Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by tukon das dun. Is a SaaS founder and expert in sales signals and buyer intent for agencies. He previously built and sold the company in the intent data space, and now has co founded GIA, which is a purpose built tool for helping agency founders surface and pipeline opportunities through first and third party buying signals. I wanted to have tucon on because most agency owners are relying on referrals. You've heard me say that 1000 times, and you shouldn't rely on guesswork to build pipeline. So tucon has a smarter signal based approach that works, and I wanted to get that shared with you in this episode, we discuss how to detect when a lead is truly in market. The right way to follow up on anonymous website visits ABM plays that actually work for agencies and more. Lead Gen is the hardest part of running an agency. For most it's unpredictable, it's slow and it's usually expensive. GF flips that. It's the all in one growth platform that turns your existing relationships and client work into a steady pipeline. Gia automates lead gen follow up and content, and it's all from the work you're already doing. You can check it out and get some free bonuses at get gia.ai/dynamic agency and now to condos. It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. What's your go to signal for pipeline ready?

Tukan Das 1:44
Leads? There's a few. The number one, and I would split it up into first party and third party signals. You know first party signal that the strongest, most, highest value signal is if a product, prospect visits my website, and if they specifically visit certain specific websites, maybe if I have a pricing page, or if they visited a book, a demo page or specific solutions page multiple times, that is one of the strongest signals when I can confidently say, Okay, this account is good in market for me to add to my pipeline and follow up. So that's the number one thing. The number two would be, is figuring out if, and this would be a third party signal, figuring out if the organization is growing because if they if they don't have budget, if they don't, they're not in growth mode. A lot of the times, they don't need my services or software, and it's true for most, most businesses. So from a growth perspective, we look for are they hiring for certain specific roles, or have they grown their let's say, if you're selling a martech solution, have they grown their marketing team by 20% in the last year? So those would be my two signals from a first and third party, and that seemed to have worked pretty well for

Chris DuBois 3:17
something like measuring growth mode, so easy to find, or easier, I guess, not easy, but to find just job opportunities that they have in house they're hiring for. How can you go back and find just whether they have been hiring like their growth rate of the company internally?

Speaker 1 3:33
Yeah, so the public free one would be LinkedIn. LinkedIn, if you have LinkedIn premium, I think you can see insights on the company, and you can filter, you can see their growth rate in the last little bit. Or you can further filter by roles within LinkedIn to see so that would be one. And then there are specialized tools that have data that can that can give you indications, are they, are they growing their certainty, or things like that? Yeah,

Chris DuBois 4:05
yeah. Some of the things that I'm looking at with my clients is, like, we have the internal triggers and the external triggers that we're trying to identify right? External hiring is great. External trigger, they just achieve the funding round and stuff. So, like, we know that's one looking there are, like, those internal ones where it's like, they're, hey, we know they're going to our website. We're seeing the signal, the trigger internally might be someone got tasked on their team to figure out a solution for X, and so now that person's going out and doing the research. I guess. Do you have a way for like, knowing those internal triggers, like, you kind of map back, what signals do we need to see, and then how do we actually find those signals? Like you have a lot of intent experience, so

Speaker 1 4:49
there are the way I look at it, like if it from an internal signal perspective, first party signals, 90% of, maybe north of 90% but at least 90% of. People that visit your website Don't, don't fill out a form, book, a demo or the action you want to take. 98% Yeah, okay, there you go. Very high percentage now, now it's imperative for you to figure out who those 98% are. I in my, in my past company, we sold intent data. We were on the third party side. We have used tools like kick fire that does that. And these days, there are a lot of they call themselves like the category is website, de anonymization. They can even go to the level of a person. I don't know the accuracy. I haven't tested. The one that come to mind is a good friend of mine, warmly, is one. I'm an advisor to them. So they do good company level, and they also do contact level. Then there's another company called sift data, Imran sift data with a Y, Sy. There's a company called vector. These are tools that you can use to track which accounts at least which account they also go to the level of contacts are visiting your website. And to be honest, I would not go super sophisticated. Like to do something super crazy, literally, just look up any company that is an ICP fit, if they have visited your website more than one time in the last 30 days, that'd be a good, good group of company for me to reach out. And you can then go further than go. Okay, if they visited the website, but have they visit the pricing page or a lower funnel page in my website, or book a demo but didn't fill out the form? Maybe we go after them first. But a lot of the times, a lot of maybe agencies, depending boutique agencies, they don't get that kind of traffic to further qualify. So I would just start with if it's an ICP, but if they have, they visited my website more than once in the last little period, I will go follow up with them.

