061 Dan Englander: Agency Outreach that Works

Hey, everyone. Today I'm joined by Dan Englinder. Dan is the founder of sales schema and a consultant helping agencies grow through outbound systems. He's the author of relationship sales at scale and has helped over 100 agencies go beyond referrals using proactive outreach and trust-based selling. I wanted to have Dan on because too many agency owners rely on passive referrals. Dan shows how to build a system that actively fills the pipeline. In this episode, we discuss how to build a referral engine that actually scales by most outbound fails and how to fix it, how to find trust shortcuts in your outreach and more. No one was asking for another community, but it made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access rather than content. Access to peers who've done it before. Access to experts who've designed solutions. Access to resources that have been battled tested. And right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today's your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join at dynamicagency.community. And now Dan Englinder. It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. What is the biggest mistake that agencies make without reach? Yeah, really great question. I mean, I think a lot of it is being self centered, right? And focusing on here are our wins. Here's all the great things we've done as opposed to the prospect and what they're up against and these sorts of things. And I think that there's kind of like blinders on mentality because a lot of the times the agency knows that there might be creating really strong campaigns for their clients that like are focused entirely on their clients customer, but they don't see the force from the trees for themselves, right, which is a common thing. So that's probably the biggest mistake. And I think the thing that makes that harder, it's not that the agency is always narcissistic or can't ever turn that off. I think a lot of the times there is humility. But the thing that stops that is real, real lack of clarity about who their ideal client is, right? Because the agency might be spread between too many different verticals. What I find is even if there is specialization, like even if you do have one vertical that you focused on for years, it's a continuous effort to understand that vertical and understand like really like sharpening what are they up against? What's going on right now? How have things changed? Like that's already enough with just one much less like five for which you've done 10 different things. So those are a few things that come to mind for mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering too with the kind of self-serving side of this. Most marketing agencies are great at marketing for our cancel out a lot of marketing agencies are great at marketing for their clients. But yeah, when it comes to marketing for yourselves, it's really hard. I wonder though how much is it this like we have this desire to just like look, I can't help you. Here's exactly how I can help you like look at it. And it's just like what is it that gets us doing that? Yeah. It's a great question. And I've done that too. We've had many messed up outpapages. We've had good ones and like whenever I've gone wrong and usually when it fails, it's like because I start going crazy with here's all the great stuff we can do here. Here's how awesome we are and like I'm pretty sure we can help here. The issue is I think the reason I'm not sure why we do that. There's probably like a lot of genetic and evolutionary reasons. But I think all I can say is like the dynamic that has changed that in my estimation is this thing called the trust recession, right? Which I talk about, I didn't invent that word. A lot of people are talking about it. But it's the idea that like we went from a situation and I might get too far into history and to other stuff where the scarce resource was information. Like you hear about the information age, right? That was like whatever the end of the 20th century, let's say and passed it into the 2000s and so on. Where you know, you have things like the parity of information between buyers and sellers kind of reach this equilibrium. So it's like you're a buyer going to buy a car. You have the blue books and you know about it. And same same thing applies to B2B. So now we're sort of past that age and there's so much information about everything but that's no longer the scarce resource. And it's really trust, right? It's this idea that like okay there's there's a lot of agencies out there. You know, you say you can do these things. Why not even why should I buy from you? But why should I talk to you right now? Why should I risk having my time wasted or maybe risk getting like pushed into something that I later regret? Whatever that is. So if you're thinking about it from the standpoint of trust being the scarce resource, that really should affect the copy you write and the outreach that you put out there, right? So I'll stop blabbering for a second but that's a few things that come to mind. No, that's great. I send you a question meant for a psychologist and you took a great great direction with it. So I agree. The something that like in-bend marketing was really big on pushing was like educating your audience. But the thing now is like education is there it's everywhere, right? It's like freely you can go to chat