Building a Lead Gen Agency: Part 4

I really, really f*cked around in my 20s. I did a LOT of crazy, cool things. Here's just some of them:

Volunteered at an exotic animal care center in Bolivia — caring for monkeys bears, tigers, and other animals that were being abused and illegally trafficked.

Performed as a rapper alongside other award-winning artists.

Gave a TEDx talk

Lived homelessly for a week in London, and made a documentary about it

Ran 2 Iron Man races

Won Muay Thai fights in Brazil

Ran 20 marathons

Backpacked through 50 countries

Hitchhiked over 1200+ kilometers

Qualified as a trained soldier in the British army

In my 20s, I tried to live the most interesting life I could. I created lots of memories. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But a year ago, I turned 30. And it hit me: I had virtually no money in the bank. I had no stable job. I had no experience of any kind whatsoever… apart from being a nomad. And even though I did do a lot of amazing things in my 20s, I didn’t set myself up AT ALL for the future.

So I moved back into my mom’s house… trying to figure things out. At 30 years old. I started looking at jobs online. I started looking at what companies were hiring. I started looking at what sort of skills I could figure out how to master — fast. That’s how I found lead generation. Within several months, I was generating $20k / month in recurring revenue from doing lead generation for my clients. I had too much work and I couldn’t handle it all myself, so I built an agency around it. Today, we’re in the $30k - $40k / month mark — and we’re growing… FAST. I'm 31 now. Things turned around pretty quickly. Today, I’m going to show you how to deliver “cold email as a service” for clients. Most people don’t talk about this… But cold email is THE SIMPLEST way to start a consulting business from scratch. When you’re starting out though, everything feels vague. It’s like… what does a $2k / month gig even entail? What do you have to deliver to get paid $2k / month? How long do you have to work? Can you balance this with a full-time job? Today, I’m gonna clear up some of those questions for you — and show you how doing cold outreach lead gen for businesses can help you stomp the gas pedal on your path to freedom. Now… as you read this… keep in mind that this is just an “80/20” version of how I delivered some of my first gigs starting out. This is not the *only* thing I did to build a $30k+ / month agency. Anyone who tells you that “5 simple steps is all it takes” is flat out lying to you. That being said… cold outreach lead gen is one of the greatest opportunities for people starting out (or scaling up) today. I cover the full, end-to-end system in my advanced training program. But here's the “80/20” method for delivering a lead gen gig for a client:

How to deliver a $2k / month lead gen gig in 6 hours or less

One of the hidden benefits of doing "cold outreach as a service” is how easily it can be automated and outsourced. In the example, I’m gonna talk about today… the client project I'm working on takes about 6 hours of work, and brings me about $2k / month in revenue. That’s, what, $300 / hr? Can’t do that as easily with Facebook ads or SEO. Here’s how I delivered it:

Step 1: Figure out your client's customer base

What type of customers are your clients trying to get? For example… if you’re working with a property manager, they might be targeting real estate investors who buy properties. If you’re working with a corporate law firm, they might be targeting small businesses. In my case, I was working DarenDavidTaylor.com — a programmer who develops and designs apps. His customer base consists of virtually everyone who wants an app developed.

Step 2: Go to LinkedIn to source leads

Once you know who you’re targeting, the next step is to go on LinkedIn and bring up a list of those types of leads. You can go on LinkedIn, type in the job title and region of the type of people you want to connect with, hit “apply”, and come up with a list. For example, if your client is targeting property managers, you can type in a job title like "property manager" or "property developer" in LinkedIn search. In this example, I brought up a list of “property developers” in the UK:

Once i hit “apply” on the above criteria, I come to a screen with thousands of leads:

Step 3: Source email addresses from Fiverr / Upwork for <$50

Once you’ve got your list of leads, the next step is to scrape their professional emails, and reach out to them on behalf of the client to see if they’re interested. (You can also reach out via LinkedIn message, but you can get a better response rate in some cases by reaching out to someone’s professional email) But the beautiful thing about cold outreach is, you don’t have to actually scrape these emails yourself. You can go on a site like Fiverr, type in “data mining” (or something related), and find someone who offers LinkedIn data mining.

For example, this freelancer from India does data collection for 3.91 pounds (about $5).

The freelancer should compile a list of emails from profiles on your LinkedIn search (even if you don’t have a Premium account yourself), and send it to you in an excel spreadsheet.

Step 4: Craft your cold outreach email copy

Next step is to write your outreach email copy. There are advanced strategies on writing and setting up cold email sequences that get massively high response rates (which will help ultimately charge — and justify — high monthly retainers from clients) which I cover in my private training. But at a basic level, your goal will be to drive consultation calls for your clients. I recommend having at least 2 emails in your outreach sequence (one for initial outreach, and one for follow up).

Step 5: Launch using Mailshake

Mailshake is a cold email outreach software tool that allows you to automatically send mass emails to leads on your spreadsheet (from step 3). You can usually only send about 50 - 100 emails per day from a Gmail account before you get flagged for spam — so if you’ve got, say, 5000 leads for a client, that’s at least 3-4 months of consistent work you’ll get paid for right off the bat. Fully automated. Total passive income. Rinse and repeat till you steadily grow past $10k, $30k, $50k, even $100k / month depending on what you decide to do.

The numbers

Let’s say your client is paying you $2,000 / month. That’s your revenue. The cost to deliver would be $19 for Mailshake, $5 for a domain (if needed), $5 for Gsuite, and say $30 for your Fiverr freelancer. That’s $59 up front, and $54 / month of expenses. Total hours of work required? For me, a typical $2k / month client takes about 6 hours of work to set up, automate, and “set and forget.” Even if you’re slow and it takes you double that time, you’re still making a cool $166 / hr. Not bad. The app development client I’ve been working with is getting about 3x-7x return on what he’s paying me (he’s getting between $5k - $10k / month in revenue from the leads I’m generating for him). That gives me some room in negotiation, in case I ever feel like charging more. Now don't get me wrong... this isn't "get rich quick." It still takes work. It takes work to make any business successful. But there's virtually no opportunity as exciting as this if you want to start (or scale) a consulting business in 2018 -- the simplest way possible. Talk soon, Deepak

Building Your Lead Gen Agency: Part 4

How to deliver a $2k / month lead gen gig in 6 hours or less

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