How To Systematize Referrals and AI Integration

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. you see it right now in the next, let's say 12 months is going to have some component of AI integrated into it, like all of it or 50 % to make it more efficient. On the marketing side, I see a lot, uh, you know, I've been using clay for also outreach by doing, um, scaling outreach and research data enrichment to, to find, you know, fine tune the, the audience and the people we reached out to um on the coding end my my folks you know some folks have been not everyone's been you know some people still like to hand crank everything but some of my team members they're able to you know more than 10x their productivity with you know the tools like code pilot and stuff like that yeah i'm seeing a lot of apps like that what I think everybody's trying to figure out how to implement AI into their products.

1:30And it's not always generative AI. It could be just features where AI is making it easier and giving more visibility into their product. We use a product called Waybook for onboarding employees. It's kind of like a notion kind of thing. but um it they're rolling out ai where like i have a new employee in california it'll spin up a california employee handbook um and then we look we can edit it then um and do that so it'll it's using ai to kind of help with the workflow that would normally hey i I need a handbook or an employee handbook for this state. Can you upload it? Now it's doing it for you, you know, kind of thing.

2:21So I'm seeing more and more of that kind of implementation of AI into the product workflow with a lot of the different tools that we use.

2:35Super cool. So any other tools or new discoveries that anyone would like to share this week?

2:46Noman, I saw you unmuted yourself. Yeah, I just had a quick question. It's like just kind of what people are using for doing follow-ups with leads and prospects, like what tools people are using. I'm trying to find things that are work within the Google workspace. So if there's anything, any ideas people have, I'd love to hear it. I use a human. It's been a great unlock for me. Like as we speak, you know, if I were to look at my inbox, things are being followed up on right now while I'm at this meeting. Yeah, just have an EA. Is that offshore or is that offshore? Offshore. Yeah. Offshore, but they work US hours.

3:36How do you manage security? I guess. Is there any sensitive information they get access to or no? Well, they, this is not like a, this is essentially like an offshore employee, a remote employee. Yeah. They have a salary. They have access. they have a seat in HubSpot. They have their own email to do follow-ups and for LinkedIn, they remote into a machine that the LinkedIn is logged in as me. And sometimes that gets logged out. I remote into that machine, do my two-factor authentication, but then they use LinkedIn on my behalf. They're too. So share the IP? Yeah, so they just remote desktop into that machine.

4:36So they don't actually have my LinkedIn login. And even if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to log in, you know, without the two-factor authentication. Yeah. Noman, you might want to look at a tool called SalesForza with a Z. I haven't personally used it. it was kind of pitched to me. It's kind of a CRM for Google Workspace. And it kind of has that mail merge built-in auto follow-up using Google Workspace. But I'm just pointing there. I can't, I haven't vetted it for you. So, but Salesforce.

5:21I'll see if I, here's a, I'll send, I'll put a link to a video, like a quick one minute or two minute video that explains it.

5:34And oops, no, that's not it.

5:41What I was going to say to you guys,

5:47if you're not already an addict, AppSumo addict, AppSumo is a great marketplace for agency owners. If you're on the forefront of tools and you get a lifetime usually offering to software that's pretty new, it's kind of not fully out in the marketplace yet. I look at it like buying crypto a little bit. It's kind of like I'm buying it at the bottom, and then about a year later, it's like really cruising along. um we got zapier years ago um full lifetime to zapier that came through app sumo so i've been a long time app sumo user i'm i've probably spent thousands of dollars on software but it's paid off because it's like being a vc every once in a while you'll land ones that are real and it and it allows you to play with them obviously because you don't you get 60 days for free to not free you pay for you get 60 days if you don't like it you can return it but um we've bought about five ai chat bots you know when ai chat bots were coming out there and uh that just really allowed us we have lifetime unlimited chat bots so we use them as demos uh to demo wow people and then we convert them to like a voice flow full ai chat bot kind of uh commercial system kind of thing so you'll find ways to use it.

