Please note: This is an automatically generated transcription. There are typos and the system may pick words or whole phrases up incorrectly.

Intro: I’m Paul Higgins an ex-corporate executive turned business owner who for five years, struggled to grow a cloud Consulting business whilst battling a chronic disease. With the help of mentors and experts, I got the business model right, built a sales and marketing engine, and developed a high performing team that ended in a successful exit. I received a kidney transplant from a mate, and now on my second life, I dedicate my time to helping other Cloud Consultants go quickly with less effort to enjoy life. Detecting an accent I'm an Aussie working globally from Melbourne Australia. I interview successful Cloud Consultants sharing their scaling story to give you inspiration and practical tips. I have dedicated experts for Cloud Consultants on the show to save you time and money by working with the right people. If you want to scale quickly with less effort to enjoy life you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Speaker 1 (0:55): Hi I'm Paul Higgins and welcome to the cloud Consultants Show episode number four seven two today's topic is closing high quality B2B clients automatically. That's right, automatically. And you're going to really learn four key things: one is why Cold email is working and if you're not doing it what you're really missing out. And the second is how to get qualified lists to go and Prospect. Alex it was a great little summary of upwork and how to do that. Third is how using AI will take the headache out of you doing all the scripts, the follow-ups, when to send them etc. you know, why not learn from billion dollar campaigns and then apply it. And the third is the three C's of creating a message which is fantastic.

Speaker 1 (1:35): And if you're a first time listener, welcome. And I hope you love what you hear and you're going to subscribe and also you know please check out all of our solo shows as well. And it's really for cloud consultants, so it's dedicated for you. So if you're a cloud consultant, you're in the right place. If you're a regular, thanks for listening. But why don't you tell me. Send it to [email protected]. Let me know that you listen and also let me know what topics you'd like me to cover. And there'll be a summary because Alex gives us lots of great content, there'll be a summary in the show notes plus there'll be a full transcript available at paulhigginsmentoring.com/podcast. 

Speaker 1 (2:11): But before we interview Alex I'd like to thank our sponsors the first is the cloud Consultants Collective. The only or the world's only Revenue Focus Cloud Consultants group. it’s peers answering questions or what peers much better than YouTube and Google. Why don't you go check it out yourself if you don't believe me just go to the cloudconsultantscollective.com to join for free today. And now there's the Workflow Academy - are your top performers feeling overwhelmed by their workload? Do you worry that their performance will suffer or that even worse they'll leave the company?  We have an Innovative solution to help you. We've partnered with workflow Academy to provide you with highly trained Junior Talent who can support your top performers and ensure your team stays on track. To learn more about this game changing solution just visit paulhigginsmentoring.com/WFA today and let us help you support your top talent and achieve your business goals.

Speaker 1 (3:08): So our guest today is Alex. He's the founder of omni.us and also x27marketing.com. He’s been in the digital marketing space for over 15 years now even though he doesn't look like it. And he went from zero SaaS to five SaaS exits in 2023 and he's generated over 100 million for clients in revenue. Along with being an entrepreneur he also creates a weekly YouTube videos that educates agency owners on how to expand their business and generate more income by showing them ways to enhance their B2B cycles and Implement inbound marketing strategies. So what I'll do now is hand you over to Alex Berman from omni.us. Brilliant to have you here, Alex.

Speaker 2 (3:50): Yeah thanks for having me Paul.  I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (3:53): Yeah same here. So look I I heard you on a a podcast, I tracked you down, we had a call and I was like I've got to get this guy in front. And look for all of you listening, you know depends when you're listening this is going to come out in the end of May 23 but I know that some of the features said that we're going to talk about will be coming out soon in the middle of the year, it's already in beta at the moment but it's a fantastic beta and we’ve been using and I recommend that you at least try it. But um that's sort of the nutshell. But if we go back to the umbrella which is cold email right, there's so many people that just keep telling me that cold email doesn't work, cold email is dead you know we've post covered, we want more relationships, we you know we don't want to be spammed. All of these myths that are out there around cold email. Give me your perspective on why now obviously there's a reason why you chose to build omni.us but tell us why you've chosen to go down the the cold email or more important I suppose the cold Outreach path?

Speaker 2 (4:47): The easiest, best, fastest, and cheapest way to reach anybody is the email. And the way that I think about it is where are you all day you know every office you're going there first thing in the morning you're opening up your email, midday before lunch you're opening up your email, at lunch you're checking your email, after work you're checking your email. So it's still very much in use. People say that cold email is dead and yet they all use email. So what is dead is the spammy tactics. If you're not going to be able to get into primary and if you're blasting out messages that aren't unique, that aren't tailored to specific people, sure you're just not going to get in the inbox. But if you send a good tailored email to a person that wants to buy and you sell them something that they want to buy, of course they're going to respond. I respond to cold emails all the time and we've seen this data across people you know our YouTube channel now has over a hundred thousand subs. All people learning cold email and they send me stats all the time like hey Alex I just sent out 3 000 emails and booked 300 meetings. They're like hey Alex we just made a million dollars off this cold email campaign. So I'm seeing it so to say that it's then is just incorrect one. But two, I would say before you would declare any channel then I would listen to what the experts in that channel have to say and then test and Implement what they have to say, give it its best shot because everyone's been saying everything is dead. Since I started calling now I've been cold emailing now for eight, nine years since I started it people say that it's dead and I've I've gone through waves of everything being dead. Content marketing is dead, SEO is dead, Facebook ads are dead, and guess what, people are making millions if not tens of millions of dollars a year using all of these tactics everywhere in the industry.

