Marylou: Happy Tuesday everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have a guest who, in her own words says that she has fallen into this part of the pipeline that we all love, top of funnel, but she has done a tremendous job so far. I wanted to introduce her to you because she has some really great information that you’re all going to benefit from, listening to this podcast today. I have with me Patty Laushman. She is the founder of Revenue Catapult out of Colorado.

I actually met her in a funny way. I got an email from someone, that was a cold email, and I love getting cold email so continue to send them to me everybody, but as I was reading through this email I noticed that it seemed like it was a little bit older Predictable Revenue email. I wrote back to them saying, “Hey, this looks like a Predictable Revenue email.” They actually forward the email onto Patty and that’s how we met. I got on the phone with her and I was just intrigued by how she learned about or how she deployed this type of system. Had she read Predictable Revenue? I invited her to talk to us and wow, you guys, interesting stories. Patty, tell us, what got you interested in top of funnel Predictable Revenue type of systems?

Patty: Great. Hi Marylou, thank you so much for having me on your show today. As a fan of the podcast, it’s really an honor to be here talking with you about the stuff. I think my story is kind of funny because I really, probably never should have ended up in this line of work. I had started a tech company back in 2003 and grew it for nine years. I sold that company in 2012.  I had a four year old boy at home at that time and was trying to figure out what my next gig was going to be, trying to reinvent myself. I really thought who’s going to hire a former business owner. I had a lot of different skills but had never gone very deep on most of them. It wasn’t like I could go out and get a job in one of the areas that I managed for my business.

I got very, very lucky. I connected with an enterprise software company that was based in Sydney, Australia. They were trying to start an office at their North American presence about 15 minutes from my house. I connected with them and did a bunch of recruiting for them. They were just looking for someone in the local area who had a professional network to draw from and that was me. Over a couple of years, I helped them hire a bunch of people.

One day, I was in the office and the CEO pulled me aside and said, “Hey, what do you think about trying your hand at this outbound prospecting stuff?” I was like, “What are you talking about? What does that mean? I’m familiar with inside sales. I’m familiar with outside sales. I’ve never heard of this before. Tell me more.” He said, “Just go get this book called Predictable Revenue and read the first three chapter then come back and talk to me.” I was getting ready to go on a vacation. I got the book and I read it then I read it again. Then I thought, “Okay, sounds like sales and I’m not really interested in sales but there are some things around it that are really interesting for me. Specifically, I like the idea of using technology to solve a business problem which I saw using email to warm up these cold leads is a really interesting concept.”

I came back, sat down and talked with him and I said, “Well, I’ve read the book twice. It sounds kind of interesting.” He was like, “Okay, go.” I was like, “Alright, I’m going to need a little help. I have basically and email address, a LinkedIn account, and access to personnel at the company. That was about all I had to start with. I had a database of context in their salesforce account. Had some context, talked to people about the product then try to understand what the pain points were, of the people that they were going to be expecting me to reach out to. Honestly, I thought I’d give it about three weeks and then I would go back to that CEO and say, “I tried it. This is just not for me.” I really expected that to be my experience. I had no other consulting gigs going on at the time.

I have to tell you, by the end of the first week, when these senior bank executives were agreeing with me because I had something in email, I found that absolutely intoxicating. I’m sitting here in my little home office sending off these emails and these very important people in this organizations are willing to give up to me their most resource at work, which is their time. It really took off from there. Whenever there’s great success in business, I think there’s always a combination of smart decisions and a little bit of luck.

I brought a lot of experience with me into the role and so, I can take credit for that, but what was really lucky for me in that situation is this company had a product that solved the problem that literally, every bank in the world was trying to solve at that time. They could solve it very elegantly. I was able to craft really compelling messages demonstrating how they had solved these problems for other people like you, as I’m approaching these bankers. It was great. Once I proved that the model work, they are willing to put more money into tools like email automation and access to information about the companies I was targeting. It was amazing. It totally took off. Over about 20 months of part time effort, I dropped about $30 million in sales opportunities into the top of their sales funnel. That’s my story.

