Harris Kenny

SUMMARY

What is Intro CRM used for?

Intro CRM offers sales as a service. It helps sales teams by taking care of inbound leads and helping with tasks like updating properties and importing lists into CRM systems like HubSpot. The goal is to give account executives more time to focus on closing deals.

What are some common mistakes that companies make with leads that come to them?

In a single sentence, this means that the biggest mistake companies make with inbound leads is either not qualifying them at all or qualifying them too much by hand.

How quickly should a business respond to leads in the real world?

One-line answer: At first, the speaker's company tried to respond to leads as quickly as possible. However, they found that better results came from taking more time to ask better questions and give more context. They now care more about how quickly they respond than how fast they respond.

How the company of the speaker uses inbound and outbound marketing?

The company of the speaker uses a strategy called "inbound-informed outbound," which means that they use signals from leads that come in to drive and inform their outbound campaigns.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00]

Ricky Pearl: Today on a Couple of Pointers Podcast, we're lucky enough to have Harris Kenny from Intro CRM. Welcome to the show.

Harris Kenny: Hey, Ricky. Good to speak with you.

What does Intro CRM do?

Ricky Pearl: So, for the sake of the audience, just explain it like I'm five. What does Intro CRM do?

Harris Kenny: Yeah, so we provide sales as a service, but that's a very broad thing. So going into a little more detail, we support revenue teams, typically marketers are our customers and we're helping them with handling inbound leads. And then to a lesser extent, we do outbound as well, but largely inbound driven.

And so, whether that's trade show lists, contact form, request for demo on the website, and we handle that fractionally. So we have an embedded rep working inside our client's CRM, typically HubSpot and updating properties, importing lists. We do some projects, some HubSpot projects, as needed to make sure everything's flowing.

And our job really is for account executives to be busy. So, in a perfect scenario, we're taking these small tasks off of their plate and allowing them to focus [00:01:00] on closing deals.

Ricky Pearl: Oh man, I absolutely love the concept. I had someone reach out to me a month ago saying, Hey, we're getting 200 inbound leads. Our marketing machines humming. Of the 200 leads though, 140 of them are real trash of the 60, most are not gonna convert like they X, and then there's 20 gold within there.

But they were really struggling to get through all 200 to find the 20.

What does a customer normally look like before they come to you?

Ricky Pearl: So talk to me about what does a customer normally look like before they come to you?

Harris Kenny: Yeah. Typically what's happening is leads are not being responded to. So, you look and it'll be days a week plus sometimes there's not even certainty or clarity around did anyone even get back to them at all? ? And be because people are too busy. There's the pro the challenge, so there's a couple of ways that people come in.

They may have an administrative assistant or an operations type person who's keeping an eye on the inbox, but the or they'll have account executives and closers doing it. And so there's different problems with those different ways of handling it. On the like admin side, those folks te tend to not have sales experience and they tend to not [00:02:00] understand the tools, so they tend to not know where you can automate and where you can use enrichment to make that job more efficient.

How you can use templates and sequences and other tools. get back to people faster and spend less time on it because that's not their job really. Their job is to do everything and then the closers are like, look, I don't have time to kick the tires on this because I have a real proposal I gotta work on.

And they are rationally saying I need to focus on the thing that's closer to closing cuz that's my job. And but the problem is if you keep doing that, eventually the top of the funnel dries up.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Make it makes so much sense. What have you found? I just wanna dig into this cuz there's so many companies not doing this right? They spending money, getting people to their website, filling in their form and fuck it up. Just it just waste. So where, like, where have you seen the biggest waste?

Where are companies wasting their inbound leads?

Ricky Pearl: Like what are some of the, yeah, just where are companies wasting their inbound leads?

Harris Kenny: Yeah. Okay. I think that the biggest. The first thing that we do, and this is what we learned with a client who had really strict requirements. So we learn from our customers all the time, and we have got one in [00:03:00] particular who I feel like is showing us the way. I feel like they have a very strong marketer and they've got really strong traction.

