Outbound sales lead generation for hospitality

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hey everyone thanks for listening to the GTM news show I got Scott here today hey Scott hey how's it going doing well doing well thanks for jumping on so Scott um came across him on LinkedIn like I do a lot of my guests he was posting some great content around outbound systems uh emailing calling um all that fun stuff so I'd love to Jump Right In And before we I hit record uh you mentioned we should definitely talk about uh what folks are not a good fit for when it comes to outbound strategies so let's start there Scott love to hear your thoughts yeah so I think the root problem here is a lot of startups in early stage companies if you've been selling off referrals if you've been selling off inbounds or plg you really have only captured a solution to our market and I think this is actually the problem in general with intent data is like if you think about how intent data is categorized it's kind of terrible actually because it's like oh we're interested in this category right it's kind of trying to take inbound on marketing and put it on the outbound the problem with that is if you you you're gonna do typically outbound messages at least on from an email perspective that are solution focused you get like a 0.1 percent conversion rate from email to Interest really low and so you have to do stupidly high volume you're essentially shotgunning the market trying to find people with buying content the this is compounded because a lot of times those companies they talk all about their product and what you need to talk about instead if you want to hit a larger market is you need to talk about pain and you need to talk about problems if you can talk about those two things and typically for me the easiest barometer of whether someone's a good fit to do outbound is do they have like an actual sales process with like a defined Discovery process and do they have um case studies if you don't have those two things you're going to really struggle with outbound because customers are going to look you up and they're like what does this person do how they help someone like me they're sunk and then when they actually get on a call with you you're gonna slide into solution pitching and then it just doesn't work so I think those to me are like hey you need these two ingredients and you can do this as a solo founding team don't get me wrong it's just a lot of small teams have not put those foundations in place super interesting Scott thanks for sharing that's uh yeah I like that idea solution aware um and I'd love to hear more about so it sounds like from an outbound perspective if they have case studies if they have a sales process um obviously they have a proven track record and then a way to convert those those low intent uh leads um is is essential I'd love to hear more about that solution aware so um can you explain more about that concept because I actually haven't heard about that concept before so you know ever it's just stages of the marketing funnel right pain pain aware oh my back hurts problem where it's like oh I have a herniated disc solution aware I'm considering steroids injections or this kind of surgery like where or I want to get I want I'm looking at chiropractors solution is I've decided what to do with my bravo and the problem is by the time someone's solution aware you've actually caught them late in the body process trigger event selling is amazing on this front and this is actually why referrals work well is you're actually building your own if you build a network of strategic Partners You're Building like an intelligence Network where people funnel people right as they start going into a buying process into your into you and so that that's where kind of referrals actually come from in a sense based on trigger event sellings research um I think that where people I'm trying to put another way of thinking about it this is demand creation versus capture right if anything that's solution aware we are this category that is demand capture messaging demand generation I guess another way to say it is if you're if you don't have demand generation messaging on your website and your um outbound content isn't demand generative like it talks to pain points or problems people have you're gonna fail because someone already has to believe you someone like you is the solution to their problem versus hey did you know that if you have this problem it can happen because of this and you can do this about love it that's super cool yeah it reminds me of um I think it was Forester came out of the study that only five percent of your target market is in Market at any given time I think three to five percent the rest of it is not looking for a solution so maybe that kind of ties into like they're not there's no demand that you can capture because they don't even know they have a problem or they're not aware of a problem or it's not acute enough of a problem all those different types of things so if I'm hearing you correctly go in with more of a demand gender and creation educating the market on a problem that they may not know they have yeah and you'll get a much higher percentage in that that point one percent of just trying to to cap to uh to basically capture all the demand that's already in Market that people already have no they have a problem they're looking for a problem and even to your point they're probably too late if you get to that point because they probably already asked for a referral or they already looked on Google or they already