How Dana Publicover finds her clients

This week I interviewed Dana Publicover of growth marketing agency P&Co. If you've listened to the show before, you know that Dana is my first guest. I asked Dana to be my first interview because I've followed her career for years and I've seen her transition from solopreneur to agency Owner. Dana's worked with big names like NASA, McKinsey, Google, and Virgin, and now she guides scaling startups to growth stage through a deep understanding of how to talk to their customers.

In this episode, Dana and I talk about finding her first clients, what's shifted in 15 years of working for herself, what she does when she hits a client drought, and her timeless advice for staying in business. I know you're gonna love this one. I'm Lex Roman and this is the Low Energy Leads Show.

Lex: Dana, welcome to the show.

Dana: Ah, I'm so happy to be here.

Lex: I'm so happy to have you. You're my first guest. Ooh. Let's dive right into it. I wanna start by talking about the early days of your business. So we're gonna go back in time. Mm-hmm. When did you start working for yourself?

Dana: Started working for myself about 15 years ago. Um, and it was a completely different business back then.

Lex: Tell us about it.

Dana: I was doing freelance copywriting and I was working at a couple different agencies and filling in and. It's, it's really interesting because that that copywriting thread has gone through every iteration of what my work for myself has been in those 15 years.

So, um, I've had many different names and many different business models, but this is the first one where I've put my name on the door. So to speak and leaned in. It's my married name, so public over and now I'm public over and co. And this is the first time that my freelance and my individual work has scaled to not only support a team, but require a team to deliver, which is really, really cool.

Lex: What an exciting growth path. We love to hear this. We love this journey and I love you, celebrate your team quite a bit on social media, so I love seeing those. Moments and who you're connecting with and how you bring people into your orbit.

Dana: They're the best. I could not do it without them, and I really don't want to.

Lex: So going back to the early days of your business, do you remember how you found your first client?

Dana: Yes. Um, and this is actually the method I go back to. Every time there's a significant drought. So anytime I lose a retainer or a big client changes their mind or a project comes to an end and I'm just without work.

This is exactly what I do. So I will reach out to people who, I'm gonna say this really businessy, but these are my friends. Um, but among my friends there are people I would identify as super connectors. So people who have really big audiences and you know, there are just those people in your group that happen to just know everybody.

They're always thinking, oh, I know exactly who you need for this. Um, so. I will send no more than maybe five or six emails to these people. Um, you try not to do the same people every time. Um, you know, if I'm hitting two droughts in a year, that's a pretty bad year. But, um, I'll just send an email and I'll say, look, hey, this has happened.

Just a refresher. This is exactly the thing I do. This is exactly who's a good fit for that. Can you think of anyone in your network right now? Um, let me know. I'll, I'll pay you a finders fee. I, I just need some work and being that humble and vulnerable. Which is really, really hard. And, and even, you know, as, as business grows, it gets even harder because you don't want people to see that image of success you're projecting on social media and think, oh, she can't get a client.

Look at that uhhuh. Oh, not so successful. Now are we asking me for work? Um, but if you've surrounded yourself from people where it's safe to be vulnerable, you know, I've got, like you, Lex, I've got, I've got other friends where I could just send a text and be like, dude, I, I gotta have something for next month.

Do you know anybody? And there's no shame in that. Um, I think especially just since. To, you know, there was the, the 2019 Weird Financial Times and then into 2020 with Covid I d and then into 2021 with like, what else is going on? And, and even now, we've got, you know, I'm in Germany, there's a officially declared recession here.

The US is crazy, the UK is crazy. I think we've all reached the point where we can admit when we don't have work. Because a lot of us have been in that situation in the last three years. And um, so I was laid off or downsized or whatever you wanna call it, like five times back to back in 2008. Um, so I decided, okay, this has got to stop.

Um, I stopped, I had gotten to the point where I stopped bringing a box of stuff to the office. Like I only took what I could carry out in my bag with my head held high, cuz I was like, You know, anytime you get called into the office, you know you're gonna have that meeting where you're getting laid off.

So I just, that trauma drove me. Um, so I traded that mental anguish for the mental anguish of the emotional entrepreneurial rollercoaster. Yeah. Yeah. And how do you feel about that? How is it better? It. So right now things are really good, so I'm gonna say absolutely it's better. Absolutely it is. Uh, maybe six months ago I would have a different answer.

Lex: Yeah, it is, rollercoaster is a great way to describe it. One of the things you said to me, um, when you and I first talked or maybe like reconvened. We reconnected. You said, when I don't know what to do, I book my calendar. Do you remember saying that phrase book my calendar sounds, book out the calendar. 

