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Revolutionizing Cold Outreach: Michael Maximoff on Building Relationships, Not Just Pipelines
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Cold outreach has a bad reputation—spammy emails, pushy SDRs, endless noise in the inbox.
But Michael Maximoff, co-founder of Belkins, believes it doesn’t have to be that way. In this episode, Michael breaks down why most outbound strategies fail, how to rethink outreach as a marketing function (not just sales), and why relevance beats personalization every time.
He shares lessons from scaling Belkins into a global powerhouse, the role of AI in creating hyper-relevant buyer journeys, and why CEOs should be their company’s best marketers.
If you want to transform cold outreach from a numbers game into a trust-building engine, this conversation is for you.
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Transcript
Introduction and B2B Lead Challenges
00:00:10
Speaker
It's Mark Evans and you're listening to Mark and Spark. Most B2B companies say they want more leads. I would argue that all B2B companies say want more leads.
Expertise in Outbound Strategies
00:00:21
Speaker
but lot of them don't understand how to make Outbound And that's where Michael Maximoff comes in. He's the co-founder of Belkins, a fast-burning agency that's helped hundreds of companies, cracks the code on cold outreach, pipeline building, scalable sale development.
Debating Cold Outreach
00:00:39
Speaker
In this episode, Michael share what's broken with Outbound today how he's built a thriving business around fixing it and the lessons he's learned along the way. Welcome to MarketingSpark.
00:00:51
Speaker
Glad to be here,
Evolving Outbound Methods
00:00:52
Speaker
Mark. Thanks for having So let's get into it. It goes without saying that cold outreach, email and calling is, let's say, an interesting creature, controversial creature.
00:01:05
Speaker
There are many people who believe that it's not effective. It's a waste of time. Who and really likes to be called or emailed out of the blue?
Importance of ICP and Personalized Outreach
00:01:16
Speaker
Now, if you were to ba to if you were to debate someone on the anti-cold outreach side, someone who advocated strongly that cold outreach doesn't work, is a waste of time, what are your biggest arguments in that debate?
00:01:34
Speaker
That's a great start to a conversation. We just got to get over that. I would agree with folks. If you think that cold outreach doesn't work, it sucks, it's not elegant, I think you're right. And the reason you're right is that you're thinking about direct outreach as this Salesforce twenty twenty ten twenty twenty playbook where you have this SDRs or BDRs going out there, making calls,
00:01:58
Speaker
sending out cold emails, and then trying to get your attention and then handing you over to someone else to visit.
Relevance in Direct Outreach
00:02:04
Speaker
So these are usually junior professionals that have been around. They're the less paid in the company. at Their job is to just hunt the leads so they don't care about you. They care about their appointments and meetings. so And in this way, you don't have ah good customer experience because someone is just getting on the call, trying to get you at a very inconvenient time and calling you so on and so forth. I get it.
00:02:24
Speaker
That is where everyone was living. This is the world that I'm describing that everyone was living The SDR that I'm preaching and direct outreach is not a part of the sales function where you just try to get people on the phone, but that's a part of a marketing function.
00:02:39
Speaker
And SDRs and direct outreach are moving into a more communication type of role where their job is to lift up whatever marketing is doing, to build relationship with customer, get intelligence, connect with them, build rapport.
00:02:56
Speaker
But in this all instance, the meeting booking is always secondary in a way I hope the listeners are following
Full Funnel Marketing Concepts
00:03:04
Speaker
me here. The biggest difference, and this is my the biggest argument, is that if we are all thinking that the direct outreach
00:03:13
Speaker
Of the old, the 2010 Salesforce top of the funnel meter bookers playbook, it sucks. It doesn't work. It's not client oriented. And now with AI and with just every market to being a red ocean, so much competition, so much noise out there, so much automations.
00:03:33
Speaker
You don't want to be called. You don't want to get that email. But it doesn't mean that the direct outreach cannot evolve and transition to something new. The transitioning happened already a couple of years ago. and We're going to see more and more of it when the SDRs moved from a sales function into marketing function. That's what the marketing was missing. It's just having someone who can help to get those articles delivered that they are writing or get those case cases or white pages or get people on a webinar or send mail or just literally just talk about their pay points and create the more relevant buying journey, more messaging. Because marketers, what they've done, they were, let's run some ads, let's test, and so on and so forth. Running ads right now is super expensive. Not many businesses can do that. So when you're starting a company or when you're trying to build a pipeline and you're marketing, build a pipeline for us.
