Professional Services Playbook

join me in welcoming to the stage Michael maximoff of folderly Michael welcome [Music]

okay hey folks uh it's been a long day I know so bear with me for another 20 minutes okay I'm trying to kind of shake things up and give a nice presentation a lot of content all right uh so um the the reason why Nathan asked me to to do the keynote today is the the the nature of the or the reason why we started the SAS company the first place so I started this agency called Balkans

back in 2017 and now we are rated the number one agency according to Claud G2 and all other ratings we do this appointment setting like lead generation appointment setting for businesses in 50 Industries and we already serviced hundreds of customers worldwide right and the fatherly product is the spin-off of the agency but we didn't close the agency so in a way agencies the parent company that we currently operate and we grow that have their own team and their

own kpi and the fatherly was the brainchild of the agency because we were not able to find the the platform that could solve our problem right so uh what folderly is this platform that helps you to get your emails out of spam so a lot of marketers and sales people or who are in sales and marketing knew that whenever you run a campaign you subsequently end up in spam and uh that's where we ran into when we were building the agency and we had to solve

that so we built the product right and now uh The Way We Grow is that we essentially are building like an ecosystem of products where every product is a complementary to what the agency is doing and all of them are servicing the same type of customers thus increasing the LTE and all of the things right so the so we started the the the the SAS fall delay platform um so we've developed it for about a

year right and these are the sort of like Revenue metrics growth that we have for the for the SAS and we obviously didn't uh you know didn't raise any money or Etc because we had you know we had the agency that can finance that right and I'm gonna talk in a minute about how we kind of packaged our team and what is the um the the cap table etc etc all right so in the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about um the agency and the fatherly and the

cold emailing in general maybe give you some tips folks about how to send a nice cold email right so talking about um the agency so the first one how we tested SAS ideas on agency clients so when we were growing the agency right and we've been growing or doubling every year um and these are the projection of how many clients we had per se right um we were able we were able to work with a lot of different Industries right so and

because of that we were able to collect the feedback out of those Industries on what they need so in a way we were able to understand who from those Industries have bigger problems with fam right for example is it e-commerce or is it computer software or Sasa Etc right and that helps us a lot to be able to understand what are the first industries that we're going to be marketing this to right and um

just going back a bit here um it also helped us a lot uh to be able to understand what industry are ready to pay more for our product and also using this we were able to sell our first clients as the service which I'm going to talk also in a minute so the few things here how we test the sales idea on the agency clients right so first one um

we had as I mentioned clients from the different Industries right the second one our agency clients wear low hanging fruits so imagine this we have this 100 clients that we work as an agency we deliver the service right and we know that this we know these guys because we have an account managers assigned to them uh we know how much money they spend on marketing Etc how big their sales teams are and we know that they are sending code emails right and we know that they have a problem with Spam so the first thing we do is we go to

them you say hey guys we can solve this problem to your to to your sales team and this is how much money that's going to cost so in a way they don't necessarily even need to have a product for this to solve right they just need the pro they have a problem they want the problem to be solved so in a way we start making the first money out of being able to solve the problem and not offer the product and that was a a great sort of like experiment for us because then we we knew who was ready to to pay

us for the problem and how much money they're able to pay us and I will actually go back to this but just want to show you this is one of these first clients that that we had and this is the email that we sent so in a way um what what we realized we're like okay now we need to understand how we can package this so the the folderly as a product was grow from a service so what the what we did we we sell this audit so we came into a client and we say hey

um we wanted to understand what's your current sending reputation is and what the problems are and uh there's an audit that cost two thousand dollars which is obviously we just take it off you know it's not the real number right so we can spend 500 on that but that was the cost that we thought is fair to get that problem fixed artist to pinpoint the problem right so long story short or so you have the customer they say sure and then they we determined that they had like eight mailboxes that they had

problems with we Market those mailboxes and then we we made this first 10 or some you know 10 or ish a thousand dollars from that customer and that's when we realized so the customer is for example a marketing agency they're sending a lot of cold emails they had problems with Spam and they are ready to pay us for this so this money went to financing our developer team right so it means that we already had some money to be able to without even taking off the money of the agency we're able to

essentially to take those money and to be able to invest them into our engineering team right so I think that the my point here is that very often the great thing about the agency is that you have these great clients that you already work with but very often the agencies they still focus on delivering the best service but they're not thinking about how they can actually productize their services how they can sort of like sell the solve the problem that they're solving with the service

with the product and while they already making money how they can create products subsequently that these products will be marketed to the clients that don't necessarily use this agency Services right so so because we already have relationship with these clients selling them this the software was an easy like a no-brainer for us right so that's how we make the first sales then sales service then create a product that's what I said right so we created the service which already solved the problem and we start

selling that service and start making money and then we subsequently created the product um then High Cost of the service gets you easier to sell a product so right now if you go to folder the website you will see that software costs about 200 per seat which is for the SAS is a lot right and if you're a business that has 5 10 sales people then you will be spending 2500 a month on this software alone which is also a lot right because that's another software that you

pay for however if you already pay us a thousand dollars for the service or fifteen thousand dollars for the service right and then we need to object you for now the 400 600 for that then you will go for it right because the total total amount that you pay us every month is not significantly decreased but the value that you receive from that is much higher so in a way um when we start working on our pricing we didn't just one of the reasons why we went to the premium side of the pricing where

because we knew that um our pricing will be compared to our service prices right and that also help us to get that first much higher profit or more profit margins to be able to again spend those money on their enduring spend those money because you know no one you know no one here I think doesn't want to play in the game when you have a low margin on any product because then you cannot risk and you kind of make mistake because if you have a low margin and you make a mistake then it costs you a lot and that's when a lot

of people go through that Etc and uh so I'm Eastern European right and um we obviously cannot uh we you know like in our culture you know we don't have a debt in general so either you have money or you don't because there's no like Banks or institutions that would help you with your business so in a way if I have a hundred dollars then I can spend them if I don't have them then I don't have them and I don't spend them right so in a way with that logic we always were focusing on creating the products

of the services with them with a very high margin uh obviously we need to then deliver on the margin we need to have a much higher quality but the point was that uh we never thought that we're not going to have enough money to because if the customer ready to pay this amount for solving the problem then it's already win for us right um selling the product to low service deals this is this one is cool so when show I want to show you this slide when we have this Belkin's agency we have folder release Force another right

um every company every product has their own sales team and we have different acquisition channels the reason why we're marketing that as a different products because then you can find in every category right so in a way um Elkins is competing with some agencies and it's a very straightforward value proposition faulted with other leads force and other products without the category and all of those generate leads and the great thing is that because it's one team in one company right we are able to sort of like utilize deal of each other to be able to

sell to each one of them so for example if the Belkin's agency been on the market for five years and we already have probably five thousand or six thousand loss deals in our pipeline we are able to access those deals to sell the product right so in a way it's it's decreased the acquisition cost for those and and then we can start like and then because the same is the same ICP right the same ideal customer profile so in a way if the the the Balkans agency is

catering their services to a uh to a small mid-sized or Enterprise type businesses to sales and marketing leaders then all our products and services we develop should cater there's the the their developers into the same type of ICP and in this way we can use the laws deals or deals of of other products to Market them to each other which creates a lot of additional traction during the beginning when you have a product right because when you have a product there you need to get

those first 10 users or 100 users and uh that's that's how we know that whenever we create a new product we are able to have a zero budget but uh we are able to test it to understand whether it has a need or not right delivering a service using a product as a unique value proposition this one is great because the way we were looking about our unique value proposition and I started this appointment setting agency in 2017. you can imagine there was a lot

of companies doing the same and how I was different like do I have a different messaging better Etc right so I was thinking with my partner about how we can create unique value proposition and we focused on email as one of the channels right and when we were focusing on this channel and we created folderly that was our unique selling point for our agency sales people to be able to sell it right because then other agencies are just agency delivering the service and we we are appointable setting agency focusing on email acquisition Channel utilizing our

proprietary technology to be able to uh to get you in front of the customer and close more appointments which is great right so then customer so in a way by creating SAS product I was able to increase my sales numbers for my agency TN because my agency numbers are higher and we can generate more leads and more customers I'm able to upsell those customers with my product which is like a circle right so the more products I create the more I help that initial company and then it's a circle circle

right so again the point here is that um whenever and again I I think I I was very lucky to be able to start in the service industry because I was able to know how to make money and how to service customer because in service industry um chart matters and sometimes in one of your customer churn then it leads to a laser layoff etc etc right so we knew how to make sure that we can minimize

the churn and we knew that um whenever I were if I were to start in any other service business I would still make sure that that service is delivered on a higher standard that we can grow that service but at the same time um I can create product to support those Services that's I'll kind of do that all over again right um another Point sell products by uh by giving them better deal on service to get them hooked up right the same goes

