How I Doubled My Revenue By Making and Automating a Plan – Charles Max Wood – MicroConf Growth 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] these are kind of the same things and I'm going to talk about essentially the process that I go through to find sponsorships which I pulled together in December and immediately saw doubling in the number of sponsorships I was able to fill and the income that I was making from them so just to see who in the audience here has a podcast I see a handful of hands so I run a podcast network for software developers called deaf chat TV and we produce 13 podcasts every week no I am NOT the host on all of them I always get asked that with wide eyes no no I don't I'm currently

0:55the host on about half of them and I'm working to change that so just to give you an idea I spend most of my time doing a lot of the other administrative stuff and by that I mean I've delegated most of the administrative stuff and I spend most of my time finding sponsors and kind of figuring out what the next steps are for the for the podcast network so before the process you can see that our average invoice for sponsorship was about $10,000 they usually signed up for about eight weeks of sponsorship and I had about 42 percent of my sponsorships filled and afterward you can see that the only

1:41thing that really changed was my filler rate I doubled my fillery but I doubled it on some of the shows that are a little bit more expensive to sponsor because they have more traffic so what changed well for one I started reaching out to more companies and you can see that this is just your standard sales cycle right I reached out to more companies they scheduled more sales calls and they sold more sponsorships and the other thing I did is once those sponsorships ended I automated the process of renewing and that's how I've been able to maintain that fill rate so let's talk about this process so the

2:29first thing I do is I send a cold email I don't know where Rob went but you remember yesterday when he said cold email is dead and then he said well there might be some places where it's actually applicable yeah Andrew pointed out on where Andrew is but Andrew pointed out yes I'm that dinosaur right we we make it by sending cold emails and then the next day we get on social media and we just follow them right so we follow him on Twitter we follow him on LinkedIn and then we send another email because if you send somebody an email and then you send them an email the next

3:12day and you're like hey did you get my email they're gonna spam you they're gonna put you in spam but if they see your name come up and then they see your name come up again then your name is going to stay in their head just like it did yesterday when I got the third email from Zander saying I still have your slides and so his name stuck in my head so then when I was running into tropicana to make sure he got it I ran into Brendan Dunn and I said hey Zander did you get my slides yeah I mean he gave me crap about that yesterday

3:49afternoon you you all can give me crap about a tuba yeah right so I had this name stuck in my head I knew I was looking for Zander to give him the slides and I ran into somebody whose face I recognized and I just anyway kind of funny but anyway so so the whole idea is is that you do some of the things that nobody else does right people are trying to sell to these folks in my case it's marketing officers so director of marketing chief marketing officer at a company that sells to software developers because that's who our shows reach and so when I'm reaching out to them by the way

4:26it also helps that I'm reaching out to people who get paid to spend money you know they see my name pop up and they can tell that I'm interested in what they're doing and this is something that nobody else does and so I think this is a combination mostly of doing the things that nobody else will do making sure that they see you and recognize your name and then doing the follow-up and so then I send that second email hey by the way now that I've explained what we do and how we can help you here are some other ideas of things that we can throw

5:00into this and I get a 50 percent response rate on that second email right because they know I'm interested they know what I'm offering they know it's not a one-off thing and they feel like they've seen me enough and know me enough to be willing to schedule that sponsorship call if that doesn't work then I go back in and I'll comment on a Facebook post on their Facebook page or I'll reply to a tweet or retweet a tweet or I'll leave a comment on something that they posted to LinkedIn and what that does is again it creates that give-and-take right I've given them something it's just a retweet

5:42but it's that idea of reciprocity plus again they see me engaging with what they're doing and engaging with what they're about and so the sales process isn't about outbound marketing it's about interacting and then when I send that last email and this is the end of my sequence the other 25% who haven't responded to one of the first two emails usually respond to that one and then there are another 20% or so that never reply which is fine I figure they're just doing other things so you have this process right and it all feels manual right I have to go in and I have to click stuff and so when I said I

6:25automated this stuff what I meant was so I lied to you again I go and click stuff so the process is automated because I put it into HubSpot and HubSpot prompts me to go do this stuff it's sends the emails automatically but it doesn't go do the the high touch stuff it only takes me a couple minutes per interaction that I do for this and it gives me a to-do list so I just go in and I just do my to-do list every day but what that does is it makes sure that the process happens in the right order on the right timing and that's the

6:59automated part and then it gives me all these statistics as to when people come back and start interacting with me and you can see that the open rate on the emails is 76% and there are 29 people currently in the pipeline because I put people in I'm gonna hire somebody to do that that part is tedious but the click rate 7% and that's people who click the link to schedule the email their reply rates 24% and a lot of times I'll get people to schedule after I reply to them out-of-band right so I probably schedule 30% of the people I reach out to first sales call and my sales calls conversion

7:40rates like 80% because I've already done the work I already know who they are I know what they're doing I know how to talk to them I know what they're trying to do I know who they're trying to reach I know I can reach them and so that part's easy once I get them on the on the call but that's what I've done I've just put it into hub spot and made it easy so let's talk about how I've identified the targets because I think this is important to part so we're gonna back up we're gonna see how we get people in and I have processes written up for all of this

8:13like I said I'm gonna hire somebody that's so I'm gonna automate it I'm gonna delegate it somebody else do this so the first thing I do is to find companies that market the software developers I already said that and then I typically qualified them by seeing if they're spending money to reach people in another way right so if they're sponsoring another software podcast if they're sponsoring a technical conference that usually means that they're willing to spend money to get in front of developers and that's a really easy sell because if they're sponsoring a podcast in my space I almost always have a bigger podcast in that space if they're sponsoring a

8:52conference they're spending a ton of money to get people to travel out there they're getting it they're spending a ton of money to put a booth together they're spending a bunch of money to get that space on the expo floor they don't have to buy any of that when they sponsor a podcast and I reach at least ten times as many people for them so I know I have a selling proposition right there and then I also typically will look and see if there are people I already know what the company cuz if I can talk to somebody on their development team a lot of times that's a really convenient way

9:26to get in the door so that I can actually get in front of their marketing people because they'll send an email over to their colleague that they go to lunch with every day there's not one of the developers hey you ought to sponsor this podcast I love them and like I said sponsors of other podcasts I put people spending money at conferences and things like that but yeah podcasts are included there so anyway so here's how I find the people right because I have to get their email addresses oh we got the whole process up there you can take a picture of this or you can email me or text me

10:07and my email and text at the end and I'll just send them to you just text me your email address but yeah so I find people on or I find the company on LinkedIn you just do a company search you click on the company and you click on the list of employees and then what you do is you can search the job title so I just put marketing in there and then I get the list of three or four people that I want to reach and then I go to Hunter died oh there was somebody here from Hunter died oh that I talked to the other day so go find him

10:36tell him thanks it's a great tool you can use it for free if you're only doing a handful of searches every so often right here but yeah so I'm using it for free I'm a freeloader and a liar but yeah so I put that in I get their email address and then I add them to the sequence in HubSpot and that's pretty much it and the whole point is to get them to schedule a call with me so we get them on the call and then I closed the sale and that's pretty much the whole process but the thing is is that if you sit down and you

11:13figure out what your process is and then you automate it either by doing what the last talk was about what zapier or doing what I'm talking about and at least prompting yourself every day and being in the discipline of doing this stuff that's a lot more than a lot of people do and that will get you past the door below