Speaker 1 (6:26): Yeah well I remember when in1993, when I worked at Coca-Cola when I first started I said that there'll be no more Corner small shops right, mum and pop shops, whatever you want to call them in your country, they won't exist right and there's still plenty of them today, right. So yeah I agree that you know it's the case. And and look for me I might be in the minority, I actually have someone that completely manages my inbox, right. And if something's good it still comes through and I'll reply by email but I'm not sitting in my inbox all day. How many you know of B2B we’re mainly doing B2B businesses, are people's mainly still organizing their own inboxes from your experience?

Speaker 2 (7:05): It really depends. It depends on who you're targeting. So if you're doing a bottom-up sales approach which means like for us as there's a couple different things we can do. We can either sell to the sdrs so directly to the sales development rep or the marketing managers directly, or we can start sending to the CEOs and the directors of sales. CEOs, directors of sales, SDRs. Now what I found is SDRs manage their own inboxes, directors of sales are where you get into the issue of like all these guys are too busy they're not going to respond, but CEOs want to respond to the valuable messages. So one thing people get wrong with both bottom up and top-down sales approaches is they think that they need to send to the direct decision maker so hey I need to send to the director marketing and I need to send to the director of sales, when in fact it's more valuable to send to the junior account executive and have them forward it to the director of sales or send to the CEO and have them forward it to the director of sales than it is to go directly towards the person that probably does have an inbox manager and would never respond to these kind of emails. The biggest CEOs on the planet, billionaires, etc are managing their inbox. I cold emailed Mark Cuban to get feedback on an app before and he got back on the cold email. We have booked meetings with you know the CEO of, well we cold email the CEO of JP Morgan and he passed it down, we booked a meeting with them. TV Land, like giant companies Starbucks you know, McDonald's, Alaska Airlines, these people respond if the pitch is relevant. That's all you need to know.

 Speaker 1 (8:33): Yeah and like I said like to me you're listening to Alex and I, don't manage your own inbox right. I think the biggest gift you can ever give yourself is get someone else to manage your inbox. That's the inbox. Doesn't mean that they're managing all your emails, right, like I've got a folder called aph to read and they just drop it in there when I've got to action something or if I've got to do something they can't do it for me, right, so yes we're all still touching uh email official. And I know you know obviously with Omni you're saying that there's more than email and at the moment you've got email and text. Of the two formats, and then you're going to be expanding it, tell us a little bit about statistically you know is it still an 80 20? That's still email 80 or how you're seeing that some of these other channels are developing in relation to cold outreach?

Speaker 2 (9:18): Email and cold calling are the two most effective. Cold calling's gotten less effective but the reason why I say that is there are databases online so many databases you can just go in, get leads for a fraction of a cent per lead and you can extend you know a thousand targeted emails or have a list of a thousand emails or phone numbers and just make those calls. Those databases are not fully built out for the Omni channels. For instance let's say I wanted to send a thousand cold telegram messages where am I getting those usernames from right or a thousand cold tweets you know I can use a tool to build a lead list on Twitter but it's not going to be the same as building a list from Sales Navigator. It's not going to be the same as buying a list from LeadShark or Apollo or Zoom info. And so just from a scalability point of view, cold email is still number one. With cold calling as well you know layered in that's the first Omni Channel. However, like you said some people are they they're blocked on the email address right so they're not responding to their emails and then the first step for a very long time was send a LinkedIn message to these people. So you go out and you send a LinkedIn message, however, now that's filled with spammers and I know personally I I'm more likely to respond to a cold email than I am to a cold LinkedIn message at this point. Although you know five years ago that wasn't the case. However, I'm on Twitter if you @ me on Twitter I'm most likely to respond especially if it's a public tweet not a DM. So that's my Omni Channel. That's where I am. Some CEOs and people I've found are not on any social media except they have like a personal Instagram that has like a hundred followers on it. And if you follow them and message them on there they're more likely to respond especially if you do it the right way. Facebook, you know all of these other channels are where these people are. Everyone is online somewhere, everyone's addicted to social media somehow. And for the rare cases where they're not addicted to social media you can send them a gift to their office. You can go to a conference that they're attending. There are so many ways to contact these people. The  main thing and the main reason why I like the Omni Channel approach, specifically the automated Omni Channel approach is traditionally like we all know this, right, you know if the CEO is not answering your phone call, you should send them an email and if he's not answering the email you should send them a Twitter message, or you can send them an Instagram message, or you can you know send a gift to his office. But traditionally, one, it's very hard to manage these kind of campaigns because it's on a bunch of different tools. But two, nobody wants to write the campaign as well you know like how how often are you just sitting in your inbox and you're like oh I know I should do a full cold e mail drip to this guy but I just what do I write an email too, you know, what do I write an email seven and then what does the Twitter DM look like? And then you stop and then you just don't do it. So with Omni we want to jump that by one, writing all the scripts for you so you know we've done this like you know we've sent millions and millions like maybe 100 million cold emails we've generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and so we just took all that put it into these scripts and I can just hit one button everything is built like the same stuff that you would pay a consultant maybe twenty thousand dollars for to build your automation. It's now an

