Ryan O'Donnell is a midwest kid who moved to NYC after college and landed a job on Wall Street making 500 calls a day. He hated it, followed a passion for tech, and ended up joining a company early that eventually sold to Yahoo for $850M. He grew a business unit from $0 - $20M and left Yahoo to startup.
Fast forward 3 meandering years trying to generate sales and Ryan decided to build a product to speed up the time to revenue for any business selling a product or service B2B called Sellhack. He’s successfully running this company today, helping his clients get in front of the right prospects faster and with a better close rate than they’d been doing on their own. He’s a father of 3, husband, and hobbyist prepper, and he’s in relentless pursuit of scratch golf.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why sales is all about automation and efficiency
- Using data to take the guesswork out of the prospect search
- Crafting compelling emails to prospects based on what you know about their competition (that you already work with)
- Figuring out how many prospects you need to capture every week at the top of your sales funnel in order to get the number of new leads you need at the bottom of the funnel
- SellHack’s algorithm for verifying the email address of a person who you might just know their name and company
- Replyify: a tool specifically devised for sending out cold email campaigns and building a sales process to contact prospects in other ways
- Strategies for crafting an email that works for cold selling B2B products and services
- How and when to ask to schedule time with a prospect
- Tiering your offerings and basing communication with prospects based on the tier
- Using the ideas from this podcast not only inside your agency, but also with your clients
Ways to contact Ryan O'Donnell:
- Email: ryan@sellhack.com (email Ryan for the special offers)
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Sam Mallikarjunan is a Marketing Fellow at HubSpot and former Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs, the somewhat-secret experimental arm of the world’s #1 Sales & Marketing platform. Sam teaches Advanced Digital Marketing at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, and he is also the co-author of the book How To Sell Better Than Amazon (which, thanks to the publisher, is ironically available for purchase on Amazon).
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- The way the internet has changed selling so that there’s almost too much information
- How salespeople can help consumers sift through the breadth of information out there
- Structuring sales calls so they’re all about asking the buyers questions about their business
- The power of inbound: competition where no one else is competing
- Learning to say no to bad revenue
- Why you need to build buyer personas -- both for your ideal customers and customers that you don’t want to do business with because they’re going to cost you money
- Why clients need agencies to teach them what to do -- not how to do it
- Getting involved with your client’s complete business -- including the sales side of their business
- How to get your clients to treat your agency like a partner instead of a vendor
Ways to contact Sam Mallikarjunan:
- Website: www.mallikarjunan.com
- Twitter: @Mallikarjunan
- Website: thinkgrowth.org
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Drew McLellan is the CEO at Agency Management Institute. For the past 23+ years, he has also owned and operated his own agency. Drew’s unique vantage point as being both an active agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year gives him a unique perspective on running an agency today.
AMI works with agency owners by:
- Leading agency owner peer groups
- Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
- Offering AE bootcamps
- Conducting individual agency owner coaching
- Doing on-site consulting
- Offering online courses in agency new business and account service
Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why all agencies weren’t made to grow to the same size (and why that’s okay)
- Why agency owners have to work extremely hard when they’re at 0-5 employees and why all the employees in an agency that size have to wear multiple hats
- The bench strength problem for agencies with 5-12 employees and why there might only be one employee with a certain skill and no one to back them up
- Why the systems in processes must change for an agency once it hits 12 employees
- The change around 15 employees that takes an agency from being a family to being a team
- The decision-making process: why decisions are made collectively before agencies reach 12 employees and why agency owners need to take more autonomy at times as the agency grows
- Why around 35 employees is a great size for agencies in terms of cash flow (and why a gorilla client can be very dangerous at this point)
- Bigger, better clients and bigger, better employees: why 35-65 employees is the point where agencies “level up”
- Why bigger doesn’t equal more profitable for agencies anymore
Ways to contact Drew McLellan:
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute which is now a UBM company. It is the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Joe’s fifth book “Killing Marketing” was just released. His third book, “Epic Content Marketing” was named one of “Five Must-Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- The evolution of content marketing
- Focusing on your core verticals to help clients out with some part of the process that they’re terrible at
- How agencies can help clients build an audience of people that knows, likes, and trusts them and how that has a large impact over time
- Why elevating someone to the status of an expert with content marketing is a long-term process
- Focusing on clients that already value and have a budget for content marketing
- How delivering value to prospects on a long-term basis will all you to do business with them without going through an RFP
- How getting your audience to know, like, and trust you with content marketing will allow you to sell easily
- Some of the many different ways to monetize your customer list
- Changing the defined idea of marketing to match consumer behavior
- Why you can’t be everything to everybody and need to focus on a niche
- Why your sliver of opportunity to get started in on a niche is right now
Ways to contact Joe Pulizzi:
- Twitter: @joepulizzi
- Website: www.joepulizzi.com
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!