it's made such a difference to the campaign that we run for you guys. In the same way, it affects all of our campaigns, because we're... so your campaign is gonna... it's gonna work 10 times better if it's personalised.

So the messaging that's going to any of your... to each of your prospects. You know, it's great. We're all…  we all know we're going to reference their name at the start, we might reference their company, and we take this to the Nth level, we'll have dynamic variables in there that might reference the weather at the moment or the day of the week or the prospects location, you know “Hey how are you getting on in Bristol at the moment?”. Yeah and things like that that are, you can be really smart with this stuff.

But you can also blow your campaign by trying to be smart without doing it well, if that makes sense? 

So, I'll give you an example of that. So, SoPro, our company name on LinkedIn, we are SoPro – social prospecting. 

It's just a, you know, we found that there's some SEO logic in there. And that's just how we present ourselves and other businesses, they might have a very long-winded company name or perhaps have PLC at the end of it, or you know limited. 

And, and the thing is those those company names… you'd be amazed on how many times they make it into prospecting emails. Because people have got a you know they've produced a template that's got, you know variables for, you know, four or five pieces of data to be inserted that they know that they know they have within a data file, and all of a sudden you've got an email that's referencing a company name that you would never, you would never write it in that way.

27:34

JA: Yeah. 

27:35

RW: Does that make sense? And then you know perhaps industry as well, you know, some of the industry descriptions, you're gonna hear it's great that you know what industry somebody is in. But it's when it says it, in technology services for example, you probably wouldn't write that if you're writing somebody a note you probably say ‘the tech space’. And it doesn't sound natural. So whilst it is critical to personalise your, your templates and have those, those variables in there. I mean you genuinely won't get results if you're not doing it. 

You've got to spend the time to go through that list, and informalise the data to a format that is natural language, rather than you know visibly a data point. You might want it you might be referencing the size of the company for example, and you know in your data file you've got the companies in the size bracket of 200 FTE to 500 FTE. You wouldn't write it like that you'd probably write “midsize businesses in the tech space”.

So you've got to get... so, and some of that in formalisation can be done just with formulas in Excel. Running it down that column and just converting those numerical company size values into something that would read as it's written from me to you. And others, you need to pay a bit more attention and with the company names, go through and strip out those PLCs or extended company company names, sometimes-

28:59

JA: Maybe use an acronym?

29:01

RW: Absolutely. And, and those things make the difference between somebody receiving your email as a mass marketing communication. And it's patently obvious that it is sometimes, when you've got things like SoPro – social prospecting coming in the first line. I can tell it's been written by an automated platform. And, and, and actually what drives responses, is that human element.

So fundamentally we are trying, we are, we are, we want to produce a situation where somebody is receiving an email from you and actually it comes across like you. 

You've just been sitting on a train typing it out, and then sent it over. And sometimes actually sometimes it's alright if it looks a bit scrappy or if it's a bit short. Because that's that's how people send emails. It's way more important to be human than it is to be polished.

So that's, that's why it's so important to have this data informalised before you start your, your sending.

30:13

JA: Excellent. Very good. Okay so personalization / de-formalising if we can call it that. And let's move on to point six, if we may?

30:22  

RW: Cool okay so, Point Six John I want to talk about chasers. So, a chaser email is, in my language, a chaser is anything other than the first message. So, for every campaign that we run. More often than not, most of the responses come from the chaser emails. And you would never expect that. We didn't. We, when we, you wouldn't believe this either, when we first started we actually didn't have a chaser email. 

We were persuaded once by a client that it would be great to do a follow up. And, you know, we thought “alright, we'll give it a try” and then lo and behold I think we've batched it up and did a whole month's worth of follow up-emails in in a single day and we got something like 70 responses for the, for the client and all of a sudden they had to stop everything for a week or so while we catch up on these. But yeah, very quickly it has been built into our kind of modus operandi as a, as we have a sequence of engagement now that... we know the optimum number of messages is four. It's diminishing returns after four for message so fice, six, seven, you really start start to see a quicker drop off. But, yeah those four messages. You actually… the fact that we'll get 60 to 70% of responses from the chasers justifies it and ot’s actually, it's not too much additional work. 

Once you've set your campaign up once it's all running once the message is received the two ads, kind of, you know, message 2, 3, 4 it's a huge payoff for a comparatively small amount of work. So, yeah, don't leave it out. The stats are there. It bears out every time. And, yeah, the chasers are one of the most important aspects of the campaign.

