Standing out against the noise with personalized client outreach with Dan Englander

Hey everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

And then Agency Management Institute, all one word. Subscribe and search the existing video database for all sorts of actionable topics that you can implement in your shop today. Alright, let’s get to the show.

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional digital media buying, web dev, PRR brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build, a Better, Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ will expose you to the best practices that drive growth, client and employee retention and profitability, bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hello everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute and I bet you are not at all gonna be surprised to know that I am back with another episode of Build a Better Agency as we march our way to episode 500. Hard to believe we’ve been doing it that long. But today’s episode is a great example of of the relationships that we build and the good people that we surround ourselves with, thanks to the podcast. So before I tell you about our repeat guest and the topic, just wanna remind you, we’ve got some great workshops coming up in April. So two of them are gonna both be live workshops in Denver. So on April 11th and 12th, we have running your agency for growth and profit that’s gonna look at best practices for biz dev leadership systems and processes and money.

So that is aimed for agency owners and super senior leaders, and again, Denver 11th and, or sorry, April 11th and 12th in Denver. And then we also have our AE Bootcamp, that’s gonna be April 25th and 26th. That particular workshop is built for entry level folks. So I’d say zero to four or five years of experience in the agency space. We see a lot of junior account execs, account execs, project managers, account associates, that sort of level. So if they’re new in the profession and you want them to learn more about how to be a great account exec or account manager and help you grow the agency by growing their client’s business with you, this is a great workshop.

So check those out. Without further ado, let me tell you that today’s guest is Dan Englander. And if you’ve been a long time listener, you know he is been on the show a couple times before. Dan owns a company called Sales Schema and he works with agencies specifically around developing outbound efforts to attract right fit clients. So Dan has hel hosted a podcast, which I’ve been fortunate to be on several times, the Digital Agency Growth podcast, and really an expert in helping agencies sell, sell, sell. So I wanna pick his brain.

I wanna find out what he’s thinking after the bumpy ride that 2023 was for all of us and what he’s projecting we should be thinking about for 2024. So without further ado, let’s get him on the show and get started. Hey Dan, welcome to back to the podcast. Good to have you Drew.

Thanks for having me again. Good to see you.

So remind everybody a little bit about your background and the work you do before we dig into the conversation. Yeah,

For sure. So again, Dan Englander, my background is, is originally in the agency space. First working on the account side back when social media was new and hot and cool. And I’ve literally answered problems on Facebook walls for consumer brands and pitched various things that were mostly overlooked. A few things got picked up by clients left that gig was kind of fell into a sales and business development role for a creative house called Idea Rocket. Tried every tactic under the sun to convince people to buy video services Yeah. And to get leads for that business. So learned a lot from that. And then kind of did the Tim Ferriss thing for a little while. Went off on my own, started a company called Sales Schema, which eventually has become a targeted outreach company specifically for agencies and B2B service companies at this point.

We’ve worked with, I believe 110 agencies since 2014 to get, you know, thousands of of meetings going up market going, going up to brands. And we’re really, you know, not nec, we’re in the lead generation space by definition, but we’re really looking to build relationships because that’s the only way that you can think about doing outreach the right way is we’re not selling anything, we’re connecting clients with their future clients, basically. And that’s, that’s what we’re up to.

Right. So how was, how was 23 for you around that? ’cause you know, you and I were talking a little bit before we hit the record button. New business was an uphill grind for most agencies last year. So were you finding that with your clients as well?

We, we were, and it, you know, was overall revenue wise down year for us, down year for clients. Sure. On a macro level. But in terms of activity, in terms of meetings and the sort of metrics that, you know, we have to hold ourselves accountable to activity was actually up a lot. And some of that’s maybe, you know, it’s hard to tell signal from noise and what’s micro versus macro Yeah. Things we’re doing. But I think that what we’re seeing is like a lot of companies needing help navigating different, you know, AI or, or navigating, you know, other changes and down economy, whatever it might be, and just kind of more interest in looking towards experts. Right. Because I think that a lot of the times, like just reading content online, I think people, what we’re seeing, this is me reading tea leaves a little bit, but more and more there’s more openness to talking with somebody that actually really knows their stuff.

And we’re seeing that kind of across the board.

Okay. So as you, as you enter into 24 and you think about how you’re gonna guide clients, first of all, did you see any shift in activity or success rates as the, as the year ended as fourth quarter came and went?

Good question. I, I think so. You know, it really depends on industry. Like e-commerce will not talk to you leading up to to holidays. Right? Sure. Right. But in pretty much every other industry, I would say we, we did see upticks in terms of, of the, the meetings. But you know, to, to give a little context with the outreach we do, we’re never like, Hey, are you ready to hire an agency right now? Right. It’s really like, we should probably talk and a lot of people will have those calls when things are quieter, right? Yeah. Because that, that’s, that’s the misconception a lot of agencies have where it’s like, nobody’s buying right now or, or whatever, or like this fiscal calendar’s done with this company. But that’s actually when you need to be talking with them. ’cause that’s when they’re gonna be making their plans.

