EP 54: Best Lead Generation Strategies for SaaS with Mike Blumenthal

I’m the host of SAAS Buyers Club which is what you’re watching right now where I interview SAAS Founders service providers

VCS private Equity anyone who is in the SAAS space and with a mission of

providing value to SAAS Founders so that they can increase the exit value of

their businesses because I believe anyone comes on this show and can provide some value to the SAAS Founders

that are out there will help them increase the value of their businesses so that they can get better exits with

that being said I’m pleased to introduce Mike Blumenthal who is the founder of

SAAS lead flow and SAAS lead flow’s proposition is that they’ll book your

B2B startup five to 10 qualified demos every single month using multi- Channel

outbound so Mike thanks for joining today yeah thanks for having me Omid super stoked for this conversation and

uh to share some some wisdom of the last eight years of building tech companies and and working with Founders in all

different Industries really looking forward to it awesome man so what do you want SAAS Founders to get from the

episode today yeah the the one thing the one key takeaway uh is that I would say

the mechanics of selling your product service to the market are are very very

simple and they’re repeatable um but they’re not novel so you know I would

say the one takeway would be you have to get in the trenches and really sell your

product and Service as a Founder better than anybody else can before you can expect that magic bullet or get that big

check exit check it’s really comes down to like founder Le sales and and doing

the one1 stuff the right way cool let’s get into that so where should SAAS Founders start yeah I mean I I would say

in 2024 2025 it’s all about your your personal brand and how you’re branding

yourself uh putting yourself out there I know we’re both in um several content

groups together where you need to have a really clear value proposition to the market of what you can help with you’re

attracting your ideal customer profile I think that’s that’s number one um number

two I would say is having a real outbound motion on top of that it will

accelerate your growth tremendously what I mean by outbound motion is you’re reaching out to people for networking

you are sending DMS on LinkedIn to have conversations or add value um you’re

cold emailing people so um I think those are really the two foundational pieces

of that and I even made a market research report this year you need a personal brand and you need an outbound

motion otherwise you’re can really struggle to sell any sort of B2B product or

service okay so the two primary things that satisfy Founders need to know is build a personal brand and get some

outbound motion yeah cool absolutely so what does SAAS lead flow do yeah so we come in and

do a done for you lead generation service so instead of having to hire a sales development representative a

business development rep um train them oversee them set up all their systems we

come in and we already know how to do it and we set it up for you done for you service and what’s going to happen is

we’re going to reach out to your ideal customer profile we’re going to generate lead and book you meetings so you can do what you do best and that’s sell your

product and service and so do you help them on the personal brand side or what

does that look like yes so we’ll help you optimize your profile uh usually we’ll show up and this LinkedIn profile

hasn’t been touched in years so yeah we’ll absolutely help you optimize your personal brand we won’t do the content

writing or the appointments uh you know any of the ghost writing but we do have a lot of different features we can throw

in which will help your distribution and get you in front of more audiences all right what are some of those

features yeah so I mean what most people don’t realize about social medias is the

Giant game the best way to grow is to get engagement and to get impressions so

um we have various ways that we can get you in front of new audiences depending on who your target is by getting you into engagement groups um there’s even

software that can automate it now and that’s where we even met right on that’s right yeah I’m here for the

sauce Mike so I’m gonna I’m gonna get I’m I’m I’m going to uncover the sauce man okay let’s uncover it baby

that’s it’s so early um that I think it’s good to be promoting some of this stuff a lot of people see these really

famous SAAS Founders like Adam Robinson and every post he has is like magic you know it’s got all these Impressions and

all these comments like wow he’s really good it’s like no he just actually has an engagement pod that people are in and

you know that’s the type of uh secrets that most people don’t know but we can uncover them here I’m good with it yeah

yeah I mean that actually was like super disappointing for me to find out I mean it makes sense so yeah anyone who’s

listening out there most of the influencers that you see that get like thousands of likes on their posts are

using something called engagement pods where this engagement pod is actual real

people it could be like a community or a network of people who come together and they’ll put a group together and what

they’ll do is anytime they post on social media because the algorithm rewards immediately engagement what

they’ll do is they’ll take the link for that piece of content and they’ll go drop it in their engagement Group which