32:02

JA: This is really interesting. I mean, a couple of years before we started hiring SoPro. I was doing a little bit of cold prospecting myself manually. So I'd find the prospects who looked interesting, find their email address, contact them with a personalised email, but I never followed up. 

I didn't follow up basically because I felt embarrassed about it, you know, sort of, the British reticence kicked in. And then I met SoPro, one of your guys, and he said we send a sequence of four emails and I thought “Oh my God I can't do that and that's so intrusive. That's not me.” I said, “Well can we just do like one follow up?” And he said, “Well you can, but believe me that you know, three and four that get very good results,” and sure enough they did. We've got a lot of clients now, off the, you know, the second, third and fourth emails that go out, so it really does make a difference and don't be shy about it. 

You're going to tell us in the members-only Mastercast, what those how… what the email approaches should be. So, full members, make sure you listen to that. 

But yeah, I can reiterate, from my own experience the importance of sending chasers. And so anyway, we've just done point six, so point seven please.

33:16 

RW: So point seven is not unrelated to chasers. This is about the content of the email so it's worth having a think about who's writing your emails. 

So, you are probably the founder of a small agency. And to be in that position you are probably somebody who has been around the block, you've got a bit of experience. You've, you know you are running a business. You're actually you're in a lot of cases you might be in a similar position to the person that you're, you're writing the email to. So actually, you are the... you would almost certainly be the best person to write this email. We spend so much time trying to wrestle email copywriting away from marketing teams. I think that's the that's the point near the, you're gonna get a totally different template, if it's if you write it yourself and actually the, we'll talk more in the in the next session about how to write these templates, because there's, there's a lot that goes into that but the one thing that you, you typically see from from people in a marketing department that will be tasked with something like this is, there's a lot of really great polished descriptive copy that, that describes products or services fantastically, but it actually isn't always the best for this type of email. 

And yeah, so we just need to make sure you're doing that yourself. And usually just a few lines and you don't even need to be selling a product or a service. That's not the value exchange here really you want to be just just inviting somebody onto it to grab a coffee or perhaps a quick call just to discuss how you can solve one of their problems. 

That's, that's the value exchange here. It's 15 minutes of their time for potentially solving one of the problems. You don't need to sell a product or service in that... in that email. So it doesn't need to be something that's handed over to expert copywriters. 

If you are going to use a copywriter make sure you're specifically an email writer, an email writing specialist. Yeah. And because it's just a totally different type of copy. And again, this is it's the difference between seeing a, you know, a 4% lead rate on a campaign and a 0.4% lead rate. You're gonna get... it's tenfold if you nail it and you're... Every time it does come across like marketing copy, it’s game over. And you're gonna you're gonna quit the prospecting campaign thinking “What a crazy idea that was, I knew that wasn't gonna work”. You know, and actually this will be the reason. 

So… Yeah, put some thought into it. Do it yourself and make it a really nice personalised message format that goes out.

36:22

JA: You mentioned something then Ryan, the lead rate. And you said, the difference between 4% and 0.4%. A 4% lead rate, i.e. 4% of your recipients respond positively, it's pretty good right?

36:38 

RW: It is pretty good. Yep. So, a 4% lead rate. We publish our cross campaign stats and SoPro global average lead rates at the moment are around about 4%, our campaigns range probably from one and a half to, in some cases, up to 10%. If you are, if you've got a homegrown prospecting campaign and you're delivering a 4% lead rate, you can pat yourself on the back because that is a, it's a very impressive output, given what's involved to do that, especially if you're running at any kind of volume. So, yeah, so really anything, anything over 2% is, I think, you can be pretty pleased with.

37:16

JA: Great so don't mourn those 96% who don't respond, celebrate the 4% who do.

37:24

RW: I think you should actually factor that into the message that you're writing as well. Because it's such a, it's such a true point. And if you think that because I touched on your your open rates. A target open rate will be 40%. Well actually, that means that 60% of the people that you're sending your message to are not even going to open it. It's, you know that that's the thing. And those that do they're going to be looking for an excuse to close it, from the moment that they've opened it. And, you know, keep it short, keep it personal don't give them that excuse, and just make it a logical ask, and yeah, you know, a long tirade about, you know, products and services and special offers is just, it's gonna, people are going to switch off straight away.

38:08

JA: Right, well we're going to go more into the messaging in the, in the members-only Mastercast. Let's go on to then we're on to point 8.