CEO's Role in Marketing
00:04:21
Speaker
what marketing are doing. Do they do SEO and content? And you see the payoff two years ago, what marketing would do. So with the SDRs coming to marketing right now, the marketing now have this people who can connect with folks, validate messaging, make sure that we're talking to the right people, ICP refinement, messaging product market fit, literally extending whatever marketing is doing. And that's the future. And that's the outreach that I believe in. And that's when you think about this, then we're like, okay, then that makes more sense because That's what the marketing was missing. They didn't use the sole channels.
00:04:53
Speaker
And now it's not about them reaching out to me to get my business right off the bat, but more about knowing who I am, extending relationships, putting me into their book of business for a long time so that I decide when I talk to them instead of them bringing me in.
00:05:08
Speaker
Does that make Obviously, you've got a very biased view of the world because you do go to outreach for a living. But I understand theory of moving away from transactional, seeing cold ads reach as a series of transactions, book a demo, book a meeting,
00:05:26
Speaker
to more relationship building, where we want to offer you value.
Executive Brand Advocacy
00:05:32
Speaker
We want to share something that you feel is relevant, whether it's a white paper or come to a webinar that's about your specific needs and interests, or here's a great blog post that we wrote or watch this video. I understand that that changes the dynamics of that relationship that you're trying to build. So you're giving as opposed to trying to take immediately. It's like going on a series of dates where you're learning about somebody as opposed to trying to get married on your first, the first date.
00:06:05
Speaker
But I think one of the pushbacks here is that people are being inundated by cold outreach, whether it's email or calls.
00:06:16
Speaker
and And a lot of that inundation, a lot of those that activity is people who are using the old school methodology and people have no patience for that. So one of the obvious questions is, if you're playing the same game, but in a different, better way then other SDRs and BDRs, how do you stand out from the pack? How do you say to somebody or create that impression that, no,
AI in Personalization
00:06:41
Speaker
I'm not here to book a demo. I don't care about that, although you do, but I'm here to...
00:06:48
Speaker
educate you, to engage you. So you'll get to the point where I like what this person is doing. I trust what this person is doing. So then I want to take an action. How do you stand out in a crowd? How do you make sure that you don't get lumped together with all the other people doing terrible cold outreach?
00:07:04
Speaker
It's a two-part answer. So the first part is that The entire company should be evolve involved into relationship building, including the C-level executives, decision makers, in terms of the managers of the team.
00:07:17
Speaker
The time where I'm an SDR and I'm going out and booking business, book of business, and just reaching out to people, no one wanted to do business with me. No one wanted to get on the call with SDR. But... If I reached out to folks as Michael Maximoff, CEO and founder of the business, and i do that not to get you meeting right now, but hey, you're in my universe. We have common connections. You guys, the industry I work with, I like to introduce myself. I reached out to folks.
00:07:43
Speaker
I post relevant things. You see me boasting. I'm active. Or I like what Michael is doing. Let me reach out to him. Or if I reached out to you respond to me. The point is that We are broadening
Metrics for Outreach Success
00:07:56
Speaker
the relationship building from being just a function of an SDR BDR to being a responsibility for lot of people with the one organization.
00:08:04
Speaker
So in this way, the SDRs are more helping to either build the process around it or drive that process or drive that conversation, so on and so forth. The second part is that the conversation should be very relevant to me because What happened over the years so is we became lazy as marketers and we always told, oh, know your customer.
00:08:26
Speaker
But how do you know your customer? How does it work? It's through refinement, refining on the ideal client profile, through talking to folks and say, oh, I'm talking to Mark. Oh, Mike is not relevant. It's not his area of responsibility. Let me talk to someone else. So The way the direct outreach campaigns have been deployed before, and that's the main mistake that folks are doing, they're looking at the ICP as this ideal client profile for those that but don't know what the ICP stands for.
00:08:50
Speaker
They look the ICP as this List of criteria. I work with mid-sized companies from 200 to people that are between 50 million to 500 million in revenue. And my decision makers are C-suite and then VP level, director level in sales and marketing. And they need to be geographically located within the United States.
00:09:09
Speaker
That's what most of my clients come to us when they start campaign with us. And when you look at this, then the next step would be the Eziars. They take this ICP and they start building list. They go to Apollos, Zominfos of this world, start extracting leads, building and then running campaigns. All of these titles receiving a bunch of irrelevant messages that are being prepared for all of them.
