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Perpetual Traffic
The Super Secret Formula Corey Quinn Used to Grew The Scorpion Agency from $10M to $200M
00:45:55
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- [00:03]
Ralph Burns
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- [01:46]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Petrulo, the founder of Mongoose Media.
- [01:50]
Ralph Burns
That's right. You were supposed to say your own name. Anyway, I'm still in shock that you just went cliff dive. Why were you cliff diving? You were cliff diving one day and then you were in a Learjet or like a private jet the next day. Or do I get that incorrect? Is that vice versa? Flip it around.
- [02:06]
Corey Quinn
Vice versa. Yesterday I flew in a jet. Today, this morning we went for a run and our friend was like, let's go jump. And then I did. So I flew. Then I jumped off a cliff.
- [02:18]
Ralph Burns
You flew twice? You flew? Really flew twice. One, one without the. Not in a comfortable seat, but just.
- [02:26]
Corey Quinn
So did you go like one I flew backwards. The other I flew forward.
- [02:31]
Ralph Burns
Like, I assume this is like a feet first landing, right? Or did you go like belly flop?
- [02:36]
Corey Quinn
No, come on now. I went feet first.
- [02:38]
Ralph Burns
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what your style is because, you know, I've done it once, which I told you about. But like all my buddies did it like belly flop style and they almost died. So anyway, I did it feet first. I wasn't screwing around.
- [02:52]
Corey Quinn
I would have been like instead of feet first, I went fear first because I was shaking and sweating in places I didn't even know sweat could like escape my body. But to go dive deeper. For those listeners that want to understand the importance of DS and GBO and a whole bunch of other acronyms that will make sense as we progress.
- [03:12]
Ralph Burns
Yeah. Think that we're teasing it. We're teasing it right here because we have Corey Quinn who is, I will say this, I'm going to be a bit of a shill on the show today because I believe in what he's doing and I met this guy literally like 6 months ago and I've like given him like tens of thousands of dollars since then. So. But the results have been there, which, hence the reason why he's on this show because I know about 30, 40, 50% of the people that listen to this show are e. You're either a agency, you're a larger agency, you work in an agency, or maybe you are an independent contractor just sort of doing this for somebody else and you've got like a va and you're doing it on your own. There's a lot of people that can benefit from what Corey has done here. Corey, just to give you, before we formally introduce him, he was the CMO of Scorpion. Scorpion is a huge performance marketing agency, digital marketing agency and became the CEO. They were sort of stuck at this 10 to 15, 10 to 20 million level which a lot of agencies aspire to. And he 10x their revenue single handedly. No one else was involved, it was just him. Now I'm sure he had an entire team to do this, but the things that we're going to be talking about here today, if you're an agency or a consultant, this directly relates to you. And I've seen the light. We have made the same mistakes too many times and hired Corey and now he's rectified a lot of those mistakes. We're on a tremendous growth trajectory at year 11. So without further ado, Corey Quinn. Welcome to Perpetual Traffic.
- [04:54]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Thank you, Ralph Lauren. I'm super excited to be here with you both.
- [04:58]
Ralph Burns
And if you haven't gotten his book, see here's shield number one. Look at this. Nobody does this. Like, look at that. Get anyone? Not everyone. It's one of the best books that's out there for agency owners. I'm serious because I read it And I immediately said, well, geez, I got to hire this guy. Which is pretty much what I did. My team was like, who's he? So tell us a little bit about why we're talking so enthusiastically about you. It's not just because you're a handsome dude with great hair. Like, what is it about what you do that agency owners should sort of stand up and notice what's the big concepts?
- [05:34]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah. So again, thank you, Ralph for having me. And Lauren, it's a great honor to be here. It's an amazing podcast. It's a big honor to be here.
- [05:41]
Corey Quinn
The shill's coming right back.
- [05:43]
Ralph Burns
It's just shill after shill, baby.
- [05:48]
Lauren E. Petrulo
All of us are just people.
- [05:49]
Ralph Burns
Like, well, yeah, people are.
