The 2021 Guide To Outbound SaaS Sales – Mark Colgan @ Speak On Podcasts

Todd Chambers
Hey, Todd Chambers here. Hello!

Welcome to another episode of the Masters of SaaS podcast, brought to you by Upraw Media, an agency that works exclusively with SaaS companies to help help them improve their messaging, conversion rates, and, ultimately, scale up their PPC. On the podcast we speak with top performers from the SaaS community. And today, we have a different type of episode for you.

We're gonna go deep on one particular subject, and that subject is outbound sales for SaaS. Has anyone ever messaged you on LinkedIn and instantly tried to sell you something? "We do this, we do that"? It's terrible, right? And it's really, really annoying. I get them all the time.

Well, outbound is not spray and pray. It's about starting conversations and playing the long game, as our guest, Mark Colgan, explains. And Mark has tons of experience in this area - more than 10 years of experience in sales. He previously ran a team of 100 outbound prospectors, he's a coach for Sales Impact Academy, start-up advisor and mentor and he now runs an agency called Speak On Podcasts. So if you're already doing outbound sales, or you're considering it, this episode is definitely for you. We're talking about prospecting, defining who you should be targeting, using triggers to focus on prospects that are more likely to convert, preparing the data... And then the sexy part, which is actually doing the outreach. What are the best channels to use in 2021? And how should you approach your messaging? And then, towards the end of the show, there is a bit of a bonus; we also talk about the advantages of starting your own podcast for a SaaS business. I personally can't wait to test this stuff myself, and I'm sure you guys are gonna get a ton of value. So, please enjoy.

Hey Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Colgan
It's great to be here!

Todd Chambers
Yeah, always good to see you. For people that don't know you, let's start off with a basic introduction. Who is Mark Colgan?

Mark Colgan
I'm living and working remotely, I'm currently in Lisbon at the moment. But I've been working in sales and marketing for the last 13 years. Currently, I manage an agency called Speak On Podcasts, I coach sales development reps when it comes to outbound prospecting, I do some mentoring on Growth Mentor alongside you, Todd... And yeah, I have a few other consulting agreements with a few SaaS companies. So excited to talk about outbound prospecting today and a few other topics too!

Todd Chambers
Yeah, absolutely. And that is indeed the topic of conversation, outbound sales for SaaS companies. And this is interesting to me, because our whole job is around inbound. So for me, you know, researching this podcast has been nice to dig in and learn some of the ways that SaaS companies can approach this. And you have quite a lot of experience in outbound. And thank you for the introduction. But maybe you can just go a little bit deeper on the sales side, I know you've managed really big remote teams doing outbound sales at scale. So maybe you can speak a bit more of your sales experience.

Mark Colgan
Yeah, sure. So I actually started my career in recruitment. But it's very much a business development role. So there's two sides to the job, you had to interview candidates to find, you know, if they're going to be suitable for the roles that you had. But the other part of the role, which was the most important part, was finding people who are hiring. Back then when I started, there was LinkedIn, but it didn't have the job functionality like it does right now. So I had to do a lot of cold calling and calling around. I was up in Nottingham at the time and covered the East Midlands, so calling factories and manufacturers in Derby and Leicester, just trying to see if they needed any accountants, because that's who I was recruiting for. So a lot of my time was spent on the phone, and it was very much "pick up the phone and money comes out", "always be closing", you know, the very old school reputation of sales. But that's changed a lot in recent years.

So to bring that more up to speed I ran a business called TaskDrive, and they specialised in lead research and data enrichment. And really what that is - it's the very first step for outbound prospecting. You need to have data in order to know who you're going to be speaking to, you want to have the right emails, the right direct dials, and we provided that for our customers. And I was in the fortunate position that I got to see what our customers were doing for outbound prospecting. And I used to jump in, offer some advice around how they can improve their open rates and their reply rates and also dealing with the influx of replies. Are they ready for it? Have they got their pipeline management steps in place, and have they actually got the bodies there to manage all of the demand? We had one customer that had to pause with us because the emails were working so well he didn't have enough people to close the deals. The leads were coming back in from the outbound prospecting and there was a week or two weeks before they had a chance to reply to them.

So we're going to cover this today as part of the overall outbound sales for SaaS. But hopefully that gives a little bit more of a flavour of my backgrounds. And just to add to that, I teach a cohort of sales development reps. So these are usually the younger people within the sales organisation. They're the people who are sending the emails making the phone calls, booking the meetings, usually for an account executive, and I teach a cohort of around 50 to 70 several times a year and I take them through the fundamentals of outbound prospecting.

Todd Chambers
You also have like a personal mantra - I'm not sure if it's a mantra or it's a goal but - "always be connecting". Is that correct? And where did that come from?

Mark Colgan
I've always been a connector of people, whether that be friends or having different groups of friends and introducing kind of like minded individuals, also from a professional space. It's like, when I have a sales call, and I perhaps can't help that company because they're not the right fit for me, or they're just not in the right space or time, I will make introductions to help them get to where they need to get to. And I think that's how we've established a relationship as well, Todd. I speak to a lot of companies who might need help with PPC, I'm not a PPC guy, but I don't want to just end the phone call and say, "sorry, I can't help". I would much rather say, "I can't help, here are two or three people that I highly recommend".

Since I've had that kind of mantra, it's generated so many opportunities for me. I mean, I've got to go to Techstars in San Francisco, all completely paid for, that was because I spoke to somebody at a start-up event in London, just randomly, connected him with somebody else, you know, and it's doing all these things and paying it forward. And the idea is you don't expect anything in return. But the more people you speak to, the more you increase your surface area of opportunity. So have that mindset of "always be connecting".

Todd Chambers
I love those serendipitous, you know, meetings, like you said. I think that's kind of how we met. And you also introduced me to other people as well, so... And I guess from a sales perspective, which is what we're speaking about today, that's also maybe a good mindset to have, right? It's playing the long game.

Funnily enough, I used to be in sales. That's where I cut my teeth. Coming back now forward and researching for this, it was really interesting to see all the different technologies that salespeople have, all the different techniques. But one thing that came up was "revenue leader". Is revenue leader basically just a fancy way of saying someone that's in charge of sales, or is it someone that's in charge of getting revenue into the business? Like, what does that mean?