00:09:30
Speaker
And now with AI, they're personalized. So now people just, when you went to the school, you're posting about this, doesn't create any relevance. So what I propose is you need to refine the ICP. So it means that for different sizes of the business, whether it's 100 people or 500 or 300, if it's an industry manufacturing, manufacturing consists of medical devices and hardware manufacturing and other sub-industries. The different states have... So the point is,
00:09:54
Speaker
The ICP should be so more granular and so more refined so that when you reached out to folks, you're talking their
Sustainable Outreach Strategy
00:10:01
Speaker
language. You literally say, oh, Michael, you're spot on. You talk my language because you're not looking at me as this profile, but you look at me as you know me. And now with AI, you can do that.
00:10:11
Speaker
right Not only lazy people can do that with AI because now you can break down any industry and sub-industries, any titles, and you can literally personalize your messaging to be more relevant for the specific people reached out to.
00:10:24
Speaker
And then you start reaching out to folks and you start talking to them. And then let's say you talk to five, 10 people and now you see, okay, this is completely off the rails. I'm not going there. And go and then with these all iterations, within three, four months, you're going to tap into the people that would want to hear from you, the people that your message, the people that will tell you, yeah, Michael, you're spot on. And now you start including them in your universe with that first part that I've mentioned through a lot of that. I think the thing is that, yes, these are all best practices, offering value, trying to build relationships, all the good things. I'm not arguing with you on that point.
00:10:56
Speaker
And I will talk, I do want to talk about how ah companies can build a solid foundation, and a solid strategic and tactical plan for effective cold outreach. I think what I'm trying to hammer away at is that even if you're following best practices and your ICP, you've defined your ICPs and you're very relevant, there's a lot of noise out there. There's an awful lot of noise out there. Anybody listening to this podcast will understand that if you look at their email inboxes or LinkedIn is that they're getting pounded away because most people, most companies are taking a very blunt approach to outreach.
00:11:35
Speaker
If there's a hundred messages coming at me or a 500, my default is I'm going to dismiss most of them. What I'm trying to get to is how does the cream rise to the top?
00:11:45
Speaker
How do you get people to look at your outreach? Number one, and that moment where they decide where it's relevant or not, though, though, that's interesting. Maybe I should spend another couple seconds digging in as opposed to getting the delete button. That's actually a great, great question, Mark.
00:12:03
Speaker
The way I'm looking at this is if you want to do business with someone and you know that your product is a good product and you eventually we're going to end up doing some business with you, I want to identify where you are at the buying journey.
00:12:17
Speaker
So do we have the pain point of the problem that I'm trying to sell or you don't have? Are you looking for a solution or you don't? Is that something that you want to do it or not? So literally just by understanding where you are at this different type of the journey would tell me how aggressively I should pursue this or that opportunity, right?
00:12:33
Speaker
So that's the first baseline, right? And the reason why this is important because...
00:12:41
Speaker
You don't necessarily need to hammer people with your LinkedIn messages if they want don't want to hear from you, right? In a way. But it doesn't mean that you don't need to include that person or that company in the universe of your brand, right? In the way, what what what I'm preaching here is that it's all about building the touch points and building the brand recognition and having an opportunity to engage with folks.
00:13:07
Speaker
And it doesn't necessarily mean that engagement should lead into the sales conversation, right? But the point is that through those multiple engagements, different from the different channels that you're doing, you are able to identify where the interest of that person is at or that organization is at and the relevancy, and then you're able to then create a more personalized experience for them.
00:13:27
Speaker
And I think it's important to give context for listeners why, you know, where I'm coming from with this, right? Because I've built my business to be one of the best single channel cold email agencies in the world. So we've done very well.
00:13:42
Speaker
And we've done that for six, seven years. And then back in 2022, I started noticing that whatever I was doing with cold email, it stopped working. As you said, we stopped answering emails. They stopped getting on the call. My clients stopped closing deals. just stop but So they're like, Michael, whatever you' generating us, you have this very fancy subject lines. And people just say, hey, I am on the call because Michael was so good at his outreach that I'm just on the heat, but I don't have a buying intent. So when that was happening, clients started leaving us. We're hold on, what can we do?
00:14:10
Speaker
And then we start looking what's happening, why it's happening. And we realized that for a lot of clients, we were just doing this single outreach. We were just generating leads, but we were not building brand. We were not building them more journey. We're not ah creating the relevancy. We're not trying to establish a relationship. We're just literally pounding and getting those meetings.
