Happy Sunday, folks!

18 months ago, this idea seemed pretty bizarre to me:

You can just... build an audience of prospective buyers and become visible to them. And (hopefully) memorable to them. And (hopefully) remembered and reached out to when they need the service you sell. Without special charisma and just a bit of skill and money, you can do this.

These days, this idea seems like a solid lead generation option to me. Not bizarre at all.

Here's how I implement it for clients:

1: Make sure my client has clear positioning that can be expressed in a memorable way (ex: React development for scale-ups, B2B Ecommerce marketing)

2: Build an audience of 10,000 buyers and recommenders

3: Create and email a topical weekly newsletter to the audience segment I can discover email addresses for (typically 3k to 5k). My client is the sponsor of the newsletter, and their content is often part but not all of the newsletter. The leading-indicator stats for this approach are very good: https://opportunitylabs.io/nlsstats

4: 5k to 6k of the audience will match into a LinkedIn ads audience and can be shown ads to reinforce my client's brand and positioning

5: 30% of the 7 to 5k no-email contacts will accept a no-pitch LinkedIn connection request from a relevant vendor that doesn't look desperate to sell them something

- Some percentage of them will respond positively to an (automated) polite+personal invitation to subscribe to the weekly newsletter

- Some other percentage of them won't subscribe, but will see my client's content in their LinkedIn feed (which can be re-purposed newsletter content)

The goal of this approach is to position my client as a salient, memorable source of educational value to a relevant audience of prospects and buyers without the cost of ghost-written thought leadership or the potential brand damage of irrelevant straight-to-the-sale cold email.

I've got my systems for delivering this dialed in to the point that I could take on 2 or 3 more clients. Happy to discuss with you if you're interested, just hit reply.

From The Confirmation Bias Files

I really like Matt Clancy's "living literature reviews", and this one was especially interesting: Teaching Innovative Entrepreneurship. He looks at the available research on the effect of entrepreneurship training programs.

A big part of what makes Matt's writing so interesting is how he constructs something like a socratic dialog as he walks his way through the scientific evidence on whatever question he's writing about. There are some booooooorrrring literature reviews out there. Matt makes what could be boring stuff much more interesting.

One of the life phenomena I find ever-fascinating is: things we do because we want the second-order effects but we can't get those second-order effects without doing the things that yield them. I attended Davidson College, a somewhat elite small private school. I had no idea that the payoff of connecting deeply with classmates (and maintaining those connections) far exceeds the value of the education itself. And if you're a normal person, you don't need to have any idea about this. You just go with the flow -- you participate -- and you end up with both the education and the network. I am not a normal person. And I'm not saying if I had known about this I would have spent less time in the library reading back-issues of Mix magazine and Positive Feedback magazine instead of connecting deeply with classmates. :)

Here, though, is the clipping I'm adding to my "Confirmation Bias Files":

It looks like entrepreneurship training doesn't work because of the training -- it works because of the professional network it helps participants build. That confirms my biases. And it might also be true.

Last Week’s For-Fun Poll

The question was: How many professional peers do you periodicaly or regularly interact with?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ None (3)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 1-10 (13)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 11-50 (6)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 51-100 (0)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ More than 100 (0)

22 Votes

Someone left this comment: “Peer defined as someone doing work in, or just adjacent to, the work I do (or hope to do again.) I meet at least monthly with many for what I call a “play date”: a time to discuss ideas, synergies, and be curious together. ”

This Week’s For-Fun Poll

I hope something good happens to you this week,
—Philip.

Hey hey! Sorry for no email last Sunday, a sandworm ate my homework. BTW, if ever you come to the AMC Classic 12 in Missoula, MT to watch a movie in their IMAX theater, bring earplugs! I think they got Los Lobos’ old hard-of-hearing soundguy to set the levels in there. Yeesh!

Lead Generation Learnings

In an information landscape that looks like the illustration below, who has more power?

Who has more power: the creators (they create that massive pile of stuff the guy at the computer in the illustration above can attempt to consume), or a trusted curator(s)? A Few Social Media Influencers Are Shaping AI, published on IEEE Spectrum, got me thinking about this question yet again. Here’s a critical moment from that article:

This is just one paper. However its core finding is more consonant than dissonant with my experience of navigating an overwhelming information landscape, which is: curators are powerful. They’re powerful because they perform a very valuable service, and it’s easier to leverage their curatorial contribution than it is to be informed about everything.

Are curators more powerful than any individual creator? Weeeeeelll, that one of those “what’s the sound of one hand clapping” unanswerable questions.

For sure, though, curation can be a powerful, valuable service when done well. How could the attention and trust that curation earns you be used to generate leads? Hmm… 😇 

Random Curatorial Excellence

Sometimes Spotify’s algorithm is a good “curator” for music discovery. And sometimes Spotify’s curation pales in comparison to a human’s work.

If you’re into awesome 90’s underground hip hop, you’ll enjoy this, from curator DaRocknessMonsta:

Last Week’s For-Fun Poll

The question was: If marketing works for you, what activities have a track record of success for you?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Inbound (5)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Outbound (4)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 A combination of inbound and outbound (7)

16 Votes

A few respondents elaborated:

• “I ticked outbound because I can directly attribute success to some of my outbound activities, but I’m pretty confident (but without evidence) that the inbound efforts have in some way help me to make successful sales. If nothing else forcing myself to generate useful content means I am much better at explaining the benefits of my approach which results in me being much more confident in sales conversations, which are in some ways often like an interview. ”

• “Despite (or perhaps because of!) everything I do online to produce engaging and entertaining content on LinkedIn and to my email list that demonstrates my expertise to my ideal clients, it generates no leads. Outbound (primarily keeping in touch with ex-clients & people who know me / like me / trust me and asking them to refer me) is how I generate leads.”

