[00:00:00] James: This is Outfoxed, the podcast brought to you by Hunter.io, the trusted B2B lead generation platform built for every professional. Get ready for no playbooks, no posturing and no egos. This is the show for the builders and not the theorists. Let's get into it.
[00:00:17] Matt: Well, Matthew, welcome to Outfoxed. Excited to have you here. For those who are joining, again, welcome to Outfoxed, my favorite podcast of the week. Because I get to be the main guy, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's ego talking. No. Mostly it's because I get to drive the questions, and that's the part I'm the most excited about.
[00:00:37] Matt: With me is Matthew, founder of Colman Rose. Colman Rose is a B2B growth consultancy, as you say, with genuine skin in the game. I'm gonna come back to that. You've spent what, a decade or so helping SaaS and professional services companies grow and you've keyed in on while you've used, while you've worked with large accounts as well,
[00:00:57] Matt: you've really said you focus on SMEs. And, so I'd love to dial into that. So, Matthew, welcome to Outfoxed.
[00:01:07] Matthew: Thank you very much for having me on the show. I'm excited to get into things.
[00:01:11] Matt: That's great. As, so just so you, you know, everybody listening understands that is a different accent that you hear with Matthew. Matthew's joining us from, Milton Keynes, which I had to look up again this morning 'cause I was like, I know that this is interesting to me for some reason.
[00:01:26] Matt: And after, 20 straight years of two Red Bulls a day, which I did, the math is 20,000 Red Bulls, so medical science, if you want to do some research, I'm here. But it means that Red Bull Racing is headquartered in Milton Keynes. So, that was the connection. And, Matthew, tell me, do you have a race story?
[00:01:46] Matt: A Red Bull racing story?
[00:01:47] Matthew: I suppose a small one. I mean, Milton Keyes probably isn't famous for that much, but, having the Red Bull Formula 1 team based here is maybe one of those. But if anyone, listening is ever in the area and, wants to go on the Red Bull Factory tour, I can thoroughly recommend it.
[00:02:06] Matthew: It's a good two or three hour experience, and the amount of time and effort and intelligence that goes into that will just blow you away. It's an unbelievable experience if you're in the area. So I thoroughly recommend it.
[00:02:24] Matt: I think that's a bucket list trip at this point for me.
[00:02:26] Matt: I'm gonna have to do that. There's only a handful of those. Are you from Milton Keynes originally?
[00:02:32] Matthew: Not too far away. Yeah. I mean, I've spent most of the last, 30 odd years in and around the area. So yeah, I live not too far from here. It's not the, I suppose most fashionable place in the UK.
[00:02:48] Matthew: I mean, it's, the city itself has only been around for like 45 years, something like that. But it was deliberately positioned so that it's equidistant between London, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge, and somewhere else, I think. So that it could basically be a commuter hub for all of those places. So, yeah, no, it's, like I say, probably not the, it doesn't have that much culture, I suppose, or history behind it. But it's nice. I mean, once you get out into the villages and stuff, it's a cool place.
[00:03:20] Matt: Nice. Well, I'll, let you know, I'll report back once I get a chance to visit.
[00:03:25] Matthew: Good.
[00:03:25] Matt: Okay. So what did I miss in the intro? Did I cover it okay?
[00:03:29] Matthew: I think you covered it perfectly, yeah. You know, I've spent just shy of 15 years in digital marketing and sales. Started things out. I was very lucky to be exposed at the first company I worked at to all manner of businesses, right from, you know, small micro companies right up to,
[00:03:52] Matthew: you know, large businesses, as, you know, like Costa Coffee and Volkswagen Financial Services, and AXA, who are a big insurance brand over here, as well as PWC. You know, through to, you know, like I say, businesses that you've, probably never really heard of. I left that organization and then spent six years at another business where again, got good exposure to a large portfolio of companies, but spent most of that time niching more and more into B2B.
[00:04:31] Matthew: A big reason of that is because I got into the HubSpot ecosystem about a decade ago. And obviously HubSpot very tied in with longer sales cycles and B2B orgs. And then just shy of two and a half years ago, the stars aligned and I founded Colman Rose and, you know, have gone from being just me to a team of four now.
[00:04:57] Matthew: So, yeah, ticking on, ticking along okay. And, yeah, that's probably like a, super quick tour of my background.
[00:05:05] Matt: That's awesome. Thank you. So, you've had an expanse of experiences, you've worked with a large variety of companies. I have as well. What made you decide the companies that you wanted to focus on were gonna be, kind of, small to medium sized enterprises?
[00:05:20] Matt: Was there a particular moment or experience that kind of drove you in that direction?
[00:05:25] Matthew: I wouldn't say it was one particular moment, or experience. I would say it's a collective of them. So when you work with larger organizations, so our ICP is, ish, right? Ten to a hundred employees.