7:14But if you haven't used AppSumo, become a member and check it out. Good recommendation, Kevin. For sure. Always being on the forefront. Okay. Awesome. Thank you for all the shares. I'm making sure to note everything here and I'm definitely going to post all those in the community. 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.

7:50The 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. 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.

8:20So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Something I thought might be fun today is to, if anyone has like a main challenge or an idea that they have, to do like a hot seat sort of a session. I'll pull up a timer. And the way that I've done these before is whoever's in the hot seat gets two minutes to explain their challenge or their idea. And at the two minute mark, other people are allowed to jump in. And then after that two minutes is up, there's a 10 minute window where everybody can ask questions, share relevant experience. The goal is to either solve the challenge with experience or an idea, or to take the idea and to 10X it.

9:03So just bring it to life, make it way bigger. And then at the end of 10 minutes, there's a one minute period that's kind of like a transition phase or like a recap phase or a tie up phase. And then whoever has the next one will immediately start with the next two minutes. So with the time we have, we'll only be able to do about two of them. But if somebody has like a main challenge that they're looking to solve right now, or an idea that they're kind of toying around with and want to take it off the ground, that would be awesome. Does anyone have something that comes top of mind. All right. Peck raised his hand.

9:35So let me pull up a timer here really quick. And that way we can... Whenever you add the time aspect to anything, it always makes it more fun, I think. Two minutes. Peck, you ready? Sure. Two minutes. Okay. Here we go. All right. So we found that referrals work and referrals probably are still number one source of revenue. So I've intentionally started a referral program. We hand crank it today. I'd like to scale that. It's currently about 20 % of our revenue. It's a very aggressive and generous referral program. It's like 10 % first year revenue. Our clients are, you know, we look for big ticket clients.

10:19So I'm curious, love any thoughts on how we would scale this. Ideally, I would like right now it's about 20 % of our revenue. Ideally, I'd like to flip that to make it 80 % of our revenue so that it's not, you know, that, that makes the business much more interesting in terms of it. It's, you know, customers coming in, not through, you know, our, our own actions, but being referred. So I'm curious if anybody had some thoughts on how they would approach this. any questions that follow up on that i can answer i think that's it let's start with the 10 minutes

11:04so pack just kind of real quickly repeat that like what's what are you wanting out of that you want yeah i'd love to think like how you know if referrals today is 20 of a revenue how do we you know and it's manual hand crank like me and my ea will follow up on referral power partners hey you're working on this you know how's that going you were going to introduce us to these people how's that going um i'm curious to see how one make this referral program much wider reaching much broader get more participation um you know right now it's mostly from my my network? What if we, you know, maybe is it possible to try to treat this as almost like an affiliate type thing where just people, they don't even know, but maybe they learn about Impeccable and see if they want to be a referral partner.

11:58But just, yeah, just any thoughts on how we would scale a referral partnership. I kind of have helped this with the client. And what we did is We kind of used, we created like not a newsletter, but communication with all the referral partners. And we shared case studies or use cases of successful referrals. Basically, we kind of took them through the journey. Like, hey, want to just announce that this month we worked with this partner and here's the journey that we went through. Because some people get stuck through the journey. They don't know where to make the introduction or just dump it off.

12:43Are they part of the journey through the thing? So the more you can help people understand that full journey that they're going to go on, I think, creates FOMO, too. The outcome is like, hey, now we both have more business together. And what's the outcomes that are there? um it most people we find take three to five of those before they start to jump on board but um you're you're subliminally injecting success stories into it and they people want to be part of successful uh journeys it's and it's kind of scary for people that have never done it to they probably have people but they just don't know what that looks like it's going to be any awkwardness in their relationship too.

