Proposal FAQs

It’s just me that does all the day-to-day work on your messaging and outreach. I do have a small team of freelancers that I’ve worked with for several years, who help me with some of the repetitive behind-the-scenes data and technical setup work, but the person you’ll deal with, working daily on your outreach campaigns, is me alone.

People who talk about ‘number of leads’ in outbound prospecting often miss the fact there’s a spectrum of what constitues a ‘lead’ - from someone with an immediate requirement and brief, down to someone with a vague interest who might come back week or months later. My goal is usually to generate around 10 ‘positive responses’ on that spectrum each month. That’s usually enough to generate a positive ROI from the activity pretty quickly.

I do outsource this element of the work - to someone who specialises in agency new business development. Their goal is to get meetings and conversations lined up for you, so they won’t typically engage in detailed conversation with your prospect about your services, but they will encourage them to book a conversation with you for a proper discussion about their requirements.

It varies depending on the size of your audiences. Generally I’ll work this out based on the total size of your target audience, dividing it up so everyone on the list is approached twice or three times over a 3-month period. It usually averages out at around 5,000 outreach messages per month, which is a decent volume of sends to get a good number of responses.

In almost all cases, messages appear as if they’re being sent by you (or by whatever member of your team is most-appropriate to be dealing with sales conversations). I have some clients who prefer to use an alias name, which is fine. Generally it’s best the messages don’t appear to come from me, as it only takes a quick LinkedIn search by the prospect to uncover that I’m an outsourced sales operation, so using your name or an alias name is the best approach, especially as we can use the process to build your own reputation and contacts via LinkedIn too.

Keeping outreach activity running continually is one of the keys to its success, so I’d never suggest pausing - except literally when people are off work over the actual Christmas period. Times like the summer holidays and early December are actually good for outreach marketing, as so many other people stop doing it you have a better chance of standing out. If ever I receive an out-of-office auto-responder, those people are always followed-up with when they return to work. All that being said, you are free to pause my outreach activity at any time, with no notice period required, subject to my reduced-rate ‘pause fee’ that just covers my costs during such down-time periods.

Because this business is just me, I’ve had to develop extremely efficient and automated processes so I can spend all my time on clients’ outreach campaigns and zero time on admin like credit control and invoicing. I use GoCardless to process direct debits, which is an industry-standard system that gives you full control over the direct debit. You will only ever be debited for amounts which you’ve approved the invoice for beforehand. If your accounts dept is unable to signup for direct debit, unfortunately we won’t be able to work together - this is the only method of payment I’m able to accept.