Brutally Honest Cold Outreach Advice (backed by $140M ARR)

welcome to the cold Outreach podcast where we talk with entrepreneurs business owners and sales leaders about their Journey using cold Outreach to jump start their careers and their businesses so today we've got Marcus Chan who is recognized as one of the leading sales experts in the world by both Salesforce and Linkedin he was a top producer for 13 years and was a sales director leading over 110 employees at a Fortune 500 company he now owns venley Consulting Group which is one of the fastest growing sales training companies around helping thousands of sales professionals double their

sales results in days he's also the author of six figure sales Secrets Marcus welcome to the podcast oh man I'm pumped to be here it's great to catch up same here so I want to take a quick step back and go back in time to when you're first getting started and you had no connections or reputation to rely on what sort of Outreach did you do to start growing in your business and in your sales career cool I'm going to probably break into two different segments because there was when I was working for somebody else

and building in that way and then there was also how I basically built my business too right and because of the different seasons in my life and the knowledge I had in my head I approach things in a very different way so let me start with my career first so I think like a lot of sales professionals when they go into sales for most people that get turn into the deep end it's like okay good luck and get after it and mine was really no different now this is back in 2007 during the last recession

so there was no real training no real marketing no real leads they had a homegrown CRM system and they basically said go that was really it and my initial Outreach no joke cuz I literally was like hey boss what should I go do I've never done sales in my life by the way he's I'm like what should I go do he's I want you to go out outside and I want you to walk into businesses so my very first call out which was literally going door to businesses like by foot remember that day I asked

him first hey how many should I walk into he's walk into 30 I walked into over 60 that day and I didn't book a single meeting I didn't have any interest defitely didn't close any deals right but that was like my very first start into that and then that involved into what should I do next you got to call them so I'm like let me call them next then eventually had how a cold email and by the way I got no results early on so like I really struggled cuz I was just trying to go

after everybody and that was how I got my start as a first time in sales now as an entrepreneur I learned a lot at that point because fast forward 13 plus years pretty fortunate to figure out how to do cold Outreach to actually how to run deals how to close deals and do it over and over in my corporate career I did generate over close over 140 million AR right in 13 years so did pretty well end up hitting my quota 13 years in a row 100 250% hit presence Club pretty much every single year

M about a couple years because of let's just call it like some of the stupid kpis that shouldn't really matter but it is what it is the overall Target but it is what it is whatever so when I started my business I had made a lot of mistakes that's why I want to share that piece first cuz some people when they hear about half F my business screw they're like oh wow like you have magic test no I don't I just fail for so many years earlier on like I made all the mistakes I figure

out well didn't work what did work so when I started my business I could be like way more targeted so when I jumped head first and started my own business in September 2019 I had at least a better strategy if you will number one I was really clear on who I was going to go after before I didn't really know my I my de customer profile I was going after anyone and everyone now I knew who I wanted to go after so I can be much more Target about my Approach but I also knew because

it was just me and I didn't have the resources of of a company it going to be me I'll be burning my own cash I'm like okay like I also need to make sure I maximize my time and do highly leveraged things so when I started my business literally my Outreach was different I'm building hyper Target list on LinkedIn and I'm sending connection request and I'm sending manual video messages the initial Outreach is cutting through the noise right so my initial Outreach early on when I build my business I say started off the back of

literally doing cold video messages on LinkedIn and then I L social selling where I was leveraging commenting and engaging going after and borrowing traffic off of my competitors that anywhere in the space identifying their weaknesses building content that basically opposed their weaknesses and showed up different positioning and leverage social selling and then generate inbound eyeballs in which then I'll take those and I'll maximize them through the DMS to go from there then scale to emails with that and then a scale to generating lead magnets where I could drive organic traffic to the lead magnets scaling

that and then having a whole outbound system with that from calling basically multi-touch as part of it so grew much faster as a result but a lot of was because I had learned quite a bit from my earlier mistakes and I was able to take and apply from my own business that's super interesting I love that you touched on this Evolution and I think that'll be a great Stepping Stones as we go through this conversation to touch on going back to those early days when your bosses just get out there and just get in front

of these people what were some of the most surprising responses that you received doing that cold Outreach walking into businesses or cold calling them what were some of those responses you got so from contextual perspective this is also the season business starting to shut down so it was really hard to get money and funding businesses are basically shutting down going on under unemployment was going up so literally the objections are like Hey we're shutting down our business okay okay that's I can't like hey that's why we got to meet let me show you how we

