The Most Creative Cold Outreach EVER

In episode #2955, Eric Siu and Neil Patel share creative approaches to cold outreach, explore the benefits and drawbacks of building in public, and dive into how positioning and pricing can impact your business. They also unpack valuable insights from private equity on market dynamics and scaling effectively. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES(00:00) Creative Cold Outreach Strategies(02:59) Building in Public: Pros and Cons(05:58) The Importance of Positioning and Pricing(09:10) Lessons from Private Equity and Market DynamicsPrefer single topic episodes? Head over to our YouTube channel. To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us:Single Grain << Eric's ad agencyNP Digital << Neil’s ad agencyX @neilpatel, @ericosiuInstagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal, and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. I don't know if you've seen this, Neil. This is the most creative cold outreach that I've seen yet. So, check this out. So, Sherry Rodriguez sends you two cents over here.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  And then it says, "Hey, Tom, wanted to give you my two cents.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  We took Rippling's IG from $36 to $6,200 and over 150 likes by using our targeted media buying strategy."

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Got 14 minutes to talk about doing the same for your company.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  I get one of those every single day from PayPal.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  You get these two cents?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  No, mine's not two cents.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  What do they give you?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Pick a random name, like, I don't know, Sherry Rodriguez. And it would be, "You just sent Sherry Rodriguez, you know, $3,000. If this wasn't you, click here." So I get the opposite. Yeah, I get the scam ones every single day. And I get tons of them from PayPal. But it's not really PayPal. They make it look like it. And I'm like, alright.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  I think it's creative, but look, man, I think what matters more than the creativity, and this kind of goes into the topics that you had earlier, is a cold email with good offers, right? So, right now, what's working for us on the Carrot side is we send, like, if we say, "Oh, we're reaching out to MP Digital." We'll send you a personalized landing page just dedicated to you, and it's personalized with your logos and things like that, right? That converts decently well. Now, we've changed it over into, because we have a waitlist right now for Carrot, but now it's just like, "Hey, Neil, private invite." Right? So, it's private invite, and then what you get is, it's like a 30-day free trial or something. You can just log into the app and then just start using it, right? You can bypass the waitlist. And so, we selected you specifically for it.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  This exclusive offer will only be around for the next seven days or so. That type of thing. There's exclusivity and it's expiring and things like that. Um, but you know, it's, those are the types of things that are, that are working for us. And there is a little creativity in the second one, but the first one is just a good offer. So.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  By the way, have you started charging yet?

