How John Karsant Books 80% of Sales Meetings with One Channel (And Why It Still Works in 2025)

🎯 Who Should Listen:

• B2B Sales leaders looking to improve meeting conversion rates
• CROs exploring more efficient outbound strategies
• Demand gen marketers struggling with email and LinkedIn fatigue
• RevOps leaders rethinking SDR productivity and GTM channel ROI

💡 What This Episode Covers:

What is the most effective sales channel in 2025?

• John reveals why 80% of his client meetings are coming from the phone – and why cold calling is making a real comeback in B2B SaaS.

Why cold calling still works (and better than ever)

• Insight into how live conversations out-perform email and LinkedIn for learning, booking, and converting.

How cold calls reveal the truth about your ICP

• Cold calling becomes your fastest A/B test engine: real objections, real tone, and feedback loops in hours – not quarters.

Email is flooded, LinkedIn is spammed – what now?

• Breakdown of how automation tools have polluted digital channels, and why conversations are the only scalable differentiator left.

Scaling smarter: How fewer reps and more signal = better pipeline

• Karsant outlines a lean model for testing outbound without bloated SDR teams – built for learning and velocity.

🔁 Key Takeaways:

• 80% of meetings are coming from cold calling (not email, not LinkedIn)
• Live conversations accelerate ICP clarity and message-market fit
• Automation is now the noise– real voice is the signal
• You don’t need a big SDR team to validate outbound

Ready to replace guesswork with conversations?

Explore how ChatMetrics turns website visitors into qualified meetings with real-time staffed chat and SDR alignment:

👉 chatmetrics.com

 00:00- Terry: 

Welcome to The Chat, come behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies for the past 10 years. As Chat Metrics. We’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales. Across diverse sectors. Each week, we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales who share insider secrets and strategies for driving inbound success.

Join us on The Chat, your front row seat to the future of inbound.

Today on the chat, John Karsant is the co founder of Level Up Leads, helping companies supercharge their outbound sales efforts.

We’re going to dive into his journey, the lessons he’s taken into business, and his

01:00-

insights on GTM strategies, partnerships, and scaling revenue. John, welcome to the chat.

John:

Thanks for having me on, Terry. Appreciate it.

Terry: 

It’s my pleasure,

Jumping right in, what are some of the most effective GTM strategies you’ve seen working for scaling B2B companies at the moment?

John:

You know, I think this has changed over time. My answer probably would have been different a few years ago, but right now it’s the phones. 100%. are seeing the most success on the phones with our SDRs, cold calling. It’s not even close. Right now, I’d say across email, LinkedIn, and cold calling, about 80 percent of our meetings are coming from the phones.

Terry:

Wow.

John:

Is by and far the most successful. And here’s another, another, interesting point is it also, a lot of our clients come to us and they don’t have everything dialed in, not even their ICP and they’re trying to learn along the way it’s part of the reason why they hire us and the phones is the quickest way to pivot and understand what people are receiving or seeing and how they’re receiving our message. Whereas an email is just much tougher to get that feedback.

02:00- Terry: 

It is, because if it doesn’t resonate, it’s just a complete black hole, whereas at least when you’re on the phone, you get some type of response.

John:

That’s it.

Terry: 

What do you think’s driving that? Because I look, I know that from our perspective, growing our business, I built this business from cold calling in the very beginning. Then we’ve switched in round about 2020 to much more of an email focus. And we’re sort of in that, in that no man’s land at the moment, uh, heading back to doing a bit of email, but I’m thinking that cold calling is something we’ll be looking into based on conversations like this one, um, that I’ve heard from many other people as well.

What do you think is causing that shift, I guess, from emails being as effective to the phones?

John: 

Yeah, a few years ago, email was great. It was awesome. You know, you could send out a hundred emails. And you could get like an interesting lead or two from that. And now the numbers don’t aren’t even close to that. I think the main reason here is why email has become more challenging

03:00-

Is the market is more saturated? There are more and more tools that offer an email function to it. For example, like a email hunter is a point where I’ve been around for a long time. It’s typically known for finding and validating email addresses. They add on an email function, another LinkedIn tool designed for LinkedIn outreach, add on an email function. And so I think there’s more and more tools in the market data is easier and easier to get access to, and it’s cheapermuch, it’s much, much cheaper to run outbound campaigns. All you need to do is set up the campaign yourself and run it. You don’t need that much involved. Whereas cold calling it’s more expensive, especially if you’re hiring somebody native, you’re going to be paying their salary, paying for all the tools you typically need to finding mobile numbers are more expensive than finding emails. And then you typically need someone to train them. just let them die on their own without any supervision or, you know, adjusting to the scripts and things like that. So it’s just a much more

04:00-

Expensive channel to run. And plus no one wants to do it. Even the SDR is on my team. I know they don’t want to be doing this job forever. Right.

So, it’s a tough job. You’re facing rejection a lot. And I think due to that, there’s less people making cold calls sending

Terry: 

know, the old, uh, Call reluctance. Email is almost like the easy way out of getting out of cold calling. And I think that, um, you know, you’ve hit the nail on the head when you talk about accessibility. There’s tools now, one step further, One thing just to add to the items that you mentioned, I think, now, is that there’s availability for domains to be set up, burner domains to be set up, and, you know, mass relevant emails be sent out with things like these tools, these platforms, emailing platforms, that offer things like Spintax and A B testing of sequences.

And so, you know, you can sit there and spend a lot of time setting up email sequences and then go and blast

05:00-

10, 000 people. In the smaller businesses, it might be okay just to get a couple of responses and a couple of leads. But the problem is that it does. Mess the market. I’ll use that language to be a little bit more polite. It pollutes the market for everybody else, really, when inboxes are just getting filled with absolute spam. I took a quick glance at my, and I never do this, I never look at my spam box, quite frankly. I’m of the opinion that if you can’t get your shit together to get into my inbox, then I don’t want to talk; it’s not somebody that I should be talking to.

I’m just kidding. But you’d be shocked. I was actually quite shocked at some of the large organisations that have ended up in my spam box. you know, and I can only just think that someone in their business somewhere is sending emails from the main domain, uh, out to a cold list and being marked as spam.

I look, I can, I get why emails came as a wave and why they were readily adopted. It’s the easy way to get away from the cold

06:00-

Calling, but I can certainly, I don’t think that cold calling.

Do you think that, that cold calling has ever been less effective? I believe.

John: 

I don’t know. think once you can dial it in, it really can work for you and you’re in your favor, like there’s not there’s it’s just so much easier to have an actual conversation. You can really get a feel for their vibe, you know, like that gut instinct of whether or not you know they’re interested, or they’re trying to

Terry: 

Yep.

John:

The phone, like you can really feel that. It’s much harder to gauge those types of things over a text message or or, uh,like, if you ever this happens, this is not even work related, but in personal life, you get a text message and you either you sent it or you receive it and you take it out of context. And it’s, you receive it completely differently than you kind of like reread it later.

And you’re like, Oh, you have a different feeling about that. And it’s like, I think it’s much easier to understand how someone feels on a, on a phone and in a conversation. it’s not like everyone’s going to say

07:00-

Yes, that’s not, it’s not going to always happen, but it is a lot easier. Like one of the things we talk about on our sales calls is we have your calendar open when we’re making these calls. So when they are interested, all we need to do is just find the time. Okay. And so it’s, it’s much easier to get, get calls booked in the calendar. The other thing I’d say is I think there are waves of what’s working. Like there was a while LinkedIn work, I mean, sorry, uh, email worked really well. I think calling is working really well now.

And I think there’s going to be cycles as people start to pick up on things. Same thing with trends in the outbound lead gen space, right? Permission-based openers. Now we’re kind of seeing it, everyone’s using it. So it’s starting to sound repetitive. So you kind of need to switch things up a little bit.

Terry: 

Yeah.

John:

So we’ll see how long the cycle lasts, but right now, yeah, we’re finding the phones to work very well.

Terry:

I actually doubt whether the phones have ever been less effective. In my mind, I mean, I made, and this will sort of

08:00-

show my age a bit, but I was thrown a physical hard copy of a Yellow Pages book on my desk when I switched from a fairly senior accounting role into a very junior sales role.

And the sales manager that I’d been giving a hard time each month about not hitting his budget actually ended up working for him. And so he threw the yellow pages at me and said, call. Uh, and that was in 1992. And I can say it was certainly the biggest difference between then and now, is that everybody used to answer the phone.

Whereas now with mobile technology and the proliferation of cold calling and the technology that will come up and say, you know, potential spam number, that type of thing, people have it can decide whether it’s somebody they know or not they want to answer for. But it’s it’s worked all the way through in 2015 when I started this business.

