PDF - B2B Growth Ebook by B2B Marketers Founders Community

STEP BY STEP
GUIDES TO FIND,
QUALIFY AND
CONVERT HIGH
QUALITY B2B
LEADS AFTER
GDPR
INTRODUCTION
INDEX
7
CONTRIBUTORS
THE COMPLETE
GUIDE TO FIND,
QUALIFY AND
CONVERT HIGH
QUALITY LEADS
WITH SIDE
PROJECT
MARKETING IN A
1
PROCESSED WAY.
BY
RICARDO GHEKIERE
The complete guide to find, qualify and
convert high quality leads with side
project marketing in a processed way.
By Ricardo Ghekiere
I am pretty confident to say that you probably know at least one person in your network that
has an ad blocker installed right now.
Not because I am some kind of future fortune teller, but because of hard core data.
In 2017, 615 million devices now use adblock, which increases the odds that somebody in
your network is using an ad blocker right now. In fact, on the 15th of february 2018, Google
Chrome has launched his own ad blocker, increasing that number even further. Or maybe
you are already using the Brave browser like I do.
It turns out 95 percent of people don’t like being interrupted and the other 5 percent just hate
it.
To put it in the words of Jeffrey Zeldman:
“We hate advertising so much, we’ve trained ourselves not to look at the top or right sidebar
on most sites.”
My parents would even mute the TV when commercials were shown during the break.
Sounds pretty familiar?
As Seth Godin puts it, the key to great marketing and sales is that you need to gain the
privilege to contact your prospects, over time by building trust. A great way to build
trust is creating value for your prospect, which mostly leads to blogging or other types of
content creations.
Great, but as we both know, creating high quality content and hitting that publish button on a
consistent basis is one of the hardest challenges as a company.
What if we needed a shortcut to attract find and attract high quality leads without
disturbing them with ads?
This is how Side Project Marketing was born.
An alternative mix between content marketing and paid advertising that is slowly taking over
the world, and this guide will help you build yours from scratch.
www.ricardoghekiere.com 1
This guide will teach you how to:
1. How to build your Side Project to find, qualify and convert leads to achieve the best
sales prospects.
2. Lead acquisition - finding tangible values to provide to clients as an inbound strategy,
that they actually need.
3. Teach you how to sell your service or product without selling.
4. An alternative to blogging and spending wasteful money on ads that don’t convert.
5. How to create an effective lead magnet that is scalable.
6. The exact proven process to build a Side Project. No hacks, just process.
This guide will not teach you:
1. How to distribute your Side Project since every product has different traction channels
and every target group is on different platforms.
2. How to inject the mentality of failing fast into your team.
3. How to gather data insights for you Side Project, which is preferably the phase before
prototyping and building. If you have these already, you are already a nice step ahead.
This guide is for:
1. Business owners or Marketing Managers who are looking for an additional way way
to grow their company next to their paid ads and blogging efforts.
2. Growth Consultants that would like to introduce a new way to grow their clients
companies.
3. People who are curious about how to build and develop a prototype in less than 3
days.
This guide is not for:
1. Business who have not proved their business model (clear retention, NPS satisfaction,
language market fit). If you have not figured this out yet, go work on creating a better
product. Like serious.
2. Businesses who are still figuring out who their target audience is.
Content Breakdown
What is Side Project Marketing? 5
Examples of Side Project Marketing 6

Coverr. 6
Game of Hacks 10
The psychology behind Side Project Marketing (or why it works). 11

1. Principle of Reciprocity 11
2. Principle of Authority 12
3. Principle of Consistency 13
4. The power of free 13
The 7 step Side Project Checklist 15
The Side Project Sprint: How to set up your design process to build the right Side
Project that fits your business 16
Before starting out: 17
What you need for your workshop: 17
How long it takes: 18
What the ultimate goal is: 18
Day 1: Seek to understand then to be understood 19
Meet the Experts and How might We - 15min/chat 19
Heat Map Vote - 6 min 20
A Sign Of Life - 30 min 20
Solution Mapping - 30 min 25
Lightning Demo’s - 30 / 45 min 27
The One-Step Sketch 29
Day 2: Taking a decision is better than no decision 30
Heated Art Museum - 10/15 min 31
Speed critique - 3 min per sketch 31
Mix Match Voting - 10 min + ⅔ min per vote 32
Super Vote 33
Prototype 33
Day 3: That’s just your opinion. 34
The Five Act interview 34
How to test and validate your Side Project without writing a single line of code. 37
How to use a simple trick to get unlimited free trials at any software company. 42
How to design the perfect landing page for your Side Project. 43
The 4 basic rules of a Landing Page 43
Consider these 4 psychology tricks in your next Landing Page 46
Install these analytics before launching your side project to optimize your feedback
loop. 49
1. Google Tag Manager 49
2. Google Analytics 50
3. Heap Analytics 50
4. Hotjar 50
5. Sumo 50
6. Facebook Pixel 50
Frequently Asked questions about Side Projects 51

1.What’s the difference between side projects and Side Project Marketing? 51
2.Aren’t Side Projects going to distract us from our main product? Should we stop
blogging and advertising? 51
3.How do you I explain Side Projects to my peers? 52
4. Can we use something we’ve already built? 52
5. Should my Side Project always be free? 53
What is Side Project Marketing?
Imagine you would always have troubles with creating the right formats for your different
Social Media channels, wasting a lot of your time.
You start asking around in your network or google a solution and encounter a tool that does
exactly that, absolutely free.
You are playing around with the tool which has helped you created those amazing posts for
a couple of days.
As human curiosity kicks in, you are wondering who made this tool.
Yes, it’s that exact same feeling when somebody has watched your Linkedin profile and are
wondering: ‘Who the hell is this person?’.
On the top right corner, it reads ‘get started with Buffer’ and you give it a click.
It takes you all the way to a landing page saying: ‘Buffer, a better way to manage your Social
Media’
Providing you with ever more tools to help you win at Social Media and you give it a spin.
This is exactly what Side Project Marketing or engineered marketing is all about.
“Building something of value that solves a small problem of your target audience in
order to upsell them your related product/service later-on.”
Pablo helps Buffer to find, qualify and convert high quality leads for Buffer, a social Media
Management platform. Which is exactly what you’ll be learn to build in a step by step way for
your company.
These are the 2 main questions you’ll need to solve to build your side project:
1. What is the core product you are selling?
2. What kind of tiny problems do your target audience who would buy your product face,
preferably every day.
Examples of Side Project Marketing
There are a lot of well-known Side Projects that would win the wall of fame such as
Unsplash by Crew or Website grader by Hubspot.
Although these projects are great for inspiration, they come far from the reality you will be
building.
Not that I don’t believe in your amazing skills, but because I am a strong believer that if you
want to increase the speed of your learning curve, you should look at projects or people just
a few years ahead. Not a Richard Branson.
Therefore, I hand-picked some great examples that are more in line with building your Side
Project.
1. Coverr.
Coverr.co is a website that allows you to download royalty free (even for commercial use),
unique and beautiful video footage for your website.
Video backgrounds you would normally pay thousands of dollars for, are now completely
free to use.
Of course, these are great for your smaller projects, but what if you need a skilled
videographer for your larger projects?
That’s where those little white words in the top corner comes in handy and human curiosity
takes over.
“Coverr was made with love by the Codersclan and Veed.me teams”
This is exactly where you land after clicking those little shiny words.
Of course.
A marketplace to find projects as a videographer or a videographer as a company.
As you can see they solved the 2 big questions when creating a successful Side Project:
1. What is the core product Veed.me is selling? A marketplace to hire a

videographer.
2. What kind of tiny problems do people who create websites have? Finding high
quality videos to use for website in smaller projects.
To show you just how powerful this project was, here is a quick recap of their data.
In March 2018 they had 360K visitors.
20,68% of that traffic actually had that ‘human curiosity’ effect and continued to the website
of veed.me.
Ad budget spend? 0€.
Does this mean you won’t need to spend money to get your Side Project from the ground.
No.
It does show you the power it has to reduce the CAC you are having right now and how
scalable this can be.
2. Game of Hacks
Another less known but amazing example is done by Checkmarx, a cyber security company
that launched an addictive yet useful mini-game called “Game of Hacks” which tests coders
ability to spot vulnerabilities in code, helping them to learn along the way.
The game received massive positive press coverage, had over 35,000 players in the first 24
hours (it’s 80,000 now), and drew thousands of visitors to the Checkmarx website.
Many of those visitors were quality leads which have turned into real customers. And now
the team is working on productizing an enterprise version of the game.
Marketing done the right way.
If you didn’t capture the idea yet, here is the formula to your great Side Project:
1. Figure out what the core products/services you are selling.

2. Figure out who is buying your product and what tiny problems they encounter during
the process that is related to your product or service.
The psychology behind Side Project Marketing (or
why it works).
To follow the philosophy of Einstein (which he probably never said, since most quotes are
just assigned to famous people to make it look smarter):
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.“
These are 4 human principles of why Side Project Marketing can be such a powerful thing to
build.
1. Principle of Reciprocity
Do you remember the last time you were invited to a party? (if you haven’t, no worries,
nobody is judging you)
After the party, you might have felt that little obligation to invite them back over the next time
you are hosting a dinner/party.
This little feeling is what we call reciprocity.
Simply put, people are obliged to give back to others the form of a behavior, gift, or service
that they have received first.
It’s a mechanism that was builds into humans to make sure we stay human.
One of the best demonstrations of the Principle of Reciprocity comes from a series of studies
conducted in restaurants.
The last time you visited a restaurant, there’s a good chance that the waiter or waitress
handed over a little gift.
Probably about the same time that they brought you the bill.
A liquor, perhaps, or a fortune cookie, or perhaps a simple mint.
So here’s the question.
Does the giving of a mint have any influence over how much tip you’re going to leave them?
Most people would say no, maybe you did too.
But that mint can make a surprising difference. In the study, giving diners a single mint at the
end of their meal typically increased tips by around 3%.
Interestingly, if the gift is doubled and two mints are provided, tips don’t double. They
quadruple—a 14% increase in tips.
But perhaps most interesting of all is the fact that if the waiter provides one mint, starts to
walk away from the table, but pauses, turns back and says, “For you nice people, here’s an
extra mint,” tips go through the roof.
A 23% increase, influenced not by what was given, but how it was given.
So the key to using the Principle of Reciprocity is to be the first to give and to ensure
that what you give is personalized and unexpected.
This is exactly what is being triggered when you are build something of true value for your
clients/prospects.
It allows you to build trust faster in a world where trust is being shattered every single day
(yes, this is a little nudge at the Facebook data leak).
2. Principle of Authority
What the science is telling us is that it’s important to signal to others what makes you a
credible, knowledgeable authority before you make your influence attempt.
Of course this can present problems; you can hardly go around telling potential customers
how brilliant you are, but you can certainly arrange for someone or something to do it for
you.
What you want to achieve at the end of the day is what Sidekick (now integrated) did for
Hubspot or Unsplash for Crew.
“Oh yeah, I knows those guys or company, they are the ones that build XYZ. They
must know what they are doing“
If they know how to build this and solve that one small problem I had, they probably also
know how to fix this bigger problem I have.
Since you are solving that little problem they are having right now, you have just triggered
the power of authority.
Guess where they will be going the next time they have a larger problem?
3. Principle of Consistency
Imagine receiving 2 cards from your favorite coffee bar around the corner.
As always, if you manage to get a full card, a free coffee will be added to your bill.
Now, on the first card, you’ll see 10 numbers before hitting that free coffee.
But before you leave, the barista gives you 2 stamps on the house.
The other card has 8 numbers on it, and no stamps are given to you.
Which of the following cards do you think have the highest redemption rate?
Now you might be thinking that in both cases you’ll have to gather 8 stamps in total, making
no difference between the 1st and 2nd card.
Yet, as research by Joseph C. Nunes shows, the 1st card has a higher chance to be
redeemed.
Why?
People provided with artificial advancement toward a goal exhibit great persistence
toward reaching that goal.
It’s a phenomenon called the endowment progress and shows why the principle of
consistency is that powerful.
In other words, people like to be consistent in their actions, therefore we are more motivated
to complete tasks we’ve already started.
By receiving help of your Side Project and solving that little tiny problem they have right now,
they are going to feel more open to work with you in the near future since the power of being
consistent kicks in.
4. The power of free
Free is this magical price that everybody seems to love and it’s changing the way we do
business right now.
In the 19th Century, a man by the name King Gillette invented the world’s first
disposable-blade razor.
His strategy was simple.
He sold the razors, only the handle part, cheaply to places like banks who would give them
away to new customers as part of their promotions, absolutely free.
As most men know, the handle isn’t the expensive part, the replacement blades are, and
they sell them with a hefty profit, later in the sales cycle.
Yet, customers were more than happy to accept this free gift. To truly understand why free is
such a powerful marketing method, we need to understand the psychology behind it.
Behavioural economist, Dan Ariely, tells us that most transactions have an upside and a
downside. But when things are free, we forget the downside.
Why?
Because as humans, we are intrinsically afraid of loss.
With free, there’s no visible possibility of loss.
So we speed right by all those questions we would otherwise have about the value of an
item and land directly on “yes please.”
That's exactly what Side Project Marketing is about.
Giving value to your customers that would normally cost them money for free to earn their
trust and sell something related later-on.
The 7 step Side Project Checklist
❏ Needs to provide value
Pretty obvious one but keep in mind everybody's perception of the word value is differently.
Think very clearly how much value your Side Project is going to deliver without thinking of all
the fancy features you would need to build.
❏ Cheap to build
If it’s going to take your development team ages to set it up, this might not be the right Side
Project to build. Try to understand, most developers won’t be able to tell you how long
something is going to take since it will always ‘depend’ on the difficulties along the way.
❏ Cheap to maintain
It’s just another startup if you need to be spending more and more time maintaining the thing
you are going to build.
❏ Attracts qualified leads
The reason why I always shout that knowing who your target audience is and what their real
pain points are is because of this. If you don’t know who you are building it for and what they
go through every single day, you might attract tons of leads, but not the right ones. Wasting
everybody's time. And time is … money.
❏ Focus on a niche problem
Pretty straightforward, the trick is to do something very well, not everything very bad.
❏ Leverages unfair advantage, if you have something on your team that you can
do better than your competitor (not a must)
The best Side Projects are build out of some competitive advantage you have been building
on all these months.years. Think about the data you have gathered along the way which
might be relevant to your target audience and how you can build something to share it with
the world.
❏ Easily marketed
A Side Project should be something which is easily picked up by media or writers who need
content for their blogs. For the simple reason that you want to keep you CAC as low as
possible.
The Side Project Sprint: How to set up your design
process to build the right Side Project that fits your
business
Back in school I always used to be the idea guy. My creativity was like the stomachs of
people eating hot dogs at these crazy competitions on Youtube.
A bottomless pit.
Until one day a good friend of mine stopped me in the middle of my talk saying: ‘You always
talk about your ideas, why don’t you put your mouth where you words are and start building
it?’.
It was just that little push I needed to realize that ideas are worth nothing in the real world.
The real golden nuggets and insights come in the building phase, not the ideation.
Yet, when you start brainstorming about what side project you should be building, it’s going
to be tempting to start with solutions.
It’s just a human thing to do.
It’s the same psychological effect that happens when people are talking about their problems
and you are trying to help them with ‘let me tell you how I solved this problem’.
It’s a recipe to failure.
Seek to understand then to be understood
Use this exact same process to build Side Projects.
Before starting out:
‘’Side Project Marketing has one goal and one goal only. Build something of value for
your target audience in order to get more of those people.‘’
If you don’t know who your target audience is, there is no point of building a side project.
This is why this guide isn’t for people still discovering their business model or target
audience.
It’s important to understand that if you have multiple audiences, you’ll need to focus on just
one segment of your audience and invite experts on these segments to your Side Project
Workshop.
Do this now:
- Talk to your team (and make sure you have the decider/moderator in your team aka
people that can take big decisions) to discuss which target audience you would like
to go after.
- Find relevant people who can talk more about this segment for your first workshop.
This is probably your customer service, CEO/CMO, Product Owner, Sales,... If you
can have somebody who falls under your target audience, also invite them.
Pro tip: If you are an advanced company like Hubspot and offer multiple services, you’ll
need to decide which service you want to gain more traction and choose the target audience
accordingly.
What you need for your workshop:
People:
- A facilitator (You?)
- A diverse team who understands the target audience you are going after
- A decision maker aka Manager/CEO/CMO/ Team Leader
Stuff you’ll need to thrive:
- Whiteboard/wall space
- Tons of Post-it notes
- Just plain old white paper
- Sharpies
- Sticky dots
- A good old time timer
- Good coffee, beer comes after.
- A lot of water
- Some snacks
- At least one energetic and enthusiastic person.
How long it takes:
The workshop should be between 2-3 days depending on how advanced your team is with
other kinds of sprints or if it’s a first or a second run.
What the ultimate goal is:
- Figure out what Side Project you should build for your target audience.
- Figure out if what you are building, is really solving a problem.
- Better understand the needs of your target audience apart from your product.
Bonus tip: These sprints are also great for product managers to better understand what to
build next into their product or service.
Day 1: Seek to understand then to be understood
Meet the Experts and How might We - 15min/chat

Your team probably knows a lot about the challenges your target customers might have.
But that knowledge is distributed, or maybe not even in house.
Before starting a Side Project it’s important to gather as much knowledge about the
problems you want to solve for your target audience.
Monday morning is devoted to an exercise called ‘Meet the experts’.
A series of one-at-a-time interviews with people from your team, from around your company
and possibly even an outsider with special knowledge about a specific topic you are trying to
counter. Preferably these are people who have deep knowledge about what struggles your
target audience have (note to people reading this: if you don’t know who your target
audience is, this might end very bad for you).
These 15-20 minute interviews with the experts will consist of 3 big questions you want to
hear more information about (feel free to add more):
1. How would you describe the product/service you are selling to (insert target
audience)?
2. What is the problem your product is trying to solve for them?
3. What (other) kinds of problems do (target audience have) which are related to
our product or service?
As you go, each member of your team will take notes individually by listening very carefully
about problems they hear from the interviews and translate them in ‘How Might We’s’.
Especially during the last question, writing these down is of extreme importance since this is
where all the golden nuggets are.
It’s important to keep this structure since it will allow you to compare notes later-on and save
time.
The principle if very simple, experts talk and your team converts them into questions starting
with ‘how might we’.
For example:
When somebody is talking about the fact that men who come into a store can’t really decide
on how to pick his jeans size you translate it into a how might we.
‘How might we help men who come into our stores to pick their jeans size?’ → this is what
you write down on your post-it.
The more the better.
At the end of the exercise your team will have multiple notes starting with ‘how might we’.
Since this random thought of helping men choose better jeans just popped up while writing
this, I’ll guide you through this guide with this example.
Heat Map Vote - 6 min
If everything went well, you have now a pile of ‘How Might We’ notes.
It’s time to stick them all against the wall or whiteboard.
The moderator gives each member 2 voting dots — Everybody must now vote on the
challenges they consider to be the most pertinent to solve, without discussion.
You can vote on your own post-its here and you can put both your votes on one challenge if
you feel strong enough about it.
Once the 6 minutes is up, the moderator quickly takes the voted problems and arranges
them in order of priority. The last call is always given to the moderator of the sprint.
You should now have a clear targeted problem you would like to solve together with your
team.
Don’t forget it’s just an exercise, if you strongly feel another option is better, go ahead and
discuss why you think you should target that problem.
A Sign Of Life - 30 min

The worst thing that can happen to you and your team is building something nobody cares
about or doesn’t really see as a big of a deal.
Before starting a brainstorm on how to solve the problem you have discovered and voted, it’s
a must to go and figure out if there is any sign of people having this problem online/offline.
This is why I named this exercise ‘A Sign Of Life’.
It’s spending at least 30 minutes time with your team going on a hunt to figure out if more
people are actually having this problem and if they fit in your target audience.
The goal is simple: validate if the problem actually exists and is big enough to solve.
Now you might be wondering: ‘Do I just randomly google stuff?’.
That’s one option, but here are 3 strategies that could take you a little further.
Also, to join you in the trenches, I’ll be guiding you hands-on with an example I mentioned
above: “How might we help people choose a pair of jeans”.
Strategy #1: Quora
You probably already know Quora. It’s a community where people ask questions and look
for solutions to their problems. It is also an excellent tool to find problems to solve!
So, how can I find a problem to solve with Quora? Here are my three favorite Quora-based
problem investigation methods:
Search in reverse
Search on Quora as if you were searching for a solution to a problem.
People who are looking for solutions usually say things like:
• Is there any way to...

