Revolutionizing Cold Outreach: Michael Maximoff on Building Relationships, Not Just Pipelines

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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to MarketSpark. Most b to b companies say they want more leads. I would argue that all b to b companies say they want more leads. But a lot of them don't understand how to make out outbound work, And that's where Michael Maximoff comes in. He's the cofounder of Falcons, a fast growing agency that's helped hundreds of companies crack the code on cold outreach, pipeline building, scalable sales development. In this episode, Michael's shared what's broken with Outbound today and how he's built a thriving business around fixing it and the lessons he's learned along the way. Welcome to Marketing Smart.

Michael Maximoff: Glad to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: So let's get into it. It goes without saying that cold outreach, email, and calling is, let's say, an interesting creature, controversial creature. There are many people who believe that it's not effective. It's a waste of time. Who really likes to be called or emailed out of the blue? Now if you were to bait to if you were to debate someone on the anti cold outreach side, someone who advocated strongly that cold outreach doesn't work, is a waste of time, what are your biggest arguments in that debate?

Michael Maximoff: That's a great start to a conversation. We just gotta get over it. I would agree with folks. If you think that cold outreach doesn't work, it sucks, it it's not elegant, I think you're right. And the reason you're right is that you're thinking about direct outreach as this Salesforce 2030, 2020 playbook where you have these SDRs or BDRs going out there, making calls, sending out cold emails, and then trying to get your attention and then handing you over to someone else to visit. So these are usually junior professionals that has been around. They're the last paid in the company. Their job is to just hunt the leads so they don't care about you. They care about their appointments and meetings. And in this way, you don't have a good customer experience because someone is just getting on the call trying to get you at a very inconvenient time and calling you so and so forth. I get it. That is where everyone was living. This is the world that I'm describing that everyone was living. The SDR that I'm preaching and direct outreach is not a part of the sales function where you just try to to get people on the phone, but that's a part of a marketing function. And SDRs and direct outreach are moving into a more communication type of role where their job is to lift up whatever marketing is doing to build relationship with customer, get intelligence, connect with them, build rapport. But in this all instance, the meeting booking is always secondary in a way. I hope the listeners are following me here. The biggest difference, and this is my the biggest argument, is that if we are all thinking that the direct outreach of the old, the 2010 Salesforce top of the funnel meter bookers playbook, it sucks. It doesn't work. It's not client oriented. And now with AI and with just every market to being a a red ocean, so much competition, so much noise out there, so much automations, you don't want to be called. You don't want to get that email. But it doesn't mean that the direct outreach cannot evolve and transition to something new. The transitioning happened already a couple of years ago. We're gonna see more and more of it when the SDRs moved from a sales function into marketing function. That's what the marketing was missing. It's just having someone who can help to get those articles delivered that they are writing or get those cases or white pages or get people on a webinar or send mail or just literally just talk about their pay points and create a more relevant buying journey, more messaging. Because marketers, what they've done, they were, let's run some ads, let's test, and so on and so forth. Running ads right now is super expensive. Not many businesses can do that. So when you're starting a company or when you're trying to build a pipeline and you're, hey, marketing. Build a pipeline for us. What marketing are doing? Do they do SEO and content? And you see the payoff two years ago. What marketing would do? So with the SDRs coming to marketing right now, the marketing now have these people who can connect with folks, validate messaging, make sure that we're talking to the right people, ICP refinement, messaging product market fit, literally extending whatever marketing is doing. And that's the future. And that's the the outreach that I believe in. And that's when you think about this, then you're like, okay. Then that makes more sense because that's what the marketing was missing. They didn't use the sole channels. And now it's not about them reaching out to me to get my business right off the bat, but more about knowing who I am, extending relationships, putting me into their book of business for a long time so that I decide when I talk to them instead of them bringing me in. Does that make Right.

