The Growth Playbook You Actually Need in 2025: Lessons from Michael Maximoff

Michael Maximoff is the co-founder of Belkins, the #1 B2B appointment-setting agency, and a leader in revenue growth strategies. In this edition of Growth Leap, Michael breaks down how he scaled Belkins to 8 figures by focusing on acquisition, retention, and revenue alignment.

We dove into why traditional marketing and sales silos no longer work, how to make outbound effective in 2025, and why retention is the key to sustainable business growth. Michael also shared insights on structuring sales teams, setting up shared KPIs, and integrating marketing, sales, and customer success into a single revenue engine.

Michael discussed the importance of founder-led sales in the early years, how he structured compensation to drive retention, and why the best growth teams obsess over long-term value instead of short-term wins. We also covered the role of partnerships, content-driven outbound, and how to stay financially disciplined while scaling.

We covered:

• Why acquisition and retention must go hand in hand for growth
• Outbound sales in 2025: How to make it work without spamming inboxes
• Sales and marketing alignment: How shared KPIs transform results
• Founder-led sales: Why early-stage CEOs must drive sales themselves
• Financial discipline: How tracking every dollar helped Belkins scale
• Building trust in B2B: Why relationships matter more than volume

Whether you’re a startup founder, sales leader, or marketer looking to scale without burning cash on ineffective tactics, this episode is packed with insights on how to build a sustainable growth machine.

Chapters

• 2:03 Michael's Journey and Belkins Overview
• 4:32 Strategies for Scaling and Financial Management
• 7:12 Focus on Acquisition and Retention
• 8:12 Subscription Model and Client Retention
• 12:50 Aligning Sales and Marketing for Success
• 19:08 The Modern Marketing Playbook You Need
• 22:29 Cross-Department Collaboration
• 24:04 Joint KPIs and Communication
• 25:43 Streamlining Team Collaboration with OKRs
• 26:13 Unified Projects for Better Team Involvement
• 27:02 Effective B2B Sales Strategies
• 28:36 Building Relationships for Lead Generation
• 36:17 Understanding and Engaging Your Prospects

Transcript

POD045 - Michael Maximoff

The Importance of Perseverance in Business

[00:00:00] Michael: you need to be curious about what else can be done there.

then you start doing it and you're going to fail miserably one month, two months, three months. Then a lot of people gave up, then you do the four months and the five and the six months, and things start popping up. So, probably a lot of executives that are listening to this, if you have a certain campaign or certain program in place that you wanted to run, either a new ICP new market.

Make sure that you allocate at least 12 months to be able to see this campaign through from top to bottom. Because if you just have a three months thing, Hey, we're going to have this 10, 000 is going to take us three months. You're not going to see anything because you're probably going to fail if you for the first time. 

Introduction to Growth Leap and Guest

[00:00:44] Michel: Hi everyone and welcome to Growth Leap. I'm your host, Michel Gagnon. We talked to pretty awesome business builders who are designing disruptive and meaningful companies. 

everyone. Joining us today is Michael Maximoff, co founder and managing partners at Belkins, the number one B2B appointment setting agency. With more than 10 years of experience, Michael's all about smart growth strategies that get results. He's also the brain behind SaaS solution like Folderly, ByWords, and ClickRoads. And he's an angel investor helping shape the future of MarTech. In this episode, we'll dive into how Michael scaled his agency to eight figures, developed a new marketing playbook for today's landscape and leveraged B2B omni channel strategies to drive growth. So if you're looking to grow your business, improve your lead generation or rethink your marketing approach, this conversation is full of insights.

You will not want to miss. 

[00:01:40] Michel: Welcome to the show. How are you? 

[00:01:42] Michael: Michel, thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great. I look forward to conversing with you and, answering all the questions you might have, as well as, sharing whatever I know to 

[00:01:52] Michel: I got a lot of tough questions for you. 

Let's start with the first one that you may have, practiced the answer a couple of times already over the years, I'd like to get started by just making sure that the audience knows. 

Michael Maximoff's Journey and Belkins Overview

[00:02:03] Michel: what Belkins is and you know, what is it that you do for how long have you been in business And why you're the number one B2B, appointment setter agency.

[00:02:12] Michael: Of course. Um,so we create, or build pipelines for our clients. We primarily work with businesses, that cater to other businesses, so we are in B2B, uh, work with different industries from software to more traditional businesses, like constructions, manufacturing, financial, you name it. the way we work is we, execute, go to market campaigns from top to bottom.

we define the strategy. build the ICP list, set up tools, automations, create messaging, run those campaigns for clients, and deliver qualified sales ready appointments that our client sales teams can talk to, and move them to closing in a way. And then we are supporting clients with some other things like.

consulting, CRM implementation, anything related to the go to market, we kind of doing that. And I started this business back in 2017. So it's my eighth year as the founder. And we've started as the marketing agency doing cold emailing. And then we grew and scaled To this point, we have over 300 people globally, over 200 ongoing clients and work with over a thousand customers around the world.

from small businesses to enterprise companies like NVIDIA, Cisco, tech data, you know, you name it. and then while. Building the agency, and growing it, we are very passionate about entrepreneurship business and, and startups. So whatever money we were making, we are reinvesting back into the business.

if you know professional service, then usuallyyou always have some money. Are profitable because if you're not profitable building the agency, what the hell you're doing with this, right? so we've generated some profit, put that profit back in the business, start building our own software.

