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Eggs 448: Building a Successful Sales Team from Scratch with Kevin Downey · EGGS! The Podcast

0:12
Hey everybody, Happy New Year and welcome back to Eggs the
0:15
Podcast. But before we jump in, I want to
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1:32
Now back to the show. Hey, everybody, welcome back to
1:35
Eggs. The podcast today special guest
1:37
is Kevin M Downey. Kevin, how are you?
1:38
Happy New Year. I'm good.
1:40
I'm good. Happy New Year to you.
1:41
Thank you. Absolutely.
1:43
Well, let's kind of start at the beginning, Kevin.
1:44
Let's talk a little bit about who you are and what you do.
1:47
Sure. Yeah.
1:47
I mean, our agency is called Kevin M Downey.
1:49
We've been around for 10 years. We do recruitment and sales and
1:53
business development reps for clients and Rep outsourcing for
1:57
from mostly in B to B but some B to C companies and that's
2:01
basically it now. Cool.
2:03
Well, let's take a few minutes and just kind of unpack how you
2:05
got here. One of the big things we like to
2:06
showcase on this show is sort of the entrepreneurial journey in
2:09
addition to, you know, flexing our guests expertise.
2:13
But we'd like to learn a little bit more about just sort of, you
2:15
know, your story. How did you end up here?
2:18
Yeah. I mean it's, I won't go too, too
2:22
deep into that, but I grew up in Chicago, grew up in an
2:26
entrepreneurial family. My maternal grandparents were
2:28
entrepreneurial. My father followed into that and
2:32
grew up around a family business, retail and wholesale
2:34
pretty big. And yeah.
2:38
And then I, I ended up being in the golf industry as a kid and I
2:41
got into sales. That's how I ended up in Kansas
2:43
City, moved around from a couple companies, kind of moved up the
2:46
ladder, if you will, or the food chain.
2:48
Ended up with Callaway Golf here in KC for KC and our for Kansas
2:52
and Missouri. And yeah.
2:54
And then I just, I decided after a few years with a brand newborn
2:58
being on the road seven days a week for however many months in
3:01
a row that I just, it was time to do my own thing.
3:04
So that's how I got started, got into commercial real estate.
3:08
I had a few side businesses I started and sold, started and
3:11
failed certainly one or two and and then started our agency
3:16
about 10 years ago and we're still running.
3:18
I love that. Yeah, No, thanks for that
3:19
background. No, it's funny.
3:20
I've only ever been to Kansas City once, but I remember there
3:22
was a lot of confusion around the Missouri side versus the
3:25
Kansas side. And we we, I was tour managing a
3:29
a band back then. And so we were trying to
3:31
coordinate where we were going to meet and all these things.
3:33
And it was, it was a whole thing.
3:35
So anyway. But great city issue here is the
3:37
Chiefs being moved from Missouri to Kansas, which.
3:39
Is Oh yeah, from. KC, MO to KC Kansas tonight
3:43
that's that's got the locals not too happy.
3:45
Everybody is up in arms. Oh, how funny.
3:48
So cool. Well, let's I guess get into
3:50
this a little bit more. You, you founded your agency
3:53
sort of on this principle of being better and working harder.
3:55
How did that philosophy evolve? You mentioned growing up in an
3:59
entrepreneurial family and things like that.
4:01
You know, I imagine some of this may have been imposed on you,
4:04
but can you talk about just sort of developing in the ethos like
4:07
that? I mean, I think a lot of people
4:08
have the notion like work harder, but the piece that I
4:12
think is is really key there that maybe isn't part of it of
4:15
everybody else's sort of philosophy.
4:16
Is that be better part? And I wonder if you'd just talk
4:18
about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, we, I try to set a
4:21
really good example. You know, I'm not the, I'm not a
4:25
rah rah leader guy. That's not what I do.
4:28
And my company's not huge, right?
4:29
We're, we're just six on my team, plus the outsource reps
4:33
that we have for clients. I, I lead by example, right?
4:37
So the goal is to always work as fast and and as high quality as
4:41
possible for clients. So you're always a step ahead of
4:44
their request, right? That's what I try to teach my
4:47
people. If they have to come asking you
4:49
things, that means we're doing something wrong somewhere along
4:51
the lines, right? So we always want to be a step
4:54
ahead of them. Yeah, No, I love that.
4:56
Would you, are you able to point back to the point in your
4:59
career, you know, as you, you know, obviously you went into
5:03
sort of an entrepreneurial path. Well, I mean, or I guess you,
5:06
you chose your, this path as a result of the lifestyle that you
5:10
were trying to build around your, your new family.
5:12
But in your early entrepreneurial days, how did
5:16
you know that that was going to be your path versus just, you
5:18
know, going to school and taking a job like normal people do?
5:20
Like, how did you decide that I'm willing to take this risk?
5:23
And, and I think for families that are entrepreneurial, it's a
5:25
little easier, but, but you know, 'cause you're at least
5:28
exposed to that stuff or it feels less risky.
5:31
But but I wonder if you talk about just sort of your thought
5:33
process a little bit. Yeah, I think I, I think to that
5:36
point, actually, I, I've always told people, you know, you, you
5:40
kids do what their parents did in a lot of cases, right.
5:44
You see a lot of that same theme.
5:46
Kids go to school in the areas and study the same things and
5:49
they end up professionally a lot like their parents.
5:51
Not always, but you see a pattern and a theme with that,
5:54
right? And it's mostly because they
5:55
replicate what they know. Easier for me to be an
5:58
entrepreneur because I grew up around it, right?
6:00
My father was an employee ever since I was born, right, of
6:04
anybody else. And I think just, it's just part
6:08
of the way. And my maternal grandmother was
6:10
an entrepreneur when she was 14. So it never worked for anybody
6:14
else. So I think I think it was just
6:16
part of the psychology of the way that I lived.
6:18
And so it wasn't really a hard jump to start our own thing.
6:23
I think also I saw the writing on the wall with the golf
6:28
industry and just saw a kind of an end game to in the way things
6:31
were changing and it was just time, right More than anything I
6:35
think. Yeah, I love that.
6:36
Well, I think pattern recognition is a big part of it,
6:38
and being able to see that, you know, you recognize that writing
6:41
on the wall. I think for a lot of
6:42
entrepreneurs especially, you know, they've always wanted to
6:44
do a thing or they think about a thing all the time and never
6:47
actually chase it. And so I think being able to
6:50
recognize that and then being able to take that next step into
6:52
your own business is like one of those critical pivots that I
6:54
think a lot of people miss. Yeah.
6:58
I mean, I, I think given the employment market and this is a
7:00
more of a rabbit hole, maybe a different conversation for a
7:03
different day, you're going to see more and more
7:05
entrepreneurial type of psychology and people by force,
7:10
right? I think there's going to be more
7:11
freelancers, there's going to be more fractional people working,
7:15
you know, more fractional work and set up from executives all
7:18
the way down to frontline people.
7:20
I just think we're going to see more and more of that people
7:22
starting their own things. They're going to do it on the
7:23
side at first, just by necessity.
7:27
Yeah, no, I I think you're right.
7:29
And maybe we can use that as a Segway to start talking about
7:32
how we get started. You know, here we're we're
7:34
having this conversation on the, the first Monday after the new
7:37
year this January 5th. And you know, for a lot of
7:40
people, they're just coming back to work today.
7:42
And or you know, if you're anything, anything like me, like
7:45
I got laid off at Christmas last year from a side job I was
7:48
doing. So, so when I hit the ground on
7:52
January 5th or whatever it was last year, you know, my whole
7:55
world had switched and it was time to, to go back into
7:58
something. And so I think a lot of people
8:00
look at the first of the year sort of fresh starts and new
8:03
beginnings. And I wonder if we could talk
8:05
about just sort of in the spirit of biz dev and creating teams
8:09
and starting to build systems. I wonder if we could talk a
8:11
little bit about just like where you would start if you were
8:13
starting fresh in 2026? Easy.