[00:05:39] Matthew: Right? We can and have worked with companies slightly outside of that. But, you know, that, from an employee perspective, obviously there's other factors that filter into our ICP, but, that's our focus. And the reason why we've kind of landed on that is that companies, you know, certainly
[00:06:01] Matthew: 250 employees, 500 and up are just in a different way of doing things. You know, things happen slower. You get code freezes on websites. You get layers of bureaucracy within an organization for obvious reasons, right? Like compliance, legal, all those sorts of things. And honestly, I personally just enjoy working less with that type of company.
[00:06:27] Matthew: There's a space for it in the market. Of course there is, and there are other companies that are better suited for it. But, you know, we have a client who, they're about 25 employees. We send them stuff and it's done within 24 hours.
[00:06:41] Matt: Right.
[00:06:42] Matthew: And it's like, you know, I've had a supplier recently who's literally said to me, he'd be like.
[00:06:47] Matthew: These guys are a dream. I'm like, yeah, I know. You send them stuff and they just do it and they just crack on and you know. That was a massive reason for us in terms of focusing on, that size of, on that size of company.
[00:07:00] Matt: Yeah, it makes sense. It's always been kind of my favorite as well.
[00:07:04] Matt: To me I want everybody I work with to be as close to the user or as close to the problem as possible. And when you get to a certain size, the decision maker is so separate from the end user or the customer, that often what's shaping the decision has less to do with what value you're delivering and more about organizational constructs and, you know, revenue.
[00:07:26] Matt: It's just like, it kind of, the value falls away and the focus becomes more, I don't know, financial, for lack of a better word. And that to me, it just makes projects less interesting when it's, yeah, when you're far enough away from the problem, you're not really emotionally connected to the outcome anymore.
[00:07:45] Matt: And that to me is what I like about SMBs. They care still about the process and the outcome.
[00:07:52] Matthew: Yeah. 100%. And I'm not saying that, I don't necessarily think that people don't care in larger organizations, but a lot of the time you are, we are personally dealing with, I'm not saying you're saying that either, but, you know, I, a lot of the time we deal with like, at least, or have a relationship with the owner or co-founders of the organization and for them, you know, if the business doesn't work, they have no money coming in, right?
[00:08:19] Matt: Right.
[00:08:20] Matthew: There's a massive, massive risk associated with that. And I, honestly, I just get a bigger kick out of working with this type of business, based off, you know, having spent 10 plus years working with different varieties of companies, and I personally think that
[00:08:36] Matthew: I and therefore the business are a better fit to work with those smaller entities, day to day.
[00:08:43] Matt: Yeah. Right on. Now, you've mentioned a couple of times ICP, and one of the things that I find is true when I work with SMBs in ways that is still often true, even in larger organizations, is that there's a bit of a mystery about the process of defining your ICP about segmenting your customers.
[00:09:05] Matt: And I think, you know, I'm consistently surprised at how uncommon a certain amount of rigor and discipline are on this particular topic, because it doesn't feel like there's a lot of like really, really great black and white blueprints for how to do this out there. How did you determine that that was your ICP specifically from a business?
[00:09:28] Matt: So I like, I understand your personal preference, but as you get into like professionally, what made that ICP attractive?
[00:09:37] Matthew: So, there's a few things for us that I, having done this for a period of time and, I've worked with a couple of, you know, one or two people companies. That is a
[00:09:53] Matthew: challenge because, sometimes marketing and sales activity is potentially seen as the thing that can help save them when sometimes that might not be the case or can help them really kick them onto the next level. You know, the reason why from a business perspective that we typically work with companies where they've got at least 10 employees is that, you know, that is a very good sign that the company has established customers or a handful of customers, and fundamentally, look, there's no exact measure for product market fit, but they're either very, very close to it or they've already got it. Right?
[00:10:35] Matt: Right.
[00:10:36] Matthew: But then you don't get into that top end of company, where you get those, you know, levels of data protection officers and all that sort of stuff.
[00:10:44] Matthew: That means that, you know, we end up slowing down and have to go through, you know, campaign approvals and all that sort of stuff. So I think that, that was a definite factor from a business point of view. In addition to that, like honestly, there are companies designed to work with businesses that charge, you know, tens of thousands of dollars every month for their support, right?
[00:11:12] Matthew: There are also companies out there that may work on a few hundred dollars a month, right? And we are in that gap in between, right? You know, we're not charging a few hundred dollars and we're not charging tens of thousands of dollars every single month. And in my opinion and the business's opinion, that gives us enough bandwidth to be effective.
[00:11:33] Matt: This is really interesting. Do you put most of your energy into the places with your clients where you thought you would, or do you find that each of your engagements often requires something unexpected? Something that there's like, oh, we have to remove this hurdle first before we can actually get to the thing that we wanna do with you.
[00:11:51] Matt: Do you find that with a lot of your clients, there's that kind of thing that gets in the way early in a relationship?
[00:11:58] Matthew: Sometimes. I think it depends what it is, right? I mean, you know, when we work with clients initially, certainly earlier on, we're looking for ways that we can drive value as fast as possible.