• How can I...
• Who can help me to...
As you see from the picture above, people have already been asking themselves on how to
choose a pair of jeans and 6 people have answered the question, leaving you with some
initial data of the existence of the problem and what solutions people are suggesting.
The best part?
Quora is giving you related questions to the problem you are looking to solve.
Have a look around and see what other related problems people are having to buying or
keeping their pair of jeans.
The disadvantage of this method is that it covers all kind of problems, so you will have to
search deeply until finding a problem you really want to solve.
Search for different topics
This method is more adjustable to your personality and knowledge. It consists on browsing
on Quora for topics you would like to solve a problem.
For example, let's suppose you want to solve problems people have with jeans. You could
then search “Jeans” on Quora, and visit the topic.
Now you have a full list of what people are looking to solve and the suggest solutions paired
with the questions.
Ask the question
The last method is pretty obvious but won’t be able to help you in the short time frame you
have. Just ask the question on how people are solving their problem right now.
Make sure to invite people to help out with answering your question.
Strategy #2: Twitter
Twitter is a great source to figure out the problems people are having. In fact it also helps
validating if more people are having this problem since they are retweeting it.
People who need a solution usually tweet things like:

- Anyone knows how to…
- I need help with…
- I don't know how to…
- More people having trouble with..
So, you can search for these phrases on Twitter.
And with a deep search, you will find great tweets that can lead to validation of your problem.
Strategy #3: Reddit
If you haven’t heard of Reddit, don’t worry, but you might discover a whole new world right
now.
Reddit bridges communities and individuals with ideas, the latest digital trends, and breaking
news.
If a cat video went viral, it probably was first seen on Reddit.
By subscribing to communities, called subreddits, like AskReddit, your fellow Redditors will
provide you thousands of problems people are facing every day.
Search for things like:

• How do I
• How do you
• Can’t seem to
In my case I could find a discussion on how to pick a jeans which keeps validating the
problem is out there.
Strategy #4: Buzzsumo
A great way to figure out if the problem you are trying to solve is broadly shared is by figuring
out if there is already content tackling this problem and see how much it has been shared.
This is where Buzzsumo comes in handy.
As you can see the number 1 shared topic about picking jeans is huge with 3,9k shares. This
article and strategy will also help you on the next exercise: Solution Mapping.
If you can’t seem to validate your idea online, try and have a swing offline by asking your
target audience if the problem really exists.
If not, try to go for the second choice you made with your team in the ‘How Might We’.
If you validate the assumption, it’s time to write it down in big letters on your whiteboard
since humans tend to forget things very fast.
Solution Mapping - 30 min
There is a famous saying: ‘If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.
In other words, it’s not because you found the problem, you also know how people would like
to have it solved.
This is where solution mapping comes into play.
This exercise is pretty simple, you find out how people are currently solving the problem they
are facing.
This is how to get started:
1. Make a list
Ask everyone on your team to search how people are solving the current problem and ask
them to put it into a list.
Everything you review should contain something good you can learn from and something
you feel needs improvement
After 20 minutes of finding and writing down the solutions, everyone should narrow down to
his or her top one or two solutions they found.
Write the collected list on the whiteboard. It’s time to begin the demo’s.
2. Give 3 minute demos
One at the time, the person who suggest the solution gives a tour on how it works.
Since people like to go overtime and debate, it’s always a good idea to keep a timer
During this exercise you should always consider the words ABC, Always Be Capturing.
While people are presenting always wonder and write them the answers to:
1. What is something that sticks out from the solution given and could be used?
2. What is something that could be improved?
These notes are just to jog your memory later in the day, so they don’t have to be fancy or
detailed.
Use 1 post-it per idea that runs into your mind to make sure everybody can see the big idea
that hit you later-on when sticking them to the whiteboard.
This is how your whiteboard should look like after this exercise:
Now you and your team know what kind of solutions people are using, what is good about it
and what could be improved. Now it’s time to figure out what to build in the afternoon.
---------------------------------------------------- AFTERNOON --------------------------------------------------
Lightning Demo’s - 30 / 45 min
Take a look back at the whiteboard with the solutions people are using right now. Before
starting this exercise, have a look at what other people have jotted down as good or bad.
Take a look back at the ‘How Might we’ that you are trying to solve in order to refresh your
memory. Preferably, this is written down in big letters on the whiteboard.
In this exercise we are going to look at all the different Side Projects that exist and see how
you can steal the most effective parts from all of them in order to incorporate them into your
Side Project.
Spend at least 20 minutes going through all the different options that exist. To make it a little
easier, we have gathered all the greatest examples out there into one simple to use page
right here: http://www.fastforwardonline.be/sideprojectmarketing/
Feel free to look around a little more if you have encountered other examples.
All done?
Now it’s time for everybody on the team to choose 1 or 2 side projects they could see
working for the How Might We question you are trying to solve.
It’s time to present them in another 3 minute pitches with a slight difference.
While presenting, the moderator on the team has to ask the following question after each
presentation:
“What’s the big idea we can take away from this Side Project?”
Then make a quick drawing of that inspiring component, write a simple headline above it and
note the source underneath on the whiteboard or post-its.
After the exercise you should now have a full board of the best ideas out of each Side
Project.
You’ll probably want to do it a little more organized than us. You’ll probably want to aim for a
result just as shown below:
The One-Step Sketch
As much as I love the design sprint philosophy, I always felt that not all parts are always
useful to certain situations. In the case of building a Side Project, we aren’t aiming to build
and validate the next big Slack venture, it’s still just a Side Project of your core activity.
Therefore, I am a strong fan of the one-step sketch instead of the 4 step sketch for these
kind of projects.
And it’s pretty simple.
Every team member now has whiteboard full of ideas of how the Side Project should look
like in different pieces. Now it’s all about putting the right pieces together.
Revise your How Might We and spend 30 minutes alone trying to come up with one or
multiple drawings of how you see the Side Project. Try to use as much parts of the drawings
shown on the whiteboard.
Although you are free to draw anything, here are some general rules you should remember
while drawing (make sure to write these down):
1. Make it self-explanatory, if nobody understands how it’s working, it’s not a good
drawing. Which doesn’t mean you have to go all Picasso.
2. Keep it anonymous
3. Ugly is okay
4. Words Matter, since it has to be self-explanatory you need to think very carefully
about the words you use to explain the Side Project.
5. Give it a catchy title (this one is pretty obvious)
This could be an example of your sketches, but remember words matter.
Once everybody is finished, put the solution sketches on a pile but resist the urge to look at
them.The moderator will now hang them up just like an art museum, since we don’t want
people to know which solution is from whom to remove biase.
Before you leave, it’s important to start looking and invite at least 5 people from your
target audience over to your prototype on Wednesday or in 2 days depending on when you
run the sprint.
Try to avoid friends and family.
--------------------------------------------------------- Day 1 Ends ------------------------------------------------
Day 2: Taking a decision is better than no decision
From here on onwards the process will look very familiar to the design sprint process with
some minor tweaks tailored to Side Projects.
Heated Art Museum - 10/15 min
If everything went right, you now have a full wall with ideas on how the Side Project should
look like. Without actually knowing who drew what. I do understand that some people just
have a horrible drawing style that is very typical, just pretend you have no clue from who it is,
okay?
Empower your team members with 20 dots each and let your team follow these steps:
1. Don’t talk
2. Look at a solution sketch
3. Put the dot stickers beside the parts you like (if any)
4. Put 2-3 dot stickers on the most exciting ideas.
5. If you are having trouble understanding what he/she means, write it down a sticky
note and place it next to the drawing
6. Move on to the next sketch and repeat.
You now have a wall full of Side Project ideas with dots on the most promising ones.
It’s time to discuss.
Speed critique - 3 min per sketch

In the speed critique, you and your team will discuss each solution sketch and make not of
standout ideas. The conversation will follow a structure and a time limit of course.
During the speed critique the facilitator is going to be really hands-on to guide everybody on
the team through the exercise. This is also the reason why somebody will need to be
appointed as a note taker. As you are reviewing the sketches on the wall, the note taker will
write down standout ideas on the sticky notes and place them above the sketch.
Got your note taker?
Let’s start with the process:
1. Gather around the solution sketch.

2. Set a timer for three minutes on each review session.
3. The facilitator narrates the sketch, meaning, just talks about what he can tell from the
sketch. Note that the person who made the sketch does not talk or make a move,
even when it’s wrong.
4. The facilitator calls out standout ideas which are shown by the clusters of dots.
During this process, the note taker is taking notes on his post-its of all the big ideas.
5. When the sketch is finished discussing, the creator can now explain the missing
ideas the team failed to spot and answers questions.
6. Move to the next sketch and repeat.
This is something which will 99% happen to your team.
People will start to see new ideas that can be combined with their ideas. It’s natural and
amazing at the same time. Make sure to keep these ideas to yourself and just focus on
writing down what stands out of the solution. This is how it will look at the end.
Mix Match Voting - 10 min + ⅔ min per vote

I call this Mix Match Voting because of something which happened in the last exercise.
Because people are exposed to new ideas they’ll most probably see their idea combined
with aspects they didn’t realize.
This is how it works:
1. Give everyone one dot which represents a vote (represented by a big dot sticker)
2. Remind everybody of the How Might We question
3. Set a timer to 10 minutes
4. Each person privately chooses which option they feel more likely to succeed. But
here is the twist. They can also add one of the aspects from the other sketches on
the board to improve the choice they are picking. For example: I love idea of having a
who is your jeans quiz but I would love to see it together with a rapport of a case
study about jeans (whatever). Make sure people write this down.
5. When the time is up, place the votes on the sketches.
6. Each person briefly explains their choice and what they would love to combine the
idea with. Count 2-3 min per vote.
Now you should have dots hanging of what your team believes are a great idea to execute
on, it’s time to supervote
Super Vote
The supervote is the ultimate decision. Each decider, which is mostly the highest authority,
will get 3 special votes, and whatever they vote for is what your team will prototype first and
test first.
Deciders can choose whether to go with the mainstream and go for sketches that were the
most popular or ignore the straw poll. In short, the decider can do whatever they feel
answers the ‘How Might We’ question the most. But remember, be honest about your
decision, your ideas aren’t always the best.
The sketches with supervotes on them are the winners. This is the prototype you’ll be
creating first. This is how it will look like:
Don’t forget to keep all the ideas that aren’t chosen that day. You might and will probably
need them in case the first prototype turns out to be nothing.
They are just called ‘Maybe-Laters’.
It’s important to understand that a process is just that. A process to align people. It’s not
pixel perfect and it will never be. If you feel something is missing you should be doing
differently, go do it. Experiment and remember, always have fun.
Now it’s time to build the actual prototype.
Pro-tip: take pictures of every single sketch and voting, you’ll thank me later.
Prototype
Head over to the next chapter ‘How to test and validate your Side Project without writing a
single line of code’ to start prototyping without writing a single line of code.
--------------------------------------------------------- Day 2 Ends ------------------------------------------------
Day 3: That’s just your opinion.
The last day has arrived.
The day where you have invited 5 people from your target audience to spit out all the things
you haven’t been thinking off and validate the side project.
To not just let people walk in and say: ‘So, what ya think’?. You can follow this template.
This structured conversation makes sure you capture as much data from your interview as
possible.
The Five Act interview
1. A Mexican welcome to start the interview (pretty obvious)

2. Open-ended context questions about the customer
3. Introduction to the Side Project
4. Detailed tasks to get the customer reacting to your awesome project
5. A little debrief ato capture the last thoughts and impressions.
A Mexican Welcome
When doing business in Mexico you’ll notice one thing. They never talk about business on
the first meeting.
You talk about family, friends and drink tequila. Even in the Morning.
Trust me, I am half-Mexican.
When the person walks in, go ahead and just have a small chat about the weather, how
his/her day was or why he/she is wearing those weird shoes.
The goal is to make the person feel comfortable to be open, honest and critical (maybe the
shoe isn’t that such a great opener after all).
Before starting out, it’s important to have your team capturing every single detail that is said
or done.
ABC, Always Be Capturing.
Context Questions
There is this awesome feeling you’ll have when building a prototype. It’s the same feeling
you have when buying new clothes. You feel like wearing them.
The same will happen to your prototype, you’ll be eager to show it straight away.
Not so fast.
Instead, start slow by asking some questions about the customer’s life, interests, and
activities. These questions won’t only help you to better understand your audience world, but
it will help you understand the reactions and responses given.
The goal is to ask natural questions to better understand the life of your target audience that
is tailored to your product.
For example, if I would have build the website findmyjeanssize.com I would have talked
about the jeans he or she is wearing and talk about how awesome it looks and where he/she
bought it.
Afterwards you could ask about the pains he had during the search for his perfect jeans size.
Let them tell you the story about their pains and lives, in a natural way. Preferably,
connected to what you are going to show them.
Prototype introduction
Alright child, it’s time to unpack your new clothes. Before unpacking it, it’s important to follow
these steps:
- Ask for permission by asking the person if he would like to see the prototype. It’s
important to understand the psychological reason behind this. By asking him for
permission, you are gaining mental buy in from your customer.
- After asking permission it’s important to tell him/her that some things might not be
working. Rome wasn’t built in 2 days, neither is your perfect prototype.
- Remind the customer that there is no right or wrong answer, any critique is useful.
- Remind the customer to think aloud when walking through the steps, this will help
understand the choices he is taking. This won’t feel natural to people so try to pull it
out a little. Don’t go all freaky by saying: ‘I can’t hear you’.
Tasks and nudges
During the process you want to get the most out of their thinking. This is where open-ended
questions come into play. As the customer goes through the task, the interview should ask
questions to her think aloud:
- What is this?
- What do you think of that?
- What do you expect it to do?
- Which problem do you think it will solve?
- Do you feel this is the way you would want your problem solved?
- What would you do next?
The goal is to understand if you are actually solving the problem and if this is the right format
to solve the problem. Maybe you have build a chatbot, but people would rather have a
website or visa-versa. Understanding their motives why they would want to choose another
format is crucial.
Always keep in the back of your head that if you would have asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster horses. Not cars.
Quick debrief
You’ll see and hear a lot during the interview, but might miss some important aspects since
you were focussing on something else they were doing. Especially men are pretty good at
doing only one thing at the time.
Here are some great example questions you can ask to capture the interview:
- How does this product help you compare to how you are currently solving the
problem xyz?
- What is something you liked and something you disliked about the product?
- How would you describe this product to your friends? (probably the most important
question in order to build your landing page!)
- What is something you feel should be build before you would use the product?
And well, you are done.
You have now a Prototype Side Project with all the feedback you need to be honest to
yourself and see if you are really solving a problem and if this is the right format people want
this problem to be solved.
You are now literally doing better than 99% of the companies that are targeting people while
sitting on their toilets with lousy ads.
Go conquer the world, like for real.
How to test and validate your Side Project without
writing a single line of code.
Sometimes having no tech resources is actually in your advantage since you can’t imagine
how many stuff has been built around the world that was just wasted code.
I have to admit, I have also been there.
And even if you have a lot of tech resources, nobody likes working on stuff nobody is
actually going to use.
I remember talking to my dad how it used to be in the ‘old days’.
People would walk around with phones the size of a shoe and you would only call the IT guy
out of his cave when you had a problem with your ‘computer’.
In order to show the world about your idea, you would either have to be very creative with
Knex/Lego or you would have to spend a ton of money to get your prototype out.
Times have changed, leaving us with a huge amount of possibilities to build prototypes of
what we are actually trying to say.
Get Started
When I asked The Design Sprint Slack group, owned by Jake Knapp (founder of the sprint
book), what the favorite tools are to prototype.
I came to a surprise.
I had given away 5 of tools I used to test and validate assumptions recently, hoping to get
their favorite stack of tools.
All I got was one tool that stuck out, Google Slides.
Which I totally understand because of the simple reason that everybody can or has worked
with this kind of tool.
Making adoption a little easier.
So if you feel like prototyping a little more on how it should look like or which tool you should
use, Google Slides is all yours.
If you want to take it a little further, this might be the stack you would be looking for.
Since these tools are always evolving, I have build an always up-to-date directory of
tools to start prototyping your Side Project without writing a single line of code.
Mockups
Have an idea but don't know how to bring it to the world? Hosting a growth or design sprint,
but feel like you are missing some design or engineering hands?
These templates are easy to use, incredibly professional and hugely varied – bringing you
everything from business cards, brochures, photos, real-life settings, tech devices, posters
and much more!
- Applaunchpad has a great tool to bring your idea to life called the Mockup Generator.
Just paste your picture or design into their tool and see your idea on any type of
screen. Combine it with Canva or any other design tool and call yourself a designer.
- Mockuups provides a drag-and-drop tool for creating beautiful app previews and
marketing materials. Place your design instantly to the huge collection of mockups
and find your ideal in a second.
- Screenpeek is a super simple mockup generator of your current website. Simply copy
and paste a URL link and a simple mockup is generated. Currently they provide the
latest iPhone, iPad, iMac and MacBook. Only the iPhone is free.
- Mockupsjar is similar to applaunchpad this tool is taking it a step further. It also
includes some great picture frame mockups, t-shirt, packaging, vinyl, books,
billboards and almost every current device imaginable including the new iPhone X
(10) and Apple Watch. Mockupsjar is also free to use.
Stock Images
Trying to figure out why you have seen the same picture around the web? These websites
and tools might be guilty.
- Unsplash has beautiful high quality free images and photos you can download and
use for any project. No attribution required. They have just raised a bunch of cash,
which looks promising for the future of the platform.
- Pexels has free stock photos you can use everywhere. Free for commercial use and
no attribution required.
Color picker/stealers
Like a color you see on another page or don't know which colors to use for your website? All
solved now.
- Colorzilla looks shady as ****. But it does the trick. Download the chrome extension
and pick any color you would like to steal from your or another page. Yup, for free.
- Coolors is amazing. Imagine you could press your spacebar and get color schemes
that fit together. All for free.
- Web gradients is an awesome tool that collects 180 free awesome gradients, that will
help you design the background of your website.
All these tools come and go, use this always up-to-date directory of tools to start
prototyping your Side Project without writing a single line of code.
Logo design
The only downside to the free/ freemium logo generators is the low res download quality,
although for the purposes of getting a quick logo put together without the need to hire a
professional designer, these options below are more than capable for your Side Project,
unless you feel like building it within your own website.
- Canva is one of the most versatile online design tools out there. If you are looking for
more customisation options compared to some of the other logo designers, then
Canva is the ideal tool. Download straight away for free in .png format.
- The Ucraft logo designer is one of the simplest customisable, modern logo designers
I've used. Ucraft includes a large variety of font types and colour pallets, plus the
export process couldn't be easier. Its completely free!
- Logo Dust has provided all its unused logo designs available for free. The designs
are simple and clean and available to download at the click of a button. There isn't a
huge collection like some other libraries but the quality is great and frequently gets
updated.
- Logopony is powered by artificial intelligence, which will help you design an awesome
and unique logo, containing even some icons. Paying $19, you will get a web quality
logo. If you pay $49 you will get lots of sizes and combinations.
App builders
Validating your assumptions is the first key step you should take before getting in the
building phase. Since, I assume, you don't want to be another app in the app graveyard, are
you?
- Thunkable is a native app builder for anybody and everyone who wants to build apps
— from the non-developer to the highly skilled developer who wants to do do
something quicker and easier. Starting from a price of free.
- Bubble lets you build apps without code. The greatest part I feel is the learning curve
to create your first prototypes. A great way to build and learn faster than your
competitor. Starts between 0-14$) depending on functionality and whitelabel.
- Launchaco isn’t really an app builder. Say again? Yes, this is not an app builder, but I
use this awesome piece of software in combination with an app builder in order to
create landing pages at lighting speed for my app mockups. Starting from free.
Chatbot builders
Having conversations is a basic need of humans. Yet, most of our digital stuff online is still a
one way stream. Why not prototype your chatbot idea before wasting all of your money and
resources?
- Manychat is my personal favorite since they have really understood that integration
and segmenting are key to building a great chatbot. You can start for free, or pay
10$/month to get some more advanced settings and integrations
- Chatfuel is the also one of the best bot platform for creating an AI chatbot on
Facebook. Learn how to create a Facebook message bot quickly and easily, no
coding required.
- Landbot.io is a simple tool to build conversational websites and improve lead
conversion rate. Think website + chatbot in one. Start for free.
Landingpages & page builders
Knowing that people have the shortest attention span in ages, it’s important to have a quick
and easy overview of what the potential gain is going to be when they keep on reading. This
is exactly how you can build in hours, not days.
- Instapage is one of the most powerful landing page software that provides post-click
optimization for all digital and advertising campaigns. What used to take years, now
takes hours. You have a 14 day free trial.*
- Launchaco is pretty much the simplest way to build a website for your Side Project
for free.
- Webflow is used when you want to take your Side Project a little step further since
you need a basic knowledge on HTML and CSS. It makes the website design
process sooooo much easier than the competition. Moreover, the price is quite
reasonable.
- Wordpress + Template is a great way to build your entire side project without writing
a single line of code. Just choose a template from the envato market and start the
building phase. Warning: sometimes a template can slow you down because of the
quality or non adjustments you can make.
Don’t forget, all these tools come and go, use this always up-to-date directory of tools
to start prototyping your Side Project without writing a single line of code.
How to use a simple trick to get unlimited free trials
at any software company.
What if there was a trick to get unlimited amount of free trials with your favorite software like
the landing page builder I just mentioned above?
This is exactly what I asked myself a month ago while cursing on an expensive piece of
software with a free trial.
So I did what I like to do best, find solutions to a problem.
Here is exactly how I pull this off in less than 3 seconds and no technical skills.
Now, most people know that I have a very cheap mindset.
Why overpay if something can be tested with limited amount of resources.
It’s a mindset I had to craft over the past years with high ambition and limited budgets.
In one of my growth guides I explain how I scrape attendees from websites to segment them
and see who would be interesting to meet in order to get the most of my events.
Now the problem I encountered is that the software I am using, only provides a 7 day trail.
After that, the cost goes up to a minimum of 1999$.
Which I prefer to spend on a holiday.
Here is how to bypass it with what we call an alias.
Use your normal email and add a +1.
For example mine would be: [email protected].
Create an account and you’ll see that you’ll still get the confirmation mail, but the email
registered is different.
The best part? It’s super scalable.
Change the number and you can make up to a million combinations.
How to design the perfect landing page for your
Side Project.
Did you know that the average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine
seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose
concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitized lifestyle
on the brain.
Hence the importance of being able to create a well structured and written landing page in
order to capture the maximum attention and learn as much as possible.
Nope, this is not going to be the most comprehensive summary of a great landing page
since this would be a book itself. This will show you some of the sometimes overlooked
pointers that will put you ahead of the curve.
Here are 4 basic rules on how to improve the quality of your Landing page. Remember,
these are just the basics.
The 4 basic rules of a Landing Page
1. Your USP / one liner
The biggest struggle I see a lot of companies make before they hit Product Market Fit and
(also after) is finding Product Language Fit. In other words: ‘How do you explain in one
sentence what benefit the user will receive and what kind of language they speak” (which is
also different depending on the segment you are targeting).
Remember, we have now a shorter attention span of a goldfish.
The best way to figure out how to get the one liner to work is to send your early prototype to
people you think would use your Side Project and ask them the following question:
‘How would you describe this tool/website to your friends?‘
You might be surprised what responses you’ll get.
For example, when we started out with our design sprint for the ECB (European Central
Bank), our goal was to figure out a business case where instant payments could flourish in
less than 4 days.
Based on the data we had gathered beforehand and feedback of our initial MVP, we figured
out the best business case was tailored to people who needed to prepay large amounts and
were afraid that they would have to spend ages asking back the money from their friends or
strangers.
In case you were wondering, the blue dots on the screen is our market research data, placed
in a nice jacket by our data scientist helping us to build better arguments in order to better
understand what to build. It’s not some kind of decease we found in somebody's brain.
Based on the initial feedback, Yuomi (You-owe-me) was born, the fastest way to get your
money back.
Which brings me to my second point
2. Your baseline describing the USP
Your USP line should grab the attention of your user to continue reading, your base line
should explain exactly what problem you are solving and why they should opt-in.
In other words, it should answer the question: ‘How are you solving my problem exactly?’.
In the case of Yuomi the baseline was: ‘Purchase concert tickets, refund trips and pay
restaurant bills as a group’.
This tagline was based on our initial data since this is where we discovered the biggest pain
points were.
3. Your Call To Action
To design your CTA properly, take the following factors into consideration:
Position
This one is pretty obvious, but somehow most companies haven’t understood that your CTA
should be above the fold (meaning people shouldn’t scroll to see it).
Color
When deciding the color scheme of your landing page make sure to design the CTA button
in a contrasting color. This will help the button “pop” off the page and be found easily by
visitors.
Copy
Similar to the overall copy of a targeted page, the CTA button copy needs to be
customer-centric. This is because CTA buttons are meant to inspire action and the copy that
should be action-oriented. Explain exactly what will happen when they click that button.
4. Supporting image
All too often I see people placing images that have nothing to do with what you are selling.
The image must be relevant and empathetic so that it explains what your product does and
also connects with your visitors emotionally, not another video your designer felt was
awesome.
If it doesn’t support the message you are trying to enforce, it shouldn’t be there.
Remember, the goldish.
When you have a look at the Landing page of Youmi, you’ll notice we are taking the
customer on a journey that makes them dream about sending reminders to their friends to
pay them with a click of a button.
Which also came from the initial feedback round.
Consider these 4 psychology tricks in your next Landing Page

Psychology plays an integral role in the success of your marketing materials, which includes
your landing pages. This is because your visitors are human beings who make irrational
choices based on their cognitive biases and past experiences.
1. The principal of Social Proof
Imagine you are walking on the street, and suddenly everybody is looking up.
What do you do?
99% sure you might look up as well.
This is the power of social proof.
The principle of social proof dictates that human beings tend to do things that they see other
people (like themselves) doing. This is where the herd mentality comes from.
Adding social proof is easy. You just add testimonials, just as we did below.
Now you might be thinking.
I haven’t got people who have used my product yet.
Good point, we didn’t either.
So all we did it was add our team as a testimonial to describe how it helped them.
Nick loved it, like for real.
2. The Principle of Scarcity
If you have never visited the site Appsumo, you should spend some time checking it out right
now.
In short, they allow you to buy upcoming saas software for a fraction of a price.
Here is the catch, it’s only available for a certain amount of time.
They do a fantastic job activating some of these psychology principles.
Notice how they trigger the principle of scarcity?
Just 4 days left to buy yourself a deal worth 500€ for a great price of just 49$.
Which brings us to our next principal.
3. The power of asking high favors to ask your real favor.
Yes, I pretty made these words up, but the principal still counts.
Actually it’s called the door-in-the-face technique, but who cares anyways.
The principle is quite simple yet super effective.
Sales people start with asking a bigger favor (buy this software for a lifetime at 500$/year),
which you’ll probably end up a saying no.
The moment you say no, the salesperson would ask, what about the same deal at 49$ for a
lifetime?
The price now looks like a bargain compared to the bigger price, right?
Give people a price to compare with. We all like discounts, that’s why Black Friday is such a
big deal.
Here is how I showed a homeless guy in Antwerp to use this technique right now.
4. The principal of authority
This is the idea that people follow the lead of credible, knowledgeable experts.
It’s the same principle that explains why people buy from people the know, like and trust.
By placing authoritative people of well-known brands on your page, you are able to increase
the chances that people will trust your Side Project since they associate it with the people of
brands on your page.
The brain goes a little bit like this: ‘If they felt it was good for them, it should be good enough
for me’.
This principle is a little tricky since brands and especially people are not always keen to
having their face on something which is just a prototype. This one is up to you. :)
Install these analytics before launching your side
project to optimize your feedback loop.
The biggest mistake you can make before launching your Side Project is not installing the
right analytics.
The reason is simple.
What people say what they would do, and what they actually do are most of the time not the
same.
The key is to have not only qualitative but also quantitative data to help you figure out
puzzles you might run into.
Remember, these analytics can vary depending on your Side Project.
1. Google Tag Manager
How would you feel if you were slicing bread in the morning and just before taking your first
bite, your kids or partner would ask to cut another slice?
You would cut a slice.
But what if this would happen every single time you would want to take your first bite?
You would probably do two things:
1. Tell them to cut their own slices.

