Speaker A
How do you not get them to burn out? When you have a complicated fulfillment process, you just can't scale it.
Nick from LeadBird explains how a simple, well-built fulfillment process lets 12 reps manage 1,000 clients, and why ghostwritten LinkedIn content is the strongest channel beyond cold email.
Key Takeaways
- Simplify fulfillment aggressively; a small number of high-impact activities drives most results.
- Modern cold email requires supplementary channels and service-led offers rather than direct meeting asks.
- Ghostwritten LinkedIn content combined with engagement-based sequences is a high-leverage channel.
- Technology and templated infrastructure can preserve campaign personalization while reducing rep workload.
What the video covers
- Scaling agency fulfillment depends on simplicity: complicated processes don't scale, and 'simple scales, fancy fails' is the guiding principle.
- LeadBird's account managers have roughly four core responsibilities: attend scheduled client calls, clear their inbox daily, complete PM board tasks, and monitor an underperformer dashboard.
- Strong back-end infrastructure (e.g., one-click Clay table generation) removes mundane setup work so reps can focus on campaign personalization.
- Personalization layers, such as using client review data in copy, still give reps room for creativity within a standardized system.
- Cold email has changed significantly; simple list-plus-pitch campaigns no longer produce strong results.
- Pushing for a direct meeting CTA works poorly; lead magnets and service-based offers that lead into a sales process perform better.
- Ghostwriting LinkedIn content for clients, then qualifying engagers against the ICP and running LinkedIn sequences, is among the best current plays.
- Multi-channel approaches (LinkedIn, content, dialing) can extract significantly more value than outbound email alone.
- The speaker expects cold email plus LinkedIn to become LeadBird's biggest product line within two to three years, including an SDR recruiting and placement system.
Chapters
- 00:00Intro and the burnout question
- 00:47Scaling 1,000 clients with 12 reps
- 06:23Simple scales, fancy fails: cutting fulfillment complexity
- 07:47Account manager responsibilities and back-end infrastructure
- 09:31Creativity versus standardized workflows
- 12:16Does outbound alone work? Multi-channel strategy
- 13:13Ghostwriting on LinkedIn and service-led offers
- 14:11Future product lines and SDR placement
- 15:14Shout-outs and closing
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Which one is that second prong that has the highest lever? Every cold email agency has access to the same tools.
Speaker A
Most of the time, your customers will know what you know.
Speaker A
[music]
Speaker A
[music]
Speaker A
Nick, finally in person.
Speaker A
Finally.
Speaker A
And thanks so much for coming on over here as well as on all the billboards.
Speaker A
Yeah, dude, thanks for having me on that.
Speaker A
That was a... It was honestly crazy to see and do with the family.
Speaker A
Like, man.
Speaker A
Yeah, it was good.
Speaker A
Like, it was...
Speaker A
You've managed a thousand clients.
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker A
More interestingly, more interestingly, with just 12 reps.
Speaker A
That's a hundred clients per rep.
Speaker A
Let's start with that.
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker A
How do you not get them to burn out?
Speaker A
Because we're talking about that right off the...
Speaker A
Yeah, and, and like, you know, there's, there's, like, there's peaks, and then there's, you know, lows, right?
Speaker A
For every account manager.
Speaker A
Um, I think what happens is a lot of people, they overcomplicate their actual fulfillment process.
Speaker A
Okay.
Speaker A
And when you have a complicated fulfillment process, you just can't scale it, ever.
Speaker A
And even if you look at most people that run complicated fulfillment processes, the actual results that they're driving for their client are pretty minuscule.
Speaker A
Mhm.
Speaker A
And so, I was speaking to, um, I forget his name.
Speaker A
It was like six years ago, right when LeadBender was starting to take off.
Speaker A
He was running probably one of the fastest-growing agencies in the US.
Speaker A
Okay.
Speaker A
Um, in the mortgage lender lead gen space.
Speaker A
Mhm.
Speaker A
And he actually was looking at my fulfillment.
Speaker A
And he was like, "Dude, this is comically hilarious."