is usually on telegram or Whatsapp or something like that this engagement group knows that when a link gets

dropped into that engagement group everyone in that engagement group goes and engages with that piece of content

so that they can drive the algorithm to boost that piece of content it was

actually very disappointing for me because I was like um yeah I wanted to believe that you know if you make it you

made it because you’re like recognized for you know one thing or another as

opposed to which there is an aspect to it that it is that like if your content isn’t good engagement group isn’t going

to help that much your content has to actually be good but yeah I thought it was just like you know you post on there

and it’s just so good that it gets like thousands of likes but that’s not the case social media doesn’t work that way

which is you know I’m not surprised that there’s an not all true involved uh you

know and it’s pretty much every social media platform has the same sort of Engagement farming uh fundamentals that

you you can pick up on if you see you look under the hood a little bit like the same 10 influencers are commenting

on each other’s stuff and XYZ so yeah no surprise to me but go ahead I’m just an

idealist I guess you know like when the when the when the curtain drops and I

see you know Oz behind the curtain I’m like oh man you know I want to dig into

this okay so the two aspects are build a personal brand and outbound engine are

super important for SAAS Founders in 2024 and 2025 and you’ll come in you’ll help them optimize their personal brand

portfolio so you primarily work on LinkedIn is that right or is it any platform I’ve tested them all it’s a

great question I’ve tested them all I’ve tested X and Instagram and Linkedin and Facebook um for a B2B service provider

like myself linkedin’s gold uh X is is probably second and then it really

niches out from there depending on where your target market hangs out but yeah primarily LinkedIn okay and so you’ll go

in you know you’ll optimize their profile you’ll you know guide them like here’s what your bio should say here’s

what your experience should say here’s what your featured post should say you should definitely have like your

calendly booking Link in your featured posts for example that’s sort optimize the profile is there anything else that

people should know in that respect I would also say just making sure that there’s some sort of social proof of

what you’re doing um and it’s very clear we I like to say we help X target market

solve y problem through Z mechanism should be like blatantly clear um my my

headline up until this week was we help founders with in one to two million Revenue generate more leads through

outbound multi- Channel outbound right like so it say exactly what you do so when someone shows up your profile they

don’t have to go investigate because people are lazy it should just be right in their face agree 100% Okay cool so make sure

that what you do is your value proposition is right in people’s face and then on the outbound engine what

should people know about building an outbound engine the first thing is the setup is critical uh and it changes

every week it seems like so uh you have to make sure that you set everything up the right way otherwise you won’t get in

front of people um this the second thing is your lead lists are critical who you’re targeting so understanding your

ideal customer profile verifying that they’re actually EV valid emails or you know that they’re in your target market

and the third is the copywriting needs to be quick and Punchy so setup SL deliverability key list building needs

real expertise and and understanding what you’re doing and then three the copywriting needs to be would I reply to

that okay so on the setup piece like how can s found make sure that the setup is

right yeah I mean there’s plenty of YouTube videos on how to set up cold email or the LinkedIn Outreach tools to

you so just if if you don’t want to pay someone um go get your YouTube MBA and

uh I would say you know make sure that you warm things up properly you don’t just start sending stuff from day one

those are the key if if you don’t go do anything else that I would say listen to those two pieces of advice you know

don’t send from day one and and uh make sure to warm things up but there’s so many good people out

there like Nick Abraham um Eric noski who just have incredible case studies of how you set up cold email and do all

that so I would go look up those guys let’s talk copyright copywriting it’s so interesting because you kind of do like

this whole world that I feel like there’s a lot of people that do the individual pieces right so like a SAAS

founder could go hire a copywriter or a SAAS founder could go hire a list Builder

or a SAAS founder could go hire ire a uh cold outbound email service for example

that will warm up domains or whatever but it kind of sounds like you’re a onetop shop where SAAS Founders can come

to you and you do you know the entire process you build the list you warm the

you know the the accounts and you make sure that the copy is says what it needs to and and and so that they can get

those responses so yep on the copy piece what are some things that SAAS Founders

need to know there sure so the the I’m a product marketer by trade meaning I

learned how to explain value propositions features benefits uh in in

a way that speaks directly to your buyer Persona and so when you are thinking

about writing copy you should always start with empathy of what they care about and I’ve even built a GPT that

