Building relationships that attract right-fit clients to you with Matthew Kimberley

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run. Traditional digital media buying, web dev, PR brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Bill to Better Agency podcast, presented by a white label like you, 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 McClellan.

 

Hey, everybody. Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency as we march to episode 500. Kind of excited about that. I have some big plans for that episode, but in the meantime, a great episode. Today we’re going to talk about sales. We’re going to talk about sales from the aspect of trust and how relational sales is, especially in a business like ours, where what we sell isn’t something somebody can hold.

 

And so how do we a understand who is the right fit for us and be? How do we build that trust that relationship not only so they’ll buy from us, but also so we can invigorate our referral chain as well. Have a great guest to talk about that today. So Matthew Kimberly has been on the show before. He has written several books.

 

He’s a business consultant. And most recently he partnered with Michael Porte to write the book Yourself Solid for coaches and consultants. Version of that book. If you haven’t read the book, it’s great. But, they’ve decided to sort of really narrow focus it, down to just individual types of businesses. So, I saw an advance copy and the consultant thing fits us to a tee that we are doing more consultative sales.

 

And so I think you’re going to find Matthew’s take on all of that super applicable to you. And very interesting. So that further ado, let’s welcome him to the show. Matthew, welcome back to the podcast. It’s good to have you back there. Thank you for inviting me. Nowhere I would rather be right now than with you. So you just finished a brand new book.

 

Tell us a little bit about it and kind of what prompted it. And then I want to unpack the content because I think they’re very pertinent for our audience. Absolutely. Well, some of your listeners and listeners might be familiar with the book yourself. Solid by Michael Port. It’s a book that came out about 20 years ago. Yeah. And it was a marketing system, a system for getting more clients.

 

And you can handle even if you hate marketing and selling. And it was right at the cusp of the the online revolution. I think it started as a system in Manhattan where Michael, who went on to be my business partner later in time, was helping gyms fill their rosters with with lots of lots of clients. And he realized, it seems, a personal trainer.

 

Anybody could actually take it to other gyms. And then people outside of the industry said, well, could you help us with our legal practice or our dentist’s office or whatever that might be? And so Michael codified this system, and it was released to shoot a claim, and it became one of the original small business marketing guides, I think.

 

And over the years there have been different iterations because technology moves very quickly. So the second edition update and that third edition and then the illustrated edition made it accessible to people of different learning styles. And then, yeah, the fourth edition came out, at which point we said, well, we can’t keep up with technology, so we’re going to provide principles and frameworks and guidelines rather than how to manage your Google+ page.

 

So we took the whole house and yeah, know it’s a terrible day, isn’t it. Terrible day for all the bosses. I remember back in the day, I paid $1,000 for a course on how to crush it on Google Plus, and I’d say it was money well spent. You know, having a short lived trade. We had to make money quick, right?

 

Absolutely right. And so over the years, we’ve seen the various. And my journey with Book Yourself started was I was a business owner. I ran an agency, a recruitment agency, and I needed all the help I can get. I was in my late 20s and I’ve been promoted to CEO by accident, owned a company, and marketing and sales advice was everything.

 

So bookshelf selling was a very popular book. I got on the mailing list and more and more in love with marketing the small business, and less and less in love with the agency side of recruitment and approached my and said, look, I’d like to be a like a representative for your brand and the rest is history. We became business partners.

 

I ended up owning the company for a while and the journey through Bristol started over the various years. I ended up with a couple of operational people now in charge of the organization. Michael was running heroic public speaking on do various consulting for organizations, tiny and quite large, from my base in Malta and the the current custodians of the brand said what we’d really like to do is introduce book yourself solving the systems in new markets.

 

So book yourself solid for coaches and consultancies. When I was approached about the Michael and I looked at the original text, tore apart and said, how can we make the proven system more specifically appropriate for the agent of change? The person who is specifically in the business of helping people move from A to B, so whether that’s a personal trainer or a business coach or somebody who does a corporate consulting, management consulting, and in fact, one of the questions we had to ask when we were putting the book together is, what do we call this person?