So like they're doing a lot, right? And so we're really following them and working with them as they need things. And so they were like, look, we need to have these bigger customers. We need to have qualification. And so they gave us a big long list and so I boiled it down and said, look, if we're emailing back and forth, I need to get this down to two questions to know whether this is good or not good.

Ricky Pearl: Here.

Harris Kenny: Other questions on here, allow us to research that on our own. Do our own enrichment use clay or something like that to do individual enrichment. Cuz I think people see a really high ticket item, like a clear bit, and they say, okay, that's expensive. Or maybe they've never even heard of it. And you don't need to necessarily pay for all the enrichment in the world.

It's just can I get headcount? Can I get which department they're in? Can I get this person's LinkedIn? Just a couple of data points to make sure that they're generally a fit. So the biggest mistake I see people make is either not doing any qualification or having too many qualifications that are being done manually.

And so if you can boil it down to one to two questions, you're gonna be much more likely to get that person through the process. And then [00:04:00] we do that asynchronously, and so we'll do that research and enrichment on our own in parallel to going back and forth to the prospect and our promise to the prospect for our customers their customers, is if you work with us, if you play ball and help us understand these couple things about your business, your first conversation will be with someone who knows what they're talking about.

I promise.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah, that,

Harris Kenny: The person who you'll talk to will be an expert in that 30 minute conversation will be worth your time. And that's the second thing I think I see people making a mistake, is they struggle with this stuff and they say, okay, let's just have an entry level person talk to everybody and then a lot of people say you don't know anything. Why are we talking If you don't know anything about, why am I on the phone with you right now if you can't answer my question? Some people get

Ricky Pearl: That's something we struggle with, right? That's one of the pain points of being a customer and having this SDR-AE model is when the SDR calls you back and has to do that qualification. Now, I personally don't mind SDR is calling me for a quick qualification. I don't mind that. What I don't like is when I have to set a meeting.

Harris Kenny: Right.

Ricky Pearl: To then meet the SDR, to then set a meeting for [00:05:00] the AE. That kills me. If I fill in a form, 30 minutes later, my phone rings and it's an SDR, Hey Ricky, you fill in the form. Awesome. I just wanna understand what you're looking for so I can connect you into the right person within the company.

You know this, and then they run through a quick qualification. I don't mind that. I find that quite efficient, but fuck the pain of having to actually meet and deal with SDRs. I love that you're moving that.

Harris Kenny: Yeah. Yeah. I've had that experience too, and it's just, it's hard for everybody. And by the way, the real reason I think people hire us is that job sucks for the SDR too. They don't stay in that role because it's a, an annoying job. Like one of the biggest things I think we solve is that like turnover and uncertainty and that loss of knowledge and the lack of documentation and

Ricky Pearl: We do the same on outbound and you handling that for the inbound. And I also like that because it's handling the inbound so squarely under marketing, I always have to fight to have the outbound that I'm doing under marketing too.

Harris Kenny: Yep.

Ricky Pearl: The outbound really is where the marketing and sales crosses over, but yours bit more into the, into marketing.

It's pretty square where it sits. Now [00:06:00] te

Harris Kenny: Yeah.

Is it a volume thing? Are people stuffing up when they only have five leads a month or is it only once they're getting to their a hundred it might be that you find that quality really goes down?

Ricky Pearl: What kind of volume? Do you find comp? Is it a volume thing? Are people stuffing up when they only have five leads a month, or is it, or is it only once they're getting to their a hundred, le a hundred a month or whatever it might be that you find that quality really goes down?

Harris Kenny: That's an interesting question. So I would say the first question is like, what are the leads worth? So if you have, even if you only have 20 leads a month, but if your average deal size is like 40, $40,000 or something like that, you your ideal number of leads that you let slip is zero, right?

Because you never know. And the other thing that's getting trickier about it is that the buying process is changing. And increasingly, and we're definitely seeing this on our side. And this is where I think automation goes astray a little bit, is that executives are increasingly delegating this to junior level people, like literally entry level SDRs are the ones who are doing research on and BDRs are doing research on, tens of thousands of dollars in spend and software.