2. Tell them to tell you how many slices they want so you can cut them in advance.
This is exactly the feeling your developer will have when they are being asked to install yet
another code to track or test another program.
Before launching anything, make sure to install the google tag manager code which will
allow you to place code on your website without the need of heading over to your developer.
Let the poor guy or girl eat his first slice of bread. :)
2. Google Analytics
You have now installed the Google Tag Manager code, awesome!
Now you can start adding you own code.
Adding Google Analytics code is pretty obvious to understand where your visitors are
coming from and how much time they spend doing things on your website.
Feel free to take it a little step further by adding goals you want them to perform.
3. Heap Analytics
Google Analytics is great to tell you exactly where people are coming from, but is having a
little trouble explaining what exact events they have been performing, unless you spend
hours of time installing tags and triggers with Google Tag Manager.
Install heaps analytics code and it will track anything anybody does forever, you can use this
guide to help you out with the implementation.
4. Hotjar
See how visitors are really using your website, collect user feedback and turn more visitors
into customers, that’s pretty much how to summarize Hotjar.
It’s a all in one tool to understand how your customers perceive your website with their set of
eyes.
5. Sumo
The perfect free tool to start building your email list, welcome people to your Side Project or
help people share your creation. The set-up is as simple as me saying ‘apple-pie’.
6. Facebook Pixel
What a shame if you couldn’t retarget the people testing your product in an early stage to
test your new improved version, right?
Frequently Asked questions about Side Projects
1. What’s the difference between side projects and Side

Project Marketing?
Side projects is what people work on the side while working their 9 to 5, hoping to make a
buck one day.
Side Project Marketing is with the specific goal to be free and upsell them later-on with your
real product or service. These 2 criterias should always be there:
- The tool must be small in size (usually 1–2 pages).

- Because your side project will be small in scope, you want to reduce the need for
maintenance and updates.
- It shouldn’t be a startup by its own, although this has happened before.
2. Aren’t Side Projects going to distract us from our main

product? Should we stop blogging and advertising?
When consulting companies in their growth phase I always see the same story.
Lot’s of content out there, nobody actually reading it.
They are playing the numbers game because somebody once told them that inbound is a
great way to attract valuable leads.
And it does, if you are able to deliver high quality content people actually want to read.
But most people forget that content marketing is just like the liquor business.
Coca cola isn’t only successful because of its addictive drink (great content), it’s a leading
company because they have found a great distribution system to get their drinks to the right
people at the right time.
When I am thirsty, sitting in my favorite bar somewhere in Belgium.
Distribution is king when it comes to content.
I am not saying that Side Projects are the cure all solution to not blog or advertise anymore.
They should be part of your overall strategy to mix up your Marketing Mix.
3. How do you I explain Side Projects to my peers?
Great question!
I always explain it with a piece of cheese in the supermarket.
When walking into a supermarket, you might have encountered a person handing over a
little piece of cheese for free.
Now, it’s good to understand that this piece of cheese wasn’t given to you because of your
beautiful eyes.
Marketers and salespeople know that giving real value upfront is key to convincing
customers later-on.
In this case, it’s a piece of cheese to convince you to buy the bigger cheese later-on.
Side Projects are the cheeses in the digital world.
You give them a little taste of what you got to convince them later-on with your product or
service.
But remember, the piece you are giving away for free should be related to your core product.
Giving away cheese to upsell people for cheesecake, does not work.
4. Can we use something we’ve already built?
The best way to predict the future is by looking at the past. You don’t have to reinvent the
wheel if you already have something which is validated.
In fact, the best Side Projects were built on top of existing content. Try having a look at your
Google Analytics and try to figure out how you could build something of more value out of
your best performing blog.
5. Should my Side Project always be free?
Yes and no.
Yes if you want to makes sure it’s shared with maximal impact. Remember the power of free
discussed in the first chapters?
No, if you feel it would bump up the quality of your Marketing Qualified Leads.
You’ll need to test and validate this with your market.
THE DEFINITIVE
GUIDE ON
HOW TO
CREATE HIGH-
CONVERSION
B2B SALES
FUNNELS
(TEMPLATES +
2
EXAMPLES)
BY
ANDREI ZINKEVICH
The Definitive Guide on how to create
high-conversion B2B sales funnels
(templates + examples)
by Andrei Zinkevich
When it comes to the B2B sales funnel, you’ve probably heard the sad statistics from
Hubspot: more than 60% of companies struggle to generate quality leads and are
dissatisfied with their level of revenue.
Why?
Here are some reasons:
● The cost of customer acquisition is growing every year

● Old outbound lead-generation tactics like cold-calling and PPC generate fewer leads
● Sales cycle are longer
But the key reason is a weak sales funnel, which leads to an unstable, unpredictable sales
quota.
You increase your marketing budget and generate more leads, but your close ratio drops.
You hire copywriting gurus to improve your sales pages and offers, but you only hear “We’ll
discuss it and call you later.” You know this means “never.”
You invest in new expensive SaaS and coaching programs, but the ROI is miserable.
Did you see your company in any of these points?
If you do, you’re in the right place!
This guide will help you to build a high-converting B2B sales funnel so you can have a stable
flow of high quality, sales-ready B2B leads, improve your close ratio and increase sales.
https://getleado.com/ 1
Here’s what you’ll learn in each chapter:
● In the first chapter, you’ll learn what is b2b sales funnel, how it works and the history.
● In the second chapter, I’ll show you some of the traditional mistakes that companies
make while creating the b2b sales funnel. You’ll learn about the microstages your
sales funnel must consist of (not AIDA, like everybody says), marketing qualification,
lead nurturing and lead scoring, and why these are very important elements in your
marketing.
● I’ll show you how to create a high-conversion sales funnel, step by step.
● You’ll learn which instruments are necessary for management of a sales funnel. As
well, I’ll share my private toolbox with you.
● In this chapter, I’ll reveal key b2b sales funnel metrics you must check on a regular
basis to increase conversions and close more deals.
Content Breakdown
Chapter 1 - Introduction to the B2B sales funnel 2
Chapter 2 - Stages of sales funnel 5

Pipeline mistakes 6
What is lead nurturing 9
Progressive profiling 11
Sales qualification 12
Lead scoring 12
Sales qualification 13
Chapter 3 - Creating a sales funnel 14
Chapter 4 - Sales pipeline management 18

Web forms 18
Pipeline and contact management 21
Lead nurturing 22
Lead scoring 22
Chapter 5 - KPI and optimization 23
Chapter 1 - Introduction to the B2B sales funnel
What are B2B sales funnel?
When it comes to marketing, every entrepreneur has heard about it. It’s an important part of
marketing process which, in general, tells you how many leads become customers or how
many deals you close.
This is true.
But there is one thing you must know: the sales funnel is just a part of the lead-generation
process and the customer’s journey. But it’s not exactly a customer’s journey.
Surprised?
Actually, lead generation consists of:
● Marketing funnel which is responsible for driving and qualifying targeted leads
● Sales funnel which is responsible for lead nurturing and closing deals
● Post-sales funnel, which is responsible for educating buyers and shows the value of
your product or service while tracking customer satisfaction.
● Referrals funnel, which is responsible for generating referrals and word-of-mouth
campaigns
As you see, this is a contrast to the AIDA model, which is traditionally used to describe the
lead generation process.
But why do we call them funnels?
Let’s dive into some history.
Who invented sales?
In 1898, Elias St. Elmo Lewis created the Purchase Funnel, which is better known as AIDA.
The purpose of the purchase funnel was to describe a sales process that consisted of 4
steps:
Awareness - A lead becomes aware of your product via advertising or word-of-mouth, etc.
Interest - If it seems to be relevant and useful to the lead, he expresses interest in the
product.
Desire - this is the stage when the lead understands all the benefits of the product and
wants to buy it
Action – The lead actually buys the product.
Elias St. Elmo Lewis used the funnel metaphor to visualize these 4 steps. Wide at the top,
narrow at the bottom, it shows how many leads are dropped at each stage.
This became a key marketing instrument for almost a century. But times have changed.
Nowadays there is much more competition, the sales cycle is longer and the most important
part – which AIDA misses – not all leads are equal, and not all leads are sales-ready!
Attracting unqualified and non-targeted leads will only cause you to spend your marketing
budget ineffectively. Your sales cycle and customer acquisition cost will increase, too.
So is the sales funnel dead?
Actually, it is dead in terms of its old definition as AIDA when it comes to the B2B sphere and
its associated complex and costly services like consulting, insurance, taxes, audit and
assurance, expensive SaaS, etc.
But it still works in the B2C sphere (for example, e-shops or photography) where standard
products or services are sold and the sales cycle is less than 30 days.
Let’s return to the purpose of the b2b sales funnel.
The main purpose is to divide the sales process into microstages, from the marketing
qualification (we’ll speak about this later) through to signing a contract.
Such separation will help you overcome objections, describe the benefits of your product or
service and reduce the sales cycle (and avoid “we’ll think about it and call you later”).
This is very important because you can see which microstage you are losing leads, and
you’ll be able to prepare necessary content or counter-arguments.
As a result, your sales team will communicate only with sales-ready leads who know exactly
why they should choose your company and how they’ll benefit from your product.
How do the sales funnel work?
The typical B2B sales funnel can be described as a process of educating the lead and
overcoming his objections, in smooth-moving microstages.
As mentioned earlier, the main purpose of such a sales funnel is to prepare sales-ready
leads for the sales team.
We’ll speak more about this in Chapter 2.
If you enjoy this post, make sure to subscribe for more right here and get access to
100+ marketing guides.
Chapter 2 - Stages of sales funnel
So let’s get back to the sales funnel as a part of the customer’s journey.
The customer journey refers to the way your customer moves from awareness about his
problem to refer your company or product to his friends.
The lead enters the sales funnel when he is marketing-qualified.
This means we know exactly what the lead matches our customer avatar. We know which
segment he belongs to and what problem he has. And most importantly - which product or
service will best meet his needs.
Next, lead nurturing comes into the game.
With lead nurturing, we must show all benefits of our product, educate the lead about
different solutions to his problem, and give him options so he can choose the best one.
As well, we should work on objections and doubts to get more sales-ready leads at the end
of the lead-nurturing campaign.
There are also 3 more important elements of the sales funnel process:
● Progressive profiling
● Lead scoring
● Sales qualification.
I’ll reveal them a bit later when I describe the sales funnel stages.
Pipeline mistakes
Before considering the sales funnel stages, I just want to show you the most common
mistakes companies make when architecting a sales funnel.
The biggest one is using AIDA as a universal method for developing the sales funnel.
Here’s how the folks from Mailmunch describe this model.
Awareness – This is a stage when the prospect becomes aware of his problem or need and
seeks possible ways to solve it.
He can find your ad, blog post or social media post, and visit your website for the first time.
Interest – This is a stage when the prospect clearly understands his problem and looks for
solutions.
This is when he might download your white paper, subscribe to a newsletter, etc. He
expresses interest in your products.
Decision – At this stage, the prospect is choosing between solutions and is sales-ready.
He can book a free consultation with you, sign up for trial, or download a white paper with
product comparisons.
Action – At this stage, the prospect becomes a customer, signs a contract with you and
transfers money to your bank account.
What’s wrong with this model?
On a global scale, AIDA is still functioning, but this is a bad model for creating a b2b sales
funnel.
The model doesn’t show:
● Why and where exactly we lost a prospect

● Which channel generated non-targeted traffic
● Precisely which part of the sales funnel must be fixed.
As well, AIDA relies on an old, outbound process, means we should drive leads to the sales
team immediately at the decision stage.
What’s wrong with this?
Here are some stats from Hubspot:
● 63% of people requesting information on your company will not purchase for at least
three months – and 20% will take more than 12 months to buy.
● 50% of leads are qualified, but not yet ready to buy.
● 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before the buyer talks to sales.
● 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those
leads will be qualified
● Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales.
● 91% of customers say they’d give referrals. Only 11% of salespeople ask for
referrals. But 83% of consumers are comfortable making a referral after a positive
experience.
This means if you’ll still use the old AIDA model for your sales funnel, you’ll lose almost 75%
of your leads.
Did you notice the last fact about referrals?
This is another common mistake made when companies architect their customer’s journey.
AIDA shows that the last stage in your funnel is Action when a lead signs a contract with
you. But in the customer’s journey, we also have 2 additional funnels: the Post-sales funnel
and the Referrals funnel.
It’s totally true that an unsatisfied customer will never make a referral and never buy from
you again.
So, exactly after sales, we should track customer satisfaction, educate and help them with
product implementation – and only after this move a customer to the Referral funnel.
The next mistake is a “rid” leads.
By default, AIDA means that we should contact every lead. So if a marketing campaign
generated leads at a suitable rate, it counts as effective.
Correct?
No!
Not all leads are equal.
If the lead doesn’t fit your customer avatar (that means he will never buy from you), your
marketing campaign is unsuccessful, and you should stop it.
If you don’t, your company will definitely join the famous “marketing sales war” when sales
folks spend time on unqualified leads. Meanwhile, the marketers will retort that the sales
team has low sales skills and doesn’t know how to sell.
The last mistake is skipping lead nurturing and lead scoring.
As I wrote earlier, the old outbound process drives leads to the sales team. But not all leads
are sales-ready.
As you saw in the Hubspot statistics, 83% of leads aren’t ready to negotiate with you in the
first 3 months. That means they need more information about your company and products.
They need to “sell themselves” on your company as a safe choice and have a clear vision of
the benefits they’ll get.
That’s why avoiding lead nurturing and lead scoring leads to low close-deal ratio. But we’ll
speak more about this in the next chapters.
So, what are sales funnel stages?
The first stage of the sales funnel is lead nurturing.
When we know for sure that a lead fits our customer avatar and we can put him into the
appropriate segment, lead nurturing starts.
What is lead nurturing

Marketo describes it as the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of
the sales funnel and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and
communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information
and answers they need.
Lead nurturing is important because the major part of your leads aren’t sales-ready. They
need more information about your product, and they have a lot of questions and objections
which must be overcome before you drive the lead to the sales team.
Just look at these facts, which underscore the importance of lead nurturing:
● On average, 50% of the leads in every market are not yet ready to buy (Marketo).
● Almost 80% of new leads never become sales (MarketingSherpa).
● Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a
33% lower cost (Marketo).
● Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas
Group).
So, in short, the main goals of lead nurturing are to:
● Demonstrate the benefits of your product

● Overcome objections
● Build a relationship and credibility
● Gather additional information about the lead for sales qualification
● Drive the lead through the microstages of the sales funnel to sales qualification.
But there is still one question you’ll be asking: how will I know exactly which segment I
should put my lead into?
There are so many criteria I must know for proper segmentation, and I can’t apply them
during marketing qualification because nobody will fill out the long lead-generation forms.
That’s true. Nobody will fill in this web form.
Your lead-generation forms shouldn’t be very long because your conversions will be nearly
0%. Instead, you should choose 2-4 criteria which will help you to segment a lead and
qualify him.
Other qualification work will be done by progressive profiling.
Progressive profiling
Progressive profiling is a process of gathering information about a lead during a lead-
nurturing campaign for future sales qualification.
Here is an example from Unbounce.
1. A prospect visits your website and downloads a whitepaper.
They submit their name, email address and company name through your web form.
2. After receiving a few drip emails, the same person clicks a CTA to register for a webinar.
A dynamic web form, for now, asks for their industry, company size and a custom question
about their software needs. Dynamic web forms present unique fields to each prospect
based on the information you already have (or don’t have) in your database.
3. Not long after the webinar, the lead requests a video demo of your product.
You now ask them to specify a budget range and implementation time frame.
Sales qualification
As I mentioned, the last goal of lead nurturing is to drive qualified, sales-ready leads to the
sales team.
A question you might have: how will we know that the lead is hot and sales-ready?
To know this, you should apply lead scoring to your lead-nurturing campaigns.
Lead scoring is a process of applying values from 0 to 100 to a lead’s data and behavior.
That means you can set up a level (e.g., 80 points) that indicates when the lead is hot and
sales-ready.
Lead scoring
How does lead scoring actually work?
The first step is marketing qualification. The more the lead fits our customer avatar, the more
points he receives in the beginning.
For example, we have 3 criteria for marketing qualification:

● Job title
● Company size
● Industry
Our ideal customer is the CEO of mid-sized (50-100) law firm.
For each criterion our lead matches our customer avatar, he gains a point.
The second step in lead scoring is deciding which of the lead’s actions should tell us about
his growing interest in our products.
Here are some examples:
● Visited a pricing page - 8 points

● Registered for the webinar - 10 points
● Clicked a link to a product-related article in an email - 3 points
But not all actions are equal and should be scored!
As well, you should also add negative scores to your lead-scoring process.
That means you take away points from actions that are non-targeted (e.g., unsubscribes
from newsletters, negative social media comments or no website activity for the last 3
months).
The last step in the lead-scoring process is to set up a level (e.g., 75 points) which will signal
that the lead is sales-ready and should be driven to sales qualification.
Sales qualification
The sales qualification is the last stage in the sales funnel.
At this stage, we gather additional information about the lead and decide which products, at
which price packages, we should offer them.
For this purpose, we can use discovery calls or events like webinars, demonstrations
applying BANT methodology (or others like ANUM, MEDDIC or CHAMPS, depending on
your business).
The BANT method helps us to identify whether:
● The lead is a decision-maker,

● he has a budget,
● he has a problem our product can solve,
● he needs the solution quickly.
If the lead fits the sales-qualification criteria, he is driven to the sales team, who will be
responsible for further negotiations and deal closure.
Chapter 3 - Creating a sales funnel
As we saw earlier, there are 2 global stages in the sales funnel: lead nurturing and sales
qualification. But these are just global definitions. As I said, both of these stages consist of
micro-stages.
Seem difficult, but I’ll simplify it for you in a minute.
The first thing we should discuss before creating a sales funnel is the sales cycle.
The sales cycle is the timeframe from marketing qualification to signing a contract. It can be
described as a formula: lead nurturing (days) + sales qualification (days) + sales process
(days) = sales cycle length.
This metric helps us to identify a timeframe for our lead-nurturing campaigns. You can easily
calculate it in your CRM (the date of “Sales qualified” stage – the date of lead creation).
Let’s look on example:
● The lead was marketing-qualified on 1.05.2017 and appeared in the MQL stage in
our CRM
● On 1.07.2017, the lead was moved into the sales qualification stage
● On 17.07.2017, the lead was moved to the negotiation stage
● On 1.08.2017, the deal was closed.
So what’s the length of our sales cycle?
92 days (1.08.2017 – 1.05.2017).
The lead nurturing process in our example lasted 2 months or 61 days (1.07.2017 –
1.05.2017).
But what exactly should we do during this 61 days? Which campaigns should we apply to
the lead-nurturing process?
That is what we exactly will talk about later!
The traditional approach to lead nurturing means that we should provide relevant information
at each stage of the buyer’s journey to the exact segment.
But how do we define these stages and decide which exactly information to send?
I use 2 tools for this purpose.
#1 - Divide the sales funnel into microstages
Microstages are actions that clients usually take during the period between their first contact
with your company and signing a contract.
I deliberately wrote clients, not leads! That means we should analyze our previous
experience with our current customers and check out these actions.
Here’s an example:
A prospect visited our website, downloaded the guide and is marketing qualified.
Then, after 5 days he asked for a consultation with a specialist from our company. After 2
weeks, he asked us to send him product specifications.
A week later, he asked us to send him some case studies.
Two weeks later, the lead proposed a meeting.
Every one of these actions is so called "microstages". Avoiding or skipping one of these
micro-stages (something sales and marketing teams regularly do) will lead to the loss of the
deal or cause the lead to change his mind: (“I’ll think about it and call you later”).
That’s why it’s so important to define micro-stages and drive leads smoothly from one
micro-stage to another.
But this is not the work of marketers only. This is exact time when the marketing and sales
teams must unite to reveal the micro-stages.
Now let’s get back to the definition and goals of lead nurturing.
The basic purpose of lead nurturing is to build relationships with leads and position your
company as the best choice with the help of relevant information.
That means we should work on the lead’s objections, demonstrate the benefits of our
products, and show how we can help solve the lead’s problem. That is the exact information
the lead requires to become sales-ready.
I call this the “Map of Information Necessity”, which is the second tool I promised to tell you
about.
#2 – The Map of Information Needs
The map of information needs is the tool I use to define which content, at which micro-stage,
I should send to leads.
Here is the process I use to craft it:
1. Sales team interview
I ask the sales team these questions about leads:
● What objections do leads usually have at each micro-stage?

● What questions do they ask about our products?
● What information do they require at each micro-stage?
2. Define the content to send
The second part of the process is a brainstorming session which again involves the sales
team. As marketers, we prepare our content propositions and discuss them with the sales
team.
Let’s return to our example.
The lead has downloaded the guide, and after 2 weeks has asked for the consultation. At the
consultation, he asked about the differences between our product and others and whether
this product fits his business.
What do these questions mean?
They mean that our lead doesn’t know or is not sure how he’ll benefit from our product. As
well, he doubts whether our product will fit his business.
Which information should we share with the lead?
Here are some ideas:
● Detailed comparisons between our product and our competitor’s, with objective
benefits and disadvantages
● A case study how our product was used in the lead’s market (remember, the lead
asked about it later, in our example)
● An article on how to solve the lead’s problem, including examples of our product.
The primary benefit from such an approach is sales-ready leads and a shorter sales cycle.
The second one is not so obvious, but it really works: it’s the prediction of the lead’s next
steps, his questions, and objections. This is a process we call “sending relevant information
and building relationships with the lead at each step of the customer’s journey.”
Want to increase pipeline and grow your B2B business?
This 60-second quiz will show you where exactly you leave money on the table and
what marketing strategies you should focus on to grow your B2B business.
Chapter 4 - Sales pipeline management

In previous chapters, we spoke about how to create a sales funnel. But the question is,
which tools should we use for pipeline management?
There are many tools you can use, but I prefer to simplify the process. If one tool can
manage a couple of business processes, I prefer it.
So when it comes to sales pipeline management, my favorite tool is Active Campaign.
Active Campaign has CRM and sales automation, marketing automation, email marketing
features and dozens of integrations. It is pure gold for pipeline management.
Of course, there are other advanced marketing and sales automation solutions like Hubspot,
Pardot, and InfusionSoft, but I prefer Active Campaign for its simplicity.
In this chapter, I’ll briefly review how you can manage your sales funnel using Active
Campaign.
Web forms
Some CRMs lack web forms or aren’t convenient (they don’t redirect URLs after form
submission, or lack custom fields). So you need to find another solution and integrate it with
CRM via Zapier.
With Active Campaign, you can build as many web forms as you need, set up custom
redirects after form submission, add tags (I forgot to tell you that Active Campaign is a
tag-based system) and add them to specific lead-nurturing campaigns.
Best of all, you can create pop-ups, floating bars, and floating boxes so you won’t need other
solutions for this.
If you want to modify this, you can also add a custom CSS.
As for custom fields, you can choose simple text field radio buttons, hidden fields, drop-down
menus, multi-selection lists, and date. This makes Active Campaign web forms perfect for
MQL and SQL.
All the collected data will be stored in the contact’s profile.
Pipeline and contact management
Pipeline management in Active Campaign is similar to that in modern CRMs. It has a
drag-and-drop feature, a live desk with everything opened, and you can upload/download
your list of contacts and the CRM and catch the social profiles of leads.
But most importantly, it has a built-in sales automation process (which some CRMs make
available only in high-cost packages) and it tracks the lead’s behavior (like website visits,
content downloaded, or links shared), which allows you to easily apply lead nurturing and
lead scoring in one place.
You can easily add tasks to the sales team based on the lead’s activity. As well, you can set
up an automated process for when the lead should be driven to the next microstage in your
sales funnel.
This awesome and valuable feature helps you minimize the human factor in the lead-
generation process.
Lead nurturing
Active Campaign makes it very easy to implement lead nurturing using a wide variety of
marketing automation features.
You have three core instruments: email marketing, website messages, and SMS.
Also, Active Campaign is a tag-based system, so you can add or remove tags for each lead
action. This helps you to create hyper-targeted segments and increase the ROI of every
marketing campaign you’re running.
Lead scoring
Active Campaign has a very simple and easy process to apply lead scoring.
You just add a score based on behavior or the lead’s characteristics in your automation.
Active Campaign immediately displays it in the lead’s profile.
All the data updates in real time, so your sales team will immediately be notified of every
sales-ready lead.
Chapter 5 - KPI and optimization

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Peter Drucker’s famous quote is especially true when it comes to sales-funnel analytics. A lot
of companies use this tool only for sales forecasting and managing their client database.
But if you do proper analytics, if you know how to optimize the conversions at each
micro-stage, you’ll get much more ROI from marketing campaigns and close more deals.
So what are the most important b2b sales funnel metrics?
As a rule of thumb, we know the formula for increasing sales:

Sales = customers (leads x close ratio) x deal size x transactions.
Based on this, Pipedrive CRM highlights four important metrics.
Pipeline metrics
1) Number of deals
This metric shows you what sales volume you can expect at the end of the month based on
previous statistics. As well, you can see how many marketing-qualified leads should enter
your sales volume to achieve the target sales quota.
2) The average size of a deal
This metric shows you the actual deal size. Based on it, you can decide to increase the deal
size by upselling if you aren’t able to generate new qualified leads this month.
3) Close ratio
The close ratio is the average percentage of deals won.
You can apply the close ratio at each microstage in the sales funnel, so you can optimize
them and increase your average close ratio.
More on this later.
4) Sales cycle
As we’ve already seen, the sales cycle is the average lifetime of a deal before it’s won. By
applying this metric, we can see how much time the lead spends at each micro-stage and
decide what we can do to shorten the period.
I always measure one more important metric – the number of sales-qualified leads.
5) Number of sales qualified leads
As B2B marketers, our main goal is to drive sales-ready leads to the sales team. So why
aren’t we measuring it in the sales funnel?
These 5 metrics will help us identify the gaps in our lead-nurturing campaigns and optimize
them for better conversions.
Let’s look at each metric and analyze how each of them can help us improve the sales
funnel.
Based on previous statistics, we can easily calculate how many marketing-qualified leads
(MQL) we should generate this month to achieve our sales quota.
This metric helps us analyze the effectiveness of each channel and instrument we’ve used
during our marketing campaigns:
● How many MQL have we generated from each channel?

