Video Overview

In this #6 episode of The B2B Outbound Marketing & Sales Automation Series, our guest was the Head of Growth at Zopto, Stephen Cotter.

Stephen gives us a quick tutorial on all the features and capabilities of Zopto.

Did you know that your Zopto campaigns can run in the background, even while you’re offline?
Then you are free to say that you don’t have wasted precious time.

Zopto has a very neat and clean dashboard, holding a whole heap of information.

Scroll through their astounding website:
Zopto

STAY TUNED for more success stories, tips&tricks, and more awesome tools in the B2B Outbound world!

Speakers

Interview Transcript

[00:00:07.050] – Dancho – Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode at The B2B Outbound Marketing and Sales Automation. For today we have another guest. We have Stephen Cotter on the call. He’s from UK and Head of Growth at Zopto.com. Stephen, welcome.

[00:00:23.250] – Stephen – Thank you very much, Dancho.

[00:00:25.110] – Dancho – How are you today?

[00:00:26.820] – Stephen – I’m very well, thank you, very well. We’re about a week away from Christmas now.

[00:00:35.340] – Dancho – Everybody are in the Christmas mood now. And to start things with a bit more easy questions, my first thought was like, okay, who is Stephen first? Because I want my audience to start recognizing you.

[00:00:49.920] – Stephen – Yeah, it’s a good question. So I’m normally a behind the scenes type of person. My background was in cybersecurity, and what I found really interesting with that was cybersecurity and marketing is with cybersecurity, you’re hacking people, you’re hacking systems and with marketing, it’s essentially a very similar type of process where hacking things, people build systems and we need to get them down. So my background is in cybersecurity. I used to sell to I.T. security managers, which are probably the toughest people to sell to in the world. You can imagine cold calling an IT person to talk about security on the phone.

[00:01:37.420] – Dancho – Yeah, introvert people not really comfortable discussing about that.

[00:01:40.810] – Stephen – Yeah. And what I found really interesting from selling cybersecurity was breaking down those people. So as an example with an I.T. security manager, you would go into the court saying as an example, hey, I know you don’t want to talk about security, but just to let you know, this is what some of our or some of your competitors are doing around security. And it’s just a psychological trick. And I think that really bodes well in marketing and the fact that you’re doing the same thing, you’re doing the same thing, you’re finding these ways to change that dynamic.

[00:02:17.830] – Dancho – So it could actually be I’m a cybersecurity expert and marketing hacking people’s psychology in order to do what? Force them to do something or realize that they need something at the end of the day?

[00:02:30.310] – Stephen – Yeah, I used to do, this is quite funny. I used to do social engineering, which is I used it to break, people used to pay me to break into that company and find their weaknesses. Essentially marketing is a very similar type of thing. Because what you’re doing is you go to the receptionist, you’re putting on a face and say, hey, this is me, I’m trustworthy. It’s similar to marketing in the way that we’re trying to psychologically exploit these types of these areas with people, these weaknesses. And I think now people are becoming very self-aware. I got a lot of people saying that I love the email that you sent me, ten out of ten for the effort.

[00:03:11.800] – Dancho – Yeah, exactly. I wanted to add in cybersecurity, you’re breaching in order to steal something or take something away. In marketing, you’re reaching to start building relationships with people. So that’s the only difference. Maybe the steps are similar, but the idea is bit different.

[00:03:28.030] – Stephen – Yeah, it’s all about the crown jewels. What, what are you looking for and how do you get them? And people become desensitized to the same types of approaches, time and time again.

[00:03:39.400] – Dancho – Nice, nice. And Stephen, I saw that you’re currently Head of Growth at Zopto.com.

[00:03:43.600] – Stephen – Yes.

[00:03:44.380] – Dancho – What inspired you and what is actually a Head of Growth?

[00:03:47.770] – Stephen – I don’t know. I’m involved in pretty much everything. So it’s a fantastic role. But Head of Growth is somebody who really looks at the organization and we want to grow through a number of different ways, so you can imagine. We’ve got people that aren’t customers yet of Zopto, we want to make them customers. So we’ve got to find ways to attract them, we’re going to make our preposition valuable. We’ve got customers who spend a lot of money with us. We want to make sure that they are happy. They see the value in the product. So, yeah, I mean, I do the strategic and the strategic partnerships. So we speak to a lot of organizations. We do the integrations. We actually launched an integration yesterday with a company called LeadWorks. If you don’t know what LeadWorks do, this is cool. And this is yeah, this is maybe a good time to speak about products because what LeadWorks do is they have a database and IP database. So the one thing that every single person has on the Internet is an IP address. And what they do is they match the IP address to a company. And then what we’ve done now with Zopto, we’ve integrated LeadWorks in Zopto.