GBT, ask any question. You're going to find all the resources you need. And so really it comes down to who builds trust the fastest. And so exactly what you're saying is I'm seeing it in my day-to-day work with agencies. And so right. And I think that like this might be a clumsy metaphor, but it's almost like AI is this giant juicer that's like squeezing the last drops of juice out of like the value of information alone. Right. And then it's like you're not going to out compete that. So yeah. So I mean a lot of like what we're helping our clients with is really figuring out like what's inherently scarce and then leveraging that systematically. So a lot of the times that's looking at things like commonalities, it's looking at referrals, but doing it in a way that is proactive and systematic. So does each individual campaign scale? No, but the system overall does and is repeatable and so on. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to outreach where I think there is a bigger trust gap that needs to be crossed in order for anyone to be able to reach out to anyone and have them actually believe you're there to help them, not just sell them something off the bat. How are you helping your clients with actually bridging that gap? It's really a question. So I'll definitely get into that to do a quick sidebar on this kind of like inbound versus outbound kind of thing. Yeah. I think that the lines are getting pretty blurry between those things. If you're talking about like, hey, I'm getting on Instagram or I'm getting on a LinkedIn, I'm having my attention hijacked for 15 minutes and then there's this lead magnet that I barely remember signing up for. And now I want a list. I don't know that that's a world away from a person, a salesperson or an owner that has built a very deliberately crafted list. And since somebody either content or like a request for a call or something with personalized kind of commonality driven outreach, and then you have a lot of situations where you have people that have gotten under your list, but you're proactively making them an offer to get on a call or tend to webinar or something like this. So, you know, I'm a big believer that all marketing is interruption marketing. I love South Goan and I love the death. I don't agree with this permission marketing thing because permission involves always interrupting somebody. It would be great if we had products that were so dynamic and amazing that all of our business only came through organic referrals, but we live in the real world, right? And we're not all MIT tech billionaires. So this is so anyway, I wanted to say that. I think a lot of the times people draw these lines between them about an outbound. I think that we're all playing the same game at this point, more or less. But to answer your question about tactically how we're thinking about it. So first, the way that most people are thinking about this is taking the lessons from tech companies, from software companies, as I've said, "Hey, here's the way to do outbound." You have this infinite kind of cold model. Everything's super automated. Automation is great. We do a lot of it, but it's kind of like scaling to the moon using increasingly like kind of AI-based personalization. I think the issue with that is we all kind of see it coming from a mile away and our BS walls are getting higher as AI becomes more ubiquitous. So what we're looking to do with outbound is really look at where does the low-hanging fruit live already and how can we pick that for as long as possible and then keep it kind of expanding the low-hanging fruit basically. So what that means in the first 90 days with clients, from most clients were built, we were implementing a program we call the referral engine. So what that means is like looking at connections, figuring out who you would already ask for referral, mapping who they know into accounts that you want to reach, and then going from a situation where you're like, hey, do you know anyone to, hey, I saw you might know these specific people. Would you feel comfortable making intros and then sending templates to make the intros as easy as possible? So it's not the most typical and traditional outbound play, but it is outbound and it is leverage. So that's the most common thing. And then from there, when we're getting into more like colder style leveraged campaigns, the sort of stuff that is fully automated, we are going cold sometimes. but as much as possible, we're using commonalities. So it's like, okay, you wanna reach CMOs and Fintech companies between X and Y size. We could just go after all of them all once or we could find the ones that are in Portland, Maine. Hey, it looks like there's like 50 people you'd wanna talk to in Portland, Maine. Maybe not Portland, but like, let's say you're going to, yeah, trade showing Atlanta in three months. Like there's a hundred people there. Let's start with them, right? 