AI is just doing it and it's just as effective if not more effective because it actually follows the bullet points. It doesn't try to go rote and then it just manages the whole thing you hit one button if they reply to the Tweet guess what, they're removed from the campaign. If they reply to the email ,they're removed from the Twitter campaign, they're removed from the Instagram campaign. So it's it's super streamlined, super automated, and we're in beta right now but once this is all built out, like the email and texting is working great, once LinkedIn, once we get Twitter, once we get telegram, WhatsApp, voice memos, all this stuff in there it's going to be incredible.

 Speaker 1 (12:46): Yeah yeah totally totally agree. And that's why I'm so excited, that's why I wanted to bring you in early, right, so I said you know you're listening to Alex like no, this is new. It's the concept, not new but the way that he's implementing, the way that he's implemented across one platform and having the AI do it is definitely new. So I'll talk a bit more about it but just you know for my personal experience, you know, I've tried different approaches I'm constantly reaching out to owners you know, I've probably reached out to you who's listening or watching now at some point you know, I'm you know yeah like you said email LinkedIn etc, but the other day you know I was trying to get someone on LinkedIn and email then you know it's probably like 10 attempts, all different ways. I thought it was really creative spent all this time then I just sent a quick one line on WhatsApp and bang, ping me straight back. Had a meeting last week, I've got my second meeting, and we're basically going to do business together right. And it was just that easy because that was the platform that he's going to respond to quicker than others and if you look at like you know depends where a country you're watching or listening to and where you are, but you know like WhatsApp now is really where most of the private conversations happen. It used to be you know, we all had Facebook messenger and I think that sort of you know done as dash or certainly I know for me and everyone sort of migrated to Whatsapp still under the Mark's umbrella of course but yeah I think you know trying that but as you said the rough bit normally is well I find two things. One is how do I really find the target list to get people to send it to in the first place, and then the second is you know, what do I write? So let's address the first, so target list right, tell us what on the and how Omni helps us with the target list. Do we have to create them ourselves? Are you helping us with that? Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (14:29): Sure so Omni has a tool that used to be called LeadShark. That's now called Omni leads which is a database of contacts. You can go in there and you can buy leads you know for a few cents per lead. I think it's 20 30 cents per lead. You can build your contact list that way but it's not the only way to build lead lists. You know there's a another tool out there called Apollo which has slightly older lower quality leads but they do unlimited. So if you need a full like big volume you go use Apollo. if you want smaller targeted leads, you go to Omni leads. You can also hire Freelancers to build it. There's a ton of different ways to generate leads. You can also build them yeah you can build them using sales Navigator. The manual stuff what I like to do is hire freelancers in Philippines and India to do them because they already have access to these you know, these tools. They have a sales Navigator, so for instance instead of spending 99 a month on sales Navigator spend 99 for 4000 leads and then you're good. You can now use that, use those 4000 leads to make your 99 and reinvest it. And then you can have unlimited that way yeah and I'll show you maybe I recommend the tools.

Speaker 1 (15:36): Yeah I'm sure Alex you do this every day of the week you know you'll bring but how would I so a former Salesforce about my HubSpot partner I teach you how do I find these Freelancers and know that I've got the right freelancer in the right list?

Speaker 2 (15:49): Going over to up lead or sorry going over to upwork.com and you post a job that says you know, lead generation freelancer needed. And then the job post would say something like hey looking for leads of the following criteria - CEO, company size between five million and 50 million, in the food and beverage industry. Data needed: name, title, phone number, company name, email address, website. And then once you post that on upwork, dozens of people, because they're already ready to go, dozens of people will apply ,and then I ask them for sample leads. I say hey would you mind sending over five leads that match the criteria? That's what I respond to every single person that applies to the job. Then from there let's say five people will get back, then you look at the leads, you run them through an email verifier. So email Dash verifie. I think it's a lot mail yeah email address verifier or any of these email verifying tools out there that are free.You just make sure that they you know verify email address that's a good one. You just make sure that they're valid email. Then I would just confirm them, then from there let's say you have two Freelancers that deliver good work, you hire both of them to build a lead list you know, pay them both 50 bucks for let's say fifty dollars for a thousand leads something like tha,  and then one of them is good one of them is bad and then you have your good one. That's it and then you spend a hundred dollars for a thousand lead.