Thanks to all who responded!

This Week’s For-Fun Poll

I hope something good happens to you this week,
-P

Happy Sunday, folks!

Lead Generation Learnings

My friend Brad Farris — coach to agency owners — recently published a really interesting article: https://anchoradvisors.com/all-sales-come-from-conversations/. Here’s a summary of it:

And then last week a client of mine shared with me a lead generation experiment they’re running. Here’s what they’re doing:

Visit the websites of competing organizations that support similar goals as my business or provide similar services. Make a list of organizations they identify as clients. Then, each day:

1. See who from their client base is on my newsletter list

2. Send email in Pipedrive inviting one person to a research chat about their experience with the org

3. Little drops in this bucket are already adding up to valuable conversations

I love the smart, efficient way my client is combining several information sources in order to guide their outreach and make it very focused and relevant.

I love the idea that my expertise would radiate such brilliance that everybody in my market would have to wear sunglasses when looking it. And I love the idea that my expertise would generate such a gravitational field that everyone in my market begins to orbit around it.

For me though, that idea hasn’t become a reality. I think Brad and my client, unbeknownst to each other, are together pointing towards a more realistic business development approach for those of us in this bucket. To paraphrase James Carville: “It’s the conversations, stupid!” 🙂 And to paraphrase Wayne Gretzky: “Connect with those who are already buying, not those who have no record of buying“. OK, that' was a pretty tortured paraphrase. Anyway! I hope these two ideas combine in your mind to give you some ideas/motivations for executing proactive, thoughtful business development.

Last Week’s For-Fun Poll

The question was: If you've never done any form of marketing, for how long have you continuously been in business for yourself?

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ >1 year (0)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 1 year to 3 years (1)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ >3 years to 7 years (2)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 >7 years (3)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Other (0)

6 Votes

I got one explainer comment from someone in the >7 years bucket: “All word of mouth. Started by partnering as a contractor to folks who had more work”

Thanks to all who responded!

This Week’s For-Fun Poll

One way to simplistically organize the world of marketing is two buckets: inbound, or attraction-based activities, and outbound, or outreach-based activities. We’ll go with this imperfect taxonomy for now.

As usual, I appreciate any comments you feel like leaving to enrich your answer (the comment field shows up after you click your response).

I hope the coming week is a good one for you!
-P

Happy Saturday, people!

As many of you know, I regularly advocate for doing research that is small, focused, inexpensive, and enables better decision-making. I refer to this as small-scale research (SSR).

Check this out from Josh Baron, a criminal defense attorney (he shared this with me and then gave me permission to share it with y'all):

To give you a sense of the kind of questions Josh was asking in this survey, here is a screenshot of one of the approximately 30 questions the survey contained:

Josh's research illustrates one of the ways you can use a small, focused research project to create significant value: learn about how one side of a "market" thinks or operates, and share this information with the information-starved other side of the market. I use quotes around market because in some cases you are gathering information from one side of "a place where parties can gather to facilitate the exchange of goods and services" and sharing that information with the other side of that market, and in other cases, like with Josh's research, the market is more of a metaphorical trading relationship between criminal defense attorneys and jurors.

Many of the clients you serve are choosing to endure uncertainty about some question or, more likely, a large group of questions. Life involves lots of irreducible uncertainty, we learn to deal with it, and none of us have the resources to become more certain about everything. Small-scale research is a response to this impulse: "we don't have to be so uncertain about that, and I'm going to speculatively invest some time, effort, and money to try to reduce the uncertainty that we as a group hold about that." This is an act of service that often creates shared value for the researcher and the audience the research is done for. That's what you call a win-win.

Sharing success stories like this is part of my advocacy for this idea. The other part is implementation support for those wanting help executing a small-scale research project, and on that front I'm prepared to teach you/your team how to do it, coach you/them through it, or execute the project for you at prices ranging from $500/hr to $4,500/mo. There's no sales page for this, just hit reply if you're interested in discussing.

This is turning out to be a somewhat more sales-focused email than usual, but all this stuff is a strong value, so I feel fine about that.

There's a deadline looming: if you want the 22% early-bird discount on the 2-month Build A Cold Email Stack online workshop that I'm running starting on February 23, you'll need to register for the workshop before Monday, Feb 19th.

The simple way to explain what this workshop is about and what you'll get is: it's everything I've learned and refined over the past year -- including a lot of turnkey process that you can use as-is -- about getting inexpensive-to-produce content created and enjoyed by an audience of prospects and recommenders. It includes 8 hours of 1:1 implementation time with me (up to 60m/week) to adapt and integrate these ideas into your business. And it includes 12 hours of group discussion time (90m/week) to share learnings, discuss, argue, and connect.

I think that's a deal, even at the full price of $1,800, and especially at the early-bird price of $1,400. I'm around this weekend if you want to email me with questions beyond what the sales page answers, and if you need to relieve that itch in your buy-button finger now, I've got you covered :)

Last Week's For-Fun Poll

Last week's for-fun poll asked how long you could run your business for without Internet access. Jonathan Stark keenly suggested that a more interesting variant of the question would be: for how long could your business keep earning income without you personally having Internet access. That's a great distinction because it gets to the heart of one of the kinds of leverage you can build into your business, and if you're not already there, Jonathan's email list is a good place to get inspiration about increasing leverage in the solo/small expert firm.

