Maeva Cifuentes: Intentional Sales and Long-Term Growth

So, welcome back to Leaders Consulting, the show that brings you interviews with experts in the trenches at the forefront of consulting, sharing their own perspectives, tips, and resources they picked up along the way for your benefit. On this episode, we're joined by Maeve C. Fuentes, who is the CEO of Flying Cat, which is a marketing agency, and she's an expert in SEO and content for B2B SaaS companies, That's business-to-business software as a service companies, as well as starting and scaling her own agency.

With that agency, Flycat Marketing, she's helped B2B SaaS companies like ActiveCampaign, Hotjar, Mixmax, Stonely, Livestorm, and the list goes on. She's helped those companies drive predictable and sustainable month-on-month growth through search, scaling her agency from $0 million to $1 million. I think that's in revenue, isn't that right? In 18 months.

So, Maiva, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Jonathan. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, it's great to have you on. So, Maiva, why don't you start us off with a unique approach, tip-toller strategy that you feel maybe someone in your position a couple of years ago could have really known about, but maybe they don't? There's so many things, Jonathan. So picking one is really difficult for me.

And especially what I thought about is something that I've learned more recently. I've been doing a lot of work on sales and sales process and forecasting and just building out a really strong sales process. A little bit of background when I started, it was a lot of word of mouth, referrals. We are in a very small industry because we were focused on vacation rental technology, vacation rental SaaS, which is super, super niche.

So I never really had to do that much sales. And I wanted to expand. So just this year, focus has been being really intentional about our sales. So one unique tip that I can give, or I can actually give two that I've learned quite recently is because even as you mentioned in the description, I talk a lot about month over month growth.

But since we actually do long-term growth, what I used to do is forecast in terms of monthly growth. And then at the end, say, okay, this is how much monthly growth you'll have at the end. But one unique easy tip is in forecasting is actually multiply that number by 12, because then you're looking at yearly incremental growth. And it just looks like a lot more compelling number.

And it puts us in the perspective of building long term, which is really what we're trying to do with SEO. So that's one tip. It's just it feels like cheating, but it's not cheating because it's actually it is the number that we're going after and it is the number that we can drive. It's just a shift in focus.

So that's something that I started implementing recently. and just shifting the proposals, the way that we've been doing proposals. I've changed it so much over the last six months. And I've done a lot, a lot of work, just trying to find that angle of how do we show the value that we give to the client without doing all of the work, without doing all the strategy work.

So we've just found it in the middle of doing this, what we are calling mini strategies. And it's basically just doing this kind of forecasting, benchmarking, and just really showing being unique in each proposal to the client. I think that this is really important. It really adds a lot of value rather than doing just showing them a cookie cutter, the same puzzle, that same slide deck that you take everybody through, this has really made a big difference for us and has taken us from the clients being like, okay, interesting, but this looks like the same proposal as any other SEO agency to them saying, it's really clear what we need to do, why and why the value is this much.

So just do custom-made proposals. That is my unique approach and tip. Yeah, interesting. And would you be able to walk through what that process looks like i mean one of the one of the dangers with setting out custom proposals is you spend so much time and effort and work on those proposals that sometimes don't materialize is there anything that you've done or is there anything kind of baked into your process that minimizes that risk yes so i've actually done spend a lot of time on this and it works for us because we're an seo agency i don't know how this would work for other kinds of consultants.

But I've identified these four different archetypes for kinds of SEO work. So there's the builder, which is a website that has not invested in SEO at all. And they need all of their pages created from scratch. And optimizer, which is a website that has already invested in SEO.

And they just need to optimize these pages. So basically, I've created these four different archetypes. And based on the archetype that they are, there is a set. This is the goals that they have in the beginning.

And these are the kind of exactly the framework that will follow. So I invested a lot in setting up the framework that we follow depending on the archetype. And then I've created the kind of templated proposals based on that. And then we just kind of fill in the answers.

So it's work that I've invested a lot in creating these frameworks that for us, it's a very similar process depending on what kind of archetype we define them as. But for the client, it feels really custom because it says, oh, this is your situation. This is the market. These are your problems.

And this is the kind of goals we'll go after. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. It sounds like you've built something that's somewhat unique to the way that you approach things from other SEO solutions out there.

Yeah, we invested a lot of time in figuring this all out. But I think it feels pretty unique. We have a whole framework we call a foundation's growth scale. And this helps us find, it's not only for the sales process, really, it's also for fulfillment and implementation that we have this, this is what it looks like, depending on the archetype, which allows us to be both flexible have that kind of flexible custom feel to it but also repeatable and scalable Excellent I love that Both repeatable and scalable at the same time And I curious you know your your backgrounds you you obviously you have an aptitude for languages, I understand.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but you started out doing freelance translation. How did you go from freelancing as a translator to deciding to start an agency and into the world of SEO. I'm curious how that transition happened and what made you decide that you wanted to build a team to work alongside with you? Yeah, that's a good question.

Yeah, I was a translator for almost a decade. My parents are translators as well. So I followed in their footsteps. And initially I focused on legal translation.

So I was working with a lot of contracts, court transcriptions, and those kinds of things. And I started getting into marketing, which I found more interesting. It was funnier to work with marketers than with lawyers. So I was translating marketing copy.

And slowly, I got into copywriting and content writing from there until I found that a little bit more interesting than translating. It felt more creative to me. I'm also the kind of person who just likes to have new challenges over and over again. So I was writing a lot of content, but it was for really small companies or solopreneurs or just really early, early stage startups that didn't really understand why they were creating the content.

They just thought that they had to, but they didn't have any kind of distribution plan in place. They didn't really know how they were going to get people's eyeballs on it. So I started getting really curious about that and asking them, well, how is my work? How's your investment in my work making an impact for you or giving you a return.

So I experimented with different channels, social media, email, until I started learning SEO, which I really enjoyed. And I really felt like it was the channel that I cracked the code to. So I started my own blog as well, experimenting, and it was very successful. After a while, after a decade of working by myself and all the losses are mine, all the wins are mine, all the struggles are mine, And I just missed having a team, to be honest.

I wanted to share this journey with people. And even though I went to co-working spaces and I met people there, it wasn't really the same experience for me. And I just dreamt of having a team that I could celebrate things with and that we could all work together towards something. Additionally, there was a lot of stuff that I didn't want to be doing myself.

When you do SEO, it really requires a whole team. It's really, really hard to get good results if it's one person doing everything because it requires not only a different set of skills, but also just a clear mind focusing on one thing at a time. And also, if you're that person who's doing the strategy, the writing, all of the research, the client management, the invoicing, it's just really hard to have a big impact for the client. So I started building the team from there.

I've actually left translation completely because I wanted to focus on this agency and I found it to be a lot more rewarding for me, at least, and a lot more lucrative and also a lot more conducive to retainer contracts where translation is just project based and I wanted longer term relationship with my clients. So that's that story. Yeah, I love it. That's very interesting.

And you mentioned there that you're - so initially you started off with some of the smaller companies, the entrepreneurs, but you saw that they didn't really necessarily have a very strategic plan in place or they didn't have the right distribution. I'm curious nowadays are there any particular red flags that you define where you say you know if if this comes up in this conversation or we notice this pattern or something like that or are there any other signals that you take to indicate that someone's either a really potentially really good client or maybe not such a great client?

Yes there are so we used to take clients on where we would work directly with the CEO or founder and that's already a red flag for me now So if they don't have an in-house marketing person already, an in-house marketing hire, we will not work with them. Mainly because it's impossible to move quickly if the CEO is your contact person. They really delay things. And it's just they need to have already invested in this kind of channel or in marketing.

So they need to have an in-house marketing person to manage the relationship with us. Also, ideally, they've already invested in SEO before. we do have clients that haven't and that's okay but um we just have a lot more data to work with to understand forecasting and to see what's possible if it's a validated channel or not if they have invested in it before and ideally at least the contact person or the company has worked with an agency before otherwise it's it's going to be a really uphill battle so these are things that we look for other than also matching our our icp which is very specific now, B2B, SaaS and MarTech, SalesTech or HRTech, Series B+, making $10 million in annual recurring revenue or having at least $25 million in funding.

These are very specific parameters that we have for choosing a client. And basically the opposite of those would be green flags for us. So SEO is a validated channel for them. They already know that they can get customers from it.

So all we have to do is scale that. They have worked with agencies before. They know what they're looking for. We have a dedicated contact person who is, you know, they're fully involved in managing the relationship with us.

These are all green flags for us. Interesting. Yeah, that's quite substantive, right? Well, one thing I'm interested in is sometimes I've seen people say that, ah, You know, the ideal introduction for me would be a VP of marketing.

I've always wondered to myself, why a VP of marketing and not a head of marketing? Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the size of the company. Sometimes the head of marketing will be our end user sometimes.