And so, if you have really rigid rules about how you're gonna route it or which ones are the most important ones, it's very easy to miss. Here [00:07:00] it's so funny, I've done a lot of work in hardware over the years. So many engineers use their personal email addresses, like at the biggest companies that you've ever heard of in, in terms of hardware.

And so the volume in question is a good one. I would just say in parallel, it's who those are there's a lot of interesting things in there where there's weird edge cases that you wouldn't think it's that big deal. Oh, we only have a few a month and Oh, these are Gmail addresses.

Who cares? Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. But I would say once you're getting wherever it's, the team is having a hard time keeping up. So like as few as five to 10 a week, if the team is having a hard time keeping up, that's where you wanna think about it. And it may not be hiring us, like it may just be implementing a better process on your side.

And implementing templates, implementing clear rules about what lead status you use if you're, using HubSpot and having those trailing tasks to make sure they don't slip. But it's whenever leads aren't getting heard hearing back like a day plus, that's when you start to have a problem. I think.

Ricky Pearl: So now what's some of the service level agreements or what are some of the timings that you've found are important? People are like, oh, if you don't get back to your inbound leads the same as they hit enter, [00:08:00] you got five seconds. If you don't call 'em in five seconds, they're gone.

What have you actually seen in practice? How quickly do you need to get back to leads?

Ricky Pearl: What have you actually seen in practice? How quickly do you need to get back to leads?

Harris Kenny: Yeah. Yeah. It's like a game show. You're going and the platform falls and you like get dunked in the water. You lose the lead forever. So when we first started doing this, my initial focus, I was really trying to follow research and see about speed. So my initial focus in the first version of this service was we were staffed up globally.

So we had people literally around the world intentionally. I went on Upwork and I did geographic filters to make sure I had different time zones covered, and we were replying around the clock to do as fast as possible, and we set up a whole system in with SLAs and alerts and secondary alerts to make sure they're getting responded too quickly.

And it was like after X number of minutes, it would alert the rest of the team and it did work for sure. But what I found was that for our best clients, what they wanted was more context. So we have eased up a little bit in terms of how quickly we get back to people. We, it is still important. We have, our initial alarm goes off at an hour and the secondary alarm goes off at four hours and it does run [00:09:00] 24/7.

And I keep an eye on things, I think our response times are still quite good, but they were lightning fast before and it was more triage. It was, we were running it through front and we were just rapid response, getting back to people quickly. And what we found is that taking a little more time and asking better questions has definitely gotten better results.

And so it's actually counter to a lot of the graphs that you'll see about response time. And I, we don't have enough data to really say that authoritatively, but I could just say from our experience and from what we're doing, that's what customers want. And it seems like that's what prospects want too.

They want to have a little bit more of a contextual conversation and rather, Just somebody who's immediately hi, what's up? Who are you again? Why'd you call and not knowing anything about ' em?

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. That makes sense to me. And maybe that five minute speed to lead is, has originated from B2C, right? Or lower ticker items where your product is the same as someone else's product. Often if you're selling a $40,000 product, yes, whoever they're talking to first must help, but ultimately they've probably got a good decision making criteria and a good decision making process. And they're looking to get in vendors [00:10:00] to, to understand like as long as you appear responsive, that's important. But then if you differentiate yourself by saying, Hey Harris, I had a look and this is what I've noticed about your company, and you come to that conversation prepared with the case studies that look like there his asking the right questions.

You can differentiate yourself that way, and it's probably a more impressive way to stand out.

Harris Kenny: Definitely. Yeah. Very well said. I totally agree. And I think it's interesting, you're, it's like first principles, like you're drilling down and being like, where did those studies even come from in the first place? And it's funny because if you go look it up, and I've spent time trying to find them.

So many of those statistics are recycled on blogs from content marketers and stuff, but many of those studies about speed delete are like years old, like very old. The

Ricky Pearl: And the study was first done by some automation software that responded to your leads instantly within five seconds. We did a study and we found that customers who respond within five seconds are far more likely to, and all of it is, it's like Mars, Mars the chocolate company and they make a lot of dog food.

Has [00:11:00] done all the research on animal nutrition. Yeah. Alright , let's not get into conspiracy theories, but we know a lot of information is product led

Harris Kenny: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think fundamentally like you said, responsiveness. Totally. Do we wanna get back to people in a timely manner? Of course. And we do that and we try to do that. But is it in all cases, in every situation, the most important thing In our experience, no. And where I'm starting to look at automation on our side is what can we use, we're looking at Clay and connecting clay up with HubSpot.

Using potentially GPT-3 and some other tools to do some of that research that you would do on your own as an SDR o BDR, so you can have that information at your fingertips faster there those are ways that I'm thinking about compressing response time. Rather than saying, skip the context, just rock a response back.

I, that's what I, okay. How do we compress the research?

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. I like that a lot. And Clay's a perfect tool for something like that. Build out for each customer a table that has their qualification and connected to their HubSpot, and as a lead comes in, boom, automatically enriched and it's [00:12:00] pushed something back to you.

Do you build out the rest of the sequence typically in HubSpot?

Ricky Pearl: Do you build out the rest of the sequence typically in HubSpot?

Do they need hubs do you handle that on your side and then push that back?

Harris Kenny: Yeah, that's a good question. Right now we are not requiring, people have a certain tier for HubSpot, so if they don't have email sequences, we will just create trailing tasks and follow up

The customers for whom we're doing that again, they have high, pretty high ticket offers, and so it gives us a chance to play around and customize a little bit of the copywriting and.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah.

Harris Kenny: I think in the future that's something we might think about, but so far that's not really hurting us. Yeah, like where I'd like to go and, this is what we talked about a little bit in the past and where y'all are so good with phones. Like I wanna figure out how we can do more with omnichannel on these inbound leads so we can really get on their radar and help the salespeople do more social selling and help the prospect then connect with that AE on LinkedIn and what can we do to not just have a good handoff, but to try to really

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. What gets a little bit harder is now the person on the phone needs a lot more context, not just context of the lead and who the lead is, but a lot more [00:13:00] context of the business. Cuz if they get asked a question and they're like, I don't fuckin know, like it's fine. It's good that they say, I don't know.

But if they say, I don't know, three times, they're gonna be like, this company does not sound like an expert and I'm calling for help

Harris Kenny: Yeah.

They seem like they don't know

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I

Harris Kenny: Just keep saying that.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah, I gue I guess there's a, and if they try deflect to them not knowing, they either have to own up and say, Hey look, I'm just calling to, I'm not, all they can go it's my first week on the job.

You can't ask me too many questions. I guess it'll bring up a whole range of other issues, which I have no doubt he'll tackle. And we do inbound leads, but I know that's one of the challenges is the context of the business.

Harris Kenny: One interesting thing that we've seen so in the beginning when as we started doing this more contextual, like deeper work alongside our clients, they were, the sales reps were like account executives. Were like, Hey, who are you? why do you want access to my calendar?

How come you get the first pass at these leads? I was used to that being abandoned and neglected so I could go in and cherry pick whatever I [00:14:00] wanted and get back to them whenever I wanted, and now all of a sudden, so there was hesitation. And frankly, if I were in their shoes, I would've felt the same way.

None of it was misplaced, like it totally made sense. Over time though, what we're seeing is that relationship's getting a lot stronger. First of all, they love just having these meetings on their calendar and we're syncing everything into the CRM so they can see all the notes and they can see all the, because it's email only, it's all in there.

And we're increasingly seeing that. They're now kicking stuff back to us where they're like, look, I went to a show and I got a bunch of cards. Could you run this through your sequence and follow up on them for me? And hey,

Ricky Pearl: Oh mate.

Harris Kenny: To a year ago, would you mind? And so now it's feeling like reciprocal.

And so sometimes if I have to call in a favor and say, look, this person just will not give me this qualification stuff over email. Would you mind giving ' em a call? They're like, yeah. No problem. I'll hop on the phone, I'll see if I can get

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. You've taken so much work off their plates,

Harris Kenny: Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: Actual trade shows. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen someone spend a fuck ton of money. I think that's the official price of trade shows. That's, and to [00:15:00] go and get business cards, leads and or a list from the show, or they'll scrape the vendors or something and then be like, ah, let's do something with this.

Let's do it. We're definitely gonna do it. We're a hundred percent gonna do it, and then not do it. Probably more often than not right.

Harris Kenny: It is funny you say that because I have in my mind been like, do I just do trade shows? Because we did a thing for a client where they had a list of trade show leads. It was 58 leads, we se I did a video on YouTube about it. We segmented the list and we did a generic trade show type email, and then we did a segmented one with multiple points of personalization.

We found if they were hiring, it was really, it was a really solid email. I think I was private,

And the difference in response rate was 2% versus 27% between the two different ways of handling it. So I think not only did they not get back to them at all, it's like what if they got back to them? What would that look like in terms of getting that return because it's like you're so close, you've already talked to them before, or you've got their address, you've got their information. Like you're just so close to then [00:16:00] not follow up because of process or people are busy. It's just, and then to be putting pressure on an outbound agency or on Google AdWords or whatever to go find more people.

I don't know.

Do you use other forms of of sales collateral or marketing collateral? Do you have your customer's recorded intro video or like how important is that?

Ricky Pearl: Do you use other forms of of sales collateral or marketing collateral? Do you have your customer's recorded intro video or like how important is that? Everyone seems to like, have that as oh, we're gonna need a one pager, or we need a video. Has that been important getting back to you inbound.

Harris Kenny: I think today it's not necessary, but I think that over time it's gonna be more important, especially for higher ticket items where you're really trying to. Equip your champion to have the information that they need. We had an interview that I don't, it hasn't been published yet, but this guy is an expert in communication and he talks about how people, often retain 10% of the things that you tell them.

And then if that's your champion, and then they're going and having a meeting over a video call with five other people on a buying committee or whatever, and they're each only retaining 10%. It's there's like nothing left, right? There's 1% retention. And so I think that, as we go forward, better [00:17:00] sales teams are gonna do it and it's gonna force others.

Others who aren't doing it, I think are gonna start to fall behind. I think today you can still get away with not having a digital sales room, not having strong collateral. You can get away with just having a checkbox of Hey, see attached pdf. They skim it, they ignore it, but it was there so they know it exists.

But I do think that over the next couple years that I think that is gonna change and the bar is gonna go up.

Ricky Pearl: I need to get better there. People often say could you send me a one pager? I'm like, I'm gonna go to my website and I'm gonna click print.

Harris Kenny: Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: Like that's the informa. All the information that is relevant I've put up on the websites.

Harris Kenny: Sometimes it's an indicator that a lead isn't qualified or isn't really paying attention or isn't doing the research. Like sometimes they want that, but it's not

Ricky Pearl: Yeah, I get, and listen some people and they live in their inbox. And it makes sense. Like some websites are so convoluted. Anyway, I get it. It's just probably something I need to get better at as well. I'll do a video instead. I've got so many questions on inbound, but all this has been great.

If someone wasn't doing something right at the moment is do you think it's better to just automate an inbound sequence that as somebody fills out a web website, web form?

Ricky Pearl: If someone wasn't doing something right at the moment is do you think it's better to just automate an inbound [00:18:00] sequence that as somebody fills out a web website, web form? Cause I imagine most are doing this. Somebody fills out a web form, they get an automatic email, and then if they don't respond to that email, they get another automatic email.

That's a feature with most, you can do basic Zaps or I don't know, most sales engagement platforms, most CRMs you can achieve.

Harris Kenny: Yep.

Ricky Pearl: Why not do that or, why use you overdoing that.

Harris Kenny: Sure. I would say that probably for a lot of people, that is a really good first step. And if you don't need that human in the loop looking and seeing, Hey, this lead is really interesting. Or you, the way you could automate it at like a stage one of this would be you do automate that sequence and then maybe you do an email notification to a rep to do a human review.

But they know that it's not time sensitive cuz they can review it at their own leisure basically and then get back to them when it if they think it's interesting, do it omnichannel, pick up the phone or get on LinkedIn or do a Slack alert. I think that's a really good way of starting it.

I would say where we start to add more value is when you have the complexity that comes in of supporting maybe multiple reps, having shifting qualification criteria [00:19:00] where maybe marketing is looking for tighter feedback loops. So, marketing is really our customer, even though we're serving the sales team, marketing is using the properties and stuff that we're updating to inform their campaigns.

And we'll run validation on lists and we'll report back and show them, hey, this. What that trade show attendee list or whatever actually looked like versus maybe what you thought it was. And so then they'll change their future decisions based on that. So I would say that where it becomes more of like a multi-player game is where I think the things that we do are more valuable if it's just a function of hi person, thanks for reaching out.

Yeah, I think you probably don't need to work with us, honestly. And I do think I would automate that.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah that, that sounds great. Quick little question on trade shows. Trade shows are a little bit different when it comes to speed to lead and somebody filling in an inquiry on your website.

When do you find getting back to leads from a trade show to be most effective? What timeframe from the trade show?

Ricky Pearl: When do you find getting back to leads from a trade show to be most effective? What timeframe from the trade show? Let's say it's a three day long trade show.

This is a name connects it on day one.

Harris Kenny: Yeah, I think you wanna get back to people as quickly as possible, [00:20:00] but having to recognize that like they're gonna be getting other things. And so if it's like a generic marketing email versus an email that looks like it was written by a sales rep that's plain text, couple sentences with a reference to something that happened to the show or something about their company, that second email is way better.

The HTML formatted with a table and an image and a video and a picture of the team in front of the booth. Those most of the time, I think are just not even worth sending at all because there's nothing, you're not really saying anything to them, you're just like acknowledging that they stop by

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. And they're like, yeah, I was at the show. I know I stopped by. I stopped by everywhere.

Harris Kenny: Yeah. Yeah and a lot of people will get cold email too. Hotel vendors and other companies will buy those lists and so they're getting tons of email. I would say like a little, in my experience thing to think about is in those subject lines, like for big trade shows, not using the trade show subject line or sub trade show name in the subject line, because there's a really good chance that for bigger shows, they're getting tons of spam from hotel vendors and rental car vendors and on all sorts of [00:21:00] people print shops using that, CES or.

So there's other ways. I would say other, because people's mental filters kick in and they're like, oh yeah, this is another, somebody just

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Yeah. That's super interesting, right? Like you had this 2% response rates to a blank templated email and you had a 27 response rate to a personalized one. The difference between 2% and 27%, it's massive when you're talking about trade show leads and similarly, the time and. It just makes so much sense to work with a company like yours.

You're investing that that net dollar value on a trade show that fuckton of dollars to not have good follow up is like figure out your follow up before you do the trade show.

Harris Kenny: I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Think from the end backwards. Totally.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Because, and that's all it's about. I'm only at the trade to start these conversations and if you're not at the trade show to start the conversations.

Sure. Just invest your money in how you look. It's a branding exercise. Yeah, no problem. But that does seem like a waste. Tell me if this theory's good. Our voice thoughts, if you're doing a trade show, either wanna be first in their inbox or last in, in their [00:22:00] inbox, I'm almost like follow up on the date.

Like literally whilst they're walking around that night when they get back to the hotel they, it's there like they haven't got the noise yet cuz like three days after the trade show, it's the hundred emails. So it's like an hour after they visited your booth or two weeks later?

Harris Kenny: Yeah, I like it. I like it. I think the most important thing is what you say, right? So that initial email could just be, Hey, it was really nice meeting you. Look forward to staying in touch. But we have a customer who I think is doing this really well, where they're tapping into industry trends in that messaging.

So like their product has a new sustainability module and they're not just saying, here's our new feature, they're referencing look, we had a breakout event or a happy hour where this guest speaker came and talked about sustainability in this industry and of course this is now built into our product as well, but you're tapping into the stuff that they're thinking about in general when they're at the show, when they're talking to their peers and they're in the talk panels, they're not necessarily thinking about features of software or whatever.

They are thinking. They're there for getting caught up on the current events. And so I've found that clients who are able to [00:23:00] tap into that and speak to that in their follow up are able to, it's not like a chameleon, but you're able to show that you understand. You're there thinking about and talking about the same things that they are instead of just being a distraction.

Ricky Pearl: It's like talking to another person. You can have an interesting conversation or you can have a boring benign conversation. And if you are able to show something that's interesting and irrelevant as if you're having a conversation, it's not just about showing you clever. You can walk up to random person that can talk about things that show that they're clever.

You're like but I'm not interested. So finally, when you, and I'm just trying to understand the difference between an outbound email. I actually have another question for you. An outbound, but I, an outbound email and this response to an inbound lead, are you as strict with word counts, with not including links and things like that?

Because often, are they like delivery issues? I guess they filled out a form on your website, but their mail server doesn't know that.

So your first email still needs to be delivered, what are some of those similarities or difference?

Ricky Pearl: So your first email still needs to be delivered. So what are some of those similarities or differe.

Harris Kenny: Totally. So we take a lot of principles from outbound and do apply them to inbound. We [00:24:00] do try to keep it relatively short because, so if they, because if they just filled out the form on a website, and let's say this company's never been touched you before, there is no relationship between their accounts and your accounts.

And a lot of the way a lot of these tools work is like you just get a notification of a contact form and then when you go to reach out to them, you're starting a net new email, which is a cold email technic. From your CRM. So we do try to follow those rules. We'll make sure that clients have the d n s stuff set up that all the outbound people know and we do keep it simple on follow ups.

We'll include more. I would say we, we can let the word count go a little bit longer if needed. We can assume more is the biggest thing. I think with when a lead comes inbound, you can ask more like leading questions. Basically like what is happening in your business that caused you to reach out to us, because obviously you're the one that started this conversation.

And that's the biggest difference I think, between outbound and inbound in terms of messaging,

Ricky Pearl: Brilliant.

Brilliant.

Harris Kenny: Technically a lot. We do a lot of similar stuff for the same reasons. And then, honestly, like the biggest thing is we'll just talk to the marketers and make sure that they're not torching the.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah,

Harris Kenny: Cause many know, but many don't.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Email deliverability is one of those [00:25:00] things. I'll still go an organization and go who owns this? And they'll be like it, and I'll get an it and be like, what are, they're like, your email inbox is set up, you know your username and you know your fucking password. You can log into your inbox.

My job's fucking done here,

Harris Kenny: Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: No. Yeah. What are you talking about?

Would that be like outbound to a lead list before an event? And then the intention is to capture them inbound afterwards?

Ricky Pearl: Nobody owns this. This has just been so insightful. This world of responding to inbound is so important. And you did mention at the beginning you do a little bit of outbound. Would that be like outbound to a lead list before an event? And then the intention is to capture them inbound afterwards?

Harris Kenny: Yeah, it could be any number of things. We've spent a lot of time doing just. Pure outbound campaigns over the last couple years, and I think we're increasingly getting better results as we're adopting better and better practices, but where we're able to get the best results and where I think it's the best fit with our competency and my experience and just our check stack and stuff like that is where, I don't have a catchy name for it, , but it's like inbound informed outbound.

So what'll happen is like you see three leads come in. This is a real story from a real client. Three leads came in all referencing a competitor. [00:26:00] And so, our team, cuz that's their whole job is hey, that's weird. Why? So we asked them, Hey, by the way, a couple other people mentioned them today, is what's going on?

