Transcription
Over the last few years, the way that we do go-to-market strategies has completely changed, and the old ways of doing things are becoming completely obsolete. If you actually want to keep up with your competitors, you need a really cohesive plan. So, in this video, I'm going to give you the literal blueprint that I use for myself, as well as the blueprint that I've used for over 335 agencies that you can steal so that you can have a strong go-to-market strategy, start getting clients, and have so much business that you don't know what to do with it. So let's get into it.
A lot of people, when they do a go-to-market strategy, they think, "Oh, I can just have this service that I offer to these customers, and all of a sudden, business is going to fall into my lap." The problem with this is that it is a "throw spaghetti against the wall and hope that it sticks" approach. In today's day and age, that does not work because there are so many different businesses popping up left and right. So, competition is getting fierce; consumers are getting way more savvy to the fact that there are more businesses reaching out to them; there are more options out there for them; and this whole freelance culture, entrepreneurship culture, is catching up, and there's more competition out there. The businesses that are on their receiving end are becoming more savvy to what actually works for them. In addition, services are evolving, so we can no longer just say, "Hey, we're a business owner, and we do this for you." We need to be really pinpointed on our offer and what we're actually offering to consumers and make sure that we're ahead of the game.
If we do not land this correctly, what's going to happen is we're going to have this business; we're going to be all excited about it and our market strategy; when we actually go to market with our business, it's going to flop. It's not going to meet—it's not even going to get close to hitting—our expectations, and we're going to be frustrated, and we're going to end up just having a job at the end of the day. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through six different phases of a go-to-market strategy that you should steal completely so that you can make sure that you are fruitful when it comes to your go-to-market strategy.
First things first, that we need to decide is, just like the foundation of our offer, the first thing that we really need to figure out is what is it that I can do? I always like to look at what's on the forefront. Like, I'm not going to probably offer SEO; I'm not going to offer things that maybe seem a little bit more traditional; I'm not going to do like newspaper placement or like print advertising kind of things. What is it that's catchy? What is it that is unique right now in the market, and how can I use that to learn a skill set that can solve businesses' problems? So, right now, like anything AI, unique ways of getting leads, or unique ways to get new clients for customers is going to be the way to go.
If you are thinking about, "Okay, what is my skill set? What is it that I can actually do?" Think unique and think innovative, and think, "Okay, what's on the cutting edge? What is something that people will actually be attracted to or actually curious about?" In addition, guys, we want to make sure that we actually have a skill set in what we're offering. Like, we have no idea what AI is like; we shouldn't offer AI. If you have a skill set, use the skill set; we can just package it a little bit different, which I'll talk about here in a little bit because we're going to do this together. I'm going to just come up with an example; I'm just going to say I do an AI automation agency. Let's just say that because that's on the cutting edge; I think it'd be fun just to kind of see through.
The next thing that is really helpful to do is a competitive analysis. What a lot of people do is they'll try to recreate the wheel a lot of times, and they'll try to be like, "Okay, cool, I'm going to do this AI automation agency," and they get overwhelmed on what they should offer, what they should actually do, the deliverables, the positioning, all that sort of stuff, and it can be really challenging and time-consuming to really figure out, "Okay, how do I make this unique? What's actually working in the marketplace?" And I like to do this before I go any deeper because what this allows me to do is it allows me to see who's having success in what I want to do, how are they positioning themselves, what makes them unique, what are their testimonials saying, what is their pricing (if they have it), what are the ads that they're running? And that gives me the ability to expedite the ability for me to make decisions on our offer, our positioning, not be overwhelmed by having the need to offer everything to everybody. Because what happens often times is like we become an AI automation agency, but really we become an order taker and somebody who can offer AI automation, and it just becomes you just create a job for yourself. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a competitive analysis. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to say "AI automation agency" in Google; we're going to just kind of pop through and go down some. So I'm just going to open some up; I'm going to get probably like, or probably like 10 in there. What you could also do is let's just go to Maps; this is going to be more local if you have like a local business—leading AI automation agency Kelarai.