[00:04:57.550] – Dancho – Some additional formation from them.

[00:05:00.600] – Stephen – Yeah. Hey, John, I saw you on our website, earlier today. It becomes creepy, almost too creepy, but still good. So there’s a lot involved in Growth Marketing, Growth hacking partnerships. Yeah.

[00:05:17.350] – Dancho – Even for me it’s creepy when I visit your website and you and I just got the SMS “I’m in front of your door.” That’s creepy. And I’ll be scared. But sounds quite interesting because the Growth is not just acquiring an acquisition of new client, but it’s actually figuring out how to maintain the existing one and actually drive new channels of retention. Okay, I think that we actually need a Head of Growth in BizzBee Solutions, as well. The way you put it, I think we need one person like that as well.

[00:05:49.390] – Stephen – Yeah, you need a wage person who thinks weirdly and thinks how do we do these things in a separate way? I’m just working on actually about an hour before I’m trying to find these website visitors that we’re getting on our website. We can now use Zopto to send AI videos to them. So I’m trying to get Santa close to an AI. It’s a company called Synthesia and you put in text, so somebody visits our website, and we check him on LinkedIn and then he gets a welcome message from Santa, saying “Hey, Happy Christmas”. So yeah, it’s a little bit crazy.

[00:06:33.660] – Dancho – Nice. No, but this is really useful because you’re figuring out ways how to do it. And as you said, it’s hard to define the role, but when you specialize in that part, you start thinking beyond the box in terms of how you can actually reach more and more people.

[00:06:49.000] – Stephen – Yeah.

[00:06:49.330] – Dancho – And moving the conversation towards the Zopto. I mean, nowadays there’s so many automations and marketing and sales and LinkedIn and other parts, and it is an ecosystem. So I just wanted to ask you, how is Zopto fitting in the big ecosystem? Is there other tools that are needed before Zopto? Are there other tools that needs to be used after Zopto? So where is Zopto in the ecosystem of automation?

[00:07:13.990] – Stephen – I think I mean, we’re one of the main players. We’ve been around one of the longest time, our solution, as well is completely cloud-based. So we differentiate ourselves from Chrome extensions. I think these Chrome extensions do a great job. But if you are serious about LinkedIn, what can happen is, you know, you become dependent on that. Sorry, you have to use this Chrome extension all the time. You have to be online when we’re talking right now Dancho, you’re not going to be able to use it. So it’s lost time. I’m using my Zopto campaign right now, completely cloud-based offline messages people. And I think where we’ve really found our success model is why people flock to Zopto is because, a) if you’ve got you know, you mentioned yourself, you’re an agency, you’ve got customers. You want to make sure that they’re happy, you need to invest in the solution and is going to do a good job. And secondly, so I found that there are a lot of automation tools, but, what really goes into the message, why why are we automating these messages, who told you these are good, have we measured these messages? Because people send, people download the Chrome extension, they send a huge block of text and you can’t really measure. It’s just, oh, this is working, because it’s going out. The working is success, really detailed analytics results on which companies are working. And we’ve just obviously got the API stuff as well. So we’re getting weird with the types of integrations that we can do. There is no limitations as to what we what we’re thinking about.

[00:08:57.770] – Dancho – Nice, nice, and when I’m looking usually at automation, how currently are being abused, even by the people, is like spamming, just sending too many pitches like here are five attachments and key studies and PDFs and all the other stuff. While on the other hand, I mean, we as an agency, what we preach is that relationship is king. You can use the automation at the high level of the funnel in order to get the conversation starter. But then you really need to start talking with people rather than I mean, pull the plug and everything to be fully automated and just meeting start coming out of the bottom.

[00:09:33.800] – Stephen – Yeah, I think a lot of this is very similar to, this isn’t new, people have been sending the same emails and it’s like, if you were to meet somebody, the way I see LinkedIn automation is if you were to meet somebody, we’re speaking now and this is maybe an example because this is technically a podcast conversation. But if I was to meet somebody outside and he said, hey, Stephen, and I said, hey, John, my name is Stephen and I work for this company, I do this, this is what I do. And there is no back and forth, it becomes a loss. And I mean, we pushed and we pushed it, we’re doing the 12 days of Christmas tips, and I think one of the marketing team they posted is how would you like to be spoken to? Why would you share this if you wouldn’t like receiving this? And that’s really, you know, having that self-awareness which companies are working, which companies aren’t, what’s in it for the customer, you know, what’s in it for the prospects.