based on the product or service will uh and in crew your targeting will list out

a list of challenges or problems that they’re likely to encounter and the solutions that you can provide to them

so it’s really about one can you speak their language and understand their their problems so empathy and two can

you elicit interest enough where they would believe that a it’ll work for them

B someone else has tried it’s social proof or C that the risk of at least talking to you is worth it for them I

mean that’s really the key and I try not to have like more than three or four line emails it’s l as simple as hey we

recently helped another company like yours get this solution would you be interested in a similar result you know

like really Punchy copy that just gets them to reply the caveat there is everybody today is asking for time it’s

like hey could I get 30 minutes from you so I can explain to you how this works and people don’t have time it’s their

most scarce resource so how can you differentiate that um what we do is we do lead magnets we do loom videos we

send out all sorts of value ad activities to them and then they kind of self qualify themselves too uh if

they’re more if they’re interested and you just have to continue to follow up to see if it would be worth booking them into an actual demo or point I feel like

we have all the pieces now are there any pieces to the puzzle that are missing for the most part that you’d like to add

in I think if we’re just talking about appointment setting or lead generation the last part is like that preall flow

because just because someone has agreed to show up doesn’t mean they will and so making sure that whatever software you’re using whether it be cly I use

tidy Cal um if it it needs to have some sort it can just be like hey we’re scheduled to meet in 15 minutes but

including some sort of case study or proof of who you are and what you’ve done leading up to the meeting um and

making sure to really confirm those appointments because we have seen a huge uh uptick in people booking time and

then just disappearing in 2024 so making sure that you have a follow-up plan and

you don’t just if they don’t show up that does not mean like move on it just means that they got busy something

happened and they should go back into your phone funnel I’d say that’s the one piece that’s missing so far got it so

followup is key the fortune is in the follow-ups man the fortune is in the followups yes walk us through a story

case study story of maybe like a SAAS founder that you helped where they were

when they came to you you know what it looked like for you to work with them the results that you got what you did to

get those results that sort of thing I’d love to yeah hear an actual application of you your services to the problem yeah

for sure so one of my favorite is is a company called ideal trades uh so they

built a very successful SAAS company um multi-million ARR business off of two

channels trade shows and cold calling and I I firmly believe those are

fantastic channels I we use those in all my businesses and they hadn’t really

implemented a a good cold email Marketing System they had done marketing emails so they’d send out of HubSpot or

MailChimp to 10,000 people like you’ve seen these emails before where it’s like

here’s all the bullets of what we can do for you register now right and no they weren’t getting any result so we set up

this system for them and we emailed 8,000 people in their target market uh

we had 150 qualified leads out of it and then they actually sold

47 uh annual plans out of the program in about two months and so just by and and

you can see like you have to email 8,000 people to get 150 people that are qualified for your service to close you

know a third of them which was incredible um so it’s a volume game um but yeah we end up working together for

over a year and um even launched a new verticals using the same motion so it

was a really fun project and uh I love those guys over ideal trads they’re great cool love that so what would you

say most Founders you know when they come to you it sounds like they have one

or two channels that might be working what does that look like is it usually trade shows and cold calling is it all

over the place like what is the status of of most of the SAAS Founders that come

to you what are they usually doing yeah so one they’re usually trying

to run ads which are getting increasingly expensive um this year I have talked to probably a dozen Founders

who chose to do ads as their main channel one of them spent 60,000 because they were VC backed and they needed

their growth engine to be turned on immediately there was Zero Roi for 60 Grand and and AD spent I have I have a

whole laundry list of stories like that then the other side is they’ll be doing

uh some sort of emailing calling business development at a very low volume unintentionally meaning you know

if you’re a Founder you got a bunch of stuff to worry about you got to do product customer support probably

fundraising all these different things every and then sales right we’re like

usually they don’t like to do sales so it gets pushed to the side that’s why having a company like SAAS leadlow come

in we’re we are experts at that domain we know how to do sales and marketing

and we’ll do it scalably and we’ll do it at an affordable price versus a full-time headcount um and that’s where