can have that they're like get out of here so that was a really interesting one for sure people are cursing at me with the inperson when you do also iners prospecting as well you ran into just weird things I had someone pull a gun on me before in person on a cold call I've had dogs bite me on in person cold calls you just deal with just other things as part of it plus on top of that cold calling for sure on the phone is hard cold emailing so all that stuff is hard to a

certain extent but you do get to do the comfort of your laptop in your home for the most part H you're in the office when you're doing both like uh field sales and also on the laptop as well you also deal with being like outside so like literally if it's pouring down rain it's icy out snowing you're the elements as well try to knock on doors and have conversations with people but on top of that the mental game gets really really tough Mentor said the hardest door to get through is actually your house door so

once you get out your house door the second hardest door was actually out of your car door because even in between if you walked into one business got completely your face kicked in it takes a certain mindset to get back in your car and now drive to next business or if you're in a business park to keep on going now after you got bit by a dog to keep going to next businesses after that and be relentless towards that versus if you're an auto dialer you can be a little bit more Mindless with it and

not have to think while it does it for you but here you're forced to make these micro decisions on the spot that I didn't really anticipate because it's like you're like that was so hard like coold Co I got my face kicked in should I go to this next one they're probably going to tell me the same thing they're probably tell me going to go out of business you start getting your own head in a whole different way and then you add in the other components of you're physically uncomfortable because you're drenched completely drenched and

you're wet you're uncomfortable and like you're out in the elements and it's just like a mental game so there's weird things like these external objections for prospects but you also create a lot of internal objections to yourself and actually do what you need to do to be successful we see that so much even when just people trying to send email they get in their head thinking about the rejection aspect of it and this is sales in general right selling can be of a space of getting rejected non-stop in order to get that one yes right

when you're in the field I I'm so curious were do you have like mantras did you have a routine what were you able to do in order to cultivate the courage to overcome the fear of jection in that role so the the first thing was it was really hard like you don't know what you don't know so like after my first couple months of blaming everything in the world for all my problems blaming everything from a bad boss my bad territory lack of leadership lack of support lack of everything and even no real pmf as

I thoughtz we were a startup division of a big company after I went through all that rigma role and blamed everything else and I realized it didn't change my circumstances un once I changed I started to realize I need to make a change and I got really into personal development books and reading books and that was like a first piece where I actually didn't know anything mantras or any of that type of stuff quite yet and what was interesting was as I read these books about motivation like Tony Robin Zig Ziggler Etc the common theme

was like they had a way to basically set their state before they went into the day and that's when I started to make these changes so early on I did very minor things and now it's gotten much more intense because I realized life is just a mental game but what I started to do even the first thing was like we had go to the office daily at the time it wasn't same as it is now but back then everyone went to the office so it was a 45-minute commute one way and I also realized I

used to listen to the news it would make me feel bad like IID listen to the news it like hey again unemployment keeps going up interest rates keep going up businesses are shutting down the world's falling apart I'm like oh my God it made me feel bad and it only reinforces stories that was already hearing from my prospects so when they gave me objections I'm like I guess you're right we probably shouldn't have a conversation I'll just I'll pray to that so the first thing I started doing was I started eliminating things that actually would

hurt my mental mindset I cut out the news and I replaced it with stuff that actually would feed me better feed more stuff so for example I started like listening to audiobooks I was broke and didn't have any money I literally would go to the public library and I'll get all these personal development books like CDs on tape and I'll burn them onto my laptop I upload to my iPod Pro or iPod whatever version I had and then I had an old stereo in my car it didn't have a plugin but had I got those

FM transmitters so I don't remember those but you has 100.9 again and that frequency on your iPod and also on this you can hear it through that so I started doing that because I'm like my commute I couldn't like risk driving around trying to change CDs in my car so I started to listen to these just like to to brainwash myself I turned my car into a university on Wheels so that was like the first piece then I learned about affirmations so I started to do affirmations just making sure if it is to be it's

up to me control the controllables whatever I can glob on to I found to be powerful I would start doing that right and then I started to learn about how to reprogram your mind I also learned as part of my journey trying to become a better version of myself was often times when we get dealt with tough circumstan or situations we start creating questions in our mind that we start answering that are disempowering so for instance someone yell me on the phone say hey you're a piece of crap never called me again they hang up

