Alex Berman is the founder and chairman of Experiment 27, a marketing and lead generation firm. Berman is responsible for generating over $6.5 million in B2B sales and over $35 million in leads for his clients.
On this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Alex shares how a lead generation agency produced leads for their clients and how Alex uses Youtube to drive not just awareness but also drive revenue.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- Alex on Youtube
- Experiment27.com
- @alxberman
- Alex on Linkedin
Transcript
Alex Berman:
So a lead is anyone that’s interested in buying what we offer. What most agencies do incorrectly is they try to sell everything to everyone. As most services businesses, it’s a trap that everyone falls into. If you’re getting replies that are saying not interested … So basically, there’s a couple different types of replies. If they say you are spam, then your email’s terrible. It’s shitty. You need to throw it out. If they say, “We already have somebody in house to do this,” or literally anything that’s a sentence, then that means your offer could be wrong.
Will Barron:
Hello, sales nation. I’m Will Barron, host at the Salesman Podcast, founder of the sales school, and you are watching the world’s biggest B2B sales show, The Salesman Podcast. Let’s meet today’s guest.
Alex Berman:
Hey, it’s Alex Berman. I run experiment27.com and I’ve generated over a million dollars in B2B leads.
What is a Sales Lead? · [01:10]
Will Barron:
On this episode with Alex, we’re diving into how a lead generation agency, a company that does lead generation for other brands, how they go about to drive these leads with cold email, cold outreach and YouTube. Let’s jump right in. We’re going to dive into how a lead generation business drives and generates new leads. Just for context, I guess first, we’ll start with in the context of your business, Alex, what is a lead?
“A lead is anyone that’s interested in buying what we offer.” – Alex Berman · [01:12]
Alex Berman:
Sure. A lead is anyone that’s interested in buying what we offer. At Experiment 27 we do marketing for other agencies. Like you said, we’re a lead generation company. A lead for us is an agency, let’s say, they’re between a million and 10 million, sometimes up to 15 million in revenue, that is in need of more enterprise clients.
Will Barron:
Perfect. That makes total sense. Is there a specific, because we’ll dive through a bunch of them, but is there a specific channel or a specific pathway that you’ve hacked that is, or intuitive, that works particularly well for you?
Alex Berman:
Sure. Our two biggest channels right now are cold email, which is also our biggest channel for our customers, and then YouTube. We’ve been doing YouTube for two and a half years now, and both of those are crushing it.
How Alex and His Team Get the Most Out of Cold Emails · [01:55]
Will Barron:
Well, we’ll touch on cold email first because that’s probably the most practical for the audience, but we’ll definitely dive into YouTube towards the end of the show. I’ll keep everyone listening because I’m intrigued and fascinated on that as well. For B2B especially, YouTube seems fascinating. But with cold email, what are you doing different to everyone else? Or let me rephrase this. Are you doing anything different to everyone else, or are you in the same rat race as most of the audience who are just sending more and more email with less and less customization and essentially just sending more and more spam to try and get that one or 2% reply rate?
“What most agencies do incorrectly is they try to sell everything to everyone. What we found works is targeting a specific industry, targeting a specific job title, and then finding an offer that that person wants to buy, and then crafting all of your messaging towards that offer for each specific cold email campaign.” – Alex Berman · [02:41]
Alex Berman:
Oh yeah. The goal is to spam as hard as possible. We send 10 times more emails than anyone else. Yeah, so what most agencies do incorrectly is they try to sell everything to everyone. And it’s as most services businesses, it’s a trap that everyone falls into. Let’s say you run a UX or a design company. You might send a cold email that says, “Hey, we offer UX UI front end, back end, with all of these different bullet points for the customer.” Then you’re used to having them pick what they want. That doesn’t work at all in outbound sales, even as a marketing company, even as us.
Alex Berman:
What we found out works is targeting a specific industry, targeting specific job title, and then finding an offer that, that person wants to buy, and then crafting all of your messaging towards that offer for each specific cold email campaign.
Alex Berman:
For us, those three variables are CEOs at digital agencies or video marketing agencies or marketing agencies, anything like that. CEOs at those kind agencies, and they want to buy an initial marketing review. That is all we sell in our first email and it’s all we sell throughout our entire campaign. We want to get that initial sale. Right now it’s about 10,000 bucks for that over a month. We push everyone towards that.
Alex Berman:
For digital agencies, it’s the same way. Whatever that first offer is will depend on the first two variables. But that’s what most people get completely wrong about cold email. Once that’s figured out, you can write paragraphs, you can break every rule and you’ll still sell stuff.
Should You Lead With an Offer When Sending Out Cold Emails? · [04:07]
Will Barron:
Because this seems counterintuitive, it does to me from interviewing hundreds of people on the subject, it might not to you Alex, being in the trenches and doing this, but are you saying we should lead with an offer rather than lead with some, and a lot of it is bullshit, value of, “Here’s a blog post I think you’re like,” or “Here’s this … I thought of you,” and stuff like that. Should we lead with, “Hey, I can help you.” Perhaps the price, “This is how we can get started”?
