How $25 Cookies Generated $200 Million in Sales (Gift-Based Marketing Strategy)

[00:00:00] What if I told you that one marketing agency grew from startup to $200 million by sending gourmet cookies to cold prospects? While most marketers are stuck in the spray-and-pray email trap, today's guest cracked the code on gift-based outreach that consistently turns cold leads into seven-figure clients.

[00:00:23] And we're talking from Lululemon to Hyundai. His strategy has closed massive deals by skipping gatekeepers and landing directly on decision-makers' desks. If you're tired of low response rates and want to learn how Thoughtful Gifting became a company's number one sales channel, beating out their entire $6 million marketing budget in ROI, then you need to hear this case study. So make sure you stay tuned for this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

[00:00:55] Social Media, Content Influencer, Marketing, Blogging, Podcasting, Vlogging, TikToking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, Email Marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side.

[00:01:22] Because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neil Schaefer. Hey, everybody. This is Neil Schaefer. And welcome back to the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today is episode number 429.

[00:01:52] Now, the title of this podcast is Your Digital Marketing Coach. So everything we cover is related to digital marketing. But once in a while, I meet someone, I hear about someone, I get pitched by someone that has, well, an amazing story that I think we can all learn a lot from.

[00:02:09] Because if there's anything you should know about me, your digital marketing coach, is I like to look at digital marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing, marketing, and business, and life very, very holistically. Sometimes we need to take a step back in order to move forward. And that's what today's interview is going to be all about.

[00:02:30] My guest is Corey Quinn, author of Anyone, Not Everyone, and former chief marketing officer at Scorpion, where he helped scale the company to $200 million in revenue. But here is what makes Corey's story fascinating. While most agencies rely heavily, as you can imagine, as we all do, on inbound marketing, SEO, and paid advertising, Corey discovered that gift-based outreach became their absolute number one sales channel. And we're not talking about the typical corporate swag.

[00:03:00] And hey, I appreciate it, but you know, this takes it to another level. Or logo-branded items that end up in desk stores, right? Corey developed a systematic approach to sending high-quality, thoughtful gifts that cut through the noise and build genuine relationships with prospects. His team sent over 15,000 gifts annually as part of their sales strategy. And the results speak for themselves.

[00:03:23] So, in today's convo, you're going to learn why traditional outreach methods fall short when targeting high-value prospects. The psychology behind why physical gifts create lasting impressions. And Corey's proven framework for gift selection, timing, and follow-up that turn cold prospects into literally million-dollar clients.

[00:03:44] So, whether you're a service provider struggling to get past gatekeepers, an agency looking to land bigger clients, or an entrepreneur like me seeking innovative ways to build relationships with dream prospects, this episode will challenge everything you know about B2B outreach. So, without further ado, let's dive in with my guest, Corey Quinn. You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schaefer. Hey, everybody.

[00:04:14] Welcome to another edition of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. You know, in marketing and in sales, outreach is something that we often have to do. There's influencer outreach. There's blogger outreach. And obviously, if we're trying to generate leads, a popular type of outreach is using cold emails. Obviously, there's outreach on LinkedIn. But have you considered, strategically, considered different types of outreach?

[00:04:41] And I think a lot of us, we get caught up in the same traps without thinking of new and creative ideas. Well, today's guest is going to bring some really, really creative juice to the space when we think about outreach. His specialty, among others, is gift-based outreach. And I think when you hear his case study of his success with gifting as part of that outreach, I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised. So, without further ado, I'm going to bring my guest on.

[00:05:07] And I'm going to allow him to go into his background, introduce where he comes from. But my guest today is Corey Quinn. Corey, welcome to the podcast. What's up, Neil? Super excited to be here. Awesome. So, Corey, I always like to start with my guests. Obviously, today we're going to be talking about gift-based outreach. And there's a lot of different ways in which you help service providers and brands and agencies. But let's take a step back. How did you get started? Where was the epiphany that said, you know what? Gift-based outreach.

[00:05:35] This is going to generate millions of dollars for our company. Absolutely. What background got you to be to where you are today? Yeah. And you had shared some background on you that you've done B2B sales. You understand that domain and that landscape. So, I'll take you back a couple years. I was graduating from my MBA program here at Los Angeles at USC. And this is about 18 years ago now.