8:16
I, I think having been around this for 10 years, right and and
8:21
before that entrepreneurial activity, but helping companies
8:25
with what we do and, and obviously our focus has changed
8:28
a little bit in that time period, right, in 10 years
8:30
because we're not huge. So stick and move with the
8:32
market a little bit. But I would say working with
8:37
tons of small businesses and growing into mid market and
8:40
seeing different things, small businesses do a really good job
8:43
at deliverability of what products or services they offer.
8:47
Any entrepreneur, the first advice I would give them is pre
8:51
plan, start working on your, your lead generation system
8:57
immediately, right? Because a lot of times we hear
9:01
people have a deliverable, big or small, right?
9:04
Whatever they do and and they perfect that and they go to
9:08
market and they can do it and they get maybe a few clients
9:10
from just relationships and all that network stuff and all that,
9:14
but then they don't know what to do.
9:15
I would advise people to start working on whether you're B to C
9:19
and you need to learn how to market online or advertise
9:21
online and get return on investment there to be able to
9:23
drive leads in a systematic fashion or in B to B where I
9:27
spend more, more, you know, more time.
9:29
You have an easier way to build a system to generate leads
9:32
because you can manually do it without money into advertising,
9:36
right? There's two things you're going
9:38
to drive leads day-to-day. It's going to be e-mail, high
9:40
volume e-mail, or reps That's it.
9:43
Those are the only two things. There are other things that
9:44
work, but they work intermittently.
9:47
Like webinars can be great, but they're intermittent and they're
9:52
hard to put on really well and drive the traffic, but you can
9:55
do it. And trade shows are always great
9:58
if they're targeted right trade. But again, that's an
10:00
intermittent thing. That's not a daily driver of
10:03
leads. Yeah, no, I think that makes
10:05
sense. And as somebody who's basically
10:07
built a whole business that was just built on networking versus,
10:10
you know, actually lead generation, we talked a little
10:13
bit before the show that I'm trying to launch this new
10:15
company and a big piece of that is we will need a steady flow of
10:17
customers. This is new for me and it's
10:20
funny, we've been running a marketing agency for 20 years
10:22
and it's like, but this wasn't our realm, you know, we didn't
10:24
do this kind of work and so and we never had to for ourselves.
10:27
We got a little bit spoiled and, and so now as we're moving into
10:30
this new industry and all this stuff, we've got to make new
10:33
friends and we have to make them fast.
10:35
Otherwise there's not going to be any capital to do, to do
10:37
anything with. And So what would be, I guess
10:42
the one thing I liked about you mentioned in B to B that you can
10:45
sort of, you know, I guess manually collect names, things
10:47
like that. You could do some vetting
10:49
through LinkedIn, stuff like that.
10:50
I guess that's what you mean that you're not paying for
10:52
advertising necessarily to win those new leads.
10:55
You know, what are the things that people can do that are low
10:59
budget, you know, affordable? When does it make sense to get
11:03
into e-mail that kind of stuff? Like what, where would you is
11:06
the real beginning? So because like for me, and, and
11:09
I'll just speak as a total novice in this realm, you know,
11:12
pre planning lead generation for me, I mean, at least would mean,
11:16
OK, well, I'm going to start identifying people in the
11:18
industry that I want to get in touch with or companies I want
11:20
to work with. I'm going to identify key
11:22
individuals in their company, you know, maybe executive
11:25
leadership or marketing directors or, you know, money
11:28
people or whatever. And then I'm going to try and
11:31
find e-mail addresses or contact information and then I'm going
11:33
to reach out and, and you know, this would be like, I guess the
11:36
low tech version of doing what you're talking about.
11:38
But I wonder, I mean, is that really all there is to it?
11:41
I mean, 'cause it seems like, oh man, pre planning lead
11:43
generation like this must be a huge thing, you know?
11:46
But is it really as simple as kind of what I just laid out
11:48
there? Like at least in its most pure
11:50
essence? You're talking about a maybe a
11:52
little more manual way of doing it then.
11:54
I mean, first of all, I would you always start with prospect
11:57
list in B to B. So go to Apollo would be my
12:00
recommendation to everyone. I mean that's your, you know,
12:05
less expensive competitor to say Zoom info, which would be viewed
12:08
as the gold standard of, of prospect data for, for
12:11
companies, right. But I would get on Apollo, I
12:14
would learn how to build prospect lists and I would look
12:16
at my total count. And then from that we derive the
12:20
business development system. So if we are dealing with 10s of
12:25
thousands of contacts or more contacts, not companies, then
12:31
e-mail has to be part of what you do.
12:33
And when I say e-mail, I don't mean e-mail through your CRM.
12:36
I don't mean constant contact or MailChimp newsletter stuff.
12:40
I mean direct response, one to one text based emails, right?
12:44
And not sequences. No, no, no of this, you know,
12:49
drip campaign stuff that doesn't work.
12:51
You want to drive response, you have to do what we do on the
12:54
phone, right? Johnny, do you have this pain
12:56
point? If you do, I can help you solve
12:57
it. This is what I have.
12:59
This is what I want you to do next.
13:00
I want you to reply. I'm going to send you stuff.
13:02
And then we're going to, you know, obviously we're going to
13:04
follow up with them. We're going to try to move them,
13:05
call to action to a calendar, all that stuff.
13:08
But you have to learn how to do e-mail, right?
13:11
And that means minimum, minimum level is thousands per day,
13:17
right, Whether we're using and I don't, we don't want didn't need
13:21
to dig deep into the to the infrastructure side, but but
13:24
Apollo plus an e-mail API or something like a mail reefer
13:28
server based system combined with say smart lead as ACMS.
13:32
Either way, you can build a system that can get deliver
13:34
ability and you can run thousands a day and then you can
13:37
layer that as big as you want to go.
13:40
At one time when I was doing e-mail for clients, we had one
13:42
client for seven out of eight years.
13:44
I had one client for 7 1/2 years and we were sent at one point
13:48
36,000 emails a day. Oh wow.
13:52
Well, so maybe that maybe kind of answers my question, but I, I
13:55
had a thought here, you know, is it better to have a lot of
13:57
emails or not them or like fewer but better qualified emails
14:01
just. Need them to be targeted, right?
14:02
They need to be verified, they need to be reaching out to the
14:05
right people, right. So depending on the size of the
14:08
company, you might be targeting owners in SMB, but you're
14:12
obviously going to be targeting employees as you go up in size
14:15
for a lot of things, not everything.
14:18
As an example, we target almost exclusively owners, but we deal
14:22
in small business to mid market. We do target just a smidgen,
14:26
maybe less than 10% VPS of sales CSOSCROS as part of our
14:33
outreach, but we're almost exclusively targeting owners,
14:36
right? As an agency for what we do, you
14:39
know, for what you guys do, for example, you're definitely going
14:41
to be targeting some employees, but there's going to be some
14:45
smaller businesses where you're going to hit owners too.
14:47
And you just want to make sure that you're targeted with your
14:50
outreach. And the volume of e-mail you
14:53
want to send is dependent upon the prospect list size.
14:56
If you have 100,000, you want to send 100,000 a month.
14:59
That's 5000 a day you want. You don't want to e-mail them
15:02
more than once a month if you can help it.
15:04
Yeah. Well, and how do you, or I mean,
15:07
maybe you have some advice on this?
15:08
I mean, obviously in the world of AI and stuff like that, we're
15:10
starting to see increased volume, a lot of automation in
15:13
and around e-mail space, you know, the kinds of things that
15:16
people are producing. I don't know, it seems to me
15:19
anyway like I'm getting a ton of these things that seem AI
15:21
generated probably. What do you think about, I mean
15:26
automation maybe first of all, but like, how do you
15:28
breakthrough when the world has become so noisy?