Mark Evans: Obviously, you've got a very biased view of the world because you do go to outreach for a living. But I understand the theory of moving away from transactional, seeing holdouts reach as a series of transactions, book a demo, book a meeting, to more relationship building, where we want to offer you value. We wanna share something that you feel is relevant. Whether it's a white paper, come to a webinar that's about your specific needs and interests, or here's a great blog post that we wrote, or watch this video. I understand that that changes the dynamics of that relationship that you're trying to build. So you're giving as opposed to trying to take immediately. It's like going on a series of dates where you're learning about somebody as opposed to trying to get married on your first the first date. But I think one of the pushbacks here is that people are being inundated by cold outreach, whether it's email or calls. And a lot of that inundation, a lot of those ad activity is people who are using the old school methodology, and people have no patience for that. So one of the obvious questions is, if you're playing the same game, but in a different, better way than other SDRs and BDRs, how do you stand out from the pack? How do you say to somebody or create that impression that, no, I'm not here to book a demo. I don't care about that, although you do. But I'm here to educate you, to engage you. So you'll get to the point where I like what this person is doing. I trust what this person's doing. So then I wanna take an action. How do you stand out in the crowd? How do you make sure that you don't get lumped together with all the other people doing terrible cold outreach?

Michael Maximoff: It's a two part answer. So the first part is that the entire company should be involved into relationship building, including the c level executives, decision makers, in terms of the managers of the team. The time where I'm an SDR and I'm going out and booking business book of business and just reaching out to people, no one wanted to do business with me. No one wanted to get on the call with SDR. But if I reached out to folks, ask Michael Maximoff, CEO and founder of the business, and I do that not to get you a meeting right now, but, hey. You're in my universe. We have common connections. You guys, the industry I work with, I like to introduce myself. I reached out to folks. I post relevant things. You see me boasting. I'm active. Or I like what Michael is doing. Let me reach out to him. Or if I reached out to you, respond to me. The point is that we are broadening the relationship building from being just a function of it as your BDR to being a responsibility for a lot of people with the one organization. So in this way, the SDRs are more helping to either build the process around it or drive that process or drive the conversation, so on and so forth. The second part is that the conversation should be very relevant to me because what happened over the years is we became lazy as marketers. And we always told, oh, know your customer. But how do you know your customer? How does it work? It's through refinement, refining on the ideal client profile, through talking to folks. They say, oh, I'm talking to Mark. Oh, Mike is not relevant. It's not his area of responsibility. Let me talk to someone else. So the way the direct outreach campaigns have been deployed before, and that's the main mistake that folks are doing, they're looking at the ICP as this ideal client profile for those that who don't know what the ICP stands for. They look at the ICP as this list of criteria. I work with mid sized companies from 200 to 1,000 people that are between 50,000,000 to 500,000,000 in revenue, and my decision makers are c suite and then VP level, director level, and sales and marketing. And they need to be geographically located within The United States. That's what most of my clients come to us when they start campaign with us. And when you look at this, then the next step would be the Aziras. They take this ICP and they start building the list. They go to Apollo's, ZoomInfo's of this this world, start extracting leads, building and then running campaigns. All of these titles receiving a bunch of irrelevant messages that are being prepared for all of them. And now with AI, they're personalized. So now people just put, you went to the school, you're posting about this. Doesn't create any relevance. So what I propose is you need to refine the ICP. So it means that for different sizes of the business, whether it's a 100 people or 500 or 300, if it's an industry manufacturing manufacturing consists of medical devices and hardware manufacturing and and other sub industries. The different states have so the point is the ICP should be so more granular and so more refined so that when you reached out to folks, you're talking their language. The little is, oh, Michael, you are spot on. That's you talk my language because you're not looking at me as this profile, but you look at me as you know me. And now with AI, you can do that. Right. And now only lazy people can do that with AI because now you can break down any industry and sub industries, any titles, and you can literally personalize your messaging to be more relevant for the specific people reached out to. And then you start reaching out to folks and you start talking to them. And then let's say you talk to five, ten people, and now you see, okay, this is completely off the rails. I'm not going there and gone. And then with these all iterations, within three, four months, you're gonna tap into the people that would want to hear from you, the people that your message, the people that would tell you, yeah, Michael, you're spot on. And now you start including them in your universe with that first part that I've mentioned through I the entire

