Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Dancho Dimkov. Dancho, welcome.
Hello. Hi Thomas, thank you very much for inviting me on the show.
You are very welcome. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. I mean Thomas I have a shorter version of the story and the longer version of the story and for the longer I always need at least a few beers to tell the whole story. But in short, I’m an owner of a business consulting company which is focused on helping companies grow And since last year we actually specialised into outreach into prospecting and regeneration with primary focus on B2B world and high ticket service providers. The thing is that Bizzbee is established five years already who time flies and over the last five years you know as we learn as we upgrade. We saw that the most value that we can provide is really helping high ticket service providers and reaching out to call prospects.
Start building that relationship ethical relationship is the key word here and start building the relationship authority toward bringing people on meetings and hopefully bringing more clients to our clients. Okay, thanks for that introduction. The topic of discussion, as we previously discussed, is LinkedIn sales navigator topic. Well, I’m glad it’s your favourite topic because I don’t have a great deal of knowledge to call stuff to say about it. You know people that don’t know what is LinkedIn? 10 1000 Navigator? Sure. Sure. Well, almost to take a step back, I just wanted to give you an idea why linking you really need it. Is that since we are working mostly into the B two B world and I’m sure that you as a marketing agency are also targeting to other companies, B two B there are so many ways on how you can reach out to the prospects and you have ads, you have content, you have social media, you have cold calling an email. But when it comes to social media, I’ve realised that Lincoln is one of the best social media for business is I mean you cannot really go to what’s the newest one TikTok and start chatting about your business opportunities.
I mean the demographics there that people are going are more teenagers. Probably it’s TikTok or you know in my time we had Facebook and then Twitter came in and some of them moved to Twitter, then Instagram came up. So the younger population moved to Instagram and now with the TikTok there will be so many social media but when it comes to business network, I truly believe that LinkedIn is the best network out there for businesses and for me because we did a lot of regeneration and database building for a lot of our clients. It was a really hard process. I mean you find the database and then you built with emails with contact information and everything And then in six months or 12 months you need to update the database because people change jobs, people get fired, people get promoted. So it’s a constant effort on updating your database. On the other hand, you have linking where as people change their job they are so happy they go on LinkedIn and updated on their own. So you somehow end up with a database that is self-updated.
People are happy to tell you that they’ve changed their job or position or move to different companies. So when we had that realisation we said Lincoln is actually the best way how can how companies can grow their businesses. Especially if they’re targeting other companies. Now when it comes to the sales navigator is a premium feature functionality on LinkedIn which gives you all the advanced filter that you need because yeah I mean you are into ad I’m sure you when you do Facebook targeting you say well I’m interested in males 25 to 40. With these characteristics, with these demographics with this interest. Well the sales navigator is exactly the same thing. Just for Lincoln. So what you can filter out, you can filter geographically, you can say I’m interested in people from the UK. So it’s going to show you exactly how many people are in the UK. Then you’re saying well the UK is a big geographic. So I’m interested into the automotive industry. So people that are in the UK but are working in the automotive industry.
Then you can choose the company size. Well, I want to be up to 50 employees. So it will show you all the people that are in UK, in automotive that are working in companies up to 50 employees. And you can use several additional filters to narrow down the industry the employee size. But it’s more important that after that you can focus on the people, you can say well you know what I’m actually after the CEOs of these companies or I’m more like a marketing person. I want to approach the chief marketing officer of chief marketing executive or head of marketing or director of marketing. So you can put those specific positions and LinkedIn will be like in our database. We have 6000 people that are chief marketing executives from UK. In the automotive industry. Within up to 50 employees. So for us that’s like a magic went you click a button and it shows you the specific segment that you can then do whatever you want. You can use ads, you can do outreach.
You can build the database out of them. You can even start some chit chatting or building a relationship with those people. But at the end of the day, the sales navigator is actually the functionality of being able to segment the market into different sub segments. Yeah. So how does it differ from the ad platform? from what the LinkedIn ads? Yeah. Well with the Lincoln it’s you need to pay for the debt while with the self-navigator is a monthly subscription. You actually pay off in different currencies. But somewhere 60 to 80 whether it’s dollar pounds or euros. And with that you have access to that advanced filters, segmentation. Then if you want to do ads, you go into that direction. If you want to do outreach, you can start sending invitations to those people. Or there are some tools, automation tools that you can just scrape the list and then find their emails and then do a proper either email or cold calling or different approaches that the whole world is not.
