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Mr. Biz Radio: How to Build an Amazing Lead Gen Engine

Unedited transcription of the show is included below:

 (00:05):

Welcome to Mr. Biz radio, Biz. Talk for Biz owners. If you're ready to stop faking the funk and take your business onward and upward, this show is for you. And now here's Mr. Biz, Ken Wentworth.

(00:20):

All right, welcome to another episode of Mr. Biz Radio with me, Mr. Biz Ken Wentworth. And we're gonna talk about a topic this week that I think everyone's gonna love. I know that you're gonna love it because, you know, we've, the predominance of our audience are entrepreneurs, business owners. We've got a couple, as I say, entrepreneurs in there that are kind of thinking about it, haven't quite taken a leap leap yet, but, but nonetheless, listen to the show or watch the show for edification, for information to maybe, you know, gather some of that stuff to take that leap. And this show today is going to be right along the lines with any people that fall into that bucket. And we're gonna talk about creating a, an amazing lead gen engine. And that's pri primarily what we're gonna talk about in the, in the next couple of segments here. And we've got an absolute master. Uour guest this week is Mr. Ben Arritt. He has 20 plus years of complete p and l accountability building businesses to record profits. He founded a global 10 year event in brand marketing agency that averaged 138% year over year profit growth. His latest project is providing fractional CMOs and CFOs to lower middle market businesses looking to scale. And,Ben, welcome to Mr. Biz Radio.

(01:33):

Thanks for having me on, sir.

(01:35):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I gotta tell you, like, I always say this, you know, we typically, you know, we've got such a, a thankful we've got a, a decent lead time on shows, but we happen to have someone who postponed and had to reschedule out. And I just met Ben a couple of weeks ago and I'm like, man, I gotta get you on the show. This would be awesome. And I happen to have a slot. Let's do this And Ben was accommodated the schedule and it all worked out. But, so Ben,you know, we always like to start with talking about your, your sort of your entrepreneurial journey, because everyone's got something that really resonates and, and I love hearing the stories and, and the inspiration that I get from a lot of the guests that talk about, you know, some of the things they've gone through.

(02:14):

Yeah, absolutely, man. I think you talk to any small business owner, they have horror stories, <laugh>, and and I definitely do. So for about 10 years, I owned a, a global event marketing and branding agency, as you mentioned. We projects everywhere from from Singapore to canned France for a billion dollar companies. I managed an average of about a hundred to 140 people a project. We garnered some coverage in the Wall Street Journal for one of my clients. I made what I felt was just really disgusting amounts of money, just crazy amounts of money.

(02:51):

Disgusting is, is in the i the beholder.

(02:53):

That's right. That's exactly <laugh> compared to what I was making before. And I was, I was pretty successful before that. But you know, I tell you, man success came at a price. I know what it means to sleep every other day. I know what it means to be taken to the hospital for dehydration with muscle cramps so bad. It, it literally tore muscle tissue. I have lived a horror show of a life to make that kind of money. I also have a background in, in startups. I've been through some accelerators. I lived in Austin, Texas for a while. Went to Capital Factory, unfortunately, come, came rolling into the office the first week of March, 2020, thinking I was gonna rapidly network with people. That was a very bad time to try and rapidly network with anyone. <Laugh>. Right.

(03:46):

That place turned into a, a ghost town of yeah. Buzzing fluorescent lights and concrete floors really rapidly. But I'm surprised even let you in the building. Yeah, right. I mean, I, I, I got there. Literally, I got there right before it all shut down, so it was buzzing, you know, and then it just went from buzzing to dead. Yeah. Yeah. it was a crazy time. Everybody is, you know, asked me the years I was there. Oh, how'd you like Austin? I don't know. I'll tell you if I ever see it, because <laugh> living in house arrest for two years. Yeah. so at any rate you know, given what I've been through, I mean, I know what it feels like to work crazy hours in a way that your family and your friends just cannot rationally understand to keep your baby alive, you know?

