How to successfully cold email (even if you don’t know your audience).
Ask An Agent with Max Fleming of "Motive LA"
Welcome to “Ask An Agent,” a monthly agent - brand conversation with Max Fleming, founder of Motive LA, where we have in-depth discussions around specialized creator economy topics.
For my first chat with Max, I wanted to dig deep into the beginning steps of building a creator marketing campaign: Discovery and Outreach.
It was illuminating to be able to ask Max questions that I’ve wondered about the creator/agent/brand relationship for years, like at what point does an agent approach their creator with an opportunity? Do creators have access to their email aliases? Etc.
Between trips to NYC and the Super Bowl, Max and I caught up to discuss:
Tips for how to cold email successfully
Who’s reading your outreach to creators
Max’s goal for partnering with brands
And more!
Neil: What’s the percentage of inbound vs outbound deals you take on?
Max: We have 21 clients. I would say it is probably 60/40 - 60% inbound, 40% outbound. We have a lot of high profile creator clients, but also we have a lot of clients that are developmental, and we have to act as if we're the ad agency internally - create the idea, bring it out to a brand partner, or a buyer, or somebody that can expend some dollars for them to react to the idea and execute upon the idea. So I would say, 60/40, some months, some months are 80/20 in favor of the inbound. Our business is sports and entertainment - So the summer months can be very busy, but there's only really one sport going on. It's golf and baseball [no NBA, NHL, NFL, etc.]. It's always depending on what's going on. Those [slower] months we get really, really creative, for sure…
Neil: Starting with the outbound, is this you going to brands? How are you pitching most successfully? What are you supplying on the agency side to a brand that you're seeing work in the market right now?
Max: I come from traditional talent representation at an agency, where I started in TV and film representation. We had this word called “coverage,” where we had to cover all of the casting directors/producers/networks/studios and we needed to know everything that was going on so that we could best service our clients. How we did that was going out and communicating with all the casting directors, assistants, associates and producers and studio execs, and trying to know what they were up to at all times. And there was always, like, the Monday or Tuesday of the week that we dedicated to doing our research. And then on Wednesday and Thursday, we would submit all of our ideas because we knew what they were looking for. So I would say in my office, we're always covering our ad agency partners, our really close brand direct relationships, where we always kind of know what's going on based on the perennial calendar, but we're also very in tune with what they may be looking for because we've been working with these people for a long time. But from a new buyer standpoint, I just want to make sure that they're aware of who we represent, who we work with, how we work and how we're different from a big agency, like a Wasserman, CAA or WME because of our size and nimbleness. We want to reverse engineer the process - we're super community oriented where you can come to us and you can feel a family atmosphere. We want to be the best in the business.
Neil: Let's talk cheddar: What are we doing? Six figures? Seven figures?
Max: Yeah, high six figures and with a huge, high profile brand. But I think that's great for the journey that we're on to build a business. Our creators’ jobs can generate income in two ways, right? I don't touch the dollars from the AdSense that they're earning. We provide the value that we find off platform and integrate on platform. And yes, brand partners come and go, and we work on really cool, advertising vehicles for them. Our goal from a business building standpoint is: How can we work with brand partners that can uplift our careers so high that at the end of the Mount Everest right when we get to the top, we're only working for The Pointer Brothers LLC or Olson LLC. Or we're only working for creator X LLC. Because we’ve established such a brand persona that we're doing X, Y and Z, just for that brand. And then when we are at that point, how can we be extremely selective and specific, including other brands to continue doing creative things. Each creator is in a different arena, but I would say the goal from start to finish for everyone that we work with is we want to build a business. When we get to that point where we can establish so much likeness that we can develop that next water bottle to sell to Stanley or just to put in stores at say Dick's Sporting Goods, then we control all the aspects as part of it. But it's a journey and it's freaking awesome.
