- Agency Inner Circle
- Posts
- Let's Marie Kondo Your Lead Gen
Let's Marie Kondo Your Lead Gen
1000 cold emails a day shouldn't spark your joy.
Tim Kilroy
18 Apr • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
In partnership with
This Week's Cleaning List
Everything Is Weird AF
With tariffs & looming recessions & ICE agents running amok there is economic and business uncertainty. We made Canada (you know the nice people who live upstairs) kind hate us. JD Vance is breaking trophies and the president has declared war on the Federal Reserve, Harvard & Medicare.
It doesn’t matter if you for or against whatever is happening, sh*t’s just WEIRD.
Budgets are tight. Prospects are slow.
And that leads to full-blown agency panic.
That panicked feeling can lead to some poor decisions:
Excessive discounting
Letting go of staff
Thinking that there’s some kind of magic bullet tactic that will make everything better
The panic is OK to feel…really. But don’t let it make you clutter your agency with useless stuff that doesn’t really spark any joy (or create results).
😬 The Panic Is Real
When things get weird, agency owners do weird things:
Discounting themselves into the ground
Laying off the people they desperately needed 3 weeks ago
Buying yet another “cold outreach playbook” from someone who scaled to 8 figures in 4 months on Upwork
Panic is human.
But panic also clutters your agency with stuff that doesn’t spark joy (or revenue).
🚨 Panic at the CRM
Here’s a real story about a client who almost built a high-volume hamster wheel out of $2K/month and pure anxiety.
One of my clients was feeling the panic. He watched a bunch of YT videos and was clearly getting hit with all the worst “magical system” ads on the internet. He signed up for some course and became convinced that he needed to be sending 1000 cold emails a day.
He jumped hard into Clay & Apollo (both great tools, BTW), bought a bunch of aged Gmail accounts, and started on his 1K a day cold email journey. He was spending something like $1500/mo on this setup.
The emails went nowhere…very few responses (mostly “never email me again”).
So he made a better offer. Free static creatives.
Bingo! Great response rates.
His designer got a little stressed out, but whatever…tons of leads, right?
He started shipping out all these creatives (at an additional cost of $500 or so a month) and he was excited about all the biz to follow.
Here’s what happened:
→ I don’t like them…
→ We tested them and they didn’t work…
→ Silence…
Just started reading the Make Business Matter newsletter…it’s full of smart brand/growth plays. Worth the inbox real estate.
🛑 Stop The Madness
Our panicked agency owner was so sure that the solution was in scaling his email volume. He got trapped in the DO MORE = MAKE MORE trap. His spend was now $2K a month…and nothing in his pocket to show for it.
He was on to something…the free creatives were attractive & people wanted them. But sending out MORE emails was just making more soul-crushing work with nothing to show for it.
Those freebie seekers & the “I don’t like it” folks weren’t interested in working with the agency. They wanted something FREE. All of that activity just cluttered everything (Marie Kondo was NOT pleased because the lookie-loos did NOT spark joy.)
Instead of scale, I told him to filter. Not everybody who asked deserved the free creative. We added a little friction to the process.
We made everybody go through a creative review and testing call BEFORE they got the free creative.
Here’s what happened…
The “I want something free” folks disappeared.
The “I don’t like it” folks had to talk to someone (and by the end of the call they always did like it)
The “we tried it & it didn’t perform” folks suddenly had a testing strategy to help them understand how to actually test new creative
The end of the story is pretty good…
Our agency owner realized that more wasn’t better. He got sharper with his targeting (eg, only folks that were currently running ads were targeted, etc.), and he filtered by adding friction. He dropped his spend from about $2K/mo to about $500. Here are the before & after results. Turns out “scaling” is a lot easier once you stop trying to scale the wrong stuff.
FREE CREATIVE/NO CALL → Positive Response Rate: 24% 💥 | FREE CREATIVE/CALL REQUIRED → Positive Response Rate: 26% 💥 |
Why Did This Work?
Because it required commitment - the only people that hopped on a call were those who were ACTUALLY interested in discussing opportunities. We filtered out the clutter…and I swear I could hear Marie Kondo yelling, “LFG! This is sparking joy!”
If You’d Like To Marie Kondo Your Lead Gen…
…even though the world is f*ckin’ weird, and you want to take a 60 day growth sprint with me check out my new program, designed just for the weirdness - Survive To Thrive:
|
Funny of the Day
Thanks to Our Sponsor - Wistia
Wistia analyzed millions of videos so you don’t have to
Wistia, a leading video marketing platform for businesses, just released their fifth annual State of Video Report! The report, based on insights from over 14 million videos, and 100,000 businesses, brings you the latest video tips, trends, and insights. Download a copy to…
See how your videos perform against industry benchmarks
Learn which kinds of videos get the most engagement so you can make more of them
Find out how to scale your video strategy for less $$ with AI
Plus, it’s actually fun to read. How many reports can you say that about?
Interesting Notes From The Interwebs
5 Steps to Turn an Agency into a Productized Service Business
Motion.io discusses transitioning from traditional agency models to productized services, offering stability and scalability.
12 Marketing Agency Industry Trends and Benchmarks for 2024
AgencyAnalytics provides a comprehensive overview of current trends, challenges, and expectations in the marketing agency landscape.
The BEST Digital Marketing Strategy For 2024
A YouTube video that delves into effective digital marketing strategies tailored for 2024.
The 13 Best Marketing Podcasts 2025
Meltwater curates a list of top marketing podcasts, offering diverse insights from industry experts.
Growth Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide
The Growth Agency explores the differences between growth and traditional marketing, emphasizing data-driven strategies.
Our sponsorships are ads (obviously - duh). But some of the companies or services linked in our content may pay us a minimal commission if you buy something from them. Potential payment is never a factor in what we link to, and we have direct experience with every company or service where you can buy something that we mention in our content.