Right. Right. It’s like the plans are gonna take months to pan out probably.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So as you look a across the horizon for 24, what do you see?

It’s a good question. I see like we’ve talked about a lot things continuing to go towards, towards experts and those that, you know, we use the word niche, but I think really the better term is like specialization. I think that yeah, for sure think, you know, more and more like the idea of an agnostic agency is going to become less opportunistic, let’s say. I think that’s gonna happen. I think when it comes to our world and outreach and getting meetings and relationships to happen, I think there’s gonna be a bigger and bigger premium put on trust. There already is that premium. But I think with more and more availability of people that can solve problems for you in the digital realm with ai, there’s gonna be, you know, a greater premium put on that.

So, you know, I can get tactical, like what that means to outreach and all that sort of stuff, but I’ll, I’ll leave it, I’ll leave it at that for now. Yeah.

Oh I’m sure. We’ll I’m sure we’ll go there. But I’m curious, when you think about the trust factor and as an agency, you’re pursuing a prospect who doesn’t know you very well or doesn’t know you at all and in real, in real terms, doesn’t know, you know, may know of you, how are you helping clients build and strengthen trust in the sales process?

It’s a great question. I think a lot of it, I mean to take a step back, a lot of it is getting agencies to change their mindset about new business a little bit and to get them to think more like the rest of the B2B sales world. Which is that, you know, a lot of the times agencies are getting this artificial view of their sales cycle and what it takes to build trust. Because most of the business sometimes for years is coming from referral or personal network. Right. And you’re talking to people when they have a need, when they’re problem aware and solution aware. So a lot of it is saying like, look, there’s a lot of stuff that happened way, way, way before Right. They said, Hey, do you know anybody that could solve this problem? Yeah. And you’ve gotta get used to that process. So I think that’s, that’s the first thing. And like the one of them, you know, the most common things clients tell us is our sales cycle is a lot longer than, than we thought it was right from there.

And I know this is something that you really, really help a lot of clients with. True. It, it’s really about getting clarity, you know, under like, there’s all sorts of tactics and software and I think what, what a lot of people do is they’ll go buy the expensive piece of software or the expensive data source because they’re, they’re scared to do the real work, which is Right, where can we win? Right. The good news is like, it doesn’t have to be one niche. Like a lot of the times we’re, we’re we ask our clients, great, go after three at once, you know? Right. You can do that. We’ll show you how to do it or we’ll do it for you. Yeah.

Yeah. We talk about a three-legged stool sometimes, right? Yeah, yeah,

Exactly. That’s, that’s great. And it’s kinda like reaching the same solution different ways. But I think with that, you know, with clarity it’s like the attention to detail with that. Like actually, you know, when it comes to outreach, being able to look at those lists to be able to say, okay, this is a, this is a fit for these reasons and this isn’t. And then from there, like getting into the way we think about things, it’s not going after anyone and everybody, it’s not trying to achieve massive scale. It’s trying to see achieve kind of like a minimum viable level of scale, which for us is around like 300 people average contacted per week. ’cause from there you can like personalize that to a large degree. You can find the people that are actually gonna be willing to talk to you. So when you say we work with med tech, they’re like, oh yeah, these guys do work with med tech ’cause they right said the right things to me.

And the bar is low, you know, if people are like, I get outreach, I don’t read it well, I look at ads, I don’t buy every thing I see in an ad. Right. But If, you If you do things right. It really does work, work really well. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so let’s talk a little bit about the personalization, because I think, I think there is sort of this tug of war between scale and personalization and how much personalization and where do you get, where do you get to the creepy level? Where do you get to the, oh, I bet you sent this email to 10,000 people level. So how do you guide clients around best practices around personalization of

Outreach? Yeah, that’s a great question. And I frame that out a little bit. I think there’s a lot of questions about that. Like with ai, we talk more about ai, but like, you know, a lot of the times when you see personalization, people will either just not be doing it or they’ll refer to like somebody using their first name as personalization. Right? Right. Or, or it’ll be like, let me look at all this stuff about you and then regurgitate it back to you. Right? Right. Both things are, are uncompelling because everybody know because they’re inherently abundant, they’re not scarce. Right? So we, we value scarcity, right? Everybody does on a human level. So the way that we’re thinking about that is, is that attention to detail. So, you know, you know, you’re, you’re describing the business problem. You’re solving for a specific niche, not just a wide industry, but like, here’s this group of companies we can solve this business business problem for.

And then the way we think about this is not just personalization, but commonality. Like what’s the thing that you have in common with somebody that would allow them to talk to you? In my book, I talk a lot about Dunbar’s number, which is like the number of relationships that you can maintain on a loose basis. They postulate it’s like 150. Our whole thesis is that there’s other circles that go out beyond that by triples. Like, so you might have a few thousand people that would talk to you, but If you, if only you knew you had this thing in common. So our whole thing is, let’s start there and, and and so on. So to give some tangible examples, a lot of our clients are going to trade shows, conferences, they might have headquarters, different places. They might go to see clients different places.