And they said, oh prices growing up by 8 X. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting , I could see why you're shopping around. And then it's okay, let's build a list. Based on that in inbound event that just happened, that signal that just prompted us to run an outbound campaign.

But we're using that inbound context or signal to drive that outbound campaign. So

I would

Ricky Pearl: So Clever. It's so clever. And any marketer listening to this would be like, of course. And at the same time, any marketer's yeah, of course I know that, but of course I'm not gonna fucking get to it. It's just in the, it's just,

Harris Kenny: The list. They don't have the dedicated domain ready.

Ricky Pearl: Exactly, it's just over the cusp of in order for me to do that, and that is obvious.

I need to do these three things first, and I'm just never getting around to those three things.

Harris Kenny: Yeah, exactly.

Ricky Pearl: Mate. Great. I can just see.

Harris Kenny: The replies too? It's because those are more speculative, like you're gonna get some rep, like when we ran that campaign, we had a lot of people come back that weren't big enough, that were not qualified, and, but we had a [00:27:00] couple that were, and one of 'em closed.

And so it's cool. It's worth it. No skin off our back. We're not upset about it because that's our whole job. It didn't cost us, we didn't lose any big deals because we were working on this lower, higher risk or lower probability campaign.

Um, whereas an

Ricky Pearl: They, yeah. There's a lot of different qualifications when it comes to outbounds and differences to inbound. And people don't appreciate the amount of work that there still is in filtering out unqualified leads. So, wait, this is it really has been incredibly insightful because it's a world that's, adjacent to what I do.

And yet it's so different, it, it is a different world. Reminds me of when I went to Japan and you walk into this extremely advanced culture, so advanced, like older than Western cultures by far are. But so different. It was if like the same things were put in, the Western culture and Japanese culture were put in two separate Petri dishes.

This culture's been developing much longer. So it's, but completely different. And I find that's that's this inbound outbound for me at the moment.

Harris Kenny: I would say these principles apply to outbound. I get cold emails and I respond to 'em every once in a while if it [00:28:00] catches my eye and people don't get back to me I bet I'm interested in your thing. Tell me about it. Give gimme the pitch. I'm not saying like dance or whatever.

I'm saying like, tell me what you do. I'm okay. And surprising amount of the time, people never respond. I'm like, what are you doing?

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. There's a separation. There was an agency doing the outbound, but then they're leaving it for the customer to handle positive replies. And the customer's not set up, which is why they went to an agency to begin with. It makes I, yeah. That makes sense. Anyway, but this has just been incredibly insightful and I could keep going, but I want to respect respect your time and get my kids off to school.

But but I've still got a lot to learn from you. And I'd love to, we should do something sometime I'd love to peek under the hood.

Harris Kenny: Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: See the engine?

Harris Kenny: Yeah, totally. It's probably more duct tape and paperclips and rubber bands than I'd like. But yeah, man, absolutely. And just likewise, I'm a huge fan of your work and learn a ton from you too. I think there's so much room in this space, there's so much room for so many people to do better with this revenue stuff, there's just a lot more to be gained by sharing and talking about what we're doing instead of keeping it in and being secret and assuming that everyone [00:29:00] Else doesn't know what they're.

doing

Ricky Pearl: Mate, I assume that's half, half the world marketing expert, sales experts know a lot more than what I'm doing. It's sure I've developed some expertise, but what I've realized in marketing and in sales, the key, the real skill is a capability of execution, and we've built that machine that can execute effectively what it executes on.

I'm happy to take advice from every expert in the world. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I appreciate that. We are aligned

Harris Kenny: I've seen your folks on LinkedIn and stuff. You've, you're, yeah. The, you're doing a, you're doing a hell of a good job, and I, it's a really privilege to be on the show, and I appreciate the opportunity, so thank you.

Ricky Pearl: Bye mate. We'll chat again soon.

Harris Kenny: All right. Cool.

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