686 – 1.8 Million Dollar Direct Outreach Case Study With Will Wang

Podcast: Download (Duration: 31:46 — 29.2MB)

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Will Wang

Podcast highlights:

01:26 – What’s in store
03:03 – Setting the context
03:48 – Introverted prospecting
04:40 – Dealing with change
06:28 – Is it the right strategy?
08:46 – Who are the people you want?
09:45 – Going after the audience
12:11 – The thing that only you do
13:31 – We’re the best, and here’s why
15:19 – Using tech to get the details
17:35 – The three key email elements
19:18 – When people don’t respond
21:41 – We’re not ready just yet…
24:00 – Making it work in your favor
25:07 – It doesn’t end with the sale
26:48 – Making things even better
28:45 – Why Australia has great marketers

Expand your marketing toolkit with help from James

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 686. And this episode is about a $1.8 million direct outreach case study. Brought along my friend, Will Wang, from GrowthLabz.com. Hey, Will.

Will: Hey, James, thanks for having me back.

James: Always welcome, Will. You deliver fantastic concepts on this show. And at my events, we always get a huge amount of feedback from them, because you’re talking about stuff that we don’t find out there in the public, especially the opportunity to peek behind a $1.8 million direct outreach case study is rare and unique. So firstly, let’s define outreach case study. What are we going to be talking about today?

What’s in store

Will: Sure. So what we’re going to be talking about is the exact step-by-step process that we use for one of our clients to go out into the market with a product or service that we’re offering and integrate a sale, which is worth about $1.8 million. So this is literally going to be the exact process that we run for them to both get the lead and also close the lead and turn them into a good client.

James: Right. So you’re basically going to show us what sort of things happen for a paying client of your agency. And of course, we’re going to need to keep some of the elements of this conversation with a degree of confidentiality, just to preserve the interest of the client in the market, etc. But I think what we’re really wanting to share here is a message that it is possible, because some people would say, Well, you know, I haven’t been doing podcasts, or I haven’t been doing videos, so I don’t have a warm list. And you know, they’re really thinking the only alternative is big paid ad campaigns. But when you’re starting out cold, wouldn’t it be nice if you could have processes that you know actually have worked for other people, and you could start pretty close to the mark? And, of course, if you want help with any of what we talk about today, I encourage you to get in touch with Will. He is truly an expert in this topic, as validated by this example. So how do you want to step us through this?

Will: Cool, thanks, James. Really good kind of praise, I really appreciate that. I guess how we start is, you know, I’ll give the listeners a little bit of the background on what the company does, and the type of deal that we’re going after. We will make an announcement and there’ll be a whole bunch of PR around this in the coming weeks, as the deal gets announced. But just for now, obviously, you have to keep a little bit of confidentiality around this.

Setting the context

So to start off with, the company that we’re working for, they provide a service. So think of them as similar to, let’s just say, a PR agency, in that they help their clients with some kind of communication. And they were going after the corporates, right? So the big companies here in Australia, the ones who are listed and obviously have big budgets, a lot of team members on board. And it’s a good fit, because they needed the budget to do the service that my client has to offer.

So that’s a bit of the context around who it is and kind of who we’re trying to get them into. So with the process itself, the way to think about it is, you know, I’ve been on your show a few times now talking about similar themes in terms of cold outreach, using email or using direct mail. But a lot has actually changed since the last time I was here. So a lot of the technology, a lot of the environment and how to do it has changed.

Introverted prospecting

So I think what I’ll do is I’ll take you through what we term the introspect process. So it just stands for introverted prospecting process, which we kind of came up with. Because if you listen to the podcast, my story is that I was an introvert, and kind developed a process of prospecting that didn’t have people shouting in my face and telling me to go away. So I guess, let’s start at the beginning and kind of walk through 12 steps and what we did there specifically for my client, and how that ended up with this big sale.

James: Yeah, that sounds great. And when you say things have changed, I’m curious about that. Obviously, in a field like ours, there’s a lot of innovation, and you’re using different platforms. You know, humans haven’t changed that much. But I imagine you found some of the processes that are more effective than other ways. And maybe sometimes some of the techniques you have been using stopped working. Could you just give an example of how you realized these things have changed?