● Which channels didn't generate the expected number of leads?
● Should we reallocate and reinvest the marketing budget in more effective channels
and instruments?
● The average size of a deal in your funnel
Another metric which influences the sales quota is the average deal size.
But how can we, as marketers, influence it?
Here are some ideas.
As a seller, you always have different solutions with different pricing packages. As a rule of
thumb, there are always three tiers: basic, standard and premium.
Basic tier means we sell only the solution the lead needs, at the lowest price.
Standard tier means our standard proposal.
Premium tier means higher prices, along with more advanced features added to the
proposal.
So why do some leads choose premium tiers and some don’t? Only because they have a
budget?
One reason why leads choose premium packages is that they know and understand all the
benefits and ROI from buying the premium solution.
That’s why it’s so important to demonstrate all the benefits of your premium solutions during
lead-nurturing campaigns.
Some leads will always ask you to send them more information about premium products,
which gives you a chance to increase the average size of a deal.
The close ratio is the most important metric for B2B marketers when it comes to sales funnel
optimization.
Usually, this metric is used only by the sales team to analyze the effectiveness of their work.
But as B2B marketers, we must also use this metric to analyze the close ratio of our
micro-stages.
How many leads went from one micro-stage to another?

Why will we benefit from this knowledge?
Let’s look at an example.
Imagine that you generate 100 marketing-qualified leads each month.
You have a basic lead-nurturing campaign, which only demonstrates the benefits of your
products and pushes leads to sales qualification.
Only 5 leads pass through sales qualification.
You decide to divide the sales funnel into microstages, and after few months figure out the
next situation.
We lost:
● 25% of leads after sending the guide
● 30% of leads after consultation
● 20% of leads after sending the specification
● 20% of leads after sending the case study.
This means that only 5% of your marketing-qualified leads passed through to sales
qualification.
Now we have a clear picture of what we should optimize.
Here are some ideas how to improve the sales funnel:
● Update your guide to include the clear benefits of your product, show results of your
clients and testimonials, add a USP.
● Update your case study with more details:
○ What problem did your customer have when he reached you?
○ What exactly did you do to solve the problem?
○ What results did you achieve at every step?
● Listen to consultations provided by your team. Check whether all their answers are
helpful to customers.
○ Do customers understand everything?
○ Does your specialist drive the lead to the next micro-stage by offering them
the next steps to take at the end of the consultation?
You can use the same approach to optimize your sales funnel.
P.S. To learn more about a B2B marketing, visit Facebook

community “B2B marketers&founders”.
THE ULTIMATE
GROWTH
ENGINE: STEP BY
STEP PROCESS
TO AUTOMATE
YOUR
OUTREACH ON
LINKEDIN /
TWITTER /
3
EMAIL.
BY
GUILLAUME
MOUBECHE
The Ultimate Growth Engine: step by
step processes to automate your
outreach on LinkedIn / Twitter / Email.
By Guillaume Moubeche
Hey guys, in this guide I'll be revealing THE best way to acquire B2B customers at scale and
with the best ROI possible.
I've worked for months with my friends at Phantombuster to automate all tasks just for you (and
for me as well ˿ ) so once you'll set up TUGE (The Ultimate Growth Engine) you'll be able to
get leads on autopilot.
Who is this guide for?

Founders, Growth Hackers, Head of Growth... working in B2B companies and who are looking
to get more leads on autopilot and skyrocket their conversion rate ӕ
https://lemlist.com/ 1
The problem
Growing a company is hard.
It's hard because time is your most valuable resource, but you need time to figure out what's
working or not.
With all the different marketing channels available, we have way too many options!
However, choosing the wrong channel could lead to a company failure.
I know... it can be scary... but don't worry... we have THE solution ̖
What's the solution?
You don't have to choose one channel!
And the great thing is that, nowadays, you can automate pretty much everything.
In this guide, you'll learn how to build your proper Growth Engine.
You'll be able to automate your acquisition and skyrocket your conversion rate using 3 different
channels:
● Twitter
● LinkedIn
● Email
Tools you'll need:

● Phantombuster
● lemlist
● Hunter
● LinkedIn Premium Account (not mandatory but recommended)
Building The Ultimate Growth Engine

I know... It's a bit of a catchy title... and you're probably wondering why is it so powerful?
Simply because being multi-channel add a ton of credibility to your product/service.
You've probably already read it, but the consumer decision journey has radically changed in the
past few years. Before the purchase decision happens, your prospect will go through many
different stages on different channels.
According to McKinsey
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-d
ecision-journey a buyer will go through 3 stages (Awareness, Familiarity, Consideration) before
the purchase decision.
With the ultimate growth engine (TUGE), we will highly influence those 3 stages making the
purchase decision easier.
Knowing that most people don't buy products from a company but from people, we will leverage
the power of social-selling to increase conversion rate and trust.
With the combination of social selling and emailing, your prospect will feel much closer to you
and hence will be much more willing to have a meeting/call with you.
Ok ok... I know... You must be like....
I could go a long way with the "WHY it works" but let's get our hands dirty now and get s***
done!
So, what's the plan?

Next, I promise, we will explain "HOW" to do the following steps automagically ("it's like
automatic and magical at the same time" - Elon Musk)
First, the plan:
Step 1: Define target
We will use LinkedIn to find our ideal customer profile (or target or persona.. Well.. you get it).
LinkedIn is THE best B2B social networks and it allows you to filter people based on criteria
such as Position, Location, Industry and so on... Which is perfect when looking for prospects.
Step 2: Get a list of prospects
We will scrape (extract) all that data to get a list of about 1000 prospects matching your criteria.
Step 3: Get social accounts and emails
With that list, we will then get emails, linkedin accounts and twitter handles.
Step 4: Warm up your audience
With that information we will visit each linkedIn profiles, follow each twitter accounts and send
personalized LinkedIn invitations.
By doing so, we will raise interest in our prospects’ minds.
Step 5: Build warm relationships at scale
While we are warming our audience up, we will send personalized emails and follow-ups using
all the actions done in Step 4 to build a warmer approach. To do so, we will use the best email
outreach automation platform ever created: lemlist (no bias here, I'm just the co-founder and
CEO ˿ )
Step 6: Get rich, do nothing
Ok ok... I made you wait long enough... You deserve to get the recipe of TUGE (The Ultimate
Growth Engine)...
Set up TUGE
Before setting-up, TUGE I'd like to warn you that you'll be using an extremely powerful tool
called Phantombuster. It *can look* scary if you're not a developer but don't worry it's pretty
easy to set up! You absolutely do not need to know how to code to use it (they just called their
different programs APIs to scare marketers ̪ )
Just follow the guide below and it's going to be alright ̏ - If you prefer video tutorial here it is :
https://www.useloom.com/share/9fb2ad3a53974458836aa514707b84ba
Let's start the set up:
STEP 1: GET A LIST OF TARGETS

1 - Create an account on Phantombuster.com (You have 30 day for free)
2- Go to: https://phantombuster.com/api-store/4832/linkedin-search-export
3- Click on "Use this API"
4- Click on Configure me!
You'll now see the 3 configuration dots blinking. Click on them.
5. Linkedin authentication
Because the script will manipulate LinkedIn for you, it needs to be logged on your LinkedIn
account. For that you just need to copy paste your session cookie in the script argument:
● Using Chrome, go to your LinkedIn homepage and open the inspector
● → Right click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect”
● → CMD+OPT+i on macOS
● or
● → F12 or CTRL+MAJ+i on Windows
● Locate the “Application” tab
● Select “Cookies” > “http://www.linkedin.com” on the left menu.
● Locate the “li_at” cookie.
● Copy what’s under “Value” (Double click on it then Ctrl+C) and paste it into your script
Argument)
// How to access your cookies with Firefox and Safari//
6. Choose which search results from LinkedIn you want to get
Go to LinkedIn and search for your Ideal Customer Profile using linkedin filters (eg: Job title =
Marketing // Location = United States // Industry = Marketing and Advertising)
Copy the URL of the search results directly in the search text field on Phantombuster.
7. Which degree of connections?
The three checkboxes allow you to target specific degrees of connections. For this specific test
we will enable the 2nd checkbox only for better results.
8. How many pages of results?
Define here the number of pages you want to bot to scrape.
Remember that the bot connects to your account in order to execute those scraping operations.
In order to not exceed LinkedIn daily user's requests, Phantombuster advises you to use this
API wisely.
See LinkedIn Commercial Use Limit.
Note: We noticed that LinkedIn will not return more than 100 result pages. In my case I just put
40 but you guys can whatever you want
Click on Launch & Enjoy!

It’s done! All that is left to do is to click on "launch" to try your script!
9. Use the result file

Once the bot has been executed you can use the result file. Right click and the file called
"result.csv" and click on copy link
STEP 2: Warm up your audience by visiting their LinkedIn Profile and adding them automatically
Whenever you visit someone's profile on LinkedIn, s/he will receive a notification saying that
you've been visiting one’s profile. The great thing is that it will raise interest in your prospect's
mind and that you'll also be able to use this automation to personalize your invite message ;-)
We will also do two more things at the same time:
1- We will add each person we’ve visited its LinkedIn profile automatically.
The great thing is that people don’t know that you did it automatically so you can even mention it
in your message request.
2- We will find the emails of each of those person using Hunter.io. This service allows you to
find anyone’s email using their first name, last name and company name. The great thing is that
Phantombuster has an integration with Hunter so we can use the Hunter API key directly.
So, let’s look at the practical part:

1. Go to https://phantombuster.com/api-store/4508/linkedin-network-booster and click on "Use
this API"
2. Click on “Configure me”
3. Paste your session cookie (same as in STEP 1)
4.Paste the link to the CSV file (Step 1 point 9)
5. Write an invitation message. Here is mine:
“Hey #firstName#,
I've checked your impressive profile and I would love to connect and exchange!
Best,
Guillaume”
#firstName# will be replaced automatically by the First Name of the person you’re sending the
message to.
6. Go to https://hunter.io/ - Create an account - and then go to https://hunter.io/api_keys in order

to copy your API key.
7. Paste your API key into Phantombuster
8. Click on settings
9. Click on "Repetitively" and select 6 times per day (This will allow you to visit 60 profiles per
day)
10. Click on Launch
For the STEP 3 & 4, it will depend if your target is on Twitter or not… If not, you can go directly
to STEP 5
Now that we’ve automated the process of visiting LinkedIn profiles, sending a personalized
connection request and get their email address automatically, we have two different channels to
set up. Twitter and sending emails.
Since both APIs are running 6 times per day automatically, you can only visit, add and find the
email of 60 profiles per day. Therefore, depending on the size of the list you’ve exported, you’ll
have to wait some days before you can do the next steps.
For example If you have a list of 400 people, wait for a week to set up the next APIs (60x7=420
→ >400).
STEP 3: Finding your target on Twitter

Some people are very active on Twitter and automating some of the Twitter actions can be
extremely valuable in order to not only raise the interest of your target in your product/service
but also to build warmer relationship. In essence, people like to feel important. If they see you
on every channel they will believe that you’ve spent time doing research on them and therefore
they will be more inclined to start talking to you.
The Google Sheet part:

This is a bit annoying but you’ll have to do some “excel” work. Don’t worry I’ll make it easy for
you.
1. Go to your API “LinkedIn Profile Scraper” and click on “Console”
2. Use the result file
Once the bot has been executed you can use the result file. Right click and the file called
"result.csv" and click on copy link
3. Open a google sheet - Take the first cell and write =IMPORTDATA(“Paste your URL”) and
click enter
4. Now you’re going to keep only the columns Full Name and Company Name
5. Name a new column “Query Twitter”. In that column take the first cell and write = then select
the first cell of “Full Name” write &” “& and select the first cell of Company Name (the formula
should look like this: =A2&" "&B2). That will give you a column with Full Name and Company
Name
6. Go to https://phantombuster.com/api-store/4485/twitter-profile-url-finder and click on “Use

This API”
7. Click on configure me
8. Copy and paste the link of your google spreadsheet and make sure that the link of your
spreadsheet is in “Public mode”
9. Copy the name of the column containing both Full name and company name directly into the
configuration panel of phantombuster
10. Click on launch
11. Once t
This API will allow you to find all the Twitter URLs profiles. Once we have the link to the Twitter
profiles we can now automate all the task regarding following up automatically those profiles
and like some of their tweets.
STEP 4: Second Touchpoint with your target

In this part we will use two different APIs to automate following of Twitter accounts and
engaging with their account. Now that we have a list of Twitter account, we will be able to do
that by setting up two new APIs
1. Go to https://phantombuster.com/api-store/4127/twitter-auto-follow
2. Click on “Use This API”
3. Click on “Configure me”
4. Open a new tab and go to your twitter account
5. Get your Twitter Session cookie
The Session Cookie you'll need to make this API work is called "auth_token",
Here's how you can get yours:
● Using Chrome, go to your Twitter homepage and open the inspector

● → Right click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect”
● → CMD+OPT+i on macOS
● or
● → F12 or CTRL+MAJ+i on Windows
● Locate the “Application” tab
● Select “Cookies” > “https://www.twitter.com” on the left menu.
● Locate the “auth_token” cookie.
● Copy what’s under “Value” (Double click on it then Ctrl+C) and paste it into your
script Argument)
// How to access your cookies with Edge, Firefox and Safari//
6. Configure repetitive launches
Twitter will not let anyone follow many people over a short period of time (if you force this, you
can be banned from Twitter).
That is why this API will only send up to 50 follow requests per launch.
To do so, go into "Settings" > "Launch" > "Repetitively". Select "Once per working hour".
Click on Launch & Enjoy!
It’s done! All that is left to do is to click on "launch" to try your script!
Now that you’ll start following each account automatically, your target will have notifications
about it and you’ll be able to raise the interest of your prospect. To go one step further we will
now start engaging with the content your target is posting on Twitter.
The process:
1. Go to https://phantombuster.com/api-store/5578/twitter-auto-liker and click on “Use this API”
2. Configure the API
3. You can use the same settings as the one above except that you should put “10” as the
number of profiles to like per launch - and 2 to the number of tweets you’d like to like
4. Configure repetitive launches as above (I think that by now you should be pretty familiar with
the PB APIs)
Well done! If you’ve made it so far you’re almost done with setting up TUGE!
So far, you’ve warmed up your audience on 2 different channels: LinkedIn & Twitter.
Your target is now aware of you and your company but in order to start building a business
relationship, email is still the best way to do this.
The good thing is that, thanks to all the automation steps we’ve done before, we can use that in
our email copy so it will feel more personal.
Also, to make emails looks more personal, we will use the best email automation platform ever
created: lemlist
Well… Ok, I might be a bit bias on that point because I’m the CEO of lemlist ˿ ˿ … but in
essence, lemlist allow you to put personalized images in your emails which ultimately increase
the reply rate of your emails.
For the next part, we will use the file containing the emails addresses thanks to STEP 2.
1. Go to https://phantombuster.com/apis and Click on the Console of the API “LinkedIn Network

Booster”
2. Click on “Files” and then Click on “Download” the csv file.
3. Go to https://lemlist.com/ and click on “Start Your Free Trial”
4. You can check the full tutorial on how to set up a campaign here
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHGnq4vhtJQ&t)
I know that a lot of people often struggle to find inspiration when writing email templates, that’s
why we decided to put inspirational templates directly when you create an email template in
lemlist so you’ll never run out of ideas.
However, here, I wanted to be fully transparent in this guide, so I’ll share my own exact
template.
Email 1:
Subject: thoughts on lemlist?
Bonjour {{firstName}},
I know these sales emails can be a little awkward so here's a quick video I’ve made to
break the ice:
Now that we're old friends, if you could get a higher reply rate to your email outreach what
would you say?
If the answer was something like “Hell yeah! I’d love that”, here are two very good reasons
why we should have a quick conversation about moving {{companyName}'s email outreach
to lemlist:
You build warmer relationship using lemlist. Why? Because you can generate personalized
images automatically directly in your emails (Well OK… Guilty! The image above was
generated automatically… but it’s pretty cool right? ̏ )
I promise to include another personalized picture in my next email.
Looking forward to filling up your inbox with personalized images,
Best,
Guillaume “
As you can see on the image, the tag {{firstName}} will be replaced by the First Name of the
person I’ll be reaching out to and the grey circle would be replaced by the logo of his
company (this is done automatically using lemlist)
Since you can also automate follow-ups with lemlist, you can now create templates for your
follow-ups. And then create a sequence.
My advice is to send a total of 3 to 5 emails.
Only stop sending emails if the person replied or clicked on the unsubscribe link.
Below I’m showing you an example of follow-up I’ve used:
Email 2:
Subject: Re: thoughts on lemlist?
Hi {{firstName}},
Any thoughts on that?
Guillaume
P.S. I was so excited to have a chat with you that I even put a t-shirt with {{companyName}}’s
logo and I just had to share:
“
Here again the grey rectangle will be replaced by the logo of the company of the person
we’re reaching out to (this is done automatically using lemlist).
I really hope that you enjoyed the guide and feel free to reach out anytime if you have any
other questions.
There are many different ways of using those tools combined together but I wanted to give
you a detailed use case that I’m sure will work for most of you!
Love ❤
HOW TO
START A
PODCAST
FOR A B2B
BRAND: A
26- STEP
4
PROCESS
BY
JAMES CABRARY
How to start a podcast for a B2B
brand: a 26- step process
by James Cabrary

So you’re wondering how to start a podcast, but guess what?
There’s another question you have to answer first.
Why should you start a podcast in the first place?
To help you answer that, consider a couple of facts:
23% of B2B marketers say that podcasts are a part of their content strategy. (For
comparison, 81% say the same for blogs.)
But according to Social Media Examiner, 26% of B2B marketers plan to increase
their podcasting activities, and 44% want to learn more about the podcasting medium.
So what does that mean?
If you’re a B2B marketer, it means you need to start a podcast soon…before podcasts
become as commonplace as blogging.
Why not wait until all your competitors have launched a podcast?
Because right now, you have the ability to start a podcast and stand out from the crowd.
Every B2B brand is looking to differentiate themselves from their competitors…and a
podcast is a perfect way to do that. At least, until everyone and their mom starts a
podcast.
If you’re worried about whether your buyers listen to podcasts—don’t be.
From 2012 to 2015, the number of total episode downloads more than doubled from 1.6
billion to 3.3 billion. Yep…I said billion, with a big fat “B.”
57 million Americans consume podcasts every month…that’s 21% of the entire
population. And if that number doesn’t impress you, consider this: That’s the same
percentage of Americans that use Twitter.
So yes, your buyers are listening to podcasts.
But if you’re reading this article, you’re probably already convinced that your brand
http://sweetfishmedia.com/ 1
needs to start a podcast. So the rest of this article will explain exactly what you need to
do.
By the end, you’ll know exactly how to start a podcast.
Ok, let’s jump into the 26-step process that will show you exactly how to start a podcast for
your B2B brand.
Content Breakdown
1) Define Your Most Profitable Buyer 3

Example 4
2) Name Your Podcast 4

1) Ideal buyer’s industry + ideal buyer’s role 5
2) Ideal buyer’s industry + generic role 5
3) How to + what your ideal buyer is responsible for doing 5
3) Design a Logo 5
4) Design Templates for Headline & Quote Images 5
5) Buy Equipment 7
6) Download Recording Software 7
7) Storage & Workflow Storage 7

Workflow 7
BOARDS —> LISTS —> CARDS 7
Boards 7
Lists 7
Cards 8
8) Purchase a Domain Name for the Show 8
9) Set Up Your Email Outreach 8
10) Set Up FollowUpThen 9
11) Plan and Record Episode 1 10

Below is a template that you can use for your episode 1 script: 10
12) Create a List of Generic Interview Questions 10
13) Determine a Gift Idea for Your Guests 11
14) Invite Existing Clients to Be Guests 11
15) Write and Record a Standard Intro & Outro 11
16) Write and Record an Ad Spot 11
17) Choose Background Music 12
18) Mix a Sample of the Intro/Outro, Ad, and Music 12
19) Write iTunes Copy for the Show 12

Below is a framework that we use when we create iTunes descriptions for our
clients: 12
20) Write an Initial 3-Part Cold Email Sequence 13
21) Sales Initiation 13
22) Create a “Guest Sales Initiation Tracking” Spreadsheet 14
23) Create a Podcast Page on Your Website 14
24) Set up Calendly 14
25) Set Up the Show in Libsyn, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio 15
What you need before you launch: 15
Hosting Your Podcast on Libsyn 15
Launching in iTunes 16
Launching in Stitcher 17
Launching in Google Play 17
Launching in TuneIn Radio 18
26) Ask Friends, Family, Colleagues, and Clients to Review the Podcast in iTunes 18
1) Define Your Most Profitable Buyer