[00:10:26.080] – Dancho – It’s funny, Stephen, we have your internal joke is that when you’re approaching on LinkedIn, it’s like going in a bar, meeting a girl. So you’re not just going to go to the first girl – Hi, would you marry me?, No!, Okay, going to the next one – You just need to start chit-chatting a bit, start a bit of a relationship and conversation. And if you get some positive feedback, then you can deepen a bit the relationship. So it is an internal joke. But when you said, as you’re meeting someone from outside. Hi, my name is Dancho we do this, this and this and it’s like, whoa, wait a minute. Or here is a PDF, here is a flyer, here is my business card and here is something else that they’re like – I didn’t ask for any of these. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

[00:11:06.154] – Stephen – Exactly.

[00:11:07.180] – Dancho – It’s silly, but that is how currently things are outside the world with all the spam. It’s not just in LinkedIn, it’s also in email. But yeah, that actually makes the difference between properly using the automation and just blasting with pitches around the LinkedIn.

[00:11:26.150] – Stephen – Yeah. It’s weird how people have got a lot smarter with email, but I feel that because LinkedIn it’s quite a new area, social selling requires almost a little bit more delicate as well. And with email, you know, people are getting quite smart. There is a lot of companies out there that’re doing very cool things with email. But I think with LinkedIn one of the main fallback is people not really being self-aware of those messages. And I think that’s why at Zopto we have that analytic stage, so you can see how many people have responded, how many people have replied, which campaigns are working. And I’ve done all of this Dancho. I use an automation tool about four years ago. But I just went crazy, I sent out thousands messages.

[00:12:16.210] – Dancho – Yeah, quantity approach.

[00:12:18.820] – Stephen – Yeah.

[00:12:19.720] – Dancho – With 0.00 something result. It’s still something.

[00:12:23.500] – Stephen – Exactly, yeah. But I think people need to sort of use what works and what doesn’t work, there is need to test it what is working and what is not working, rather than “It didn’t work for me”. And I said, well, you only tried one approach.

[00:12:41.450] – Dancho – And that’s actually probably good idea with, as you said, based on the reporting that you’ll get, then you can start thinking about optimization of the campaign, whether you need to tweak your profile, whether you need to tweak the messages or whether you need to tweak, given the target. If they’re not responding to that message, maybe you’re looking at the wrong people.

[00:12:59.840] – Stephen – Exactly. And people do it in a slightly odd way. They message people and they sort of give up after two weeks. I think the idea is just not to give up is to learn from that.

[00:13:13.040] – Dancho – Exactly. I think that we are all excited to see behind the curtains of Zopto. So perhaps Stephen you can show us how it works, what kind of magic we can do with this Zopto automation.

[00:13:25.550] – Stephen – Yeah, of course. I’ll share my screen with you. I’m one of those people that has a lot of tabs opened at any time. So, apologies.

[00:13:34.520] – Dancho – I know the feeling. I’m not that kind of guy. I really have one or two tabs. But believe me, a few of my colleagues like 50, 70 tabs at once. And I’m so confused looking at that.

[00:13:45.330] – Stephen – Yeah. Yeah. I guess it’s about I think it’s about 3:00 p.m. is my optimum top-heavy time. I’m about 55 tabs opened. And a big shout so you guys. So this is the Zopto portal. I use my account now for really just for testing and measuring. With Zopto you got a very clean dashboard so you can see what’s working, the activity levels you’ve got. You’re able to set specific campaigns as well. So, yeah, I mean, there’s a whole heap of information in the dashboard. And what you can see here is, you know, I got 102 acceptance in the last week or so and we’ve got 32 replies. Setting up the campaign is quite cool. So we can trigger a campaign through a number of different options. And the first option is just using Sales Navigator. So I was speaking to somebody yesterday, actually, and I didn’t notice you can actually search and use Sales Navigator for I think they’re releasing a chatbox and they said to me, you know, how would you use that? And if you’re looking at chatbox, why don’t you find the technology that they use? If you’re trying to sell, what you can do is if you type Intercom. You know that these people are using Intercom, and you want to pitch to them. So, again, we’re using that presumed logic. So what we can do is we can view the current employees of these organizations using Intercom. We can then find to know if he is speaking to a smaller marketing agency. And I’m agreeing to the whole LinkedIn way to use it.