Cold calling, cut through. We, we sent some emails initially, we did some email blasts, we did some email relevance, but it was cold

09:00-

Calling that was, absolutely the way to go. And even now, I find that, you talked about feelings and it’s a little bit offside. Well, I talk about this a little bit on, in the content that I write and that, you know, people don’t remember what you say, but they remember what you, how they made you feel.

When you get an email in your box and the email is not relevant or you’ve just missed one thing, it might be just that you’ve made an assumption about a particular ACV or deal size and it’s off. That’ll just, can switch them off from the entire message. Whereas when you’re in a conversation with somebody, you can hear the tonality.

When you’ve made a mistake, you know, you can back up, you can show some humility and you can actually impact truly how that person feels on the other side of the phone.

John: 

You mentioned 2015 and cold calling. And that was my, when I had my first. Real like behind a computer job was 2015 working remote. And I was, in the solar lead generation space.

10:00-

I couldn’t agree more like a lot of I wasn’t doing heavy cold calls, but I was cold calling to your point. The email cadence, like the email sequencers, were just starting around.

And I remember I was during that job in 2015 that I learned how like the ability to do a sequencer. And it was like, Oh my God, I can’t believe you can do this. You can set it up, and you can set the times and everything. So it’s like before that, you know, maybe I’m off by a year or two, maybe it started in 2014, but it wasn’t that easy to send out these emails.

And then a lot of things were bouncing and calling was the way to do it. that’s how you did a lot of business and that’s how it’s been going for a long time.

Terry: 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s one of those things where if with email, our emails were, were very effective. I’m interested to see how our new campaigns go. We’re launching again in the next couple of weeks. With email, I think the point, Timeliness, is the biggest challenge. You know, with all this discussion about intent data

11:00-

And, and, you know, there’s businesses and platforms now that will give, send you with, there’s triggers, certain triggers where maybe somebody’s moved a role or changed the, changed an organisation.

so timing is always the biggest challenge for me. relevance. is difficult at scale, but there’s so many tools now that allow even that to be much easier than it’s been in the past. I’ve mentioned before, but the A B testing of different sequences, the spin tax available in emails, tools like clay that scrape the web for little pieces or snippets of information about individuals that can make, you know, the message very, very, Resonate from a relevance perspective, and I think that sort of changed the world a bit with email.

So we’ll see how that goes. But look, do you have any thoughts on balancing the difference between inbound versus outbound in high growth environment and particularly whether it’s yourself or with the clients that you work with?

John:

I’ll speak on our, on my, my own company, just cause I think it’s a lot

12:00-

Easier with our clients. It’s you kind of, they come to you with a certain, they’re all in a different stage of the company

Terry: 

Yep.

John:

just getting started to well established. and then typically when they’re hiring us, will give us inbound leads, but they typically want to deal with the inbound leads because they’re warmer and they generated those.

So we don’t always get the luxury of that. But what I can say, level of leads is I got started off outbound. It’s the only thing I really knew. And that’s how I grew the business. But. You started, I started to over time, and I wish I did this sooner, build up a brand and an inbound engine. And it’s certainly a work in progress, but is now how we’re setting a lot of our meetings as they’re coming inbound, they’re warmer and they’re the sales cycle shorter.

Terry:

Huge. And I think it’s a long process. It’s not something that you could just going to do in a few months. it takes a while. You got to build up the case studies. The third party reviews like clutch and G2, you have to have a good website. Like all these

13:00-

Things factor into somebody actually deciding to click that schedule, a meeting button. And that has been a game changer, but I think a blend of both. There are some companies we’ll work with that are only working inbound leads, and I’m like, well, what about the outbound, and when that’s, which is why they come to us in that circumstance, but it’s, Yep.

John:

I think you should be doing both as a company.

Terry: 

The inbound is, it’s a long play, as you say, and it can be almost a fruitless labour of love for a very long time before you start to see it pay off. But the inbound, the beauty of those inbound leads, the few that we’ve had come in, because it’s an area that I haven’t really been focused on until about last November.

But when you do start to get those inbound leads come through, it’s, you know, phenomenal.

John:

Hundred percent. Yeah.

Terry: We had a conversation. I had a conversation with an inbound lead last Wednesday morning. They’d signed up by lunchtime

14:00-

And we were live on their website on Friday.

John: 

Wow,

And we’ve, and anyone listening.

Terry:

We’ve booked four sales qualified meetings for them since then.

John: 

That’s

Terry:

It is. But that came from, interestingly, that came from a random conversation that I’d had on Reddit.

And I’m not even, it’s not, I’m not, it was very random that I was even on Reddit. It’s not somewhere that I usually frequent, but, um, it was just fascinating the way that whole process had come through. You never know where it’s going to come through. You never know, really, you know, as much, there’s so much talk these days about the dark web and dark social and trying to attribute where your inbound, where your marketing efforts are paying off.

It was bizarre, you know, like a literally five minute visit to Reddit and somebody read that particular comment and thought that’s what we need. So,

John:

That’s strange

Terry:

It was, uh, it was bizarre. It was bizarre. wonder if there’s any other opportunity on redditit’s a time thing too and

15:00-

where you’re going to spend your time. we’ve done pretty well out of LinkedIn, so far. So,it’s a, it’s about how many, how far are you going to spread yourself thin. For us personally, I mean, in the, in the last 12 months, In the last six months really, we’ve launched a podcast.

I’ve got active on LinkedIn again. We’re about to launch our email campaigns next week. we’ve reactivated our social media in terms of Facebook and Instagram, and um, uh, YouTube, the YouTube channel. We’ve put quite a lot of content on that as well. Um, It’s just another step. I think, um, for us in terms of B2B, the, there’ll be one or two of those channels.

You know, Instagram will probably drop away before we go and step into another one again. it’s, uh, You’ve got to be in there long enough to see what the results are going to be before you make a decision to move somewhere else. I mean, that’s one thing that I’ve learned about strategy over the years.

You’ve got to be careful not to jump around too much because you never know on the cusp of something. But we’re getting pretty well long enough in Instagram. Instagram is not

16:00-

A place for us. So it’s really, and we haven’t really put too much effort into it. It’s just been, Oh, let’s just post everything else that we do in through LinkedIn, through Instagram as well and see if anything sticks.

But it hasn’t been.

John:

Yeah, I can attest to that too. I’ve like thought about the Instagram or and it’s like I feel like youtube’s so much easier for our space and I don’t know. I just I haven’t done the, we have an account, but it’s almost non-existent. And so, um,it’s, it’s crossed my mind, but I just feel like YouTube is, uh, cutting, you know, creating content like this, clips. I just feel like it’s a much better use of time right now.

Terry:

Yeah. And so that is, so you’re saying that you’re on YouTube, not on LinkedIn? TikTok.

John: 

I’m not on TikTok. Thought about it quite a bit. We have a linkedin page. I saw a instagram page, but it’s not really Active at all.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting, just on TikTok for a minute, it’s one of those places where

17:00-

I see it as strong for e-commerce. Well, I’ve done a little bit of research over the last month or so. It seems that there is more B2B there at the moment, but it is very early days. And I think it’s one of those cases where, if you’re, if you’re an influencer, And you know, your intention is to grow a huge audience and, and, you know, continue a path that you’re already on, then yeah, you should B2B definitely in TikTok.

But I think from our perspective, you know, I have no, aspirations of this podcast becoming, you know, the next Joe Rogan experience. So it’s not an appetite for, and quite franky i really just abhor social media full stop. Its A labor of, uh, of hate for me. , unfortunately.

John:

And it may vary company to company right and who you’re like you said that e commerce might make more sense if I think about who our typical buyer is, it’s probably someone between the age of

18:00-

30 to 60,

Terry:

Yeah,

John:

Probably even in more like 40 fifties is the sweet spot and they’re not on TikTok.

There are some, but it’s just like the, most of the people are not there.

yeah, yeah.

have to understand your audience and where they’re hanging out.

Terry: 

Exactly. Exactly. Um, look, you’ve, you have built a pretty strong partnership ecosystem. What’s the secret to a successful partnership strategy?

John:

Like just being in the space and being well known, right? Like me, posting stuff on LinkedIn. Like I even just a friend of mine was consulting for a company. And he reached out to me directly, and now the CEO called me this morning, and we’re going to work together. And so, like, I’ve built, people are aware and like, they will recommend us, or they’ll leave a job and go to a new job ,and they’ll want to bring us in. So, like, those are the types of relationships I’ve built.

Terry: 

Yep. Yep. Yep.