You have a list that you can just populate with that, but you have a list of highly relevant prospects for you. For example, if you have an accounting software, you are a marketing agency. So if you specialise in SAAS or software companies to linking, you can filter out SAAS companies from UK and you can focus on the CEOs and once you have them you can use them for ads. You can use them for outreach for different channels. I can certainly see how it would be benefit beneficial for people who are looking for to scrape the database for leads when you say it’s outreach, are we talking messages? So you can automatically send messages to that number of people, is that right? Well, you can send messages whether it can be done automatically or manually. That really depends on the campaign and the metrics because we’ve worked with 400 clients so far in these five years and in some case you apply all the filters and they’re like 100 people in total, that is their target.
And we’re like well in this 100 people you really need to minimally approach like check out your profile, see what they’ve done and see, I mean toward the account based marketing almost in this way because before reaching out you can do some insight, you can do research on the person, you can do research on the company. So when you’re reaching out to them it’s like high poll. I saw your podcast especially I like the podcast with Gary on this topic. I would really love to connect and also I want to follow up on that. So then it’s really tailored approach like one-on-one chit chatting or if you have a much bigger audience then you think well I can do some automation but not like send message one way, three days and another one or at least not the whole conversation. You can just automate the conversation starter topic. Like you can send an invitation, they accept. You can pull up with some question or some general information and once they respond you still need to move again to mineral conversation because I still don’t believe that much in automation.
I mean automation, I truly believe as a set of automated steps but automating the conversation like chatbots and stuff. It will take a few more years till we get there. I don’t I still don’t feel comfortable when you chat with something. Can you realise you’re actually chatting with the chat? But it’s really uncomfortable feeling. Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s not quite there. Yeah, I do understand for people who are potentially using it for the first time, what would you recommend of the options that you’ve gone through? Well actually, if you go to our website and busy solution under resources, we have video interviews where every two weeks we’re doing a video recording of a software automation to for prospecting whether it’s for linked in whether it’s for email and I think we have at least 10 so far and they’re short like 15, 20 minutes where we live, the owners presented their software with screen sharing and they really go by step by step. Well, if you click like here, you can set up a message here, you can do automation like that.
But for first time users I really recommend to trade first manually because you cannot automate the process that you haven’t done manually. And start considering direct automation. We have here an interesting term called digital prospecting fever and we clean that term because people in physical life behave in a certain way. But when then it comes online they have completely different to give you an example. I mean before corona we were all going to be to be events and exhibitions and fairs and when you go to a bit to be conference or fair, you know you can meet 5 to 10 people, you can establish some meaningful conversation with them if there is a good match you can exchange some business cards and then follow up by their own email or call if there is an opportunity. Well, people don’t do that online. They even write the message I’m writing to five million people and then you blast to a huge amount of people and then you’re wondering why nobody is responding and that’s actually you’re caught by the fever.
Well, online I can actually do so much more and it doesn’t work like that. I mean, almost when even doing automation you cannot send a message that you wouldn’t otherwise send it manually. So our recommendation is first use it amount manually send several outreaches. See what kind of response you’re gonna get. Try to tailor really respond that conversation. And then you can start thinking well, now I know what are the most common questions and responses and discussion topics. Then I can find the tool that can just replace me and use this step 12 and three and four and many times it doesn’t work like that. I mean the with the automation people know that they can blast to millions and you’re either a prince from Nigeria selling money or selling Viagra and those kind of stuff. And that’s unfortunate. But you know I saw that on your website, your ethical marketing agency. People forget about the ethics when it comes to the outreach. And I really think that on a physical events, you know you cannot just think, hi my name is Thomas here is my business party for interest.
Call me. Hi, my name is Thomas for interest. Hi, my name is Thomas. People don’t do it like that. And somehow when it gets the online we did. I don’t know why. I don’t know how but just we have a switching our mindset, it’s like I’m in a physical event. nice to meet you. How his life are you are, what are you doing? I’m doing this. We are not a good match. Okay nice meeting you high next one hour. Good match. Well, I can actually help you, give you a business card to follow up. Then you move to online area like spamming everybody. It’s really weird experience. Yeah, I was gonna say every now and again you used to get those people who do that one line introduction business card and then they go to the next person but they don’t they’re not perceived very favourably, are they? So, yeah. Yeah but that’s usually a junior work, you know at the junior you’re focused on quantity at the end of the day when your boss asks you how many people you talk to? 100 people. I went to a bit too big conference. I reached my business card to 100 people.