- [05:50]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah. I'll give you a little bit of context in my background to help the listeners understand why the growth at Scorpion was so transformational. Not just for Scorpion or even for my career, but there are so many powerful lessons that came out of that that agencies everywhere could really benefit. So my background is I've been in the agency space about 20 years now. When I graduated from business school, I took a job as a business development representative at a digital agency that sold PPC and SEO to large retail brands. And I was lucky enough to sell deals into Lululemon, Remax, Hyundai, the Men's Wearhouse. These are big six FIG 5, six figure SEO deals and PPC deals. And I fell in love with the art and science of selling and I was pretty good at the time. I was the top salesperson for the agency for the for 19 consecutive quarters. I led, I led the team and I was eventually recruited to take a sales manager role. And then most recently as you mentioned, Ralph, the team chief marketing role at marketing officer role, I should say at Scorpion. And the thing that was happening at Scorpion at the time was that it was largely founder led when it came to sales and marketing and across the entire board and they had about a six person sales team. They had subsisted primarily on inbounds and referrals. And the founder brought me into his agency because he had an insatiable appetite to grow. He really wanted to help more businesses. This wasn't out of a self serving need or ego. This was more about, hey, I think we have something pretty special. We've got some great clients, some amazing results. Let's go see how many more people we can serve. The challenge was, is that they had a six person sales team who by the way were extremely well compensated, they made great money, their commission structures were ridiculously Good. And they drove great cars and quit. Quit the day about noon. And they had a really great life, which is awesome. And they're all great guys. However, the challenge was that we had. I inherited a sales team and stepped into this sale, this sales and marketing role, to not just nurture or farm what was already in existence, but to get it really to the next level. We can really expand growth. And so that was the environment that I stepped into. We did a bunch of things to move, grow the agency. Obviously, we figured a few of those things out over the years. Yeah.
- [08:28]
Ralph Burns
So what were they doing for set? Like, you got these fat, happy salespeople, which you and I have a very similar opinion of salespeople. Just in general, that's a hard culture to break. You're coming in there, they're like, they're doing their job, they're making good money, but the founder is like, listen, like, we're not getting the growth. We're sort of stuck at this level. And this could be any level. It doesn't matter what it is. Whether you're the million dollar level, the couple hundred thousand dollars level of 5, 6, 7, 10 million, you guys are at that level. You just sort of reach this growth. What were they doing up until that point to get clients in? Because a 10 to $20 million agency is like, that's no slouch agency right there. They were doing a lot of things right.
- [09:09]
Lauren E. Petrulo
It is. They were doing a lot of things right. What they were doing absolutely well is that they were early. Now, not everyone who's starting an agency has this benefit, but in case of Scorpion, they started developing website. It was initially a website design company, then came SEO and then ppc. And one of the things that they figured out was when they were trying to grow the business, it was the founder and a couple of his best friends. They literally went through the yellow pages. Remember those? The. The yellow book Lauren doesn't like we want to sell. And they wanted. They wanted to sell some websites. So they started going from the front of the book to the back, and they got to attorneys, which is of course at the front of the book. And they started selling a lot of websites to attorneys. And this is about the time when SEO started becoming a thing. And as a result of that, it turns out how attorneys shop, and you may be familiar with this, how attorneys shop for a website design company and later a marketing company, was that they would search for other attorneys in their area and see who's doing well. Well, because we were early in the game, we had A lot of attorneys in a lot of cities that were ranking really well top of Google. This is before the maps even. And so they would find a Scorpion client and they go to the Scorpion client's website. The bottom of the Scorpion client website is a scorpion logo Scorpion. And that would go to a sales page on the Scorpion website which would lead to a phone call, which would then lead to a one call close. The salesperson do the one call.
- [10:45]
Ralph Burns
Pretty good. Yeah.
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Lauren E. Petrulo
Beautiful backlink. Beautiful backlink. It was all kind of this beautiful ecosystem reinforced itself. That one call close would result in the salesperson standing up, walking over to the big metallic gong and striking the gong. And everyone would open up a beer and have a good time. It was a great sales culture. I mean I was like, I wanted to, I wish I was one of these early sales guys. Challenge is that you can't scale. That you can't scale. You can't get more people to search on Google for personal injury attorney in my area or whatever that is. And so we had to figure out how do we take what's working and also layer in more opportunities in the market.
- [11:23]
Ralph Burns
So this is in and around, I'm guessing 2009, 2010, is that. Or before that?
- [11:29]
Lauren E. Petrulo
This is 2015.
- [11:30]
Ralph Burns
This is 2015. Oh, okay.
- [11:32]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I joined in 2015. The company started in 2001.
- [11:36]
Ralph Burns
So that growth happened in those 14 or 15 years thereabouts. Okay, so you come in 2015, you got all these salespeople that are ringing the gong like things are good, they're making good money. Or at that point had sing. Things started to kind of flatten. And that's the reason why you were brought in. Like how did that introduction sort of happen?