Poll results:

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 1 hour (3)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 1 day (4)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 1 week (1)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Several weeks (1)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 1 month (0)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Several months (0)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Other (OMG please leave a comment if you choose this one 😁) (1)

10 Votes

Also got this awesome comment:

“I spent 4 to 6 month a year sailing around in Atlantic Ocean. Internet is very much dependent on our location. < 20 mile off coast : pretty fine, most of the time (beware of cliffs though :) Otherwise: you might send me an email. I may receive it. But not guaranteed. Hope this nourishes your thinking :)”

Thanks to all who weighed in on this one!

This Week's For-Fun Poll

I'm curious about how many if you have never done any form of what you yourself would consider marketing, and of that subset, how long you've continuously been in business for yourself.

Rules for this: you define what is/isn't marketing. Only respond if you've never done any form of what you would define as marketing your services.

Happy Caturday everybody! -P

Happy Sunday, people! I hope the Super Bowl deeply nourishes every parched nook and cranny of your souls.

Lead Generation Learnings

I had a client who once said "If I had 4 hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend 5 hours sharpening my axe." This week felt a bit like that to me; lots of getting organized and improving the meta-tool of process.

I think that's the main shareable thing I learned about lead generation this past week: it's worth it to get organized.

Even though lead generation is the main thing I sell and so it's what I'm focused on every workday, there's still lots of picking up and putting down various components of my process, and therefore lots of opportunities to waste 30 minutes trying to figure out what exactly what needs to happen next with this piece of the process for this client. Even though there's lots of automation I've built to make things more efficient, there's still lots of client-specific state that has to be tracked. My brain is definitely not the right repository for the state about all of those moving parts.

Something like Notion is probably the ideal place for this kind of state-heavy process. But I use and very much like Logseq, so I spent time building client-specific dashboards and some templates using the smartblocks plugin. Once I got to the point where I can click a button and the exact right piece of the much larger overall process appears on the dashboard with the right pieces auto-completed for me, it was a very empowering feeling.

Another realization was that improving the meta-tool of process requires a very different headspace, at least for me. The natural headspace for me is a kind of fluid, associative, thinking-in-metaphors-and-possibilities sort of place. I'm unsure how to describe the headspace I had to be in to build empowering process and templates. But getting there felt like squeezing myself into a different shape. It was a palpable feeling of discomfort.

But I'll say it again: it was so worth it! As I think about how this might apply to your business development efforts, I wonder:

• Are you using even a simple CRM to track opportunities, and to remind yourself to maintain relationships with people who might be important to your business but not salient in your daily thinking?

• Do you have marketing or business development work that doesn't get done at all, or gets done less than it should because of some kind of friction? Maybe that friction is fundamental and just needs to be powered through, and maybe it's reducible with better process?

Last Week’s For-Fun Poll

Last email’s For Fun Poll was: “How do you house yourself?” Results:

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Apartment I rent (6)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ House I rent (2)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 House I own (20)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Movable dwelling (1)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Other (If you like please also leave an un-identifying comment with more details) (4)

33 Votes

When I wrote the poll, I was hoping for some fascinating answers to the “Movable dwelling” choice! When my wife and I lived at the Oregon coast back in the early 2010’s, we and our 2 cats and 1 dog lived in an 8×8’ pumphouse for about 6 weeks while we were waiting for our manufactured home to be delivered. I worked on a folding table under a big maple tree on a laptop run off a deep cycle battery + inverter and a cellular modem hooked up to yagi antenna I made from some 1×2 cedar furring and welding rods, mounted on a tripod and aimed at the not-close cellphone tower. We showered at the YMCA and ate a lot of sandwiches during this time. Not a movable dwelling, but still… 🙂 

The “Other” responses were mostly folks who own apartments rather than rent them. Thanks to all who responded and commented!

This Week’s For-Fun Poll

Happy Sunday folks! This week my wife and I are moving into this sweet rental house we found, so if any of you want to help me move a few sectional sofas with pull-out beds inside them that mangle your fingers when the bed frame unfolds on you while trying to get the sofa through a doorway, let me know and I'll send you the liability waiver and our address! (Kidding about the sofas but not about the house.)

We "generated the lead" for this house in an interesting way. We published a 1-pager website with some info on us as renters, a photograph of my wife and I, multiple past letters of recommendation, and our promise to be great renters. We made a flyer with some of that info, a QR code linking to the site, and contact info. And we posted it physically and digitally everywhere we could think of. Within a week we were talking to a landlord who was just about to start looking for renters for this house. He found us indirectly, via his social network. A friend of his knew his plans, saw our ad, and forwarded it to him, allowing us to intercept his search for new renters.

Lead Generation Learnings

Anytime the topic of lead generation comes up, I'll haul out this mindmap and get folks talking to me about their reactions to this section of the map:

(Full mindmap: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/images/lead-generation-2024.pdf)

The general pattern here is interesting. Yes, I'm sure you can find some exceptions to what I'm about to say but most of the time...