Mark Evans: think the thing is that, yes, these are all best practices, offering value, trying to build relationships, all the good things. I'm not arguing with you on that point. And I will talk I do wanna talk about how companies can build a solid foundation and a solid strategic and tactical plan for effective cold outreach. I think what I'm trying to hammer away at is that even if you're following best practices and your ICP, you've defined your ICPs and you're very relevant, there's a lot of noise out there. There's an awful lot of noise out there. Anybody listening to this podcast will understand that if you look at their email inbox inboxes or LinkedIn, is that they're getting pounded away. Because most people, most companies are taking a very blunt approach to outreach. If there's a 100 messages coming at me, or a 500, my default is I'm gonna dismiss most of them. What I'm trying to get to is how does the cream rise to the top? How do you get people to look at your outreach, number one? And that moment where they decide where it's relevant or not, they'll go, that's interesting. Maybe I should spend another couple seconds digging in as opposed to hitting the delete button.

Michael Maximoff: That's actually a great great question, Mark. The way I'm looking at this is if you want to do business with someone, and you know that your product is a good product, and you eventually we're gonna end up doing some business with you, I want to identify where you are at the buying journey. So do we have the pain point of the problem that I'm trying to sell or you don't have? Are you looking for a solution or you don't? Is that something that you want to do with or not? So literally just by understanding where you are at this different type of the journey would tell me how aggressively I should pursue this or that opportunity. Right? So that's the first baseline. Right? And and the reason why this is important because you don't necessarily need to hammer people with your LinkedIn messages if they want don't want to hear from you, right, in a way. But it doesn't mean that you don't need to include that person or that company in the universe of your brand. Right? In the way what I'm preaching here is that it's all about building the touch points and building the the brand recognition and having an opportunity to engage with folks. And it doesn't necessarily mean that engagement should lead into the sales conversation. Right? But the point is that through those multiple engagements different from the different channels that you're doing, you are able to identify where the interest of that person is at or that organization is at and the relevancy, and then you're able to then create a more personalized experience for them. And I think it's important to give context for listeners why you know, where I'm coming from with this. Right? Because I built my business to be one of the best single channel cold email agencies in the world. So we've done very well, and and we've done that for six, seven years. And then back in 2022, I started noticing that whatever I was doing with cold email, it stopped working. As you said, people stopped answering emails. They stopped getting on the call. My clients stopped closing deals. They stopped so they're, Michael, whatever you're generating us, you have this very fancy subject lines, and people just say, hey. I am on the call because Michael was so good at his outreach that I'm just on the heat, but I don't have a buying intent. So when that was happening, clients started leaving us. We're, hold on. What can we do? And then we start looking what's happening, why it's happening. And we realized that for a lot of clients, we were just doing this single outreach. We were just generating general leads, but we were not building brand. We were not building them more journey. We're not creating the relevancy. We're not trying to establish relationships. We're just literally pounding and getting those meetings. So I had to change my business to be able to drive real value. And then over the last three years, we were working with clients to change the playbook and change what can we do. And whatever I'm talking right now, it's the everything that I've also tested on myself and my own company, and that's why I know that this work. But it takes patience and time to get it developed.

Mark Evans: Let's assume that I'm a b b SaaS company, and my marketing channels have been content, going to conferences, doing webinars, but I recognize that I'm missing another way to engage and educate prospects. And I decide that I wanna explore cold outreach because I want my BDRs to be very targeted.

Michael Maximoff: Right.

Mark Evans: And I need to have conversations with the people that matter to me.

Michael Maximoff: But I

Mark Evans: have no idea what to do. I have nowhere to start. I'm doing marketing, and my sales my salespeople are booking demos. Where do you start as an organization? How do you structure your campaigns so that different parts of the company are in sync working together? What is that starting point, and what are best practices to make sure that everyone's aligned, you're following best practices so that you're doing the right things from the beginning?

