partner TESTIMONIALS

The story started

About Skylar's Experience!

The Beginning. 

Well, would you look at that. I’m already 22 weeks into my journey here at Pearl Lemon Group (and accompanying, haha)! Although I’m not quite sure when my time with the company will end, I’m proud to say that I’ve been part of such a dynamic and inclusive team for the last 5 months. I’ve learned a considerable amount, interacted with people from all around the world, and gained some of the skills that I hope will propel me into the future. To say that my time here has been a whirlwind would be an understatement! There’s always a new challenge and opportunity to be part of something – whether it’s a small task like setting up a cold email or a larger one like meeting and greeting clients and creating new content for the Pearl Lemon Group brand, things are certainly never dull. So let’s get into it!

When I first applied to Pearl Lemon Group, we were just heading into lockdown in the United States. I’m based in the state of New York, so we recorded some of the highest numbers in the country – both in terms of cases and deaths from COVID-19, especially in those earlier months when everyone was scrambling for PPE and supplies to outlast the pandemic. I had just been laid off from my previous position at a large cosmetic retailer and was (still am!) on the cusp on graduating from university with a degree in marketing and political science. Since I had not had any partnership experience within the marketing field, and fearing for my prospects upon graduation, I began sending out applications to companies far and wide. Since everything was moving online, Pearl Lemon Group seemed like the perfect place to apply – digital marketing (as we can see from the sheer global scope of the company) can thrive under any “stay at home” order!

 

The first week.

After being offered a position at Pearl Lemon Group, partners are required to take part in a 7-day “trial” period where their skills and work ethic can be assessed – as well as the overall fit for the company and the individual. I started my trial week on June 1st, 2020. And let me tell you, it was a riiiiideeeee.  Despite the high emotions of this period, or maybe because of it, specific things from my experience at Pearl Lemon Group have become foggy in my mind. It’s for this reason that I will be using a combination of Clockify records in combination with my historical partner blogs to paint you a fuller picture. 

At the time, Lydia was fully in charge of the partnership program. She quickly sent me over quite a few training packets – Archbees, Loom videos, and quick tasks. Since it was all extremely overwhelming at first, I spent quite a bit of time just trying to understand what I was supposed to be doing. This can be a challenging feat at any company, much less one that’s remote and includes people in all different time zones. It was during this time, the 7-day trial, that I was first given the tasks which would come to define my time here at Pearl Lemon Group (up until this point at least). 

I was tasked with setting up a Linkedin account for lead generation. At the time, I had no idea what this was or what this entailed. Although I had heard the term in the classroom, and even been tested on the concept, when put into action, it really constitutes a different beast entirely. From day 1, I was pushed into the pot. My first Linkedin account to tackle was for a client called Food Razor. A client! Interacting with a client on the first day of an partnership is really an experience that sums up Pearl Lemon Group in a nutshell – they throw you in the deep end, but there’s plenty of lifeguards around to make sure you don’t drown.

During this week, I really learned a lot of lessons that I would (and still do!) carry throughout my time here. Looking back on my records, my trial week constitutes almost the most hours that I’ve done for the company in a single week. Although this makes sense because I was trying to prove myself and get a handle on things, I have since realized that at Pearl Lemon Group, it’s about the quality and efficiency of the time you put in, not necessarily the magnitude. 

The Next 30 Days.

After the initial trial week, partners will be asked to either stay on for the full program or released to pursue other opportunities. I was grateful to be asked to stay, and was looking forward to earning some of that Pearl Lemon Group coin! 🤑 This period comes before a contract is signed, which will be important to the story later. Although many partners are bounced around between positions to discover where they are the most suitable, I was pretty quickly set up in the world of Linkedin lead generation. There were a couple detours through the Land of Quora, the Alley of Written Content Creation, etc., but those were quickly abandoned since I did not show an aptitude for them.

I continued deeper into my journey with Pearl Lemon Group lead generation. Since I mainly focused on this, I was spending a lot of time in the world of “Pearl Lemon Leads,” an offshoot of Pearl Lemon Group itself. When I came into the picture, many things seemed quite disorganized and I again found myself floundering. I was spending a huge amount of time trying to figure out how- or even find the materials to tell me how- to actually conduct a task. Although this is not the worst thing in essence, it was quite discouraging in the early stages. Syncing this with a conversation I’ve recently had with Deepak himself brings a bit more clarity to the struggles I encountered in the beginning. He informed me that Pearl Lemon Leads had just been started a mere few months before I arrived on the scene, lending to the confusion. I feel that over time, as I grew in the role of Lead Gen Manager, I have been able to put new processes in place to make things simpler and more straight forward for the people who walk beside and behind me.

