Tyler Gillespie I help Productize service businesses

Looks like you are off to a great start. Curious to where you are today based on this question being asked ahile ago. I would actually look inward before worrying about how to scale the marketing and sales side of things.

You have 20+ customers already which is amazing.

Assuming you haven't figured out a great sales and marketing strategy yet I would look at the following.

1. How can you ensure you keep these 20 customers

2. How can you ensure your productized service has a recurrring aspect?

3. What can you do to increase the customer value and buy more?

4. How can you get your customers currently to buy more frequently?

5. How can you increase referrals from your current customer base?

There are endless strategies, tools, and tactics you can leverage here. I personally would start with any low hanging fruit possible. Not knowing your business or having any context makes it more difficult.

I personally love Optinmonster. You can create a series of popups that can be positioned around your website to optimize and encourage people to optin. Focus on the pages with the highest traffic first. I would avoid instant pop-ups as these are just annoying so use delayed popups to ensure the "prospect" is interested. As well exit intent pop-ups are great as well.

Next, I would focus on your copy throughout the website while leveraging A/B testing to see how you can improve your optin copy.

Once those are optimized then I would focus on two areas.
1. Retargeting Ads
2. JV partnerships
3. Guest Posting
4. Paid Media

More than happy to review this with you and share these ideas in greater depth if you're interested.

This is a great question.

I would take this time to run through a thought experiement I like to ask companies I work with in similar situations.

Problem vs. Symtom

Your goal is to improve conversions and capture more leads from the traffic you currently have.

You are assuming the problem for your high bounce rates are actually because you don't have the proper "tools"

When in reality your high bounce rate is the symtom of something else.

Tools are great but they won't help your problem you face at its core.

*is the traffic source your driving traffic from the right one?
*Is your website horribly designed?
*Is the content and copy on your website not adding any value or grabbing the attention of your visitor?
*Is your service or product not positioned correctly?

I would start there before trying to find the "tool" because more than likely your real problem can be fixed or addressed sooner then you think.

There is a lot of ways to attack this goal. Strategies here would also vary based on your available resources.

I would read these two books to dive into first:
1. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes (https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Sales-Machine-Turbocharge-Relentless/dp/1591842158)

2. DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson (https://dotcomsecrets.com/)

With these two books, it will give you a solid foundation and the proper philosophies to attack that first 100 customer goal.

My biggest takeaways to give you a quick recap:
*Know who that dream customer (Avatar, rich persona profiles)
*Locate where they play and hangout
*Build a database of the top 100-300 dream customers which will be your new "Dream 100"
*Create a plan of action to personally reach out to them with a multi-touch campaign that brings them a lot of value and plants the seed of who you are.

Chet Holmes approach is stellar and his business practices are truly timeless. Russel Brunson has a more modern take on many of the same principles which are refreshing.

Happy to help map out what your dream 100 looks like as I have done this for many customers over the years. Best of luck!

We have hired a lot at our company and for higher level positions often the best way to structure this is by using a "vested" equity structure.

Your main goal is to determine if this person the best fit for our company now and long-term. This structure allows you to do this and limits your risk profile of hiring the wrong person and giving away too much equity.

An example might be structuring a deal where X new hire gets X in equity but it is vested over time. You can also put in the contract that if X person leaves before let's say a year they are entitled to no equity.

A year is often a great time frame to ensure you have the right person and they are committed.

Hope this helps

This is a great question. I would first determine and clarify what your sales target is. Once that is defined I would then reverse engineer backward's to arrive at some numbers that can then fuel your daily sales "process" driven goals.

You will have "outcome" sales goals which are where you would like to go.

Then you will have "process" driven sales goals which are what you will need to do consistently each day to ensure you get there.

A simple sample would look like this:
Sales Goal is 10 new customers per month
You know if you talk to 10 leads you can close 3 of them (30%) which means you need to talk to at a min of 34 leads per month to hit your goals.

Next, you will want to determine what you need to do to actually get 34 leads to the "decision" stage of your funnel.

Look at your funnel from top to bottom (this will be different for everyone) but everyone can determine to some extent for example how many people you need to reach, visitors to your website, optins, etc.

You may determine that your process-driven goal each day is to cold email 10 new people per day which result in getting you your 34 sales conversations per month.

Or you will see that if you can drive 1,000 visits to your website per day that will result based on how your website and funnel converts in 10 new customers per month.

This will require you to sit down and outline your funnel and conversions. Once you have that number then you can have a clear focus on your process-driven goals from a sales perspective.

But once you know that you can arrange your "Growth hacks" to match that process-driven goal that will get you to where you want to go.