'Cause they're gonna be more likely to talk to you and not almost nobody's sending them that message. It's like, we work with companies just like yours. You can see our website that says it, I'm gonna be in Atlanta for this conference. Like, let's start there. And then if you keep doing it, then once you kind of start thinking in this way, there's dozens, hundreds of ways to implement these campaigns over and over again. So that's the kind of way we're thinking about it. - Gotcha. So like you brought up being in, targeting like an event that's coming up and being able to say, like, we have this, we're all going there. Like what other types of, I guess, commonalities? Are you able to find so that you can do this without needing to travel, without needing, you know, I guess to leverage different events and things like that. - Yeah, really good question. So you don't necessarily have to be getting on planes all the time to make this work. The whole point is that you're short cutting the trust gap. Like you're getting into like hot air balloon and hopping over it as opposed to like climbing, you know, through a canyon. Sorry, I met a four, it's still always hit. Put it anyway. - I'm here for it. - Yeah, yeah. - So like even just knowing about a key industry event and thinking about going or saying you might go or saying like, I'm gonna be there or whatever can be enough is already like a cut above what is in 99% of people's inboxes, right? Because everybody's just trying to re-curgetate publicly available information versus like, hey, we're in the cybersecurity space. You know, are you gonna be at this big cybersecurity event? Hopefully we can chat then. Doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna be at it or you might say like, I'm thinking of going, there's a lot of different ways to do this. And that's just one example. But geographies alone can give us really far by like finding that balance between the person but in commonalities and scale basically. Another one that we've done in the past, which is definitely a smaller scale campaign but just to give an example is like a relevant company campaign. So like agencies, you know, so much of the time, it's like we get business because we have friends that are CMOs, they like bounce around, they take us with them and then like the opposite end of the sword happens as well and you lose these clients. That can play out really well if you actually think of that dynamic deliberately with like, okay, who do we, you know, who can we find that used to work for one of our biggest clients or used to work for a company, I used to work for or used to work for a partner of ours. And then if you're cross-arferencing that and did the accounts that you wanna reach, now you might have a campaign of like 50 people that would take the call with you 'cause it's like you're in their world. So a lot of this trust building is like really kind of like sending, you know, giving people this feeling they're like, okay, this person's in my tribe, I'm probably gonna encounter them in the future and we probably know a lot of the same people and not manufacturing that but really like making it happen in a way that's this leveraged, that makes sense. - Yeah. So interestingly, I actually got an email this morning from a sastool I'm subscribed to that just said, hey, our CEO is gonna be in, excuse me, in New York on these dates, if you're in New York or around there and you wanna meet up for coffee, you know, just reply, we'll set it up and I'm not gonna be in New York anywhere near then but now that you're bringing this up, it's like I'm rethinking about that email and be like, man, if I was in New York though, there's a good chance I'd probably take that meeting just because of like the serendipity of like that happening, it's like, oh, this is interesting, let's go. - Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up 'cause like when we go through our coffee training, a big concept is timeliness, right? And we hear timeliness, it's sort of like we think of fake urgency and like exploding offers and all this stuff, but really timeliness can be very subtle and I think that in B2B, like subtleties usually what we're doing, it's not this loud screaming siren and like, hey, I'm gonna be in the city, is an example of that. I think another reason that the example you brought up is good is that it's very honest, like although like we're making a message that feels one to one, even though we're sending it to a lot of people, it's directionally honest, right? We're not lying, we're not breathing any tactics. One of the negative version or the evil version of the message you described is one that I see a lot, which is like, I'm trying to describe it the right way, but it's like the message will say, hey, like, I was just in conversation with our CEO of lunch and your name came up and like, here's the thread, it's like, why would that happen? And what universe would you be talking about me over lunch with your CEO? It's like these little, but everyone just sees it coming and then, you know, so it's better just to be honest 'cause it's a lot less energy in the long run aside from the ethical and old stuff, yeah. - I get those all the time for podcasting. Where I just, hey, I loved your show. Like I think this person would be awesome to be on it. And I just, I mean, I archive, I'm immediately, but recently there was someone who I've been seeing her on LinkedIn, good content, I'm like, oh, I shouldn't, once I have some spots I should invite her on, but then a PR agency reached out using that same type of messaging on her behalf. And I'm like, hmm, don't want to, like, I'm still probably going to invite her on directly, but I'm not going through that PR agency 'cause it's just such a disingenuant way to go about it. And I don't think-- - Yeah, and what I find is, I think we get hit up by probably, like, about 30 of those