[00:06:00] And a lot of my classmates at that time, everyone was going into commercial real estate. And I wanted to go back into the internet. And so, I had previously had a .com back in the late 90s, if I'm going to date myself. And in any event, I was going back into the internet industry, let's call it back then. And started working for a digital agency as a salesperson. My title was a business development representative.

[00:06:28] And my job was to go out and close deals with large retail brands. Turns out that I love sales. And I love the art and science behind it and the pursuit of closing deals and all that stuff. It's really fun. It really clicks with who I am. Turns out I was pretty good. So, I was able to close large six, seven-figure deals with Lululemon, Remax, Hyundai. And these are SEO, PPC type of deals, right? So, loved it.

[00:06:56] Was the top selling producer there for 19 consecutive quarters. Made my way into sales management. And then most recently, I was a chief marketing officer at a digital agency called Scorpion. And Scorpion, at the time, was really focused on selling websites and PPC and SEO to attorneys. And I was hired. I was kind of an expensive hire for the company at the time. They kind of just hired local kids. But I was sort of an outsider. I had an MBA.

[00:07:25] And the challenge they were looking to solve was they really wanted to scale their revenue. Well, what I found when I joined the company in 2015 is they had this amazing sales culture. It was a six-person sales team. They had a separate sales floor that was away from the rest of the company. It was like this protected space. And it was brilliant because you walk into that sales room and it's like you get a wave of energy. There is mojo in this room.

[00:07:54] Phones are ringing. People are closing deals. And deals are getting done. The phone would ring. And 30 minutes later, that salesperson would hang up the phone, stand up, walk over to the big metallic gong and strike the gong because they got a one call close. It was a really, really great sales environment. So I was hired into this environment not to just kind of be a farmer and just kind of nurture what we already had.

[00:08:19] The founder, my boss, the CEO and founder of this business, was very eager and intent to expand the company, grow the company faster. The challenge was that a lot of the tools and tricks for inbounds and referrals were already being done mostly. We did a little bit of work there. But still, we weren't growing fast enough to meet our growth goals.

[00:08:43] And so what I ended up doing, myself and the team, is probably what other folks, maybe people who are listening here, who maybe are already doing inbound campaigns and are already doing all the various things you hear about content. Maybe you're already doing things around referral-based marketing and partnership-based marketing, and yet you're not growing fast enough.

[00:09:06] If you have this big growth goal, not growing fast enough, you tried everything else, what do you think, Neil, would be the next logical thing when you've done everything from an inbound and referral basis? What's the next possible way to get more leads? Well, the traditional way is just throw money at ads, right? Yeah. So let's say you did that. What would you do after that? And we did that, right? So what would you say next? You're going to pick up the phone, right? Yeah. You know, it's funny.

[00:09:30] I have a paid mastermind, digital first group coaching community, and one of my members is targeting lawyers. Okay. And really, the end when you have a very, very defined audience, and correct me if I'm wrong, Corey, from your experience, because if you're agencies, you're targeting brands or CMOs, there's only a finite number of these out there. Like, there's only a finite number of lawyers. And it comes down to the one-to-one relationship. It comes down to how do we get in front of them, right? How do we get... Right?

[00:09:58] So I assume that's the direction that Scorpion went as well. Yeah. And, you know, the context, again, was that aggressive growth goals. We know that based on research from Harvard Business Review and elsewhere and Bain and others, that only 3% of an addressable market is coming inbound anytime. So what that means is if you're targeting attorneys, of all the attorneys, only 3% of that market is going to be looking for an alternative.

[00:10:23] And in the world that we live in, we all live in today, there's almost an infinite number of choices that an attorney or whomever your target buyer is, is going to choose from. Right? So that is a very, I would call it passive way to build business. It's good. You got to do digital. You got to do ads, content, lead funnels, all that stuff. However, it's not the only channels or strategies that you can deploy. So going back to my story at Scorpion.

[00:10:49] So what we did in that moment was we decided, well, let's start doing cold calling because, you know, there's attorneys out there. They're not calling us. Let's call them. Right. We went out to Den Bradstreet, bought this huge Excel spreadsheet of all these attorneys, cost us tens of thousands of dollars. And of course, had to go into that sales room and say, hey, guys, we love that you're closing all these inbounds. But guess what? We need to just start picking up the phone, doing some cold calling. Yeah. I love that.