- [11:58]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, so. So the context was that they were subsisting on the inbounds, which was form fills, phone calls primarily you had the one call closes. You had a six person sales team who were fairly good guys. But they were conditioned to let the phone ring. They weren't doing any outbound, they weren't doing any prospecting. And so what the founder would do every once in a while is that he would hire a brochure company to create a brochure and he'd buy a list from Dun and Bradstreet and send out like 3,000 brochures to law firms to try and make the phone ring. Of course that would never really work at all. And so that's why I was an outside hire, I was an expensive hire. I had the MBA and all this experience and they he really wanted to invest in figuring this out. And so one of the things that really made a difference at this time, when I showed up, they were already fairly vertically focused. So I didn't actually help drive that change. It was something that I inherited. I remember when I was interviewing for this role, I wasn't actually very serious about taking the job because it was a website design company. It was out in Valencia, which is about an hour north of Los Angeles. And if you've ever been to la, you know that the traffic here is really bad. And so I said to myself, I was being recruited. I said to the recruiter, I'm sure they. I'm sure they're a great company, but, you know, they're so far away. And it's a web design company. You have websites like Wix and all these things coming out. So I don't think I want to take the interview. And the recruiter was pounding me to take this role. And I eventually took the. Took the interview. And I learned something interesting in the interview, which was that the client retention rate for a Scorpion client was about 93% annually, which is amazing for any agency, but certainly serving local service businesses that can go in and out of business, Right? And it turns out that's what kind of turned my mind around as far as this job opportunity at Scorpion was the fact that they were. They had something inherently special about the company, about the culture, that they were doing something different. And one of those things, it turns out I learned after taking the job was the fact that they were vertically specialized. In other words, they had a deep. What I call today, a deep specialization in personal injury attorneys.
- [14:09]
Corey Quinn
Yes, the first acronym has been revealed.
- [14:12]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Hey, we hit it. Thank you, Lauren. Here we go. So deep specialization, that is that you talk to a salesperson who only worked with personal injury attorneys. When you bought from Scorpion, you went to an account team that only worked with personal injury attorneys. And it's subtle, but the impact of that, as we all know through specialization, is that we were able to work with personal injury attorneys of all types, including the best in the country. And so we learned what it took to build and run a successful personal injury personal injury firm, that we would take that learning and we would extend it to our young personal injury attorney clients, the ones who were just starting out, who had no idea how to run a practice. And so it allowed us to be not only a provider of leads and websites and landing pages and all those great things, but we also serve the role, sort of an unspoken need in the market of a business coach, because a Lot of these attorneys, they go to, they don't go to business school, they don't understand marketing, they understand how to argue a case in the courtroom. That's why they went to school, that's their training. Yet they live in a world where they have to find a way to market themselves online. And like it or not, they're not, they can, they don't necessarily have the right skills to choose a good partner. And so we stepped in as a, and even in the sales process, as a business coach, we would ask them questions that would go beyond the scope of marketing and into the growth of their business. Things like we talked about intake and average cost of case values, things like that. In any event, all of that led to a very deep specialization and expertise in serving that market. And that ultimately led to a flywheel of referrals and credibility, allowed us to raise our prices. The other thing that made Scorpion really special was that we were very much a client first culture. We want our clients to feel like they were the only client. And so that was something that was institutionalized before I got there. As well as the vertical specialization. What my job was to take that and to crank up the volume of new revenue.
- [16:18]
Ralph Burns
So the generalist trap. We have hundreds of agencies that are listening right now. I was like, I'll just take anything because hey, I need to pay payroll. I've got maybe rent, I've got all these overhead costs. I'm not going to turn away business. It's a tough sell sometimes. So what would you say to those individuals? And they're like, we're doing okay. Maybe we're at the million dollar mark or maybe we're approaching that wherever it happens to be. Like, I've got lead gen, I've got digital, I've got services, I've got here, there, everywhere. I'm doing services all over the place. Like our last co host here had eight services and he would just like sell them all to like whoever and whoever came in the door. And like you can get to a certain level doing that. But why is that a trap?
- [17:06]
Lauren E. Petrulo
It's a trap because it feeds upon itself. When you are serving too many different types of people, you end up creating a lot of context switching in the business, right. Which leads to operational efficiencies. Sure, you may build out the SOPs, but when every client that you sell is a different type of industry, a different type of client, those SOPs that you've created are worthless. They're useless to you. And so as a result of that, you have you End up with a business that's full of bottlenecks. And guess who is the number one bottleneck in the agency? Whitney Generalist firm founder. The founder is because they're the only ones that knew, know that what was sold, it was some special combination of things that was sold to this client, which is completely different, that was sold to the last client, right? And as a result of that, your team just receives these jobs, this work that they don't really understand the whole context. They won't. It's new to them. They don't understand the industry. And so, unfortunately, at scale, this becomes a challenge to produce amazing work. Your work ultimately becomes mediocre. And when you have a mediocre product in a very competitive world of agencies, you begin to be perceived as a commodity. And then commodities, of course, get traded up. Clients who think you're a commodity, they think they can find the better or the same somewhere else for cheaper or maybe work with a specialist. And when you're a commodity, you lose. Clients churn. And of course, when clients churn, you have to chase revenue. And when you chase revenue, you have to say yes to everyone, right? You got a mortgage to pay, you have employees to pay. You have trying to get your kids through college. Like, all of those things, you. You have no choice but to say yes. And so that repeats this process where you're saying yes to just mediocre fit clients instead of amazing fit clients. And it is so common in the world we operate in, because I think, in a way, it's hard for us to turn away good revenue.