...people's preferred approach to lead generation is a reflection of how they got into self-employment. If they got into self-employment by being well-connected, then networking as a lead generation approach will make a lot of sense to them, and will feel like the right approach. If the early internet connected them to semi-anonymous folks who published interesting articles about working online, and that's what got them to make the leap into self-employment or entrepreneurship without the benefit of being well-connected, then publishing to generate leads will make a lot of sense to them, and will feel like the right approach.

I don't think there's a thing in the world wrong with this. Lots of things can work just fine for lead generation. There's usually room to follow our natural preferences, become better and better at them, and prosper as a result. Yes, there are cases where some business just can't work with certain lead generation approaches. I have a hard time imagining an HR consultancy that specializes in CEO succession planning using only digital marketing for lead generation. I also have a hard time imagining a SaaS not making heavy use of digital marketing for lead generation.

So sure, there are limits to this pattern, but I find that most of the time our preferences with respect to lead generation mirror how we got into business in the first place.

Last Week's For-Fun Poll

The question was: Do you attentively read the foreword of most books that you read?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes (13)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ No (10)

23 Votes

Thanks for the comments some of you left enriching your responses:

Why yes?

• I find forwards useful for more tightly positioning the rest of the book, so I better tune myself into what I’m about to read. There’s something about a third party perspective that adds more than if it was just written by the author.

• It's a bit like reading a movie review on Rotten Tomato before watching the flick. In the book forward, I know it is completely biased, but it helps me define what the author thinks I should be getting out of the book to some extent in another reader's words.

• I like to know more about the author, their motivations, and reasons they have approached the book. I also tend to find more honesty in these than elsewhere in the book.

• I think I read the forward to get the feeling that I have read the entire book later. In other words, if I don't read the forward, maybe I'll feel less accomplished or successful in my book-reading endeavor, which is weird to say out loud but I guess that's why I do it or that's what my brain comes up with as an explanation for why I read the forward.

• I am a completionist and it’s part of the book, but I also consider it as an intro.

• I think I'm scared I'll miss something. I actually enjoy introductions. I at least start the foreword.

• I don't know that I get any value, but I read books cover to cover as long as it keeps my interest. The foreword is kind of a fun way to get hyped about the rest of the book, and sometimes I don't know much about an author going in so I guess in that way it helps set the stage 😅

• I read it to get a sense of the author's mindset when writing; where was he? what was happening in his life? what prompted his huge expense of time, talent, and treasure for this undertaking? It helps me with my own interpretation (some may say prejudice) of the material.

Why no?

• To avoid spoilers. Also, to get to the meat of it.

• I like to get straight to the point. My time is limited.

This Week's For-Fun Poll

I hope you have a great week!
-P

Happy Sunday, folks. For you today: some lead generation learnings, and a bit of panhandling.

Lead Generation Learnings

I used to hold to a very comfortingly-simple view of lead generation[1]:

• Lead gen based on communicating with an opted-in audience: GOOD

• Lead gen based on communicating with an opt-out audience: VEWWY VEWWY BAD

Like so many beliefs in the world of marketing, my prior about lead generation was based on a combination of aesthetic preferences, second-hand observation, and the availability heuristic.

As I've started to use carefully-constructed opt-out audiences and email as a content distribution method, I'm reminded of this story Cormac McCarthy told in an interview once:

Source | More on McCarthy

I now think the question isn't opt-in vs. opt-out. The fundamental question is relevance and value vs. irrelevance/lack of value.

Every one of us has at least one vivid memory of being included in an audience we didn't opt in to and being "marketed at" in an irrelevant or value-less way that irritated us. We can easily call to mind those stories and use them to condemn opt-out marketing writ large. But when we're included in an audience and then on the receiving end of marketing that we find useful, enjoyable, or delightful, we overlook the opt-out nature of that marketing.

I’m not arguing in favor of opt-out marketing here, but we should see our biases for what they are.

I Can't Stop Thinking About

Panhandling.

So I'm on this call last week with a past client/friend. He's German, and I'm using his local knowledge of the culture to check an assumption I have about cold email and German culture which is: it's jarringly discordant to just walk up to someone you don't know (physically or digitally) and ask them for something, right? That's my assumption, based on various comments from previous German or Germany-adjacent clients over the years.

My friend is confirming that my assumption is correct, and then to further emphasize his point he says: "It's panhandling." My friend is German and also very fluent in English and American culture. This wasn't a translation glitch on his part, or an insult. It was just the best word to describe how one culture sees the practices of another. I'm generalizing bigly here about entire cultures and so forth, I know, but this was a wonderful moment for me.

As most of you know, Americans by and large only use the word panhandling to refer to someone asking for money from passersby on the street. So to hear someone use that word to describe scrappy, proactive ways of doing marketing for business services was delightfully profane. I'm not kidding. It was shocking, and completely delightful.

And yet, if we take the idea of panhandling to the semantic chop shop, the chassis we’re left with is: using the means available to you to put an offer in front of people you don’t know. Yes, with actual panhandling, the offer is asking for money with nothing tangible in return, and the kayfabe is “I’m broke and desperate”.

But using the means available to us to put an offer in front of people we don’t know? Maybe we're all just panhandling, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.

(Some More of) Philip's Panhandling

A bit more panhandling of my own :) I am conducting some very focused small-scale research to learn about what kinds of rates/fees e-commerce agencies charge. An e-commerce agency is one primarily or entirely focused on e-commerce, and if you know the rates that one charges because you've worked with one in the recent past or because you work at/run one, I would greatly appreciate your participation in this anonymous research: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5HBG3M5 (about 2 minutes to complete this survey)

For-Fun Poll

Beehiiv (my new email platform) does polls too, just like Substack! So I'm going to continue ending my emails to you with a "for-fun poll" where I ask whatever question is on my mind and then share the results in the next email.