So what I'm going to do with these competitors is I'm going to start making notes of these guys, so I'm going to put them in here. So this seems like a decent competitor here, and I'm going to start to just fill this out: optimize processes, automate workflows, elevate business, like it; let's paste and match style here. What else makes them unique? AI development, lead generation, CRM optimization; say goodbye to potential clients lost due to slow follow-ups, wasted hours chasing unqualified leads. So it seems like they're optimizing a lot of like the sales side of things; top AI automation agency, AI automation. Let's check them out. We automate your workflow for highly profitable scale, custom and done for you; great headline; let's use that here; cool; let's make sure we save this one here. I'm just going to go through each one, and I'm going to look for like what makes them unique, look at their testimonials. Wow, they have a lot of social proof; they have a video here; their automations; I really like this; definitely going to screenshot that, add that in here. Okay, let's see what else; put repetitive tasks on autopilot; killer call out; great copywriting on this website; let's see testimonials; we can screenshot this; our company was struggling to keep up with the demands of our growing business until we found this automation agency; great automation assessment; that's really unique too; these guys are awesome; I like these guys; results; case studies; like services; like this is really good too. So I'm just going to screenshot these like because this is good to know, like if I'm trying to figure out, okay, these people are clearly successful; like what are they doing that makes them successful? Image predictive analysis; kind of do a lot of different things, which could be a hinder; I like how they turn manual inconsistent work into operational excellence; okay, love that; okay, let's look at another one; monks.com; what we do; this is like very full-servy, so I actually would not consider these a good competition; I think I hit on an ad for these guys, so let's just go to their homepage because we're trying to find someone really niche; we build bespoke data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence solutions; yeah, these guys are like pretty massive and seem like maybe a little overqualified as well, so I'm not going to use those people as a good example; AI automation; so a Webflow and SEO agency for growth-focused businesses; so this is like SEO, so it seems like I just hit on like a landing page for them, so this isn't really a great example; let's go here; guess this isn't bad; so I'm kind of just in the process of finding the right people; goope; build and test; deliver; nice; they have the pricing on there; sweet; brand voice copy; this is great; so we build custom AI automation agents for; so it seems like they're like a ChatGPT or like an AI agent creator for people, which is a cool service; our AI workflows 10x your staff; interesting; let's see if there's any calls in here; I like these headlines; this is good; few testimonials; not really great testimonials; not bad; the automated agency; not a good example; this is overwhelming; not a good example; and then obviously not a good example here. So we have two good examples from the competitive analysis that I want to use here, or three, sorry; AI automation.agency; AI automation; yeah, cool.
So now what I'm also going to check out is I'm going to see if they're running any ads. So if I go to Ads Library, I just Google that; we can go to Facebook, and then we can actually type in "AI automation agency," see if these guys pop up; no; let's go to their website again; they don't have their Facebook up there; so let's kind of mute AI automation; let's see if they're running any ads; Axe Automation, and they are. So what I can do is I can just take this URL, go to their ads, boom, sweet, and I can see like their ads; you could screenshot a few of them too; stop fighting Mondays; let's make your MVP; confused by automations; we get it; awesome; wakingdigital.com; let's see if they're doing anything; waking digital; don't see anything. So this was really helpful for me because again, I'm coming into this pretty cold, running this competitive analysis; like I found my number one competitor, which is going to be Axe Automation; like wow, this is exactly who I want to emulate, and what I'm going to start to do is I'm going to be like, "Okay, cool, like what from here is it that I want to like emulate and start offering perhaps to make them more efficient?"
So the next thing that we want to do is we want to come up with our offer breakdown. So really what we want to come up with is we want to come up with the who, the pain, the outcome, the steps to outcome, the unique selling proposition, and the pricing for our business. And what this is going to allow us to do is this is going to allow us to speak the customer language and allow us to come up with copy that's actually going to solve their problem and kind of cohesively create the foundation of what we're actually doing and what our business is actually about. So from looking at the different competitors, what I want to do, if I'm going to go to market, I'm going to do the service that is going to increase the likelihood of my clients making the most amount of money. Yeah, I could do project management; yeah, I could do like staff augmentation, but I know that I'm going to choose the service; I'm going to pick the service that's most likely to get my clients the most money because that's going to be the strongest message that's going to attract the most amount of people because they're the most problem-aware that they want to make more money. We're all humans, so I think if we can offer a service that is going to make them more money, it's going to be a lot easier to sell. So I like the sales and marketing automations, so that's going to be like the breadth of it. Okay, so I'm going to go back to my GTM strategy, and I'm going to go, "What do I do?" Okay, AI automation; I'm just going to do sales and marketing automations to make more money.