And then when you think well what was the outcome of that input and usually very low and when you’re talking to senior self said well, I talked with five people are close to and that’s it. There’s no point in doing that kind of quantity. You’re doing manual outrage like you said to begin with as well. You can probably minimise the amount of people that you’re going for and therefore personalise it a bit more and most likely get some response for that. Yeah. Yeah. I can actually show you that several steps that we’re doing for the ultimate process because I think it will be very useful if someone decides to start. I mean aside disclaimer on our website we have absolutely everything for free. I mean, we have seven different e-books. Okay? You need to leave us your email but other than that, we have a new book on how to define your ideal client profile then how to build a database. Didn’t even how to create the engaging conversation starters and how to do execute actually linking campaign.
And we’ve had an e book that once people start responding how to nurture them into a meeting not sending an invitation. Someone accepts you. Hi, my name is Dan. Trying to sell this, this, this if you’re interested, here are 75 attachments and three PowerPoint presentations, and it doesn’t work like that, honestly. And I was just saying that we have that resources, everything available on our website, we give it for free. And usually when we work with companies in our case there usually B2B service providers first we take the linked in profile because I know that people are saying you know your linked in profile should be like a city and that is true if you’re looking for a job but if you’re a business owner and if you’re really thinking about growing your business you’re not selling yourself, you’re actually selling your company. So your profile should be actually how you can help your ideal client, how can you help automotive industry, how you help business companies or B2B or consumer product.
So actually your LinkedIn profile should actually reflect how you actually help the companies you serve and we do that. So we make it as a funnel to be really attractive to at some personal note not to be hi my name is down so I have an executive MB. I have a master’s degree. I have 20 years of experience in that but it’s really like a story. It’s like I’m done show I had an agency. I had a lot of problems with my agency and I figured one thing how to use the outreach to actually get clients and now my goal is to actually help a lot of other agencies in order they could do the same and get more clients. So when you put that as a story it’s really on a different level and we’ve tested it a lot Thomas and it really affects the acceptance rate, engagement rate and people start connecting with you because you know now 21st century you have so many invitation and people guard is like this, it’s like who is this guy? Why is he inviting me? And we have an internal joke here like someone invites us, we have accept and we’re just seeing how much time it will pass to the start pitching whether it’s like accepting me that follow up.
Well, I sell this or I do website or I do SCEO or stuff or they will genuinely engage into a conversation which is what we preach engage into conversation, qualify see if there is a need and only if there is a need, you can invite them on a coal where you can discuss more or if you see that they’re not ready. You keep them in your network and then maybe they’re not ready now, but maybe after a few months they’ll be ready and if you have them in your network, they can see your post social content and what you share. So the first step is really boosting your profile to really reflect to your ideal client profile, the second step is usually using the Lincoln self-navigator filters to find to laser focus on who is your ideal target, whether it’s like just 500 people, whether it’s 100 people or whether it’s a 5000 people. The whole goal is that to know who you’re talking to because when you’re doing automation you don’t want to be hi my name is on show we do regeneration as general or we actually help management consultant thing bring more strategy cost which is far more specific.
And then you can use linking to focus on management consultants, owners of management consulting companies. So the whole aspect of the campaign will be more tailored to that group. Then we have a copywriter that it doesn’t write message one and then move them to a meeting. But we do sequencing of messages, but the focus is not to drive them to the funnel. But you know as a funnel is like this our focus is not to drive them down. But actually tried 32 different conversation starters just to get them engaged. That’s the whole goal of the automation just to get them engaged because once they start responding were moving from 1 to 1 communication where we can move them down and qualify they’re a good fit. So we usually do 3 to 4 messages. And you know there is a good psychology behind those messages. Like the first one is duality. So when we are creating the messages, we’re trying to put some duality in the messages. It’s like as a management consultant and talking about because that was our last campaign as a management consultant.
On the one hand, it’s really up to management consultant to actually help companies to survive during this crisis. But on the other hand now companies have really tightened budget which really applies also for marketing agency. On the one hand now marketing agency should support companies in order to get more clients and survive of the crisis. But on the other hand, companies really have tough budgets and you see and putting the duality and people really engaged in this kind of conversation. I mean Thomas, when you are asked to what do you think between A and B. People really want to respond. And that’s really a good strategy. And then the second conversation starter is usually empathy where you think you know what? I know it’s hard and as a marketing agency now during the crisis it’s really in our crisis everywhere. It is a good start at starting a conversation. It’s like when companies hit the price what they cut first the marketing budget, it’s a really bad mistake. But it’s reality. It’s like when people need to cut, they start from the marketing and it’s really hard in this to compete against on an international level.
