How Jeff Ferguson Built Amplitude Digital by Constantly Doing the Effective Work and Building Trusting Relationships

[00:00:00] Jeff: because it's so rare to get someone to really personalize kind of that outreach.

[00:00:04] Jeff: It's like that spam, the generic stuff that people can pick up on that instantly, you know, this is going out to a thousand people. Right. But if you personalize elements of that, it could have a higher impact in the response rate.

[00:00:15] Mike: Welcome back to the next episode of the Marketing Moguls podcast. I'm your host, Michael, and I'm here today with Jeff Zaya. He's from height. Welcome Jeff. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:24] Jeff: Thanks for being, what's up Michael? What's up man? What an honor it is to be on this podcast. I'm so excited, dude.

[00:00:28] Jeff: I'm pumped to have a, a conversation with you and learn from you and hopefully you can learn from me as well, man. So this is gonna be a

[00:00:35] Mike: fun time. Absolutely. And I know our audience is gonna learn a lot too, so I'm really grateful that you're here. I'm really excited to get started. We've already talked a little bit off recording, but I just wanted to see if you could take a quick second to kind of introduce yourself to the audience.

[00:00:46] Mike: Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, how you got there, stuff like.

[00:00:50] Jeff: Absolutely. And before I do that, I wanna just thank the audience, man, because honestly, like the people that listen to podcasts I admire that you're investing in yourself, right? You know, listening to podcasts. You could listen to music and other stuff, but you'll listen to this podcast specifically cuz you wanna learn more about marketing, you wanna further your career, you know, I admire, admire that and respect that.

[00:01:09] Jeff: So thank you for tuning in. And I hope, you know, we can learn from each other, and I, I welcome for you to connect with me as well after the podcast. But, you know, my name is Jeb Zaya. I'm the VP of the Man Generation for Height. I'm also the owner. I just recently launched my own franchise in the height, height DC here in the DC area.

[00:01:25] Jeff: So just got a quick story. I joined Height about two and a half years ago. During the end of the middle of Covid my background is in developing business sales and business development teams, right? So I, I produce high performing teams and I've been doing this for agencies, for cyber security companies, for SaaS companies, and I just recently joined this amazing cyber security company.

[00:01:47] Jeff: During Covid and I got hired during Covid, the first week of Covid, and I had a job for about a week. It was, it's just a short term because of the, all the pandemic, all the stuff that is going on. Like, Hey, this guy's the newest hire, he just started here. We gotta make cuts. And I was one of those cuts. But man, God works in a serious way.

[00:02:06] Jeff: Cause that same week, one of my good friends JC Height reached out to me through Instagram or DM says, Jeff, I'm looking to franchise my agency. And I thought that was crazy. I'm like an, a marketing agency that's a franchise. I've never heard of such a thing. And I, I got it. Just got me really curious and we started having some conversations.

[00:02:23] Jeff: Started diving into what, what would that model look? And after, you know, several discussions I dove right in like this is, this is, I gotta do this. This is gonna be amazing. It, it's so crazy that it just might work, right? It was one of those ideas that seemed bar fetched, but man linking back about it now, fast forwarding two and a half years.

[00:02:41] Jeff: You know, growing from zero franchises to now having 24 across the country, generating close to 10 million in revenue, being one of Inc five thousand's, fastest growing agencies in the country. I'm like, man, that was a good mooch. Lemme pass on back for like taking a risk and taking that chance and. You know, investing in this amazing team and, and something that I really also believe in with my whole heart, because our company's not just about, it's, it's more than just an agency.

[00:03:07] Jeff: We're on the mission to really empower people, and we're doing that and we're empowering the country of Nicaragua. A lot of our team is headquartered in Nicaragua through world country that has gone through some ups and downs, and we're investing heavily in building a company there that really.