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, we charge for it.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  So you have revenue?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Uh, you don't have to reveal your revenue, but if I were you, I would do a, uh, groove HQ did back in the day.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  What did groove HQ do?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Uh, we're go.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  From oh shit to?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, from oh shit to aha.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Excuse my language, but it was from oh shit to aha. Uh, we're.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Did he build in public?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  We're, we're, yeah, we're going to a hundred thousand dollars a month, follow our journey to learn more. Uh, or we're going from zero to a hundred thousand dollars a month.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Follow our journey to learn more. Uh, and I'm, I'm paraphrasing it here. The oh shit to aha again, excuse my language. That part I know was in there. Um, and cause I use a similar one and I gave him credit. I'm like, yeah, I ripped this from groove. I did that, but I'm going from zero to a million visitors a month, or a hundred thousand visitors, then a million visitors. And then it didn't work as well because then it was not relatable. Like I'm going from a million visitors to 10 million a month. Like you're like, I don't even have 10,000. Uh, so when you do a smaller numbers, it's great. But if I were you, I would map the journey from zero to a hundred thousand dollars a month in MRR and make it public. I bet you would get you tons more traction and revenue.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  I would go for. So what I would go for building in public is probably more on the ad side of things. Cause I don't want to reveal revenue numbers. Um, I don't want, cause right now we have. It's so interesting because there's, there's people inserting spies to like check. So, so somebody reached out recently, right? They're like, oh, oh, we're really interested in using carrot. Um, we're considering the competitor that ripped off of all of our stuff, right? And I was like, I was like, oh, okay. It's cool. So he's like, yeah, can you, um, can you send me your entire product roadmap? And, um, can you, can you tell me, um, exactly what it's going to be like, but by, by which date you're releasing? I'm like, why do you need to know those things so specifically? And I forgot that person was an advisor to the other company. Um, but there's a lot of, um.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  I don't want to draw any unnecessary attention. That's what it is at the end of the day.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I, I think the unnecessary attention will help you versus hurts you because if someone knows that you're doing features. Do the spaces small enough where people already know what customers want and they're working on creating similar features to you? Some of their features may be better than yours, some of your features may be better than theirs.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  But the space is small enough where people already know what their ideal customer wants, and they're just focusing on building a lot of stuff.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what we've learned so far. Um, so this is actually, this actually goes into my, my other topic on why you should ship marketable features. And what that means is actually giving away a lot of these features and splintering that, like, let's, let's say you have three features with Uber suggest, right? Um, and typically, yours is more difficult because it's self-serve, right? Let's, let's use it for Scout. So Neil has a tool called Scout. It's not self-serve, right? It's, it's a managed service, correct?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Uh, software, but yes, it's managed software.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Okay, it's managed software. So, point is, people can't sign up for it on their own, right? So, my point is, um, what we're doing with Carrot is we are, we're actually going to build out a lot of these features and then just give them away for free, but then gate all the other stuff and let them in. So we are building more top of funnel by giving away a lot of these features for free. Um, and that's going to be our way, our Trojan horse to get people in more.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  But when I look at like managed software, and it could be a little bit different, but like my team has to set it up for the customer and get it going for them and then they just could end up using it. When I look at what you're doing, I get there's handholding because it's not pure self-serve, although it could be self-serve.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  It totally could be, yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  I would still push stuff out in public because when you write social content and create videos on what you're planning to build in the next thirty, sixty days and sharing it and giving previews, it creates more buzz and anticipation. And then when you release it, it creates more buzz and anticipation as well. If your competitors beat you to the punch and take that feature and release it a week before yours, it doesn't matter because the market's also big enough from a consumer standpoint where, just like Instagram, if you post a video on one topic and I post the same video on the same topic, there's going to be a lot of people who don't see your content and there's going to be a lot of, uh, my people, vice, vice versa, right? Uh, a lot of my people wouldn't have seen your content, a lot of your people wouldn't

