Unlock $1M Revenue: Proven Strategies for Agency Success

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. we'll keep it we'll move it to open forum questions yeah so quick question on the cross selling right i know eric has talked about this in the past where you want more of like a surgeon as like and i'm sorry maybe not a surgeon um a guy that's a specialist yeah yeah um would you want an account manager to upsell those in the back end those different services or do you want the sales guy that initially sold him in the beginning to later in the contract to come in their check back in? No, once a sale happens, you ideally want the account managers to upsell because they're building the relationship on a monthly basis.

1:07You also, when account manager sales, it doesn't feel like a sales pitch versus a salesperson. It's just like, yeah, we're doing this. Have you ever thought about doing this? We've helped other customers and here are the results. Like, you know, you're an ideal candidate for it. And we're seeing X, Y, and Z, especially after you get into the project within a month or two and you can show them something, it makes it really easy for the account manager to upsell more because they're building the relationship. And then, so right now we use a lot of overseas help, right? You would not recommend to use overseas account managers for US-based clients now?

1:39No. You can use overseas help to do a lot of the work, but you should have the account manager be really good in US-based, if it's US-based companies. The reason being is even if it costs more, people spend more money paying a good account manager by a lot, even if the exact results are the same and the service is the same. One of the biggest reasons for churn, even when people get results, is because of the account manager. Okay. Cool. Enrique, you good on that one? Yeah, that's pretty much it. All right. Aliyah, you had a follow-up. Yeah, I think it's the same with what Nathan and other guys had also, that there's one other guy within our group he said that to break through from six to seven figures he started to focus on one thing and focus was the key to grow basically but you mentioned that we have to have we have to have multi-service and I'm right now I'm doing multi-service I'm doing full custom based service I'm doing everything for the companies that I'm working for because it's the business problem that I'm solving.

2:52So they need every solution for that. But I would say at what point would you go multi-service if you're starting from focusing on one thing? And yeah, I'm just trying to have that. So you can look at focuses many different ways. Some look at focuses as I just do SEO. A better way to run a business is I do marketing for e-commerce businesses, D to C. And then you sell them multiple services for that. Or you could just start off saying, I do SEO for e-commerce. And once you're starting to get revenue traction, you have happy customers and you're driving results. And you got the processes and the frameworks down where your team is performing well.

3:34It's not about the revenue numbers. It's about how well they're performing. And do they have it down where you don't worry if they get another customer? Do you need to be in there and doing the work yourself because your team can't form but assuming they got it locked down then you can start introducing new services not all of them at the same time one at a time instead right right okay makes sense all right mario you're up yeah it's actually building upon what alien asked and some of the other guys and girls here essentially you know there's that common adagio that you need to offer one thing and that's kind of how you sell you know your niche you specialize in all that stuff but then again you You go to seven and eight and nine figures with a broad portfolio instead.

4:18So like in our case, we have retainers spanning from$3 ,000 a month to$30 ,000 a month. And they're already higher ticket than some folks that sell link building or some cheaper services. So the question is, especially now in that slower economy, does it make any sense whatsoever to start with a low ticket service so that you can lure the clients in and then you start working with the account managers to upsell? because as you said, it's more about upselling and cross-selling and less about lending new clients. So this makes sense. Introducing a cheaper service just to lure in more clients and then onboard them with the more expensive services, or would that distract that with low ticket?

4:57No, no, no. That is actually the right approach. So we try to work mainly with enterprise companies. We'll take accounts that only pay us$2 ,000 a month. Enterprise, no joke. We have an account with a 90 plus billion dollar company, not million, billion at$2 ,000 a month. The reason we take that on is if you can produce results, you can land and expand to multiple regions, service offerings, etc. But the key here is the client has to be the right type of client. If you're working with the SMB, let's say a plumbing company in a localized region, and they can only afford$2 ,000, grand, it's hard to upsell them and cross sell them when they don't have a budget because they're only making$300 ,000 a year in revenue.

5:38So they can't spend more than call it 20 grand or 24 grand a year with you. The point I'm getting at is the land and expand is the way actually most agencies grow, but you have to make sure you're getting the right type of accounts. If you're already taking up 10 % of someone's revenue in marketing fees, but it's very little that they're paying you, you're not going to land and expand much at all. Plus they're a pain in the ass. Right. But it's okay to start at two grand a month and then move to 50K, right? I mean, since they're already an enterprise and stuff. It's not a two - We're a nine-figure agency and I still will take on accounts at$2 ,000 a month if I know they're the right fit and I can get them to millions of dollars a year.