um you know got to somebody else super interested in please I was just saying um I had a funny conversation I was asking Justin Michael like hey will you think about buying cycles and intent and Justin was like I create buying Cycles right and I think the heart of good sales trainers is they dig the especially guys like Justin in top of funnels they dig and they're like hey other people like you have solved this problem other people like you have addressed this that's you're actually creating demand because you're giving insight in your topic I love that that's so cool it creates buying Cycles that's an awesome awesome uh uh marketing and and slogan that's super cool awesome so we kind of built a kind of a foundation as like folks that are that are not um uh a good fit like if they don't have case studies they don't have a sales process maybe they're going in with a solution aware mindset of like Hey how do I just get those three to five percent of your Market versus uh going with educating what else what other things do you see that are like best fit for folks that are looking to do outbound um yeah what are some great great clients that you've had that you've had great success with um what type of clients were they what kind of mindset what kind of systems processes Etc honestly part of the reason we're going through the pivot is I am not happy with the revenue creation we've had with a lot of clients I had I oh Klein I had a few years back had this very strange and interesting offer which was like Hey I will ghost write a book for you and and then once he goes throughout the book I will make it the number one bestseller on Amazon and you'll be able to leverage that to get clients that do that and and the way it worked is you didn't have to do any writing you literally just like you did 10 interviews and then a writer wrote the book based on call transcript so it's it's content repurposing people know about that these days but um that worked very well we generated quite a quite a bit of sales but if that's also a unique offer I think one of the reasons I'm pivoting my business model is a lot of the clients we've had been pretty early stage and don't always have a sales leadership background so like we would do call Audits and I was like I don't know I don't know about this like we have one client where even though I'm not personally happy with the email results there they've got like pipeline committed like a month or two in and really what that came from is the sales leader was just so on point like jumped on the leads thoughtful responses good Discovery like very clear next steps they did a very good job at that and they also had a clear idea of their ICP that works then it works really well if you can do that we're also pivoting with that client to do a lot more Ai and and creative stuff in our outbound just because they're in an e-com Niche so it's that Market's just super saturated the hey can you have 15 minutes that's not a good offer that doesn't add value in in that market and those people don't want to buy that way anyway interesting and thanks for sharing yeah it sounds like a good offer something unique versus you know you know going in with your products differentiated offer that you you stand out versus a typical uh you know can I have 15 minutes or typical 30 minutes Etc um tell me more about your pivot what what's what are you seeing yeah what's caused the pivot and and what do you what are you moving to so I started thinking about this at the beginning of the year a lot of it came just from a lot of conversations with Aiden vanderobic and if you don't know Adam has gone into a ton of different businesses with this methodology he calls closed circuit selling and the idea is basically like what if I could distill everything that is compelling about a prospect buying into like a very short concise piece of content and then look at my best billing clients uh fines find the common characteristics find the segment of people like them that are actually in a buying cycle right now and meet them with that content with permission-based messaging so in Adam's case he took Financial Services products in like the New Zealand area they it was like a 12 figure or not 12 figure deal seven figure deals 12-month sales cycles and he was so dialed on his messaging and his targeting he he would get seven figure deals two call closes because he'd find the people exactly in buying cycle and just say hey look um can I send you this very search on XYZ and then we'll see if it makes sense to continue the conversation he told me the first time he was doing that someone actually called him back Midway through the buying process and was like hey can we go to contract on this um so that's kind of a very extreme example of getting all this stuff right um Adam also was doing some of the stuff phone ready leads and task missions are doing on phone validation he was doing that like years back where he would call initially with a survey and then call back with an actual offer so that so that's interesting started is I was talking to Adam talking to Justin thinking um a lot like what what's the future B2B look like like what What playbook is going to work with the buying process moving online um and then that kind of I guess I'm calling it like outbound demand generation which is like the problem with normal Dimension is a lot of times it's focused either on just capturing a lead or if it's more of the refined Labs approach it's like hey we're going to educate the market but there's not really an understanding of like who's your ICP