So we've, spin off a couple of softwares, including folderly and then buy awards, then spin off a couple of agencies and then just kind of growing there and trying to reinvest them what we can as well as Invest and do some angel investment with some other complimentary companies that, that we can help with regards to their marketing business development and so on so forth.

so that's kind of 

long story short 

[00:04:09] Michel: like to talk about how you got there from the idea to where you are today with hundreds of employees with, an 80 figure revenue business. Can you share a little bit of, maybe some of your secrets on, you know, how you. Manage to scale and you know, maybe share also some of your advice for the audience about what to think about, when that's your goal and you want to get there 

Strategies for Scaling and Financial Management

[00:04:32] Michael: early on. Really what you need to think on is acquisition and retention. So by acquisition is you always need to be looking for clients either offline, online, building your brand on LinkedIn, participating in events, you're always generating new business, new relationships, new network.

Even though sometimes this Opportunity doesn't feel like, you need to work on it. And then another one is retention. How you can build successful ongoing relationship with your customers from the first time they meet you during the onboarding or sales call to the point of retention, expanding the contract, cross selling, up selling all functions.

Early on, we were focusing on these two functions. I have a co founder, and, my best friend joined the company early on as well, he was helping us as well. we're very lane focused I'm working on acquisition, you're working on retention, and thenthese two things are working very well.

So that was early on to help us scale quickly, and easier. the second thing that we did was we were very financial cautious. So the first thing that I did, I, I downloaded the PNL template from somewhere and we start categorizing each and every dollar we spend in our agency based on the category, like, and by category, I mean, like, Furniture office supplies, marketing tech team training, cost of service, marketing, sales costs, management fees, like all the things were, were, categorized.

and then we categorize each and every payment invoice that we received from the customer. So then we can then predict like, okay, how much money we can make next month or the month after, and then we can budget them. So even though that was the first time I was doing this, I already started feeling what the budgeting was and the planning and forecasting, which helped me not to make stupid decisions in terms of spending the money I didn't have, right.

The third thing was. Pushing yourself every month. So we set up a goal early on to grow 10 percent every month. Like that's it. So whatever we're making, we're investing back into the growth. you know, we were working on like, okay, how we can retain this customer, how we can reduce the churn, how we can make more client sales so forth.

So again, focusing on both acquisition and retention, having the correct financial structure early on, and Setting up realistic, but aspirational goals every month to grow and then pushing yourself to grow during the first early years was, you know, the, the, the biggest things ever. So I remember the first year we made something like 250, 000.

The next year we made 850, 000. Then the next year we made 1. 5, then 3. 5. Then 7. 2, then 11 and now we're, closer to 15 up to 20, they're just kind of growing from there. Yeah.

Focus on Acquisition and Retention

[00:07:12] Michel: What I like about what I mean, there's a couple of things in there that we need to unpacked you Talked about focusing on acquisition and retention, which is not a speech that you hear that often, for, especially for entrepreneurs and founder, like 

, the reflex is to focus on acquisition. you build your sales funnel and try to close the deals.

Even if sometimes, you close a deal that you cannot really deliver on. Right. you're going to feel the pain afterwards. I'm, Curious to know, why you've thought about retention from the get go, especially since 

know, you're focused on lead generation, right?

And a lot of, a lot of sales team or, or companies are just, you know, trying to. throw leads down the, the sales team or customer success without really thinking if, these customers are going to stick around that's, you spending a lot of effort energy and money, very frequently on the wrong leads.

So what was your mindset or your thinking from the very beginning about acquisition and retention being key?

[00:08:11] Michael: This is a great question. 

Subscription Model and Client Retention

[00:08:12] Michael: I think I need to mention that from the get go, our business model was a subscription based, payment model. So we didn't charge our customers per project. We charge a monthly subscription. So that was a flat fee every month. when I was working on my competitive advantage, I was like, okay, there are some bigger companies out there that are more successful that are charging customers.

Three months upfront, six months upfront, they're charging big set of fees. They're charging something else. So I need to be very lean. I need to be very agile. So I said okay, can we do a month to month? Can we just have a month to month? we might not be on the lower side of the price point.

we don't want to be cheap. We want it to be flexible. so we did the month to month. If it's a month to month, then the customers can turn next month or the month after, how can we ensure that we still can have that retention revenue, that ongoing monthly payments from the customers?

Because then if I acquire 10 customers, once one, And they are kind of paying it months too, and I'm acquiring one or two customers months too. Then it means that I will have 12 customers next month. So I'm growing 20%. the logic was how I can keep my ongoing paying customers while still adding new customers.

obviously it's a difficult task because, something can go wrong in the relationship. our job was to measure this. how we can reduce churn we were one of the first agencies on the market that were who were able to reduce churn to about 10 percent month over month at scale where our closest competitors were like 25%.

The way we did it is We've set up our internal client metric called, client KPI, which is basically a number of leads that we generate per customer. when you start working with us, we're like, okay, here's the contract. Here's how many leads we can generate for you.

this is our commitment. This is what you pay for. it will go to our delivery team. for this customer to be successful, I need to hit 10 meetings a month. since we set it up, we knew that if we're hitting the KPI, clients is happy.

We are happy. Earth is great. If we're not hitting the KPI, clients is not happy. So then I built a customer success team, or we call them account managers, whose job was to. Lead the account from the strategy standpoint to retention standpoint. we set up their compensation in a way that 50 percent of their pay is their base.

And 50 percent is the percentage from the fees that customers are paying us like a partner, likerevenue sharing If customers are paying us, they're making more so they can build up their portfolio of customer and essentially the income for the entire organization and increase their own income as well.