Why not start there? You’re, why not look at the people in those places and say, I’m gonna be in your town or my partner’s there. And that is, there’s something timeless about, about that. And it also lets you achieve a certain level of scale. So you’re not writing one-to-one emails. You’re like, here’s a chunk of people you know from hundred.

Hey everybody, I, Hey, hey you, I’m gonna be at this show and next month. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. And it sounds basic it, but the thing is like very few people are getting to that level of detail where you’re like, I can solve this business problem. We, we work in your space and by the way, I’m gonna be in your neck of the woods or whatever. Not a lot of people are getting those, those emails with that level of tastefulness. And that’s how we’re able to see like, you know, one to 5% meeting rates and then you’re getting a meeting a day and then, you know, good things happen, If, you keep up the inputs. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s interesting. So in 2023, you know, we do the agency edge research every year. And in 2023 our focus was hey, clients of agencies, how, when and where do you give your agency more money? And one of the things that we learned was that agencies or clients do in certain moments want to spend more time with either their agency of record or if they’re shopping for an agency. And one of the biggest places they said were trade shows. Trade shows and conferences. Because they’re already there. They’re already kind of already unplugged from the day to day. They have, they have a window of room. So your example of, Hey, I’m gonna be at this show, or we’ve got a booth at the show, or I’m speaking at this conference, would be a perfect tee up I think for a prospective agency.

Because we know from our research, and you just said you found it as well, it’s a, it’s a good hunting ground. It’s a, people are in the right mind frame to have some of those conversations.

Yeah. And, and I’ll just add to that, like, you know, to be honest, we’re, we’re heavily a digital shop. Like I’m not getting on planes and just, we just had a new board. So it’s like, I don’t do that a lot. And maybe, maybe we’ve left a lot of money on the table for that. But that’s, I’m willing to, to accept that. And I think a lot of agencies might be in that, that that boat too. You could still use locations though, right? Because we had a client and we did hometown based connections and he ended up connecting with an old partner that he didn’t talk to in 30 years. They had an RFP, you know, long story short, multi six figure engagement, right? Like, so these things, there’s, there’s a lot of ways in, and a lot of the thinking about like Cialdini, a lot of the times it’s very ripe brain. It’s very emotional. It’s like these, these connections that you have that aren’t necessarily just business, right?

You need the business part of the, the ingredients too. But the the top of the top of the email, you know, can be something personal. Yeah.

Yeah. So how are, how are other ways that you’re personalizing, you’re helping clients personalize their outreach? ’cause most of your outreach, most of the work you do is email based, right?

It it is, yeah. And that’s, that’s for a few reasons. And I’m not, you know, I, I’m not completely mono monotheistic about email. Sure. I don’t think there’s anything I made, but I I, and not even about outbound. I think like ads are great. I think content’s great. What we’re doing now, it works really well. There’s a few things that I think are good about email though. For one, it’s, nobody owns it. It’s a protocol, you know? Yeah. So you don’t have to interface with the tech company. You can be compliant, you know, If, you are doing stuff on LinkedIn and somebody else is doing that for you. You’re breaking their to OS which is, you know, right. Not, not horrible and you probably get away with it, but it’s something to know about. And and also you can get to a higher level of scale with email and email’s where we go to make plans and do business.

Our calendars are there. LinkedIn, we might be reading articles. It’s harder to convert that to a call, right? So emails usually our starting place. Yeah. For that reason. And that’s kind of how we’re thinking about it in terms of a personalization. There’s a lot of different tactics, right? And with AI that is increasing a lot more. But we are still kind of putting our, our flag in the ground with commonalities and with the things that are inherently scarce. ’cause those are the things that are gonna be timeless and valued. So I think that, that then that makes it harder to sell for us. ’cause we don’t have one slick tactic. Right. A lot of it’s process and attention to detail and, and that kind of thing. Like if I’m reaching out to a MI, I’m not saying Agency Management Institute incorporated, I’m saying a MI.

Right? Right. These little things matter. So it’s less about one tactic and more about a process that a small team can implement like over and over again. Yeah.

And, and how much of that process is successful based on Consistency of following the process? Because one of the things I find is, yeah, I’m sure you do too, is that a lot of times agencies sort of throw up their hands after, you know, it’s a little like New Year’s resolutions, right? Everybody’s in the gym, you know, January 3rd, but most people are not in the gym still by February 15th. And so I find that the agencies that are really successful with Biz Dev do a few things, but they do them really consistently and well. Do you see that as well?

Absolutely. Yeah. That’s huge. And, and that’s, you know, a lot of, we’re we’re moving into to training products and stuff as well. And like a lot of the stuff that we, you’re you’re teaching agencies about is like, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta like recontextualize what success means, right? Like success isn’t gonna mean close business until maybe a half a year or a year from now. You’ve gotta like look at the, the wins as I’m building new relationships in my market with people that could do business with me in the future. So that’s, yeah, that’s the first thing as far as the work goes in terms of like setting up the machine and doing all this stuff, like I said earlier, I think it’s more about getting clarity on the, the lists IE the the counts, the people you wanna reach instead of thinking about this as like, I’m gonna go buy this gadget that’s gonna solve all my problems.