00:14:28
Speaker
So I had to change my business to be able to drive real value. And then over the last three years, we were working with clients to change the playbook and change what can you And whatever I'm talking about now, it's the everything that I've also tested on myself and my own company.
00:14:47
Speaker
And that's why I know that this works, but it takes patience and time to get it developed. Let's assume that I'm a B2B SaaS company and my marketing channels have been content, going to conferences, doing webinars, but i recognize that I'm missing another way to engage educate people educat prospects.
00:15:14
Speaker
And I decide that I want to explore cold outreach because I want my BDRs to be very targeted and I need to have conversations with the people that matter to me. But I have no idea what to do.
00:15:25
Speaker
I have nowhere to start. like I'm doing marketing and my sales people are booking demos. Where do you start as an organization? How do you structure your campaigns so that Different parts of the company are in sync, working together. What is that starting point and what are best practices to make sure that everyone's aligned, you're following best practices so that you're doing the right things from the beginning?
00:15:52
Speaker
Before AI and before 2023, chat GPTs and all of them, and even a few years before that, we were living from 20, I think, 25, 2010. We were living in the world of builders where it had been and very difficult to build a product, but it was easier to sell it, right? And now we're living in a seller's world where it's super difficult to sell, but it's relatively easy to build, right? Now you have the Vibe coding, right?
00:16:21
Speaker
So with that being said, every executive, if you're a startup owner, you should be marketer. You should be one of the best marketer in your company. And it means it's a founder-led sale. So you mean to go out there, connect with people, talk with people and be very active. You need to be the best spokesperson in the world about your product, about your company, right? And you need to do that in a very consistent manner. And I know this is not intuitive because a lot of the people probably listening to this are like, I don't have time. I need to talk with my customers. I need to build a business.
00:16:52
Speaker
I get it. I also need to do that. But I need to spend 30, 40% of my time going out there, connecting with people LinkedIn, creating creating articles, running my newsletter, doing my podcast, talking to people.
00:17:05
Speaker
And what doing that, I'm not just... What I'm doing is... I'm also trying to accumulate the insights and the unique data that it my business generates and package that in a way that I can create value for the people I'm talking to.
00:17:22
Speaker
So a good example is, Balkans generate lot of data, outreach data. We do benchmark reports, we do different white papers, research papers, so on and so forth. And We're spending considerable amount of time and resources to building those. And I'm personally involved into the research and now this part, talking with customers around this, collecting this information. And then what I'm doing is that I'm creating my own content to be able to,
00:17:48
Speaker
sure position Balkans as this partner in the space that have so much insights and the data that I'm sharing with people for free. I'm literally educating and I am going out there and doing that sincerely without asking their in their business return because it's important for this problem to be solved.
00:18:05
Speaker
So the point that I'm making here is the best playbook, Mark, in the situation that you described is
00:18:13
Speaker
Being ah founder who is a marketer, product founder-led, marketing founder-led sales, thinking about building your company brand through your personal brand, connecting actively and building this universe of your target prospects and the people. you You and i we probably would know top 1000 companies that we would love to be our partners or our clients.
00:18:35
Speaker
Why don't we have a list of those businesses? We have a list of those people and let's connecting with people. You don't need to ask their business. Hey, we have a second, third connection in common. I like what you're posting. I love your business. So I patiently start building that traction month over month where And then using direct outreach through my LinkedIn or email to validate whether I'm talking to the people. But then after after I validated that, sharing those unique insights and the amount of knowledge that I'm sharing without asking a lot of things to return. That's great for a startup. And I totally agree with you, for most smaller companies, the CEO or the founder is the best marketing and sales asset they've got better than any other channel that they could deploy. and
00:19:17
Speaker
But what if you're... yeah there's a bigger company, a $5 million, $10 million, $20 million dollar company. And the CEO has to manage staff worked with investors, worked with partners. They got a lot in their plate. my experience with a lot of CEOs is that um don't have time for this.
00:19:40
Speaker
I don't know if outreach works. This is not something I can allocate a lot of effort to. How do you leverage the power of the CEO and their ability to be brand ambassadors and brand advocates?
00:19:53
Speaker
when they may not have the cycles to do it? Do you ghostwrite all their activity? Do you create somebody else in the organization who becomes the brand evangelist or advocate? How does that work? Because I think for a lot of companies, the CEO just doesn't want to do it, but you still got to have somebody who's leading the charge. I agree with you. In many cases, SaaS companies need
00:20:17
Speaker
Like somebody who people can relate to. If you look at Chili Piper, for example, Alina is the head of the company. Spark Toro, it's Rand Fishkin. lot of those companies have people who are front and center. But if you're not, if you have a CEO who doesn't want to do it, what's the playbook for that?