a week or something. And there's like, I forget the name, I wish I could wrap them better, but there's like one that does it really well. And it's obviously a form letter. And maybe they personalize like the name of our show, but they don't say anything like, love the episode with this. It's just here's who it is. There's a one-sheeter with like their name, face background. And the quality of the guests are good. And it's like, that's good enough, you know? - Right. - And they're not breaking any trust. - Right, nice to have that, even if we don't pick everybody, it's nice to have that in the inbox, right? So, this is kind of a sidebar, but a lot of the time as people will say this or that is dead, like email is dead, it's like, no, email is not dead. It's still where we go to make plans and do business. Like that was one example, hey, I still want this in my inbox. It's just, you know, just doing it better. And I want you to have a better-- - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah, so that was one of the things I wanted to get into. Like what is, like what's working and what's dead in 2025? But I guess to what you're saying, it's like nothing is fully dead. It's just people are not using them with the best strategies and tactics to actually make it work. - Yeah, and I'm always like hesitant. I think whatever you hear XYZ is dead, it's like you're looking to clickbait, you know? Well, their solution is usually the alternative. So it's like, yeah, this is dead. You should come check this out. - Yeah, exactly. So you always have to be skeptical there, but no, I mean, like email is not dead. It's been going strong since the '70s. Has I think the main thing that's changed as there's a higher degree of barrier to entry for it, right? And that's because of the technology. It's because of what goes into setting up the right infrastructure for deliverability. And with large language models, you know, internet service providers like Google and Microsoft are making it harder for the messages to get through. So there's kind of this, this kind of like issue where the spammers are just going to keep adjusting to that and they're still going to get their messages through because that's all they do. They can just keep playing the cat and mouse game. But for your average like white hat person, like, you know, an agency that wants to contact there a few thousand prospects, tastefully, there's just more that has to be done. Is it worth it? I think it still is worth it because everything's hard. Like building anything that's repeatable and that you can keep doing is hard. You want to do ads. Well, you talk to most ad experts, they'll tell you that, you know, cost per click have gone up and that's gone harder. And that in general, getting attention is harder than it was in the past, right? So it's just kind of what game you want to play. And I think for B2B, email still makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah, there's a mindset shift, I think that like in this, in our current times where everybody wants things very fast, it's like to look at marketing and say, we just need whatever's going to get us leads in the door, right? Fill the pipeline. Yeah, it's going to take time. Like no matter what you're doing, there is going like effort that has to go in in order to create this system. So that it works. Yeah, exactly. And I might have lost your question a little bit because I think you asked about tactics and kind of like what's worked and what has worked. So I think that there's stuff that works with transactional products and big scaled markets that doesn't work as well with like complex services, i.e. agency services. And I think this is one of the biggest voids we're looking to fill in the market is that I don't know what percent, like a huge percentage of sales tactical advice is based on like the software industry and really what's worked for them. You can go all the way back to like the predictive, predictable revenue model, like they're in raw stuff that now has been challenged, I think a lot, which was like the idea of, hey, I'm going to go hire this BDR, they're going to go pound the pavement, dial for dollars, hit up people over email, give you some meetings and then we'll have an account executive close them. I think that's tough because in a consultative sales, so much of getting on the phone is about like the information, the learning you're going to get, the relationship you're going to build, as opposed to like a product driven sale, which is so much about. what the product's doing and also the downside risk is so small to a lot of these software products versus an agency thing that is going to affect your career, it could get you fired if you hire the wrong agency and so on. So a lot of it comes down to getting away from the massive amount of scale and the cold stuff, the fake AI based personalization and again, getting back to some of the stuff I talked to earlier, like the commonalities, the trust, referral based stuff and so on. The stuff that's not going to go out of style any time soon, no matter how the technology changes. Yeah. Right. So as you're looking to help a client fill in their pipeline, start outreach, is there a specific area that you focus on first? Yeah, it's a really good question. So I think a lot of the stuff, like everybody wants to get to like the slick tactics and software and stuff and we get there