Thousands, and thousands, and thousands of pounds. That’s what Phil lost to a lead generation agency this year.

Is this common in new business lead generation? Or are there some business, like there are consultants, who are grounded and ethical?

So when Phil was approached by Namit Jindal from Deliverability Ninja, he was invited on the podcast to examine his lead generation approach in much more detail.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Phil Lewis: Thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds. That’s what I lost to a lead generation agency this year. They’d approached me saying they could generate loads of leads and then they vanished taking quite a lot of our money with them. And I found myself wondering, is this common in new business lead generation? Are these businesses actually worth talking to? Are there some businesses, like there are some consultancies, who are ethical and do this job better than others? Or actually, is it just the Wild West and none of them are worth talking to at all? Welcome to the Consultancy Business Podcast. We are here to champion ethics and excellence in independent consultancy. Generating leads is really difficult for most of us who are independent consultants. So it’s no surprise that there are plenty of businesses out there that will purport to help us with this most difficult of challenges. So when I got approached by Namit from a business called Deliverability Ninja, I decided to invite him on the podcast and I was pretty clear about the rules of engagement. I said to him, listen Namit, I’d like a conversation with you in which we really examine your approach and the experience that consultancies like me have of working with businesses like yours. And in fairness to Namit, he was completely game for it, more than happy to show up and have a good faith conversation with me, in which in some senses actually, he gave as good as he got. So you’ll make your own mind up when you listen to the conversation over the next 35, 40 minutes. And I hope you find it of some value as you determine your approach to lead generation in your own consultancy. Namit, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:49] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Hey, Phil.

[00:01:50] Phil Lewis: So I think we can start with you just explaining a little bit about your business and the work that you do, if that’s okay.

[00:01:57] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Sounds good. So I’m Namit Jindal and I’m the founder of Deliverability Ninja. I run a cold email deliverability and a lead generation company. So our main goal is to help new businesses get more leads via cold email. And more mature businesses double their sales pipeline using cold email.

[00:02:17] Phil Lewis: That’s a good jumping off point for us. I think it’s fair to say Namit, that certainly in terms of my own experience over the years, the world of lead generation is a very mixed bag, particularly when, as a consultancy owner, you’re working with third parties. And indeed, when I say mixed bag, what I really mean is most lead generation activity fails because there are very, very high trust barriers in our marketplace, in consulting. So most clients have had experiences of working with consultants or those who do this type of work before, and a lot of them have had pretty poor experiences with consultants. And of course, there is a kind of industry perception of consulting as being, you know, full of people who will borrow your watch to tell you the time or charge you a huge amount of money to add not a great deal of value, if you put it in those sorts of terms. So when you’re dealing with clients, you’ve got that sort of historic experience in that sort of mindset, it’s always seemed to me that any kind of cold lead generation, whether it’s done via email or LinkedIn or whatever, is more likely than not to fall flat. Clearly, your experience has been different. So I am interested in what I’m not seeing about how this kind of lead generation work can actually work.

[00:03:49] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: So I think everything that you’re talking about can be summarised in one word; the offer. What you’re talking about is, yes, I’m a consultant. Yes, I help with something in particular, but what am I truly offering? Cause I promise you if what I was offering was sales consulting, no one would take me up on it. I’m not the most famous sales leader out there. Why would anyone take me on? But if you were to improve your offer, get a risk reversal and make it so that you are promising… guaranteeing the value you are delivering. And that’s when people buy from you.

[00:04:31] Phil Lewis: Help me understand that in more detail. Is what you’re saying that trust barriers are overcome by having a more compelling offer?

[00:04:40] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Absolutely, right. Like, trust barriers are overcome by having a no-brainer offer, and a risk reversal. So something of a guarantee, right? Let me explain that, right? So for us, and I can do this for any other offer too, but for us, when we reach out to more mature sales companies, these are companies who already have STRs.