Alex Berman:
Maybe not the price. We don’t really lead with the price. The way that we do our cold emails, I’ll say our subject line, Stella FD has one called Quick Question that we used to use for a while. Our top performing subject line right now is: I would love to work with company or I was born to work with … and then the company name. Then we’ll say, “Hi Will, came across this Salesman podcast, really love the interview you did with Jared Glant,” some custom first sentence. And then we’ll pitch ourselves. “Hey, I’m Alex Berman. I’m the CEO over at Experiment 27 where we’ve generated over $100 million in leads for digital agencies. Love what you’re doing with your agency, but I feel like we could help drive more enterprise clients or help get you more enterprise clients. Would you mind hopping on a quick call? I can send over a few times.”
“If you tell an agency owner that you can make them more money or you can find them cornerstone clients, or whatever’s going to light up their brain, then they’re going to respond. You don’t have to send them a blog post or anything like that.” – Alex Berman · [05:32]
Alex Berman:
Literally, that simple for a first email. Yeah, it’s all money. I know coming from the UK, it sounds a little rough. I sold in the UK before. They hate talking about money first. But in the US, if you tell an agency owner that you can make them more money or you can find them cornerstone clients, or whatever’s going to light up their brain, then they’re going to respond. You don’t have to send them a blog post or anything.
Will Barron:
Okay. There’s three things here and we’ll go through them an order of, when you say “light up their brain,” do you experiment on this?
Alex Berman:
Yeah, I do it inside the UK. I feel you hurting.
How to Write an Email First Line That Lights Up Your Prospect’s Brain · [05:54]
Will Barron:
Do you experiment on that one sentence? I guess if I was writing an email, I’d be wanting to bold it, italic it, because that’s the thing that’s going to really hook them. Is this something that you do AB testing with or anything like that?
Alex Berman:
So the first line, and I’ve tried to systematise this so many times. For agencies, we’ve got it downwards basically like, “Hey, came across agency name and really impressed with the work you did with portfolio item.” That’s great for agency owners and you can try to get it for other things. But yeah, what I recommend doing is rewriting that first line for literally every email you send. If you’re sending 150 cold emails, you’re writing that line 150 different times, 150 different ways. 150 different ways.
The Quickest Way to Differentiate Yourself From the Competition in an Email · [06:35]
Will Barron:
Good, because that’s what I hoped you to say and that’s what I recommend as well, because that’s the quickest way to separate yourself from all the other shit that’s coming in people’s inboxes, isn’t it?
Alex Berman:
So, what’s so interesting, when I first got into this, I thought there were millions of variables that made a cold email work. I would think it’s the name of the person sending it or the website, or any number of things. But now yeah, are those three variables in place, and then it really is, did you customise the first line? It almost doesn’t matter what the content of the line is. I was just talking to an outreach manager today, somebody who works at our company, and he was trying to systematise that for the last week. He was sending the same subject line or the same first line out. This week he started rewriting the subject lines and his meeting book rate was at about 1%, which is so low for us, and it jumped to 5% this week, literally, just changing the first lines. What is that, five times more meetings?
Will Barron:
It’s mad, because we think it’s going to be a lot of time. It’s going to be a lot of effort. But I know it isn’t. When I’m booking guests or I’m reaching out for potential ad sponsorships or the lead generation and traffic generation that we do on the back end of this for our bigger customers, that line, you can bash out 20 of them, and you just get in this state of flow and it flows out. It doesn’t take that much longer than setting things up in Yesware outreach or whatever you’re doing. By the time you import a spreadsheet and you mess round and you do all this stuff, you’re just doing that anyway. So the second thing here-
Alex Berman:
It takes a little bit longer. One to one, it takes longer. Of course, you can just hit send on a list of a thousand versus writing a thousand first lines. It might take two, three minutes, four minutes for each first line. But in the long run, you could send 10,000 emails without the custom first lines or you could send 300 emails to get the same number of meetings. So it all evens out.
Will Barron:
It does. And I think we’ve covered this on the show before as well, Alex. It evens itself out when you just burn with one email campaign, every single person in your industry that you could possibly have talked to, by sending them spam the first time. You just get blocked, they don’t want to speak to you on the follow-up, whatever it is, versus if you go 300, if you go 30, if you are 25 at a time, at least you’ve got a chance to respond and get some numbers back before you can burn through everyone. That’s a mistake I see people making and it’s very difficult to come back from without changing company or changing your first starter name, which is more hassle as well.
Alex Berman:
Right now we do 50 at a time. So …
Will Barron:
Perfect.
Alex Berman:
Especially as we’re trying to come up with the variables, we’ll test 50 to a certain title, or we’ll test 50 to a certain offer. Yeah, we’ll try to get it to a certain place, and even when we’re testing subject lines, if we don’t get over a 60% open rate, I’m throwing that subject line out, at 50 at a time until we can get over 60%.
Rotate Subject Lines to Keep Them Fresh and Keep Those Open Rates Up · [09:15]
Will Barron:
Cool. Well, the second thing I wanted to dive into was the open rates and subject lines. You mentioned something that it was one of Stella FD who’s been on the show a bunch of times, one of his subject lines, I think that you used in the past and that wasn’t as effective now as it was then. Is this something that you need to continuously work on in the fact that other people are using similar lines, you just get redundant, people see them more than once and they think you’re spamming them? How do we need to rotate and work on a subject line to keep them fresh and keep those open rates up?