(04:35):

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And when you've been through that, your heart is kinda with other business owners, right? And you're trying to get your website set up, or you're trying to set up an inbound lead engine, you're trying to, to get things off the ground, and it just feels like everything's designed for massive enterprises and, and it just feels like you're trying to take a, a jet engine, a jet airplane to the grocery store, you know? Holy cow. It that complicated. I just wanna go to the grocery store. Yeah. And and so at rate, with all that in mind I created a website called www.grokketship.com, and the first thing I did is I started to curate the business books. I've read the mentor sessions, I've been to the workshops I've been to for startups startup school from Y Combinator, you know, the things that I've learned and curate that, that information for free for people.

(05:29):

So that kind in a do-it-yourself sort of way, they could they could learn and not go through what I went through to learn a lot of those things. And, and then from there, the other thing I was thinking, if, if we could match fractional CMOs with lower middle market small businesses that want to scale, you know, if you could hire someone who could give you the cheat sheet, you know, the, the growth hack notes tell you where all the rocks are in the river. They know all the customer acquisition channels in your market niche, and they've already scaled three companies that are exactly the same size in your industry, vertical. Holy cow. Hire them. I mean, take 'em, go from 10 million to a hundred million and you can do that and pay somebody for four months of, of fractional CMO time.

(06:17):

Wow. That's a no-brainer. Yeah. So we launched that and the response has been insane. I mean, in six weeks time, we got the ex CMOs and VPs of marketing from Walt Disney, PayPal, Hootsuite, Salesforce, Zipcar, eHarmony, Uber Eats I mean PepsiCo Nbcuni Universal List goes on and on. And about three weeks ago, I, I launched the a, a service professional CFOs and that's taken off. So we got 63 CMOs on the roster that are world, world class, and I think recently I checked, I think it was yesterday, I'm at just shy of 40 CFOs. So we're putting together a, an incredible team, and hopefully we'll help businesses with scaling rapidly. That's our, that's our goal.

(07:10):

Yeah. And it's so important, Ben, you, you mentioned this, I mean, I think a lot of times what I've seen is business owners, especially when you're bootstrapping and you're start, you're a startup and you're trying to bootstrap and you're trying to figure out the marketing stuff on your own. And I understand that, right? I'm, I'm a C F O guy myself, and so I understand being frugal, but man, spending money in the right way instead of it taking you, you know, you doing YouTube videos or someone on your team doing YouTube out, figure out, you've got someone who's an intern, who's got some, you know, taking some marketing classes and maybe fooled around a little bit here or there, or you just hit the absolute easy button and accelerator, like you hit the accelerator on the Tesla, right? Yeah. Just take off by having someone who's been there, done that. It's got 10, 15, 20 years of experience with these massive brands that they say, got it. You know what, that's not gonna work. And here's that, that thing you mentioned. Yeah, that was six months ago. That doesn't work anymore. Right?

(08:03):

I've done this three times. Here's why you don't wanna do that, right? Yeah.

(08:07):

<Laugh>. Yeah. You know, I mean, not on the marketing side as well. And, and I, I tell people this with marketing, especially because it's so easy to look at it and say, oh man, I'm running, I don't know, fill in the blank. I'm running some Facebook ads and I'm, I'm getting an r o i of, you know, 37%. I'm like, first of all, it took you three times as long as someone who's does it every day, second of all that 37% or whatever the heck you're earning, the person who lives and breathes this every day can probably 10 x that at least. Right? So you're, you're all proud and pounding your chest about your 37% and the, and the experts going, that is, I wouldn't even, I'd cancel that a ad campaign I wouldn't even run Something was only getting 37%. It's crazy. Well, we gotta hit a break here, Ben. I, I I wanna come back and talk a little bit about the formation. I guess we, we've talked, talked a little bit about grokketship, but I really want to get into lead gen stuff, building that lead gen engine.

(09:03):

If you would like to reach hundreds of thousands of business owners every week, Mr. Biz radio can help . Our show airs globally seven days a week for more than 25 hours across several internet radio stations, plus 20 plus podcast platforms. Also video exposure on the new exclusive Mr. Biz network streaming channel, which gets blasted to 100 plus streaming platforms and the Mr. Biz YouTube channel and our 350,000 social media followers multiple times every week. Join Mr. Biz nation as an advertiser by emailing us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

(09:42):

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(10:13):

Got a question for Mr. Biz. You want answered on air, email it to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Now once again, here's Mr. Biz.