So, but the, the cadence of the work, I think is, is not insignificant, but I think it’s less compared to developing content every single week or right. Going to trade shows and getting on planes. Like, I think that it’s comparatively less. It’s just something that people have to learn. And you know, for outreach, the cadence is about weekly, right? You’re looking at like, who are we contacting next week? A lot of this can happen through automation. And, and as you start getting used to it, automation can take up more and more of the slack. But I think at the beginning it’s like, okay, here are the people, here’s the message. And one thing I love about email is I’m kind of like, I’m kind of an old soul. I’m kind of a history major. It’s, there’s something very ancient about it.

Like, you’re just sending words to people, right? And you’re trying to get them to agree to talk to you as opposed to like all these other dependencies and inputs. If, you had an ad funnel, you know, it would be a lot more complicated. So that’s one thing I love about it.

Well, and I think back to your point about trust, I think also that Consistency of creating niche centric, helpful content is part of that how you build trust long before you know you’re building trust. Right?

Exactly. And to kind of go, I think you to to go go into your question a little bit more, you know, what, what builds trust? I think it’s, it’s walking the walk and talking the talk, right? Right. There’s a lot of things you could say, like, we really understand med tech is, is not as good as saying, we have worked with these three clients for the last, you know, 10 years we have an opening and I have an idea for you. Right. And then they can go on your site and see that that’s true. That that’s a much more powerful statement. Right? So I think a lot of it is like, you know, one rule of thumb that we have is don’t send an email, don’t write an email that you wouldn’t send to somebody you actually met in person. Like, and that, that’s, that’s huge. So a lot of, a lot of it’s kind of unlearning marketing copy and marketing lessons, right?

Yeah.

So let’s talk a little bit about noise because I think that’s part of the challenge and, and, and I think it’s probably why some agencies don’t engage is because they haven’t figured out how to not just make more noise. And so I’m sure part of your sort of noise strategy is, again, the personalization, the not sending an email you wouldn’t send to somebody, you know, how else do you help clients stand out from, I mean, I don’t know about you, but I get 500 plus emails every freaking day. And so I am very quickly triaging through and most of them never get opened.

Most of them never get looked at. So how do you help clients stand out from that?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And, and the dy and there’s the, the dynamics always looked at with any sales or marketing channel, like you’re going for a few percentage points. Yeah. And also, like the bar is very low. Like most people that are sending emails are doing it in this mass spammy thing. So in terms of standing out, sometimes it’s something that’s tactical and overt, like I talked about earlier. Like, Hey, I’m gonna be in this place. We have this specific thing in common, we’ve worked in your space. Here’s the proof of it. I have an idea. I think a big thing, a big thing that makes these conversations happen is timeliness, right? Yeah. And you might be like, well I can’t control timeliness, I don’t know when they’re buying. I don’t know this, I don’t know that. But it’s like, there’s a lot of ways to think about timeliness, right?

You think about what’s going on in that specific niche right now like that that’s, that an insider knows somebody else wanted. You can think about events, trade shows, like I talked about. You can think about I have an idea that I wanted to run by you that, you know, inherently is, is timely. There’s a million other ways to think about that. We just lost a client I wanted, so we have space we just won a client or another one that I thought of recently that we will kind of wanna try is like, hey, we’re working on an RFP in your industry right now. I don’t know if we’ll win it, you know, but if we don’t, we will have space for you. And I would like to talk with you about this. You know, can perhaps you some of the ideas. I thought that the other day, go ahead, everyone can steal it. It’s fine.

These are all just, and, and the, and the list goes on. So I think, I think thinking about that, just again, walking the walk talk and the talk, like there’s words that, there’s terminology, there’s verbiage that, you know, somebody in med tech would use somebody in e-commerce would use. But If, you try to be everywhere and you try to do this massively scaled thing, it’s not gonna work, right? Because there’s these little things right on the margins that people aren’t, aren’t gonna get to know. Also, and this is another rabbit hole, so I can give you the floor Drew, If, you have other questions, but no, Getting through is probably more than half the battle, right? So just getting the email opened is, is big. I sort of deliverability, right?

So I, I compare this to SEO you know, there was like a time when you could just hack SEO right? Or have fake back links and that kind of thing. And then it became a thing where it’s like, no, you have to have quality content and Google’s smart enough to know that and so on. So outreach is becoming more like that. Where If, you send stuff that like 50% of the people you send it to don’t want, they’re gonna hit the manual spam button, you’re gonna go to spam and all you’re gonna see is a low open rate. You won’t know what’s going on. So the good news is though, you can avoid that, you just have to have a little more attention to detail and a little more care and it still works really well. So that’s, that’s huge. Yeah.