I would go in my head without realizing it God they are such a jerk what is wrong with them what is wrong with me why is this job so hard and without realizing it my brain would answer they're in a bad mood because they're probably going on business and the economy is bad and realistically you're probably going to fail anyways in sales because you can't hack it you probably need to go to market some other role you're just not good at this job and I call these ants automatic negative thoughts what would crawl in and

another would keep crawling in before I knew it had an infestation in my brain of these negative thoughts so I started to realize this and I said huh what could be the solution here what could I do instead and I realized the P the answer was that I need to ask myself better questions questions like if I had a tough Co call situation hey what can I learn from this what can I do differently how can I take control of the conversation how can I show up as an equal to that Prospect how can I

get a more desirable outcome I don't know the answer who might know the answer how can I prove my skill set in what world can I see this being where I'm successful and it wasn't overnight but I literally had no joke a Post-It note with some of these questions written down taped to my monitor and then the same ones on my car visor because I realized when I was in the field those things would still hit me the same thing after a tough cold call so I had to get back in my car and reset

myself and then on top of that I started to learn what else can I control and I realized there's only two things my attitude my actions so doing things like that was really powerful so control but you know what when I feel physically fit I feel better on calls actually I feel more confident so what can I do I can eat better I can work out better oh hey when I party too heavy and I black out and the next day I feel terrible and try to make coold calls maybe I should stop blacking out

I start paying very close attention on what I could eliminate and replace with better habits on top of that I started to invest into myself so that was a big thing I started to go to Tony Robbins conferences hiring mentors joining coaches and programs because I wanted to create the environment to be successful because that's a big part of the game CU if you're just surrounded by a bunch of people complaining which was my team it wasn't making me any better so I had to force and create a situation where I could Thrive it was

a combination of all those type of things and it wasn't overnight but I was sort adding these things over time so I could help set myself up to at least give my brain a fighting chance to stay positive and keep going I really love that because that's the same thing I see it's a negative attitude pattern that is the thing that's holding everybody back from from doing more cold AR and putting themselves out there so what were some of those misconceptions that you had about doing cold Outreach and sales in general that you were able

to change with working on your self-development BAS basically yeah first one was it's a numbers game and I think a lot of people interpret the numbers game as in a volume game I don't want to say there's not power in doing volume because there is some benefits to volume when you're new in the sense of the more repetition you do with something the better you're going to get that's really actually quite critical but if you continue to compound that over time it doesn't really make sense and I think one the biggest misconceptions is let's just

keep doing that and this is scale it up but reality is when you look at like how to be actually High leverage volume is only one piece of the equation in what's most important is how effectively you actually do something so it's like looking at your actual conversions at each stage to get better for instance like if I have if I make 200 Cod calls let's say on the phone let's say I have a 10% connection rate so I'm like I talk I talk to 20 people great all right out of the 20 if I'm

converting 20% Then I'm booking four people right and the average rep and most average leaders say hey good job little Marcus let's double that let's just double it to 400 calls cuz then you're just going to double your appointments yes by pure simple math that logic makes a lot of sense okay but when you think about that what's the damage to your mind when you have to do that how much more extra effort do you have to do is that truly the highest leverage Thing versus the smart rep or the one who realizes conversions means

better at skills is a better way of doing things thinks huh but what if that 20% conversion on the phone how can I get to 30% 40% 50% how do I get to 80% because if you get to 80% now suddenly you're booking like four times the amount of appointments in the same level of effort you're just much more skilled now it's harder to do because it requires advancing your sales skills but that's what I realized I'll give you a really simple example 2011 I switched companies and uh I started having a lot of success

pretty early on and I remember early on though my manager said hey Marcus I want you to make 80 calls today it's like week one I want you to make 80 calls and I want you to see if you can book like eight meetings that'd be really amazing so he course pulls the most garbage list I was new I think he trying to he want to test my skills all right it pulls me on the most garbage list gives it to me and I grind through and again this is like 4 years into my B2B

sales career at this point I ran sales teams I like taught people I've had success I built things from scratch so I have like more experience i a l context there so even the 80 dials I booked seven meetings now I'll tell you right now they're pretty crappy meetings the lead list is pretty bad to be accurate it was not a good list and I was looking for somebody else I'm like okay I'm pretty good I'll book these meetings so I book it and I felt pretty exhausted to be quite Frank and so I went

to him I saidy listen let me let me build my own lead list let me just do what I normally do if you're cool with it and I'll book you the same amount if not more meetings and I'll do it in less time cuz his other thing was like I want you to be here Mondays 800 to 12 on the phones but I said what if I could do it in 2 hours do I have to stay here other 4 hours CU I don't want to stay here if I choose to stay here I'm going