Dealing with change

Will: Yeah. So the best example is a massive change recently. We kind of, you know, changed the way we fundamentally ran things. So what I mean by that is we were creating domains and using Google to to send a lot of emails for our clients. We noticed that, you know, fairly quickly and almost for some of the accounts overnight, the amount of emails getting into inboxes that we were sending just literally dropped, it literally fell off a cliff. And so what had happened was Google had implemented an algorithm that’s super strict, and it looks at the amount of emails or the types of emails you’re sending out from those inboxes. And if the emails look too similar, then it just blocks the account. So things like that change all the time, and we had to work at a process around it. And that process, even though it’s a lot more work on the humans within business, and within the process, it’s actually come back and given us much better results. So things like that just happen all the time in terms of what we’re doing.

James: And that’s why a professional agency like you is always researching and developing and coming up with solutions. And it was interesting for me to watch from the side there, because I’m involved in some of the operations of your business, because we have regular conversations. It was interesting to watch you adapt as the changes came through. There was no panic or crisis; it was like, Oh, this is now behaving differently, we need to find a new solution. And then within a day, you started testing new solutions, and then you found one that works. So I think that’s fantastic. A very mature approach to it.

Will: Yeah, thanks, James. I think the reason why we had to adapt to that kind of situation was we kind of built it with solid foundations, you know, built it on the premise of, we’ve got long term thinking when we do work with clients. And we want to do things that work long term rather than short term, little hacky things that might give you good results, and you know, in the next week or two, then you’re going to have to rework the entire process. So 90 percent of the process that we did was, it was still solid. It was just that one component which we had to change around. So it wasn’t a major change for us, fortunately,

James: Perfect. So take us through to the next stage.

Is it the right strategy?

Will: Cool. So let’s go first step-by-step in terms of this introspect process that we’ve created. Now, I’ll use my clients as a really good example of how to approach the things that we do. So the first step that we had with our clients, and not just with this one client, but all clients, is we kind of sit down and plan out to figure out if cold outreach is even the right strategy. Now, some businesses, depending on the customer lifetime value, which is how much a customer is worth to you over the next 12 to 24 months, or however long they’re going to stay with you, cold outreach might not actually be the most effective method. Because this client, each individual client to them was worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, it really did make sense to go deep and to use this process.

So that was the number one thing, looking to make sure we had the right strategy, and only focusing on one or two channels. So one of the biggest things that I come across, when we talk to new companies or new people looking to engage our services, is they want to try all these different channels, all these different platforms. Really, they only need one or two have a really successful campaign.

James: Right. That’s probably very common. People are like, Okay, I gotta do this, this, this, this, and this, and I’m watching this, and you just say, okay, of all of that, let’s start here. Let’s do this one.

Will: Yeah, and it’s really funny, because I think when we started talking, James, that’s the problem I had as well.

James: I had that exact conversation with you. You know, it’s an entrepreneurial affliction, by the way. Even when we solve things. I’ve had a few clients lately where we’ve actually solved the thing they wanted help with, and we got it under control and killing it. And then immediately, they start finding extra things. In fact, the next person I’m speaking to after our call today, he’s got this knack of finding opportunities like no one else I’ve ever met, like, every single week, he’s got this entire new venture that could be a multi-million dollar thing. And he’s very successful. He has the biggest eyes ever for opportunity. You know, that’s who gets attracted these roles of being a driver. And a company who wants to grow rapidly and become a bigger company is going to have someone that visionary in the front there, seeing opportunity in everything where other people don’t see opportunity.

Will: Exactly right. So I think that that’s the one key thing with these guys, because they were in the exact same boat, they were looking at five different platforms or channels. And we just said, these are the two that we’re going to focus on. And so that was, for us, step number one of the process.

James: Perfect.

Who are the people you want?

Will: So step two, for us, it’s all about finding the right people. And I’ll go for these fairly quickly. Because in some of the other podcasts and also on stage, I kind of covered some of this as well. So step two for us is all about looking introspectively and seeing who your best customers are. Not just in terms of profit, although that is very important, but also in terms of enjoyment and liking who you’re working with. So that was one thing that we really narrowed down on and said, Look, who are the best customers? Who have you got the best results for? And who do you want to work for every single day of the week?

