Clarity trumps persuasion, with Stephen Woessner.

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Build a Better agency, where we show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees, and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of expertise as both an agency owner and agency consultant to you, please welcome your host, Drew McClellan.

Drew McClellan:

Hey everybody. This is drew McClellan, and I am stoked to be with you today. I know how tough agency ownership is because I am still walking that path right next to you with my own agency, but along with running MMG for the past 20 years, I also work with over 200 small to mid-size agency owners every year, helping them improve their businesses, and as a result the life that business affords them. The Build a Better Agency podcast is my way of extending that work and trying to help more agency owners just like you.

But today I want to dive right into our conversation with my guest, Stephen Woessner. Stephen, thank you for joining us today.

Stephen Woessner:

Well Drew, thanks very much for the invitation. Very kind of you, and I’m excited about the conversation. I think it’s going to be awesome.

Drew McClellan:

I think it is going to be awesome. So for those of you who are not familiar with Stephen, Stephen is the CEO of Predictive ROI and the host of the Onward Nation podcast, which is really brilliant. He is the author of two bestselling books. He’s a speaker, a trainer, and his digital marketing insights have been featured in all kinds of places like Success, Entrepreneur, The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc Magazine and other places. He also is the CEO of the agency Predictive ROI. Stephen, what else does my audience need to know about you?

Stephen Woessner:

Well, I think that maybe what makes us a little bit unique and different is the fact that we blend a lot of this education, private sector or public sector I guess, education academia, because of my backer around at the University of Wisconsin, the Lacrosse Campus, into the fact of blending it into an agency. And so we have this model, as you know, that we just really love to teach in a very fully transparent way. And, and sometimes we get criticism from that. It’s like, “Why would you teach this stuff? Why are you giving all this stuff away?” But I really love to teach and share. And so we have very transparent recipes. We take people behind the green curtain and teach them exactly what we do for search engine optimization, and I love to do that. So I think that, aside from the fact that we guarantee increases in traffic leads and sales, I think the fact that we’re so transparent about what it is that we do, we actually train our clients on what it is that we do, I think all of that blended together makes us unique and different.

Drew McClellan:

Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because I think for a lot of clients, the whole SEO thing and anything that sort of happens digitally on the web, it feels a little bit mysterious and scary. And so I suspect that your willingness to open the kimono allows them to build trust much quicker with you. That they understand what you’re doing and it’s not some secret potion, or worse yet, that you’re not doing anything and they’re paying for nothing. Right?

Stephen Woessner:

Yeah. That’s actually a great way to put it. I’ve actually had more than one client or perspective client say to me, when I said that we will do this for a period of 12 months, we will guarantee increases in traffic leads in sales, and during that process will actually teach you all of the recipes, all the strategies, all the ideas, all the tactics, all the step by step ingredients of stuff that we’re doing. So you know exactly what it is that we’re doing and how we drove those result outcomes. And we will transfer all of that stuff over to you at the end of 12 months. We’ll just give it all to you so that you can take it in house if you want to, and literally that CEO said to me, “Where did you come from? Why would you do that?” And my response is, “Why would we not? That’s kind of awesome to be able to do that.” And by the way, we still continue to work with that company after that 12 months, because that really builds trust, being able to do that. Being fully transparent, or using your words, opening the kimono.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. Well, I think the misperception, and I think a lot of agencies and agency owners have this, is if they share their secret sauce and show a client how they do what they do, they’re going to want to do it themselves. But the reality is most clients don’t have the time or the energy or the focus, and they would rather spend the money and let the expert do it. But it is reassuring to know how it’s being done.

Stephen Woessner:

I think you said it perfectly. That is exactly what our experience has been, that when you’re fully transparent, that when you show your client it’s not mystic dark magic voodoo, and you share those recipes, they look at it and say, “Oh okay, this isn’t mystic. Dark magic voodoo. I don’t have the time or the bandwidth, or quite frankly, the interest in mastering this now that I know that, what it is that you’re actually doing, then just go get on with it, increase our traffic leads and sales will be how happy to continue paying you just do that.

Drew McClellan:

Right, right. Well, this all leads into the idea that really predictive ROI is a different kind of model for an ad agency, or a marketing agency. It’s sort of the new wave of how agencies are beginning to think about how to talk about the work they do and the results they deliver for clients. And so my perception of predictive is that you’re an agency that is all about measuring and delivering results. So talk to us a little bit about that model, and why you think it resonates with your clients and business owners in general today, and what agency owners, particularly traditional agency owners, maybe a branding agency, or an agency that has won a lot of creative awards, how they need to think differently about how they interact with their clients.

Stephen Woessner:

Boy, there’s a lot of really great questions in there to unpack and to build a conversation around. And I think why it’s of interest first with an owner, a business owner, is because that’s what they care about. That’s the income statement, that’s the P&L. And so this kind of cost per acquisition, or the sales model, or guaranteed sales, when other agencies are like running away from that, we run toward it, because that’s where you can then command a premium price. When you tackle the biggest pain point, and also the biggest pleasure point too if you’re successful, but the biggest pain point in a business owner’s business, if you can confidently you do that, well then you’re no longer a vendor. You truly are a partner because you’re moving the needle in the right direction.