I can’t emphasize enough how important this is…
If you’re like most B2B brands, you have several types of buyers.
But if you want your podcast to produce a positive ROI and actually add revenue to your
sales pipeline, then you need to first determine what your most profitable buyers look
like.
For example: If one of your products is purchased by IT departments and another product is
purchased by finance departments, you’ll need to understand which product & buying group
is most profitable for your organization.
Producing a podcast, whether you’re doing it in-house or outsourcing it to an agency like
ours, requires an investment. The time, money, and opportunity cost involved in producing a
podcast is substantial…but you’ll see a significant return on that investment if you brand the
show correctly.
In order to brand the show correctly, you have to be laser focused on using the podcast to
reach your most profitable buyers.
Your podcast should attract your most profitable buyers in two different ways:
1) Your most profitable buyers should be the guests that you’re featuring on the
podcast.
Most B2B marketers focus solely on getting their most profitable buyers to listen to their
show…but that’s the wrong way to think about your podcasting strategy.
Instead, B2B marketers should primarily focus on featuring their most profitable buyers as
guests on their podcast.
When a potential buyer is featured as a guest on your show, a genuine relationship is
created between the buyer and your brand…and that relationship is what will ultimately lead
to revenue.
With our show, B2B Growth, we’ve found that 65% of our podcast guests turn into sales
opportunities.
Instead of sitting back and hoping that your ideal buyers will listen to your podcast, you can
proactively reach out to your most profitable buyers and ask them to be a guest on the show.
In the podcast outreach we’ve done for ourselves and our clients (reaching out to senior
level executives), we’ve found that buyers will agree to being a guest on your show 55% of
the time.
55% is a baffling number, considering that the average cold email reply rate is 0.1%!
2) Your most profitable buyers should also be the ones listening to your podcast.
Even though your primary focus should be featuring your most profitable buyers as guests
on your show, you’ll still want to brand the podcast in a way that attracts your ideal buyers as
listeners.
This is typically done by creating very niche content with your podcast…content that will only
be attractive to your ideal buyers.
And if you’ve followed step #1 above (asking your ideal buyers to be guests on your
podcast), then the content on your show will inevitably be niche, relevant, and authoritative
to the exact audience that you want to reach (other ideal buyers).
Example
Think about it this way:
Who wants to listen to a podcast called “The Healthcare CFO”? I sure as heck don’t.
But a CFO in the healthcare space would listen to that podcast religiously…every single
week. Because a show like that is extremely rare, and hyper-relevant to them.
So if a healthcare CFO is your most profitable buyer, producing a podcast like this would be
a no-brainer.
2) Name Your Podcast
Once you’ve determined your most profitable buyer, naming your podcast is relatively
straightforward.
There’s no need to get cute or fancy with the name. So long as your most profitable buyers
instantly understand what your show is all about (after only hearing the name) then you’ve
named your podcast well.
Below are a few naming formats that we like to use when we’re branding shows for our
clients:
1) Ideal buyer’s industry + ideal buyer’s role
Example: The Healthcare CFO Show
2) Ideal buyer’s industry + generic role
Example: The Oil & Gas Executive
3) How to + what your ideal buyer is responsible for doing
Example: How to Sell Homes
3) Design a Logo
We’ve all heard the saying: “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover.”
But that’s ridiculous. All of us judge books by their covers…and the same is true with your
podcast.
When you email a prospect and ask them to be a guest on your podcast, the first thing they’ll
do is click the link to your show. If the logo looks like a 4th grader designed it, they’ll assume
the quality of the content is just as bad. They’ll either tell you no, or just ignore your email
altogether.
On the flip side, if the logo is well-designed, your prospect will probably listen to an episode.
If they like what they hear, they’ll want to be associated with your show and they’ll agree to
being a guest.
Long story short: don’t scrimp out on your podcast logo. It matters.
4) Design Templates for Headline & Quote Images

Once you have a logo, you should also design headline & quote images. See below for an
example.
You can use these in two ways:
1) As graphics to complement the written content – Podcast episodes are great for
repurposing into written content (blog posts, Medium articles, LinkedIn published posts, etc).
Use these graphics in your written content to keep readers engaged throughout the entire
piece.
2) On social media – These images are excellent for sharing through your social channels
as you promote each episode of your show.
Somewhere on the templates, it’s a good idea to have
● The URL of your podcast website.
● The episode number.
● The guest’s name.
● The guest’s headshot.
● Your show’s logo.
5) Buy Equipment
This is where so many people get tripped up.
They think they need to spend thousands of dollars building a state of the art sound studio,
and that’s just not the case.
Forbes ranked our show as the top podcast for B2B entrepreneurs, and we’ve recorded
every episode with this simple setup:
1. Blue Snowball Mic: $49
2. Pop filter: $6.99
3. Sound shield: $69.99
If you buy those 3 things, you’ll spend less than $140 and have everything you need to
record a high-quality podcast.
6) Download Recording Software

Now that you have all the equipment, you’ll need a way to actually record your interviews.
I use Skype for all of my interviews and since I’m a Mac user, I use eCamm recording
software to record each interview. eCamm is $29, one time…and it’s incredible.
If you’re using a PC, try Cast, Ringr, or Zencastr to record your interviews.
7) Storage & Workflow Storage

When you start a podcast, you’ll need a place to store all of the content that’s going to come
from your show.
We suggest creating separate folders in Google Drive to hold your audio recordings, show
notes, and blog posts.
Workflow
You’ll also need a tool to manage the workflow of each episode that you produce. Trello is
the perfect tool for this.
If you’ve never used Trello, this is a quick explanation of how it works:
BOARDS —> LISTS —> CARDS
Boards
First, you’ll create a Trello board. The name of your board should be the name of your
podcast.
Lists
Once you’ve created the board, you’ll need to create lists. These lists should represent each
stage of your podcast production workflow.
These are the seven lists that we create for our clients:
1. Potential Guests
2. Interview Scheduled
3. Ready for Audio/Writing/Images
4. Ready for Publishing
5. Scheduled to Publish
6. Published
7. Promoted
Cards
Now that your Trello lists have been created, you can start creating individual Trello cards to
represent each episode.
Inside these cards, you’ll be able to attach all of the headlines, blog posts, show notes, and
graphics associated with the episode. You’ll also be able to set the due date for when the
episode should go live.
Since you’ll need to build a team to produce your podcast, you’ll want to invite everyone on
the team to the Google Drive folder & Trello board that you created.
Once everyone on your podcast team has access to the Trello board, you can keep all
podcast-related communication inside each episode’s Trello card.
It’s really easy to @ mention a team member in a Trello card comment. These comments will
allow the entire podcast team to communicate with each other, without cluttering everyone’s
inbox.
8) Purchase a Domain Name for the Show

Next up, you’ll want to purchase a domain name for your podcast.
This domain should redirect to the page on your company’s website where your podcast will
live.
For example, our podcast domain is www.B2BGrowthShow.com. When you type that URL
into your browser, it redirects you to www.SweetFishMedia.com/b2b-growth.
Try to secure the exact name of your show as the domain name, but don’t lose sleep if it’s
not available. Just add “show” or “podcast” to the end of your podcast’s name, and purchase
that domain.
We use GoDaddy to purchase domain names, but there are a ton of providers that you can
use for this.
9) Set Up Your Email Outreach

If you want to secure decision makers at your target accounts to be a guest on your podcast,
email outreach is incredibly effective.
Mailshake allows you to send 1 to 1 emails in bulk. Then it automates all of your follow up if
people don’t reply.
What’s that mean? I’m glad you asked…
Tools like Drip, MailChimp, and Infusionsoft allow you to send 1 to many emails. This is how
lots of companies send their newsletters and lead nurturing activities.
But here’s the problem with using tools like Drip, MailChimp, and InfusionSoft for podcast
guest outreach: the recipient knows that you’re mass blasting the email.
They can see the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, which is a dead giveaway
that you’re asking lots of other people to be a guest on your show.
The other problem with most marketing automation tools is that they don’t have reply
detection. So you aren’t able to set up automatic follow up emails when someone doesn’t
reply to the previous email.
But tools like Mailshake are totally different. These tools send 1:1 emails directly from your
Gmail account (you can see everything that goes out in your Sent folder). When someone
doesn’t reply to your initial email after a certain number of days, the tool automatically sends
your follow up email…it’s beautiful.
So let’s say that your ideal customer is a mid-market professional services firm. The primary
decision maker for your service is a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), so you decide to start a
podcast called “The Finance Executive”.
You first start by identifying the exact mid-market professional service firms that you want to
work with, then you track down the email addresses for the CFOs at those companies.
You find 10-15 CFOs that you want to interview on your show, load their contact information
into a spreadsheet, then upload the .csv file into a tool like Mailshake.
Then you load in your initial guest outreach email into the tool. Make sure to keep this email
short and sweet, and ask a yes or no question as the call to action.
Note: In step 20, I share a few email templates for guest outreach.
Then you’ll set up your follow up sequence (for the guests that don’t reply to the initial email).
I typically send 2 follow up emails after my initial podcast guest request (usually 3 days
apart), and we usually see a 60% reply rate on this email sequence.
If you’re only sending one email to ask potential customers to be a guest on your show,
you’re missing out on an enormous amount of guests.
People are busy…especially the type of people that are decision makers for your product or
service. So you need to email them multiple times if you want to secure them as a guest on
your podcast.
10) Set Up FollowUpThen

Now that you’re set up with a tool like Mailshake, you’re all set for your initial guest outreach.
But what happens when a potential guest replies to one of your initial email sequence?
Once a guest replies, they will be kicked out of your automated follow up sequence…but
you’ll still need to determine a topic for the episode and get the interview scheduled.
All this back and forth requires more follow up. But this follow up is a bit more manual than
the follow up you used for your initial outreach.
We use FollowUpThen to solve this problem. FollowUpThen is a free tool where you
schedule follow-up reminders in the BCC field of your email (e.g.,
[email protected]). In that example, you’d get a notification from FollowUpThen in
your inbox four days later reminding you to follow up with that guest.
Time-saving hack: After setting up your FollowUpThen account, send a blank email to
[email protected]. You’ll get an automated reply as soon as you send the
email. Click “Reply All”, then “Send” on the automated reply email, and Gmail will remember
the most common follow up email addresses (e.g., 1day, 1week, 2months).
Head over to “Settings” inside your FollowUpThen account, and turn off all notifications. The
default is set to send you an email every time you place a follow up in an email, and trust
me: it gets really annoying, really fast.
11) Plan and Record Episode 1

Now that your email outreach is in order, you need to get ready for Episode 1.
With episode 1, we suggest recording a short, stand-alone episode explaining what your
audience can expect from the show.
Take some time to write out a rough script for the first episode. You don’t have to read from
the script when you record, but it’s comforting to have a framework laid out in front of you. Of
course, you can re-record as many times as necessary, so there’s no real pressure.
Below is a template that you can use for your episode 1 script:
Welcome to the very first episode of <name of show>.
My name is <first name, last name>, and today I’ll be explaining what you can expect from
this podcast.
But before we jump into that, I’ll start by explaining why our company, <name of company>,
decided to start this podcast.
<explain why you wanted to start a podcast>
So what can you expect to hear when you listen to each episode?
<explain what listeners can expect: approximate length of each episode, types of guests
you’ll be featuring on the show, topics you plan to cover, etc>
If you have any ideas for possible episode topics that we should cover on the show, or you
know someone that would be a perfect guest, make sure to connect with me via email at
<your email address>. The more input we get from listeners, the better this podcast is going
to be.
Thank you so much for listening to episode 1 of <podcast name>. Make sure to subscribe to
the show in iTunes or your favorite podcast player.
Until next time.
12) Create a List of Generic Interview Questions

Ideally, you’ll have worked out a specific topic and talking points with each of your guests
before it’s time to record your interview.
When you have this outline in place before the interview, your conversation with the guest
will flow incredibly well, and the episode will be hyper-focused on the topic that your guest
chose.
However, before you ever launch your show, you should also take the time to write up a list
of generic questions.
The reality is, people are different, and some guests will be less organized than others. They
may choose a time on your calendar then fail to respond when you follow up about the topic.
In that case, it’s good to have generic questions to fall back on. These questions will vary
depending on the focus of your podcast, but here are some examples to get you started:
● Why is <topic> so important for <audience> to understand?
● Where do you see people struggling the most with <topic>?
● If our listeners could only do one thing after listening to this interview, what would you
want them to do?
Note: The secret to a great interview is nailing the pre-interview. Check out this article to
learn how to do just that.
13) Determine a Gift Idea for Your Guests

It’s a great idea to send each of your guests a gift after you record their interview.
First, it’s a genuine thank you to someone who is probably very busy, yet took the time to
join you on your podcast.
Two, it’s one more point of engagement as you build this new relationship with someone that
could potentially become one of your customers.
We’ve found that books are a great thank you gift.
You can also use a tool like Alyce if you want to send a more personalized gift to each guest.
14) Invite Existing Clients to Be Guests

You’ll find that getting responses on cold emails to prospective guests is far more effective
when your podcast is live and already has a few episodes under its belt.
So it’s a good idea to ask a few of your existing clients to join you as the first guests on your
new podcast. These early episodes establish a base of quality content.
We recommend reaching out to 7-10 existing clients or relationships that you believe will
provide excellent content on the show.
15) Write and Record a Standard Intro & Outro

Write out a short script for the show’s intro. It should be short and sweet. Your goal here is to
explain the value of the show to the listener in a few sentences.
Do the same for the show’s outro. In the outro, thank the audience for listening and give
them a preferred call to action (subscribe to the show, reach out via email, etc.).
Then record both of these short scripts. The good news is that you’ll only have to record
them once, then you can apply them to every single episode.
You can record these scripts yourself, you can use freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork to record
your scripts, or you find someone on your team that has a great voice to do it.
16) Write and Record an Ad Spot

Don’t be afraid to put a 15-second ad for your brand in each episode.
Succinctly write out the core value proposition of your company, then end the ad spot by
sending the listener to your website or preferred page.
Record the ad spot (preferably with a different voice than you used for the intro and outro
scripts), and place it in every episode.
We suggest putting the ad the very beginning of each episode, before the intro. You can also
use the ad to break up the content in the middle of each episode.
17) Choose Background Music

To give your show a professional feel, you’ll want to have music playing behind your intro
and outro.
There are thousands upon thousands of songs you can purchase or download for free, but
one site that our team likes to use is Pond5.com.
Here are a few tracks that we really like:
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/40501301/hip-hop-beat-back-life.html
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/47408769/hip-hop-and-rock-cinematic-trailer-action
-driving-energetic.html
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/53117351/inspiring-hip-hop.html (start at :10 mark)
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/45734755/hip-hop-rap-beat-piano-and-strings.html
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/33625795/hip-hop-agressive-instrumental.html
(start around the 8 second mark)
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/61492818/energetic-upbeat-modern-trap-hip-hop-d
rum-beat.html
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/47469594/hip-hop-light-beat.html
● https://www.pond5.com/stock-music/22569922/hard-hip-hop-dirty-rap-swag-playful-imp
ulse-drive-push-actio.html
Note: If you find awesome free music to use, wonderful. But we’ve found that the quality of
paid audio tends to be way better than anything you’ll find for free.
18) Mix a Sample of the Intro/Outro, Ad, and Music

Use a freelance audio engineer and get two audio files: one with the ad and intro/music and
one with the outro/music.
You might need to go back and forth with the audio engineer a few times to get the timing
and spacing the way you want it, but it will be well worth your time to get this right.
Once you have the samples you like, you can apply them to every interview that you record.
19) Write iTunes Copy for the Show

Write 2-3 paragraphs describing what your podcast is all about, who it’s for, and the topics
you’ll be covering.
Below is a framework that we use when we create iTunes descriptions for
our clients:
<Podcast name> is a podcast dedicated to helping <ideal client> <high level benefit from
listening to the podcast>. If you’re looking to overcome <specific challenge that your market
faces>, or learn best practices from <your niche> experts, this show is for you.
Each episode features an interview with an executive or thought leader, discussing topics
like: <list as many keywords as you can related to the content of your show>, and more.
In addition to the podcast description, you’ll need to write two additional pieces of copy:
1. A title with keywords – Example: The Finance Executive: Cash Forecasting | Tax
Planning | Leadership
2. Talent name – Example: J.J. Jingleheimer: Accountant | Corporate Finance Expert |
CFO of Schmitty Schmidt Company
The more keywords that you can place in your iTunes description, title, and talent
name…the better. Ranking for a specific term in the iTunes ecosystem can make a
significant impact on the organic reach of your podcast.
20) Write an Initial 3-Part Cold Email Sequence

Below is a framework for the 3-part email sequence that you’ll plug into Mailshake (or the
email automation tool of your choice):
1) The initial email should be very short, with a crystal clear call-to-action. Something like:
Hi {name},
I saw that you were a speaker at <industry conference> and thought you’d be a great guest
for our podcast (PodcastURL.com).
Any interest?
2) The first follow up email should be another simple message. Something like:
Hi {name},
I wanted to circle back about having you as a guest on our podcast (PodcastURL.com).
Up for it?
3) If they don’t respond to the first two emails, send a “breakup” email. In this message, you
make it clear that this will be your final time reaching out, but let them know you’re still very
much interested in interviewing them if they’re interested. It can look like this:
Hi {name},
I never heard back from you on my last two emails, so I’ll assume you aren’t interested in
being a guest on our podcast (PodcastURL.com).
If you change your mind down the road, let me know. I think our listeners could learn a lot
from you.
21) Sales Initiation

This is the part of podcasting where you’ll tangibly experience a return on your investment.
Once each episode is live, you’ll want to initiate a sales conversation with your guest.
These emails shouldn’t look like the spammy blasts that you and I get every day in our
inboxes. You know what I’m talking about…emails that have zero personalization and don’t
address any real challenges that we’re currently facing.
No, your sales initiation email following a podcast interview should be the exact opposite of
what I just explained. Because by this point, you’ve spent 15-30 minutes having a quality
conversation with this person!
If you’ve asked the right questions during your pre & post interview, you should be armed
with insights into what your guest’s challenges are, where they’ve seen success in the past,
and/or what their strategic objectives are for the next quarter or year.
When you’re writing sales initiation emails, I wouldn’t recommend using Mailshake. Instead
write customized emails that tie your company’s solutions to the specific context of your
guest. Then use FollowUpThen to send follow up emails if they don’t respond.
I interviewed hundreds of guests before I was confident enough to initiate sales
conversations…and it was a massive mistake. As soon as I started thoughtfully and carefully
engaging my podcast guests with our offering, our company’s revenue skyrocketed.
Don’t make the same mistake I made. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to do business with
the people that you feature as guests on your show.
If you (or someone from your team) doesn’t initiate the sales conversation with each guest,
you’ll be leaving quality sales opportunities on the table.
22) Create a “Guest Sales Initiation Tracking”

Spreadsheet
Create a spreadsheet where you track each guest that you’ve featured on your show, and
the results of your sales initiation efforts.
By tracking the number of podcasts guests that have turned into sales opportunities and
closed/won deals, you will be able to prove the value of your podcast to your board or
executive team.
23) Create a Podcast Page on Your Website

You’ll want to send podcast traffic to your brand’s website, so you’ll need to create a podcast
page on your site (e.g., “www.YourWebsite.com/podcast”).
You don’t need much on this page, but you’ll want to have these elements:
● Your podcast logo.
● A description of your podcast (same as your iTunes description).
● A subscribe button.
● A podcast player containing all episodes (we love Smart Podcast Player).
To see an example of a podcast page, you can check out this one.
24) Set up Calendly

You can go back and forth with your guests a million times to figure out a day/time to record
that’s convenient for you both. Or you can save tons of time and use a tool like Calendly.
Simply set up an account, create the fields for the information you want from the guest, then
send the guest your custom Calendly link.
Calendly syncs with your calendar, so the guest will be able to see what times throughout
the week are available and choose the time slot that works best for them. You’ll get a
notification as soon as they choose a time, and then you’re ready to roll.
Oh, and it’s free.
Note: When you’re setting up your Calendly page, make sure to create fields to collect your
guest’s Skype ID (make this a required field), the topic of the interview, and the guest’s
company website.
25) Set Up the Show in Libsyn, iTunes, Google

Play, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio
Finally, you’re ready to finally launch this puppy!
There’s a lot that goes into this part of the process, so we’re dedicating this entire section to
show you exactly what to do, step by step, to launch your podcast.
In the same way you need to use a web hosting service to host a website, you need to use a
podcast hosting service to host a podcast—or at least that’s the simplest way to host your
podcast.
This section is going to show you how to host your podcast using Libsyn, but there are lots
of other services that you can use (Blubrry is another great hosting provider).
This section will also show you how to submit your show to four directories: iTunes, Google
Play, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio.
What you need before you launch:

● Show logo (3,000 x 3,000 px, .png format)
● iTunes copy (You wrote this in step 19)
● Fully produced episode 1 with approved ad, intro, outro, and show music
Hosting Your Podcast on Libsyn

1) Set up Libsyn account at www.libsyn.com
1. Input your credit/debit card information

2. Document the username/email in your login/passwords doc (created in step 7)
3. Show slug: name of podcast
4. Choose a subscription plan. (We like Libsyn Classic 50 + stats – $7.00/month, since it
provides basic metrics on how many people are downloading your show.)
5. Log in to the new Libsyn account
2) Choose “Settings” on the top menu bar, then select “Edit Show Settings”
1. Show Title: Copy/paste from your iTunes copy
2. Show Description: Copy/paste from your iTunes copy
3. Website Address: Link to webpage that will host the show
4. Tags/ Keywords: Copy/paste the section of text from your iTunes copy
where you listed a series of potential topics. Use all of the words/phrases,
separated by commas.
5. Public Contact Email: Use your company email address
6. Default Show Feed: choose Libsyn Classic Feed
7. iTunes Store Web Address: Leave this blank
8. TuneIn Web Address: Leave this blank
9. Stitcher Web Address: Leave this blank
10. Copyright Notice: Leave this blank
11. Moderate Comments: Leave this blank
12. Artwork: Upload your 3000 x 3000 logo.
13. Verify that there are NO “&” symbols in ANY of the copy (make sure ALL
“&” symbols have been switched to “and”)
14. Click Save
3) Choose “Destinations” on the top menu bar, then select “Edit or View Existing”
1. Under “All Destinations,” next to “Libsyn Classic Feed,” click the “Edit” button
2. Choose the iTunes category that best fits the show for Category 1 (this will likely be
“Business > Management & Marketing” OR “Business > Careers”)
3. Subtitle: First sentence of your iTunes description
4. Summary: Entire iTunes description
5. Author: Copy/paste from your iTunes copy (Talent Name)
6. Owner Name: First & Last name of show host
7. Owner Email: Your email address
8. Verify that there are NO “&” symbols in ANY of the copy (make sure ALL “&” symbols
have been switched to “and”)
9. Click Save
4) Choose “Content” on the top menu bar, then select “Add New Episode”
1. Add media file (fully produced episode 1)

2. Title: The title you choose for episode 1 (e.g., “Why You Should Listen to
<Podcast Name>”)
3. Description: A short description of the episode.
4. Verify that there are NO “&” symbols in ANY of the copy (make sure ALL
“&” symbols have been switched to “and”)
5. Click Publish
Launching in iTunes
1. Open iTunes desktop app
2. Sign in (You must have an Apple ID)
3. Go to the “iTunes Store” tab, then click “Submit a Podcast” (or click this link)
4. In the top left corner of the screen, under “iTunes Connect,” click the “+” icon
5. Go back to your Libsyn tab, and click “Destinations,” then “Edit or View Existing”
6. Under “Quick Links,” copy the link under “Libsyn Classic Feed”
7. Go back to your iTunes tab and paste the URL into the URL field
8. Click Validate
9. Confirm that the information under Feed Preview, General Information, and Podcast
Episodes is correct
10. Click Submit
Launching in Stitcher
1. Click this link, then scroll to the bottom of the page
1. Provider Name: Name of your company, not the show host
2. Email: Your email
3. Password: For consistency, you can use the same password as you did
for Libsyn
2. Use the RSS URL from Libsyn
1. Choose “Destinations” on the top menu bar, then select “Edit or View
Existing”
2. Copy the RSS URL link
3. Use the information in your iTunes copy to fill out the name of the show and description
Launching in Google Play

1. Log in to the podcast’s (or any) gmail account
2. Click this link:https://play.google.com/music/podcasts/publish
1. Click “Publish”
3. Click the “Add a Podcast” button
1. Accept the terms of service
2. Use the RSS link from Libsyn
3. Use the information from your iTunes copy
4. Submit the show
Launching in TuneIn Radio