Michael Maximoff: Before AI and before 2023, CHADGPTs and all of them, And even a few years before that, we were living from '20 I think '25, 2010. We're living in the world of builders where it's it'd been very difficult to build a product, but it was easier to sell it. Right? And now we're living in a seller's words where it's super difficult to sell, but it's relatively easy to build. Right? Now you have the vibe coding. Right? So with that being said, every executive, if you're a startup owner, you should be marketer. You should be one of the best marketer in your company. And it means it's a founder led sales. So you mean to go out there, connect with people, talk with people, and be very active. You need to be the best spokesperson in the world about your product, about your company. Right? And you need to do that in a very consistent manner. And I know this is not intuitive because a lot of the people probably listen to this are like, I don't have time. I need to talk with my customers. I need to build a business. I get it. I also need to do that. But I need to spend 40% of my time going out there, connecting with people on LinkedIn, creating posts, creating article, running my newsletter, doing my podcast, talking to people. And what doing that, I'm not just what I'm doing is I'm also trying to accumulate the insights and the unique data that my business generate and package that in a way that I can create value for the people I am talking to. So a good example is Balkans generate a lot of data, outage data. We do benchmark reports. We do different white papers, research papers, so on and so forth. And we're spending considerable amount of time and resources to building those. And I'm personally involved into the research that now this part, talking with customers around this, collecting this information. And then what I'm doing is that I'm creating my own content to be able to to position Balkans as this partner in this space that have so much insights and the data that I'm sharing with people for free. I'm literally educating, and I am going out there and doing that sincerely without asking their in their business return because it's important for this problem to be solved. So the point that I'm making here is the best playbook, Mark, in the situation that you described is being a founder who is a marketer, product founder led marketing, founder led sales, thinking about building your company brand through your personal brand, connecting actively and building this universe of your target prospects and the people. You you and I, we probably would know top 1,000 companies that we would love to be our partners for our clients. Why don't we have a list of those businesses, we have a list of those people, and it's connecting with people. You don't need to ask their business. Hey. We have a second, third connection in common. I like what you're posting. I love your business. So I patiently start building that traction month over month where and then using direct outreach through my LinkedIn or email to validate whether I'm talking to the right people. But then after I validated that, sharing those unique insights and the amount of knowledge that I'm sharing without asking a lot of things return.

Mark Evans: That's great for a startup, and I totally agree with you. For most smaller companies, the CEO or the founder is the best marketing and sales asset they've got, better than any other channel that they could deploy. But what if you're, there's a bigger company, a $5,000,000, $10,000,000, $20,000,000 company, and the CEO has to manage staff, work with investors, work with partners, they've got a lot in their plate. And my experience with a lot of CEOs is that, I don't have time for this. I don't know if outreach works, this is not something I can allocate a lot of effort to. How do you leverage the power of the CEO and their ability to be brand ambassadors and brand advocates when they may not have the cycles to do it? Do you ghostwrite all their activity? Do you create somebody else in the organization who becomes the brand evangelist or advocate? How does that work? Because I think for a lot of companies, a CEO just doesn't wanna do it, but you've still got to have somebody who's leading the charge.

Michael Maximoff: And I agree with you.

Mark Evans: In many cases, SaaS companies need a like, somebody who people can relate to. If you look at Chili Piper, for example, Alina is the head of the company, SparkToro, it's Randfiskian. A lot of those companies have people who are front and center, but if you're not, if you have a CEO who doesn't wanna do it, what's the playbook for that?

Michael Maximoff: You must have people passionate about your company. Passionate about your company, about your mission, about your brand. There should be people that would want to tell the world how great you guys are.

Mark Evans: But it doesn't have to be the CEO. Right?