- [18:58]
Ralph Burns
Oh, absolutely, Absolutely. And it's. It's like it's a drug to a certain degree. You're like, well, I know I should specialize, but all these leads over here, the beauty of all this is that and what I found and you, it's interesting because I didn't realize that you sort of inherited the specialization side. Like, I'm not saying, like, you didn't have anything to do with it, but it's like they already had a PI law or an attorney sort of subspecialization or a deep specialization, you just sort of tightened the focus a bit, obviously, with some of the strategies we'll talk about here. But what I found when I pitched this idea to our team, and we did it in an area that we've talked about many times here on the show Beauty and wellness. We kick ass with beauty and wellness. We just do. Like, it's. It is our deep specialization. But it's not the only area that doesn't mean that we do great work with PI Law. We do work with digital and lead gen and all these other sorts of things. However, what I found is that when I actually brought it to the attention of like our group, everyone was like, this is great because salespeople sell but operations fulfills. And operations was thrilled. And you remember our first calls, Andrew was like, oh my God, this is a godsend.
- [20:18]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, doing. She's like smiling ear to ear. She's like, yes.
- [20:22]
Ralph Burns
She couldn't wait. She's like, what does Corey want us to do this week? I'm not even going to try and do her accent. It's like she did like all the work. She. I was like, okay, Ang, don't you want any help? She's like, no, I got it. Because she was so excited about it. Because she's like, as soon as you operationalize the operation side with consistency and we knew that we had this gargantuan advantage over so many other agencies, it's like just leverage it. But it means operational efficiency, which is people doing similar tasks, not necessarily the same tasks, but you can then have more efficient headcount numbers. You don't have to hire a creative team for a lead gen and then another one for this and that, another thing. And everyone was very much in alignment. So I looked at this as not just necessarily a growth mechanism, but I'm always sort of thinking culture wise, how can I build the culture and get everybody really aligned with the vision, the direction of the organization. And it did precisely that, which I never really thought that was going to be it. I just thought about like, how do we grow?
- [21:26]
Lauren E. Petrulo
And the beauty of this, I think in that context is that as a result of that internal alignment and enthusiasm and focus and just mojo on the inside, you're going to create better results for your clients. You have better, they're going to have a better experience. And that of course leads to turning you as a provider in this vertical market, as a true authority. Like you're going to create consistent, great results for this industry. People are going to notice within that industry, which of course leads to something really great which is allows you to become more of a premium offering. You're become a hard to find solution in the market. Not everyone has this level of expertise or as is as credible as you are. And so as a result of that, you're able to increase your prices, which increases your margin. And the last step we're talking about here is this deep specialization flywheel, which is what makes it a flywheel, is that you Take this extra margin that's created by the systems and the results, the predictable results for your clients, which produces the authority, which produces premium pricing, that creates margin, which allows you to reinvest in the vertical. Right? That's where it actually becomes a flywheel, is that all of a sudden you're taking that margin, you're going in and you're creating better systems. Maybe you're training your people even better. Maybe you're doing better sales and marketing, which is what I got to do at Scorpion. We got to give away, we got to do really amazing marketing that, hey.
- [22:54]
Ralph Burns
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- [24:30]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Well, let me give you, let me give you some numbers to kind of quantify this. We, so we sold into personal injury attorneys. They would hire us for 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars a month and they would stay with us for 30 months. Our generalist competitors would sell those same attorneys for 2k a month and they would churn out after 12 months. And so if you take a step back and you look at the revenue opportunity each client, these personal injury attorney client would generate at least $300,000 of revenue for Scorpion, $24,000 for our competitors. That produced a tremendous amount of margin that we were able to go back and re market in the, in the market to personal injury attorneys that we ran circles around our competitors. What I mean by that is we had a bigger booth, we threw better parties, we sent out amazing cookies, we gave away cars. You know, we did all these amazing things. We way out marketed our competitors. That would further allow us to continue that flywheel. We would be able to deepen our expertise, improve our systems, create even more leverage internally, create even more authority and so on and so forth. And that's how we dominated the market.