I hope you have either a great week or, if life is about to hand you a tough week, I hope it also gives you something to laugh about along the way,
-P

Notes:

1: I'll occasionally point out that "lead generation" is a misnomer. Most of us don't create the desire in someone to buy services like ours out of thin air. Instead, we intercept someone's existing desire that's turned into the action of them searching for a solution. We don't generate leads, we intercept opportunity. To map this to an analogy: if we are deer hunters, we don't cause a deer to materialize in front of us so we can kill it. If we are farmers, we don't cause a field of full-grown corn to materialize in front of us so we can harvest it. I'm being pedantic, but the term lead generation implies that you can just cause opportunity to materialize. If you follow this vector of thought too far, it gets you thinking that you can cause your market to want stuff it does not in fact want. Ideas and word meanings do matter! I know better, however, than to tilt at this windmill outside of a footnote. :)

Hey there! This is a reminder that the super-early-bird pricing for the Build A Cold Email Stack Workshop ends today. On a practical level, that means when I wake up tomorrow in Mountain Time I’ll tell Stripe to charge $1,400 for the SKU rather than the current price of $900 (and the full price of $1,800).

Here is a link you can use to buy a seat: https://buy.stripe.com/3cseYvabm16F7E48wH

If you know anyone who might want to attend this workshop, there’s now a page describing it: https://opportunitylabs.io/workshops/ol-workshop-cold-email/

What would your business look like if you had a repeatable process for becoming known and memorable to new prospects? This email promotes a workshop that helps you build such a system.

I’ve spent the last 8 months experimenting with using cold email to distribute education-based content marketing. As I’ve morphed my business away from a pure advisory/education model to a done-for-you services model, I’ve been looking for a balance between the value and usefulness of educational content but without the labor intensity a commitment to such content usually brings in its wake. I’ve developed something I like and the market seems to like. It offers the speed and reach of cold email without direct selling, and the value and usefulness of educational content without much emotional or intellectual labor.

I'm ready to share this strategy and the process I've developed to implement it.

You're invited to Build A Cold Email Stack. This is a 2-month-long online workshop, starting mid-February, where I'll help you build a system for using email to reach a sizable audience of prospects with useful content. At $1,800 for the workshop fee, this probably only makes sense if a new client would be worth at least ~5x that amount. Also, you'll need to sign up for some SaaS tools that total up to between $561 and $739/month (actual costs varies within that range depending on how quickly you want to build your cold email audience; if your intention is to stop building your cold email audience after some months your software cost would then drop to $290/month).

Here's what you'll get in this workshop:

• Guidance on both low-effort and high-effort ways to create actual value for a cold email audience in a way that's totally different from the kind of cold email you hate receiving.

Sorry, I have to break from the bullet list here and say this again for emphasis: When I use this approach for my clients, I am not sending cold email sales pitches. I am sending relevant useful content, and the labor intensity of creating that content is scaled to their appetite for content-creation labor, their business needs, and so on. As a result of sending relevant useful content rather than a sequence of sales pitches, the email metrics we’re seeing are indistinguishable from those of most double opted in email lists (remember, always take open rates with a grain of salt no matter how the list was built). Ok, back to the bullet list of what the workshop includes:

• A recipe for setting up an extremely high-quality, robust cold email tech stack.

• Guidance on building a highly relevant list of prospects with recipe-level instructions for the mechanics of the process and principles-level instructions for audience definition.

• Weekly group session where we discuss progress, questions, and so forth. (Exact day/time TBD but will very likely be between 8am to 10am Mountain time to provide the best time-zone coverage for most of you.)

• One private 60-minute screenshare implementation session per week of the workshop (up to 8 such sessions per participant) where I help you translate the workshop's recipes and guidance into the specifics of your business. (If you want to preview my availability for these sessions to make sure my availability matches yours, you can check out the scheduling link for those implementation sessions here: https://opportunitylabs.io/baces1on1s) Again, this is not a course, it’s a workshop that combines learning with custom implementation support.

There are some pretty easy ways to know if this workshop would not be a good fit for you:

• Not a good fit if you are desperate for extremely short-term results from outreach, are not open to a more investment-minded/generous approach, or are for some other reason definitely going to use your cold email stack to send transactional salesey emails. The world has more than enough of that already and I don't want to be part of the problem there.

• Not a good fit if you don't know who your buyers are (meaning you could not in 1 or 2 short sentences describe who is a good fit for your services), or if it's not possible to construct a LinkedIn search that selects buyers or recommenders. (An example of buyers you can’t construct a LinkedIn search for: Boards of Directors that are struggling with effective succession planning)

• Probably not a good fit if your buyers are exclusively in the EU.

If this description leaves you interested but with questions, please let me know your questions: philip@opportunitylabs.io

Oh, I almost forgot: early-bird discounts. Let's go big with that discount: 50% off the workshop fee for those who pay by EOD Monday, Jan 15th.

If you want to buy yourself a seat in this workshop, here's the payment link: https://buy.stripe.com/3cseYvabm16F7E48wH. If you want to buy a friend, family member, secret crush, or estranged sibling/child a seat in the workshop, the link is also https://buy.stripe.com/3cseYvabm16F7E48wH.