Alex Berman:
We use Yesware for sending everything, and that gives you an analytics dashboard. But I think Close.io does this, Mailshake does this, whatever. I’m looking at the send and our outreach managers are as well. We’re looking at the open rate for every 50 cents. So Quick Question, for instance, I was actually just talking to somebody yesterday, where Quick Question is crushing and they’re selling to manufacturers. So it works there. Some of our clients, company name, slash, and then our company name works really well. So Salesman.Red Podcast/Experiment 27 works well. And then, I was born to work with your company, is lower.
Alex Berman:
That subject line, it’s different for each business. It’s different for every email you’re sending like whatever. So yeah, we’ll test every 50. And if it’s under 60%, we’re throwing it out. We can have a list. I could sprout out 100 subject lines right now. We’re going to test every single one of those subject lines every single time, because there are certain businesses or certain combinations where those work and then certain where they don’t.
Will Barron:
And is this, wait, when they do work, they don’t work, is this predictable? Or do you find that it is just totally random? And so you have to test them.
Alex Berman:
It’s random. So I describe putting email and getting it right as smashing your head against a brick wall over and over again. It literally is like brute forcing a password or something. But as soon as you get it all working, it prints money for your business. So I like seeing that at the end of the tunnel and I like running at the wall over and over again, trusting the system and knowing it’s going to work out. But yeah, I can see how it would be very frustrating for most people.
Will Barron:
Yeah. And it’s easy to give up right, after you’ve done these first few emails, you’ve tried this, you’ve tried that. You’ve gone through, and if you’re doing batches of 50 or whatever, you’ve done it four or five times. You can be disheartened by some of this, right?
Alex Berman:
A hundred percent.
Will Barron:
Yeah.
“9 in 10 businesses fail or something like that. It’s the same in emails, 9 in 10 cold email campaigns are probably going to fail as well. That’s why you just have to continually test.” – Alex Berman · [11:39]
Alex Berman:
The way I think about it is it’s like finding product market fit for your startup, because it really is. Every time you want to sell a new offer to somebody, you have to identify the customers. You talk to the customers. You run through the whole process, you’d run through if you were doing lead startup or something. And yeah, your startup’s going to fail sometimes. What is that? One in 10 businesses fail. I haven’t actually read that in a book anywhere. I feel like I’ve just heard that. But it’s like one in 10 cold email campaigns are probably going to fail as well. That’s why you just got to continually test. That’s why we test.
Will Barron:
I know the number of context in the UK, 85% of businesses fail within the first seven years. Clearly these are small companies versus big venture back companies in the grand scheme of things. But yeah, that’s the percentage of businesses here in the UK. Okay. So Alex-
Alex Berman:
So it’s little bets, basically. It’s trying to get as many at bats as possible, to use a sports reference. And yeah, if you’re sending to 3000 people at once, you only really have one shot. If you’re sending to 50 people that could be a hundred less, a hundred. My math is so bad. That could be less than a hundred darn tries.
What To Do When You Don’t Get a Reply From That First Email · [12:40]
Will Barron:
What do we do Alex, when we don’t get a reply from that first email. But we, in the context of we’ve had a good open rate, we have had other replies from other people. So we know that there’s something right within the message. There’s some lean startup perspective. There’s some product market fit there. So we know we’re totally not crazy. And it wasn’t some totally shit email that we sent over in the first place. What do we do with everyone that didn’t reply to us? How do we follow up to them?
“Basically, there’s like a couple of different types of replies. If they say you are spam, then your email’s terrible. It’s shitty. You need to throw it out. If they say we already have somebody in-house to do this, or literally anything like that, then that means your offer could be wrong.” – Alex Berman · [13:13]
Alex Berman:
Yeah. So let’s talk follow-ups. You were saying that you get good replies. If you’re getting replies that are saying not interested. So basically, there’s like a couple different types of replies. If they say you are spam, then your email’s terrible. It’s shitty. You need to throw it out. If they say we already have somebody in-house to do this, or literally anything that’s like a sentence, then that means your offer could be wrong. But yeah, for follow-ups, we do three follow-ups after the first email. The first one is a simple and we’re doing them all as threaded replies. So basically, replies to whatever the previous message is. Some sending tools don’t let you do that. Yesware let’s you do that, which that’s why I like them.