John: 

Too many, partnerships. Like, one, I’ll shout out,CloudTask with Amir, who I know you’re, you are friendly with. Uh, like that, it could be a partnership

19:00-

Where, you know, they are generating some interest and then they’ll pass over that interest and lead to us. And we’ll take over that conversation. And of course they get a cut. so there’s a few of those, I wish I had more, but there’s a few of those out there.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. Look, I’ve found the relationship with Amir to be excellent. He’s very proactive. CloudTask has been an excellent company and it really, it’s been probably, it’s not probably, it’s the first marketplace partnership that we’ve stepped into or dropped our, dipped our toe in the water with. And, um, it, it seems good so far. Excellent.

John: 

And also on the hiring side, we’ve hired some people through them as well. So it’s been a nice and in that sense to be able to see talent quickly through the videos in their marketplace and hire quickly, When needed. So that’s been

Terry: 

Excellent. So you mentioned, um, some time in the solar industry. I mean, in my mind, certainly here in Australia, the solar, cold calling solar companies are almost the bane, uh, of, uh, of every housewife

20:00-

At home trying to cook dinner at five 30 on a, on a weeknight. ha. What was that experience like for you?

John: 

It was a, it was an incredible experience for learning how to run a startup or a business. Not that I got to see everything but were so small I was the first sales guy that I learned so much just because there wasn’t other bodies I would ended up doing a lot of different things Wearing a lot of different hats and at the time it was like man this sucks I’m, like not making any money for all this work, but I look back on it I’m, like that was the best experience I could have ever had to get you know to start level up leads and that was really good now in terms of the solar industry Like I just had to learn on the fly. I didn’t know anything about solar you and so it’s interesting. So we were selling leads. So I was making B to B sales, but we

Terry:

Okay.

John: 

B to C leads to them. So it was an interesting play. So we had, we were generating the B to C leads on our own,

Terry:

Them B to B. And so it’s

21:00-

like a good way to get a feel for how the, that, that process and ecosystem works. that, yeah, that’s, that space is interesting. Cause there’s all these regulations. states and countries. So what makes solar more like the incentives and whether or not someone is like likely going to sign up, Based off something expiring. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

In, in Australia? Do they have like

Terry:

In place?

Most definitely, and so one of our early clients was a solar company. So they had their own call center, they were doing outbound calls, but they were also increasing their marketing spend. And so we sat on their website, qualifying the, um, website visitors and really giving them enough information to turn them into, into qualified buyers.

It was a very interesting experience because this organization went from relatively small to all of a sudden I’m watching, like literally tens of thousands of website visitors that were spending a lot of money on marketing and, um, I’d had a couple of chats with the

22:00-

CEO. He seemed to be, how would I describe him?

Almost roguish. In his approach, you know, let’s build a, they had five people in the call center to start with, and then they built that out to 150 And it was like, just boom, everything’s just gone supersized. And I thought, I wonder if these guys are going to be too big, too fast. But they had the deal.

I could see the lead flow that was coming in from the website, let alone what they were getting through their call center. So I knew that, um, you know, there certainly was demand for what they were doing. And they were just at that right timing where there were government incentives and there were government deadlines in terms of those incentives being closed.

And it was almost to the extent here in Australia, where very, very low nominal cost from the homeowner and the government subsidies were very large. Unfortunately, they were selling, and it was all based on, Tesla, Powerwalls, was the the banks. And

23:00-

Unfortunately, uh, Tesla put a six month delay on the Powerwalls coming through.

And it killed the business. They missed the rebates. They had to refund all of the money. Well, there was no money to refund because they’d built out this huge call center. Uh, and it went from, you know, 150 mile an hour to zero in 1. 2 seconds. It was, uh, it was a terrible thing to watch. and that was back in 2016.

And that was, you know, a supply chain issue.the experience that we’ve all just come through from the, from 2020 onward in terms of logistics and supply chain issues with anything that’s a physical product. you know, I’ve seen firsthand back then in my prior experience in the steel industry can, you know, sort of attest to that when you’ve got building, you know, Timelines and deadlines and so forth for liquidated damages, but from the solar industry Same here in Australia.

We had those deadlines, but unfortunately for that company, they went too big too soon I’m pretty sure If they weren’t so big and they had enough cash to

24:00-

Manage through the people that didn’t want to wait, the government was going to honour the rebates that had been signed up for, but the problem was a lot of the individuals, a lot of the customers, just didn’t want to wait another six months.

They wanted their money back, so that’s what caused the problem for them.

John: 

Yeah.

Terry:

Interesting space, the solar industry. I get what you’re talking about from generating B2C leads. That’s the product, but you’re selling to B2B. You’re selling to companies that you’re in the lead gen space there.

John: 

The other interesting thing about that space and something that doesn’t happen in B2B, at least in my experience, but leads are sold multiple times. So we had like either a solar company that would buy one lead exclusively, or you had based on the zip code and parameters that you could see it was being sold like three or four times. And it was like a very interesting concept to see the back end of how it all worked. And then like what, what type of information was being submitted and what was being filtered out. And so it was a good learning experience on seeing.

25:00-

The back end of that.

Terry: 

It’s one of those areas that so B2B tech is one space that we’re in. we’re also pretty strong in finance, strong in education, strong in industrial products as well. and it’s one of those, Conversations that my business partner, my co-founder, and I have had with regards to, we could literally set up a lead gen business.

Pick an industry, like insurance, for instance, and, you know, set up a lead gen industry. The reason we didn’t do that is because the way that we provide our service We’re very personalized and it’s very focused on the individual company. and we really felt that part of our value proposition was helping organizations avoid having to double pay for leads that have been, already shopped around the marketplace.

And, you know, I’ve got people chasing them all over. Once you own that space and have websites. traffic and visitors coming to your website and you can

26:00-

Generate leads from there. I mean, that’s the Utopia for any organization really? Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. You own it. You own it. and it’s interesting places like CloudTask for instance They could easily be in that environment where they have an inquiry coming in for a particular product.

They’ve got five, providers on their platform in that particular vertical that solves that problem. You know, it’s almost the same. So I always look at, at marketplaces as the same sort of thing and why I’ve avoided them in the past. But, I really, I’m enjoying the experience with CloudTask, Amir’s doing an excellent job there as far as I’m concerned. So, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s great. I guess my natural born cynicism, uh, hasn’t, uh, hasn’t played through at all. So, what, um, what part has AI played in your business to date, and how do you see that changing in the future?

John: 

Well, we talked about. ai, well, we’ve talked about more so like more and more tools coming out. A lot of them AI.

27:00-

Backed or AI functionality there. Now there’s AI SDRs, which are becoming more popular, especially on the email side of things, not the calling. but the way we’re using it is on the calling side is so, one we we use Orum as our dialer. They’ve been great.

Terry: 

Ah,

John:

They give us, AI, transcripts of every call. it’s very easy to take notes and provide feedback. but the other cool thing is we, we started using a tool again, AI based that plunks into Orum and a separate tool, a separate company. And it allows us to set up an AI bot based off our persona for our client, their ICP, and then it allows our reps to get practice in based off who we’re trying to target and practice the script ahead of time that we’re, we’re actually launching with the client. And then it also plugs into Orum and analyzes live calls. So that

Terry:

Wow.

John:

Like, for example, how we’re leveraging AI to.

28:00-

Not like directly with the client, but directly, how in house, so we can improve. No, I think, I think SDRs, they get a little, I wouldn’t too, if I was in their shoes having to do that in front of a manager. And if you can practice on your own time, better.

Terry: 

Yeah, role plays are the bane of most people’s lives. It’s, but they’re one of the greatest things you can possibly do. That practice, I mean, it’s like anywhere else. In any other industry, there’s a lot of practice that happens before you actually get out to, to do your, you know, apply your trade.

Usually, sales is one of those things where it can be a couple of quick conversations, a bit of training, and then, you know, you’re out into the throw, throw into the, into the cold face. so what, how have you seen that impacting the results or, or the ramp time? What, what’s been the outcome of that for you, for your team?

clients that don’t have the biggest total addressable market. So it’s maybe a little bit smaller. So rather than wasting, I wouldn’t want to say wasting, but rather than learning on the fly with Actual people in their, their and burning part of the TAM potentially. Yeah.

John:

That we can

Terry:

Yeah.

John:

Ahead of Time.

00:29-

We don’t charge for onboarding with our clients. So sometimes they want to be quick to the market. Some, you know, we’re typically like a week, 10 days to launch, but we say, no rush, no rush, like, let’s just let the SDR get a little bit of training and practice in. It’s specifically or especially with the clients that don’t have the biggest total adjustable market

Terry: 

Are you able to adjust scripts or call scripts based on feedback through the calls? Or like, I mean, obviously you’d imagine you’d start with a particular script from the client. or, or how does that work? What, what does that actually look like?