(10:24):

Welcome back, show it's time to Mr. Biz tip of the week. And this week's tip is a financial tip. And this one sounds so obvious, but unfortunately, I see it in almost every business I've ever worked with since I've left the corporate world several years ago. One of the quickest ways to financial problems is holding onto unprofitable customers. Now you say, well, thanks for that one genius, right? I, I couldn't have figured that one out. But here's the problem. Most businesses don't realize they have 'em. I call it the silent business killer. You gotta find the silent business killer and eliminate them. There are products or services that you're offering that are at best break even. But oftentimes what I find, and again, almost every single business I've worked with has this. They're actually losing money on that particular product or service. And so in that example, it sounds completely counterintuitive.

(11:13):

Your sales are going up, revenue's going through the roof, but every one of those sales is actually costing you money. So your sales are going up and your net income's dropping, and you're like, this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You got the silent business killer lurking in your business. If that's the case, you gotta find them and eliminate 'em. So that was the Mr. Biz tip of the week this week. Talking again, Ben Arritt sorry, almost messed that up. I asked you before the show, and I, I still messed it up, but <laugh> no, no worries. I like your business tip, sir. <Laugh>. Yeah, I appreciate that. <Laugh> and, and actually Ben created a, a special link for, for people who watch and listen to the show, and we'll put it in the show notes as well. www.grokketship.com/mrbiz and also follow Ben grock ship on Twitter.

(11:54):

But I, you know, we talked a little bit about Grokketship with the formation, why you started it, what the different things you're doing there. But I know you wanted to really talk and I really wanted to have you talk about creating an amazing lead gen engine. And I know you have a lot of stuff to share on that. So usually we, we only talk, well, not only, but we usually, you know, save the tips for the last one. But I know you got a lot of stuff to cover. So let, if you don't mind, let's just dive into it.

(12:17):

Let's roll, man. Okay. So first of all, as you said, www.grokketship.com/mrbiz with no dot after the mister is the exclusive link for Mr. Biz listeners, where we will go over this stuff, get ready, it's gonna be like drinking water from a fire hose, <laugh>. So the first thing to know is that if you are B two B, probably the number one place to go to begin sourcing leads. And the easiest place is gonna be to go to LinkedIn. And if I could do a share screen with you right now, I'm going to, you're gonna have to enable the screen sharing, sir.

(12:58):

Yeah. Producer Allen, can you make that happen? I can't do it on my end producer Allen, can you hear me? <Laugh> Uhoh, I don't have access to be able to do the allow the share screen,

(13:10):

And that's not the only place you can go. But for B two B, I think that's probably the number one place in almost everybody has LinkedIn access, even if they have the free version.

(13:20):

Yeah. And I'm wondering if producer Allen may, it's Allen, if you're not sure, it's there should be a share screen button down towards the bottom, right? Yeah. I'm trying to do it on my end and it saying, you have disabled screen sharing. Shoot,

(13:37):

While he is looking for that I'll give you a couple of disclaimers. You know, it's gonna be good when it starts with, with disclaimers <laugh>.

(13:45):

So the first thing is that most of the apps that are out there that allow you to acquire leads and a person's contact information scrapers as they're called mm-hmm. <Affirmative> are against LinkedIn's terms of service. That doesn't mean they're illegal, that just means that LinkedIn doesn't like it. So, predictably, all the different companies that do this are on LinkedIn. Their CEOs are on LinkedIn, their employees are on LinkedIn. They even say what they do on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn doesn't have a problem with them saying, yeah, we scrape stuff off of LinkedIn, which is against the terms of service. So how does that happen? And I think the bottom line is, is it's kind of like, you know, speeding on the interstate. If you're five over, you're probably gonna be all right. Right? <laugh>. So if you're a small business owner and you're using this and you stay within the limits that are recommended by these applications, and by the way, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people log in every day and use these tools to acquire potential leads and the contact information of those leads.