And then we set it up or connected it to churn where you essentially, if your churn. Is higher X percentage than your commission or your percentage of commission is lower. If your churn is better your commission is higher. So in this way they have the two controlling schemas, the churn rate.

So we, they keep it at the certain volume. So in this way, most of our customers are staying with us. And then the percentage where they can make more money. So they have personal income. this focus with that key client metric that we had did amazing job. We've then brought on amazing people.

they stayed with organization for three, four, five, six years. They build their portfolio. They build a relationship that they were happy because every next year they were making more money. And they created that Belkin's IP and that the knowledge that they keep, and then we were just empowering them.

So now the team of co managers and Belkins are like partners where each one have a portfolio of customers, each one making revenue for them, for the organization and, and in this way, retention is the king because retention is what 95 percent of the entire revenue of the organization, right?

So existing customers, not the new one. So you've your total revenue of your agency is.

retention revenue and through new revenue, you're only growing. you cannot grow purely operatingthrough new clients you always need to have that big retention core of your customer that are the ongoing payments. 

[00:12:04] Michel: You said that your customer success team had skin in the game, to make sure that you were retaining the clients. if you go up the funnel, did you also have something for the salespeople or, the biz dev folks to make sure that they were bringing in the right people?

I've, I've, I've experienced that myself a lot, you know, the companies that I've led or in my own business Matt Wallach, who was on the podcast, a while back calls it the commission breath, you know, you, you just, you, you just need to commission. And sometimes what happens is that salespeople or marketing people bring the wrong leads, right? Sodid you have something similar for marketing and sales to make sure that they were bringing people that you could really, keep and satisfy?

[00:12:47] Michael: This is excellent point. so. 

Aligning Sales and Marketing for Success

[00:12:50] Michael: Because I spoke a lot about retention, the key was reducing churn and increasing retention. That's the key, right? it means that we're doing everything we can to keep the customers happy, keep the customers paying, now the question is if we're gonna sign a contract with someone that we cannot be successful with, Can I actually reduce the turn rate and increase retention?

I cannot. So I cannot ask you something that you cannot do, right? I cannot come into you as my comment and say, Hey, why did you lose this account? And he was like, well, this is not a qualified deal for us. So what we did, we've got back to our sales and marketing team.

And he said, these are the type of customers that we are most successful with, and we only work with them. Because this is the only way we can continue growing the agency. So we've set up, clienteers and, delivery projections where a client, depending on their industry, depending on their size, depending on their competition, we can score them.

And then it goes to our sales and marketing team. So then the marketing team focuses and attacking only ICPs and the buyers that the delivery team knows that they can deliver on right now, because we can. Deliver great on those customers. We can generate a lot of testimonials, five star reviews, video reviews, case studies.

We are very successful in those verticals. that's a lot of things that the marketing and sales team can use too.they say, Hey, we are the number one, here's how much success we had. they are happy. Right.Early on, because we were so retention focused and put in place qualifiers tiering descriptions and, identifications of who the ideal clients are and try to stick only with them.

it helps a lot to align our sales and marketing team. when someone asks me like,what is your GDM strategy? Are you marketing focused? Are you sales focused? No, we are client service focused. that's why, we've had, success scaling this. when you talk about skin in the game, we believe in fairness.

So, both business development team and the marketing team and the sales team, all have skin in the game, not just based on per commission. So getting percentage from the commission from the sale, but also, getting some perks from, uh,quantitative numbers. So for example, if you're hitting KPI X, or if you're booking X number of meetings, so you know, we believe in,in both.

Uh, so obviouslyit took some engineering to make the entire, PNL works and all the structures works and metrics works, but we've made it. And in this way, everyone is happy. And we are trying to adjust things depending on the external internal conditions. Every. Every year, probably. So the percentages might change year over year, but the logic is the same, right?

We all are in this together. We're all building great future for ourselves. And if we are successful, we're all successful. If someone is unsuccessful, then we all are unsuccessful. There's a lot of interesting things I want to cover. I want to go back to something that you mentioned at the beginning. when you get started, you always have to be looking for the new clients. Can you share some specific, tactics or strategies that you've used, to be able to do this? And also, How you've maybe structured your day, because when you get started, you're wearing all the hats most of the founders and startup founders and leaders that I meet and coach have the same problem, right? where do I go? What do I prioritize? Am I working on the right things? I like to understand a bit how you've managed, how you've, navigated that, The advice that I can give people is, You focus on things that is priority for your business at this point, or what's the most critical and essential and you do it to yourself. And then you delegate something that is secondary or something that, can be easily replicated.

Right. So, I am a huge believer of the founder led sales team. So I was my own head of sales and chief revenue officer for the first, I think three, four years. so I was the one. First start building up my pipeline, closing deals, and then bring on the sales team, taught the sales team. And then I led the sales team while still closing for a few years, because being on the front, helps me to see how my value proposition is comparing to my competitors.

How am I pricing? Is it fair? Is it not fair? If someone is struggling, am I struggling as well? Closing, right? Because you as the founder or the agency owner, you'll be closing more than anyone else just because. I can pitch it differently just because it's my company, my agency. I can give the logic why I did it like that.

And you can't compare that with, a sales executive being taught this. Right. So, so yeah, so I was founder lat early on. I built my own pipeline now because I started like eight years ago back then. Called email was a go to channel for us. So we've learned how to, source leads, create, compelling sequences, set up tools, around them, generate appointments, convert, done right now.