So we try to be more empathic with the client and you know, if they want duality, imagine how much people want to complain. It’s like, you’re right. It’s really hard. Or actually it’s not hard for me. I really blossomed during this corona crisis and that’s all we need to start responses because from there we moved to mental conversation and we’re saying, you’re right, if you’re so if you’re doing really good, just tell me, how are you currently getting your leads? Because it means that you’re quite good at that. Or if you’re not well, have you considered linking is live? And you see, I’m actually qualifying them if they’re good leads for us. Or if they say, you know what? We have a team of regeneration for linking in house or we’re actually working with an agency for three months. And then we think, well, there’s no point in pitching. Yeah, we can ask, how are you happy with the current supplier? But you cannot really push them. Well, just come on a call. There is no point. And the whole goal with that conversation and relationship building is to connect with people.
And I think that’s the ethical part here where we’re not trying to blossom a million people. And then with the hope of 0.1 success, you get few interested people. But it’s actually to start building relationship. So if they know you as the go-to guy for marketing services or for Lincoln in this case even if they don’t need now after six months they’re gonna be like I know a guy on Lincoln that is really good at Lincoln, let me connect with him and that’s really the relationship building. And Thomas also didn’t mention that when people connect with you on linking you have them in your network. So if you’re reaching out to your ideal clients, you’re actually surrounding yourself with your ideal target. So it’s not just whether you’re going to do a blast or outreach or some campaign but whoever except you have them because then you can do some social content. You can create some blogs, you can create a block on how marketing agency can utilise the outreach to get more clients or how management consultant can actually do themselves the Lincoln ultras to get more clients and you can start posting about that because you know that at the beginning you won’t have a high visibility but as you start posting more frequently you are the go-to guy for LinkedIn outreach.
Great information. Thank you for all of that. You mentioned that you did some tests before about what was effective and what wasn’t effective. You let me know what you tested and what the results were. Yeah. Well, actually we’re now in the process of building a busy laboratory and you know like in the forest service we have a different be so now we have a special being a white coast with Google with how it’s called doing experiment. And the whole goal is that we have informal tests a lot. I’ll show you give you examples, but now we just want to formalise it. So our goal is to test as many things as possible. For example, you take two linked in profiles with absolutely everything the same. The only difference is one is male, the other one is female. So we start sending invitations to 1000 people and we actually measure the acceptance rate on the male versus the female. And from experience, female will always get better acceptance rate. But the problem is we’ve never made it as a one variable and everything else has a fixed.
But from experience as we work with different clients, we’ve noticed that with females they get really much better acceptance rate. So now with the experiment we want to say easy by 20% or is it by 50%. So we want to be able to do that. Or then we’re trying to just tweak the name. Whether if you put more Eastern Europe name versus Western Europe name to see whether it will also affect the invitation. So there are like 10 or 15 tests that we want to do just on the invitation. then we want to do on the follow-ups. Whether push directly on a call will yield a better results than actually, you know, 10 sequenced message and we want to document these findings so then we can make a small book which will say like the 10 or 20 test we did but this will be backed by science like 37.5% improvement if you do like this or 25% or in a significant difference between this and this. We don’t know when that however, what we were doing now test in Bisbee, we had a client from, from Ireland actually who was getting really bad acceptance rate.
The good and better acceptance rate is really when you compare it against a benchmark. So in our case, like 25 to 35% acceptance rate is a good benchmark. If you get 5 to 7% acceptance rate, something is wrong. And it’s easy because acceptance rate is affected by what it’s either the invitation message, your profile or the target and those are the only three variables that affect your acceptance rate. The invitation messages usually as plain as possible. So I’m moving it away. So if you have a low acceptance rate, it’s either your profile or is your target. Either your target does not resonate with you and we need to change your profile. So it would more resonate or we need to change the target and find another targeted to more resonate with your profile and with that client from Ireland he was doing some mindset coaching paradigm shifting something and the point there was that we just changed his title like not helping companies elevating their business, something like that.