to do Inc producing activities in those two hours but I don't want to stay here make more calls just to make more calls like you tell me you want me to get eight appointments I'll get you eight appointments like he's like sure prove it to me because I've done before I just built a way better quality list became properly prepared that following Monday I made 40 calls because it was a much more curi I booked nine appointments in under 2 hours and he looks at me like what just happened I'm like I don't want to

just to work harder I like to be really effective and efficient because the money is not in making the appointments I need to be running those calls so I much prefer now these other two hours I'm going to prepare for those sales calls later this week and I'm actually going to crush it and that's when you understand the leverage you start realizing it's a higher leverage thing to increase your skills but a lot of people don't realize that and what they hope is they hope their skills Advance by time it's going by but the reality

is time going by does not mean your skills will Advanced all it means is time goes by if you've been a parent for 20 years it doesn't mean you're a great parent still it doesn't mean you're a parent for 20 years if you've been in sales for 10 years doesn't mean you're great in sales doesn't mean you're in sales for 10 years unless you have a track record right it's completely different that's why if you meet certain people who might be five years in sales but they've made so much more money than you chances are

pretty good they're better skilled than you are at the game of sales so the question is how can I Advance my skills across the board from Outreach to running the deal so I don't just spin my wheels trying to play the activity game I like that because it's almost counterintuitive to what you hear most mainstream advice which is if you want to get more just double your volume do as much as you can even to an extent Heros talks about just do more right but in a way what I'm hearing is something that's like practice

perfect you know what I mean make perfect practice and I'm curious cuz you said that it was almost list building that was maybe that one meta skill that improved your overall conversion rate are there any other skills that you would recommend for cold Outreach or for outreach in general that you're like hey if you were to be able to focus on these this is what's going to move the needle for your overall career for overall progress so for sure list building is a really key one another Ro key I'm not going to say in order

cuz I don't think they all they're all really important being able to truly understand your protic problems and write messaging that aligns to them I think that's really really critical cuz you get the perfect list but if it's not relevant and doesn't hit on certain things that that's going to be in the mind of the proc of where they're at it decreases your chances of conversion right that's also a really key skill I would say consistency and discipline is really important too just being consistent with just like doing it it's amazing like how much better

I'll give you an example I was just talking to a client a week ago he says Market W it's Q4 it's crazy like my plan is I'm going to start try to empty out my Pipeline and then come like Jan one I'm going start working building a pipeline I'm like stop that's the wrong way to think like this is how you go from like Feast to famine between quarters is you stop doing the daily things if you know that you have a wedding coming up in the summer time if you just eat really healthy and

work out really hard for the first couple months before that yeah you'll get in pretty good shape for that wedding but what happens after now you're in terrible shape and it's not good for your health you don't feel good anyways versus you build consistency in compound consistency you're better off making sure every single day maybe you're just really busy more deals so maybe you don't necessarily Prospect for 3 hours a day and you can only do an hour a day well an hour day consistently is still way better than not doing it at all so

being able to be really consistent with it is going to be really really key I think what's also key as well is preparation it's 100% controllable thing but like how are you preparing yourself to do the Outreach I always highly recommend when you're going to do Outreach let's say you have a cold call block you're going to cold call for two hours straight on a say Monday morning you shouldn't be doing any research dur that time you shouldn't be looking stuff up you don't want to be multi tasking you don't be opening up slack jumping

around you don't want to be contact switching six sense open UPS you're trying to like look at like the most recent stuff they did on there you want do that research in advance in a different time block now during your call call session those two hours my only objective is basically to go through the calls and make the calls I'm going to make singular Focus one single task that preparation is going to be really key another thing I find is really useful is because it's hard to do it's difficult to actually commit to doing you

have to make sure you eliminate obstacles and make it easy for yourself and this goes back into preparation I remember early on I knew I was supp to co call I get to the office all I got to do let me just clean my desk area up a little bit I like yesterday's coffee mug on there there's like some snack crumbs I want to wipe it clean I want to wipe it clean dust everything and then I'll be good oh you know what I just want to check my email because I want to make sure

anybody emailed me to get back to them and it's 4 hours later you're like oh my God I didn't do what I supposed to do right versus set yourself up to be successful I'll give you a really simple example this is like 2011 at the new company we had our call blockx 8 to 12 I was going to set that our boss wanted to do so most reps they got the right before eight they put their laptop down go getting coffee get water go get a snack they open the laptop up they dock it up