A couple of the major campaigns that I have had the pleasure of working with were 

  • Food Razor- as I mentioned before, a company that turned paper invoices into digital ones for restaurants
  • Get Known- a marketing company helping lawyers rank 
  • Sure Oak- an SEO company
  • Working Den- a company brining healthy lifestyle solutions to remote workers 
  • Whatify- a SaaS company
  • Plant Sumo- Deepak’s plant based delivery company
  • Kemistri- a Forex trading platform
  • Pearl Lemon Group itself
  • And many more! 

These, of course, were not all in the first 30 days, but the experiences I gained from the earlier ones still guide me today. 

I also began to get involved in a new task that I nicknamed “video content creation.” This entailed procuring and curating Deepak’s extensive history of lectures, seminars, tutorials, tips, etc., and breaking them down into relevant bits and pieces before stitching them back together and forming short and informative courses for easy consumption. Doing this actually enabled me to work with other people on the team on a more consistent basis, communicating about editing, adding subtitles, and uploading schedules. Although time-consuming, video content creation gives me a great break from doing Linkedin tasks all the time and it is one that I continue to do to this day. 

During this time, the Pearl Lemon Group company was quite small. My first meeting had less than 8 people in the Zoom room. Although cozy, there were many awkward moments because we were not used to working with one another! It continued in this way for quite a long time, with some members of the team leaving and new members arriving on a frequent basis. In some regard, I think that I came onto Pearl Lemon just as the company was hitting their “Renaissance” so to speak. With more processes up and running than the previously named “Purr Traffic,” clients, new members of the team, and increased business ventures poured in. Despite this, I was still feeling quite a bit of unhappiness from the level of disorganization that I saw in the company. It was for that reason that I decided to turn in my resignation letter to Deepak and Lydia at the end of my 30 days, giving up my chance at a five month contract with the company. 

The Next Five Months.

Clearly, I made the decision to stay with Pearl Lemon Group after my attempted resignation. After writing and sending that email, I was pretty set on packing it up and moving on to my next opportunity. However, Deepak was quick to act and reached out to me to discuss my concerns with the company and what could be done to change them. It was this action that ultimately led me to the choice to stay – any company with a leader who was so invested with an individual partner and getting to the core problems of his business is one worth staying around for and growing beside. This is certainly not something I have experienced before, which perhaps does not say positive things about my various retail roles in the past!

After deciding that I would stay, I continued on with many of the roles that I described previously- Linkedin lead generation and video course content creation. Although still working to fully understand my role and duties with Pearl Lemon Group, I approached the work in a more relaxed way – finally comprehending that “quality over quantity” was a mindset that would guide me from that point on.

When I first joined as an partner, the Pearl Lemon Group employee count was quite low, as mentioned previously; weekly meetings felt like a limited gathering. As time progressed however, the community began to grow, and at quite a rapid rate! Myself and a couple other partners who had joined the program with me were soon surpassed by an influx of new additions, quite a welcome change in my eyes because it allowed us to interact with more faces from around the world and continue to grow the Pearl Lemon brand as it is today. I’m extremely grateful to have the opportunity to work with minds from the UK, Egypt, the USA, Greece, Spain, Poland, India, and more. 

We quickly grew from a small team with multiple duties stretched across the same individual, to a team of nearly 30 with specified tasks and divisions for each member. We welcomed a new HR team member who was able to interact with all of us on a daily basis, answering questions and building infrastructures that were missing and dilapidated before. We’ve welcomed a whole new sales team over the course of the last couple months as well, helping to bring in sales for all aspects of the Pearl Lemon Group experience. 

Since my role as a Linkedin lead generation manager is a relatively experimental role at Pearl Lemon Group, I’ve had the opportunity to come up with ideas and processes to implement during my time here. One of the things that I tried (and continue to try) to improve is the communication between the sales team and the Linkedin team. Since we rely on our sales team to close our deals, it’s imperative that we make clear roads between them and ourselves. To attempt to do this, I constructed a couple of “reporting forms” through which the sales team can communicate our successes and failures to us in hopes of making improvements. 

Additionally, we’re always on the lookout for ways to improve our actual Linkedin accounts, getting them more engagement and making them more believable as brand ambassadors. To do this, we’ve been using various extensions, quite a popular thing to do at Pearl Lemon Group! The best ones so far are Content Studio to curate and schedule posts and Podawaa to manufacture and sustain engagement. 