Mark Colgan
The way I see it is that revenue comes from the customers. I mean, everybody knows that, right? But having a revenue leader or chief revenue officer, which a relatively new title that really came out of Silicon Valley, hyper growth startups, the revenue leader is really in charge of making sure that the silo departments of marketing, sales, customer success, and product are all talking to each other, they're not going to be a developer or product manager, but they're going to be taking the feedback from the sales calls and the feedback from the marketing and the lifecycle marketing, and then passing that over to a product. So really, it's one person who can see the moving parts of the different departments within the business, typically, chief revenue officer is an ex-sales, like VP of sales person, CMO... And I think we're seeing less of... I think we're seeing more CMO roles merging into the chief revenue officer. And really, you'll have a VP of marketing reporting into the chief Revenue Officer for the CMO. Part of it is disappearing a little bit, some chief revenue officers can be customer success as well. But they kind of have to have that commercial experience, whether through business development or marketing previously, so yes, one person to oversee the component moving parts of every interaction with the customer.

Todd Chambers
For a SaaS company, when we're talking about outbound sales, what is the starting point? If you're a SaaS company, and you're looking to grow, you've got marketing, you've got sales, there's all different ways you can gain traction. But if you're thinking about outbound sales, what are the kind of the starting criteria to decide whether it's potentially a good channel for you to explore?

Mark Colgan
There's no kind of like "a one size fits all" answer for this. But some of the things that I suggest that you look at his what's your average deal size. So if your product is for is 10k a year, then you probably have enough of the average deal size to justify the efforts and cost of outbound sales. Whilst it is a really effective channel, it can be expensive, because you might be fully loading your team with a sales development rep and account executive. So you've really got to take that into consideration. So if your average deal size is 10k a year, that's pretty much the starting point, any lower than that than the you at the unit economics wouldn't work out. The caveat to that is if there's huge upsell and cross sell opportunities in the accounts that you're selling to, then it may be worth you taking the hit up front for the customer acquisition cost, because there's going to be expansion revenue in the future.

Another thing so you can't just take that answer as like, "oh, that's the green light. Let's do outbound sales". A lot of startups, especially early stage, when they haven't really achieved product / market fit, or perhaps the founders haven't sold the product to anybody outside of their network or their friends and family is probably a little bit too soon to put in a repeatable, scalable process for outbound. What they may want to do is focus on closing deals themselves for people outside of their network, because otherwise, they haven't got a proven method to say that if they do generate a lot of interest and a lot of leads, can they actually close them?

I think that leads on to the last point I say is like, have somebody ready to close the deals. I've seen many companies start outbound with the best messaging and really good targeting, they get really good response rates, and then they just completely dropped the ball because they don't have a the person there to close the deal. Or they're not even responding to these replies when they come in. It seems like a complete sin to me, but I see it happen over and over again.

Todd Chambers
Super interesting. So that's actually an interesting question as well. What is the minimal structure in terms of team size? If you're looking to build a an outbound sales organisation, you mentioned that you probably need someone that's doing the prospecting finding the people qualifying them all that stuff, which we'll get into more detail, you need someone to close... So is that two people, or do you typically need three or four different people?

Mark Colgan
A lot of companies if it's early stage, and they have sold the product to people outside of their network, it could be a good idea to outsource the sales development part of it, and what I mean by that is the prospecting part. And then what happens is you have somebody in your team, and it could be the founder if they have the time, but you have the founder closing the deals, or at least doing the discovery calls, finding out if there's a fit between the needs of the prospect and the solution that you have, and then taking them through to close one. So you might outsource that bit. One of the benefits of doing so is that if you pick the right supplier, they will help you build out your messaging, they'll help you build out the kit, the sequences, all of the emails, you won't have to worry about that because they handle it.

However, there are hundreds, if not thousands of companies out there. And the majority of them that I've seen have been pretty bad. They're doing tactics that worked several years ago, but just don't really work anymore. So if anybody wants any introductions, again, "always be connecting". There's a few people I can recommend, or good companies. I'd much rather recommend somebody that I know does a great job than you struggle, because I've worked with quite a lot of companies who previously used an outsourced company, and they did a terrible job. And then the founder tells me that outbound sales doesn't work. And I'm just like, "well hold on a second. What was the message? How many follow ups did you send was your targeting right?". And then they show me the emails, and it's just a terrible message where they're just pitching and they're sending it to irrelevant prospects. So, no wonder outbound didn't work.

Todd Chambers
Well, let's get into the meat of it then.

So, I can maybe just summarise zooming out, in terms of your thinking about outbound. I think you break it down into prospecting, preparation, and then outreach. Before we do like, step one, would you say it's having the right mindset and having the right intention? Like if you're going into outbound, you're thinking, like, "hey, I just want to take a growth hack. I want to just hack into somebody's inbox and think I'm gonna hear great responses". What is the correct mindset, you should be thinking about when approaching outbound?

Mark Colgan
You've got to remember that people - your prospects - don't wake up in the morning, get out of bed, make a coffee, and say, "I really want to buy a performance management solution today", or "I really want to buy a software that can help me create graphic design images much quicker". So you've just got to remember that your prospects aren't there waiting for this email to come in.

And I think importantly, to the mindset of outbound prospecting is yes, your goals is revenue. However, the point of prospecting is really just to start that conversation with somebody. And a lot of companies make the mistake of making their first emails all about them is a pitch. And then they're asking for them to book a call or to book a demo. And that's like walking up to a bar, seeing somebody that you find attractive and asking them to marry you, without even having a conversation with them! You've got to remember that the point of prospecting isn't to book the meeting, it's to start that conversation with your ideal prospects. And the more conversations that you have the more higher chance that you have of these prospects converting into customers.

And you've got to play the long game. Chet Holmes, in 2007, released a book called "The Ultimate Sales Machine". One of the quotes he said in there was that, at any one time, only 3% of your market are actively buying. So that means if you send out a thousand emails, only 30 people out of those 1000 might be in a position where they're looking to buy. You've got to remember that if you just go in with a high buy from me, because that's the that's your pitch, you're just not going to get the response rates that you want. And when I talk about some of the outsourced sales companies using old tactics, that's what they're still doing. And it just doesn't work in 2021.

Todd Chambers
It's madness! Every single day - and I'm sure loads of people listening to this will think the same thing - I get so many messages on LinkedIn. I'll get connection requests, and people just go straight for the juggular. It's just so stupid, like, I have no context into who you are! And you've just gone straight in and asked me if I'm interested into your like outsourced development opportunities. It's just ridiculous. And it's the same thing with inbound as well, I get kind of the same analogy.

It's like if at certain points people are looking to buy, like, if you're running lower funnel search ads, and someone is specifically looking for that solution, they're searching for it, great. Show them an ad that says, hey, you know, "you want to buy my shit, you want to sign up for my free trial", that's totally acceptable. But if you're prospecting and it's the same thing we do with inbound, you don't just go in for a free trial and a cold audience on LinkedIn, it doesn't work. So it's kind of the same analogy, right?

