Should you hire a BDM or use an outbound agency?

Auto-generated from the video, lightly cleaned. Some words may be mis-heard.

00:00 So, if your pipeline's looking dry and you're thinking about hiring a sales rep or a marketing person, I'm going to save you about 100 grand a year or more just in this video alone, right? If you're looking at your pipeline and you're going, "Ooh, looking a bit dry at the moment. We need more meetings. We need more leads coming through. And we need more revenue, right?" A lot of people, B2B companies, if you're a founder or CEO, you'll be looking at it going, "Okay, we we either need more sales people or we need another marketing person." So, what I'm going to do in this video is just map out those two options, why they typically fail, and essentially what to do instead. Right? So, generally we see this in B2B companies doing anywhere up to sort of 10, 12 million a year, or even higher generally, but I'm essentially going to be talking to companies that are doing between 1 and 10 million a year in revenue in this video. So, we've got the two options here. You've got sales reps or BDMs. Then on the other side, you've got marketing people. So, for both of these two hires, you'd be looking at at least 100k each per year. Right? And so, if you're looking at six-figure salaries for each, right? typically both of these need a ramp period or ramp time to get up to speed in your business. And both of these two

01:09 hires don't really have a great idea on how to grow your B2B business. And typically they don't have the same incentives that you do as a business owner, founder, or CEO to grow your revenue and in turn obviously your profits, which is the most important piece here, right? So, what I'm going to go through first is sales people and BDMs. Right? So, what a lot of B2B companies end up doing is that they'll look at hiring a sales rep or a BDM first as opposed to hiring a marketing person or any of the other solutions. Right? so, you end up paying, you know, six-figure salary, maybe they're on some sort of bonus, commission, incentive structure. What I see a lot of the time is that they're not incentivized as much as they should be. And so, their base is very, very comfortable for them. They get very comfortable. They're not as hungry as they used to be, sales people, right? And that's a lot of the complaints that I get is that they're just not as hungry. And typically that's because they're on such a high base that if they don't hit the numbers this month or they don't, you know, close that deal that it's fine. They can still live and still, you know, have a good life, right? And so, the bonus incentive structure is not high enough. Even if it is high, a lot of people they still get lazy, right? And so, you want

02:10 this at a certain point to attract obviously good quality talent, but not too high where it's too comfortable for them. So, what you've got here is that they need a system or a pipeline to work, right? And so, a lot of people, you know, the olden days you hire a BDM, let's just say 10, 20 years ago, you'd be able to hire a BDM and they'd be able to fill up their own pipeline, go out there, cold call, prospect, door knock, etc., cold email, and they'd be able to fill up their own pipeline regardless of having a marketing team in place. Nowadays, it's essentially flipped where sales people and BDMs they need leads, they need deals and opportunities coming through the door for them to close. So, essentially they're just glorified closers nowadays. So, if you think of sales people and BDMs more of closers nowadays to take the leads, you know, turn them into meetings, you turn those MQLs into meetings, and then obviously convert them through that sales process. So, they essentially need leads and meetings to work from. They need a system to work, and they need consistent management, ongoing support, training, etc., to keep them up to speed and obviously keep them hungry and incentivized, right? And so, a lot of sales people when you're hiring them, they'll sound good

03:18 on paper that they got good history, etc., but when it comes to selling your product, it could take them three to six months to really ramp up and get up to speed, right? So, if your constraint at the moment is not having enough sales people to actually manage the leads and meetings coming through, then 100% be looking at hiring sales person first, right? If that is not your constraint and you don't have enough leads and meetings coming through the door, then I typically wouldn't be looking at hiring a sales rep or a BDM to fix that problem. Even if they do fix that problem, it's going to take six months plus for them to do it, and either way there's more of an issue, you know, further up the line or further before the sales rep than actually the sales rep being an issue themselves, right? In terms of marketing people, so obviously marketing people, for anyone decent, it's going to be 100k a year plus for anyone good. A lot of people, you know, even if they are exceptional, right, you're going to be needing to pay them 300k a year plus for them to actually want to work with you. Generally, we see a lot of these highly talented marketers that go and start their own business, their own marketing agency, or just start their own startup in general because they know how to market a certain product and that's an