The day to day grind of building Linkedin campaigns can be arduous at times, especially when it comes to building a new skill set. I’ve recently been learning how to completely set up a campaign end to end, from account optimization, to content curation, to backlinks through Zapier, Google Sheets, etc., to message writing, and more. Despite this, once the concepts are clear and the goal is mentioned, these daily tasks are things that are easily picked up and achieved through a good session of “sitting and trying.”

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been involved directly with clients and their campaigns since day 1. However, my first solo campaign came at the beginning of August. It was for a company based in the USA. NY to be exact! How fitting that in a company that takes clients from around the world, my first one would be from my home state. They are an SEO company as well, so I was quite confused at first as to why they were booking a campaign with us. Couldn’t they work it out themselves? It was from there that I learned that not all digital marketing agencies are quite as diverse as Pearl Lemon Group and that Sure Oak did not actually offer lead generation services for their clients, much less themselves. 

Building their campaign was a collaborative experience with the Sure Oak team. They were a lovely group to work with and were always ready to answer any questions that I had. Lasting for 2 months, the campaign gave me a lot of insight into running a full campaign and the most important part of it all – keeping the client happy! This fortunately was the case with this particular client, but was not so with another one who I was working with simultaneously. 

Working Den is a company that signed on with Pearl Lemon Group for Linkedin lead generation services as well. They are mostly a “one-man-band” in terms of operations for themselves, having just launched. Their main focus was to bring healthier lifestyle choices to people who work remotely, a difficult portion of the population to find it turns out! Although the campaign was revised multiple times and kept running throughout the course of the contract, it was ultimately unsuccessful in uncovering the kinds of leads the company was looking for. Although disheartening, this failure gave me a taste of the realities that sometimes come with client relationships, a taste I hope not to sample too often. 

As Deepak’s web of companies and prospects has continued to grow, I have been recently recruited to help out with lead generation on those accounts as well. Not only are we running campaigns for Pearl Lemon Group itself, we are running them for Omnireach, Deepak’s Ulinc replacement, and Plant Sumo. This has allowed me to get a much broader perspective of the company, and work with quite a few more people than I had in the past. Since the Pearl Lemon brand is growing at such a rapid pace, keeping up with the influx of people and getting to know them personally can be difficult, but it comes naturally when working on a project together. That’s a great reason why I love to get involved in the many different pools of the Pearl Lemon pond – to grow with the other people involved and improve networks all around. 

The Now and Moving On.

During the last month especially, I’ve been able to take on a bit more of a leadership role within Pearl Lemon Group. As the lead generation side of the business continues to grow and shift, and new and resourceful people become part of the team, it’s important to keep us all on a good track to success. I’ve been fortunate enough to have gotten involved with Pearl Lemon Group at a time when things are changing, giving me quite a bit of insight into the overall processes within the company. 

It’s for this reason that building a complete guide to Linkedin lead generation has been such a huge focus for me recently. By compiling all of the knowledge that I’ve gathered into one central place, I hope to be able to ease the transition into the role for any new partners or employees that come around. If nothing else, this may be my legacy at Pearl Lemon Group! However, it is quite an extensive project and most likely will be something that grows and changes as the years, months, and weeks go by.

Pearl Lemon Group is a digital marketing agency that really encompasses all the ideals of a grassroots organization and all the magic and messiness that comes with that. Although rapidly growing and adjusting, the company values its employees over all other things and the absolute humanity that flows between their connections. It’s a place where the inexperienced can come to seek an education, and where the experts can come to build their own fortunes. Deepak’s philosophies about life and business truly come from a wide range of life experiences, which make them far more relatable and effective than if they were to slip from between the pages of a book. It’s his drive and passion that really pulls the company together and gives all the other people on the team a direction and purpose. 

As my anticipated “end of partnership” date rolls closer and closer, it’s nearly time for me to make some decisions on the future. Although I’ve enjoyed my time with Pearl Lemon Group quite a bit, as well as working remotely, in the current climate of COVID-19 and civil unrest in the USA, it’s imperative that I can land a position that provides certainty and some specific benefits for employees. I am grateful to have been offered a position to continue on with Pearl Lemon into the upcoming year, but I cannot yet be sure of what path I will choose. However, if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Pearl Lemon Group is just at the beginning of its journey, one that will undoubtedly be long and prosperous, if the tenacity of its founder is anything to go by.

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