John:

So we can set up different scripts based off who we’re targeting like personas, and you can set up the AI bot accordingly. and then you can also adjust the bot based off of like nice, rude. Things like that to make it harder to set the meeting. And part of it is like, yeah, we want them to set the meeting, but we want them to practice the objections and how to handle

30:00-

Those because that’s, that’s what’s going to come up and that’s going to be the difference.

Terry:

Yeah.

John:

That’s huge. I personally don’t have a lot of experience using it, Patrick, who,who we both know, the one managing that and he gets to see all the insights on how that works and he’s helping set up these, AI bots for our, our SDRs before they launch.

Terry: 

It’s very helpful to be able to practice those and then, be able to handle them before we actually start. And Yep.

John: 

It’s very nice. It’s a, it’s, you know, we started working with this company maybe four to five months ago, and it’s just an extra selling point. And it also just helps us do better as a, you know, as a company. And

Terry:

Yep.

John:

Right?

Terry:

And so when you onboard somebody, do they have to come to you with the, with the phone scripts that you’ll use? I mean, are they, is it traditionally someone that’s done calling in the past? Or you mentioned that you had a company that’s been doing email, or focused on inbound, and, and, you know, the conversation was about outbound.

Did they come with scripting, or is that something you helped develop?

31:00- John: 

We developed it 90 percent of the time we’re developing that, but it is a collaborative approach. Occasionally, companies will have some, something already, which we’ll work off of it’s rare. They have something that’s working. Otherwise, they typically would just be doing it in-house, but there has been a few times, but yeah, most of the time we’re creating it.

We’ll create a few versions, and we’ll get their feedback. We’ll collaborate on it, ultimately finalize it and then test it in the market. And

Terry:

How long generally is, sorry,

John: 

I’m sorry, I was going to say last thing is. Pretty rare we set up something with a client and it stays and it’s just perfect forever, right? There’s always adjustments we’re making or adding things in, no matter whether it’s Email, calling LinkedIn.

There’s always adjustments going on.

Terry: 

And how long is it generally, let’s say, have you ever been in a situation where you’ve started calling and found that the messaging was just completely off point and you’ve had to go through and readjust, what sort of time frame or number of calls is sort of involved to

32:00-

Adjust it to get,positive outcomes?

John: 

Yeah.

all the time a common one is someone will fill out the onboarding form with a certain set of information, we filter, we onboar,d we star,t and then like someone else will come in from the organization with contradicting information

Terry: 

Hmm.

John:

It’s very common, you know, like the ceo will come in or something or there’s a new hire and then So it’s like, no, you said this.

And so we’re all, yeah, we’ll have to adjust the script, the targeting. Sometimes it’s just one, but, it’s just often what that stems down to is like, they just didn’t have everything down their ICP and they’re still learning. And yeah, we’re

Terry:

Yep.

John:

With that, that, uh, phase of trying to understand who to target and what to say.

Terry:

Do you, um, so in terms of the data and the TAM, is that something that comes from them? Is that something that you help with?

John:

We source all the data.

Terry:

Okay.

John:

Clients will give us a company list, which is nice. Yeah. Hey, we know we want to target these thousand companies or two thousand

33:00-

Companies, but we need you to source the contacts. great, but not required. What we’ll typically do is get the data or their ICP, and then we’ll send the client a sample list. we’ll try to give them as much variety as possible for the company size, titles, things like that. And then they approve the sample list and then we’ll source everything from there.

Terry:

Yeah. Okay. Excellent.

John:

Important aspect because if you’re like dialing wrong numbers or it’s not right, like you’re just wasting time. time and money. So it’s

Terry:

That’s.

John:

Get that.

Terry: 

That’s one of the reasons I asked the question. It’s harder to get accurate phone data. And look, I found that one of the things that when we’re dialing here originally in Australia, you know, Lucia was probably the best mobile phone data for here in Australia. And then since then, and when we started to call into the U.

S., it sort of, accuracy tended to drop off a lot, and then there were other providers that worked better for us there. What about the next step? I mean, in terms of the data, do you do any

34:00- 

cleansing of phone numbers? you know, I’ve heard of things where you want to find out the, find numbers that actually answer or that a verified numbers.

Terry: 

Yeah. Okay. Excellent.

John: 

Important aspect because if you’re like dialing wrong numbers or it’s not right, like you’re just wasting time. time and money. So it’s

Terry:

That’s.

John:

Get that.

Terry: 

That’s one of the reasons I asked the question. It’s harder to get accurate phone data. And look, I found that one of the things that when we’re dialing here originally in Australia, you know, Lucia was probably the best mobile phone data for here in Australia. And then since then, and when we started to call into the U. S., it sort of, accuracy tended to drop off a lot, and then there were other providers that worked better for us there. What about the next step? I mean, in terms of the data, do you do any

34:00-

Cleansing of phone numbers? You know, I’ve heard of things where you want to find out the, find the numbers that actually answer or that a verified numbers. Do you do anything along those lines at all to help increase your productivity?

John: 

Yeah, there’s, we typically are validating things externally from any system. So it’s just I wish they weren’t the case, but these then a lot of these data providers have gotten better. That is for sure, but it’s still not great. And so we ended up having to pay for multiple data providers to one fill in the gaps, but two for extra validation. like we use Lucia, but not that much like we have all these different like we may have Lucia for a certain reason or a certain market where the data might be better or, they may provide intent, but the other one doesn’t. So we’re using all sorts of, data providers, but then we’ll external externally validate through, you know, something like clay or like Hunter and what

Terry: 

Emails and then also the phone numbers.

Okay. Um, do you do anything further with the phone numbers? You know, I’ve heard of things like, you know, phone-ready leads and so forth that’ll

35:00-

Send them through a, you know, some type of calling process to validate whether they’re going to answer, whether it goes to message bank, voicemail, that type of thing.

John:

Yeah, that works better with an individual company. doesn’t work for us because we don’t have that type of luxury and time and then it’s also expensive.

Terry:

Yeah.

John:

If it

Terry: 

Yep.

John:

An individual company and you want to do that for your internal team, that would make more sense. But for us as an agency, it doesn’t. We don’t have that type of luxury.

Terry:

I think for an individual company, if you’re not using something like a parallel dialer like ORM as well, you would want to do that if you’ve got people there, you know, you You know, virtually clicking a button in their CRM every time they’re dialing, then, you know, you’d want to make sure that they’re getting through to the most likely numbers to answer.

John:

You’ve got a little bit of, a little bit of leeway when you’re using parallel dialers. there’s

Terry: 

Of, out of,

John:

Sorry, I was just going to say one more thing to your question about which numbers to call in or, um, they will give you a sense on which, which numbers are like, I

36:00-

Think they have something like called hot leads or hot numbers, and they’ll give you a sense of like, which ones to dial first. Or more likely to pick up. I don’t

Terry: 

Okay. Because,

John:

It. It’s probably some AI detection.

Terry: 

They must have a huge, all of their clients are calling, you know, millions and millions of numbers. So they must have some reference of which numbers answer and which numbers don’t. I mean, I’m sure they don’t have any, I mean, look, their platform, that to me would be probably one of the biggest values, in a calling platform to be able to say, Hey, listen, you should call these ones first.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. We know that they answer. That’s a great insight to get. Yeah.

And also Smartlead has something similar. I don’t know how I know where they rolled it out. I don’t even know if we’re using this function, but if an email bounces for, and they recognize that, they will likely see that internally. And if other companies are starting to send to that email, they will like automatically remove it. Or notify you, which is yeah. Yeah, very. It’s very cool. And look underneath the benefit of

37:00-

Some of these newer and larger platforms now as well. You know, Smartlead, Instantly is another one that’s, that’s really come to the fore in the last couple of years. Um, you know, those guys are, are growing quickly. And the features, um, it’s hard to actually keep up with the number of features, new features that these platforms are bringing out.

I think, you know, you can literally as an organisation sign up to either of those platforms now, and virtually with the press of a button, get, um, As many domains as you need, as many emails set up as you need. You know, set up a campaign. I think you can even get the data through them now to a certain extent.

And, be able to press a campaign without, you know, having to go anywhere else.

John:

Yeah, I think you can with Instantly. I don’t, in terms of getting the data, I’m not positive on the SmartLead.

Terry: 

Ah, okay. Yeah.

John:

A cool feature that you can actually, if you’re, you don’t have a ton of cash flow, but that’s something you could do all in under one platform. That’s

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. Um, just as a, as an aside and as a point of interest,

38:00- 

How hard do you push ORUM when you’re dialing? Is it running the 10 parallel lines at a time? Or 3? Yep. Yeah.