It's a bit tricky now with, in terms of acquisition, but. Now thought leadership, social selling and LinkedIn are very big channels. several, startup founders and, agency owners that started early on and they're successful with their early acquisition strategy because they are great content creators.

So essentially they'repassionate about what they're doing and they're. Writing about it, shooting about it and talking about this. And that helps them to build that first foundation. And so I think like just learning the content creation skill early on, as well as combining that with your selling and marketing motion helps you to be a very like generalist and being able to be successful in terms of acquisition.

Yeah. now I also advise people to focus more on partnerships, key partnerships right now. We need collaborative growth. We need people that are very good at one thing that can compliment us. So, going out there and looking for partners that are specifically in terms of complementation with you, like for example, I'm doing design, we're doing content, someone who's doing web development, we can create a page together, right?

my tool, like Clay is a good example. If everyone is familiar with Clay as a software. They're huge into integration. So essentiallyyou can partner up with clay build your integrations with clay. You can build a lot of workflows with clay. They help to promote you and then you can get some,traction there as well.

So I think like just, social selling, thought leadership, content creation, partnerships, are the key things that I would utilize, at this point, if I were to start 

Modern Marketing Playbook

[00:19:08] Michel: you've said a couple of times, or you've hammered the message that the old marketing playbook is no longer working. And, um, you know, you've worked on revamping this, to come up with a solution that actually works. Could you explain a little bit what you mean by the old marketing playbook?

And then we'll be able to get into the new solution.

[00:19:27] Michael: So, traditionally, the way people looked at the funnel was the top of the funnel is done by marketing. then we have, you know, middle of the funnel, the sales team, and then bottom of the funnel sometimes, or like retention is done by the client team. And then everyone have their own metrics.

Everyone works in their show. the marketing team works on creating demand. The sales team works on closing the demand and retention works on, generating that retention revenue, And working with existing customers. The reality is, When you look at the demand part and the marketing conversions are down, it's hard to do.

The costs are up. marketing alone, working in silo is not able to generate demand. Sales team then doesn't have the demand or doesn't know how to generate the demand. So they're just stuck with the motion where, oh, we don't have a pipeline, we don't have leads. And then the retention in focusing on the customer side and delivery.

Is not aware of what the sales and marketing teams are doing are not involved in what is there. So there's this huge discrepancy between the, how this three teams are working together, and that's why we're still talking about sales and marketing alignment or alignment between this. Right. When you talk about the alignment in 2024, it's just sounds ridiculous.

It's like, why we still going on this? Right. so that's the old playbook. and then we have a customer, Who. is looking for a solution and behaviors also change. So instead of just opening a cold email or going LinkedIn, they do their own research. They engage with brand through multiple channels.

They don't want to see what the marketing are doing. They want to see what the delivery team is doing with clients. They can talk to the sales team, but they don't want to talk to the sales team that wants to sell something, but wants to talk to the sales team. to talk to someone that knows the problem and then speak about the problem, right?

So how would they know that the sales team who's closing is the one that knows about the problem? If the sales team doesn't speak about those problem openly, great content, so on and so forth. So role swap, they changed. And that's why if someone is trying to build a traditional funnel with the marketing team, generate demand for me with a sales team, focus on the closing and then delivery team.

Hey, focus on delivering value to customer scaling. This thing doesn't work. So what I'm trying to do with my team as well is how we can bring everyone together. How we can build the funnel where all the pieces are involved and integrated together.

And then you have a buyer who is engaging with every person in all the teams together, and they can see the entire company on a more flat surface rather than looking at this. So they kind of look at this, right. And there are some, you know, tools and processes and things that you can do to this, but the entire logic is how you can open up sales and how we can open up delivery team, to talk more about the problems, talk more about the customers and be the front face and then how you can open up marketing team, to work and closely with the delivery team, and with, with the sales team and support them into featuring and highlighting what the incredible job these teams are doing, and you know, with, with clients directly.

So,

Cross-Department Collaboration

[00:22:29] Michel: I'd like to dig deeper because, in my experience, you have different types of people in a team and a company, you have those who have this 1980s mentality. We think that, you know, knowledge is power and they try to keep things for themselves. But the big majority of people, when you talk about collaboration or alignment, like people are open to this, what I've experienced is that they don't know how, especially when you think about cross department, collaboration. So do you have, you, you've mentioned tools and processes, can you mention one or two things that you've put in place that brought people together?

And I'll give you an example. in my previous gig, we wanted people to. Look at the data we had meetings where people were extremely vague. They had three bullet points on a slide saying the client is not happy and, it just didn't work. we thought, how do you change the culture? And one of the things we did was to say every meeting starts by looking at the data. we spent a couple of,of hours building a dashboard that made sense, without overwhelming anybody, but every meeting had to go through this this habit or tool, helped us change the culture.

You could not go around this part of the meeting, right? it's a little bit like to get out of your bed, you have to go through the gym. And you cannot, get your coffee until you've done your workout. Right. So are there any tools, processes, mindsets, or, or that you've put place where you say, when we do this, people, work together.

It's smooth and there's no,there's no question.

[00:24:03] Michael: Yeah. 

Joint KPIs and Communication

[00:24:04] Michael: So we start off with joint KPI and joint metrics. So it's like, there's one, two, three metrics that we are all looking at together and we all reporting and all of our future depends on this three metrics. That's it, for us, it can be, our churn rate, as I mentioned, it can be our retention rate and it could be our, tiering of the customers with tier one being the customers that we are more successful with.

tier three being those that are more difficult to work with. we need to have a certain percentage of new customers that are in that tier or existing customer that are in that tier. And when you look at this, like this metrics, like all of them are the ownership of, of all marketing, the sales and the client service team, like all of that, because.