15:31
Just I, I mean I looked at 250 or 300 setups for clients over 8
15:36
years because they would come to me especially after I got a
15:39
reputation, they'd come to me with what they are doing.
15:41
So I would look at what they're doing.
15:43
And to be very honest, I only saw three to four good setups
15:45
out of a few 108 years. Most everybody does e-mail
15:50
wrong. They almost all use their CRM,
15:52
they're sending from their main domain.
15:54
They're almost all sending sequences or drip campaigns and
15:57
they market to people. They don't.
16:00
Business development lead generation in B to B is what you
16:04
do on a cold call. It's not marketing to people,
16:09
right? Like I said before, right, what
16:10
would I do on a call? That's how I learned.
16:12
And we failed it first for clients ourselves and for
16:15
clients really a little bit because we were following
16:17
everybody else. This goes back eight years ago.
16:21
But once I realized I was like looking and I was like, why are
16:24
we marketing like this when it's not what we would do on the
16:26
phone? Like let's just do what we would
16:28
do on a phone, on a phone call, on an initial call.
16:32
And that's how I learned how to write emails.
16:34
So I voiced it and transcribe it and then tweak it a little so
16:37
that it makes sense, obviously. But yeah, block style copy 125
16:45
words Max, Probably some, if I can get it down to 75 or even
16:49
65, that'd be great. You just got to learn how to do
16:53
it that way. And you have to send volume.
16:56
Yeah, well, and I won't ask you to fully improv one of these
16:58
notes, but like, what kinds of things are you putting into
17:00
these messages? Like, you know, I think you make
17:02
a really good point. I mean, I will say this vast
17:04
majority of spammy emails I get are, you know, I have a service,
17:08
you should buy it. And here's why it's not.
17:11
You know, I think I heard you say, you know, do you have a
17:13
pain point? You know, and you know, so I
17:16
think for people who aren't natural salespeople or who
17:19
haven't spent a lot of time in sales, it might be good to have
17:22
you sort of differentiate what a marketing e-mail is versus what
17:25
a A. Yeah.
17:26
And to to go back to history when I dealt with clients on
17:29
e-mail sales department and owners understood what we were
17:34
doing much better than marketing people within the within the
17:37
clients. And I dealt with owners more
17:39
than I dealt with employees. But the marketing people were
17:42
always the hardest to get to understand it because they can't
17:45
turn off their marketing brain. They keep want to push messages
17:49
right. So it's all about just ask him
17:51
what you would ask him if you ran into them and you you cold
17:55
ducked them and you walked in the door, right.
17:57
I meet John and John's got XYZ company and I've got whatever,
18:01
let's say it's us like I do outsource, you know, reps as
18:04
part of what we do. John, Hey, could you use more?
18:07
Could you use a good inside sales Rep or could you use
18:09
somebody to generate leads for your sales team?
18:11
If you can we do this. What I want to do is send you,
18:14
you know, a little information about our processors and pricing
18:17
and rates or whatever it is, PDF.
18:20
And then if you're interested after looking at it, we'll jump
18:22
on a call. That's it.
18:25
I mean, that's right. If I have a call, which goes to
18:29
when we have smaller lists, we remove e-mail and we focus a lot
18:32
more on reps, right? But it's no different, right?
18:35
The first thing when you make a call, you have the ability to
18:38
keep going on the call. But with e-mail, you have a
18:41
stopping point. It's a reply.
18:43
All I want is a reply. They can tell me to go away.
18:46
They can tell me whatever they can say, yes, I'm interested,
18:49
send the PDF. That's it, right?
18:51
That's all we're trying to do. Well, and is the purpose of the
18:54
volume to overcome, I guess the ones that do get scrubbed off or
18:57
get spammed or or ignored or whatever, like, is that the
19:00
purpose? Cause certainly, I mean, if you
19:01
had, I don't know, and nobody gets this, but if you sent out
19:04
5000 emails and you got 5000 responses, you'd be in trouble.
19:07
So it must be kind of a game of numbers that you're playing
19:09
here, right? Yeah, no, certainly not.
19:11
But. Let me give you the best
19:13
performing one in recent memory that I can give you with the
19:17
with the algorithms the way they are and everything.
19:19
So it would be ours more than a client's just because of the
19:24
need and the targeting. And I've been doing it so long,
19:26
I know how to message it really, really well.
19:29
Donald, you know, 100 emails for us at some point, right?
19:32
And different variations. 12,000 outbound 4045 leads in a day.
19:41
OK. That's about as good as you're
19:42
going to do so that, so we're, we're looking at like in that
19:45
campaign, you're looking at like including negatives and not not
19:48
interested in unsubscribes. You're talking about a little
19:51
over a 1% response rate. That would be exceedingly high,
19:55
like a normal client point 2.3% response rate.
20:00
I think people confuse like they it's easy, but it's not because
20:05
if you don't have the volume, you're wasting time sending
20:09
emails on your CRM where you can only send 50 to 100 a day per
20:13
e-mail address. Right.
20:15
The management of those campaigns doesn't make sense.
20:17
You can't send enough volume. What are you going to generate a
20:20
lead a week? I mean, and, and then your sales
20:23
reps are playing around with the CRM and e-mail instead of making
20:26
calls, which is what they should be doing, right?
20:29
Which is the big thing we get into these days when we're
20:31
restructuring sales teams, especially in B2B.
20:34
Yeah, No, I think that that's an interesting topic and maybe we
20:37
could go into that a little bit more.
20:39
I, I heard you on another podcast, it may have been your
20:41
own podcast interviewing somebody else, I'm not sure.
20:44
But but you were talking about that idea about not having sales
20:47
reps on LinkedIn and not having sales reps doing a number of
20:50
other things that are sort of outside of the scope of, of
20:53
prospecting or whatever. But it's the common stuff that
20:55
sales reps do slip into, which is they start creating their own
20:59
net, you know, e-mail lists or they start creating their own
21:02
whatever it is. And so I wonder if you talk a
21:04
little bit about just your perspective on that, like what's
21:06
the role of the salesperson in all this?
21:08
Right. So when we're, because I'm tied
21:11
to Aptive index, which is an assessment product, right?
21:13
I'm a strategic advisor there and also recruiting all of our
21:16
strategic advisors nationwide. You know, I, I understand the
21:21
profile difference between a hunter sales Rep, a farmer sales
21:25
Rep and ABDR. So BDR being hard, cold, cold, cold, cold outreach,
21:30
right? All three of those are very
21:32
different things. If you're, if you're, without
21:36
going again too far into it, if your sales person's relationship
21:40
is as a farmer, they are going to have an ongoing relationship
21:44
with the customers, cross selling, upselling, checking in
21:47
with them, filling inventory, whatever you want to call it.
21:50
Then I'm fine with them doing their own prospecting because
21:53
there's light at the end of the tunnel.
21:55
And it's a matter of putting them in a structure, in a system
21:59
where they can't fail right? Because they have to go build
22:03
that customer base. But once they build the customer
22:05
base, they're done with cold outreach, more or less, whether
22:09
it takes six months or 12 months.
22:10
There's a, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, right?
22:13
But they are not built for cold out reasons that they can do it
22:15
and get through it. Hunter sales reps, which you get
22:20
a little more of in B to B is sales when you want the sales
22:25
Rep to do the selling. And this would be a principle
22:27
sometimes initially and they have no ongoing relationship
22:32
with the customer, maybe an annual renewal, but that's it
22:35
because somebody else is doing the deliverable, right?
22:39
The whatever the team is or the people are, whatever it is that
22:42
you do, the sales Rep really has no ongoing relationship.