[00:03:20] Jeff: Helps people with their, you know, having good careers, stable careers, people, a company that invests in, in the people that work for the company. And at the same time, you know, we're doing some amazing things across the US growing these franchisees where we give people the, the freedom to really build things their own way, but empowering them with a process of fulfillment team with the the playbook for how they could grow their agency from scratch and, and scale it and live

[00:03:44] Jeff: their best life possible. So really pump in. It's kind of been a jer my journey in nutshell. Right? But now I wanna know if you have any anything that I could dive into specifically throughout that journey, Mike, I would love to share more.

[00:03:56] Mike: Absolutely. A million things. Let's see. So just to get started, The, I agree with you, like the idea of this franchise option, right?

[00:04:05] Mike: For like an agency type of thing. I've never heard of that before, so that's really cool though. And I think that's an awesome thing cuz it's, it seems kind of new now, maybe I just haven't heard of it. Maybe people in our audience have, but new ideas typically are really cool, so I like to hear about that for sure.

[00:04:18] Mike: One thing that I did want to ask you though is, you know, obviously we're the marketing moguls and you do, I'm sure tons of marketing yourself and you have in the past you mentioned business development. Mentioned kind of like managing these teams and everything. Can you talk to us a little bit about how your role, specifically being the VP of Demand generation, how that fits on the team in terms of how you interact with like the sales team, how you interact with the marketing team, and basically just like how you fit into the company as a whole.

[00:04:46] Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. So my role is all about opportunity creation. Right? Okay. I'm, I'm looking to create opportunities for my franchisees. I have 24 locations across the us. Each of those needs to have a full pipeline of opportunities to be able to close yields, to get revenue. So the way that we go about creating our strategy for the man generation is, is really two main prongs that we focus on.

[00:05:09] Jeff: One of them is, and what we are doing is we're helping our franchisees create a very strong personal brand. Mm-hmm. and I developed this idea from looking at what our tough franchisees are doing and trying to. Learn from that to create a process that we can apply to all the franchisees. Some of our leading franchisees have a very strong personal brand, so they're posting on Facebook, they're posting on LinkedIn, they're sharing reels, they're on podcasts, they're speaking on stages.

[00:05:33] Jeff: So what happens when you do all of this? You create. Authority. You create thought leadership, and then companies, right? Business owners are going to those folks saying, Hey, I, I see you on stage. I heard you on the podcast. I saw your post. I wanna know more about how you can help my business grow. Boom, you gotta lead, boom, you got an opportunity, right?

[00:05:50] Jeff: So that's a big part of how like my team, how we're supporting our franchisees is by helping them create their own personal. So we do that by putting strategies in place to help them create content on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on social and so many cases, we actually do it for them. So we tell our franchisees, Hey, here's a prompt.

[00:06:10] Jeff: Shoot this video, send it to us. We'll do the editing. We'll post it on your behalf. We'll schedule it, get it out for them. So these are some of the things that we're doing on the personal branding side where even we have a team, one of our teammates, his sole focus is reaching out to the different podcasts to try to get our franchisees schedule on those podcasts.

[00:06:27] Jeff: Nice. and that sitting guy is also reaching out to different stages in advances to try to pitch our franchisees so we can get them on the stage. Right. So that is all part of our opportunity generation department, demand gen team. So that's one big aspect of what we do, that personal branding side.

[00:06:43] Jeff: Mm-hmm. . Then the other side is like more traditional prospecting stuff, right? So the code emails, LinkedIn automation, which we do, and then we're getting great results. Email outreach creating funnels right in our CRM so we could put leads and nurture them over time. We have partnerships with, with podcast where we actually put produce ads, right?

[00:06:59] Jeff: We have an ad on that podcast. We run Facebook ads and Google ads, right? So all the kind of traditional, you know, doing SD on our website, the drive organic traffic, these are all these traditional prospecting stuff is a part of my, my second, second prong. That secondary team that is working on those initiatives and all of.

[00:07:15] Jeff: Things are working together to then ultimately create opportunities for a franchisees. So when they're waking up every morning, there's a an inbox full of people that wanna talk to them, and we're helping 'em schedule those appointments, and then it's on them to then have that conversation, that discovery call, that strategy deck, presentation, the negotiation, the proposal review, and so on.