My offer is I will double your open rates and reply rates within 90 days. So that’s a really compelling offer. I don’t say hey, I’m going to consult you on lead generation. That’s not a real offer. I tell them what they’re getting. They’re getting double the open rates and reply rates within 90 days. Then after that I add a risk reversal, which says; you guys don’t pay if I am unable to double your sales metrics within 90 days, you don’t pay. So now you can calculate for a company which will make £500,000 by doubling their sales metrics within 90 days, they have no problem paying me £20,000.

[00:05:45] Phil Lewis: I think a lot of consultants listening to this Namit would actually buy that, and they would go at one level, yeah, that logic makes sense. But if they then pull that into their world, I’m not sure it continues to hold water. So, for example, in my own consultancy, we work in, effectively, organisational change. Now, what I can’t do is guarantee a client an outcome. And the reason I can’t guarantee a client an outcome is not because I’m not good at what I do. We have a string of industry awards in both of my practices, incredible client testimonials, really, really good client longevity and so on. So there’s not a question over the quality of what we deliver, but the success in the relationship is ultimately created by two companies in the relationship. Which is to say me as a consultancy, and the client as the client. So if the client doesn’t do what the client’s supposed to do, then it’s really difficult for me as the consultancy to guarantee any sort of outcome whatsoever. And the one thing that 10 years in business has told me is the fact that clients can be very variable when it comes to keeping to their side of the bargain. So I guess what I’m challenging there is the idea that I could turn around to a client as a consultant and say: I will guarantee you outcome X or outcome Y because the world that I’m in makes it quite hard to be able to do that, because it’s partly dependent on the client. So your thoughts on that.

[00:07:27] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: That’s where you add conditions. They need to be reasonable. That’s very common for them. That’s very common for any consultant, right? Like, yes, I can do X for you, but I need you to do Y and then only this condition works. So like, you need to explicitly tell them what they need to do and what would make them a successful client. That’s your condition. Like: hey, my guarantee works as long as you guys are doing this from your end and it needs to be super objective. Like measurable, right? So ideally what I’m saying is that there are three things that you need to do. One; you need to tell the potential client, prospect or whatever like the lead or whoever you’re reaching out to cold — what they are actually getting out of it. Like what is the end benefit to them? You need to quantify that benefit to the best of your ability. Then you need to add your guarantee which is like: hey, if you guys don’t get it, you don’t pay me anything or I do this or whatever. The stronger the guarantee. Third, you need to add conditions, which is, which you don’t need to explicitly state in the first lead, but this is something you need to tell them before the contract closes and having the contract that: hey, you guys will only get this result if you do this, this, and this, and then you need to have, like, testimonials showing the result for an additional layer of trust.

[00:09:02] Phil Lewis: All of which assumes, I guess, going into it, that you actually know what the client wants in the first place. So what I mean by that is again, if I come into the world of say, lead generation, then it seems fair enough to go; well, what any client would want if they’re talking to an organisation like yours, Namit would be more leads. And probably you could specify that a bit more and say; well, higher quality leads, for example, as well as more leads. But if you come and talk to a consultancy like mine, well, we’re in the world of organisational change for want of a sort of better set of phraseology. It can be very hard within that to know what a client’s precise needs are. So for example, if we talk about organisational change, well, we might get involved in digital transformation. We might get involved in mergers and acquisitions. Or we might get involved in a situation where a client needs to reduce its workforce to improve its operating efficiency in some way, shape or form. Equally, what the client needs may not actually be influenced by those sorts of business events at all. It might be influenced by, for example, the fact that the leadership team is held to be poorly performing within the client organisation. Or there is some sort of relationship breakdown between the CEO and the Chair of that organisation. Or the fact that staffing morale is really, really low. So again, in our world of consulting, understanding what the need of that client is, before you make the approach, is extraordinarily difficult. And I guess there’s a build on that, not just what that need is, but also if that need even exists at that point in time. So then you get into the world of, well, if I don’t know whether the need exists, and I don’t know exactly what that need is, then are we just playing a kind of numbers game here in the hope that even with what you’re saying, which is offer and risk reversal and everything else, what we’re actually playing is a numbers game in the hope that we can say enough of the right kind of thing, to enough people, that one or two then kind of lift their hands and go; yes, that sounds like us. And then there’s a conversation and things can move forward from there. Because I don’t see how you could actually understand client needs in the abstract sufficiently well to be able to do any other kind of approach.