Mark Colgan
Yeah, 100%. It's just understanding where the customers are in their buying journey. And Todd, you and I have spoke about websites and conversion rate optimization a lot. A lot of people build their website, and they're like, "this is an inbound lead converting website, that's what I want". So all the call to action is "sign up for a free trial" or "book a demo". Not everybody coming to your website is there to do that they're not ready. So you may want to think about offering like a secondary call to action, which might be on demand webinar or to a piece of content, which is going to be valuable to help them understand their problem frame the solution that you potentially have to that problem, and then nurture them down the later stages of the funnel. And it's the same with prospecting.

Todd Chambers
Got it. So it's about playing the long game, having conversations, essentially building a pipeline, making connections, "always be connecting".

So the next step then, I guess, is - before you then jump into more tactical stuff, which is like targeting and you want to start contacting people - you really have to understand who those people are, right? And this is probably basic for a lot of people listening to this, but the next step is really having an ideal customer profile. Right? That's kind of the starting point.

Mark Colgan
Yeah, you say it's quite basic, and a lot of people will understand the term ideal customer profile or ICP. From my experience, the majority of companies that I've worked with do not have a good understanding of who the ICP is. When a when a consulting customer comes to me and says, "oh, we can sell to everyone". I'm like, "no, you can't, you're not going to sell it to my nan, and she's everyone". And that's not going to be an ideal customer for you. So who is it, which type of company, so really, you've got ideal customer profiles. And you've got buyer personas, the ideal customer profiling is all about the businesses that you're trying to target. And the personas are the individuals within those businesses.

So I'll start with the ideal customer profile. So you might want to think about which geographies do I sell to or which industries and sectors do I need to sell to. Do these companies need to be using a specific software?

To give you an example, there was a business intelligence analytics platform that only worked with Salesforce, they plugged into your CRM, which is your customer relationship management software, and it was Salesforce the only one they could work with. I was using Pipedrive, I was being pitched constantly, in a follow up sequence... And then finally, I had the heart to turn around to the guy and said, "look"... He asked, "are you not interested?", and I was like, "I use Pipedrive!" And he was like, "oh, sorry, we don't work with Pipedrive". So I was the wrong account to be targeting because I was never going to be a customer in the in the first place.

So you've got industry, you've got the geographies, you've got technology, you might even say they have to be a certain size in terms of employees. Again, if you're in the if you're selling into the HR space, or even into the sales space, the larger the sales team might qualify whether this is a customer you want to work with, or not. So do they have one sales rep, or do they have a team of 200 sales reps, very different messages that you'll need to send to those two companies, even if your solution can solve the problems for the individual and the to the team of 200 really get focused on what those companies are. And there's nothing wrong with splitting these out into different campaigns. So you might have a message and a prospecting sequence just for the small businesses and one for the medium and one for the large because they will have different challenges and different pain points that they're experiencing.

Todd Chambers
It's so true, what you said about ICP, you know, I said, most people listening to this will probably understand the basics of an ICP, but actually, you're right. Actually, with many of the companies we work with - even decent size SaaS companies - we're like, "cool, can you please send us your ICP? Can you please send us any information you have in your customers, whether it's personas, whether it's jobs to be done? Can you please tell me, you know, the LTV, the unit economics?" And they're like scrambling around trying to find it. So actually, you're probably right...

Mark Colgan
And Todd, from working with you and having introduced you to companies in the past, I know now I need to ask them those questions before I even get them to you. Because you're going to ask those questions to them as well. And you're right, they scramble around because they don't have that information readily available. And they really should.

Todd Chambers
The ICP also kind of ties in with positioning as well, because you don't want to be everything to everybody do you? You want to have a specific niche, a very specific target market, so you can speak to those specific pain points and those needs. If you're trying to be everything to everybody, then it's going to be much harder to sell as well.

Mark Colgan
Just to take the example of Speak On Podcast, the guest booking agency I run, we started off with, "we help entrepreneurs, coaches, authors and leaders appear on podcasts". Now we've refined that to b2b businesses and technology brands. And you could even niche that even more, you could say, sales technology brands. We've decided to keep it to b2b technology. I came across a company who does a very similar offers a very similar service. They offer publicity tours for book authors, and speaking on podcast as part of their offering. So you can niche and niche and niche.

I think there's a huge fear that people have when they go, "oh, I don't want to niche too much". It makes it so much easier to sell the same product or service to a similar audience and to a similar persona, then in the future, you can always expand. I think people when they make decisions around sales and positioning, they worry that all we're always going to be pigeonholed like this. But if you look at any of the large companies that have ever achieved hyper-growth, they always expand and go upmarket. So don't be afraid of niching to begin with. And at the end of the day, what I like to remind founders is that no one remembers what you were saying a year ago. You remember that no one else does. So just kind of get over that little hurdle, niche to begin with, and then expand.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, so it's like a few things. So then you said you changed your targeting within Speak On Podcasts. And I guess that was based on feedback, right? You actually went out and spoke to people, you've got customers, and then you realised "oh, actually, it seems like this particular cohort of people, it serves it really well, so let's chose that niche". Yeah, there's no harm in kind of starting somewhere, getting feedback, and then, you know, adjusting over time.

Mark Colgan
Yeah, we saw that if you're a b2b brand, and you speak on a podcast like this, there's more benefits than just speaking on the podcast and getting in front of somebody else's audience. You actually can create a ton of content based off a half an hour an hour interview. You also can split that content up, share it with your team and get it on LinkedIn. What we learned that the value for most of the people, the customers that find the most value of the b2b brands that have the need to increase the awareness of their brand. One of our customers turned around to us and said, "Mark, I want to double up, I want to double up the amount of podcasts and speaking on because I just want to be everywhere. I do not want to have a conversation with a prospect who hasn't heard me or seen my content, or seen our content pushed out for our channels, I just want to be effing everywhere". And you know, that was his main motivation to double up and speak on more podcasts.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, super interesting. So make sure you have an ideal customer profile. And then the next part is going a little bit deeper in terms of the customer understanding, right, it's having a persona within that company.

Mark Colgan
So the persona is really understanding the different individuals that are going to be involved in the decision making process. Typically, you'll have a decision maker there, the person who is steering the initiative, but then you've also got people like the users who is actually going to be using the product. If you're selling in a payroll software, and then the HR person, or if it's a bigger company...