So let’s talk a little bit about competition. I know, I know you’re going into 2024 thinking this is, this is the time for us to kind of rethink how we frame up all of this effort. So take us, give us the macro view first of sort of why is now the time to rethink and then what are some of the things we should rethink?

Yeah, yeah. I mean I think there, there might never be a good or bad time to rethink stuff. I think you have to kind of just look at right. You know, what’s going on in your agency and so on from there, you know, like I talked about, I think now might be a good time to rethink because of, you know, how much more digital competition there is and so on. And all the things that have already been in motion accelerating. I, I also just think like a, as always, it’s what asking agency owners, like, what are you trying to build? And most of them will say like, we’re trying to grow so we can do x, we wanna have an asset we can sell. And like we hammer on like there’s no way you can do that If.

you don’t have at least one, if not a few repeatable new business channels so that not all the business just comes from you as an owner. ’cause then you won’t have anything to sell. So those are all, you know, a few, a few good reasons to rethink things. I, I think beyond that, like a lot of the times a with people in that situation have sort of been sold this idea of, oh, I can just hire a salesperson, then they’re gonna be successful. You know? Yeah. So I think re Rethinking for, to get more tactical and get into like outreach is Rethinking the typical model of sales where you’d say, okay, you’d have like this BDR that goes and gets you meetings, then you’d have like, you know, a higher level person take that. I think that that, that works to some degree.

But we’re in a consultative sales environment, right? So I think a lot of Rethinking is, is getting agencies from like, not to take all the lessons from Silicon Valley, but really sort of pave their own way, which means that If, you’re on a consultative sales environment. People need to be getting value from that first call, right? Yeah. So it doesn’t mean that the owner has to lead the sales process. We need somebody on there that people wanna talk to. So those, those are a few things that come to mind.

So, you know, most agencies, they’re struggling to have enough revenue adjusted gross income in our world to pay for the bodies that do the client work. And so it’s challenging, I think for them to build out a sales team, a bunch of people who aren’t billable. How do you recommend a smaller shop approach? The idea of having a sales team, given that resources are limited, that their head count’s probably pretty small. How do you coach them into doing that successfully?

Yeah, great question. So the first thing is kind of order of operations. And that’s, you, you know, what you don’t wanna do is go hire for sales before you have the machine and the support from making that salesperson successful, right? ’cause you’re gonna get people that are great at selling in the interview and then you’re gonna hire one of them and then they won’t work out. And you’ll keep blaming that person as opposed to blaming yourself. So that’s, that’s the, the harsh reality. So they need support and they need a system from there. The other thing not to do is to conscript somebody to sales. We see this pretty often as well, which is like, hey, you’re good with clients, you wanna sell different,

Right? Right. Different things, very different, right?

Some, yeah, some crossover, but it’s, it’s different. They have, you have to have somebody that’s motivated to be in sales that wants commissions, that wants to be doing that, that wants to hear no, you know, over and over again. So those, those are the build the, the first building blocks from there. And this ties into outreach, but I think you could also apply it to other, other marketing channels. So you’re like, how do I build this machine? How do I build this system? Right? Thinking, thinking about it in terms of hats. These could be separate roles eventually, or they could just be you or they could be you and one other person, but you’re wearing three different hats, right? The first one is strategy, the second one is, is basically sales. We call it the face of the campaign. So this is the person that needs to be on at lease that first call, right?

And, and research, who’s the person throwing coal into the, into the burner, right? The person that’s making sure all the knobs are turned the right way, that everything’s teed up and happening for the next week. This is more, you know, a can do an outreach perspective. So the strategy part is like, you know, who are we contacting? What are we saying to them? You know, where can we win the overarching like channels we’re using and that kind of thing. Like the, the whole, the whole forest, you know? Right. Re yeah. Research is like quality control. Is this, are these people, you know, matching the strategy are are the lists, right? Am I saying a MI and not Agency Management Institute, Inc.

Right?

And then face of the campaign should be nine times outta 10. It’s that sales person. But it doesn’t have to be like, you could say all the CEO’s down to get on that first call, but we have somebody else that’s gonna be running the call, right? Yeah. And that way people are like, I’ll talk to Drew ’cause he is the CEO E and you have some, so that’s atypical usually that faces the sales person is the person kind of moving stuff forward. So I think even if your team’s limited, that’s usually the case with us If, you can think about it in terms of hats and then actually put time blocks in for those things every week, then you’re, you’re gonna be more likely to be successful.

Yeah. I think, I think part of it is we assign bits and pieces of it to people, but we don’t give them the bandwidth to actually do it. It’s sort of on top of an already overloaded schedule. And especially if they’re client facing, it’s always easy to default to taking care of the client rather than doing the biz dev stuff.