- [25:42]
Ralph Burns
Well, talk to us about the thing that you referred to. There is gifts. And the talk that I saw, I actually, I didn't actually see it. I heard about it later on because everybody was buzzing about it, but they were talking about cookies. Tell us about cookies. And the thing we now know as gbo acronym alert.
- [26:02]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Our second one, Gift based. Gift based outbound. Okay, so going back to the gong and the six person sales floor, we had this specialization. We had all this, these great case studies and happy clients. We just needed to get in front of more people. And so what do we do? Of course, we bought a list from Dun and Bradstreet and we started cold calling. We had to go into that sales floor. It was actually a separate room in the agency. And we had to knock on the door and say, hey guys, love that you're closing. Yeah, love that you are closing these inbounds and ringing the bell.
- [26:34]
Corey Quinn
Time to start hunting. Stop just gathering.
- [26:37]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yes, we want, we need you to actually start picking up the phone and start calling these attorneys.
- [26:43]
Ralph Burns
I can hear it right now, like that record, like the needle going across the record. Everyone's like, what?
- [26:52]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, we moved the, the goal post and we actually gave them a quota, which was hard. Right. And there's things we did tactically to help ease that. But one of the best things we did is that we figured out that if you send a gift ahead of a cold call, you change the whole dynamic of a, of an outreach. Let me tell you what happens when you cold call an attorney. Maybe some of the folks who are listening are familiar with this. You have. You typically get what's called a gatekeeper. Gatekeeper is the office manager. It is the receptionist. It's someone who answers the phone. And their job is to prevent Scorpion and other vendors from accessing the attorney. So we would get shut down all the time. It wasn't until we started Sending gifts. And what we did is first off, we found the most amazing gourmet cookies that you could find. Like, you have to hold the wall just not to fall.
- [27:45]
Ralph Burns
Why cookies? That's how. Why was it cookies?
- [27:50]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So we tried a number of things. Cookies ended up being the most popular because what happened was they ended up getting shared in the break room. And people in the staff of the law firm would be standing around drinking coffee, eating these amazing cookies and saying, who brought the amazing cookies? And someone would say, I don't know, some company called Scorpion. And then someone else would say, well, who's Scorpion? And someone else would say, I don't know, some company. The name Scorpion was like bouncing off all the walls before. Before you know it. Right. And so by the time we called the. Instead of getting the typical arms crossed, sorry, they're not available, we got a much different reception. We got the, oh my God, you're the ones who sent those amazing cookies. Those so good. We ate all of them. Like, those are so good. Like, let me put you through. Right? And the impact was transformational. We were able to set meetings with people that were otherwise very difficult to get.
- [28:50]
Ralph Burns
So the objection that I had when we first started talking about this, it's like, that's great. Attorneys have a physical office in many cases, like we're in the beauty and wellness niche, for example. A lot of these offices are far flung. Like, they're virtual. And so you have to figure like, so how does that change that dynamic? I mean, I can turn. I used to work in an office. So we'd go into the break room and there'd be coffee and there'd be donuts or whatever. I was in pharma and medical, like, we did the same thing, like with the doctors and the surgical suite, all that sort of stuff. Point is, like, in a virtual environment where people are far flung, how does the strategy change, if at all?
- [29:28]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So with COVID with remote work, it definitely has changed the environment. The one of the most important steps that you can take in the early stages of this process, it's a four step process that I teach, is that you actually have to call the office to make sure that they can receive a gift there. If you can't find a phone number, if you can't confirm an address, don't send a gift.
- [29:52]
Corey Quinn
Makes sense. That's like a really good technique because I'm just thinking of the amount of times that you guys probably sent cookies to an outdated address because not everyone updates their things. I think of how people change their Emails, people could have been changing offices or the person who was responsible. And then at that office and it's just a P.O.
- [30:10]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Box.
- [30:10]
Corey Quinn
So that's a huge tip where I'm just like, oh man. Always just confirm. It's like your RSVP for a wedding invitation.
- [30:19]
Lauren E. Petrulo
That's right. And so the way I teach it today at Scorpion, we were able to scale it up. We had 60 salespeople. We closed 60 deals a quarter, sorry, 600 deals a quarter. Across the 60 salespeople, all doing gifts. Each person, each salesperson got 250 gifts sent per quarter to a list of businesses. Which by the way, made the cold calling much easier. And so, but when I teach it, it is much more of a quantity, sorry, a quality over quantity strategy. So instead of sending out 600 gifts, you want to send out 10 to 20. And you want to send it out to the VIP prospects in your industry. Not just any business, but the best of the best businesses. The ones you really want to get in front of the ones that would.
- [31:01]
Corey Quinn
Be so like your sniper, not your shotgun approach.
- [31:05]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Exactly. I call it spear phishing.