• 6:41Speaker 01

  have seen my content. Even a lot of people who follow me won't even see my content because of the way the algorithms work as well. You never get even ten percent of the people to see your content. So why not just push it out there, get the press, keep pushing harder? Because when someone knows your MRR, it doesn't hurt you. It doesn't make you seem bigger or smaller. None of that matters. People want to pay you for the features, the product. So who cares? Your agency is big enough where the MR is big and people won't end up judging you.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Here's what I, I don't care about the judging. I care more and by the way, I don't really care so much. I don't mind, like I actually like it when the competitors copy because it shows, oh, you have no vision.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Um, so I'm actually okay with that because it takes them on this wild journey, right? Um, I think, I don't think, I know, we have done episodes of this podcast on why we don't like building in public. And we've had our reasons for that. So I don't like building in public, right? Um, so the, the MRR thing doesn't bother me so much, um, and because I don't care about the, the judgment piece. And I don't really, I'm okay with taking them on this ride, right? But I, there's other reasons why we don't like building in public, which we've talked about on this, on the podcast.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  But I would consider at least doing the MRR one. And here's a reason being. When you look at MRR, the person that's going to follow you is usually another B to B SaaS company. On your journey from growing zero to a hundred thousand in MRR. They are your ideal customers.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Here's the, here's the problem. Let me address that piece. So all of our customers right now are mid-market to enterprise. They're not the small, they're not small companies.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  No, no, I know that, but when people follow your journey, you're going to get businesses in B to B in SaaS that are going to follow along to see if they can learn anything from you and implement it in their mid or large size, uh, corporation. Like when you do a conversion test, when you share pricing, all these experiments, big companies can't run them like the way you can because it could have a huge negative effect on their earnings for a period of a month and can screw up their stock price. But when they see data from the smaller SaaS companies, dude, because if, if you look at my agency, NP Digital, our largest chunk of clients are enterprise SaaS companies that are typically publicly traded. It is the largest segment. I would say it's roughly 40%.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  The one thing that most of them have in common in the marketing department is they look at SMB SaaS startups to see all the stuff they're doing so they can learn from them.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Bingo, you got it right. And then they take that and then they figure out what they want to experiment on because if three or four people write about something that's a failure, they tend to backlog it and not do those things right away. Because you have to remember, when you're publicly traded, uh, let's say you're doing an A B test and you're blogging about an A B test you did with Carrot. Uh, A B test that produces negative results. As a startup, we look at it as like, oh, cool. Didn't work out. What I learned from it. As a publicly traded company, you're like, oh, it tanked my new signups by 10% or 20%. This is going to affect my quarterly earnings three months, uh, I mean, three quarters from now or two quarters or whatever it may be.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  So this is where I would, I would land. I know we can move on from this. Um, so I have a thought around this too. So totally okay with sharing experiments and sharing the results of those, those experiments. But the, the reason why I don't like the M R R piece as well is we have a mutual friend. Um, we're not going to name names here. Um, he, he built in public, one of his companies in public and he, he's got a ton of impressions on LinkedIn. A lot of followers, a lot of views, a lot of comments, right? Hundreds of comments per, per, per LinkedIn post. Um, that business has stalled out. And it created, I think he, he, he mentioned it was like 30 competitors or something like that. Um, so whatever advantage he had went away. And, um, it's kind of just stuck in the water now. It's not really growing. It's not really going down, right?

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Um, and so that is another thing to be worried about, but I do, I think where I landed with this conversation is I think, I would like to share much more of the experiments that we're running because we're doing some pretty cool shit. So.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the last point I have, and I, I won't keep going back to this. That person who shared on LinkedIn.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  You know, you know who we're talking about?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Okay. I think I know who you're talking about. They go to your retreats.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  No.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  No?

• 11:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so then I don't know who you're talking about.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  But that person, if they have a lot of competitors now, whether they posted publicly or not, if they were in a business that's working out, they would already have thirty plus competitors. A great example of this is Gong. Gong doesn't reveal their numbers, but the moment everyone talks about someone in this space that's raising money or valuation, it just breeds a ton of competitors. And you revealing numbers isn't gonna change how many competitors you get, whether you reveal them or not. If you're in a space that has a lot of money to be made, and your space does have a lot of players who are making good money and over nine figures in revenue, you naturally will have competitors whether you wanna blog about it or not. So if you release a feature and you don't talk about your revenue,

• 11:49Speaker 01

  whether your revenue goes up or down, if the sentiment for your features are really good, they don't give a shit, they're just gonna copy it because they know that the market wants it.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Which is exactly what happened with that LinkedIn post. When we did that LinkedIn post, which sparked us to work on it full-time. Again, that post got thirteen hundred comments and then seven hundred likes or something like that. And then immediately that competitor copied, straight from that post started copying. Took him three months to release it, right? So my point is, I think the action I know I'll take from this is we'll be posting a lot more about the stuff that we're building. And that's what it is. And then I, I do think we've been a little more quiet because we've been heads down building. But now we're getting to the point where a lot of these enterprises, there's one enterprise right now.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  They're like, dude, when can we pay for this? When can we pay for this? Like, they're trying to like, just get ahead of the pilot, like, we just wanna pay for this, we just wanna pay for this.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  You should just let them pay for it.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, we are, we are. But like, we're like, but also I think it's important, guys, I know we can move on from this one. It's important to understand what your, your positioning is. Cause right now we're starting to figure out our positioning, right? I think we've done like twenty-two of these pilots or something. And we actually have a couple paying customers right now on, on actual MRR, right? And when, when you look at Superhuman, for example, you didn't use Superhuman, right? The email app?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  I hate it.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  You hate it? So I, I hated it for a while and then Yanniv got me to use it, right? But Superhuman's positioning is what do you think it is?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  We save you time, make email more efficient.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  They make you faster, right, with email? And we're noticing now, people are kind of starting to say the same things. Oh, it's just, you, you, you have, you either have way more value in this, or it's just easier to use this, right? Um, and so, my point of saying all this is that, when you're building in the very beginning, you have to figure out what your positioning is. Um, and, once you figure out your positioning, you can just attack that. And then, when you're talking about pricing with people, I'll go to Neil, I'll say, hey, um, there's a couple pricing questions I can ask. I say, hey Neil, um, what would be too expensive where you wouldn't pay for this thing? That's number one. Then, number two, I would ask, hey Neil, what's too, if, what would be too cheap where you question the quality of this product, right? Like a, like a Louis Vuitton bag, if you bought it for $2, you'd question the quality of it, right?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  The third one, which is the most important one, I would ask you, I'd say, hey Neil, um, what would be, an uncomfortable price, that you'd still be willing to pay? And that's the real pricing question, right? And we're actually settling around this pricing range right now, where it's around 1,500 to 2,000, or 5% of ad spend, whichever is higher.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Per month?