Speaker A
And I was like, "What do you mean?"
Speaker A
And he was like, "This is like, you're doing a whole bunch of things. None of this is actually driving results for clients. These are all just like little nice-to-have things and features that you just made and add into your business to make your life more complex."
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker A
He's like, "Dude, cut 80% of this out, because I can tell from everything here, this 20% is what drives the results."
Speaker A
And then he gave me the classic saying, which is, "Simple scales, fancy fails."
Speaker A
And that's what it was.
Speaker A
It was just a classic example of that.
Speaker A
I think a lot of agency owners fall in that trap.
Speaker A
And, like, our process is super simple.
Speaker A
And we just built a really good back-end infrastructure where, if you look at it from a pure "what is our account manager responsible for" standpoint, it's like four things.
Speaker A
It's like: make sure you hop on calls with your clients that are on your calendar and show up, right?
Speaker A
It's make sure that at the end of every day, your emails are completely cleared out.
Speaker A
So that means that you've responded to everybody that ever came in and handled all the inquiries that way.
Speaker A
You go into your PM board, and you have exactly every task that is supposed to be for you already listed and assigned to you there.
Speaker A
And then the PM board is designed in a way where you do the task in the actual PM board, like in the actual task itself.
Speaker A
And that's what it propagates into wherever it has to.
Speaker A
Exactly.
Speaker A
And then you have your underperformers, and you have a dashboard that identifies the accounts that you're doing bad for, so you can be proactive about going in and engaging with them.
Speaker A
But that's really about it.
Speaker A
And so it's a really simplified workflow, and it works, simply put.
Speaker A
It feels like you're set up in a way where, you know, they talk about the whole McDonald's process, where they SOP the crap out of it, so that even a 16-year-old can run a billion-dollar business, right?
Speaker A
We have this open conversation within the team, where if you set up too many simplistic workflows, it also counters the fact of how do I structure this?
Speaker A
Do you feel like when you make it too easy for your team, the team doesn't necessarily get a chance to think through what has to be done, and you've just built someone who's become what they call a code monkey?
Speaker A
Do you feel like that is a stifling of their creativity, or do you think it's the opposite, because they don't have to think about mundane activities, so they can actually focus on creative pieces of the core offering that they have?
Speaker A
So, it's twofold.
Speaker A
Yes, it does definitely allow them to just take the easy seat, right?
Speaker A
Just do the basic bare fundamentals.
Speaker A
But I think that's where tech is really important, because, you know, if we think about our space, what's the things that make campaigns really unique and crazy is, like, different layers of personalization.
Speaker A
And so in our lead list building process, they're not having to build like a 10-step Clay table, right?
Speaker A
They can just click a button that will spin up that Clay table for that specific use case.
Speaker A
You get what I'm saying?
Speaker A
And so then it's not like, you know, the creativity, the actual campaign, being specialized and different from others, is still really heavily there.
Speaker A
But it's not like they're having to go figure out how to customize and build it all out themselves.
Speaker A
And so, yeah, we're still allowing them to be able to, and they can choose.
Speaker A
They can say, "Okay, hey, for this client, they're going after local businesses. I know that this personalization, if I can pull in their reviews, for example, and I can take that column and then be able to put it into this copy and write it this way."
Speaker A
So they still have that layer there, right?
Speaker A
But they're not having to do the actual work of opening up a Clay table, pulling in that specific enrichment, and then doing all that kind of stuff.
Speaker A
If I asked you the obvious question, "Does outbound alone work?" you might say, "Yes, kind of, etc."
Speaker A
But to be truly honest, right, or truly detailed, does outbound alone ever actually work?
Speaker A
And if it does, do you think you can extract a lot more from another channel, like a multi-channel approach, like branding or content creation or blog articles or, I guess, LinkedIn, or even dialing?
Speaker A
I know the obvious answer is yes, you have to do many things, but which one is that second prong that has the highest lever?
Speaker A
Yeah, and I think when people hire cold email agencies, or they're doing cold email themselves, they just have the wrong expectation.