[00:15:18.680] – Dancho – LinkedIn has very nice filters that you can use to really niche out to the ideal, whether you’re using booleans within the keywords or within the titles, it really is is worth the value for the money for paying Sales Navigator.

[00:15:33.200] – Stephen – Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, we can type in CEO. This is one way to kick off a campaign at Zopto. We’ve got 221 results in this campaign and we can just simply paste in the URL here, completely cloud-based. So once I do this, this will happen offline. And you can start your campaigns now and we can also kick off a campaign via profile links to our solution except those type of links rather than having a Sales Navigator.

[00:16:05.490] – Dancho – So, it accepts both, normal LinkedIn URLs and the Sales Navigator, because they’re really different when you’re copy/pasting them.

[00:16:12.260] – Stephen – Yeah, absolutely. So rather than spending, the whole point of automation is to make things quicker, if you have to spend two hours separating URLs, it’s not really automation. You just do a regular job so you can paste all types of links in here and you can upload a CSV as well. So as an example, if you’ve got a lot of data and you can attribute that data, is that Udemy, you know, Udemy, a lot of people have their LinkedIn URLs on that Udemy page, there’s a few Chrome extensions that will do a good job of getting that LinkedIn URL. And we can attribute the course name, the Udemy course name to that person and say, Hey, John, I saw your course at Udemy and again, that is going to bolster the way that you can start the campaign. And we do have an API available as well. So what this allows you to do is start campaigns outside the Zopto platform. So I’m going to show as an example, Lead Works is the company that was just recently integrated with. You’ll be able to log into Lead Works and I’ll show you how this would work. So you can see these are some of the organizations that have been on our website over the last few days. And what we can do is if we click on the “People” section, you might want to blur some of these names because they’ll probably be customers. So the once the “People” section loads, what you can actually do is you can unlock them using Lead Works. So we do have a coupon code I think at the moment as well.

[00:17:52.360] – Dancho – Nice. Yeah, yeah, and so when you have a CSV import, you can actually use Zopto maybe to export from your CRM all the leads that have LinkedIn profile and just put it on the import option.

[00:18:10.520] – Stephen – I do that so frequently with people that we’ve done so when we do demos with people and we get a lot of I mean, we’re very lucky as an organisation to get a lot of inbound traffic. And what we don’t sometimes do as a LinkedIn company, or as an LinkedIn automation tool is we don’t sometimes outreach to people. So I found massive success just using HubSpot and the Dymocks integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You get to built lists directly from HubSpot, and you can build that lists using HubSpot.

[00:18:47.810] – Dancho – And you can create a campaign directly to those 40 people?

[00:18:50.600] – Stephen – Yeah. You know, “hey John, I’ve seen that this and that. I’ve seen that you do this”. Yeah. There’s a lot that you can there’s a lot you can do with HubSpot. So I think Salesforce have an integration as well, we can build these lists. I’m just going on as I clicked on the wrong website so if we click on “People” you should be able to see a few people. And the idea is that you can build campaigns outside of Zopto. So you simply go to Lead Works, You click on the Zopto integration and this campaign and this website, visits its campaign. And this is live. So anybody who visits our website automatically gets, I think, an invitation from me directly. Just say, hey, hey, John, hey, Mike. Really cool, really cool stuff. Also, this is quite cool. So what we can do is we’ve got the ability to have custom fields within the Zopto platform and what you can do is you can actually put additional data into Zopto using these custom fields. So what I have been doing, and this is a really cool campaign, if anybody is listening, is we can maybe put some information, we can get this campaign ID and we can start a campaign in Zapier and we can actually put information in to Zopto. And to give you an example Dancho of what I’ve been doing is, I deleted all of my campaigns actually yesterday but I’ve been enriching that information. So let’s say I connect with you on LinkedIn, I get your domain. Now if I enrich this domain, I can get your registered address so I can put that registered address back in to the Zopto portal. So I can say, hey, Dancho I saw that you paste X, Y, Z at the moment and would you be up for virtual, is this still your address? And we can actually enrich that information using Zopto as well.

[00:20:54.860] – Dancho – The logic there is, Stephen, that in addition to the existing fields, that LinkedIn allows, you know, a normal to use the name surname position as a customization. You can add completely new fields in Zopto that can be used during the outreach?

