Overview:

The episode discusses strategies for successful outbound email marketing. Bill shares how he scaled his company Athena's outbound program from 50 emails per week to 1.2 million emails per week with a low spam rate. He emphasizes the importance of targeting the right person with the right message at the right time. Bill also provides tips on tools for data, email infrastructure, warming domains, and best practices. Athena's outbound program now generates 46% of their $7 million in annual recurring revenue. Bill advises on how to approach personalization at scale using tools with deep datasets versus more manual hyper-personalization. He concludes by offering his expertise to help others improve their outbound marketing through tools like Apollo and Robots.

Takeaways:

• Bill shares how he scaled an outbound email program from 50 emails per week to 1.2 million emails per week with a spam rate below 2%. This program contributes over 45% of their total revenue.
• Choosing the right message for the right person at the right time is key to success. Personalized subject lines and content perform best.
• Renting cleaned contact data from platforms like Apollo and Robots is recommended over scraping or buying data. These platforms have deep datasets.
• Warming up email domains is important for deliverability. Tools like Warmly can help automate this process.
• Best practices include setting up proper email authentication, warming up emails gradually, using subdomains/multiple domains, and rehabilitating reputation when needed.
• Outbound works well for B2B but can also be effective for B2C with high customer lifetime value.
• Laws around spam differ by location and a low spam rate is important to avoid issues.
• Subbrands can help scale outbound further while protecting the main domain.
• Consultants or experienced in-house talent are options to set up and run outbound programs.
• Target personas include hiring managers, heads of engineering, and founders for early-stage companies.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Welcome everyone to the December 20, 23 edition of Elite Marketers.

So today we've got an interesting session because it, it's about how to get a meeting with anyone, and we're taking it from two very different perspectives.

So first we've got Bill with the cold email, and second, we're gonna have Sana, who's doing some incredible stuff with the whole offline, going with direct mail and that sort of thing.

So two very different, very different perspectives that will open our eyes on what's possible.

So, but starting with Bill, bill Curve was introduced to me by Scotty Baker, who's also on this call, is gonna be sharing how he built and scaled his cold outbound email efforts from 50 emails per week to 2 million emails per week with a lower than 2% spam rate.

So this engine contributes, you know, to greater than 45% of their total revenue.

And he is run by a team of two.

And scaling outbound email is hard.

And what he's gonna do, he's gonna share with us the tools to make it easy.

So you might not walk away with knowing exactly how to send 2 million emails per week, but you will definitely walk away with the tools to begin to build your own outbound program.

So, you know, as we know, the first company to ever make it to the a hundred million hub revenue was, uh, was Salesforce and they did it outbound.

So, uh, yeah, I'll, without further ado, I'll hand hand the reins over to you, you bill.

Alrighty, thanks Scott, appreciate that.

And thanks.

Uh, Scotty Baker, also for, you know, the opportunity to be here and introduce me to, to, to Scott, the host.

So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna introduce myself formally in a moment, but I've got some slides prepared, so I'm just gonna share my screen.

Gimme one, gimme a second while I get this all set up correctly.

So here's my screen.

Now, just let me Present it.

Can everybody see?

Can everybody see my screen now?

Is it loading up?

All right?

Yes.

Got it.

Yep, yep.

Alrighty.

So mastering lead gen with cold emails.

So let's dive in.

I'm gonna go through a quick introduction, outbound today, understanding your audience, crafting your message, some best practices, team and technology, what mastery looks like, how we or I can help.

And then we'll have some time for questions.

As Scott mentioned, I'm gonna try and do this in 25 minutes so we have, you know, time for q and a at the end and so forth, but I haven't time for this.

One other thing is I didn't get our team to help me with the design of this.

So it looks, I'm not the best designer.

This is all put together by me, so, no, no, uh, no jokes about the design, lack of, uh, skills.

So, so anyway, let's dive in.

So myself, I'm founder and CEO at Athena, we're a global talent platform.

So we align talent with opportunities.

So normally if you think of offshore teams, global talent, you think of Philippines, India, so forth.

We have big talent pools in Latin America, Southeast Asia, really around sales, marketing, product and engineering.

So that's, that's what we do.

Lots of, uh, customers.

I was recently ranked number one mentor at Start mate, which is Asia Pacific's leading startup accelerator.

Out of 150 mentors, I'm also an investor at Blackbird vc, which is the southern hemisphere's largest VC fund, an angel investor in humane.

You might have seen the technology humane, the AI pin that came out the other day.