Speaker A
Cold email has dramatically changed from what it is today than what it was six years ago.
Speaker A
You could just take the simple route of taking a list, saying, "Hey, I do this, I'd love to do this for you, can we book a call this Friday?" and you would have crazy good results, and your sales process would just be that.
Speaker A
But now it's way different, and I think people come in with the expectation that it's how it was six years ago, and they refuse to do the extra things that would allow them to have really exponential campaigns.
Speaker A
So I think some of the best plays right now, and some of the best results you see from an agency service perspective, are ghostwriters right now who are posting content on behalf of their clients, and then they're taking everybody that engages with that content, qualifying them to see if they fit their ICP, and then running sequences from LinkedIn to go engage with them.
Speaker A
That's literally the best play you could do.
Speaker A
And it's the same thing even on the cold email front.
Speaker A
Some of the clients want to put the CTA as pushing for a meeting, but that just doesn't work to any real extent. For the most part, you're going to have a way better shot of pushing them to some kind of service lead magnet, doing some kind of service work, and then taking them down a sales process that way, versus just trying to pitch them direct response and get them to meet on Friday, you k
Speaker A
lose it all and and reinvest back in but now like we've just built like the craziest recruitment system to hire train onboard and place SDRs really quickly and get them activated on client accounts and then just have really good
Speaker A
management to make sure that they're getting the results for the customer and dude I think that's going to be actually our biggest product line in the next two to three years.
Speaker A
I think cold email and LinkedIn is going to be a a big function but if you look at Martell Group they started off cold email and LinkedIn being their main core product, and then they Yeah, cold I know they were cold dialing at some
Speaker A
point. And so, you know, I think we're still going to be huge on cold email. Still we think we're going to be huge on LinkedIn, but I think cold call is going to be the Yeah, I think that's going to
Speaker A
be the thing that gets us to like 40 to 50 million dollars a year. And so, that's what I'm excited about. I think next year is going to be like our our biggest growth year, um God willing, and
Speaker A
year after that just just keep going. it goes. Nice. Man, big shout out to V, man. Like built my entire career off of SmartLead.
Speaker A
Like it quite literally changed my life. Like you You guys can look at all the other sequencers in the world, right? And there's not going to be a single sequencer you're going to find where the founder is in the trenches every single
Speaker A
day, you know? And you've been doing this for what? Like how long is SmartLead now.
Speaker A
4 years every single day in the trenches. Like man's still doing customer support. Like that's You got to serve the fulfillment and operations right?
Speaker A
But dude, like I mean, kudos to you. Like you just don't Like and I you know, I was talking to Nick Verdier about the Yeah, I was telling you earlier, too.
Speaker A
It's like I was like, "How does this guy not burn out?" Like you've done five events this week, give or take, and it's like man's is at the event, and then, you know, we're going back to the hotel
Speaker A
where we're sleeping, he's pulling out his computer, and he's like, "All right, team, let's get to work." And it's like, "Bro, how?" Like what are you What are you running on? Like this is crazy.
Speaker A
You see, we don't have the green card yet. [laughter] We're still immigrant. But it's it's nuts. It's nuts. But yeah, I mean, like SmartLead best sequencer in the world, easily. Like Thank you. It's cuz of your support that
Speaker A
we're able to So it's a win-win. You couldn't even pay me to get off of there. Like I got I got I'm staying on.
Speaker A
I always tell people whenever V sells SmartLead cuz like exit's going to happen one of these days. Like it's it's bound to happen.
Speaker A
Just yeah. I'm I'm hopping off SmartLead. I'm out. [laughter] Uh if a PE is looking at this, he's not He's going to stay on.
Speaker A
Don't [laughter] Uh all right. Well, thank you so much for that. Appreciate it heaps. And yeah, keep crushing it, and congrats on everything, dude. You're going to kill it.
Speaker A
Cheers, man. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. [music]
Topics:cold emailagency operationsfulfillment processLinkedIn outboundghostwritinglead generationSDR hiringpersonalizationClayscaling agencies