And so the reason why I think we’ve been successful with that and being able to charge a premium fee to be able to deliver that is because we’re conquering the biggest fear, the biggest pain point, the biggest challenge in that business owner’s business. And I would encourage other agencies to consider that.

Look, our model’s not for everybody. We’re burning the candle at both ends. We are moving at a pace and tempo that is uncommon, and I get the fact that there are not maybe a bunch of agency owners around the country saying, “Oh yeah, I’m totally all in for that.” I get that. But I think the reason why I would encourage other agency owners, no matter what your specialty is, to consider something like that, either a hybrid or maybe the model itself, is because at some point your business owners, your clients, will demand that of you.

We’re getting into, and we’re already in there, but we’re getting to the point where agency owners, or excuse me, business owners will say, “No, I really appreciate the track record of creative. That’s awesome. And I’m not trying to take that away from you, agency principle, but how does that make me more money? How does that generate more traffic leads and sales, and how will you be act that up? How will you measure that? Everything from the initial opt-in or somebody just going to a landing page all the way through to my transaction? My cash register ringing.” And if you can’t do that, I think at some point, you’ll lose.

And so I don’t think it’s me saying that, that should be the reason that you jump into this, or to maybe transition your agency toward that. It’s your clients that will force you into that at some point, whether that’s now, five years from now, whatever. But it’s coming.

Drew McClellan:

Well, one of the things that I do for AMI network members for the agencies that belong to an AMI network, is I talk to them about the trends and what I’m seeing across all of the agencies that I work with. And without a doubt, you’re absolutely right. One of the things I’m seeing are the agencies that are the most profitable, and that have the least client turnover, are the agencies who are inside their client sales funnel with them, and are able to document and measure how the work the agency is doing is moving people through the sales funnel. And especially those agencies that can tie it directly to a closed sale, those agencies are knocking it out of the park. So you’re absolutely right that it is not only coming, but for many agencies, the time is here and it’s now.

Stephen Woessner:

Amen to that. And you just really articulated our relationship with clients perfectly. We’re so intimately involved. We are helping our clients hire, and sometimes fire say sales team. We are helping them train sales team. We are so involved in the vital metrics up and down that funnel in helping them optimize those things, in various different ways and strategies and so forth, and in our world, we call those recipes, but we are so intimately involved in the customer experience, their customer experience, because we’ve got skin in the game. And also it’s pretty darn fun being involved in all those different things. But also, I think mostly the traditional agency would look at that and say, “Well, that’s a client’s responsibility,” and that’s not the way that we look at it.

We look at it as we’re a team, and if we jump in with some of our experience in other industries before predictive, and we can apply it here to make improvements, then we’re going to do that, and we’re going to help our client win no matter what it is that we have to do. But I understand that would create some indigestion for some agency owners.

Drew McClellan:

A valid point. But let’s talk about from an agency’s perspective. And again, from an agency that’s a little more traditional in its structure, what are some things that they can do around this idea of being results focused? What are some things that they can do or begin to think about that will allow them to at least begin to weave that thinking into the DNA of their agency?

Stephen Woessner:

Well, here’s what’s interesting. Sometimes it isn’t necessarily this big technical shift. Sometimes it’s just a little bit more of awareness and paying attention to the vital metrics, and being able to measure them all the way through. And so we’ve got these 23 different recipes, and so we can … Is it okay if we just talk about out a few of them? Is that alright?

Drew McClellan:

Absolutely.

Stephen Woessner:

Okay. And so it’s been my experience that one of the most expensive, and we take some of those recipes and we break those down into what we call money draining mistakes. These are things where we find business owners or businesses where they’re just leaking money out of their business, just money falling out of the bottom of the boat essentially. And so the first one that tends to be the most expensive is bounce rate.

Now, I know that in of itself, maybe some agency owners, maybe some of your listeners are rolling their eyes. “Yeah. Okay. We you’ve heard bounce rate before.” But let me break that down to be more specific about what I mean by that. And so the typical quote unquote “Unoptimized website,” if you will, has a bounce rate of between 50 to 60%. And sometimes landing pages have bounce rates of between 70 and 80%. And if you’re doing paid traffic to a landing page and it’s getting 80% bounce rate, what in the world is going on there? Something’s going on. And so our goal for bounce rate is about 30%.

And so what we have found over time is that if we can reduce the bounce rate of a particular landing page, let’s say, from a 50 to 60% down to 30%, and there’s a paid campaign there, you can essentially keep the paid budget the same, but by reducing bounce rate, your conversion rate actually goes up. And the only thing you changed was making that a better experience. And so we have a three step process, or three ingredients to reducing bounce rate. And I’ll tell you what they are right now. And so the first one is X, Y, Z. We put an XYZ statement on a page, so that very simply, the customer avatar knows they’re in the right place. And so XYZ means we do X for Y, so they can Z. Meaning we, as in the company, we do X. X being the products of services. I know that sounds really fundamental, but hopefully the owners listening right now, or agency staff listening right now will take that and go, “Do we have an X, Y, Z on these landing pages?”