- [31:07]
Corey Quinn
It's, I think every cookie baker that does this in mass one is like, send it to all 600 or else.
- [31:15]
Lauren E. Petrulo
You end up getting a lot of cookies returned.
- [31:18]
Corey Quinn
So people returned the cookies?
- [31:20]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Well, I'm just saying if they, if you don't get the address, if you don't have the right address, it's going back to that. But no, people wouldn't return that. We did get an iPad return though, once. They thought that it was too expensive of a gift. They said thank you, but no thank you, really.
- [31:33]
Ralph Burns
They returned it like a bribe. Like, this is too much.
- [31:36]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, this makes me feel uncomfortable. I can't take this.
- [31:39]
Ralph Burns
I could see that there was doctors that I used to call on that just wouldn't allow like anything. Like it feels like a bribe. My staff can't touch it, my staff can't eat it. All of that.
- [31:49]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah. And there's, that brings up a good point. Excuse me for interrupting, but the medical industry is very sensitive about receiving gifts. Right. They have compliance and rules about that. So there's also sort of different industries that are more sensitive to receiving gifts than others.
- [32:05]
Ralph Burns
So the key is prescreen, call ahead, make sure there's a physical address, make sure that. And I have to double check with our team on our latest send out on that. The point is like, that's the key to everything. It's not just, oh, these are our best clients, let's just send them out blindly. There's a whole process of making sure the information is accurate and getting to ultimately to the decision maker which may or may not be the president and founder of the law firm. It could be somebody sort of internally. So there's lots of nuances to this. Like and I know at the height you guys were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this $3 million a year. $3 million a year.
- [32:51]
Corey Quinn
That's just on the gifts or is that the whole sales outbound?
- [32:54]
Lauren E. Petrulo
No, that was the cold that was sending gifts to cold prospects.
- [32:57]
Corey Quinn
But again so it wasn't so. Sorry. There was a double call though because you were saying there were one thing. So one was to call to verify the address, then you sent the cookies, then there was the actual call after. So you would cold call, not ask Scorpion, but it's just a regular hey, I'm just calling. Is this your address? Cool. Hang up, send the cookies, wait a few days to confirm the cookies were there and say like hey, this is a sweet offer for you. I definitely want you to nibble on this. Like let's go. Chips ahoy ahead.
- [33:28]
Ralph Burns
Oh my God. So many bad analogies in that one. But anyway, methodology I teach you.
- [33:35]
Lauren E. Petrulo
The gift needs to be unique, striking and has to leave an impression. And I'll give you a quick story of something someone on our team who did this really well. Scott sales guy, his name is Justin. He's selling into franchise multi location businesses. More of an enterprise level sale. Three year deal. We would make over a million dollars for a sale and we Justin had his list of 50 prospects that he was focusing on for the year let's call it and more like an ABM approach. There was one CEO on this list that he didn't have a relationship with, couldn't get an introduction to would email and the CEO didn't respond. And so Justin was researching her and couldn't get any traction with her. So he's researching her and he found out that she was interviewed in an article and in the article she was asked what is your all time favorite quote? And she said well my all time favorite quote, this is the CEO was something my dad used to tell me growing up and it's something that stuck with me and it's be authentic and tell great stories. So Justin went straight to Etsy, found an amazing artist and had that quote embroidered on a pillow, sent that pillow overnight FedEx to the CEO. That led to a phone call which led to a relationship which led to a 1.6 million dollar deal for Scorpion.
- [34:57]
Ralph Burns
That's Fantastic.
- [35:00]
Corey Quinn
You can't sleep on those numbers. Some can only dream about them sometimes.
- [35:06]
Ralph Burns
Or take a nap on them.
- [35:07]
Corey Quinn
This is no pillow talk. Okay, that's the last one.
- [35:09]
Ralph Burns
Oh, God. Like just once she's on a roll, Corey. She just can't stop.
- [35:14]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I, I love it.
- [35:15]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, please don't stop. Please. I love it. Please stop, Lauren. Just please stop. So I was on the beach this weekend and I was telling somebody about this and like, oh, yeah, we used to do that all the time. I'm like, really? What'd you send? It's like, oh, we just sent, you know, mugs. And I was like, oh, with your logo on it, right? It's like, yeah, it doesn't really doesn't work. So like there's a lot of people that think that gift based outbound is in a lumpy mail and the like. I know you actually advocate this too. Like the personalized video in the box kind of thing. Like how wide can you go with this? Because you obviously you want to match it with the individual industry to a certain degree. What would you say about those people? Like, yeah, we're already doing it. It's like, well, it's not unique, striking or it gives a positive impression. Like with a coffee mug with the Tier 11 logo on it. It's actually a really cool mug, by the way. But I don't know if that's going to knock down any doors and get past any gatekeepers. So what would you say to that?