Alex Berman:
So the first email is just a simple like, “Hey Mike, I know you’re busy. Just wanted to make sure this didn’t get buried.” One sentence email, just bumps it up to the top. The third email is one we call the two ideas email. This is what we’ve been doing recently, which is, this is what we do for our company. It’s like, hey Mike, I just talked to the, or I’ll say, Hey Will. Hey Will, I just talked to the CEO of a major Chicago-based digital agency, and they said they were dealing with the following two issues. And it’s like one, their salesmen aren’t hitting their numbers. The problem with that is they’re not going out and finding leads like when they go to events, it’s inconsistent. There’s no real lead generation system there. And then two, their business is overly reliant on referrals. The solution to that is to test new marketing channels and find new customers like that. Would love to …
Alex Berman:
Or, “If you found these interesting, would love to discuss helping you find more enterprise clients. This is what we do all day. Would you mind if I send over a few times for a call? Thanks, Alex.” So a little bit of a longer email there. And if you want to have somebody transcribe that you can. It’s a little bit of a longer email there, but it’s because there are multiple types of people. So some person is going to see that first email and be like yeah, I want to grow my business. But then the third type or the third email is going to hit a person where it’s like, they want more, they want to read more. They want more information before they respond. And then the fourth email is the traditional breakup email, which I’ve also gotten negative feedback on, but which gets the highest response rate. Which is, “Hey Will, at this point, I’m going to assume adding more enterprise clients to your agency isn’t on the timeline this year. Feel free to reach out if that changes.”
“The whole point of a sales call when you’re following up for email is literally to get them back in the inbox or get something on the calendar to actually talk about it. We don’t try to sell $100,000 software or whatever on a cold call.” Alex Berman · [15:38]
Alex Berman:
So simple for email sequence. If you’re going to do a cold call, I would do it after the second email. Our cold call strategy is calling. Basically, if I was calling for you, Will, I would say, I’m the assistant for Will Barron. Or even if I was you, I would just pretend to be your assistant instead of you. That way it doesn’t turn into a sales call. And I’m just asking if they’ve seen the email. Basically the whole point of a sales call when you’re following up for email is literally to get them back in the inbox. You can get something on the calendar to actually talk about it. We don’t try to sell $100,000 software or whatever on a cold call, which is also another issue a lot of agencies … That’s a mistake a lot of agencies make as well.
How Many Follow-Up Emails Should You Be Sending Out? · [16:30]
Will Barron:
Well, that’s a mistake a lot of sales people make because they’re told that cold calling is … through people like Grant Cardone. As you mentioned, we’ve had Jared Glant on the show as well. These individuals, you can call anyone. You can hound them. 50 calls is no good. You need to call them 100 times. And this is something that I thought is really relevant then as well, Alex. Why do you only have four emails? And then is there a follow-up in six months or do you cut things off? How does that work after that? Because we’re told and we’re bombarded and we’re told on this show all the time, we need 10 follow-up emails with seven call calls. Then you’d like four things they’ve done on Twitter. Then you find the wife and follow them on Instagram, if they’re hot. Then you do this and that. Is four emails enough to get the low hanging fruits to get the potential good customers on board?
Alex Berman:
Yeah. A hundred percent. It’s a different type of sale. So if you’re selling to car dealerships or you’re selling to restaurants or any of these local businesses, sure. Keep hounding them. If you’re selling to like we do, the director of marketing at Wall Street Journal or something, you’re not going to send … If you send them 500 emails, they’re just never going to talk to you. You send them four emails, and then yeah. If it’s a 50, if it’s a test of 50 cents, one of those four emails might not even work. So when you go back in three months, you go back in six months, the emails will look completely different or you’ll find that the title was wrong and you’ll send to a different person.
“If you’re selling something they need and it’s the right person and it’s the right type of company, they’d be stupid not to respond to you. If all three of these variables are correct, unless the person’s completely swamped, they will get back to you. If you can’t communicate that as a business, that’s on you.” – Alex Berman · [17:19]
Alex Berman:
Because if all three of those variables are correct, unless the person’s completely swamped, they will get back. Right. If you’re selling something they need and it’s the right person and it’s the right type of company, they’d be stupid not to respond to you. So it’s like, if you can’t communicate that as a business, that’s on you. And I wouldn’t keep sending that wrong message to them a hundred times.
How to Not Get Rejected When Reaching Out Cold · [17:40]
Will Barron:
And is that the mindset that we should have for salespeople? Because that essentially eliminates rejection the way you just described this. If we all felt that way, it eliminates rejection from an email or cold calling or whatever it is. If we know that we’ve got the right person, the right message, we’re selling them something useful, we shouldn’t be ashamed of picking up the phone, right? We should be excited for it.
“You want customers that want to buy from you and if you know they need what you offer and they are not buying from you still, that just means that you’re not communicating it correctly.” – Alex Berman · [18:20]
Alex Berman:
Well dude. All right. So you sell ads for the show, right? Have you ever found a brand that’s perfectly aligned? They’re advertising on other salesman podcasts. They know the type of show you are. They know the type of audience. Those guys would love to buy from you if you pitch yourself the right way. But then you call somebody like, let’s say you call a blender company or something that’s completely outside of you. You’re going to have to explain yourself so much more. So yeah, you want customers that want to buy from you and if you know they need what you offer and they are not buying from you still, that just means that you’re not communicating it correctly. And yeah, hounding them over and over again is not going to help that. What you need to do is take a step back, figure out what you’re doing wrong and then approach them in yeah, three or six months.