And so we do X, X being the products of services for Y, and Y being the customer profile. So somebody goes and says, “Oh, okay, you do this. Oh, and you do it for me. Awesome. And so now I’ll stay.” And then so they can Z, and Z being the result outcome. If I stay on this page, because you’re doing this, this product our service for me, and I need that, and then so Z, so that I can do this, and this is how my life improves.

And so then just by having the X, Y, Z clearly defined, bounce rate can go down by 10% in two days.

Drew McClellan:

Wow.

Stephen Woessner:

So then we take that deeper though. We eliminate visual clutter. Don’t give the avatar are 15 things to think about, give them three. Remove the options. Still give them options, but instead of 15 it’s three. And, and then just very, very clear calls to action. Dr. Flint McLaughlin, from Marketing Experiments and Mec labs … It was so amazing. He and I did a video interview together when I was in Jacksonville at their headquarters. And he said to me, he goes, “Stephen, clarity always trumps persuasion.” I’m like, “Oh, so stop trying to be cute. Stop trying to be overly creative. Tell the avatar what they need to do and how to do it, and they will.”

So if we follow those three steps, bounce rate goes down to about 30% or less, your lead gen goes up, and you haven’t spent any more money. So that would be a real quick thing to fix. And then I can certainly share any additional recipes you think would be helpful. We can do as deep of a dive as you want to, Drew.

Drew McClellan:

Well, it’s interesting when you say that. First of all, I’m sure there are a lot of agency folks who cringe at the idea that being clever and being creative doesn’t matter. And I know that’s a hard pill to swallow for all of us who came up through the business, and it’s not that there’s not a place for it. There will always be a place for great copy and great design. It’s just that it can’t get in the way of the sale.

Stephen Woessner:

Yeah. And that’s absolutely the right perspective. You’re a 100% correct. And so on a longer term nurturing campaign, or some sort of brand awareness campaign, or whatever, there definitely is a place for it. In our world, we are working on really immediate lead gen. Typically, a business owner wants to go from X to Y in a 12 month period of time. And so we’re essentially on the clock, if you will, in our model. “Stephen, I want your predictive ROI team to ignite my leads in this period of time. This is what the conversion metrics are for my sales team, and if you do that and we do this, wow, we’re going to make magic happen.”

And so that tends to be our world, which I know is not suitable and appropriate for every owner who’s listening to this interview, but that’s what really drives our model.

Drew McClellan:

So thinking about one of your other recipes, or one of the other sort of methodologies that I think you guys have mastered, that a lot of agencies really struggle with, is the whole idea of the scorecard. So even if you’re not doing any work with a client online, just the idea of identifying, “Hey client, let’s mutually agree upon how we are going to measure whether or not we’re being successful together.” So talk to us a little bit about that and your scorecard calls. And again, think of this in terms of the agencies that have clients that don’t do transactions online, or may not even be doing a lot of things other than brochure-ware on their websites, but who are doing business in brick and mortar stores, or sales people out in a territory, that sort of thing. Because I still think your scorecard is perfectly applicable to those kinds of agencies and those kind of clients.

Stephen Woessner:

Okay. We just had one of those calls, this morning at 7:30, where we are going through the vital over the last several weeks with a particular client. And so we start at the top end of the funnel and we look at, “Okay, how many ebook downloads did we have?” Okay, now that’s not an online transaction, it’s an online opt-in obviously. But how many ebook transactions did we have? I’m just going to turn around real quick and look at my whiteboard. And we had 118 ebook opt-ins. Awesome. So very top end of the funnel. Now we can start to nurture that relationship. And out of those eBooks, we then have … Once you download the ebook, then you get this opportunity to take that for further, right away, and that ignites our lead gen. Plus then we also have targeted ads going to that landing page as well.

And so then we take that further. So how many leads do we generate? And it was 199. And so in that few week period, there was 199 potential lead … Or not potential, but people raise their hand. And then that goes over to our sales team. And from that, how many of those opportunities then converted into actual demos of the service? And that was then 45. And so out of the 45, how many of those demos then converted into new clients? And that was 23. And so at the top end, we took in 199 new leads. We converted 23 at the back end, which was 11.5% conversion rate.

There isn’t anything mystic dark magic voodoo about that process. It’s just understanding the metrics and how the client makes money. Now we do use is a CRM. We do use Infusionsoft. So all of that stuff was in Infusionsoft, but then we’re just able to serve that up in a scorecard, and then being able to understand what lever do we need to pull to accelerate those things up and down the funnel? And so it’s not overly complicated. It’s just the fact that we have the discipline to do that, and we know what our client’s numbers are all the time, because we have access to that data. And then like I said, we know what knob to turn and what button to push to accelerate results, or to bring results back, which I know sounds odd, but let’s say that a person leaves the sales team. Well, we don’t want to have to 200 leads flowing to people if they’re not there. So we do need to regulate lead flow from time to time, either up or down.