22:46
They are there just to close the customer, get paper and then
22:49
they're basically done with that relationship, right?
22:52
So they're always selling in that sense, always doing new
22:55
customer acquisition. They are not built for business
22:59
development. They are the opposite profile to
23:02
a business development representative.
23:05
So we are paying these. The epidemic we're dealing with
23:08
in B to B and why we're seeing so much restructuring is that we
23:12
are paying these sales reps in the United States that are
23:14
hunter sales reps exorbitant salaries to do something that
23:18
they aren't built to do and don't want to do.
23:20
So they avoided like the plague by spending time on e-mail and
23:24
their CRM and LinkedIn and whatever other BS they can come
23:28
up with to avoid dialing the phone.
23:31
And their job, if they're being paid to generate their own
23:34
leads, is to either dial the phone or their boots on the
23:37
ground. Those are the only two things
23:38
they should be doing. You can automate e-mail, you can
23:40
automate LinkedIn, right? So in restructuring sales teams
23:46
for B to B now, because biz dev has gotten so difficult, and you
23:50
could say it was getting really hard decades ago, but obviously
23:53
COVID exacerbated the situation. We want say Hunter sales reps to
23:59
be booked with calls or at the very least booked with leads all
24:03
day everyday. And business development, e-mail
24:06
and LinkedIn is all done by somebody else that is driving
24:10
them appointments or leads because they're more expensive.
24:13
They're probably some of the most expensive people,
24:16
relatively speaking, in a company, right?
24:19
And if they're not going to do the business development, what's
24:21
the point? We're just wasting money.
24:24
So let's like I have a, we have a new client that we're
24:27
recruiting Latin American reps for to do business development
24:30
in Texas. He had 7 salespeople, two had
24:34
and he, and this was a former sales role, but he's been
24:37
frustrated with the same problem and he had two salespeople that
24:40
were full books of business, one kid that was really comping it
24:44
that had about 5040% full. And then he had four reps He's
24:48
paying salaries too that weren't doing much.
24:51
And I just told him I was like, keep a Rep or two, get build a
24:55
business development team, drive them leads and appointments.
24:58
He fired 4 reps, kept the one kid and then the two that had
25:01
full books of business. And now he has five business
25:04
development reps or 4 for that one salesperson.
25:07
And they're going to keep driving him leads or
25:09
appointments until he builds his book of business to where it's
25:12
about 90%. Then we add another salesperson
25:15
and we then drive them the leads in the appointments.
25:19
Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense and I
25:20
actually really appreciate it 'cause like I say, I mean, I've
25:22
always been on the marketing or on the design side of things and
25:25
so I haven't really spent a lot of time on the sales side.
25:27
So for me, I mean, I'm sure for a lot of our listeners this is
25:30
old hat, but for me this is all really interesting because even
25:32
the delineation between sales reps is really a great insight
25:36
for me. You know, as I'm thinking about
25:38
the type of people that we might bring into our new organization
25:41
and how we're small and we don't have a lot of capital, it makes
25:43
me think, well, God, what? When would you hire 1st and
25:45
where do you put the money and you know, these kinds of things.
25:48
So I wondered if you maybe talk about that a little bit, which
25:50
is, you know, based on a business size, you know,
25:52
especially if somebody's coming into you and they're one of
25:54
these smaller companies that you're working with.
25:56
You mentioned earlier that you might do more Rep driven stuff
25:58
on the phone for a smaller company, which makes me think
26:01
they might do something different for a bigger company.
26:03
So I wonder if you just talk a little bit about the strategies
26:06
for companies you know, small to large, and where would you start
26:08
if you were starting with nothing?
26:10
Well, we can come to that, but let's go back to e-mail and
26:13
prospect list size. So if our contact list is big
26:16
enough, e-mail has to be part of what you're doing.
26:18
So 10s of thousands or more like I had a client like I referenced
26:22
that was 36,000 a day at one point that client's prospect
26:25
list was over 800,000 contacts because they were in promotional
26:29
products and corporate gift which applies to.
26:31
Everyone. And you have multiple
26:33
departments to hit, plus owners in SMB, so you've got tons of
26:36
people to go after. So e-mail was their workhorse to
26:41
drive inbound leads to sales reps who are farmers.
26:44
They're a farmer style sales Rep.
26:46
They're account managers, right? They may get paper initially,
26:49
but then they manage that customer and they keep selling
26:51
to them, right? So I don't, I don't know that
26:54
it's about company size, although capital matters as much
26:58
as what is the style of salesperson you have?
27:01
Is it like in, in, in, we use yours as an example as a
27:05
salesperson theoretically going to sell take you out of the
27:08
picture. But if you hired A salesperson,
27:10
are they going to keep selling to the customer in reality?
27:12
Or once they get the customer, is it pretty much going to be
27:15
managed by an entirely different part of the company?
27:18
Yeah, like in the case of us, it would be handed off to a project
27:20
manager inside the company. Very normal stuff, right.
27:23
So that's a hunter sales Rep model.
27:25
So for you, because you can sell your own stuff, you should be
27:28
your first salesperson and you should have a business
27:30
development team that is driving you appointments because they
27:34
are built for business development, which is again,
27:37
different than a hunter sales Rep where in aptive index, the
27:41
the language we use is would be high I high influence and high
27:45
intensity, whereas a farmer sales Rep is high sociability,
27:49
right? It's not that they're low in the
27:50
other things, but we're looking for the extreme thing we're
27:53
looking for in the person to match them to the sales role.
27:56
So when we're recruiting for clients again in the United
28:00
States recruiting anyway, we want to run everybody through
28:03
active index because we want to, you know, we have to identify
28:06
are they built for sales and what type of sales role, right?
28:10
Because I can, you know, again, for, for business development, I
28:14
want high consistency, I want high C because they're doing the
28:16
same thing every day, 50 to 100 times a day.
28:19
A high influence Eagle, what we would call Eagle sales Rep,
28:24
Hunter sales Rep prototype is not built for that.
28:27
They don't want to do it. They're not built for it.
28:30
They're built for influence and intensity and presentation and
28:34
salesmanship, which is not what cold outreach is.
28:37
Cold outreach is a marketing function done by salespeople, if
28:41
you want to think of it that way.
28:42
Business, right? Well, yeah, no, I think that's
28:45
really interesting because like I've always seen my role in the
28:47
company as being more about developing the relationships,
28:49
right? And that's because in our former
28:52
agency, that's kind of how life was, was, you know, people came
28:55
to me because they knew me and they weren't even really hiring
28:57
my company. They were hiring me and I just
28:59
happened to work at my company, you know, so it was kind of a a
29:01
different deal. And now we're trying to turn
29:03
that around to where our company has reputation in the space and
29:06
we're well known and people should hire us because we're the
29:09
best in that business. And, and so that's a big switch
29:12
for us and so or a big switch for me emotionally anyway.
29:15
And so moving into this role where, you know, I can, I can go
29:19
out and hunt for these prospects, you know, based on
29:21
these things that are driven to me, I think is a really
29:23
interesting perspective because it's not something I've thought
29:25
about before. Yeah, I again start with Apollo
29:29
build prospect list. What's the total contact count
29:31
look like if it's in the thousands or 10/15/20 thousand
29:35
emails? Not going to be an important
29:37
part of what you do. Like not newsletter.
29:40
I'm talking about direct response, one to one text based
29:42
e-mail. It's not going to be a core of
29:43
what you do because you can only e-mail people so often before
29:46
you're going to. If you e-mail them too much,
29:48
you're going to burn up the infrastructure too fast, so you
29:51
can only e-mail them once a month, and then they'll forget
29:53
they ever got an e-mail from you for the most part.
29:55
Right and. I sent 100 and 510 million
29:59
emails for clients over eight years.