Dana: Yep. That does sound like me. Um, can you say, explain what that is? Yeah. So this is kind of on the lines of, um, Of, you know, sending the desperate messages to the people, you know. Um, this is getting as many conversations as you can fit into your day as is possible. Um, and it's a little bit different than filling up with sales calls.

These are not sales calls. These are, um, hey, we have a lot of shared interest. Or, um, Hey, we have a common customer. Type or, or actual customer. Um, your content looks really interesting. Can we just chat? This is not a sales call, you know, if you say that, people usually think it is a sales call, but, um, just connect with people because from these calls you build your network and you meet people you wouldn't normally come up against because you don't have.

A motive. The motive is just talk to someone. Um, and these people will remember you and especially if you're super clear on who you're looking for and what you do. Again, going back to my email, this is, you have to know who I need to find, what are they doing right now and what do I do for them? Um, and if that just comes through naturally in the conversation and then ask them about themselves and find out what they're looking for.

I would say if you book, you know, five to 10 of these calls in a week, there are at least three people you can connect within that. I actually keep a network roster in notion where when I meet a new person, I write a couple details about the call, anything that was memorable and stuck out, um, and then what they do, and then I can easily search it and find it.

It's kind of like, um, If you watch the office, like I think everyone has at this point, um, Michael Scott's Rolodex. Um, don't talk about this. No, I, I don't go that far. But, um, it just feels, it's just nice to have that searchable thing. And then if someone says graphic design, I can literally type design in my little search bar and, oh, here are four people I talk to.

Lex: Yeah. And then you're helpful to them too. Right, right. Which brings relationships and not just a one-sided, Hey, I need your help again, I.

Dana: Absolutely. I would say, and, and this is a question that comes up a lot, um, in sales talks, but what is the highest impact, highest value sales tool? Um, and in my experience, it's relationships.

100%. Yeah. Shout it from the rooftop really hard. It's a hard lesson to learn. I feel like it takes a long time to learn that lesson. Yeah, but if you ask, um, like old school agency guys, um, like, like a friend of mine is, uh, probably in his late sixties and he is a retired agency owner, and I asked him, where did your biggest clients come from?

And he said, uh, uh, I think one of his clients was like, Verizon. And he said, yeah, we leaned the Verizon deal because my neighbor. Worked for them, and we just had a conversation. The, I mean, to get a giant, like Verizon as a client, because that's your neighbor, that connection is so much easier. How much sales energy would it take to land Verizon

Lex: start door knocking in your neighborhood, everyone right? Get out there. They always say, meet your neighbors. Now you know why.

Dana: Now you know, why bake some muffins. Go on a walk.

Lex: Okay, let's move to today. Okay. Can you tell us what Publicover & Co is doing now?

Dana: So this version of my business, first of all, it's the most successful of any other version. So it's definitely, um, encouraging to keep going.

But I think all of those other versions had to exist in order to get us here. Because I'll, I'll give you the path and then I'll show you how it comes together. So I started in agency work. I was a copywriter. I was in-house marketing teams for, um, a publishing company as well. And as I'm doing that agency work, I'm starting to get picked more because I'm out outgoing and I love talking to new people.

I get picked to do market research. In the market research. I'm hearing things that I feel like really could inform. The copywriting and the language that we're using. So I'm stealing my, my side hustle in the agency. I'm stealing data from the market research and I'm injecting it into the copy and then we're getting really, really great results and the campaigns are really resonating.

So I think, okay, there's something here. But in the market research, I really. Liked facilitating those. So I went down the path of a facilitator, got into design thinking, which led me to UX design, which led me to UX research. And so at this point in my career, I am building and scaling internal research at, uh, product based startups.

And I think, okay, but what we're doing here is really gonna work on the marketing. And they're like, Dana, please stop going back to marketing. If you wanna be a marketer, join the marketing team. This is the UX team. And I think, okay, but there's something here. There's something here. And it's just like bothering me in the back of my head.

So, um, you know, I, that was a six month position, it ended, and when I went back to what I was doing, I was thinking, do I really wanna do design thinking, consulting, design sprints, facilitation, or do I wanna try. To blend all of this together in a crazy way. And everyone around me was telling me, you can't be such a multihyphenate.

Um, this, this Emma, Emma Gannon's book I think had just come out and this was a thing. Um, they're like, stop trying to shoehorn so many different things. Just be the thing. One simple thing and it just, every time I tried to simplify it, it just wasn't working. Um, so I started iterating this process that was blending customer research and usability studies with copywriting and language.

So we are. Learning the customer's language. We were learning what they call things in the research. Then I'm taking that language and those pieces and those sound bites and turning that into copy to sell to these people. And then I'm taking it a step further and I'm running usability to tests, usability studies.

