Outbound Lead Generation Case Study: Booking Meetings with Consultants and Law Firm Owners

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Harry Morton

Founder, Lower Street Media

In this article, we will take a look at how we generated 1 lead a day, in a tough target market, for the founder of Lower Street Media, Harry Morton.

Lower Street Media offers podcast production services for companies and consultants.

Curious to learn more? Let’s take a look.

Campaign 1

Our friend and partner, Harry Morton founded a podcasting production service that helped companies and consultants. He came to us and said that Lower Street wanted to help consultants create their own podcast.

So we used a variety of different channels to target consultants for Harry’s different campaigns, which we will discuss below.

Step 1:

We used a search engine called Clarity. fm, to find consultants.

When you click browse on Clarity.fm, you can go into many different categories. We scraped every single category on Clarity.

When you go into each of these groups and subcategories, you will get a list of people.

Step 2:

We then looked up all of these people manually and their cost per minute, and what topics they were experts on.

Next, we then sorted each of these consultants by those who were really expensive. Why?

Well, we knew that those who charged more would have a budget for podcasting.

We also wanted people with a clear track history, so we removed consultants who didn’t have any reviews and removed those who were cheap because they would probably not have the budget needed to create a podcast.

One thing that we also did was use the help of a web scraper that has a Ph.D. in Europe. He’s a whiz at Python, and he was able to extract the name and expertise topic, the hourly rate, and even the LinkedIn profile.

Step 3:

We then ran a campaign on Linkedin.

As always, our messages are ultra-personalized. In our messages, we used the person’s name and rate and mentioned the topic they specialize in.

We would also like to point out that the prospects in this campaign were not just part of Harrys’ second-degree network. This was one of the few campaigns in which we targeted everybody: first degree, second degree, and third-degree network.

This was the connector message that we used :

“ (First Name), found you on Clarity. Looks like you know a thing or two about (topic). Let’s connect? – Harry.”

And this is an example of the message we sent once they replied:

“(first name) hoping I don’t have to pay your $(rate)/min to talk about podcasting with you. :)”

Because these messages were so specific, and the prospects knew that we had a look at their Clarity profiles, we ended up getting a great response.

Prospects

Connected

%

Qualified Leads

%

Connection Rate

%

Lead Rate

To break it down :

We sent our 299 connection request invites, and 135 people connected. This gives us a connection rate of 45.2%.

Out of all who connected, 52 prospects replied to our messages, giving us a lead rate of 38.5%.

Read some of the replies that we got:

1. Hey Harry, thanks for thinking of me. What is the podcast about?

2. Hi- would you like to tell me more about the podcast? Thx.

3. Hi Harry,

That sounds great, happy to help. I look forward to hearing from you, and in the meantime, I’ll check out your podcast.

4. Ooh – that’s an interesting topic! I’ll have to think about which case I’d like to discuss, so I’ll schedule for a week or two out, so I have time to mull over my choices!

Also, is it an audio-only interview? I haven’t used Riverside before, so I’m just wondering what to expect. Thanks!

5. I would love that!

On a side note: We set all of the appointments for Harry. All he had to do was show up for the meetings and speak to his new clients.

Campaign 2

Lower Street Media

Harry also wanted SalesBread to target lawyers and founders of law firms.

Why?

Harry saw a clear advantage for law firms to start podcasting for these two reasons.

Reason 1:

Some lawyers use podcasting for recruitment purposes.

Reason 2:

Some lawyers use podcasting so that their practices can become better known, which, in turn, helps them win more cases.

But there was a slight ditch in the road when it came to targeting lawyers.

The problem is when you go after lawyers; outbound sales practitioners know that this is one of the tougher segments that you could possibly target.

Why?

Well, lawyers are constantly getting hit with marketing and sales solicitations. This is because law firms make a lot of money, so they have the budgets for these kinds of marketing pitches, so naturally, they are a highly sought-after mix.

The lawyers that we were targeting were used to seeing tons of cold emails and LinkedIn messages every day. Their inboxes are literally full of them.

We needed to do tons of research to find the right prospects and develop the perfect list. Besides this, our messages had to be ultra-personalized so that we could stand out from the crowd.

This was our second approach:

Step 1:

First, we needed to target lawyers that had an interest in podcasting. So this could have been lawyers or founders of law firms who appeared on podcasts as guests.

We went into Sales Navigator and used the filters to generate a list of potential prospects. The screenshots below show how we did it. We filtered by location, title, industry, and groups.

Step 2:

We then took this list and plugged each person in, one by one, into a search engine called Listen Notes and used their API to see if they have been featured on a podcast. For example, with the lawyer listed below, we see that she was a guest on a podcast. We would also have to check that she did not have her own show yet, because if she did, then Lower Street Media wouldn’t be able to help her out.

See the example below:

So as you can imagine, this second step took hours. Granted. There were many false positives; you really have to find out if these people would be the right fit for this campaign.

The good news is, though, that if the law firm CEO took time out of their busy day to show up on a podcast, and they did not have our own yet, we knew that this was a really good segment that we could go after because this meant that this person really liked the idea of podcasting.

If we could just find law firm owners or attorneys or partners on a podcast and reached out to see if they would like their own podcasts, this would be the best segment that we could build. This was a really manual process, and we used the help of the Listen Notes API to export these searches.

On a side note:

Why do this? Why go into so much effort in building the perfect list?

The answer is simple.

If we could build the most accurate list with the right prospects, we would make Lower Street Media a lot of money without spam thousands of lawyers that aren’t a good fit.

Did this approach work?

You might think that this would be an award-winning recipe. But guess what? Unfortunately, this approach did not work. WHY? Might you ask?

For two reasons.

Firstly, there weren’t enough lawyers that we found using this method. We found less than 500 lawyers that we knew were on a podcast. So our list was too small.

Secondly, this method was time-consuming, so we needed to find a faster process. Yes, we did get some qualified leads, but we needed more.

So we shifted our focus and tried a different approach.

Our third approach:

We then started to reach out to lawyers on Linkedin using Linkedin Sales Navigator.

Step 1:

We used the filters in Sales Navigator to look for lawyers. We typed “Legal Marketing” in the search bar, and then we filtered by groups to help us refine our list.

We knew that not every lawyer would be open to starting a podcast. So we used LinkedIn groups to show us which lawyers and law firm owners were already interested in marketing for their law firm.

We thought correctly that this group would be the best slice of the legal world to go after when pitching for a podcast because they were already interested in ways to grow their law firm.

Step 2

As we did our searches, we also narrowed down, as always, using second-degree networks. So Harry didn’t start off with a whole lot of connections in the legal space, but with time we added 688 connections of law firm owners.

Every week, we would keep adding prospects to the campaign as a secondary group. So then, every time we reached out, the prospects were able to see that it wasn’t a total stranger reaching out.

And this added to some credibility. It also indicated that these were people that did accept at least some invitations because their network was large enough to include one of Harry’s common connections.

This is why we could get an almost 30% invite acceptance rate in probably the most cutthroat industry there is to target.

Below is an example of the connection invite we sent out to 2300 lawyers in Harry’s second green network. They were either law firm partners, owned the law firm, or were practicing attorneys.

“{first_name}, would like to talk about having you as a guest on my legal podcast.

Chat soon,

Harry”