[00:07:36] Mike: Absolutely. And in terms of the prospecting, you mentioned a bunch of great things there. You mentioned like cold milling. You mentioned using like LinkedIn automations, you mentioned a bunch of different things. What would you say if you had to pick, has been kind of like the most successful type of outreach that you all have done?

[00:07:50] Mike: And maybe if you could, what's something that you all have utilized in the past that you just haven't seen work super well, or you just haven't gotten great results?

[00:07:59] Jeff: So I'll give you one of the hottest things that we're doing right now that is working really well. We, we've gotten some great appointments scheduled from this tactic.

[00:08:05] Jeff: It's leading to some really big opportunities. And it's video audits, right? Video audits. So let me describe what that means. We get someone that, you know, we do, you know, outreach, someone expresses interest, like a lead bag. Hey, you know, which you want the video audit of your website. So we have one of our team members.

[00:08:21] Jeff: Go on the website of this prospect and just basically run through it and start advising like, Hey, here are some areas of opportunity. We could change the cta. The copywriting here could be better. The link structure is kind of broken. The website's loading too slow. It's not responsive. We looked up mobile.

[00:08:37] Jeff: It's not really loading up properly. Mobile, you know, the branding is off on this area. You know, this form is not working properly. So we basically go like in. Five minutes attend video at times, depending on what's, you know, the extent of the website and we start pointing areas of opportunity as well as areas maybe that are, they're doing well.

[00:08:54] Jeff: Like, Hey, this lead form is great. This call to action is great, your blogs are great, whatever. So we, we do that video audit and we send that to the prospect. Mm-hmm. that is getting the highest response rate because first of all, you know, it's very valuable. It's like off right, right from the gate, right.

[00:09:08] Jeff: And providing value, which I think is important because many times, We want that meeting, gimme the meeting, gimme the time of your calendar. But there's no value being brought to that initial engagement, right? So we're providing that value from the get-go. And that, I think that shows people, wow, this, this first of all type.

[00:09:22] Jeff: They know what they're talking about. This is legit stuff. This is valuable. And even if you, you don't use me like this stuff, this if it's still valuable, whether you go into another agency. So we have that approach for, hey, you wanna learn more, you know, we'll be more than glad to help you. improve this.

[00:09:36] Jeff: If not, you know, at least this could show this to your current agency and let them, you know, work on these things for you. So that approach is working well. But I think also a differentiator there is the video component, right? Mm-hmm. . So video is very powerful and we need to be using more of that in our prospecting outreach because people wanna see another person, right?

[00:09:53] Jeff: Yeah. It's sometimes it's easy to ignore, like a cold email coming through and you kind of read the text and it's boring and I, I delete it and whatever. . But if it's someone's face, you know someone that is on their website actually blames this up. You see their facial expressions, you hear the tone of their voice.

[00:10:10] Jeff: That stuff is more impactful. Like, wow, this person actually invested time up front helping me, right? The least I could do is now give 'em some time. Okay? The least I could do is meet with 'em for 15 minutes, and imagine if they could, they did this right from the beginning. Imagine what they'll do once I start.

[00:10:23] Jeff: Yeah, so that approach has worked really well for us and we're starting to do more of that and perfect a team that is really good at doing those, so we could crank them out at a higher volume and get more quality appointments.

[00:10:34] Mike: Gotcha. Okay. And then for sending those to them, like you mentioned, how do you do that?

[00:10:38] Mike: Like do you typically reach out to a prospect first? Like maybe you find somebody that you're interested in working with, you recognize that that's somebody that you all would like to partner with. Do you ask them first if they'd be open to website audit, or do you kind of just run the audit and then just send that over to.

[00:10:51] Jeff: Yeah, so we asked, we asked them first, right? Okay. We want, we want them to say, yes, I'm interested. Right? Hey, I'm, I prepared the video for you is, do you mind sending it over? Right. We get permission to send it over, and I think that's important because if you just send it to anybody,

[00:11:04] Jeff: You know, that could be a lot of time out, wasted up front. and these people are not really interested and they're not, so we need to get them to raise their hand Yeah. and say, yeah, I, I'm, I wanna see it.

