EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Shahed Islam:
Hello, everyone, my name is Shahed Islam. I run this podcast for agency.maagedcoder.com where I talk to other agency owners or anyone who is involved with an agency to talk about their agency and the process mostly. So today we have a guest, Zack Drew. He works in an agency, and I found him when I saw that their agency has been selected on the cloud top 100, I think. Is it 100, Zack? Firstly congrats, and thank you for joining our podcast. So can you introduce yourself?
Zack Drew:
Sure, hey everybody. Zack Drew here. I am one of the five partners here at Blue Label and I oversee client solutions, which in other words, means sales, marketing, partnerships, and account management.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. So over the last 17 years, a lot of us who started an agency, whether it is software development, or digital, one of the struggles I see is how do we start, and how do we grow? And Business Development is the big problem. And when you told me, we were talking earlier that you’ve been running the Business Development. How did you guys start? Did you guys have a Business Development team when you started the agency or maybe more about the agency, how you guys started?
Zack Drew:
So Blue Label Labs, we’ve been around for 10 years. I joined about three years into that. So I’ve been here for seven. When we started, you’re only mainly just the founders who were building apps, complex websites for friends, family, other folks that they met along the way, and turned that into an agency. We had a website up when I joined, and that was about it. It was my job to go and find other clients or convince them that we were the right choice, which mainly meant pretty early-stage entrepreneurs with just enough money for us to build something for them.
Shahed Islam:
Okay. That is a typical scenario. I have seen it again and again. You start with a founder, like me and my wife started. And within the network, you build a business. And then you need to start growing. And that’s where you need the Business Development. So we need to cover Business Development. How did you start? Maybe a little bit more about how did you guys start, and how does it work on the Business Development? If somebody is listening who has no idea how to do the business development for a software development agency how do they start?
Zack Drew:
Yeah, sure. I think I started with revamping the website. I think the website needed some work to be able to present ourselves better. So I started with that, and focused on case studies and being able to show off past work. I think, is the most important thing for most websites. And from there it was about creating the right business listings for the company across the internet, wherever business listings can be posted. So I think at this point, Blue Label probably has 300, 350 business listings everywhere a business like ours could be listed. And I think that’s part of it. Part of the battle is to make sure you’re everywhere you can be so that no matter how anyone’s trying to find you they can. So I think it was mainly website, business listings, and then we also discovered clutch along the way, which became a big component of our lead generation.
Shahed Islam:
So how do you guys do the lead generation right now? Is it any outbound, inbound? How many team members are on your team right now?
Zack Drew:
So my Business Development team is two client-facing sales team members, a sales support team member. And the marketing function is taken care of by me, our co-founder, and we’ve got a writer who’s mainly full-time with us to write content. And then we have two agencies, one for SEO purposes, and to help us with that link building campaigns, meaning going out and getting other folks to provide us a backlink from a high-quality domain, is one main channel that we use. And then social media agency as well, who helps with our social presence, and social ads as well. But in terms of the source of leads for us, the majority of leads still come inbound. And that would be 90% of leads come inbound, which means we need to be everywhere, and also have a great website that converts well. So website focus is pretty big for us, and to make sure it’s as good as it can be. And it’s conversion-focused as it can be. And then clutch is a big source of leads.
Shahed Islam:
A lot of people have a good rating. I have talked to many agency owners, and they have thousands of clients they serve. But I cannot even find the one cloud. How did you guys become a top leader in the cloud?
Zack Drew:
It’s a mix of paying for placement. We pay a pretty penny to be at the top list for global app debs every month. It’s a pretty steep price tag, which puts us really above everybody else on the list. That’s one way. But then there’s an organic component of that, or perhaps a more real component of that, where it is about reviews and quality of past clients, quality of reviews, types of clients, size of clients, awards. All of those things are used to determine where you fall on the clutch list. And so we aim to optimize those things, stay in close contact with our clutch representative, and make sure they understand what new things we have launching soon. So that’s a big source. And then you mentioned outbound. Outbound is about 10% of our leads, and we’ve done a lot more of it in the last year, year, and a half. And that tends to be cold outreach via email, a bit of cold calling, a bit of cold LinkedIn outreach. But mainly email, and lots of AV testing to figure out what messages are resonating, what subject lines are working, and figuring out who the right targets are for us. Generally, it’s CMOS, CTOs, C-suite, and heads of product. Those tend to be the roles we approach from an outbound perspective.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. When I talk to other successful entrepreneurs, or Business Development, who is running their Business Development department on agency, one thing they mentioned is that discipline is very important. You didn’t just start seven years ago and did some SEO, did some things. You mentioned that very specifically 100 places where you listed the website. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because that is a common theme I have seen, that these people who are being successful they are very consistent with their Business Development. It’s kind of marketing, social media, and other approaches also. You were talking about that regularly keeping in touch with the [unintelligible: 07:32] representative to make sure that you are on the same page.