Speaker 1 (17:11): And if you had any experience so you know most of you listening uh after whether someone uses a particular software or not, right, so let's so you know Zoho, you know is someone I want all of business owners in this segment blah blah blah that are they're already using Zoho will they be that specific in creating these lead lists?

Speaker 2 (17:31): Well it depends on the software. So certain software are trackable like that. So for instance HubSpot you can go through and build a list using built with. Built with will scrape all of these tools to find everyone that's using HubSpot or everyone that's using lemlist or I believe everyone that's using Zoho. If they're using Zoho for the site or Shopify or any anything like that and then from there you can build the list of leads they might, so hey here's everyone that's on Zoho here's their names, here's their phone number if you have their phone number, here's your email address, your website, LinkedIn, and then you go from there. 

Speaker 1 (18:05): Right and if you're driving and can’t write this one, don't worry we're going to have the transcript and we're going to have the show notes and Alex's great little summary there will be there for you to use. So that's brilliant so we've got the target accounts right. now the next bit like I said is the scripts. It's like what do I write, how many do I write, etc etc right so how does omni.us help with that?

Speaker 2 (18:28): So you go to omni.us and there's a couple things that you do. First you connect your email accounts and it walks you through step by step how to connect them. You can set up your text message, you can set up all this stuff, it walks you through step by step. Then the next thing you do is create a campaign and it sends you to a campaign creation page where you fill out who are you selling to. So what's the job titles that you're selling to, what is the company size that you're selling to, what's the industry, and then you fill out a few questions. So like you know, I help companies do what, you know what is your benefit statement, and then you write multiple versions of the benefit statement from each one like how does my company help people save money, how does my company help people make money, how does my company help people save time, and you do those and then you write your case studies too so like you know, we helped Sony increase sales by 10 in three weeks using whatever. And it walks you through step by step what to do, then after all that's done you hit generate and you only have to fill this quiz out one time and it gathers all the data that it needs to write everything for you. So right now it's cold emails and cold texting but the same data that we gathered can be used to write voicemails. It can be used to write Twitter DMS, even vsl or vsls or even short Loom videos. It's all the same data that we're gathering so that's it. You just fill it out my whole thing out one time and then that's it. And if you don't have case studies, there's also versions where there's no case studies, although I always recommend the best way to get new clients is to talk about you know previous clients that you've done the work with especially previous client in their exact space. But it works even without case studies as well.

Speaker 1 (19:58): So just quickly on the emails, right, you said multiple emails. So your view with this is you're not using your domain, you're using other domains that you've created. Is that how it works?

Speaker 2 (20:08): Yes so the way that we get around any sort of spammish news and protect our main domain is by sending using other domains. So for instance Omni. We have omni.us. We wouldn't send cold emails with that domain. It's too valuable. We don't want to lose it. To spend, we'll send from Omni us app.com or like omniapp.com or we are omni.com and then each of those will forward back to our main domains. If you type in We Are omni.com, I don't know if this maybe this is one we own, maybe not, it will go Auto Direct back to us and then the emails would go out Alex we are omni.com. And that way if that ever gets lost to spam, then we don't lose omni.us. But Omni also has a tool called warm-up which is also constantly sending and receiving emails with other Omni users automatically to force the the emails into the primary. So the problem with the emails holding up a lot of time is you'll send 10 emails maybe eight will get marked as spam, two will end up in the promotions tab. So what Omni does is you send those 10 emails to another Omni user, a group of omni users, and they do end up in spam. Like some end up in spam, some end up in promo, but we control the inbox that receives them so then we mark them as important and we mark them as primary. And what that does long term is it improves the reputation of everybody that's using Omni so your domains now are being saved from am. Your domains are ending up in primary and that way your emails are actually getting to the people that you want them to get to.

Speaker 1 (21:41): Yeah brilliant, brilliant. Okay, excellent. So so with the scripts right like you know I can hear someone on listening to this thinking yeah but once they're all the same isn't everyone going to get the same, and then the game's up like you know we all use the same formats etc etc. So you know, what do you say when you hear that because I'm sure you've heard it more than once?