 

Because he’s a coach, consultant, trainer, speaker. Every time we mention it as this, any of those things. But we settled on a shorthand with an explainer that, you know, we’re going to say, coach, but if you are somebody who helps move people or organizations through the journey, then this is this is absolutely for you. It’s for people who generally deal with little inventory.

 

They’re not necessarily thinking about making stuff. Right, right, right. Instead, they merchants of wisdom and intellectual property. I say, yeah, yeah. And, you know, you and I were talking before we hit the record button. That is certainly the shift for agencies these days. So agencies are finding themselves being more and more commoditized for making the things. But the one thing that somebody on Fiverr or I can’t do is think strategically, like an agency owner or an agency leader can.

 

And so a lot of agencies are watching their their revenue shift from I make money when I, when I buy media or I make a widget for a client to do more work being done on the strategic side, the guidance side, the leading the client through all of the crazy change that we’re seeing, you know, post Covid so that when I saw that you and Michael were releasing the book, which is just out now, so folks can go to their favorite bookseller, whatever that may be, online or down the street and pick up the book.

 

I knew that it would be good for us to have the conversation. So what I really want to do is kind of unpack some of the things and that you and Michael thought were particularly pertinent to that consultant to to somebody who sells ideas and strategies and encouragement and, you know, as kind of guiding a client from where they are today.

 

You know, let’s figure out what the delta is. Guide the client from where they are today to where they want to go, which you know, is a challenging sale. It’s a you know, you have to trust that I’m smart enough to get you where you can’t get by yourself. That’s not easy. Right? So so let’s talk a little bit about some of the core tenants that you feel are critical for a consultant or someone who is in that consultancy kind of a role in terms of attracting, I will tell you, one of the challenges the agencies are facing right now is really long sales cycles.

 

So I know that part of the value of what you and Michael teach in the book is a way to create relationships that speed up the sales cycle, that that earn trust faster and allows somebody to raise their hand and go, yeah, I want to, I want to open up my wallet to you. So let’s talk a little bit about that.

 

Talk to us about how we do that. How do we make that happen. So yeah, an analogy from the world of sports that I really like is that if the team is continually losing, then the coach is the one who gets fired up. So the way they and however yet the coach gets to decide who plays when. And I think the idea that the coach gets to decide who’s on his team is really, really critical.

 

And we have something in the book of some solid framework called the Red Velvet rope policy. We believe that there are some people who you may not work with and others not so much. One of the dangers for an agency owner, a consultant or a coach, particularly if they’re looking at a dwindling bank balance or they’re concerned that cash flow is going to be an issue, is that we tend to lower our standards for who we’re allowing onto the team, because we’re hoping for a Hail Mary.

 

I’m going to stop the sports analogy there because that’s about the that’s about the limit of my sporting knowledge. But there are some people who are coachable. There’s some organizations that we’re going to be able to do our best work with, and some organizations, by dint of the people in them they are going to do is more harm than good in the long term.

 

They’re going to pay us a check and the relationship might become fractious. Would you blame a doctor who who’s patient or sick in spite of the doctor’s advice? Okay, really important that you take these meds and you don’t eat these foods. And three months down the line, you’ve not taken the meds, you’re not eating the food. It’s not the doctor’s fault.

 

Well, this is a bad customer now. Great doctors. There’s a there’s a strong argument. The doctors, particularly in the, you know, primary health care industry should not choose their patients. But you certainly find doctors, coaches, consultants, medical professionals, mental health. You know, I had a conversation with my therapist and she’s like, I need to know if you’re going to be a good if you if you’re going to be a good client or not.

 

I need to know whether we’re going to whether we’re just going to spin our wheels, because I really want you to get a result. So I need to see whether you’re open to implementing the strategies that we suggest. So this idea of a red velvet rope policy, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you work with the kind of ideal client that you’re meant to serve, and it’s not based upon the industry they’re in or the amount of money that they’ve got or or who their recommendation is based upon their inherent characteristics, not their circumstances.