[00:21:11.150] – Stephen – Yeah, absolutely. So it’s an amazing way to become that type kind of campaigns.

[00:21:22.640] – Dancho – The more personalized the outreach, the better the engagement and the response rate, because if you have very general message it will be less engaging for me rather than, you know, the more personalized, that actually someone saw that we are in Skopje, Macedonia, and included in the message.

[00:21:38.600] – Stephen – Absolutely. Yeah. Nail on the head. What we also do, which is quite cool. So, I mean, we have to meet the standards with Zopto. You can run your campaigns very simply, you can automate a number of options. We’ve got cool features. So with email as an example, you can’t send a million emails in one day, you have to warm up your account. So we’ve got these auto-scale views and randomize options, as well. And you have full control over your account. And again, because it’s completely cloud-based, you don’t have to be online. So once we set up these campaigns to run, we can wait 12 days. We can have “example invite 1”. And then we can have “example invite 2” as well. So we can actually schedule all of these messages to go out because we’re logged in through the Zopto portal, I can shut down this campaign, I can shut down my tabs. And this will just run in the background. And when somebody does reply, we get all of the messages directly into the inbox folder and it’s a small inbox as well. I don’t know about you, but have you ever been so lost with Sales Navigator’s inboxes, you lose messages because it’s almost like confusing to understand I guess.

[00:22:53.630] – Dancho – All the time. You need to go into the regular inbox in LinkedIn and then you need to go to the Sales Navigator inbox and then who answered what and where, it is quite confusing, honestly.

[00:23:04.460] – Stephen – Yeah. So what we do is both of these messages come directly into the inbox and yeah, we can unlabel these inboxes with these messages accordingly to strategic partnerships. And what I then do as I can export this information. I can export the inbox and then I can either paste that to somebody, a lead, somebody internally, maybe the sales team. And one of the most powerful features of Zopto is the ability to whitelabel and because essentially we are a cloud-based solution a lot of agencies use Zopto in order to manage that customers LinkedIn account. So this this would be completely white label, the URL. It’s not going to say Zopto. You can start to include things like chatbox in the actual platform as well. So you can speak to your agency customers. This becomes really exciting, so we’ve got some custom job descriptions in the platform. We’ve got an API key. You can start managing campaigns outside of the platform.

[00:24:03.710] – Dancho – It can be fully customized.

[00:24:05.240] – Stephen – Yes, fully customized and very simple to manage. If I just want to go to my colleague, let’s look at campaigns. If he ever goes on holiday for a week, he doesn’t need to stop his campaigns. We can just see what’s going on. So it looks like at the moment it’s been quite busy on Zopto. You can see that it’s got a lot of sequences going on, a lot of invitations, and it can be fully, fully customized and fully white-labeled.

[00:24:36.090] – Dancho – I see, so it is quite a comprehensive tool. I mean, from setting up campaigns to scheduling, putting few things on autopilot, I saw look at other profiles and do some automated engagement just to keep the ball rolling. This is all done from the cloud. It means that you just log in, you let it run and then check it out from time to time in case someone is interested to get in a deeper conversation.

[00:25:05.730] – Stephen – Yeah, that’s Zopto in a nutshell. We do everything. We have the ability to customize different names and these are custom variables as well. So if I’ve met Bill at an event, I can call this “Event 1”.

[00:25:26.280] – Dancho – Yeah, when you’ve got him. So it is like a CRM for all the leads that are engaged in the campaign or they’re all your LinkedIn friends?

[00:25:35.760] – Stephen – Well, you can, you can run campaigns to your first connections. You can run campaigns to new sources of data that you’ve acquired. It’s very customizable in the way that it all comes together. And because it’s completely cloud-based, that’s the real value. And we are running right now while I’m on this call with you right now Dancho, I’m running my campaigns. There’s no time lost. There’s no desktop application. We’re just completely cloud-based at the moment.

[00:26:05.390] – Dancho – Yeah, no, no, sounds very, very interesting because from here you can actually take care of the entire LinkedIn outreach.

[00:26:13.400] – Stephen – Yeah, exactly. We’re constantly releasing features, to be able to see we have future suggestions that our customers regularly update with ideas that inspire us from our development side of things. When we just want to create this unbelievably easy yet powerful experience for our customers as well. LinkedIn is a goldmine for Lead Generation, but if you do it wrong, you can also blow up the goldmine. So what we want to do is be very careful and very thoughtful and effective without messaging. I think we’ve developed a tool around that, Zopto becoming a central point of your Lead Generation. This is way more effective than cold calling.