13:31So we try to address those kinds of questions that come up. So that's something that we found has worked. I haven't done it for myself personally, but that was something we did with the client and it worked really well. Yeah. So Austin asked, what's your process like now? Yeah. So we, we identify folks who make my, you know, we, I pitch it to people. I look at their connections, you know, I have a sales navigator, so I can see if they're well connected, see if they're interested. I, you know, schedule a meeting with them. I kind of give them the overview, the TLDR. If they're interested, we do a lot of the heavy work lifting for them where I'll go, you know, my team will go into Sales Navigator, look at like their connections and say, hey, these people are a good fit.

14:19I then, we schedule another call where we go through those connections because they've already expressed interest. They want to go with this. So they want that handholding. So I go through the list and say, hey, who do you know well? And, you know, we start stack ranking those, the list I put together. And if they don't know them well at all, we just throw those away or cross them out. And then think, oh, I went to college as this one. This was my ex-co-worker. Oh, hey, this was my roommate, blah, blah, blah. Okay. They would totally take calls with that. And then, you know, we usually, if they ask, oh, how should we talk about Impeccable?

14:56We have case studies, we have decks, we have, you know, have a Google doc with talking points. So we have the partner playbook that I give them access to. And then when they have a question, I just real time answer it in the document so that it's always like this document that has tons of answers. The bottleneck in the process. Yes. Well, I guess, you know, think in thinking about what Kevin said, right, like sharing the some some people are more engaged than others. I kind of find this even within the referral partner list, right? There's like an 80 20 rule where some partners, you know, they say they're interested, and then they realize, oh, man, this is a lot of work to follow up on these.

15:41You know, at first, it sounds like good money, but then it's like, okay, I got to actually do some emailing and contacting. So it's like an 80, 20, some people will 20 % are engaged. We usually schedule, like try to schedule meetings, you know, two to three weeks out to say, Hey, okay, you said you were going to talk to these people. How's that going? How it's actually played out is some people, you know, they kind of just fall off and they never don't respond much. um and then even the people who refer they're not always engaged uh so like like successfully refer so some of my most successful partners i mean i haven't talked to one of them since may but and they're but they're getting checks they they'll email me like oh i refer you know hey where because they successfully referred you know the only time they contact me is like hey where's that check i was like okay well we haven't we're still waiting for the client to pay us um so so it's it's it's kind of weird that way um yeah but does that um other than financial yeah maybe status yeah we don't have a leader board or gamification we have added you know more milestone rewards to incentivize more quick wins to kind of gamify it a bit so in the past i don't know two three months we now added a 250 like if you say you know this person we we said this is an icp for us ideal customer we say hey i'd love an intro to this person they make that intro if that person takes a meeting um we we will pay 250 for that so and then we tell the the the referrer immediately saying hey they took the meeting you know we we need to pay you$250.

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19:54um yeah and i don't have anything productive to tell you because it sounds everything you're talking about is so good you know all my stuff just has to do with automation and you know website pages and stuff like that and i'm sure you've thought about this and your personal work one-on-one with these people you'd have to find somebody as good as you to help you do exactly right things. What you're describing is very good. In my opinion, it's just the problem is you, right? You're only one human. Yeah. No, I don't mean to be discouraging or anything. I think it's great. I was just, this is not what you're looking for.

20:35I'm sticking in the chat, but it's a referral program on a tool that I'm actively participating in. And I've been really impressed with what they've done. I don't know if there'll be anything inspirational in there. no right now it's hand cranked so there's no tool or automation so i'm i don't know of um yeah i'd love to see oh this looks like it's a hubspot form but uh yeah any good other good patterns where there's some automation or stuff i think would be great yeah you know we don't even have a partner referral page so that's one i mean that's the page and so i i go down the hubspot template and sequence this route, not into the automation of the email, but more long format email where maybe you're providing information for the case study and here's how, I think Kevin was talking about FOMO or whatever.