Neil: I always wish that more creators and agents would pitch me on ideas. It's so much easier for me to green light something that you come to me and say, “hey, The Pointer Brothers want to do this. Here's what it's going to take.” That's so much, much easier than for me to dream up some fully fledged campaign on my end. So I'm always trying to catch that. And love to see you're going out and getting it.
Max: Yeah, that's the name of the game. If the creator is going to make the content, it better be the content that works best for both parties. Sometimes we're making specific content that needs to be created based on briefs or call to actions or anything, but we want to make your life easy and we want to make you look as good as possible. At the end of the day, if you let the creator “create,” oftentimes it will be highly successful.
Neil: So for inbound, I know your email inbox is currently stacked. How are you sorting through them? What makes a good cold email pitch? How are you evaluating the inbox currently?
Max: I'd say outreach is a task that I still have a long time to master. It's “what would get me to answer this email?” I think I'm averaging about 270-350 emails per day, and that's on the short side. It's more like 400 - it's insane. And my associate Tyler is in my inbox with me trying to fizzle out everything that we're going through, but a proactive email based on an idea that we have is always successful when we have an existing relationship with the person on the other side of the email. The most daunting task is sending an outreach email to someone we don't know, and trying to get them to respond, because we're very much in a competitive market where every agent or manager on planet Earth is also reaching out to that person.
What do we have to offer that's going to make them respond? I try to write how I speak, I like to add my personality into my emails, because nobody else is doing it. Nobody wants to talk to somebody that's robotic. Nobody wants to speak with somebody that's a paper pusher. Nobody wants to communicate with others that aren't kind of outgoing and setting them apart. I like to include jokes. I always put quick hooks in my email. I try to keep subject lines super brief and engaging and be like, “Why the hell would he write that kind of thing? I must read this.” If you can bat .350 you have a killer year in baseball terms. But if you bat .250 you need to improve. Same for email outreach.
It's the same thing with creator content, too. When you're first just starting out or you're creating anything, you have to know what people are going to be receptive to and want to learn about. It's the same thing with sending emails. I've been sending a minimum of 100 outbound emails a week for the last six years.
Neil: Who are these emails to? How are you finding these people?
Max: I use a variety of tools, including LinkedIn, Apollo, Winmo, and SponsorUnited, to source contacts along with leveraging my personal network and industry relationships. After six years of sending countless outreach emails, I’ve built a deep rolodex, so in most cases we already have the right contact information. That said, Apollo has been especially valuable for outreach, making the process seamless and highly efficient.
Neil: Do any of your clients manage their own emails or does everything go through you as the agent?
Max: Quick tangent - I'm ready to invest and start creating a software that is the IMDb Pro of the Creator representation business. Now it's just what email is in the bio of “X” social creator, or if the buyer knows the agent that actually represents the talent, which can be annoying and which can be cool.
I have some clients that run their own email, and when they want me to negotiate or handle a partnership we always work on those together, and they loop me in, or they forward it to me. And that's our working relationship, because at the end of the day, that email that's going to the client is their proprietary information. I do not own that relationship. There are some crazy managers and representatives out there and agents that think that that's their brand relationship. No, you are not working on the deal. You're not the one in the content, you're not this, that, and the other thing - you're the outside auspices that's there to help protect and serve the best interest of the person that will star in that piece of content. You're there to make sure everything goes well and that you mediate the relationship on both sides of the table.
What I do, preferably, is create an email group alias. Call it teamjackson@motive-la.com. I use Google Workspace just because it's easier and more productive for me. I used to use MS Office, but Google Workspace is more proficient when creating group email aliases. The alias includes the client and me. We communicate together on any inbound outreach. You're responding, but the client still sees it. I will never have a client not view their proprietary information on all those things, just because it doesn't belong to me. It's ethical that all the clients see what comes through, because it's also an accountability structure for me. Say I miss an email which happens, I get 400 emails a day. We're working as a team. Jackson can flag it to me and say, “Hey, did you see this one?” Because working on a million different things, it's imperative that we discuss everything together in real time, versus just an email in that bio. Say I wasn't paying attention, or say I was on vacation that week - We could have missed out on a million dollars.