[00:11:19] They hated it. So we struggled. One of the reasons why it was a struggle was that not only did they hate doing it, but there are within a law firm, there is a professional, what they call gatekeeper. This is the person who answers the phone, screens out all the vendors. It could be the office manager, the receptionist. And so we kept getting shut down by these gatekeepers. And so we didn't let that stop us. We continued to try. We continued to call.

[00:11:47] We tried to, you know, different scripts and enrolling them to help us and all these tools and tactics. But nothing really worked. And it was a grind because we had this big growth goal. We weren't getting any progress towards it. It wasn't until we tried something that was a fluke, but it worked. And so we ended up sending gourmet cookies to the attorney in an overnight FedEx box.

[00:12:15] And what's interesting about this, Neil, is that FedEx, overnight FedEx boxes, these are urgent packages. This is an important message. It skips the front desk. It skips the mailed room. It goes right to the decision maker. Right. So the attorney would wake up, get to the office, you know, 8 a.m. in the morning. They'd see this important urgent package on their desk. They'd open it up and they'd pull out this amazing tin of gourmet cookies. And Neil, these are not just any cookies. Like, you have to hold the wall. Like, you have to hold the wall not to fall down.

[00:12:45] Like, when you're eating, that's how good they are. It's like world class. Of course, those cookies would end up in the break room. And the entire office staff is standing around drinking coffee, having these amazing world class cookies, saying, who brought the amazing cookies? Oh, my God. And someone would say, I don't know, some company called Scorpion. Someone else would say, well, who's Scorpion? And someone would say, I don't know. Pretty soon, the name Scorpion is like bouncing off all the walls in the law firm.

[00:13:11] And by the time we call, instead of getting the traditional kind of gatekeeper script that they do, it was something like, Neil, oh, my God. You're the ones that sent those amazing cookies? Oh, my God. Those are so good. We ate all of them. I shouldn't have. I completely ruined my diet. But I love you. It was so awesome. Thank you so much. Let me put you through. So there was something there, right? And so that allowed us to build direct relationships.

[00:13:41] As you said earlier, this is a relationship game. I'll fast forward a couple of years. We ended up leveraging what I now call gift-based outbound, which started with just sending cookies. But effectively, that became our number one sales channel. So in addition to inbound, in addition to referrals, which we, of course, continued to build, outbound became, or gift-based outbound became our number one driver of new business. So I'll give you some stats and kind of give you some sense of this. Please.

[00:14:10] I was the chief marketing officer there. We ended up building our marketing, my entire marketing budget for this company. And by the way, we grew it to $200 million business. It was a big business. I had a $6 million marketing budget that went to things like ads and content and events. We did 100 events a year. And also went to gifts, sending gifts to cold prospects. Guests, just wild guests. Any guesses about how much of that $6 million we spent on doing cold gifting?

[00:14:38] Well, I want to say, just because I know from my member, the TAM for lawyers in the United States, I want to say, is it like $10,000, $20,000? So it's larger than that. It's like $80,000 to $100,000 because we worked with personal injury, family law, criminal defense, a bunch of different types of attorneys, right? Yeah. And by this time, we were also in a couple of different vertical markets. We expanded into home services and franchise. So there was about 60 salespeople at this time all getting, I'll give you some more details.

[00:15:07] You can use this to make a guess. Each salesperson, 60 salespeople were sending 200, we collectively, but they were effectively sending 250 gifts per salesperson per quarter. Got you. So that's six salespeople, 250, so that's 6,000 gifts in a year. No, no, no. 60 salespeople. We ended up growing the sales team to 60 people. Okay. Yeah.

[00:15:30] I'm trying to do the math here, but out of a $6 million budget, I am going to assume that you spent no more than, no more than like 300,000. I'm assuming like 5% of it. $3 million a year we would spend on gifts. Oh, wow. Okay. Half of your budget. Half of the budget. But it was returning results. It was amazing results. And so fast forward to today. So I've left the Scorpion. We would use this strategy as again, again, our number one sales strategy.

[00:15:55] We did not abandon the traditional digital marketing or traditional marketing tactics, but it was additive and it was very, very powerful. And so today I formalized it into a process I call gift-based outbound. And I'd be happy to share with you sort of the success principles if you think that would be helpful. Yeah. Well, I mean, let's take a step back. So were there any, obviously you had a, it wasn't, you were, you know, I've received swag and things from, you know, as sort of an influencer content creator.