so for me I'm going to look my approach to be like okay let's find the criteria the 10 data points that your best billing customers your favorite customers have in common let's get those people that may only be a thousand companies 500 companies but let's get those people and then what outbound demand generation is going to be about is bottom bottom funnel up right a lot of I hear ABM marketers talking about hey let's I'm going to work on new bot top of final content I think that's the wrong place to start I think hey let's start with the bottom of funnel content let's figure out why your prospects are buying first let's revamp the the proposals and the sales process and sales collateral re-engage all of our dead leads see if we can get some closed one then let's make sales calls useful again let's find some good reason like an audit or some something educational or uncovering a problem or a roadmap something that is like hey I actually want to talk about this and coincidentally those pain points that you discover during that call tee up a proposal T at the next step create a value-added sales call and then top of funnel we do things like events LinkedIn content white papers that's kind of the pivot that we're going through and it's you know start from the bottom give people a reason take sales calls and then solve the Market's problems at scale and really all we're doing is we're mapping out the the steps that our best customers are taking to win and we're just putting that into um into into content breaking that up into little pieces Distributing that all with the goal of in front of my market that's buying and but potentially some of the people in the buying cycle but really the best fit customers regardless of buying cycle first and then create a like a an outbound content funnel that gives them closer and closer to buying experience so it's a little less reliant on the sales person educating and having business Acumen like you still want that right but but you doing more of that um you're moving that content focused buying Journey the to social media to LinkedIn so it happens before they even talk to reps but in a target boy very cool so if I'm hearing correctly you kind of start with research like what you know bottom of the funnel what activities what content what messaging worked and even further down like the customers like what success worked case studies et cetera take all that data take all that messaging and then funnel that into first kind of an outbound content approach which is really interesting I'd love for you maybe dig a little bit deeper in that I think most folks that are listening understand taking that content and running ads or you know creating organic content or you know doing thought leadership Etc um but maybe if you could talk a little bit more about how you distribute that through an outbound approach sure sure so the first of all before we do anything outbounds and I think that the usual problem with outbound agencies is like it's going to take 90 days before you start seeing Revenue that's not a good client experience so what I want to do is like hey first let's get because like if you're a new sales rep what's the first thing you're gonna do you're going to call all the clothes lost right that's the fastest way for you to hit your member well like well I'm gonna I'm an agency like I'm not going to be an outbound agency anymore I'm just going to be I'm going to create Revenue let's start with your clothes loss since if I was a rep that would be the first thing I do so we start with bond with funnel how can we convert the people that we're almost there but not quite so we start with that then then change the sales and Discovery process so it's more valuable to buyers now the outbound content side it would look like one of two things it's like Hey Taylor um saw you just hired a new CMO given the raise I'm guessing you're trying to do a lot more brand building and Lead gen to fuel uh future sales expansion right um we've helped uh Brands like X Y and Z do this would love to talk through a few of the latest marketing plays that's making them successful that's an example of a value-added sales call that you would Target to someone with buying intent or triggers right so that's that's an example of value-added that's an example of kind of you're still asking for a call but your frame you're creating value you're you're crafting the sales experience to serve the buyer and educate the buyer and create value to their situation so that's one example then the other example would be like um Hey Taylor um no since since you're in this this LinkedIn group I'm guessing you're interested in demand gen word uh we're hosting a webinar on how you can or we're seeing a live workshop on how you can um so how you can apply demand gen in a more targeted approach without needing ad spent right that's and then it's like it's this do you want an invite or or here's the LinkedIn event or even like I tried this campaign actually hey I just posted a guide on it can you take a look and let me give you your feedback on ideally we're not there yet um uh ideally you you pair Uh custom AI uh prompts with the value prop right I think my new bar we're not we're definitely not there yet I'm hoping to get there by the engineers like every message should have some form of custom prompt that ties the prospects experience to your value prop um to create some customization I think that's that's where it goes so that's those are two examples um and I hope you can see like in Prospect in the buying cycle value added sales call otherwise