Michael Gonzalez, a talented entrepreneur and founder of 10X Millennial, reveals why Skylead exceeded all of his expectations and mentions what features he and his team cannot do without.
Can you tell us a little bit about your company?
Michael: “10x Millennial is a company of online business development specialists that help individuals learn new skills, business owners scale their businesses, and generally set clients on the path to making them thrive and grow.
I founded the company back in 2016. I was working at Western Digital in Dallas, Texas, at the time, and I left that company to start working on my own, get clients, and assist them. I wanted to start my own project because I had experience running Facebook ads, YouTube ads, lead generation, and so on.”
What was your business process before Skylead?
Michael: “Before Skylead, I could only provide paid advertisement services to clients, so I was limited in terms of the number of services I could offer. Therefore I wanted to provide additional service. I had a situation where a lot of clients wanted to generate leads but wouldn’t necessarily want to run ads or probably didn’t have a budget because, you know, to run ads, you need to have a budget to do a lot of testing.
Skylead allowed me to provide lead gen services to companies and clients who wouldn’t opt in for ads but still want to generate qualified leads. And it has worked tremendously great.
Before Skylead, if the clients didn’t want to run ads, the alternative would be email marketing and stuff like that, but I’ve never worked with lead generation on LinkedIn, for example. Skylead has allowed me to do that, and it has been great. We have saved a lot of costs basically by just using Skylead instead of burning the marketing budget. Now, we have the flexibility to just take step by step, scaling up the number of accounts so we can generate even more leads and more calls.
With Skylead, we can pretty much cover the lead generation process. So everything became a lot more efficient. Right now, most of our high-ticket clients have a sales funnel, and they need to generate more appointments. Skylead has given me the option to even work with different types of funnels. However, right now, I am using it for the sales funnel to pretty much generate more appointments for clients. We used both email and LinkedIn for the outreach. However, for the client I’m working with, most of the results are coming from LinkedIn. But I think it depends on the type of the business. I’m pretty sure that for some of the clients, I’m going to be using email again.”
How did you find Skylead and what challenges did it resolve for you?
Michael: “A year ago, a friend of mine advised me to use Skylead, and we tried it. I was a little bit skeptical because, back then, I was a paid-advertising type of person. When a client would come to me and say Hey man, we want to increase the number of leads and get more results; I’d always recommend paid advertisements like Facebook ads. But when we tried Skylead, it exceeded my expectations.
Our challenges were mostly about flexibility in terms of the amount of calls or leads we could generate. With Skylead, we can easily scale up by just adding more accounts, for example, as opposed to paid advertisement. And I wouldn’t need to build the funnel, as I did for paid ads. You know, when you run ads, it is a hit-or-miss type of thing, and you must have a budget, as I said, that you would spend in no time if you’re not running ads the way it is supposed to. So, I would say Skylead solved that problem right away.”
What results did Skylead help you achieve?
Michael: "I can definitely say that Skylead helped us increase revenue by generating more leads and calls for our clients. Currently, we have 2 salespeople who can generate around 8 daily calls, which means that's around 80 calls on average per week and 320 calls a month in my math.
Before Skylead, we had around 4 calls with Facebook ads per day and per person. But with Skylead, we don't have a limit on how many calls we can book. As I said, right now, we are generating 320 bookings, but that's not a limit. The limit is the number of calls that we can handle. So whenever we are ready to increase that number of calls, we can definitely do that with Skylead, no problem.
The biggest deal we closed for our client in a month is worth $40K. IIn general, one close can bring us somewhere between $20K to $25K.
I mean, If you have 320 calls, it's hard to have all the appointments qualified, right? But if at least half of them are qualified, they all show, and you close at least half of them, then it's pretty good business, in my opinion."
What features do you find most beneficial in Skylead?
Michael: “I would say everything is really useful for us. The fact that you can create campaigns for each seat that you have and for each account.
I’d like to point out Smart sequences. You can add steps and conditions and even combine them in a flow aligned with the leads and how they will behave. Also, the fact that you can have different lead sources or upload a CSV file, I think that’s what accelerates and automates the lead generation process to make it even more efficient. So, it’s truly smart. All you need to do is add sources and messages and let the magic happen. I think it reminds me of Active Campaign, an email marketing tool I used to have, where you can have flow, combine steps, see what the lead would do, then wait a certain time before the next action. So, yeah, it’s truly smart.
Also, Smart inbox. We send automated campaigns, and when the leads reply, someone from our team goes to Smart inbox to answer questions. That’s really helpful, as well. We don’t have to log in to any LinkedIn account. Instead, we can manage and respond to all messages in one place, which saves a huge amount of time.
I mean everything is just useful. Generating the reports, integrations, all of that, but I would say the most important thing would be the support. The support is really efficient and very fast. I would say that’s the one thing we love the most.
If I or someone from our team comes across an issue or a bug, or they don’t understand something, we always remind each other, like Dude have you tried to contact support? and they just do it right away and solve a problem really fast. Your support team has all the answers and solutions you need, and they are really fast to provide them to you when you need them. The one thing I love when I’m working with a provider is that if there is something we don’t understand or that is not working, then we’re able to get a solution ASAP because time can cost a lot of money, also, so I really appreciate that.”
What exceeded your expectations with Skylead, and do you have any words for our potential customers?
Michael: “I think it’s the fact that we were able to increase the amount of leads we’re getting that fast. I haven’t seen anything like that before, so it definitely exceeded my expectations, apart from your customer experience service.
To be honest, I haven’t seen or tried anything like it in the market. I tried Skylead and saw tremendous results, so it didn’t give us any reason to look at other providers, so we just decided to stay with you guys.
I would say to the potential customers that if you are a business looking to generate leads or appointments and you have tried paid ads, but that failed, or you want to use paid advertising and combine that with automated campaigns, make it more efficient, and have that flexibility to scale when you want, then it’s no brainer, you know. Skylead is nothing I’ve seen in the market, so I definitely recommend it.”