-P

Q: Claude.ai, in 280 characters, what will readers get from reading this email that they could not get from spending the same amount of time watching product unboxing videos on Youtube? Be honest. Be honest.

Alrighty then!

A Favor

I'm setting up some new email infrastructure for recruiting research participants so I can do a better job of speaking from the perspective of data to the question of how to intercept more opportunity. This initiative won't turn into benefit for my email list subscribers for another 6 to 12 months, but I could use your help now. Over the coming weeks I'm going to email you all from a new email address (philip@ibxresearch.com or philip@research.ibxresearch.com). If you'd be so very kind as to reply to that email when you receive it, it'll help establish some positive reputation for the new email addresses. Thanks in advance for any help you are able to lend this.

An Experiment

I just finished a very narrowly-focused competitive analysis for a client. He was curious if any of his competitors have priced and packaged services, or even publish their pricing at all.

This was the perfect kind of research question to bring in a "LLM research assistant" because we were starting with high uncertainty and could tolerate a significant degree of inaccuracy in service of reducing that uncertainty.

Here's what I did:

1. Pulled the names of 1,670 competitor firms from LinkedIn Sales Navigator (LISN) and Apollo

2. Scraped the home page of every firm's web site

3. Wrote some tooling that sent each home page to GPT-4 and asked it to determine if it's a services firm or product business: 720 services firms. Also asked it to determine if it's a generalist firm or specialized solely on my client's vertical: 234 specialized.

4. Scraped every probably-a-services-description page from those 234.

5. Sent those pages to GPT-4 and asked it to look for pricing and evidence of service packaging. Aside from a few who published PPC management fees and a few low-cost productized services, none published pricing or had packaged services for significant scope projects.

It's impressive to me how generative AI makes getting researched answers to questions like this so much easier. A few learnings to pass along:

• One of the fastest ways to size the supply side of a market is via LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Inside of 5 minutes you can have a pretty good ballpark picture of how many companies there are focused on serving a particular market. But some categories will have both product and services companies showing up in even a very tightly defined search. That's why I had to have step 3 in my research process above.

• My "quick, Philip, estimate how many companies in market X are specialized vs. generalist" answer is: 20% of the market, give or take a bit, will be specialized. You'll notice the market I investigated above has 32.5% of its companies specialized (again, according to GPT-4's inspection of the company's home page, so there is some uncertainty baked into this number). That's on the high side of 20%, but the form of specialization I asked GPT-4 to look for was vertical specialization, not a simultaneous vertical and horizontal specialization.

Some Rules

You can approach an email list with an "anything goes" attitude and do sorta OK (ask me how I know hahahahahah cough cough cough...), but it's helpful to have rules you try to live by in your husbandry of an email list, if only to occasionally delight yourself by breaking one of your own rules. That is also an excellent reason to keep these rules to yourself, but I'll make an exception here, just for you, so you'll know how I intend to approach this email list in 2024 and beyond.

• Fewer or no thought experiments/good ideas/theories; more reporting on real-world experiments/research

• The only goal for the list is usefulness at the individual email level; regularity or consistency can't matter or I'll get too wrapped around my own axle and the #1 goal will be threatened

• Occasional promotion of my services, but the marketing for those is simply reporting the past performance of those services, not optimistically selling you on their future potential

• Never ever, ever, ever write “stay tuned for part 2 of this email”

Speaking of thought experiments, the Wikipedia article on Antipodes actually has some interesting examples of what happens when all you have is thought experiments:

Both of these are laugh-out-loud funny from the modern perspective, but when I take a more sympathetic posture, they both strike me as totally reasonable thought experiments that ended up reaching silly conclusions because the experimenters were working with very limited information. Maybe Pomponius Mela thought the Earth's temperature rose exponentially the closer you got to the equator, meaning that you would burn alive if you got too close? Or maybe he thought the equatorial temperature extremely-hot-but-bearable but the journey with limited technology seemed as impossible as a manned journey to the Andromeda galaxy seems to us now.

These were just thought experiments, though, not actual in-the-world experiments with real people, boats, and supplies. The thought experiments only take you so far.

From the most recent "For Fun Poll":

:)

I hope your 2024 is off to a good start.

-P

--Gang Starr, Work

This is embarrassing, but here goes.

I counted up how many times, since February 2023, I've left the house for a primarily social purpose -- where the outing was first about doing something social and secondarily about something else. The total number: maybe 3? If we expand the definition to an outing that's primarily about something else but incidentally involves social interaction with more than 1 or 2 people, the number is still in the single digits.

Weird? Maybe. I bet more than a few of you have similar numbers.

It's not always like this for me. My level of "social Brownian Motion" has fluctuated throughout life based on various life circumstances. Some of us have lives that are arranged in a way that produces a lot of social interaction as a byproduct of that life -- you chat with people while getting one of those revolting kombucha drinks at the cafe at the coworking space; you're often on both sides of the "so what do for a living?" question because you're interacting with strangers often; you have functional small-talk skills because you accompany your extroverted spouse to their work events and need to not look like a psycho in order to stay married; etc.

Others of us have great lives that produce almost no social Brownian Motion. We work from home in offices that cubicle-dwellers would envy. We opt for the self-checkout, even if the line is longer there. We order it online or we've done all the research before we walk into the store. We live in the sticks and like it that way. Etc.