Speaker 2 (21:59): The go-to format that I like to use is called the three C's. So it's compliment, case study, call to action. This is something that's been working for the last seven, eight years since we developed it with cold email. And the reason why the game is never up is because the script is hyper specific to the Target. So for instance it starts with compliments. It'll be like you know, hey Paul a big fan of the podcast, really loved the episode you did with Alex Berman. And then case study, so I edit podcasts. Recently I've worked with garyvee's podcast. He said that the editing helped them increase downloads by 30 in the last year and I'd love to do the same for you. And then call to action, mind if I send over a few times for a quick call? That's the email. That's the whole email. so what's what's interesting about that is the compliment completely changes either depending on the prospect. So every single Prospect will have a different compliment or depending on the on the niche. So let's say you're sending to consumer package Goods companies. You might say like hey Mark big fan of company name. Really love product. So like big fan of Lays, really love Cheetos. That's a compliment and that is something that can be automated across your lead list, right. You get product name in your lead list and you get company name in your lead list and then you can have customized compliments throughout. The second thing that always changes is the case study. The case studies are actually unique for every single company, right. Let's say in this podcast example, I've worked with garyvee. Some other podcast editor might have worked with you know a different podcast from theirs so their case studies would be completely different. So the only things that do tend to repeat are the calls to action. So like mind if I send over a few times for a quick call? And that's not going to burn out. That's the most a specific way to say that.

Speaker 1 (23:46): Yeah yeah great. And let's say you know you're approaching a new area and you don't have a case study, right, like you're just you know what do you do?

Speaker 1 (23:54): If you don't have a case study there's a couple things that you want to do. So if you're brand new to the area, the question I would always ask a new freelancer or a new agency that's trying to Branch out in the area is, how do you know you can get results in this area? So for instance, if I'm a podcast editor and I'm trying to get editing work and I have never done it before, how do I know that I'm a good editor? Well maybe I went through and I edited somebody else's podcast as a sample, or maybe I did my own podcast and so I've been editing my own podcast. And now that's the case study. Like hey would love to to work with you. I just edited you know six episodes of my own podcast. Happy to send those over if you want to see the quality work. That's that's one way to do it. Basically working on your own projects. The second way that I recommend, and this is what I personally did, is get a job at a company that does this kind of stuff. So I was a genome sales guy at an agency in New York City where we did mobile app development. And so I was doing some sales for them and then I started generating leads for them, and they ended up making me director of marketing. And then they ended up becoming the first client for our agency x27. So what did I do? After that you know two and a half years working on that job, I now had a case study of how I helped this agency generate a bunch of leads, then we went out and we just pulled in all the bunch of other agencies and we ended up generating six hundred thousand dollars in recurring Revenue in 30 days. It's just my emailing agencies telling them hey we worked with this company. Here's the CEO talking about how great we are. Would love to do the same for you. So you spent two and a half years at a job and you can skip the line. The third way that you don't want to do any of that is borrowing case studies. And what this is is you basically work with somebody else as a white label partner. Let's say I've never done podcast editing before. I can post a job on upwork looking for podcast editors. They can apply to that job and then I can instead of hiring them, I can ask them, I can say hey do you need more clients? I'd love to go get you some more clients. And then they say yes and now I can use their case studies to find them new clients and then after a few times doing that now I'll have my own case studies, and now I can start my own agency or just keep working with them because all agencies need somebody to fill the service and need somebody to sell.

Speaker 1 (26:10): Well the great news is that most you listening to Alex here is like, I actually have got case studies I just normally don't do anything with the rather sort of buried etc. So even you know like I've got a case study file and just every time I get a case study, get feedback, positive etc, you just put it in there because then you can pump it into the AI and the AI can then do it's it's wonders. So start preparing even if you're not using the tool today which at the end of this podcast will show you how you can start a free trial. Right today but if you're not please start collecting those case studies because Alex said they're so important so we've got the scripts we've well we've got the right people, we've got the scripts, then what happens? What's the magic from from there? I'm assuming you know there's follow-up, there's like you said there's sometimes a response ,someone doesn't, how does the AI then guide us through through the next stages?

Speaker 2 (26:58): It writes all the follow-ups for you. Typically for a cold email campaign we don't want to spam. So we will do four follow-ups total. So like send the initial email, then send a reply to that initial email like hey just bumping this up, then we'll do an announcement or a big win. This is why we collect multiple case studies so we'll share like you know, like hey just got off the phone with the CMO at this company where we help them do this. And we share the case study, and then you know we'd love to do the same for you. Let's hop on a call. PS We also worked with this person to do this. So you can send two case studies in a single email, and then the fourth one is the breakup email. So like hey Paul at this point I'll assume improving the editing quality of your podcast isn't a priority this year. Let me know if that changes. We'd love to work together. 

Speaker 1 (27:42): Great. And after the four, is that it? Like do you ever go back and retarget? Or is that that's it?

Speaker 2 (27:50): After the four for your initial cold, that's it. Because if they're not responding before emails some people have different views on this. Some people like sending eight, some people like sending 12. I tend to throw that wide net in the beginning and then I spend most of our follow-up time following up with people that already respond, interested. So it's like most of the follow-ups are going to be if someone says hey yeah I would love to and then they ghost they never book the call. Because in that case they've respond so you're their full permission, all permission to just keep emailing them over and over and over again, you know for years and years and years. And I've had a lot of clients, some clients that have closed after six months, seven months of this you know, following up. Sending them case studies, sending them news, sending them all this stuff, and they seemed interested right in the beginning so that's where the majority of those follow-ups can come into play. And if you're using Salesforce, you're using HubSpot, all of those automations can beset up inside of your HubSpot. You know I don't love the HubSpot sending capabilities, but it is in there you can set it up.