James: Right. And just for the benefit, if you’re listening to this, and you haven’t encountered some of Will’s other material, there’s several other episodes on SuperFastBusiness. Look for Will Wang. And also, if you’re a member of SuperFastBusiness, inside there, you’ll see his amazing presentation from SuperFastBusiness Live 2019. And I’m pretty excited about what you’ll be speaking about in 2020, because we’ve already announced that event, Will, so always keeping it fresh.

Will: Yeah, I have to think of something else to bring. Some more case studies, I think.

James: There’s no question between now and then you’ll have some amazing developments.

So then, you’re still over that people category. You’re looking for something else, right?

Going after the audience

Will: Yes. The right people, looking inside the business in terms of who you want to work with. And then the third step is, you know, looking outside. So going, where can we find these people? So in this campaign in particular, we found that the leads, or the audience that my clients were going after had all gone to a certain event, and it was actually quite easy to find the list of attendees to this event. So that’s not the only way to do it, obviously; there’s a whole bunch of different sources, both online or offline, that you can find people with. But the third step is knowing exactly who you’re targeting, and where you can go online or offline to get their details or to actually get in front of them.

James: It’s critically important. I looked at my data set from a survey that I did, and I compared it to a client’s this morning, and my client had a full one-third of her audience was actually not in employment. So we would have to say of her audience, those ones are probably the least likely to have the capacity to afford a solution. Whereas in mine, I think it’s less than two percent of my audience who filled out the survey are not in an employment situation. So I have a very different mix. So we’re able to exclude a portion of the audience when we’re thinking about what to sell.

And then I love that next thing. I like to phrase it as, who has my customer? Where are they? And if you can find whole pools of them, I mean, it’s ironic, around about the time we’re recording this, I’ve been speaking at the occasional event where the whole room is full of my perfect customer. And that’s a very strategic and obvious thing to do. But you can do it in the less obvious way – you can actually find clusters of customers out there. And you’ve managed to zoom in on a particular event where everyone had listed themselves as an attendee.

Will: Yeah. So that helped us a lot in terms of getting in front of the right people. Now there is a really important point that I’ll mention on this as well, just in terms of finding the people. And that’s to never buy lists that you can find online. And we’ve seen this happen time and time again. And the clients that we get on board that buy the list just never get good returns from it. Because they’re either old, people haven’t moved on from their jobs, or the list is just being hammered by a hundred other companies who have bought the same list.

James: And some of them have spam traps and things in there, don’t they? That are triggering the flags that are the sort of thing that would cause you to not have deliverability or to get your account in trouble.

Will: Yeah, exactly. If you get too many bounces, then your entire email domain is going to be in big trouble. So my takeaway is just never buy a list.

James: That’s the top tip. So you’d be better off to hire a researcher to compile a fresh list and get a list no one else has actually been approaching.

Will: Yeah, that’s exactly what we do.

James: Perfect.

The thing that only you do

Will: Cool. So that was the third point, which is, you know, where can we find these people? Now, the fourth point is more in terms of preparation. So it’s more understanding, you know, what parts of our business or what results have we got for our clients, which are uncopyable? So in other terms, I guess more salesy terms, it’s kind of like, what’s your unique selling proposition? Or what’s the one thing that we do better than anyone else? So if you can get as detailed or as tangible as possible, that’s great. So for our client, in this situation, we came up with a process. So kind of similar to what I’m doing with introspect process, we came up with a term for their process of how they do their job as well. And it just really stood out in terms of how they looked at the problem they were tackling. Now, if you don’t have a process, see if you can create one. But if not, you can use things like, we just do better customer service, although it isn’t as powerful, because it’s not something that’s quite tangible.

James: Yeah, like they say, avoid service or price, because they’re not really that unique, you know, not very valuable compared to some of the other points of difference. And you need to be able to answer that question, why would someone deal with you instead of dealing with someone else? And I think it’s Dan Kennedy who says, or doing nothing.

Will: Yeah, the biggest competitor isn’t actually your direct competitors. It’s the people that you want to work with saying that it’s too hard to do anything and just continuing on the same path.

James: Fascinating. What’s next?