21:31Here's what other people have done with this. We're really interested in expanding our whatever, whatever. Here's these longer emails rather than the short like by my thing. And so, um, I mean, I would, I have had success with that, just totally flipping the script on, on these stupid little short, nasty emails. I think Kevin was talking about them, but as I go to my traditional tools, so I'm a wreck sometimes. Yeah. The FOMO does definitely work. You know, I, it's not an email form, but when, when I pitch it and I say, Hey, some of our partners, this is what they're making. And, you know, compared to, you know, this would be one minute, very transformational in terms of kind of where, you know, if they have a successful referral, this would be decent, non-trivial revenue for them, where, you know, I wouldn't say it's 100 % passive, but once, you know, that introduction is made, and these people buy, It's they're just collecting checks.

22:42So, so, but communicating that as an email and dripping that, I think, and getting them, keeping them that excitement, right? Versus just the initial pitch. I think it's important that we don't do today. I think Matt had something to chime in, maybe? Matt, if you're still there, a couple seconds. Yeah. I don't, I cannot do it in nine seconds, though. Don't worry about it. Yeah, so this is Matt, and I'm new to the group, so I just wanted to say hello. I'm the founder of Affomatic, and we are in Miami. And I would just say that you're looking at different groups of referrals. The best referrals are client referrals, former clients or current clients.

23:30when you think about agency partners these are very transactional referrals this is what you seem to be focused on I would say that again you just have to be transactional you have to give to get you have to offer financial incentives that's what you're already doing but I would encourage you to look at clients and former clients one strategy that is somewhat at scale that I've tested is to send out a survey to your clients. And this could be with the way we can approach that it was a client satisfaction survey. So are you enjoying working with Alphamatic? Are you happy with results? Yada, yada, yada.

24:13And you can just use Google Forms. We just use Google Forms and whatnot. And then we would put a question, how likely are you to refer Alphamatic to other clients? And first off, what this would trigger, it would trigger you being top of mind. Oh, maybe I should refer Alphamatic. I didn't think of it. Next time they speak to somebody, you might be top of mind. But also it would give you an indication that a client is likely to refer you. So you could call up the client. Hi, Bob. I noticed that. I really appreciate, first and foremost, that you would even think about referring automatic. It's really flattering.

24:50I would love to be able to maybe offer you a discount on maybe one month free of service or 50 % of one month if you refer a client and this client stays with us for three to six months. So you can still offer some incentive, obviously, with clients. It's a little bit different. Former clients, you can use it this way as well. And then your employees are a source of referral as well. So, you know, you can talk to your employees and the way I try to approach it. And we've had great clients that are own employees referred. We offer a financial incentive that is as long as they work with Affamatic, you know, they still getting that financial payments.

25:33And, you know, I encourage them. I look at the clients you used to work with, look at people you went to school with. I try to send them to conferences. You know, we print business cards for them and sort of empowering that group. I think the client group and the employee group is way more efficient in terms of time spent, in my view, than going after sort of like other agencies that are very transactional. And, you know, it's sort of like, you know, You don't really have an edge in a lot of these situations, unless you build great partnerships that can work as well. But I hope that this is useful.

26:14I don't know if anybody has any feedback. This is very useful. Yeah, I think this is, yeah, the employee thing is promising. I'm glad to, you know, you're not the first person to say this. And yeah. Cool. I'm glad. Awesome. Peck, out of all those, is there a string that you'd like to pull to maybe unravel that challenge moving forward? Well, I think there's a few action items on my end. You know, the easy ones is starting to share those stories at scale instead of, you know, during, you know, waiting to have that reconnect meeting to share those stories and just say, hey, this month, this client, you know, these clients, you know, these referrals, partners may, you know, you know, kind of call them out, right?

27:09And maybe share some wins so that it inspires them. and then on the employee side I think yeah when maybe bringing it up on one on one in fact right after this call I have a one on one so I was just gonna as Matt was talking I was like oh I should you know pull on that thread and see if the employee would be interested yeah awesome

27:43Thank you.