AI-Driven Lead Generation | Toby Blatchford-Tagg | S1E18

Utsav Bhatt: Welcome to Alt Consulting, where we do AI adoption conversations. My name is Uttsav Pat. I founder of StratOff. We help companies drive AI adoption and innovation-led growth.

One area that has been fundamentally transformed by AI is lead generation. Not too long ago, generating leads meant hiring researchers, telemarketers, appointment setters, executive assistants, and essentially having a whole prospecting team who would spend hours to identify ⁓ customers and general. Reaching out to them. Today, much of that work can be automated, augmented, or even accelerated using AI.

So the question is: what does this mean for businesses that build their success around these capabilities? What needs to transform, and what we can learn from the changes which are happening in lead generation space ever since AI came into picture. We'll be discussing that today. My guest today is Toby Tag, founder and CEO of the Lead Lab, a UK-based B2B lead generation agency.

Toby has spent countless years helping companies build pipeline generating opportunities and adapt to changing ways of selling. ⁓ Welcome the podcast, Tobi. ⁓ Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Utsav Bhatt: ⁓ me start with a very simple question. When you look at lead generation today versus when you first started, what has changed? ⁓ Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Oh my God, it's almost like chalk and cheese. I started doing telemarketing out of college.

I worked for a window selling company and you had a piece of paper with people's names and a phone number and a ruler and a highlighter and you just manually put it in the highlighter, went on to the next one and so on. And that was, God, that was 25, 26 years ago. Then started a company probably 20 years ago that was a telemarketing business. Through that process, starting with manual dialing on spreadsheets, all the way through to auto dialing and then like multi dialing so it would ring five people and then connect you a few answers.

And then all the way through to moving to LinkedIn automation where telemarketing just became a bit of a dying hour and really hard to get an outsourced CPA, a good CPA on. And so we moved into LinkedIn dormation. We had a sort of eureka moment where we were getting all of our leads from LinkedIn and selling people telemarketing. And we were like, we don't even do telemarketing ourselves.

And we get it at cost. So there's a hell of a journey for us. But I think every company is different. I still know companies out there that do telemarketing.

It's really successful for them. Don't get me wrong, it's in a huge decline from a percentage point of view as far as businesses go doing that. But I'm very careful when I talk about all this stuff because we work with so many different businesses. LinkedIn automation can work for most businesses, though their target market's on LinkedIn.

But when you're talking about AI and you're talking about telemarketing, et cetera, although percentages are dropping on certain things and dropping and going up on others, it always seems to be like a nuanced answer, depending on the client and their wild they're in. Like, just to take AI, for example, like AI for some of our experiences. Messaging wise comes across really well in consumer that are you know proactive buyers from social ads and stuff like that But in business those messages don't tend to work as well people expect more bespoke more professional engagement so let us It's just about what's right for you really Utsav Bhatt: so at what point actually you realize that AI is gonna fundamentally change how this work gets done?

Toby Blatchford-Tagg: It was more of a weakness in what I was doing already. ⁓ You know, you see something's better. ⁓ you know, even ⁓ had telemarketing company or something. We still do a bit of telemarketing, but it's like five percent of our business now.

But pre covid we had 40 telemarketers, ⁓ about 25 the B2B space, about 15 in B2C. The B2C space was a different company altogether. It was a separate brand because it specialized in B2C calling. And I sold out of that business just because I didn't see it had a big future from a human perspective of calling consumer.

didn't really have the MD of the company at the time didn't really have the skill set to do ads, which I think was going to be the background of it. And then also the fact that you could see with a time people aren't even going to manually be ringing a consumer lead. They're going to get contacted by AI and book the meeting because they've already engaged with social content. So It was more about seeing the fact that also there was a decline in what you were doing.

Like B2B telemarketing was on the decline from a results perspective and B2C was also on the same. I even look through now and obviously we changed seven odd years ago now, but people try to ring you and it comes up saying, me who you are before you even answer the phone. So like any of those companies out there doing cold calling B2B or B2C, like good luck to you because ⁓ ringing a reception's never worked. Now you start ringing people's mobile numbers, it's even worse because they've got a built-in AI receptionist saying, who are you, before you even pick up the phone.