Exactly. And it is sort of like, there’s a line in zero to one, I think with Peter Thiel and it’s like, look around you, do you see any salespeople? If not, then you’re a salesperson, right? So it’s like

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah. So, you know, I think the first thing if you’re in that role is like, okay, get as much fulfillment off your plate as you can. Yeah. And then focus on getting leads and then focus on like, once that’s nailed down, you’re gonna, then you can think about getting outta the sales seat. But the part-time stuff, it can, it, it does work sometimes. And like for lower level roles, like the research and that kind of thing, we often encourage clients for our training stuff. No worries. Like, this can be handled part-time, but the ownership of it, you need to have that, the full motivation. You know, you can’t have like Right. You can’t be that split. Yeah.

Well, and I think too, if somebody, if somebody doesn’t really own it, then nobody owns it. Right. And it just doesn’t become anybody’s priority. Yeah, yeah,

Exactly. And I think a lot of it is like, it look, the, the building, forget about a handful of leads, like building a reliable new business system is in the Eisenhower matrix. It’s important, but it never feels urgent. Right, right, right. Then it never happens. And it’s like, we got a new pitch that surgeon we’ve got, we’ve gotta fire, you know, and so on.

Yep. All right. I wanna take a quick break, but when we come back, let’s talk about If. you are in a position to hire a salesperson. What’s the best practice for doing that? So let’s, let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about If. you do have the size and the bandwidth and the revenue to support a role. Then how do you go from there successfully? So we’ll be right back. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Before I go back to the interview, I just wanna remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops. And you can see the whole [email protected], on the navigation head to how we help scroll down and you’ll see workshops and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop.

They are all in Denver and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account execs, agency leaders, CFOs. We have a little something for everybody no matter what it is that you’re struggling with, people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered. So check ’em out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show. Alright. We are here with Dan Englander and we are talking about agency sales. And you know, as we talked about at the top of the hour, you know, it, it was a tough year for agencies to try and, and sell. And most agencies, if they grew in 23, it was predominantly because they were able to upsell existing clients much more than they were landing a lot of new business.

We certainly saw some exceptions to that rule, but it was, it was carrying a boulder up a mountain for most agencies in 23. But new year, new outlook, new vision, new goals. So if an agency is thinking now is the time for them to add a sales person, what are some best practices? What do you see working? Because you know, in many cases this may be the o first sales person in agency as as hired as you said, A lot of times we look for somebody who’s doing something good inside our agency and then move them over to sales assuming that those skills are transferable into a new role. And oftentimes that is not the way that plays out. So how do you guide clients into adding that kind of a staff person on the team?

Yeah, great question. So I’m gonna go back to, to foundation and foundation’s kind of like two parts. It’s system and processes and it’s also mindset, right? So just to reiterate that like system and process, you, you have a way to get leads that’s not just my old friend from college has a new project or whatever,

Right?

Right. Or a friend at, at x, y, Z company. That’s the first thing. And then mindset is knowing that there’s things that you can get away with as an owner that this sales person’s not gonna be able to do. There’s also advantages they have that you don’t like, they can defer up the line and you know, they’re more focused. So you’re gonna have to just to understand that they’re not gonna have your close rate for maybe like a year, or they might never have your close rate. They might be, oh, for sure. Right. 70% is good. And you have to just accept that. So that’s the, once those building blocks are in place and you’re kind of going out to hire, sometimes it’s easier to think about what not to do as opposed to all the ways it can work for sure. Because it’s easier to identify. I think the one big trap people get into is looking for industry or niche expertise that can be valuable.

It can shorten the learning curve a little bit, but sometimes it’s overvalued, which, you know, you really want to think more about who has the presence. Like who’s, you know, who gives you, who puts a big smile on your face? If, you were gonna ask them to record a call that’s, or, or to record themselves like talking about themselves for 30 seconds, right? There’s kind of a ine se or people and you’re like, I would spend an hour having lunch with them. It’s like, if the answer is like, no, then there’s, there’s no amount of training or teaching that’s gonna make them have that presence, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, that’s kind of the, the cold hard truth from there. You know, the usual hiring methods that, that work, like identifying salespeople is sometimes like the usual stuff doesn’t work and you might have to go out further.

I’ve noticed that there’s different hiring sites that just won’t have salespeople. There’s programs where you can find people that are more ramped up and that sort of thing. But I think in the agency world, like you, you have to sort of prioritize kind of a, a level of intelligence and a level of ability to handle complexity more than you would with like a software product or something like that. Yeah. So looking at that, and then from there, once you have somebody, you know, for us internally at Sales schema and our better clients, we’re training every single week. You know, we’re listening to calls, we’re giving feedback on ’em, we’re asking the salesperson, what do you think you did well? What do you think you need to work on? So that they’re coming up with their own answers and you’re getting into that cadence.

It’s a lot of work, but the, the rewards are as massive as they could possibly be, you know, in any company. ’cause you’re creating a revenue generation system that you’re not directly involved in.