soon enough. But there's more foundational things that we have to make sure there before we can even work with people. And I think the first one, like before we even sign on, it's just like, what do they want to accomplish? Like, people say they want to grow, like, what's behind that? Are you looking to sell this in a few years? Are you looking to scale and open up more offices? Why? Because like all this stuff is going to take time, energy, effort, et cetera. So like really, let's kind of start with why thing? And it's who, like, who's actually going to be running this and who's going to be doing it? We like recently, we really adapt to like the Racy framework, which are ACIs, a responsible account of what people know that consulted informed. I think a big issue is people putting way too many cooks in the kitchen or worse, having this kind of sales as a hobby, we'll have this partner deal with this, this other partner deal with that we're doing. We have time. What we want to figure out is like, what happens not when you have an empty pipeline? Like, we know what happens then you freak out and you want more leads. What happens when you win the next three clients, right? And you need to onboard them. Are you going to be able to keep prospecting and keep this machine running? And for a lot of agencies, the answer is no, right? And that's where they screw up. And it's the 30, 90 days after that happens that we run into trouble. So a lot of it is like time blocking, figuring out who's doing what, getting motivation. From there, the next building block is clarity. Like really like, who are we going after? And thinking about it from the prospect standpoint, how do they self identify? Because that's how we're going to build campaigns. So the A/C may provide the exact same service to banks and Fintech or between retailers and beverage companies. But that's, you know, the problems that those individual prospects have and the idiosyncrasies between those ideal client profiles are going to be completely different, right? Like a Fintech growth stage CMO has culturally different, has a million different bag of problems compared to like an institutional bank CMO, right? So that's going to inform how we build campaigns. And we need to iron out who those groups are going to be first. And ideally, there's, niching isn't the only way. But for most of our clients, it's about going from, you know, a grab bag of these ICPs towards like one over time. And then once those things are there, then we're building companies lists, we're building, you know, we're a furl strategy, which I can get into if we have time at building these scale that reach campaigns through commonalities and so on and getting them running in the background. Yeah. So I guess I'd love to dive into figuring out the commonalities more. Like, yeah, just what are, you know your ICP, right? You know, generally who you're targeting. What are you looking for in order to find those kind of levers that you can pull in order to show someone like, hey, we're, we're similar. Yeah. I mean, the fact is like it doesn't always have to be the most amazing thing in the world. If you can sort of stack them up, like it's sort of like the, the, the sum is more than its parts kind of dynamic. So if you are decently, if you're getting towards being specialized or niched and you can, like a lot of this is playing out in the copy and the sort of pain points or dynamics to try identifying. So for example, like I have a campaign going right now to owners and agency leaders in the New York area. Is it the most compelling commonality in the world that we're in New York? No, there's like tons of agency people here. But if I can combine that with, hey, like we help agencies get beyond reactive referrals and build these repeatable systems. Also like I saw we're both in New York. I'm in forest hills. No, that's a message that's harder to ignore and that's like literally the message we've, you know, made millions on over the years kind of thing. So if you can keep doing that a version of that, even just Geo's can get us really far. If you're combining that with stuff that's very meaningful to the vertical and so on. You know, others like I've talked about events can go really well. A lot of the, a lot of the times these are things that the agency's doing anyway. They're just not building campaigns around them. So more and more like what we're looking to help agencies do is not like invent something that's completely new that they've never done before. It's really just kind of adding fuel to like what's already there. So like if you're, especially like if you're already going to events, you should be setting up meetings, you know, before, during and after it. Like the events really just kind of this like hub and this like a reason to talk more than anything else. I think I talked about like, you know, previous clients or past past clients and that kind of thing. And then you know, a huge part of this like really this can keep the agency busy for a year or more. And then continuously from there is the referral engine. I think that's probably the shortest path to revenue is like it does take more like deliberate time looking at who knows who and then getting specific referrals. So those are like a few things that come to mind. Yeah. Let's dive into the referral engine. Yeah. Cool. So just to frame it out a little bit, most agencies get all