Drew McClellan:

My point, I think, is that even if none of that happens online, the idea of having a scorecard, of having an agreed upon set of metrics, that, “Here’s how we’re going to measure.” And I know, I guarantee you that half the agency owners listening to this say, “I don’t have any of that. When we ask our clients what their conversion numbers are, they don’t know.” Or when we ask our clients how long their sales cycle is, they don’t know. And I think your response would be, then you got to help them figure it out. Right?

Stephen Woessner:

Yeah. You’re exactly correct. Not only do you have to figure that out, but I love when that happens. Because now your client has just in code said to you, “I don’t know. I sure wish I knew. Could you help me?” And so we look at that as like, “Okay, that is awesome. What a great opportunity to jump in.” Because the numbers are there, the data’s there. They just don’t know how to find it, where to get it, how to calculate it, and what does it all mean? And that is a huge, huge, huge opportunity for us when that happens.

Drew McClellan:

Well, and again, even none of it happens online. So let’s say you’re marketing a regional law firm and you are sending out paper invites to how to build a will, that will protect you and your family seminar, that’s going to be held at a hotel. It could be so down and dirty old school, but the point is still being able to say, “Okay, if we want to have this many sales, how many people need to be at the seminar?” And if we want to have this many people at the seminar, being able to help a client walk that backwards, to really understand what they have to put in the top of the funnel to get out what they want at the bottom of the funnel, and then measuring that all the time, and being able to tie your at activity and your efforts to those numbers is what makes an agency not have to worry about another agency poaching their business.

Stephen Woessner:

Amen. And in the metrics that I gave to starting at 1.99, moving all the way down to 23-25 transactions, that was all offline, by the way. Those were not 25 sales made online. We generated the leads online, moved those over to the offline to sales team. And then the online essentially stopped. And we have a funnel in place, as far as nurturing them all the way through the process. So there is a little bit of nudge, essentially digitally. But after that, we generate the leads, move them to the sales team, sales team then moves them through the demo. The demo’s not online, moves them through then to starting, becoming a customer. That is not online.

So I think maybe one of our gifts that maybe I’m not naturally aware of, or maybe that I should say that I take for granted, is the fact that we understand that it’s not just an online in an offline ecosphere. It isn’t just digital anymore, or just offline, or traditional anymore. I think the agency of tomorrow, or the ones that are winning today, recognize that it’s a totally holistic ecosphere. It’s not moving them from online to offline, it’s just a blending of that. And so we pay attention to that constantly, because it matters.

Drew McClellan:

Well, it’s no different. If we thought about the business world the way we think about our own lives, how many of us sit on our couch, watching TV with an iPad in our lap immediately, and without thinking about it, blending the offline and the online? And that’s the reality of our world today. There are no two separate worlds. It’s just that they have completely interacted and are completely interwoven into each other. And that’s the way life happens today.

Stephen Woessner:

Amen. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Drew McClellan:

Okay. So all of that being said, as you know, and some of the listeners probably don’t know this about you, but not only do you serve clients directly, but you also partner with agencies. And I know you’ve partnered with some AMI agencies to teach them your methodology, and to help them bring these recipes or these practices into the work that they do with clients. And I suspect that some agencies have been more receptive to this than others. And so my question to you is, given what we know about the business landscape today, and how demanding and ROI focused clients are, tell me why an agency or an agency owner would push back on this idea, and why it might be difficult for some agencies to adopt this sort of mindset and methodology that you’re talking about.

Stephen Woessner:

Well, that’s an awesome question. Really cuts to the core of it. And really, it isn’t because what we do is very hard, or that it’s mystic dark magic voodoo. And I don’t mean to simplify our model. It is complex, but it isn’t the inability to learn it, I guess is the point that I’m making. And it really just comes down to maybe the culture within the agency, how the agency has grown over time. And is it more of a creative shop versus a digital shop that’s rightly aligned with what we do right away? Because there has been an experience before where an agency owner has asked us to help. And so we did, and we ended up just conceptually or philosophically butting heads with a very strong creative director, strong personality within that agency, because that particular creative director felt creative is what drove the shop. And for many years and decades, it did. And that creative director felt that, he knew the customer avatar and should be able to what great creative was. It didn’t matter what the data said. It didn’t matter that after that landing page was created, there was still a 60 to 70% bounce rate, and that the lead gen was awful. And in our world, if the lead gen is awful and remains awful, you get fired.