We just made it like a CEO of parenting coaching or I’m not sure what was the exact name of the company and you know what from 357 immediately, 25 30% acceptance rate. And it was like a small tweak into the profile, Nothing else. Same target, same people. We just made one tweak, and it’s significantly improve and we also had many times like yeah people are accepting us 50% acceptance rate, we’re perfect but how many of people are engaging and usually again we are looking between 30 40% engagement rate If it’s below that like 10 15%. But then the conversation starters are bad because they are not resonating when you’re setting up the duality, they don’t feel it. Maybe we need to tweak the messages or when you’re doing empathy, you’re not hitting that nerve like exactly I feel you I want to respond to but it’s more like why he’s writing with this weird messages that’s not my job or that’s not really touching me so that means that we don’t need to tweak the profile to the target audience or we need to tweak that the message sequence but that’s why we are doing the angel way Thomas where we measure everything and during that measure with a lot of A to B testing which really is different for every client. I found it surprisingly we had a client targeting Singapore and Hong Kong, which gives one message structure. Perfect results. The same messages in the US. Did not get the same results. So same profile, same service, same target audience, completely different results. And then we realised that there are some variables that we cannot control. I mean, we had clients that are celebrities and with them it’s very easy. I mean when they said the invitation everybody except and we got to the 80% acceptance rate they’re like yeah I’m so happy you invited me. I would love to get on a call or companies that really had a good social proof like case studies testimonials from clients’ video testimonials. So when you talk with someone you know they’re curious they’re gonna check out your linked in profile, they’re going to click on your website to try to look you up a bit and if you have a strong social proof, it’s much easier to move them down the funnel and bring them on a coal rather than you know start up six months ago started the business had one or two clients nothing to show us the proof.
Then it’s much harder to move them down the ladder. So once you have the messages we can start with the outreach and consistency is key here. We need to send daily invitation. It’s not like I’m gonna send one blast and that’s it because on linking as you send daily, some people start responding, you start getting mental conversation with them and that’s the nurturing part and it’s a funnel, you get daily new, some are stuck in the middle of summer struck a bit lower and there is always people that are okay, let’s jump on a call or let’s discuss this this further. So in short, that’s the cycle that we’re doing and we measure absolutely everything because for each client it’s different. We’ve realised that it takes the first few months is closely monitoring the campaign measuring the, the acceptance rate, the engagement rate, the meeting. Great just to make sure that it doesn’t work. Change different target. It doesn’t work. Trade different messages. And honestly, I was thinking that yeah, if you find the right messages with the right target, if you work forever, we realised that the same thing on a different client, it gives, it gives different results.
Great information. I love that sort of large-scale testing. I find that really interesting. Well, we even had a few clients, you know, we didn’t do the outreach for lead generation, but for product of validation, product market fit, they were like, you know what, we have a software, we are not sure whether this is our target or that or that and we need to go in front of investors and we’re like well we can actually test that for you. We can actually send to 2000 invitations to that target that target to that target once they respond we’re gonna nurture them and bring them on a meeting. And then just based on the metrics have just told you you can see which target audience best resonates with you and then you can do it a world wild scale or you can do international. But as a pilot project you can see the outreach because you’re getting feedback from the consumers from the company’s because I’m not interested. I don’t like it. It’s too expensive. It’s not for me. I’m not the right person to talk about this service.
You should talk with someone else. This is the feedback that is of absolute importance to clients when they are launching can use service or new product because we haven’t had a with an artificial intelligence software from the U. S. It was about the in the medical back pain ai that you’re just submitting the MRI and based on thousands it will suggest you whether you need a surgery or you can do other treatments without going to the surgery. And we there was no product actually it was just an idea. There wasn’t even an M. V. P. Yet. But the client said you know what I want to talk with back pain surgeries and even get them on a call with me to understand better their needs and we actually do that from around the world. We reached out a lot of big back surgery, I don’t know how the right pronunciation there, but we reach out to them. Some of them were interested talk to the client so forth. So then when the client got to a minimum valuable solution, he could reach back to them and like, well I already have a prototype and I would you like to see it and it was based on your feedback that I got during the prospective process.
So for me, okay, Yeah, I’m preaching toward prospecting a lot. I’m really a fanatic about that. I know that don’t get me wrong, the ad serves a different purpose. The prospective fits different purpose content creation. It’s also a long-term strategy for the SCEO blogs and everything. And of course there is not a single solution. You actually need. Mix of everything. But honestly, when, when we’re working for us Bizzbee, we went to the content way and we know it’s going to take a month, you cannot just write a block and expect some feedback in like in two days, 50 clients reaching, I’ll just you because you wrote a block. It takes time. However, with the prospecting, it’s like once you have the messages in the target, you start conversations and we have cases in the first month, he gets 15 meetings. He calls five clients within the first month and that is like, okay extraordinary example, we have examples for zero meetings in the first month, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the days you start getting feedback and the agile way adjusting the campaign and see what works.