Michael Maximoff: It might not be the CEO. It might be the CRO. It might be CMO. It might be someone else, right, that would do that. Now the thing about that, you do wanted to build brand and invest resources into helping that person to build the brand, those that are closely associated with the management of the organization that you know that you're gonna build the relationship for the next ten, twenty years. You don't want to invest money and promote your SDRs and your BDRs, then in one, two years, they leave the organization and leaving all their book of business with them. You wanted to have people within the the of the of the bus. And then I think that just generally, you were telling me this, and I was like, I don't understand what marketing why do some people don't want to talk about what's happening in their organization if they know that's the way to build trust and see that people are doing business with people? They are not doing business with the spreadsheets. And with this, literally, you do business with me, you build trust. If you're not if I'm not going out there and I'm talking to customers and I am talking about this openly, this is, you know, who we work with. This is what we're proud of. These are the people I'm bringing on board. This is the mission of my organization. Then who what's the point of I was just I don't understand. What's the point of growing the business then? It's not just necessarily about the the profit margin in a way. Now if you have a profit margin already and then we've done this already, that's great. Right? But if you are just starting a company, we this is the exercise. Right? You're you're wanting to build a business right now. Now if you build a business twenty years ago and you have a referral, word-of-mouth, book of business, everything is growing, you're looking for more cost effective channels that you don't need to go as a CEO, that's a different playbook. You might all all all already have budgets in place. Right? You already might have a professional sales team in place. Right? You might choose a lot of different outings. If I cannot afford going out to conferences, spending a 50, 100, $200,000, or $300,000 a year in conferences, what can I do as the founder of business to substitute that? That's the question.

Mark Evans: I agree with you. I think for smaller companies, your CEO has to be active, has to be a relationship builder, has to build trust. Larger companies, they've got bigger obligations, they've got bigger teams to manage, they've got lots of things that they're doing. So I think that in those cases, it's good to have somebody who is the VP of advocacy, or the VP of marketing, or somebody who is essentially front and center. I wanna shift gears a little bit, because we've we're chasing our tails when it comes to this topic, is that you mentioned earlier in the conversation about personalization, and the ability for AI to help accelerate or make that process more efficient. What are your thoughts in terms of personalization versus scale? Is there how do you balance that? Is there a middle ground that most SDRs are missing so that people feel that you know me, your content is relevant to my needs and interests, but at the same time, an SDR can not can do reach out to dozens, if not hundreds of people as opposed to a small number?