And then when they look at this metric, they start extrapolating into how many new Deals we've created in our sales pipeline. what tiers of the deals, how many of those were converted into like high qualified to close deal? How many of them are onboarded? How many of them we lost?

all of the team leaders and all of the teams are looking at those metrics and they're all reporting those metrics and it helps a certain alignment that you don't understand, like how all of this are connected. So that's, that's the first step, right? This, the second step is obviously that. communication that needs to go on, on a weekly.

So we've created Slack channels, team created their own Slack channels without me being overseeing there. So they kind of collaborate together. they do a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly, Overview of the different aspects of the work. Sometimes you don't need to look at all the metrics every week.

You just need to have a more, you know, session where you discuss like where we at. So that works as well. 

Streamlining Team Collaboration with OKRs

[00:25:43] Michael: Uh,then we also have OKRs, OKRs like Objective Control Result System where, every year, that goes to yearly, OKRs and then quarterly OKRs where each department or team, set up their own, Priorities that they can work on during that period of time that will lead them to those successful KPIs at the end, right?

And they all have access to this. So having all access to the KPI, having joined KPIs, having joined OKRs and then access to the OKRs help us a lot to streamline the conversation. 

Unified Projects for Better Team Involvement

[00:26:13] Michael: And then the third thing is to work on projects together. for example, usually sales deck is done by a sales team or a marketing team, right?

our deck was done by marketing sales and delivery team together, right? They all contributed and they worked on that. We're trying to build up processes and projects where everyone is involved.

So when you have a webinar, a webinar is organized by the marketing team, but being hosted by sales team and delivery team together, right. And with the client, for example. So just the more you create the, the project that unify the team and they can work on, they can see the entire, organization and, playbook to them, thenit makes sense for them.

And then they're more involved. this is just a low hanging fruit, but if you even do this three things, that's just going to be a game 

[00:26:59] Michel: I agree. 

Effective B2B Sales Strategies

[00:27:02] Michel: I want to talk about sales and setting, meetings and appointments for your clients or for yourself. there's so much noise and, it's very difficult to reach out to people the way it was done, What are your strategies? What are the things that work today to be able to do the work that you do in terms of B2B sales and setting up appointments for your clients?

[00:27:28] Michael: So most of the time when people are trying to generate leads and set up appointments, they think about the conversion stage of the funnel. Like I reached out to you, 

I can engage with you. I converse with you. We can have a conversation. There's a conversion. what I think is that the buyer should go through more preliminary stages, which is awareness, activation, engagement, and then it goes to conversion, right?

So 10 years ago, I can build the list. I can set up something based on the volume and pure competition and the way that not more businesses we're using, let's say, cold email or LinkedIn outreach. I could get more conversion and more meetings. And it was easier for me 

Now this conversion is down. When you jump into the conversion stage right off the bat, you cannot expect that your buyers are familiar with your company, with your product, know anything about you. And then they would be interested in engaging. And if they will be interested in engaging, it doesn't matter that you're going to sell to them.

So they don't have a buying intent, right? the way to solve this problem is to look at how you can engage with your audience initially to build that first awareness and activation and engagement

stages. I

Building Relationships for Lead Generation

t could be even Building a list of your dream clients and the people that you want to engage with.

[00:28:43] Michael: Connecting with people on LinkedIn with some message, going to the webinars they're doing, commenting their posts, just purely like doing an actual relationship building early on. You don't need a lot, like literally doing that for 500 contacts every month, which is 20 working days. So you're looking at 25 contacts a day, which is like, what you spend an hour and within an hour, like three minutes per contact, you can just be successful in that.

So by doing that consistently, you're able to first put your name in front of them, get them visiting your page, seeing your name Then the second step would be talking about the problems that they have from the standpoint of creating some kind of content, maybe a webinar, maybe event, maybe a live discussion, anything, and then promoting it and say, Hey, here's the podcast that I did that I spoke about this.

this is the problem. If you're interested, happy if you engage, that's it. This is the second stage. Every time you look at their engagement level, like who is liking, who is visiting, who is engaging, who is answering, who is joining. And then after that, you can reach out for the conversion. The longer you're going to be building this process, the more time, the more volume you're going to have.

You're going to build a list of companies and people that are aware of you. that are active, that are engaged, and then they're ready for the conversion. And then when the conversion stage, when you can send an email, you then not going to be thinking about, Ooh, how I can create this. cool campaign with hooks and it's like, Oh, I read this because you don't need this.

You can create simple messages because you know that they're relevant. You know that they're engaging. And in this way, even sending 10 emails or 20 emails would be a game changer because in this way you can convert five or seven, right? I think this misconception right now is that you need to play the old ball where you need to Scrape Apollo with 2000 contacts, build the message, use hooks, set up sequences.

If at the end of the day, what gets the job done, gets the job done. So if five emails going to get the job done, what the hell, right? So I think my, my point here is thinking about how you can get to the point when five emails can make the difference and doing that preliminary work first would be Budget sensitive, I would say time sensitive because then you're going to have more experience doing all of these things. very effective method of building your 

[00:31:03] Michel: if we recap what you said, you would say the first phase is just. Connecting with people. this is something you would do as you mentioned commenting on, you know, some of their posts or, whatever's happening in the world.

