B2B Sales Solutions with BizzBee Solutions’ Dancho Dimkov

4 Jan 2021

Spammy messages are lousy, says Dancho. That’s the worst thing that could happen to a B2B outreach campaign.

By sending spammy messages, you’re burning bridges with a potential client.

BizzBee Solutions is focused on building solid and meaningful relationships rather than sending passive-aggressive messages, with the main intent of selling.

Speakers

Podcast Links

Listen to the episode here: UpMyInfluence

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00.750] – Intro – Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show, I’m Josh Elledge, Founder and CEO of UpMyInfluence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. Stick around to the end of the show. We will reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest-growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let’s go.

[00:00:36.880] – Josh – And with us right now, Dancho Dimkov, you are the Founder and Chief Executive Bee at BizzBee Solutions and you’re found on the web at BizzBee Solutions. That’s two z’s so, BizzBee Solutions.com. Dancho, thank you so much for joining us!

[00:00:55.750] – Dancho – Hi, Josh! I’m so pleased to be part of your show. I mean, I was excited when you said Chief Executive Bee because we’re proud of being bees, hard-working bees.

[00:01:05.750] – Josh – Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you are based, we were just kind of looking at maps and stuff. So you are in Macedonia which again, do a quick Google search. So just north of Greece and beautiful, beautiful mountains, beautiful, beautiful part of the world.

[00:01:22.990] – Dancho – Yeah. We’re actually a population of two million people, so it’s not a big country. So people kind of get confused is it in Africa, is it in Asia somewhere. I kind of get used to it.

[00:01:33.880] – Josh – Yeah. So tell me about BizzBee Solutions?

[00:01:37.210] – Dancho – Well, where to start? It’s a long story. I mean, BizzBee Solutions is a consulting company that works in helping B2B service providers in growing. I mean, I saw your podcast is also focused on growing. So we’re so excited to actually be part of this show and show you our angle on how we actually help the B2B world.

[00:01:58.630] – Josh – Well, I think that there are a lot of things out there that don’t work very well. And sadly, I see a lot of, you know, I see a lot of business owners kind of throwing a lot of money at bad ideas. They sound good from the mouth of the guru, but in reality, it’s just not what works well today. It may have worked at one point. So what have you learned that works very, very well when it comes to improving B2B sales?

[00:02:35.200] – Dancho – Sure. Josh, we’re preaching the one story. I mean, when it comes to B2B, the ads are not really working that good as when it comes to B2C. When you’re talking to consumers. I mean, in a B2B, you cannot really just put the Facebook ad, with some flashy LED “Buy here!”, and then you just go with the five-dollar compulsive, impulsive buying, you just swipe your card. And it works in B2C, but when it comes to B2B, it’s like a different sphere of your brain. I mean, in B2B they’re always more money involved. So it’s high-ticket and more expensive services or products. On the other hand, there are always multiple people involved. It’s not like I can just decide on the spot. I need to check with my wife if it’s a small company, or I have to check with my boss. There is a board of people that they need to decide and usually, the sales cycle is never like, okay, let’s just jump on the spot and seal the deal. It’s more like, let me think, let me budget it. So it is a time consuming and it’s really unfair to try to treat B2B same as B2C. And what I’ve realized that in the B2B world, the relationship is king. You cannot just do the old school, I don’t know, 1990s, when you just start spamming people. It’s like, “Hi, would you like to buy?”, “No.”, “Okay, hi would you like to buy?”, “No.” Okay, and just go one by one by one. Just burning bridges.

[00:03:54.730] – Josh – Yeah.

[00:03:55.010] – Dancho – I’ve realized that building a relationship with people is key and it’s been like that. It’s not something new that we invented. I mean we just try to mimic it into the digital world.

[00:04:06.810] – Josh – Yeah, and, you know, relationships, you really can’t rush. I mean, you know, it’s just like any relationship in life, you have a romantic relationship. You know, you can’t, as much as marketers wish they could snap their fingers and instantly have people fall in love with them, it’s not how it works. It doesn’t work in romantic relationships either. You know, unless you have some superpowers or something, you can’t snap your fingers and make someone fall in love with you. That’s not how it works. You need to spend time together. And so I know that some marketers love the concept of fully automating everything and using A.I. and bots and all that stuff. Where do you see that being a challenge or where do you see that having a place?