Chris DuBois 6:55
Yeah, so I'm using warmly for my own side, perfect. And it's actually interesting, because I had someone pop up recently, showed up a couple times, and then I got a friend, well, Dan Englander, so anyone can go back and listen to my episode with him. But some they that same person popped up on his site looking at our podcast episode like page. And so he just sent that, oh, hey, this person was looking at our podcast episode. Might be worth reaching out to him. But then, like, 20 minutes later, I kicked off with a new client, and this was an advisor to that client's company who was just doing his research on me. So it's like, okay, look like perfect example of how, like, we've seen someone who's actually doing the research. We can pull that data and see how this pans out. Like it was, it was really interesting.

Speaker 1 7:37
But here's one thing, Chris, I think that people, a lot of people, miss out on. And this is a fine art, so these tools can tell you who, like a company, is visiting. So that's great. That's a signal. But then comes the follow up. The art here is not reaching out to Chris or because you don't know, let's say you don't know who has visited. I just know someone from Dynamic agency has visited my website, let's say out of Boston. And I can make an assumption that it might be one or two of these people, based on the roles when I reach out to you, I shouldn't be saying, hey, saw you were checking out my website. Make it just that. It's a chance coincidence that I happen to reach out to you. This is something true. I have seen over and over again. People try to over optimize that, and it actually comes across as creepy. People love to be known like, Oh, it's a chance, coincidence, yes, of course I was visiting. Don't call it out. That'd be, that'd be one of my my recommendation.

Chris DuBois 8:42
I can second that one, because it's probably really awkward when, when you're like, Hey, I saw you're on my website. What exactly? But the but I have had someone, I saw them on my website. I connected with them on LinkedIn. I didn't send a note or anything. They accepted the connection and then said, weird, I was just on your website, and I'm like,

Speaker 1 9:02
That's exactly they will tell you you are so spot on. Yeah.

Chris DuBois 9:08
I mean, awesome. The Yeah. So I guess the question is, like, how, how do you go about incorporating that, like, intent data into your marketing strategy for like, how are we doing the outreach? Because so we want it to be like, just, we're sending connection requests to people, but we might not even know that it's that person at the company. So is there, I don't know. Have you seen success in finding, like, I don't say like a tailored message, but like, some way to actually find out who is the responsible party for making decisions just based on whatever signals you're getting, right?

Speaker 1 9:44
So this is a whole, like, there's a whole sequence of playbooks that you can follow, from, from, from a signal. The first thing you need to know is, and let's, let's say you, you don't know the person you you don't know who is visited. You know the company. It's a company level signal. Let's just take stick to that for a sec. The first thing you need to know is you need to have a very clear idea who your ICP is, you know, and again, depending on the complexity of your sales, there can be 20 people in the buying room. But I'll give an example for Jia, we sell to founders of these boutique agencies. That's that's who we sell to. So if I know that someone from this agency came to my website, I would try to find out the founder that if they have multiple partners at that agency, I'll find their name, and maybe if they're a big enough agency, if they have a head of marketing or CMO, those are the three buyer personas I follow a playbook there is the first thing to remember is intent is not a silver bullet, at least any of these, third party or first party. It's not going to tell you Chris is going to buy from you. It's not an inbound lead. It gives you a notional direction on which accounts for you to focus on. It is really a prioritization mechanism. So let's say you have that prioritized list, then the approach would be, connect with all these ICP within those account on LinkedIn. Don't send a note, literally, just connect with them on LinkedIn. Next thing you can do is add those two or three people, maybe to a small, relevant outbound sequence at the same time. And then, while you have connected with these, send a connection request, have send an outbound email sequence, see who are the people that have accepted your connection request a or who have a and who have visited your profile, then on LinkedIn, because that's also a signal of intent. And the third thing is who is opening or engaging with your email. Then you know, out of those three people, maybe it's one who's just resonating, or maybe two, those are the people then that you maybe send a DM if they haven't responded like hey, love to tell you more about what we are doing a dynamic agency, or love to tell you what we are doing at Geo. That'd be my approach. If you are doing more of a high tech let's say you are selling an enterprise SaaS, and you get that signal, then it becomes interesting. Then, in addition to these things, these are foundational things that you need to do. In addition to that, then what you can do is all right, if you have a lead scoring mechanism that signal that they whichever first party or third party, whatever you got, could be a scoring factor in your lead. You can add whatever score is, like, maybe I give five points, and every visit I give five more points. Or you can go further sophisticated, saying, hey, if they visited the pricing page, I give it 10 points. So you are using it in scoring without doing anything. And maybe you have something set up, and it's like, if the score hits this, then do that. So that's one thing. The other thing that we have seen people do it is, and again, this is not relevant in an agency world, at least in a small boutique agency world, but definitely in large enterprise, SaaS is then maybe you, you you fire off an ads campaign where you provide air cover on those accounts so you know your sales people are DMing them or sending connection requests, sending email, maybe start build a custom audience list with those accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, or maybe display ads, and then with that, with that account, with that location, show them an ad at the same time. So those would be some strategies that we have seen people use with intent data, and it can go really sophisticated, or you can start small and do the basic fundamentals. Yeah, that'd be my approach.