[00:31:16] Michael: Yeah. You know, just, I'll give you an example. So ByWards, we kick it off six months ago. I still don't have a big sales team. What I'm doing is I know that my buyers are, head of growth and product marketing. I use sales navigator. I build the list of how to grow since health navigators in tech, that are in the companies with 10, 20 million, 

This is my list. I have 2000 people. I use tool called expanded at IO. that, using to automate, like you have a builder where I can automatically use the list to visit the page, like the page, follow, send connection requests, send a message. And I set up a simple message and actually I can, if you want, I 

you that message real quick.

so the message is, hoping for some feedback, John heard you have a good eye for great copywriting mind going to buywords. io and giving us the honest review of the copy, don't hold back, smile. Uh, and then the follow up can be, if you hate the copy, I'd love to hear why, if you loved it, curious if you would be open to letting us write for your company, we could run a pilot, A B test, whatever you want.

That's it. 50 percent of the people accept my connection request, 20 percent reply. And there are people that actually record the zoom, go to record loom video, go to landing page, you know, that they make it like, Oh yeah, great to connect. We start conversation. We start all these things.

what I'm spending is a hundred dollars on navigator. 50 bucks on expand or 70. So I've spent. A few hours of my time doing this, I've narrowed down to exactly ICP and the buyers, that could be interesting. I have a good product and I, I, and I have a considerable volume, but it get the job done for me right now, to be able to, and I'm not talking about the conversion, I'm not talking about selling even for the first stage, you're just putting people in front of you, right?

That's it. 

[00:33:00] Michel: I I mean, a lot of people, and I'm pretty sure it's the same situation for you. a lot of people. Are doing that, reaching out to us. I think there are a couple of templates people are using, and I've made the mistakes myself, but you know, you have people who reach out to you and they pitch you the, the full marketing brochure in one message, which is a

bit depressing. And then you have people who are asking to connect and exchange ideas, which is a bit, obscure

It feels a bit like, a pitch is going to come afterwards. Right. and then, you have people who, are just straightforward and selling, look, there's some, help people or companies like yours find, great it talent you want to connect.

Right. So basically what you're suggesting is, a better vision of all of these things where you were a bit more human. 

[00:33:50] Michael: that's an excellent point. even with the latest example, we can help you to build your talent, right? if you reach out and say, Hey, we're doing this, we're going to be the best, let's connect. Why don't I, I'm connecting, it's relevant.

Now, if you're going to send me the second message, Hey, would you like me to do the talent for you and start pitching me? I hate that. But if I see you on my newsfeed and I see you have a report or insight about how the developer's salaries range in Europe has changed or like five years, I'm going to engage.

I'm interested. It's relevant for me. here's what you can do to reduce the time to hire twice. So the way it works is usually the message that you receive are from the BDRs or account executives or someone that started the job three months ago. They're actively looking for leads.

connecting with decision makers and they think it's easy to start generating the leads. but if you're in this business for three years, And you build your list of people like 6, 000, you build the profile, you're great in creating content and creating insights, communicating them.

You're not chasing the short term gain, but chasing a long term lead and nurturing. if you create a very nice message that's like, oh, it's, it's, it's nicely done. And you're not because you're not in a hurry because you've, you're not doing that the second week, you've already done that for years, then you're good.

So I think the message for the people that are, I mean, like looking for the job or don't want to change the job, don't do it. Like try to stick in one industry for a longer period of time. one of the lessons I've learned when I changed my industry early on, I worked in the.

In a media industry, I work with publishers around the world. I spent three years doing that. It's gone. the connections, the network, everything that I had in the industry, because I changed the industry is gone. Now I'm in my industry, my like eight years and things are just start happening for me, you know?

So the next 10 years would be like huge for me because essentially everything that I work on for the last 10 years, I'll be building up in the next 10 years. Even changing the companies, but within one industry, within one ICP, within one buyers is very significant because in this way you can capitalize on everything that you've done in the past.

And this is much, much better than thinking about the hooks and thinking about the scale and about like how I can get with AI a message and which AI is better, the chat GPT or Twain or random that can create me a better message that would. Send another generic message to you and me, Michelle, that we will look at this and say, like, you have no idea what you're doing.

Right. So.

Understanding and Engaging Your Prospects

[00:36:17] Michel: You often talk about understanding your prospects, unique needs. And, I want to also talk about curiosity, empathy, humility, afterwards, but I'd like to understand how you gather insights about your prospects, unique needs. And if there's, a methodology that you've, uh, perfected over the years that helps you, uncover their needs and not necessarily what their goals are.

Historically, we always looked at, prospects or buyers from the ICP standpoint, ideal client profile, which is a company, their industry, their size, the revenue, you know, what they do, B2B, B2C, whatever. So, okay, if company fits and then the prospect who is like their title, and then maybe how long they've been with their organization.

[00:37:05] Michael: So now all this information is not enough, because you need to also know is how, what are the unique challenges or problems of that buyer in your specific industry that is in the relationship with your product, then how these challenges are. extrapolated to the other people that are involved into the purchasing decision, which is the buying committee.

So because usually your product, your service are, are not, but just by one person, but a X number of a group of people that are connected with their same interest in the organization. So the buying committee can consist of CFO, CMO, leader acquisition. So essentially like to buy Balkans, you might, you need a, VP of marketing, VP of sales, CEO, head of finance.