00:20:34
Speaker
You must have people passionate about your company, passionate about your company, about your mission, about your brand. There should be people that would want to tell the world how great you guys are. if But it doesn't have to be the CEO, right?
00:20:47
Speaker
It might not be the CEO. It might be the CRO. It might be CMO. It might be someone else, right, that would do that. Now, the thing about that... You do want it to build brand and invest resources into helping that person to build the brand.
00:21:01
Speaker
Those that are closely associated with the management of the organization that you that you're going build the relationship for the next 10, 20 years. You don't want to invest money and promote your SDRs and your VDRs. And then in one, two years, they leave the organization and leaving all their book of business. with You wanted to have people within the the the wheel of the ah the bus. Um,
00:21:19
Speaker
And then i think that just generally you were telling me this and I was like I don't understand what marketing, why do some people don't want to talk about what's happening in their organization if they know that's the way to build trust and see that people are doing business with people. They're not doing business with the spreadsheets. And with this, literally you do business with me, you build trust. If you're not, if I'm not going out there and I'm talking to customers and I am talking about this openly, this is, you know, who we work with, this is what we're proud of, these are the people I'm bringing on board, this is the mission of my organization, that who, what's the point of
00:21:52
Speaker
I was just, i don't understand. What's the point of growing the business then? It's not just necessarily about the profit margin in a way. Now, if you have a profit margin already, and then we've done this already, that's great, right? But if you're just starting a company, we this is access exercise, right? youre You wanted to build a business right now.
00:22:08
Speaker
Now, if you build a business 20 years ago and you have a referral, word of mouth, book of business, everything is growing, you're looking for more cost-effective channels that you don't need to go as a CEO, that's a different playbook. You might already have budgets in place, right? You already might have a professional sales team in place, right?
00:22:24
Speaker
You might do a lot of different things. If I cannot afford going out to conferences, spending $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 or $300,000 a year in conferences, what can I do as the founder of business to so substitute that? That's the question. I agree with you. I think for smaller companies, your CEO has to be active, has to be a relationship builder,
00:22:43
Speaker
has to build trust. Larger companies, they've got bigger obligations, they've got bigger teams to manage, they've got lots of things that they're doing. so I think that in those cases, it's good to have somebody who is the VP of advocacy or the VP of marketing, or somebody who is essentially front and center.
00:23:03
Speaker
One shift gears a little bit because we we're chasing our tails when it comes to this topic is that you mentioned earlier in the conversation about personalization and the ability for AI to help accelerate or make that process more efficient. What are your thoughts in terms of personalization versus scale?
00:23:28
Speaker
Is there, how do you balance that? Is there a middle ground that most SDRs are missing so that people feel that, you know me, your content is relevant to my needs and interests, but at the same time, SDR can do retail to dozens, if not hundreds of people, as opposed to a small number.
00:23:51
Speaker
I'm using a bit different terminology. I'm using relevance instead of personalization. So for me, personalization is around people investigating me as the kind of person, what I'm at, what I'm posting about, where i'm talking about. And then relevance is more about understanding my needs and then talking with me the same language. So where I know that AI works the best is, and then this is a practical example.
00:24:14
Speaker
we're recording all our sales calls, right? And let's say we have library of, let's say, 500 sales conversations with manufacturing companies. And they all are, for an hour, everyone talk about their needs, their pain points, what they're looking for, what they're there, so on so forth.
00:24:30
Speaker
Before AI, there is no way someone from, as your team, would go and listen all of these calls and then repackage them. Now you can feed all the transcribed into this anthropic or cloud and you can say, hey,
00:24:43
Speaker
I want to know all the pain points, all the needs, all the challenges that people are talking about this right now. And then go me down to as exact title, to exact geography, to exact type of the business, literally.
00:24:55
Speaker
So I can achieve the level of the relevancy that hasn't been known before. And then i can use this information to create my landing page on the website where I talk the same language, put that on my email, create, I think, okay, they have the same problem. So how do I solve the problems? Oh,
00:25:10
Speaker
Let me create a survey and then create a study with my customer that will be talking about this. Let me talk an article and I put an article on my blog talking about this exact issue that they're ringing out. So now marketing team achieved so much. The level of personalization never been seen before. Let's say even go to my website page, every yeah industry page, every article, everything is personalized to what the customers have been talking with the salespeople on the call.