[00:11:33] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: So clients have unique needs. For someone like you who does so many things, it’s going to be a lot of things, right? And you’re absolutely right. It’s hard to predict. The first thing that you need to do is understand what your entry offer is. Like, you cannot run consulting with five different offers. It just like… it just doesn’t make sense. Like, yes, once you land and expand clients, you can tell them; hey, I help you with this, and I help you with this. You can eventually figure out problems, but you need to understand what their main offer is. And sounds like your main offer is, like, I’ll improve your organisational structure to do X or something like that, right? Like I need to understand more of what you do to give you an accurate offer. Once you do that, you need to, like, have a balance leaning towards more of identifying what kind of clients typically need your help. Now, since you’ve been consulting for so long, you typically have a pattern of clients. Either clients show up when they’re made certain X growth, or whatever your trigger is, which is common amongst your clients. You need to find that trigger and reach out to those exact people.

[00:12:51] Phil Lewis: Yes. So if we now broaden this out, then. Again, what I hear in what you’ve just said is; in order for me to be able to advise on that, we’d actually need to do some work to work out exactly what the kind of common threads are, and then we can work out how we structure an approach, which is of maximum appeal. Fair enough, I think. If we come up and out of your particular business for a second, and perhaps look across what we might call the lead generation industry. I’ve made a joke for years, which is; I would dearly love to be able to say I’m a consultant without immediately having to follow it with the word ‘but’. And the reason I was keen to talk with you is because lead generation and lead generation agencies, consultancies, businesses, whatever you want to call them, have pretty poor reputation in our industry. And I can point to any number of consultants who have felt burned by having spent money, not to get any kind of return out of their lead generation activities whatsoever. And that’s not just the case in consulting. It’s also the case in related worlds like advertising and marketing and so on. So I’m interested in any reflections you’ve got about why that’s the case. Why so many people have had such poor experiences, and how you might suggest to a consultant that it would be worth them having a different kind of go at this.

[00:14:28] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Yeah. So I don’t think cold email would ever work for you. Unless you have an offer, a VSL, either video testimonials for your clients or a risk reversal. One or the other in place.

[00:14:44] Phil Lewis: Namit, could you just tell me what a VSL is as well, please? 

[00:14:48] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: It’s essentially a video sales letter which is like a three to seven minute video of you explaining what you actually do. That has a 300% conversion rate for your website, because when you reach out to cold traffic, that means these guys don’t know you. So your offer, your website, all of that stuff needs to be in place and compelling enough. The biggest mistake I see people do is have none of that in place and start reaching out cold. It just doesn’t work. If that’s the case and, like, for us, we don’t take on clients that do that. Because when I started, I took every client possible and then I realised, yep, that’s the common factor within these clients. It’s never going to… cold email is never going to work for these guys. Because of I’m, I’m taking a loss, taking them up, right? So that’s, that’s one of the major problems. Obviously, then we can go into like, I don’t know the agency you hired, whether they were actually good at what they did or not. I don’t know, like the, all the factors that come into play here.

[00:15:52] Phil Lewis: But in your experience, in order to be able to feel confident in the guarantees that you’re offering to your clients, what you’re saying is, fundamentally, three conditions need to be in place. The first is there needs to be an extremely well written and compelling and differentiated website and other digital assets. Secondly, there needs to be a really clear and compelling offer. And then thirdly, what you were talking about by way of a VSL, a video sales letter, also needs creating such that actually there is a kind of, I suppose, human element to the outreach as well. Because that’s the other thing, of course, is we all get so many of these InMails from LinkedIn or cold emails, or increasingly in my case, actually sort of crap that comes in off WhatsApp, that kind of stuff as well, it can be very, very hard to find a reason to pay attention to anything at all. So what you’re basically saying, if I’m understanding you correctly, is there needs to be some pretty high-standard stuff in place. And then, and only then, can this kind of lead generation activity work.