Chris DuBois 13:45
That's great, I think even just in using like Jia right now. So getting the growth inbox is like, one of my favorite features of this, where I don't what frustrates me the most about most tools right now is they're looking for, like, how can I take AI and just stop the human from having to do anything? What I love about the growth inbox is, like, it's surfacing these insights to be like, Hey, you should go talk to this person about this, and now I get to actually go, look at that person, have a an actual interaction with them that's human, like me, connecting with someone, and then come back, check it off, like, but it's filtering this to do list for me that just saves so much time. Like, I'm not on LinkedIn 20 times a day. Yeah, I'm doing it like, twice a day, and just I check my growth inbox, and then I check for messages later in the day, see what's up. And, like, That's it, but everything's way more targeted.

Speaker 1 14:37
So yeah, if I may add one thing, Chris, the insight that we got with agencies is, rarely have we seen agencies do mass scale marketing or outbound rarely you will rarely see an agency or boutique agency use a tool like SalesLoft or outreach. It just doesn't work. It's a very trust based relationship heavy mostly it's through referrals. Users and through their network. The approach we took with growth inbox is because we focus only on professional service firms, so we understand the pain points with JIRA, the growth inbox is sort of like a growth coach. Literally every morning I'll tell you five to 10 people I'm not going to dump on you. Say, Hey, there's 1200 accounts. Go figure out who to reach out to within them. They did this. You're just not going to use it because you don't have a team of SDRs to divert them and blah, blah, blah, you're the busy founder. You want to keep building your pipeline proactively. Here is it, five people. I'm telling you why you should be following up. Why are they in your growth inbox? Did some research on them, like the assistant, did some research, found some talking points, and then it's up to you to go follow up and just connect with them, have a meaningful contact with them. So that's that's why we see the growth inbox works for this specific segment of agency owners.

Chris DuBois 15:53
Yeah, no, it's great, even just within the, like, the week I've been using it, the it's learnings for like, when I say, Yeah, we're going to ignore that one, because it's someone I know who you know might actually be a competitor or something, right? That person doesn't show up again. But it keeps getting more targeted. Now, when I go look at the contacts, it's like, it's showing more of the strong ICP fits and surfacing those. So it's, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 16:20
yeah. Thank you.

Chris DuBois 16:21
Yeah, so. And I want to bring that up just as we're looking at the data, right, the intent data, and knowing it's like, if I know, hey, this person just engaged with my competition, and which is not something that we can I can look at from my website with a lot of other tools, but if I know, you know my five competitors on LinkedIn, and I can see that someone who's a strong ICP, fit, just engage with them. I can go look at that post, see what they commented, and then I know this person might actually be looking for a solution, not because they know who I am, but because they know who my competitors are. I think that goes under appreciated with a lot of marketing where it's like someone just might not know you exist. And so by putting your like, just connecting with them, right, so they realize, yeah, it's someone else. It's yeah, yeah. Great opportunity. Thank you. So yeah, we got to get more. I think more agencies need to be doing things like this, move on to different points, because now I just feel like I'm gushing on Geo, because I actually really like this tool. What, a what is a mistake that you see with agencies like in scoring leads or even just interpreting signals?