38:17- Step Eight Monitor your performance metrics

RW: Point 8 already okay. So were are… this is around monitoring of delivery stats. And then not just delivery performance stats as well. And you've... we've touched on actually recording some of the data. I think it's not always the same person that's doing all of these things. In smaller agencies it often can be. But the important thing is carving out time each week. At the start I think I mentioned resourcing a campaign, you got to dedicate that time moving forward. It might be half a day each week, and actually an hour of that I think would be very well dedicated to just looking at the data and monitoring everything from delivery rates to open rates to response rates to lead rates and of those leads the variance of the different types of leads or the deferred interests, the referral leads and you know the straight up positives that are happy to jump on a call. 

And those stats, you're looking at them across your campaign but also looking at them by industry sector, by company size, by job title. It's an exercise to do once you've set it up if you're doing it in Excel or once you've created your reports in HubSpot they're there for you next week to look at. You know that there's a setup piece there at the start but really you want to be in a position where you can just look at those stats each week, and they aren't going to tell you stuff every week. Every week you're going to be able to say, “Right, these sectors are not performing. I'm going to switch these off and focus on these”. 

You're going to see job titles that are performing better or worse than others, and you're going to be able to make adjustments to your targeting based on that. You'll be able to see the, the lead types or response types that are coming back, and you're going to, you're going to change, make material changes to the campaign, every week. And those those changes are going to, you know, week by week and month by month produce 100%, 200%, 400% overall uplift in your lead rates. Your campaign might be running at 5% in the first... sorry, 0.5% in the first couple of weeks. You know, to get to 4% in, you know, by the end of month three, you know that's eight times your initial performance. You've doubled your campaign however, many times you need to to get to eight. And that's when that does happen and you just need to put the effort into, into really looking at the data and interrogating it analysing it and making those making those calls. And they’re quite logical. Once you've got the data these things will jump out at you every time.

40:48

JA: And a platform like HubSpot or PipeDrive will allow you to dig into those stats. 

40:56

RW: It will allow you... well it's gonna allow you to store it. It's gonna have, I mean they are customizable and they all do, they all do have different packages that will give you varying degrees of marketing functionality and reporting. A lot of businesses. I mean certainly I mean we still export a lot of a lot of stuff straight to Excel and then you've really got you've got the flexibility you can throw it into pivot tables and charts and graphs up in no time and so I'd often... My preference is to have an Excel spreadsheet just set up. I'll export from whatever CRM platform we're using, drop the data in. It just means that you're running an export once a week dropping the data in or hitting the refresh button, everything's there ready for you. Your graphs are going to update, and your percentages are going to update, and it's going to even have those pivot tables set to give you a kind of week by week or a month by month view of that data set. 

So you can start to see trends. And, yeah, I think it's, there's a lot to be said for getting, you know, rolling up your sleeves and getting it into Excel, just to have a look at it.

41:57

JA: And. For the uninitiated CRM, the Client Relationship Management software. What kind of... what are we talking about, price wise?

42:12

RW: Well the starting prices are very competitive, John. You can take the HubSpot CRM for

absolutely free and we recommend that to a lot of our clients. Yeah, you don't have to pay anything. In fact I think most of the sort of mainstream deal management platforms nowadays have got that base tier free and you can use that perfectly adequately for a small business. If you start, you know started wanting to layer on some of the more sophisticated functionality. I think our package with HubSpot we're probably paying about £3,000 pounds a month. Overall.

42:43

JA: You're a big company. You’re a company of 1,000, sorry, 100 employees so that's a relatively small investment for one with your turnover. 

42:55

RW: Yeah, so and you know there's no... that there's there's just... the savings come at scale because it means we don't have to employ somebody to do this or somebody to do that.

But yeah, I mean we ran for a very long time. We used to start with I think we had an implementation of Podio. We quickly moved on to HubSpot, we've tested PipeDrive we work with Salesforce, Zoho have got a free CRM as well. 

And, I mean, there, there are plenty of platforms out there to test, and I would say just jump on you know ask around jump onto Google, plenty of reviews. And, you know, they will do more or less the same at in the early stages. So you just really need a platform that you can drop your data into, and work through it methodically, it will allow you to kind of manage it through a deal pipeline that you can configure. You might have four stages in your process. And as long as you, it gives you the functionality to work those prospects through those deal stages gives you a view of, kind of, you know, that overall sales pipeline and then lets you drill down into companies and contacts, it's got the information there. 