I think most Founders are struggling is they’re either doing the like hey let’s just run ads and burn money or two will

half ass and outbound motion and you get half ass results so what I hear is they

are half assing on ads and they’re half assing on

sales yep and so they’re getting half half results on on both of those um

things that they work on and you essentially help them create uh this outbound cold engine pretty much um and

and when you say multi- Channel what does multi- Channel mean yeah so it’s not just a single channel would be email

a single channel will be cold calling a single channel will be LinkedIn Outreach so I say multi- Channel because it it

takes multi-touch to convince someone to get you know on the phone with you um so

that’s what multi Channel means got it and how do you determine which channels

they should be utilizing because there’s so many of them so as a marketer I love the the it depends um but it it depends

on who your target market is because I like to say you should go hang out where

your ideal customer hangs out and so you know if it’s Airbnb host

Facebook groups be fantastic but I don’t know about LinkedIn as a channel for

Airbnb host um on the contrary if you’re looking for a director of sales it’s

going to be on LinkedIn it’s not going to be on Instagram so that that’s how we choose and you know I I really like I

mentioned at the beginning I’ve tested them all um it’s and earlier this year we had a legal TCH ass where the

contract literally was toex every channel possible for the first three months that was their goal so we did

LinkedIn we did Twitter we did Facebook groups uh I don’t think we tried

Instagram with it but and then we were ramming cold email and uh you know what came out on top was LinkedIn calling and

email uh even for them not maybe not unsurprising but um that’s really the

way to go is is I stick with those three and most people are afraid to pick up the phone and call you’d be surprised

how great results you can get in 2024 in 2025 with just calling yeah I feel like the channel that most of the market

ignores is like the one people should always be looking for that thing that kind of is falling by

the wayside for example like I feel like uh cable tv ads is one that like no one

really has been thinking about because no one really watches cable TV like that anymore but there’s like a whole Market

so if you’re in a space where your Market watches cable TV then that’s

fantastic it’s an it’s an incredibly overlooked uh form of advertising to reach your target market or radio for

example like and so to dive into that space where so many people are overlooking it’s a flex it’s it’s it’s a

hack so yeah picking up the phone and and calling people in this time where everybody wants to automate or make it

easy um for example is is a way to get ahead of your competitors what what are

some other things you’ve noticed in in 2024 in terms of trends that have worked that maybe in the past haven’t been the

same yeah uh I I mean cold calling is definitely the the one channel that

stood out this year uh once we dialed it in you can book so many extra appointments every week because like you

said everyone’s automating and optimizing I I wanted just to reiterate that I know we just said that but it’s

it shouldn’t go un said if you can dial I don’t know we will have one person

doing 50 60 calls a day um and that’s low you know I talked to an SDR last

week at seamless AI he does a thousand bils a day has a 100 conversations and

uh you know he books he books I think he said his best month was over a 100 calls

just from one guy dialing the phone so that was really cool to hear uh it’s as

far as I like new thing in 2024 was just how much AI can move the needle on

appointment setting or I see all these AI agents coming to life I’m really Keen to see how that comes comes around in

25 any other predictions for 2025 email’s gonna get harder and harder cold emails aren gonna work in in 25 I

wouldn’t say not going to work I would I wouldn’t bet the house on that it’s just going to get harder and harder because any 22-year-old with a computer can send

them um but you have to stand out so what are you going to do to stand out uh and how you know I I have a screenshot

in my head I sent an email um to my list the other week and I just said hey we

recently help the company do this um can I show you a video of how it works and a

chief Revenue officer at you know several million dollar SAAS goes I get this email every single week they’re

asking for my time you did a fantastic job of showing proof and then you know giving me what you’re going to

do for me and this is very timely and so uh you know that’s an example of

differentiating yourself hey can we talk about this 30 minutes this week he’s like no I’ve got stuff to do but I’ll

watch your video and then when I’m ready to have this conversation in three months we’ll we’ll have you on the quebe

so so what are you advising your companies going into 2025 yeah one clean

list three times before you send anything that’s the biggest thing we start triple verifying everything because there’s so

much turnover and people changing that emails are bouncing left and right um that’s the first thing the second thing

is picking up the phones more uh and then the third thing is how can we create more content that gets us in