So there has to be a willingness to able to make decisions that are based on data, make decisions based on these vital metrics, versus what creative ought to be or what you think it should be, because what matters is the performance of that creative. And so if an agency owner is open to that and changing everything that’s necessary in order to align with that, then awesome. We’ll win. If an agency owner says, “We need to be able to do that within the construct of this and you can’t change anything else,” then I think you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Drew McClellan:

Well, I think for a lot of agencies the challenge is how do you blend the two? So it’s not that good creative, as we said earlier, isn’t important. It’s just what is the ultimate job of the agency with this client? And that’s where that scorecard idea really aligns, both the agency and the client, with, “This is what we’re trying to accomplish.” And anything that gets in the way of accomplishing those things needs to be considered a barrier that should be removed. Not something that is enhancing the process.

Stephen Woessner:

Yeah, that’s a great clarification. Because I sure don’t want to seem to your listeners that I’m anti-great creative, because that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I grew up in this business, mostly on the account side, but with that said, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an appreciation for really wonderful creative. In our world now it is how that creative performed, and if it didn’t perform, then how come? It’s not that we just throw that out and start over, but what could be changed? And we test everything about that creative. Everything from headline and imagery or photos, and colors and all of that stuff. And so the agency that really rightly aligns with this has to be able to have the mindset of saying, “Okay, there are no sacred things.” That everything is up for change, and it’s awesome that we have this sort of creative style that we want to adhere to, but we also have to recognize is it’s okay that we’re going to make these changes and so forth. That it’s not put into stone that we can’t change this thing. We can change everything else except for this over here. That just puts too many constraints.

Drew McClellan:

Okay. We talked about a little bit about the resistance to doing this, and although I’m a little loath to follow it up with this question, I want to make sure that we dig into this. I suspect that things have not gone perfectly at your agency, and that on occasion you have bumped into a brick wall or two around this methodology and around the work you do with clients. So what I’m going to ask you to do is talk to us about a mistake or two that you’ve made, that in hearing it other agency owners can hopefully avoid some of the pain that I’m sure the mistake cost you.

Stephen Woessner:

Oh yeah. And just in being fully transparent, as I always try to be, unless I forgot something. Sure. I sure don’t mind admitting that there has been a project that we missed on, and we fully guarantee. So there is a time where I did have to write the check back, and that’s a painful process. And what we learned through that is sure that was really bumpy. And there were some missed data points in the beginning. And then a client didn’t introduce five new products like they thought that they might, and I didn’t hold them accountable. And so absolutely there are … And there are instances too, where the checkpoint meetings it’s not all unicorns running through the meadows. Sometimes we’re not performing at the level and the intensity that we ought to be. And so then we have to dig in and make rapid changes.

And sometimes we’re far exceeding our goal, and we accomplish our goal in advance of what we expected. But that doesn’t always happen. And so absolutely there are bumps in the road, which is why in the process that we have set up is we have tactical, checkpoint meetings every two weeks that are much more like production meetings. But we also have ROI scorecard meetings every 30 days so that our client feels comfortable. That they can call us on the carpet if need to be, or that we can celebrate big wins. And so it’s very, very important to make sure that we keep our vital metrics, in clear and present view so that we can make rapid adjustments because sometimes that is very necessary. It is not all smooth as silk all the time.

Drew McClellan:

Okay. So I want to pick at that scab a little bit, because I want you to get more specific.

Stephen Woessner:

Okay.

Drew McClellan:

A couple things. One, first for the listeners benefit, predictive ROI in their contract says to a client, after doing some due diligence and finding out what some of those metrics are, “Look client, here’s the deal. Here’s going to be your monthly fee. You’re going to pay that monthly fee for a year. We promise to deliver X.” So some exponential growth over these metrics. “So if let’s say your fee is going to be …” I’m just going to make up a number. “$50,000, then you’re going to have $150,000 in new ROI. And if we don’t do that, whatever those numbers are, we’re going to write you a check back for our fee of $50,000.” So first of all, listeners need to understand that.

But secondly, let’s drill down a little bit into some of the lessons or some of the mistakes that were made with that client, where you did have to write that check. And specifically, I want you to talk about the things that you learned, or the ways you’ve improved your process from that mistake. So I don’t care that the client didn’t release product, but what I do care about is what did you do differently with the next client to make sure that didn’t happen again? You know what I’m saying?

Stephen Woessner:

Sure. Yeah. Boy, we could have an entire interview or show on just those learning outcomes.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. Just give us one or two. And if you start to cry during it, it’s okay.

Stephen Woessner:

Well, first of all, just in complete disclosure, I still have a good relationship with that company today. It’s not like after that contract was ended that we became enemies or anything like that at all.

And so where we had a failing in our process early on is because we said that we need these four or five data points. Well, the reality is we needed more than four or five data points. And what we’d asked for was essentially Google analytics access. We asked for some basic, when you convert a unique visitor into a buyer, what is that rate? What is the average purchase price? And then what’s the size of the list? And then within 12 months, what percentage of the list became a buyer? Well on the surface, that sounds like pretty decent due diligence. But really we’ve added now about 18 or 19 additional questions into that data collection process.