[00:12:12] Matthew: You know, that might mean actively mapping activities onto a matrix where, you know, we look at low or medium effort, but high potential impact. And that's what we try to focus on. If that means that, you know, we need to remove this thing or, get this blocker out of the way in order to do that, then sometimes we know about that in advance and other times it comes out in the wash and we do it then.
[00:12:41] Matthew: So, I, it's just such a marketer's response, but, it depends on, it depends on the client.
[00:12:50] Matt: Yeah. Okay. I just, you know, I'm really fascinated with this skin in the game concept that you've, you know, that you're marketing as part of your brand and as part of your business. And I'm, you know, I don't see enough of that and I'm really kind of fascinated, like, how did you come to that?
[00:13:06] Matt: Was that like an early idea that was part of your, you know, genesis of the business, or did you get to that later?
[00:13:12] Matthew: So, at the company I used to work at previously there, we had a, an external advisor. And this external advisor started to talk more and more about the concept of performance based contracts.
[00:13:27] Matthew: So to just briefly recap that, you know, a performance based contract is where part of or the whole of our, what we invoiced to a client, is based on outcomes. And that person introduced the concept to me, and I bought into that a lot, right? When I was there, and I tried to introduce that to a handful of clients and would I say it was a failure whilst I was there?
[00:13:56] Matthew: Maybe not, but it wasn't as, successful as I would've liked to have, liked, it to have been. So when I was thinking about going and doing my own thing, for me that was like a core pillar of the business. And I'll tell you why. There's probably two main prongs to it. Number one is that in the UK there's over 7,000 marketing agencies. In North America, there's more than 100,000. Right? I would argue we're slightly more, well, we're more consultancy than agency. But like it or not, what we do is a commodity, right? There are so many out there. So, you know, being unique is almost impossible unless you like only work with charities and you do CRO and you know, you only work with B Corps in this particular sector or whatever, right?
[00:14:52] Matthew: So, it's super difficult to be unique. Out of those companies, I think it's less than 6% offer performance based contracts. So that's number one, right? It was a how do we try and be as unique as we possibly can be? Number two is, because I'm a massive believer if you are working with an outsource marketing and sales provider, consultant, agency, whatever, and they're not driving growth.
[00:15:20] Matthew: What's the point? Like what? Like why are you paying them? So, look, we don't put the whole fee on the chopping block because, we, you know, there's effort that goes towards things. It's not purely pay for play, but a portion of the fees that we charge our clients, goes into this up for grabs area, I suppose.
[00:15:44] Matthew: And if we basically, early on in a relationship agree some lower bound KPIs and some upper bound ones. And if we miss the lower bound KPI, they get a rebate on their fee. But if we hit the upper bound one, right, we get paid a kicker, a bit like a salesperson would. So that's where the skin in the game tax comes from, is because we genuinely have skin in the game to client's performance, and if we are not able to help them produce that performance,
[00:16:13] Matthew: we lose out. But we're also, you know, saying to clients, well, you know, you should put your money where your mouth is as well. And if we do hit or exceed performance, then, you are okay giving us, a bonus. And so far, look, do we miss KPI sometimes? Yeah, of course we do.
[00:16:32] Matthew: Right? Like you, you know, no one could predict the future. But, so far we've either hit KPI in that, you know, gone above, lower bound, or gone to, or gone above the upper bound more times than we haven't, so.
[00:16:48] Matt: Is it a deal sales process, accelerant? Do you find that this does work at helping you get more businesses involved than you would've?
[00:16:56] Matthew: It depends who you're talking to, I think.
[00:16:58] Matt: Okay.
[00:16:59] Matthew: Sorry to interrupt you.
[00:17:00] Matt: No, no.
[00:17:01] Matthew: Founders, business owners, right, are much more interested than any other persona. Which if you think about it, kind of makes sense 'cause it's their money.
[00:17:11] Matt: Right.
[00:17:12] Matthew: I think marketing and sales personas, who are our other main roles that we talk to, people we talk to day to day, find it interesting, but not as appetizing,
[00:17:22] Matthew: I would say.
[00:17:24] Matthew: So, yeah, it, again, it depends on who we're on who we're talking to, but, every time you talk to a business owner or people in general, to be fair, that's unfair of me to say not just bucket business owners.
[00:17:38] Matthew: People get it and, they understand it quite quickly. I think, I saw a very interesting post on LinkedIn the other day that a lot of supplier agency consultant owners were very against performance based contracts. Which I found quite surprising, but, maybe I'll change my mind in five years time because we've missed KPI too many times.
[00:18:02] Matthew: I hope that's not the case, but I mean I'd be amazed if that happens. Like I'm pretty confident in the model.
[00:18:10] Matt: It's interesting, you know, on the software side. I've seen over the last 20 or so years, three or four phases of experimentation in software around performance-based models.