[00:04:56.910] – Dancho – Well, funny that you mentioned the relationship, because we have an internal joke here in BizzBee, and we’re saying, okay, if you go in a bar and if you approach a girl, would you just say, would you marry me or are you just going to start some chit-chatting, and start building some conversation and trust and then deepen the relationship. So when it comes to the automation, there is some degree that could help you speed up the process, especially when we’re working with consultants which are like one or two or three people, and they’re not like corporations. They don’t have 50 SDR people in their team that they can do mannual outreach and everything. But as a small consultancy company, they need to figure out how to automate parts. But those parts should be only as we have a funnel at the top, where you can just start engaging with people and just putting some conversation starters on top. Once people start engaging and responding, it has to be a manual nurturing and relationship building. Because I don’t know, I mean, we in this business for quite a while and there was no automation quite a few years ago. And now there is an automation, there are bots, but bots are still like five years away from really mimicking people. It’s still really obvious, you know, when a bot starts saying you, “Hi Josh, I’m so excited with this and this”, and you’re like, “okay, don’t joke with me.” I mean I see it’s a bot and we have realized that because it’s obvious, but part of the outreach can be automated just at the beginning. But once people start engaging, you really need to start taking it on one on one basis and start building the long-lasting relationship, which is a bit hard, but it is the only way in the B2B world.

[00:06:37.650] – Josh – Yeah, you know what, I think when we try to fool people with too much automation, like you mentioned, like you recognize it. I recognize it. The person that is listening to us right now, you recognize it. You’re not fooling anybody, so you may as well not even bother. So but let’s talk about like that initial discovery awareness like that, that initial like what do you see working well, if, you know, maybe advertising doesn’t work exceptionally well? In terms of like, you know, again, I see in the B2B world, advertising is maybe okay for, “I think I saw that name somewhere”, but it’s no one’s going to really move or take action on that. So what do you see working?

[00:07:29.700] – Dancho – Well, I mean, when we are talking in the B2B world, there are the inbound and the outbound world. I mean, inbound is trying to attract people towards you. And there are a lot of ways organic, as you said, podcast is here and there is content creation and SEO. There are paid ads and usually, people don’t really use paid ads to go to the high-ticket sell. But it’s more like here is an ebook or lead magnet or something that you can download and then start selling you in the back with some email sequence. However, when it comes with the outbound approach, we are saying it while waiting for the phone to ring, you actually need to go proactively, start looking for people. And it’s weird, I mean, I don’t know why digital marketing people said, well, we’re doing it physically like this, but when it comes to digital, let’s mass spam everybody and just start pitching to everybody that you can see. And honestly, we have realized that is not the right way to go. So we use very small level of automation. But that is just to put some conversation starters. I mean, I don’t believe that you should pitch on Internet. I mean, even before it was called email marketing, because it’s supposed to be marketing activity. It’s not called email sales, so you should start sending email pitches and proposals and 10 PDFs in a single email, which is really weird, but people still do it, I don’t know why. So how we see it on things is as a marketing, with LinkedIn or email, your only job is to pique curiosity, get them interested, start the conversation, build the report if there is a need because, I’ve seen so many times it’s like, hey, we sell this, but maybe they don’t have a need of that kind of service or a solution. So once you build the report and see that there is a need, you still don’t sell. You’re actually saying, well, interestingly, I think we can help you. Let’s jump on a call. Let’s talk one on one where I can actually better understand your needs. And if I feel confident that we can help you, then you should actually move it to sales. You know what? 21st century people are lazy. They don’t want to do all those steps, you know, like, okay, send sent invitations. Someone accepts you on Linkedin, hi, my name is Dancho, I sell LinkedIn Outreach. Would you like to buy? And then have you seen my email? Have you seen it? Have you seen it, a lot of reminders. And I don’t know, people started, you know, when someone now invites me on LinkedIn, your guard is like this.

[00:09:52.430] – Josh – Oh yeah.

[00:09:53.040] – Dancho – He is selling me something. He is going to offer me something.

[00:09:55.550] – Josh – Right.

[00:09:55.980] – Dancho – It’s funny. People do that a lot.