1. Click this link
2. Email: your email
3. Podcast title: From your iTunes copy
4. Host name: From your iTunes copy (Talent Name)
5. XML/RSS: From Libsyn
1. Choose “Destinations” on the top menu bar, then select “Edit or View
Existing”
2. Copy the RSS URL link
6. Your Logo: Use 3000 x 3000 px .png graphic (same image you used for Libsyn)
7. Banner image: You can either create a Twitter cover image for this field or just use the
same image you used for the artwork in Libsyn
8. Country: United States (if appropriate)
9. Language: English (if appropriate)
10. Website address: Podcast’s webpage
11. Genre(s): Most likely “Business”
12. Station Email: Your email
13. Phone number: Best contact number
14. Twitter: URL of Twitter account (if applicable)
15. Accept terms & submit
Several of the directories (iTunes for certain) will take a few days to review your submission.
Then you’ll receive an email once your podcast is approved.
And that’s it—now you know exactly how to start a podcast for your B2B brand!
26) Ask Friends, Family, Colleagues, and Clients

to Review the Podcast in iTunes
To make the best attempt to land on the iTunes’s “New & Noteworthy” list, you need 3
things:
1. Downloads
2. Quality artwork (another reason not to scrimp on your podcast logo)
3. Reviews
One of the best ways to get reviews is to send individual text messages (not group texts) to
friends, family, colleagues, and clients.
Come up with a template and send it one by one. The message can include the name of
your podcast, your intention to make “New & Noteworthy,” and a link to the show on iTunes.
You are now ready to launch.
THE
ULTIMATE
GUIDE TO
MESSENGER
MARKETING
& FACEBOOK
5
CHATBOTS
BY
ANGELO SORBELLO
The ultimate guide to messenger
Marketing & Facebook Chatbots
by Angelo Sorbello
Messenger Marketing. Chatbots. Puh-lease— anything but another shiny

and distracting new trend, right?
….Except, I was totally and completely wrong. Even after I was told that chatbots
were the “biggest thing since email” — I just rolled my eyes and ignored them.
Well, it wasn’t until a mentor told me that they were here to stay that I gave them a
second look.
They were right. And I was so so wrong.
But, how much of it is buzz generated by marketers that don’t know what they’re
really talking about?
Messenger. Replacing email? Gimme a break.
However… What if they could become a potent weapon to supercharge your current
growth strategy?
How would you even do that?
Well, lucky for you — I read basically everything there is to know about marketing
with chatbots and created a step-by-step guide to help you build out a strategic
Messenger Marketing plan for your business.
Interested in using chatbots to strategically grow? Keep reading this practical guide.
https://angelosorbello.com/ 1
Content breakdown
What Is Messenger Marketing and Why Should You Care? 3
Why Are Chatbots the Future of Customer Service? 6
Why You Lead Response Time Matters 8
How to Create Your First Facebook Chatbot: Step-By-Step Guide 8

1. Do You Have a Facebook Page? 9
2. Setup your Welcome Message. 10
3. Set Up AI for your FAQ 13
The “ONE” Secret Strategy to Supercharge Your Facebook Messenger Marketing

Results 14
How to Build a Messenger Marketing Funnel 16
Chatbot Copywriting: Use Psychology to tell Stories & Sell 17
How to Qualify Your Potential Clients – On Autopilot Using Messenger Marketing 22
How to Optimize Your Chatbot, 10 Easy Tips You MUST Implement 23

1- Tell People What to Do 23
2- Make Sure That People Know that they’re talking with a bot, not with an actual person
26
3- Give them a Reason to Use Your Chatbot (Instead of the Website) 26
4- Beware of how your Profile image looks like on Messenger. 27
5- Assume your user is stupid… 27
6- Deliver Value on a Regular Basis 28
How to Get More Subscribers to Your Facebook Messenger Chatbot 29
5 Great Examples of Using Messenger Marketing and Chatbots for Growth that you
can take inspiration from 37
1. How to Teach and Sell on a Mass Scale through Facebook Messenger 37
2. How a real estate bot helped sell three apartments in 10 days 41
The Results 48
3. How to Distribute Your Contents on a Mass Scale Using Messenger Marketing 49
4. How to Increase Sales for Your Ecommerce with a Chatbot, the eBay Case 52
5. How to Go Viral Using Messenger Marketing 54
6. How to Qualify Your B2B Leads on Autopilot with a Chatbot 58
7. Other Use Cases Examples 59
How to Monetize your Chatbot Using Facebook Messenger Marketing 60
Conclusion. The Truth About Messenger Marketing (Will Messenger Replace Emails?
62
What Is Messenger Marketing and Why Should
You Care?
ManyChat defines Messenger marketing simply as “the act of marketing to your
customers using a messaging app.”
Conceptually, it is similar to how email marketing works. The difference stands in the
fact that Messenger is has a two-sided interaction.
When speaking about why you should consider using Facebook Messenger as a
marketing tool,the following graphs will make it easier to explain it why.
This last graph published by Business Insider shows clearly how Messaging
platforms are getting more and more relevant year after year. In fact, currently,
people exchange 1 billion messages with businesses on Facebook every month.
This means that, while all the other marketers are busy using Social Media, you can
surpass them by surfing the growing trend of Messaging apps.
This assumption is furtherly backed by a Nielsen’s Facebook Messaging Survey
which showed that messaging ranked second out of nine possible modes of
communication with business and that 53 percent of people are more likely to shop
with a company they can message directly.
This means that they are not merely using it for personal communication as many
people think.
No wonder that Apple recently unveiled “Business Chat,” or Chatbots for iMessage.
Not everybody replies to email or click on it. But the open-rates for emails are about
31%, while with Messenger it can be as high as 80% on average at the moment.
Exactly these numbers got many huge companies interested in Chatbots and
Messenger marketing like BMW, Adidas, etc.
300.000 AI-powered chatbots were created only for Facebook Messenger.
The major reason? In the era of authenticity in Marketing, Messenger and Chatbots
help you to build a relationship and engage with customers, on a mass scale.
Why Are Chatbots the Future of Customer Service?
Other stats that support the relevance of chatbots for business are:
1. 56% of people surveyed would rather message than call customer service
2. More than 1 in 2 people say they’re more likely to shop with a business they
can message.
3. 67% expect to message businesses more in the next two years.
4. (source: DigitalMarketer.)
5. Often the question asked from your customers are the same.
This means that basically not being proactive in using Messenger Marketing for your
business it’s the same as not replying to the phone. My suggestion: create now your
chatbot. Even if you just set up your FAQ, like I’m going to show you later in this
guide.
Why Your Lead Response Time Matters
Dr. James Oldroyd published the Lead Response Management Study, which shows
company sales representatives have a short amount of time to respond before their
leads become “cold.”
This research found “the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100
times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30
minutes after the lead was submitted. Similarly, the odds of the lead entering the
sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within 5
minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.” (Oldroyd, 2007)
Moreover, in an article published in the Harvard Business Review, called “The Short
Life of Online Sales Leads,” it’s shown how much companies who can reply faster
than the others will have an advantage over their competitors. Especially if they’re
able to save time qualifying the leads on autopilot using your chatbot like I’m going to
show you later in this guide (click here to jump at that section.)
How to Create Your First

Facebook Chatbot:
Step-By-Step Guide
First of all, if you’re wondering how much time does it take to build a good
chatbot for your business, the answer is minimum 1-hour.
Of course, like with many other projects, the more time you pour in, it’s usually the
better.
Is it hard? Absolutely not! Everybody can do it if you follow this step-by-step guide.
If you’re considering hiring a developer, their price usually starts from $ 1000 for a
basic bot (+ an eventual maintenance fee) to different thousands for more complex
works.
Should you hire a developer? It’s your choice. Again, you can absolutely create a
chatbot that converts into sales by following this step-by-step guide.
Let’s start to see now how you can create a fully working bot.
In this example, you are going to use Chatfuel, the tool I prefer to use to build my
chatbots.
There’s a huge discussion about which tool is better. I suggest you stick to Chatfuel
or ManyChat. They’re both free.
1. Do You Have a Facebook Page?
First thing first, you must have a Facebook Page to connect your chatbot. If you don’t
have, just create it now.
Once you have it, click on “Connect to Facebook” on the main dashboard of
Chatfuel.
2. Setup your Welcome Message.

Now click on your newly create chatbot, and the interface will show something
similar to this:
When writing your welcome message, ask yourself this question:
What’s that start message that can make your user understand what your world is all
about?
If you have an e-commerce, you might consider showing them your products first or
let them navigate through your products categories. However, in general, make them
sign-up for your future broadcasts immediately by giving them a clear benefit like in
the picture (it’s my chatbot if you’re guessing, and YES! You can subscribe here.)
As most of the users are still not acquainted with the fact that chatbots might reply to
their questions, another important rule for your welcome message is to always make
sure that people know that they’re dealing with a bot and not a real person.
3. Set Up AI for your FAQ

Once your “Welcome Message” is ready, click on “Set Up AI” on your main
Chatfuel’s Dashboard and insert your most-frequently asked questions, like:
You can even set-up typical questions like: “Thank You” to reply “You’re Welcome”,
or “Lol” with “I’m glad I can make you laugh.” or “How old are you?” with “I don’t have
an age, but I’ve been developed in 2018.”
You can test this anytime with the button “Test This Chatbot.”
The “ONE” Secret Strategy to

Supercharge Your Facebook
Messenger Marketing Results
You can now leave your chatbot like this, and get some return by merely saving time
from replying to your most FAQ, or by showing them your products for free, but the
truth is:
People, at the moment, just don’t know how to order something through Messenger,
like in the case of their pizza with Domino’s or their food with WholeFoods.
Or even if they know, it will not pass through their mind the idea: “Oh, let’s order a
pizza, let’s go on Messenger.”
It’s way too early for this.
But this leaves space for another opportunity, teaching to your audience, and create
value for them thanks to your contents and insights.
Right now is by far the best way to increase your sales as a consequence.
My advice would be then to don’t just use your chatbot for customer service or
selling reasons. If you do that, you’re leaving on the table the most significant benefit
you have: creating relationships.
If you see the bot of Mixergy, it teaches you what to do and what chatbots are all
about.
It first teaches, builds a relationship and trust, and only at the end it tries to sell you
something you already showed interested to and understand.
This approach is what the whole “Unmarketing” movement is about. If you want to
know more about that about how to build relationships first instead of sleazily
selling.)
Chatbots are not a shortcut for that, but they can help us to speed up the process.
Your SUPERPOWER: You’ll be able to automatically teach and create value for your
customer and sell.
This means that the process of taking a stranger to being considered trustworthy and
being a source of trusted info and education, will be all automated.
How? You need to create Messenger Marketing funnel.
Don’t be afraid. I’m going to guide you step-by-step.
How to Build a Messenger

Marketing Funnel
Now that you have your chatbot ready to fire, it’s time to create a funnel to
supercharge your activities and results. Here’s how the General Flow of a
Messenger Marketing Funnel looks like:
1. Deliver your lead magnet (e-book, quiz, or video)
2. A fun and ultra engaging first interaction + (ask to talk again / tell them what
will be coming)
3. Educate and deliver value (could be daily tips or step by step process)
4. Ask Qualifying questions (segment your subscribers)
5. Soft sell in an educational context.
6. Keep giving value & further qualify the lead
7. Call to action” (source)
Let’s see how we can create this funnel!
Chatbot Copywriting: Use
Psychology to tell Stories &
Sell
First of all, one of the main difference between Ads and Email marketing is that
chatbots are not a broadcasting platform.
It’s instead a two-way media platform where you actually have a conversation with
your user. This means that when in doubt, act accordingly:
● Do more listening than talking. Use it as an opportunity to extract as much info
and data to lead the conversation to a sale and quality the other part;
● When you write, think about what would I message to a friend to take them to
take the next step in their customer journey?
Now, let’s talk about how to make your bot compelling and get people to read your
stuff?
Copywriting is vital in your messenger marketing strategy.
In this section, I’m going to teach you how to break down your messages to make
them more interactive and visually pleasing, and how to structure your broadcasts
and follow-up sequences.
What happens often, is that people who use Chatbots send you these
long-messages that don’t fit the platform.
They, in fact, barely fit the screen of your phone.
What you’re are going to do instead, is using a fool-proof structure that resembles
real conversations between human beings.
… Wait for it!
It’s, Visual + Concise text + Button.
Why is it such a sure-proof formula? Well, it’s the same used by newspapers and
blogs.
Image Source
In this case, the yellow button “Read More” is the call to action.
Your goal with chatbots is always to segment and gain micro commitments.
So, how do you get people to click from one message to the other?
How do you position yourself to make them ready for the sale?
In which stage of the funnel are they?
Why don’t people want to buy?
With chatbots, you have the opportunity to learn from them. How?
Use the three sentences rule by Andrew Warner.
Don’t go too long without asking for the interaction.
And always keep in mind what is your goal, is it to get a sale right away? To let them
subscribe to your next webinar?
Whatever is your goal and your subscribers’ goal, always remember to build a
relationship first.
Teach → Build Relations → Sell
From what I’ve seen, if you want to sell with your chatbots, what works best is
soft-selling. Asking for a sale without doing too much.
When you send your regular messages, always give them a reason to start. At the
end of your messages, tell hem what is going to happen next.
For instance, “That’s it for today. Facebook Messenger will send you an alert once
there’s a new communication.”
How to Qualify Your Potential
Clients – On Autopilot Using
Messenger Marketing
How to get the right people to your salespeople?
It’s a common problem for B2B businesses, but now that you have your chatbot
ready, you can deploy it to send your potential customers to a different sequence
based on who they are, and the replies they tell you.
How?
After you user subscribed and you eventually delivered your lead magnet, as Andrew
Warner shows in this video, ask them a qualifying question. I.e., How much your
company spends on Ads every month?
In this case, if the answer for instance, from 0 to $ 1000, we will reply “Ok, thank you
for answering.”
But if they say more than a $ 1000, you can tell them “Do you want a free
consultation?”
How to Optimize Your Chatbot,
10 Easy Tips You MUST
Implement
Little details matters when you’re dealing with Messenger Marketing and Chatbots.
Here are some important things to make sure you’ll give a right look for your
company.
1- Tell People What to Do

If they get your Messenger bot, people have no idea of what to do.
Many people will get onto the screen of your chatbot. A blank screen and only “Get
Started.”
Guide them, or people will get lost.
Make it very explicit what people have to do, otherwise often they will just not take
actions not to tell you that they didn’t understand.
How to do it?
Go to “Settings on Your Page.” Then click “Messaging,” and click Yes on “Show
Messenger greeting.”
2- Make Sure That People Know that they’re
talking with a bot, not with an actual person
3- Give them a Reason to Use Your Chatbot

(Instead of the Website)
It’s going to be beneficial to you cause you can then re-contact them in the future.
4- Beware of how your Profile image looks
like on Messenger.
You see how the borders are cut off this image?
What do you think your subscribers will feel when they start a conversation with your
chatbot?
Well, that you’re not ready to start it.
Or that you don’t care about the details.
You’re trying to create a chatbot for the whole purpose of enhancing the experience
and improving your brand equity along the way.
Beware of this; it’s essential to get this right.
5- Assume your user is stupid…
Not because he is stupid, but because maybe he’s busy or distracted. Perhaps he is
texting real quick while waiting for someone to come in 5 minutes or has a kid in the
hands.
Take this in mind while creating your sequences and broadcasts.
6- Deliver Value on a Regular Basis

Reminder: People expect value from you on a regular basis.
This might mean that you create contents, not for you but to teach your audience
and solve their problems. You want them to look forward to your content!
What are they interested in?
This depends on your audience, try to understand it through your analytics, surveys,
conversions data, etc.
It’s not important what do you think will give them value, it’s about what brings it for
them.
Without this premise, your Messenger Marketing efforts would be useless.
How to Get More
Subscribers to Your
Facebook Messenger
Chatbot
You’re chatbot and messenger marketing funnel is ready congratulations!
Now what?
If you’re not getting inquiries organically from your Facebook Page, there are
different tactics that you use to get more subscribers.
1- Add from Comments
You can simply add a rule to your Facebook Page, that when people comment a
specific word or phrase, they’ll be contacted in automatic on Messenger.
In this example Tim Ferris used “mentor” as a word to deploy the contact:
You can simply do this by checking “Grow” or “Growth Tools” tab on the platform you
used to create your chatbot.
2- Implement “Send Button” to your landing pages
Image Source
Simple as that. Instead of asking for an email, you just need to implement your
“Send to Messenger” button on your landing page to deliver your lead-magnet,
promotion, or similar.
3- Create a viral loop by asking your subscribers to share
You can easily invite your subscribers to share by implementing a button like in the
picture.
Image source
4- Create a “Ref” Link or a Landing Page to send traffic to
You can find the m.me link at the top of the dashboard when the bot is open.
5- Use JSON Messenger Ads
You can either use the same “Comment to Chat” tactic of the #1 point or use
Messenger a destination instead of an external website.
6- Add a Customer Chat Plugin for your site
Adding a live chat to your website is not only useful for customer service. You can
use it as a tool to grow your Messenger subscribers.
7- Submit your bot to Submit to BotList and the Messenger Discovery section
There are different chatbots directories online where you can add your chatbot, such
as BotList, Chatbottle, or the official Messenger Discovery section.
They basically work as an App Store for chatbots.
8- Get a Messenger Code
A Messenger Code can be scanned using the camera functionality in Facebook and
Messenger mobile apps to lead a user to your bot instantly. It’s similar to the most
famous Snapchat code.
9- Showcase your bot on your Facebook Page
Add a Send Message button on your Facebook page. This will enable your page
visitors to connect with your chatbot in one click.
Or even consider using a call to action in your Facebook cover (like in the picture.)
Image Source (Chatfuel)
5 Great Examples of Using
Messenger Marketing and
Chatbots for Growth that you
can take inspiration from
1. How to Teach and Sell on a Mass Scale
through Facebook Messenger
As I said before in this guide, people, at the moment, just don’t know how to order
something through Facebook Messenger, like in the case of their pizza with
Domino’s or their food with WholeFoods.
Or even if they know, it will not pass through their mind the idea: “Oh, let’s order a
pizza, let’s go on Messenger.”
It’s way too early for this.
But this leaves space for another opportunity, teaching to your audience, and create
value for them thanks to your contents and insights.
Right now is by far the best way to increase your sales as a consequence.
Stapho Thienpont and Sonny De Meester of the Marketing Family, a full-stack
LinkedIn growth agency, understood that, and they skillfully used their chatbot to
deliver engaging teaching sequences with what constitutes an entire course on how
to become a LinkedIn sensei in just a few steps.
Their strategy has been to first invite people interested in the course by producing
relevant contents on the topic and distributing it on various social platforms.
Notice how they not only used this opportunity to invite their users to their Facebook
group (they could have done the same for their email list.) and how they then
segmented the list to make sure not to piss off people who are interested in the
content coming. (remember, in Messenger marketing is always crucial to segment
and ask for micro-commitments.)
With chatbots, the same principle of email marketing applies: You don’t want many
subscribers, you want the right one. That’s why Ezra Firestone of Smart Marketer
suggests adding a “unsubscribe” button to each broadcast.
They then used the power of chatbots to survey their audience and deliver the best
contents of their course. Of course, this kind of data will be useful for them also to
know better what materials create on in the future, on what services they should
focus more they’re efforts, and so on.
How many people do you think would have replied to an email sent to the same
question/survey?
Very few; that’s the magic of Chatbots, crazy-high CTR.
And now time to sta… Build anticipation.
Before of starting the actual teaching of the course, Stapho and Sonny kept growing
the subscribers to their chatbot.
How? By sharing the bot through Messenger. It’s one of the easiest ways to do it as
users remain on the platform and will be more likely to join.
And now finally, time to teach!
See how interactive and engaging are the contents. That’s the superpower of
chatbots, creating a more valuable experience for your customers, who always come
first.
2. How a real estate bot helped sell three

apartments in 10 days
by Juhan Kaarma
I’ll cover the flow of the bot with explanations and screenshots of what happens in
each step. (The content and structure of the screenshots is synonymous with the
actual client that I won’t reveal here). You can check out the bot for yourself here:
https://www.m.me/wepsbot?ref=Guide_5
Step #1. The bot is linked to a Facebook ad. When a person clicks on the ad’s CTA
button, our bot sends them a welcome message. Here’s what it looks like:
Step #2. Once the user clicks either of the buttons, it will trigger the next step, and
the bot will start nurturing the lead with information about the apartment +
understanding what are the needs of the lead.
Step #3. After getting a basic understanding of the user’s preferences and making
sure they’re interested in the apartments, it’s time to get that lead and put him in
touch with a real-estate agent who will take it from here.
Note #1. A chatbot is perfect in a way that it can interact with the person without
being too pushy, if the user is ready to take the communication over to a real-estate
agent, he can do that. If he wants to get more information, he can do that too.
Once the user is ready to talk to the agent, the chatbot asks the person about her
preferred channel of communication (for example phone vs. email). In our
experience, people prefer to leave their email in 90% of the cases.
The bot collects that info and forwards it to a spreadsheet or CRM via Zapier where
the agents have access to it and get in touch with the potential buyer.
Note #2. Once the potential buyer’s contact information is collected, the bot can do
some things:
1. show the lead another real estate for sale
2. take the user to a website
3. provide financing options and so on.
Imagination is pretty much the limit. In this case, we’re giving the user an opportunity
to check out more pictures of the property as well as check out other developments.
The Results
The bot in its nature is extremely simple, and there’s lots of room for improvement,
but the results we’ve had with this are quite astonishing.
This bot has been actively running for ten days. The ad spend has been 94 EUR
(roughly 100 USD).
Link clicks: 1064
Conversations: 243
Contacts: 60
Apartments: 3
From a total of 1064 link clicks 243 have converted into actual conversations (leads
that the bot can follow up with for example). From those 243 conversations, the bot
has pre-qualified and collected the contact information of 60 people. The cost per
pre-qualified lead is 1.6 EUR (approx 2 USD). From those contacts already three
people have made a pre-reservation for at least one apartment in the building that is
going to be built. Not a bad return on an investment :)”
3. How to Distribute Your Contents on a Mass

Scale Using Messenger Marketing
Facebook Messenger Chatbots currently have a much higher-CTR than emails.
Then, why not leverage on this factor to distribute your content more efficiently?
If more people view your blog post, the chance that your piece of content will be
shared and get as a consequence more visits, leads and SEO-juicy simply multiplies.
That’s what Ricardo Ghekiere, founder of Fast Forward, understood and sapiently
implemented to distribute his bi-weekly growth marketing guides.
His approach consisted of promoting/drive traffic to his remarkable contents from
social media and other instances, and from that articles adding a link to his chatbot.
His welcome message and content distribution system are easy to understand for his
final users.
Notice how he’s always engaging with his audience with few-sentences messages,
and how he doesn’t limit his messages to just point to the content.
He’s not pushing you anything but merely having a conversation with you. That’s
precisely what chatbots are all about, creating relationships.
And if you’re not interested in doing so… Well, just type “stop.” nobody likes spam.
4. How to Increase Sales for Your
Ecommerce with a Chatbot, the eBay Case
eBay, the leading online auction and sales platform, has been one of the first to
experiment with chatbots in the world of e-commerce.
The eBay Shopbot allows users to browse items and shop directly from the
Facebook Messenger app. Tell it what you’re looking for, it’ll ask a few qualifying
questions, and then present some suggestions based on your answers and
preferences.
An exciting feature is the chance for the user to upload and share a photo and ask
the Shopbot for similar items.
Image Source
“Shopbot is still in beta, but is getting better and smarter with each passing day…
Introducing eBay to an entirely new generation of customers.” (source)
5. How to Go Viral Using Messenger