So first of all, we’ve now taken our due diligence deeper as a result of just … We got surface data, but now we need much deeper data. So that was the first thing. We improved our data dive. Then, if I remember correctly, about 90 days into the agreement or into the actual contract fulfilling the engagement, we discovered that the baselines were actually wrong. They were inaccurate. And sometimes the skew or the deviation of accuracy was very significant. And I didn’t do anything about it. I was the engagement manager. I was running point on that. And instead of raising the hand and saying, “This data that we based our contract on is actually inaccurate, and we need to stop,” there was nothing in our contract at all that would’ve given me the permission to do so. Nothing.

And so the second thing is not only did we improve the process, the depth in which we collect data, but then we completely rewrote our contract. We engaged our attorney and rewrote the contract so that … In fact, when they first read the contract, they’re like, “I can’t believe that you had asked people to sign this. This is so in anti predictive ROI. This is very customer friendly, but this is awful.” I’m like, “Oh okay. That’s a great thing to hear.” But the truth be told, it was awful. And so then we put an entire section in there about client responsibilities. For example, if you’re driving a bunch of new traffic to some landing pages to buy widget A, don’t you think it’s reasonable that the client has widget A in stock?

And so that’s what happened to us is that we ended up finding out that several months in it’s like their top selling products were out of stock for six weeks or more, and people were canceling orders. And those canceled orders came right out of our sales bucket. After the sales had been made, they came right back out again. Well, that’s a process improvement. That’s a contract improvement. So better data going in, better contract, and then much more disciplined effort of holding ourselves and client accountable to that performance. And then when also then putting into the contract not only the better data, but then also that if the client’s baselines change, then the guarantee is null and void. So if somehow the client’s performance all of a sudden blows up, they had a sales team that was operating a 30% conversion rate, and then now all of a sudden we’re working together and the conversion rate becomes 10, well we’re going to jump in and help the client get that back up to 30, but then we’re also going to have conversations about how we shouldn’t be held responsible for that, if that is a significant change in the client’s business.

And so all of those three things are probably some of the biggest outcomes. Obviously there’s a lot more, but those are probably the biggest.

Drew McClellan:

Okay. So let me distill that down and check with me to make sure I’m getting this accurately. So number one, ask bigger, better questions, and more questions. So a deeper dive in the discovery process, and probably a trust but verify element in there as well. So when clients are giving you data, also having backup ways to verify that data to make sure it’s relatively accurate, or at least ballpark accurate, right?

Stephen Woessner:

Exactly.

Drew McClellan:

Secondly, what I heard was, make sure that your contract is specific enough. And sadly, as you know, many agencies don’t even write contracts or scope of work documents. But having a document that says, “Here’s the deal. As we enter into this partnership, we the agency are going to do this list of things. You the client are going to do this list of things, and when everyone does what they have promised to do, that’s when we know that we can accurately measure against this scorecard that we’ve also created, and we will know that we will March into success, or miss the mark together.” Right?

Stephen Woessner:

That’s perfect. Yes.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Great lessons, and good reminders for all of us that old adage of measure twice and cut once, certainly applies in our business as well.

Stephen Woessner:

Well, and you and I had so many conversations, which is why I’ve really appreciated your mentorship. And shameless, I guess, plug for AMI here, but why AMI membership has been so valuable, because you have been behind the green curtain now for years at Predictive ROI. And so your mentorship has really helped us improve our process. But when I was going through that, and I said to you what was going on? You’re like, “What are you doing?” And I’m like, “What do you mean what am I doing?” You’re like, “Why do you continue to strap all these boulders on yourself? These are client responsibilities.” And that’s true. They are.

Now, the reality is can we help our client make those smaller boulders? Yes, of course, but why would we want to expose ourselves to more risk than what’s necessary? Now, if we fall down and we don’t do what we said that we were going to do, should we have to pay for that? Yeah, I get that. And we have done that before. But why make it harder on yourself when you don’t have to? And so you have really helped me through that process.

Drew McClellan:

Well, I’m happy to be helpful. And whether an agency guarantees … As you know, you are one of the crazy few who guarantees a return of a fee. But the reality is we are all doing that when we enter into a project or a contract with a client. What we are, in essence, saying is, “Look, if I don’t do what I say I’m going to do, you have every right to fire me.” And for an agency, regardless of if you have to write a check and give the money back, having a client fire you, especially a good sized client rocks, the stability of your agency so badly that it is, albeit not as painful returning money, it can really, really damage the agency. So everybody is at risk of that. And that’s why it’s really important to have clarity around who’s responsible for doing what, and do we have a mutual understanding at the very outgoing, beginning of the project, who’s responsible for what, and how does that contribute to the outcome that we’re both working towards?

And I think the other thing that does is agency owners are always grossing at me that they’re tired of being treated like a vendor. And I think one of the things I like most about your business model is, because you are elbow deep into your client’s business, and you’re talking about business issues, not marketing issues. You’re talking about sales and conversions and all of those sorts of things. They look at you like a full on partner. You’re not a vendor to them. You are in it with them.