Marylou: That’s your story. Listeners are thinking, is this a one hit wonder, but it isn’t, right Patty? Continue. Tell us more.

Patty: While I was doing this work for them, I had the same question. I was like, “Will this work for other companies?” I put my fillers out there. I have a really good professional network in the area. I put my fillers out there. I found a couple of other companies that were willing to give me a shot. Rather than doing the work for them hands on, which I had this exclusive agreement with this one client, I was going out and talking to other CEO and saying, “Hey, I’m doing these amazing things for this company. I wonder if it would work for you.”

I found some companies where they had somebody on staff that they wanted to do this type of work. I focused on training them in how to put their own system in place. I would help them basically correct the code, create a formula from that code which is basically the messaging and then they cadence and installing some email automation that integrates with their existing CRMs. I was teaching other people how to do this. Every client that I took on in the beginning was having similarly awesome successes. I was like, “Wow. This is really cool.” I think this is really important. When I had that tech company for nine years, this was a problem I never solved for myself. Not for lack of trying. I just never figured out how to predictably fill my sales funnel. I knew how valuable this was, being able to add this function to your business.

Marylou: That’s awesome. You mentioned earlier that what you figured out was that you needed to craft compelling messages. When we hear that term in sales, it’s a little frightening because salespeople are not sure that they know how to write compelling messages.

Patty: Sure.

Marylou: Is there a secret sauce, Patty?

Patty: Wow. I wish I could say that there is one, easy formula and I’ll sell it to you for $10,000. I could really, really rich that way. I think there is a lot of fundamental truths and so I’m going to risk being a little bit general here but I’ll try to sprinkle it with specific examples.

Marylou: Perfect.

Patty: Some of the things I look for when I’m going to take on a client is I want to know that they are willing to focus on a niche because having a niche that they market to does a lot of really good things for them. In addition to being a really profitable way to grow your business because you’re doing the same kind of thing over and over and you can become better and better and better at it, rather than doing something different every time you bring on a new client, it enables you to demonstrate to that market that you understand your industry and understand their pain points.

When I had my tech company, it’s a great example, every small business owner or medium size business owner that I talked to thought their business was different. I knew, from my perspective, that if you were a good client for me, you had somewhere between 8 employees and 50 because I knew that your computer networking, this were complex enough to need someone like my staff but you weren’t big enough to hire your own person to put on staff full time. It didn’t matter which industry you were in, all that matter to me was how many employees you had because that told me whether you are a good fit for me or not. They wanted to know that we understood their industry.

If you are focused on a niche, and you’re targeting all bankers who are trying to solve the problem of acquiring customers digitally, you can craft a compelling message there. As long as, this is the other part of it,the market actually wants to solve that problem.

Another example is one of the things hospitals are really looking at now is the patient experience. If you can craft a message to a certain type of hospital executive around the patient experience, you can typically get their attention and get them interested, willing to give up some time to hear what you have to say. Being able to focused on a niche and then making sure that that niche is actually trying to solve that problem. I’m always, always on the lookout or I’m cautious of the companies that are trying to sell ice cubes to Eskimos. You have to be solving a problem that people actually want to solve. It doesn’t matter how good your messaging is if your market doesn’t care.

An example of that would be, I was working for a company that did web development but had kind of expanded into more of a strategic marketing consultancy. When I first talked with them, they knew one of my other clients who was having really great success and so the CEO wanted to bring me in to train as VP of BizDev. I said, “I’m looking at your website and you guys are really going to have to focus on a niche.”

I worked with the VP of BizDev and found that they had this great program they had developed for independent optometrist. These are people who went to school to become an eye doctor, but now, they’re competing against Wal-Mart Optical, Target Optical, JCPenney Optical, for patients. This company put together this great marketing program for an independent optometrist. They said, “Bingo. Let’s see if we can do more of this.”

I worked with the VP of BizDev. We put together a list of independent optometrist. We started our campaign and then the CEO caught wind of it, he goes, “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want to do that. I’m not comfortable trying to acquire companies outside of Colorado. We need to stick with companies in Colorado.” I said, “Well, there’s not enough independent optometrist to really make a good goal of this. If you want fast growth, you need a precisable market.” He said, “Well, why can’t you just write better templates for our web design business?” I was like, “Probably because there’s a thousand other competitors with the same message.” If you just develop websites for people in the local area, there’s a thousand other competitors out there. I can’t write you a compelling story if you don’t have a compelling story. If that makes sense.

