Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Jay Baer, someone who has been in digital marketing since it was invented. Having been there since the start, his insights and expertise that come with 26 years of experience are unrivaled. He has not only started five multi-million-dollar companies from scratch, but is also the host of four podcasts and the author of several best-selling books.
Tune in to hear his company’s strategic approach to company growth, why being scared is a sign you are doing things right and the importance of clear goals.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
Resources From The Interview:
Leave Some Feedback:
Connect with Eric Siu:
Mixmax sits in my email inbox all day every day.
Let’s say I’m writing canned messages to people. After enough people open and click through it, I can actually share the template and analytics with my team. From a sales perspective, if we can all see the same templates and we can all see what’s performing well, that’s going to move the needle.
I also like being able to see who’s opening emails, on what devices, how many times they’ve opened them, and which location they’re coming from. I like seeing all those metrics. In the Mixmax dashboard, you can set up email sequences as well.
For example, I have a sequence for a book. I can set up different sequences and send these to different people. All I have to do is upload a CSV list and use a tool like Hunter to find emails.
Related Content: 9 Cold Email Case Studies with Great Reply Rates
In this particular case, I’m trying to get people to be included in my book. There’s a variable for the first name, so in the CSV I’ll put the first name.
Then I try to customize the first line of the email. The rest of it is a template, but if I can customize each first line, I’m going to have a higher response rate because it’s customized to that individual.
I can change the subject line as well and I can have different stages that map to different emails in the sequence. That way I’m not sending everything in a completely automated manner, because that just doesn’t perform as well. Something that is semi-personalized works much better.
Frankly, I’d rather reach out to 100 people and get 20-30 responses than reach out to 1,000 people and only get five responses because it’s so generic.
For this particular outreach email, the open rate was 50% and 6% actually clicked through. Ultimately, I got a 22% response rate.
Anytime you can get a response rate around 10-15% or higher, you’re in a good spot.
Your job is to elicit some kind of response. That’s what you’re really aiming for at the end of the day.
Mixmax also lets you keep track of all sorts of other things, like the emails that I have to send out later and the reminders about people I need to get back to. This tool is super helpful and makes my life a lot easier. If you buy subscriptions for your team, you can also see what they’re doing, how active they are, what their response rates look like, and what their templates look like.
Related Content: How to Get Higher Email Open Rates (Without Being Spammy)
I’ve used a lot of different sales tools over the years, but I think Mixmax is probably my favorite one because I have the ability to customize messages and see what my team is doing.
But there are a lot of different tools out there. I’ve talked to a lot of different people on my Growth Everywhere podcast who use other sales tools, but right now Mixmax is my favorite because it’s simple to use and a lot of the other ones are a bit too bulky for my taste. Check it out!
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
Let’s talk about how you can close more deals.
First and foremost, I think most people think that prospecting, following up, doing sales calls, and closing deals can be pretty daunting, right? Most people don’t like to think of sales. “Oh, I’m just not good at sales” is something I hear all the time.
In fact, I’m still like that, to this day. I tend to avoid wanting to do sales calls, but you kind of have to if you’re running a company, especially in the early days. You have to close the deals. In the agency situation, like with Single Grain, if it’s a big deal, I’m going to come in and close it myself.
But the question is—how do you go about closing deals if you’re just starting out?
If you’re starting out, I think that the one thing you have to realize is that you have to look at your sales activity. How many deals is it going to take for you, or how many calls do you have to make, to eventually close a deal? Then you can work backwards.
Make a list of your sales activities. What you can do is figure out, on average, how many proposals you have to send before you close a deal. For example, let’s say I close at 25%. That means that I need to send out four proposals to close one deal.
Well, how many discovery calls do I need to get on to eventually get to one proposal? Let’s say 1 in 10 calls that I get on actually results in a closed deal. So, to close four deals, I need to speak with 40 people over discovery calls. But how many prospects do I need to reach out to in order to get one discovery call? Let’s say 5% of my total calls will lead to discovery calls. In this case, that means I need to reach out to 800 prospects every month to get four closed deals.
There are about 20 weekdays in one month, right? That means each and every day I need to reach out to 40 brand new people and then we also need to follow up with old clients or prospects, too.
Now, let’s say you’re starting out fresh and you don’t really know how you’re going to end up converting. Let’s say you are actually not that good at closing yet. In fact, let’s say you convert at 10%. You convert 10% of your proposals into a closed deal, 10% of your discovery calls will turn into proposals, and 5% of your prospecting will turn into actual discovery calls.
That means that instead of having to reach 800 per month, you actually have to reach 2,000 per month. That means you effectively have to send 100 messages per day. Which is why prospecting is hard.
One book I would recommend reading is The Ultimate Sales Machine. In this book, there’s a concept called your “dream 100.” In other words, who are your 100 dream clients?
Well, you can prospect for them by setting filters with SaaS sales software (like LinkedIn), or you could have sales development representatives reaching out. More likely, it’s going to be you doing it. Ideally, it’s you and your business partner tag teaming your ideal leads with hand-to-hand combat techniques.
I would also recommend reading From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue by Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross.
Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, which is one of the biggest software as a service (SaaS) conferences in San Francisco. I’d recommend reading that book and all of Jason’s articles on software as a service.
Those two books are going to be gold for you, especially if you’re first starting out with sales. Then you just keep doing it over time and you’re going to get used to it.
Learn More: The Sales Process that Grew EchoSign to $100M in Revenues with Jason Lemkin
I would also recommend supplementing your sales efforts with things like inbound marketing where you’re building goodwill with people over time.
You’re doing YouTube videos, you’re doing Facebook Lives, you’re creating a lot of content out there. You’re going out there, you’re speaking at events, you’re doing podcasts, and you’re creating all this content. That’s going to take a lot of time to get that going, but ideally you get that going so that a couple years from now, you’re not going to have to rely completely on sales and ads.
Related Content: How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy if You Are a Beginner
Thankfully, the majority of the leads that we get are from inbound marketing. We get them from podcasts and we get them from doing things like this. Yes, actually doing Facebook Lives like this and rebroadcasting these or re-targeting our audience helps a lot of people who are on the fence make a decision and commit to work with us.
You can definitely do the prospecting thing, but you can see that having to send out 100 brand new emails per day and trying to personalize each and every one of them can get really tiring. So as soon as you can, I would recommend delegating the prospecting to two other people so that you can compare them side by side, and then perhaps you can focus on closing your best prospects.
Eventually, you can hand off the closing to the other people, too. At that point, you just have to focus on growing the business and making the right hires.
There are so many different tools out there. Use tools like SalesforceIQ or some kind of CRM, like HubSpot CRM. I highly recommend using Mixmax to follow up with people automatically. You can see who’s opening emails, when they open it, where they open it from, how many times they open it, etc.
Long story short, everyone I’ve interviewed on Growth Everywhere gets their first 100 and even 1,000 customers by doing hand-to-hand combat.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Olof Mathé, CEO and co-founder of Mixmax – which is one of my favorite tools.
Listen as Olof discusses what it takes to build a successful remote team at a quickly growing startup, how they acquired their first 5,000 customers through word-of-mouth, and the art of product prioritization.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How Mixmax Acquired 5,000+ Customers Via Word of Mouth & Has a 20% Growth Rate TRANSCRIPT
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
3 Key Points:
Resources From This Interview:
Leave Some Feedback:
Connect With Eric Siu: