How I Generated $250M In Leads

please welcome John Doherty to the stage thank you hello everybody um so what is I was just talking to Nathan I'm like what's up with the Virginia crowd I'm from Virginia originally I live in Denver now but went to JMU go dukes and I know got some hoagies in the crowd but uh my name is John Doherty I'm the founder and CEO of two companies one's called Credo we help companies hire the right digital agency marketing design development um the other one's called editor ninja we're

the design pickle of copy editing so today I'm going to talk with you about how I generated 250 million dollars in leads for digital agencies as a one-person marketing team before I start I'm going to give you two uh I'm going to let you know about two things number one I'm going to swear I can't help it I'm going to swear if you're offended I'm sorry number two I talk fast do you think Nathan talks fast fellow Virginia boy I once said all 42 United States presidents at that time

this is like 2003 in 8.2 seconds so let's rock and roll so let's see if I can even get this thing to work all right sweet so over the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk to you about a few things I'm going to show you how I generated all these leads through number one traffic number two forms and conversions number three follow-ups the money is in the follow-up so I'm going to show you how we optimize that process um so uh I have always believed I'm a relationship driven person I'm an introvert but I love people so I've

built my company off of the relationships that and organic traffic that I've been able to generate uh I've I learned SEO I did it professionally for a number of years via relationships that I built into space so early days I go I love going to visiting customers this is just a goofy photo from visiting uh my very first customer in Provo Utah back in 2016 I had a lot less gray in my beard I blame the pandemic and having a three-year-old um but over the years we have grown lead pipeline substantially so my business we

help Brands SAS companies find the right digital marketing agency to work with I've worked with over 400 software Founders in last 18 months I was the marketing coach in Den martel's growth accelerator for about 18 months so I've helped a lot of SAS companies drive a lot of traffic and grow their business so I went out on my own in end of 2015 I got laid off by Zillow I was running marketing at a couple of their brands I ran marking a couple of their brands one at a time um and I got laid off from there and decided to work for myself decided I didn't want a boss so I went and I

started basically slinging leads basically selling leads and in that time we have done uh as you can see last year in 2021 we generated almost 100 million dollars in digital marketing leads I'm the only marketing person at the business so today I'm going to show you exactly how we did that there's some talk I mean the two talks ago and then the one before that there's a lot of talk about SEO and content I'm going to talk about that I'm going to give you guys some tips and tricks give you all some tips and tricks

um about uh what you can do as well and I'm also going to dispel some myths for you but as you can see in 2017 we generated about five and a half million dollars in digital marketing leads this is about 12 ish 18 months ish after I went out on my own uh the next year it jumped to 21.7 next year 29 and then we went to 72 million in 2020 because everyone fired their marketing teams but still needed to do marketing so they hired agencies so we saw about a 70 lift in our Revenue that year last year was close to 100 million dollars and this year of course it's been 2022 and everyone went on vacation and turns out

people would rather go to Europe and lose their bags thanks United rather than higher marketing agencies so but it's still been it's still been a pretty good year and we'll end up kind of around last year is the is the goal so today obviously we're talking about marketing um so everyone's heard the marketing funnel which kind of starts up here and comes down here right I prefer to take that take that flip it 180 degrees and you get a pyramid I prefer to talk about as a marketing pyramid number one you got to start with traffic you have to get people to your website to be able to show them what it is

you're you're working on so then they can convert and you can turn them into a customer so we start with traffic different sources convert in different ways different sources are more effective than others but I'm going to show you how I think through this number two is a is a good converting form so make it easy for people to we're talking about kissing keeping it simple silly I have a three-year-old um and then a conversion event how do you convert people in and then a follow-up funnel how do you get people to actually stick around attend demos Etc and come through so to start off with number one you need to get traffic

to get leads it seems pretty simple but a lot of people forget this and a lot of people you'll go and you'll read Indie hackers or something like that and you'll see these stories how I generated 300 000 you know visits to my site in uh you know in in one month you know to my SAS company I'm going to show you that you actually don't need that if you have a high enough ticket offer um so but first of all play to your strengths I get so many questions I've gotten so many questions over the years about well John what's the best Channel what's the number one channel I

can do to generate traffic to my SAS site and I say well what are you good at what do you love doing right what do you know are you a great designer Facebook ads Instagram ads are probably going to work pretty well for you as long as you have budget to actually buy those or you can make it super profitable and you know fund it that way or you raise a bunch of money or take a bunch of debt um use the one that plays your strengths and experience so for me SEO content referral I wrote my first novel at nine years old I've been blogging since 2001. I can crank out a ton of content quickly

and so that's that's how I started building the company we chose uh and you can you know if you're an engineer marketing via engineering you got calculators you got all sorts of ways that you can you can engineer growth as well you know product like growth is super popular these days um for us we chose SEO and referral and referral because it's what I knew so I'm going to share a couple hacks with you and show you how we did that and then relationships if you're building a company in a space that you know which is really let's be honest the best way to do it because you probably experience those problems a bunch of times and then

you've gone and you built a software product you should also know people and relationships have been kind of my cheat code to building this company and I'll show you an example of that here coming up so here's our organic traffic this is back to 2016 2017. we went from 1400 visits a month in November 2016 to almost 10 000 visits in October 2017. we saw like a five six x lift in leads in this time as well that was that bump that you saw went from five and a half to seven point whatever in uh in 2017 or

sorry 21 Point whatever in um in 2017 but we just started generating traffic via SEO um speaker three ago was was talking about content as well at the bottom of the funnel we kind of did it all through the whole funnel so how we did this was pretty simple we did six things that I mentioned here number one we wrote 100 plus blog posts in about 12 months time targeting long tail traffic how do I what is how to do this thing um and then a big thing that we did which honestly if I could go back this

is one of the things that I would do again if I could do this business again we published an industry pricing guide because I was talking to companies and they said uh well John how much how much do agencies cost how much should I expect to spend I was like well I don't have the answers offhand but I had a hundred plus agency profiles where they'd given me all that data so let's take that data let's put it together let's put it into a pricing guide that no one else had published now a ton of people have them but I did it first um and we've gone back we've updated it every two years and so we have we did it last year so we have last year you know

2021 data 2019 data 2017 or 2018 and 2017 I believe um so this got us a ton of links if I could go back and do it all over again I would basically I would basically publish a big guide like this with like industry data that no one else has every quarter every three months and that's all the content I would do I would do that and I would promote the out of it and I'd rinse and repeat and do it again I learned this trick from Zillow where I worked for two years where they've built that brand built a publicly traded company off the back of making data that is opaque transparent so the more you

can do that give your customers the info that they need to make smart decisions the more you're going to win I leveraged my relationship so guest posting on Moz and search engine land and all these other websites where I knew people where I knew the editor-in-chief I'd email them they'd want me to guest post they'd cover stuff that we put out so great way to kind of Leverage uh leverage relationships that I built conferences I spoke at seven different seven digital Summit conferences in in Seven Cities in seven weeks in 2017. I was on a plane like I mean

literally every week I was going somewhere else in the country Detroit Kansas City not even fun places to be honest with no no offense to anyone from Kansas City I actually like Kansas City um I didn't love Detroit but uh so spoken a ton of conferences and then also was a podcast guest podcast by the way new guest blogging it's the best way if you speak well and you have interesting things to share it's a great way you spend 30 minutes you build a backlink and everyone that listens to that podcast also hears you speak and a lot of us are better spoken than we are written so it's a phenomenal way it's kind of a multi-channel hack for you

there um so that's how we did that that's how we started growing traffic and how we grew it over time I will also say one thing that we did that's generated us a lot of organic traffic is we took so I've got you know all the marketing channels like SEO content Etc agencies Consultants verticals Healthcare medical real estate whatever business types e-commerce SAS I just blew out my whole site taxonomy I have 6 500 pages on my website all targeting things like B2B Healthcare SAS marketing companies the volume's not huge but it is hyper

targeted it is insane like we we get like 30 to 50 conversion rates on these Pages because they're so so specific um and you have enough of them um you're going to get enough enough traffic um the next thing is referral relationships so this is a blog post that was published on moz.com um you all probably know Moz or an SEO software company that was you know really popular back in like 2011 12 and through like 1718. um so I I worked for an agency in New York City that we partnered with Moz so I got to do some whiteboard Fridays and I was blogging on there Etc and ran fishkin the founders a

friend of mine he did a whiteboard Friday he did one of these videos like a 10 minute video or maybe even longer I don't remember anymore but he did these every Friday for 10 years and he did one about how to hire an SEO agency and there were two places he pointed people one to their own recommended list of agencies of which I was on there as well as a consultant myself and my site this one mention alone has made my company over three hundred thousand dollars in the last five years one mention alone 300 plus thousand

dollars huge relationships um this is the traffic over time you can see obviously it's kind of gone down we got mentioned again on Mars and started 2022 and it kind of spiked back up for a little bit um but that's how we initially uh got traffic and converted converted them into users now I'm going to talk about forms and conversions we're going to keep it talk about keeping it simple I'm going to talk about social proof and tell you what didn't work for me and what has and then talk about having one one conversion type so fewer Fields is almost always better almost always better I caveat that because there are

times that it's not but this form on the left this was our original form it was 12 Fields Long no one who knows you that they're like I'm just looking for an agency like just just talk to me right or like be an agency and just and just uh let me contact you we reduce that down to six this is our current form um and it's like 30 a 35 increase in conversions who would like to get a 35 increase in conversions I hope every single one of you should have your hand raised right now or at least be nodding um so reduce the number of uh for fields

on your form um if you uh if you need to um I'm gonna go back for a second if you need to uh you can also add an interstitial step which I'll talk about in a second called a funnel filter to further qualify people um but one thing that did not work for us everyone says oh take your conversion forms put them into multiple steps and you're going to get an increase in leads we did that we saw a 20 decrease in leads when we did that I think it's because our form wasn't fast enough going in between each step didn't move fast enough so I actually rolled that

back and we went back to one form we saw a 30 increasing leads on that as well so test test everything show the proof so social proof is massive for you if you can get testimonials right speaking before me is talking about success and getting all these testimonials and such pepper that across your site put it all over your website because because it's literally your customer telling other prospects why they love you It's Magic so on this is our current conversion page we talk about 6 500 plus happy customers happy clients finding agencies we say that twice it's actually

in that small text there in the top right we talk about the sites that we've helped we have a testimonial below that as well one thing that did not work for me is I put a testimonial below the form and we saw conversions drop by 25 I use full story on my website to come to um to record people via video record their screens um as they're kind of going through our sites I looked at the month before and I looked at the month where we saw the drop literally when there was no testimonial below the form people were just converting and they're using uh I

don't think I have it there if you look there's a next next button down there that just takes them to schedule a call um so it is kind of a multi-step form but once we implemented that index button instead of submit no one wants to submit everyone wants to do something else they're trying to achieve something 15 lifting conversions um but testimonials below the form people would scroll down they'd like look at the form they'd scroll down and look at the other testimonial and then bounce back because it caused them to have more questions than to just keep moving forward with us so I never put testimonials underneath the forms uh

anymore I've tested this to death I've tested this so many times so fewer Fields fewer choices people lie you get a lot of aspirants so if you have like a budget field and people are and you're asking them like what they're spinning people are spending just a little bit of money are going to say they're spending a lot because they want to be spending a lot right so recognize that a that's going to happen and then also figure out a way to help the people that are that have smaller budgets so then they can grow into people that have bigger budgets to ultimately you know pay you more money you can always get more information on the next step so we don't

so we basically delineate people and send people in different directions via uh based on how much marketing budget they have um this is the next step this is the second step after that form it's form they go here if they have if they're spending over 50 Grand a year on marketing they're taking a schedule called my team to qualify them and get them introduced to our uh to agencies via our software if they are spinning under that then they're put into an automatic flow they post a project and then agencies reach out to them and pay us per leader a subscription always check your conversion Pages for

errors anytime you ship your site make sure that you're testing make sure you're not like you didn't you know remove the call Scheduling been there done that not fun um so always be checking for errors and no social proof below forms if you take one thing away from this don't put social proof below forms it will kill your conversions and then one conversion type so I have one way for people to convert on my site it is get started takes you to that form this is webinar ninja shout out to Omar they have one way to get started start for free it's a free trial right you can obviously do

things beyond that like we do we kind of segment them out um but uh the other hack for you here on conversions is I talked about my 6500 plus category pages right B2B SAS content marketing agencies when you're on that page you click the get started button we're automatically populating the content marketing part of that on the form so they don't even have to fill that out because we have a ton of options there they don't have to fill that out it's like oh well how did you know I was looking for Content marketing well you're on the freaking page right so that right there was like a 12 lifting conversion so once we

implemented that so you can see I mean these things are like I'm giving you decent size numbers right 10 12 30 35 percent and aggregate this stuff adds up to so many you know so many more conversions for you over time um and then third part is that the money the money here is in the follow-up so speed to lead this is super important uh following up with people and doing a different Reach Out based off of what they did uh personal SMS so Chris person's not in here but using a sales message we sent an auto SMS to remind people of a demo um and uh that gave us a 30 Improvement

and reduce the number of people not showing up um and I'm going to talk about plain text because business business is human to Human so this is the email that we send or that we sent we've since like redesigned our logos this is an older email where you basically still send the same thing someone submits our form they don't schedule a call 10 minutes later zapier is tagging them inactive campaign with a call not scheduled tag and we're sending them this email if they have scheduled it then we put them into a different flow and we make sure that we're smsing them and we're getting you know where we're being involved and they know that we're real

people we're super excited about talking to them right but we send them this email 10 minutes after automatically if they haven't converted this stays about 15 percent of leads about 50 of people that did not schedule about 60 percent do and there's another 40 and we say 15 of that 40 I know doing a lot of math I know everyone's blood sugar is low because we haven't had lunch yet but these are the numbers um so this works really really well with that big schedule call now button that is what that improved things um too so here's an SMS that decreased no-shows

for us two demos by 30 percent so my business we qualify leads we schedule them with agencies and then basically the agencies try to sell them right we get paid for the lead and we get paid commission on the back end um we had an issue and I'll just go ahead and go to the next one um and then I'll go back we had an issue you can see there we had a big spike in late 2020 of a lot of uh leads a lot of prospects not attending calls with agencies every single one of those cost me four hundred dollars right sales message is like 49 a month so we implemented this we send this SMS

we say you know hi Mike Credo here you have a call with so and so at on this date at this time here's the time zone information is in the calendar invite because we have people being like uh where's the zoom info it's in the calendar invite this is also two-way messaging so they can reply and say oh I can't make it concierge level we're gonna we're gonna reschedule for them well when can you make okay cool we'll reschedule it for you they can also do it in the app but if you give people a chance to talk to a person they're going to do that instead of doing it themselves that's fine because I'm not

losing 400 because you know we didn't contact them um so that's uh that's just like a complete no-brainer for us um and uh we actually schedule that via zap here Book value you can book me schedule that SMS to go out an hour before the meeting via zapier through sales message um it's been it's been big we also use sales message by the way uh people that we haven't heard from in a while we use SMS to re-engage them instead of sending emails we use SMS people expect SMS these days I mean the

open rates on SMS is huge um so then this is an email that we send this is after they put someone books a call with us we find I I wanted to study psychology and business in uh in University uh my parents told me to study something else even though they were both psychology Majors um but uh sorry I studied technical writing and web development but psychology is fascinating to me and so I know that people will not do what you want them to do if they are afraid that they're not going to get what they want

from that interaction so we tell them straight up right here this is what we're going to discuss on this call that you just scheduled with us here's how we work this is what we're going to discuss so they can come prepared we get better information from them and they show up more often and then we're able to get them introduced which is how we make money um and then we also asked them at the bottom to refer their friends to us once they've had it once they've had a great experience not if you have a great experience once you've had a great experience they're like oh cool I'm basically guaranteed a great experience so they're they're happy to show up and then finally I want to talk a little

bit about measurement because all of this is no good if you're not actually measuring it you don't actually know what works as Alex hermosi once told me do enough of the things that work and few enough of the things that don't over long enough of a period of time you can't help but be successful so I actually got this from Dan Martell via SAS Academy it's called the Precision scorecard every single week we go through and we pull the numbers how many leads how many leads what percentage of lead schedule calls how much pipeline do we add into the system introduce agencies that sort of thing we do every week my assistant pulls those numbers for me and we go over them every Monday

as a team there's three of us that are W-2s so we're pretty small um uh but then I also do this for marketing so every single week I go through and I pull these numbers for every single Channel how many leads how many calls according to our model how much revenue did that make us how much did we spend on Google ads et cetera what's our Roi or row as from these different channels and across all ads and that that lets me make better decisions about uh about marketing and what to keep investing in and what not final thing is when you make these

changes when I make any change to my conversion uh forms especially I'm annotating it in Google analytics so if something drops and I don't have it annotated I'm in trouble I don't know what I changed right but so I annotate every single thing so I can roll stuff back as quickly as possible I don't use any like fancy software um so over the last 20 minutes I showed you a couple things uh number one we talked about traffic and playing to your strengths SEO content has worked really well for us and referrals and friendships has worked really well for us other things may work better for you

um I loved my relationships and expertise in building this company keep it simple with your forms pre-fill as much as you can make people think a lot less leverage social proof on your conversion pages and across your site but not under the form and choose one conversion event to have one way for them to start you can then route them in different ways based off of what they do but choose one way to start don't make them choose between a free demo a free trial uh you know whatever else you know get a puppy whatever else it is I just see SAS companies do this all the time

especially early on and then follow-ups contact them quickly if they haven't done the thing that you need them to do SMS has been absolutely amazing for us it's totally game changing uh brassan I want to cut of all the people that sign up here and then personalize it use plain text and tell them exactly what they are going to get once they show up to do the thing that you want them to do which is also the thing that's going to get them to their goal um so that's it I'm John Doherty founder and CEO of Credo and editor ninja thank you all for your time I'll be around for a little bit happy to answer questions

thank you [Music]