So I'm putting the copy in front of customers and I'm saying, does this make sense? What do you think? What questions do you still have That leads us to a really. Elegantly iterated customer informed landing page or onboarding experience or customer communications of all kinds. So, When you have all of those pieces, the marketing budget goes further, the ad spend goes further.

You could be much more targeted with your approach. Uh, and so I meet with, um, a friend of mine who is, uh, a sales guru. She's a genius, and I'm explaining to her, she's the one who is like, stop trying to shoehorn everything in. Um, I'm like, so this is what I do. So it's, it's UX meets product design needs copywriting.

And she was like, can you just call it growth marketing? Because that's what you're doing. Yeah, and of course I, I thought I had invented this beautiful thing and the, the wind sucked out of my sails. Um, but then I realized I don't have to have invented it, uh, for it to be. Fantastic and successful. I just have to keep doing it and doing it well.

Lex: Yeah. I think that point about I don't have to be the only one who's ever done this before. That's it is really important because people struggle so much with differentiation, right? We think of ourselves as really unique. We think of our approach is unique and your approach is unique even if the label applies to other people, right?

The label is really just a shorthand to help your clients understand quickly. This is kind of the realm of what Dana and the team does, right?

Dana: Totally. And, and I've had a, I've had a couple clients who are trying to invent something new, um, and, and I told them, you know, your customer isn't looking for this because they don't know it exists.

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Lex: Okay, so I, going back to what you said earlier, I completely agree that relationships are your strongest play. Yeah. But you also do a variety of marketing activities now with public cover and co.

You have your and Ideas magazine. You're really prominent on LinkedIn. How do you think about your top. Channels for getting clients and if those are part of it or not?

Dana: That is a really good question because I'm actually rethinking my entire marketing strategy right now. Um, so things are kind of in flux.

So this is, uh, you know, from data recording information may vary. Um, so LinkedIn for. Two, almost three years was one of my biggest drivers of cold leads. People I did not know directly who did not know me. And I think the real success of my content there, cuz I'll toot my own horn a little bit, I think I did a really good job on my content strategy, um, was that people I'd never worked with and did not know directly were referring me to people they knew because of my LinkedIn content.

So, The secondary or is that a tertiary referral? Um, but that's how good my content was, and that's how specific it was. It was saying exactly the right message for exactly the right people. I wasn't diluting it. People knew what to expect and they said, oh, here's a person who does exactly what you're looking for.

So I would say all of the cold leads that came from anywhere came from there, not from seo, not from anything else. Um, however, in the last seven months, my engagement, I haven't changed anything about my strategy, but it's plummeted by like 3000%. Massive changes and um, I really think the platform has deteriorated, which sounds like a really grandma thing to say, like, this is why we can't have nice things.

It used to be better, it used to be a dollar less or whatever, but seriously, I haven't changed anything and I'm getting way less traction. So, um, I've slid back to posting once a week on LinkedIn. Um, but I'm not seeing any lead generation there, so I'm gonna divert my time to where it matters. And that's obviously relationships.

Um, with and Ideas Magazine, the concept behind that was I wanted to create shareable content that wasn't about me or my company, and I wanted to give people a secondary. Um, mention. So I had all these really talented friends who had a lot of really interesting perspectives, a lot of cool, just like business editorial ideas that would come up in conversation.

And I thought, can you write an article about that? They're like, no one reads my medium, no one will see it. So I thought, okay, well why don't we give them the back link? Why don't we give them a little bit of a boost? Cuz I have a good following on LinkedIn. I get pretty good engagement on my newsletter.

I'll talk about that in a second. Um, So, and ideas was born in order to do that. Um, the problem is, and ideas was born, um, when I had minimal client activity, a really healthy internal marketing budget, and a couple extra people on the team to help me do it. At the beginning of this year, I didn't have those things and.

I couldn't afford to have six custom graphics designed, um, for six articles, you know, the header and the, the content. And, um, I had tapped the network of people who I wanted to write. They had already given me their brilliant ideas. I hadn't reached out to my second wave yet, but I was getting requests for submission that just was not, let's say, editorial quality.

Um, I realized as, as much as it was giving really cool traffic to some people who I felt really deserved it, it was doing absolutely nothing for my lead gen. So it's not dead, it's just less now. And there's a blog strategy coming out in about three months if I can get ever get around to it. This is the cobbler's.

Children have no shoes. You know, we never work on our own business. Um, But that I hope will revive it because I've always wanted to be an editor of a magazine and I got to play that part for a few months and that was, honestly, that was worth it. Whether or not business comes from it. Yeah, it's hard, right?

Lex: When you have a lot of passions and you're like, I. You know, should I do this thing? Whether or not it pays off or do, does this thing really need to pay off? Right? At what point does it tip the scale towards this is no longer worth my time, even if I love it?