John:

At six for the company, and we even recommend less than that. You’re just what we found. Yeah, it sounds great. But what we found is you tend to burn your numbers. and you’re burning your list pretty quick. So I’m pretty sure I have it set at six. And then we recommend a lot lower than that with our team.

Terry: 

Look, it’s interesting. I’ve sat in, because I was doing cold calling for our business, I sat in, and did a test drive with Orum, and I know I love, personally love Orum. I think it’s probably one of the best platforms, and I found exactly the same thing. I, you know, got all excited and thought, okay, well, let’s run it at 10, um, but there’s all of a sudden there’s three or four calls of answered all at the same time, and they’ve had to hang up on three and put through to one.

It’s like, ah, okay, I get it. Yep. Yep. And for me it was about three. Three was enough. back in the day when the data was different and people were

39:00-

Answering phone calls, etc. So, how do you think that um, AI is going to change your business in the future? Where do you have any, anything on the horizon or, or any wish list that you know, when it gets to a certain capability then that’s something you’re going to jump on?

Any pain points that you’re hoping it’ll fix? Agents.

John:

Insane. The some of the things you can do on the back end with AI.and so we’re starting to use. That to our advantage, but one thing I’m watching out for, just being in the lead gen space and maybe you are too, is just like how the AR AI SDR evolves,

Terry: 

Know, right now, you can’t make cold calls, you can’t make AI cold calls, but you, they’re just, you see these things spinning up all the time. These companies creating these. AI, uh, assistants or, what are they called? AI, um, Agents.

John:

Agents. Thank you.

Terry: 

Yep.

John:

Everywhere. So I’m just like, I’m closely watching to see how that evolves. Cause that, that could

40:00-

Affect our businesses moving forward. So that’s what I’m keeping an eye on right now. It’s great. They’re not really working that well. most of the feedback I see is like 90 percent of them are not working well, or they’re like spamming the market.

Terry: 

You see some, some weird, like good results to start, and then if it falls off pretty quick. Yep.

John:

You can, you should assume AI will get better.

Terry:

Look, I agree 100%. If you’re not working to that assumption, then, you know, you probably got your head in the sand, I think. The, from what I’ve seen so far, it seems to be, there’s a couple of insurance companies that have started to use AI to follow up on very strong inbound inquiries that have come in where they’ve got enough information to know specifically the product that they’re inquiring about.

I saw that about six months ago. I should actually touch base again to see how that is maintained. Um, there was a level of satisfaction there, but it was also very, It was a very low level of, of support call. It was like following up an inbound form fill that had been needed, where they’d ask for a bit more information and then if you

41:00-

Wanted somebody to call, book a time for a call, or transfer you over to human, something along those lines.

So it was, you know, it will, it will definitely get to the stage. Whether it’ll actually get to the point of, of cold calling itself, I played around with a couple of different platforms that espouse the ability to make cold calls. Um,one, it’s illegal, but two, it was just fascinating, so I thought I’ve got to see how this actually works.

And it’s very, very difficult. I found it very difficult to get it anywhere near having a solid, cold, call conversation. It was very easy to get it off track. It was very easy for it. It made a lot of mistakes,and look, I mucked around because of the space that we play in.

I was actually, um, you know, sort of testing it for well over six months. And then in the end, I just gave up and thought, you know, this is it was getting better, but very, very slowly. And it was a long, long way from being, you know, where it needs to be. Who knows? I mean, maybe in the last six months has been enough advancement that it’s changed.

John: 

Yeah. I got a, I got a call. I’m starting to pick up more cold calls. We’re not only to hear the pitch, but, I actually found I’m getting more and more relevant cold calls, like clients calling about an invoice, and like, actually I’m like, Oh, I’m really thankful. I answered that, things like that.

but I got a cold call, and I assume I kind of got the sense it was, it was AI. And I, after I said, hello, I just didn’t say anything. And then they didn’t say anything. then it went on for like 15, 20 seconds. I’m like, this is for sure. AI just hung up. Cause I know a human would have said something.

Terry:

Yeah.

John:

Some work to do. But one thing I will say that I do think on the inbound, there’s a much bigger use case. We were working with a company that had I never got to see the actual AI in action. hearing about it, though, and they were replacing centers. So

Terry: 

Yep.

John:

They have a ton of inbound traffic. for particular products. and so when they were getting huge inbound volume, rather than contact centers having

43:00-

To, staff for a certain like seasonality, was just like, you don’t need to do that. You can have this AI take calls around the clock and no matter high season or low season, it’s just taking it and it was like, and it can book calls, and it was like, it’s actually a YC back company.

So it was like pretty impressive to see that it was like actually replacing customer service in some

Terry:

I think that’s the very first place that we’ll go, certainly for non-complex sales, non-complex products. You know, I think we’re, as an organisation, we’re safe for a little while yet. our, for starters, it, it’s um, I think there’s just a general desire for the companies that we deal with to have human beings involved in the process.

Uh, you know, that’s, that’s our underlying purpose and philosophy really is that, you know, we, we are all about the people side of things. there’s going to be businesses that will move very quickly to AI and, and, um, You know, I’m sure as soon as it’s available and working well, that that would be the path they go. But I think,

44:00-

You know, certainly for the more complex sales, for the higher value sales, it still takes a human to human. And I’ve said this a couple of times now. I do see one day where you’ll have an AI provider bot talking to an AI customer bot, and they’ll be saying, the customer bot will say, These are the problems we’re trying to solve.

and maybe even one step further, you have an AI procurement bot, that just you come into and say these are problems I’ve got to solve it goes to the marketplace and finds all the providers that will solve that problem and then you know and then you just end up with sitting there as an exec with a you know floated up procurement manager maybe who just sees all of this AI produced options and alternatives where they’ve already gone through all of the use cases and pros and cons you know where it’s really you’re sitting at the top to make a decision as opposed to doing all of the grunt work on the way So, you know, I can see that that type of thing happening.

Do you see any emerging trends in go to market strategies, sort of, uh, 2025 and, and beyond? Is there, is there anything that you see that’s

45:00-

New that’s sort of coming through that you’ve, you know, raised the eyebrows with?

John: 

I would say getting people internally that know how to use AI is going to be huge. I think a lot of it isn’t even being used to its full capabilities. Like, we use air table internally and one of the guys on my team was starting to learn more, about it. And he’s We’re just scratching the surface.

It’s actually this, this tool is really powerful and it’s capabilities. So I think, and that’s just a small little example, but I think getting people in place to enable your sales team, to allow, you know, so they don’t have to do much backend work. That’s the common complaint in sales, all these different things in the CRM and meetings.

And so the more you can enable your sales team to take out,uh, some of this backend work and then they can focus on the phones and prospecting and research. I think that’s. That’s going to make your, your sales team much more efficient.

Yeah, it’s always been the bane of most salespeople’s lives, isn’t updating the CRM, the admin side of

46:00

things. fun.

Terry:

I’m with you, I think in terms, from a role perspective or position, the capability to utilize and leverage AI throughout an organization is going to be, you know, one of the most, um, valuable roles I think in any organization moving forward.

The it will be the role that’s able to increase productivity, increase efficiencies, reduce costs, and help leverage growth. I think out of a much lower resource base, you know, as much as and it’s a funny way to look at it, I think. But you know, as much energy as it takes to run AI on the other side.

The resources that I wonder if they’re looking at the other side and that the resources that AI, replaces and takes out of an organization, you know, whether, whether that’s factored into the, into the equation or not, because there’s no doubt once you start to leverage our properly, it’s a multiple of 10 or 20.

47:00-

It’s not just a 1. 5 times better. it’s personally I’m doing now. Um, from a marketing perspective, I had a chat with my co-founder the uh the other day. He said, I’ve, you, you’re literally doing what feels like we’ve got a marketing team of 30 people in the business. And it’s all coming from virtually one person.

And it’s, I wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without leveraging tools like Descript, for instance. This podcast we’re on now. It’s the podcast that we’re on, that we’re recording now is being recorded in a platform called Squadcast, which was acquired by Descript. Descript is a video editing platform that allows you to edit the video in the transcript.

You don’t have to go downstairs and look at the bars and all the rest of it. It lets you actually edit the video. Remove spacing, change words, it’s got your AI voice in there if you want to change something that you’ve said, you can retype it in and it’ll automatically generate the words. It’ll go through and put studio sound across everything, it will change where your eyes are looking

48:00-

And put you back at the camera.

I’ve got a problem because my camera is a bit higher than my screen here. I’d mentioned studio sound. It will go through and pull out 20, 30, 40, clips. to use in social media. it will give you the text to put in each of those clips in the social media. It’s, it is a tool that, that alone for this podcast and generating, um, social content.