[00:18:23] Matt: And I think from a software perspective, a seller's perspective, it always made sense and like being able to structure this so that there's upside for us, but it actually creates a skin in the game opportunity that should align our incentives enough that it's compelling. But I find in practice,
[00:18:41] Matt: you're right, like business owners, founder type CEOs, they get that, but everybody downstream is so worried about budget that anything that creates variability in the budget ends up becoming harder to control, harder to forecast. And I would say that 90% of the friction I've seen around those kinds of pricing models on the software side, it ends up being because of that, it's, I want to lock in my budget.
[00:19:06] Matt: I want to have opportunities to optimize. And I can't do that if, as the success goes up, the price goes up. And I feel like that's always suppressed software sales, having a performance based model. But on the services side, it seems kind of obvious.
[00:19:22] Matthew: Yeah.
[00:19:22] Matt: But you're right. I don't think I've been pitched that
[00:19:26] Matt: ever actually.
[00:19:27] Matthew: Yeah, because it's so rare, right? I mean, for me, there's, broadly three ways you can, price anything, right? Especially service, right? Input-based, output-based or outcome. I don't love input pricing. Input pricing, which is fundamentally, you know, how many, the most often, the most common version of that is,
[00:19:48] Matthew: it's hours. Right? We'll, you know, we'll do you 10 hours a month.
[00:19:52] Matt: Right.
[00:19:53] Matthew: But whoever you are paying is incentivized to take longer. Right?
[00:19:56] Matt: Right.
[00:19:56] Matthew: So whether or not they do or not, I don't know, but the whole principle of it is that, and I think that's wrong. So, for me, we avoid input-based pricing unless a customer really wants it for a very short-term project because they want the understanding that they know they're gonna pay X and get,
[00:20:14] Matthew: you know, 10 hours. Right?
[00:20:16] Matt: Right.
[00:20:16] Matthew: But we try and avoid it. Basically all of our retained engagements are a blend of, output, we are gonna produce these deliverables, on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis, and outcome-based, which as close as we can possibly get, should be tied around revenue.
[00:20:37] Matthew: You know, either, you know, MRR, ARR, you know, those sorts of things, but, you know, for some of our clients that operate in the enterprise, that's harder, especially over a shorter timeframe. So then it will come back to pipeline. Sometimes in examples it'll be, SQLs, or SRLs,
[00:21:00] Matthew: we refer to them. We don't talk about MQLs, we talk about, SRL sales ready leads. So we'll measure it in different ways, but as close as we can get to a dollar figure the better.
[00:21:12] Matt: How do you prospect for this? How do you prospect for a willingness to engage in outcome-based pricing?
[00:21:19] Matthew: Good question. So, look, we have a good understanding, I think, of our ICP. I would say that almost every business's ICP will change and shift over time. So, reviewing it informally or formally every minimum 12 months is probably sensible. But, and, as I say, we, like, we have a, generally, a good understanding of, I think of our persona as well.
[00:21:47] Matthew: Right? Typically that would be, you know, owners of organizations, co-founders, that sort of stuff, marketing leaders, sales leaders, those sorts of people. So we have a good understanding of what that looks like because we have those firmographic data, we can list a handful of companies, and figure out ways to try and go after them.
[00:22:13] Matthew: You know, about 30-40% of our business comes from referrals. 30-40% of it comes from inbound and 30-40% of it comes from outbound activity. So we're fundamentally trying to find lookalike businesses that match our ICP and go to them and present this skin in the game offer, at the right time, so.
[00:22:41] Matt: How do you determine the right time?
[00:22:44] Matthew: Good question. So having done, when I started the company two and a bit years ago, I had no clients. Like I decided to do this in what I would never recommend to do to anyone, right? Which is, you know, fundamentally try and work two jobs for a bit if you're gonna go out and become a founder.
[00:23:08] Matthew: And do your own thing, either service or SaaS or whatever, like build up some revenue first. I did not do that. that made the first few months very scary. But I pushed
[00:23:24] Matthew: that skin in the game offer, a reasonable amount in my first few months, and I got a couple of bites from it, and one of them became one of our first clients.
[00:23:37] Matthew: And we did some really, really good work for them. We did such good work that we got introduced to another client, because a director of that company was involved in this other business. And, you know, the, we are going all guns blazing on that latter one. So, but it was very focused on
[00:24:01] Matthew: bottom of funnel. Hey, buy our product now. The amount of replies to email sent was low.
[00:24:10] Matt: Okay.
[00:24:10] Matthew: Right.
[00:24:12] Matt: Because you were, doing email outreach to try to get that first set of customers.
[00:24:16] Matthew: Yeah.
[00:24:16] Matthew: A blend of email and LinkedIn outreach. I, what we have since semi-pivoted to is this model of instead of going for the jugular, as I would refer to it as in going straight for the book a demo, buy my product, jump on a sales call thing, we take a slightly different approach. And there's method to the madness, like, being honest, did I want to do that in the first few months of the business?
