One of the best decisions I’ve made in Q4 has been to engage Dan from Lushin as a coach for our account management team (currently just Joe, but we’re hiring an additional account manager - currently in late-stage interviews).
Dan advises on everything sales … hiring, techniques, and execution.
On top of already seeing better sales numbers, Dan pushed us to run an outbound sales experiment, more on that below.
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At first, we exclusively focused on inbound lead generation.
We built Bullpen on marketing-driven, inbound leads.
In the early days, my only customer acquisition channel was Google Ads. I spent $1,000 per month, and the ads generated the majority of leads that turned into customers (~10-15 leads per month / a little under $100/lead).
Although they were expensive, the ads generated enough business for us to keep the lights on while we built an organic search presence through SEO-optimized blogs.
We started ranking for long-tail keywords like “the difference in American and European equity waterfalls,” and they drove a ton of traffic to the site.
The value of strong blogs boosted the value of our homepage, and we started ranking in the top 10 for commercial real estate hiring keywords.
Along the way, we started to receive referral leads from happy customers.
Fast forward to today - our top two customer channels are 1) client referrals and 2) Google.
We also dabbled in paid social media marketing, but to date, we haven’t cracked the code on making LinkedIn and Twitter profitable sales channels. However, we’ve found that organic activity on both LinkedIn and Twitter are great lead generators for us.
Then, we launched a newsletter …
Our Sunday newsletter has been the best tool for staying in touch with customers. People like reading interesting stuff, so we focused our efforts on telling stories about our business and what we’re seeing in the market - not selling our product.
Fun fact: We tested our open rate on different days of the week and found that Sunday afternoon was the best day/time for engagement.
The newsletter has been great for two things:
Referrals
Repeat business
Today, 30-40% of our monthly placements are from repeat customers, and about 20-30% are from referrals.
Our newsletter taught me a big lesson in scalability. In the early days, I wrote and published the newsletter on a weekly basis. This quickly became untenable as we grew and my attention was pulled elsewhere.
However, it was very hard for our new writer to replicate my tone and style. As such, we decide to spin off my writing to this substack (what you’re reading right now). Our Bullpen Sunday Newsletter is taking a new form with its first edition going out today.
What about outbound selling?
I’ve been in a multi-year, friendly battle with my broker friends regarding outbound sales and cold calling.
Brokers love to worship the cold call - for good reason - it works.
When your commissions are upwards of six figures, you can afford to spend time on low-conversion activities.
As for Bullpen, the numbers never made sense to do outbound sales. The average value of a freelance hire is ~$6k per year, so outbound selling never penciled.
A rule of thumb: Your customer’s annual value need to be greater than $30,000 to justify an outbound sales program. If you’re selling a product worth $5,000 per year, you’ll need to rely on inbound sales. If the average value of your customer is less than $2,000 per year, then ditch the sales team, and acquire customers via self-sign up.
However … we found that our biggest, institutional-level customers are spending hundreds of thousands with us per year. THESE types of accounts most definitely support an outbound sales effort.
As such, Dan helped us create an “outbound experiment.” Over the next few weeks, Joe will make more than 1,000 cold calls to team leaders at institutional-level firms.
Stay tuned for results in a few weeks …
That’s all of this week! Let me know what sales channels are working for you in the comments - we’d love to test new strategies.
✌️📤
Tyler
Founder @ Bullpen
Thank you for including the detailed insight in the rule of thumb - very insightful