Explaining the value of video to clients, Finding leads for a new agency, Valuations for retainer work vs. productized services, Tracking offline conversions, and Using conversation intelligence tools

0:00So this next episode is covering a portion of our agency owners association 1.5 hour call that Neil and I did. So if you're an agency owner and or if you're looking to just learn more about how to scale an agency, there are a lot of questions that we get from the community members in here. This is basically a sneak preview into how the group works and one of the major benefits of the group. So if you're interested, please listen. And without further ado, here is the episode. All right, let's go to David. What do you got?

0:33Hi, so I'm a creative for video and I'm starting like my agency. I'm very new at this. But I have a problem to explaining the value of video to people. So they understand that the video on social media, for instance, it's valuable to make their brand stand out. But each time I get to the hurdle that they say, well, I understand it's value, but I cannot measure it. So how do I explain to them that it's, well, it's valuable what I do? So there's already enough companies that want that service. You're talking to the wrong potential customers. That's the real issue. What you want to do is create marketing material or collateral around how you can help people create the videos, how you're getting tons of engagement, how the quality is better, stuff like that.

1:21Because there's a lot of companies that already pay for that. What you don't want to do is find companies that spend money on marketing. You have to convince them that your format of marketing is great. You want to find companies who already have the need for video content and then go from there. So, for example, you can go on social media, look at all the companies that are already producing video content, but it's crap quality and show them how you can produce better quality and see and just message them and tell them what they're doing wrong and how to fix it and how you can just fix it for a monthly fee and they can do a trial with you.

1:54That's a great way to get customers because they're already creating the type of content that you offer. and now you just have to convince them to work with you versus doing it on their own okay that's very valuable yeah neil are you using the mic no son of a bitch i knew it uh all right i forgot all right let's go to no man no man what do you got is it did i pronounce that correctly no man it's actually no man like norman no more okay Got it. Noman. Yeah. Hey, guys. So it's a pleasure to meet you guys. Been a longtime listener, first time caller. So, hey, so I'm actually focusing more on my startup.

2:39I'm based in San Francisco Bay Area. I've been in and out of startups for the past, I don't know, 10 years. So focusing on my agency, trying to grow it and scale it. So it's been mostly a side hustle for a long time. So we do website development SEO work. A lot of my clients come from referrals and from a personal network. So I'm just trying to figure out, like, if you guys were to start a new agency today from scratch, where would you guys focus and try to get leads for? Well, let me go first, Neil, because you said SF, right? So, Noman, like, I'm heavy into tech. Like, I'm really into it. I'm studying all the time.

3:26And actually, there's a YPO company. Actually, Neil, I don't know if you know this guy, but this guy named David Rodnitsky, he founded a company called 3Q Digital. And 3Q Digital was based in Silicon Valley, and they had billboards all the time. This is when things were really hot, talking 2010 or so. Everything was tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, right? Um, and he's like, I'm just going to focus on the tech industry. And that's how they really grew. And I think they sold like three times or something like that. It's some weird story. You can go buy his book. Um, so you can go find his book on Amazon, David Rodnitsky.

3:56And he talks about the whole agency, like his entire journey. Right. So I recommend checking that out. Um, but personally to answer your question directly, because I have an affinity for tech and I've been in it for a while and I have a lot of relationships in that world. That's where I would start. So I think you're in a great spot. We have a lot of B2B SaaS clients and an e-com that's kind of our mix. So I think it's really you pick whatever you have an affinity for in the beginning, and hopefully it's a money-making area. And then you do that really well. And once you think you've kind of started to kind of milk the most, you've milked the most of it, then you can start to expand into other areas.

4:31But I'm sure Neil has a different answer here. Yeah, so you're already doing web development. You're getting customers. Referrals are the best source of customers. As you grow, you're going to get more of them. there's a site and I should know the name of it. It's one of the most popular sites. It works really well for web dev. Eric, what's that agency site that a lot of agencies pay for leads? Clutch.co. There you go. So Clutch, and there's a lot of sites like that where they charge you a fee and they'll drive you leads. Great place to get web development clients by the boatload. I know a lot of people who spend money on that and they're making an arm and a leg in profit.

5:12okay awesome thanks guys appreciate it but for clutch to work well you got to upload your portfolio and you have to have good work and ask your clients to give you some ratings on clutch if you can do that then it can work if you can't do that clutch doesn't work well no man you're on behance too and dribble right i'm assuming uh i haven't been on behance dribble we've been on uh we've been getting a lot of stuff on from upwork and yeah contact yeah yeah i would just post to all these portfolio sites and like if you're getting from upwork wherever else you can post to um so so yeah neil i'm curious the clutch.co people we've never paid for i don't know if you guys have paid for it before but there are i think there's people spending like a healthy five figures minimum on it i'm just i'm curious if we can share more stories here i know people who spend six figures a month on it that's amazing that by the way the way they started they just that's a whole We'll share it on marketing school, maybe.