[00:24:46] Matthew: No, I didn't. Right? But, you know, the company needed revenue or, you know, I've got two kids at home and you know, gotta put food on the table and all that sort of stuff. So the focus at that time was, you know, try and drum up some sales interest. What we do now, and what we advise most of our clients to do is work backwards from closing a deal.
[00:25:09] Matthew: So, in order to close a deal, right? You need, if you're a SaaS company, some form of demo or if you're a service company some form of sales proposal. In order to get a sales proposal, you need to have some form of interest, right? That company needs to have, an interest in the product or service that you're offering.
[00:25:30] Matthew: In order to get that, you have to have some form of like, relationship there. In order to get that relationship, you need to provide something of value. And so instead of us jumping ahead to the end step saying, Hey, buy my product, buy my product, we try to start with the value piece.
And then, and so what we try to do now is we try to add value upfront.
[00:26:09] Matthew: You know, there's a couple of models that I talk about, one of which is the 95-5 rule in B2B, which you've probably heard of, which is, you know, that in any market at any given time, only 95, sorry, only 5% of your audience are ever in market to buy, and the other 95 are out of market.
[00:26:26] Matthew: The other one is from, Chet Holmes and his buyer's pyramid and his is slightly more granular, but he basically says 3% are in market. Another 6-7% are about to become in market, and then the other 90% are either not thinking about it, never gonna think about it, or, aren't gonna come into market anytime soon.
[00:26:48] Matthew: So that means outta every, you know, a hundred people that you email, only 5 to 10 of those are gonna be interested in buying your product or service. And you know, there's countless stats out there to show that most companies, by the time they actually inquire with the business, they already have a shortlist of potential businesses in mind.
[00:27:06] Matthew: So what we try to do, from our own marketing and sales point of view is that, we try to think about where our personas are. And be in those watering holes as often as we can do without being annoying so that when they go from the 95 to the 5%, we are one of the people that they think of.
So, for example, a watering hole, I would say for people in marketing, right, would be LinkedIn, and business owners as well. Less so probably for business owners because they're not on it as much, but, certainly for like B2B marketers, they're on LinkedIn.
[00:27:58] Matthew: So, you know, I, post three-ish times every single week on a variety of different stuff associated around B2B marketing, and try to add value into the community. So that, hopefully when those people go from the 95 into the 5, we're one of the people that they think of. We have some things set up via HubSpot on our site that, you know, if using their buyer intent feature, that means that we can maybe do some warm outbound when someone visits our site, we don't get a lot of traffic, but, and the site's terrible, which is being fixed at some point in the next few months.
[00:28:36] Matthew: But that as well. But what I'm trying, what we are trying to do is add value first before we go for any ask.
[00:28:44] Matt: Which is great.
[00:28:45] Matthew: And build that relationship.
[00:28:46] Matt: What do you, what's an example of how you've added value?
When you know they don't know who you are yet, you're trying to get
[00:28:56] Matt: some kind of an awareness, some kind of top of mind.
[00:29:00] Matt: What does that value look like?
[00:29:02] Matthew: So, I think that will depend on the type of organization that you are and what you sell and your contract value and all that sort of stuff. If you have a lower contract value, you need more customers and if you have a higher contract value, you need less customers.
[00:29:24] Matthew: And therefore that will dictate, in my opinion, the value or the offers that you present. So if you are doing high contract values, right, and when I say high, you know I'm saying minimum $30,000 per year, but obviously potentially in excess of that. Things like, roundtables, private dinners, breakfast briefings, private events, those sorts of things.
[00:29:49] Matthew: Right? And that would sit in like one-to-one outreach or one to few outreach. If you are, have a lower contract value, right? And therefore you need lots of customers. You can't put on roundtables because you know, you spend so much money on producing that and all those sorts of things, and you don't get the payoff, right?
[00:30:08] Matthew: So you probably have to lean into more mass value, webinars, sorry, value creators like webinars, eBooks, white papers, all those sorts of things. So you're going to people saying, you are this type of persona. You have these types of challenges. Here's something that we think will help with this challenge.
[00:30:24] Matthew: Right? Would you be interested in receiving it? And going that way and, you know, you are bringing them into the ecosystem. Into your ecosystem, either via marketing, you know, social posting, email marketing, all that sort of stuff, or outbound, sales comms, you know, through sequencing and cadences and all that sort of stuff.
[00:30:48] Zach: Today's episode is brought to you by Hunter io, the B2B lead generation platform made for every professional, whether it's prospecting, fundraising, recruiting, link building, or just trying to connect with the right people, hunter makes it easy.
[00:31:05] Matt: I've been experimenting a lot with AI, managing my inbox, for obvious reasons. Understanding how that tech is gonna potentially disrupt the inbox is, I think, really important for us. But important for our customers and our audience as well. I think the value component of what you've talked about is something I am really just strongly indexing on because I do think that is going to be something that can survive, right?