front of our audience um that’s like lower leverage so not like PR or TV

advertisements but like personal brand content blog post being really top of

mind when people are looking for a solution uh so it’s kind of contrary for an outbound guy but I just see so much

value in in it and even GPT starting to recommend Solutions I found someone I

can’t recall exactly um what the solution was but you type in like hey

how would you recommend doing this and chat GPT is like oh you check out this company like whoa that’s going to be

huge if you can get an open AI recommendation engine yeah because yeah I mean the um search engine

integration you know is is making it so that yeah she the GPT will specifically name

your company potentially if you somehow get into the GPT algorithm exactly I

mean that’s really that I don’t know how you do it yet but I know a lot of people were building the the GPT apps and and

so on and so forth so anyway okay cool so we got our 2025

prediction um and it sounds like you’re bullish on

the uh personal brand because and I would imagine that you’re bullish on the personal brand because as you do

outbound the people that are interested in you are going to look you up they’re

going to do their own research on you and if they go to your page and you have all this content that speaks to them

they’re going to be much more likely to book that call with you because time is scarce and if you can get someone on on

a call you’re much more likely to be able to sell to them because they’re not

going to get on a call with you if they’re not interested so the personal brand really helps warm the leads up and

that’s why you are such a supporter of of the personal brand would you say

that’s accurate you nailed it dude you just nailed a customer Journey especially for bigger companies you know

I I had a Fortune 500 we’re in month 14 of a sales cycle right now and that’s

just how it goes with these big companies and I had a Fortune 100 book with me this year because they saw me on LinkedIn

just talking about their problem that they’re experiencing so yes you nailed the customer Journey even if you reach

out to them cold they’re going to look you up they’re going to see what you’re talking about see if it resonates and if it does then it’s a fit but if you’re

just have a profile or you’re unoptimized they don’t know what you do they’ll move on and go to the next thing

what do you think SAAS Founders I mean okay so we’ve talked about how SAAS founders you know some of the things

that they get wrong are they don’t build a personal brand or you know they haven’t touched their LinkedIn in ages

and they don’t have like an outbound growth strategy they’re focusing on you

know maybe one or two channels of business that work really really well for them why aren’t they able to scale

those channels of of business though I guess you can only go to so many trade shows for example so they hire you you

come in you implement this multi-channel outbound strategy that makes that essentially is you know

scalable infinitely in that you know it’s how many lists can they build how

many emails can they send and then your team handles all the you know

appointment setting sales calls so on and so forth but like what are some other things that SAAS Founders maybe

have the wrong mindset about yeah so the one in particular that’s top of my you

even put this in your questionnaire for SAAS Buyers Club like what’s the one thing you want people to know um churn

so with a SAAS it’s totally different than than most other models because it’s

you have a whole uh motion to keep them as a customer too that’s critical customer success and support and a lot

of the clients that I work with I see we get them in the door they close clients

and then churn becomes a problem and then it it all of a sudden is all hands-

on Deca how do we keep these clients that we spend all this money to acquire and it’s this constant Balancing Act of

more customers existing customers I’ve spoken several times of me that at my mon moer um of the most impactful thing

that my entrepreneurship Professor showed me and it was a graph where two companies exactly the same sell the same

service for the same price and one of them has way higher revenue and way higher margin and the answer is why

it’s because they retain customers over time and so I’m sure as as a you know

m&a attorney the valuation a company is tremendously higher exponentially higher

when churn is low and they keep their customers over time is is that a fair assumption I would say that’s a fair

assumption who knew keeping customers makes more money yeah yeah so you asked what’s

what’s the one thing that I think they’re not getting right it’s churn and customer success what would you say the

mindset often there is oh let’s just get more customers like keeping customers isn’t that important to them

or yeah what’s the mind what would you say the mindset is there I work with a lot of product focused Founders so they

want to build more product features let’s make the product better let’s make the product better but what they failed to see is that the customers that are

using it right now aren’t adopting it as it is so there’s a a product adoption

product usage problem that you’re trying to Band-Aid by building more when in

reality what you need to do is to similar that you did with the sales process understand what their needs are

and see how you can solve them today and tomorrow and that’s how you build your product road map got it any other mindsets that you

see that uh SAAS Founders often have I think in general they’re they don’t want

to get on the phone and sell or or they think that they can delegate sales way before they can like you need to be the