they load up the CRM start building the list before in 2 hours goes by I just did all stuff beforehand so literally 7:55 I'm plugged in docked in ready to go so once it's 8 I got my headset already on I'm already like going 1 second after the first call is already ringing I'm already ready to go so I'm making it easy for myself to do those things but it starts with what I did the prior day or on the prior week at the end of the week to make sure I'm set up on top

of that think about any great athlete let's say it's Michael Phelps I love Michael Phelps it's a perfect example at the Olympics before retired it's not like he just woke up and dove in the pool and want a bunch of gold medals that's not what happened he woke up and he warmed up first he stretched properly ate properly he listened to music himself in the game his own little routines of montras he did just get mentally set and so he had his whole thing he did just to be mentally ready and physically ready before getting

on the blocks and that's just what I did as well I listen to audiobook got to the point where I would actually role play out loud for 45 minutes in my car so I would run through the first 10 dials out loud and I would imagine five objections so imagine I get the worst objections hey we're going out of business we're completely shutting down we hate your guts we used to use you in the past we hate you guys I'll just imagine the worst OB and I'd role play out loud exactly how it should sound

like I'll put myself into State multiple times so by the time I got to making my first call my neop pathways are already warmed up all I need do now is hit go so I was warmed up already and for those who are watching this out there I'm not saying you have to do that but you have to have your own version of getting yourself mented already that could be as simple as I'm going to make sure I have a coffee before I start calling and I'm going to do some jumping jacks my blood flow

in right maybe listen to some music you make sure your list is ready to go maybe going to call a buddy on your team and just role play the first few rounds just do at least have a 10-minute warm-up so once you're going You're not like going to drop the ball I love this quote this is great one of my favorite quotes which is we look at pro athletes and amateurs amateurs play more than they practice Pros practice more than they play the pro is constantly practicing so once they have the ball it's go time

so when you think about even a 10% connect rate which is like probably decent most is like 5 to 10% but like once that person answers are you ready to go or are you fumbling the ball and the only way you're not going to Fumble the ball is if you have mentally set yourself up to win but most people have a low conversion because once that click soon they actually answer hey Nick I didn't think you were gonna anyways hey how you doing bad habits kick in because they haven't built the right habits and they

weren't properly warmed up so just a couple things no there's so many gems in there honestly I want to go back to the second thing you said about writing message that resonates with the list how important that is when you're sending Outreach like that and I'm curious I know you you said you transitioned when you're working for yourself to your own thing of doing video Outreach but I'm curious most people never start there so did you send Outreach that like totally bombed in the past and how did you learn to get to the point of

sending value based Outreach like videos I bombed a lot of Outreach first off I think it's part of the game if you don't know what you're doing bomb a lot so I think the first piece is hopefully you have a tight feedback loop and you track your numbers for the conversions oh man shoot I sent out like 100 emails and I only had a 10% open rate that's weird huh and I had like a 0 1% reply rate huh that's weird and they booking meetings those are symptoms something greater so you want to start diagnosing

so having that days really important first off right and then working to improve it right but I think the biggest thing is whenever something bombs it's really important to take a pause back and say what could be done differently I'll give you simp example so add some Outreach this this past year that totally bombed all right we built a whole new offer new B2B offer and I built a list of like 80 or so prospects and built out I think it was like a 15 touch sequence launched it ran it and five me off it

and each oper is like 50k each so it's like about 250k in Opportunity I'm like actually not bad I'm like okay that was my first test of this play with this offer let's scale this I use Apollo so I buil all my lists buy intent I got all built out and I run the sequence and I think we put a, contacts to start off with into it completely bummed it had super high open rates we had as a whole like 80% open rates clickthrough rates for they were like 10% click-through rates response rates was like