Marketing
“When you post on social media, you get engagement.
When you send out a Messenger blast, people respond.”
That’s what Josh Fechter of the full stack Growth Hacking Agency BAMF
understood, and he smartly leveraged his more than 13,000 chatbot’s subscribers,
which he gain along the way with a content framework he explained in this article, to
go viral on ProductHunt.
The same approach can be used for every other viral platform, like Reddit for
instance.
In the words of Josh Fechter, co-founder of BAMF:
“I went ahead and pieced together a 300+ page book about growth hacking.
Submitted it to Product Hunt.
Followed this Product Hunt launch formula.
Then received over 8,000 new subscribers.
Then I repeated it a month later with a new growth hacking book.
And I received another 4,000 subscribers.
By then, I’d also done more giveaways resulting in 14,000 subscribers.
Whenever we release a tutorial, we’re no longer promoting it to the 1,000-person list.
We’re hitting 14,000 people.
That’s powerful.
Because we include opt-ins on all our blog posts and around our site, this wave of
direct traffic from Messenger will generate organic traffic via direct referrals, sharing,
and better SEO.
Direct referrals: People sending the blog post link to friends via Messenger and
email
Sharing: Sharing the post on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
SEO: Increased backlinks, ranking on Google overtime
Here’s an opt-in I use on my personal website.
This led to over 3,000 new subscribers!
You never know where they’re coming from.
The next step is to do one viral release every month on the right platform.
Even though I release books, it doesn’t mean you need to do the same.
You can use physical products or services.” (source)
6. How to Qualify Your B2B Leads on
Autopilot with a Chatbot
Many B2B companies are wondering if chatbots wouldn’t suit more B2C brands,
e-commerce stores, or professional services providers.
If you think so, you cannot be more wrong!
Chatbots are a fantastic opportunity to qualify your leads on autopilot and save time.
But also to reduce the lead response time, which how we already said in this article,
is always more crucial to not turn your hard-earned leads cold because you weren’t
fast enough.
A great example of how to do so showed by Single Grain, a Digital Marketing
agency.
When you first connect to their chatbot, they immediately ask you if you’re interested
in a free consultation, which is the end goal of the interaction.
They also ask you on what are you interested the most to segment their users
smartly.
Here’s the qualifying question. Based on your answer you will either pass to the
following step (another qualifying question: “What are your budgets?”)
7. Other Use Cases Examples
Despite the fact that the technology is far from being at the end of its journey, and
huge steps forwards are done by developers in this field each day, possibilities with
chatbots are basically endless.
For your online business, we already talked how you can use Messenger Marketing
and your chatbot to do lead nurturing, content delivery, qualify your B2B leads and
drive more sales.
Other ways how you can use your chatbot is for lead generation, to retarget and
send order updates for your e-commerce, or deliver useful but automated support to
your potential clients (e.g. Legal help.)
How to Monetize your

Chatbot Using
Facebook Messenger
Marketing
● Increase Your Sales for Your Physical Product E-commerce by Selling
Directly via Messenger
Through Messenger Marketing, you will give your custumer an enhanced and more
personalized buying experience, and guess what. This is considered by branding
experts to increase your overall brand equity.
It’s is just a glimpse of how powerful Messenger Marketing can be if used correctly to
build a relationship and engage with your customers.
● Distribute Your Remarkable Content
With such high-CTR, if you have an extensive list of subscribers on your chatbots,
it’s going to be easier than ever to distribute and get traffic to your latest piece of
content.
● Book more sales call
Get more leads and qualify them on autopilot and use a free or paid consultation as
a CTA.
● Steemit or Medium Partner
Is writing your passion/side-hustle or profession?
With Steemit you can make money by writing, or by upvoting. You don’t have to pay
any money to give money to other people.
Medium Partner Program is similar, and you’re paid for the performance of your
posts.
● Affiliate Marketing
Combining affiliate marketing and chatbots, it’s an innovative way to help customers
find the right product at the right time. How? Join the affiliate program of Amazon,
Udemy, Clickbank, or whatever you want.
Whatever you choose to do. Remember, don’t be spammy! Build relationships, think
long-term.
Conclusion. The Truth

About Messenger
Marketing (Will
Messenger Replace
Emails?
It’s true. Messenger marketing is a fantastic way to communicate with your
customers:
1- It’s fast and enhances the experience.
2- It’s more enjoying and personalized than emails.
Marketers have been looking for something that would have surpassed email
marketing for years, and I don’t think Messenger marketing will do the work. Why?
1- You don’t control the platform. Facebook owns everything, and they will (probably)
push you to pay to reach whoever subscribed to your email list.
2- If you ever break the Terms and Conditions, you’re screwed. You worked so hard
to build a Messenger subscribers list, but it happens more often than you can
imagine incurring a ban even if you’re not a blackhat spammer.
3- Your email list remains your most powerful asset. It is something that nobody can
take from you, and is still the best way to product ROI in the long-run. However, you
can even get their email address with your chatbot, check this video to see how.
4- Right now the Open Rates and CTR are incredibly high because people are not
used to receiving broadcasts from their chatbot as they are with emails. In the late
90’s Jeff Walker and many other marketers were producing the same results of right
now with Messenger with email.
What is the matter then?
1- Messenger Marketing is still an inexpensive way to serve your customers and help
you to build a badass brand, and increase sales.
2- In the long-run, quality always wins. It doesn’t matter if Messenger Marketing does
the trick for now, in the long-run you will just subscribe to 5-10 email lists of the
business that you really care about, exactly as you do right now with Emails. I read
every single email of the people that I’m a fan of. And it all always belongs to this,
build your first 1,000 or even 100 first true fans (insert a link), and in my advice, the
best way to do this is by producing badass contents.
If you produce content that helps them out, doesn’t matter how you will reach them.
They will want to be reached, doesn’t matter if you’re using Messenger, Emails or a
pigeon.
Build a customer-centric business, stop focusing on what is best for you, and focus
more on what’s best for your customers.
THE STEP BY
STEP
PROCESS
HOW TO
CREATE ICP
FOR B2B
LEAD
6
GENERATION
BY
ANDREI ZINKEVICH
The step by step guide on how to
create your Ideal Customer Profile for
B2B companies
by Andrei Zinkevich
If you'll open any marketing book right now, in 99% of cases you'll read the same advice on
the first pages: create a customer profile (or buyer persona) before planning any marketing
campaign.
Sounds obvious but this advice is actually a pitfall which leads to problems with lead
generation – you don't need a customer profile.
You need an Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP for the future abbreviations).
What's the difference?
Ideal Customer Profile focuses you on attracting high-quality leads who are similar to your
key customers instead of prospecting everybody who might buy your product.
In this guide, I'll give you a step by step process and template how to create an Ideal
Customer Profile for B2B companies.
Content Breakdown
The biggest lie about customer profile 3
The real problem is they DON'T KNOW: 3
What is the Ideal Customer Profile? 4
There are 3 purposes of the ideal customer profile. 4
The core elements of Ideal Customer Profile. 5
Age 5
Location 5
Working hours 6
Gender 6
Target resources 7
Job position 7
What problems does your product solve? 7
Existing challenges related to your business or industry 8
Objections and doubts 8
The step by step process how to create ideal customer profile 8
#1 – Select a specific market segment 8
#2 – Find in your CRM 10 key customers from that market segments 8
#3 – Fill the ideal customer profile template 9
#4 – Gather additional information from social media 10
#5 – Interview your customers 15
#6 – Create an ideal customer profile from existing data 16
What to do if you want to enter new market segment where you don’t have customers?
17
5 control questions to check your ICP 17
1. What problem does my product or service solve? 17
2. Who is the buyer (job position) for this product or service? 17
3. Where I can find them? 18
4. What challenges do they regularly face? 18
5. What factors influence their purchasing decision? 18
Instead of conclusion 18
P.S. To learn more about a B2B marketing: 19
The biggest lie about customer profile
Before we'll dive deeply into the process, let me tell you a story.
When I open intake questionnaire from new leads, this is the most common answer about
target audience I see.
Let me tell you a story.
As a CEO of Getleado, I don't intermeddle into the operational processes. But there is one
thing that I can resist - intake questionnaires of our leads.
Every second questionnaire makes me at the same time smile and cry.
Why?
Because I see how our leads like to praise their company and products but, at the same
time, they don't know their target audience at all.
SaaS owner who sells high-ticket (5 figures) software thinks that his target audience is
marketers and BDM from North America.
Law and tax advisory company from Switzerland tells that their target audience is
international entrepreneurs or wealthy private individuals from the whole Europe.
I can give dozens of examples but let's stop here.
In the first case, I asked the SaaS owner:
– Really? Will you count a request from a marketer or BDM as a high-quality lead despite
market segment, team size or revenue?
– Yes, he answered.
– So, if a marketer of an early-stage startup or from FMCG market will reach you out, you'll
be able to help him?
– Oh, no. We don't work with an FMCG, and early-stage startups can't afford our service.
Should you be surprised they are struggling with lead generation?
The problem is not only they don’t focus on specific market segments.
The real problem is they DON'T KNOW:

● Why do their prospects buy a product (different segments have different purposes)?
● What leads and influence on prospects to buy?
● Where do the prospects hang out?
● What is their decision-making process?
That's why such companies have a big problem with filling the pipeline with high-quality
leads.
That's why the cost per acquisition from every lead generation channel is higher than they
can afford.
That's why the only chance to close the deal for them is to lower the price and to sell on the
verge of profitability.
Target broad market because you'll have more prospects is one of the greatest marketing
lies and the worst marketing strategy.
What is the Ideal Customer Profile?

ICP is the impersonation of your key customers from a specific market segment: age,
location, job position, industry, team size, yearly revenue, factors that influence their
purchasing process, etc.
I'd like to underline once more that every market segment you are prospecting is unique.
That's why you must create separate ICP for different market segments to avoid the
problems with marketing I mentioned in the story above.
There are 3 purposes of the ideal customer profile.

First one is to adapt and improve your marketing materials like unique selling proposition,
ads, proposals, landing pages, etc., according to the needs of your core customers and the
factors that lead them to buy.
The second one is to figure out lead generation channels you can start focusing on the early
beginning instead of guesswork.
The third one is to figure out important points for marketing qualification (MQL) so you’ll be
able to analyze the quality of leads from every marketing campaign you’ll run.
The more detailed will be ICP, the easier will be to generate high-quality leads for your
business.
There is a popular fable about the legendary company Procter & Gamble (the world leading
producer of household chemicals and hygiene products) amongst marketers.
Marketers use to say that in P&G office you can see pictures of the core consumer of their
products with a short description like:
"Jane Smith, 35 years old housewife, secondary education, three school-age children,
makes purchases at Wal-Mart, loves the Oprah Winfrey show."
Despite this example is about a B2C customer profile, you got the point. Even the
undisputed market leader dive deeply into learning more about the customers and regularly
updating ideal customer profile.
Image is clickable.
The core elements of Ideal Customer Profile.

Age
Age is one of the most important factors to consider when planning marketing campaigns
and preparing proposals.
You should agree that it is impossible to deliver equally the same marketing message to
young people and people over 50. These two categories have completely different values,
process, and criteria for decision-making.
While young people tend to experiment, try new tools and consider new opportunities the
elder people prefer robust and reliable solutions, are more conservative and not tend to
experiment.
By knowing the average age of the target audience, you will be able to tailor and personalize
your marketing message to their needs and features.
This means not only leveraging the language your target audience speak but also apply to
their influencers and idols, leverage target resources where they hang out.
Location
One is mandatory elements in the ideal customer profile is the geographical location of your
target audience.
I'll list several obvious things why location is so important but still, I'm surprised how many
companies neglect them.
Alignment of marketing activities to prospects timezone.
That is the most common mistake why some companies don't succeed with lead generation.
Just a quick example.
If you are targeting US companies, don't forget about the time difference.
When you target audience start work day in New York (e.g. 9.00 AM) people in Seattle might
be sleeping (e.g. 6.00 AM).
But you'll be surprised if I tell you how many companies do not take this into account.
Working hours
The same counts working hours.
If you are in Europe and are prospecting companies from the US, don't forget to align your
working hours. This means you should have somebody who'll work on the second shift in the
evening hours.
Especially, it is important for the support and sales teams.
Adopting your marketing message to the target market.
Like with examples of the age of the ideal customer, different markets have the different
mentality, negotiation and decision-making process, different features and values.
Still, English is a universal language for сommunication in the whole world, I can't fully
describe the benefits of localization and target market research.
Not only you'll be able to learn more about prospects, their needs, purchasing and
negotiation process, factors that are important for them when purchasing the product like
yours but you'll be able to find local target resources where your target audience hangs out.
Localization will help you to generate more high-quality leads from the target market and
avoid silly marketing mistakes like Clairol did with their curling iron in Germany.
The iron was named "Mist Stick" without realizing that "mist" means manure in German.
Or like Colgate did with their toothpaste in France named «Cue" – likewise the name of a
French porn magazine.
Gender
The next important element of ideal buyer persona is gender.
Many marketers neglect the gender when preparing ads, outreach emails or proposals but
from my point of view, such approach is their omission.
After all, men and women have different approaches to decision-making.
When making decisions, men are more often oriented to their mind, women - to intuition and
their feelings, to their emotional impressions.
That's why your proposals can't be universal: sell benefits to men, and emotions to women.
Of course, you shouldn't take the advice literally but if you'll see that specific gender
dominates among your customers, you should adopt your marketing materials to this gender
features.
Target resources
Target resources are resources that your target audience regularly visits (websites, social
media groups, forums, blogs, etc.).
Target resources are important to know:
● Where we can reach our target audience (TA)

● What content does TA consume and what content is in demand (their current
challenges)
● A dominant social media for lead generation
This information helps to avoid guesswork when creating marketing plan and choosing what
marketing channels you should work on.
I’ll cover the exact process you can get this information from your customers a bit later in this
post.
Job position
Just as it is impossible to make an equally effective universal proposal for different age
groups, it is impossible to create a universal effective proposal for founders and blue-collars.
These categories have different factors that influence a purchasing decision, different
purchasing power, different purchasing process.
That’s why focus on specific job positions will help you to personalize your marketing
message to this group of prospect and create effective pricing policy.
Job position is also good criteria for marketing qualification so you can dismiss leads who
don’t fit your target job position.
What problems does your product solve?

When you know the answer to this question, you can skyrocket the efficiency of your lead
generation campaigns. The more you’ll draw the attention of your target audience to the
solutions of their problems, the more high-quality leads you’ll be able to generate.
The same counts proposals.
Leads want to see how your product will solve their problems instead of listening how great it
is and awesome features it has.
Existing challenges related to your business or industry
This information will help you to create relevant content to build relations not only with leads
but with the existing customers.
I bet you’ve heard for life about new marketing mantra – delivering value.
The question is how you can deliver that value?
The answer: by helping your target audience to handle existing challenges.
Objections and doubts

This is a very important element which is missed in ideal customer avatar of many
companies.
By knowing the objections and doubts that appear during negotiations, you can overcome
them in your marketing materials, content and lead nurturing.
Want to increase pipeline and grow your B2B business?
This 60-second quiz will show you where exactly you leave money on the table and
what marketing strategies you should focus on to grow your B2B business.
The step by step process how to create ideal customer profile

Let's dive into step by step process how to create ICP.
#1 – Select a specific market segment

Like I mentioned earlier ICP is the impersonation of your key customers from a specific
market segment.
This step is the most common mistake companies make when working on ideal buyer
persona. They select customers from different market segments and try to create a universal
customer avatar.
Customers from different market segment have different reasons for buying and using your
product. That’s why versatility only harms your marketing instead of simplifying.
#2 – Find in your CRM 10 key customers from that market segments

Let me answer first the most common question: why I call the document we are working on
ideal customer profile? Not simply customer profile or buyer persona?
Because your clients aren’t equal!
Few of them can generate as much profit for your company as other 50% of customers.
But the most common and the biggest mistake I see is that companies don’t devote these
clients the time they deserve (I mean they don’t devote them around 50% of their time).
The same counts lead generation.
Companies focus on broad groups of prospects instead of targeting the most profitable
segments.
That's why the second step is to filter your CRM by market segment and by revenue. Then,
select top-10 clients.
Our goal is to generate more leads like these clients.
#3 – Fill the ideal customer profile template

Now it's time for some manual labor.
To fill in the ICP template you'll need to collect data from CRM, analyze social media profiles
of your customers and interview them.
Let's start with the easiest one.
On CRM you should look for the full name, sex, location, job position, team size, year
turnover, etc.
If some data is missed, you can collect it during the next steps.
Also, I recommend listening to the conversations with these customers (both phone and
email). You can figure out their objections and doubts, so you'll be able to improve your
proposals, lead nurturing content, sales pages and ads.
You can download the ideal customer profile template here:

https://goviral.growthtools.com/scripts/42a7dd89d46affb61896a6bea48bae24
#4 – Gather additional information from social media

Additional information about your clients can be gathered from the social media.
If you can’t find your clients by first name, last name and company search (which would be a
bit weird), you can export their emails to CSV file and upload them on LinkedIn.
Go to My Network –> More Options –> Upload file and upload a file with contacts of
your customers.
LinkedIn will show you their profiles.
On Facebook, the process is more sophisticated.
Click on Find friends button and, then, click on other email and enter your Gmail.
You might see the error message.
Don’t worry, just skip it and click on Find friends button. You’ll be redirected to the page
where you’ll be able to upload a list with your contacts.
Now you can manually analyze every client profile and collect the necessary data, or use the
tool called Stalkscan.
In this video, I'll show you how to use Stalkscan for collecting the data about your customers.
Besides the basic information about the job position, age, sex, the location I personally
recommend to take a look at websites your customers share content on their profiles.
What influencers content do they engage with.
What communities are they in.
This will help you to figure out target resources you'll be able to use for content promotion,
PR and lead generation.
#5 – Interview your customers

This is the most important step which is to your surprise is missed by so many companies.
In previous 4 steps, we collected the basic information which can help us understand better
who is our target audience and where we can find them.
In this step, our goal is to talk to our key customers and learn:
● what leads them to buy products like yours?
● what factors influence their purchasing decision?
● what are their current challenges that are related to your business?
● what are the problems your product solves for them?
● what might happen if these problems won't be solved?
● why did they choose your company?
● what they love most about your product?
● are they satisfied with everything (quality, service, support, results, etc) or something
can be improved?
● what features they'd like to see in your product?
● can they give you a testimonial or recommend your company?
● what social media do they regularly use?
● which industry blogs, websites or influencers are they following?
● who is also involved in their negotiation process or with whom they consult before
buying products like yours?
I bet you understand the importance of this information. Never brainstorm it, just call and
interview your core customers.
It will help you to improve your product, generate more referrals, improve unique selling
proposition and personalize marketing materials.
#6 – Create an ideal customer profile from existing data

The last step is to analyze all the data you’ve collected from your 10 best customers from the
specific market segment and create an ideal customer profile.
Sometimes you’ll be perplexed with what you should put in front of some points like age or
job position.
Don’t trick yourself.
Did you notice in the template 2 columns: customer share in your company’s revenue and
customer share in the company’s revenue from the specific market segment.
When you’ll be perplexed, just take a look at the customers with the biggest share and put
this data into the template.
When it comes to points like doubts and objections, target resources, reasons why they buy
your product, you should put here as maximum information as possible.
You can download the ideal customer profile template here:

https://goviral.growthtools.com/scripts/42a7dd89d46affb61896a6bea48bae24
What to do if you want to enter new market segment where you
don’t have customers?
Great question!
Here is what I recommend to do:
1. Make a list of top 100 customers from this market segment

2. Brainstorm who is the decision-maker at these companies (job position)
3. Find them on social media and collect available information (check the Step 4)
4. Send them a friend request and invite for a lunch (if you are in the same city), or ask are
they available for the quick chat about problems your product solves
5. If they didn’t reply, send several follow-up emails and send a private message on social
media
6. Interview them with the questions from Step 5. Of course, instead of asking: «What do you
love most about our product?» ask: «What do you like most about the products that solve
these specific problems?» :)
When you’ll get your first customers, return to this guide and repeat the steps from 2 to 6.
5 control questions to check your ICP

One of the most common questions I get about ideal customer profile: how can I be sure I
did everything the right way?
The first solution is to hire me as a consultant to check it and give you a feedback.
Just kidding :).
Here are 5 control questions that will help you to evaluate your work.
1. What problem does my product or service solve?

Remember famous quote by Theodore Levitt said: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch
drill. They want a quarter-inch hole”?
The same approach you should use when answering this question.
This will help you to figure out who might be a potential buyer of your product.
2. Who is the buyer (job position) for this product or service?

After you’ve figured out market segments that might benefit from your product, be sure you
know who is a decision-maker.
Of course, when you are prospecting accounts where several people are involved in the
negotiation process, you should mention all of them but underline the core person with
whom you are negotiating mostly.
This information will help you to answer the next question.
3. Where I can find them?

When knowing this information, it is much easier to plan marketing campaigns and choose
target resources for PR and advertising.
Target resources include professional websites, specialized forums or social media

communities, professional organizations. These resources can be used for publishing press
releases, banners, advertisements, guest posts to attract attention of your target audience.
4. What challenges do they regularly face?

This information is necessary to focus marketing materials on solving these challenges.
5. What factors influence their purchasing decision?