Marylou: Yeah, there is this concept of unique connection point that we need to have in our messaging. It just has to be there.

Patty: Right. I have some templates, some frameworks that I worked from when I am developing a sequence of templates for a client. Some of the things I try to highlight are the concept of benefits versus features. From my perspective as a writer, features are fine, features are important information about your product but features don’t compel people to give up their time and have a conversation with you. It’s the benefit’s they’re going to achieve by using those features that will get people to give up their time. Sending an email with a list of features isn’t a compelling message, it’s not a compelling story. But talking about how other people likes you, when I say you, I mean the prospect that you’re targeting, your ideal buyer. When you’re sending a message to that person and you’re demonstrating the benefits others like you have achieved by using my company’s product or service. That is compelling.

Marylou: Do you also look at the personas themselves? One of the things that I am a fan of is getting out of this general messaging process. Not only what you said before about niche but also, segmenting the emails by persona or by buyer. Did you also see that that works really well?

Patty: I do because what a CFO is going to care about is going to differ from what the head of IT is going to care about, which will differ slightly from what the head of retail bank sales is going to care about. The more you can tailor your message to the person who’s receiving it and what they care about, obviously, the higher your response rates, the higher your success rates. Absolutely doing that as much as possible.

                    There’s  a of tools out there today that, like you do that pretty easily where you can import prospects, assign a persona and based on that persona, put them in a particular sequence of messaging based on that persona.

Marylou: Some of the folks that are listening on the call, we’ll have the same question about the actual email engine itself. You’ve been successful in a variety of ways but can you talk us through one of the sequences where email was indeed the champion and the phone may or may not have been a part of the sequence. Also, took to us about when the phone, if necessary, is used to help get those first meetings or at least the raising of the hand.

Patty: Sure. The first client that I develop the system for and was given this amazing opportunity to try my hand at something that I hadn’t done before, they were, again, very fortunate they had the right product at the right time. It had identified a market that really was hungry for this kind of solution. In that case, it took very few phone calls to get people to the phone.

In fact, a lot of times when we did those introductory sales calls, we meaning me, the senior sales executive, and then the prospect. The prospect would communicate, “Oh, Patty called me. We had this conversation about… Patty talked about this. I want to know more about x, y, z.” And then, we’d get off the phone and the senior sales executive would be like, “Did you have all these phone calls with them?” I was like, “No, that was all done through email and literally the first time I have talked with the person was when I was introducing them to you.”

There was this perception by the prospects that we’ve had this long, ongoing relationship.

Marylou: How wonderful is that.

Patty: All these were done through email. It was fantastic.

Marylou: That is fabulous.

Patty: What was even more fun is that I was targeting companies, banks, and credit unions, both in the UK and Australia, and one of my highest compliments came one day when we had talked to this banker in Australia, it didn’t quite qualify as an opportunity. It was still in my hands. I always knew, from Denver, if I sending emails around 2:00pm or 3:00pm, they’ll come into their inbox around 7:00am, 8:00am, 9:00am. I reached out to this guy that we had had a meeting or two with already, over the phone. I was like, “Hey, aren’t you ready for a demo? Can I help you arrange a demo?” He said, “Yeah Patty, come out next week. Let’s set this up for Wednesday.” I said, “Actually, I’m going to hand you off to my colleague in Australia. I’m actually located in Denver.” He had no idea.

Marylou: Where you were?

Patty: I was located in Denver. It was perfect. Anyway. Where I see the phone and sometimes using critical is when the market size is limited and every single contact that you have is very, very, very valuable. That is where I recommend clients spend more time on the phone because you want to make the most of every single prospect that you can dig up, who matches you ideal, by your persona.