[00:16:23] And there's never been follow-up, right? So obviously part of the reason your system works is that there's follow-up. There's a salesperson that knows they're the ones responsible for sending out their gifts. I'm wondering, and I'm sure for everyone that said, oh my gosh, those cookies were awesome. Were there others who said, you know, are you trying to buy my business? Or did you have any potential negative pushback from some of those people that you reached out to? Yeah. Not that it matters if you get way more positive feedback. We just started curiosity. What was sort of the stats behind that, behind the different?

[00:16:53] Yeah. Statistically, there's going to be someone grumpy out there, right? If a large enough pool of people you're sending amazing gifts to, someone's going to be grumpy, right? So that's just the par for the course. But I think there's a couple of, I would call them key ingredients that required to really make this strategy work. When people think of outbound, they think of kind of traditional outbound, as you mentioned earlier, like cold email, cold calls, which is all based on volume, right? It's quantity first, quality second. Spray and pray.

[00:17:21] You send out a thousand emails, spray and pray, spam your tam, right? Send out 10,000 emails and see what comes back. You're not going to go through each of those people in the list before you send an email. And so gift-based outbound, although you use the word outbound, it is actually much more like, if you think about enterprise selling, it's more like ABM, account-based marketing. But what instead of doing the, to use a term from Aaron Ross, instead of doing the net phishing, you're doing the spare phishing.

[00:17:48] And so what we do is, and what I teach is, the very first thing that you want to do is to build an amazing list. And what I mean by amazing, these should be your dream clients. This is not a huge list of 10,000 dentists or attorneys. These are the first 10 to 20 clients or potential clients that would result in being a truly a dream client, right? So it's not a volume-based game. It's a quality game, it's a relationship-driven game.

[00:18:18] And that's a piece that's really, it's hard for people to get because it causes them to think differently. I'll give you a quick story that sort of illustrates this. There was someone who was actually helping me with my book, giving me some edits and giving me some suggestions. And it was a founder of an agency. It was him and his cousin, two founders. They were really interested in leveraging this concept of gift-based outbound, right?

[00:18:46] And so what they did is, and they were targeting mold remediation businesses, right? And what they did was really smart, which is that they decided they were looking for a great gift for a mold remediation business. So what they did is they interviewed their current mold remediation clients. They talked to a bunch of people. And it turns out that there is a flashlight in the market that only the best mold remediation companies use, right? It's this kind of elite, expensive flashlight. And if you were in mold remediation, you saw one, you'd be like, I want that thing, right?

[00:19:15] So they found an amazing gift, right? Perfect. Great job. Then they sent out this great gift to a list of about 30 mold remediation businesses. Great. They sent the gift. And then they did the thing that you just mentioned, which is follow-up. Absolutely follow-up is definitely a part of this. We can talk more about that. And what they found when they were following up was call after call, when they were following up on this amazing flashlight and sent to these cold prospects, what they found was one after the other, the ones that they sent,

[00:19:45] the people they sent the flashlights to were too small. They were unable to actually afford the agency services. They were micro businesses, right? And they realized that they spent all this money, all this resource, all this time without doing the first step, which was the list. The list is the strategy. If you skip over the list or you try and just breeze over the list without really going deep on it, it's like building a house on sand. It's going to fail, right?

[00:20:13] And so you have to do the list. There's two primary criteria that I can share with the list building. Number one is, do they have an acute pain that you solve, that you're a specialist in solving? So you want to make sure that if you do SEO, for example, if you're a service provider and you provide SEO or accounting or whatever it is, what is an observable way that you can see whether or not they have a pain point to address? And number one. Number two is ability to afford. Yeah.

[00:20:41] You want to make sure that you are targeting businesses that have budget. So if you're targeting local businesses, maybe they have a certain number of employees or a certain number of locations or whatever that means to you. You have to make sure that those two exist at a minimum to keep them on your list. This is a strategy. This is the first key success principle to the strategy. So I assume for the list, you're not like nilly-willy buying lists. You are doing a lot of research. Correct.

[00:21:10] And should you be sourcing lists, you're not just taking them as is. You're really doing some deep research as to who is the target customer. Are they big enough? Right. And I assume, you know, Apollo, I mean, there's a load of services out there that can help you sort of fine-tune those lists. Right. Right. So there's, like you said, there's a lot of places to source a list, but that's really step one.