5 to 8% response rates but we didn't book any meetings and I'm like this is weird that completely bombed right cuz at the end the ultimate metric is did put qualified pipes in a clo that's really at the end of the day that's what really matters and I'm like this is really strange and I had to really look myself in the mirror and it was interesting was after I was running those five Ops and by the way those five Ops actually did not close which also was another little data point and I realized there's a

mismatch in the offer in the market I realized that my list probably is still too broad in terms of who I was going after as a result of it it res to a certain level but not deep enough so to me that was really powerful and to me it's not it's bombed but I learned a lot and what end up happening because of that is now we're actually changing who we go after for the B2B offer and we made the offer even better so this is actually really powerful for us to learn from so we're

working to scale that offer next so I want to say it's a success quite yet cuz I want to see consistency but whenever something doesn't go the way you want to you shouldn't just write it off you should be like hey what can I learn from this what can we adapt from this how can we take some of these learnings and just apply it towards how we're going to continue to go because as Ox Heros says I cannot lose if I do not quit if you have that mindset you're going to win so the reason

why I like that and it's insightful is because I think something that a lot of our audience they're Founders and entrepreneurs for the most part that we find and one thing is you can have all the tools you can have all the things in place to do Outreach and you can be reaching out to the most targeted people but if your offer doesn't resonate then you're not going to win no matter what and we often find that the offer is one of the most if not the most important thing when it comes to cold Outreach

working I'm curious because now that you've been able to talk about that aspect of one where it's bombed do you remember having a Outreach or a sequence that you put out that actually resonated or was able to provide an opportunity or partnership that was like life-changing like massive leverage that came from that one Outreach what interesting is to me it's like nothing Earth shattering but i' I've created a lot of types of sequences and all types of Outreach for all types of things from selling things to sponsorships to Opportunities and sometimes it's the simplest ones

where I've ran some very simple literally LinkedIn only ones just literally engaging commenting and then like video messaging and a little bit of followup and some have been the best ones where we used have like Partnerships to like where I can tap into that person's audience who has the audience I want so we're doing webinars together or podcast or events together and it's like multiplies not just like the money I'm generate off but it's just like the exposure I'm able to borrow Their audience a whole new level so like for sure it's definitely happened now

I'll say the key to some of those is I was able to do some of that even a little later on with more a brand presence on LinkedIn because of that I've positioned myself in a certain way to be able to do it it wasn't overnight so it's taking what what what my strengths here I can leverage and how can I maximize that to be able to get in front of the people I want to get in front of so that's a great segue into there's sales Outreach and there's marketing type Outreach but then speaking

of like almost like cold networking how do you see that as being different like when you're doing Outreach to build more of a network how do you approach that differently than if you're approaching like a sales Outreach if it's cold networking there's some similarities right so whenever someone gets cold outreached they're always asking with them what's in it for me so it's really no different when you're doing like cold Outreach to somebody else it's like what's in it for them that's really like what you're thinking about so when you're doing Outreach to someone it's LinkedIn

or cold email how can you reached out and ideally there's some sort of Leverage to it from behind for example I wanted to start working with Apollo now last year when I was a dream Force doing some Stu with Salesforce we had a dinner where I got to meet their VP community and a few other people within Apollo so I didn't like write after send a connection request hey let's do something together I would subtly engage and comment DM them every now and then and then when I thought there'd be an opportunity for a partnership

then I'm like hey I have this an idea would you be open talking more about it and of course because I'm playing a little longer game here they're like yeah this totally works we're able to work on each other's network but if you think about even from even a cold Outreach perspective the principles I'm sharing here is not it's not earth shattering which is how can I provide value for them how Prov them something mutually beneficial how can play the long game and not just always be saying hey how can this be benefit to me

so that does mean sometimes you're going to turn away short-term money for long-term money but at the end of the day it's understanding what's the greater leverage longterm wise for what you're trying to work towards Wim all day long right what's in it for me we had talked about a lot of qualities and skills and you had brought a couple I'm curious because I want to go into future pacing just a little bit now that you've had a lot of experience both being in the field you've seen how sales is occurring in the current age

of like massive email massive Co you have power dialers you have tools like send and like where do you see the future going with cold Outreach in your opinion yeah obviously AI is a big part of it right I think that's obviously a big thing depends on how far out we go but I think we already see a lot of Trends across the market right so we're starting to see number one less sdrs the SDR to AE ratio is already expanding now it's 1 SDR to 4 AES or 6 a we're starting to see that

as well cuz some of the tools are starting to have right we're also seeing a conversion to full cycle so that's a big thing we're seeing too so just full cycle reps cuz some of these have these tools at hand we're already seeing AI agents for sure already thing already so it's the greatest but like they're going to be pretty good like for instance Salesforce house one where it's not designed to completely replace the SDR it's supposed to be like hey give them the tier three accounts and let them like Mass blast them if you