Stephen Woessner:

Yeah. Exactly correct. And that comes with good, and it comes with bad. It comes with an enormous amount of responsibility, but it also comes with an enormous amount of respect at the table too, because they know that you’re all in just like they are.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. So let’s switch around. Let’s do a 180 now. So we’ve talked about sad things. Tell me a success story. Talk to me about what can happen when an agency applies this results driven methodology for a client. So look at one of your clients, and talk to us about how you were able to really change the trajectory of that client, and the relationship you have with that client, because you both could clearly see that the work that Predictive ROI was doing was literally delivering to the bottom line of that company.

Stephen Woessner:

Awesome. Okay. So we had a client, and we still are working with this client today, but they had told us that their annual growth rate was about 6% per year. And once we dug into the data and we did our final scorecard at the end of 12 months, and we did a real deep dive, much deeper than they ever would’ve suspected that we did, we discovered that actually their annual growth rate wasn’t about six or 7% when they were really, really rocking the business, which is obviously what they wanted to get back to. It was 19%, 18 to 19%, which is obviously pretty phenomenal.

And so we actually helped them uncover that. It’s like, “No, actually it’s not 6%. When you guys were really rocking it was 18-19%. And thankfully, we’ve gotten you back to that point.” And so they invested $100,000 into Predictive ROI. We turned that back into $545,000 in new revenue.

Drew McClellan:

Wow.

Stephen Woessner:

Which was amazing. Yep. And so they’re like, “Okay, I give you a dollar, you give me back five.” And the reason why that’s a reasonable scenario is because they have a very, very high margin. In some products, a 70-80% margin. And so it was literally, “I give you a dollar, you give me five back? How often can we keep doing that?”

And so then we grew their list. I don’t remember exactly what percentage it was, but I think it was about 50 to 60% that we grew the size of their email list. We also took average conversion value, and we moved that up. We also took the average life … Or excuse me, the 12 month value of a customer and we moved that up by about 10 to 15%. And so essentially we got more customers to buy and spend more money within a shorter period of time. But ultimately, what we got held accountable for was, “Okay, I give you 100,000, what do you turn that into?” And in this case it was $545,000. So awesome. Because that tends to be the only litmus test that matters.

Drew McClellan:

And so at contract renewal time, what happened?

Stephen Woessner:

Well, we’re still working with them. And so what that did was, in that first 12 months, where the guarantee was really, really important, then sitting in a room with all of their owners, the CEO looks to me and says, “When we didn’t know you, the guarantee was really important. But in these last 12 months, I can tell you the guarantee doesn’t really matter anymore. And the reason why it doesn’t is because you guys have proven to us that we can trust you, that you have a high degree of integrity, that you’ll do what you say that you can do.” And so now we’re still at that same fee, and right now we actually don’t have the noose of the guarantee around us, but we will do that again if it’s important to them, so that we can guarantee their increase in sales and so forth.

But I think the point that I’m trying to make is, we were willing to do that and put that on the line. And now it’s no longer important. Will we still have goals in place? Yes, of course. But will we have the quote unquote, “Threat of the guarantee,” in place? Probably not. Which I think your listeners would be like, “Oh, awesome. You really put a lot of skin in the game. Now you’ve built all this trust. The guarantee is not that important to them, but you’re still getting the premium fee in delivering great results. That’s a great win.”

Drew McClellan:

Well, I think the other part of the great win in that is when it came to contract renewal time, they didn’t put it up to bid. They didn’t interview other agencies. You just kept doing the work.

Stephen Woessner:

Exactly. And then you’re no longer competing to keep the client. There’s no goofy RFP, or, “Hey, I think I found somebody to do it a little bit cheaper. This company over here will do it for 90 grand.” There’s none of that, right? And that’s amazing. Now, we take this as a very serious responsibility. We don’t take client relationships for granted. We don’t get complacent. Our guarantee ensures that we never get complacent, and clients love that because they know the ultimate importance that we have on each of these relationships.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. Great thoughts. Okay. So as we wind down the podcast, I want to make sure … As you know, I’m a huge consumer of books and podcasts, and anything I can get my hands on that makes me smarter, which as you also know, is not all that tough. But for me, the litmus test of a great podcast, or a great book, or a great webinar, is can I take action on it? Is it something I can do something with? So I want you to give our listeners one or two things that they can do immediately in relation to our conversation.

So again, are they all going to jump on board and adopt your full 23 recipes of methodology? No. But how can they be a little bit more results driven? How can they work with clients in a way that the client can see with great clarity, the value that the agency brings in terms of ROI and revenue, or sales, or profits. Give us a couple things that agencies owners can implement, or at least bring to their leadership team to discuss right away that they should consider doing.