Dana: Which is a great segue to my newsletter anecdote because my newsletter, as you'll recall, was actually really great.

And, um, I was getting almost a 60% open rate. I, my link click through rate was like 4%. Um, I mean, it was beating all the industry averages. It was really good, highly engaged newsletter audience. I was pouring my heart and soul into it, writing these beautiful things. It was great because I could launch and ideas and share the articles.

Um, problem is, My newsletter audience was not my customer. My customer changed between 2019 and 2022. I think this is what you and I were talking about before, where I think we kind of switched places. So, um, I. I was building, um, you know, I was hoping for more automation. I was doing a lot more, um, solopreneur sales and marketing help.

Um, much more lower budget productized offers. And, um, I just, I missed working with startups. I missed the big budgets. I missed the strategy and like touching all the pieces of the business. And so I, I went back to startups and. My newsletter list was still the old customer, so I killed it. And that really hurt because that was something I really enjoyed doing.

Um, but it was no longer serving me leads, it wasn't to my customer. Um, I needed to find a more effective use of my time. So, um, For the last three, four months, I haven't really been doing much marketing, which feels very uncomfortable. Um, as a marketer who tells people never stop, even when business is good, when business is bad, never stop marketing.

I am my own worst customer.

Lex: Well, and when you think about your existing clients and the clients that you do wanna be working with, how do you foster that retention, the loyalty, the referrals? How do you think about that?

Dana: That's a really good question too. I, this is gonna sound really hypocritical. So I started this business never wanting retainers, and I wanted all of my engagements to be one off short timeline.

One and done. Wham bam. Thank you ma'am. Let's move on. Like let's break up while we still like each other. I have rethought that and readdressed it and um, Now there's a lot more baked into, okay, well this is what we can do next. Um, and everything is built in phases that feed into each other. Um, so looking at first the acquisition, then the onboarding and the the retention piece of it, and then.

We're getting into, okay, now that we've got paying customers and they're sticking around, let's revisit that vision, mission, value situation. Let's look at the brand. Let's look at bigger pieces here. Um, I think a lot of people tend to start with that at the beginning, but we stick it at the end because right now you need people to pay for it.

Uh, yeah, that is mission critical. So, In that we're not directly saying, Hey, do you know five people just like you, who would love to work with us? Um, but there are referral points that kind of naturally come up in the conversation. And some of my clients, they'll, they'll tell me like, oh, this was the best thing I've ever done.

I'm like, can I write that down and put it as a testimonial? I'm in the process of formalizing my offboarding, which includes a testimonial and case study piece. Um, again, marketers are the worst marketers for themselves. It's a good time to revisit that. I love that though. I think thinking about it in terms of like, we had a win.

This is a moment for me to also take this win, and one of the things I'm, I've started doing, which I don't know why it took me 15 years to do this, is I've started capturing the status quo. I've started taking that before picture. So that I understand the real value of the after picture, instead of just emailing my clients six months after we worked together and saying like, Hey, how did everything go?

What were those stats? By the way? Did we see any kind of increase? It's because that's how I talked to my clients. Um, but if. If you look at, um, what it looks like before you start your work and you actively capture those results, then when you see the results later, you get to do the math and you get to see the growth.

I think there's a lot that's missed if you neglect to take that before picture cuz you won't see how far you actually came.

Lex: Okay. Dana, if you could give one tip to our listeners about how to find and connect with their best clients, what would it be?

Dana: Look at the last three projects you had that were perfect or amazing, like your three happiest customers, your three best products, the things you feel like you did the best at, and figure out what they have in common.

And then go find more people that look exactly like them. That because that's your, that's your new target customer. That's who you are. Yeah. The new target customer.

Lex: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything you'd like to share? Things you're promoting? Where can people find you?

Dana: I have a Gumroad store with some tools in it, and some of those tools are still for service-based businesses, so you can grab any of those. I'll send a link to that. But if you, here we go. If you know any C to series, a product-based startups who are looking to gain more customers or keep the customers they have, I hope you will send them my way.

Lex: You can follow Dana on LinkedIn and check out her Gumroad store where she offers low cost sales scripts, lead generation tools, and customer conversation tools.

If experimenting with how to find clients is top of mind for you. You should think about becoming a Growthtracker. Inside Growthtrackers, we work on finding your repeatable plays so you know where to find clients and how to get booked. Learn more at supereasydigital.com/growthtrackers.

I'd love to hear what you think of this episode. Leave me a voicemail at lowenergyleads.com. You can also take charge of your leads. Every week with the Low Energy Leads Newsletter, where I share tips on staying booked with less energy.

Until next time, remember that high value doesn't have to mean high energy.