The Next Step After Getting Negative Response to Your Cold Email · [18:38]
Will Barron:
Perfect. What do we do when we get a reply and we never covered this on the show from how many hundreds of hours of content we put out now. What do we do when we get a reply which is, we have a competitor. We’re not happy with them. But we are happy with them. Or something along those lines of they’ve read the email, which is hurdle number one. Hurrah, we’ve got over it. They’ve replied to us. So they’re not being rude. There’s something in the subconscious that’s gone, well, rather than delete it, this might be useful in the future. I will reply. These are all small triggers we can pick up on. So how do you then reply to that individual? Or what’s the cadence then on future replies to check in with them perhaps.
Alex Berman:
Sure. So if somebody replies back, let’s say I’m a marketing company I’m pitching and they say, hey, we’re already with whatever marketing company, and we’re really happy with them. I’ll say, wow, that sounds great. You know? And then maybe yeah, I’ll set a reminder to follow back in six months. Why would I want, if it really is going well, why would I want to break that? Even if we can do better, they’ll figure it out. Either their marketing company is going to screw up and then they’re going to come back to us or they’re not. And there are so many companies to work with. It’s not really worth being that much of a shark. I don’t know. Yeah, that’s my answer to that.
Will Barron:
Yeah. Well, I like the perspective of now you’ve got FaceTime with them. That company is going to screw up at some point in the future. Depends how badly they screw up. Whether that buyer starts talking to other people. But you’ve got to be top of the list. Right? And perhaps then we start doing the social selling thing. Super, when we’ve got else to do, it’s low priority of our time we start doing it. But that’s why I see the benefit of that. And I’ve done this in medical device sales of going to one surgeons, no, we’re happy with this equipment, this, this, and this. Something will screw up massively. And because I’ve popped my head in, been polite, not been rude, not followed up with them, not chased them. I’m the person that then gets called as the mature businessman alternative to all the others that are scrapping around and trying to get nursing staff to tell rumours and tell lies.
There Are Enough Companies To Go Around. You Don’t Need to Hound People · [21:05]
Will Barron:
And I had one competitor on my patch, pinch a load of our equipment and hide it in another hospital purely to just disrupt what we were doing. Got found out. They were never going to do business in that account ever again. And clearly that spreads around the NHSA in the UK. So yeah, I just thought it was smart and thought it was an interesting thing. And it’s your perspective and mindset, which is probably a thing to dive into in all of this, Alex, of there are enough companies to go around. Isn’t there? We don’t need to be hounding people, especially in the B2B space, to make your number, right?
Alex Berman:
Okay. So I know I used to sell SAS as well. I used to sell software. And the problem with selling a software like Yesware, which is an email sending tool or base, which is a CRM, is yeah, there are 1000 pieces of software that all do the exact same thing. So you either like me or you don’t. If you want to buy it, you buy it. If you don’t, whatever. I’ll go talk to somebody else. And it’s the same with marketing. There are very few marketing companies that do good. But all of us say we’re the best. So sometimes … I’ve been a director of marketing at an agency. I ended up, I wasted probably $100,000 hiring random agencies. It’s really a crap shoot. So yeah. It’s like, how nice you are you on the call? And can you get that base level of competency? Can you get that understanding of their needs across to them in whatever little time you have and then yeah. If they need, you they’ll come back.
What Alex Looks For In An Email as a B2B Buyer · [22:10]
Will Barron:
And just to touch on that from a buyer perspective, because it’s interesting to get both sides of the dynamic here just for a split second, then we’ll, we’ll push back onto the seller side. But from the buyer side, what do you look for in an email when it first hits your inbox? What does that first line need to say to you to get your attention and to not be just clicked delete?
Alex Berman:
Hey Alex, I loved your YouTube video, dude. Personally compliment me. As somebody who sends cold emails, it’s very easy to see when something is mass sent. If it’s like, hey, just came across your LinkedIn profile and really impressed. I’m not going to read, I’m going to delete that. So yeah, I don’t, it’s hard. It’s hard to get through to me with cold email. But it’s also like, if it is a really good, well thought out cold email, I’ll buy. But I’m also not the right person to be targeting. Right. Because I run cold email, I do cold email all day. So it’s like, if you send me a bad email, I’m more likely to tear it down on my YouTube channel than I will to buy anything that you send me or that you’re trying to sell me.
“Find the right people because if your buyers have a budget and they’re ready to buy, it’s very easy to close them.” – Alex Berman · [23:35]
Alex Berman:
From a marketing point of view. So when I was director of marketing and an agency, the way that I found an SEO company was I Googled, well first. I wanted a local SEO company, even though we were in New York, I was like, I feel like somebody in like Bozeman or Lawrence, Kansas, or something will do this super cheap. So I just searched best SEO, Lawrence, Kansas. And there was like a list of 10 and I filled out the contact info on all 10 and then whoever called me first. I worked with whatever the third guy I think was that called me. So that’s what your buyers are dealing with. If they have budget and they’re ready to buy, it’s very easy to close them.
Why You Need to Track Everything That You Do in Sales · [23:30]
Will Barron:
Makes total sense. So we’re going to go onto YouTube in a second. There’s one final thing that I think is important to just touch on and it might be a super one company or one software solution answer to this, but how do you track everything that’s going on? So you mentioned you Yesware. I use it as well for outreach emails and different projects that we do. But other than the software to send the emails, what do you do on the backend to track cadence, and then I guess, report back to clients and other things, where all these emails are going and response rates and how to follow-up with them in six months time.