- [36:11]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I would say that one of the, in addition to the USI uniquely striking impression is the emotion you want the person to have when they're opening this up is, wow, this person went out of their way to do something special for me. Like this person, I don't know who they are, but they thought about me or they're going out, they're going out of their way. Like, who is this person? And then when they call, when this, when you call to follow up, I don't want to say that they're obligated or that there's like inherent reciprocity, but you've left an impression. The problem logoed mug or one of your cheap pens that you send to a conference is that's not going to cause them to pause in their day when they receive that. Like, oh, they'll just dismiss it as another piece of swag that's not really tchotchke.
- [36:57]
Corey Quinn
And it's like, you just gave me trash. I have to throw away another coffee mug that I have to wash and I can't Already fit in this like 7,000 mugs.
- [37:05]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Oh, gosh. Yeah, absolutely. So the impact you want is someone to go, oh, okay, this person, Lauren, they're interesting. They have, they, I need to talk to this person. Because obviously they, they're different than the rest.
- [37:17]
Ralph Burns
And the cookies, like, let's not kid ourselves here, the cookies are not cheap to have this whole thing work. This is not a strategy for the faint of heart. Especially like if you're doing it at scale, like they're 100, 150, like the best vendors. And obviously there's, there's some personalization that goes along with it and everything else. So it's gotta be something that does make an impact and is sent to the right place. Hello, tier 11 team. We're making sure that is the case. The point is that's just the beginning. So tell us about the few minutes that we have left here.
- [37:49]
Corey Quinn
That's your getting attention.
- [37:50]
Ralph Burns
That's all you're getting attention. So.
- [37:53]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Exactly. And the area where people will drop the ball or fail on this is when they don't follow up. This is not a strategy where you send amazing pillows or gifts or anything like that and they're going to come calling you or wanting to give you.
- [38:07]
Corey Quinn
A check ready to buy right now, closing and then just say however on.
- [38:12]
Ralph Burns
The card you do have a URL that's specific to them. And that did happen actually on Monday, by the way, our latest round.
- [38:20]
Lauren E. Petrulo
But fantastic. And I found.
- [38:22]
Ralph Burns
But no, but that's the exception rather than the rule because it's everything is the follow up. So like give us an example.
- [38:30]
Corey Quinn
Well, that's where you'd said that's why you go laser targeted versus full broad stroke, so you can focus heavily on a good follow up.
- [38:38]
Lauren E. Petrulo
And so the follow up is a blitz. It's not you follow up forever. It's six times in 14 days. You do call email, voicemail and LinkedIn day after day. So you skip a day, so day every other day for six attempts. And the purpose of the gift is to get the phone call, is to get them on the line. That's when the purpose of the gift ends. The next step is have a sales conversation or at least have a relationship driven conversation that may lead to a sale.
- [39:08]
Corey Quinn
So you were sending these to the, what do you call them, fat sales happy individuals that were driving the Lamborghini. You're like, all right, I'm going to give you an alley oop. No longer receive a slam dunk on a silver platter, but you would provide them with these Alley oop of conversations while we got out of the pillow and into the. The ball game.
- [39:29]
Lauren E. Petrulo
But yes, these are alu, right? You're handing the ball to them right next to the net.
- [39:34]
Ralph Burns
And I'm sure they love that.
- [39:36]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Some of them probably they became a little spoiled.
- [39:38]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, they were spoiled. So I would imagine that initial group, like if you have a sales team or a salesperson, they may not like this to begin with.
- [39:46]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, well, it beats yellow booking. You said going down the line of just yellow pages.
- [39:53]
Ralph Burns
She doesn't even know. Isn't this. These genders. Oh, my God.
- [39:59]
Corey Quinn
There's things that I think, like, I'm sure I've seen those yellow pages. Were they white?
- [40:05]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Were they all white pages?
- [40:07]
Corey Quinn
They were thick. I. I think I sat on them to sit at the table when she was a toddler.
- [40:15]
Ralph Burns
Right?
- [40:16]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah. That's great. The yellow pages were the local businesses. The white pages were all the residents in the area.
- [40:23]
Corey Quinn
I didn't know there was a difference. There's. Okay, yeah, great. I again, I sat on textbooks.
- [40:29]
Lauren E. Petrulo
That's my encounter seats. It's a big thick. Exactly.
- [40:33]
Corey Quinn
Yeah. But that was an expense that no one had delivered cookies to to convince my mom and dad to buy a booster seat.
- [40:39]
Ralph Burns
So absolutely not.