Regarding your "growth hacks" I would consider the following techniques as well that are really effective:

* Very niche specific and personalized cold email campaign with retargeting campaign
*Leverage the "Digital Dream 100" technique and have a dedicated sales person reach out personally one by one.
*Create in-depth case studies and leverage them with paid ads
*Create "Skyscraper" blog posts and leverage them with paid ads and retargeting
*Do some partnerships with some of your customers with fairly large audiences to offer your software for free to them in exchange for them promoting you on their blog, social media, etc.

I would be more than happy to go over any of these with you as I have done all of them very successfully and could break them down for you in more detail.

Tyler

Great first step! Gathering data from ideal prospects this way can be very very effective to generate high quality leads for your business. In fact this is how we have added substantial growth to our business (contentpros.io) the last few years.

Once you have the scrapped data from Linkedin you will take this CSV and do a few things.

1. Can you enrich the data at all? Based on the info you have from linkedin what other information can you gather or have someone get for you that can add more personlization to your outreach emails.

2. Filter for the best prospects and remove anyone who isn't your ideal prospect.

3. Verify the contacts and emails. I use a tool like bounceless.io or hunter.io to ensure you have the cleanest list possible to keep your bounce rate near 0.

4. Create a 7 part email series that you can send to the prospects. Why 7? cause based on research this is about the amount of touches you will need to have to convert a prospect. Spread these 7 emails over 1 month as well. Goal is to continually reach out and the emails stop once they response with either a yes or no.

5. Think value when you build out your email sequence. NOT what you do. How can you add value to the need and problem they face.

6. Leverage the first emails to ask questions + add value with resources. This has been our highest converting approach. Most of our cold emails see 60% open rates and 15-20% reply rate.

7. Use a high quailty sending platform like persistiq or I even like mailshake.

Always more than happy to outline more of this process in more detail and cater an approach based on what you guys do and what resources you have available. Contact me anytime.

This is something I have been researching for a while now as we have built many courses in the past and have tried a lot of softwares.

The ones I really like are:

1. Teachable
They have a great platform and courses are all they do. They make it very easy and hands off to create an awesome course with very little worries and tech skills.

2. Clickfunnels
They also have a great "Membership" / "Course" option which we have used in the past. There is a learning curve here and requires more tech skills but overall is still great. You do have a tad more control with this option and can customize more things which you can't do in Teachable.

Currently, i'm personally moving forward with Teachable as we will be launching a few courses around How to build a writing team and how to outline and structure a blogging strategy in the B2B space. Teachable allows us to just focus on the content and makes it easy.

Hope this helps and if I can help in any way let me know

Tyler

Right now I'm doing a lot of B2B lead generation for our Blogging service which has been extremely successful. I have also helped a lot of private clients launch internal outbound campaigns that have been extremely successful.

The last year has been very interesting to see how many B2B tools, software's and information has popped up.

What I have seen work really well not only in what we are doing but many of our customers and colleagues within my network and mastermind groups are the following:

**Very Personalized Cold Email outreach with retargeting ads.

**Strategic Blog Content Creation (1000-1500 words) around your customers biggest hurdles and hesitations with buying your product/service. This is what our company creates for example (https://contentpros.io/)

**FB Ads to employees of "X target" Companies. This is fire and originally got it from Gary Vee. Works like a charm.

**Retargeting Ads with valuable blog content. Simple but most people fail to do this. You can get ninja with what you re-target but you need a base of very great content like point 2 above.

**Scraping FB groups and cold emailing them. We have developed a full system and process around this that is incredibly effective.

At the end of the day, there are tried and true things to stick to that no matter the "place" the "process" will stay the same. Then there are some growth hacking tactics that can be fun to play with. Hope this helps and always open to talk more and share some things on a call if needed.

Tyler

I would highly recommend connecting with someone who has experience here to shorten your learning curve if this is not what you do.

For our agency, we spent a lot of time & money outlining and creating the infrastructure which now is mainly on autopilot for our outbound strategy. For example, we now have a small team running it while sending on average 5-10k emails per month consistently. I can help outline how to do the same thing as well.

Team-wise I would lean in the direction of learning the framework, building a small team and launching some base campaigns internally. I have looked and hired a lot of 3rd party companies that claim to handle all your outbound campaigns but most are 5/10 quality wise and charge a hefty premium.

Once you know the structure it mainly comes down to team building, having a quality product/service, and creating value through very personal outreach campaigns.

Resources wise- there are some great books out there on this. I would highly recommend "The Ultimate Sales Machine" by Chet Holmes and "Predictable Revenue" by Aaron Ross. These both will give you a lot of higher level ideas and ways to structure your outbound campaigns. A lot comes down to your internal resources and budget as well.

Hope this helps!