best sales person person in your company for several years and only after you

found something that’s scalable uh product Market fit the all the all uh

you know running product Market fit that’s when you can start to delegate sales but it’s not going to be fun it’s

not going to be glorious but you are going to be the best salesman or saleswoman of your business period otherwise it won’t

grow so would you disagree or agree with that I’m curious from your experience I’ve actually heard that the last thing

that should be delegated when in a startup is sales and I’ve heard that

that’s the case because that’s your connection to your customers like yep if

you know the companies that we’ve seen fall off

or fail or not perform as well as I can it’s because there’s a loss of

connection to the customer and a loss of understanding of the customer and the easiest way to maintain understanding of

the customer is to maintain that connection where else is the founder going to get connection to the customer

other than literally jumping on sales calls and being face Toof face with the customer and being able to like speak

with them and ask them questions so um when I talk to

Founders I’m always advising them that sale they should constantly be in the

sales process sales should be the last thing that they delegate but I do see that yeah SA Founders often times unless

they’re like a sales guy or it’s you know two Founders one is a product guy the other is a sales guy um oftentimes

yeah SAAS Founders don’t necessarily love sales they want to be building product

they don’t really want to be on the phone with with customers but yeah I would 100% agree with you on on the

point that sales is is the lifeblood of the company and super important for the

founder to stay in and connected

to what what else would you say you you asked me about mindset I’m curious from what you see especially on an m&a

standpoint what other mindset lack is there out there today yeah I love it

that the podcast uh host tables are are turning um I just want to clarify so I

am an m&a lawyer but I also do VC fundraises I help SAAS Founders uh start

their start their company so we do incorporations pretty much anything that has to do with contracts m&a is just

it’s just a series of it’s a process and it’s a series of contracts so I say anything that has to do with contracts

is is really what we help with so we we definitely help we do a lot of m&a deals right now we you know

have about six deals ongoing on hand active right now nice um nice but uh but

outside of that you know we’ve done msas we’ll do employee stock option plans we’ll do founders agreements anything

that has a contract that’s a part of it is pretty much what we help with minus

like government contracts uh that’s like a very specific area of contracts that are called fars and we don’t really work

with those but we have an outside person that we can bring in if if someone needs help with government contracts but back

to the mindset question um I think one of the primary things that I see is it’s

really hard for SAAS Founders to let go of this thing that they’ve built

especially if it’s performing well if it’s you know producing profit and

generating their livelihood they poured a lot of energy and time and Care into

building this company over time and the market values

companies not based on how much time you’ve put in or how much you love your business or how you know cool your

product is or how well your product performs forms or anything like that it’s pretty much a strict formulaic

calculation of what is the buyer is going to be thinking about what is my return on investment in buying this

company going to be thinking about the value of your company in any other terms

other than that is likely going to be disappointing for SAAS Founders so the

mindset issue that I see with so many SAAS Founders that are going out to sell their companies is obviously they want

to maximize you know the dollar value that they get for the exit that’s the whole idea of this podcast the whole

idea is Let’s help you maximize the dollar value of your exit but

understandably a lot of SAAS Founders overvalue the values of their company

and that actually is quite hurtful to the m&a process because if a buyer

approaches you and is interested in buying your company and they have a certain value in mind and then you have

some exponentially greater value in mind that isn’t based in some Market

reality then there’s going to be a mismatch there and it could actually potentially harm the m&a process and I

see this often a lot for example where a seller uh may be

approached by one single buyer and that buyer may be the best buyer for them for

example and the buyer will make an offer to purchase the

company and I actually always tell SAAS Founders when they come to me early in the process like don’t just rely on that

one buyer because they often have as I mention some value in mind around what

they think their company is valued at so I’m like go run a process go hire a banker go hire a broker take your

business to Market and see what the market will actually pay for your business business so that you can get a

sense often times not always but often times you know when they’re approached

by a buyer that offer might be the best offer that they’re going to get for the value of their

company and when they take the business to Market they’ll realize what the actual value of their business is and it