So now what we want to fill out is we want to fill out our offer breakdown: Who is it that we serve? B2B businesses doing more than $20K a month. What is their pain? Getting lost, unorganized CRM; no data on what's doing well for marketing; sales team; St B2B businesses with a sales team; manual follow-ups; manual accountability of sales team; wasting time trying to find sales data; manual copy; manual marketing. Their desired outcome is more money; that's always going to be the biggest desired outcome that we want to promote as a marketing company, so or as a company just in general, in my opinion, even if you're doing like a service that's not necessarily like lead generation, this will lead to them making more money; streamlined data; organized pipeline; clean data; optimized processes; processing process; contract process optimization. So now what we want to figure out is we want to figure out what are the steps to the desired outcome. So when we're coming up with this, we need to realize is that people don't buy into the outcome necessarily; they buy into the process; they get convicted that your process will allow them to get from where they are to where they want to go. And guess what? We don't have to recreate the wheel because we just look at a bunch of competitors, and we can see what they're doing from their process perspective. So their process is: map out the process; find areas to automate; build and test; manage and iterate; perfect; onboarding; map out process; then we're going to basically find loops and opportunities to automate plus add AI; we're going to launch and test it; makes a lot of sense; then we're going to reiterate and improve; unique selling proposition; AI sales workflow; we're going to actually put this through ChatGPT to help us out a little bit; and then pricing; I couldn't really find a lot of pricing on these people's stuff here, but this is going to be like a value sell, because like what we want to think about is like if we were to do this for a business, and let's just say their price point is $3,000 per customer, and this helps them make four extra deals per month and then save 20 hours on labor cost per month, it's a pretty powerful offer, right? So I'm going to, just because I kind of already know this, I'm just going to say $8,000 for 3 months.
So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this; so this is going to be rough, and this will be your first draft; and then what we're going to do is we're going to go to Mr. ChatGPT or Mrs. ChatGPT; we're going to type in, using this, rewrite it in a bit more detail, using my ideal customer as a B2B company; we don't need to do B2B; we can just be a business with an existing sales team; maybe we could even get more specific; we'll just do business; okay; read a bit; my ideal customer as a business with an existing sales team; pain points; speak the language of my customer; make it marketable, polarizing, and financially driven; outcomes; steps to outcome; define process using what I wrote on how we're going to get our customers from where they are to where they want to go; USB; give me five options for a unique selling proposition that peaks curiosity. So now with this is going to do is basically going to clean this up and then make the copy a little bit more marketable, as we'll see, which will be really good because really what we're trying to do in the offer breakdown is we're trying to build conviction, because the more that we believe in our go-to-market, the more that we believe in our product, that's going to leak into everything that we do as we begin to launch this. So now we can clean this up and go ahead and just paste it in here; last leads; you may miss out on high-value opportunities because leads slip through the cracks; wasting your sales team's potential on CRM; the CRM is a mess; status scattered, making it hard to track leads' progress or sales activities effectively; beautiful. Okay, so I'm not going to go through all of these; that's will be something that you'll need to do is just clean up the pain points, the outcomes, steps to outcome, unique selling proposition; obviously, just pick one of these; AI-powered sales workflow; like this is kind of like your headlines; now we feel really convicted; we feel really convicted on our pain points, on the outcomes, steps to outcome; we know the pain points of our customers; we're speaking to the pain points of their customers; and really this drives the strategy as it pertains to copywriting, marketing, what we're going to build from like an asset perspective, but this sets us up really nicely.