04:22 extremely valuable skill set. And so, marketing people here, so obviously looking at six figures a year in salary. Even if you do have marketing staff on board at the moment, a lot of them are just focused on those vanity metrics, like impressions, open rates, click rates, all of these things that don't actually typically translate into direct qualified sales pipeline, right? And so, if we look at marketing people, you know, focus on vanity metrics. They aren't incentivized to actually grow your revenue because there's no upside for them. Typically, when you're looking at hiring a sales person, you'll obviously think about giving them a commission or a bonus structure on like deals that they close. For marketing people, a lot of people just pay them a base salary and think that they're actually going to be incentivized to grow your revenue. It's not the case. I'm not directly hitting it, you know, on at them, but it's more of the incentive structure. If you actually incentivize your marketing people in a way where they can actually make more money from generating you more revenue and in turn profit, which is actually what matters, then they would actually work a bit harder for you. Just generally, the issue that we see is that they're incentivized to do all these fancy, you know, actual tasks and

05:28 activities and they're not actually incentivized to actually grow your pipeline and revenue and profits, right? Because the incentive structure is just not there. And so, they'll be bum on the seat for eight hours a day writing blogs, you know, editing the website, sending out some email marketing, maybe some working on the SEO, or maybe putting up a few ads or a few posts every week, right? And they're like, "Yeah, we posted three posts last week or this week we've got this campaign running and getting good impressions or whatever it is, right?" They're not held accountable to actually filling up your pipeline with qualified meetings and qualified prospects. And to be frank, like a lot of marketing people just don't have the skill set to actually come into your business and rapidly grow your revenue and profits. As I said, otherwise they would be probably running their own business or demanding much higher salary than 100 grand a year, at minimum 300k a year, if they were an exceptional marketer that could come in and rapidly grow your business. So, you're looking at this, maybe you're doing 1 to 5 million a year, maybe up to 10 million a year in revenue, and you're looking at doubling your revenue, right? Over the next sort of 12, 24 months. And you're thinking, "Oh, I'll just hire some sales people or marketing people to come in and do that and I'll be able to

06:32 accomplish that, right? We just need more leads, right?" Typically, that's not going to be the case. So, it's going to drag on, the issue's going to remain the same. Up until this point, you've grown on referrals, word of mouth, maybe some early marketing stuff that covered the bases, but ever since maybe for the last year or a few years, like your growth has just been really slow and you're wondering what to do next. And and that's why these two typically fail. And the underlying issue is that obviously the incentive structure is not there, but it's also the system for them to actually work from, right? And so, the system is something that's proven in the B2B market here in Australia and New Zealand because how to get results here is definitely different than the US market, especially for outbound. It's a lot of these people that come in, they'll use some US tactics that don't really work as well here, right? How the US market you behaves and sells, calls, etc. compared to Australia and New Zealand, it is definitely different. We don't like to be as hard sold here. and so, if you look at the underlying issue here, so, what need they build is the system. So, a lot of these people will be working from task to task and there's no real structure or system in place,

07:39 right? And so, what we end up seeing in the clients that we work with and potential clients is that they've got these teams, but they're just working on real sporadic things, right, in the company. And and so none of this is really aligned with them generating pipeline. So, they'll do a bunch of activity, follow up with some leads, create some blog posts, maybe make some posts on Instagram or Facebook or maybe some LinkedIn stuff that don't really get any results whatsoever. but it's more so of a nice to have, right? Oh, it sounds good that we posted three times last week on LinkedIn. No, it's great. But did that actually generate you any results whatsoever? Has that generated you results? Probably not, right? And so you need a system that is proven to generate you more revenue, more leads, more qualified pipeline that generates revenue for your business, right? And a lot of these people don't have any idea on how to run this effectively. Yes, they are great at their own individual things. They're a fantastic asset in a company. However, a lot of them are held to their own devices and there's no real accountability or set structure in place for them to perform at their best and actually generate you results for your company, right? But if they had the system in place and they had something