                    Here’s another way that I like to use the phone or recommend my clients use the phone. The email automation tool out there… I have a preference for outreach.io. that’s the one that I use with my clients but they have the ability who is most engage in the messaging by how many times they’re opening the email. You can set a threshold for like, if somebody opens the email five or more times, create a task to follow up via phone call.

                    I was working with one of my clients last week. They’re using it a little bit differently. They’re using this tool reach out to candidates that they might place in jobs with client companies. I’m working with the COO and he said to me, “We don’t have phone numbers for the candidates. We have their emails but we don’t have phone numbers. I said, “Well, I think it’s really valuable for you to reach out  to the people who are most engaged with your messaging. How could we use this?” We came up with this great idea. Actually, I think it was the client who came up with the idea. Anyone who opens the email eight or more times, we’re going to create a task for that person or web to do a social task. Either reach out to them on LinkedIn or reach out to them on Twitter. I was like, “Perfect.”

There’s different ways to do that. Those are obviously more time consuming touches but  if you are able to identify which of a body of prospects are most valuable to you, then it’s actually worth that extra time to make the phone or in the case of this other client, I’m working with doing the social touch to deepen the engagement with those people.

Marylou: But as you said, it’s leveraging the technology. using the email engine to warm up that chill. And for those of you listening who are working account based sales where you have your core accounts that your top 20, whatever you want to call them, that you’re assigned or you want to penetrate and you want to close, then blending the phone in, blending social, using LinkedIn intelligently, those are always that will help once you get on that phone call. But as Patty is saying, the emails can be written in a way where the clients think they had conversation with you. That’s where we need to get with our emails.

                    I still see, and we all do, emails that come in that the email is telling you to figure out how you fit. That’s just like you wanted to leave that email. That’s just horrible. It doesn’t have to be like that. Patty is perfect example of who takes the time, tries to find those nuggets of differentiation of where you fit, why people should change, why now and why you. She’s cracked that code. And again, correct me if I’m wrong, Patty. You probably won’t take clients on where you can’t find essentially that compelling argument.

Patty: Absolutely. Figured that it doesn’t do any good for my reputation to take on clients that I know in advance aren’t going to be successful at this. I try to ask enough questions upfront that I can identify pretty clearly who can benefit from the system and are they committed to putting this in place. Are they right for fast growth even? Sometimes people think they want to grow fast but their backend, like their service delivery team is not ready for that kind of growth. I’m trying to look at the whole system and see is this company ready? Are they committed? And do they have that compelling story to tell? Do they have a product or service that a hungry is looking for and willing to have a conversation about? Even if they don’t know it exist, is there a pain point out there that this company very elegantly needs and if they do, getting sales meetings is pretty darn fast.

Marylou: Getting that chill warmed up and ready to go. I think a lot of times, what companies forget to do is to look outside that box and find those compelling reasons to either move into different markets, to go up market. Whatever it is, you’ve got to be able to go there and it had to be, in addition to what Patty was saying. The return on investment of putting an actual SDR team in place that the revenue has to be there. The tear that you’re working on the account have to justify the body because you will need to use phone at some point. Even with all the magic that Patty puts in, you still have to, at some point, pick up that phone.

Patty: Definitely.

Marylou: Patty, how do people get a hold of you? I’m sure they are burning to figure out how to reach out to you now. What’s the best way for my audience to reach you?

Patty: I love LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn everyday, all day. It’s Patty Laushman. And then I also have a company website that has a contact me form and it’s simply revenuecatapult.com.

Marylou: I’ll be sure to put those links in the show notes. As well that this will be transcribed to those of you who are driving and listening to this and want to grab some of those nuggets, they’ll be in the show notes on Patty’s page. That way you guys can reach out to her and start working on getting these compelling emails crafted. The email engine is a fabulous engine but if you put crap in it, you’re going to get crapped out of it. With Patty’s work and things like that, you’re creating a story, you’re creating a compelling reason for people to want to pick up the phone, to call you. I absolutely love her story about a prospect thinking that they actually had a phone conversation. That’s how conversational the emails are. That’s how they should be. Patty, thank you so much for your time. We really enjoyed talking with you and I wish you the best and for everybody who’s listening. Make sure you reach out to her.

Patty: Thank you Marylou.