[00:17:03] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Uh, yeah, we’re just scratching the surface here. What I’ve told you with that offer of VSL, essentially testimonials, guarantees… we’re only talking about the basics. It’s not even about, like, whether the cold email will work for you or not. It’s about, like, if that cold email were to work, whether that person would reply to you. Because what a cold email does is it captures seven seconds of attention from the prospect, and either they’re interested in your offer or not. If they’re interested, the first thing that they’re going to do is likely go to your website. Now, if your website doesn’t have the things that I stated, they’re not going to reply to you. So whoever, like, whether that was 5% or 7% of the people who you emailed were interested, if you don’t have the basics in place, they’re never going to reply to you.

[00:17:59] Phil Lewis: As somebody who works in and around consultancy and has done for a long time and also someone who has helped a number of other consultancies with their growth strategy over the years, then the kind of mistakes that you see consultants making when it comes to assets like their website tend to be pretty common. So, for example, in the world of consultancy, what all consultants, almost without exception, love to do is talk about their products and services. Now, I think one of the things that you’re saying here is that a product and service is not an offer, right? It’s basically, it’s the sort of list of what you do, which is very different to an offer. I would always say to a client, or to a consultancy I’m helping, that getting really clear on the transformation that you help a client to make, the problems and the needs that predict the need for that transformation in the first place, and lowering barriers to engagement by making it exceptionally clear where a client starts with you, is an absolute non-negotiable on the website. In my experience 90-95% of consultancies don’t do that stuff or do that stuff terribly well. And if I’m understanding what you’re saying correctly, then you’re saying, well, at which point in time, no wonder cold lead generation doesn’t work because fundamentally they’re going to take one look at your digital asset, get a bit lost in products and services, for example, not feel compelled to follow anything up and off they go. And I also think that it speaks to a really, really common problem in consulting and the really common problem in consulting is we find it very hard to talk in a compelling way, about what it is that we do, to our clients and to other people. We just tend to get lost in kind of technical detail. Has that been your experience of working with consultancies as well?

[00:20:05] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Yeah. So, like, to give you an example, right? Digital transformation doesn’t mean anything to me. And obviously, like, that’s just me. That’s not consultants or like saying anything wrong about that. Those words don’t mean anything to me. And I’m a founder myself, right? Like, so typically I know what my problems are. It could be like, hey, I have an operational challenge. I need automation. So I need this or I need that. Like, typically these are problems. So I’m looking for people who can solve those specific problems. So digital transformation or any of those buzzwords just cover so many things that they cover nothing in my mind, because it’s not simple enough like a third, three year, third grader or fifth grader should be able to understand what you’re selling. So that’s the major problem with consultants. It’s like you need to be specific as to how you can transform a business and what ROI they should expect from paying you money.

[00:21:05] Phil Lewis: So in terms of the work that you help organisations to do, where does your work stop and where does your work start? Because I suspect a lot of people listening to this podcast would find themselves in two places at the same time. They would find themselves simultaneously thinking something like, some of this makes sense, right? I do realise I’ve got work to do to be able to talk in a more compelling way about the needs that I meet with my clients and what my offer is in terms of how I meet those needs. At the same time as most consultants are… they will be looking for more sales, more sales leads, that kind of stuff. So your work as a lead generation partner, do you stick purely to the kind of lead gen end of it? Or does your work get involved in websites? Do you get involved in messaging? Do you get involved in offers, all that kind of stuff? Or do you need that to be in place before you start work? 