[00:31:34] Matt: So the survivability of outreach I don't think is at risk, but every single time somebody sends another crummy outreach campaign. It feels like it dents, you know, the armor just a bit. And so, this idea of value is something that's come up a lot recently, internally, it's come up on our webinars. And I love this because you're actually giving examples of like, what does value mean to your audience and how do you put that together?
[00:32:00] Matt: And I just think that that's, we just need lessons, I think in the, you know, in the atmosphere about how in email and especially outreach emails, can you deliver that value. I think those are great examples. Have you found one item in particular that's been particularly high converting for you?
[00:32:22] Matthew: For Colman Rose, the roundtables that we run.
[00:32:26] Matthew: So, in '24 we ran two. In '25 we ran four. This year we're gonna do six. One of the roun tables that we hosted in '24 got us two customers. And, that person ended up introducing us to another one, to another customer. And the total cost of those six or seven roundtables that we've ran so far is less than $8,000 in total.
[00:33:07] Matthew: And probably, that's probably a high estimate as well. It might even be under $5,000. We've had north of $250,000 worth of contract value off that.
[00:33:16] Matt: That's fantastic.
[00:33:17] Matthew: They are for us, right? You know, our contract values are higher, so we can, do that and spend some time on an event and things like that.
[00:33:24] Matthew: But there's an opportunity cost as well because, you know, we, the per event is two or three days worth of organization, but it's not huge effort, right? It's medium to low effort with potentially high impact. So for us, we, rinse and repeat that, right? And I think that any company that is
[00:33:41] Matthew: having contracts of $30,000 and up should be figuring out ways to run private events, in some way, shape or form. For lower value contracts or lower contract values. You know, if you’re sub 10,000, 5,000, you need to lean into something else, right? Because as I mentioned earlier, you can't spend the time and effort doing one-to-one invites and things like that.
[00:34:09] Matthew: But then that's stuff like webinars, eBooks, bringing them into the ecosystem, that way and trying to tie it in with, you know, effective sales outreach so that once you've provided some value, you've got some engagement. You try and find ways to, get that demo at the right moment, so.
[00:34:30] Matt: Yeah, this is great. I'm, you know, the right moment concept. This is something I think that comes up in every podcast episode at some point because I have a really strong bias that despite all the signals and despite all the sort of onsite behavior, that the timing is the one thing you can't predict.
[00:34:48] Matt: Like you can predict every other variable. You know, if you want to say you have the right message to the right person at the right time, I think you can get the first two. I think that's an absolutely doable thing. I just don't, I think you are better off planning to not be able to nail timing, because I think that influences your strategy and I think it builds a little bit more protection in that your messaging is probably gonna resonate a little bit longer.
[00:35:15] Matt: You're probably gonna make more of an impression about, Hey, you know this, oh yeah, there's this pain point, and, I think we all have this as people who operate a business. There's a pain point, you know, you have, you know, it's not a high priority at this moment. But you know, at some point you're gonna have to deal with that pain.
[00:35:33] Matt: And to me, that's one of the benefits of email outreach. Why I believe in it so strongly is that's an opportunity to create a touchpoint that's different from advertising that says, Hey, if you have this pain, this is a thing we can help with. And I don't think you're, you know, I can't, like you said, there's 5% that's likely to have the pain right now.
[00:35:52] Matt: Everybody else, I just want to have a little seed in the back of their mind that I plant for when that moment comes up. And I've seen that work and I've seen that be valuable. But because of what you said in the beginning, I think most people come in and they're like, oh, I need, meetings booked. I need conversions.
[00:36:08] Matt: I want to try to tie this to revenue directly. And I think that ends up hurting their success rate with, their outreach. I feel like you've organized your process really well to account for all of that.
[00:36:19] Matthew: Yeah. And the other thing I would say is that this is maybe a bit, maybe a bit hacky, but, and it's very tactical, but we found this effective that once you have that relationship, you go to someone and say something along these sorts of lines, hey, like, hope it's okay to ask this question.
[00:36:44] Matthew: But, appreciate, you may not be looking right now for enter your service or product, product category, but the next time you go to review it, what would it take for us to get onto the short list of suppliers?
[00:36:58] Matt: That's a great one.
[00:36:59] Matthew: And it's such a subtle way, instead of saying, Hey, do you wanna jump on a demo?
[00:37:03] Matthew: You're saying, look, when you're ready, what can we do to ensure that we are one of the people that you think about? And for us, that is a, that has been very effective to try and open up some opportunities because then they turn around and say, you know, almost always you get a reply, right? I would say 99% of the time you get, you get a reply.
[00:37:27] Matthew: And they say, we're not currently looking right now. Or they say, well, actually we're gonna be thinking about this next month. And I used that very template last year and closed a piece of business within six or eight weeks of that happening, because they said, as it happens, we're starting to think about this soon, let's have a chat.
[00:37:44] Matthew: And, that's a very good way. Like, I could not agree more with you. You cannot, I think marketers and salespeople in general would like to think that they can control the 95 going into the 5. You can't. Right? Like, you can try and influence it, but you can't control that moment.