6:18I don't want to, but I will. 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, 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.

6:53And 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. We're open forum questions now. So if you got something you can unmute and just ask. Well, I actually have a following question just for the previous one, because you're starting a lower rate for the initial services? No, no, no. Are they going to accept like higher?

7:27Not a lower rate for the initial services. You're charging whatever you would charge for the work to be done and maintaining your profit margins. So if you're normally charged five grand for X, Y, and Z work, but they want to pay three grand, maybe you can do it for X and Y and you leave out Z. And they know that, right? Because you still want to maintain your margins and be respectful of your business. You don't want to give away X, Y, and Z that you normally charge five grand for three grand because you're going to crush your margins. Or if you maintain your margins, you're not going to do a good job because they're not paying you enough, which means they're not going to be happy and they're going to turn anyways.

8:04I just want to clarify that really quickly, but sorry for interrupting you. Thank you so much. Just to add something real quick before you go, Matt. So Amber, this might help with your last question or two questions before, but Neil was mentioning. So we've talked about this on the podcast, but Neil's personal brand basically capped out for him at$10 million in annual revenue. And, you know, it's interesting because our mutual friend, Alex Hermosey, he made a video recently talking about how he went too wide with his content and it was just getting a lot of like random people and it wasn't helpful talking about diet, talking about relationships and things like that.

8:40He made it go back to business. And even I texted him last week i was like dude i actually watch your stuff again right and i'm sure neil what you start watching his stuff again because before he went too wide and now it's like it's focused again so i think if we're to start from scratch today it would be very focused content neil does a better job of that than i do he just focuses on talking about marketing the whole time literally all his content is just marketing right um so that hopefully that helps a little bit amber because even even alex who i think is a one of the top creators at the moment at least in business has like really focused in.

9:11But Matt, go ahead. Yeah, so I'm going to change topics a little bit. Neil, earlier in the call, you made a comment about a business that said they had grown 5 % over five or six years and that's not even keeping up with inflation. We had to increase our rates last year due to inflation. And we had a couple of clients who didn't increase their budgets. We increased our rates, they didn't increase their budget. So I'm wondering, now we're getting them to finally increase their budget six months later because we had to decrease the number of hours that were working, right? I'm wondering if you have any tips on how to manage that when we're seeing these inflations going up so quickly, right?

9:50How do you keep raising your rates, right? There's no way to manage that easily. You more so have to just have straightforward conversations with people and just being like, hey, I know we're coming up for renewal. This is what we can do. And instead of saying we need to raise rates due to inflation, you talk about what else you can offer them and pitch that. And if they say, Oh, I just want to renew at the same, be like, look, we can do that, but we'll have to offer X, Y, and Z less because of inflation and costs are continually rising, which it sucks. And I don't want to, but I don't have a choice.

10:24And if I don't, then I'm not going to really be able to provide you the service that you need. And you're not going to be happy and you're not going to get the results. I'd rather just be transparent with you. And you'll find that a lot of people will be okay with that. and they'll be happy that you're transparent. As long as you're not gouging them, right? Inflation didn't go up 10 % in a year where you need to increase their pricing 10 % or reduce the hours by 10%. But as long as it's realistic, people shouldn't have an issue. Yeah. Thank you. Well, thanks, Matt. Scott, go for it. Yeah. Follow-up question to internationalization, I guess.

10:55So fascinating topic, but it kind of makes sense in the agency sense is that the way you do it is you go into the region, you acquire an agency there, maybe it's smaller, but it serves the local market. So your expenses are by local standards are the way they're supposed to. But if we were to look at our clients, mostly we work with SaaS. They obviously focus a lot on North America, but then they get a ton of opportunities outside of North America, like in India, for example, a ton of traffic. What do you see from your clients in terms of going international? I know this is not so much agency, but when they go international, they can't bring their talent over there and serve the software for cheaper.

11:33ish, how do they approach the problem of going into growing GDP markets? Yeah. So a lot of them will either A, maintain the similar pricing or B, they'll come up with a different variation of a plan. The reason it has to be different is because they can't offer the same exact thing for a cheaper price. You have to remember software has high margins. You build a software once you can keep selling it and the cost isn't that high. So a lot of clients will take out a few features, but drastically reduce the price for other localized regions. And we found that to be a very effective approach. You know, look at Netflix's pricing globally, it'll give you ideas of how to really price in some of those regions.