I'm an angel investor in humane future, super atomic eight and more traveled all over the world.

I've got a cool little sausage dog you can see in this photo here.

Uh, people call me Doc, that's a fun fact.

My name's Bill, but people call me Doc.

So that's a little bit about me.

Why listen to me, as Scott mentioned earlier, I'm nearly word for word verbatim here.

Athena has scaled its outbound program from 50 emails per week in 2019 to 1.2 in 21.2 million in 2023.

Outbound email is only dying if you suck at it.

There's a lot of talk about outbound email dying.

So let's go through what it looks like.

So outbound today, outbound is harder than ever.

Today we're fighting against a lot of changes in the industry.

Google's cracking down.

Google doesn't like outbound email.

Google's one of Google's premier products is Gmail, and they like the user experience and the user experience of, of outbound email and spam is not a good experience and they don't make any real money from it.

So Google's trying to crack down and have high higher quality emails landing in the inbox.

So for people doing outbound email poorly, it's really bad news for people that do outbound email really well.

It's actually really good news.

So having said that, historically, our scale goes up, we get better, we get better at what we do at Athena in terms of our, our outbound and our result and our results go down.

That's because the industry is getting harder every year, every six months it gets harder with outbound, but still super viable channel, but not for the faint of heart.

So that's all the bad news.

Oops, excuse me, sorry.

But it still works if you put the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

That's where I'm gonna concentrate a lot today.

Those three things, you can do a million different fancy things.

There's a lot of infrastructure we can talk about.

People's preferred channel for brand communications is still email above anything else.

And if you put the right message in front of the right person at the right time, you're gonna win.

If you look at these three points I have for you, and you can kind of think of it like this, if you nail all three right person, the right message, right time, you have a client, if you nail two out of three, you have a lead.

If you nail one out of three or zero out of three, you're spam.

That's basically the, the, the breakdown.

So, so our story, it's a quick overview of our story at Athena.

So our journey kind of looked like this.

So as I mentioned, we started sending outbound emails, day one, week one Athena, and we sending 50 outbound emails.

A and today, now we 1.2 with 0.045 spam rates, which is insanely low.

We're really world class at it for a small company.

We're we're world class at at outbound, but we've been through trials and tribulations.

So we started spraying pre outbound using the wrong platforms, using the wrong strategy.

We scraped all the data ourselves, which means it was terrible data and terribly inefficient, and we killed our first domain.

So that was like the bad news that was getting it off the ground.

Athena IO is gone dead, never to come back.

We killed it.

Then we started to find our feet, we got consistent results.

Next, we found the right platforms, the right strategies, good data, and I've got a spelling mistake there.

But we started to see quality and consistent lead flow.

So that's kind of like stage two.

And then stage three, let's call it mastery and scale.

We killed another domain recently, actually we did, we're doing everything right apart from a couple small things and we, we killed another domain.

But we've rebuilt everything for from scratch with redundancy built into every step of the, the, the program.

We have new strategies and we have a really scalable, scalable customer acquisition channel.

So, but it's been a journey.

I'm gonna talk some of the highs and lows and some of the things to consider.

So, so that's a little bit about about us.

So the story today though, so going from 50 emails per week to 1.2 million emails per week.

Our historical revenue, this is not our historical revenue from day one of Athena.

This is our historical revenue from, this is all client revenue today and, and the acquisition channels.

So as you can see here, outbound attributes, 46% of our revenue today we're doing 7 million in annual recurring revenue today, USDA million USD, so 10 11 a UD million recurring revenue.

So 46% of that came from our outbound program.

And that's the, the, the, the automated stuff I'm gonna talk about in a moment.

And 27% of that came from outbound led by our sales team.

Let's just call that business development, as you can see there in purple.

So if you add those two numbers up, I don't like doing public math, but let's say it's 73%.

Our revenue comes from outbound.

So we're a small but fast growing company current pipeline.

Now this is, this is great and it's also a bit of a problem.

We've never had a marketing department because we've never really needed one, but we just hired our first head of growth and our first marketing team because we need to change the current pipeline because we're, we're a one trick pony and we leave ourselves a little bit.

We're best in class, we're world class at outbound, but it also means that if outbound something, something changed, then we might be left, uh, in a, in a rough spot.

So, but you, what you can see here though, on the right, our current pipeline, 73% of our revenue in our pipeline, which is about 5 million right now, 5 million in, in a RA in our pipeline today.

