Agency Acceleration: LinkedIn Strategy, Client Retention, and Offers

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. Yeah, I did. So my question was, I'm trying to figure out what the best plan of attack is to scale. Like for context, we're always hovering between 12 and 14 clients and an average deal size of about 6.5, 7 ,000. I'm trying to figure out if I should be focused on increasing my deal size on average. So focusing on the performance to 10k, for example, or trying to increase my capacity to 21 or 22 clients. Or should I be doing both? And I'm trying to figure out where I should be putting my effort. Marcos, what's your performance? I have to focus. What's your churn right now?

1:10Your monthly churn? How many clients are you losing? So last month we lost zero. This month we lost one. so eight percent um i put a lot of focus into getting my churn down to as close to zero as possible recently by getting a creative director got it okay because reality for everyone is if your churn is even five percent you have to replace about 50 of your customers every year um so agency churn ideally like i think it's still a shitty economy right now but if you can get 15 to 20 percent uh annual churn so we're talking like you know um 85 80 retention or so, then you're in a really good spot.

1:47And you can be a little more conservative. You might even say 70 % or so, but even again, just for the record, especially in the info product world, people in the info product world are like, whoa, 5 % churn, we're so good. It's like, it's not that good. But I would focus on like, take a look at your churn over the last 12 months or so. That's the first thing I would focus on. And then, you know, if you can think about expansion, yeah, the more, the one thing we have, there's a book called Seven Powers and it talks about the strategic advantages of like, what does Toyota have? They have their process power with Kanban, right?

2:19Or like, sorry, it's not even Kanban. It's the way they go about making their, building their cars. It's a very specialized process and everyone tried to copy it, right? Everyone in Detroit tried to copy it. And then like Coca-Cola has brand power at the end of the day. The only real power that an agency has is the power of switching costs. And that means the more things you can layer on Marcos that are value-add. So for example, right now, there's a lot of people coming to us. we need help with community management we want to do what you're doing with organic social we want this we want this we want this and we're just looking at hey like one do we have the capacity for it to your point but two where can we actually do a really good job and not try to do everything at once right so i i think just taking it slowly um and not trying to overwhelm yourself kind of going back to alianne again um you can think about expanding there because they're just there's a there's a lot of stuff you can do with the the ghost writing um in terms of add-ons but i'll turn it back over to you.

3:10It looks like you want to say something. Yeah. So just to clarify, when you say like 80 % retained retention, that's like for the entire year, right? So like, for example, if we're at, I don't know, 12 clients, you want us to, you're saying you're basically retain 10 of your clients for the whole year. I get it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you should be. By the way, the dude that I talked to yesterday from, from IPO, he he's the guy, you know how, when you, if you guys go to Nordstrom, as everyone here kind of shop at Nordstrom, Maybe not you, Allian. Okay. So you go to Nordstrom. What's the deal, Austin?

3:39You get to return your shit. And like, what happens? You return it for free, right? Exactly. Or they'll even get like, they might even pay you in some cases, right? And so this is the guy that came up with it. And what he told me yesterday is like, dude, forget about customer satisfaction. It's all about customer delight at the end of the day. Because delight means like they'll actually talk about you to other people. So how much are you delighting your customers? Oh, and this whole time, my goal was fuck the customer. I need to change my mind. Jeez. Yeah, that's good advice because, you know, we operate off like 70 % referrals.

4:10I don't do a ton of marketing, but our retention, I'd say we retain probably like seven to eight consistently, basically since the beginning of the agency. And then we're always trying to, I feel like we're always rotating those last four to five spots to find the people who fit that core group. And so it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the trap for agencies is like it becomes really easy to say yes to starting new service lines or taking on customers that you probably shouldn't be taking on. And so I think the more boundaries you can put around your business and then like be a little more.

4:43I think I was probably too aggressive in the early years. I think being a little more, I guess, vigilant, that will help you go a long way. Because again, the game here, at least for me, is how do you play this game for decades? And as long as you stay alive for multiple decades and you're constantly learning, there's no way you shouldn't be able to build this into at least an eight-figure business. Okay. I appreciate that. That's really good advice. Thank you. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners.

5:17And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency.

5:48This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Cool. David's got a question here. So it says, David, you know what? I'm actually going to just let you read it out. Go for it. Yeah, sure. But before that, just some insights on the way we do our business. I think this dovetails to the question earlier. How do you sustain clients over time? Because people do churn, and like you said, if 5 % churn, you basically have to replace 50%.

6:23I guess for us, it's not like we have clients and services. We basically sell leads. We sell calls and we sell form leads. Within that space, our clients actually go in and out. Right. So they can be in the mood for buying leads this month. They could turn and they could come back. And it's because it's pay for performance. It's pretty easy to sell them. Right. Like we just send them a doc, they send the budget in and we're off and doing business. Right. It usually just takes one phone call for a transaction to happen. Right. So David, one question on that. So if it's pay for performance, why do they stop?

7:02Because the CPS might be high. So we're selling to both aggregators and direct. So in aggregators, some people might just buy it because they're reselling it. So the CPS for that particular buy that they have might be high. So they might have a different buyer or the budget of that buyer might decreased or they might actually have a higher budget and now they're willing to take a higher CPS, but they do come in and out. Right. So you sometimes you just have to like email everybody say, Hey, anything new? Yeah. And they basically send you a hair campaign. And who do you work with primarily? So we work mostly financial products.