We’re the best, and here’s why

Will: So next is, this is a little bit different. And this is something that people might not expect. But, you know, this is something that I kind of learned a lot from you, James. And it’s creating really, really good content. So a lot of the time when we speak to people about outreach, they just think, hey, write me some emails, I’m going to shoot it off to some people and it’s going to be good. But we spend a lot of time and effort getting the stuff right before we even send a single email. And this next step, or step five, is creating a case study that shows the entire process. It’s one thing to say, Hey, we’re the best in the world at this. And it’s another thing to present them with evidence and say, and here’s why. And here’s solid proof of what we’ve done before. And that’s why we think we’re the best in the world.

James: So far, this is sounding a lot like this podcast. It’s a specific case study, we have a very clear, ideal customer list, we know exactly where they’re hanging out on SuperFastBusiness. You’ve got your own special name for it, introspect process, and you’re stepping out a specific case study that’s got the results that someone listening to this might like to get. So you better tell us your website, Will.

Will: It’s GrowthLabz.com. And you’re right, we do eat our own dog food.

James: It does work. The case study podcasts that I’ve been publishing are always the ones that generate the most SuperFastBusiness members. Because it’s fine if I say that I can help someone, but it’s even better when the client gets on the show and says that I helped them and this is the result they got, and their scenario is quite relatable to the type of person listening to this show. It just makes sense. It’s so logical.

Will: Yeah, it is more powerful coming from someone else rather than yourself shouting about how good you are.

James: Yes.

Will: Having someone else do that, it’s just way more powerful.

James: Cool. So you get your case study. And so now you’ve got this proof, it’s demonstrative of a result that’s desirable for your target prospect.

Using tech to get the details

Will: So now there’s just one final step before we even send the email. And that step is actually finding the people. So I know I touched on this a little bit before in terms of knowing where the people are. And the next step is to actually use the technology to go through and find the details. Now, I’m not going to go too deep into this, because it does get quite technical, and there are a lot of moving parts. And it will probably take me hours to go through exactly how we do it within what we do.

James: Well, I think it’s fair that you have some proprietary techniques around this, but it’s certainly generous of you to share what the actual step is, in any case.

Will: Yeah, but I will say this, though – I will say that there’s a lot of technology out there, which says, Hey, use our technology, and we’re going to get you a whole bunch of leads. That’s very similar to buying a list. And the thing that we found to make the biggest amount of difference – and this kind of comes back to the point you brought up, James, in terms of changing platforms and technologies – one of the reasons that some of the emails that were sent out got flagged was because we might send a hundred emails, and they’d all have the same headline, or they might start the same. So one of the things that we’ve developed now, which is, you know, it takes a lot more effort on our part, but it produces such better results, is we really personalize every single email that goes out. So we will research, or my team based overseas would actually research, exactly what makes the people reaching out different. And the response rate has just been phenomenal. People like the fact that you were spending the time and effort to understand them, and the responses that we’re getting… So it is a bit of a forced process, because we had to do it.

James: I’m getting a lot more of those sort of cold outreach approaches now to my business, where they’re saying, Hey, I listened to this episode you did with Will Wang on SuperFastBusiness, I really liked how he shared the concept of not buying a rented list. We agree with that as well. In fact, we have a similar topic of da da dah… Would you like to have a chat with us about that? You know, it goes on. But obviously, they’re putting some human effort into that first part, to at least establish a bridge. And the fact is, I’m actually starting to read those occasionally, because my team started sifting them out of the junk and putting them through as something that’s more personalized. So it definitely gets read compared to the old way.

Will: Yeah, and I think this is the only way to do it going forward as well. So that was step six, in terms of just going out and actually finding and using technology to find the details. The next step that we’ve got here is actually getting through and writing the emails. And again, I might have to come back with a series on copywriting, how we write cold emails, because it’s obviously very specific to….

The three key email elements

James: Well, you covered that quite well at SuperFastBusiness Live, what was in the emails, and that was very helpful. Maybe if you give a couple of tips. I think you had a really good formula of the three key elements that you like to put in an email, that definitely makes a difference. One of them is usually not there, but you put it in there. And I remember that one was humor.

Will: Yeah, exactly. So the three key elements for us is value, social proof, and humor. So value being obviously understanding what you can help them with, and why you think your product or service is a good fit for the business owner, or whoever it is that you’re approaching. The social proof being, you’re referencing off the case study of some other clients, hopefully bigger clients, or some bigger results that you can use to kind of get someone’s attention and to build trust as quickly as you can. And the third element being humor, which, you know, if you’re not humorous in real life, or if you’re not really jokey, don’t push it and try to be someone different. What I mean by humor is just be yourself and be human. But don’t talk to people like they’re corporate, because at the end of the day, it’s person-to-person marketing, human-to-human marketing, rather than just sending corporate emails off to a whole bunch of people.