[00:21:38] Step two is refining the list and filtering out those businesses that do not fit filtering in the ones that do. And so I'm somewhat impartial, but as far as where you get the list, you can get it from associations, Apollo, there's Coltlytics, which is a great tool. The real value, the real work is actually once you have a source list going in and identifying some criteria that will help you to, again, filter out the ones that don't fit. Gotcha. Okay.

[00:22:06] So the human oversight is going to be critical there. It's not a volume game. Exactly. It requires some intentionality. So you have the list. I guess the next thing you're going to talk about is you got to choose the strategic gift. Hey, that's right. Exactly right. So here's the thing. What you want to avoid is sending something that is like what you would typically bring to a conference. Okay. You don't want to bring the logo swag stuff.

[00:22:32] It must be three things, unique, striking, and it must leave an impression. I'm going to tell you a quick story about Justin. Justin was a salesperson at Scorpion and his target audience were franchise businesses. These are large, multi-local businesses that they sometimes are $100 million, billion-dollar businesses. And Justin had a list, a short list of businesses that he really wanted to close in, let's say, a 12-month period.

[00:23:01] And so in that list, there was one business that he absolutely wanted to bring on as a client. But no matter what he tried, he could not get any traction with the CEO. He went direct to her. She did not respond. He got introduced to her. She didn't engage. All these tactics to try and get a conversation going. It was just not working. And so one day, he's researching the CEO and trying to find out more about them. And the CEO was, turns out, was interviewed in a magazine.

[00:23:31] And in that interview, in the magazine, she was asked, what is your all-time favorite quote? And she said, all-time favorite quote is something my dad would tell me. And it's made a massive impact on my career, my personal life, my family. He said, be authentic and tell great stories. And so Justin went straight to Etsy, found an amazing artist, and had her favorite quote from her dad embroidered onto a beautiful pillow and sent it to her. Amazing.

[00:24:01] That turned into a phone call, was turned into a relationship, was turned into a $1.7 million deal for Scorpion. So these are gifts. I went to, I don't know, like Small Business Expo. It's this nationwide thing. And there were a few companies that just specialized in corporate gifts. And you could, you know, they have a catalog, you can choose from lots of things. I assume, you know, the cookies are something that might work for a broad market.

[00:24:25] But it sounds like you made your best success when you really customized that gift based on that actual person, correct? Yeah. So ideally, if I can wave my magic wand, every gift would be hyper-personalized, not in a creepy way, right? Right. There's a subtle line there. However, from a practicality perspective, if you're listening to this, and if you're a founder of a business, you hear, oh yeah, you have to spend five hours to find the perfect gift for someone who doesn't even know that you exist. Probably not going to happen.

[00:24:54] They're tuning out. Right. That's not going to, sorry. And so in that context, my advice is I'd rather you spend your time on building an amazing shirtless. And I only recommend you do 10 to 20 gifts to start. And that you have, that you do the follow-up, which we'll talk about here in a second, versus trying to kind of kill yourself and find the perfect gift.

[00:25:20] So that's why I recommend using gourmet cookies as an initial gift to send out. It must be amazing. It must be remarkable. It must be those ones that you have to hold the wall, not to fall down just because they're so delicious. Like they have to be truly amazing, but you could use that as a way to not get caught up in the gift selection process. I'm assuming it has to be a physical gift that leaves a physical impression rather than just a gift card. Even if it's $500. Absolutely. Right?

[00:25:50] Yeah. The other aspect here is that you're not asking for permission to send them the cookies. You see these gifting companies, these corporate gifting companies, and the strategy is, hey, we'll go in. We'll cyber stock this person. We'll come up with where they went to college and their interests and the dog's name. And then we'll send them an email and say, hey, I want to send... Like the email says to this VIP prospect, hey, I want to send you a gift. Choose which gift you want. That is the opposite of what we're trying to do here.

[00:26:18] This is not a quid pro quo where I send you a gift and you owe me 30 minutes so I can do my demo. That's not what we're talking about here. We want to send an amazing, thoughtful gift. Unexpected. It's coming out of the blue. They're not expecting this. And that's why you have to use a criteria that I call, that we developed over the years at Scorpion. It's called unique striking and leaves an impression. The gift must be unique. You cannot send any kind of day-to-day stuff because it will be ignored.