Speaker 1 (28:55): Yeah well that was going to be my next question. When does it you know, typically one of your clients handing off from using omni.us across into their own sales CRM for for follow-up? You know where have you seen the handoff period?

Speaker 2 (29:09): The idea and when we did the pre-interview for this podcast I thought the idea was setting up the automations inside HubSpot and having those emails go out. As I've explored this over the last month and a half with us and a few of our clients, I found out almost all the email sending or all your email sending should happen off of HubSpot. HubSpot’s a great CRM, they're a great data tool, you know, they're really good for analytics, they have great news and information, good content, but from an email marketing point of view, especially cold email, it's just not there. You know there's no email rotation, there's no you know, the tracking is just not as as good as it can be. So I would use Omni for all of the cold and then for actually sending out the automations and follow-ups you can also use Omni or you can use you know send in blue, MailChimp, like some of these other ones. I, we had such issues with our with our HubSpot sending recently where basically it would send the automations from these masked emails. I don't know why they're doing what they're doing, but it leads to higher spam rates and it leads to lower response rate. So I wouldn't recommend sending any emails and using it if at all possible.

Speaker 1 (30:14): Correct and most of us right, we're and you know most of you listening are actually setting up for other people right, but even yourself you've got your main domain on whatever sales CCRM you're sending so that's the one you want to protect so it makes sense to get it off and use on the for that reason. And then when it gets into you know a deal Pipeline and other things well then yeah swap it swap it over. So I think that's sort of the natural progression, so thanks for that. And then you talked about some Auto pausing on your web page. What does Auto pausing mean?

Speaker 2 (30:48):  Auto pausing just means when somebody responds to an email on any of the channels, so they respond to a text then it pauses, and you know campaigns automatically they respond to a Twitter DM, it'll pause the campaigns.b So that's something you don't get by using multiple tools. You know if you're using a Twitter DM tool, and a separate LinkedIn tool, and a separate email tool, then they can't communicate with each other so what will happen is sometimes people will respond to cold email campaigns positively but then they'll get you know Twitter messages and Linkedin messages and Facebook messages, and then the deal will die because they'll see that you're spamming them. So the faster you can turn off all those other channels the better.

Speaker 1 (31:24): Yeah great. Well as you said so at the moment there's email and text right now. From a text point of view once again are using your mobile you're using a you know a cell that you've set up like what's happening with the the text, and or is that just coming through Omni itself?

Speaker 2 (31:41): Right now for texting we're using twilio. That might change in the future. And then for that, you're setting up your own phone number that it's sending out as yeah so it's not coming from your main phone number.

Speaker 1 (31:53): Yes are you setting up a secondary phone number. Yep okay right, cool. And then so soon will be gifs, handwritten, Twitter voice drop. You know they're sort of the ones that are coming, just tell us a little bit about what's going to be unique around say, for example I'm assuming gifts, a physical gift, like you know why would someone want a physical gift versus the other options as an example you're how are you choosing it?

Speaker 2 (32:21): There was this book like eight years ago called giftology by John Ruhlin who everyone was loving this for a while and then kind of forgot about it. But in that book it was talking about how the easiest way to differentiate yourself is send a physical gift because nobody else does. And I was taught I talked to a bunch of agency owners that have this exact experience. Like hey we'll send them even a brick with a note on top or we'll send them like you know a little bonsai tree or something, and I just I really love the idea of that this is something that I've never, this is something that is very very hard to set up. Like are you going to send 30 gifts? Are you going to send 40 gifts, you're going to do the packaging? So what Omni does is now, it'll Auto create, or now what in the future it'll create a wish list of gifts for you. It'll automatically write the notes that go out with those gifts customized to the person, customized to the company, and then it will automatically purchase those gifts and send them to the addresses on file as part of the Omni Channel campaign. So you'll set you know your budget for your lead, so like hey I want to spend fifty dollars per lead total. I want to spend a hundred dollars per lead total. Because some people have very high quality leads, high value leads, they can spend 400, 500 thousand dollars. And if you set that up then it will auto buy the gifts and it'll Auto send the gift. So it's the same as Omni, you're not even having to choose the gift, and the gifts will be different. When all this is mapped out, the gifts will even be different per industry so the corporates are going to get a certain gift, the director of marketing at corporate is going to get a certain gift, the director of marketing at a startup is going to get a different gift, the small businesses will get one thing, the mid-market businesses will get another thing. It's going to be completely optimized so you don't have to think about anything.