One of the really wise things my wife often says about introverts is "at a party, introverts need a job to feel comfortable". Set the table, make sure everybody's drink is full, do stuff in the kitchen, take coats at the door, etc.

In my experience, she's right about this. The ability to focus on a task that, as a by-product, produces social interaction is so very helpful for the most introverted among us. This is the opposite of what I refer to as “Pure Networking”.

When the starting point is my model of how non-professional buyers find service providers, the ways that we can intercept their search for an us-shaped service provider looks like the following:

(y’all email readers can tap this image to embiggen it)

Pure Networking is all about meeting potential buyers or those who can be helpful to us in the quest to meet potential buyers.

I am quite introverted but I know a surprisingly large number of people because of the "job" I have at "the party" (writing several books, this email list, etc.). If I had needed to meet that large number of people first through pure networking in order to do the kind of work I do, it would have never happened. If I'd had to write "I will meet more people through pure networking" on the blackboard 100 times each day I didn't meet more people, I'd choose the blackboard every time for the delicious solitary think time it provides. The job I have is nice, but it's not so nice that I would do <shudder> pure networking to have it!

Pure networking works for some of us as a way to intercept more opportunity. [1] For many of us, it does not.

During a meeting a week or two ago, a thought partner said something very wise: don’t compare your ideology’s theoretical best to reality’s actual worst. They're not the same thing and it's not even close to a fair comparison. One of those has to contend with the complexity and constraints of the real world. The other doesn't. This has implications for lead generation, I think.

It's been an... interesting... two years for my wife and I. I'll skip the details for now, but during this rather chaotic time one of the big "in my bones" learnings has been that a consistent application of a small portion of the good ideas out there beats trying (and failing) to fully (dogmatically) apply all those good ideas.

On a different recent thought partner call, I said "blah blah blah some people just aren't cut out to be authorities/thought leaders." My thought partner asked what I meant by that. For your context, I wasn't slagging on anybody in particular or even a group of anybodies in general. Rather I was reflecting on how my previous business model was, in large part, based on an effort to seduce folks into laying hold of the tools of thought leadership and using those tools for their benefit.

I think it took me seeing that those tools aren't enough for my business to thrive to get me to the place where I could say "some people just aren't cut out to be authorities/thought leaders." Some of us (me included) just don't have sufficient stability in our life to do what's needed for effective thought leadership. Some of us question our point of view on things (marketing, in my case, and the questioning was via small-scale research) and find our POV upended as a result and need to change other things in our business as a result. Some of us (me included, as of late) don't have whatever energy source is required to regularly turn thought into a useful resource for clients/prospects (or, perhaps, the necessary freedom from ADHD/bad habits/life distractions to effectively channel that energy source) via content marketing, publishing, and so on.

Laying hold of the tools of thought leadership is one "job" that we introverts can give ourselves to avoid having to use pure networking to intercept more opportunity. If you're cut out for thought leadership, or can fit yourself to the job's demands, it's likely the best available tool for intercepting more opportunity.

80/20 Agency Marketing is 4 done-for-you services for the rest of us. :)

I have bandwidth to take on a few more 80/20 Agency Marketing clients, and I’d really like a few more clients for this service, so if any of the services look interesting and in-budget for you, please reach out. I'm happy to meet with you via video call, explain more, answer questions, and try to be helpful to you in the specific positioning, lead generation, and small-scale research ways I’m qualified to be.

And if you know someone who is needing more opportunity for their services and struggling to find it because the whole content marketing/thought leadership/authority thing is not a fit for them, please let them know that this service exists. It would mean a lot to me if you’d also follow up with them in a week or so to see if they took action on your recommendation.

I forgot to do a For Fun Poll in the last email. I really enjoy doing these, so it musta been the life chaos (couldn't be increasing forgetfulness for... you know.... ah..... reasons). :)

For Fun Poll:

Notes:

1. To be more pedantically accurate, there are approaches to Pure Networking that are more suited to introverts. Generally, these involve intentional 1:1 interactions that leverage the Internet, video calls, and so forth. I’m not saying Pure Networking is a completely un-usable tool for introverts, just that it comes less naturally for us and the way it just naturally happens for others through “social Brownian Motion” often doesn’t happen for us.

In the continued quest for offer-market fit, I've got some new service offerings at https://opportunitylabs.io. The core promise of the new offers: We'll make your business a household name to 6,000 prospects in 6 months. If that would be interesting to you, we should talk.

A few weeks ago before yet another leg of my Tour de Montana [1], I hosted a roundtable on the topic of long-term, high-value clients. I quite like the roundtable/pop-up online event format, and when the topic and audience are a good fit, the format is a real banger. Here are some notes on the event format:

• I did zero selling on the roundtable. Two prospects for my coaching services approached me afterwards anyway.

• 120 minutes is not too long of a duration, but a 90-minute duration might have put a subtle pressure on us all to be a bit more concise in our communication.

• At the same time, it's possible to too-quickly or superficially discuss things. This is one of the more wily challenges this format presents. For the host/moderator it can feel like improv or performance art in that you have a group of people show up, many of who you don't know, and you're hoping to create an experience most of them get educational value from. Under those circumstances, how do you keep the pace brisk and the discussion meaningfully deep?