And that gives some insightful feedback to our clients as well. Thanks for all of that. Love it. Other than the immediate pitch where you connect with someone and you try and sell it to them straight away. What is what some of the main mistakes that people make? There are so many I mean when we are receiving the campaigns because they target us as well just by the way of how they structuring the message sequence, you can realise whether it’s junior, whether it’s SR, whether they’re just started with the outreach because it’s like evolution curve, you start like wow, I can send to one million people message, why would I bother with customisation? I’ll just dump everything one basic message to everybody. And then as you grow you realise, well you know what if I actually break it into categories and then I could have more tailored messages and improve the conversation and then you’re saying, well that category can be 50 different sub segments and then create different variations of the messages and that’s how you, the more personalised you get, the better it is and that’s only the start because the automation will just get some kind of response.
But then if you try to do automation all the way to the meeting. It will never work that I can guarantee for that. So but then you’re seeing how mental conversation goes. You know we have an inside joke here. It’s like you don’t go to a bar, you find the girl and then you’re on your knee. Will you marry me directly? I mean, what you would say. Of course. Okay. There are some small chances she might say yes, but the majority will say no and that’s what happens when you go like hi, my name is Dancho. Would you like to buy my service? No, thank you. Next. Hi, my name is Nancy. Would you like to especially when it comes to more expensive services. High ticket service providers like five K. 10-K. 50 K. 500,000 K. You don’t just put a Facebook at in this case with a fleshy LAD. €50,000. Service click now in the client. Okay, clicks by their credit card. It doesn’t work like that because in a big to be it’s a bit more complicated self-process and they’re more multiple people involved. And the cell cycle is a bit longer. So the joke with the marriage is on the first meeting it does require get them start some chit chatting about, I don’t know the weather or about sports.
Okay. Sports is about topic with girls. But the whole point is you start with some general conversation. Even if you see that there is a chemistry. You go on a more deeper conversation. Then you have another date and few many more days and then you get to actually popping up the question and I think that it is the same in building a relationship on on LinkedIn. Actually, not just linking on B2B relationship. You don’t go hi, my name is Dan, to our services. 10-K. Would you like to buy? It’s more like start the conversation some more general first start getting and if you see that the conversation is good go out step deeper and then do some nurturing and start asking questions and it doesn’t have to be interview like how do you use outreach? Yes. What kind of outreach are using? Well we do. Have you considered linking? No Or actually Yes. Well how happy? That’s not really a conversation that’s like interview conversation meaning like hi have you done outreach? Yeah I tried but I’m not happy. I was not really happy. Yeah I know you’re feeling we actually also you’re actually sharing some personal insight and that is a conversation.
I mean, I feel like we need to teach people how to communicate, which is really the digital outreach fever. I was talking to you again. I mean, when you’re in a bar. Yeah, there are the type of people that they don’t care what you have to say and they’re just talking nonstop, but a meaningful conversation is you ask a question. They respond reflect something from you and then you ask another question and they ask a question about you and that is actually a conversation and I don’t know why that cannot be moved on Lincoln it can we’ve done it, it works like magic and it’s so refreshing because people are like from the beginning, what do you want? Why do you ask me? And then when you get to a relationship, yeah, if there is no opportunity, that’s it. You know, pitching nothing. If you see that there is an opportunity, you still know pitching. You’re just inviting them on a cold because of the meeting. You can better diagnose exactly what their problem and whether you can really help or not. So at the end of the day, you’re not really selling, you have a way of how to solve a problem. And if you find the type of person that has exactly that problem, then you’re saying we did.
I can help you. I know exactly that pain point and I can solve. And here is several case studies with similar companies like you and this is exactly what we solved and then it’s really not even a selling, it’s actually helping as many companies as possible. And that’s the only difference that I’m trying to teach everybody that when you’re doing outreach, if you’re looking it as a sales process in your head, it will be like, I’m sending message, one, then a message to and then I’m gonna invite them on a free consultation coal, which never works because we are we are seeing it as a free consultation call, but my time is so valuable, 200 years per hour, 500 years per hour and they’re going to get it for free. But we’re forgetting that they also are investing one hour of their time. And I’m not always interested in investing one hour to a complete stranger. I mean, we’re in a business work on a tight schedule. So when you’re giving me half an hour or one hour free consultation, you’re also asking me to make the same commitment, which is not always willing to commit. And that’s why we’re saying, well, you cannot put into the sequence. You need to have some chitchat established, some authority in this relationship.
So when you invite them on a coal, they’re gonna actually say, you know what I actually, I’m interested to hear you out. I want to see what you have to sell or how would you actually helped me? And that is a game changer. If you get it to that kind of level of relationship, it is really much easier actually. We’re gonna data or any calls on number of touch points. or perhaps timeframe from initial or first message to either customer or Yeah, how long it takes to turner than initial the average, how long it takes to turn an initial conversation into the sale. Yeah. Well it really depends that the consultant cancer is always when you ask a consultant. They just, it depends. But the goal is that how I see it Thomas is that you can set up the sequence for the conversation starter. The funnel is like this just at the top. So you sent an invitation. They accept you send message one, you wait a few days you send message conversation starter to see if they engage if not you.
