Dive into the crowded world of marketing with FiveRings Marketing’s CEO, Shaheem Alam. Get insider tips on standing out, offering full-service marketing from cold calls to SEO, and selling in a tech-saturated landscape. If you’re navigating a noisy market or craving marketing ingenuity, this episode is your playbook for success!
Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market Podcast.
- Tackling a saturated market.
- Unique full-service agency approach.
- Crafting a robust go-to-market strategy.
- The power of cold outreach.
- Evolving sales processes & positioning.
Resources:
Connect with Shaheem Alam:
Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:
Quotables:
- 03:06 – One thing is just with our service offerings, I’m not gonna say the only there, there might be more out there, but I haven’t come across an agency right now that’s doing full service, meaning we do the outbound sales stuff, your cold calling, cold emailing, LinkedIn prospecting, providing BDRs, SDRs, that kind of service. And then also doing inbound, you know, PPC, LinkedIn ads, Google Ads, SEO, content marketing.
- 01:32 – Brian: What makes your business difficult to market?
Shaheem: Got it. I think what makes our business difficult to market is the fact that there are tons of other agencies out there that are doing something similar or doing the same thing or doing bits and pieces of what we’re doing. So there’s a lot of competition - 14:25 – Shaheem: So that’s like the first challenge that they come with is like, they need conversations, they need sales meetings. The other thing, which is something that they don’t realize, which I’m starting to have more and more conversations with our clients about is while they think that if they get 15 meetings per month, they’re gonna close, 20% of them, 30% of them, and then they’re gonna get the revenue and they’re gonna close these deals in two, three months and they’re gonna hit their series A and it’s all gonna be, you know, according to plan.
Brian: Sunshine and rainbows. - 12:11: I think PLG requires like a community, a strong presence online, right? Like a lot of that kind of stuff. A lot of buying from a community. And most startups that we work with don’t have that. Like, we don’t actually come across PLG being a very like, common tactic that like, that’s being employed. We have had clients where they do use it because they had an open source product. And they have a huge community built out of that. We have other clients that will come and they had like, Hey, inbound is working really well because they just figured out ads really, really well. But you need all channels humming still, right? So even if you have your community or you have your inbound ads or organic or your referrals or whatever, you still need that outbound component because this is a channel again. And you wanna, ideally, as you grow, have all channels.
- 17:32 – We have some documents we share with them too, to creating like a good discovery call, and then what’s your next step? Advising them on what that next step should be, and then what should, what it should follow up with afterwards, how to follow up to keep moving these leads along your funnel. So we advise our clients and provide them with some guidance around that.