After we have the foundation laid—the foundation is by far the most important part—what we're going to do is we're going to start to build momentum on this offer. I see so many people when they start to come up with this business idea or they have this business; they're like, "Okay, I got to build this website; I got to like optimize all my processes, all that sort of stuff." No, you need to sell this. So what we need to do is we need to have a strategy for selling this. So what I like to do is there's really two parts to building momentum and getting our first couple of deals on our belt so that we can actually sell this, and the first is the sphere of influence. So basically, make a list of everyone you know and reach out to them. So now what we've been able to do is we've been able to create our copywriting; we've been able to speak to the pain points to find our ideal customer; all we need to do is make a list of everybody that we know who is in business, who potentially could be an influencer for our business, all that sort of stuff; when we need to reach out to them; this can be DMs; this can be SMS; this can be Facebook; this can be IG; this could also be like past clients, contacts, connections, etc. What we're saying is we're just saying, "Hey, John, we're launching a new offer to help companies drive more revenue through an AI-powered sales workflow; I'm looking for a few people to test drive this; would you happen to know that I could reach out to?" And what are we doing? We're just pulling copy from up here; past clients; "Hi, John, we just launched a new offer that helps businesses struggling with a nice sales process optimize, close more deals using AI; I'll shoot you more info." So what we're really testing is we're testing like openers for the momentum campaign; who's our sphere of influence; who could I reach out to? What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a list of everybody that I freaking know that could benefit from this, and I'm going to try to get people to test drive this. And when I say "test drive," depending on the opportunity, it could be a free service; if you need case studies, it could be a discounted service to get your first couple of case studies; if they're influential, then like that's for you really to decide; I kind of look at free services as marketing; so if you're spending 10 hours on somebody's services, then that's like 10 times your hourly rate is your basically your marketing cost.
The second part of the momentum is going to be the social media campaign. So what we're going to do is we're going to do some announcement posts; I would do a series of announcement posts, and the series is going to be like 5 to 10 posts. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take our offer breakdown; go back to ChatGPT; I'm going to say, "For this breakdown, write me a series of five announcement posts for my new offer, teasing it and speaking the language of my customer; make it direct response," and this will start to build momentum from like a social media perspective; I want to make them more announc—like I want to say like more announcement-driven; perfect; like these are way freaking better; now we have a series of posts that we can start posting organically. So we can just paste these in here. The next part of social media really is to just start posting and build our brand; so again, like just build brand plus be consistent on social; like we can go to ChatGPT; "Give me 20 polarizing hook ideas for my offer that I can talk about on social media," and what it'll do is it'll spit out a bunch of different ideas for content ideas, but we want to be consistent, posting five times a week, depending on how really ambitious we want to be. So here's literally 20 ideas. Now we have our offer; we have our competitive analysis; I'm feeling pretty convicted, and at this point, under phase 4, we should be able to get our first couple of deals or so, which is great.
Next, what we want to do is we want to do lead generation; again, we don't want to focus too hard on like processes, our website, all that sort of stuff; we want to focus on getting clients; we want to focus on improving our offer; then once we start to get some clients through the door, and then that's when we can start to refine the process and all that sort of stuff. So phase five is all about the generation and getting more and more clients so that we can improve our product, and then once our product is refined, then we can then improve our system. So there's really two different things that I want to talk about when it comes to lead generation first, which is often misunderstood, which is using cold email. So when it comes to launching our product, we want speed, and we want volume, and we want efficiency; meaning we want speed; we want to be able to start sending emails as quickly as possible; we want volume; we want to be able to send to a lot of people and get this in front of a lot of people; and then lastly, efficiency; we don't want to have to spend $20,000 to get a product and service in front of a lot of different people. So what we want to do is we want to also use an AI-driven software to leverage cold email, so that would be something like Instantly. And if I go into Instantly, basically, I can automate all of my cold email and automate the ability to reach thousands and thousands of people every single day. What's cool about this from like a speed perspective? I can literally get pre-warmed accounts, and I can start sending emails as soon as today. I can also literally, in two clicks, start sending emails and start warming up emails so that I can have a huge database of emails that I can then send from because what we don't want to do is we don't want to start blasting out a bunch of cold emails from our current emails because all your emails are going to just end up in spam, and that's going to be a complete mess. Literally, in two clicks, we can get emails ready to send from and start getting this in front of people. Then what we can do is we can literally create a campaign simply inside of here; so AI automation agency, and we can create a campaign that we're going to leverage to then send the emails from in a specific campaign, so we can see what campaign is actually working well from a leads perspective. What we can do is we can use Instantly Lead Finder, and we can find people who are, let's just say, management level or C-level, and industry; I mean, we talked about basically any industry works really well, so let's just do location is United States, and let's just say revenue is 0 to 10 million; here's literally 1.6 million, which is kind of a lot, so let's just change this to CEO; 267,000 people that I could reach out to to help them optimize their sales process. And all we have to do is we can just select the leads that we want; we can use AI search to also refine our search depending on who it is; we can add it to the campaign that we want to, and we can quickly have a list of people that we can reach out to. In addition, what I can do is I can create a sequence of emails; like if I don't want to write my email copy, I can again leverage AI; we're an AI automation agency, so what we could do is we could say, "My company name is Sales Automation Pro," uh, "what are the details of your offer?" Use ChatGPT; who's my target audience? Businesses with a sales team; so for case study, since I don't have any, I'm going to say, "What are some stats around AI that I could use for my target customer?" I'm just going to use stats because that's also like pretty good; love this; and then we're going to do...