Speaker 1 (34:01): Yeah brilliant brilliant. And the other one I just want to touch on is the voice drop, right. What is a voice drop and how will that work?

Speaker 2 (34:08): Voicemail drop is basically when you get a a text, you know, an audio message from somebody else. So  when all sales people are sending you texts like you know, hey Paul it's Alex great to meet you you know had a good time coming on the podcast. If I texted you that, it means one thing. If I say that as an audio message, it means so much more. If I send it as a video, I'll that's the next level of it. But I'll actually talk about whether that's not the best example or best thing to do so that's all. It is it's like you want to send your follow-up let's say you send two as text and then one has audio or even the first one can be audio, like hey big fan of your work would love to hop on a call and talk about how we can do XYZ for you. This, that's Voicemail drop. 

Speaker 1 (34:54): And we're going to use AI?

Speaker 2 (34:56): You know we're in the future now, so don't hate me if we don't end up doing this stuff. But we're going to use AI where basically you can record the voice memo once and then we'll be able to clone your voice and do something else to like I'll I'll record like hey Paul, big fan of your podcast. Loved the episode you did Alex Berman. And then it'll use AI to swap it so then it'll say like hey Gary big fan of your podcast. Love the episode you did with Charlie demelio. And it'll use AI to just change the data points. That way you don't run onto the issue of it sounding robotic because you're just changing like three words in the whole script.

Speaker 1 (35:32): Yeah yeah brilliant. Great.

Speaker 2 (35:36): Last thing on that, so the reason why you'd send the audio as well over the video is there's a ton of these guys out there that do like the automated Loom videos and the automated BS, and you can tell they're so automated. So we've now entered a phase where the most believable thing is a voice memo right. I can send a text that's automated, I can send a video, everyone sends automated videos. Nobody's sending automated audio, and so that's the most believable one so that's the one I would do that's the one we'd automate.

Speaker 1 (36:06): Yeah brilliant. And will the audio do both will it have the audio and the text like will it have both or will it just be Audio Only?

Speaker 2 (36:15): It depends on what the script end up looking like. Right now like what now the plan is it's going to be a text, it's going to be part of campaign. It'll send a couple texts and then it'll send an audio message. It might start with an audio message. And like that typically what I found is you don't want to send attachments so you wouldn't send something like hey I recorded this for you check it out although that is the standard practice. But if you look at your WhatsApp, you look at your Telegram, the audio messages you respond to typically just hand the message. There's nothing near it.

Speaker 1 (36:45): Yeah yeah, no that's good. I just know for me like you know something on someone leaving on LinkedIn and you're like I can't play it etc. Now if it was just the text as well I can go back and listen when I want it. That's great. But you know maybe that's minority. I already so just remember.

Speaker 2 (36:59): Well that's where the follow-up said content. This is the last or another thing I want to talk about. It's all Outreach exists in a context. So if I send you the audio message by itself you might say oh I'll never respond to this, this doesn't add you know text to the audio message but it exists in a world where you also gotten an email with the text that exists in a world where you can click the LinkedIn profile and look at and see what I do. So the context matters so much in Outreach. More than the messaging.

Speaker 1 (37:25): Yeah good. And the you know I know well I'm assuming most of you are listening now or watching it are using you know chat GPT or whatever Google assist launched their version etc etc, so the AI that you're using, is it you know is it off a platform like that, or is a you know a platform that you develop yourself? Like where does the AI sort of stem from?

Speaker 2 (37:47): We're using a combination of tools. Right now it's based on just using frameworks and the the text inputted. So it combines the text that you input with the frameworks that we know work and then the like the decision tree that we've built in the background. So we kind of built around machine learning. As we progress we're going to start layering on things like  Descript or chat GPT, other apis like that, but right now it's not necessary and in fact it hurts the campaigns if you ever played with Chat GPT you know it's not a good sale.

Speaker 1 (38:16): Yeah yeah yeah correct, correct. It's yep totally agree, totally agree. But mind you, it does help me a little bit when I'm an Australian selling to the US. Sometimes I'll say like you know, take this Australian version and turn into the US. And that can help a little. So for that sort of stuff I love. So reminder again that we're talking about Alex Berman, episode 472, and he's from omni.us and we will have where you can get a seven day trial of this great product in a minute. So what we're going to do now is go into the rapid fire. Ask you four questions and you're already giving me rapid responses so I'm assuming, let's just continue it, right. So the first one is where do you you know running omni.us, you know what are your daily habits that you do to help scale your business?

Speaker 2 (39:04): I focus on prime tasks. So a prime task is something that you can do to get your pitch out in front of at least 10 customers and you can increase that. It could be like what can you do today to get your product in front of at least 100 customers? And I try to do at least one of those a day. Whether it's sending you know 10 cold emails, splitting up an email campaign, doing a Twitter giveaway, doing a podcast like this with at least 10 listeners. Whatever it is, so I try to do one prime task a day. And most business owners can be valued by just thinking about that because you'd be surprised how much time you waste, you know, you spend your time on Twitter or whatever, liking tweets, but if you just ask yourself hey is this getting my pitch out to at least 10 people, the answer is no. So instead, even one to two prime tasks per day is enough to move the needle on your business. And then you can do whatever you want the rest of the time.