Neil: What’s the best way to for a brand to reach out to a creator if not the email in bio?
Max: As mentioned above, we need to create that IMDb Pro for Creators. Contact information is all there, from their agent, their manager, their lawyer and their publicist. It’s all public within the Pro model. It's all central. For now, I’d say the best way to get in touch with a creator is through the email in the bio or a DM asking for the best method of communication… Until we have a software that solves this problem.
Neil: When I'm emailing that link in bio, I don't know if this is an LA agency full of 10 people on an account or if this is your dad or your friend, anywhere in between, it could be the creator themselves. This gap of understanding creates a need for increased emotional intelligence to understand all these different parties involved, while also the business background to understand how you have to work and negotiate differently amongst these parties. If I'm talking to you, LA agent, that's going to sound different from when I'm talking to mom who’s representing their child.
Max: Neil, you could not be more right. Let me ask you: How many emails are you sending out to brands, and what are you saying to them? What if you didn't know who was on the other side of that email? How would you pitch correctly? That's making your job way harder than it needs to be.
Neil: On my end, the amount of times I said, “Hey, Team Jackson…” I just have to word it as generically as possible, because I have no idea who's responding.
Max: It's either agent, creator or manager, but I have no idea. It's got to be a daunting task reaching out to someone when you work at such a high profile and vetted company that people get excited when you reach out. I'm sure you deal with this all the time, because you have to deal with people like me, the crazy people that signed up for these jobs - sometimes when you’re talking to me it’s like a game of telephone when all you want to do is communicate with the creator.
Because the project is so high profile, good representatives should make sure that your communication to me goes straight to the creator and it's streamlined. It’s what we've been doing with The Pointer Brothers and with Jackson and Trevor [Fahnstrom]. I'm just there to add value. I'm here to get the deal done. I'm here to be helpful. You don't want to play a game of telephone. And I've had some other agents recently that are good to pull the creator into the conversation when it makes sense. We can talk business, legal, figure out all that, but once we need to communicate something we bring the creator in.
Neil: You mentioned creators reading and responding to emails. I don't see that too often in the space, maybe there's only 5% of creators that are sufficiently organized and responsive.
Max: You and I read and execute emails for a living. You're talking to people that create social content for a living and do a lot of different creative and unique things - That’s why my business exists because I'm good at responding and writing to those emails and keeping them organized. Creators business is different for each individual, just as each creator marketing executive is unique and individual. Each manager or agent is unique and individual. I would say 5% of my clients only email. No, I have to take that back. 5% of my clients respond to their emails. 95% of my clients respond to their text messages. 95% of my clients will respond to your text message if you write to them.
It's like the new tools of communication. It's very Gen Z, Gen Alpha - people don't want to email much anymore, unless they're in the business world. Jackson and I took this extremely high profile call with a huge production company for a huge, amazing project that I hope really happens. This person didn't want to communicate with us over email ever again. They're like, “just text me. I don't respond to my email.” This person probably makes nine figures a year. And I'm like, “Okay, this is how this world's gonna go.” People don't even have the attention span to read an email signature. Just text them.
Neil: I'm here for it until I need to sign a document or have something in writing [laughter]. The business background and acumen across the creator economy we've been talking about varies so drastically - you look at a creator like Timm Chiusano that was leading a team of 250+ people. He has 20 years of business background versus some kid on TikTok that is now getting 100 emails from brands and agents every day. I wouldn't expect them to read those, but the delta is wild.
Max: Let me give you an example using Mike and Henry (of The Pointer Brothers). Mike was a creator right out of school and didn't go work in the corporate world. He started making content with his brother, started filming some handshakes and some wedding dances, then all of a sudden they built a million dollar business. The other brother, Henry, went to the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. He graduated, worked at Oracle, and knows how to communicate in this business world. They're equal from the creative and business standpoints, but you can see differences in their beautiful skillsets. They work perfectly from a business + creative standpoint.