30:01
So you can watch a lot of different domains and e-mail
30:04
addresses and see what happens and you see patterns and all
30:06
that stuff. But if you have a big enough
30:08
list, e-mail needs to be part of it.
30:10
But it's still business development Rep in a hunter
30:12
sales model driving, taking those leads, responding to them,
30:16
following up with them to drive them, say to you to do the
30:19
initial sales for the company right until you're too busy.
30:23
And then you go hire a hunter sales Rep who's built for that.
30:27
And then you drive them all the leads and appointments.
30:30
Yeah, it's really interesting because, you know, like, I mean,
30:32
at least in my former sort of agency life and having worked
30:34
with a number of other agencies over the years in the marketing
30:37
and design space, advertising largely, I guess most of these
30:41
companies have tried sales teams and almost all of them will tell
30:44
you that sales has never worked for them.
30:46
And you know, it's funny because what I'm hearing, yeah, which is
30:50
crazy, but I think a lot of them are probably like me, or maybe
30:53
the ones I've been exposed to are more like me, which were
30:55
like relationship driven, right? Everybody comes to us because
30:57
they know us. Yeah, I think I've heard.
31:01
In 10 years, I've heard that line 500 times at least, if not
31:04
1000. Oh, how funny.
31:06
And so, but what I'm wondering is just now, given the
31:09
perspective of what you were just sharing, you know, choosing
31:11
the right salesperson for the position, those kinds of things,
31:13
and using the right person at the right level, It makes me
31:16
wonder, and I don't have enough insight to know how these
31:19
people, you know, did sales over the years.
31:21
But it does make me wonder if maybe they chose wrong.
31:23
You know, if they picked the wrong person for the wrong
31:25
position and ultimately that was the problem, it wasn't the sales
31:28
wouldn't have worked, but it didn't work for them because
31:31
they did it wrong. Business development in B to B
31:33
will always work. Always 100%.
31:37
If the effort is there and you build the system in the process,
31:40
it will always work. May take a little longer in some
31:43
things than others, but it will always work.
31:45
I've never seen it fail when it's done correctly.
31:47
The problem is companies say they're relationship driven for
31:50
a couple of reasons. They've struggled to hire
31:52
salespeople who don't want to prospect.
31:54
They didn't build them a system, They didn't build them a
31:56
process. They expected the resume and the
31:59
experience in the industry. Gosh, you know, we hear that all
32:01
the time. All they have to have experience
32:03
in our industry. Our industry is really unique.
32:05
We're relationship based. That's the dumbest thing I've.
32:08
Ever heard in my life? You can cold outreach any
32:11
industry with any person. It doesn't take like I can be
32:15
trained to cold outreach for anybody for anything, right?
32:18
I don't have to have great knowledge on it initially.
32:22
Build a list, give me a phone. Right, Johnny?
32:25
Hey, my name is Kevin. We do this.
32:26
Curious if you have this problem.
32:28
Yeah, right. No, it's funny because, and
32:30
maybe maybe I'm projecting too much here, but what's resonating
32:34
with me and what you're saying is that these all sound like the
32:36
excuses that I've made and others have made as a reason to
32:40
not do this, right. Oh, I don't like doing sales, so
32:43
I'll just say I'm relationship driven then I don't have to, you
32:46
know, whatever it is. But that's what that feels like
32:48
to me now, hearing you kind of say.
32:49
It back seeing is believing. You ever heard that phrase
32:52
before? Yeah, that's what it is.
32:55
They don't want a cold. Call, they don't know how to
32:57
build the system and they don't know what they don't know.
33:00
That's also another truism that we see in companies.
33:03
They hire employees. The owner doesn't know that the
33:06
employee doesn't know what they don't know because nobody knows
33:09
what they don't know. It sounds ridiculous, but it's
33:11
very true. It's just like dealing with
33:13
marketing people in B to B. They're they don't know what
33:16
they don't know. They have no idea how to build
33:18
the infrastructure, so they just avoid it.
33:20
They just, and then they say, now that won't work for us.
33:22
Our industry is too unique. We can't use e-mail, OK.
33:26
Whatever. Well, a couple of things.
33:28
So I would like to dive in a little bit more on the
33:31
infrastructure and take a little more time with it.
33:33
You've kind of zipped through it and talked about the different
33:35
pieces, but let's spend a little more time on that.
33:37
But one of the things I wanted to ask just related to what we
33:40
were just talking about is at what point is an e-mail list or
33:43
prospect list big enough to bother with e-mail?
33:45
You said that some, in some cases it's not big enough for
33:47
that. Like where?
33:48
Where would you start to draw lines and saying that this is
33:50
borderline too small or too big to not have e-mail or?
33:54
Let's say if we use a mail reef infrastructure and we do 1
33:57
server, you can send 100,000 across the server.
33:59
I got to do this in my head. So 50,000 cold, 50,000 warming.
34:03
So 50,000 / 20 days is 2500 a day.
34:06
SO50I mean I'd like to see the list be 50,000 or bigger.
34:11
A little smaller than that would be OK, but.
34:15
And it's part of that, just vetting the size of your
34:17
audience too, like I mean, just understanding how big of a group
34:19
of people you have to talk to. Like if you can't get 50,000
34:22
people on there, not to say that your business couldn't be
34:24
successful or whatever, but that's a good indicator for
34:26
you've got a big enough market to go after.
34:28
Right. Go into Apollo and you build the
34:30
prospect list, right? So you got to build it, narrow
34:32
the industry stuff down or use keywords or whatever that
34:35
involves, right? Primarily is what you're doing
34:37
as industry or keywords. You don't use SIC codes.
34:41
And then you've got to build the titles, right?
34:42
And then you look at the titles of the people.
34:44
Make sure you're pretty targeted there.
34:45
You can't. You don't want to target owners
34:47
at a company with 5000 people, right?
34:50
They have nothing to do with what you're probably selling.
34:52
You're going to target employees of different kinds, right?
34:55
So you build those titles and then you've got your company
34:57
targeting. And it could be very narrow in
35:00
some cases. I had a guy last week wanted to
35:02
do e-mail and me to teach him and he wanted hedge fund
35:06
managers. There's like 3500 in the
35:08
country. I'm like, dude, e-mail.
35:10
You need somebody to call. You got like, it's just too
35:13
small. Like there's no way you can make
35:15
use of e-mail at that point. And that's really all it is.
35:18
You just got to build a prospect.
35:19
Let's see what it looks like. Now, is it still worthwhile,
35:22
like in an audience of 3500, let's say.
35:24
So in a really niche crowd like that, I mean, is it still, I
35:28
mean, would e-mail just, even if it's just personal e-mail, just
35:30
you working through your e-mail and sending notes over to these
35:33
different people in an effort to just kind of get a door open,
35:36
Would that still be worthwhile and and somehow different than
35:39
just like e-mail automation, for example?
35:41
Yeah. I mean, that's when we would go
35:43
into a Rep calling, but then also sending emails as part of
35:46
what they do with each call goes into a slightly different topic.
35:51
But I would say yes, sometimes that absolutely is the
35:54
methodology, so long as when we're training the Rep that they
35:58
understand it is not an admin job.
36:01
It's the same problem we have with salespeople when, when
36:05
COVID hit, they all got a pass for prospecting, right?
36:08
Because, you know, rightfully so, they couldn't get a hold of
36:11
anybody. Everybody went home.
36:13
These companies, you know, none of these things were where their
36:16
phones were rolling over. A lot of them weren't, right?
36:18
So they couldn't get a hold of anyone.
36:20
They can go see them in person. So they had a pass.
36:23
Well, how long do we need to give them that pass for like a
36:26
year, year and a half, Two years, OK, that's fine.
36:29
But we're long past that now, so we just need to be very careful
36:34
that reps know what their job is.