Three emails, and now what? It did is it literally wrote my emails for me. So, instead of the case study, I'm just going to use like a stat. So I could save, and I could literally go to schedule, and I could save the schedule, and I could literally launch it. Now I have the ability to send thousands and thousands of emails, literally within an hour of using a service like this. Which is going to give us the data to then make informed decisions on what's actually working, as well as drive opportunities. So, cold email is going to be a complete no-brainer when it comes to lead gen, just from speed, efficiency, and cost, and the ability to reach that many people.
If you have budget and you have the ability to spend on Meta ads or Facebook ads or Instagram ads, for sure, another great way to get a lot of data. Because if you have money to spend, then you can reach a lot of people, and what's going to help us make informed decisions based off of the response that we're getting from ads.
After the lead generation process is done, it really becomes the process of scaling. So, finding the rhythm of what's working well. So, like social media campaign, like what copy is working well, what's getting response to well. I have my rhythm of reaching out to my SIs. I have my rhythm of cold email. I have my rhythm of testing out different copy, and I'm going to scale what's working. So, what cold email campaign is working really well? What messaging on social media is working really well? Then we're going to dial in the fulfillment. So, what's the steps to desired outcome? How do I dial this in to make it super streamlined and automated and simple to do? We want to do that once we actually get some clients to test that on. And then we hire, we hire people to work the fulfillment, work the steps to outcome, and we're pretty much dialed in from a fulfillment perspective, and we're able to finally get stuff off of our plate after we have some data and we're able to get people on it.
So, when it comes to a breakdown, what we're doing is we're doing the offer; we're doing competitive analysis; and we're doing the offer breakdown. From a week two perspective, what we're going to focus on is we're going to focus on solely the momentum campaign and social media posting. So this will be like week two through like plus; like this will be a constant thing that will con—you'll be doing with the goal of getting some clients from the momentum campaign, social media posting. We have agencies, people that we coach, doing the momentum campaign, drumming up five figures and retainers pretty quickly, just because they're putting themselves out there. Then week three becomes lead gen, and that becomes again a constant effort that we're continuing to do. So if you guys have capacity to meet these KPIs and meet these goals, then there's no reason that you shouldn't be getting clients within literally the first month of dialing this in. Then week four plus, it really becomes scaling lead gen essentially, and then week five plus would be like fulfillment—likely the fulfillment will just be you to start, and then after that you should be dialed in and ready to go, guys.
The principles of the go-to-market strategy is we want to be really specific; we want to lay a really solid foundation to scale. Because if our foundation is really solid, then it makes everything so much easier. And then we're deciding on what to actually go to market with. Look at what's trending; look at what the competitors are doing, because that's going to build your guts and build your conviction. So that when you do actually go to sell it, it's a lot easier because you're a lot more convicted on it. So do not skip any of the processes that we just talked about, because every single thing is going to be extremely, extremely important. You might have to test; the timelines might be a little bit longer just from reiterations and confirming things, but don't get discouraged if it does take a little bit longer for your go-to-market strategy, because you might have to go back to square one; you might have to refine your offer, etc., etc.
Now, this video is mostly about go-to-market strategies in a very general context, and we did hit on cold email, and it is actually a big part of that, and we only touched on it like a little bit. But the reality is is that cold email is a very scalable model if done right. So if you want to see what happens when we send 500,000 cold emails to businesses—everything from the metrics and results—go ahead and click on this video right here. Or if you want 10 years of no BS cold email advice condensed into just 41 minutes, go ahead and click the video right here. Thanks so much for watching, you guys. We will see you on the next one.