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Per month, yeah. And that's what some people are paying right now, so.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  So, two things, the second one is more of, um, a general last thought that I learned from a private equity guy, related to this. But the first thing I have for you is, do superhumans still do well, or no?

• 14:25Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one talks about them. But it doesn't mean that they don't do well, it's just, they don't get the buzz.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  I think, so, so I just listened to a podcast with him recently. They closed a big, um, consulting firm with thousands of employees, and so I have to assume they're doing okay.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, just because, people aren't talking about a company, doesn't mean they're not making tons of money, so.

• 14:44Speaker 00

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• 15:20Speaker 01

  But I was, years ago, I met in person a guy named Michael Delaney. He's a private equity guy from Court Square. He ended up buying Grayson's company, uh, Power Digital.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And I remember we were in a restaurant in Las Vegas, uh, the Four Seasons, we were eating dinner, they were staying there. And I asked him why he was interested in marketing agency, they were courting us at the time, they were looking at a lot of agencies. Uh, we also had other offers, but we decided not to sell to anyone and I'm not saying they would have went through, but. I just wanted to make my own decisions and not have anyone own fifty one percent of my company.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Oh, same, same deal here.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I just, and he, if funny enough, after our dinner, he had a calls me, he's like. He's like, do you want someone who's a minority and not gonna want fifty one percent cuz he's, he got the feeling pretty quickly at dinner. But he's told me something interesting at dinner, he actually told me two things that were really interesting at dinner, the first one's related to marketing, the second one's more related to entrepreneurship. The first thing that he told me was, I asked him, why are you interested in a marketing agency? Cuz there's so many agencies out there.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Why, why'd you ask him that question?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Because he's done so many investments, right?