So here's a good example. If you're selling in a payroll solution to a small company, it may be the founder, or they might have a HR advisor that you want to speak to because they're still small, they don't need a full time person, obviously a full-time founder founder, if you're selling into a large company. I worked in experience in the HR team, there was 100 of us on one floor. And that was only a percentage of the HR function in total. There was a whole team in the corner that did benefits on reward, there was a whole team that did compliance, there's a whole team that did learning and development. So this is why it's so important to know the different categories, different segmentations of your ideal customer profile, because actually, it was the head of reward that you might need to speak to, not the founder. And again, that's why your messaging has to be different to the different personas. And just to go in a little bit deeper, each of these personas will have their own pain points and their own challenges.

And one of the best hacks which is again, so simple when you hear it, but again, not many people actually do it, is go and look at the job descriptions for these roles. So if you're looking to sell to HR managers, or you're looking to sell to CMOS, go to LinkedIn, pretend that you're looking for your next job, which is a chief marketing officer. And just look at what the responsibilities and the objectives of those roles are. Straight away, after looking at five different job adverts, you'll see the patterns that generating demand increasing brand awareness, complementing the sales pipeline will be three core and common objectives. So then if it's an objective, then obviously they're going to to have to, not overcome it, but they might need help achieving those objectives. And that could be a pain point that they have at the moment. So look at job descriptions, and look at them on a weekly basis as well. I've always put on a calendar appointment every Friday lunchtime, I go on LinkedIn, I've got a link in the calendar appointment, I just click on it. And I just look at the most recent jobs and just see if anything's changed. TikTok wasn't on job descriptions before for any b2c brands. Now it is, you know, new technologies, new strategies, new channels are always evolving. So keep your finger on the pulse and just look at job descriptions every week.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, another thing as well, just for me, a fundamental marketing principle is when you really, really understand the customer. And another way, you know, you mentioned personas there, another way is the jobs to be done framework, you really need to be thinking about, yeah, what are the motivations of my potential customers? Like what are those pain points, which would ultimately are then motivations. And in your marketing, communication, that's really how you should speak to them, instead of speaking about yourself, like we have this amazing, you know, feature this, this product, it's speaking to their pain points, motivations, that's going to resonate much better.

Mark Colgan
One thing that we didn't mentioned in the intro was that I also run The Product Onborders, where we look at SaaS product onboarding, I did a review earlier this week, won't obviously name the company... Their headline on their website was "meet the world's most intelligent online meeting platform". And my feedback was like, "so what? I didn't wake up in the morning wanting to look at the world's most intelligent meeting platform. I wanted to solve a problem". That problem was increasing engagement within my sale schools, closing deals faster and achieving my revenue goals. That should be the messaging.

And I know you talk a lot about this, Todd, about that outcome, lead and benefit lead messaging, not just the features and the widgets, or, you know, no one cares about your product. That's what I keep telling founders as well. And it's very hard advice to hear. But no one cares, what they do care about is them and what their challenges are, and how can they overcome those challenges and look good. That's what people want. They want to look good. They do. So your messaging has to speak to that. I don't want to say ego, but it has to play on those motivations. And those drivers of the individuals.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, got it. So we need to have the right mindset, we need to know who our ideal customer profile is, we need to know the specific people are within the company. And for me, this is kind of the super interesting bit, the kind of meat of the tactics is like, you talk about it as triggers, right?

Instead of just, like, once you know who these people are, instead of just going on to LinkedIn and saying like, "okay, I'm going to segment by 200 plus employees in this particular industry in the US", like, whatever those things are, you mentioned that only a small percentage of those people will be actually looking to purchase at that moment. So yeah, the triggers you speak about it as a way of kind of giving you extra signals when they're kind of propensity to buy is a bit higher. So maybe you can just speak just on a top level about like, what are these triggers and kind of how do they work.

Mark Colgan
So, to frame the idea of triggers, you gave a great example. Let's say that your ideal customer profile is software companies in San Francisco with over 200 employees. If you went to LinkedIn and did a search for that, you will find thousands of companies, then you might say, "I want to target chief marketing officers". So you'll go and put that criteria and look at the list of chief marketing officers officers. And you might find that there's several thousands of chief marketing officers in let's say, in North America, not just San Francisco, just make the numbers bigger. Could all of those chief marketing officers find your product valuable? Probably yes. Are all of those in a need at the moment? Are they in a pain that they need to find the solution for? Most likely not.

So what when I talk about triggers, I'm really trying to understand what happens to your prospects or what happens to what happened to your customers, before they signed up to work with you. And we're using triggers to think about these scenarios and things that can happen is a really effective way of really segmenting your list to only find that 3%, who are actively buying, and I split these down into three different levels.

So I know we shared a beer in Amsterdam, when I when I saw you last year - I love an IPA. And that's why I wanted to use the acronym of IPA. So the three levels are individual level. And there's the persona level. And then there's the account level. I've got a webinar, which I put together on this, and I think we're going to include the link in the show notes. But to give you an idea, personal is what's happening to that person, is it a job change, are they using a particular technology? That's some of the good triggers. The persona is what's happening to this role? Are they currently hiring in their team, are they going to have changes that are coming up for them on that individual as well, that you could also think about? So just jumping back to the individual, what events are they attending? Because if they're going to an event they're looking to learn. So that could be a reason to start a conversation. Are they engaging with particular content or influencers on social media? That's another way to start the conversation. And then on the account level, have they raised a round of funding? Are they moving to new offices? what's happening on the account level that would signal that they might be needing to buy from you.

An example, for the account level; if a company has just raised a round of series B funding, they are going to have to do so many things differently to get to the to their next kind of goals. And obviously, to hit the targets from the VCs or the institutions when they raise that money from then they have done previously. Now, if your product can help them get there, perfect time to speak to them. So now you've seen that from the 7000 CMOS that you had on LinkedIn from your search, maybe there's only 200 of them who have just raised around of series B. Start there. And I'm not saying to neglect the rest of the CMOS, because you may get lucky, there might be people who are planning to find a solution. But I would always start with those triggers and those sort of signals.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, I totally understand the concept, it makes complete sense. And I really loved the video you made and I will link to in the show notes. You call them like lead sourcing playbooks and you have 14 of them, we don't have to go through every single one, we definitely don't have time.

But maybe you can give, like, an example of how that looks in the real world, because you have to often use software for this right? With third party tools that can help you, so maybe you can give one or two examples that have worked particularly well for you.

Mark Colgan
Yeah, I always like to give the examples that are quite easy for people to implement.