00:25:34
Speaker
So whenever I send something, achieve the engagement rate that is like, that never seen before because instead of just hypothetically thinking about what are the keywords that people are looking using these eight drafts and other tools or what do I do to to to position myself, this is my product, I literally talk about what the people want to hear about and I send that in front of them And then that's where the engagement happens. And then you can be a very personalized to... A good example is, let's say there is a terminology of like buying comedy or buying circle, right? it' There are the titles that are... different titles that are responsible for the buying decision, right?
00:26:11
Speaker
So you have a decision maker, but you also have an influencer, an end user, a champion, different roles, right? So when you think about selling your solution to someone, don't only think about decision makers. For example, I have a client who have a sustainability solution. do They do SPTA three kind of sculpting measurement for sustainability and they always sell to sustainability leaders.
00:26:34
Speaker
But the part of their decision in also the stability advocate, the procurement, the financial team, and before that, they all been only talking about how this product is great for sustainability.
00:26:45
Speaker
Now they talk about how finance team have the impact or how much business is losing or how the procurement is doing this. So They are able to personalize the messaging and the communication channels for each specific role that allow them to create a more smarter, more relevant, more targeted communication between all those folks.
00:27:06
Speaker
And that's more important. Then as yours, try to source leads through clay and finding different nuances that would tell them something that tell me, but it's not relevant to the stage of my business, my profession and so on and so forth. And then, yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
So I think just, again, this is a long example of the, so the creating the relevancy yeah you can do and you can do relevancy at scale. when you double down on creating the right structure and then knowing your buying comment and but knowing your personas and then creating the relevancy in your messaging and your product and your offering for those people and then doing that across the board not just within your emails but also with your website with your linkedin posts with your blogs with your webinars with everything not just with that because to your point what's happening now
00:27:57
Speaker
all of these that I just mentioned, folks are not doing that. They just, we have this website. This is our core messaging. It's used by everyone. So we're not personalizing anything. And then they have this SDRs that are paying so much money into creating the intent and the personalization. And SDRs reached out to all those people and try to pick their, oh, I know you.
00:28:14
Speaker
But then when the buyers engage with your brand, they don't see relevant articles. They don't see the relevant website. They don't see the relevant webinars. They don't see a relevant post. You're not posting about this. So why do I need to engage with you? If whatever, the value you bring me,
00:28:28
Speaker
It's only that one message that you personalized to me, but your entire brand, your title is not relevant to me at all. Obviously, you can do all this activity. You can engage people. You can be relevant.
00:28:40
Speaker
You can be personal, follow best practices. But at the end of the day, it's about outcomes. Every organization needs to not rely on their investment. If you have an army of SDRs or you're CEO and they're out there and they're doing cold outreach, sending messages on LinkedIn, whatever tools they're using to do that.
00:29:01
Speaker
At the end of the day, it comes down to results. What have you done for organization? How have you moved the needle? The $64,000 question or the $64 million dollars question, depending how big you are, is what are the metrics that teams should focus on to measure cold outreach success?
00:29:17
Speaker
There's vanity metrics. Oh, I have 5,000 connections or got a lot of page views on LinkedIn. But what are the metrics that companies should embrace and what are the ones that really matter?
00:29:30
Speaker
doesn't have to necessarily be booking meetings because some things can be very quantified and some can could be qualified. When you talk to clients, so here's how we're going to measure the success of Belkins. What do you tell them as far as KPIs are concerned?
00:29:43
Speaker
So we only care about pipeline. We think about pipeline, pipeline, qualified pipeline, how many opportunities we have in the pipeline, how many we generated, and then what's our pacing and what's the trend, how many end we can add. So what we've discussed today, I'm a huge advocate of a full funnel of marketing, right? So the full funnel marketing is that when you are talking to the buyers at the different stages of their journey, and you're trying to connect with them depending on their readiness to buy, and then you build your entire marketing around that, so end to end.
00:30:12
Speaker
But the traditional playbook of this full final marketing was top to bottom. So you start with, you mentioned like the page use, the connections, and then you nurture them and go down. I am suggesting flipping this and doing bottom up.
00:30:24
Speaker
So the bottom up approach is that you're focusing on the opportunity part and then what other marketing channels you're adding is to increase the opportunity likelihood. So to increase the opportunity chance.