Zack Drew:
I mean, consistency is important. I think it’s knowing where to spend the next hour, the next dollar, and figuring out what’s working and what’s not from a marketing perspective. And for us, it’s been really content-heavy. And whether it’s content for our website, SEO purposes, content on the website because it’s relevant to the people we want to approach from an outbound perspective, you have a link to great articles, or to have content that, again, can be used for social media ads. And it all really comes down to having great content from my perspective. If you don’t have great content who’s going to be listening to you? Nobody really cares. So you’ve got to have that as a starting point.
Shahed Islam:
So talking about that, you mentioned that you outsource the SEO part to another agency. And one of the biggest challenges, I see that a lot of agencies do not have a separate Business Development, forget about the marketing department. So how do you trust someone outside? And do you guys outsource or do you have to have some knowledge about what you are doing? Because when I hear SEO, and even a lot of my colleagues and people I ask they have a question mark about outsourcing. What if I get blacklisted? How do you make sure the quality is maintained, and to whom do you outsource the SEO part? What are your suggestions to other agency owners?
Zack Drew:
It’s important. It’s a funny space. SEO is a mix of doing the right thing, maybe some gray hat stuff and generally steering away from black hat stuff, which is very doable. But not advisable. Generally, it’s an easy way to get blacklisted, as you mentioned. So for us, it was about finding a good partner, and we found a good one here in New York who does great work. They’re called Taktical with a K. They do a great job at the SEO front. They just know the right strategy. They help hone keywords. They help us choose keywords for articles and do audits of the website. And the main thing they do is that link-building outbound email work to get those backlinks. And on average at this point, we’re getting about 10 backlinks a month from quality domains, sort of domain authority of 40 or above tends to be the target, ideally even higher than that. And at a pace of 10 a month that’s pretty good. That really does help our SEO ranking. For us, it’s all about getting first page keywords, top five keywords. We had a really great couple of months, partly driven by Google, our lovely overlords that changing algorithms that have helped us. And so we’ve gotten, I think it was 20 or 30 new first page keywords in the last couple of months each month, which is great. That just means that we’re going to be found for those keywords much more readily than we ever were before. So we’re really pleased with the SEO progress and it definitely shouldn’t be ignored. It’s super important.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. One thing you mentioned about hiring a content writer full time. I remember when I asked my financer, other department or other managers let’s get content team, and they were like we are development team, why should we get content like this, outsource. And we tried it until we found out a dedicated person makes a huge difference. Even the status, you post on social media, a content writer can make a huge difference. Before I was spending time, and I was wasting my time I would say, in writing an article. I mean, our developers, sometimes they don’t want to write articles. But a content writer can go on a call with a developer and just listen to him and write an article on his behalf. How do you go into content writing? And what is your advice to the agency owner why they need to invest early to get some results for content?
Zack Drew:
I think it’s mainly because writing is a skill set. And not a lot of people have it.
Shahed Islam:
I’m really bad.
Zack Drew:
Yeah, it’s not easy. It’s not easy to write for the right audience as well. You have to have the right tone, you have to figure out what your tone is. We try to be authentic and friendly but have a pretty straightforward point of view. It tends to be the way of writing, and then it’s coming up with great topics. But you’re right, if you don’t have somebody dedicated to it who is good at writing and starts to learn your agency too if you outsource, they don’t know anything about you. And they’re not going to spend the time because they’re not paid that way to learn about you and know what you do in and out. And so for us, having a writer in house has made it easier. They know who we are, they know what we do, they can come up with topics on their own, or even if we give a writer a quick outline of hey, this is the topic, here are a few bullets that we’re thinking about he knows exactly how to spin it for our audience and to make it relevant to our content and what we do. So it’s been super useful.
Shahed Islam:
I think you put a valid point that. And I think like an entrepreneur, most of the agency owners don’t think that spending that amount of money for something which they will not get returned. We are always thinking about the return on investment. So I think this is where I feel like it’s something a lot of entrepreneurs should do. Invest money right now, and in two years it will give them a return. In another part, you mentioned outbound email. I do talk to a lot of agency owners, and they go crazy about outbound email. I remember in 2001 or 2 when I started doing freelancing, I used to send emails to Craigslist at that time. And at one point every day, I was just doing emails to everyone, even though they were not looking for a website I would just send an email. The [unintelligible: 14:18] was so low, and it always remind me that I should have picked 15 people who I can serve better. So for me, I always think that when I talk to entrepreneurs they just go ahead and get anybody, and I receive a lot of these emails, they know that I have a team in India, they’re still sending it to me from there, and most likely I will not hire them. You are just wasting your time. So what are your free advice or advice for an outbound email campaign? You talked about some AP testing. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Specifically for those who I am targeting. They are sending emails from agencies from India and the Philippines, and other places, sending it to us where they’re not getting anywhere.