Speaker 1 17:31
Yeah, I don't know if it's an agency specific problem, Chris, but what I've seen is, first of all, a lot of agencies don't do lead scoring. A lot of

Chris DuBois 17:41
like this is, I don't know they have enough leads to right. Do leads

Speaker 1 17:44
exactly right, but one of the mistakes that we have seen that are doing people that are doing scoring, meaning they have a lot of leads coming in, and they want to prioritize their outreach or or efforts reaching out to them is one of the big mistakes we have seen, is they basically ignore the lower scored leads they would like if they have. Again, it's a problem of abundance. Let's say they have a lot of leads. They're like my sales team doesn't even follow up with anyone that hasn't made the cut based on whatever mechanism. And I think that is probably one of the biggest mistake you can make, is, I think the big opportunity is if you are in a fortunate position of getting a lot of top of funnel demand, where people are coming in, treat every single inbound lead as gold, as absolute goal, obviously prioritize your highest ICP fit, highest intent, highest score leads, and then follow up, do everything, but also constantly have a motion or have maybe one person or something to do a one to one touch with those leads that are just little bit out of Your ICP fit or may not have made that. You know, does people score leads by grade ABC? Maybe they're your grade B. Leagues. Do not let them sit, because one of your competitors is probably reaching out to them and closing them while you are waiting for this magic dust of lead scoring to bubble up to the top we I was talking to, and this is not an agency, but, but I just give an example. I was talking to a founder of a SaaS company, and they get 800 inbound leads a week, right? And what he told me is my sales team, the biggest screw up that their sales team has done is they have not followed up with more than 80% of the lead because they just never fit the score, and their conversion from inbound lead or a free trial to paid has dropped to 1% it's like my sales team is he actually used the term lazy. They're just not doing it. I don't think it's on, just on the sales, but it's a process thing. I think there's a big opportunity. It. So that's one mistake that I've seen people do. Yeah,

Chris DuBois 20:03
you can definitely see that. For for agencies, it's like, they're going to engage with probably every lead, because they're, yes, they're just so many. There's so few leads and like they there's so many agencies who just who need that lay. If someone breathes in their direction. It's like, let me go try, try selling to them. Think the issue is that they don't necessarily know how to sell to them. They're doing a lot of discovery, custom scoping, stuff like that. But I feel like that's something we can also solve with signals. By knowing what is someone looking at, like, what depending on what type of signal we're getting, we know how to approach a sales conversation.

Speaker 1 20:41
Other other insight that I have gotten, especially in a services world, right agencies, one interesting is if you get an inbound lead. The quickest way to get trust on an inbound lead is if you can refer a work that you have done in their vertical or if you have done work with someone that this connection might be exposed to, if you can do that enrichment, if your system, if you have a system that can enrich that and you you lead with that, I think that has a massive, massive win. Like immediately you get that trust, because people do anytime, like, shocking how many times I've seen in Jia is like, someone using us, or just booked a demo and then reached out to a customer, or someone that we didn't think that they know each other, but like, Hey, I'm checking this out. You know them. So if you in the sales price is like, Oh, do you know Chris? We actually work with them. Or, hey, we worked with a client exactly near vertical. This is what we did. If you can make that social trust, that connection based sales process, I think immediately the guards drop and they you have a leg up compared to anyone else.