Oh, bless you.

John:

It was lightning

Terry: 

Oh, what’s a lightning? Oh, I thought it was a sneeze. Wow, and so yeah, I mean that technology like that is, uh, is really what’s allowed me to start to crank up the social side of the marketing aspect that we’re doing. So it’s, um, I think it’s one of those things where if you’re not on the wave, you’re going to get dumped by the wave.

I just hired an automation team. That’s their focus. And so they have all these

49:00-

Capabilities and I don’t have to spend time doing it and make an implement, implement all this stuff for me.

Yep.

John: 

Across all these different tools.

And then they come with their own set of tools that they can use as well. So it’s. it’s been great.

Terry: 

Excellent. And have you hired them in-house, or are they fractional, or?

No, they’re an agency. Ah, very good.

John: 

as well

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. Look, from my perspective, I think that’s almost the best way to go. certainly at our stage organizations on the simple fact that with them having so much exposure to other organizations and other, tools and ideas that they can leverage from for you as well.

I think that’s the, that’s a great way to do it. The last thing I’d want to do is probably bring someone in and confine them to our little bubble at the moment.

John:

Yep.

One of the benefits of the in-house is like just the turnaround time is much quicker

Terry: 

Yeah.

John:

Budget to do it in-house, like the turnaround time and the communication Just understanding your business is much better The benefit of an agency is like, they just come with a wide set of, you’re using multiple people to

50:00-

Attack one problem. Whereas if you hire someone in-house, it’s just one person, and they may not know how to do it. So some trade-offs there.

Terry:

John, what’s the biggest challenge you’re, you’re struggling with at the moment or dealing with, facing in your business?

John: 

I would say the, the types of clients we’re bringing on and setting expectations for them is one of the big ones, right? What we do at almost everyone needs it. Everyone’s wanting more, more sales, more leads, more appointments. Everyone wants it, right? There’s never enough. But the question is.you don’t want to bring on the wrong client and set the wrong expectation.

So it’s about getting all those questions out up front, whether they know them or not, and trying to set those expectations. Because unfortunately, especially when working with product led founders and who haven’t done sales before, they don’t realize what is, required and type of information that you can gather.

And so sometimes people will come in with. Two to three X, our expectation versus theirs. And it’s like, we’ll have to turn

51:00-

Clients away. Or you just say like, look, I’m not willing to engage unless we bring down that, that agreed-upon metric.

Terry:

Yeah,

John:

You know, and it’s the tough thing there, Terry is you don’t know how it’s going to go until you start. That’s the hardest thing I’ve been wrong with. We brought on a client. They actually just about hit a year with us. didn’t think it was going to work. And it’s been, it’s been kick ass. They’ve been like really good. Cause they have a very unique product they don’t really have many competitors. So even though they don’t have everything built out, like I’ve been, I was wrong, but then I’ve also brought on clients.

I’m like, Oh, this looks really, really great. Like we’re going to turn this into a long-term partnership. I was wrong. Like it was very hard crowded market, you’re targeting it or security-type titles, and they don’t want to talk to you. And so it’s just, it’s very challenging to know. It’s imagine you’re an SDR and you’re applying for a role, and the person hiring you tells you, Well, how many meetings are you going to book?

Terry: 

Yep.

John: 

Or how, you know, it’s like, well, I don’t know. I’ve never worked with you guys before. It’s

00:52:00-

Challenging toto quote you on

Terry: 

Yeah, so many people want guarantees. I mean, exactly the same boat. It’s, it’s probably the biggest challenge we have as well because that one question is, well, what can we expect? And, you know, I can say, well, the worst results we’ve ever delivered has been an increase of a very, very capable team’s conversion rates by 38%.

And we took sales qualified, not marketing, this is sales qualified to your requirements on ICP, 38 percent on the upside, 2400 Now that was a pretty shitty website that didn’t have the right call to actions. And so you’re going to be somewhere in between that. Generally, we’ll double your sales pipeline, we’ll double your qualified pipeline that comes out.

So, you know, whatever your MQLs are, that wash through, that finally end up as revenue opportunities in your, as deals in your pipeline, then you should expect that’ll just about double. In some cases, you It doesn’t quite get there. Sometimes it’s a 50, 60 percent lift, which is still great. And they’re happy with other times I’ve been blown away and

53:00-

Seen where, you know, we’ve, we’ve had one client that came on board. They had 300, 000 website visitors a month.

John:

Wow

Terry:

And, from what I’ve seen, I was thinking this is going to be, you know, good. One of our, you know, bigger enterprise clients. This is going to be excellent. Um, we were having 1000 conversations in between each lead we delivering for them. The quality of the traffic.

was terrible. Their SEO company that they’d used prior was driving this, all of this traffic. Um, but it was to research papers and it was to, you know, students coming in and job seekers. It was, all things that did well from a credibility perspective in terms of having some traffic there, but they hadn’t yet switched to bringing the quality traffic in as well.

So we ended up literally, we ended up having to put a chat bot on the front end that said, did you want to talk to sales? So, and that’s all it said. So they come to sales. So, you know, in those instances, what we thought was going to be fantastic ended up

54:00-

Still great clients today. but we had to do things a little bit differently to, to be able to get the outcomes for them.

John:

Yeah, I think it’s it’s you know, people are always going to especially when they need to If they’re if it’s their initiative to sign up with chat metrics, right? They are going to have a boss that needs to approve it. They want to look good so they’re always going to shoot for the best metrics so They can look good in front of their boss and why that was the right decision Thank you. And they want some type of guarantee that it will work, but yeah, it

Terry:

On the company, right?

John: 

Some companies can offer guarantees. I’m talking outside of the lead gen space, just whatever it

Terry: 

Yep.

John: 

Um, it’s certainly something that comes up with us a lot, but we’ve gotten to the point where we just say, Oh, you’re talking to another company with a guarantee. Oh, you should go with them. And

Terry: 

Yep.

John:

You should go with them.

Right. That’s not how we operate. and it’s kind of the reality is like most of the companies that are offering the guarantees are not well established. They’re, they’re like, they’re begging for business.

Terry: 

And it’s that guarantee is why they’re trying to, um, uh, you know, using that guarantee

55:00-

Is a way to try and increase their, increase their client base, but it’s fraught with danger. It’s fraught with danger. You know, the only guarantee we give is that, um, if we’re not delivering value, you know, there’s no locking contracts.

We’re not going to try and hold you to anything. if, if we’re not delivering value, then, we’re not going to charge and we know, you know, almost as soon as we go live on a website, we know with the level of engagement, we know what the quality of conversations are, whether we, book a meeting in the first couple of conversations, you know, there’s ratios that we do know very quickly whether it’s going to work or not.

And, there’s been a couple of times where we’ve kicked off and within two days, I’ve gone back to the client and said, Look, I don’t think this is going to work. These are the reasons why. I’m happy to proceed, but we’re going to have to change the commercial arrangement. This is what it’s going to be like moving forward.

Uh, in one case, they said yes, because we’re adjusting our marketing, and that this is the feedback we needed to give us the impetus to do that. And then other times it’s now look, okay, that’s where it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. We shake hands and part company as friends.

John:

It happens.

Terry:

It does. It does. Have you

56:00-

Ever had to, um, fire, fire a client?

John: 

There’s certainly times where we’ve had to come to an agreement, off of certain things because,there’s sometimes there’s clients that aren’t, you know, they wanted better results, but look, they’re in their contract. And,the other times is they shift things around so much that it doesn’t really allow us time to actually. Like you were talking about earlier in our conversation, like moving around too much, you never really actually get the ability to say it worked or not. And so we have clients that are in such a scramble, but typically it’s coming from their leadership on testing different markets and different channels that they’re bouncing around so much that we never actually learn anything.

Terry: 

Yep.

John:

And so, yeah, sometimes they went and then they don’t want to hear that. But so after a few months, you’ll have to. Decide to part ways. But again, that goes back to what I was saying earlier is like, the more we can set expectations up front, like this is how it works. This is the timeframe. Sometimes it works right away,

57:00-

But then we need to give it a few weeks and make adjustments. And the more you can set expectations up front, the better off these clients will be.

Terry:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that’s the honesty and transparency, the honesty and transparency moving forward in any type of relationship. Your business is similar to ours in terms of, you know, it’s a service offer. There’s a lot of, um, potential vagueness in terms of the actual results we’ll deliver. We can talk about past experiences, but in terms of your specific instance, it’s, I can’t look at that and say, you know what, you’ve got 100, 000 website visitors will engage with 2.