And then all these people needs to know or wear or have their own interest into what Balkans is doing, right? So catering your, Approach and your go to market around the buying comedy is important because if you're skipping someone, then you're probably not going to buy because they will say, no, no, we don't need this right now.

so that's the second thing. The third thing is how these people are consuming information right now with regards to where they are at geographically, what age, what sex they are generally like what their habits are. so how they're consuming that, are they more LinkedIn? You can see it by. How many followers they have, do they actively post if they don't actively post, if they don't have a lot of followers and you're pitching them on LinkedIn and about your services, then probably you're not going to be successful.

They're visiting the page once a month, right? How active they are with email. Probably if they have certain positions, a certain industry dealing heavily with email. They might be using emails or they may be overhauled with email. So then using phone as a better example, or even trying the offline face to face things or what they're Googling or what they're looking.

So one example is a tool called SparkToro that helps you research a certain buyer based on the signals they're giving, like what they're researching, what websites they're spending their time on, what they're watching on YouTube, all those things. So in this way, you can at least align your strategy around their interest, right?

And then when you have all of these three components, you're like, okay, cool. Now let's think about, What can be done to be able to engage with these people with regards to what we can do with this organization? And that comes to the curiosity part, right? you need to be curious about what else can be done there.

then you start doing it and you're going to fail miserably one month, two months, three months. Then a lot of people gave up, then you do the four months and the five and the six months, and things start popping up. So, probably a lot of executives that are listening to this, if you have a certain campaign or certain program in place that you wanted to run, either a new ICP new market.

Make sure that you allocate at least 12 months to be able to see this campaign through from top to bottom. Because if you just have a three months thing, Hey, we're going to have this 10, 000 is going to take us three months. You're not going to see anything because you're probably going to fail if you for the first time.

so we then AB test, spend time, get it right, and then start scaling that. And then every next year you're going to do more and more. So the long term planning here is much more important and long term vision. than the short term gain that is mostly people are focusing on right 

[00:40:23] Michel: like that. Um, maybe one last question before I let you go, or maybe, uh, I always say one last, but I always lie. You've, you've mentioned, curiosity, empathy, and humility as essential traits for successful salespeople. Which is a bit contrary to what we've been used to, you know, over the years where sales, people's have to be aggressive, they're sharks, you know, you have to go out there and twist a knife, let's say. So why do you think these qualities are so crucial, for, you know, to become a successful sales 

[00:40:56] Michael: So let's start off with curiosity. we love to engage with curious people. curious people, dig deeper, they're interested in you, they do the research, they prepare. they do the follow ups. So the curious people, they really wanted to get to the bottom of things. And we love to do that because the, the, the worst thing ever is when, a sales executive just on a high level, knows about me or done the research with me, and then tell me, Hey, Michael, tell me more about this or that.

And he's like, come on, man. Right. So, um, so again, because of that, curious people are more In everything in terms of engagement and you just love engaging with them All right, so this is done then. empathy Everyone trying to put their own agenda very often in front of the other people like i'm here To sell you something or i'm here to solve your problem, right?

Elder i'm i'm moving like we have 30 minutes We're moving the speed because I have some other things going on right like people don't You Thing more about from the perspective of what the other person is thinking about this or want this. So being empathetic from about a lot of person in terms of what they're going through and how they're doing that, what they want and tailoring your approach or tailoring your page and tailoring their relationship to them.

So they know that you care if they feel that you care, then they can trust you. And if they can trust you, Then you can have a good relationship. and then, um, the humility part is,

very often when things start happening for you, you start being the best sales guy on the block. You're just closing. You just like the alpha, right? You feel like you, Don't need to learn anything or you feel like this is like already going to going through, but it's just the beginning of the journey, right?

So you need to be more. So staying humble and that humility part is very important, uh, because it still shows that there's a lot of things that you can do there. And it, it, you can project that for the people and then people can share with you because if you're, I love. To share with someone who is eager to learn, but I hate to share with someone that don't want to know because they think that they know better.

Right? so that's why I, again, I, I also, I love your style of interview because you ask questions and you kind of just start to, to, to get the person. I also start doing the same. So when I'm even meeting with my relatives, I always start asking questions to them. Like, okay, how is this? How's this? I want to be eager to learn.

And they're like, Michael, can you tell about what's happening in your life? Say, yeah, yeah, nothing interesting here. I just wanted to learn more about you. So I think like that part is, is important, especially in 

[00:43:23] Michel: Great. I totally agree. And I think, when you are curious and, empathetic, like you discover really interesting things, right. And, um, you, when you suspend your agenda and, you know, start really caring, you, you find, golden nuggets as well. if you find ways to help them better, I guess, and, then it helps out afterwards with your retention rate going up.

[00:43:46] Michael: And then everyone knows that you're trying. Like I always, to my entire career, I knew that I could. Build a good relationship with customer, even if my performance fails. So I can measurably, I can generate zero appointments a month. But if I have a great relationship and personal that I'm trying very hard and that we're testing a lot of things and things are going to happening and I know what I'm doing because I could provide them with the data, with preparation, the report, I'm very professional in this way.

They're like, okay, let's, we understand. Let's take time. let's do what we're going to have the next month. Right. So that's most important. And, um, yeah, so that's like, all of this just goes down to the caring, right? Like if you care. Then you're going to do the best to do our job. And I care more about the people around me and the people I engage with, uh, that I care about myself.

So essentially like when you're a founder, you always put your clients in first place, then you put your team in the first place, then you put your partners, your investors, and then you put in yourself. So if all of their interests are done and they're all taken care of, you will be fine and you will be very well taken care of 

[00:44:44] Michel: just one thing, because you've mentioned, you know, when you run campaigns, you have to be realistic with how fast you can get results when you work with new clients, like what's, do you have like a usual period where you say, well, you know, to be able to get to the promised, um, uh, appointment. Numbers that we've, you know, we can guarantee or we will guarantee it takes usually, I don't know, three months, six months.