But we do four messages and we do that because the first one is actually the duality. The second one is the empathy. The third one is that if they did not engage to the first two is a credibility, show them a bit about you and what you’ve achieved. And then the fourth one is usually as a farewell as a free value. Like maybe you’re busy now since you didn’t respond to my three previous here is a free book or free something that you can just taste it because as you’re tasting it and building my authority actually. But once they actually responded, there is no time frame because when they responded in the funnel and then we chit chat. Now If you send 1000 invitations there, you have 50% acceptance rate, you have 500 people that are in your sequence right? Made a small percentage of them will say you know what, you’re exactly what I needed, let jump on a coal. And that’s like cell cycle of what a few days because you send them an invitation, they accept you send the first conversation starter.
They respond and they were actually considering that they need an agency for that. And you’re like, well perfectly jump on a coal and that’s it. It’s like a few days cell cycle on the other hand that I’m talking extremes now, the other extreme is that you reach out to someone. They’re like, don’t bother me, I’m not interested and really don’t want to do that. And you’re like, fair enough, I’ll stop the sequence, I’ll stop bothering you. But all in between. Well actually engage into conversation with some, it will be within a few days or weeks. We have prospects that were not actively nurturing them for six months. But you know, you exchange some messages while it’s hot and then they called out a bit, but after a month, you, you have a new broke. Then you’re writing them, you know what we actually created the book specifically for you as a target audience. And then after three months they saw some post on LinkedIn, you’re like, you know what I actually saw your post, shall we go to, shall we have the core now. So there is no average that it isn’t a compound effect because if you continue daily, one month, second month, you will have some delayed effects from the first month and also from the second on the third month, you have some meetings started from the first month and from the second from the third.
So as you go further in the campaign it will be more and more, it will be a compounding effect. Okay, interesting. So what you’re your goals for Bizzbee who ambitious to the 100% well actually we have a book coming up, I have to mention that we’ve signed a publishing contract with the UK Publishing house and we go over the entire Lincoln and email prospecting process. How we do it with this. Be really step by step from the strategic part from like how to structure it and how to set it up to actually practical step by step, how to do it. It is expected to be out in august so my focus will be really pushing the book out to as many people as possible because I truly believe that pump is here and it will be for a long time but then google will tweak their algorithm and kick out all the spammers, then Lincoln will tweak their algorithm, they’ll also kick out all the spammers and at the end of the day it will be really left to relationship building and we’re not inventing the hot water.
I mean almost the corporations have beady arts and as the arts in their company like 30 to 50 people that are reaching how to call prospects and building relationship. And once they have it is a qualified lead, they’re moving into the senior salespeople. So, as an activity, it cannot cease to exist. It just needs to be more quality over quantity. And our second goal was actually to build an online academy, which will be, I mean, during the process of writing the book, we’ve created quite a lot of frameworks, frameworks or how to create the messages as I told you, like duality and put in what works and what doesn’t. And our goal is now to transfer that knowledge through a book. And also actually create an eight-week academy where sdrs for people that want to get higher in the corporate letter or business owners, particularly service providers like consultants, marketing agencies, software companies, whether it’s a software as a service or software development could actually common the academy and actually try to better understand with your ideal client and how to reach, reach out to them.
So, those two things will be really high purity for us in this 2021. And hopefully this Corona stuff. Well, well and soon because I mean all our employees this be, we have 25 people at the moment. they’re all in house. We don’t outsource, we don’t do anything outside everything. All the people are in Macedonia in Skopje to and it just now due to go on, everybody are working from home. So I’m hoping that really it’s not a plan. It’s a hope that we could come back home together because the energy is much different when you have people and then you need a decision, you take someone from marketing and then you take a nurture specialist and that synergy. I’m actually missing here now, but at the end of the day that is beyond our control and hopefully feel and soon and we can get together in the same office. Yeah, I understand what you mean. Certainly an adjustment to be made. Yeah. Well for us, the corona helped us a bit because you know, there were a lot of grounding of flights and everything.