5 percent then convert 4. 8 percent of those. I mean, in some cases we’re engaging with nearly 50 percent of the website traffic, lower volume traffic, but a very super, super targeted, uh, in their marketing and advertising campaigns. We’re engaging with 50 percent of the time, uh, with the traffic and converting 40 percent of that into leads for them. at the other end, the example I gave where there are 300,000 visitors, where we’re engaging less than 1%, but the

58:00-

Reality is Their outcomes still increased by four times. So what they were getting out of their pipeline before they had chat to now, it’s still increased by four times. So I mean, it’s um, It’s difficult space, and to be honest with you, it’s probably the most, the one piece that I dislike the most is that, the vagueness.

I’m a bit of a straight up, straight shooter. I like to be able to say yes or no. It’s the one piece of where I feel like I’m a bit wishy washy with the answer that you give. You know, the reality is I can’t answer that for you. This is my experience, so yeah.

John:

You can go off of past experiences and you start to pick up on patterns like. Yeah, I’ve encountered this situation before where it was this type of client and this type of website visitors or for us, it was like type of company size offering this service and there’s a, there’s other companies that do the same thing with no different, like no unique offering, they’re all pretty similar.

So you’re like up front, you’re like, look, I’ve already gone down this road.

59:00-

You’re going to face this challenge of this challenge. I just want you to know before we get started so you

Terry:

That experience.

I wish it was the case. We’ve had two customers that were virtually identical. And the first one was brilliant in terms of what we were able to deliver. On the outside they looked exactly the same. Everything from sales structure, marketing team, etc. One had excellent traffic. The other one had terrible traffic.

And so, even from, everything looking the same on the outside, until you actually go live with website traffic, you just don’t know what it’s going to be. they had, the only difference between the two was the number of leads that they were generating from the website at the, from the beginning themselves.

That’s the only tip that gives us a little bit of a hint in terms of, you know, Of what it might be like. But I’ve had the same situation where they’ve had, low levels of lead generation, and then we’ve just blown it out of the water. Because there’s just been some piece in their website that hasn’t resonated with the website visitors that they’ve not, like you said earlier, you know, there’s so many aspects to get somebody to click

01:00:00-

On that, sign up or book a demo form,

John: 

Yeah,

Terry:

Book a demo button.

There’s so many aspects to it that, um, you know, you never really do know for sure. But what’s the most surprising thing since? You’ve been with LevelUp, you’ve built LevelUp, what’s the most surprising thing that you’ve learned along the way?

John:

This is going to sound really silly and obvious, but listening to your customers, uh, and what they have to say in terms of feedback, you know, oftentimes I know a lot of CEOs have a big ego. They think they know; this is the way it needs to be done. And like a lot of our success has just been listening to what our clients. Have asked for, Hey, yeah, we’re really happy, but it’d be great if you offered this, or if you had this service too, we’d pay double for that. And so you start really, I was like, can I deliver that? Can I partner with somebody? Should I hire for that? And it’s like, all of a sudden, you, your ability to deliver, plus then you have somebody that’s willing to like be your first client, great. You build those relationships, you build that trust, and sounds so silly, but just listening to what

01:01:00-

Their pain points are and what they, what they want has allowed us to make adjustments as we’ve gone, because we didn’t know, like, for example, we didn’t offer cold calling before we just didn’t, we did email and LinkedIn, and list building.

And so like now

Terry: 

Okay.

John: 

Of where our business comes from and from

Terry: 

They’re cool. Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean look, we’ve sort of made a very, definite decision to be very, very niche in what we do. We do live chat, um, we sit in live chat. We’ve got, uh, through customers asking us to we do actually handle, um, some other channels as well. So we’ve got a couple of clients that we do the inbound,emails for and we’ll handle that.

And, you know, we’ve got some unique ways of doing that because, um, What comes in through email can sometimes be difficult to have a higher conversion rate on. We’ve built some processes around that really sort of ramps that up, utilising some things and bringing them back into live chat pages and so forth.

But we, our core business is live chat, that’s, we stick to that. we know

01:02:00-

It’s inside out and it’ll change over time. As, as AI increases. I mean, we, we leverage AI now to help the team out. There’s no doubt about that. whether we get to the point, and again, you know, part of our philosophy is that, you know, we’re human first business.

We do what we do so that, you know, people have got jobs and can feed their families. So, um. Whether we get to the point where we do offer an AI, front end at any point in time, look, I’m not 100 percent sure. I’ll never say never. but it’s something that unless we got to a stage where, you know, there was absolutely no appetite for what we were doing, you know, we could do it today from a capability perspective, whether there’s, we’ve got a desire to do it,it’s just one of those things.

The market will tell us. It’s we’ll listen to the customers and see what they say.

John: 

I think the human part that you brought up, you say you’re a human first, business, I think is very important. sometimes when a client will decide to go with us, we’ll say, because we have a lot of competition. Hey, why’d you go with us? And one of

01:03:00-

The common things they’ll say is like, I felt like there was no one hiding behind a computer screen.

Like, there was a very human aspect to the process. Like I knew who I was dealing with. I knew who I would be dealing with post-sale. And like, didn’t seem so, yeah, there’s like, like they knew who they were dealing with, and there was a very human aspect to it is what the reason is like, okay, we need to dive into that more and leverage that because. What they’re telling us is that a lot of other companies they don’t have that. Like they have infographics, they’re just like, don’t know who they’re dealing with. And it’s just interesting feedback. I think if you can in your space continue to be human, it’ll help out.

Terry: 

It’s really interesting. You know, I think in 2020, when we’re all forced to work from home, some of the chat conversations that I’ve seen happen have been almost just people wanting to have a conversation. You know, it, it’s been a valid inquiry, the person’s at the website for a reason, but then the conversation just takes a different path because I want to have a chat with somebody.

It’s almost like there’s this yearn for connection. And I’m person, personally, my belief is

01:04:00-

That, you know, as AI starts to infiltrate every part of our lives and we become less and less reliant on people, I think that there’s going to be as human beings, a greater desire for human interaction. And I think we will see, AI interactions devalued and I think we’ll see human interactions valued, valued more highly.

That’s my philosophy on things anyway. So I think, you know, first with the pandemic and now with AI, I think we’re just seeing this, a desire for human connection a lot more than necessarily, I think it was taken for granted in the past. Now it’s valued a lot more.

John: 

I agree.

Terry:

If Is there anything that I should have asked you that I haven’t yet?

John: 

No, I think this has been a great discussion. I feel like we could keep going, but it’s up to you on, you know, what topics or directions you want to go at. Lots of good, it’s cool to be like founder to founder and hear about your stories and what you’re facing, even though it’s, you’re a software and we’re not,you know, setting expectations with

01:05:00-

Clients and like understanding who’s going to be a good client versus not, or I guess I should take a step back, like not knowing who will be a good client until you start, but having a sense. Before you start with them. It’s just really cool to have these types of conversations and then also get your perspective on what’s working for your company and your business, with lead gen.

Terry: 

We’re not software.

John: 

I thought you’re my off I thought you like had the chatbot on the website.

Terry: 

It’s not a chatbot. It’s actually human beings in there. And so we’re, we’re software agnostic. It’s all human beings. That’s why I say when we’re human first, we’re people first. That’s why I talk about the AI on the front end. I don’t know. So now it’s a real, it’s our team sits in there. So when I talk about that example of that,inbound, um, prospect or lead from Reddit.

We’ve got human beings live in three days on their website, booking sales qualified meetings for them. Yeah, so it’s, you talk about

John:

The inbound chats?

Terry: 

Correct.

John: 

I

01:06:00- Terry: 

Correct. Yeah, so that’s, that’s, uh, that’s what we do. But yeah, it is, it’s, it’s and that’s why, you know, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation because there are so many similarities in what we do.

It’s not software, it is a service that we’re offering. It’s like you’re virtually outsourcing staff. If you want to, if you want to put it into a particular niche, you’re just outsourcing staff. I mean, that’s

John:

You’re providing. But when you talk about the product of your product, which is where we should be having the conversation with the client, you’re doing exactly the same thing we are, except you’re doing it in an outbound process.

Terry:

We’re doing it from there in, you know, we’re optimising their inbound process, but we’re both delivering qualified pipeline for the clients. And I, look, I love being in this space. And I’ve had a pretty long career in the steel industry and in an in organisations, firstly that were smaller and private companies and then large public companies that had a big business.

Chunk of the market share, even though they wouldn’t admit to that because acquisitions would be, you know, held up by the competition bureau and so forth. but when you’re in a

01:07:00-

Large market share, it’s getting, and you’ve got virtually most of the market covered, you get a complacency through the business where the sales reps believe that, they’re being impacted by the market.