will but as a result of it anytime you can scale something like this it just leads a more crap out there that's the issue we're already in a trust recession so people are already really skeptical across the board so it continue to get harder for sure it'll be harder to break through the noise harder to get a hold of exacts it'll be harder for basically everything what does it actually mean for sales professional these days it means a couple things in entrepreneur number one how can we make sure what we build is going to be

one Omni channel number two how can we be super relevant to them and how can we make sure we stand out as much as we can and how can we utilize some of these tools now not just to do more Outreach but to do better Outreach so if you have tools that can generate far more relevant much more personalized messages that's going to be way better so I really don't care if I get a cold message or if I get an ad that's written by AI if it's really relevant to me it it talks to

the problem I'm dealing with I really don't care where it came from versus having a bunch of messages from people that are just Spam ones are obviously very fake so I think we're just going to see a trend across the board now I do think eventually scrs are going to go away completely that's just the nature of the Beast or we're going to see it to a point where you only see them probably in Enterprise org for a more strategic complex sale that requires a far more skilled person to do it but that's how I

see it those probably what I see from future like Outreach I think eventually get to the point hopefully it'll be completely automated and it'll be completely AI driven but also be useful and relevant and not spam like which is what it is right now yeah it's that's super interesting and I love that you you said trust recession because I feel like that is the one thing everyone agrees on right now is that trust is falling off a cliff because of how much volume AI is producing nowadays and so I'm actually curious we're already seeing it

with like on LinkedIn and on X where there's just armies of ID verified fake accounts right there's just armies of bots now doing Outreach so I'm curious with that being said what like challenges do you anticipate entrepreneur salese doing cold Outreach in the the next 5 10 years are going to face with that trust recession I think across the board because people are more skeptical there's going to be a lot of Outreach out there but the way it's designed now with all these aiot it's almost like a marketing arm very in inexpensive lowc cost marketing

arm versus in set of pain for X ads or LinkedIn ads or doing simultaneously they're utilizing these as another way just get their name out there as a mass awareness whether they convert or not they don't really don't care was what appears cuz they're playing a lot of numbers if you will right now if you think about this majority of prospects and I think the data is like I think like 68 or 78% of prospects will do research before booking a call they'll look at their website they look at reviews Google it they'll look on

probably chat gbt now and just before they decide to hop on a call with the business so what does that actually mean what that means for a sales professional or for an entrepreneur or business owner is hey how can we make sure that for lock of better term were easily found whether they Google me whether they look on YouTube whether they look on x how can I make sure I'm easily found so that way I'm hopefully top of mind that's going to be a big thing so that means for being on social media really helps

so for instance like when I'm Googled like the first thing it pops is my LinkedIn and then it has a bunch of stuff I do a Salesforce and then it has like my YouTube knock on I'm pretty much as right now on the first page on the first page like basically me which is really nice for having a common last name like Chen so that's actually worked pretty well so when they Google me it's easily found so do you that's really key I think the second thing which T in the point you mentioned earlier which

goes back to the offer is to differentiate you must have world- class fulfillment like your backend must be world class and the reason I say that is especially for how a lot of people buy outside just doent research what else they do they text their friends they go into slot communities like Pavilion say hey what are you doing Forex so I'll give you example I'm just switching one my text stack and I did all my typal research and had some buddies the same text stack so all I did was I texted them hey man here's

my concern about this product what have you seen he's no issues at all I'm like this is how people buy these days this is before even hop on a call so that's how a lot of these decisions are made these days is like they're just doing their own homework already so as a business owner number one just make sure you're easily found across the board and high value and then number two back fulfillment is so good that people will talk about you and they'll Rave about you cuz when they do that it makes it better

so even earlier before fil we're talking about even my program I continue to trying to make it better and better over time because I'm trying to make sure that the experience is so good that people are telling their friends and family so I'm the first person they think about it doesn't happen overnight but having a world class product is a big part of it and then of course marketing it to and maximizing all those components I I just mentioned so you had brought up a point and this is something that we're uncovering a lot from

having lots of conversations and really studying the market and where things are going cold Outreach in my personal opinion is a marketing function now like it has transformed into a marketing function from a sales function where you can almost do massive amounts of Outreach that are value based and we like to think of it like value Engineering in a form or a way I want to take it into your business currently actually we talked a little bit about the future how are you utilizing cold Outreach right now now given all the tools that are out