00:30:36
Speaker
So that's why the most important is the pipeline, and the measurement. And to achieve this pipeline in the measurement, you cannot, with your SDRs and with your outreach, you cannot just cycle through the leads with three to five touches. So the typical playbook, how it works is, I'm an SDR, I'm sourcing 1,000, 2,000 names every month.
00:30:58
Speaker
I'm sending a sequence or a cadence of three to five messages. I'm doing a couple of calls. I'm getting down some of those meetings. And then I'm moving and doing and another next month, another 2,000, another cadence. And I'm at It does make sense. You're not even able to build enough touch points with folks, not building enough presence. You're just broad, just scrapping the surface and just going and cycling through the leads. What's happening, the common conversation that even my internal team had before we ah ah we have this approach was,
00:31:26
Speaker
Michael, can we look for in a different industry, a different ICP? We already exhausted our total address of the market. We've talked to every company. I said, guys, we've just stepped into this industry. You had 2,000 businesses. Yeah, but we already emailed all of them. We've called them. They don't pick up the phone. We've got 20 meetings and we need to move on. We cannot just talk to them again because they would try to talk to us. So with this bottom-up full-final approach, we're able to elegantly cycle through the leads multiple times.
00:31:50
Speaker
So in this way, you can focus on your sweet spot, this one or 2,000 businesses, and you can go deeper into them and and find the right prospects and opportunities and then nurture those opportunities through the pipeline.
00:32:02
Speaker
and That's kind of balancing act because I agree with you. I agree that it's you do it some initial engagement, some outreach, and then you move on because you're not getting the results that you want. You're not getting the means for it. What's the balance between to, there's a scale here between ignoring your prospects that you've already reached out to and then basically pounding away forever, eventually hoping that if you apply enough brute force, they'll relent. They'll say, okay, I'll download a way paper or I'll go to a webinar, I'll book a meeting.
00:32:34
Speaker
There has to be a user-friendly way to focus on those 2,000 prospects without making them feel that they're being inundated with your messaging. What's that formula?
00:32:46
Speaker
My formula is that once you've validated that, and then again, talking about the sustainability guys for one of our clients that I mentioned before, For the first six to nine months, we're going out there and we're just talking to a bunch of different industries, different titles, and just booking meetings. And a client saw 20, 30 meetings a quarter. oh this is great.
00:33:04
Speaker
And then the first quarter, we had 45 meetings. The next quarter, we had 35 meetings. Then third quarter, we already had 25 meetings. And the client said, why did the meetings go down? And we because we already talked to a bunch of different people, we cycled through all of them.
00:33:17
Speaker
And then when we took, looked at that hundred meetings that we booked, clients said, only these five turn into opportunities for us. Those with the food and beverage industry, with the stability title, this is it. Right.
00:33:28
Speaker
But then my team, Michael, we don't have more system built. Like this total rest of the market of this is built. The leaders in food and beverage are so tiny. Then it's only a couple of hundred of businesses. What do we do? So we employed this full funnel strategy where Our job was to first utilize at least three to four key people within the client organization, their managers or their C-level.
00:33:52
Speaker
And then we wanted to make sure we're connecting with all of the people in in in that small universe, right? That's the first step, right? The second step would be to see that what we're talking about right now is relevant and up to date with what these companies are going through. So it means that we update our blog, we update our webpage, we prepare the key studies, and then we start creating content on social, on LinkedIn and corporate page that is super relevant for this food and beverage industry that is focusing on first building the pain points relevancy and then going down into, so I call it a
00:34:26
Speaker
Awareness, engagement, activation, conversion. And each stage takes three months to build it up. So you cycle through the stage. So in a way, then within one year, that specific prospect will get 100 or 150 touch points, but they would be not bombarded on you from all at the same time, but they would be sequenced on you from channel to channel, depending on which channel you prefer or engage. That could start with LinkedIn and social selling.
00:34:52
Speaker
with emails, with calls. If it's on a later stage, we have a workshop on the preparation. Even articles or email newsletter or even ads. People don't know, but on LinkedIn, for example, what you can do is you can download a list of your target prospects. You can upload that into your LinkedIn advertising account and you can set up a conversion, not on the clicks, but on views, which will cost you 50 bucks or 100 bucks to show their targeted paint-based advertising for your targeted list without expecting them to click.
00:35:25
Speaker
but they'll just see your brand, see your logo. They know that the problem exists, they know the pain points, and then they can engage. Some people will click, some people will connect with you, some people will start the conversation. You're suggesting that rather than sending email after email or LinkedIn DM is that it could be advertising, it could be blog posts, it could be webinars.