The answer to this last question will help you to figure out the basis for unique selling
proposition (USP) and USP amplifiers.
Image is clickable.
Instead of conclusion
In this guide, I gave you a step by step process to create an ideal customer profile, showed
the most common mistakes and underlined the importance of ICP.
If you are entering new market segments, I recommend you to update ICP, at least, one time
per quarter. For stable businesses, you should update ICP, at least, one time per year.
As I mentioned, the ideal customer profile is one of the core elements of the system B2B
marketing.
Learn more about system B2B marketing in free email course by clicking the image below.
P.S. To learn more about a B2B marketing:
1. Join Facebook community “B2B marketers&founders”
2. Enroll in free email course System B2B Marketing.
3. Read more guides:
● B2B Sales Funnel: The Definitive Guide (Templates + Examples)
● How to boost B2B sales through LinkedIn with inbound marketing
-- Andrei Zinkevich
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Andriy.Zinkevich
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azinkevich/
Email: [email protected]
31 SIMPLE, YET
BRILLIANT
LEAD
GENERATION
TECHNIQUES
TO
SUPERCHARGE
YOUR SALES
7
PIPELINE
BY
GAETANO DINARDI
31 Simple, Yet Brilliant Lead Generation
Techniques to Supercharge Your Sales
Pipeline
by Gaetano Nino DiNardi
In this mega guide, I’ll breakdown 31 different lead generation techniques you can use to
supercharge your sales pipeline almost immediately.
Why am I sharing this? Because as a solo-founder, I wear many hats. Two of which are
currently sales and marketing.
As a result, I am the lead generator, the SDR, and the closer.
While this may seem laborious, it gives me tremendous power over revenue.
I’m in control of every step of the sales process – from awareness to decision making.
If I were in a sales role within another organization, I’d probably create a similar system for
myself. That way, I’m not waiting for someone else to bring me leads. I can go get them
myself.
Even better, I can go directly to the leads that are most likely to convert.
In this article, I’ll show you how to create a similar process.
You’ll learn 31 lead generation techniques across 14 categories to fill your own sales
pipeline and build career-changing relationships that last forever.
1. Optimize your social presence
2. Build a personal brand “hub”
3. Create how-to blog content
4. Create engaging video content
5. Build an outreach system
6. “Shock and awe” with direct mail
7. Tap into your network for referrals
8. Tap into engaged communities
9. Build strategic, win-win partnerships
10. Tap into new audiences with guest blogging
11. Use influencer engagement to amplify your message
12. Survey your prospects
13. Grow your LinkedIn audience
14. Set up meetings with senior decision makers
www.saleshacker.com 1
1. Optimize your social presence
Good lead generation systems need a strong foundation.
And that foundation is a credible personal brand.
If you haven’t optimized your LinkedIn profile to show off your best qualities, now is the time.
Social media is going to play a big part in your lead generation efforts.
If leads are researching you, they’ll judge you by your LinkedIn profile. It’s sad, but it’s a fact
of sales life.
Follow this checklist and make sure you tick all the boxes:
Profile picture: People are wired to digest images before words. Consider getting a
professional head shot, preferably smiling.
Header image: Use as a visual demonstration of your expertise. Logos of publications
you’ve appeared in or a picture of you with an industry influencer can quickly boost
credibility.
Headline: Demonstrate your thought leadership. Include accomplishments, awards, and
expertise.
Bio: Once you’ve hooked them in using the “credibility boosters” above, they’ll be reading
your bio. Use this section to describe the specific solution you solve, and how you do it.
Recommendations: Ask for your peers or co-workers to write about the value you bring to
their job and the organization as a whole. To get the ball rolling, write one for them first.
In the above example, Jim Keenan of “A Sales Guy” has done the following:
1. Used a cover image to showcase his book (authority)
2. Has a clear, friendly and professional head shot
3. Lists credibility boosters in his headline (CEO, Forbes Contributor, etc.)
Don’t worry if you haven’t any accomplishments or publications under your name. We’ll
cover how to build credibility and authority in your industry shortly.
2. Build a personal brand “hub”

Creating a website might seem like a task for marketers.
But from a personal branding perspective, having your own website can supercharge your
long-term career goals.
It will act as your professional hub – the platform for the content you create and the
credibility you establish.
There are many benefits to owning a website, including:
List building – Owning an audience will set you up for future career success, especially if
you ever want to start working on side projects.
Credibility – Websites are the perfect platform to show off your expertise, credentials, and
publications you’ve been featured in/written for
Job hunting – Cut through piles of CV’s Word documents and half-baked LinkedIn profiles.
The good news? Building one doesn’t have to be difficult and requires zero technical skills.
Wix, for example, provides a drag-and-drop user interface, allowing you to build a website
without having to learn code.
However, I would highly recommend hosting a WordPress site and using a theme like
Bridge. It comes with a drag-and-drop visual website builder similar to Wix but provides
more flexibility and ownership.
Check out this guide from Smashing Magazine to learn more about setting up WordPress.
So, what must your website include? To demonstrate credibility, you should have:
1. A home page: to quickly demonstrate expertise and include a call-to-action
2. A blog: to create and showcase content that solves your prospect’s pains
Here’s a good-looking home page example from Noah Kagan:
It has a clean design, giving the visitor only one action to take. It also includes a professional
photo of Noah himself (an experiment showcased by VWO shows that images of people can
increase conversion rate by 48%).
Noah’s goal is to build his email list. What you include on your homepage will depend on
what you want to achieve. If your goal is to build credibility, include logos of publications or
companies you’ve helped.
Brian Dean boosts credibility on his homepage by including blogs where he’s featured, as
well as testimonials from other marketing influencers:
Remember the recommendations you gathered when optimizing your LinkedIn profile?
Re-purpose them into testimonials (with permission, of course).
The next step is to create how-to content that helps solve your prospect’s challenges.
3. Create how-to blog content

Blogging is by far the fastest way to share expertise, build authority and generate your own
leads over time.
Come up with topics by focusing on the challenges of your prospects.
3a. Uncover topics with customer development

Start by interviewing your current clients. Find out pains they’re trying to overcome that
relate to your value proposition.
For example, if I were doing this for my content marketing service, Grizzle, I would ask my
clients questions like:
1. What does your current PR system look like?
2. What are your biggest demand generation challenges?
3. What are your biggest hurdles when connecting with relevant influencers or partners?
By digging deep into these questions, I’ll know exactly which topics to write.
Let’s say a common challenge is “finding the right publications to target.” Your job would be
to create content that helps prospects solve that problem. If it includes the solution you’re
trying to sell, even better.
According to BuzzSumo, the top performing articles on LinkedIn included these phrases:
3c. How to create actionable content your audience will love

The B2B crowd love how-to information and trend data. When creating content, focus on
insight backed by data, or actionable how-to information.
For this example, a “how-to” guide would deliver the most value. The next step is to create
content that teaches prospects how to identify the right publications to target.
Start by creating a content framework. This is an outline that maps out your content from
Point A (the challenge) to Point B (solution).
In my example, it might look like this:
1. Introduction
2. Ask your audience
3. Research competition
4. Find editors
5. Conclusion
It then needs to be wrapped with an engaging and attention-grabbing headline. For more
information on generating killer headlines, check out Buffer’s complete guide.
For this example, some possible headlines include:
1. How to Find Publications With an Engaged Audience
2. 3 Steps to Targeting Publications Full of Your Buyer Personas
3. The Definitive Guide to Finding Guest Blogging Opportunities
These focus on a) the task and b) the outcome. The headline should tell readers what they’ll
learn in the content and the outcome they can expect from following it.
4. Create engaging video content

Video content is hugely popular with marketers and salespeople alike – especially on
LinkedIn:
1. They generate huge amounts of engagement
2. They’re incredibly shareable
3. It allows you to put your personality forward
Allen Gannett, CEO of TrackMaven and author of “The Creative Curve,” has been killing it
with this format.
In the post above, Allen has shot a video with Amy Mowafi, CEO of MO4. They discuss what
American companies can learn from their Egyptian counterparts.
At the time of writing, this post has 337 likes and 33 comments. Allen simply opened his
mobile camera, click record and share insights.
Despite its simplicity, it works so well because so few people are doing it. The videos that
deliver practical insight reap the biggest rewards.
So, how can you do this?
Talk to clients with whom you have a strong relationship. Ask if they’d be willing to chat with
you for a two-minute video. Prep them on a specific question to add structure.
If you’re with them in person, record direct-to-camera. Otherwise set up a Skype call and use
screen capture software to record the discussion.
Here’s another example where Allen did just this.
The topic is specific (networking tips), and he includes subtitles for those who are on a busy
commute.
By asking a specific question and getting an in-depth answer, your video content will have
structure, and the value will be clearer when writing a description.
When writing your description, tag the person you interviewed to introduce them and tell your
audience what they’ll learn. This way, you’ll your content will be seen by both your
audiences.
5. Build an outreach system

While it’s important to lay the foundations for the long-game, you want to see results fast.
Email outreach is still incredibly effective when done the right way. Luckily, you’ve already
laid down a solid foundation by uncovering your prospects’ challenges.
Here’s a quick three-step process for building your own outreach system:
5a. How to find the best outreach targets

Good news! Your marketing team has already profiled your ideal clients.
They’re called buyer personas.
These documents outline everything you need to know about your clients:
Image Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/create-reinforce-buyer-personas/
Buyer personas include background information on their professional history, their goals,
frustrations and where they hang out online.
Identify channels where your prospects are active. Use LinkedIn to uncover target accounts
that fit your criteria. Having Sales Navigator will make things easier.
5b. How to write compelling outreach emails

The philosophy of personalization has shifted in recent years.
The {first name} variable is no longer good enough. Your entire email needs to show that
you get your leads and understand their pains.
The easiest way to automate this is by segmenting your outreach list. Use the buyer
persona documents to do this.
The positioning of your solution will be different for each persona. For example, those with a
more sophisticated content marketing system in place will understand more sophisticated
buzzwords than those who haven’t even started blogging yet.
Therefore, the introduction and pain points I focus on will be different for both. Segment your
message by organization and buyer persona.
5c. Test unconventional approaches to optimize results

When I validated the need for Grizzle, I did the complete opposite of “cold email” best
practices:
1. “Keep your emails short” – mine were a wall of text
2. “Add value” – I made it clear I wanted to do work with them
I tested long emails because I wanted to give my target audience as much information as
they needed to make a decision.
If I don’t get a response, I follow-up with what I call a “statement of empathy,”
acknowledging the length of my previous email and providing a shorter version.
Using this approach, I generated my first three clients. You should constantly be testing new
approaches, especially when using saturated channels like cold email.
Test things nobody else is doing. Measure your results and, if you’re looking to optimize or
things aren’t working anymore, try doing the opposite.
6. “Shock and awe” with direct mail

You head to Sales Hacker to learn some killer lead generation techniques.
You see direct mail on the list.
You check the date.
It’s 2018.
No, you’re not reading through some old-school sales content. Direct mail is making a
comeback, and for good reasons.
According to InsideSales, B2B direct mail generates a response rate of up to 65%.
As everyone is still going all-in on digital channels, this traditional medium has a huge
opportunity for attention.
The process is simple: send a card or handwritten note along with a gift.
This “lumpy mail” technique bypasses the gatekeeper and straight into the hands of the
decision maker, eager to know what’s inside.
What kind of gifts should you include? According to InsideSales, gifts with a perceived value
of under $11.40 reflect poorly on response rates.
Furthermore, useful gifts (e.g., books) are 47.3% more likely to generate a response than
edible gifts.
There are three key elements to successful direct mail:
Make it personalized: Tailor both the gift and the message to the recipient. Segment your
target audience and use relevant language for each persona or industry.
Make it valuable: Remember, cheap gifts don’t work. Make sure your gift has a high
perceived value.
Make it useful: The gift must have some utility. Bonus points if it helps your prospect to do
their job better.
Check out the full infographic on Sales Hacker to learn more about executing profitable
direct mail.
7. Tap into your network for referrals

“Ask for referrals” is the sales equivalent of “email your list.”
To salespeople, it’s just obvious.
And yet, some of us still don’t do it enough.
The first question is, when is the right time to ask for referrals?
For software providers, the best time to ask is once your product has generated results –
whether that be in the form of money made or time saved.
At what point does your product become a habit? Work with marketing to find out indicating
behaviors, then reach out when the iron is hot.
For professional services, there’s a sweet spot. Too pushy and you’ll come across as
money-hungry. But skip it altogether, and you miss out on untapped growth.
Here, the best time is after the first phase of your project.
When clients are happy with your work, that’s when you ask. Remember, don’t be pushy.
Simply ask them if they know of anyone else who may be looking for a service like yours.
The second question is, how should you ask for referrals?
Here’s a five-point checklist to keep in mind when reaching out to clients:
1) Set the intention early: Get your clients prepped for referrals by mentioning it before the
close. This way it’s not a surprise, and it’s much more likely they’ll refer you.
2) Ask for qualified referrals: If you ask clients who they know, you’ll get referred to
anybody. Ask for referrals from people who fit your criteria, e.g., “marketers in the software
space.”
3) Referrals aren’t cold calls: When you do get referred, you should enter the conversation
by playing on the relationship with your client. Use a friendly tone, and act like you’re already
part of their network.
4) Delight your clients: You’re not going to get referred if you don’t deliver on your
promises. Of course, it’s down to your product or project delivery team to fulfill this. But you
can still go above-and-beyond to deliver value.
5) Turn your referral process into a system: Set reminders “X days” after a prospect
becomes a client. Furthermore, find ways to add value using content for the duration of their
relationship with your organization. This is how you build long-term relationships.
8. Tap into engaged communities
There’s no point in building your personal brand and creating content if nobody is going to
see it.
During your customer development conversations, you should also find out where they get
their new information from.
These channels should include publications, influencers, and communities.
Find out where your prospects are hanging out online. Communities are one of the most
effective ways of getting your content out to a wider audience.
8a. LinkedIn
While groups have become quiet and inactive, the news feed is where all the action is.
Repurpose your content into a standalone, value-driven post.
Here’s an example from Sales Hacker’s very own Gaetano DiNardi:
You’ll generate more engagement and traffic from your existing LinkedIn connections. More
on how to build your LinkedIn audience later.
8b. Quora
Many of your potential leads are using this Q&A platform to find information on their
challenges. Information that you are qualified to provide.
Answer their questions using your content as a guide, including step-by-step instructions and
a link back to your original content. Here’s a recent example:
GET ACTIONABLE SALES TIPS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS
DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX WEEKLY
8c. Facebook Groups

Groups generate a much higher engagement rate than pages. Which is why many business
leaders have invested in building their own.
Tap into these communities by providing value. Don’t spam links to your content. Here’s a
great example from Logan Honeycutt:
The principle here is simple: find out where your prospects are and add value to those
communities.
That means creating organic content. Work within the context of how those communities and
platforms work. Answer questions, provide value and share your experiences with fellow
members.
9. Build strategic, win-win partnerships

I believe tapping into other people’s audiences to be one of the fastest ways to grow your
own.
That’s why strategic partnerships work so well in the long-term. You’re adding value to
brands and individuals who have access to your ideal clients.
9a. Complimentary solutions

If you’re selling a marketing solution, it may not make sense to partner with a FinTech
company. But if you both target marketing directors in enterprise-level organizations, it
makes perfect sense.
Partner with non-competing organizations who share your target market. Offer to send any
leads or referrals their way as long as they offer to do the same.
This approach is more business development than a sales play. But by partnering with other
sales leaders in non-competing companies, you tap into an entirely new audience.
Many SaaS platforms now have their own marketplace. For example, if you’re targeting
e-commerce companies, then you may want to consider getting featured on the Shopify App
store or Experts directory:
9b. Co-branded content

Some partners may not see the value in a referral program.
If this is the case, offer to create a long-form piece of content for their audience in exchange
for a share of the leads generated.
This is exactly what PPC agency KlientBoost did. At the beginning of their journey, they
sacrificed owned content to create co-branded ebooks and webinars with companies who
had access to their ideal clients.
This approach helped KlientBoost grow to $1 million in revenue within a year. All because
they built a lead-generating asset, which still works for them today.
10. Tap into new audiences with guest blogging

Another easy way to get your content and message in front of a larger audience is through
guest blogging.
While some marketers feel it’s a waste of time, it can still drive qualified leads. In fact, we
used the approach you’re about to learn to generate a near 6-figure deal.
Here’s a three-step guide to get started:
10a. Find the right publications

For this to work, you must target publications that have authority in your market with an
active and engaged audience.
Therefore, you should measure each target publication against these metrics:
Domain authority (DA): A search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website is
likely to rank on Google. Primarily used for SEO purposes, this can be a strong indicator of
how authoritative a blog or publications is. Use Moz’s SEO Toolbar to measure this.
Social following: Look at your target’s Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages. Do they
have a large following (at least 10,000 followers)? Are people actively sharing, commenting
and engaging with their content?
Monthly traffic: Although only a “rough” metric, TrafficEstimate.com can provide a ballpark
figure on how much traffic your target publications generate.
Next, you need to find publications that accept contributions. In Google, search for phrases
such as:
● industry + “write for us”
● industry + “guest post”
● industry + “submit blog post”
● industry + “submit content”
● industry + “guest column”
● industry + “contribute to our blog”
● industry + “become a contributor”
● industry + “guest author”
You can also use AllTop, a directory of blogs categorized by topic and industry. Here’s what
we get when I search for “content marketing:”
10b. Outreach and pitching

At this stage, most professionals create a piece of content and “pitch” it to editors.
Shopping content you’ve already written is inefficient. For whatever reason, your content
may not be a “fit.” Meaning you’ll have to go through the whole process again until someone
accepts it.
Instead, reach out first and collaborate on content. Ask if editors if they’re accepting
contributions. Share your existing work and see if they’d like to hear your topic ideas.
Once you’ve generated a response, focus on topics that sit in the sweet spot of these three
areas:
Your value proposition: It must be relevant to what you do and the challenge your solution
solves.
Needs of the publication: What kind of content do they publish? Is it strategic or tactical?
How-to or opinion- and insight-driven?
What the market is talking about: Look at publications like Forbes and other industry blogs
to see what trends and topics your audience is already engaging with.
When pitching topics, make it clear you’ll deliver practical, how-to information. Publications
are hungry for this kind of content.
10c. Distribution
Guest blogging itself is already a form of marketing to other people’s audiences. While most
blogs share content with their email lists and social following, you should give it an extra
push.
Having your name published in an authoritative publication builds credibility. Amplify your
content in the communities you’re engaged with (see technique no. 8).
Outreach emails are also effective. Use BuzzSumo to find the most shared articles on the
blog you’ve published to:
Click on “View Sharers” to see a list of Twitter accounts that shared the content:
Reach out to any relevant individuals who would find your content most valuable. You can
either do this via Twitter DM or email.
When reaching out to sharers, it’s important to mention a good reason. In this case, it’s
because they shared a popular piece of content from a publication you’ve just contributed to.
Personalize each email with a reason why they would find it useful.
11. Use influencer engagement to amplify your

message
Networking with influencers has many benefits:
● They can introduce you to leads and provide new sales opportunities
● Their active audience may find your information valuable, meaning more eyeballs on
your content
● They can be fun and profitable business development opportunities
So, how do you connect with them in the first place?
When connecting with B2B influencers, most advice looks like this:
1. Share their content
2. Comment on their articles
3. Tweet @ them
4. Email them
The problem is, this doesn’t provide real value. Sure, everyone loves the extra social shares,
but does it solve their biggest challenges?
One of the best ways to start a relationship with influencers is to get them involved in the
content creation process. Especially when that content is published in front of a large
audience. Guest blogging is a particularly effective vessel for this approach.
Start by identifying relevant influencers. Who are the thought leaders and senior decision
makers with access to your best leads? Create a list, including contact information and
metrics such as the size of their social following.
Next, find a topic that is relevant to these influencers – or at least a segment of them. For
example, when I created this blog post about side project marketing for CrazyEgg, I targeted
the marketers and founders at the brands I included:
The connections I made in this article were secondary to the content I wanted to deliver. But
the principles are still the same: feature relevant influencers in your content.
Once you have a topic that brings everyone together, reach out to them. I often find Twitter
or LinkedIn are the best platforms for beginning this relationship, but email also works.
Voila! You’ve created win-win, value-driven relationships with thought leaders.
12. Survey your prospects

Most B2B professionals are eager to see what challenges they share with peers.
So instead of a traditional cold email, try surveying your prospects instead. To them, you’ll
appear as someone gathering data and insights on the industry.
The secondary bonus to this is the insight you’ll generate on your buyer personas. You’ll be
able to segment each respondent based on their answers, showing you where your solution
will be able to serve them best.
To collect responses, use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform:
Boost your response rates by using an incentive. I’m not talking about Amazon gift cards, but
rather giving them access to the insights you generate before they go “public.” This will
create an element of exclusivity while providing you with new content for your audience.
13. Grow your LinkedIn audience

In 2017, we saw LinkedIn evolve in a way we’ve never seen before.
Instead of a platform for recruiters to find candidates, it becomes a place for professionals to
connect, share value and truly generate new business opportunities.
Having a large, loyal following on LinkedIn can open up many opportunities – including, of
course, lead generation by means of social selling.
Here’s how to do it.
13a. LinkedIn audience growth

By now, you should have already optimized your LinkedIn profile. Now it’s time to build your
audience.
This is where having LinkedIn Sales Navigator comes in handy. With it, you can view and
connect with an unlimited number of people.
Having a large following expands your overall network on LinkedIn. You’ll end up with more
eyeballs on your content.
Don’t fret over irrelevant people connecting with you. If they follow you and engage with your
content, then you end up increasing your reach.
There are a couple of tools that can automate this process at your discretion, which include:
1. Linked Helper
2. Dux-Soup
But you must be careful. If you use these too often or send too many connection requests at
once, you risk getting your account banned.
13b. Create organic LinkedIn content

Once you build an audience, you need to engage with them. You need to give them an
action to take.
This doesn’t mean sending them an InMail to set up a meeting. You need to nurture them
with valuable, engaging content before starting the sales process.
Right now, thought leaders see a lot of success with LinkedIn posts (in the news feed):
The best content on LinkedIn share stories, deliver insight or provide raw, how-to
information.
Here’s a framework you can follow when creating yours:
The first two sentences need to draw your audience. Start with a change (in your business or
industry), show credibility or outline a problem.
End your post with something emotionally-driven or insightful. The objective is to inspire
engagement, spreading the reach of your content. It’s the part where you drive the “big”
lesson you aim to teach:
Finally, you need content that keeps their attention and adds value throughout the entire
post. Do this with tangible examples (from your own experiences or those of others),
third-party statistics to back up your claims and instructions on how to solve a problem:
13c. Turning connections into leads

Over time, you’ll slowly build an audience with thousands of professionals and business
leaders. Among these people are profitable sales opportunities.
There are a couple of ways to do this. The first is to identify them manually, generate insight
on their pains and use InMail or email outreach to get their attention.
The second method is to get them to identify themselves with a sales funnel.
Here’s what it looks like:
1. Export connection email addresses from LinkedIn
2. Use them to create a Facebook Remarketing campaign
3. Create a short how-to video guide that helps them solve a relevant challenge
4. Include a call-to-action to schedule some time with you
To export email addresses from LinkedIn, click on My Network. Under the left pane, click on
the “See All” link:
On the next page, click on “Manage synced and imported contacts” at the top-right of the
page.
Finally, under “Advanced Options,” click on the “Export contacts” link. The contact details of
all your connections will download in a CSV file.
You can now upload these emails to a Facebook Remarketing campaign. This guide from
the guys at Acquisio will help you get started with this.
Most event pages have a registration process for speakers. Look through the event website
or search “event + register to speak” on Google.
Here are some tips when pitching to speak at events (especially when reaching out to event
organizers):
● Tailor your outreach to the conference, including any relevant “credibility boosters,”
e.g., publications where you’ve contributed.
●
● When pitching a topic, don’t be broad. Tackle specific, in-depth topics on a pressing
challenge.
●
● Be polarizing where possible. Challenge the status quo and don’t be afraid to take a
controversial stance on a topic.
●
● If you have a recording of a previous speech, even in front of a small audience, this
can be an effective way of demonstrating your capabilities.
Finally, don’t turn your talk into a sales pitch. Add practical information. Share insights and
examples of others who overcame the same problems.
14. Set up meetings with senior decision makers
The old-school method of prospecting at events looked something like this:
1. Look at the list of exhibitors for interesting looking companies
2. Approach salespeople at the event in the hope you’ll be introduced to the right
person
This is a spray-and-pray tactic. Instead, book meetings well in advance of the event itself.
Start connecting with target prospects now. Research the accounts you want to engage with
and find out who will be going. Identify the most relevant person and connect with them on
LinkedIn.
When reaching out, make it clear on a) your intention and b) what’s in it for them. What
specific advice can you provide? This advice must be relevant to both their role and
organization.
Limit each meeting to 10 minutes. That way, even if you end up scheduling five to ten
different appointments, you have plenty of time to take advantage of other opportunities. It’s
also much easier for a prospect to say yes to a shorter commitment.
Events also provide an opportunity to re-engage with stale leads. Reach out via email or
social media and ask if they’d be willing to meet. You might find that the decision maker that
was blocking progress last time has moved on.

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STEP BY STEP

To put it in the words of Jeffrey Zeldman:

Sounds pretty familiar?

This is how Side Project Marketing was born.

This guide will not teach you:

This guide is for:

This guide is not for:

Examples of Side Project Marketing 6

The psychology behind Side Project Marketing (or why it works). 11

The 7 step Side Project Checklist 15

Frequently Asked questions about Side Projects 51

A marketplace to find projects as a videographer or a videographer as a company.

1. What is the core product Veed.me is selling?​ A marketplace to hire a

In March 2018 they had 360K visitors.

Ad budget spend? 0€.

Marketing done the right way.

1. Figure out what the core products/services you are selling.

This little feeling is what we call reciprocity.

A liquor, perhaps, or a fortune cookie, or perhaps a simple mint.

So here’s the question.

Most people would say no, maybe you did too.

4. The power of free

Because as humans, we are intrinsically afraid of loss.

With free, there’s no visible possibility of loss.

That's exactly what Side Project Marketing is about.

❏ Attracts qualified leads

❏ Focus on a niche problem

It’s just a human thing to do.

It’s a recipe to failure.

Seek to understand then to be understood

Use this exact same process to build Side Projects.

What you need for your workshop:

Stuff you’ll need to thrive:

How long it takes:

What the ultimate goal is:

Meet the Experts and How might We - 15min/chat

But that knowledge is distributed, or maybe not even in house.

Monday morning is devoted to an exercise called ‘Meet the experts’.

The more the better.

Heat Map Vote - 6 min

It’s time to stick them all against the wall or whiteboard.

A Sign Of Life - 30 min

This is why I named this exercise ‘A Sign Of Life’.

Now you might be wondering: ‘Do I just randomly google stuff?’.

Strategy #1: Quora

Search on Quora as if you were searching for a solution to a problem.

• Is there any way to...

Search for different topics

Ask the question

Strategy #2: Twitter

People who need a solution usually tweet things like:

So, you can search for these phrases on Twitter.

Strategy #3: Reddit

If a cat video went viral, it probably was first seen on Reddit.

Search for things like:

Strategy #4: Buzzsumo

This is where ​Buzzsumo​ comes in handy.

Solution Mapping - 30 min

This is where solution mapping comes into play.

1. What is the core product Veed.me is selling? A marketplace to hire a

This is where Buzzsumo comes in handy.

For example mine would be: [email protected].