[00:27:05.480] – Dancho – Definitely.

[00:27:07.640] – Stephen – And more scalable. And it’s weird that a lot of businesses aren’t really thinking about LinkedIn. You know, still, I mean, it’s very popular, but, even bigger organizations should be using this, if the audience obviously is on LinkedIn.

[00:27:21.660] – Dancho – Yeah, honestly, we as an agency, we’ve never opt in into telecalling and cold calling. It is something that I’m not really in favor when someone is just calling me in the middle of nowhere. And with LinkedIn and email, it’s a bit more comfortable because you can answer at your convenience. And of course, if it is spam, it still a spam. But if someone is reaching out and trying to give some value or trying to ask a question, yeah, I would rather have an email and I can answer at 3:00 a.m. or whenever I’m actually checking out my email rather than when the phone actually rings.

[00:27:56.040] – Stephen – Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, it’s a good tool that we’ve got. We have some big plans, for 2021, anyway.

[00:28:05.370] – Dancho – Yeah well I had a question about that but I had one before that because our current audience are high-ticket service providers and when we are talking about high-ticket, we’re talking about consultants, we’re talking about software development companies – SaaS, marketing agencies, sales agencies. And these kind of companies are not like 500 employees or 1000 employees that they can actually afford an SDR team to work for them like 20, 30. And that’s why we actually showcase this kind of marketing and sales automation. So I was curious because in high-ticket service providing, there are bit more expensive services, how they can actually use Zopto in order to not have 30 people as an SDR team, but as a one-man show or as a small team, how they can actually use Zopto to get more clients?

[00:28:57.300] – Stephen – Yeah, I mean, these high-ticket organizations, it’s an easy return on investment. You get one customer on LinkedIn and you’ve paid for this platform for, you know, a year or two. So what we try to do is we try to get that whole spam approach. If we are speaking to high-ticket customers, we understand them. So this is why you have a consultative call with an account manager. Every Zopto customer, regardless of the plan, gets a call to set up the optimization as well. And we really understand exactly what the customer is looking for. “Hi, Mr. Customer, why did you choose LinkedIn?” “Oh, what did you see with its success? What did you learn from that? How do you approach this?” And we do give that one small consultative approach.

[00:29:44.820] – Dancho – Nice. So you actually have an onboarding process that you can help them navigate. I mean, when you’re trying a new software, they’re always, okay, what is this now and what I’m supposed to do here. But, yeah, you have that covered as well.

[00:29:56.820] – Stephen – Yeah, I think the average company uses around 50 different types of software. You can imagine the investment learning a new one. And I’d like to think I’m quite technical, but there’s tools that, I heard about this new tool last night. That time is time. You know, if if I’m getting paid money I have spent time learning. The business is losing money as well, so that your approach, as well as doing that for customers, is highly valuable as well, because not only did the company get better results from that experience, but also didn’t have the same three hours learning a new solution.

[00:30:32.850] – Dancho – Yeah, yeah. I mean, our value proposition is that on our website we have a six or seven ebooks that if you want to do it yourself, we give the knowledge for free. We have an ebook on how to find your ideal client, how to build a database, how to create different outreach messages, which is completely different to the inbound messaging, even how to use automation and how to even nurture the people that start responding. So at the end of the day, the value is the expertize of working with more than 300 different clients and have internal benchmarks and what is good, what is bad, and knowing how to optimize the campaign. And it is really useful to have this kind of conversation because the more people, more high-ticket service providers realize what is the potential with this kind of marketing and sales automation, the faster they can grow. I mean, I give you an example, that if you have a consultant and usually consultants are, it’s a one person or it has one assistant that helps and they cannot really afford going cold outreach, cold emailing, cold LinkedIn, manually. So the automation is the only way forward in these kind of scenarios.

[00:31:43.800] – Stephen – Yeah, I think it’s a real shame that LinkedIn have something to help you with the automation themselves. And, you know, we, I’ve actually done it for myself. I was connecting and messaging people. I was just, by the end of it, I had my hair up. So, yeah, it surprises me. And that’s why a lot of automation tools exist, because they’re just so convenient compared to the other option. And I think LinkedIn might need to get a look at a model and say, well, why is everyone going to automation? You know, why some many people are drawn to automation, because it’s easier, because is obviously a problem with doing it manually.