• Anything you can do to help attendees feel safe or encouraged to transition from attendee to participant is potentially valuable. The event I ran was 120 minutes, and at about the 50-minute mark and about the 100-minute mark I stopped the discussion and made space for introverts or those who maybe had been sitting on something they wanted to say but hadn't felt an opening to say it. The feedback was: love this. I also let folks know that it's fine to "lurk" for the whole call if that's what they wanted.

• I tried something totally new for me: Instead of asking every attendee to introduce themself at the top of the call, I provided a Google form where anybody who wanted to be known to other event registrants could just drop their contact info and a little context on who they are/what they do into the form and then I shared the resulting spreadsheet with all call registrants [2]. This saved a ton of time, but did make it a little harder to contextualize some comments from those who participated. Tradeoffs! I think I will definitely use this approach again in the future, but perhaps with stronger urging for people to contextualize their comments a bit more robustly the first time they comment on something.

• I could have done a better job of preparing attendees for the roundtable's agenda. On the one hand, I wanted to remain fluid and adaptable as the discussion happened, so I didn't want to have a too detailed or rigid agenda. But in prioritizing this, I might have deprived the group of the opportunity for more of us to show up having already put deep thought into the key questions we addressed during the event.

• Choosing to not record the event seemed to be an OK approach. I'm not confident this enabled next-level deep sharing, but I do think it sent the signal that the event was a place that requested and benefitted from everybody's best effort at presence and focus.

Here are some thoughts on the content of the roundtable (long-term, high-value clients):

• No one had a repeatable formula for creating these kinds of client relationships. Of course, the lack of any extant formula of this kind is why I convened this roundtable in the first place! And yeah, some part of me was hoping someone would show up and drop exactly this kind of formula in front of the group. It's fine that that didn't happen.

• There's an interesting tension between two approaches to offer design: Approach 1: you purposefully start clients on a small/limited scope/low risk service that is probably diagnostic in nature, or delivers some initial planning or design work. You then work to upgrade those clients to a more long-term engagement. Approach 2: you just offer your meant-to-be-long-term-service right from the jump. I hope I'm not mis-remembering this part of the discussion [3], but I sensed a definite preference from the roundtable attendees for Approach 1.

  • I am generally very suspicious of zero-sum thinking, but there certainly are specific situations where we can't have things both ways; we have to pick a direction and go with it and trade the benefits of the other direction to get the benefits of the direction we've chosen. I get the sense that you can design your business to appeal to long-term, high-value clients but that direction probably requires you to forgo some of the benefits of Approach 1.

• Related to the above, I got the strong impression from the roundtable discussion that if you end up working mostly with long-term, high-value clients, you also tend to start those relationships by doing quite a lot "for free". This "free stuff" might look like any of the following:

  • Spending a lot more time in semi-structured exploration with a prospect before there's discussion of specifics or before you submit a proposal.

  • Delivering the exact kind of value you would deliver while "on the clock" for a client but doing so right from the jump with a prospect. [4]

  • During a project, being willing to do out-of-scope stuff knowing that it's good for your client and trusting that it's good for your long-term prospects.

• This "free stuff" thing is a chicken-and-egg question. What comes first? Do profitable long-term relationships allow you to be generous with prospects, or does choosing to be generous with prospects make profitable long-term relationships more likely?

Roundtables like this one are nice ways to explore important topics where there's no obvious single best practice. I hope to host more of them in the future for y'all. Thanks to all the most excellent folks who participated!

-P

Notes:

1. Driven further west by the need for better medical care options for my wife, we're in Missoula now. So far, we like it here. It lacks some of the dramatic mountain views more readily available in Bozeman and Paradise Valley, but more than makes up for that in having coffee roasters who understand the superiority of a light roast, better sandwich shops, more trees, fewer $80,000 Jeeps driven by spoiled college students, and 370 parts-per-million more patchouli in the air. Who knows, maybe we'll stay! Missoula also has the best cannabis dispensary name I've ever seen: Prescribed Burn. Any Missoula locals on this list? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

2. I don't think Zoom makes it easy to know who actually attended the meeting vs. who registered but did not attend, so for my sanity when I was doing followup after the roundtable, I just used the list of registrants that Zoom makes it easy-ish to download.

3. Hosting a roundtable can feel like juggling while riding a unicycle, so I may not be a 100% reliable witness about everything that happened during the event. :)

4. My recollection of Lencioni's book "Getting Naked" is that he illustrates this kind of approach quite well in that book.

I’m hosting an online roundtable on the topic of long-term, high-value clients. We’ll address questions like the following:

• Are such relationships mostly luck, or is it possible to engineer these kinds of client relationships?

• If you prefer such relationships, do you think or act differently as a result? If so, how specifically?

• What tradeoffs are necessitated by these kinds of client relationships?

• And of course any relevant questions or learnings you want to bring to the discussion.

This event lasts for 2 hours, starting at 9am Mountain time this Friday, October 13th. It’s free and open to anyone interested in the topic. It will not be recorded. The format is moderated peer-to-peer discussion.

If you’d like to attend please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYtceuhqTotGtKIM4bDdXWgkz28p4Nsz3xU

The most recent Friday Fun Poll results:

I hope some of y’all in the top $$$ half of that distribution attend the roundtable to share your learnings :) ICYMI: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYtceuhqTotGtKIM4bDdXWgkz28p4Nsz3xU

Can a Friday Fun Poll go out on a Monday? Does it then become a Manic Monday Poll? So many questions…

(If you have strong opinions about this'un, I'd love to hear them in the comments.)

Happy Monday, y’all!-P