Alex Berman:
So we use a series of Google Sheets and then we queue, we use Yesware, basically, for queuing the emails to go out in the future; and then otherwise yeah, it’s Google Sheets that track response rates or that track number of emails sent. It’s just a series of columns. We’re not getting too fancy with it.
Will Barron:
And I’m the same. I don’t use a CRM software. And I think you’ve got a YouTube show, YouTube video that describes your process, right. And how you track them and conversion rates, I think.
Alex Berman:
Oh multiple, yeah. If you want to go to, our listeners want to go, go to b2bsalestraining.org. It’s all of our most helpful videos. And all of our videos, the reason why they resonate, maybe this gets us to the next part of the interview or not. But it’s like, I just go inside our company and show what would be in a paid course, usually. Just here’s exactly what we’re doing. Here’s the exact files we use to track. Here’s the exact contract our lawyer wrote. Just take it. You know?
Will Barron:
So what a transition. I’m clapping. I’m clapping you there, Alex.
Alex Berman:
That’s stand-up comedy dude. That’s 114 mics.
How to Drive Leads Through YouTube · [25:17]
Will Barron:
Mate, how the hell do we drive leads from YouTube? Give us the inside scoop on this.
Alex Berman:
Yeah, for sure. So it’s a really long process. And you’ve been doing this for a while, too. How long have you been making YouTube videos?
Will Barron:
YouTube video is probably two and a half years, but the podcast has now been running three and a half years or so. I was too scared to be on camera at the beginning of all this.
Alex Berman:
A lot of people are. Yeah, I was doing the same for two and a half years. But I was making YouTube videos before. It was just me logging my journey. It really took off when I started doing specific teardowns of companies. So for instance, we did, there was this agency called Fueled who later became a client of ours. They’re an agency in New York. I think they’re 100 people now. They’re crushing it. They’re amazing. But we took their site and I made this video that was like how Fueled site compares to Vader Media. Or actually I think it was even more click video. It was like, why Fueled doesn’t get enterprise customers? And it was a comparison of Vader Media site that gets a bunch of enterprise customers and Fueled site. And it was a six or seven minute video, and I emailed it to the CEO over there.
Alex Berman:
But I also published it live on our YouTube channel. And he got back and they became a client of ours. So it’s stuff like that. And then that video, I think ended up with eight or 9000 views. So if Fueled got value from it, everyone else would too. And it was basically a series of these. This is where we started. It was a series of these small case studies where it’s like, here’s a company called Soft Town, and here’s how I would improve their website. And then here’s the four marketing channels that I would do it on. Basically, live teardowns of how I would … Basically, what I would charge $10,000 for, I was just doing for free in these YouTube videos.
Alex Berman:
I also generated a lot of the money early on. It was not generating a lot of views. What generated views was doing pop culture teardowns. We did this teardown of how DeadMau5 markets himself. And he tweeted that out, which is amazing. Because he said, “I was spot on with the marketing,” which is great.
Will Barron:
Yeah?
Alex Berman:
He’s a DJ. And we did one on Joe Rogan and stuff like that. That drew a lot of subs. But didn’t really make that much money for us. I think it actually did help, though, in the YouTube algorithm. And then recently what’s been crushing it, we did this, we still have this series called Cold Email Teardowns, which is us taking shitty cold emails that I’m getting and rewriting them for people live. And then that used to be an unedited, 11-minute video. And then I started crunching that down to three, four minutes of actionable content. That’s the one, every time I do one of those, we’ll get leads every time. Usually dozens of leads. But it depends on the video.
Will Barron:
For context now, for someone who’s in B2B sales, we can use Sam, the shark, who’s on the desk here now. He sells-
Alex Berman:
You got to get him a partner. That’s a fighting fish. Right?
The Process of Putting Together YouTube Content and Driving Leads · [28:05]
Will Barron:
He sells yeah, that’s probably not the, we don’t want like Peter or the SPCA in there, on the back of the show. It might make a viral video, but probably won’t do the brand any good. He sells CRM software. How could Sam the sales shark put together YouTube content to promote … or not even promote because he doesn’t necessarily want to be the face of the brand perhaps, because he wants to take this YouTube channel to different places, use to different companies maybe. I don’t know, maybe it’s a personal branding thing. Perhaps you can there distil some of this down for us. But how could he get potential CRM enterprise customer leads from YouTube content or video content, in general?
Alex Berman:
So our YouTube channel is called Alex Berman. We’ve gone through three companies now, right? I was at Dom and Tom in New York, rose to director of marketing. Then Inspire Beats, which was another company that crashed and burned. And then this company. And it’s been pivoted and I haven’t changed the YouTube channel name. It’s just Alex Berman. So I would say personal branding is really the way to go. And if you’re selling a CRM and you’re a sales guy, you are in the best situation possible because all you have to do is talk about sales. Like, hey, I was talking about, I was going through this deal the other day. And then we went, you don’t have to say their name obviously, but just to anonymize it, like I was going through this deal the other day. And here’s the process we took. Here are the follow-ups we use. And all of those follow ups could be using your CRM, but they don’t have to be. Literally, however you do sales, if you use your own product, that’s YouTube videos.