[00:38:01] Matthew: Right? You know, because it'll be a new CMO comes in or, a new, chief revenue officer comes into the business and says, no, we're now gonna do this. And then all of a sudden people start moving in certain directions, right? But what you can try to do is put yourself in the crosshair so that when they do go from the 95 to the 5, you are one of the people that they think of.
[00:38:22] Matthew: And that's why multi-channel, email, LinkedIn, social posting, potentially LinkedIn ads, email marketing, all these things have to try and work in unison, for those things to happen.
[00:38:36] Matt: Yeah, I'm a big fan of adding retargeting. It allows you to control the costs of advertising and getting a visual to go along with your email is a really, I think it's a really powerful way to capitalize on the way the brain works.
[00:38:52] Matt: You know, it feels like more touchpoints than it actually is. Especially since retargeting, you're gonna see that two or three or four times, and I can't tell you how many times, personally, before even getting into this space, I would see an email, think about it, and then I would get 6,000 more emails and move on.
[00:39:09] Matt: And then I see the ad later and I'm like, oh yeah, or the LinkedIn post, or whatever. And just that second touchpoint. It can be so much, so powerful at cementing that really subtle brand that often subliminal brand impression that you got outta the first one. That's, I harp a lot on making sure your brand is present in the email for that reason, you want to get as much value outta that brand impression as possible.
[00:39:33] Matthew: Yeah, a hundred percent. I couldn't agree more. The challenge with stuff like that is that, especially with digital over the past sort of 20 years or so. A big reason why people have promoted digital advertising and digital marketing and all this sort of stuff is because it's been seen as like super measurable, right?
[00:39:53] Matthew: You can measure this and all that sort of stuff, and it, and that is true to a point, right? It is arguably more measurable than offline stuff because you can measure clicks and things like that and, occasionally you can measure views and, views of ads and, those sorts of things,
[00:40:08] Matthew: but with AI search and with privacy, you know, complaints and concerns, globally, it's only gonna get harder. which therefore means you need to figure out ways to be as present as you can, as cost-effectively as you can on the channels, in the areas where your buyers hang out. Back to the watering holes, discussion that we had earlier,
[00:40:38] Matthew: to capitalize when they go from the 95 into the 5.
[00:40:41] Matt: This is great advice. Like I feel like, you know, you're living it still daily, but also just that genesis story of how you landed your first couple clients and got the business started, I think is really valuable. How, I'm curious, how long do you think it took from, you left,
[00:40:58] Matt: you said, I'm gonna go out on my own to that first client check. How long was that period of time?
[00:41:05] Matthew: I, so I was thinking about doing it in the middle of '24. I mean, to be fair, it's a very quick story. Like my original plan when I left university was go and get a job in London. And I did that, it was a job I didn't enjoy and I left after four days and I was like, I wanna go self-employed.
[00:41:24] Matthew: Because my dad had been self-employed, my brother was self-employed. And I was like, eventually I wanted to do this. So I did that for a couple of years, felt like I wasn't progressing as much as I wanted to. Went and got a job and my plan was two years agency, two years in-house and then go and start my own company.
[00:41:37] Matthew: Somehow I ended up 11 years into a four year journey and still hadn't started my own business. so the stars align towards the backend of '24, as I say, and I, took the leap, I registered the company on. I knew I was gonna do it, but I registered the company on the 16th of November '24. I got verbal confirmation on my first client early December,
[00:41:59] Matthew: and then I got my second one on the 1st of January where we kicked off on the 1st of January, but I'd been teeing it up for a few months before that. Being like, I think I'm gonna do this thing. Would you be interested in having a discussion? All those sorts of things. The one thing I would say about outbound generally, right, is that you need to warm it up as much as you possibly can.
[00:42:19] Matthew: Beg, borrow, steal intros and referrals and all that sort of stuff. Like, LinkedIn for B2B is your best friend here. You know, mining mutual connections and going to your people that you know and saying, Hey, how well do you know these three people? And they, chances are most people come back and go, well, I don't know that person or that person, but I know them and be like, ah, can you introduce me?
[00:42:42] Matthew: And it just makes all of this stuff so much easier because outbound's so hard. It's so hard to be able to break through, especially in a, as a commodity. You know, like a service provider in marketing services. So, yeah, to come back to your question, I mean, you know, technically two weeks, but actually it was a few months of like small pockets of conversations to build that up.
[00:43:09] Matt: Okay. Changing gears, this is great. I want to talk about tech briefly before we run out of time. You know, there are companies where their tech is their company, and I don't mean just SaaS companies, but I've talked to a lot of agencies where they, sort of build a pipeline tool and their job, what they're trying to do is just put as many people through that as possible and the tech stack is a critical part of their business.
[00:43:37] Matt: But so far as we've talked about this, I think other than LinkedIn and outreach, you haven't really talked a lot about the technology side of it. How critical do you find tech stack for you and when you're working with your clients, do you tend to drive or try to influence the kind of tech they're using?