[00:09:58.850] – Josh – I know. Yeah. Okay, so that doesn’t work. So take me through maybe what a very authentic and effective LinkedIn strategy might be.

[00:10:12.680] – Dancho – Okay, let me put it into a few steps. Very simple one. First…

[00:10:17.660] – Josh – First off, we should say LinkedIn is amazing if you know what you’re doing. If you just, if you engage with people in a way that people like to be engaged with, LinkedIn is amazing. It’s you know, we obviously, it’s a big tool that we use and it has made our dreams come true.

[00:10:39.230] – Dancho – Yeah. Josh your stealing words from my mouth. I mean, when it comes to B2B, LinkedIn is the only platform that is really working really good. I mean, you can do some scraping a database or something, but positions become obsolete within three to six months. Emails are no longer the same. Why? Because, you know, people switch job, they get promoted. They come to another company. While on LinkedIn, people are updating the database on their own. You switch to a new company, you go on LinkedIn and brag about you have a new job. So it is a database in real-time updated, which is fantastic for us. So the first thing that we’re usually saying is like, okay, even LinkedIn is a big platform. You need the laser focus. This is what every consultancy, I don’t know why nobody listens to it, but it is the truth. If you have a laser focus target, you know who you’re talking to. You can make the conversation and messaging tailored to that needs rather than, yeah, we’re a software development companies we can do WordPress, we can do and be a generalist, rather than going toward the medical sector, saying we are software development specializing in medical health and health care. And we’ve already have a portfolio or case study of a few medical softwares, which is very specific and very tailored. So usually our biggest problem with clients, especially with the generalist, is like, but I can serve everybody. Why should I just focus on one?

[00:12:03.440] – Josh – Right, right.

[00:12:04.610] – Dancho – I know the feeling, but we’ve been there, we’ve been generalists and I’ve realized that the specialist is actually the way forward.

[00:12:11.030] – Josh – Oh, gosh, yes. I mean, so many, look, I think you’re so much you’re perceived to be so much more valuable if you’re a specialist. And I think the fear is I don’t want to lose that business. If I say, well, I’m sorry, I really don’t serve, you know, enterprise-level companies. And then you’re just kind of waiting around for that enterprise-level company to just call you up because you didn’t say you didn’t serve them. So it’s they were never going to work with you. I mean, when let’s say for example, like I want to go to a, you know, a physical therapist or something, you know, I want to make sure that I know that they know me. Like they say, Josh, I’ve seen a thousand people with the same condition just like you and I can solve 95% of them, I can fix their problem. Like, okay, done deal. You can take my money.

[00:13:08.990] – Dancho – Yeah. We call that the social proof. If you have a social proof, a testimonial or a case study with the exact same company industry, you have a jackpot. And we have the example just similar to you. It’s like who gets a bigger salary? Is it the general doctor or is it the heart surgeon or brain surgeon? In volume, the general doctor do a lot in quantity, but when it comes to quality, the heart transplant surgeon does one surgery a week and still he gets a much bigger salary.

[00:13:39.110] – Josh – Yeah, what about for email outreach? Like how do you, I don’t know what’s a good strategy? If I said, well, you know, in this case, I don’t really want to, I don’t know that my people are really on LinkedIn or I would argue against that. But I guess if someone wanted to implement a little bit of email outreach to. Like, where do you start? Like, how do you, you know, is there software that you particularly like for helping to build databases? And then when it comes to the outreach, what do you see as best practices?