12:10Okay, so less features, less price, just okay. Yeah. And you got to adapt the currency to their local currency. Most of these players like Adyen, Stripe, etc. will accept multiple currencies that really helps increase the conversions as well. Yeah, that's what started to come up with conversations regional pricing uh like charging in usd if even if you charge lower the conversion rates are still there so you have to go and offer them something in their right okay makes sense yep alian uh my point is uh if you're starting from scratch now at what growth rate uh per year do you think that you can run a marketing agency i just want to know that number and uh and see where I'm not good at.

12:57I don't have a real number for you. I think it's tough. It's so pie in the sky. And also in this economy, you're not going to grow as much. It's just a terrible economy for agencies. I'm just telling you guys the truth versus telling you guys can grow up 50 % a year. If you're starting from scratch, sure, you'll grow. And if you're starting from$10 ,000 a year, sure, you'll grow and you can grow by leaps and bounds. But it is a tough economy right now to maintain customers, to get new customers. Just the economy globally is terrible. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency.

13:32So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Wait, wait, wait, wait. quick show of hands real quick raise your hand if you think the economy is good right now brian david nathan okay david you haven't spoken so david why do you think it's a good economy right now um i can only speak to what's going on on my end where things really slowed down and then now like at least in b2b sas people are starting to spend again and maybe it's just by nature of like the segment that we're going after where they didn't raise that ridiculous valuations and now cutting back.

14:25So I have a pretty small slice of the view. And I do agree with you in certain sectors and industries, it's booming. Like if I was an agency in India and just focus on the local India market, I would be like, the economy is great. It really depends on the industry you're in and who you're selling to. But B2B SaaS has been pretty resilient, especially enterprise. especially the ones with low churn and a good economy, bad economy. Sure. Their valuations may have gone down, but they still have paying customers and they're still, you know, growing, especially the ones with a net negative churn, you know, they're making more money, even if they don't get new customers.

15:03Well, also the B2B software recession was 2022. So they've kind of started to happen like a recovery started to happen like last year. Koush, you're going to be the final question. Cause we're four minutes over, over here. We just want to give you a little more value, but Koush, go ahead. 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.

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16:16Excellent. Super. So I wanted to know if there's an offline brand that doesn't have a website or anything, they have a physical store, it might be a premium brand. What kind of marketing digital strategies would you implement for them? Because it's hard to measure whether the conversion is happening through your efforts or not. You can show engagement, but how do you actually in the end show that the final walk-in happened because of you? have a store locator page and then also do google my business and all the local listings but have a store locator page on the website and you can show how many people are actually going to that and you can also start showing stats and data on how many people are searching for their business and addresses and stuff like that and you can attribute a lot of that to digital marketing so i'll add a little more context of you so there are jewelry brands very big jewelry brands in India.

17:07These are not necessarily the brands that have websites of their own while they have the budgets to make them. But that target audience is a lot of people who don't really actively use digital platforms that easily, right? So they might have just started adopting a lot of Instagram and Facebook, but they're not the people who click on a link, go onto a website, go onto a store locator page. And what do you do in such situations? What you have to do is you just have to do brand recall studies. Hey, how'd you learn about us? Where'd you find out about us? Where'd you first see us? And I would really emphasize social media and show them the engagement, the likes, the followers, all that kind of stuff.

17:45Cause you're like, look, your brand's getting out there for more and more people as well. And then also do brand recall studies. Hey, have you followed us on social media? Even, even if they say, Oh, I didn't come in because I saw something on Instagram. You can ask them, do you follow us on Instagram? Do you see our stuff? It all gives signals that, hey, the marketing is working, you're staying top of mind. I can know about a store, but I could forget about that jewelry store. And then when I want to buy a piece of jewelry, I will probably pick whatever's top of mind, right? That's how a lot of people are with their purchasing decisions.

18:16Cool. So for two things before we go here. So one, let me just wrap up the economy thing. So one thing is, you know, at least in the United States, we lost 685 ,000 jobs in May. Inflation is still sticky. The yield curve is still inverted, right? And then you have this banking crisis that has been sitting for a while. Commercial real estate is another one, right? And then for, at least for Neil and I, I think we get to see, you know, our lead flow and then we get to see customers that are churning too. So you look at your own business too. And then you also talk to other people too, right? So I think the main thing is you get your own information.

18:48You have to learn to think for yourself and then you jump to your own conclusions. the final thing is Ezra's going to send you all a survey for this one so we're looking forward to doing more of these in future bringing in guest speakers as well and we want to continue to improve the product here but thank you all for your time hope you enjoyed this and have a good rest of your week