usually isn’t what they originally were hoping that their business was valued at

so the mindset issue is don’t don’t overvalue your business understand what

makes the value of your business and what the value to the business of the

business is to the buyer ultimately as well and stay again stay connected to

the market very similar to what we talked about you know in the same way that Founders need to stay connected to

the market in terms of being connected to their customers the same way

potential acquirers are also customers of sorts that they need to stay

connected to to understand what is the market willing to pay for this business

and I think this could also I don’t know if this is something that you help with Mike but you know they often say that a lot of SAAS Founders

undercharge for their for their services as well a lot of a lot of SAAS Founders

don’t know that they could actually for example increase prices and that’s one way to increase revenue for their

business yep so in that same way um you

know staying connected to the market knowing what the market Market is willing to pay and positioning yourself

uh accordingly based on that information incredibly important yeah totally true

uh and I think that the SAAS model has been

devalued uh from a like monthly subscription perspective for some time

because people who maybe have a b Toc mindset you know there’s no b2c product

out there today I won’t say no but there are very few that are more than like 20 bucks a month I mean from Amazon Prime

to Netflix um but when it comes to adding Enterprise Value you know I was

my buddy was just in town this week that sold a $1.2 million a year contract to a big insurance company right annual

recurring revenue and I think a lot of times early stage Founders would be like

yeah I’ll just charge a 100 bucks a month you know that’s a $1,200 annual contract value to make a million dollar

business you need a lot of those curious what makes makes SAAS lead flow different

from other lead generation companies great question yeah so there’s

two differentiators one I am a Founder at heart um built several tech companies

with others for others uh have a piece of some right now so I know what it’s like to be in your shoes and uh that’s

the first thing is it’s not just a person running an agency who’s trying to scale you call yourself a boutique

agency I’d say the same thing um but moreover what we build for you

that done for you service at the end of the contract it’s all yours I can transfer it over to you and you can hire

someone you can run it yourself if you want to so it’s not a service that you

turn off and disappears it’s a service and an asset that I built for you and your company when you build these

systems for people what does your team look like is it you know you have a you

have a copywriter on staff you have a bunch of people making calls s like what do people actually get as part of the

service yeah great question so uh we have a customer success manager who

oversees all my client activity making sure that you know all the activities all the tasks that need to happen

because when I onboard you I press a button and there’s 30 things we need to do so all that gets delegated out and

yeah we build we build a team underneath you I call it scaling weed generation teams so we have a copywriter we have an

inbox manager we have cold callers that we have ready to go and trained up and so yeah you get you get um all of that

done for you and usually I have three to five people on any given account um

based on their skill set and their ability to what they can do and that way we can really you know make sure you’re

getting the most out of your service all right so you said that when people hire you a button gets pressed and there’s 30

things that they have to do what are like give us an idea of what happens when the button gets

pressed yeah so I built this amazing notion operating system and so I press onboard client and all of

a sudden we have a cold email setup that needs to happen we have campaign creation and copywriting that needs to

happen we have list building that needs to happen so each one of those projects has subtasks underneath them um and all

those immediately get scheduled out and usually I say basically by the third or fourth week after you’ve paid um we’re

sending and we’re going so all that’s happening behind the scenes all I need from a client usually is who they want

to Target or who who their ideal customer profile is and then I have them spot check our list to make sure it’s

the industries they want and then they approve the copy got it what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen SAAS

Founders who hire your service what are like some roadblock once they’ve hired

you that they should be aware of in the process of of working with you yeah I

mean the first one’s expectations on results uh you know every Market’s different every Target Market’s

different so I always try to set expectations I mean you you called on the beginning I mean we’ll we’ll say 5 to 10 qualified Le meetings um I’ll

guarantee how many people will reach out to um but you can never Force somebody to show up on a call that’s just not

possible you can’t I mean you can incentivize them but um so that’s the first thing the second thing is the the

language the copyrighting some people are really really particular about how they want their product to be spoken

about um which we just go back and forth and have tight feedback loops I’ve learned to let my clients in really

early on the copyrighting process like really early very rough drafts because I’d rather just have you tell me from

the beginning like this is off this is what I want to say um then spend two or three weeks like really refining

something and showing it to you and be like no this is terrible it’s like well I’ll just show you draft one give me the most candid feedback you can and we just