General problem solving content anyone who isn't a buying cycle and there aren't triggers or who's about to be in the buying cycle they're going to want to attend that event and then you're going to capture them I love it super cool Scott yeah I uh this is actually similar to something I did years ago um continue to do for my clients and work on which is kind of like an inbound outbound approach or you're taking a typical like inbound content like an event right or some sort of case study or white paper or whatever something valuable content that they would enjoy consuming and you're going in an outbound channel uh which is like I still never see this it's crazy I don't every day I get dozens and dozens of typical like hey um you know let's book a meeting I never get invited to a webinar I never get invited to some sort of content and um so I think you're you're definitely honest on the night and I was super successful uh with this kind of concept even just inviting people to a webinar cold email invite them to a webinar obviously personalize it and it sounds like you're trying to get to some AI personalization at the beginning to kind of tie in the content um which is super cool and make it personalized and whatnot um love that we could probably talk for an hour about that because I think that Concept in general like how do you it's just different right is this you're you're coming at it everyone else is tip you know doing the typical let's meet you're coming out from a very selfless standpoint of just trying to give them content so it sounds like there's two approaches obviously if they're in a buying cycle or if it's a closed lost or there's some sort of intent you go at it more with um you know the case study example uh and and book a meeting if not General awareness you go at it with inviting them to content educating them and whatnot super cool um I'd love to hear more about uh we have a couple more minutes left here just about kind of some tactical um setups as far as so outbound in general is so saturated right uh whether it's cold calling or email or whatnot or social selling I'd love to hear it let's talk about email for example or maybe just in general what are your kind of pillars of what are some things that you have to get right to even get in in somebody's inbox right let alone have the message resonate which is kind of what we talked about the beginning how do you actually get in front of people what are some tools data best practices a little question sure so that's like it's weird to talk about this because I feel like it's kind of been solved it's like so these are these are basically the options on email um you need email warming you need sub domains or secondary domains and um you need uh those need to be correctly set up and then you need a tool that supports volume email or inbox rotation so the stack the the options right now basically that are I think really good uh are instantly smart lead um and Apollo just added up to 15 inboxes per seat those are cool those are the options on that front on the um and then you know options there are basically buy inboxes with cloudflare or GoDaddy and then by G Suite or Office 365 make sure to set up you know all those tools have instructions on how to set them up correctly um and then the other option which we're looking at is warmy.io Steve Schmidt told me about that send grid and then like uh subdoming something like that I think that's another decent option that could be a lot simpler we're going to experiment with that um so that's kind of the inbox stack um nothing too crazy there like just set up the tools correctly the harder part with email actually is you need a really clean lead list so you need to do some form of look-aliking if you just anytime you pull an industry based list 30 to 50 inaccurate and you need to have some good automated Persona matching um yeah so I think to me that's almost the harder part is like yeah you know inbox rotation all that stuff like that playbook's pretty well established spin tax or AI personalization I think you know you really the last thing I'd say is just like get a really clean lead list if you're gonna do foam my shortlist get good phone data um Best in Class seems to be right bound right now Lucia Apollo Zoom info's coverage isn't that great but Lucian Apollo seemed pretty good seamless is cost effective and then from there it's you either go phone ready leads for the low low volume you could go task minions or Cloud lead to fill and validate or if you want to go to volume Side Sales fitting Nooks Orem like that's the stack like that's what you do um and there's a few options we're exploring on LinkedIn automation but like those are those are kind of the volume options um on the and then if you want to go low volume I would phone validate and um use lavender with a really good lead list and some buying intent so yeah very cool well that you could probably do a two hour master class on just all that technology and what the whys behind it and everything like that and uh I'm uh I've learned a lot from you and I've looked into almost all those things and I can attest that you need all of those things and unfortunately yeah um I'm curious Apollo data do you validate their data at all or are they are they good to go in general so you have to use verified Apollo leaves but if you do verified you don't it's like it used to be a lot worse um they made some changes and now it's like if you have verified apolidated you're basically done like we don't we don't do anything else like we just we pull the lead list from