All the bit to be, events were cancelled and everything and it pushed companies that they have to move online. Unfortunately, there were so many mistakes made because you’re in a rush, you don’t know how to do digital outreach and you make it wrong and you invest a lot of money in the bad ways. And so many companies assist exist during this period. But on the other hand, there were so many companies that reach out to us and said, you know what we need help and then help not just do the outreach, but we were doing this, this and this and now we’re forced to figure out how to qualified prospects, how to reach out them, how to nurture them, how to get them on a cool and people were used to, you know, physical meetings and now with the Zoom it’s much harder, I mean it’s harder to connect to people on a personal level on a Zoom rather than having them sitting next to you where you can present them and feel the energy, the vibe in the room in order whether to speed up or to slow down or how to, how to present. So for us, the Corona was actually an improvement. Unfortunately for us, it was good because a lot of companies were pushed to digitalise and start looking for online ways to reach out to potential clients and with anything new.
I think that people, rightly or wrongly, can always be a little bit scared maybe about trying something new. If there was someone who was interested, they were like, yeah, this does sound interesting. What would you say to them? Well I must firm believer on the agile approach before this, I was working in a software company and I did my master on scrum and agile project development methodologies and honestly I truly believe now even businesses should be run as a gel as possible. You cannot no longer, I’m a management consultant, but you can no longer make a three year business plan. I mean who put Corona into their plan when they did in 2019, like I’m gonna grow this business and then Corona will came in. So with the agile approach, I’ve realised that with the outreach you have the luxury of listening to the feedback from your ideal clients. So if your ideal clients are management consultant or if your ideal clients are e commerce stores with the prospecting, you’re reaching out to them and that feedback is golden nuggets for me because you can tweak the services, you can find some new problems and actually create new services.
You can make add ons to the service like add additional services because like 50 cold prospects, if they say yeah, but we also needed this, then you have a new service, you just add it and start offering it that as well. So for whoever is interested in doing the outreach, I would actually recommend to go to our website which is busy solution dot com and we do really have a lot of resources. We have to biblically block where we try to give our best on what we’ve learned in the last two weeks we have a biweekly newsletter which cover different topics. One is copyrighting for outreach, another is for linked in or database building and we have the books which are free that you can just download and try to do it yourself. On the other hand, so that’s why I’m actually dividing one is do it yourself or on the other hand, the dump for you part, which is our agency, then we take care of absolutely everything from defining the ideal target. Optimising the profile, setting up the message sequences, reaching, executing the campaign handling all the responses and you just give us your currently link and we just start getting your meetings on currently.
So the boat approaches we believe and that’s why we’re like we’re not going to make money out of the content but we’re sharing it for free because I truly believe that if only few owners from your audience go to the BCB website, download the books and try to themselves and if they had a few more clients and if that helps save their businesses, I’m happy it doesn’t have to be that everybody has to earn money and everything is for profit. It is a tough time and people are struggling and businesses are suffering. So the whole goal is that if you could use all tricks to get at least one or two new clients that could keep your food for some time, I’m happy. Well, I think you’ve given a lot of value today, so on behalf of the audience, thank you for that. And can you remind me of the link and also where else might be the best place for people to find you? Yeah, well, the website of our companies www dot BBC solution dot com. And I mean, personally I’m active on LinkedIn, of course it’s we do what we preach and Facebook, I mean I never got to that Instagram thing and Twitter thing and all the other social media.
So you can find me as Dancho Dimkov on Lincoln or on Facebook where we also share a lot of things that as we learn as we find new stuff. We update frequently.
Dancho Dimkov, thank you very much.
Yeah Thomas, thank you very much for inviting me to this podcast. I really enjoy talking about outreach and I truly hope that I’ve inspired some of the audience to at least give it a try to try talking with people. I know that at one point for me it was an ego stuff, you know. Yeah, but if I reach out to them, they should change me. I’m not going to change them but that’s still with the self-mindset when you’re reaching out with the relationship building mindset you’re just expanding your network and network is really an important thing when you’re growing business and the more people you have in your network, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend you could always and it’s not always the relationship building about clients. Many times I actually ended up buying services because yeah as a company the goal is to sell services but you need services in order to grow so many times as we sell to clients on and we’re listening about the services like wait a minute actually need this.
So if you’re going with the mindset to sell, sell sell, they can feel that I mean a cold prospect is when you are so pushy but why don’t you buy and stuff, they can feel it but if you’re going with the mindset to actually just yeah I want to get as many friends with my ideal client profiles even if they don’t have on it now it’s fine they’re gonna get there at some point or maybe never. But they are in your ideal client, they have a friend that could use your services. So from my angle is that I truly hope that some of the audience will actually try with the outreach. Start building the relationship and hopefully they’ll manage to get some clients out of it at the end of the day.
Well, I think you’ve given enough information for people to get started at least, so thank you very much.