- [40:39]
Corey Quinn
That salesperson went wrong.
- [40:41]
Ralph Burns
It went horribly wrong. So the key is also, I was.
- [40:44]
Corey Quinn
Expected to be tall. That's. Let's blame genetics. Okay. I was supposed to be tall enough.
- [40:48]
Ralph Burns
That I suppose I actually needed one. Because you're like 6 foot 2. Anyway. On heels. Well, even higher on heels. So anyway, so that's the key. And then the next step of that is a whole other thing, which we're not even going to get into. But it's like, let's just recap here for a second. Just so people, if you're trying to close like a sale a month and you're an agency, you guys are closing 46 deals a week. That's 600 a quarter. If I'm doing my math correctly. That's literally one an hour. If you're working a 40 or 50 hour week, that's an insane amount. Like, this really works. I think that was the stat that I was like, you serious? And it actually work this way.
- [41:35]
Corey Quinn
That's more. I'm just. You go back. So you bring it down to more than one an hour. That's like a. That's more than most of these people. That's more to bite off than they can chew. Hence why that was a soft, delicious cookie. But like, that's massive. How much of that came from the GBO strategy.
- [41:49]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So half of it came from gbo, the other half came from inbound and events and things like that.
- [41:54]
Ralph Burns
You guys had a very half though.
- [41:55]
Corey Quinn
Half was controlled and predictable.
- [41:58]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Gift based. Outbound, correct?
- [41:59]
Corey Quinn
Yes.
- [42:00]
Lauren E. Petrulo
That's well said. That's well said. We didn't wait for the phone to ring. We actually did the targeting, we sent the gifts, we did the follow up and then yeah, close the deals if.
- [42:09]
Ralph Burns
You'Re thinking about doing this and obviously get the book. First off, we've got a special giveaway for perpetual traffic listeners. Here is like if you have a sales team, they may not adapt to this well, especially if most of your leads are coming in and they just have to fill like it's all form fills and there's really no outbound at all. Like it didn't sit well with our team and we had to hire a new team as a result of this shift. Now they're also very adept on the inbound side. But the outbound was just like a, it was like a foreign language. And so we had to make some very hard choices as a result of this. But we realized that this was one leg of the stool that we had just never really done a whole lot with and could never really make it work, which is outbound just in general. And it makes complete sense to me. And like the specialization obviously has started to bear fruit on our side. So like this is a legit strategy, ladies and gentlemen. So Corey, it's been incredible to have you on here. We could keep talking about. There's so many other things like this is just like the tip of the iceberg. But I know you've got a special offer for perpetual traffic listeners only.
- [43:21]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So yeah, so for your listeners, guys, we. I've made this book available to your listeners. It's the audible version. So it's the same version that you're going to get. You go to Amazon and buy the audible version. It's a full audiobook narrated by me. So you'll be. You get your little bit, a little bit more of my time in your ear. You can go to anyone, not everyone dot com, that's anyone not everyone dot com. And that's where you'll be able to access the audiobook as well as there is a digital workbook that includes worksheets, templates, videos, all these amazing resources. You can go through the five steps. We talked about a couple of them today. We can go through the full five steps following the workbook in the book.
- [43:59]
Ralph Burns
And no like code. We have to enter or Anything like that, just go to anyone. Not everyone Dot com. All right, put that on your favorites Perpetual Traffic listeners, especially you agencies. This has been amazing, dude. Like, this is, it's kind of a mind blowing, like logically it makes so much sense. It's like I have had, we have hired five or six different agencies to try and crack the code on Outbound and have never been able to do it until now. And it's, we're finally serving the audiences that we do our best work with, which is incredibly gratifying and it trickles all down throughout the entire organization. So yes, I'm a shill for Corey Quinn, of course, but you screw it. I think this is one of the best strategies that's out there. So where can people connect with you personally? Is there any place you want to connect there?
- [44:51]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, I'm very, I'm very active on LinkedIn. So if you, if you're active on LinkedIn, reach out to me there. Would love to connect with you.
- [44:57]
Ralph Burns
It's awesome. All right. And make sure that wherever you listen to podcasts, leave a rating and review. We love to read those on air here. And obviously, yes, that's the best part. We require it for all our guests. We, by the way, Corey. So I expect a five, I expect a six star review anyway, a little give and take here. So make sure that you do leave. That at least gets us to a wider audience here and learn how to do all this stuff the right way. This is specifically for you agencies as well, which I know you've been listening all this time and have been looking for ways to grow your business. This is the way to do it. And of course all the resources that we mentioned here, including anyone, not everyone.com is over at Perpetual Traffic. So on behalf of my amazing co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, till next show, see you.
- [45:46]
Corey Quinn
You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.