That's all you need. Really. So yeah, no, you don't need to pay anything at all for that. That's that's all within the free HubSpot CRM.

43:58

JA: Excellent. Very good. Well, the penultimate point number nine, please.

44:04  

RW: So, this is, I want to talk about risk of burning your domain. So, it's only because I've seen it done so many times and it's and it's just... it's so painful to watch. And the impact is so destructive. You can do so much damage to your brand and ultimately this... this exact scenario is, you know, the, the number of times I've seen businesses needing to literally register different domain names and ultimately rebrand on the back of this is, you wouldn't believe it. 

But. So, the way that email deliverability... the way that mail servers determine whether or not to allow an incoming email through the net, as it were. One of the things that they're going to be doing is they're going to be checking that domain against a variety of different blacklists and they have their own blacklist as well. But there are lots of black lists out there. 

And if you start to send a lot of poor quality messaging, or perhaps a very high volume of messaging. If you start to see a lot of people clicking on “This message is junk” for example in their Gmail interface. You, and, or if you're sending a lot of messages with incorrectly configured mail server set DNS settings for example, you just can very quickly build up a reputation as a poor quality sender. You're going to find yourself on one or perhaps multiple domain blacklists for sending email spam. 

And then they're very difficult to get off. And you can get off some of these and, you know, sometimes it can take a long time and cost a small fortune to do that. But you know, there's … sometimes this damage is irreparable, and it can take such a long time that actually you're not going to be able to do that. And if you if you, if you are blacklisted, that's... you then can't even your, even your kind of core emails that you might be trying to send to your own clients for example are just going to start not arriving. It's like you’re switched off as a business in a way. 

So, you can't ever allow it to happen. 

And for that reason most businesses will set up a secondary…. In some cases might have a stock of marketing domains. So, John you've got Write Arm as a domain at the moment you might have Write-Arm, you might have Write Arm UK you might have a variety of very similar domains that we only use for the outbound activity and that meet and register those it will cost you know, four quid on GoDaddy or whatever the going rate is it's not going to break the bank, and it won't put any additional work into the, into the setup, but just doing that safeguards you against it. If you were to, to kind of get something wrong you accidentally configure your system to send 10,000 messages instead of 10. You know, all of a sudden, or if you send a lot of messages with incorrectly configured variables and people are getting gobbledygook on the other end, you know, they're going to be quickly pressing the “This is spam” and “unsubscribe” buttons and then they can really damage you. So yeah just just do it safely, send for an alternative domain, and it keeps your primary business domain in the clear and safeguarded for any downsides. I just wouldn't allow any of the businesses that we’re associated with to work in any other way than doing it that way. 

But it's not something that you would ordinarily know if you haven't done this before. So, yeah, take it seriously and just make sure it's going from you messages coming from a non- core domain.

47:57

JA: So again, if in doubt, then bring in somebody who knows what they're talking about.

48:01

RW: Absolutely. 

48:03

JA: Won't cost you much.

48:06

RW: Yeah, you could you can have information like that for a coffee or a beer if you if you wanted it for me so I think my I've set the prices low.

48:15

JA: You might regret that Ryan because you might find all the members of The KitchenTable Community are suddenly asking you for a coffee or a beer.

48:23

RW: We love those conversations and I'd be absolutely happy to, to field all of those questions or yeah and you know we connect our team. Our team are happy to help as well. We've got a load of free tools that will help with this stuff as well.

48:38

JA: Yeah I want I wanted to say. There's a fantastic set of tools called the SoPro toolbox which you'll find if you go to SoPro (sopro.io) and full members of the Kitchen Table Community get £600 worth of credits for using those – that’s £100 for six months. So yeah, really useful in terms of some of the things you've spoken about today about making your emails deliverable, and so on. Yeah, all kinds of tools there so do check them out. And we go on, Ryan to point ten, the final one. The big reveal, please. 

49:39 

RW: The big reveal. It's so I want to touch on, I want to touch on sort of applying some common sense to volume, the run rates of your of your prospecting campaign because it's, it's so easy to, to kind of to think that, “Well my response rates are very low, so I've just send more messages. Then I'll get more responses”. And you know that's a, it's a kind of crude I'm sure there's more thought that goes into it sometimes, but I've set the scene here just by... I want to talk through your average company... and the average SoPro client will have a target audience of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 target companies. Right? So that might be. I don't know... directors and sort of senior technical people within mid-size B2B businesses in the UK that have got some kind of ecommerce offering, yeah, that might be the kind of brief that somebody would be, would be searching for or searching for prospects within. So 10 to 20,000 individuals, meeting that meeting the criteria.