James: Yep, that’s very good. So, you’re really tuning that email from being dead cold, like icy frozen, to being quite interesting. In fact, in some cases, it could generate a smile and be entertaining for someone to read.

Will: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s really funny because I think I shared this during the events as well, where it wasn’t even the emails that we get back saying, Yes, I’m happy to have a chat, which were the ones that I was most excited about. It was really the emails saying, Look, I’m not actually interested in your service. But I really liked your email, and it made me laugh. So I just wanted to let you know that.

James: That’s way better than the original slide in your presentation of the reaction you might be getting if you don’t take the effort. So it’s good. Like I get bombed every single day with this sort of stuff. And occasionally someone does it with class, but it’s so rare. And you can be that person. That’s great.

When people don’t respond

Will: Exactly. So next after that, typically what happens is, during this step, you get some people replying back and saying, Yes, I’m happy to have a phone call, happy to find out more about what you do, which is great. Like, it’s brilliant, right? That’s what we set out to do. But there’s also a certain portion of the people that actually don’t respond. So for example, in the email sequences we write for clients, it’s typically five to eight emails spaced over a month or two. But some people just don’t respond because they are actually busy. So with this client in particular, because each deal size was, each client for them was worth so much money, what we did was we used direct mail and phone calls to follow up with everyone who had opened an email and hadn’t responded.

James: And where do you get the phone calls done from? The client’s using in-house people for that?

Will: Yeah. So in this case, we actually trained up someone part-time that the client paid for to sit there and actually follow up on the phone calls.

James: Fantastic.

Will: Yeah, we had a lot of really good data. And this is an interesting point in tech. The technology we used actually showed us people who had opened emails more than 10 times that hadn’t replied.

James: Yep.

Will: So in theory, these were lukewarm.

James: Yes. I mean, 10 times, you’d have to say there’s something happening there.

Will: Yeah, there’s some level of interest. So you know, we had some very, very soft, very low touch, you know, not hardcore closes on the phone, just some very gentle phone calls to see if we could add more value, and it really helps with the process.

James: And look, you can even use basic technology, like a Loom video, which will send you an email when someone’s watched the video. As simple as following someone up after they’ve watched the video can make a huge difference between that and someone who hasn’t watched the video. But also, it can show you when they watched the video, and you might be able to catch them at the exact same time the next day if you weren’t able to be responsive after they watched the video. So you can use those tools. I remember using this technology about, gosh, must have been about seven or eight years ago. I was able to integrate Wistia videos, like to trigger an email after a Wistia video was watched, by using FuzedApp. it could fire off at a tag and send out an email from my system once a video was watched.

Will: Yeah. There’s a whole bunch that you can do really easily. And it makes a big difference.

James: Nice. Okay, so far we’ve got the telephone sales sort of leveraging all that really good research and data, so it’s not just wasted. It’s not going through a bucket with holes in it – you’re catching it again and recycling it.

We’re not ready just yet…

Will: Yep. So the next step, which is step nine of the process, is what happens when someone says yes, but they’re not ready to buy now. So just some context, you know, we were obviously going after bigger companies and going after contracts which are six, seven, you know, some of them probably would have been close to eight figures with each contract.

James: I imagine a lot of them are talking about budget, and sign off from the board of directors and second decision-maker, that sort of stuff.

Will: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it actually is a timing thing. So this one particular deal that we’re talking about that our clients did, it took about four and a half months of nurturing before they had the paperwork signed. So it was four and a half months of them going back to the client saying, hey, by the way, you know, I know you said to give you a little bit of time, I’m just coming back and we’ve just written this book, or we’ve written this article, or there’s something of value I think I can add. So just wanted to send this to you just to keep us top of mind.

James: It’s exactly what I used to do when I sold Mercedes-Benz. I’d send out a photocopy of a new model coming through and stick a Post-it note on it, and I’d say, hey, Will, check out the new SL, it’s probably out next year. If you want to preorder it, let me know. And I would generate sales before the car even got here.