their business referrals and overfrails are good. The issue is they're reactive. Most agencies are just waiting for them to happen. The ones that are a little bit better but not good enough will have a situation like they meet somebody at a conference or networking or a happy client and then they'll go and say, hey, do you know anyone who fits this criteria? Sometimes it'll work. Usually it doesn't and the reason it doesn't isn't always because people don't want to help us. It's because there's a lot of homework we're giving somebody. If I say, hey, Chris, I want to meet for you. It's different because you know tons of agencies. It's not a good example. But if I met somebody that, you know, in a conference, I said, hey, I want to meet agency owners between next and why you have this problem, that person then has to go scan their role at X, understand what we do well enough, write a message, make the stars align and it just doesn't happen. So what we want to do is basically get to a situation where you're asking for a specific referral. And what we want to do is, you know, we want to do a different process. So what we want to do is, you know, we want to do a different process. And we want to do a different process. every month, factoring in, churn, everything. And for most agencies, like the actual revenue that they need to be gaining every month is in the single digit thousands, right? It's not a lot of money to be able to hit your, your far out targets. So when you bring up being able to leverage your referrals, potentially get on a call, have four potential referrals made on that, even if you only close one of those in a month. Like that could check the box for your net new revenue. So at the end of the year, you're hitting your targets. And so if you can turn this into a system and just like every month, you're at least getting that one referral through this, which that feels pretty reasonable. - Yeah. - It's like, why would you not just take this approach on top of doing like your regular marketing and everything, but like create that system to actually leverage referrals in a way that's more deliberate rather than just praying, someone else is gonna send someone your way. - Yeah, exactly. And this is why it's become our starting point for like 90% of cases. Is it's not a world away from what the agency's already doing. It's just done more peractively, right? And done more deliberately for sure. Yeah. - Yeah, I think so is a word stream study from a couple of years ago, but they said 60% of agency prospects are coming in from referrals. And like for me, if it's terrifying, because like more than half your business is something you have no control over. But what if you did actually take control of that? - Right, like through the out, deliberate outreach. - Yeah. - Completely changes the game. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it is like all the technologies there to really get that insight over like where you should be focusing your energy. It's just about putting it together the right way. And a lot of these tools like, you know, as a side like LinkedIn, I don't think has done the best job making that easy on people, which ostensibly is what it's for. - Yeah, because there's too much clutter in my opinion. - So what's the 80/20 here? If you had to give that one to ask, one big domino, I guess, then everyone can get outside as results from. - I think people clarity trust, I'll give three. - Sure. - Yeah. - Yeah, I mean, there's way more than that. So when we talk 20% here, probably still. - Yeah, it was a little bit in there. - It's tough to narrow down to one, but yeah, people clarity trusts in that order. - Yeah. - Awesome. All right, well, Dan, I get two more questions for you. - Yeah. - First one, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read? - Oh, man, that's great. I have a couple ideas. I always go back to the War of Art. I like it a lot. It's all about like, the resistance. So if you ever read that, you got it back there. - Yeah, it's nice. - Are you reading it right now? - It's timeless. It's really great. That one's great. I think for sale specifically, I like the Challenger sale. It's by a couple of few people with C.E.B. or whatever they're called now. I think it's kind of like a spiritual sequel to spin selling. It's just a good consultative sales model. It's more about like this teach, tailor, take control framework, which I think is a really good framework for the post information age, right? Where people like know a lot of stuff. That's more about like perspective and leading people a little bit without being forced, you know, pushy or whatever. Yeah, there's the first two. And then, shamelessly, my own book, Relationship Sales at Scale, which is about our whole manifesto and how to think about the stuff and so on. Yep. - Awesome. All right, last question, where it could be, but find you. - Yeah, a bunch of different places. I think saleskima.com is our site. If you wanna check out the book, it's just saleskima.com/book. And it's right there, it's best place. - Awesome. All right, Dan, thanks for joining. - Chris, thank you for having me. Great questions, all over the phone. (upbeat music) That's the show, everyone. You can leave a rating and review or you can do something that benefits you. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substag. 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