[00:22:07] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: So ideally we get a company which has everything in place. But in my experience in the past two years, that rarely happens. So we need to get involved in the offer placement, brainstorm messaging with companies and make sure that their offer is tight. But they need to have either testimonials, be willing to do guarantees, or some of that stuff. Like they need to be willing to play ball with us. Because I have been, like, I’ve been a part of this industry for so long I know who gives you the best, cheapest, fastest websites. I know what you need on your website to make this successful and get actual meetings with the people you want. You need to be willing to play ball.

[00:22:56] Phil Lewis: So by the sounds of it, one of the guarantees that you’re offering is that you will underwrite a certain amount of lead generation activity. And unless you’re able to satisfy a set of metrics, then the client doesn’t pay. Which means it’s fair enough, I think, that you would start to dictate some of the terms around what you would need from your clients in that context. So, can you talk to me more, then, about what you have seen to be the biggest predictors of success other than a kind of clear offer, which you’ve said is non-negotiable, and also a well written website, which sounds like it’s non-negotiable, and a good quality, you know, video sales letter, which also sounds non-negotiable. What else do you see that predicts success for your clients in lead generation terms?

[00:23:51] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: A differentiated offer, I think, or a differentiated product or service, right? Because we just don’t do that for consultants. So if SaaS company come up that is, like, differentiated in the market, that works really really well. And the other thing which is, like, something not a lot of people talk about or maybe they do, and I haven’t heard people talk about as much, is a lead magnet. What can you do for free to get people interested in your sales funnel?

[00:24:21] Phil Lewis: Consultants really struggle with lead magnets and they struggle with lead magnets for two reasons, in my experience. The first thing is that it can be very, very difficult to do a highly limited and free consultancy job. So in general, most ethical consultants would be wanting to do a job properly, which means proper diagnosis, proper solution design, proper delivery. And it can be really hard to work out a way of doing that which is small and contained and protects both client and consultant. The second reason I think is that — it’s kind of a related point — but it can also be the amount of time taken in talking to clients about how you can help them. Even to get a free small thing sold, as it were — I’m saying sold in a kind of loose sense of the word sold because no one’s actually paying money for it — can make it deeply unattractive to want to go down that road because I’ve certainly had experiences where doing something at low or no value for a client, it’s taken me as long to get to that place as it has done to actually sell the first project. So again, I find myself wondering, what am I missing when it comes to lead magnets and consultancy?

[00:25:57] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: I think it’s about, like, understanding what a lead magnet is, right? Essentially… so let’s talk about what is your… if you had to make your offer right now, right? What would be your main product or service that you help someone with?

[00:26:11] Phil Lewis: So we, for example, in one of our practices have a really interesting diagnostic tool which helps clients to understand how ready they are for change. And it’s very data driven, and we could theoretically have a lead magnet, which is something like; we can help you, a leader, understand how ready you are for change, at no cost.

[00:26:41] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Amazing. That’s a great start. But, like, what does change mean?

[00:26:45] Phil Lewis: Which brings us back to our previous point, right? Because the central challenge in my consultancy is that change can mean any number of things right now.

[00:26:58] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: So it has to mean one thing right? Like you come up to a leader and be like, hey, are you guys ready to change? And that’s supposed to be a diagnostic tool at no cost. So it needs to be like, hey, are you guys ready to do this thing? Are you guys ready to do this? Like, it has to be one main thing that really matters. Or you can segregate that… this would matter for this audience, this would matter for this audience.