(14:49):

So it's not like this is a small secret industry, okay? Right? but all these different apps publish limits and they say, Hey, don't go over X number a day. You don't respect those limits. You're gonna get one warning from LinkedIn, and after that, they're going to ban you permanently and you are done. Done. Yeah. You don't want to go there. So all that to say, respect the limits don't go crazy. And, and you're gonna be okay, but if you don't and you get busted, you're gonna, you're gonna be in big trouble. Very quickly. The second thing I wanted to mention is that once you acquire someone's contact information and say you set up some cold email sequences to send to them, you want to comply with the CAN SPAM Act? You can, you can Google it. I'm not an attorney.

(15:37):

I'm not gonna tell you what you can and can't do. But a couple tips might be that you need to include your address, your physical address, and you have to include an unsubscribed link. Okay? I would recommend that you tread lightly. You don't spam people half to death. You highly qualify who you target. You customize it to them as much as you can, and you might send 'em a couple emails and then back off. Like, don't send 'em anything else. Either they're interested or they're not, man. Yeah. Don't, don't sit there and bang on somebody. You know give some, give some, let people know you're out there, but then that's it. You, you don't, you know abuse these tools or you're gonna be in trouble. Yeah. The last thing I'll mention, and hopefully your, your guy can find a way for me to share screen relationships are what's most important.

(16:28):

If you're trying to grow your business, and everybody knows this, I would say start looking into networking associations locally where you are. There's some big ones. I just did an article for the Private Directors Association, which is for corporate board members about cross pollination of executive networking associations mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and the Atlanta area Kettering is really big, but say they're not really big nationally. So you wanna look at some of the national ones. You could look at Vistage you might wanna look at N A C D. That's for, for public board members. But there's a lot of executive and c e o level networking associations you wanna check into which will allow you to make the connections you need, whether it's for private equity, who would, whoever it is you're trying to, A c g is a huge one for middle market private equity. So that's another one I'd recommend. So this is like the spices on the hot dog. What I'm showing you here isn't the hot dog relationships are the meat, okay? Mm-Hmm. But the hot dog tastes a little better, and we're gonna try to expand the surface area of luck with some of these tools.

(17:46):

Yeah. So the first thing is,you go to LinkedIn, you run a search, and,and you filter who you're trying to target by industry. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And if you do do a Google, you're gonna find that there's 148 different industries. That's totally wrong. The truth of the matter is that they don't tell you is there's 520, but they don't tell you. Oh, wow. Okay. They only tell you that when you search underneath recruiter. So if you go to recruiter, help LinkedIn recruiter slash help, you find out that there's classifications and sub classifications. So if you pick construction, you get 30 different sub specifications automatically. You don't know that there's three tiers. If you pick a tier two, you get every, you know, you see what I'm saying?

(18:36):

It's bracketed. Yeah. Yep, yep. You get everything that's underneath it. So unless you go looking at the chart that's, and the LinkedIn recruiter access, you don't really know what you're selecting when you select that. Why is it this has, you know, 10 people and this other one has 27 million? Well, <laugh>, it's 'cause you can't see the tiering. And that's what you, why you need to go look up that chart. And that's gonna help you a lot use your filters correctly when you're trying to target people. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. The next thing is once you've run your filters, you got a nice looking list and you're like, yeah, those are people I want, the two that I would recommend taking a look at are salesql, literally salesql.com to pull the information. And the other one I'd say take a look at is apollo.io. To give you a quick overview, you've got research tools like LinkedIn, Grotta, and Synex and Apollo to research who to target.

(19:35):

Then you've got the contact information acquisition tools like Sales QL Grow Me Organic, Lucia and Apollo Grow Me Organic is the only one I know that you can scrape leads outta LinkedIn all day and never get busted. The only problem is it's glitchy, it dies, it locks up. You have to start over <laugh>. But if you're patient and it's slow, it is really slow. Like you just gotta run it in the background all day. Oh, really? Okay. But it'll allow you to scrape leads all freaking day, thousands of people all day. It's the only one that can do it like that Sales QL is super accurate. It also goes three, three emails. Deep phone numbers are trash, don't even bother. Okay. But if you want like three emails you can use to contact someone like from their Gmail account to business, that'll do it. Lucia is the best for phone numbers.