[00:11:13] Mike: Yeah. Otherwise you guys would probably be cranking out a ton of those for people that might not be interested in, like you said, that

[00:11:18] Jeff: going spam, whatever.

[00:11:19] Jeff: So we want them to opt in and then we have, once they raise their hand, opt in, then we have a reason also to follow up with them. Hey, you, you said you wanted this, is it as valuable? Is this youth useful? Does it make sense for us, to me to get Right? So you, yeah. You're giving permission to engage and that's what we need in order to have a productive.

[00:11:35] Jeff: Dialogue that that leads to another. .

[00:11:38] Mike: Absolutely. And I love the way that you put it about adding value. I feel like a lot of times I think we're maybe starting to get away from that some, but I feel like we're still kind of stuck in that period where everybody wants to kind of take, take, take. And it's one of those things like you mentioned where I'm sure you get reached out to 20 times a day.

[00:11:52] Mike: I know I do. I know a lot of our listeners do. with people being like, Hey, can you schedule a meeting with me? You're like, Hey, I'd like you to do this for me. Can you give me this much of your time? Or whatever. So it's great that you all offer some sort of value, especially upfront, just to show like, Hey, we're not just trying to take, like we wanna bring value to you.

[00:12:09] Mike: We wanna offer you something and then if you're interested, we'd love to take some of your time, but we wanna give you something first. And I think that that's really powerful. Yeah. Especially cause.

[00:12:19] Jeff: Yeah, of course. That's the, the holy girl delivering that value. Another thing that also, it's a little thing, but it makes it a big difference, is the personalization aspect.

[00:12:27] Jeff: Yeah. So even if you don't deliver, like all that value kind of, you know, may not be reasonable for every person listening to this podcast, Hey, I can't really do that for my business. Whatever. Well, imagine if you just personalize certain aspects of your outreach, right? Like doing a little bit of research on the individual, Hey, we, we, we both went to the same college.

[00:12:44] Jeff: You know, I, I noticed in. Podcast, you mentioned this, right? That stood out to me, and then you bleed into your ask, right? So even elements of personalization make that prospector, right? That person that's doing the outreach stand out because it's so rare to get someone to really personalize kind of that outreach.

[00:13:00] Jeff: It's like that spam, the generic stuff that people can pick up on that instantly, you know, this is going out to a thousand people. Right. But if you personalize elements of that, it could have a higher impact in the response rate. And then you, become more customized as you engage 'em and they raise their hand.

[00:13:14] Jeff: Now I could send even more time delivering value, but I, I it leads with the personalization. Absolutely.

[00:13:20] Mike: And then the other thing I was gonna follow up on there is, so that's something that's working really well. What's something that's working not so well, or maybe not even right now, just something that you all have seen over time.

[00:13:30] Mike: Maybe like a way a way of doing outreach that just hasn't worked too great for you all. Is there something that comes to mind when you think about that?

[00:13:35] Jeff: It could work. we've found diminishing returns from, this has been cold email outreach.

[00:13:41] Jeff: Okay. Cold email out and cold calls. Yep. Cold calls. So we had a team when we, when I first started at high, you know, that's one of the areas cause I had seen it work in other, at other times with different companies that I worked at. But I've seen, I just seen declining kind of reach, right? Just the time, the, the effort that it was invested into it, to the kind of return that we got.

[00:14:00] Jeff: And it could be maybe cuz of our price points, right? There May, maybe it makes sense for larger businesses or b2b like big, big b2b or targeting like corporate, like big fortune 500. Maybe it makes more sense. we had some issues with data, getting the right data, so, gotcha. Like we wanted to do called outreach.

[00:14:15] Jeff: We have to get data. We, you know, there's got a lot of providers of info. There's sales intel, right. And they usually have really good data, but it tends to be for larger accounts, which are not really our target audience. Gotcha. One of the red flags say this is, you know, we're having some difficulties kind of getting that, that small business owner, right?