Will: I’m glad that you don’t work at Mercedes now. Otherwise, I might be in trouble and buy a new car very often.

James: Well, one client, he was so impressed, he hired me to teach his sales team financial planners how to make sales, because he bought so many cars from me. And that was how I afforded my first laptop. I reinvested the entire check back into my laptop, and that got me online. True story.

Will: Wow. Nice. Cool. So that was step nine, which is having a nurture process in place for people who do say yes to a phone call, or getting the case study, but just aren’t ready to buy now.

James: In other words, don’t think you’re going to be some all-star stone cold, hardcore closer and sign up everyone you get on the phone. Because that seems to be a perpetuated stereotype that I’m seeing online, especially from the USA market. There’s this big sort of gun-slinging closer thing. But really, I learned when I was selling that this phase is called obtaining commitment. And there are certain points within a sale where it doesn’t make sense to ask for the order. If all the components aren’t in place, you’re better off to keep it warm until everything’s in place. And then it makes sense for it to move forward into a completed sale. So that’s a great subtlety, and one we don’t talk about much out there in the sales space. You don’t have to put the pressure on, and sometimes that could do tremendous harm if you put it on too early.

Making it work in your favor

Will: Yeah, exactly right. So that was the nurturing component of it. The next step, which is step 10, was engineering the sales process to kind of work in our favor. Because, again, being corporate, there was more than one person involved in the purchasing process. So what we actually did was, we engineered or we worked backwards and said, for us to get this client on board, what would we need to do? And who do we need to talk to within the business to get signed off? So we figured out it was chief marketing officer. We had to go for procurement, had to go for the chief financial officer, had to go to the very top as well to get signed off. And we just mapped out what each of the people in these positions might be objecting to, and then worked out the sales process to get around those as quickly as possible.

James: Perfect. Yep. So it’s understanding who the stakeholders are, and communicating in a way that will make it easy for them to move it forward.

Will: Exactly. And having separate messages at each step of the process with each person we’re talking to.

James: Nice. Okay. And that’s why you get the big bucks, because this is delicate work.

Will: Yeah. It’s kind of like that old analogy of, when you see a duck on the surface, it looks really calm, but its feet are actually paddling like mad underneath.

James: Nice. Well, there’s a lot at stake. You know, it’s a longer buying cycle, and it’s a bigger dollar value amount.

It doesn’t end with the sale

Will: Yeah, exactly. So coming from that, coming from engineering the sales process, one thing that I think a lot of people, especially in the sales and marketing space, don’t talk about enough is the customer’s experience, or the onboarding process. Because for me, or whether it be the market, it doesn’t just end with the sale. In fact, you know, the way I kind of look at it is, instead of being tempted to rush off and down shots of tequila and celebrate, I think the real work actually starts when you do get the sale. That’s when you start going in and serving the clients, you know, making sure that they get the results that they’re after. And it’s one thing that I really wanted to make sure, that the clients we’re working with, we’ve got it right. Because if that process isn’t right, they can very easily turn around and say, Look, we’re not honoring this contract. We don’t want to work with you. We don’t like what’s happening after we’ve given you the verbal yes.

James: When I sold cars at Mercedes-Benz, we used to wait until the car drove off the lot and you saw the taillights. So I’d teach my salespeople, we don’t celebrate the sale until we see taillights. Because anything can happen. Like, the car could be stolen, it could be crashed, the payment might not come, they might change their mind. They might not even be alive by delivery date. Like, don’t celebrate the sale until the money is in the bank and you see taillights. It’s certainly one thing. And there’s nothing more off-putting than when they ring that sales bell while other people are on the phone to prospect. Like, Well, what’s that noise? Oh, yeah, someone just made a sale. They feel like they’re fresh meat in the pen, you know, ready to be lined up. It’s not cool.

Will: Yeah, I’d probably go for that in a call center environment back in the early days. I think it’s just the whole culture and the way that it’s positioned. I think it’s not customer-friendly.

James: It’s a bit boiler room, isn’t it? I think we’re past that now. Right? It’s a young man type thing, and we grow up out of that. So what’s next? We’ve made the sale, but there’s still more, isn’t there?