Michael Maximoff: I'm using a bit different terminology. I'm using relevance instead of personalization. So for me, personalization is around people investigating me as the kind of person, what I'm at, what I'm posting about, what I'm talking about. And then relevancy is more about understanding my needs and then talking with me the same language. So where I know that AI works the best is and then this is a practical example. We are recording all our sales calls. Right? And let's say we've had a library of, let's say, 500 sales conversations with manufacturing companies. And they all are for an hour. Everyone talk about their needs, their pain points, what they're looking for, what they're there, so on and so forth. Before AI, there is no way someone from SDR team would go and listen to all these calls and then repackage them. Now you can feed all the transcribed into this Anthropic or Cloud, and you can say, hey. I want to know all the pain points, all the needs, all the challenges that people are talking about this right now. And then go me down to exact title, to exact geography, to exact type of the business literally. So I can achieve the level of the relevancy that hasn't been known before. And then I can use this information to create my landing page on the website where I talk the same language. Put that on my email. Create I think, okay. They have the same problem. So how do I solve the problems? Oh, let me create a survey and then create a study with my customer that will be talking about this. Let me poll talk an article. And I put an article on my blog talking about this exact issue that they're rigging up. So now marketing team achieved so much the level of personalization never been seen before. Let's say even go to my website page, every industry page, every article, everything is personalized to what the customers have been talking with the salespeople on the call. So whenever I send something, I achieve the engagement rate that is, like, that never seen before because I instead of just hypothetically thinking about what are the keywords that people are looking using this ad drafts and other tools or what do I do to to position myself? This is my product. I literally talk about what the people want to hear about, and I send that in front of them. And then that's where the engagement happens. And then you can be very personalized to a good example is, let's say, there is a terminology of buying comedy or buying circle. Right? It's are the titles that are different titles that are responsible for this the buying decision. Right? So you have a decision maker, but you also have an influencer, an end user, a champion, different roles. Right? So when you think about selling your solution to someone, don't only think about decision makers. For example, I have a client who have a sustainability solution. They do SPTI three kind of sculpture measurement for sustainability. And they always sell to sustainability leaders. But the part of their decision in also the sustainability advocate, the procurement, the financial team, and before that, they all been only talking about how this product is great for sustainability. Now they talk about how finance team have the impact or how much business is losing or how their procurement is doing this. So they are able to personalize the messaging and the communication channel for each specific role that allow them to create a more smarter, more relevant, more targeted communication between all those folks. And that's more important than SDRs try to source leads through clay and finding different nuances that would tell them something that don't need, but it's not relevant to the stage of my business, to my profession, and so on and so forth. And then yeah. So I think just, again, this is a long example of the so the creating the relevancy you can do, and you can do relevancy at scale when you double down on creating the right structure and then knowing your buying comment and knowing your personas and then creating the relevancy in your messaging, in your product, in your offering for those people. And then doing that across the board, just within your emails, but also with your website, with your LinkedIn posts, with your blogs, with your webinars, with everything, not just with that. Because to your point, what's happening now, all of these that I just mentioned, folks are not doing that. They just we have this website. This is our core messaging. It's used by everyone, so we're not personalizing anything. And then they have these SDRs that and they're paying so much money into creating the intent and the personalization. And the SDR reached out to all of those people and tried to pick their, oh, I know you. But then when the buyers engage with your brand, they don't see relevant articles. They don't see relevant website, they don't see relevant webinars, they don't see relevant posts. You're not posting about this. So why do I need to engage with you if whatever the value you bring me is only that one message that you personalized to me, but your entire brand, your entire is not relevant to me at all.

Mark Evans: Obviously, you can do all this activity, you can engage people, you can be relevant, you can personal, follow best practices, but at the end of the day, it's about outcomes. Every organization needs an ROI on their investment. Maybe you have an army of SDRs, or you're a CEO, and they're out there, and they're doing cold outreach, sending messages on LinkedIn, whatever tools they're using to do that. At the end of day, comes down to results. What have you done for organization? How have you moved the needle? The $64,000 question, or the $64,000,000 question, depending on how big you are, is what are the metrics that teams should focus on to measure cold outreach success? There's vanity metrics. Oh, I have 5,000 connections, or I got a lot of page views on LinkedIn. But what are the metrics that companies should embrace, and what are the ones that really matter? Doesn't have to necessarily be booking meetings, because some things can be very quantified, and then some things can be qualified. When you talk to clients, oh, here's how we're gonna measure the success of Balkans, what do you tell them as far as KPIs are concerned?

Michael Maximoff: So we only care about pipeline. We think about pipeline pipeline, qualified pipeline, how many opportunities we have in the pipeline, how many we generated, and then what's our pacing, and what's the trend, how many ad we can add. So what we've discussed today, I'm a huge advocate over full funnel marketing. Right? So the full funnel marketing is like when you are talking to the buyers at the different stages of their journey, and you're trying to connect with them depending on their readiness to buy, and then you build your entire marketing around that, so end to end. But the traditional playbook of this full funnel marketing was top to bottom. So you start with you mentioned, like, the page views, the connections, and then you nurture them and go down. I am suggesting flipping this and doing bottom up. So the bottom up approach is that you're focusing on the opportunity part, and then what other marketing channels you're adding is to increase the opportunity likelihood. So to increase the opportunity chance. So that's why the most important is the pipeline and the measurement. And to achieve this pipeline in the management, you cannot with your SDRs and with your outreach, you cannot just cycle through the leads with three to five touches. So the typical playbook how it works is I'm an SDR. I'm sourcing 1,000, 2,000 names every month. I'm sending this sequence or a cadence of three to five messages. I'm doing a couple of calls. I'm getting down some of those meetings, and then I'm moving and doing another next month, another 2,000, another cadence. And it does make sense. You're not even able to build enough touch points with folks. You're building enough presence. You're just broad just scrapping the surface and just going and cycling through the leads. What's happening the common conversation that even my internal team had before we we have this approach was, Michael, can we look for in a different industry, different ICP? We already exhausted our total addressable market. We've talked to every company. I said, guys, we've just stepped in this industry. You had 2,000 businesses. Yeah. But we already emailed all of them. We've called them. They don't pick up the phone. We've got 20 meetings, and we need to move on. We cannot just talk to them again because they would just why do I talk to us? So with the this bottom up full funnel approach, we're able to elegantly cycle through the leads multiple times. So in this way, you can focus on your sweet spot, this one or 2,000 businesses, and you can go deeper into them and and find the right prospects and opportunities, and then nurture those opportunities through the pipeline. Yeah.