So one of those is "the new role". So, you can, using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, if you're doing outbound sales, and you haven't spent 60 pounds or 80 on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, just do it. It saves you so much time, and it allows you to build lists of leads. So what you might do is put in 7000 CMOS into one list, and call that list "CMOS in North America". What that list will start to tell you over time is that - I'm thinking of numbers - 340 people in this list have started a new role, go and speak to those people. Because when you start a new role, no matter what job you're going into, or any any senior role, you're usually going in there to improve the existing state, or to completely revamp it, or there's new objectives that you're being given. So, therefore, people are in more of a buying mode, they're looking for the solutions, they get in and they just go "oh, crap, I didn't realise how bad our CRM was, we need a new CRM", or they might even look for a service provider like PPC, "okay, these are the targets that I need to hit, I need to increase the top of the funnel leads that I'm generating". So when somebody starts a new role, they are more likely to be buying, so that's one of them, which is a really easy one to understand.

And another one to start with, another one that I love, is the in-market. So, with that, the playbook is all about finding people who are using or interested in a similar software, and I'll give a really clear example. I was helping one of my friends who's a cold email copywriter. As much as he can write great cold emails, he was struggling to find clients who are looking for help. We went to Product Hunt. And we looked to see who had up voted cold email software like Mailshake, Like Reply, Lemlist, we then took all of the up people that are voted because we took that as a signal, as though they're interested in this product. They might be a friend of Sujan Patel, of Mailshake, or Guillaume of Lemlist, however, they may be using the platform. And then we put all of these leads into one list. And we started to slowly send emails out to them saying, "hey, I see that you're a fan of Mailshake. Hope your campaigns are going well, if you're interested more than happy to give you a free review, or a 15 minute video of me reviewing your cold email sequence". That generated so much business for him that he's now built an agency, but using that model to constantly find people. And now he is just managing the people who are writing the copy, super simple and really easy to implement.

Todd Chambers
Now forget the spray and pray approach like just have a much more strategic and laser focused way of doing it. So now we've covered the kind of the prospecting part and definitely check out those lead sourcing playbooks. But like, in practice, you probably end up with a list of - I'm just gonna throw a hypothetical number - 100 people, I guess, then the next bit is you have to kind of prepare the data, right? You have to enrich it, you have to... and so on. If you can just speak briefly about that.

Mark Colgan
Yeah, so this is the boring part, the unsexy part to be honest, and it's all about just preparing the campaign getting the data ready.

So you'll want to put all that data maybe into a master spreadsheet, and you want to clean the data. And what I mean by cleaning the data is if you've scraped that data, or if you've had somebody manually putting their data in, then you want to make sure that there's you know, some people's names on LinkedIn are capitalised. So you just want to make sure that their sentence case capitalised, for example, their job title might say "master of growth", or "growth universe consultant", you know, some wacky sort of stuff like that. So make sure you're reading it because you're more than likely be using these this data from the spreadsheet in your outreach campaign for merge tags, and I can explain that in a bit more detail. So just make sure you clean the data, make sure that their name isn't Mr. Mark Colgan, but because that's what people might put on their profile. Also, company names. So if you're going to use the merge tag for a company name, make sure it doesn't say Speak On Podcasts LLC, or Upraw LTD, remove the LTD because it's a signal that it's an automated email, basically. So clean the data.

The next step is verify, please verify the emails. If the email verification tool that you use says that this email is invalid, maybe check that for a different tool, you pretty much work the same anyway. But don't send emails to an invalid email addresses, you'll just increase your chances of appearing in the spam folder or your emails. Not landing into the inbox doesn't mean that you can never do anything with these leads, they're still good leads. But you might just want to start on LinkedIn first, rather than email.

The next step is to segment. So segment these, your big list of, let's say it was 100. But let's say in that 100 that you had some companies who had just raised a round of funding and other companies or other people on this list who have just started a new role. So you might want to just put a segment in there that says: are they recently raised funding? Or is it a new role? Because again, your message needs to be different to those different people because they're going through different triggers. And then that's where personalisation comes in, as well. So that's how once you've got the segmentation, you can then start to personalise the emails, to personalise the content of the emails to the individuals that you've got.

Todd Chambers
So all the different steps; now we've got nice clean data. I guess this is the the more of the sexy bit, which is actually doing the outreach. So loads of different ways to do that, right? There's LinkedIn, there's just like using things like Mailshake, which is just like direct email. There's social media engagement. Like, there's all different ways of doing that.

Before we get into those specific channels, like, how should you be thinking about it? It's like, you don't just, as you said before, you don't just want to be going in like, "hey, you ready to buy my stuff". Like, it's more about a conversation, it's more about bringing them some value, like what are the lessons you've learned with outreach?

Mark Colgan
Yeah, so this this really comes down to what is your average deal size, and this is where this number is really important. If you're selling a product, which is 10k a year, you probably can't spend too much time making every email 100%, personalised and customised to each individual person on that list, you're probably not going to send them a piece of direct mail to their address, and you might not spend the time creating a video for them if your average deal size is 50k $50,000 or maybe 100. If it's $100,000 deal for just year one, you could probably send a person around using something like TaskRabbit to hand deliver a letter to them, it's gonna cost it's gonna cost you $15. But you've got that in in the potential budget because that the deal size is large. So you really need to think about where you need to start from. So what I would say is if it's 10k, and just above 10k, a month, a year, email and LinkedIn or email and social - that's your two channels. If you're between 10 to 50k, you might want to do email, social, maybe some video prospecting.

Just a quick tip, don't record a personalised video for the first email, it takes a lot of resources to create a personalised video straightaway, I see better successes using video in their prospecting in the sequence. So it might be an email two or three. And what you may want to do is send the videos to people who have opened the email but not replied.

Todd Chambers
So if if the LTV is more than a million a year, you send like a carrier pigeon with a bottle of wine around the neck...

Mark Colgan
I want to send a mariachi band to an office. I've said this so many times, I will do it one day, I want to get a mariachi band in the in the foyer of a large business and just singing the song about about my business.

Todd Chambers
That'd be so cool!

I'm actually really surprised by what you just said there about the video, because that was going to be one of my questions around video. And to me, I don't know what some of the best tools, I think it was simply Vidyard. But someone sent me something on LinkedIn. And they sent me a video and I was like, it just stood out. So in your opinion, that's not the best thing to do.

Mark Colgan
It depends. So if you're around that 10k of your average deal size? Probably not. If you have a larger deal size, then yes, but you really want to make sure your targeting is right, because you're going to be recording a minute video for 1000 prospects, for example, you really have to be confident that your targeting is right.