[00:26:48] It must be striking. You, me, and everyone listening, we all walk through our day in a half hypnosis, thinking about what we said yesterday, what's going to happen tomorrow, what's going on in the news, all of that stuff. We want to have a gift that makes us present, gets us to the here and now. That's why cookies or things that align with the senses are so powerful because it gets us super present. And the third one is the impression. What is the impression you want to leave them with? Because at Scorpion, we really cared about the customer experience.

[00:27:18] We wanted our clients to feel like they were the only client of ours. And so, of course, that premium experience had to extend into the gifts that we'd send. So things like, what is the packaging? What is the actual gift itself? What's it like to open it? What's the card say? And so on and so forth.

[00:27:35] So all of those elements are called what they call touch points that are really important to ultimately leave an impression that they are a VIP prospect, that they are someone that I'm genuinely reaching out to to build a relationship with, not to sell my wares to. That makes sense. So I'm assuming, yeah, all this makes sense. So I want to take it to the next step then. So you send the gift.

[00:27:59] I'm assuming the people you send the gifts to, they're not calling you, that it's in the follow-up. Thank you. The salespeople that are following up, are they saying, hey, we're from the company who send you the present? Or do they even make mention of the gift? Or what was sort of the procedure? I'm assuming with every client it was different. But was there a standard? So the way I teach it today, which is not at scale. What we did at Scorpion was all scaled up. Like we had 60 salespeople and 250 gifts. That's a little bit different of a play.

[00:28:28] Most people, when they start, it's going to be founder-led. Which means that the gift is coming from the founder. And it is, if you build a list of VIP prospects, the best prospects, the dream clients that you want to have as clients, you're going to target the founder or the CEO of that business. So what you're doing is you're sending, the gift is from a peer. A peer meaning you are founder to founder.

[00:28:55] It's not SDR or sales rep that's been on the job for six months to a founder of an important business, very successful business. That's not going to have the right impact. So the first step is the founder. It needs to come from the founder. The card has to be founder to founder, like the message in there. And guess who does the follow-up? The founder. Gotcha. Now, if it is a larger company where you have a sales organization, you could do head of sales to founder. That also works.

[00:29:23] But you want it to be an elevated title. And I recommend I teach the six steps, the six-step follow-up process where you follow, the gift arrives, they're eating the cookies, everyone's freaking out. This is the best cookie they ever had. That's when you want to call because that's when they're in the moment and then they're fully appreciating that versus calling six weeks later when they've completely forgotten about that experience. Right? So I teach six attempts in 14 days. Gotcha.

[00:29:51] So literally, it's on their calendar that, hey, your prospect is receiving the cookies for you. You don't send the cookies unless you have the follow-up already time blocked in your calendar and that it is a sacred follow-up time. And then you said six follow-ups in 14 days. What if the founder is like out of the country for two weeks? Well, you could adjust. But, you know, adjust as needed on a case-by-case basis.

[00:30:15] But the default is that you want to front-load the follow-up relative to when the gift arrives. Because, again, you want to strike while the iron's hot before the phone rings, the client calls, and all these distractions kind of remove that magical moment from their awareness. And then when you're calling, are you alluding to the gift or are you just assuming they understand, oh, you're the scorpion guys? Yeah.

[00:30:41] So you are following up on the gift and you are qualifying. It should say in the card, but you're also qualifying it that you're doing it to open up a relationship, have a discussion, build a connection, a long-term connection with them. Versus, again, the quid pro quo thing where you're a sales guy, you got commission breath, and you need to close them on the first call. Like, that's the opposite energy you need.

[00:31:05] You really want to have a peer-to-peer, hey, Neil, I know you're an expert, you're a big influencer, you have a huge following. I'm also an expert. I have a following. Love to connect with you and just learn more about you and the work you're doing. Gotcha. So one last part of the puzzle that I wanted to ask you about as we were prepping for this call, you talk about the long-term ROI of consistent gifting, that it's not a one-off. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Here's the deal.

[00:31:34] For cold leads, the businesses that you don't have a pre-existing relationship with, about half of them are going to ghost you. I don't care how great the gift is, especially if you're sending cookies, something at volume, they're going to just ghost you. So here's the playbook. The gifting strategy is not a one and done, right? That's not going to set you up for success. You need two things. You need duration and you need frequency. Duration is the length of the gift-based outbound campaign.