So, and then obviously we're constantly learning. Like we've gone through different phases of how good something is. Like we're doing AI calling at the minute and we're actually selling it as well as a product, as a sort of, you know, newer part of our business. But we tried to do it two years ago and it just wasn't good enough.

So it's almost like you've got to constantly be testing and measuring new markets with these technologies changing. to see what can work for you and for your clients. And we've sort of gone on that journey. And sometimes, like you say, when we did the AI calling first time two years ago, it wasn't good enough.

And then a year ago, we went again. And it's much, much better now. And don't get me wrong, we don't use it for a lot of our clients, but we have a few niche clients that it works perfectly for. But my point, as you're getting to, is that just because you try something once, especially when it's technology-based marketing, AI, it doesn't mean it's not going to work again a year later.

⁓ and I, one of the reasons that drove us towards a lot of that stuff is the human, we're obviously based in the UK. We have an office in South Africa as well, but the cost of staff in the UK is, is astronomical, to be transparent, ⁓ same in the U S where majority of our client base is in the U S, ⁓ and the UK. So, you know, all these things lead you to look for other solutions, AI, international resource, all these things that just. make you competitive basically.

Utsav Bhatt: So let's get into ⁓ some details here and and for a moment let's step back and look at the entire process. Now many of the listeners might not be even aware of what a modern B2B lead generation process actually looks like. ⁓ because people are cum accustomed to sending emails, you have a referral call and then you speak to a customer or they reach out to you on website because your SEO optimized that world is gradually shifting and shaping differently. so for website discovery now you have AI based discovery which is happening and there's a whole different automation happening there.

So when you talk about B2B lead generation, if you could just sort of step back and explain it to someone who might not be privy to the process in depth, what has actually changed? What does modern B2B lead generation process look like? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, well, we obviously are specialized in LinkedIn automation at scale. So that's taking multiple profiles where it's three, five, 10 or 100.

And we have clients in all those categories. There's three core parts to it. There's creating the perfect data set for the outreach, which we do a webinar every three weeks. So if people want to go to the website, in, we give lots of like points and tips on how to do this stuff yourself.

But just to give you some of the over top things. One, obviously, is your copywriting, the messaging journey that you're writing from LinkedIn Outreach. Obviously, it's going to go to lots of people, so you need to make sure it's going to get people to respond, and we go through that in the webinar. Also, the data management.

Common mistake people make is they trust Sales Navigator at scale, so they'll pull 1,000 contacts from Sales Navigator in. We almost always cleanse at least 30 % of that. We always take 30 % out, which the average user might not know to do or have the time to do, et cetera. Then, obviously, response management.

being consistent with the responses, but also lead enrichment. So once you get a positive response on LinkedIn, the ability to call them on their mobile or on their email address is super powerful. It's no longer a cold call. You can ring and say, even on the silly AI thing that comes up on your phone now, oh, you spoke to my colleague, Steven Peterson on LinkedIn, I was just answering questions.

They're obviously going to pick up because they've obviously engaged on LinkedIn. So that's what we do. We do LinkedIn automation from start to finish, all done for you at scale. Again, might be three profiles, might be 100, depends on the size of your company.

And what we try to do is flip the script on LinkedIn. Like people want you on LinkedIn, going through the newsfeed, going through their inbox because you're a consumer. What we do is we turn you into a seller rather than the consumer. Like our goal is you only touch LinkedIn when someone's interested.

We'll email you and say, ⁓ you've had a positive response from Peter or Sally or whoever. They want to know how much it is. Jump on LinkedIn and respond. then yourself or your company, other directors, your sales team, scrolling.

People are posting their runs now on LinkedIn, wasting their time basically. Posting content is really hard to get leads from and engagement from. So from a cost per acquisition point of view, which is obviously what we look at as a marketing company, is that in-mails cost a hell of a lot more, especially at scale. And ads are even worse than that to be transparent.

The best CPA you can get on LinkedIn is LinkedIn Automation at Scale. That's just a matter of fact. So we facilitate that with clients and do it on a monthly basis as and when they need it basically. Utsav Bhatt: Yeah.

⁓ one thing like no just to make it practical, you know, often ⁓ in in the consulting world there's understanding that you can't sell consulting projects on LinkedIn. Like you can ⁓ share your thought leadership, your ideas, you can connect with people, let them know that you know you are writing about a particular topic, ⁓ you are a thought leader an area. ⁓ but LinkedIn is not a place where you sell say a hundred thousand dollar project. ⁓ Now ⁓ might be right, be but ⁓ would love to sort of Learn from you on how certain big ticket ⁓ projects or services ⁓ if you have experience in that area could be sold by a platform like LinkedIn.

And I'm asking that specifically because in in today's day and age you have so much of content which is AI generated and so many sort of inbounds that people receive that it becomes a bit tricky to navigate that and ensure you get a good engagement ⁓ from people. So ⁓ would love to know if there is new, interesting that you have found for selling high-ticket products, services. services on LinkedIn using automation services. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Well, we have a number of clients in the high ticket space.

Now, from our point of view, if they have a small market or whatever, they can work with us for as little as £450 or $620 a month. So it's very easy for them to get return on a high ticket offering. Obviously, they need size of market to do that. But what we tend to find is writing...

Obviously, our expertise come from writing the messaging. Now... It's really hard to communicate to someone who's not done LinkedIn outreach for 10 years on how to write that messaging journey properly. It's not the same as email outreach.

It's his own entity. I guess to keep it really brief and over the view, it's one, it's never about me. People make that mistake constantly. Also, it's almost like you want it to feel like a chat.

Like end of the day, it's like in platform, it's like Facebook, it's like Instagram, et cetera. So you need to communicate in a similar way. As soon as you write an email on LinkedIn, people won't necessarily give you the time to read it all. So you've got to get their attention very quickly.

Also, the more of an email it looks like, the more automated it looks like. You want to look like Toby just sent you a message because he thought he could benefit them. And also, it's about the hook. So that first line or two is the most important thing in the whole thing.

It's about how you communicate benefit to them in that instant. Now obviously there's a lot of detail around how we do that and again in our webinar that we run every three weeks, which you can check out on our website and book onto. We go into more detail on that. We go into more detail on the data, the response management, the lead enrichment, all the little bits of the puzzle that make it work.

People, what tends to happen is people do LinkedIn automation themselves because they've got a marketing personal, they're a director, they attach their profile to a software and it's, you know. It's not done properly in short. There's ones out there that will do AI to attach to it. But there's so many nuances in business where if you fall down on one of those three categories, LinkedIn automation is going to fail.

If your data is not right, if your messaging journey is not right, if your response management is not right, you are not going to get leads. You only need one of those to be wrong. then so if people are doing it themselves without that experience, you can imagine how many people are dropping the ball on one, maybe two of those every time. So it's just about Obviously, sorry to keep going about it.

We can obviously educate people on how to do it right if you want to do it yourself. We're massive believers of the free education comes back to you in the long term. Like the amount of people that have come back to us a year later or recommended us but not used us or tried to do it themselves after we taught them and been like, I'm got time for this. You know, can you guys do it for me?

⁓ Is is quite quite dramatic. Utsav Bhatt: you look at how AI is changing lead generation more broadly, if you look at the industry, ⁓ what is something that was earlier ⁓ say a would say is our competitive edge, ⁓ and now AI is quickly turning it into a commodity. ⁓ Is there sort of in the whole process which is like ⁓ no longer? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Well, speed of response is a huge thing for AI and lead generation.

And obviously, you know, this is caveat by what lead, what AI is used with, whether it's B2C, how interested the lead is, all that stuff. But take away all that detail, just the literal speed of response is an absolute game changer for lead generation. Again, challenging in B2B and not necessarily something I would recommend using for most clients, but B2C extremely powerful. Also, you can do like hybrids.

Like we have a couple of things where we'll use like half AI, which allow you to draft quicker and stuff like that, to respond quicker, but at the same time making it your own. The other thing just to be safe, especially to speak niche on LinkedIn is that LinkedIn obviously hate AI. Their biggest fear is that Toby and it's have go on to LinkedIn and are talking to their bots. So they are have seen accounts be.

put in big trouble because they attach AI communication fully, i.e. they're literally talking to their bot. So that's not something I would definitely recommend.

But I think it's really hard to speak about it broadly because there's just so many, it's hard for us to speak particularly because of the nuance of all the businesses we work with. I think the key thing comes down to is you have to explore it for your business and you have to minimize the risk. When people are out there thinking, need to get into it, the best thing to do is look and there's the old saying about being accepted of the three outcomes. You know, one, what's the worst that can happen?

You know, am I comfortable with that? If I try this AI product or service, what's the, what's likely to happen and what's the best that's going to happen. If you can live with the bottom one and minimize the risk of the cost to try it, et cetera, it could dramatically change your business. And this is taking it from someone who's done that.

failed a year later, gone again and done it in the AI space because when it does work, is game changing for your company. And as I was reiterating earlier, the technology is always changing. So you constantly have to be exploring. And the best way to do that is to try to find ways to explore it at a minimal risk to yourself.

Because there's companies out there that want 20, 40 grand off you just to try something, which obviously can be real challenging when you just want to test an AI thing. that may or may not work in your space. Utsav Bhatt: ⁓ could you give an example of a company or a client in terms of what was the impact they had when they moved to a ⁓ sort of an automated way reaching out and doing lead gen, ⁓ in terms of numbers, impact, any process they might have changed, just so that ⁓ you know, people listening to ⁓ this podcast would get a sense of ⁓ what changes and what's the of change.

⁓ Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, well, there's so many channels like for example, one of our biggest clients has 135 of their their CFOs on our system and What what we tend to find is that they were doing a lot of email before that over the last well for years to be fair Up until the last couple of years they still do email But it really fell off a cliff in the last couple of years and they started with us a couple of years ago And it's almost been a 4x from a return perspective on what they would get against email.

So dramatically profitable, but also dramatically profitable against email. So if you think of, and there's many companies and we really exploded in 2024 because that was a massive year for an email fall off. So you can imagine all these companies out there that had this long-term sustainable channel that's drip fed them leads constantly, then overnight it's vanished. It would stop performing quite dramatically.

And that's still the same, be honest. not quite, it has got a little bit better to be transparent, but it's nowhere near as good as it was back in, you know, 2023, 2022. Email was really booming, but it's really dropped off now. So that's just an example of someone who changed channel because I say changed channel, but allocated more budget to a new channel and they tried something and that test, that measure of, okay, there's some proof of concept here in this space.

We're not doing it. whether it's automation or AI, has paid off for them dramatically because now they've got a number one channel they didn't have before at a much better cost, 25 % of the cost based on the returns being a 4X on their email outreach. Utsav Bhatt: Yeah. ⁓ so with the changes that we are seeing in the over the past two decades from you know telemarketing to some sort of automation to AI enabled automation, ⁓ moving from emails to LinkedIn, what's next?

If you look at next five to ten years, ⁓ what do you think is the future of Lead Gen? What is the Lead Lab thinking about as you grow your business right now? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: for me, it's a bit of a guessing game because I'm not a tech mind. Obviously, I have lived this journey.

What I would say is, you know, the quality of AI photos these days. I had my partner play a prank on me where she put someone in our house. And I was like, I was literally driving home to be like, who's this person in our house? I think with time that's going to happen with calling, which will dramatically improve the AI calling.

Now we do AI calling at the minute, but it's allocated to a very small section of our client base because of the imperfections of it. But I can't not see a world in five years time where you can't tell the difference between talking to Toby Blatcher Tag or Toby Blatcher Tag AI. Now don't get me wrong. Technology might be able to tell so the likes of LinkedIn may be able to tell that you're doing that and that'll be a big problem and they'll just ban accounts but when someone picks up the phone a consumer or even you know a small business owner whoever it may be I Think they could get to a point where you can't tell the difference and now that's me guessing and you know up to Elon Musk and whoever out there in the world creating this stuff, but ⁓ I Just don't foresee a world in five years time where that's not happening And even where they change laws where if you do make phone calls, you have to pronounce out the front end that it's AI, because I think that's the way a lot of things are going.