Alex’s Strategy For Coming Up with Incredibly Good YouTube Content · [29:36]
Will Barron:
That makes sense when you put it as simple as that, right? But how do we get creative from that? And that might be a process of hiring someone like you to brainstorm on these things. But is there, I guess, that’s the question. Is there a structure or do you have a methodology of producing video content so you can do it regularly? Or do you have a notebook that you write down and when something pops into your mind in the shower, you scribble it down.
Alex Berman:
Sure. So right now Thursday mornings, I do an hour of finding video ideas. So basically, I have two types of videos. Monday and Wednesday, which they used to be different types of videos. Now they’re just me riffing on whatever. So I’ll just list out video ideas in a couple bullet points. And then Fridays are the best of the podcast. So my marketing director, Ronaldo, will listen to our podcast episodes at bold, interesting parts. And so I’ll talk about what I learned from that part of the podcast episode. And then do three minutes on that. Then I’ll send all that stuff to our video editor, Ruben. He does videos for 60 bucks a video. I think you can get it even cheaper. And I show him PewDiePie videos and stuff too. So I try to have that comedic edge to it, so it’s not just the same boring business content over and over again.
Alex Berman:
But in terms of, if you want to, if you were starting and you wanted to create YouTube content, what I would do is think about not questions customers ask you, but questions you’ve asked yourself that you’ve come up with an answer to. Because we’ve all struggled with random stuff, especially when it comes to sales. So let’s say you’re selling the CRM. Maybe one of the things you have asked yourself is, what’s the correct amount of times to follow-up? Or how do you follow-up with a customer? You’ve answered this for yourself.
“For me, creating content is how I can deliver as much value to my past self and how I can create an interesting story for my future self.” – Alex Berman · [31:25]
Alex Berman:
So the video would then be step by step, how we follow-up with customers or step by step, how I follow up with customers. And then you’re running through each of these emails. Blur out the customer names. They’ll probably not see the video. It doesn’t really matter, whatever. And show the actual emails that you’re using. Deliver as much value as possible. To basically your past self is what I try to. I try to see it as how can I deliver as much value to my past self and how can I create as interesting as story for my future self as possible.
Great YouTube Videos Mean More Inbound Leads · [31:40]
Will Barron:
And final bit on this, because this might be the … and there might not be a simple answer to this. This might be the most difficult part of all, perhaps. How do you go or how does one go from having a great video? I really enjoyed the Joe Rogan one. I think you were dissecting how he asked great questions. Clearly, as a podcaster, I loved it. You got a big old thumbs up for me on that one. But from a video like that or perhaps a more business oriented video, how does that lead to a inbound conversation with someone? And again, for context for the audience or Sam, the shark here, do we need to have a homepage? Do we need to be having email addresses in the YouTube descriptions or on Facebook or whatever. How do we get that attention? And someone goes, oh, this dude might be great for my business. How do we transcribe that into a phone call?
Alex Berman:
So for all of our videos in the description, we have two giveaways. One is like I said, that contract that our lawyers wrote. Cost us a thousand bucks to put together. And I just do experiment27/contract and people can download that. Then they’re on our email list where they’re hard pitched. I don’t deliver any value in the emails. If you sign up, you’re just going to get sold to, honestly, James Altucher style. And then the other one is the client questions that we ask. Basically, experiment27.com/discovery goes to all the client questions. And then some of our videos will have downloads too. But it’s pushing them towards that and then just hard selling them. And if you guys want to sign up to any of those, you can see our threads.
Alex Berman:
It’s two different ones. One sells on one-on-one coaching, and then one sells on agency marketing depending on what your revenue is. And there’s a little quiz there. But that’s all too complex. The Joe Rogan video I just made for views and subscribers. Because the way YouTube works is as soon as you hit 10,000 subs, and I was talking to some of my friends who have over 100,000 subs, they all said the same thing. They’re like, as soon as you hit 1000 subs, you get one organic bump when it comes to YouTube. So you’re promoted on a certain level.
Alex Berman:
Then as soon as you get 10,000 subs, you get another bump where YouTube just shouts you out everywhere. So the Joe Rogan video, the DeadMau5 video, all that, was to get me up to 10,000 subscribers. And I’ve seen the same thing. We used to get most of our traffic from just organic stuff, Reddit or anything like that. But now most of our traffic comes from YouTube search, recommended. I get all of those YouTube ones and Google organic. And it wasn’t really until we hit 10,000 subs that started happening. So that’s really what the Joe Rogan play is. It’s more playing for numbers rather than playing for actual leads.
Will Barron:
And before we get ahead of ourselves and the audience think they need a million subscribers to make this work. And talk about you in a second. But for me, we’ve got about 14,000 subscribers and I’ve done multiple six figure deals now on sponsorships, on the traffic generation and email list stuff that we do on the backend of this are some of the biggest companies. Well, the biggest company and a couple of the other biggest companies within the sales industry and the sales space, based on our both video content and then the production quality of the video content.