One of the biggest things is though you remember your email is about starting a conversation. If you have too many links in your your first email or in in your emails in general, and you're sending out 1000 there's a higher chance of you triggering the spam filters. When you're talking about scaling your outbound. It's best to not put that first video in the first email, but do include it in maybe the second or the third. It's all about how you're going to market and how you plan to scale.

Todd Chambers
Because there are like, I think, we've got email, phone, video, social and direct mail. So direct mail and phone seemed like the more old school ones. And you were talking about like when you first started out in recruitment doing cold calling. And over 10 years ago, I'd also done cold calling and I think I feel like, these days, I consider cold calling almost... Yeah, really old school, definitely something that you wouldn't do. But is it kind of like, almost come back full circle now, because nobody's doing it actually. cold calling is is potentially a way to go.

Mark Colgan
Yeah. So my other mantra is, is just be different. It doesn't take much to be different in the world these days. And when it comes to sales, that's picking up the phone and having a conversation with your idle prospect, when the majority of people aren't doing it. People have been saying the phone is dead. And they've been saying that for years. It's just not true.

As part of the course that I coach about outbound prospecting, I brought on the VP of sales, a really well known software company, he said that this year, so we're recording this toward the beginning of March, he has had less than five cold calls. And he's a he's a very visible VP of sales that you could sell multiple products to he's had less than five calls. So there's this call reluctance when it comes to sales reps, and also get it if you're a founder and you're bootstrapping and you haven't raised around a funding and you don't have the money, you're likely not going to include phone calling as part of your sequencing. If you've got $100,000 deal value, then you've probably raised some funds. So you've got the capacity, you've got the resource to introduce calls.

Todd Chambers
I love what you said there: "be different". And I think that's such a good core fundamental marketing principle as well. And I think Seth Godin, in his book, "Purple Cow"... it's a great book to read for anyone just just be different. For example, yesterday, - we're hiring for multiple roles - and a girl... We have like an application process. And we don't require a video, but she sent me a video and it just stood out. She you know, she earned that that intro call. So be different. I think that's that's great advice in really anything you're doing in business.

Mark Colgan
And Todd, it's often the most simple things to be different. I don't know if you remember my hype video for the webinar I did the other week. Yes, I'm sitting here, I'm sitting in the same place I was in my office, I've got a whiteboard. And I just put some really pumping music on in the background and then just lifted up a whiteboard. It's it took me two minutes, but you know who else is doing that? Did it work? Was it effective? I don't know. But it definitely interrupts the pattern when people are looking at their LinkedIn all the time. And it just mixes it up a little bit.

Todd Chambers
That's so true. It's interrupting the pattern. And that's the same with marketing. So like somebody's searching for a particular solution. They're probably googling stuff they're searching around, they're looking at multiple websites. Everyone often says the same thing, even if their messaging is good. It's like, you're very much in a sea of sameness. So yeah, it's that it's that pattern interrupt like "oh, why this is different", and it kind of stops and make you think so.

Mark Colgan
And you raise a really important point, which we haven't mentioned yet, is when you're in the b2b world, you still selling to humans. So remember that it's a human at the end of the day that you're trying to start that conversation with and build that connection with and build that relationship with, when your emails and your messages aren't coming across that you're pitching, you're actually trying to help them. And you're helping them because your solution can help them.

You want to be the guide in their journey of being the hero. A lot of companies make the mistake of making themselves the hero, "we are the best we can do this, we do that this is what we do." And again, no one wakes up in the morning, going like, "oh, I really want this". They're the hero in their journey. And your job in sales and marketing is to guide them through. And if you think about it, I'm not a Star Wars fan, but Yoda and Luke Skywalker - Yoda is the guide. He's the one that does it, you've got Q and James Bond. They're the characters that you need to be and let your customers be the hero.

Todd Chambers
Love that. Really, really nice advice.

Again, you said there's, like, we could do a whole different podcast on outreach in all those different channels, we definitely won't go through all of them. But what do you think are some good examples, one or two examples of things that you've seen, whether it's not video, like how can you really kind of have that pattern interrupt, stand out? Like what things in 2021 do you think are a good strategy to try?

Mark Colgan
Yeah, so subject lines is a good place to start. So keeping a subject line short and sweet, you can differentiate yourself just by standing out with the subject line. Part of the job at Speaking On Podcast is that we introduce our customers to potential podcast hosts, we know they get pitched all the time. One of our subject lines is like "oh no, another pitch..." We know that they're thinking that, so we put that in our subject line. And we've tested it out it works in some industries doesn't work and others, it depends on how busy they are. And our messaging is like, "look, we know you're fed up, we know you're fed up of all these pictures. However, we've spent time going through your recent episodes. And here's something that we think could resonate with our audience based on what our customer can talk about". That's all we're doing. It's just it doesn't take much to be different. Rather than saying, "Hi, Todd, I really like your podcast, I have somebody that wants to come and speak on your show, let me know like", that's just the generic one. So subject lines is a good place to start and really is the copy and the messaging show that you understand the challenges that your prospects are going through. And you instantly build more rapport with that individual because you're coming to the conversation as a peer.

So by saying things like, "as you already know, x y Zed is a challenge for companies such as yourselves, would you be interested in finding out how we help companies achieve ABC and get results like X Y Z? Let me know if this would be a value to you. Let me know if you're interested". Don't go in with a really, really strong call to action by saying "let's book a 30 minute call". Because, again, no one woke up in the morning thinking, "I hope I book a 30 minute call with a salesperson today". Be softer with the call to action. Gong produced some data that said that the most effective call to action. And I saw this about a year before this data came out, which is asking for interest. "Are you interested in learning more? Would you like to find out more? Would this be of value to you?" So all you need to do. Because again, we're starting conversations, we're not selling anything.

Todd Chambers
I guess if at least people say no, then you can kind of like stop bombarding those people as well. Yeah, a question I had that I thought about, kind of, is there a way to warm up the audience first? So you know, I've heard of people doing this using paid ads. Like if you're using LinkedIn, for example, then you can use that same targeting to get them with ads. Have you ever seen anybody do that successfully?

Mark Colgan
Yeah, again, depends on the budget, right? Depends on your budget and your average deal size. So if you've got a bigger deal size, you can afford to do some kind of warm up through pre targeting, which I think is what it's what it's called, whether you use something like ad roll or LinkedIn, because you've got the list, because you got the emails, you can do it. Another simple way, if you haven't got the budget, is just go and look at their profile, look at their LinkedIn profile. Even if you hire a VA, the VA has, let's use that 100 list again, 100 LinkedIn profiles, get the VA, click sign into your account, and click on each one of those LinkedIn profiles, opens up in a new tab. Todd has viewed your profile, now everyone's gonna see it. But... "Todd, okay". And then you know, two days later that VA might then go back onto that profile and click follow. Again, another touch point. And you know, this might be a week or two weeks before you even send that first email or have that first interaction. So there definitely are ways of warming up and you just want to be familiar, we like to be within our comfort zone, the majority of the time, and especially in the b2b environment, when there's a risk involved in any purchase. We want things to feel safe and to feel familiar. And then I guess the next thing is just kind of test and refine, right? See what messaging works.