Stephen Woessner:

That’s great. So the first thing that I would suggest that those listening right now would do, is go back to the middle part of this interview where you asked me to articulate the vital metrics and how that’s measured. And then you asked me a couple of pushback questions, and then we made that really crystal clear. And so go back and understand that. Draw out a funnel on a piece of paper, and then take the 199 that I’d mentioned all the way down to the 23, and all of those things that happened in between, and articulate or illustrate that funnel. And then take that and make that your recipe in which to build conversations around. Have that funnel in place, go out and talk to a client, and ask them questions about the behavior of leads going into the top end of the funnel, the behaviors that are happening in between the middle part of that funnel all the way down to the bottom of the funnel, so that you can understand the psychology of their buyer. Just doing that will enable you to ask better questions and elevate you from a vendor status, trying to sell them a PPC campaign, or a lead page campaign, or an email campaign, to partnership level.

And then when the client says, “Oh wow, awesome. You understand my funnel. You understand my consumer behavior,’ and forth. And then you can say, “What is your bounce rate on these landing pages?” And they’re like, “Well, what is bounce rate?” Then you can define bounce rate. Bounce rate is when somebody comes to a landing page, they puke, they hate it, they immediately leave without making one single click. And guess what? We have a three step process that we can use to reduce bounce rate. Now you’ve just proved into the client you understand the funnel, you understand the customer avatar, you understand what’s going on in the middle part of the funnel and how to produce a better result outcome at the bottom. And oh, by the way, we can reduce bounce rate from your 60 to 70%, down to 30% or less by doing these three things. Let us do that for you.

So now you’ve given a very practical and tactical understanding of how the customer makes money, how your client makes money, and a very powerful optimization series of steps in order how to improve that. And you’ve elevated the conversation.

Drew McClellan:

Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So I’m going to give you an opportunity. Any last thoughts, or something you think agency owners need to hear again in relation to our conversation today?

Stephen Woessner:

Well, I literally think the biggest constraint, and I know this may sound simplistic, maybe even a little bit naive for some people, but the only thing that’s keeping you from doing this, it’s not the technical skills within your agency, it’s just because you’re afraid of it. And stop being afraid of it. I know that it sounds like mystic dark magic voodoo, but it’s maybe the fear of criticism. What will my internal team think if we move in this direction? Maybe the fear of criticism about your peers and the marketplace and so forth, but really your clients are going to continue to start demanding it if they’re not already doing that. So really the only thing that is keeping you from mastering this, is you. That’s it. The actual technical side of it is not that complicated. It is not mystic dark magic voodoo when you have the right strategy, the right recipe, and the right steps to follow.

So trust me when I say that your team, from a technical perspective, can absolutely handle this. It is just you deciding that will we actually make the transformational shift and move our agency in that direction? And if yes, the resources, the education, all of that stuff is absolutely there at your fingertips. It’s just you need to decide if you’re really going to be open to doing it. And if you are, there are so many great things. Of course painful things too, but there are so many great things on the horizon if you actually choose to make that decision.

Drew McClellan:

Okay, that is a great way to end our conversation. I know how crazy busy you are, so I thank you for your time. I thank you for being so transparent, both about the upside of the business, but also the moments of pain that I know that you, like all agency owners, have endured. And I got to tell you that I think one of the things that I respect most about you, is whether you have been knocked to your knees or you are flying high with a client, you always keep your eye on the prize, which is serving the client well, knowing that will serve you and your agency well. And I think that’s one of the reasons why you’re as successful as you are today.

Stephen Woessner:

Well, I appreciate you saying that. That means a lot coming from you, because you meet with so many agency owners and so forth. And I’m grateful for the invitation. Thank you for allowing me to be here and share some of this stuff. I treasure being an AMI member, I treasure your me or your mentorship, excuse me. Just very kind of you, so thank you, Drew.

Drew McClellan:

So Stephen, if anybody wants to get ahold of you, if they want to follow up on any of this, if they want to start reading the content that you write, they want to find out about your books, what’s the easiest way for someone to get contact information or reach out to you?

Stephen Woessner:

Well, my email address us is pretty simple. It’s just Stephen with a P-H. So S-T-E-P-H-E-N @predictiveROI, and you can course find us at predictiveroi.com, or if you want to take a listen to some of our stuff, onwardnation.com. That’s our headquarters, if you will, for our podcast. Onward Nation daily podcast or business owners. So those three channels would probably be the best.

Drew McClellan:

Awesome. All right. To my Build a Better Agency Listeners, thanks so much for investing the time to listen to this. I hope you took away a lot of great ideas. I hope some of it frightened you a little bit. I hope some of it inspired you a little bit. But remember that the goal at the end of the day is for you to build an agency that takes care of you and your family in the way that it should. So with that, I will sign off for today, and we will be back with you next week with a new issue. Thanks much.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of Build a Better Agency. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. While you’re there, sign up for our e-newsletter, grab our free e-book, and check out the blog. Growing a bigger, better agency that makes more money, attracts bigger clients, and doesn’t consume your life is possible here on build a better agency.