[00:43:55] Matt: I'd love to hear more about this aspect of your relationships with folks.
[00:43:59] Matthew: Tech for me is an enabler.
[00:44:01] Matt: Okay.
[00:44:02] Matthew: Right? You can still do all this stuff without having a CRM system using, you know, just a spreadsheet or some, or pen and paper, right? All of it just makes it faster, easier, you know, especially in the age of AI and, all those sorts of things.
[00:44:17] Matthew: So I've, I have technology tools that I tend to lean towards, and recommend because I've personally experienced them and think they do a good job. In terms of what that looks like, as I mentioned earlier, like I got introduced to HubSpot ecosystem before HubSpot even had a CRM. It was just the marketing hub as they call it now, but it was just a marketing automation platform with a couple of other bits.
[00:44:46] Matthew: Right? But we do a lot of our work in and around the HubSpot ecosystem. And I think they've been very smart with the way that they built that platform to enable lots of other tools to connect into it. So that's often one of the main things. But it doesn't matter whether you use HubSpot or Salesforce or Pipedrive or Zoho or whatever, in my opinion, I just think that Hubspot, arguably, does the best job of it.
[00:45:09] Matthew: For actual outreach and things like that, we tend to work with customers on a variety of different systems. The, from a data enrichment point of view, Apollo, Freckle, and then we've honestly, we've just started getting involved a little bit more with, Hunter, and then there's other tools, out there, from like a sequencing perspective that, you know, HubSpot sequences can, but it's not great for volume outbound.
[00:45:41] Matthew: I think it's better for like, inbound stuff.
[00:45:47] Matthew: And there's tools there that we've messed around with. But I think, honestly, like I still come back to tech, just being an enabler of all of this thing and whether you use, Hunter or Apollo or whatever it is, it probably comes a little bit down to like personal preference on what can fit in with your ecosystem, so.
[00:46:09] Matt: Well, obviously I'm sure in the sales process, I would argue that point. But yes, I agree with your, with your comment and I'm, actually very pragmatic about this. I think people need to find the tool that makes the most sense for their workflows.
[00:46:20] Matthew: Yeah.
[00:46:21] Matt: Interestingly, AI is gonna disrupt the heck out of that.
[00:46:24] Matt: Workflows are gonna be the most commodity portion, which they didn't used to be. So this is gonna be kind of an interesting transition. This is great. Thank you. I love that you reduce the importance of tech stack because if you look at LinkedIn, LinkedIn would tell you that tech stack is like the most important piece of your outreach process.
[00:46:44] Matt: And, you know, as much as I would like everybody to use Hunter, I think you've gotta get other things right before the outreach process is really all that productive for you, to close up, give some advice, favorite podcasts that you're listening to, a book that you're finding particularly inspirational.
[00:47:03] Matt: What's something that you'd love to influence people who are listening?
[00:47:08] Matthew: So I, think it depends on what your main focus is. So, the new email newsletter that I probably recommended more than any other in the last 12 to 18 months is Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged.
[00:47:21] Matt: Yeah.
[00:47:23] Matthew: I recommend that a lot to people. For sales and outbound,
[00:47:30] Matthew: Sam McKenna's, or samsales, her newsletter and the content that she puts out is, very, very good. As is 30 Minutes to President's Club's content, I think theirs is pretty good. And for marketing, the two that I probably read the most one is, DoWhatWorks' Substack, that they push out.
[00:47:54] Matthew: And, Emily Kramer’s as well. but I think it, you know, my role spans quite a bit within.
[00:48:00] Matt: Right.
[00:48:00] Matthew: Within GTM, across base sales and marketing. So, which makes it hard 'cause there's a lot to read and there's a lot, I don't know. And try and catch up on. But, yeah, they're the things that I tend to, dive into most at the moment, so.
[00:48:14] Matt: That's great.
[00:48:15] Matt: Yeah. Neuron is one for AI. I mean, of all of the jillion emails or Substack updates that have gotten put out there, I feel like the Neuron is probably my favorite for, AI. So if you're looking to supplement Matthew's really great list, there's one I would recommend email newsletter.
[00:48:33] Matt: Matthew, this has been a pleasure. Anything you want to make sure you mention before we, before we wrap?
[00:48:40] Matthew: I suppose the one thing I would probably say, and I advise to a lot of my clients is that, especially with everything going on with AI at the moment, go left when others go right. Like, if everyone's jumping on a trend in a bandwagon, what can you do
[00:48:55] Matthew: that's the exact opposite of that, to stand out?
[00:48:59] Matt: Yes.
[00:49:02] Matthew: I think that's pretty good advice.
[00:49:04] Matt: Love it. Dropping a gold nugget on the way out the door. Brilliant. Matthew, it's a pleasure. Thanks so much for this.
[00:49:09] Matthew: Thank you.
[00:49:10] James: If you like what you heard, please like, subscribe, and explore even more of the Outfoxed community by visiting www.outfoxed.hunter.io.