00:35:47
Speaker
It's that idea of a you're constantly in someone's universe. So after a while, if you're always talking about their problems, if you're being empathetic, that message comes from um but from different angles, but it's always focused on what their problems are. Eventually, it seeps into their conscious and they recognize when they're ready to make a buying decision,
00:36:11
Speaker
your brand tends to be top of mind. Just to finalize on this, so that's exactly what you said. And then just the outcome of this is, so so we went down into the number of meetings. So we've had from, as I mentioned, to about 20. Then the next quarter, we've dropped it five. and but only very relevant to the opportunity base. And then the next quarter, we grew it to 10.
00:36:28
Speaker
And the next quarter, we grew to 15. But all of those 15 that we grew quarter by quarter have been opportunities with the very targeted people that are educated, that have a buying intent. And they're ready. So they decided to engage with us because they've been on their our radar for so long, then they just then engaged. They're like, guys, yes, i actually was on top of this, or I have this planned. I would love to connect on this one.
00:36:51
Speaker
and So the from the marketing standpoint and from outcome standpoint, it's not about generating 100 meetings within the first year of running this playbook.
00:37:02
Speaker
It's about building the playbook that give you this minimum viable product that is the opportunities, the pipeline that you know work, and then trying to build it from bottom up into what else I can do to increase this number. But you don't deviate from the ICP and the quality. I think the formula is that you'll your outreach is very relevant, very personalized, focuses on the problem so that when you do generate leads, they're high quality leads because you're not, it's not spring and pray.
00:37:31
Speaker
You're not trying to touch as many people as possible. The number may not matter from an outreach point of view. It's really about the opportunities that matter. Just want to circle back about metrics and you said pipeline and moving the that's the definition of moving the needle. So how do you define pipeline? So that's company's define it in different ways. So is it?
00:37:53
Speaker
Yeah, let me just ask you a simple question. What is pipeline? How do you define it for your clients? It's opportunity. It's a new opportunity created in the pipeline that people engage with. There's a different level of qualification of that opportunity, but it's a ah company that match my my size, my my location, my ideal client profile.
00:38:13
Speaker
It's a targeted buyer or a title who is my preferred per decision maker whose response for that. And then they engage with us. in an actual conversation. So they got on the phone with us, either with our sales team or our leadership team, and they start talking about their needs.
00:38:29
Speaker
We don't know whether their urgency of their, of their i need to buy it tomorrow, or I have a defined budget, but they are talking to us. So they started with this early, when you look at your pipeline, this, the demo part or the opportunity identification part. So that's the first part of that pipeline, but they're engaging. So through those conversations, you know that, oh,
00:38:51
Speaker
They know about our company. They know about the product. They have a need. They want to talk more. And there's a second or third steps coming in. We engage this. We do the proposal. We would do something else. So you identify. So you can put a dollar amount on them. So after that conversation, we have a dollar amount. So that's the most important.
00:39:07
Speaker
and this conversation hopefully has addressed some of the myths and misconceptions about cold outreach. I think it's been interesting from a tactical and strategic perspective because there are lots of organizations that are still leaning into cold outreach as a way to break through, especially when advertising doesn't work as well as people expect. It's harder to get people to pay attention to what you're doing. Sometimes you need to deploy brute force, but as you say, you need to do it in a very smart, relevant, and personable way.
00:39:37
Speaker
Where can people learn about you and what Belkins does? I'm very active on LinkedIn. I'm one of those guys who, although run multiple businesses, i create my own content. I write it.
00:39:49
Speaker
I edit it I post it. And I only post about things that I'm passionate about personally. No BS frameworks. And I literally just talk about this is important for me. So I'm sharing. People can reach out to me at to Michael Maximoff LinkedIn. I also have my own newsletter called From Zero to Agency Hero, where I talk about how I build Belkins into the powerhouse it is today, sharing all my best practices. And I talk about the problems of the industry and how we're solving the problem. I do my own podcast, Belkins podcast, where I, like you, Mark, maybe not as good as you, but to interview folks about the challenges of their business growth. So you folks can reach out to me and see my work, any one of them.
00:40:25
Speaker
Thanks, Michael. And thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. And of course, share a via social media.
00:40:38
Speaker
I'm always interested in talking with SaaS entrepreneurs and marketers. If you have a good story to tell, please reach out. You can get me by email, mark at markhevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn.
00:40:49
Speaker
Until next time, thanks again for listening to Marketing Spark. Free audio post-production. by alphonic dot com