36:36
So in other words, when when we have like my outsource team or
36:39
if I'm training a Rep for a client in general, I do not want
36:43
reps sending manual emails. But there are times when you
36:46
build it into the system and the process, so long as they
36:49
understand it's a calling job first.
36:51
It's. A calling job.
36:53
And that makes sense, yeah. That it would just be like an
36:55
aspect of the job, right. You make the phone call first.
36:57
If they want the follow up, you follow up an e-mail or whatever.
37:00
Or you can. Cold e-mail them.
37:01
As to your point, if it's a really, really narrow niche
37:03
list, then yeah, you do the cold manual e-mail.
37:05
Don't even automate it because it's not worth the hassle at
37:08
that point. Just manually e-mail them
37:09
because you're not sending that many a day.
37:11
You're sending 1, you know, 202530 emails a day or
37:16
something. That's OK.
37:17
Remember, when we do marketing e-mail to generate leads with
37:20
automation, we are not sending on the main domain.
37:23
So then when we get a Rep doing manual emails, we have to be
37:26
careful that they limit the volume of cold emails because
37:29
they can do damage to the main domain if they you know.
37:31
Yeah, actually it's funny you say that because that's AI just
37:34
had circled it here on my little piece of paper which is sending
37:36
from the from the main domain you in the same podcast I was
37:41
listening to you where you were speaking on this topic.
37:43
One of the things you said is absolutely, you know, it's
37:46
verbatim or, you know, verboten. People are not allowed to use
37:49
the, you know, primary domain. You know, your, your
37:52
official.com for emailing. So how does that work?
37:56
Like why can't they do that? And then what should they be
37:58
using instead? I mean, you're just damaging
38:00
your main. I mean, you're going to damage a
38:01
domain if you're cold emailing with any volume, it doesn't it,
38:05
whether you do a structure like Mail Reef where you're spreading
38:08
out that infrastructure. You're, if you've ever heard of
38:12
instantly against smart lead campaign management systems in
38:15
the concept of doing, let's say on Mail Reef as the server,
38:19
you're doing 20 domains and 100 e-mail addresses.
38:22
And you're doing that because you want to send 25 cold emails
38:25
a day per e-mail address, but they are all tied to one
38:29
campaign, right? Whereas if you do it with your
38:33
CRMCRMS are not built for that. And that's why they always fail
38:36
because you can only send small volume and each e-mail address
38:39
is its own campaign. That's a waste of time to manage
38:42
that. Like it doesn't make any sense.
38:44
So just manually e-mail at that point.
38:46
But my point is, is like in in a mail reef type structure, we're
38:51
sending 25 per e-mail address per day, but we're doing it
38:54
across 100 e-mail addresses for one server.
38:58
So we're sending 50,000 calls per month, right?
39:01
We are not using the main domain right at all, obviously,
39:05
creating 20 different domains specifically for this use case
39:09
and five e-mail addresses for each domain.
39:12
Well, and are these going to be like subdomains of the main
39:14
domain? So like, I guess so there's some
39:17
kind of brand relationship, you know, if you work at XYZ Corp,
39:20
like are they getting emails from sales.xyzcorp.com or
39:23
something? You know, like, I mean, what's
39:25
the connection, you know? Yeah.
39:27
Some do subdomains. I think that looks a little bit
39:29
weird to me. We just created new domains for
39:32
everybody. Like you need 20 domains.
39:34
It's actually AI. It's one of the first AI things
39:36
I used was that actually to create, you know, automatically
39:40
create domains. And so we would always start
39:43
within company name. So let's say it's
39:44
kevinmdowney.com, we would do Kevin M Downey online.com, Kevin
39:48
M Downey pro.com, Kevin M Downey sales.com, kevinmdowneyusa.com
39:54
and keep going, right? And you would have the AI create
39:57
30 or 40 and pick the 1st 20 and boom go.
40:00
Right, OK, well, that's interesting.
40:03
We started to talk about it or I, I sort of mentioned that we
40:05
should which is take a little bit more time to talk about this
40:07
infrastructure, you know, so the the thing that we actually have
40:10
to build. So if you're a business owner,
40:12
maybe you run a small company, but you're still involved in
40:14
your sales process and you're trying to grow, what is the
40:17
actual set of, of tools look like?
40:20
So I mean, cuz in my mind, I would have just gone to like
40:22
MailChimp or something and got an e-mail thing and you know,
40:25
uploaded some emails and started sending from there.
40:28
Like, I mean, but those guys are kind of expensive and the more
40:30
emails you throw in there, it gets expensive and stuff like
40:32
that. And so I wonder like what is
40:34
our, you mentioned the, you know, building the
40:39
infrastructure the right way cuz you've seen so many setups that
40:42
were wrong. So what is the right way?
40:45
Like if we're going to build something and we're being wildly
40:47
ambitious, we're sure we're going to scale.
40:48
You know, it's worth putting in the ground level work to make
40:51
sure we build the right tool. What's the way to do it without,
40:54
I guess overspending? I understand there's some giant
40:57
versions of this that you could really scale, but you know, is
40:59
there a good scalable tool that we could start with or set of
41:02
tools? So there's two different
41:03
infrastructure models that I would do.
41:05
So let's start with the simple one.
41:07
And it's brute force, right? It's Apollo plus an e-mail API.
41:10
Single domain can send up to 6000 emails a day.
41:14
You're going to have to ramp up to that.
41:16
You're going to have to run reputation management emails
41:18
against that domain, but you're never going to be able to hold
41:21
reputation entirely in that model because you're sending all
41:26
that volume from a single domain.
41:27
You are going to get marked as spam no matter what, no matter
41:31
what you send. Because there are some people
41:33
that say that if you cold e-mail them and you don't know them,
41:36
that's actually an invasion of their privacy.
41:38
Some feel that way like that's why I'm I'm all for not doing
41:43
the phone like I I'm all for e-mail.
41:45
You can e-mail me as much as you want from anywhere.
41:47
I don't care, but you can't hit my digital device.
41:49
You hit my phone with a text now now you cross the line that's my
41:53
view right So I'll block all of that right and it's also
41:58
illegal. So companies don't do it that
41:59
much, but emails legal right. So the difference is like you're
42:03
going to get marked as spam. Some you just like in the brute
42:07
force infrastructure of Apollo in an e-mail API, you're,
42:11
you're, you're just, you're going to get deliverability
42:13
issues at some point. But you can still generate a ton
42:15
of leads even if you get 30 or 40% block, which is almost
42:18
always going to come from Google.
42:19
By the way, any e-mail address that's hosted by Google, that's
42:22
going to be the hard one. That's going to be the first one
42:24
that blocks you, right? And so in a brute force model
42:29
like that, like you're talking about, I mean, even
42:32
understanding some of the implications down the road, you
42:34
know, that you will get blocked or that you might damage
42:36
reputation to a single domain. Like would that still be a good
42:40
entry level point for a small business?
42:42
Like versus thinking about all the implications about further,
42:44
you know, future damage to that domain or whatever.
42:47
Like is, would it be OK for your first six months, let's say, or
42:50
whatever, or even maybe your first year to, to, to approach
42:54
it like that? We.
42:54
Still use that infrastructure in my agency and we run 4 to 5
42:58
domains at all times and they're all kind of trashed.
43:00
But I mean, it's easy to manage, it's fast and we generate a lot
43:05
of leads that way because we're, we're, I mean, we are typically
43:08
sending because our list size is really big.
43:11
So we're typically sending 20, you know, about 20,000 a day.
43:16
So, and can you elaborate a little bit on like what this
43:18
e-mail API thing means? Like is that using a tool like a
43:21
MailChimp or something like that?
43:22
Or directly pinging a server or? Something a mail gun connects to
43:27
Apollo or Sendgrid again, you know.