Chris DuBois 21:52
So yeah. So something that I do see with agencies is because they have so few leads, a lot of them seem to default to thinking like just cold outreach, doing like the volume play is going to be the answer, whereas I'm a pretty strong believer that's not the play for agencies, because we're consultants, anyone because we're doesn't work. We're in this trust game, right? Like we're we're not just selling a product, we're selling a service. And so we need to show them that we are trusting of delivering on what we promise. So in that case, ABM is probably a much better play, you know, for those types of audiences. But there is a, I think, a some confusion over, like, what is just marketing and what is ABM and where is ABM? Like, just crossing into like, someone doing sales like biz dev on that side. How would you approach ABM, for foreign agency, to kind of get the most bang for their

Speaker 1 22:49
buck? I think ABM is just marketing. It just marketing where, where you don't have just an ICP list. You actually have a target list, a defined list of accounts that you are going after, I think, depending on your deal size and how big is your target list. ABM can work in many ways. You can do one to one. You can do one to few, one to many. Like these are the cliche things. I mean, I'll, I'll give examples of how ABM done, right? I have seen work very well. Is direct mail actually works very well when you are trying to do an ABM campaign. And one of the best ones I've seen, not I've seen, I've heard the talk at Sastre from brex, which is a company that targets, it's not an agency play, but they target B to B tech companies. And one of the direct mail campaign that they ran was they had a list of accounts that they wanted to close, and they didn't, necessarily didn't come in inbound like that was their wish target list. And the ABM play that they did was they literally send them a personalized box with a champagne, I think they spent $250 or champagne like that was their high, high value car with their name. They send it to them, and they go, if you like it, take a picture and share it on your LinkedIn. We will give you some extra credits or something. So it did two things. The CRO was telling the story. It did two things with that. ABM campaign was one. They booked a ton of demos, because you're standing out. When you talk about trust and cold, everyone is hitting your inbox. Everyone this is something unique. They're like, Hey, you don't have to take a demo for this bottle of or this gift. I just wanted to thank you for whatever you just thought you're doing cool stuff. And so a lot of people like, oh. So you're standing out, definitely. I'm going to check you out. Maybe I'll look at them, high likelihood. But the second genius play they did was take a picture, share with your network, so they got so much earned media for free. It was the best performing campaign. I think it works in agency world too. If you want to, let's say you are servicing. I'm just making this up. Let's say you're servicing series, a series, a companies in the eastern part of us. So literally, take a look at all the companies from a list like CrunchBase or something, or even Google that has raised an a round in the last six months. You're probably gonna get at least 20 companies, at least in the Boston, Massachusetts area, send them a hyper personalized media gift and say, Hey, congratulations. We we help other series, a companies, grow their do their demand, Gen or SEO, or whatever. You send that message and that's it. People have sent boxes of cookies or things like that. I think ABM direct mail, or direct marketing direct mail that I think works really well from an ABM perspective, that's what I've seen work.

Chris DuBois 26:10
Yeah, I can't remember who to credit with this, but someone recently gave me the line their inbox is full, but their mailbox is empty and and we actually use that to like that inspired. I got a client who were about to launch a direct mail campaign right now to see if this works. So I'll report back in future episodes. Okay, for that part, but I get similar to like direct mail. What are some of the other like tactics you've seen? Where like I get, I get a little timid when talking tactics on the show, because everybody loves a shiny tactic when they're but they're not. Usually they're disconnected from the greater strategy. But here we've talked to strategy. It's like, let's find the signals. Like, we know what we're pushing people to now. We know when to reach out. It's just like, what are some of those tactics to reach out? Is there anything else you've seen from clients that's just like, oh, I hadn't thought of that. Like, that's a that's a pretty interesting idea.

Speaker 1 27:05
I mean, I at this point, every idea that you can think of someone has tried, but one, one thing in an agency world that that has worked very well is, and I've made this post, like in software companies, you have a free trial. What is the equivalent of a free trial in an agency, right? It's very difficult in a services business to give a free trial. Typically, people do free audits, but that take up a lot of time. It just doesn't scale very well. But let's say you're doing an ABM hyper focus. Let's say you have 20 companies that you're going after. You really want to close some of them or create pipeline from them. An interesting tactic is reaching out to the decision makers and without even asking them, saying, No, can I do an SEO audit for your website? Do something if you can a low weight, but that is insightful, and give it to them. It's like, Hey, this is what I did. Just thought it'll be useful. And just stop the chances of you that converting into a deal is astronomically high. I'll give you an example. There's this kid, he does copywriting or LinkedIn ghost writing for other founders. He literally reached out to me. He's like, Hey, I do this. I work with other venture backed companies. Here is some comments that I have found from your post. There's some insights Would you be open to if I sent you two drafts based on your audience that I think would be relevant? There's literally nothing for me to say, No. I'm like, Sure. And he sent us a Google Doc. He probably used some kind of chat GPD or something to help with it. That's only fine, but those were pretty high quality drafts he sent. I'm like, Damn, that's good. He's like, and then I stopped following up. I forgot. Then he followed. He said, Hey, did you get a chance to review those? I'm like, You know what he has done work. Let me review. They were good. And he's like, Can we get a gun a call you got on a call we had a deal on on the table. So I think that if you can do that kind of thing, that's a tactic that would work every time, but again, it's how do you scale it? So that's why it doesn't work. One too many. But if you have a hyper focused target list, anything that you can do, low effort, a free trial, without asking them, just saying, Hey, this is what I did for you. Would work very, very well. Yeah, I