6:06Scott, go for it. Hey, guys. Thanks for hosting amazing sessions. Question on agency valuations. Is there a difference between valuations for agencies that do retainer work, right? So you close someone in 12 months, two years, three years, versus productized services. You know, so digital PR agencies, for example, popping up and they give you a package, you buy a package, and then you keep purchasing them over time. They seem to be generating a lot of revenue, but I'm wondering, is there a difference in valuations between the two or it still comes down to how long you can retain a customer in general?

6:42People prefer recurring revenue where their annual contracts and your churn is low where they end up paying you for more than one year. Valuations for project-based businesses tend to be the lowest. but if your project-based business is reoccurring which the even those project people keep paying you and they almost all renew investors will look at that as recurring in essence because it's the same customer staying with you for a long time so it just shows as recurring bingo but the moment you have uh project-based work and you have to keep getting new people your valuations drastically go down.

7:27Like if a business is doing a million in profit, they're not going to get, it's hard to get 5X when it's one-off projects. Yeah. Makes sense. Good. 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. And 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.

8:03Great experienced 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. This 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. All right, let's go over to Gabriel. Is Gabriel here? Yes, I, uh, yeah. So you just had a question.

8:38I have a lot of, um, uh, broken motor, uh, clients and some of them, you know, I can tell the, the results or the conversions from marketing campaigns happen. You know, as much as we try to push on phone calls and tracking forms and web chats, you know, a lot of the Google Ads campaigns end up sending traffic, basically, to locations, specifically, I have some medical clients that they see appointments. So I was just wondering if you have any tips on tracking and attributing offline conversions that will make also sense to the client. so if it's offline conversions the easiest way is the client needs to ask where they came from how they hear about you if they don't it's really hard to correlate that's sad but it's true yeah and you know we we actually the the great thing is we track also the phone calls we we have many situations where we ask the user we can tell they click on a google ad right from search and they call and we ask them and they say sometimes uh i was just driving by and i saw the business you know and so i'm just trying to find a way instead of like listening to every single phone call and things like that and a more automated way to attribute it uh because that happens a lot sometimes i'm running youtube ads and it has a specific tracking number for youtube and we ask them and they say i saw you on tv so they're probably playing tv youtube on their tv and their smart TV, but that's kind of like, it has become a lot of really like manual reporting to make sure we also get credit for those commercials.

10:14I don't, Eric may know of an automated way, but I don't know why when you're, go for it. 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. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready. Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year.

10:48You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible. This 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. Yeah, so Gabriel, what are you using to listen to all these calls right now? Call real. Call real, okay.

11:24So Neil actually pays for the same product that I pay for. We both pay for this product called Gong. So Gong, what it does for you is you can actually set keywords to track for it, to look for. You can also look for key phrases or questions like, hey, did Neil ask this question on a call, right? And then it'll like show a check mark or not. So you can actually have a report that shows, hey, were these things discussed over here? Were these things said? And then it'll also track, you can, again, they have like different keyword trackers. So you can probably, I hate to use the word streamline, but you can streamline that process quite a bit.

11:56It's not cheap. I think it's like a couple hundred bucks per user or something like that, or maybe a hundred bucks per user. and then they have different AI features that will connect with your CRM too and you basically just work within Gong. So, you know, maybe that's a bit overkill right now, but if it sounds like you're looking at a lot of calls at the moment, it might be a solution. I think Freshworks has a competitor to Gong that's affordable. Freshworks? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they have a competitor to Gong. There's a few Gong alternatives, just Google Gong alternatives. You'll find a lot of them out there that are really cheap.

12:27Neil, you remember when we were coming back? G-O-N-G. But just Google Gong on alternatives. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint.

13:00And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. Neil, remember when we were sitting next to that guy on the plane last year, coming back from HubSpot, the inbound conference? Okay. so this guy has a company called grain.com it's not quite single grain it's grain.com um so g-r-a-i-n.com it's conversation intelligence made simple so i remember meeting him it's like oh i've heard of your product before and it's like 15 bucks per seat billed annually 29 bucks and you can also do monthly as well um this might be a cheaper solution for you oh and they ripped off the design of gong so just just use that nice yeah sorry gong we love you guys we neil and i pay for you so there's that i don't think we use gong anymore i think we switched a cheaper alternative a long time ago oh wow good for you oh gabriel does that answer your question you're good yes uh yeah it gives me a pathway now to start researching into this thank you okay perfect Cool.

14:14Well, look, I think that's it for today. Ezra's going to send you guys a survey just to see what we can do better here. Please be brutally honest with us. And we look forward to doing the next one. Thank you. Have a great weekend. Bye. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Thank you.