(20:23):

I've talked to a lot of people who do this for a living. Lucia is number one for getting phone numbers. Apollo is a good middle ground. It only gives you business information, but it does give you some phone numbers and some of 'em are actually fairly accurate. From there, you need to verify all the information you've scraped. There's zero Bounce, there's <inaudible>, I've done abs. Between all the different ones. You need to use Zero Bounce after you verify you're gonna lose 50% of them. So then you take the second group of emails you've scraped and you verify those and that'll get you like another 15%. And then you take the third group of emails and you verify. So instead of losing half your contacts, you have to verify each email column independently to build up the list. Otherwise, you're gonna lose half your contacts when you go through the verification process.

(21:11):

Then you need to think about deliverability. If you're using something like Lend List or Apollo, you're, you're directly emailing out of your, your Gmail or your Office 365 account. If you use something like Mail Gun, mail Jet, or SendGrid, it's creating a separate S M T P server, which allows you to create higher amounts of volume. We're talking about you do 6,000 emails a day outta one email once you warm it up to that. But you can't start there. You gotta start with about 25 emails a day which brings up an another point for best practices. You need to use a separate domain for emailing. Sorry, I'm out of time. <Laugh>.

(21:55):

Um alright, we're gonna hit a break here. We're gonna, Ben's got a lot of stuff to share. We're gonna, excuse me, we're gonna dive right back into this. I know, I know from when Ben and I talked earlier, he's got a lot more stuff to share here. Hopefully we can get the screen share going. If not, we can work around that. But come back after the break on Mr. BI radio.

(22:21):

Check out all three of Mr. Business best-selling books at mrbizbooks.com. Now, once again, here's Mr. Biz.

(22:30):

Alright, welcome back to the show. Appreciate everyone's patience. We were producer Allen and I were scrambling a little bit. We haven't had we haven't had to try to screen share and all that stuff before. So we, we, and we didn't test it beforehand. Like we should have

(22:45):

<Laugh> causing trouble troublemaker. We ran,

(22:47):

We ran over a little bit. So we're gonna cut this one, this last segment a little bit shorter than usual <laugh>, but nonetheless, we'll still be at 30 minutes overall. But but Ben, if you would just pick up where you, you left off there talking about going through, you know zero balance and getting, you know, kind of cleaning out the list and things like that.

(23:04):

Abso absolutely. And you guys have the screen up here now. So I'll show you. We're running a search here. I'm gonna type in c e o and LinkedIn and we're gonna pretend as though we've run all the filters that we need to run. Okay? And we've, we've gone through the industry list and we understand that better now that there's actually 520 of 'em to filter through. And we look at this and think that's what we want. I'm gonna click this button up here for Sales ql. And you can see that these people come up on the list. And if I click this start button here, I can extract out, it'll say the next 40 pages which will gimme 400 contacts. And what I'm doing is I'm essentially stealing out of LinkedIn all of their contact information with a click click of a button. I'm not going to click continue 'cause I don't want that information in my sales QL account, but if I did click that button, it would dump it into sales ql.

(23:52):

And when I do that, here's what it looks like. You can see all these folders or different scrapes that I've done. Look, woo, there's all their information. Now I have removed their info from Sales ql. I can click export, put that into a C S V, and then import that C S V into a program like list lem list like this one right here. And all I have to do when I have a sequence like this is import the leads. So these are just different sequences that I've got. And you can see here, I can do email 1, 2, 3, 4. I can include invites on LinkedIn. I can visit their LinkedIn page, I can send 'em a direct message, then I can send them an email in two days. There's a whole science to scripting subject lines, first line, second line, so forth, what you should put what best practices are that's published online.

(24:46):

I won't even bother getting into all that right now. But the point is, I've gathered all their information, I've set up a bunch of sequences, and then I just let all this run in the background every day, every day, just drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, sending information out there about what we do and waiting for people to book. So if you look at this email, you can see in here, I've got a Calendly link and the, and the thought here, and a lot of people go, Ben, I've got a calendar. Why? Why do I need a calendar? And I'll, I'll show you why. Let's just say I want to differentiate between people who are booking a call to be a fractional C M O versus hire a fractional C M O versus be a cmo, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> you, you know, even if you're doing charity work, you, you might only wanna do that on Friday afternoons, right?