so for example I can sell the service and I can give them um that my product as a complimentary to healthy service right and then use agency clients as initial product which is like uh as I said so I show you this so this is the the table so when we started the um so I actually wanted to show you this first so I've mentioned this Belkin system agency it's a group we have this back-end office that consists of admin HR recruitment financial and legal and we have this

product services that we market and everyone have their own obviously team and the kpis ETC right and uh the great thing is that I was able to get my first team on the SAS um of the agency to be able to build that product without actually financing it and then after we've successfully launched it and we see the traction then those folks they were able to build the team within uh you know their verticals and then those teams start working on followers separately but I didn't sort

of like you know went and and sort of like hired the team and built the product so it was organic sort of like building from uh of the agency right um so in terms of uh in terms of the cup table right so this is how the cap table looks for us so we don't give away Equity to anyone so me and my partner so the way it works is um the way it works is uh we are purely Performance Based and revenue sharing

based so in a way we believe that uh if we make money we make money and split them together so when I started agency all the people that started with us and the sea level and generally everyone is like Performance Based so um in our organization everyone has to have their own individual salary spreadsheet that they can fill out their their compensation themselves so in a way they have their base they have their table with bonuses Etc and then everyone is Performance Based so if you're a

salesperson or like account manager or even like a developer you can make more money out of your performance if the company performs better right because they they so everything is very open so because of that everyone is super hyped for being efficient and show the better number because the more money we make as the company obviously the more money you can put in your own pocket which is great as as a result no one no one talks about uh stocks Etc because everyone are

in this you know in this situation where every next year the more you work the the higher your percentages or the more companies make your salary growth your bonuses grows your your you know creating more value for yourself or your family etc etc and as a result um most of the people in the company they are Performance Based right and they make money of the kpis that they make of the company performance in general um there are some people that gets the

the profit sharing right um usually these are hats or sea level and whenever we start a new product within this organization then essentially if that product is successful like folderly then the person who built that product is able to get the revenue sharing from the whole company so in a way you are interested in building the great product because then you you can feed off all the other products were successful and everyone in the company interested in having as many successful products as we can because

everyone will be taking off money from all this product so it's a it's a shared responsibility for the success of all the products and sharing resources so all the marketing people all the template writer copywriters designers they care about each and every new product in the company to be successful because that's going to lead to their success right um the the few things that we did so bootstrapping performance as I said right so it means that um from the so the first thing that I did was when I started the company and I

had you know and had nothing in terms of the bank account right uh we built a p l and we make sure that every money that came in from the customer are categorized so I knew where we spend every dollar from the start part of the company and because of that we knew that we knew how to efficiently spend money right so we couldn't invest money to go to a trade show because we knew that we can spend the same much of money for example buying some leads and sending some emails and then we can generate more clients so we can be efficiently

spending this money in a different direction right uh we always and and because right now everyone in Performance Based and revenue sharing they also think twice before spending money so it means that whenever you send Whenever you set up a budget for a marketing leader for example hundred thousand dollars a month they won't want to spend this hundred thousand dollars a month because they knew that the more money they spend the less money they get so they would want to be smart about the money they spend so if they spend for example seven thousand dollars they

would say okay well I re I get my kpis done for the lowering amount of money so now I can make more money of myself and the company right so we were uh you know our clients came from the outbound obviously emails our the first clients that we know how to Market them agency gave us the first clients and then the these clients now are shared and the new product that we're releasing we're using agency as you know as as the sort of like donor area for the clients

um because email drivability and spam is a new problem we're currently working on creating a lot of content and educating users and that help us to also grow and you know in terms of the brand and and marketing generally and we also are able to set up new market benchmarks and kpi by doing a lot of study as well as you know um and then I'm gonna share in a minute some numbers with you in terms of the average open rates industry rates that we were able to collect because we were able to service so many businesses and send so many emails right uh we're

focusing a lot on the key studies and reviews so I've you know I realized that obviously whenever you grow a business um having external testimonials very important for the acquisition right so right now because we have you know hundreds for the agency for example we have hundreds or you know video testimonials case studies you know like external testimony all of them then our sales team are able just to send the links and it's a no-brainer for the customer to know who is the best in the game right but for us to get to this

point we were we had to ask every customer hey can you leave this we're having so much fun right now there's some great results can you leave it we need to so we follow up every customer we even have a kpi inside our team for our account manager to be able to collect this many reviews every month because that's the only way you will do it gradually and you do it consistently every month without and that help us to be the leaders and then obviously the premium support which I'm not going to be talking about right so this is the

contract that is available on this drive that Nathan is giving away that the example of the contract that we used to uh to send uh to to close service clients for the product um and then real quick so talking about the cold emailing right because I know I'm out of time uh this is the the way how the cold emailing well generally how the email works so whenever you start sending out an email um you think like oh well I have an email I send it recipient either

received it or not but on the backhand under the hood there are also things going on at the same time right so the most important things are there is the sender reputation right the setup as the content and that would so for example when you see the screen the first line is Right whenever you send out an email it uh so the email when you send the recipient it automatically assign your settings like the game settings and some other so it's very important for whenever you

send a cold email make sure that your DNS records are set up set up correctly sorry and very often because we are using so many tools um we are to engineering them and that's why a lot of time we see for our customers that their DNS records are not set up correctly and that helps their the main reputation right the next what this you know based on the process what it does is that um the spam filters they check in your policies and then based on that they

just uh they check the IP reputation and The Blacklist and then they check your content and then on the last third line you see when they decide if all is good then they bypass it if something is wrong then in current unit and if it's something is really bad then they reject it all together but if it's quarantined or rejected then it harms your reputation so in a way the more balanced emails you have uh the more people Market is Spam or more spam words you have in the content that affects your

reputation and it's it stores in on on the you know in the databases of this spam filters so in a way subsequently in the future whenever you're going to be sending the same emails but maybe to a different group of people their reputation of your campaign will be much lower because of the result of your previous campaigns right so which is important so this is the the link to this document where we uh so we collected over 10 million emails that we were sending over last like four years

to 100 on the behalf of thousands of customers and we were able to get the average open rate and every little probably rate of the of the cold emailing so you're able to access this document through this link and you can see for example whenever you're planning your call that email campaign and you want to email e-learning you can say for example where you need to be in terms of your email open rate and the prior rate right and then the last one is 10 uh 10 tips or 10 things you need to keep in

mind whenever you run a campaign all right so first one validate your prospect emails right that's very important so there are a lot of tools we recommend using zero bounce as a tool to do that so make sure that all the emails are valid we even don't recommend to using catch all emails just the valid emails right uh reached out to the target audience to avoid spam flagging so by target audience I mean um it's better to be very targeted in terms of who you email to so don't just buy a database and just send a blast be

very targeted in terms of who and how you send in emails to so it's better to spend more money on this very nice targeted 100 or 500 leads and get the result out of them then blasting 5 000 emails and getting a 0.5 open rate right as I mentioned set up your DNS correctly you can use our platform for that uh create engaging content subject line matters so the way uh so the idea is that the the more open rate repair rates and engagement rates you have for your

emails uh the better your reputation is and the higher your reputation is it means that General you're going to have more open range so it means that if you have a very low engagement rate then uh you need to work on that because by having higher you're gonna set up yourself for Success um average sequence of emails five six follow-ups adhere to the Natural mailbox limit so the setup matters so for example our

perfect setup for the cold emailing is um Google as the ESP and Tool reply.io or outreach.io as the engagement platform to sending out emails and when I'm using Google snesp one mailbox has a natural limit of under 250 emails per day that can be sent with the delay about 200 seconds between emails so it means that I can send only 200 because if I send more then it harms my reputation and I really wanted those 60

to 70 open rates right uh personalization is the key show show me you know me right so personalize your Outreach as previous speakers were talking right always a B test of course uh different Industries different icps different templates right uh never use personal emails right so we never email to anyone with like a Gmail and Yahoo and others you use only corporate in mailboxes because in a way I can probably for example my mailbox boxes Michael at belkins.io right which is

like I think a half percent have 50 of the people have the mailboxes with their name and the domain name so I can find it basically just by Google it right so which is fine and then don't be afraid to mix the other channels to your Outreach to drive the best results so um obviously I didn't have time to explain our Omni Channel approach to marketing but we are doing a lot of those things but the idea is that um even though we are email focused we still invest a lot into different channels to mix them up and to be able

to create the customer a more holistic approach to their buying Journey right so really focusing on all the channels so if you're not using all the channels then you should start using them obviously some more heavily some less heavily but at the end of the day it's about being everywhere and hitting as many doors as you can oh thank you very much [Applause] [Music]