Right. So two thoughts on that. One, I think that’s where a lot of agencies fail, is that they hire the person and basically they throw ’em into the frying pan and expect them to, to just make it work. I they’re not, they’re often not given the level of support, especially from the agency owner, that they really need to understand the business and really to hone their skills. Two, the sales training, I could be wrong, but that feels, I don’t remember you doing a lot of that way back when you were on the show a few years ago. Is that a new offering for you or a new Oh,

Offering? Oh, no. To, to clarify, like we’re, we’re only in the, the outreach and lead gen business, but we still know a lot about sales training from just doing it ourselves and just observing and observing clients do it. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So when you’re listening to calls and when you are critiquing, what are the mistakes that are being made? What do you hear over and over? Like, oh, there, there it is. There’s mistake number two.

Yeah. I’ll answer this question in a roundabout way. And that’s like, I think that marketing is calls with technology, you know, legions evolved, but it’s still the same human wiring at the end of the day. Yeah. And I think sales training, like you can look back at sales training books from like the 18 hundreds and it’s like this is all 80%, 90% true, basically. Yep. Tru, you know, there’s, there’s maybe less trust. People have more information, you know, Dan Pink and talks about that and everywhere. Yeah. Others do challenger sale. But to answer your question, I think a lot of it is the, the, and this is from my own limited experience and clients, like, we’re not a sales training business per se, so a grain of salt. Right. But I think a lot of it is just kind of lack of natural curiosity from salespeople.

I think a lot of the times, like you need scripts, you need playbooks for people to run through, but you need people, somebody that can put that aside and just say, I’m genuinely cu genuinely curious about this prospect’s problem.

Right.

And, and ginger

That well it, yeah. It’s the, it’s the age old advice of you shouldn’t, you’re not actually listening if you’re already thinking of your response and you’re driving to, you’re trying to drive to a goal rather than actually connecting with that other person. Right,

Exactly. Yeah. And I, and I think some of that, you know, to get into, to sales process digs into setting up the call the right way at the very beginning and the Sandler world, their terminology for this as like, upfront contract or, or setting expectations. Here’s what we’re gonna do on this call. Right. You know, does that, does that work for you? So you’re getting buy in the whole time and so on. I think this is hard for agencies ’cause they’ve never had to learn it. You know, they’ve, they’ve never actually done it themselves and they’ve sort of survived from getting to people, you know, at the referral stage. And there

I was just gonna say, so much of their sales comes at the referral stage, which is so much further down the path. Right. They’re not used to starting at first base, they’re used to starting at third base.

Right, right, exactly. So that’s, that’s a great way to put it. Yeah. Starting at first base. So, so I think a lot of it is like, you know, just kind of going through through that yourself and, and, and you know, holding yourself under the microscope a little bit. And it’s, and it can be really empowering. I, I went through this myself early, early in the career where like I, I kind of fell into a sales job without it being called that and had a sales trainer that was like, you’re in sales, you wanna learn how to do it. I was like, and it felt dirty in the first week and then we get over it, right? So it is what it is.

So again, this is gonna air early in 24 if people are listening in real time. So give us some tactical just, okay, If, you have If you, if you’re ready to sort of scrap whatever you’ve done and restart and sort of build a sales process or a machine If, you will, what would be the, what would be the tactical steps you would tell an agency owner to tee up for 24?

Yeah, and I’ll kind of base it on our core experience, which is like an agency focusing on B2B, going up market. Like if you’re going to like restaurants or something like that, right? It’s a little bit different. The first thing I would say is like, the stuff we don’t do, but what we’re doing now, thought leadership inbound newsletter, like pick one, it doesn’t matter which one it is, but pick one that is gonna be most likely to be consumed by your industry. Yeah. If you’re in private equity, it’s gonna be different than if you’re a tech startup, you know, selling to tech startups. So pick one and just stick with that for like at least a year probably. Yep.

So,

But on the outbound side, you know, we’re core believers that outbound needs to be part of the food group because it for sure allows you to build these relationships in a way that you have control over as opposed to Yeah. Waiting on on things to happen. So for outbounds, you know, pick one, pick pick where you have the, you know, the most likelihood of winning, pick a known quantity. Yeah. Whatever that niche is for you and you, you’re on the fence about it, just pick one, you know? Right,

Right.

And then from there, you know, it’s, it’s really about, you know, building that list of accounts, getting really clear on a list of, of whatever, 400, two a thousand or more accounts that you wanna reach. Find, get that built, get it perfect and get the list of all the prospects you could ever want to talk to pretty much. Perfect. And then find an interesting way in there’s, to get more tactical, you know, we use, we work a lot with Apollo. Apollo can help you do all of that. And we have like trainings and all that good stuff that I’m happy to shamelessly plug if that would be useful.