(25:31):

So you can create different, you know, live meetings versus zoom call meetings versus so forth and so on. And you can bifurcate your traffic with different, different links and different durations as well, and different durations. Also, different time cushion. You know, if it's a meeting somewhere in town, you might want 40 minutes of cushion every time somebody sets a in-person meeting versus like 10 minutes if it's just a Zoom call. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So that's why I think Calendly, Calendly is really a powerful tool. And you can look, include those links inside of your email sequences. And, and then it'll also automatically set up a Zoom call for you. And then all of this of course gets tracked. So going back to this example right here, if you look at my data, you can see I've got about 75% open rate, 21, 20 2% click back, and about 11% replies, which is pretty good.

(26:23):

You wanna stay over 50%. There's a lot of best practices that you need to educate yourself about as far as what to include. So you don't get stuck in a spam filter. You've gotta set up your Dec cmm, S v F and D mark records correctly. If you don't know how to do that, you need to go to Upwork to hire someone. Which brings me to my next topic. So let's just say you wanna scrape a bunch of information and get all these leads, and you wanna set up email sequences, but you don't wanna break LinkedIn's terms of service. You go to Upwork and a lot of people have heard of it, but they haven't tried it. Literally go to Upwork and at the top there'll be a search bar and type in lead Jen. And you'll see, 'cause I've got coming up here on the screen, all these different people come up.

(27:04):

And let's just say we won't only top rated and top rated plus, oh, look for $7 and six $50 cents an hour. We can hire people who do this. Some of these people have literally LinkedIn recruiter level access, which is a lot of money. Some of 'em have ZoomInfo and a lot of advanced tools. I have one or two tools. They have like 10 tools. So you could look up the top 15 private equity companies in your area and say, Hey, I don't know who the top four contacts are. Find 'em for me and gimme all their personal cell numbers, personal emails, everything. Bam, 30 bucks and 24 hours later, you got it. And now you're, you're calling those people and and getting appointments. It's amazing. It really is. And it's that easy. And a lot of people just don't realize how easy that is.

(27:52):

Then if you wanna do multi-platform outreach, you could look at a software tool like Phantom Buster, which goes cross platform between Facebook, Reddit you know, all the different social platforms pulls from different groups. And a lot of people don't realize that those, those tools are out there. I know I cover a lot really fast and I know it's not able to show you everything on screen here in the two segments, but that's why we did the video. That's why, why we have this special page for Mr. Bizz customers grokketship ship, www.grokketship.com/mrbiz M R B I z. And you can see all this repeated with demos and, and different screens. I'll mention one other one. Apollo is an all-in-one. You can run a search, it'll give you all the search filters that a LinkedIn navigator account will give you, which is great if you don't have a LinkedIn navigator account. And it'll set up your email sequences. So you can see here, I've done a search in pharmaceutical groups, it has all the different filters, I've got all their information, and then I can set up a sequence or some of the sequences. There you go. Different, different tool. So different tools do the same thing. They, they all have different pros and cons. Super

(29:09):

Powerful Ben, super powerful guys. Go back, rewind, hit pause, take your notes, do whatever, and go out to www.grokketship.com/mrbiz. We'll put the link in the show notes out of time here, Ben. But I really appreciate you coming on. Absolutely fan, fantastic information. I got a whole bunch of notes myself. I'm gonna have to go back and fill in some of the blanks, but great information, Ben. Appreciate it. Thanks

(29:29):

For having me on, man.

(29:31):

Yeah, absolutely guys. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Have a great rest of your week. And don't forget, as always, cashflow is king

(29:39):

To become part of Mr. Biz Nation, follow him on all social media platforms or never miss a show by going to mrbizradio.com. If you prefer free video content, visit the Mr. Biz YouTube channel or check out his streaming channel, which is available on 100 plus streaming platforms at mrbiznetwork.com.