[00:32:30.090] – Dancho – Well, the logic behind automation is to replace repetitive work, which means that if someone needs to manually click a button, automation is doing it. And Stephen, on another topic, we’re also working with marketing and sales agencies. And I saw that you have several partnership opportunities on your website, so maybe you can, you’ve already mentioned that you have the white label. So you can tell us a bit more about how that works?

[00:32:56.720] – Stephen – Yes. So white label and organizations can have their own version of Zopto within around 48 hours. So if you, a lot of people we thought, this is going this year, particularly with the pandemic. So we thought a lot of people, they’ve wanted them to think that’s been the motivation for them to stop and buy licenses at Zopto, they then reach out to people to get to customers using a small plan. And then they’re becoming agencies, with a white label at Zopto. There’s a lot of organizations that do become very dependent on infrastructure because of the white label. Business is critical to them. We also do that video program, so organizations do get referrals. So we do a number of high-ticket consultants who have Zopto, who know how to use Zopto, and they make quite a lot of money

[00:33:50.420] – Dancho – So, they’re even delivering training, and at the end, well, here is my affiliate link if you want to start using Zopto.

[00:33:55.910] – Stephen – Yeah, I mean, some of our biggest affiliates, they grow over 50 accounts. And because of the influences in what they do, and because they know what they’re doing. So these guys are pros. They have hundreds of people that go to them for Lead Generation and they do deliver. They say, this is how I did. So we do have a lot of organizations, I think, and we pay a lot. I could be an affiliate or a white label, but I think when we also do have the white label and I think we are looking at other ways to expand.

[00:34:41.670] – Dancho – That’s what I wanted to add with you. It’s not a partnership just in the white label and the affiliate, but you are also partnerships in integration with many other, either automations or complementary tools that you can complement each other through the API.

[00:34:57.760] – Stephen – Yeah, it’s a fun job, spending a lot of time thinking what works, what doesn’t work. So we just started using Clearbit, which is a big enrichment company, so we can get people’s addresses, we can get their phone numbers, put it into customers through LinkedIn. So it breaks the mold. And I think that’s what we want to do. So I think at the moment we want to become predictive. We want to almost have these patterns that we can see. And we’re going to probably start to feed that back to our customers as well, because it’s quite valuable that they understand what works for that competitor as well. So they get their chance. And they said it’s an interesting it’s an interesting proposition.

[00:35:50.270] – Dancho – Yeah, no, I completely understand. And that was actually my second question, because when we are discussing what is the future of Zopto and where are you headed in 2021. During your demo, you showed me a feature request, where people are actually asking for features and functionality. And on the other hand, you have the integrations, where you first tested it for yourself. And if you like it, then you add that integration under the Zopto umbrella. But a side of that, I mean, what is the general direction where you see I mean, as the Head of Growth, you have to have a high-level overview strategic in terms of where it’s Zopto headed and what is actually the future or hopes for 2021?

[00:36:32.720] – Stephen – The future of Zopto will be, this is being recorded. They’re going to play this back in the next year…

[00:36:42.630] – Dancho – At the end of 2021 is like, “Hi Stephen, you made a bold statement that…

[00:36:46.890] – Stephen – Yeah, yeah. It’s been a while. I think Zopto will be a fundamental part of most businesses. The idea is that we see organizations who spent 5000, 6000 dollars a month on PPC. The pay Google, is a very competitive market and the acquisition is very high. You have to pay 200, 300 dollars for one lead. And is that lead a good quality?Have you qualified them? And I think this is we’re talking more about what Zopto actually is. You know, we are thinking of, being that, how to make Zopto the central point to most organizations, because cold calling it’s not dead, but it’s not as popular as LinkedIn. Email is dying. I get about two or three emails a day, I love getting cold email, by the way. And I think that’s the key here is these automation tools are only going to get bigger and they’re only going to get smarter. So Zopto, I see it being as important as the CRM system, if not hopefully a CRM system in the near future.

[00:37:56.510] – Dancho – I see, so you’ve tried PPC, you’re thinking B2B world is not really working, and if you ask me also with Facebook ads, I mean, especially in high-ticket service providers, when it comes to a more expensive solution, it’s not like you can put an ad “20000 euros, buy here”. It’s more you need people to start noticing you, start reaching out to people, build relationship, because if I need to spend 20 or 50000 euros, I’ll start thinking who I know in my network that actually can help me rather than put a job ad. And start reaching out in LinkedIn. Yeah, you’re going to start getting meetings and appointments and hopefully clients. But on the other hand, you’re actually broadening your area of focus because you get more people in your profile, you’re growing your network. So even then, you can even start doing some posting on LinkedIn and thought-provoking thoughts and, you know, positioning yourself as a total authority rather than just as I said before, start spamming people just with “would you buy, would you buy”.