73% of that comes from outbound at scale, which is crazy.

And 12% comes from business development.

So that's 85% of our business comes from outbound sales.

So how do we get there?

So let's go back to that first thing that I mentioned, right message, right person, right time.

So let's start with right message.

What is a good cold email?

A good cold email has a strong subject line and good personalization.

So here's what I'm gonna talk about first is, uh, lemme just see these slides.

Yeah, sorry, I skipped a slide.

So first, starting with the subject line.

Now there's a million different ways to to, to test this subject line.

And anybody that's starting with cold email, you're gonna have a million different ab tests and I recommend doing that.

But the data shows from our two partners that we use.

One of them is the biggest in the world and one of them is at a very large scale.

The data shows that the best subject line in the world on average across industries is your company X, my company.

So Corp X, Athena, Tesla X, Microsoft, your company X, my company.

If you wanna start with outbound email, that's the world's leading subject line.

You'll also see variations of this subject line.

You would've had 'em in your, it had it in your own inbox.

But something that is a valuable idea to start with if you're gonna dive into cold outbound is to lean on this subject line heavily while you test your others.

So if you're thinking 80 20, maybe this is your 80 and 20 is your AV tests a thousand times from Sunday, you can ab test and you will probably beat this.

But on average, this is the best subject line in the world.

So this is something that can give you a foundation for a subject line.

So let's move on to the actual content inside of an email.

So there's two ways to talk about this and there's hyper-personalized email.

So hyper-personalized email has a personalized subject line and it has personalization in the first section of the email.

This is actually, I kind of was rushing a little bit with some of these slides.

This is actually not the best example.

Normally I would have the personalization in the first paragraph beneath Hi Christian in this example.

So, because that's, some of that is what you might see in the preview of the email, but in the first part of the email, you wanna have personalization.

So hyper-personalized might look like, Hey Scotty, great work.

I saw on the, we had a successful webinar last week, how that, I saw that you went to X school and that must be awesome.

I know you connected with this person.

And that real personalization that a human being has done.

There are now AI tools that can help with this, which we will go into maybe a little bit, but, but hyper-personalization is personalization that a human being sits down and researches their their prospect basically.

So that's one type of personalization.

And then there's personalization at scale.

So personalization at scale is using partner tools, which I'll recommend 100% to use.

A couple of tools we'll talk about shortly.

And these tools have their own deep data sets on prospects all around the world.

And in those, in that data you'll have, you can see here it says personalization, name, title, company, department plus four.

I mean, the partners that we use, they have 30 different, 30 different data points.

So to the, to the trained eye, you can kind of see through it that it's not personalized.

But at the end of the day, business is about solving somebody's problem.

So if you have personalization, if, if your email looks decent enough, but you're gonna solve somebody's problem, right?

Per right person, right message, right person, right time, you're gonna be, you're gonna be good to go here.

So there's major differences between these two types of two types of ways to approach copy inside of the email.

And they are as follows.

So hyper personalization is slower because as you can see, I've got in the brackets here, it's basically led by reps, SDRs, or account executives will hyper personalize their, their emails.

And normally this will be to the highest value prospect.

So these will be bespoke lists that you might've made yourself and you're really trying to personalize every touch inside of the email to try and get the highest warm reply rate.

So as you can see down the bottom here, highest warm reply rate for hyper-personalization, but because it's hyper-personalized, because it's slower, it's harder to scale.

It's kind of one-on-one, one to one, sorry.

So conversely, scale.

So personalization at scale is kind of led by the company or the program or the department, let's say.

So personalization at scale is faster, it's easier to scale, although it has a lower warm reply rate.

So what we're really looking for when we talk about success in, in outbound email, we're talking about warm reply rate, it doesn't matter, open rates don't matter, replies don't matter.

All you should care about is one reply rate.

Hey, this is interesting, I'd like to see a demo.

Or Hey, this is interesting, here's my credit card.

So personalization at scale, faster, easy to scale, lower warm replies.

'cause it's not hyper-personalized, but it's one to many.

So, so write person.

So that's right message, right person.

So I'm assuming everybody on the call here knows their ICP or their buyer persona, you know, whatever you wanna, you wanna talk about.

So, oh, all right, cool.

I'm selling to 30 to 45-year-old tech professionals in the Melbourne and Sydney, whatever.

I'm not, I'm gonna assume everybody has their ICP, their buyer persona down.

So if you don't, that's step one.

I'm not gonna talk about that on that, on today's score.