get tighter feedback loops does your team actually handle the

sales call as well so once the qualified meeting is book thecr shows up and actually sells the

product as well so I’ve done that as an upsell I haven’t had anyone on my team

jump in there and do that yet um I’m sure we could in the future and I’ve had

people ask if we can do it but usually if you want some like an actual sales professional it’s going to be me showing

up to the calls I haven’t delegated that yet got it interesting very cool man I

think I want to use your service to be honest for the law for that’s like what I’m thinking right

now we we definitely have a bunch of saas lists and uh I I can already tell

some good copy that would come out of it we recently help XYZ firm you know raise money or sell whatever it is you know is

this something that’s on your road map yeah and okay like let’s walk through like an

exercise where let’s say you’re you were to help my firm implement this just so

SAAS Founders could get a feel what does it actually like look like for us to work together what would it what would

it look like let’s like run through like a little hypothetical role play for the last few minutes here yeah sure so tell

me I me who is your ideal customer who who signs a contract to work with your

firm yeah it’s often times SAAS Founders who you know have hit uh 1 million

ARR um and they are either looking so I have a few buckets where I help SAAS

Founders the first one is hit a million ARR they’re looking to maybe go out and

raise you know a million two million three million or potentially more so

they’re either looking to raise seed or series a and um that’s one bucket of of

Founders that we help another bucket of SAAS Founders that we help is more mature SAAS Founders again um usually more than

1 million ARR uh usually around 1 million ibida um so you know they’re taking home

a million profit one to two million profit and they’re ready to sell their business maybe they’ve been approached

by for example private Equity or something like that or a strategic buyer and they are in the process of

negotiating through their Loi so I would say those are probably the two biggest use cases that end up hiring my Law Firm

okay so let’s pick one of the offers that’ll be easier so let’s say uh they

want to raise and I I’ve run this offer before pretty prettyy successfully actually so basically what we would do

is go find build a lead list of companies that are 1 million ARR to

let’s say 20 million ARR and just put a subject line as simple as funding

question mark and then cold emailed them with hey we recently helped another company put together their you know deck

and um contracts they’re ready to raise money is Raising something that’s on your 2025 bingo card question seems so

simp simple man it’s not rocket science these Founders come to me all the time of me

they’re like What’s the Silver Bullet man I I got this new product I’m launching in the market I’m like mechanics are always the same calling

emailing social media that’s it just got do it

right all right let’s do it sounds

good awesome um Mike thanks so much for joining me on the show man man I’ve I’ve

learned a lot oh I do have one more question what are like the typical response rates that SAAS Founders should

what are the metrics that that SAAS Founders should should know like what are the response rates on cold emails

you know responses to LinkedIn DMS if there are founders out there that are doing this stuff themselves what should

they know about like openend response rates sure yeah so when it comes to

email uh if you have anywhere from like a 2 to 4% let’s say reply rate that’s

pretty good the positive reply rate is going to be about 20% of what so if you have for sake around numbers you have 5%

reply rate 1% should be positive replies got it that’s generally how I think about it for that for LinkedIn you know

generally for every it’s it’s a little bit higher it’s say you’re probably between five to 10%

reply rate and positive reply rate once again remains around 20% got it all

right so for all the SAAS Founders out there thank you yeah I’m always like seeing SAAS Founders be like yeah I’m sending cold emails you know my my open

rate is XYZ per is that you know is that good is that market like so on and so

forth um so I wanted to make sure and get that information out there but yeah Matt yeah Mike um really appreciate you

joining me on the show today and I’ve got so much learned so much next episode

Mike’s going to uh Implement his his system and we’ll like show you under the

hood and of what it looks like I think that could be cool actually yeah yeah i’ I’ve run a funding

offer before and we had very good results um so yeah it’s not too it’s

when you when you’re offering that type of value you know millions of dollars value people reply to your emails yes

who wants money raise your hand yeah pretty much yeah thanks for

having man this great conversation great question asker and uh looking forward to staying connected man likewise and for

all the people out there you’ll be able to reach Mike uh his contact information

and his LinkedIn everything will be in the show notes below um everyone out there thanks for watching make sure you

like subscribe comment let us know who you would like to see on the show if you

have any questions for Mike make sure you reach out to him and join us next week thanks everyone