[00:27:24] Phil Lewis: Yes, and where we have always struggled is the fact that because what we work in is environments where different types of change are going on; because there are many different types of change, some of which I talked about earlier on, it can be very difficult from the outside to be able to understand the type of change that that client is seeking to make in their organisation. The thing that all of our clients have in common is the fact that in order to bring about the change that they’re seeking, they fundamentally need their people to be working together in very different ways to how they’re working at the moment. And the other thing they all have in common is that they’ve usually tried and failed to bring that about. So we have an approach which works in almost any change environment because we’re fundamentally dealing with a kind of underlying set of organisational needs and behaviours that predict success in any change environment. But when I’m talking to a chief people officer, I’m talking to a chief exec or whatever, or my business partner is, then, we are in a place of, you know; we know we can help them, but we have to feel our way into, where is that organisation at the moment in its, in its kind of transformational needs as it were. And that’s okay to do when we’re referred in. It’s okay to do when we are in front of somebody at a networking event, or we’ve been… they’ve approached us after a speaking event or whatever. It is harder to do if we’re just looking at that organisation from the outside, simply because we don’t know what’s going on in that organisation around the time that we go, hello, would you like… And that I think is why a lot of our lead generation activities in our practice have been really challenging over the years. Simply because we don’t really know where that organisation is up to. And therefore it can be quite difficult from the outside to predict precisely what is, you know, the right angle in on the conversation.

[00:29:29] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Then I think you just have five different lead magnets, right? Are you ready for X? Are you ready for X? Are you ready for X. And then cold email does not work for you because you do demand capture. You guys don’t do demand generation. So you’re trying to capture people who are already looking for a specific product or service, versus convincing them that they need it in a way. So yeah, unless you have specific triggers that qualify someone to need that specific change, because change is too abstract. Like, you cannot talk in abstract terms when you’re doing consulting if you want to do any form of lead generation. You need to be super specific. So now you have five different lead magnets if you’re doing five different kinds of changes and then you run ads. Or unless you want to do a volume play, cold email will be tough unless you can identify, typically, companies with 200 to 500 employees after they’ve hired 50 people need change number one. Typically companies with 500 to 1,000 employees after they’ve grown this much or just raised Series E need this kind of change. So unless you can put people into specific categories, and actively segment them, right? And you need to think about it this way. If you were to meet a random person on the street and, like, sell them what you’re consulting or show them how your consulting can help them in 30 seconds, what would you say? Yeah, it has to be super, super specific. It cannot be anything abstract.

[00:31:03] Phil Lewis: And I think what you’ve just given our listeners there is a really helpful way of thinking about this, Namit, because what I heard in what you’ve just said is this: if you are running a type of consultancy… say for example, you’re working in marketing consultancy and you’re helping people to sort out their brand strategy, for example, or you’re working in and around the procurement process and you’re helping people to save money on the goods and services that they’re buying into their organisation, then you are in a position theoretically at least, where it might be possible from the outside to create a really compelling offer. And provided all those other conditions that we’ve talked about throughout this conversation are met, then lead generation might work for you. If you’re in a form of consultancy where you are helping organisations with, for example, transformation, then lead generation might not be the way forward for you. If you’re in a world like the one that we’re in, for example, where transformation can actually mean a number of different things, a number of different needs, and we need to be able to go out and talk to those range of needs, and there are different ways of doing that. You mentioned advertising, for example, there are other ways we can do that as well, the tactics that we do use with some success. So I think that’s a really interesting distinction that we’ve just drawn there, which is between consultancy where actually ultimately you can drill down into a very, very specific use case and therefore a very specific offer, and consultancy where the use case actually might be a number of different ways in, say, and therefore you’re talking to a number of different potential offers, and it might actually be that therefore cold email lead generation of the kind we’re talking about here isn’t actually right for you. And if I’ve understood that correctly, and that logic holds true, then I think that’s a really genuinely useful and insightful thing to say, because firstly, I think it’s very clear for our audience here when they should be talking to someone who does the kind of thing that you do, Namit. And also it’s clear when they shouldn’t be, or when they’ve got work to do themselves beforehand. And if I’ve understood everything you said correctly, the only thing I would say, you know, to that in the end is I wish more people in your industry talked with that level of candour because I’ve not heard that level of clarity from anybody else.