[00:45:07] Michael: So we have this, um, we call it due diligence process where our sales team during the, the client journey, they evaluate, cost, client, uh, digital footprints, like the state of their website, their, uh, their digital channels, their social channels, their value proposition, their competitor. So they identify.

Where customer add that sort of like comparison table. And then based on, our average projections, we have also like table of the industries, the clients, the different scoring, and then what is the typical conversion we can expect from the first three months, the second, quarter, the year.

Right. And then the, the job of the sales executive is to compare both and then provide customers with realistic expectations, say, Hey, this is Here's what's happening. Here's what we can do. Right. Uh, usually we definitely wanted to get some short term results as well as the long term conversion. So if, we, because we won't be able to close it, so we, we're trying to be very realistic, but we're trying to um, provide customers with commitments and with, with results that they could say, okay, I like this.

Let's, let's do this. So, for us, right now it's also the. The cost of acquisition cost per deal created. So, um, on average, we're looking between, 400 to 600 per qualified meeting booked on average. So then depending on the customer budget, we can say, okay, we can generate And then depending on their state of digital, digital footprints, we can say, okay, for you and for your industry, we can generate 15 qualified meetings for you.

We can do 25 for you. We can do 35. So it's the job of the sales executive to determine that number and then put that number in the contract. Uh, but it should be a number within the first period. Pilot period just to see that this partnership works and then this number should be increased a quarter over quarter, to be able to, again, because you always learn more, you have better channels and so on so forth, but no one can provide this projection in silo and just say, okay, Here's how I can do this.

It could be in a collaboration with what you already have and what your plans are in your market and your competition. And then your past experience with, with other companies that, uh, that you worked with. So when I receive a message, someone saying that, Hey, I can generate 60 appointments for you.

They're like, You cannot, because you, you, you just send me a cold email with a 60 number, right? Which is not going to happen, right? Because 

you didn't do the job. So,

[00:47:25] Michel: And just one last thing, um, business model at the beginning of the interview, you said that you had, um, this, uh, subscription model at the beginning. Like, have you. Change that over the years. Like how does the business model look like now?

[00:47:39] Michael: so the thing about the subscription model is that it's really like SAS was. Again, SAS is amazing because of that subscription model. You can always predict how much money you're making, how much are you spending, what your costs are. Um, you can build your contract around it. So we stick to this model early on.

Um, we added set a fee. Uh, later, to cover some of the costs that we're experiencing to onboarding and keep the customer. so we have the set of fee plus the fixed fee. a lot of companies in our industry, they wanted to do the performance base, like pay per something like, or commission or sharing something usually doesn't work really well, especially new engagements just because you, you know, for the first few years, we just figuring things out with the client.

it hits hard on the business. So you kind of predict and you don't have cash to, to spend. So I wouldn't go with those. the projects are great. So We, didn't implement the project based payment, because of the specifics of our industry and our competition. So we still need to be aligned with what other companies are doing.

We kind of just do our own thing. but, um, there are agencies in my network, they're doing, content, boutique content and, performance, uh, advertising. And they have. Project based fee. So, they started to say 25, 000 project that can take two or three months and they can do this and this and this and this and this.

And then after the project, they renegotiate what's next. Uh, but usually there is a problem with this business model is that you cannot predict the turn. So you can have like, sometimes like something happens, like elections are happening. Yeah. We're not going to be continuing with you. Let's do next year.

And you're like, shit, I don't have clients right now. but for this, if I, if I think about the project based, model, I would do a very high margin and I would go like off market. So I would charge a lot. but I will charge like a one time, like 50, 50%, something like that. because that was my first company I've built and because, I knew that this model works really well for my competition.

And I knew that right now, a lot of design agencies, development agencies, they all are doing, the fixed fee, uh, or retainer model just to have a more predictable, cashflow. I'm happy that I, Choose that model, um, instead of the others. but now with all the experience that I have, the I would definitely experiment with the more high, high margin models, uh, for sure.

[00:49:53] Michel: Thank you so much for your time, Michael. Do you have any parting words or last advice before I let you go?

[00:50:00] michael-maximoff_1_10-10-2024_161021: Yeah, so, I try to write, uh, more often on, on my LinkedIn. And I also have a newsletter called from zero to agency here, where I've spoke about all these topics and other length of topics, uh, just in a very great detail with all the tools, the links and all the things. So if anyone wants to check it out, just go to my LinkedIn and you're going to find the newsletter, the podcast, all the other things in directory.

So I'm trying to openly talk about the things that I'm doing. Because I was very admiring the other people that were doing this and leading the way. So it's my time to share whatever I learned to help the, the other generation to create meaningful and thoughtful things and not just go with the mainstream and with something that is popular and not something that is hard.

Because actual valuable things are, are hard to achieve and are, are just difficult. So we need to grind to get it to the top. So, yeah. So hopefully you guys are grinding right 

[00:50:57] Michel: Great. Thank you so much, Michael, for your time. Really appreciate your insights and your generosity. So I wish you all the best and let's stay in touch.

[00:51:07] Michael: Thanks, Michelle. Thanks guys for listening to this. We'll be in touch.

[00:51:11] Simon: Thanks again for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And as usual you can find the show notes at stunandawecom.