[00:14:13.510] – Dancho – Yeah, when when it comes to LinkedIn, it’s easy because you have the Sales Navigator of LinkedIn where you have some advanced filtering and you say, I want the chief executive officer in health care in the states and you can do that. When it comes to the email, you can do that, but you still need to find their emails. And it is a labor-intensive process. And honestly, I’ve tried like 20 different softwares, I didn’t like none of them. Either the artificial technology’s not there yet because you know what? It’s not just like give me one thousand, no one million emails. And if I lost to 0.00001, I’ll get a client. It doesn’t work like that. Google will prevent it. So, again, we are trying to start the relationship world. I mean, even with the email, it’s better to find one hundred but highly qualified leads in terms of, okay, I don’t know why I started with medical industry, but it’s a good example. But I want to target software that are in the medical I want to go on angel.com or Crunchbase and see they already have received some funding and if they’ve done, then I want to find a CTO and then peach them something about us. And in this case, it cannot be automated because it’s not just on LinkedIn. Scrape the database and do some, I don’t know, tool that you’ll find the email, but it’s more like deepen understanding of who you want to approach and then, I don’t know, pick one by one. So when you’re going to start the email outreach, you’re not talking in thousands, you’re not even talking in hundreds, you’re talking in dozens where you’re saying, look, I know your pain, I know your problem, and I think that we should connect. But still, we are saying it’s email marketing, it’s not email sales. Because email sales is, hi, my name is Dancho, I want to offer you this, this and this. This is our value proposition. Below is a PDF with our quote and everything. Email marketing is just like Josh, I’ve seen you. I saw a lot of your podcast. I think that we can help you if you’re interested, let’s jump on a call. Let’s see if we are a good fit first. There is no point in just pitching to people that you haven’t qualified them yet.

[00:16:28.210] – Josh – Yeah, yeah. You know, so it’s spending more time. You know, the same thing in media as well. You know, there’s these platforms that, oh, we’re going to blast out your pitch to, you know, ten thousand journalists. Do you think that any of those journalists, if that’s the platform, do you think any of them are going to engage with us? They’re not. We are too busy for that. And it doesn’t work. And, to your point, like with media, it’s the same thing. It’s you want to cultivate a relationship with, you know, twenty, you know, accessible, fairly accessible media in your industry or in your region or whatever, get to know them, follow them, engage with them and then just follow the natural flow of the relationship and where that goes. And that may very well be if you have something that’s truly of interest to them, it’s going to be an inevitable next step. It’s like if you show up and you keep on dating and, you know, you’re just, you’re a gentleman. I mean, you’re being, you’re just you’re courting well. It’s inevitably it’s going to lead to, you know, the next stage in the relationship. If it feels, you know, if it’s mutually, yes, people are feeling it.

[00:17:54.280] – Dancho – Yeah. But Josh, I think I have read it somewhere on your website and I completely agree with you on building the authority. The same logic where we’re saying we want our clients to become the go-to guy. You have a go-to guy for LinkedIn, you have a go-to guy for a website, you have a go-to guy for different things. And if you become the go-to guy, maybe at the moment there is not a need for your service from that particular prospect. But even after three or six months, if he has a need for a podcast or anything around building need of your services, he’s like, I know a guy. I made it from LinkedIn or email or an event. But I want to be the go-to guy when it comes to email and LinkedIn Outreach. And we want to share that vision with our client that it’s not like numbers, how many invitations, how many acceptance rates, how many conversion… We want to actually make them the go-to guy and I saw it on your website where you were talking about building an authority and that is not really part of the Outreach, but it is crucial for a B2B success.

[00:18:58.810] – Josh – Well, and so I think why authority matters is this is just how people, you know, we live in a, here’s another dating metaphor, Josh. We live in a swipe left swipe right world. And so if someone reaches out to me, they better start making sense really quick, because I’m only going to give them a few seconds of my time and then I’m going to see either what I see checks the boxes or, you know, I get red flags. And, you know, if I click and I look at someone’s website and it looks like amateur hour, it’s a no go. If I look at their LinkedIn, who’s this person messaged me. I said, you mean inevitably I’m like, okay, well, this is an otherwise fine Outreach or whatever. I click and look at their profile, their LinkedIn profile, again, and it’s amateur, it’s a nonstarter. And the thing is and the frustrating thing is for businesses is people won’t tell you why they didn’t engage. Why did they bounce off your site? They just do. So if you have that authority, then it’s kind of like knowing lets see, when someone discovers me, what are they probably going to do? They’re going to do a little bit of due diligence. And so we just want to head them off at the pass. And so, okay, if you’re going to Google, you know, if you’re going to google Josh Elledge, I’m going to pay attention to what they’re going to see and I’m going to be mindful of it.