Todd Chambers
Try different things, yeah. What advice can you give around analysing results and fine tuning?

Mark Colgan
Yes. So you know, I've got to a position in my kind of experience now where I can pretty much write - and this is going to sound arrogant - I can write a good message pretty much in the first go, because I've just done so many of them. I was working with a client who's working with an outsource agency, and they're split testing every line of the email and I'm just like, "don't do that". It's pointless. Just A/B test the subject line, and then maybe the message and the value proposition that you're giving and the call to action. Do that for the first sample, and then roll with it and you'll know this as well. But how many companies have you seen that do A/B testing, but they just pick 50% in the list, and then 50, the other 50%, they A/B split. And then they're like, "oh, this one worked better". But they've got no one else to send the emails to now, because they've actually gone through the full the full addressable market. So only split test the percentage of the overall hole, such a simple mistake. And you and I know this and see it all the time.

Todd Chambers
So final step ,then, is, and you touched on this in the beginning as well, we were talking about making sure you have someone to close the deals, let's assume this all goes well. You're suddenly having loads and loads of conversations and actually 234 conversations in or touch points, you're actually booking demos, you're having consultations with people... What are some fundamental things you should be thinking about in terms of, you know, pipeline management?

Mark Colgan
Yeah, so first of all, be ready to respond to incoming or replies, inbound emails, be ready to respond. And you can simply do that just by having a couple of copy and pasted snippets, which is like, "hey Todd, thanks for getting back in touch. Here's the information that I was referring to. And then here's a link to book some time with me". If that's appropriate.

Don't worry about the tool. Don't worry about the technology. A Word doc. I often say as well to the companies I work with is, forget the technology. Let's just get it in a Word document. First of all, Google Google document. Let's keep it simple. And here's everything with a simple stick. So yes, it has some canned snippets and replies ready to go back, also respond almost immediately. These are very, very warm conversations, and people have expressed an interest in finding out more, so make sure you've got somebody there to reply, it is honestly unacceptable to let it go for longer than the time that you're in bed. If somebody has replied to your email, respond as quickly as you can to it. And then also, from a pipeline point of view, make sure that you understand what the different stages are in the sales process after prospecting. Prospecting is just the beginning of the sales process, you've also got to convert these leads into customers.

And then obviously, the next part of your business is customer fulfilment. So how do you deliver the service to them, but in that middle bit of conversion, and again, the smaller the deal size, the quicker it takes to convert that lead into a sale, the bigger the deal size, it might be a multiple months of a deal that you have to work through, but you need to understand what those different stages are. Typically, it's qualification. So yes, they were the right ICP the right person, but do they really have a need? Then it's discovery. It's like, what are their main challenges, which part of our product service and features would actually be able to help them and then you're pretty much working to close. So it might be contract negotiation, or it could be just simply sign up here, transact hearing convert, you need to know those stages. And you need to know what you need to do at each of those stages.

Todd Chambers
Amazing advice. One thing you just said there about response times, and it was just yesterday, maybe you have some more context in this, but where did I read it? And it said something like 73% of customers go with the first responder? I've no clue if that's true or not, but like the first person that gets back to them, like, is that true?

Mark Colgan
Yeah. I don't know that specific number in fact, but the logic? Yeah. 100%.

What was I doing... Oh, yeah, I needed to go to the dentist just to have go to a dental hygienist and I reached out to three. I'm in Portugal, it's not the same as in the UK in the US, it's not as quick and you have to get used to that. The first one that came back, I went and had my hygiene thing done. So yeah, 100%. One of them hasn't even replied, Todd!

Todd Chambers
Yeah, it's crazy, right? Just bonkers, and it happens in SaaS, it happens in sales, and it happens to every company, you've just got to make sure you've got some type processes in place. But I feel like we got so much value into such a short amount of time. So I think that's a pretty good lay of the land in terms of how a SaaS company can think about outbound. And in the show notes we'll put links to some extra resources where they can watch that webinar. We'll go through different playbooks. And yeah, we'll break that down a little bit further. Thank you for all that information.

So right now you're working on Speak On Podcasts, which is... Maybe you can just tell us about that. What's the new venture?

Mark Colgan
We built Speak On Podcasts after my co-founder and I were separately pitching ourselves and other customers onto podcast. We were connected by a mutual friend. And after about an hour's conversation, my co-founder, who is called Jakub, after an hour conversation with him, I was like, "you seem like a cool dude. Why fight and go up against each other, let's just collaborate". Never met him in person. But we started a business. That was in June 2020. We did a month work station in Tenerife in August. And you know, we live together for a month and I haven't lived with anyone for age, I was living and working remotely and used to my own space. It worked out so well, we achieved so much in that one month. Fast forward about eight or nine months later, we're now aggressively hiring for new roles. And we've grown from a team of me and him doing it separately to 12 people currently now, and we're expanding that to 15, maybe even 16.

So growing really quickly, and essentially what we do is we help b2b technology brands get in front of their ideal audience by Speaking on the podcasts that their audience is already listening to. So there's a ton of research a ton of matchmaking. And then the nuts and bolts is the outreach. And it is literally the same things that we've spoken about today. ICP buyer personas, their podcast hosts, the research, the clean the collate the verify. That's our research, the outreach message, super simple, be different start a conversation, the follow up, that's what our podcast booking agents do is they manage the back and forth between the podcast host and the customer. It's the same model. It's the same four or five different steps.

Todd Chambers
Yeah. And that just shows you've been able to grow that in such a short amount of time using those exact principles that you've just spoken about. So yeah, clearly, it's working for you. Kudos!

So yeah, just podcasting. And this is an interesting subject for me. I think this is episode 13, or 12 of this podcast. I mean, I'm new to podcasting. I was hearing some stats. So I get very numbers, but like, most people start a podcast and they quit between five, six or seven podcasts, somewhere in that in that mark. And there are over a million podcasts?

Mark Colgan
Yeah, I think it's 1.9 million, close to 2 million.

Todd Chambers
Okay, wow. So on that note, you can hear people thinking, like, "wow, podcast is so saturated now. It's so hard to stand out". But what do you see as the advantages of starting a podcast?