[00:33:52] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: Yeah, yeah, I somewhat agree to what you’re saying. I think a lot of businesses need to be broken down further. I’m, very curious to dive deep, have a whiteboard in front of me about your business and, like, ask you to tell me every single thing that you guys do and find common patterns so that we can make specific… but obviously you guys know your business better than I do so if you say, hey, it cannot be broken down into anything specific I would trust you on that.

[00:34:21] Phil Lewis: I think it’s just a case of how you define your work. And again, you know, there could be ways of doing that. I mean, I do actually think there are a number of use cases into which, for example, our work would sit, I guess the question is, if you’re dealing with a business that does have a number of different use cases, could you ever get to a cold email style approach that actually means you’re not playing a game of hit and hope? You know, so in the end, if I said to you, there are five or six use cases for a business like mine, how does that then work in the context of cold email marketing? Because, what do you do? Do you just literally take an audience of however many hundreds or thousands of people, and then just randomly divide that audience up and then just sort of throw enough at the wall and see what sticks. That doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly sophisticated or attractive way of doing lead generation.

[00:35:18] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: I mean, obviously, that’s one practice that’s common within lead generation agencies, and I’m not denying it’s not. Like, it is there. But a better way to do that with those five offers would be a) you either pick only one and save people need it. The one with the least friction, the one that you feel people most likely need. Second is you segment that audience to most likely, and that’s what I’ve been coming around it’s like, if you have five offers, you write down what kind of audience might need offer number one the most. And that, combined with a lead magnet approach, you will hit success. Just to be very honest with you, positive reply rates are one to two percent. So yes, you need a thousand people to get those 10 meetings.

[00:36:05] Phil Lewis: I should be clear with our listeners. I invited you on this podcast because you actually emailed me and I can’t remember exactly where you emailed me, but you emailed me, I think it came into one of my email accounts and it caught me at a moment in time. When, for reasons I won’t go into now, I’d been thinking quite a lot about lead generation and specifically just how questionable a lot of activities in your industry actually are. And I got back in touch with you and I said, Namit, I’m not really interested in you developing leads, but if you’d like to come on my podcast and have a conversation about lead generation, I think we could open this conversation up to, you know, many, many other consultants that could be a new business opportunity for you. But also, you know, give us an opportunity to talk about this subject because a lot of consultants, as I’ve been saying throughout this conversation, have been burned quite heavily by lead generation businesses and so on. So I just want to acknowledge the fact that you were sort of game enough to come on this in the first place, because I did warn you it wasn’t going to be the, perhaps the, the plainest sailing of conversations today. But also in closing, not only to thank you for your time, but also to ask you if you had one piece of advice for anybody thinking about doing lead generation activity, whether on their own or through a business like yours, and we will put links to your business in the show notes if anybody does want to follow up with you, then what would that advice be?

[00:37:39] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: So this is super lead generation specific. And that means whether you’re doing an ad, cold email, cold call, LinkedIn message, whatever. After writing any piece of message or advertisement message or whatever, ask what is in it for the prospect. Like, what does the prospect get out of it? Like, it has to be super prospect focused and they need to understand, like, it needs, they need to have a very clear benefit offered applying to you. That’s going to be my best piece of advice.

[00:38:12] Phil Lewis: Namit, thank you for joining us on the podcast.

[00:38:14] Namit Jindal – Deliverability Ninja: This was a good talk.

[00:38:20] Phil Lewis: A huge thanks there to Namit, who, as I said in the intro, in many senses gave as good as he got. I’ll be honest, I found myself not persuaded by much of that argument, but you will of course make your own mind up. And I would be interested in hearing any and all views on not only what Namit had to share, but also lead generation, what’s worked for you, what hasn’t and so on. So do drop me a line, phil@theconsultancybusiness.com or you can track us down on LinkedIn and post there. In the meantime, many thanks for listening as always new episodes are out first Monday of every single month on your favourite podcast platform. And if you find value in these episodes, we would hugely appreciate any likes or shares that you are able to offer. Every single one helps us, as still a relatively new podcast. In the meantime, as always, thanks for listening and bye for now.

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