So if you've got your I CCP though, there's three ways you can go about finding the data of your I ccp.

One is your own data.

So you may have, everybody has a CRM, obviously in contact, so you have some of your own data.

But when, what I say here by your own data is you can build your own lists.

So scrape data, everybody knows the tools out there to scrape data, data, find people's emails, find people's phone numbers.

That's very painful, very slow, and I don't recommend it, but it's one of the systems you can use.

You can use your own data, you can next, you can buy data.

So buying data, the most typical platform really in technology in order to buy good quality data is ZoomInfo.

ZoomInfo is a listed company, incredibly expensive.

You know, they do a, they do things well.

They're very, very expensive and very enterprise.

So I wouldn't recommend Zoom info, I would highly recommend against it, in fact.

And the third option, which I would recommend is renting the data.

So data you rent.

So we use two platforms, which I'll talk more in depth again in a moment.

Plo.io is one and robots is the other.

So Apollo and robots both have the technology in order to, to schedule your campaigns.

So that's great.

But they also have their own data sets.

So this is from, this is from both Apollo and robot's websites.

So find and convert the perfect leads, find, this is Apollo.

Find contact, find contact, and close your ideal buyers with over 270 million contacts and streamline engagement workloads powered by ai, 270 million contacts.

So you've gotta remember what I mentioned earlier, when you're trying to do personalization at scale, and you're looking for deep data on 30 different data points on your, the perfect contact, Apollo has 270 million of the world's leading decision makers across all industries.

Grow robots on the top right has a hundred percent million, um, 171 million plus of the world's leading decision makers.

This data is cleaned, updated.

So when data bounces, when a, when an email bounces, it bounces twice, I believe it's just scrapped from the system.

So somebody's moved on, it's not Mark at Acmy corp anymore.

Mark's moved on to his next role.

So his email doesn't work anymore.

The system will pick that up, it'll kick the, it'll kick the email outta the system and you know, the data's clean.

So, so if we're going just back a step, you can find your own data, buy data at a very expensive rate, or you can rent data, let's call it renting data.

You'll pay for it, obviously, but let's call it renting the data of Apollo and robot.

So that's what I, I highly recommend.

So next we have the right time.

So I'm gonna go through this a little bit quicker, but right time, how do you know the time is right to reach out to your prospect?

Few indicators you can use, both Apollo and robots have hiring, currently hiring.

So for us, we do, we build global teams.

Offshore talent you think of like outsourcing, you know, that kind of stuff.

So they have currently hiring in their custom fields when you're searching their, in their fields, when you're searching their database.

So I can say technology companies, San Francisco, 51 to 200 headcount, currently hiring, I can use that, that that field.

Next is recently raised capital.

Both of the partners that we have, which again, robots and Apollo, I'm relatively certain, robots I think took it down for a little bit and I think it's back up.

But they have recently raised capital.

So obviously some of the best people to sell to people that have just had $40 million of cash pumped into their coffers.

So, so recently raised capital, recently purchased software.

So there's a few different tools that you can use to find out, okay, this person just bought, or this person just signed up to AWS cool.

They're obviously building the, the, the, the, the infrastructure of the technology platform.

I sell complimentary tool X to AWS great time to reach out to, to, to, you know, whoever the prospect is.

Live lead scoring.

So engagement metrics.

So both Apollo and robots Apollo do it better.

Lead scoring.

So if a lead engages with a, a lead magnet or your, your website email or whatever, you'll have live lead scoring.

And then market trends.

So everybody has their own market trends.

I don't know what they are in all of your industries, but knowing your own market trends.

So, so that's some of the ways in which you can get the timing right is just an example of, you know, lead scoring and, and behavioral stuff inside of Apollo.

But, but that's some of the ways that you can get the, the final part, right, which is the, the right time.

It's kind of the hardest.

But, but if we go back, success in outbound is, is very simple.

If you're doing the, the easy things, right, it's right message, right person, right time.

So that's a little bit on on those three points.

So it's some best practices with outbound.

So few best practices in, in order to have success, firstly you have to have a great email infrastructure.

So I won't go into the specifics about that.

I'll do one, I'll go through one slide in a moment.

But some real technical stuff that you just have to follow.

Basically a checklist, a couple of blogs or an onboarding, an onboarding manager and make sure that your email infrastructure is set up for success.

Otherwise, you're gonna land in inbox bamming boxes and the trash bin all the time.

Second is warming up emails as well.