[00:20:34.310] – Dancho – Let me give you a 30 second rundown, because we’re actually covering bits and pieces. What we’re trying to understand is who is their niche that they want to approach? After that, we’re actually polishing their LinkedIn profile in order to when you click okay, who is this Josh. Sounds credible, increase the acceptance rate. Then we have a copywriter that actually creates a three or four messages, which is automated sequence. Nothing pitchy, nothing selling, nothing mentioning about about the product or solution. Is just conversation starters. This is what we call them. Because on a conversation starters. Once people start responding. So we do the automation where we are sending that one or two or three conversation starters. Once the people start responding, we have a team that actually manually starts the conversation. We don’t want to make assumption and like, well, since you are in the states, in this age, you probably have this kind of problem. That can work at a very high level. But if you’re chit-chatting with someone, it’s very weird to assume that you’re married or you’re single or you have this kind of problem in your business or you have that kind of problem. So it has to have the minimal conversation and nurturing.

[00:21:43.490] – Josh – Yeah. At the same time, though, I think you’ve got to be very thoughtful about it, because there are people that have DM me and I’m like, I kind of don’t have time. Like, it’s I think you really have to be thoughtful about what your communication is. Again, is personalized as possible as valuable as possible, like it should. I feel like any communication like, it should be, here’s why I’m taking the time to message you. Like you got to you can’t come across as phony, fake and like how are you this fine day? I’m like, yeah, I’m probably not going to engage.

[00:22:21.320] – Dancho – How is your business or what are your goals for 2021.

[00:22:26.000] – Josh – Get out of here! Yeah. So, and so the answer to that though and I know we only have a couple of minutes left here, that’s one where you really just have to go through. What do I say when I reach out? And I think it’s really an exercise to look at and ask yourself, what would you respond to. In particularly, and you may be like your client that you’re reaching out to or your potential client or whatever, but imagine yourself in that circumstance. And again, I think that it’s just going to require some imagination. For us, you know, we always lead with you know, it looks like you might be a fit for a podcast that we know of or happy to make an intro. Let me know if you’re interested, because I know that they’re looking for to interview founders. That usually works pretty well, like some variation of that. And again, it’s the ask is something that the other person, well, that’s valuable. Like I’m interested in that. I don’t want a white paper generally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Click on this strange link. No, no thanks. Dancho, so someone going to your website, I see that you do have like a free ebook, the outbound growth formula. And that right there I was on your website. Yeah, yeah. It’s reengineering LinkedIn Lead Generation. Is that what you’d recommend people grab?

[00:24:10.090] – Dancho – Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, Josh, I mean we are giving our knowledge for free. It’s not something that we try to hide, what kind of tools we’re using or how we actually do it. So if you go at the first book, which is a shortcut to grow is our main ebook and then it’s divided, okay, how to build a database, how to create messages, how to do the LinkedIn and then how to do the email. And finally, once people start responding, how to do the nurture and many times on the calls I have, it’s like it’s free knowledge. I cannot hide knowledge. Is not like it’s not out there. It’s just the experience on how you can utilize that. So I would really invite everybody that is even interested in thinking about LinkedIn or email Outreach on our BizzBee Academy. I mean, we are the proud, hardworking bees. We have some e-books that people can learn more about it with very specific examples and case studies on how they can actually do it on their own.

[00:25:05.630] – Josh – Yeah, fantastic. All right, Dancho Dimkov. The website BizzBeeSolutions.com. There it is. Yes. Dancho, thank you so much for joining us. This is great.

[00:25:22.000] – Dancho – Yeah, Josh, thank you very much for having me. It was really a pleasure being here on this podcast.

[00:25:28.870] – Outro – Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com/guest. If you got something out of this interview, would you share this episode on social media? Just a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you do that, tag us with the hashtag #upmyinfluence. Each month we scour Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. We pick one winner from each platform and you get crowned king or queen of that social media. What do you win? We’re going to promote you and your business to over one hundred twenty thousand social media fans. Totally free. Now, can you also hook us up? Now in your podcast player, right now, please give us a thumbs up or a rating in review. We promise to read it all and take action. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. Your feedback helps us fulfil that mission. While you’re at it, hit that subscribe button. You know why? Tomorrow! That’s right. Seven days a week you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. Fifteen minutes a day. My name is Josh Elledge, let’s connect on the socials. You’ll find all the stuff we’re doing at upmyinfluence.com. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur movement.