The un-productization of Lead Cookie and evolution to higher-quality

"You really nailed it on the productized service front." - This is what a friend who I hadn't spoken to in a few years said to me the other day.

I laughed because to the outside world, Lead Cookie did look like we nailed it as a productized service.

And to be honest, at one point we did... but markets shift and industries change.

In this post, I am going to share how we have been slowly "un-productizing" Lead Cookie. I'll explain why we are doing this, what that looks like, and what you can learn from our journey. This journey has helped us become one of the best B2B lead generation agencies in the market.

The perfect productized service...?

3 years ago, I had what felt like the perfect productized service. We were entering a rising market, there was insane demand, and we were producing amazing results for most of the clients we signed on.

I was able to remove myself from role by role, and elevate myself from a consultant to a CEO.

It was a pretty amazing feeling, and I learned a lot along the way.

But there was one big problem... I could see that the industry trends were not looking good...

I wrote on this extensively as I was learning it in The fatal flaw I made with my business and how you can avoid it.

Seeing weaknesses and shifting industry trends.

While business was amazing for a period of time, I began to see that I had a limited runway while things would still be good and stable.

I knew that LinkedIn was going to eventually crack down and make outreach through the platform harder. I also saw the trends of GDPR, CANSPAM, and the overall challenge of cold email deliverability growing...

It was clear that outbound as an industry was getting harder from a technical level.

But it wasn't just technical, it was behavioral.

In Andrew Chen's Law of Shitty Clickthrough Rates he talks about how all marketing tactics become less effective over time. Beyond the technical changes of the industry, I knew that digital outbound was getting harder and harder.

I wrote about this in my post on The Outbound industry is evolving.

All of these factors combined made it clear that we had to evolve as a company, and that we were most likely going to have to break free from our "productized" roots.

Evolving into a low-quantity, high-quality provider.

While most agencies dream of building productized services, we decided to un-productize ourselves.

As we surveyed the possible solutions for Lead Cookie, it became clear what the market needed.

The market demands lower-quantity, higher-quality, outreach.

We first began to test out these campaigns where we focused on quality over quantity... and to no surprise, every time we did it, results were leaps and bounds better than our standard outreach approach.

One of our most recent campaigns got a 28% response rate and 13% positive response rate, and generated 188% ROI in the first 4 months. Those numbers even blow me away!

Yet those numbers would not be possible in a more productized, mass outreach style approach.

Adding in appointment setting & cold calling.

To add to the complexity, we also ramped up an appointment setting and cold calling department. This dove deep into uncharted territory for us as this requires highly skilled individuals who can speak on behalf of our clients.

While this was a scary move at first, it has skyrocketed results for our clients and led to significant retention and customer satisfaction.

Transitioning our business to a new model.

The hardest part of this is simply the transition. While we would love to flip a switch and move 100% to our new approach overnight, that is simply not possible. There are a few problems at hand.

We have to build new systems - Our new approach on higher-quality outreach requires new systems to be built, and team members to be trained. This takes time and often bottlenecks at 1-2 key individuals who reach capacity.

The new service costs more, so we need different customers - In order to do our higher quality outreach approach, we have to charge more. It simply costs more to run. This means we have to focus on getting in front of a different clientele than those who normally purchased our standard Lead Cookie services.

Who gets the standard service, and who gets the new? - One challenge we ran into is that some customers who come through are still a fit for our standard LinkedIn outreach service. The service still works well, and we are still one of the best at it. But we now have to understand how to sell with multiple different product lines.

More complex sales process - We had to throw our old sales process out the window. We have now moved from a one call close to a 2 call close which includes a discovery call and a sales presentation.

Shifting team members - A very unfun part of this is that the model also requires a different mix of team members. We need fewer people in total, but more who are higher skilled. This means some sad layoffs of team members as our overall headcount had to shrink for the new model.

I'm grateful we got ahead of this.

The other day a guy reached out to me who was shutting down his LinkedIn outreach agency. He said "we made it rain while the sun was shining, but it's looking like time to get out."

I spoke with this individual on the phone, and it was clear that this person was only focused on a purely productized, mass, spammy outreach approach. The idea of going toward high-quality was just not on his radar. And so as results dropped, he just threw in the towel.

On our side, I'm grateful we have gotten ahead of this. Today nearly 35% of our revenue comes from our higher quality services.

By the end of 2020, our plan is to be 100% hand-qualified on all leads. Our goal is to focus on being the one of the top 3 high-quality outreach firm in the industry.

What you can learn from this.

Think about your industry long term.

It's easy to bury your head in your business, but sometimes you need to pop up and look at things long term. This is essential, especially in fast-paced digital industries where the pace of change is amazing. In just 3 years, I watched the entire outbound industry turn on its head.

So keep your head up, and think long-term and take action accordingly.

Take action, no matter how small.

When I realized where the industry trends were going, I was honestly just paralyzed in fear for almost 6 months. I stressed about it but I didn't know what to do.

Eventually, I realized I just had to start taking some action. While I couldn't fix the problem overnight, I could start taking small innovative actions. Week after week, the team worked on developing new capabilities or parts of a service line that could expand. And after a year of this, we have evolved as an organization, and continue to grow.

You can run an agency and still have freedom.

There is this belief in the world that "productized services are the secret to freedom". While I do agree there is some freedom in them, I would say that the statement has been misconstrued.

Instead I would argue "being a great CEO is the secret to freedom".

At Lead Cookie, I would not even call us a productized service anymore. Yet I still spend 4-8 hours per week on the business. The key is that I have an amazing team that I lead who runs the business for me.