Mark Evans: That's good at balancing, Ash, because I agree with you. I agree that it's you do some initial engagement, some outreach, and then you move on because you're not getting the results that you want. You're not getting the means for it. What's the balance between two there's a scale here between ignoring your prospects that you've already reached out to, and then basically pounding away forever. Eventually hoping that if you apply enough brute force, they'll relent. They'll say, okay, I'll download a white paper, I'll go to a webinar, I'll book a meeting. There has to be a user friendly way to focus on those 2,000 prospects without making them feel that they're being inundated with your messaging. What's that formula?

Michael Maximoff: My formula is that once you've validated that and then, again, talking about the sustainability guys for one of our clients that I mentioned before, for the first six to nine months, we're going out there and we're just talking to a bunch of different industries, different titles, and just booking meetings. And a client saw twenty, thirty meetings a quarter. Then, oh, this is great. And then the first quarter, we had 45 meetings. The next quarter, we had 35 meetings. Then third quarter, we already had 25 meetings. And the client said, why the con the meetings goes down? And we because we already talked to a bunch of different people. We'd cycled through all of them. And then when we took looked at that 100 meetings that we booked, clients said only these five turned into opportunities for us, those with the food and beverage industry with the stability to idle. This is it.

Mark Evans: Right.

Michael Maximoff: But then my team, Michael, we don't have more system build like, this tidal addressable market of this is building leaders in food and beverage is so tiny that it's only a couple of 100 of businesses. What do we do? So we applied this full funnel strategy where our job was to first utilize at least three to four key people within the client organization, their managers or their c level. And then we wanted to make sure we're connecting with all of the people in in in that small universe. Right? That's the first step. Right? The second step would be to see that what we're talking about right now is relevant and up to date with what these companies are going through. So it means that we update our blog. We update our web page. We prepare the case studies. And then we start creating content on social, on LinkedIn, and corporate page that is super relevant for this food and beverage industry that is focusing on first building the pain points for relevancy and then going down into so I call it awareness, engagement, activation, conversion. And each stage takes three months to build it up, so you cycle through the stage. So in a way, then within one year, that specific prospect will get a 100 or a 150 touch points, but they would be not bombarded on you from all at the same time. But they would be sequenced on you from channel to channel depending on which channel you prefer or engage. That could start with LinkedIn and social selling, with emails, with calls. If it's on the later stage, we have a workshop on the preparation. Even articles or email newsletter or even ads. People don't know, but on LinkedIn, for example, what you can do is you can download a list of your target prospects. You can upload that into your LinkedIn advertising account, and you can set up a conversion not on the clicks, but on views, which will cost you $50 or a $100 to show their targeted pain based advertising for your targeted list without expecting them to click. But they'll just see your brand, see your logo, they know that the problem exists, they know the pain points, and then they can engage. Some people will click, some people will connect with you, some people will start the conversation.

Mark Evans: You're suggesting that rather than sending email after email, or LinkedIn DM, is that it could be advertising, it could be blog posts, it could be webinars. It's that idea of you're constantly in someone's universe. So after a while, if you're always talking about their problems, if you're being empathetic, that message comes from different angles, but it's always focused on what their problems are. And eventually, it seeps into their conscious, and they recognize when they're ready to make a buying decision, your brand tends to be top of mind.