[00:39:02.240] – Stephen – I think that LinkedIn has a huge piece, not just cold call to business as well, you know, upselling through LinkedIn, webinars through LinkedIn, promotions through LinkedIn. That I do see it being so imperative in the future. If you send 100 messages over email asking you to join Webex, you know, not many people are going to even see it. You’ll do it on LinkedIn and you’ll find that those results are 10, 20 times sometimes better than they are on cold email. It’s going to change the world. It’s just, you know, we want to ride that wave.

[00:39:37.490] – Dancho – You want to catch the first wave because there will be a lot of followers. So you want to be the first.

[00:39:42.650] – Stephen – Yeah, that’s, I want Zopto to be when Head of Growth goes to a company and says, right, are we doing anything on LinkedIn? We need to get Zopto in here. Before they even say HubSpot, Salesforce. That’s my dream. So I’m very biased towards the company I work for. But I think, you know, why not? It’s proven to be successful. Zopto started using Zopto, you know, we’ve got a lot of business through our own products.

[00:40:12.150] – Dancho – You’re using your services. I mean, of course we currently have five LinkedIn profiles in BizzBee that we are using for LinkedIn outreach. And it’s funny when we get on a call on a client from LinkedIn and he’s like, well, whether LinkedIn will work or whether this process or framework that you’re using, I can trust. And then I usually finish with the simple question. Well, you’re here on the call, right?

[00:40:36.350] – Stephen – Yeah.

[00:40:36.980] – Dancho – So I was actually in your sequence and at that moment, aha. And the moment they get that it’s like, okay, I understand, this works because I’m here talking to you, Dancho. And is like saying so, how are you, how did you got here. And I’m silenced, just waiting for him to digest, process and say – aha. So actually you used the automation then you put the nurturing part and now I’m here on a call.

[00:41:01.100] – Stephen – Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if it works for the customer, well how do we get you, how did we acquired you. I think that is possibly, and I have worked in sales for long time, the best objection I have ever heard from anybody.

[00:41:13.930] – Dancho – It works like magic, is like

[00:41:17.120] – Stephen – Literally, nothing that that person can say, well, you know, it worked for me. Like, there’s nothing that person can almost come back with. I got in a meeting with a decision-maker using this process. You’re the person in the meeting. What can you say to them? Nothing.

[00:41:33.170] – Dancho – Yeah, it works like magic. Well, that’s Stephen. We have to move toward closing. I mean, thank you very much for participating on this episode. I loved hearing all about Zopto. I mean, even sneak peek behind the curtains and how it works. I’m sure that all the listeners here would be interested to have a look at it. A side question, is there any free trial or something that people can just come in, try to play a bit to see if it works for them?

[00:42:03.440] – Stephen – Yeah, we can have a three-day trials. And what we found is that the trial is a good way to experience it. But we tried it with I think we did a 14-day trial. And it’s not because people didn’t love it, it’s just that they signed it for 14 days and they never you know, they’ve never signed into, we find that three days is the optimum.

[00:42:24.020] – Dancho – Yeah, I mean, even if it’s a day, my point was that something that I can put below this video.

[00:42:29.390] – Stephen – We will give you a coupon code. We’ll give you a link. We’ll do whatever you want, Dancho.

[00:42:33.180] – Dancho – Yeah, I mean, okay, coupon could also work. But the point that people can say, okay, I saw the video, this sounds interesting. I would give it a try, click the link. Go on Zopto, have a dry run one day, two days. They can see what kind of invitation or response they get. And then if they want, they can choose one of the pricing plans that you have and then take it from there.

[00:42:56.640] – Stephen – Yeah, we’ll do that. We’ll sort it out.

[00:42:59.740] – Dancho – Perfect. Stephen, thank you very much again for coming to this show. It was a pleasure meeting you, and we will cheering for Zopto to become the most famous.

[00:43:09.060] – Stephen – Thank you, Dancho. Thank you very much.

[00:43:10.710] – Dancho – Have a great day.

[00:43:11.940] – Stephen – Thank you. Bye.