Speaker 1 (39:50): Yeah yeah yeah. Look in and you know it's a classic like if you've come off holidays. So if you're pipeline's a bit empty at the moment, you're probably taking a little bit of January and February off, and all of a sudden you're like, you know, you're in trouble and like this is where a tool like this can actually do that work for you when you are on holidays right, and it keeps your pipeline going, it keeps those activities going. So that's brilliant. Because this rapid fire will shut up and I'll go back to you. So the next one is you know, where do you learn more about scaling your business?

Speaker 2 (40:18): I learn a lot just by following random people on Twitter. So if you go to @AlexBerman, just look at the people I'm following, and I follow a pretty good group. I try to keep it very tight. That's what I learned the most, and then there's there are books. So there's two books one is called traction, and it tells you how to market your startup, and there's another book by a different author also called traction that shows you how to do all the management and the scaling of your startup so the two traction books I'd say are solid gold 

Speaker 1 (40:45): Yeah, well we'll have those links in the show notes so you'll get that which is brilliant. Then we grant you one wish the omni.us, what would it be?

Speaker 2 (40:55): Let's get 3.5 billion paying users on there. Half the world let's see what happens. 

Speaker 1 (41:01): All right brilliant. And the last one is, what do you know now and I know that you know this is not your first rodeo right as we said in the introduction, but you know, what do you know now already about running omni.us that you wish I had known sooner?

Speaker 2 (41:15): Okay so a startup is only a couple different things. There is the trial to paid conversion rate, there's a number of Trials, and there's the churn rate. So number of if number of Trials is low, you add more trials. If the number of people that are signing up and converting to paid is low, then you have to add more value or add more wins. And then if the number of people churning is too high, then you need to look at bugs and make sure that your tool fixes the promise. And with those three levers you can just grow any SaaS. That's it you know, if your churn rate is too high, we'll fix it now. Your churn rate's lower now that people are saying longer. If people aren't converting from trial to paid well fix that. And now more people are paying, and then if not enough people are signing up, do more marketing, get more people in the funnel. And now people will sign up, there's nothing else you need.

Speaker 1 (42:04): Yeah brilliant. All right, look this has been an absolute blast. So once again Alex Berman from omni.us. We will have all the links in the show notes etc. But congratulations, and this will be out in the 30th of May so a lot of the features that you spoke about are in with the pace you go, some of them are already on the platform by then. But what you can do is actually go right now to omni.us and get a seven day trial. And then the brilliant thing with, think of all this disparate tools you've got at the moment but this cold Outreach, you can bring them all in out of one umbrella and it's 49 USD at the moment. So hopefully it'll be that when when this goes live. But yeah look, it's a brilliant tool. My team and I really enjoyed using it and I think you know this is something that if you're also selling in sales strategy, you know, coupled with the platform but you're selling in sales strategy, this is a great tool I add to your mix as well that complements your HubSpot, complements your Salesforce, compliments your Zoho, complements other tools that you've got. So Alex absolute pleasure having you on today.

Speaker 2 (43:05): Thanks for having me Paul.

Speaker 1 (43:07): What a great interview with Alex right, how's his energy and the vision that he's got for the company. But more importantly, he's just making it so much easier for you to do something that a lot of people put off because it is clumsy, it's difficult, right. And I think he's three C's and the way he's suing his spring you can get a seven day trial and also after that you can sign up for 49 a month which is a steal at omni.us. All the links will be in the show notes. Why don't you share what you learned from Alex. You know it might be that work process, might be the three C's, whatever it is. Take a photo, share it on LinkedIn. As he said he's there and also share it on Twitter as well because he loves being on that platform. And why not share it with peers, right. I'm sure that your friends and the people in the industry haven't got an abundance of leads right, this is a great way to start creating those, so please share it with them. They'll think you're a rock star. Once again check out the solo shows. And if you're scaling your Cloud consoling business and want to see a blueprint of how to do that, what's worked well, basically created by others that have gone before you go, have a look at that it's paulhigginsmentoring.com/blueprint to get your free copy today. And as always take take action to scale quickly with less effort to enjoy life more.

Outro: Learning is just one piece of the puzzle. It is now time for Action. Head to today's Show page at paulhigginsmentoring.com/podcast. Get the links and put it into action. Head to your favorite podcast platform, subscribe, rate, and review the show. Suggest topics for me to cover at [email protected] and don't wait one more minute to gain access to content especially for you a cloud consultant at paulhigginsmentoring.com/newsletter. This could be the difference between wasting time figuring it out yourself or scaling quickly with less effort to enjoy life.