I think there'll be a lot of laws in place to protect consumers, whether it's B2B or B2C from talking to AI, because they are useful tools, but no one wants to talk to a robot, especially unknowingly. I think if people are fine with it as a consumer because they just want the thing, whether it's they've applied to a social ad. and then they get called by an hour and they're like, okay, that's your process and I want this product, then so be it. But I guess they are in on it, if you like, as opposed to, you know, being tricked to pretend it's me when it's not me, if that makes sense.

Utsav Bhatt: what's lesson from your own AI journey that leaders in other industries should pay attention to? ⁓ And I asked that because you have ⁓ sort of transformed your organization from a ⁓ telemarketing team, you know, forty people, ⁓ now the business shrunk and you took a conscious decision of moving into a direction. ⁓ That's easier said than done, right? Just to move into a new direction and getting to a it's it's extremely tough.

⁓ so what would be one advice would you want to give to folks who are paying attention to AI but still figuring out what to do? Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah. I think ⁓ you've obviously I touch on that you've always got to be trying things. I also think as you get older you a lot of people I think my first 10 years of business, you know, it's just like a rat running on a wheel trying to grow whatever is in front of me.

And I think COVID was a really good reset for me where you get to build the business you want. And I think that's something MD should do more of where they aren't just growing a business, they're growing the business they want to grow. ⁓ Just because you know, mental health in men these days, you know, all the negatives that come with the stress of being a small business owner or a large business owner are quite dramatic. So end of the day, as you get older, you realize what's more important and growing a business that is more enjoyable.

It's easy for me to say because having a telemarketing company with 40 staff where you are basically the sales director to 30, 40 clients and they ring up being like, hey, I didn't get any leads today. Your telemarket didn't get any leads. And it's like, You put the phone down, you get the same call. That's tough, you know?

And the beautiful thing about LinkedIn automation is it's not necessarily reliant on a person. In that sense, there's no blame game. It's like, okay, we've written this copy for you. Maybe the copy, we could change it.

But it doesn't have the same hiding place of, why didn't you tell me, Mark, get me a lead today? And that when you multiply that pressure, it's really huge. So I think build a business that's going to make you happy. I think that's the number one.

think a lot of people get lost in that. They get lost chasing their goals. I did that for the first 10 years. I remember pre-COVID playing tennis with my business partner and he told me something that happened to the business, which I didn't know about.

And I snapped and smashed my racket. And I'm not that sort of person whatsoever. so, yeah, I mean, the number one advice I would give is, you know, you're in your business, you're working in it. Is it the business you want?

And if it's not the business you want, even more, you need to be exploring these other things. because you can still be in the same space, but you can totally change the business. I'm a good example of that. You know, we're still in lead generation, but we do something that we love and we're passionate about.

And we don't dislike, to be honest, because you get to a point where you dislike telemarketing. And obviously, my journey aligns with the fact that, you know, telemarketing doesn't really work anymore from a cost per acquisition point of view. So, yeah, I think. Choose happiness over just financial goals sometimes because I've made an awful lot of money in a year and I've made less money in a year.

I can tell you I was happier in the year I made less money because of the company I ran. So that's just my personal experience at 40 years old. And that we're looking to keep on growing the business and take it to another level. But I'm happy to do that because I love this business now.

I didn't love it 10 years ago. Utsav Bhatt: Very well put. And I think if I had to sort of summarize ⁓ one one other point that you had mentioned earlier is keep experimenting because ⁓ I think three years back ⁓ the kind of images which all these AI tools were generating were, you know, not interesting to to now you're not able to make a difference. In fact I received a call last week and it seemed like an AI bot talking to me in in the native language and saying, Hey, ⁓ you sort of gave a request to ⁓ check on a new property development which is happening and I'm like Toby Blatchford-Tagg: for example.

Utsav Bhatt: Am I talking to a bot? You're like, no, no, you're not talking to a bot. I'm like, no, no, I think I'm definitely talking to talking to a bot. But but what made me sort of ⁓ sort of ⁓ take notice is it's matter of time when it'll become so good that you can't make the difference.

The latency will go down, it'll be more natural, it'll not waste your time. And sort of then sort of it becomes a real formidable thing to Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yeah, I've done that. I've done that myself. Yeah, yeah, I've that myself.

Well, the fact that both of us have done that, have literally been on the phone with a real person and asked if it's a bot, is just a sign. I mean, we are obviously nuanced in the sense that we do, we live in that world. So we almost, the other side of the current, so we were thinking about it, but someone just sounds a certain way on a phone call, you think, is this a real person? But yeah, it's funny.

Utsav Bhatt: Hmm. Yeah. One one last thing which I want to ask, ever since you mentioned about LinkedIn automation, there are a lot of sort of ⁓ conversations and and questions with people ask on how effective it is. Any sort of numbers which you want to share in terms of benchmark or what's a good response rate, close rate, because ⁓ the numbers on telemarketing is very clear, on email marketing is pretty clear, it's going down.

⁓ but in terms of link automation, what have you seen as the best case scenario for you to get a response from someone that you absolutely don't know about, but if you target really well, you know, you might get a conversation going. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Yes, I mean that we see a range. So we see a reply rate all the way from 10 % to 70 % for our clients. The difficulty is they're across multiple sectors, multiple size businesses, different job titles.

We've got people that target janitors, know, cleaners, head of cleaning inside a company. there's a lot of variables. So I think you obviously ideal, why would you want to be at a minimum in between 25 % and 50 as a sort of range. The range is broader than that, but that's good, and that's acceptance rate.

And from there, you're looking at a reply rate of hopefully around, because once they accept, they're go on the messaging journey, you're get a reply rate of around hopefully 10%, and then in that 10%, you're probably gonna get 1 % that's positive. So if you reach out to 2,500 people in a month, Utsav Bhatt: Yeah. Mm. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: and you get $1,200 accept, then it's quite good lead flow from that.

And then that's really what it comes down to, the volume. The reason we could do two and a half, even at our entry point, is because it's across three profiles. Five profiles, 4,000. 10 profiles, 8,000, and so on, right?

As soon as, and I think a common mistake people make with LinkedIn Outreach is they are a director or a marketing person, they put their own profile on there, they do it for a couple of months and then they stop. And it's like, that's too small a test. It is a volume play. and doing one profile and especially not doing one profile with the experience of LinkedIn outreach and how it should be done properly is probably why people fall on their face and one of the most common things we get is companies come to us and say, I put my profile on Duck Soup.

I got a couple of leads, but da da da da. And I said, no problem. We basically do that times three times five times 10 on steroids done for you. We'll just email you when the leads come in and you've got a lovely solid lead flow.

⁓ Utsav Bhatt: Yeah. Yeah. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: to grow your business and all good businesses are built on multiple marketing pillars. Not just one, not just two, as many as you can fit in at a good cost per acquisition.

Utsav Bhatt: And I think one one thing which I would sort of say in conclusion is when it comes to lead generation, ⁓ what I have learned the hard way is ⁓ consistency and up. ⁓ and running a system, running a process is much more powerful than having momentary ⁓ you know, motivation to reach out to like sort of fifteen, twenty people. So when you go with a proper lead generation system, ⁓ an agency can done it repeatedly ⁓ irrespective of you are, what mood you are in, you're feeling like reaching out to people or not, ⁓ somebody doing for you I think is a Is a big thing and it sort of shows up after a couple of months when the system keeps on running and then you sort of start seeing the lead.

So Toby, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for sharing your insights. And thank you everyone who is listening. ⁓ if you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to the channel and join us for more discussions on AI adoption and organizational transformation.

See you next time. Toby Blatchford-Tagg: Exactly.