Zack Drew:
I think first and foremost AP testing is important to figure out what is the right subject line to get the email opened in the first place. And we found really simple ones work the best. Things like tell me more about blank company names app, or improving blank company name app. Despite the fact that those are super boring subject lines those get the highest open rates. And at this point, we’re running somewhere between 50 and 70% open rates with headlines like that. So they’re clearly working. Reply rates are much lower. We think a great reply rate would be 10% or even more like three or four these days. Just fine. It’s just about targeting. But it is a volume game. I think while it’s important to figure out who are the right people that you want to get this message from a company perspective, and from the perspective of a title, it’s still a numbers game, you really do have to send a lot of emails. And I don’t think I’d shy away from sending, it’s important to send as many as you can in a day, depending on the health of your domain and the like. So from our perspective, if you’re sending more than 100 emails a day from any one domain you’re probably running some risks. So we just buy a bunch of domains, or we have a bunch of domains, and we send from a variety of domains we don’t really care about so that if they did in the off chance get blacklisted we don’t necessarily care. But we also tried to prevent that from happening in the first place. And we do that by only sending a certain volume, we don’t send more than 100 emails a day from an email address, we make sure that emails are separated by at least a few minutes apiece so that it doesn’t look like it’s a bot doing it. And as long as you do that you’re in a pretty good spot. And you can have as many email addresses as you want that are doing that. It’s been working for us.
Shahed Islam:
What CRM system you guys are using? Any suggestion on which is better? Would you try any different ones?
Zack Drew:
CRM, we use Zendesk sell, which used to be called base, and it got bought by Zendesk. And it’s good. It’s simple. It’s nothing fancy. I don’t think we’d ever need in the foreseeable future a salesforce-like rocket ship, it’s too much. Way too heavy for an agency to need that kind of software. So we find the simple ones to be the best. And we’ve been super happy with Zendesk sell. We don’t use it to send emails. We could, you can if you want but we don’t. They do get tracked via CRM, which is important. But we do use another email engine called persists for our outbound email efforts, which helps orchestrate the autofill of company names and other information and also does the personalization element, and it also does the timing of the sense. But it doesn’t send within a couple of minutes of each email. So persist is what we use for that.
Shahed Islam:
[Unintelligible: 18:31]. I think one thing I learned the last two years is that outbound email, of course, you have to send a lot because competition is high and consistent. You cannot start an agency yesterday. I mean, I got three calls yet last week because of the podcast that, oh, they outsource to another agency, they got a domain name, and they’re like, oh, I bought the domain. I set it up. I said, no, it won’t work. Google is smarter than you, you have to buy a domain a year ago, you have to warm the email address, and you warm the IP address. So I think people need to show patience there is what I found out. And another thing is consistency, you talked about volume is very important. But endpoint is that your 10% sales come from outbound email. In our case, less than that, 5%. Going back to Business Development, the last part, how important is your existing client to give you that? I mean, why Business Development working with your existing client is important? Because that is the part where people are….. if you think Business Development is about the outbound email you are only going to make 10,000 a month where you need 100,000. Where is the other 90,000, Zack?
Zack Drew:
There’s surely something to be said for keeping your existing clients around, happy, and making good referrals. I think for an agency early days, they’re probably working with relatively small clients. So there probably isn’t much of the, call it an inside sales strategy, that’s possible meaning inside sales tends to be useful when you’re working with a bigger customer, for instance. So we work with iHeartMedia, Time Magazine, Bloomberg. So for us, inside sales is okay, we’re working for one product manager, maybe a few at that company, how can we get in front of other product managers within that company to see if they have other digital products we could help with. And so, inside sales becomes important when you’re working in companies of a certain scale. But before that, it’s about keeping your current client happy, making sure they can be good references for you, whether it be on review sites, or for other customers that are going to want to talk to them to understand if you’re legit and good. And so you’re going to need those references. So you need happy clients to start, that’s for sure.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. And do you guys do anything specific to keep up or keep in touch with your client? Because one thing I found out even my experience that I have a list of client where from our top-level manager, a Business Development person is assigned just to keep in touch with them, maybe even build their LinkedIn profile. So that guy who works on a top company, or your existing client knows that you are out there, or just say hi to him. Any other advice for existing clients keep up? How to get a referral from them?
Zack Drew:
Depending on the client, meeting with them. From an account management perspective, it depends on our client. Sometimes it’s once a week, or me or my team meet with them. Sometimes every other week, and sometimes it’s once a month, it depends on the client, and their needs, and how important they are to us. But the other aspect of that is asking for referrals, it really just is a matter of asking the question. That gets you most of the way there and most people just don’t ask. And if you don’t ask you’re surely not going to get any. But the strategy we’ve taken is one ask. But secondarily, it’s even looking at that person’s LinkedIn network. Going through it completely, if they share their followers, seeing who they’re connected to. And we send emails to our clients to say, hey, we see you’re connected to these four or five people are you friendly enough with any of them to make a warm introduction? So we tee it up for them, we say, these are the people you know that we want to know. And that works really well because it simplifies it. And most people won’t deny you that if they know that person. Sometimes they don’t, and things like that you get a lot of connections, you don’t know. But assuming that the person is connected to them and knows them they’ll make that introduction pretty quickly.
Shahed Islam:
That’s really good advice. Zack, we ran out of time. Thank you for your time today. If people want to contact you what is the best way of contacting you?
Zack Drew:
Sure. Go to our website www.bluelabellabs.com or emailing us at contact at bluelabellabs.com.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. Very nice talking to you.
Zack Drew:
Thanks.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.
Zack Drew:
Bye.