Will Barron:
Simple as that. People have got in contact with us. No opt-ins no baits, no email lists. None of that. They’ve seen the video. It’s been in the feed, as you described on the side then. It’s been shared for the YouTube algorithm. And they’ve gone, oh, this guy is doing interesting stuff. Well, we’ll just have a chat with him. See what we can do. As I said, I’ve done multiple six figure deals on the back of that. And for context for you, Alex, how many, you’re about 16,000 subscribers? Is that correct?
Alex Berman:
Yeah. Something like that.
You Don’t Need Millions of Subscribers to Drive Leads From YouTube · [35:00]
Will Barron:
So we’re not talking about 4 million. We’re not talking about PewDiePie. We’re not talking about, I don’t know, Gary V, if he’s got a couple of million on there at the moment. Is it five, 10, 15, 16, thousand is enough to do crazy amounts of business. Right?
Alex Berman:
We were building our entire, we built basically our entire agency. I think we closed, it was 400,000 in revenue, basically yearly revenue, ARR, with under 1000 YouTube subs. So it does. Yeah. The number of subs is not correlated to the amount of money you’re making at all. Especially in B2B. I like the subscriber number just because I like to feel popular. I like to go to places and be like, hey, you got 16,000 subs. But otherwise no, it has no bearing on the amount of money that I’m making, at all.
Will Barron:
Yeah. I like to look at our friend, Victor Antonio’s channel and get depressed on the growth and the speed that he’s going at all of a sudden. Well, no, all of a sudden.
Alex Berman:
No, I love Antonio.
Will Barron:
It’s been seven years now.
Alex Berman:
He’s got the 100,000 subs. But it’s also the Hollywood dream because he hosts the show on Spike TV. And he told me, they found him just by Googling sales trainers. And then they just picked his video and gave him a TV hosting job.
Will Barron:
Wow. I did not know that.
Alex Berman:
Yeah.
Will Barron:
I’m going to have to buy some fake subscribers, I think.
Why Buying Fake Subscribers Is Not a Really Good Idea · [36:13]
Alex Berman:
No, I wouldn’t do that. Okay. So buying fake subscribers is another big thing. I know a lot of people are tempted there. I would definitely not recommend it. It’s very clear, and I can’t call out exactly who it is, but there’s a few people in the business space where you see they have 500,000 subs, then you look at their videos and they get maybe 1000 views each. It’s so obvious to anyone who knows what they’re doing. And it actually, it makes you look like a clown. It hurts your brand more. It’s much better to have a realistic thing. So it’s like I have 16,000 subs in the B2B space. There’s a lot of burnout. Maybe I get three, four, 500 views of video.
Will Barron:
Makes sense.
Alex Berman:
That’s realistic.
Will Barron:
And that’s what we get as well?
Alex Berman:
Yeah.
Will Barron:
Similar kind of numbers. So, good. We’re the same.
Alex Berman:
Every once in a while, something will hit. I just had an Owen video who’s another YouTuber. I think he’s got like 36,000 subs and his are the same. 1000 subs or 1000 views, 2000 views, whatever. But yeah, in B2B, there’s a thing called burnout, which is basically for you and me, a lot of people will sub because they want business content or sales content and then they’ll get a job at a Starbucks or something. Or they’ll just give up. So they’ll stay subbed to the channel, but they’re just not into whatever we’re talking about anymore.
Will Barron:
Yeah. Well hopefully the audience aren’t starting B2B sales and going to Starbucks because I feel like I’ve not done my job very well there. But yeah, the burnout is real.
Alex Berman:
I wonder where they go.
Will Barron:
We like the entertainment don’t we? That’s what we need in YouTube. More so than just straight business content most of the time.
“The way I think about content creation is you’re not making it for whoever’s listening, you’re making it for yourself. And if you’re not getting value from it, there’s no reason to do it.” – Alex Berman · [37:39]
Alex Berman:
Well, the way I think about any sort of content creation is you’re not making it for whoever’s listening. You’re making it for yourself. And if you’re not getting value from it, there’s no reason to do it. There’s another big name podcast that I’m not going to name, another big entrepreneur. And when you listen to his stuff, he’s extremely burned out. He does not want to be on this podcast. Because he’s already made a business. So he is talking about basic stuff. And the audience feels that. And even if his viewership go up, he hates himself more. So yeah, I try to think about my future self. What would my future self, if I have kids, if I want my kids to hear my voice, right? What do I want them to hear? And then also my past self. What was he struggling with and what can I help them with?
Parting Thoughts · [38:26]
Will Barron:
Well, that is probably the best way for the audience to get started with this. I appreciate that Alex. And with that mate, we’ve covered a couple of links which will include in the show notes. But is there anything else you want to share with the audience before we wrap up?
Alex Berman:
Anything else I want to share with the audience? See we’ve got free courses at experiment27.com. If you click Free Courses up there. It’s just collections of our YouTube videos, but they’re set up in good playlists. Otherwise, have a great day. Thanks for having me.
Will Barron:
Good man. Well, we’ll lead to all that in assurance to this episode over at salesman.org. Alex, want to thank you again for joining us on the Salesman podcast.
Alex Berman:
Thanks Will.