43:31
So just purpose built e-mail marketers, Yeah, that kind of
43:34
thing, yeah. You got to watch your terms of
43:35
service on those things. But but the reality is that's
43:38
what companies use, right? Yeah.
43:40
So that's the brute force infrastructure.
43:42
And that's easier, relatively speaking, for people that are
43:44
novices. It seems overwhelming because I
43:47
do train companies. I don't e-mail for companies
43:49
anymore, but I consult and train companies on how to build it
43:52
themselves and when they're completely novice it's both are
43:55
hard. And on this brute force level
43:57
too, like I mean, is that scalable?
43:59
So let's say you do start to find some success, do you just
44:01
add domains? Is that how you scale basically?
44:03
Domain and e-mail address you can just keep going.
44:06
OK, interesting. Can put five boxes on an Apollo
44:09
user. Costs almost.
44:11
I mean the cost factor is next to nothing.
44:13
Just got to learn how to run it. If you want long term
44:17
infrastructure though, that's when you get into a Male Reef
44:20
plus smart lead for example. Although Male Reef's going to
44:22
have their own CMS, Mike Benson is their CEO.
44:26
Very good company, make a great product.
44:28
He is. They've got their own CMS coming
44:31
out. So you we won't necessarily have
44:33
to use smart lead or instantly let's say, or whatever else.
44:36
E-mail Bison is another one. There should be able to do it
44:40
through male Reef here pretty soon.
44:42
From what I hear with mail reef, you're talking a more long term
44:46
infrastructure because you're doing all those domains and
44:48
e-mail addresses. So you're holding reputation
44:51
long term because you're running 50,000 cold emails on a server,
44:55
50,000 warming emails across all those domains in that server and
45:00
you're spin taxing all your emails.
45:01
So you're really trying hard to hold the infrastructure in
45:06
place. It's not throw away.
45:08
You want to hold it right because it's it's not brutal,
45:10
it's not expensive, but it's not something you want to just toss
45:13
because the setup is more involved.
45:15
OK, that makes sense. Well, and so for the beginner,
45:18
you know, doing something like a brute force model, this is where
45:22
some of your data may be throw away, right?
45:24
You're trying to build this audience in the 1st place, that
45:26
kind of thing. So there's going to be a lot of
45:27
just stuff scrubbed out of there, right?
45:29
Where So what you're saying is with the more advanced model or
45:32
sort of the, you know, the gold tier, it's you know more about
45:36
preservation of the data that you've got and having good data
45:38
on those you know, who responded, who read, who opened,
45:41
etcetera, all that stuff over a list over longer term.
45:44
It's just infrastructure reputation, right?
45:46
So your IP address, everything you're doing with those domains,
45:49
those e-mail addresses, you want to keep the reputation of those
45:53
things intact. That's why you run such low
45:55
volume on each e-mail address. It's why you have to spend tax.
45:59
It's why you're running cold to warm is a one to one ratio,
46:04
right? You're, you're for every cold
46:05
e-mail you sent across an e-mail address, you've got a warming
46:08
e-mail that's going out that you can't see.
46:10
It's invisible that's going out, and a reply is happening
46:13
invisible invisibly on when you set that up that way.
46:18
OK, now that's super interesting.
46:20
Well, and yeah, and I mean, like, is this the kind of thing,
46:22
I mean, obviously you train companies in this.
46:23
So I assume there's some level of sophistication required to do
46:26
this. You know, if you're advising
46:29
somebody or if they wanted to try and get in touch with you,
46:31
Like what, what is the, I guess engagement look like if somebody
46:34
was to reach out to somebody like you and when is the right
46:36
time? The website hit me on schedule a
46:38
call. I don't even, we don't actually
46:40
publish the e-mail program, training program and consulting
46:42
on the website, ironically enough.
46:44
We just focus on the Rep stuff, recruiting and and then the
46:47
outsourcing. But if, if they just get in
46:49
touch with me, I only can take so many clients on that just
46:53
because I'm not that big and it's got to be me, right?
46:56
There's unfortunately I don't have somebody else in my company
46:58
that can do it. So I can only take like a client
47:01
or two a month on that. But we, I can help them directly
47:04
and it's just like a 30 day consulting engagement.
47:08
It's very low cost. I charge $4500.
47:11
I work with them one-on-one and if it goes past 30 days, it's no
47:14
big deal. It takes 60 days.
47:15
I don't really care. Some companies take longer.
47:18
You're talking about bigger companies, so the bigger the
47:22
company, the more layers of people you have involved.
47:26
Usually things slow down the more people I have involved that
47:29
I have to deal with. Yeah, it makes sense.
47:31
Anything with it with all that extra red tape?
47:33
Well, we haven't spent a lot of time talking about reps And the
47:36
reason is I think a lot of small companies might be reticent to
47:40
get into hiring people, even if they are fractional people in
47:45
the 1st place. Like, I think it might be a
47:46
little bit scary or intimidating for some people, but can we make
47:49
the case for reps and why in some cases that might actually
47:52
be the better way to go? I've said reps never fail, like
47:56
if they do it right, they don't fail.
47:57
If they do their job and they do it right and they're taught the
47:59
right way, it's not going to fail.
48:01
It just sometimes takes longer because it's slower.
48:03
But there's an argument for it, right?
48:06
Because unlike e-mail, like getting back to the basic gist
48:10
of what we're doing, when we do the cold outreach on e-mail,
48:13
we're waiting for, we're we're waiting for a reply, right?
48:16
We want them to reply. That's all we're trying to do is
48:17
Dr. replies. We don't care about opens.
48:19
We don't care about clicks. We don't measure any of that.
48:22
Don't care. How many leads am I getting?
48:25
That's all I want to know, right?
48:27
With a Rep, though, I can generate that lead and I can
48:30
take that conversation further on the first call and get all
48:33
the way to an appointment. I'm not going to do that with
48:35
e-mail hardly ever, right? So with a Rep, I can dig deeper.
48:40
We can hit narrow audiences, we can switch audiences quick.
48:44
We can do a lot of different things with reps.
48:48
That e-mail by itself really, I mean, yeah, somebody's going to
48:51
manage the e-mail and reply and stuff, but it's really good to
48:53
have a baseline of reps, whether it's sales or biz dev, sales dev
48:58
type reps. They're replying to e-mail
49:00
leads, but they're also doing cold outreach or they're
49:02
exclusively doing cold outreach, right?
49:04
Depending on the size of the audience.
49:06
If I only have 4000 people to call on, I only need one Rep to
49:08
do that. I don't need e-mail.
49:10
I don't need multiple reps I only need one.
49:13
So you know, in the system it'll always work.
49:17
Yeah. So when is then the right time?
49:19
Like so if you're a small business owner and you're trying
49:21
to think about getting into sales, like in a real way, what
49:24
is the right time to engage with either a company like you or
49:28
starting to build your own deck, those kind of things.
49:30
And you mentioned at the very top pre planning and stuff like
49:33
that is the very first thing you would say.
49:35
I mean, obviously it makes sense, right?
49:36
Yeah, exactly. Get started, right.
49:38
I know it's. Crazy.
49:38
I would say before you start your business would probably be
49:41
a good idea, but that's not realistic, right?
49:43
Sure. But for people who are like, I
49:45
don't know, maybe have been doing it on their own or trying
49:47
to be mom and pop for a long time or whatever and now they're
49:50
ready to scale or they want to do something different.
49:52
Like, I don't know, Like I think there's probably a time that it
49:55
doesn't make sense to call somebody for help.
49:57
Like you should just be doing it on your own.
49:58
Maybe not, but you know, I'm just curious where your thought
50:01
is on that. Yeah, In our case, we do
50:02
recruitment right more than we do outsourcing, right.
50:05
So we're recruiting reps in the United States for clients, sales
50:08
and biz dev. We're recruiting reps in Latin
50:10
America for them to contract directly for sales and biz dev.