So there's, you can either warm emails yourself, quite manual, quite painstaking, or you can use platforms and partners that, uh, will do the domain warming for you, which is pretty nice.

It's pretty cost effective.

It's a bit of a false economy to warm the email accounts up yourself today because it's pretty cheap and easy to do it, uh, through, through partners, but you can do it yourself.

Comply with sending limits.

So it is possible, I believe, to send 2000 emails still per, per email account.

So bill@athena.com, I can send 2000 emails per day if I want, but that'll just destroy my domain reputation.

So when I mentioned that we continue to scale, continue to get better at what we do at Athena, but we get worse results in the warm reply in relation to warm reply, it's because email, email warm replies and email deliverability continues to get harder because of a number of different factors from all the providers, Microsoft, Google, so forth.

So complying with sending limits is key.

If you have really good domain reputation and you have really good messaging, really good targeting and really good timing, then you can probably send 500 emails up to 500 emails per email account per day.

But I don't really recommend it because it's gonna be, it, it could get messy.

So if you want to be relatively safe and, and and comfortable, you probably want to have sending limits of 200 to 250.

And this is one of the reasons why outbound's getting harder, because if you did everything right previously, you could send a thousand emails a day, pretty, pretty comfortable if you did it, if you did it right.

But over time, that gets lower and lower and at the moment you're probably safe at 250 emails as long as you're doing things pretty well.

So complying with sending limits and then using subdomains, different domains and sub-brands.

So sub-domains, we'll talk about these in a moment.

So we'll talk about these in a moment.

And then rehabilitating domain reputation.

When it, when domain reputation gets bad.

So if you end in a lot of, if you, if your emails are ending in spam, excuse me, ending up in spam, then there's different ways that you can rehab your domain reputation.

So you pull the emails out of, out of the campaigns, prospecting campaigns, and you put them into rewarming sequences basically, and tools that you use to warm your emails up originally.

So these are kind of some best practices to buy.

So some of the technical stuff, the e email authentication records, D-A-D-K-I-M-S-P-F, these are the things, the technical things that I mentioned earlier.

They're all pretty much must haves now.

I mean, it says here that DA is highly recommended, it's not, it's must have.

This is all must have.

There's even a few other things, a few small other points you need to kind of comply with.

If you miss this step, you'll never be successful in any other, any of the following steps, which is like, this is like, yeah, putting your pants on and walk outta the house.

This is like step number one.

So email warming.

So this is kind of like a, a typical warming schedule days, one to three 15 emails at a 452nd interval days, four to 7, 25 emails, so on and so forth.

You know, over 30 days you can warm an email pretty, pretty comfortably.

And like I said, back in the past, even like four or five years ago, this was kind of a manual process.

There was some tools, but not really.

But now you can find tools and I can recommend a couple that are, that will take care of this for you for a small, a small cost.

And then going back to the sub subdomains, different domains and sub-brands, this is a typical subdomain excuse the quality of the image.

I just took a screenshot at moments ago, but McKayla at mail hive co.

So the, the male.is the subdomain obviously.

So what a subdomain does is it protects your main domain.

So we in the past had Athena, sorry, excuse me, bill@pay.athena.com.

That's cool.

Subdomains are cool.

What I recommend even more than that, I highly recommend is actually different domains.

So now we don't actually use subdomains, subdomains still are good, but even better is in my example bill@heyathena.com, no.no subdomain.

It's a different domain, not linked in any way to your main domain because what you're trying to do here is you're trying to protect your main domain business as usual emails.

If you end up in spam and you get high report spam reports and so forth, obviously there's so many transactional emails to in, in running a business, if your main domain gets damaged, it just can turn into a total s**t show, as you can imagine.

So, so, so there's subdomains, they actually work.

But if you wanna get ambitious and like scale with the outbound program, you probably want to have different domains.

And then I'll talk about sub-brands later.

Sub-brands is like when you get to the mastery stage.

We'll talk about that in a moment.

So, so that's some of the best practices that you can kind of think about in terms of running a successful outbound program.

I'm gonna just quickly talk about out team and tech to give you a bit of an overview of what we're able to accomplish, what tools we use and who were, who we have in the team in order to, to make it happen.

So these are some of our team that we have.

We have basically three guys.

Scottie mentioned two earlier.

That was from like, uh, originally when we booked this, this, uh, this session had two people, two people managing.

We have three now.

So we have Tino head of sales.

Tino oversees things.

He doesn't put his hands on anything, but he's like strategy like myself.