Michael Maximoff: Just to final on this, so that's exactly what you said. And then just the outcome of this is, so we went down into the number of meetings. So we've had from, as I mentioned, to about 20. Then the next quarter, we dropped it to five, but all very relevant to the opportunity base. And then the next quarter, we grew it to 10. And the next quarter, we grew to 15. But all of those 15 that we grew quarter by quarter have been opportunities with the very targeted people that are educated, that have a buying intent, and they rated it. So they decided to engage with us because they've been on our radar for so long then they just then engaged. They're like, hey, guys. Yes. I actually was on top of this or I have this planned. I would love to connect on this one. So the from the marketing standpoint and from outcome standpoint, it's not about generating a 100 meetings within the first year of running this playbook. It's about building the playbook that give you this minimum viable product that is the opportunities, the pipeline that you know work, and then trying to build it from bottom up into what else I can do to increase this number. But you don't deviate from the ICP and the quality.

Mark Evans: I think the formula is that you your outreach is very relevant, very personalized, focuses on their problems, so that when you do generate leads, they're high quality leads, because you're not it's not spray and pray. You're not trying to touch as many people as possible. The number may not matter from an outreach point of view. It's really about the opportunities that matter. Just wanted to circle back about metrics, and you said pipeline, and moving the that's the definition of moving the needle. So how do you define pipeline? Because lots of companies define it in different ways. So is it yeah. Let me just ask you a simple question. What is pipeline? How do you define it for your clients?

Michael Maximoff: It's opportunity. It's a new opportunity created in the pipeline that people engage with. There's a different level of qualification of that opportunity, but it's a a company that match my my size, my my location, my ideal client profile. It's a targeted buyer or a title who is my preferred per decision maker who's responsible for that. And then they engage with us in actual conversation. So they get on the phone with us, either with our sales team or our leadership team, and they start talking about their needs. We don't know whether their urgency of their of their I need to buy tomorrow or I have a defined budget, but they are talking to us. So they started with this early when you look at your pipeline, this the demo part or the opportunity identification part. So that's the first part of that pipeline, but they're engaging. So through those conversations, you know that, oh, they know about our company. They know about the product. They have a need. They want to talk more, and there's a second or third steps coming in. We engage this. We do the proposal. We do something else. So you identify. So you can put a dollar amount on them. So after that conversation, you have a dollar amount. So that's the most important.

Mark Evans: And this conversation hopefully has addressed some of the myths and misconceptions about cold outreach. I think it's been interesting from a tactical and strategic perspective because there's lots of organizations that are still leaning into cold outreach as a way to break through, especially when advertising doesn't work as well as people expect. It's harder to get people to pay attention to what you're doing. Sometimes you need to deploy brute force, but as you say, you need to do it in a very smart, relevant, and personable way. Where can people learn about you and what Belkins does?

Michael Maximoff: I'm very active on LinkedIn. I'm one of those guys who, although run multiple businesses, I create my own content. I write it. I edit it. I post it. And I only post about things that I'm passionate about personally. No BS frameworks, and I literally just talk about this is important for me, so I'm sharing. People can reach out to me at Michael Maximoff LinkedIn. I also have my own newsletter called From Zero to Agency Hero where I talk about how I built Belkins into the powerhouse it is today, sharing on my best practices. And I talk about the problems of the industry and how we're solving to solve these problems. I do my own podcast, Belkins podcast, where I, like you, Mark, maybe not as good as you, but to interview folks about the challenges of their business growth. So you folks can reach out to me and see my work, anyone out there.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Michael, and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and, of course, share via social media. I'm always interested in talking with SaaS entrepreneurs and marketers. If you have a good story to tell, please reach out. You can get me by email, mark@markEvans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. Until next time. Thanks again for listening to Marketing's Mark. Free audio post production by alphonic.com.