Chris DuBois 29:37
can second that. And I think this is where the having a targeted list, having knowing the signals and stuff is super important. Because I I've had a client before. They tried that kind of on their own, but they were just hitting anyone who fit their they thought fit their ICP. But if you look at like the 5% rule, right, 95% of the market is not currently looking for a solution. So like, those people don't care. Whatever you got right now, they got other. Priorities. But if I figure out who those 5% are like with Yeah, they probably want it.

Speaker 1 30:06
The stat that I always used to say when I was doing lead stuff and then at IDG was between three to 5% of your target market. Doesn't matter what product or service is actively looking for a solution. 40% are problem aware. They're not looking they know they need a marketer, they know they need an SEO, they know they need an IT whatever, but they're problem aware, and the other 55% don't even care. They just bought a solution. They don't have the problem. They don't have budget, or whatever it is. So you need to figure out who that 3% are, and then and put in a lot of effort. It's very hard. The other 40% you need to be doing staying on top of mind for them. And the other thing that I want to add this is all my previous life, things, insights coming back to me while they were chatting is just because an account is on your ABM list doesn't mean they're in market. You need to understand that a lot of the times ABM lists come from I have seen sales again. This is in software companies. Agencies are different. Sales Team coming up with a wish list saying, Here's a list of accounts I want to close. Just because you want to close that lighthouse customer doesn't mean they need to be in your life. They just probably bought one of your biggest competitors subscription for the next three years. Doesn't matter what you do, doesn't matter what your gifting strategy, they're not going to convert. So how you curate your ABM list goes? And that's why I think using signals, a combination of signals, whatever signals you're using, and some high profile ICP definition to come up with the ABM list, is the best play, and then executing whatever you do.

Chris DuBois 31:41
Yeah, awesome to come. This has been great. Lot of great. Thank you. Not only we hit the strategy, but we got some tactics in there too. As we're winding down here, what ask two questions to all. Guess what book you recommend every agency owner should read?

Speaker 1 31:58
Yeah, that's a tough question. I don't know if it's specifically for an agency owner, Chris, but for a founder. I think every agency owner is an entrepreneur, right? Like you're starting a services business. I think this might be, people might have mentioned this. I would say the book by Ben Horowitz. Hard thing about hard things, yeah, I think it's a you have that that's probably back in my shelf there too. I think that would be one book that gives real no BS talk about how to run a business and the real struggles of it. And again, I think the founder struggles are real across every whether you're running a venture backed startup or it's different scale, but there's a lot of those. So I think that would be the one book that immediately comes to my mind

Chris DuBois 32:41
to recommend, definitely a good one. I actually don't know that anyone's mentioned that book on the podcast yet. We're a daily content episodes deep, so, yeah, definitely good. I got it right back here. Last questions, where can people find you?

Speaker 1 32:56
Yeah, the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm super active on LinkedIn. I mean, we, we, we use LinkedIn as a channel for thought leadership, connecting with audience. We sell into agencies, so our target market is there. So LinkedIn would be the best place look up to kandas to find and then and then email. But LinkedIn would be the best place for people to find me and connect. Love to chat.

Chris DuBois 33:23
Awesome. All right, man. Well, thanks for joining. Great. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 33:27
Thanks a lot.

Chris DuBois 33:32
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai