Goal One Is Just to Get Them to Answer (with Drew Johnson from Everflow) | Ep. 270

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to Scrappy abm. This is your podcast with practical playbooks that don't break the bank. In this podcast, we dig into the exact playbooks that ABM practitioners are using today to get their first ABM program off the ground. We'll dig into how they're using their current tech stack in order to create Scrappy programs that rely more on creativity than new technologies. So if you're looking for how to get ABM off the ground in your organization in the next 90 days, let's dive into this episode. Hello and welcome to Scrappy abm. This is your podcast with practical playbooks that don't break the bank. This is your host, Mason Cosby, and today I'm joined by Drew Johnson, who is the senior Director of Business Development over at Everflow. Drew, thank you so much for joining me today.

Speaker B: Oh, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

Speaker A: Uh, I'm really excited to dig into this. You've got some interesting playbooks specifically around, uh, Outbound and how you actually determine the right folks to go after. I, uh, always try to get a bit of a mix between marketing, sales, BD and customer success on the show so that, uh, our marketing audience can learn a little bit of what's working on the other parts of the house. So that said, Drew, before we dig into anything else, can you give us a quick overview of Everflow and kind of the ways that you guys are approaching, uh, your outbound program?

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. So Everflow is a tracking analytics platform that plays predominantly in the affiliate space. What I think separates us from a lot of our competition is that although we play predominantly in the affiliate space, our client base is really anybody that has a brand or brands where they want to see multiple traffic sources running to those brands and attribute who's sending what. So whether it is internal media, buying, referral program, influencers, affiliates, uh, whatever wacky things you could have that potentially could send traffic. Or if you have multiple brands, either you own or don't own, you can set them all up in one place to track where everything is going, track who you would pay out for what. Since mostly affiliate is usually synonymous with performance based, uh, payouts and then being able to do those payouts through us, kind of an all in one. We play, like I said in affiliate, I would say our verticals, we play in as anybody that wants to see more data. And we definitely use Outbound as a big motion for us when it comes to securing more clients and more prospects, because we are a bit. We're not the would say the leader of the pack. If you were to look at our industry and who we're going up against, there's other people that have just been there longer, bigger logos that whole you know, going up. David Vers Goliath when you're a newer company. And so we rely on a lot of I uh would say different marketing tactics around sales, doing outbound sales and everything tied to that. Uh, I don't know how much you want me to go into the specifics of the outbound now, but I'll let it rip. So yeah, I would say for what we do a lot of it's we our ICP and what we consider somebody that cares about us is anybody that has a sales funnel that has multiple stages in it that they're either having issues and having visibility into want visibility into it or have different programs that they want to pay out and track differently. So by that we have a lot of people in lead gen home services, finance, insurance people that track a lead, uh, an account set up a lead of deposit. We do a lot with mobile where it's an install account creation. We have a very cool report around customer value where we can show kind of even when a affiliate sends over someone in a game or a uh, gambling we can track when they hit a certain amount of money or a certain level to reward accordingly. And so what we do is then once we get in some clients and we have around 1200 clients now, once we get in a big client something starts to work, it starts to pop from our side, AKA revenues rolling through. Um, we start to kind of look into, pounce into a vertical around that client. So we closed a client called Rugier who was a GLP1 client. From there we created a list to go after a bunch of others. Obviously we know the big players out there that do telehealth but there's obviously a lot of others as well that DO Telehealth and GLP1. And so we've gone on to you know, work and we're in talks with some of the big names like Ro Co. Like Bluechew, all of these ones that are health and health adjacent while bringing in people like as I mentioned Ruji, uh, like body health, reflex MD, Gobi Health, pretty much anybody who's doing GLP1 or telehealth as, as we've talked to now. Now this is just a newer vertical we've gone after because we've done. We've seen success in the past with Nutra. We've seen success in the Past with clients that do tella uh, anything pay per call tied with lead gen. So this was just kind of a vertical that made sense. And so now we basically have most of our team SDRs and AES going after a list of accounts we've made through lookalike audiences, LinkedIn and lookalike audiences in Gemini. And then almost all of our outreach that's showing success is pretty much being done in LinkedIn.

Speaker A: Yeah, I really love this approach to target identification. Talked to quite a few folks that are, you know, they, they read something online of like there's a growing market and then they decide oh we, we should go after that market. And I love yes market growth but also market growth that has some historical context for we've actually been successful in that spot. So I love that framing. I am curious as you then think about, you know, where is that line of this is a one time great customer versus this is a vertical we want to pursue. Do you have any kind of a threshold that says we this is when we rethink the verticals that we target based on the number of customers you've closed in a specific vertical.

Speaker B: I think for us the way that it works kind of in our industry with affiliate is like you got to get it while the getting is good kind of mentality where like once you see one come in and they have success, they success literally just being revenue. Affiliates want to run it, affiliates start talking about it, affiliates are running it. Once you hit that, it's kind of that like wildfire. You quickly go to get every. Everyone's going to start trying to build their own companies, especially with like AI and giving you the ability to create a company on the fly. And so we are kind of in tandem with that trying to bring those clients in and expose them to everflow. And so I would say we are now at the other end of telehealth and GLP1 where the market is going to start to, I don't want to say dry up but like money's not getting uh, falling off trees as it was before. You're going to need to have something different. You're going to need to be bundling, you're going to need to be paying out a much higher premium than you would for a CPA in the past that you would now. You can't just get away with one product. And so we're just seeing now like okay, we had all wheels to the floor, let's go after all of these brands to now all of those AES and SDRs are focused on different things. And we only now have a few focused on Telehealth and GLP1 because we're just seeing them slower to come in. They have a lot more requirements. I would say we also use as an indicator from when we have clients in of like when clients start to churn or not like reactivate. So we have a six month contract that goes from month to month in some cases. In other cases we have years. But we are very flexible on our contracting and how we do it. And so with that being said, you have people that will come on, they'll run the contract, let's say a year down the road, a year and a half. They're not hitting the numbers they want for how they staffed. And those companies will figure out ways to either take it, run with less affiliates or just do internal media buying, whatever that may be. We start to see more of some of these clients not succeeding, getting this off the ground. And that's really where I think our big indicator is for. Okay, let's pivot and as well as like you know, just the normal. We've hit all the same 70 accounts with three different people at this point. We can go back to it once we start to get some trickle in from like a LinkedIn or email helpful context.

Speaker A: Uh, you just referenced LinkedIn and email so I'm curious, we were talking a little bit before as you think about like how to actually reach out to folks. What are some of the core channels that you're using and where you guys seeing the most success today?

Speaker B: So I would say, I mean we do just this pretty standard outbound playbook where we utilize email calls and LinkedIn. I would say we're a little bit new age in the way that we like look at LinkedIn is in like that's what works. The other stuff is great. The other stuff we have people do it but the other stuff we're using in a concept of multi threading tied to the LinkedIn reach out. Uh, that we're doing a lot of the LinkedIn outreach as well is very non formal and I would say what's the best way to put it like help driven in the sense of we looked at uh, we look at the way we're doing LinkedIn outreach from two methods. You want the person to connect with you, that's one aspect and then how you're pitching them after they're connected with you. I do a lot of this kind of based off just like human psyche, what somebody cares about and looking at it from a sense of Normal speak that you would have with someone. I think now with AI and everything else, everybody is very tuned into what is fake and what is not or what's just gobbity goop of. Here's a pitch with some emojis in it. Don't you care? Nobody cares. We find that it's very much like, hey, even if you are having an ask of a question, if it's coming from a place that seems real and direct, people will answer that. So we'll say things like, do you manage the affiliate program? Do you handle referral program? Are you looking for more traffic? Are you looking for more signups? Something as very simple as after that ad and getting them added on LinkedIn and connected, you being able to do that outreach around that. So you can kind of use that as a litmus test of are they engaging at all? No. All right, they don't care. We'll get back to them and add somebody else. Are they engaging at all? That's great. You can go, oh, that's awesome. I don't want to waste your time. Are you the best person to reach out this, reach uh, out about this too? If not, do you. Could you point me in the direction of who that is giving them a link to book and making that booking as easy as possible, both getting them to give you the email. So that's kind of consent to bother them on email. So sending all the information through that, sending all the information through LinkedIn and then whatever information else you can grab of, like who else would be looped in, you can start to do that same outbound approach to those other people that are named.

Speaker A: I'm always curious when people use LinkedIn as the primary channel because the, the main complaint around LinkedIn is like, uh, oh, but that's tough to scale. So I'm curious as you think about LinkedIn outreach, like how are you guys actually creating consistency? Are you using any kind of tools or is it all manual? Like how do you actually approach the operations around LinkedIn outreach?

Speaker B: We have sales nav so like we can see some of the data a bit more. I think the thing with LinkedIn as far as like scaling on it is there's like the camp of do you buy a scraper that's a lot cheaper than LinkedIn sales nav that can do a lot of like the automated outreach that you could get from like a sequencing tool, but just in LinkedIn or do you buy LinkedIn sales nav for all the seats? Know, I'm only prefacing it this way because we use LinkedIn sales nav, so they can't get mad at me for hearing this and check our accounts. But I think a lot of people also have issue with getting that data back in from a LinkedIn to whatever their respected CRM is. Because you need the person to be in your CRM in order, like, you need a lot of connections connected in order for the data to flow into your CRM to track it. And I think when everybody is doing their leadership and their direction based off data, it's hard for you to have a completely 100% confident look at the numbers from LinkedIn a lot of the time. And so we do a lot of just tracking overall activity in our, uh, hubspots, our CRM and our CRM tied to the activity in LinkedIn. We've done a lot of calls with LinkedIn to understand what that activity, uh, what they consider activity when they pass that back into us. And then looking at like some people when we started doing like a manual, like I've done X amount of messages this week on LinkedIn and then using that as the two comparisons of like, what seems to be the smell test, that makes sense for all that activity, but then utilizing a lot of the deeper tools that LinkedIn Sales NAV gives, which is like they, they're coming up with things that are very similar to a lot of the AI tools that are coming out where it is. Here are the other companies similar to them. Here's what they've all listed in the news recently. Here's who's recently started the job there and just utilizing all of those tools fully while being able to just create lists and give everyone the ability to go after who they think will be a fit.

Speaker A: It really sounds like one, you're abiding by their, their uh, privacy policies, so, you know, want to make sure you call that out. But then two, it sounds like again, because of some of the challenges that come with LinkedIn and data syncing, it sounds like your approach right now for your BD team is more activity based of are we doing the right number of outreaches for LinkedIn purposes? And then based on activity, that should be a proxy that we should see X number of meetings actually booked. So is that how you're really measuring success right now?

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say that and I would also just say, like taking a step back, I think, from working with other sales leaders that have done BD and outbound and with working like I used to manage our SDR BDR team, there's this idea for some People that like, oh, I need a big list, I need hundreds, I need thousands that I don't go across or do it. All we do smell tests of 50 at a time, 100 at a time, where with LinkedIn there is a quicker answer rate and I look at is of whatever outbound you're doing. LinkedIn should be first because you're almost waiting for that to heat up. You're waiting for those people to add you back, you're waiting for them to answer you back. So you want to. If you have a list of 50 that should all be banged out from, you've added three to five people at each of those companies in that one week. By week two, by week three, I mean by week one or two after that they should have like some sort of ads. Uh, you know, you would imagine, let's say five times 50. You're now looking at 250. You should have at least like 70 people that have accepted you. 50 people have accepted you. You should start to have been able to give some of those messages out. So around week three, around four, you should start to see that info coming. If you've had any responses at all. I think we look at it of just uh, did you get a response from those 50 people? We look at the activity to say, hey salesperson, you've done your job. But for us to check to make sure that this list works or we should waste time on it, we're basically looking at a 50 to 100 list. How many answers do we have after a month and does it make sense for them to keep focusing on that or let's wait for that to trickle in more and then they go after that after another month.

Speaker A: Super tactical and I appreciate the framing of, you know, LinkedIn does take time to warm up. It sounds like you guys are not doing a bunch of inmails because I don't think anyone ever responds to an in at this point. Uh, sounds like you're going the route of connections and yeah, I mean the day that we've been seeing is if you don't get a connect within the first three weeks, you're unlikely to get a response at all. Do you guys have a practice of Aaron going in and like actually withdrawing connection requests to reinitiate them or how do you guys actually handle the inevitable like re engagement play once you've already connected in the first place?

Speaker B: Oh, so I guess as far as like the a pro or a process around like the withdrawal part that not really because LinkedIn I believe auto withdraws it after like a month. So like I don't even think you really have to go and, or at least for us, like I wouldn't want to create a process for that and just add extra work when it kind of does it for you. But I would say what the process that we have that's like at least the most replicable is like making sure that you have email notifications set up so that you get an email from LinkedIn. They'll usually send you an email that batches everyone that's accepted you in that timeframe. Usually if you're getting a lot of different timeframes, you can get multiple emails in a day. But the best practice is definitely as soon as you get that email, you reach out. So if you just said, hey, looking, a lot of my connections are, hey, we had a ton of mutual connects, wanted to add you directly. Looking forward to it. If I really want to reach out to that person, as soon as I see that message come in from LinkedIn that says they've accepted me, I'm going to reach out and say, hey, thanks for adding. Actually I'm looking to connect with somebody to discuss sending some more business your way. Are you the best person for that or is there somebody else you'd recommend me going through? And that will be my immediate next message. And, and that will be my indicator of when to strike. Based off of M. I know that they should be online because that just came up.

Speaker A: Yep, it sounds like you guys have like a 5 minute SLA for when you actually get the connection request. Because I mean I found the same thing. If you don't respond really quickly. I mean if it took them two weeks to accept the connection request, it's probably gonna take another few weeks to see your message. So like how do you actually help enforce that speed to connect?

Speaker B: I think it's at this point it's been enforced with us just through like the proof is in the pudding. Like when they don't do that, LinkedIn doesn't really work. When they do that, they, it works and they get answers. Like it is a very. I think LinkedIn is very. It's what I built my sales career on. It's when I ran my SDR BDR team, what I trained them on because it's what I know, it's, it's what I've got to work. It's very conversational. If you don't converse like a weirdo trying to just push something it. You can get the answers from people even if it's not like the Right, people. It's a matter of tweaking your messaging for who the people are that you're going after. Like, I always make a joke when I talk to the team about reaching out is, like, look at the person. Like, take whatever preconceived notions you have of people and things and whatever's happened in your life, like, make that a thing. Like, your main goal and goal one is to get them to answer and to get them to accept you. That's goal one. That is completely separate than what the goal is. But you still need goal one to get to goal two. Once you get to goal two, let's say they're not answering. Uh, we try to enable our team to think more outside of the box and be smarter at what they're doing. And so, like, there isn't the idea, I think, anymore of, here's your call track. Here's what, here's your playbook. It's going to work every time. Do it. That works. When you are the number one company in the space, when you are the best company in the space, when you have the best logos and you have the most of something, you can easily use one silver bullet every time and then back that up on a call. For us, we need to do a little bit more of figuring out who at the end of the day cares about what we're selling and giving to them. So, like, and there's different people that wear different hats. So in one company, the salesperson might actually work on affiliates versus an affiliate manager at another company versus the partnership manager versus the cmo. They could all be doing the same role. So it's a lot of, I think, trying to not just get the ad right away, but identify if that ad was correct and then get the information in order to pounce. So I make a joke that, like, I will usually look if I'm not getting an answer and I really need to connect with someone. I will look in marketing or the hiring department for the sweetest old lady I can find. And I will reach out and go, hey, been trying to reach your company to send you guys some business. Do you by any chance know who the best person to that would be? And they are going to be sweet and they are going to say, wow, of course we would love to help you out. Oh, my gosh, thank you so much. I can't thank you enough. You email that person and that message is at least more received because it is said, okay, we were told to connect to you. In most cases, whether you are a jerk or you're nice. You, you are still going to ask what are you talking about? Like, because you're either a jerk and you're like, I know you're full of crap and you're not actually know anybody from that, like, person. What they would never tell you that or they're going to go, oh, well, I am that person. That person was right, sure, I'll hear you. And so that's the way I kind of look at it is like, you, you want to go after the more senior people and the people that would have titles that care about you. But like, you have to understand that if you don't get any answers and you need that account, there are other ways to go in. You just need to change your messaging.

Speaker A: Yeah, I just love the basic premise that you continue to reach out to various folks in the organization because there's, you know, the number one piece that we hear from a lot of folks is how do you do targeting? Like, everybody's job titles are different and you know, they don't have clarity on exactly what they do. And I mean, it's very similar here where you just continue to reach out to the right person or reach out to different folks in order to identify the right person and then just get the intro. So I think that's super smart, very tactical. Appreciate that, that breakdown. I'm curious as you then think through, like, things that haven't worked because we talked a lot about the things that are working. Like, what are some things you guys have tried that are now kind of the, the what not to do playbook that people should know as they consider these kinds of approaches.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I would say, uh, any sales in the initial message, like, if you're not already connected with the person, like, the end of the day you got to look at connecting with somebody gives you the opening to message them as much as you would. Like, they can block you again and you can't do and like, obviously that stops. But like, not a lot of people are using LinkedIn and policing it the same way they would on, like if you were on like an Instagram or a social media app where maybe like, you know, somebody kept hitting you up and was bothering you for whatever that reason is, you can block those people. That tendency is a lot more of the way a, uh, human is using those apps. LinkedIn it is still, although it's more social media now than it was before, still at the end of the day is probably used mostly from 9 to 5 or the people that are trying to now be influencers. That maybe discuss what they did, whatever they did and had an event that would look like it. But any sort of like, reach out. That is a pitch I think we just don't do. Because to that point of are you reaching out to the nice to the right titles? You are shooting yourself in the foot if you reached out to the wrong title with the wrong message. And we offer such a specific solution for different people at a company that we do need to do a little bit more of identifying before we can pitch slap. And that's really where I would say our. No, no. Is. Is that like going back to that concept of there are two parts. There is the ad and then I would say even the making sure that you added the right person and then there's the pitch. I would say that making sure you added the right person can go in either of those slots. But that's the way that we split it up of how would you talk to someone if you just wanted to add them as a connection on LinkedIn? That's what you do once they're on, then. This playbook varies very differently. But this task, a playbook, is pretty much the same all the time. The other one is what needs to be fluid and change.

Speaker A: Love that breakdown. Um, um, Drew, this has been, again, super helpful for, I think people that, you know, marketing often will set up an outbound sequence for sales and then just say, go do it. And, you know, it's been a minute since quite a few marketers have been in the seat of actually doing the outbound efforts and getting the direct responses. So I think this is a super helpful breakdown for people to better understand different ways of doing outbound in different channels and how those channels are nuanced. So is there any other parting wisdom that you'd like to share with us before we wrap up this episode?

Speaker B: Yeah, I. I would just say, like, be open to different wording. Everyone is different. You only have your own experiences. You've only had what you tried. I would say at this point, what outbound looked like now is different than what it looked like two years ago. It looked like four years ago, which looked like six years ago. It's going to keep changing. And it's one of those that, like, you're going to hire younger people that know more or have better success because they're just tapped into the other younger people that are on the same, like, level as them. So being very open, the more that you go up through the ranks, the more that you do it. I outbound, I don't feel like is something you can look at your seniority as much unfortunately and go, I've done this and had this success, so that means I'm now a big dog forever. You kind of need to always continuously prove yourself while you're in that role and prove that you're printing the money. And as long as you go at it with this open mentality around, okay, there are other things that work and always willing to try new things, you should be able to always at least have an answer for your higher ups for who you report to on why something is working or why it's not.

Speaker A: I love it. Well, Drew, again, thanks for joining me today. If you want to find out more about you, where would you point them?

Speaker B: Feel, uh, free to email me@drewverflowio Add me on LinkedIn, please. I'm always on there as I'm sure you could tell from everything I've just said. I'm always open and happy to discuss anything that is affiliate Setting up an agency if you wanted to go into doing affiliate from any adjacent agency if you're looking for a platform, if you're looking for just advice on anything performance marketing, I'm um, all ears and open to helping out anyone.

Speaker A: Love it. Well again Drew, thanks for joining me today. There's been Scrappy ABM and we'll see you guys in the next one. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Scrappy abm. If you're looking for more content just like this, I highly recommend you go subscribe to our newsletter. We release weekly playbooks so you have the actionable ways in which you can start to build an ABM program today. Just go to scrappyabm.com newsletter to subscribe. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd really appreciate if you'd leave a five star review and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.