Often it's even a content marketing manager or like a content marketing lead or an SEO lead. But if we can start the conversation with a VP of marketing they approve the budget and they have the overall view of where the strategy is going But the contact person is going to be the head of something, usually, either content or SEO or growth or marketing. So both are good for us, really. I mean, depending on the size of the company, we may have to end up talking to, we may end up having to convince and sell to both of them anyway.

Even if we have one sold, we still have to convince the other stakeholder. So, yeah, it just depends on the size. If it's a really big company, sometimes even just a marketing lead, not even a VP or head, sometimes they have the decision-making power. Interesting.

Yeah. I guess, well, I have a theory that it may also be because sometimes that VP of marketing can be the most influential person in the whole buying decision process. Because the head of marketing, they're way too busy. The founder, they're dealing with other things.

But they'll listen to their VP of marketing to vet potential service providers or whatnot. I've also noticed with certain services, like we do podcast production, we help people guests on other shows as well. And what we found is actually that VP of marketing often fits into the kind of demographic of people, you know, 30s, millennials, that listen to podcasts that are, you know, avid podcast listeners. And so they're very familiar with the medium already.

Yeah. So those are also some kind of interesting signals I picked up on. Yeah. I mean, a lot of our contacts, like if I'm looking at it at the same angle, they're going to be generalist marketers.

So they don't know that much about SEO. Most of the time, sometimes we are connected with people who know a lot about SEO. So whether it's a VP or head of marketing, usually our contact needs some education on it. Although our ideal one, they're really bought into it.

They've seen it work before. They have enough knowledge about it to understand whether our strategy is good or bad. But I don't know if they're getting really deep into the technical nitty gritty of SEO. Yeah.

I'm curious. So when you're approaching your own content strategy, I'm curious, do you dog food, for want of a better term? Do you use your own processes and approach to marketing for your own purposes the same way that you might use them for clients? I'm curious, is that an iterative process?

Is that something that you're honing yourselves over time that's applicable to your clients? Or are they completely different kind of ball games that you're playing in? so i wish that we could do our own that we could service ourselves as a client uh but it takes a really big team it's very resource heavy what we do for our clients and we only have one person in our marketing team so no we can't we can't we don't have the bandwidth to do it for ourselves at the moment so we actually are mostly focused on linkedin and partnerships and referrals for ourselves because it's what our one person marketing team can handle because for our clients we give them a team of at least five six seven people to launch um and we just don't have that for ourselves right now yeah and so you mentioned three sources that you mentioned well three platforms uh or or ways of generating leads you mentioned linkedin partnerships and the third one being marketing you would put that into kind of a marketing book referral sorry yeah um what would you say the split would be between those three in general um or does it kind of vary at any given time partnership is a new channel and that kind of ties in with referrals as well so there's referrals either client referrals or friend referrals but then we also have a partnership program now that we're just starting to implement And so we don't have that much from that yet.

We just have a little bit. So I would say the majority of our clients are coming in from word of mouth referrals. And then we do so much LinkedIn activity, everybody on the team. We have an employee, I guess you could call it an advocacy program where everybody's active on LinkedIn and helping them build their own personal brands.

I would say probably right now, it's half that and half referrals. And we are just focusing on building this partnership channels for this year. Interesting. Yeah.

I would definitely say you're quite noticeable on LinkedIn because you all have the same red background. That's a very common theme, isn't it? Yeah. We call it painting LinkedIn red.

it definitely stands out because i don't think there are that many other people using red a lot people using blue i like blue so i go with blue but blue is also nice yeah interesting and and so the you know linkedin as a as a channel um i take it you've been focusing there on that platform for some time how long would you say that would be i have been personally active on linkedin for I want to say three or four years posting daily. And then the last couple of years, I started becoming a lot more active about building the network and engaging with other people, leaving comments and just building the network.

But I've been posting daily on LinkedIn for three or four years. Wow. Okay. So you must obviously see you know, results in order to keep up that discipline, right?

It's a really good channel for us. And it's really helped me a lot. Just build network brand recognition, just help us with showing our authority and just getting to know people. Building a network has been one of the biggest things.

Yeah. And during the time that you've been on the platform and using it, would you say there have been any times where your paradigm shifted about the way the potential of the platform or, you know, the, the possible outcomes from it? I think a lot of the time people see LinkedIn as a bit of a one way channel. You know, it people posting there but not necessarily a great deal of engagement as opposed to some of the other platforms out there But I curious how your perspective has changed over time about it Yeah, I mean, I can see that.

And there's definitely a lot of just kind of shouting into the void. And that's what I was doing for a while. And I did get a little bit disillusioned with it. but um i did change this year to where my purpose was how can i just connect with more people if i have very little time i would actually prioritize engaging with other people rather than posting my own content so that has changed things for me a lot just trying to build that network rather than using it only as a content distribution platform i think that that's the wrong approach to have with LinkedIn, it just makes things go really slowly and you might not actually get anywhere with it.

But if you just see it as a networking platform and content's just a bonus, then I think it's still a pretty good platform. But I can see why some people are getting frustrated with it. Yeah. And so for someone who's pretty, you know, pretty low on time, doesn't necessarily have a huge interest in spending a lot of time, you know, scrolling on their phone or so on, what would be some kind of low hanging fruit or low time investment, but high kind of outcome activity that they could?

Yeah. So what I do is I've built a list of people that I want to engage with. I've bookmarked them on my browser and called it the social ecosystem. I got that idea from Justin Welsh, who's somebody you should follow if you're interested in.

He has a great program for exactly what we're talking about now, LinkedIn, building on there. So I've bookmarked all these people and I block out time every day and I just go through. And these are people who are in my industry who I want to be associated with who publish frequently. And every day I spend about 30 minutes and I just go in there and comment on all of their things.

And that way I don't have to scroll actually through the feed. I don't scroll through the feed. I only go to these people's profiles and I comment there. And then once a week I batch content create.

And so I end up spending, it's all planned out. I try not to go on LinkedIn outside of that time. And it still keeps me really active on there. And of course, during that half an hour every day, I also respond to any comments that are on my content.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's a very methodical way of using social media as opposed to the way that a lot of people generally tend to passively consume it. So just being a lot more intentional, basically.

Try to be strategic with it. Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

Great. This has been really interesting so far. I am conscientious of time. But one last thing I wanted to ask you a little bit more about was I noticed that you do these panels.

I'm forgetting the exact round tables. round table sorry that's the word I was looking for um I'd love for you to tell me a bit more about those um it if I understand correctly you kind of dive into uh specific topics around SEO around industry and you invite on other respected uh people who can speak to those is that kind of general gist yes so we did I want to say four round tables and it's a limited edition thing so So we have our last one at the end of this month. And it's a live strategy session.

That's how the first ones were. We did live strategy sessions. We talked about how to do keyword research, how to do forecasting, how to prioritize your strategy, things like that. and we'd go step by step exactly how we would do it with client and just teaching our way of thinking about SEO, which is really revenue focused rather than traffic or rankings of those kinds of things.

And then people, we had a live Q and a, so we have our last first it's all of the ones that we've already done have only been with internal team members led by me or somebody from the SEO team. But at the end of this month, we are inviting the co-founder of ClearScope, Bernard Huang, and Travis Daly, who's also director of marketing at ClearScope, and Nigel Stevens, who's CEO at Organic Growth Marketing, was another SEO agency. So it's going to be more of a panel-style discussion rather than a workshop like the other ones were.

And I'm really excited about it because they're all brilliant SEOs. And so, yeah, that's going to be a live event on the 31st of January. That's going to be really, really good. I think we're going to talk about EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, which is a Google ranking factor.

And a little bit about AI as well, which you were asking me about earlier. So we are going to talk about that there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's obviously, you know, a field that's constantly changing and AI obviously has a big impact on it as well. Definitely. Absolutely. Well, Maeva, this has been great.

I will include the details of that panel in the show notes. Lastly, do you want to tell people where they can go if they want to find out more about yourself, your agency? Where's the best place for them to find you? Yes, well, they should connect with me on LinkedIn.

Just look me up, Maeva Sifuentes. They can sign up for the roundtable, which you said you're going to put in the description show notes. And then check out our website, flyingcatmarketing.com.

But if they want to connect with me personally, the best place is LinkedIn. You can also find me on every platform. My personal name there is Maeva Everywhere. So everywhere on Maeva Everywhere, you can find me there.

Excellent. Well, Merva, thank you for your time. And thanks for coming on the show. Thanks to you, Jonathan.

Thanks for having me. That's all for this episode. And if you want to follow the podcast on social media, we're on all the platforms. So if you just search for Leaders of Consulting or our handle Leaders of C on your social media platform of choice, that includes Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, you'll find us there.

Thank you.