50:14
And I've got my own inside sales team that they can contract and
50:17
outsource to. I think it all depends on the
50:20
company and where they're at. And to be honest with you, some
50:22
outsource people come to me for outsourcing and we turn away.
50:25
And I'm not bragging when I tell you this.
50:27
It's just because I'm pretty particular, we turn away 50% of
50:30
the people that come to us that want us to do biz dev for them
50:34
and it's or sales just because it's, it's not a fit or it's
50:39
going to take too long to get them ROI.
50:42
They need to have their own Rep and they need that.
50:45
They they just need to do it that way.
50:47
It's better. But I, you know, it just depends
50:51
on what they have and who they're targeting.
50:53
I think the biggest challenge in business development today for B
50:56
to B is that the audiences are so wide for certain things.
51:01
IT, cybersecurity, promotional products, corporate gift
51:07
printing. I mean, I go down the line of
51:08
all the stuff we've dealt with over the years.
51:10
There are certain things that can hit almost anybody anywhere
51:13
in the country, right? That gets tricky.
51:16
So I try to teach clients to narrow the scope somehow, some
51:20
way geographically, vertically, just like with print, we try to
51:26
teach clients to recruit a Rep and they target 1 industry type,
51:30
right? They're doing direct mail, go
51:32
call. This rep's calling dentists.
51:33
That's it. That's all they do is call
51:35
dentists. So they learn the lingo, they
51:37
learn how they work, all that stuff, right?
51:40
ITI would say almost the same thing.
51:42
Start geographically, start at a certain size, right?
51:46
Narrow the scope, perfect that process and system first, then
51:51
expand it. Now go to another city or go to
51:54
a different size company. You mentioned that you guys are
51:57
doing the recruiting and stuff like that for the Rep, So what
52:00
does the engagement look like with you?
52:02
So do we hire you, you find us a Rep and then we employ the Rep
52:06
or do we route these guys through you and like especially
52:09
like with your Latin American reps and things like that?
52:11
Are we direct working directly with the representative or do we
52:14
work with you as an agent of the representative?
52:16
Right. So no and the outsourcing model,
52:17
they definitely are going through my agency and the reps
52:20
are employed by me or contracted by me, I guess in some case,
52:23
right. And they are predominantly Latin
52:25
America. When they want to recruit a Rep
52:27
that they're engaging directly, they engage them directly.
52:30
We get, we get paid a placement fee after they hire the Rep.
52:33
So whether it's United States or Latin America, they come to us,
52:36
they say we want you to recruit us, this salesperson, we want
52:39
this type of salesperson. OK, great.
52:41
They sign a proposal, we get to work.
52:42
We market the position via a lot of different methods.
52:45
We drive candidates in mostly have them take assessment if
52:48
they're US based, and then we're, we're, it's up to the
52:53
client to interview and determine who they want to hire.
52:55
Then they pay us. OK.
52:58
It's it's just a flat $6000 placement fee for a Rep in the
53:01
United States, $3000 placement fee for a Rep in Latin America.
53:06
OK. And with your reps in Latin
53:08
America, I mean, are there any language barriers or anything
53:10
like that that we need to be concerned about?
53:12
I mean our accents thick and it makes it challenging or is it
53:14
just not really that big A? Deal.
53:15
I mean, that's what we do. So we get 50 a day from 48
53:18
countries and and we're always recruiting, right.
53:21
It's like speculative recruiting, if you will.
53:23
We don't do that in the United States.
53:25
Every recruiting gig we do for clients is custom for them.
53:28
Latin American recruiting is the opposite.
53:30
We are only recruiting 1 dashboard of candidates and it's
53:34
all sales and business development for all the clients
53:37
that come on that want to sign on that.
53:40
And we get 50 a day, We get 3 to 5 placeable reps per day.
53:45
So they have to have very good English speaking skills.
53:48
A lot of the kids down there now have US degrees.
53:51
They've done it online. They've come here for college,
53:54
worked for a while and gone back home.
53:57
The kids that have are from well, you know, financially,
54:00
economically better families, let's say, you know, stronger
54:02
financial backgrounds. They're they're those kids are
54:05
all have been speaking English now since they were three, like
54:08
they were toddlers, all of them, all of them.
54:11
I mean, they may have an accent, yes, but they've been speaking
54:14
English since they were toddlers.
54:15
Yeah. Is there an opportunity with
54:17
some of these Latin American contacts or people who might
54:20
speak Spanish as a native language?
54:21
I mean, can you work in Spanish also?
54:24
So if you have a company that maybe wants to reach a Latin
54:26
American audience, is that something that can be?
54:28
Facilitated for a client doing that right, They wanted a Rep
54:31
that was bilingual, which obviously is the case already.
54:35
They're going to eventually be targeting all Latino base law
54:41
law firms in the United States. So they're going.
54:44
To speak to them in Spanish predominantly because they
54:45
market themselves as Spanish attorneys, right Law and firms.
54:48
Sure. Yeah, No, I think it's really
54:51
interesting. We have a small team in Spain
54:52
and so we spend a lot of time in Spanish language and and do a
54:56
lot of like trans creation of documents and things in the
54:58
native Spanish and things like that.
55:00
And so I think that that's a really interesting thing too,
55:02
because it really does open up a whole another piece of the
55:04
world. You know, if you have a business
55:06
or a product or service or something that might be
55:08
applicable. Also finding reps that have, you
55:11
know, I don't know, knowledge of the, the local scene, You know,
55:13
somebody who can, you know, maybe is from a, a particular
55:16
country and has experience in that country and can you know,
55:18
really help your product shine in that world.
55:21
We're doing one now specific to that.
55:22
We're doing recruiting in Argentina.
55:26
I think they really want them in Buenos Aires.
55:28
So we're trying to find Buenos Aires, but somebody could
55:30
relocate somewhere in Argentina where we're doing specifically
55:34
that right now. We don't do that a lot.
55:35
Most of the. Recruiting are.
55:37
Gonna work from Home Office remote work.
55:39
Sure. Yeah, it makes sense.
55:42
I just think it's an interesting opportunity.
55:43
I know what we found trying to work in Spain.
55:46
The cultural differences are huge, and a lot of things that
55:48
you might not even know about that you may be able to benefit
55:52
from working with a Rep in a foreign country.
55:53
So I think that's very cool. So you touched on it kind of
55:57
quickly, but let's we're starting to get to the end of
56:00
the hour. So let's just take a quick
56:01
minute. Where can people get in touch
56:02
with you? How can they engage?
56:04
You know what's the best way to communicate with you?
56:05
If they'd like to reach, reach out offline.
56:07
Kevinmdowney.com is the website. We have a schedule, a call or a
56:11
contact form, whatever's easier for them.
56:14
Again, our programs and pricing is right on there.
56:16
So it's, you know, recruiting for a placement fee, right?
56:20
Every no money upfront or if they want to outsource to my
56:24
team, that's fine. But obviously they're kind of
56:25
front in that case. And it and it's, it's, it's that
56:30
easy. And if they would need help with
56:31
e-mail, they just need to get in touch with me, schedule a call
56:33
and I'm glad to help them. Again, I can only take a limited
56:36
number of clients with that but but glad to help them if I can
56:39
put it on the schedule no problem.
56:41
Love it. Well, cool.
56:42
Well, thank you so much, Kevin. I really appreciate you taking
56:44
the time to visit with us today. Appreciate it.
56:46
Thanks for having me. It was great chatting we took,
56:49
we got almost a whole hour and that was great.
56:52
Yep, I love it. Thank you so much, Kevin.
56:53
Have a happy new year and thanks to everybody who tunes into the
56:56
show this week and every week and we'll see you guys next
56:58
time. Thanks.
57:00
All right, just like that. So.