there what does that look like for you current state we have a whole ecosystem that's important to understand first off we make sure the social piece googleable piece is there so like we're like Relentless with posting content nonstop it's high value so if they were to Google us we're it's easily found this is across multiple platforms right but we're also doing is we're leveraging like long form content like YouTube and we're giving out so much value most people charge for completely free so that's like the first we just make as part of the ecosystem we're

making sure that's definitely a part of it we also then utilize Discovery ads and retargeting ads as part of that strategy okay and then on top of that we then also utilize lead magnets which are all pixeled and this way we can capture information as part of that kind of overall ecosystem because the outbound doesn't just start with just oh let me just scrap bunch of leads and reach out to people like marketing is supposed to help with that Outreach piece right just like you mention it's basically a marketing function we're making sure it's wholly

cohesive as part of that process and then on top of that now all our organic content is driving towards all our free content at all we're posting which is full of lead magnets so we're trying to gather all it stuff then we're doing Outreach whether it's LinkedIn cold email the cold call is really off all the opt-ins right but again it's all part of that whole ecosystem so before we even reached out to them they may have seen us 10 15 20 times so I one point I was using one software I could actually see

every page they visited before we even called them and it was always like a really consistent thing where oh what looks like first they Googled something we popped up they clicked on this then they they jumped to these different pages then they went to LinkedIn went over over here for a little bit and then they opted into this we tried call a couple times they didn't answer and then they opt into something else then we call them again they book a call like two weeks later but because that level of consumption we also then know

I think the last time I pulled it our average sales cycle for our smaller deals is like 7.2 days or something like that so from the time they opted in so we could see it because of what they're doing so the Outreach by itself is not a singular hey we we just qu call email it's a comprehensive system an ecosystem we built that hopefully is designed to nurture the prospects increase their trust in us and reduce their skepticism so they're open to having a conversation I love that you say that especially when we've helped a

bunch of clients and then just from learning over the last few years it's like cold Outreach doesn't happen in a vacuum like you're saying you can't just write a message and then forget what human nature happens right like everyone goes and researches who is this person who reached out to me and so I love that you said that exactly so that being said what's your biggest pet peeve right now when you get cold Outreach when you're on the receiving end what's what's your biggest pet peeve fake personalization they just pretend it's just hey I saw

you went to University Oregon go Ducks or I'll get these ones they're like hey I saw you're a coach like how you thought about writing a book I'm like dude if you just Google me like you probably could write a better message like I don't mean to be egotistical but it's like oh if I already wrote a book like maybe it's hey I see you wrote a book hey I can help you increase your sales for and generate more clients okay interesting let's have a conversation or hey may help you optimize your book to convert

for more leads cuz I know you're going through Amazon right now and Amazon you don't get those leads okay interesting all right that might be more Peak and have a conversation or you can run help me run Amazon ads like they just did a little bit of HK it would have just resonated a lot more it ties in with your preparation point right it's one thing to mass blast but we've got to at least do some research before we're sending out spam that's right I personally have found this to be incredibly enlightening and looking back

I guess if you could start over knowing what you know now what would you do differently in order to grow first off it depends on who the market I'm going after that's really really important so whoever the market I'm going after I want to figure out was the easiest way to get in front of them so that's a first piece that means I hopefully know my ideal client profile I also know exactly what my offer is going to be and that's how I'm determine how I build out my Outreach is going to look like that's

really important so for example some people here might hear hey Mark so sounds like you use LinkedIn to build your business I should do the same thing the reason I chose LinkedIn is because I knew accounting Executives and B2B sales teams are easily found on LinkedIn I know they hang out on LinkedIn that's why I chose LinkedIn so it was very targeted and very specific to it versus like my buddy who just started a new offer he sells to the MSP firms and he can post on LinkedIn all day long but typically these Founders or

CTO these going after yeah maybe they're on there but they're not really active on there so his best bet his key Outreach was he was able to get on a stage for another 400 of them teach something valuable make a pck generate a ton of inbound leads so because of that the Outreach to the people can adapt based off what you're actually doing so that that's what the first step is you have to understand who are you going to go after what's your offer going to be and where are they already hanging out if you

can figure all those things out and and get to where they're already looking you can steal that traffic if you will and redirect it to you wow Marcus this has been super enlightening and very interesting story so I want to give you a chance where can people learn more about what you're doing what you got going on next like how can people find out more about you awesome first off it's been a pleasure guys it's been a lot of fun jamming out today you can find me pretty easily you can head to LinkedIn find me

on LinkedIn or on YouTube or go to benley consulting.com to find out more about our products and services awesome