They know all of the customers. You know, there’s nowhere else that they’ve got to go. Their hands are tied. They’ve got handcuffs on. They can’t grow their business. Then you walk into a market and you realise that, you know, this guy that’s been operating as the sales rep that’s been in this market for five years, It’s had the blinkers on and in the last five years there’s been so many new businesses grow that have gone to competitors and new competitors have parked up that, you know, their market share in that market’s gone from 60 percent down to 30 percent and the Rep’s not even been aware of it because they’ve just sat comfortable with where they are and,

At the pointy end with what we do, both from an inbound and even more so from an outbound perspective, you know, you turn that on its head.

You’re out, you’re hunting. It’s like, it’s the hunters, the hunting side of the sales world. And it’s some, it’s an area

01:08:00-

That just really, um, um, resonates for me. And, I enjoy it. I think it’s, it’s one of those things too. The biggest challenge or the greatest satisfaction I get when we have a new client come on board is an understanding that they’ve been getting, Fifteen marketing qualified leads come from their website that then goes through to sales and they’ll trim that back down to seven or eight, um, each month and, you know, the sales team sort of wishes they were better qualified than in the first month that we’re there and all of a sudden there’s thirty sales qualified leads have gone into the pipeline and you see, hearing feedback from marketing that, you know, where our sales is asked, can we do any more of this?

And, you know, all of a sudden, the whole environment in there, the relationship between sales and marketing has changed, because you’ve been able to go and save sales time because they’re not dealing with the MQLs anymore. We’re not through the web-based, uh, MQLs anyway. And, uh, and, they’re enjoying the

01:09:00-

Additional opportunities, you know, it’s, uh, it’s probably the biggest satisfaction that I get.

Um, the way we charge, it is, is very risky. There’s a lot of risk that we take on board, and that’s why. As part of the onboarding process or discovery process, we ask how many leads they’re getting from the website now. Because if they’re not getting any, there’s no market fit. And it doesn’t matter how many chats we have, they’re probably not going to get any, at all.

So I think, yeah, that’s

John:

Yeah, so how do, how do you charge, by the way, is it off of per

Terry: 

Oh, it’s per lead. No, no, it’s per lead. So, yeah, it’s per lead. So, that’s right. So in the conversations we have with your website visitors, When we qualify to your requirements, whatever that might be, if it’s just BANT, that’s fine. If you want to know organisation size, role, etc, etc. If somebody meets the ICP or the qualification criteria, then we book them into a calendar meeting with one of the account executives, then that’s what we charge for.

John: 

I see.

Terry: 

Minimum expectations, you know, you need to be getting 10 to

01:10:00-

20 a month to make it work for us. But we just charge purely on that basis. And it’s like, you know, we, there was a lot of conversation in the beginning between my, my co-founder and I as to how we would charge. I was very concerned about that.

Um, I was concerned on the basis that we don’t know the quality of their website traffic. You know, we’ve got to put a lot of trust in them. And I was convinced, you know, he just said to me, look, it’s like this. We both agree. We want the business to deliver extraordinary value. And if we’re not delivering value, then we don’t want to charge.

We’d rather, and no locking contracts. We don’t want people to be locked into some contract that they’re paying and not getting any value for. And so we made the decision to go on a per lead basis. And I, you know, I look back over it, look. There have been a couple of clients that have taken advantage.

that have set us up with one particular criteria. and we’ve delivered against that criteria, and then they’ve come back at the end of the month and wanted to change the criteria and drop 50 percent out of the leads out that we’ve pushed through.

01:11:00-

Which we did, and then the next month, when we started booking to the new, um, Higher criteria with less leads then they wanted to come back and go back to the first criteria again So it was like, there’s a bit of muck.

Yeah, look change around You know the first I think the it took them by surprise the impact we had in the very first instance I mean, you know the worst result today still that we’ve had that 38 percent increase was you know The white pages and yellow pages Here in Australia, I was in, a meeting to do the proposal with the White Pages marketing team.

Uh, and their head, so they had the head of revenue, CMO, head of, digital and head of the, CRM. And these guys are, it’s a many, many thousand organisation. It’s a, purely a marketing business. They’d like the, these phone directories that it’s, it’s, it’s built into. banded out into doing SEO and websites for their customers and all that sort of stuff. You know, they’re used to tweaking their website to get a conversion

01:12:00-

An increase of, of 0. 2 of a percent, you know, of 0. 3, 0. 5 a percent increase was a big increase of conversion rate for them. I stood there and said, look, I’m going to guarantee you, this was in the very early days. I was a bit on the desperate stage and it was our biggest deal at the time.

I said, look, I’ll guarantee a 25 percent increase in your conversion rate. And they literally, two of them burst out laughing. I lost all credibility. It scared the hell out of me. I watched their faces. It was like, I realized I’d made a big mistake. Um, And, uh, look, long story short, we recovered it enough to say that they signed up, we ran a pilot and, at the six week mark, the CMO actually took me and my business founder out to lunch and rattled off the 15, we, we knew there was 15 points of value that you get from having live chat on your website.

And he rattled off, uh, it was about 12 of the 15 value points to the extent that. They were using a digital agency for their advertising, and they were running PPC campaigns.

01:13:00-

Well, when we were chatting, we could see that it’s white pages. What they wanted, the traffic they wanted coming to the website was business traffic.

That’s actually the business traffic they want to increase their, um, either do a website with them, get a website done, or advertise with them and pay for advertising in the white pages. But what was happening is they had a lot of traffic coming for people that were looking for phone numbers. And so that went back to the agency.

They cut their agent, they cut their budget by 60 percent with that agency and were able to increase the amount of qualified traffic because they were wiped, went through, you know, all the keyword campaigns that they were running and took all the search traffic out of it. So, you know, that was, that was probably the, the, you know, aside from the 38 percent increase, that was the biggest win was that they also did that with a lot smaller budget went to what they had in the past.

So, and things like, customer insights in terms of. Have you got this feature? It’s just like you said, listen to the customer. You don’t get an opportunity to listen to the customer in any more detail than live chat, chatting with all the people. So on the website.

01:14:00- John:

It’s good. It’s a good selling point.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah.

John: 

Yeah.

Terry: 

I just need to get the message out there a bit better.

All right, John, look, um, it’s been a great conversation. Thank you. I don’t want to talk for too much longer. I’m fearful that we’ll end up when I catch up with you guys in, uh, in February that, uh, we’ll, um, won’t have too much to talk about, but, uh, I’m sure that won’t be the case.

John:

Talk about.

Terry: 

Ha, ha.

All right. Well, look, um, is there anything else you’d like to add before, um, before I sign off?

John: 

No, I, you know, if you’re interested in development and appointment setting, you can, uh, go to levelupleads.io or check me out on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there. Uh, you can just search into the chat, John Karsant. And you’ll find me there, connect with me, and we can have a conversation.

Terry: 

Yep, and we’ll have all those links below. Is there anything good that you’re reading at the moment? Nope. Well, that you’d recommend as far as, uh, sales leaders and, and marketing leaders and founders that are the main audience for us.

01:15:00- John: 

Nothing right now. Sales-related, like one book I always go back to and read a lot, is How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s an old book, but a lot of the principles still apply today on just how to deal with people and what’s important to them and the spotlight on them and things like that.

And it still carries a lot, a lot of weight today.

Terry:

I’ve got it on the bookshelf right there.

John:

Oh, nice.

Terry: 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s a great offer. What about any good movies? Seen any good movies lately?

John: 

I don’t really watch many movies and it’s not by on purpose. I just don’t make it out to watch movies anymore. How about you? I’m

Terry: 

Uh, no, I’m in the same boat. I don’t, uh, uh, work is my leisure. Actually, as strange as that sounds, I mean, I like to get out and do walking, get out on the jet ski and that sort of thing, but um, generally, I think when you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life. And so, don’t watch too many movies.

I watched a very interesting Netflix series over quite a long time. It took me to get

01:16:00-

Through it, called, uh, It’ll Come to Me, American, I’ll find it. I’ll put the link below.

John: 

Reference. I don’t watch the shows that much either.

Terry: 

Yeah, yeah.

John: 

Like we were talking about the Australian open before this conversation a bit. And like, I’ll watch the basketball and sports that, that I will tune into

Terry: 

I want you to be the UFC. Yeah, I don’t mind the UFC. yeah. Alright, John, look, thanks very much. It’s been an excellent conversation today. I really

Terry:

Appreciate the time. It certainly, um, has been a great nearly hour and a half. I’ve enjoyed the conversation immensely. we’ll have all the links below for everybody. And, uh, thanks for joining us on the chat.

John:

Thanks for having me on Terry. Appreciate it.

01:17:00- Terry:

Been a pleasure. ​