We kind of are involved.

These are outbound manager.

He does more of the technical stuff.

He kind of manages the campaign.

So he is like a, he's a, he's a mid to senior guy marketing guy.

And then we have dlo, who's digital strategist, dlo lens, his experience where he can, so he's another mid, mid to senior guy.

So we have three people managing our program, really like two and a half, kind of with some oversight from Tino and, and myself.

And we're able to send 1.2 million emails per, per week our tech stack.

So we have Apollo for sending and for data.

So when I say sending and for data, so we schedule all of our, all of our outbound through Apollo and we use their data.

Their data is the best in the world really.

ZoomInfo and Apollo robots we use for sending and for data as well.

Their data is not as good, but they have more cost effective plans and better plans if you wanna be really aggressive and scale, everyone costs you anywhere near as much as Apol.

So we use a mixture of both and we use a mixture of both just for redundancy in case one of them, I dunno, anything changes.

We use warmly for email warming.

Robots also uses robots also has a, uh, a free tool inside of their platform for email warming.

But we use warmly 'cause it's kind of a little smoother SendGrid for once you get to our level, you, you use something like SendGrid to build upon your email infrastructure.

That's not really step one of an outbound campaign.

So you wouldn't really need to worry about SendGrid until you, you know, get some real momentum and then lavender for email copywriting.

So that's kind of like a tool to improve the way that you write copy.

Yeah, just a great tool for email, for outbound email that we use only a few slides to left.

So yeah, and our, our our, our output, so our team, our, our, our tools and our output.

So we send, yeah, one, 1 million emails a week now.

And then I wanna just quickly finally talk about what we think mastery looks like.

So we're getting towards the, the mastery stage of outbound email.

Our plans for 2024 is to continue to strengthen our infrastructure because that's core to us.

Use start to use tech for hyper personalization at scale.

So you'll remember I mentioned before the two systems of like writing the copy, hyper personalization, and then personalization at scale.

Thanks to the rise of AI.

And just thanks to, you know, technology at large, there's now tools that you can use for hyper personalization at scale.

They pull data points from all around the internet and then they pump 'em into LLS chat, GBT, the others, whatever, GPT from OpenAI and the others, uh, cords, the other one from Anthropic and and so forth.

So you can use hyper-personalization at scale.

Now we plan to build more sub-brands.

I'll show you what we do with sub-brands in a moment and then increase our capacity to 5 million emails per week and beyond.

Really, we've built a fully evergreen system and I'll show you how we have done it and what mastery looks like.

So what I just talked about, we'll get anybody, if anybody takes it really seriously and is really ambitious and kind of follows the, except you'll have your own process.

But if you follow the steps that I outlined, there's no reason why you can't send a hundred thousand emails per week through your, through your brand outbound emails.

What you won't be able to do is send 1.2 million emails per week per your brand because you'll tread on the same prospects too often.

You'll have to recycle too prospects too quickly and it'll just become too difficult.

So what we've actually done has, we've created sub-brands.

So every one of these brands you see here, Jack's devs named after my brother Jack Ziggy's tech talent named after my dog, Ziggy Higher React devs, global sales talent, global marketing talent.

These are beautiful sites, fully fleshed out domains, great user experience.

And we run outbound email through all of these different sub-brands as a landing page, talks directly to our, the, the, the ICP we're looking at, they reply and then we funnel, we, we, we, we fess up, we say, Hey look, we're actually part of Athena.

They come into Athena's sales pipeline.

And then we, uh, continue from there.

So this is like, uh, pretty high level stuff.

I've never actually told anyone about our sub-brand strategy because it's so kind of important to us.

But that's what we do.

That's how we got to 1.2 million.

And in order for us to get to 5 million per week, which will be around $20 million of pipeline generated per month, we'll do that next year and we'll have 50 sub-brands.

That'll, that'll be how we do it.

So pretty interesting stuff.

How, how we, how we do it, following on how we can help we being me, we being Athena, my company and you know, team and partners that we partner with.

We're, uh, I'm on the sales advisory board for Apollo.

I'm like a a, I'm on basically the customer advisory board I'm really close with with Apollo.

So if you want intros and priority deals that Apollo, I've got a Typeform that I'll dump in the, in the comments and you can, you can say, hey, yeah, I'm interested in looking into Apollo.

I've got priority, we're the biggest customer in all of robots is customer base.

So I have a great relationship, as you can imagine with robots.

