Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive. Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback was very encouraging.

In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past week and share with you what I did, as well as the results we achieved. If you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.

As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business. Sound good? Here we go!

Key Activities in the Weeks of April 28th and May 5th, 2014

During the past two weeks, here’s a summary of what happened:

1. We had a baby! (hence my missing last week’s update)
2. We published 6 blog posts
3. Talked with a New Prospect (inbound lead)
4. Created a training video for our social media manager
5. We got a referral
6. Discovered a new outbound lead generation strategy
7. Results from direct mail
8. Scoping Call into Video
9. Note templates in Infusionsoft

Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

We Had a Baby!

Our daughter, Kiana, has finally arrived. She was born on May 3rd at 1pm and has been doing her best to rob Liz and I of sleep ever since!

As you might guess, Liz and I are pretty excited about her arrival and have been having all sorts of fun getting to know our little bundle of joy! Liz’s folks have also come by to spend the week with us, and as you can see below, Grandpa hasn’t been playing with more than just Kiana during his stay!

6 New Blog Posts

This week is the first week that we’ve been publishing a post per day on Groove, and as you will see down in the traffic numbers, more blog posts = more traffic. Here are this week’s posts:

• 6 Ways LinkedIn Can Help Grow Your Business
• How (And Why) to Define a Targeted Audience for Your Marketing Campaign
• How to Test the Viability of a Niche Without Wasting Valuable Time and Resources
• How to Stop Getting Ignored and Break Through the Clutter in Your Prospect’s Inbox
• Groove April 2014 Traffic Report
• 12 Ways to Get Personal Using Twitter

Talked With a New Prospect

On April 22 a woman named Tina (not her real name) found the Groove blog and downloaded one of our free reports. Capturing a lead in this fashion is something that happens about 5 times a day, and each time I receive the notification email from HubSpot, I take a look at the email address of the new lead to see what I can learn about them.

Most times, the address is from a gmail account, so there isn’t a lot I can glean from it (although using Rapportive definitely helps). However, in this case, the email address was not a gmail address. Instead it was from a health care company.

Bingo.

I quickly typed up a very short personal email asking her if she wanted to arrange a time to talk and she replied with a yes.

When we spoke, it quickly became apparent that they need, and can afford, what we do. She told me that they have a budget of $5,000/mo and that the current supplier had two months left in their contract. She also told me that they weren’t happy with the results.

After the call, I sent her the same email that I’ve shared in previous posts and I will continue to communicate with her over the next two months so as to give us the best chance possible of becoming the replacement for the current supplier. If you want to see how this turned out, just become a subscriber so you don’t miss future posts.

Social Media Manager Training Video

For the last month or so, I have been personally managing our social media accounts using HubSpot. Now that I have figured out exactly how many shares, when, and on what network, etc…I thought it was time to create a training video so that I could hand this task of to a member of our team.

The video below, which lives in our internal Wiki, has also been uploaded to Youtube just so that I could share it with you.

We Got a Referral

One of the long-time readers emailed me last week to say that she had a referral for us. From what I could tell prior to speaking with them, the lead looked well qualified.

A week after the introduction, we had our first conference call and to say they are well qualified is an understatement. Much to my delight, this is a marquee client doing $3.2B in annual revenue.

During the call, we talked extensively about their goals and how inbound marketing could help them to achieve this goals. By then end of a 60 minute call, I’d answered all their questions and told them that our fee would be $5,000/mo. They thought that sounded reasonable and asked me for a statement of work.

I’m never one to get too excited before I get paid, so I won’t do that here. They did indicate, however, that a decision would be made early next week and asked me if I had the capacity available to start work for them right away.

So why am I telling you about this? This is the kind of thing that happens when you create genuinely helpful content, so if you aren’t yet doing that, when are you going to start?

New Outbound Lead Generation Strategy

Another reader (Sebastian) wrote to thank me for writing this series of posts and in that email he also shared with me a cold email strategy that he’s been using with good success. Here’s what he wrote:

I did something VERY similar (to your Target 100 list) this week, but via email. I used the cold emailing template to email a target 100 list I made. I picked a particular segment of the market (they have $, they understand marketing, etc). I scraped emails from 2 specific sites. I’m getting a LOT of responses, and even though not everyone is interested I’m openinig conversations with many important people. 2 calls already scheduled for next week, in both cases i briefly described services AND stated starting prices BEFORE they agreed to talk.

The strategy he’s using is freely available here. For those of you who think that cold email is SPAM, you are wrong. If you follow these guidelines, you can email anyone you like. To get the email addresses, just hire a VA or spend some time Googling around. There are plenty of ways to do it.

Results from Direct Mail Campaign

In previous posts, I have written about how we are using 3 dimensional direct mail to reach out to a list of 100 suspects that fit the criteria of an ideal client. Each person on the list receives one letter per week, and each letter tells them to visit this page.

So far, we have received two phone calls, neither of which have become clients yet. None of the recipients has yet attempted to download the report.

While this might appear to be disappointing, it’s pretty much in line with my expectations. I figured we’d have to mail each person at least 5 times prior to getting any results.

If I had the time to make follow up calls, which I do plan to do, I have no doubt that we could have achieved more by now. My excuse? B-A-B-Y! With that said, the total cost of the entire campaign will be more than covered by just ONE client.

New Systems for Handling Leads and Scoping Calls

With all the content, direct mail, and email outreach that I’m doing, I quickly realized that I needed a consistent way to handle the leads that call me, as well as a way to ensure that the first sales calls (called ‘Scoping Calls’) are all handled in exactly the same way.

System for Leads

All the activity that I’m doing is producing conversations and in the video below, I’m going to show you how I’m using something called a Note Template in Infusionsoft to save me time and ensure that I handle the follow up and other important activities in a consistent fashion – so nothing ever falls through the cracks.

System for Scoping Calls

With more leads coming in the door, I find myself needing to do more scoping calls and as a result, I’ve realized that it was time to build a system for these calls so that they were done in a consistent fashion from prospect to prospect. Check out the video below to see how I’m using Infusionsoft and Slideshare to do this.

Traffic & Leads

Since my decision just over a month ago to begin actively blogging on Groove, the results have come very quickly. Below is a summary of the activity over the last week. As you can see, traffic was up 31% from the previous week and new leads was up 46%. Suffice to say, it was a good week for these two metrics.

Additional Resources

• See prior posts in this series
• Get the Best Buyer Formula
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

Now What?

If you liked this post and want future updates on our progress with how to start a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]