Apollo we own we you have to check the box that's like only verified leads and then you're done and then my goats are there from there would be like scrubby scrubby and then do some other waterfall enrichment but like Apollo verified and done is good enough 90 of the time very cool interesting and um so yeah I've been falling Apollo for a while I'm in a customer of theirs and and really and appreciate everything they're doing um have you used their sequencers at all because I know like syntax can you even do syntax in Apollo uh funny you you can't you okay um I just met with the product manager and I was like hey this is how you should build I met with the product they have a really incredible PM in charge of sales engagement Matt Lincoln I'm really optimistic they've got I don't know uh there they have good things coming on the dialing front and I I think I can say that I talked with them about how I would Implement spin tax it's going to be significantly better their spin tax is going to be significantly better to and easier to use than um other tools on the market so I'm very excited about that or you you don't really need spin tax if you have ai personalization just FYI online got it totally yeah how do you integrate the AI personalization with Apollo the current plan is going to be just CSV imports from play um or magic reach would probably be one of the two go-to's um cool eventually the the we might use cargo and a direct API integration they I'm trying to get them to loosen up the API limits but Apollo's got a pretty limited API out of the box Unfortunately they just have they have a lot of rate limits that makes it more painful so got it hopefully they change that got it cool super helpful yeah I never got into the weeds that's cool yeah really viable information I think in general the biggest takeaways are obviously determine if you're a right fit to do outbound um I really love that content uh how do you how do you coin that again content-led outbound or I'm calling it outbounds what was the term you use there outbound demand Generations that's right that's what I'm like very cool yeah and whether you're educating folks um we have a minute or two left can you uh just give me kind of a rundown of intent data what's your thoughts and intent data how valuable is it um and then triggers if those things kind of coincide I have not personally used it a lot um so I'm I am like from what I have heard from the people I've talked to um you're you're they're seeing like double digit lifts in closed cycle close rate from a structural perspective from what I've talked to with Kyle at bricks Kyle Williams at Brick stack you like double so the way it's like okay intent data 10 to 40 lift could be really good in Enterprise but if you pick up the right structural fit you 2x the close rate that's what at least what Kyle Williams had so for me I'd rather pick the right structural just do a really tight look-alike first and then sure you can layer on buying Triggers on top of that but the buying triggers that are active you're maybe that's what I've heard I have um max at trigify did a really interesting test on that he's on like a 10 15 lift so it's noticeable it's better um I don't think it's as important as building a good look like in my opinion got it and a look-alike is just finding the right list making sure you're targeting the right ICP to based on your current customer success what are your a tier best billing customers happiest what customers have because usually you will find trends for instance um a lot of smbs I've seen this in a couple different companies your a tier customers they'll always have they typically will have a certain number of people in key departments so for instance one company we worked with the the a tier lookalike was they're using Shopify they're using cloudflare CDN they've got at least 10 meta ads in the metadat library meta ad pixel they're using clavio they've got at least one marketer at least one person in the Ops Department um I think that was it oh and they have 90k plus site visits a month another guy site visits didn't matter but they had to have one Mercury one sales person so that's kind of like department head counts and key titles like for me if they don't if something doesn't have an account executive they're a lot worse of a fit so for me those are like that those are some no one was really talking about that as a fit thing it's presence of job titles department head counts Tech get what are your ATR customers have in common and you can look at that on sales ads really easily um foreign Polo but the data isn't quite as good as sales now that's what I would look at um and if you can stack those things together what typically happens is if you if you don't have those roles it's a lot harder for people to use your tools effectively right um I gotta go in a minute but um yeah that's that's to me no one seems to be talking about I should maybe do some more content on this but that that's what I would look at like carbon head count what titles do they have what tech do they have um keywords and industries just go a little deeper and you'll be surprised has been my experience super cool Scott thanks so much for sharing thanks for coming on the show super helpful how come folks follow you online uh just go to my LinkedIn Scott Martinez I'm pretty sure I'm like the only Scott Martinez in the world so it should be easy some good marketing there for you super cool Scott thanks again for coming on uh really viable information um thanks everyone for listening and we'll see you next week see ya