And we have like priority, priority deals and, and, and packages that robots, I can get an intro to to robots if you want outsourced talent.

So if you want somebody in Latin America or Southeast Asia running your programs, normally you would save 50 to 70%.

Then hiring locally maybe a, uh, a mid-level talent for 13 to $15 an hour, um, senior talent that could run your program for $15 to $25 an hour.

We can do that.

And then consulting, this is not, this is external as well, but I, I know really great outbound consultants that I could recommend 'cause there's a lot of people that say they're good, but I know some that are actually good.

So I'll, I'll share a type form in the, in the, in the chat simple Typeform, if any of those four things are interesting, you can just tick yes.

And and I'll get in touch and help if I can, if not all good.

Hopefully, you know, everybody got some, some interesting insights out of the, the presentation and uh, yeah, next I'll throw it back to Scotty and we can go through, you know, questions if anybody has any.

And, uh, that's it.

So that's, that's, thanks for listening.

That's the, the presentation from my end.

Yeah, no, that was, that was awesome.

Thanks.

Thanks Bill.

And yeah, just so good to get it from you as a, as a practitioner who's doing such incredible volume in this, in this space.

So I mean, one, one question I had B2B, B2C, is it, I mean obviously it works very effectively for B2B.

What are your thoughts on B2C?

Historically, I think outbound is better suited to B2B, but if you have a, a decent lifetime value, then it can work for B2C because you'll be able to find the data, you'll be able to build the program.

But it works best if you have a healthy lifetime value.

So if you have, if you were, say you say you're Canva, the design tool Canva, you know, Australian design tool, Canva outbound would be terrible for the B2C business for Canva.

'cause they charge $8 a month, it's just not ever gonna work if they were doing B2B to try and win their enterprise deals, great tool for Canva.

So, but if you have B2C customers where you charge a high ticket item, it can definitely work.

Yep.

No, that's, that's great.

And I'll open it up to, to the, you know, to everyone see what other questions are out there.

One, one question from me, Scott, and thanks for that Bill.

You, you mentioned the, the standard deadline and you said your company X my company, have you got an example of what that type of headline might look like?

No.

So it's very simple.

So if I was prospecting to three heads of engineering, which is typical prospect for us head of engineering at SpaceX, for example, the headline would literally read SpaceX X Athena, their company x, Athena being my company.

Yeah, that's how, that's how, how you do it with the platforms that I mentioned.

They'll do it for you.

So you can, they have the data and you just put in the, the form the fields will say your company X, their company X your company.

But super simple just like that.

Hey Bill, what, what SMTP services do you use?

Do you use postmark or SMTP to go what's better?

Our team manages that, that's the technical infrastructure stuff that me as CEOI don't actually know the most recent up-to-date answer because there's a lot of changes in the infrastructure side of outbound as well.

So although we send 1.2 million emails a week, I actually can't answer that one.

Well, Dan, to be fair, um, okay, and, And I guess you wouldn't be able to answer the, what sort of DM a c tools you use to create the keys for, but I can No, no, but what I can do, if you send me, if you just put your email in the chat there, I can introduce you to our outbound team.

I do a bunch of mentoring at a, in like a startup ecosystem in, in a and I'm always introducing people to our team.

So I can introduce you to our team and you can pick their brains.

You can, you know, ever, if you've ever got any issues we like helping, we're happy to help.

So although I can't answer it, if you flicking your email, I can do an intro and the team will, you know, that they'll be able to help you out.

Perfect.

I'll just see it in each chat.

That was a, a great talk.

Thank you very much for, for what you shared, bill.

One, one of the things that I've always been a bit scared about with doing mass emailing is the, the spam laws in Australia because they are quite harsh compared to, to other countries.

And I remember a guy in, uh, Western Australia called Wayne Mansfield, I if you've heard of him, and, and he got fined $5 million for sending out a million dollars of, oh, a million emails.

I think it was.

They find him $5,000,005 for each email that they deemed spam.

And do you ever have issues with the, the legislation or, or by buying or renting lists so they cleaned or opted in so that they don't pass a spam and is it a bit of a gray area?

What's deemed spam in Australia and what isn't?

Yeah, that's right.

It's a, it's a really large gray area because the definition is prospecting is not illegal sales prospecting.

So prospecting is not illegal, it's kind of a little bit of a gray area, but spam is obviously illegal.

So the, the difference between spam and being a good prospector and good outbound sales is really comes down to those three points I mentioned earlier, right message, right person, right time.