[00:32:02] At Scorpion, we knew that attorneys would stay with their current agency, the dream attorneys we wanted as clients. There was someone else. On average, they say they stay between two to three years with their current agency. So we would send them gifts over a three-year period. We'd keep them on the list. Wow. And we'd continue to send them gifts over a long period. So that's duration. Frequency is how often within those three years are you sending gifts?

[00:32:29] And so what we would do is every quarter, we would send them a gift for three years and run the six-step follow-up for 14 days for every gift. Guess what happens after the second or third gift? They finally start to return your calls. Yeah, these guys are not giving up. Right? And they're being persistent. And by the way, the follow-up is very thoughtful. By the way, the gift is very thoughtful. And so, okay, we weren't ready then, but now we're ready to have a discussion.

[00:32:58] Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So, Corey, this has been amazing. I know that you have a book, and I know that your company provides services, a lot of really creative, you know, outside-of-the-box thinking type services that are very effective as well. So I'd love for you to tell my listeners. And if you have any advice you wanted to give on gift-based outreach that you weren't able to cover as well. Absolutely. So I'm the author of Anyone, Not Everyone, which is a five-step proven process to escape founder-led sales. It's what we did at Scorpion.

[00:33:28] It's a $150 million, $200 million playbook. And for your listeners, Neil, I'm happy to give the audio book away for free. Over to you. That's okay if I may extend that. So all they have to do is go to anyonenoteveryone.com. Anyonnoteveryone.com. They can sign up for the audio book, and you'll also get an online workbook with videos, templates, worksheets, all this stuff. So it's really, really – there's a lot of tools that you could use to implement all of the teachings in the book. And, yeah, I think that's a great place to start.

[00:33:59] Very cool. Thank you so much. And then tell me a little bit more about your company and how you help other companies. Yeah, absolutely. So my focus is today – a lot of the work that I do is helping businesses to escape what I call the generalist trap, which they're serving too many people. They have high client churn, potentially low or dry sales pipeline.

[00:34:20] And so what I teach is a methodology I call deep specialization, which starts with specializing in a vertical market, doing the positioning and messaging, and then actually firing yourself from sales so that you can ultimately run the business and get to what I call ultimate revenue certainty. So that's the domain that I operate in. And what's the name of your company? Should someone be interested in learning more about it? It's very creative. It's called Corey Quinn Inc. Okay. Well, there you go. All right.

[00:34:48] So you got anyone at everyone.com and then Corey Quinn Inc. Corey, this has been fantastic. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. I know it's going to help a lot of my listeners. And yeah, hope that our paths cross again in the future. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me on. Man, wasn't that an exciting interview? I was blown away. I hope you were as well. I know that some of you watched the live stream of this interview, which you can catch all these interviews on YouTube at youtube.com slash neilshafer

[00:35:16] and got immediate feedback as to what they have been doing wrong and how to correct it. So I hope this episode serves you well. Next time I'll be back with a solo episode. If you haven't subscribed and or reviewed this podcast, well, it would be appreciated. But more importantly, 50% of these shows are interviews with compelling thought leaders, authors, experts that I find like Corey, as well as half being my own.

[00:35:41] And on my own journey, I'm happy to announce that we're getting much closer to publishing that expanded and revised edition of maximizing LinkedIn for business growth. Last chance. If you have reviewed it and you want to make sure you get the free upgrade with the new version, which is going to be double the length of the previous version. And lots of advice, including more about my ask Neil framework and generally using AI for LinkedIn.

[00:36:05] Make sure that you take a screenshot of that online review and then send it to me, neil at neilshafer.com. Anyway, really excited about that. And I'm already working on my next book. I learned just like musicians when they finished recording a CD. Well, they used to record albums, but I digress. They go straight into the studio to record the next one. And I felt some of that energy I'm already at, you know, I want to say a quarter to a third done.

[00:36:31] Can't announce the book yet, but I am busy working away and can't wait to introduce it to you all when it gets close to introducing. But until then, maximizing LinkedIn coming soon. Thank you so much for listening, for all your support, wherever you are in the world. Make it a great day. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcast.neilshafer.com.

[00:37:01] Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilshafer.com to tap in to the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.