7:40So insurance, for example, like enterprise or regional insurance agents. Then some mortgage companies, some home services companies. So it's pretty easy to, again, we sell product, right? We say we're an agency, but we actually sell product. So the sales process is pretty easy and they do come back. Anyways, so the point there is, is there a way for you to do something similar, right? For example, with Marco, if you're selling ghostwriting services, you're basically selling on an article basis. I'm just thinking out loud, right? And you're productized that way. So going to my question, right? So LinkedIn and using LinkedIn, and this is also like something from what Marco said.

8:25And we tried to reach out and find new clients on LinkedIn and basically say, Hey, do you want leads? Do you want calls? Stuff like that. But knowing that everybody gets picked up by that type of email from sellers on LinkedIn, well, they usually just say ignore or archive or delete. Right. So are there, you know, how would you approach that? Like how would you build credibility? So they respond to you. I'm going to answer your question second and I'm going to go with something I thought of first. So I have a friend that does pay for performance. His agency has like 40 people. They do 40 million in profit, not revenue, profit.

9:01And it's all pay for performance. And the way he works, he works with financial services companies, more so like debt companies, and he sells them leads. So he makes all the landing pages. He drives all the traffic. And then if that client decides, hey, I don't want to pay you anymore, he's like, okay, yeah, great. We're going to take this entire funnel and we're going to give it to your competitor. right so they're just slide over to the competitor that usually doesn't happen um their clients have stayed with them for we're talking like um probably decades or so um or at least over a decade i should say um and so like that might get your mind to think about something in the long term because the p i do believe the best marketers um if you're best in the world you can operate on a pay for performance or maybe like a pay-per-usage basis especially in the next five to ten years um so that that's high level right that's something for you to think about out there but to answer your question on the LinkedIn emails front to stand out, it's really with, with emails or emails, it's how good is your offer at the end of the day?

9:57And so, you know, recently the last couple of years, people have been sending Amazon gift cards. Those Amazon gift cards still work, by the way, the response rates on those are still pretty decent. Some people have been sending out these AirPods. I think the AirPods don't work anymore. In fact, I think it's, I did that like in 2017, it's not fresh anymore. Right. Um, like David, like to me, it's like, if you're sending leads really, if the leads are really good, they should be renewing with you. So something is not adding up in my head, but if they are in fact really good, let's say you sell the leads to agencies, everybody here, right?

10:27Imagine everybody here. Hey, everybody, I'm going to give you, um, three leads in the next 30 days or so. And if you like it, let me know. And like, if it's Brennan, that's like three really high qualified leads. He'd be stupid not to come back to you and say, hey, like, I need more of that stuff. You know what I mean? It's like a drug, right? It's gotta be a good drug. If you can do that, I'm in. Same thing with the drugs too, just lock it up. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment.

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11:29This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive.

12:11And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketing school dot IO slash hire. Again, it's marketing school dot IO slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. uh the churn the churn number is um so what were you saying you said retain what annually so a good agency let's say in like you know the better years right you'd be retaining 80 to 85 percent of your customers annually and that's revenue or customer count that's that's on your revenue okay yeah cool i'm happy then yeah sounds like you're doing well there um i keep challenging my dirt, my mark.

13:04Eric. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Brian. No, I'll get you're good. My thing's not important. I was just wondering how does the Amazon gift card work, Eric on LinkedIn? Yeah. Well, before we do that, you should go on Amazon and you should buy the Alex from Mosey workbook, not the actual book, but here's another. So here's an exercise for you. Homework for you. Right. Alex from Mosey has his hundred million dollars offers book. You don't need that book. Just get the workbook, the workbook, like in one page will tell you, Hey, here's what a good offer looks like. Right. But the rest of it is a workbook.

13:33So then any of you that have a crappy offer right now, and I'm not saying we have the best offer necessarily. Um, but if you want to learn how to craft a good offer, use the workbook. That's, that's the first thing. Uh, the second thing is the Amazon gift card. So you can offer like, Hey, um, Scott, I'm going to, you know, how about, uh, you know, if we, we jump on a call for 15, 30 minutes or so, I give you a hundred dollar Amazon gift card. Right. And that, that tends to get pretty decent response rates. All right. So Marcus, did you have a separate question? Personal brand authority increases response rate also try to switch to outbound connection request 40 a day versus email and have a conversational approach versus a cold pitch oh that's advice got it can you run that for people marcus no we just write viral tweets man well you said what we just we just write the viral post we don't we don't do the outbound but we just that's a good headline we just we just write viral post man i'd like that yeah we're very focused i don't even i don't know any of this fine acquisition stuff.

14:29I'm a new to that stuff. I write viral tweets. What type of agencies are in here? Like, I'm curious. Yeah, type in the chat what type of agency you are. I know Adam's got the experiential. Marcus. Viral tweet man agency. I like that. Legend. Experiential. I think experiential, by the way, there's a premium on those agencies right now. adam i don't know if you know that oh i didn't know that i think it's um um i saw somewhere that it's like if it's like has significant scale it's like 17x time to sell well my theory is the more you know ai takes over the world the more important the real experiences are going to be so that's kind of in line with that yeah it's very harder to break through i mean that's why everyone's here today it's like how do you break through in digital and linkedin it's getting crowded and crowded and then so they're looking to do things out there you know in the public sphere so the demand is there