So we, at Athena we have a 0.04% spam rate and that's super duper healthy.

So we'll never come into any real trouble with spam laws.

But if you downloaded a list, bought, bought a list from somewhere and had really poor targeting, messaging, timing, I guess then you'll have much higher spam rates and then maybe there'll be somebody that might come down on you.

But the thing is Apollo, the platform that we use, the one that I mentioned is the kind of industry leader.

I mean, they're one of the fastest growing tech companies in the world.

They just raise their series C or D you know, $70 million at a $2 billion valuation or whatever.

And they're not a hollow unicorn.

Like lot, lot of the startups in the last few years, they're a real business and they're growing incredibly fast.

And it's because this is an integral, integral, excuse me, part of business is outbound sales.

So as long as you're doing it well, you're protected.

But to be honest, I'm not a lawyer.

So if you've gotta create your own philosophy around how you do this stuff and your, your question's super warranted.

So if you feel like the risk is worth the reward and you feel like the gray area is is wide enough, then it's a great channel.

But there are laws, especially in the eu, so the eu, you can't really get data.

The platforms we use don't really, don't really like targeting the EU because of GDPR rules, which are much stricter.

So, like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but this is a, I mean the biggest companies in the world gotta use an example of Salesforce.

Salesforce have written books about this stuff, you know, first company to a hundred million a RRR Salesforce, 100% pure cold outbound.

But yeah, super good question.

Consult your, consult your, uh, consult your lawyer.

Okay, thanks.

Hey Bill, I've got a quick question just about your, uh, the talent finding talent to do this.

If we were to set up this system, I imagine that talent would need to be trained.

Would the consulting then be a, a, a requirement I guess to, to get this system built if we were to do this ourselves?

Yeah, so look, there's a number of different ways you can go about it.

So you can go about it, the trial and error way, and I'm sure you'll do fine and it'll be, you know, slower and bumpier and rockier, but you don't have to have any consulting, you know, fees and not that the consultants that I know are super expensive and what have you, but you can certainly get off to a start on your own.

So two different scenarios in which, you know, if you were to get somebody to come in and help you would be either getting somebody in who's, uh, junior or an associate level email marketer and having some consulting support with somebody who can kind of help you build the infrastructure and, and get off to a start.

Or the other option is you could have somebody come in who's mid to senior talent who has let's say four to six years of experience with outbound email.

Our team, for example, we've been doing this for Caesar, the guy that runs our, our program.

I mean he's, he's a, he's a mid-level guy and he's been running our program for two years, two and a half years.

And he could, he could build a program with his ice closed himself.

So there's kind of couple ways that you go about it.

And Is he, is he actually available for consulting or you saying you would get someone like that?

No, so w we've, we've helped a lot of our clients.

Like we've helped them, but we haven't had a con it's been informal and we haven't had a consulting agreement and it hasn't been super high touch on our end, but we've certainly helped.

But there are a number of recommended consultants that I know through the Apollo network and through people that I, yeah, I have a, a few consultants that I would go to.

I actually don't know their prices, but I know that'd be, you know, it'd be, oh we'll set you up for 2002 and a half thousand dollars a month for, it'll take eight weeks or 12 weeks.

So it'll look something like that.

But no, our team doesn't do the high touch stuff 'cause they're like, you know, got their own jobs.

So, No, thank you.

I really appreciate it and great presentation too.

That was fantastic.

Bill, can I just ask your question, who is your ideal client?

Yeah, so we have two, two ideal clients.

One is on the early stage, and that would be a startup founder.

So if we have a, in technology basically, so you might think of, uh, 51 to 200 employees.

So that's an early stage series.

A founder for example, who are, you know, trying to preserve their runway and, you know, hire global talent so they can save, you know, 50, 60% of their hiring costs.

So that's one persona.

And the second persona, we're trying to move upstream a little bit.

So the enterprise persona is 200 plus employees, series C or D you know, funding and what have you.

And it'll be like a, a hiring, like a hiring manager.

So it would be head of engineering.

So the most in demand, the most in demand talent that we can find is like bespoke engineers.

So like a cloud engineer, you know, senior full stack developers, so on and so forth.

And a hiring manager is normally somebody who they just want to get talent in yesterday.

So like, so when we go enterprise, we go the hiring managers and head of engineering, and then when we go find a, excuse me, earlier stage, it's like directly to the founder.

'cause you can normally get access to them and they're normally making those decisions, right?

Yeah.