[00:14:32] Jeff: That local business owner getting their cell phone, getting their email address right. They weren't able to provide us what we. So that also kind of led to, you know, we, our emails and were kind of very, they're not as, not as personalized because we have bits of information so that they were, I would say generic, right?

[00:14:49] Jeff: And this is gonna be very transparent. We were sending out generic emails that. Many people ignored delete it or say, Hey, unsubscribing from this, you know, outreach. And because they had, they, they had no recollection, they had no idea who we were. And the, we didn't deliver value, we, we didn't personalize.

[00:15:05] Jeff: So it started, you know, we may have, we may get a hit here or there, but it wasn't something that was scalable for us. And so we had to kind of. , terminate that program and say, okay, where can we better focus our efforts that will yield a higher return? So we started looking at other aspects of like outreach, but not, email.

[00:15:24] Jeff: So let me lead to another one that's actually doing really well for us is LinkedIn automation. Okay. So we ha we found this, this platform out there that helps us do LinkedIn outreach where we could customize, you know, aspects of the message and start building our network with people. A automatically.

[00:15:40] Jeff: Right? And so we could use Sales Navigator, create a very tailored search in Sales Navigator where we could identify like geography, the, the role of the person, the actual title, the keywords, and we give it that information. Then the automation program starts to. Invite these people to your network.

[00:15:57] Jeff: Now, the key there, right, the difference where I believe is it's working better than just cold outreach, is because that LinkedIn outreach is attached to an individual profile. You go and check out, right? So they see my face, you know, they see,my recommendations, they see my endorsements, they see my, the content I'm publishing.

[00:16:14] Jeff: So there's more behind it than just. A generic email that's being sent out. So that is now starting to get, get a lot of traction for us as we dial in to targeting, and then we dial in the messaging of what we're saying, right? So not, not just leading with, you know, make some time, let me get some time on your calendar, but hey, would you like to see the video on it?

[00:16:34] Jeff: I, you know, I wanna review your website. Would you mind if I send this to you? Right. So getting people to engage with that initial email, and then if they engage, then leading with the, the, the second blow right of value to. .

[00:16:46] Mike: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I wanna say, I really appreciate the honesty about the cold emailing too, because a lot of people, they only really wanna talk about what's going really well.

[00:16:54] Mike: And part of the podcast is to learn, right? Like you said in the beginning, it's an educational style podcast. We wanna learn as much as we can about marketing, about outreach, about things like that. So we really appreciate that. And it's funny that you mentioned that, because I've met and talked to so many people that have used cold emailing, especially on a.

[00:17:08] Mike: Scale and they all have a lot of the same problems that you're mentioning where it's very hard to get good data, and when you do, it's really expensive. Like it's not cheap to get your hands on good data, especially when you're emailing at scale. So yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up. I wanted to see would you be willing to name drop the platform that you're using for the LinkedIn automation?

[00:17:27] Jeff: Yeah, I think I could, I could drop it. I, I don't know if they're, allow anyone to use it, but you could. There's a couple out there, so I'll mention U Link and wxy. Those are two that are available. Gotcha. Okay. U Link and Wxy. I think one of them is invite only, so you could obviously do a research and check 'em out.

[00:17:44] Jeff: But those are two that I, I recommend. You do some homework on That's awesome, fit, right, fit

[00:17:48] Mike: for you. Thank you. Another one that I wanted to ask about, we talked to a lot of different people and also part of tier 11, the owner of the podcast is advertising. Do you guys do any sort of advertising for either you know, the franchisees or for your own

[00:18:00] Jeff: prospecting?

[00:18:01] Jeff: we've done Facebook ads and we've done Google Ads. Mm-hmm. But they're just very expensive. Right. So we've been, we haven't had the, a whole lot of success, like the, the cost per meeting has been so high that it's doesn't allow us to scale really. It really Right. So that's why we're investing our efforts in pretty more of the organic.