You can imagine that if you've got a 0.1% lead rate. You're going to send... You'll send 1000, emails for every lead that you're going to get. So, to give me, give me 10 leads in a month I’m gonna have to send 10,000 emails or 20 leads in a month, I'm gonna send 20,000 emails. I'm gonna have to... I'm gonna very quickly burn through my entire audience in a month. 

And the downside of doing that is, what are you going to do next month? What are you gonna do the month after? You and you because you've got to know once you've put each prospect through your, your contact sequence, you're going to have to give them a period of time to cool down. 

Now, for us, the default is six months at least. Some of our clients they expect extend on that, and they might give prospects, you know, 9 or 12 months between re-engaging at some point further down the line, because you can't pester people and that's why we say we'll stop after the fourth message. And what that means is if you're going to give everybody a minimum of six months between getting in touch again, you can't , you can only go round your entire audience, every six months. So we've got an audience size of between 10 and 20,000, on average. Yours might be a bit higher, it might be a bit lower. But let's say it's an average of 15,000 prospects running over six months. 

Well, that gives you two and a bit thousand prospects, even going full pelt. You can't, you can't take more than a couple of thousand prospects each month. So you've got to throttle your campaign at that kind of level, but then you've got you've got to take into account that all of those 10 or 20,000 people that are out there, you're not going to be able to find the contact details for all of them. You won't be able to... you know, there's going to be drop off as you go through that through the process. 

Some of them will be, you know, the messages might not deliver. Some of them you haven't sourced the contact details, some of them you don't have all of the other details so you won't be able to message them if your message templates require multiple variables. 

There's a drop off and even within SoPro will contact between 70 to 80% and I think that's pretty high, of all of the prospects that are visible on, say, LinkedIn, for example. And so if you're very quickly or you're doing a bit thousand each month. That's going to drop to two maybe one and a half thousand, at a max. And if you start going beyond that, what's gonna happen is you're just going to get to a point where you've got no prospects left within the cycle and you've still got another three months to go before you can start again. 

So that's that's the thing, the risk of burning your audience. And you've really got to apply some common sense to throttle, even though... and it's so important sometimes because it because we all need deals today. You know, we're all going to chasing targets this month and you know we need the revenue in for, you know, for salaries at the end of next month. And that's kind of it so it's a tough, a tough balance to do but you've got to have the discipline to throttle your activity so that you're not cycling through your market, any more than once every six months. 

And if you've got a small market maybe that means you're capped at 500 or even 300 prospects a month. But you've got to do it, otherwise you end up with this kind of boom and bust kind of marketing scenario where all of a sudden you've got a load of sales activity going on and the engine just starts motoring and then it all stops again and you just can't build up. It's very hard to kind of build momentum, build kind of stability within the team and start to formalise the kind of, you know, the pipelines and let you concentrate on growing your agency properly because this is, you know, it's forever being switched on and switched off.

So, yeah, I hope that makes sense John but it's one of the things that is again some of these are the more sort of subtle points. They're not the basics of running a campaign but they are things that are like totally make or break when it comes to establishing a prospecting channel and really kind of getting sales functioning properly as business.

55:11

JA: Well, Ryan that that's all absolutely fantastic. So much information to take in there's so much wisdom imparted evening if you just take home and enact one of those points, you'll be doing really well. But taken in total, all 10 I think will result in, you know, an incredible boost to your new business. So, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom there. Do check out so the SoPro Toolbox. If you go to sopro.io you will find that if you're a member of The KitchenTable Community as I said you get 5% off your SoPro campaign. If you don't have the time to run your own prospecting campaign then SoPro really are the best in the business, if you want to hand over that responsibility. 

And you get £600 worth of credits, as I said earlier for the SoPro toolbox if you do want to run your own campaign there's invaluable tools that you can use to sense-check and just vet what you're doing. 

So Ryan, you're going to be joining us for the members-only Mastercast, which will be coming up hopefully before too much longer. But in the meantime, thank you so much for taking part in this KitchenTable Community Podcast. Been a pleasure to speak to you.

56:11

RW: Thanks for your kind words John, real pleasure, looking forward to the next session, and thanks for having me.

56:14

JA: Well thank you, bye for now. Bye bye.