08:47 to work on, they had a structure from you as a business owner, founder, CEO that actually gave them, "Hey, this is the focus. This is what we need. This is what we're building towards. These are the metrics that we want to hit. This is the revenue that we want to hit. Here's how we're going to do it. Here's the strategy and the plan to do it." Okay, now here you go. Go on, figure it out and go and action this, right? A lot of companies don't do that and they don't know, the founder and CEO just doesn't have the marketing and sales skill set and knowledge themselves to be able to action this and actually do it, right? And so what we see, a lot of clients and a lot of potential clients that we see in the market, they might only be doing 1 to 2 million a year in revenue, which is not much, and they still try and outsource their sales and marketing to someone else for 100k a year thinking that they're going to be incentivized to go and figure out all the problems that you've got as to why your revenue is not growing. Often times, the reason your revenue's not growing is that you don't have an offer that people really, really want or you're just not presenting that offer in a clear way in the market using these channels and the tactics within the channels to actually get your results. So, you end up just spinning your wheels wondering why your revenue's staying the

09:52 same, wondering why every hire that you bring on board just hasn't been generating you the revenue that end results that you want, what you're paying them for. And so, what you need instead is having a system to work from, right? And so, what we run for our clients is a proven system where we come in, we build it, we implement it into their business, and they can either run it themselves or we run it with them, right? And we do it all for them. Maybe they don't have sales people or many marketing people in their team, and they need us to do it for them. Or these people are already filled up, and we need to come in and run it for them, right? And so, typically that starts with outbound through email and LinkedIn outreach. They're two proven channels to get results in the Australian and New Zealand market for B2B. After that, obviously you can layer on some meta ads as well, maybe some organic content on LinkedIn, etc. but starting with your email and LinkedIn outbound is typically the most proven channel to test your messaging in the market, test your offer if that's something that people actually want and respond to, or has it just been something that your warm market are responding to, right? Is it something that your cold audience would actually want, something that they would actually buy, right? And it does require some real thinking time and actually

10:56 intentional thought into this to actually grow your revenue. Otherwise, you're just going to be stuck no matter what channel, no matter what tactic, your revenue's just not going to grow unless you actually figure out the core issue as to why it's not growing, right? Then you can delegate some of these tasks to the marketing people and sales people, right? If the sales people have a system to work from and they have consistent leads and meetings coming through, then they can actually perform their best as a salesperson, which is walking the prospect through your offer, your product and service, figuring out if it's a fit or not, qualifying, etc., following up with value, and actually closing the deals, right? Overcoming objections. sales people naturally are just not that great at going out and hunting for their own deals, right? If they are, they're using outdated manual approaches, maybe manual cold calls, they're not able to find email addresses of decision makers in their market. And so, you're paying them six figures a year for them to sit around on LinkedIn for 4 hours a day, half of their day, trying to find some LinkedIn contacts to go after, manually message. They get no responses whatsoever. But, you're paying for them for that. And the deals that they do close deals that were, you know, essentially layout deals that were

11:59 closed either way. You know, they may not have even needed a meeting in order to close, right? You could have gotten on the calls yourself and closed the deal, right? And you didn't need to pay the commission or even have the sales person. So, if they have something to work from, the system, the marketing people have a system and a set structure that you set as the founder or CEO and that you give to them, and you have the knowledge and understanding to go, "Okay, no, actually, that right there is Like, don't be working on that. That generates us no revenue whatsoever." Right? And you can actually say that, and you have the confidence to know that it is something that's not worthwhile doing. Or, you might be able to say, "Okay, this is what we want to be working on. This is the highest revenue generating task and activity that we can be doing. This is the focus for the next week or month or whatever it is. I want you to attack this problem, solve it, and then we can move on to the next problem to grow the revenue." Right? So, it's essentially changing the thought process behind hiring these two people. They can be great if you hire them correctly, at the right time, and give them the set structure and incentives for them to perform at their best. So, if you want to see what the system actually looks like, how it works, etc., how it would

13:00 be implemented into your business, you can click one of the links in the description, watch a short video, and you can book a call from there. Or, check out any of the other videos on the channel that explains it in a little bit more detail.