[00:18:19] Jeff: Kind of traction for the franchisees. But we have done Facebook ads, we've done Google Ads, but, you know, think about it, right? Like we're a marketing agency, so there's a lot of good marketers that are probably doing really good ads. So there's a lot of competition, I think that drives the price up. And, you know, you really gotta be very creative with your ads in order to get the re the, the kind of response that you, that makes it cost effective.

[00:18:40] Jeff: So it's an area we we're experiment here and there, but you know, we'd rather do it for our clients than really do it for ourselves and we're still like more focused on the organic kind of reach and generating leads to that because it's a less cost per acquisition.

[00:18:53] Mike: Gotcha. Yeah, that makes perfect sense cuz I completely agree.

[00:18:56] Mike: So sadly we only have time for about one more question here, but I wanted to ask you, when, in terms of like your work and everything and even the franchise situation that you mentioned in the beginning, what would you say like your biggest rock to move is right now? Like what's your biggest kind of project or challenge?

[00:19:10] Mike: Like what's the number one thing that you, Jeff, are working on and trying to push forward? Okay,

[00:19:15] Jeff: so here, here's my biggest shock right now. And I always tell it's innovation. Innovation, right? As business developers, right? What's working now doesn't mean it's gonna work tomorrow, right? This, you know, next week if the new thing is gonna pop up, right?

[00:19:28] Jeff: New platform, you know, something gets banned. Can't do that anymore. There's like, Chat, g p t, right? Everyone's starting to use, like, so I, for me, like I'm always coaching my team. Let's look for what's next, right? And always be experimenting. Always be experimenting. Like we can't just depend on the, the same things that we've been doing, right?

[00:19:48] Jeff: What got us here won't get us there. So we need to kind of continue learning and looking now at what's, what's out there and, and innovating and trying, not being afraid to fail and set up an experiment. Like, let's just try doing this for a week. Let's, yeah. So one of the things that we're doing now is we're investing heavily in reels and, and TikTok.

[00:20:06] Jeff: So I know you. I'm not a big fan of TikTok. I've never been like, but, but I, but after some conversations with people like, Hey, you gotta, I may not like it personally, but hey, they could work for our business. They could work for, let's at least give it a shot. Right? So I can't let those personal things like, and, and stop me from being willing to try something new.

[00:20:24] Jeff: So that's something that I'm always sharing with my team. Let's innovate, let's try something. Let's bring a new idea forward. Let's invest a little bit of time and effort in it. And adding, I think that to the, the high performing teams that I've seen on the business development side are not afraid to fail, and they're not afraid to experiment.

[00:20:41] Jeff: And that's what keeps them on the cutting edge. That's what keeps them producing better quality leads and more leads in most teams is because they're trying things that not every, everyone else is not doing. So because of that, they stand out like, wow, I wanna work with 'em. I wanna talk to them.

[00:20:54] Jeff: So I think that's something, again, my biggest shock to move is let's keep pushing innovation, let's keep pushing, let's not resting. What, what's working now? What could work better? What can we try out? What's the next experiment that we're gonna run? So that's a, that's an ongoing rock, right? That's the one we're gonna always carry, but we have to carry if we wanna be the leader.

[00:21:11] Jeff: That's

[00:21:11] Mike: awesome. Yeah. And that's a wonderful rock to have, man. Continual learning, education, taking risks like that. Innovating all of that. It's amazing to hear. It's amazing to see. Sadly, we gotta run, but I really, really appreciate your time today, Jeff. Thank you again so much for coming on the podcast.

[00:21:26] Jeff: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate you having me. If you guys wanna connect with me, feel free to reach out to me on Lincoln j Zaya. I'm really active on Instagram, j Zaya. You can follow my stories there. I post some rules that I think are pretty entertaining and people love to watch 'em, so check them out.

[00:21:40] Jeff: And I, again, once again, thanks for the time today.

[00:21:43] Mike: All right, that's all we had time for today. Thanks for tuning in Mogul Nation, and we'll see you in the next one.