How Directive Consulting CEO Garrett Mehrguth grew Directive Consulting to $20M revenue and 150 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is garrett mayor gut he's building a tool and a company called directconsulting.com it's the customer generation agency for sas he's running it as ceo it's an award-winning performance marketing agency for software companies headquartered out in irvine california launched in 2014 the company has had exp has expanded the team of 20 95 people across three global offices la new york city and london gareth you ready garrett you already take us to the top yeah man let's have some fun with you yeah yeah this is interesting so what got you into this were you sort of a you know top sales rep at one of these sas companies and left or how what got you into sas no man i never did anything with sas actually um i was selling five dollar social media calendars on fiverr um yeah honestly so i was selling 500 social media calendars and then i got my first client was like a uh shawarma shop and i helped them out i was like i didn't know anything about search or digital yet i was mostly just doing like yelp and facebook pages and then from there essentially i just tried to do my best i came back to get paid on the 30th day he said come back tomorrow and the whole place was boarded up so that was our very first client and then i got a hookah shop did their seo so he asked me i did a website he's like hey can you do seo i was like i've never done it before i'll figure it out i ranked number one for everything in a couple of months and then from there i just kind of kept plugging brought my best friend along um what year was that how was probably 2014 2014. and guys i don't want to bury the lead i want you to you know stop the episode now the reason i brought garrett on is because he's now working with some of the you know the brand name sas companies whether it's sendoso or post ipo companies like blackline even folks like build.com obviously you guys heard alex bean come on from divi right before build.com bought those guys sumo logic we're gonna dive into all of that today so garrett fast forward to today how are you helping somebody like you know zach lee or sendos or zominfo yeah so there's a big problem we're trying to solve in the market that every marketing leader is getting their butt kicked by which is most sas organizations exist today because they saw they solve a specific problem in a specific niche and search which is the default i have a hundred grand i'm gonna spend it let's go to google ads is somehow this like default mentality but the problem with google ads is it has intent but not firmographics and so what happens is it's very difficult to scale while controlling your lifecycle stages down funnel and so what happens is people try to go to linkedin but then the problem with linkedin is it has firmware graphics but it doesn't have intent and so we developed our own methodology here called customer generation which is essentially looking to build upon the promise demand jen forgot about which is how do i actually increase revenue and so we help organizations move from mqls as like the sign posting to sqls so that everything we do is filtered through sales and then essentially deleted the go to market function that the playbook everybody uses on linkedin so the playbook on linkedin let's say if yourbill.com is like the ultimate guide to ap software decreasing accounts receivable or whatever that is right like they have this guide and then you do lead gen right like you download an asset and then you try to send it to an sdr and the sdr hates your guts because they call them and they've never read the asset before and the timing's not right and so what we figured out how to do is how do you get people to commit to a sales meeting directly from linkedin at scale and that can completely change your pipeline amongst a bunch of other tactics so let's start with like results and then work back to like how you got some of these results like via case study everyone knows sendoso really really well right they just did a big round they're basically you know corporates and really the leading corporate sort of sending program whether that's gifts or things like that can you talk about the results you drove for them and then backfill how you did it or at least tease us a little bit no i mean every account's different because some clients are going to want to do certain tactics they're not so it's not that there's like a universal playbook you can apply right it's like we have zoom info as well right so like all the kind of the top marketing softwares you think about they're either in our pipeline or or they're clients of ours um amongst other industries right a lot of cyber security a lot frankly everywhere i think we have about 125 accounts and they all are you know over 100 employees 25 plus million in funding okay so if someone's listening right now under 100 employees you're probably not going to be the right fit they need 100 million in funding and more than 100 employees 25 million in funding so we do help like series a type companies but they're usually let's say um the it companies if you know what i'm talking about like they usually have a little bit more funding they have a little bit more maturity in their marketing organization but the results wise i can just use myself as a case study i think it's more appropriate because i actually do this for myself i think if you're going to hire an agency you should hire someone who can do it for themselves can we here so i really i so i just i disagree with you there i really wanted this episode valuable for software founders listening and if you give an example of how a software company works with you they will take then they will learn from it even if they don't ever pay you for anything can we can we use a software company as an example yeah i'll use this like a metaphorical one so the the with software the way we like to look at is kind of short term and long long-term at the same time and so most software companies have actually a blessing in review sites and so most of companies have to try to grind out for years to kind of become number one or number two or number three in their category but what review sites let you do and what most people don't realize is you can essentially pay to be number one and so what we help do is we help to look at it holistically because the buying journey requires multiple a lot of times these sas companies buying center so you have to figure out how do you get someone from apathy to action so on linkedin we're running convo ads on review sites for positioning what's a convo what's a convo ad yeah so a combo ad is a new ad unit on linkedin and so convo ads are really really special you can only send a a linkedin user can only receive one ad every 30 days now the problem with combo ads is they recommend the default bids to be like 30 cents and so a lot of people send them but they never get received because they get outbid we don't ever do a bid for less than five dollars for example because it's this valuable real estate and it's about 70 cheaper than sponsored content it functions like a lead gen ad but the key to this is gift cards so what we help people do is use gift cards with a full ltd cac model and then base that off of opportunities or deals to drive revenue so let's say we're working with sendozo and actually ironically sending gift cards with their platform yeah the the goal here is to look at all your channels in the ltd cac model you take an account your gross margin retention rate of customers churn all your kpis and you actually build out your life cycle stages and you can start to answer the question hey if i raised another 10 100 million dollars in funding where would i allocate it and so we help our clients get really good with capital allocation and then within the actual convo ad we're writing the copy and then using gift cards to get people to a meeting and then we're using tools like chili piper to get it to be scheduled so you decrease your no-show rates and we're essentially helping them drive pipeline whether it's through convo ads organic or even let's say google ads gara let's stay on this real quick the client is sendoso they're paying you to help them get leads give me the copy let's say i was one of the target audiences i was a head of hr at a big company that sendoso wants to get me to send gifts out right to my employees right so i'm a target customer what might you put like what's the actual text of that combo ad that you might send me and what's the gift card size yeah so we've tested millions of dollars of gift cards um the most effective price point is a hundred bucks i don't use a hundred dollars because it doesn't i like everything we do to be shockingly memorable so the copy would go like this hi nathan 29 minutes 105 gift cards and gift giving technology you've never dreamed as possible that's the hook and then we help brands like x y and z deliver gifts and delight in a new modern era take 29 minutes pop on a call with one of our team members at the end of the call we're going to send you 105 gift cards sound good and then it goes into conditional logic and so the way a combo ad works it uses like yes no and so let's say and so we can qualify him still so we'll say hey do you manage gift giving at your organization let's say yes or no and if they say yes we can put them into...