• 16:34Speaker 00

  But, but, but you would, these are a lot like scalable companies and, and like software companies.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Correct, and marketing agency, service space, very people reliant, AI wasn't as big back then as is now. Uh, and I bet you AI two years from now will be much bigger than it is now, of course. And he said, Neil.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Marketing agencies is like going to a party and drinking punch. When you go to a party, they usually have a really big punch bowl and it's big enough where everyone can get drunk. So he's like, it doesn't matter how many competitors there are, the space is just massive and there's just money to be made, not for one person, but for everyone, just like at a party. It's very rare that the punch bowl goes empty, it's like, but then everyone's already drunk and they've already, you know, had enough.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  I, I, that analogy just doesn't work for me.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Did you drink some of that?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  I haven't drank any of it, it, it goes through the bottom. But the point he was getting at is, it's such a massive TAM. That it doesn't matter how many competitors there are, there's enough money to, for everyone to do well. Similar to what you're doing right now, it doesn't matter if people have the same features or better features or worse features. You're in a big enough space where a lot of people are gonna get drunk off of whatever it may be and they're gonna, everyone's gonna make money.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Sure, and that's why I don't, so you're completely right, like the, the marketing space, MySpace. I mean, agency side, yes, absolutely, right? Um, even for the software side, absolutely. There's, there's enough room for everybody. I think for me, though, it's. Again, you guys should check out that episode while we talk about, we were kind of made fun of building in public. But again, my takeaway is I will probably share a lot more. We've, we've held back on sharing. We haven't shared enough, to be honest. So we'll be sharing a lot more. And you have a second piece that you wanted to share before we move on.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, the second piece I ended up learning from is more entrepreneurship. He invested in a company back in the day called AmerisourceBergen, which I believe has rebranded to Sensora.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Sensora does what? I think it's like two, three, four hundred billion a year in revenue. It's a pharmaceutical distributor. Their margins aren't great, hence their market cap's not as high. But the last time I checked, I think they were a Fortune 10 company. Sensora.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  I only know the software company Sensora.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's called Sensora. I would just type in AmerisourceBergen stock.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Amerisource.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Amerisource Bergen stock.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Sensora, okay, yeah, twelve points five seven billion.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Is there a market cap?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Right? But when you look at the revenue, they do, they're doing really well. They do, last year, twenty twenty four, they did two hundred and ninety-three billion in revenue. Low margins, though. Net income of one point five one billion. It's a pharmaceutical distributor again, right? And he was telling me about AmerisourceBergen, because I remember we had dinner, and I was like. He was telling me that, he was asking like, type of companies we work with. I'm like, yeah, we just got a lead from AmerisourceBergen. He's like, funny story, I bought them. And when he bought them, they were much smaller. And I was just like, okay, so what happened? He's like, when I started in the world of private equity, I'm talking as if I'm Michael Delaney. He's like, when I started, if, when I was in the world of private equity. We bought companies, we fixed them up, we grew them, and you just kept holding them.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And he's like, but over time, what changes? You started getting LPs. Because when he, when he was running private equity. And this is in the early days, like when we were born. He was using bank money. And when I say bank money, imagine you're a bank like JP Morgan. You have all these depositors. You need to make money off these depositors so you can give them better returns. They were taking a portion of the money from the bank and investing it into corporations, buying them, holding them. It would spit off returns and it would be very fruitful for the bank because they were just owning stable companies that were growing and their balance sheet would just keep growing. What? Yeah, there you go. Since sort of their stock is very stable.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Their stock just going up into the ride and has continually done so. And he's like, then all of a sudden, we started spinning out of the banks and a private equity company started becoming independent. And we had to get LPs and the LPs put clocks on our funds. So he's like, we had to liquidate assets and keep selling. He's like, one of the worst things. He's like, life was great. He's like, I just bought a company, fix it all. He's like, why would I want to sell it? And it was at that point that made me realize, huh, if I can grow a business.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Buy and hold.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Fix it.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Or just hold.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yes, and continually grow it. You're better off holding. Now, if you can time the market, which is really hard to time the market and the multiples are crazy during a certain period, by all means, sell and then you can reinvest in whatever you want. But the big two takeaways I learned from him is if you go after the big TAM, which was the first point, that's key to doing well as an entrepreneur because even if you're not best in class, everyone gets drunk and everyone's happy as long as you go after a big enough market. And we know that in the agency space, there's just a lot of people who do well. And the second thing I learned from him is if you have a good company and you're growing, call it 20 plus percent a year, you're continually doing well, why would you want to sell it for lower returns?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Because a lot of these funds have lower returns than 20% or whatnot. And if you're getting 30% returns, why would you trade your paper for their paper unless their offer that they're giving you is really worth it for you?

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Remember what Warren Buffett, or do you know what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger said about their favorite holding period? Their favorite holding period for a company is forever. Meaning that if you find a good company, you ideally want to hold it for forever. Like, why would you sell, why would you put this artificial clock on, oh, within 10 years, you need to liquidate, right? It actually doesn't make sense if you have a really great asset. But, you know, I understand why they need to do that. Like, you know, they want a return, right? So, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. Yep. Well, please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.