Well let, well let’s actually talk about, and then it’s really just about just sticking with it, right? So once you’ve got the list, you, you’re building some thought leadership behind it. So if they click on something, they’re gonna see that you actually know what you’re talking about and you have, you have some depth in that, again, to your point, whether it’s a podcast or a newsletter or blog posts or videos or whatever the heck it is. Yeah. You know, which listeners, you know, that Steven and I go into incredible detail on in the book Sell With Authority. So if you’re looking for that, and by the way, we both give those books away for free. So If, you go to either the AMI website or the predictive ROI website, you can get the book for free. You don’t even have to pay for shipping. So, so don’t tell me that you can’t buy the book, but, you know, so again, establish some thought leadership, create a list based on that thought, like who’s gonna care about the fact that I’m an expert in this?

So build a list and then it’s really about deciding how you’re gonna reach out to them and doing it consistently enough that over time you get traction. I wish it was more complicated in some ways and I wish it was, you know, like some secret sauce. It really is about just doing it and doing it well and consistently. Right.

Exactly. And when we see responses from prospects, like they’re almost always something to the effect of, I don’t usually respond to this kind of outreach, but there is something different about it. Right. And ’cause it looks like a one-to-one piece of outreach and you can actually achieve that once you have clarity in your specific Yeah. And the other way to think about this is you’re not selling anything in that outreach. You’re just de-risking a conversation. And once you think about de-risking a conversation, the the, the goal becomes a lot easier. You know? Right. It doesn’t take a whole lot to do that. You just have to be deliberate and clear about it. Yeah.

Right. Okay, so this was great and this, I love that we’re doing this early in the year so people can, because everyone’s just coming outta holiday hibernation, they’re starting to think about sales, they’re feeling the fact that they haven’t really done much sales effort since Thanksgiving probably. And so, you know, there’s been an eight week or so dearth of activity and they’re thinking, oh crap, I gotta get going. And so the timing of this is, is good. So as we wrap up, yes. Let’s tell people how to reach you, how to access some of your training. What are the best ways for them to get some support from you and your team if they decide they wanna do that?

Yeah, for sure. I really appreciate the opportunity, Drew. We have a new video training, it’s basically called take charge of your agency’s future revenue. Pretty bold title. It’s everything we know, everything we’ve learned from, from 10 years, basically tactically like the order of operations, all that good stuff. The goal is to give you what you need to basically get to that like two to five appointment level. And with that it’s just, we’ll make a hot link before this goes live, but sales kiba.com/aami will be that link and we will get that off and, and yeah from there, you know, we’re training people, we’re doing this done for you, done with you done alongside you hybrid and so on from there. Yeah.

Okay. Awesome. This has been great. It’s always good to catch up with you and you know, I love the fact that you’re in the trenches with your clients so you, you know what works and you see it every day and so I’m, I’m grateful that you made the time to, to be with us today. Thank you. Yeah,

Likewise. You really appreciate it.

You bet. Alright guys, this rep’s up another episode. Again, Dan gave you the formula, you just have to follow the formula and, and I think one of the things he said early on, which is everyone’s looking sort of for the silver bullet because they don’t want to do the hard work. They don’t wanna define who their best customers are. They don’t want to take anything off the table. I promise you. Being a a mile wide in an inch deep is no different and much less successful than being a mile deep and an inch wide. There is power, there’s riches in the niches, there are reasons why there are so many of us out there talking about the value of that. And the minute you do that and then you start talking from that place of authority and you use some of the things Dan talked to you about in terms of creating familiarity and connection with people at a very safe level.

Hey, I grew up in Minnesota. You grew up in Minnesota, Hey, we went to Univer, you know, we’re both badgers, we’re what, whatever it is, right? Find, find a way to connect that allows you to in have that first conversation with the intention of creating relationship, not with making the sale. I think we also suffer under the delusion that one phone call makes a sale. And it sure does sometimes when it’s a referral and they’ve already been shopping your website for six months, you just didn’t know it. But when we’re talking about true outbound, that’s just not the case. You’re much earlier in the process and you have to set your expectations accordingly. So lots of good actionable items. In this episode. I hope you put them into play and underline, stick with them long enough for them to work.

So we often talk about the fact that we are so impatient that about the time something’s gonna work, we stop and go, ah, that’s not working anymore. Or you land one client, you get so busy that you stop prospecting for the others. So this really does have to be a consistent focus on your part and it takes longer than you think. So give it the time that it needs. All right, couple quick things. Thanks to our friends at White. Label IQ. They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast and also of the summit. By the way, the summit is May 21st and 22nd this year for the first time in Denver. So we’d love to see you. But the, and the folks at White Label will be there and you can chat with them about how they come alongside agencies to do white Label, PPC dev and design.

They work with tons of am I agencies who rave about the quality of the work and the quality of the human beings behind the work. So check them out at White Label IQ dot com slash aami. They’ve got an offer of some free hours on your first project for you. And as always, just wanna remind you, I am super grateful that you keep coming back. This would not be fun. If, you weren’t listening, so I love that you come back. I love hearing from you about which episodes really resonated with you. And I’m gonna be be here back here next week with another guest. So I hope you join me then too. Alright, in the meantime, have a great week and I will see you next week. Thanks for listening.

Come back next week for another episode, designed to help you build a stronger, more stable and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and other professional development [email protected].