Making things even better

Will: Yep. So the final step, because it’s nice to make one sale, but what we really need to do is go back and make 10, and make 100. So the very last step, which is step 12, is about optimizing what we do. And even though we had won it, we actually went back into our process and through every single step and said, Where can we improve this entire process, to not only make it easier for the clients to buy from us, but to make it so that they actually want to do more business with us in the future as well? So step 12 is all about, even though it’s a win, let’s take as many lessons as we can from that win, and apply it to be better, just even one percent better every single day.

James: That warms my heart, Will, because so few people talk about this. That’s where the gold is. This is where the relationship starts. Most people think it’s the end, but it’s the start. And this is where you get your repeats, your referrals, your goodwill. You’re doing good stuff. I love how you’ve put that step 12. I mean, this whole process is just incredible and effective.

So you generated $1.8 million in direct outreach sales. How long did it take from start to finish for this client? And did they have to spend $1.8 million with you to get the result? Or did they actually make a profit?

Will: So, from start to finish, it’s about four and a half months from first email cold into actually signing the contract. The way that the numbers play out, the client came back to me and said, we’ve pretty much paid your fees for the next five to 10 years. So just keep doing what you’re doing. So, definitely a very profitable result for them. And for me, it’s great to know that they’re getting really good value from working with us.

James: Excellent. If you want to work with Will, check out GrowthLabz.com. I work with Will; I see what Will’s up to; I’ve been in touch with Will for quite some time now. And we also adventure together in the Maldives. So we have some really good context and some wonderful discussions. But I think it’s so rare to find a values-based sales professional who’s so switched on with the tech savvy, that’s what attracted me to working with Will. Will’s part of my coaching, and I’ve also got plenty of my clients are working with Will on campaigns and getting tremendous results.

Why Australia has great marketers

In fact, Will, you’ll laugh at this, but I had a client recently say, Are all the good marketers in Australia? Because they’re getting looked after by Will and Charley and me. And it’s just great that we have some good supply here. But what I think is going on is in this market, we get hybrid vigor. We get all the best business people from China, and we get we’ve got the Italians and Armenians and Indians and Arabs, and English and French and like, Greek. We have all the cultures here, blended together, making international business, you know, quite interesting and diverse. And we’re able to look at outside and see what works from somewhere else in the world. It seems to arrive here pretty quickly. And I think we’re over represented when it comes to a global platform. But no doubt this stuff is going to work in international markets. That’s really the point I wanted to make here.

Will: Yeah, we’re definitely seeing really good results. In the US as well, we’ve got a good base of clients. But James, I just think a couple of things as well. And I think the point you made just then was actually so good in terms of, you know, the talent coming out of Australia. I think for me, like the way I look at it is, we’ve got to think of tall poppy syndrome, where if you’re doing big things, you tend to get cut down by people who are jealous or whatever else happens. But I think as part of that, as a side effect of that, you know, what I see happening with marketing is, there’s people out there from Australia, just making waves, like exceptional results, and the way that they’re doing it is, I think we are all a little bit scared of tall poppy, so we don’t want to be scammers or anything like that. And we’re just making sure that we’re getting the good results but doing it in the right way. That’s kind of what I’ve noticed.

James: Plus in Australia, if you put a foot wrong, legally or financially, you get taken out instantly. It’s very strong regulations and a big stigma around failure. So we’re here doing the best we can, Will.

So Will, thank you for sharing this. I love how concise you’ve made it. You’ve just condensed a multimillion-dollar formula for cold outreach, that anyone can follow those steps. They could try and do it themselves, and I’m sure that there’s ways that you could learn about or discover some of the little sort of, expand some of those steps where it gets a bit nitty gritty. But of course, if you want it done for you, that’s definitely easy. Get in touch with Will. Will Wang, GrowthLabz.com. Thank you so much for sharing. I hope we can get you back sharing some more insights, and I’m really looking forward to your SuperFastBusiness Live 2020 presentation.

Will: Thanks, James. I’m looking forward to hanging out with you on the boat in the Maldives, as well.

James: My pleasure, and I’ll somehow manage. So, James Schramko here, this is SuperFastBusiness.com. If you like this, or you know someone who you think could benefit from having a multimillion-dollar cold outreach campaign to get their business up and running, if they’re realistic about the time frame and they have a good product or service for people, then share this episode and I really appreciate that. Thank you so much.

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