Mark Colgan
There's a lot, and I'll do my best to remember them all.

The first thing I would say, if you're thinking of starting a podcast, forget about the numbers. A lot of people, Todd, look at podcasting and they put it in the same bucket as a demand gen activity, like pay per click, or like a webinar that they're going to launch and they want to know; "how many people are going to sign up to the webinar, to get paid ads? What's the return on ad spend?" There is no tangible return on ad spend or ROI for podcasting. However, the intangible benefits are you become known liked and trusted in your network. People are familiar with you, they have a very good understanding of what it is that you do. You're connecting people, you know, going back to that motto of "always be connecting".

And, you know, the question I often say to people is like, what is the ROI of your ideal customer listening to you talk for 35 minutes in their ears? you're wearing your own air pods, right? That's a really intimate part of you that you're hearing me talk to you about. And you've heard me talk for 45 minutes, right into the head. You could be running, you could be showering, you could be doing the dishes, you know, people are consuming this content all the time.

And if you're there talking about how the challenges that your customers face, how you've helped them overcome those challenges, also talk about your mess ups, the things that you've made mistakes and as well be human, because it's similar to your point about people go to the first responder, the person that responded first, if I'm looking at two products that pretty much do the same thing. I can think of several sales and marketing automation platform to do exactly the same thing. But if I'm constantly hearing the marketers or, you know, the leaders of one company talk, you know, what the customer is achieving, and what are some of the mistakes, the data or the sort of stuff, I'm gonna go with them because they're more likeable, they're more approachable, I feel like I already know them. I like their style. And they're the ones I'm going to make a decision. So when it's a commodity, and software is becoming even more commoditised, it's going to be branding, and the experience that you give people, that's going to be more important.

You've got companies like Drift that built their business on pure brand. Gong.io, they've been on over 400 podcasts. One company used podcasts to increase their employer branding, because they needed to hire 400 people after raising a huge round of funding. So they just went on every podcast and it drove inbound interest because they were just talking about the amazing experiences that it create for their employees and how happy their employees are. Gong, again to use that as an example, they just get brand. And I think any SaaS company now that is looking at how you market... They did a Super Bowl ad for this year! They also put their best performing sales reps on billboards in the towns that they live in, in the cities.

You know, branding is so, so important. And yeah, podcasting is just one really, really effective channel to think about. And again, one of the strategies that podcast hosts use, and you may know this, is, some podcast hosts only interview their ideal customers, because it's an easy way to start the conversation. So yeah, definitely. And I'm more than happy to talk to any SaaS founders thinking about podcasting as well.

Todd Chambers
For me, I think, what are some of the other benefits as well, it's just learning. I just, I mean, it's like having conversations for me, I get to learn I get to speak to, I don't take the same strategy of only speaking to people in our ideal customer profile. I've kind of ruled our way completely out the window. I'm definitely seeing this as the long game. And my goal is to do a hundred podcasts, but just learning and speaking to really interesting people about the business is such a nice kind of intangible benefit.

Mark Colgan
It's also evergreen as well, Todd. I love and respect the work that you do, but as soon as you stop spending money on ads, those ads aren't showing anymore. I get people reaching out to me say "hey Mark, I really loved your interview with the "Brutal Truth". That was a year and a half ago that went live! Yeah, people are discovering it.

And I think that's another important thing - which I probably need to do a better job articulating - looking at those triggers and signals, when people are looking for solutions. And let's say that you call the podcast title, "how to do outbound sales for b2b SaaS companies". That's exactly what someone's gonna search and they might search it in six months. They hear me talk. Mark seems to know what he's talking about, Todd asked him some good questions, good answers came out, and they might reach out to me. So it's like this evergreen piece of content that lives out there.

And then of course, as you know, you guys are great at content, you can produce a ton of content of every interview that you actually host and that goes live. So there's tones of benefits.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, and another one as well; so having your own podcast is one thing, obviously what you guys do you help people get on other people's podcasts, basically you're leveraging other people's audiences, right? I mean, all you have to do is basically turn up, have a conversation, speak about what you know. And you know, I the same. We spoke on a PPC podcast, and I had the same thing. People messaged me every couple of weeks, "hey, I listened to on the PPC podcast, super interesting". Like, yeah, leveraging other people's audiences is underrated.

Mark Colgan
Yeah. And you're there to show up, give value and you know, connect people. And again, I keep coming back to that mantra - "always be connecting". And that could mean offering value, it doesn't necessarily have to mean "Todd, meet John, or Todd, meet Lucy", it's not always person to person, it could just be offering value and just connecting people with a message. And like, one of the reasons why we built Speak On Podcasts is that ultimately that's what we're able to do. We help people share their message to a much wider audience than they currently can by themselves.

And you're right, one of our customers just went on a podcast, 40,000 listeners per month. So huge podcast, that's 40,000 people that are now going to hear about his his story, his journey. You know, he and I won't go into detail, but he's got a supplements company, which is he built it because his daughter had these issues. And he discovered that this particular supplement can help with that. And then you know, this was how it spiralled into this multimillion dollar supplement company that he has. Now, that story is fascinating. And people want to know about it. And then they're like, "seems like a nice guy. He did it to help his daughter. Now he's helping other people. I'll go and check that out". Yeah, simple.

Todd Chambers
Cool. Well, listen, I really appreciate you taking the time, you gave us so much value on the outbound stuff in such a short amount of time, and really wish you the best of luck with Speak On Podcasts, seems like you guys have, yeah, really struck on some gold. So, so good for you. And where can people get in touch with you in the multiple places people can get in touch with you?

Mark Colgan
If people do have any additional questions, the best place to reach me is LinkedIn. It's Mark Colgan. To find out about all of the different fingers and pies I'm working on at the moment, you can go to Markcolgan.co.uk. And I'm actually launching a $5 outbound prospecting review where if you come to yellowo.co.uk/5, put in your 3 LinkedIn profiles of who you're trying to target, your subject line and your first cold email, I'll do a video review of that email and send you back suggestions of how you can improve it. I just want to help as many people as I can, and just that $5 isn't gonna make me rich, but it just stops the spam and gives gives a little bit more intent from the people that send it through. So thank you, Todd. I've really enjoyed the call.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, you're welcome and speak soon!

Thanks for listening to the podcast guys. for links to any other resources, head over to https://uprawmedia.com/blog. And super important - please let us know how we're doing! Check the links in the description where you can leave some feedback, or you can just email me todd@uprawmedia.com. Till next time, adios!

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