 

So a client company might be really down on their luck. They might be struggling to pay wages, but they might be the best possible client for you. Whereas an organization that’s absolutely drowning in cash and you’re saying, well, they’re going on my way. A list of of prospects. Well, they could be terrible communicators. They can do it. They can put you they could call.

 

She was a fourth rate citizen, you know, ignore all your calls until it’s time to get on the preferred vendors list and then make you sit tight for 24 months while you fill in forms and then say, well, now you now you’re in. We got your hostage. You know some of those. When I ran an agency, I refused to pay the preferred vendors, get a preferred supplies list.

 

It was a it was an unequal relationship. So we’re really looking for especially the smaller consultancies, smaller business, the coaches, the one that bands the partnerships. We’re looking for clients that see us as equals. When you do that, you do your best work with them and it enters into a virtuous cycle. So they like you, they walk away, they talk about you in glowing terms, and you in turn feel energized and inspired and are able to show better results.

 

And momentum counts for a lot. If you can get a little bit of momentum up here mentally as an operator, a partner in your agency, then you find that that counts for an awful lot when you’re out of momentum, when you’re trying to get back onto the bike, that’s a tough place to be in. And we can mitigate against that by having very strict criteria for the characteristics of the personalities involved that we’re prepared to work with and who we’re not.

 

So we should really look at auditioning our clients rather than auditioning for our clients. That would be the number one principle, I think. Yeah. You know, I think for a lot of agencies, you are right. They you know, you get that nagging feeling in your gut when you’re talking to a prospect and you’re like, this is this is not I don’t feel them leaning in.

 

I don’t feel them that they’re willing to take risks. I don’t feel that there. But to your point, we’ve been on a dry spell. We need to you know, this is one of the reasons why it’s so important to have an active pipeline so that you don’t have to take whatever swims in the net. You can choose the right prospect who turns into a good client because to your point, the client who will follow your advice, who will partner with you, is much more likely to get results, which then ends up being that they stay a client because they’re happy with the results.

 

They’re moving the the ball forward and they want more as opposed to, you know, what happens for a lot of agencies is you have a lot of upfront time with discovery and learning about them and all of that. And if if they’re not willing to do what you recommend, then the relationship is short lived and expensive for the agency because they never were able to recoup all the upfront time that they put into it.

 

So in the in the book, do you talk a little bit about, I’m assuming that there is a I believe anyway, every client is the right fit for somebody, but they may not be the right fit for us. So how do we determine right fit? So who gets past the red velvet. You know, rope for me versus somebody else.

 

Yeah. Completely different. And it’s also flexible. Yeah. The red velvet rope obviously if you’re doing a one off rebrand of a of a milk carton, you know, you might not need to have two great relationships with this person. The stakes are a bit lower right. If you’re a multi year you know cross media campaign that’s the stakes are slightly different.

 

If you’re inviting someone to have a cup of tea with you, it’s a bit different to advise someone to go on vacation with you, so you can have a little bit of flexibility in your red rope. Yeah, right. And you’re absolutely right. I would say it’s different for everybody. If I primarily do 1 to 1 consulting work, that’s pretty much what I do.

 

And my red velvet red criteria pretty simple, you know. Does this person show up on time? Most of the time there’s if you were like once or twice as great, if you’re habitually late or actually that’s a bit of a red flag for some of my core values regardless. But I just don’t think that our time is more valuable than everybody else’s.

 

I like to crack a joke occasionally, but possibly more when I was younger. I’ve grown into a bit of a more serious, bitter old man as time’s gone by, but I’d like to test the boundaries of my sense of humor with the person I’m talking to. Because, you know, one of my I need perpetual feedback. Yeah, I measure perpetual feedback, spoken and unspoken.

 

And I think that you can be comfortable in your skin is very, very important. So if if micron doesn’t laugh at my jokes or doesn’t laugh at some of my jokes, then I don’t know if we’re going to get on, you know, would I have a drink with this person? That’s a great criteria, but I want to sit down and have a cup of coffee or a dinner or a beer with this person.

 

That’s a great criteria. And other people have different styles. You know, I am not at all interested in being a puck in a game of corporate hockey. And one of the things that I’m working to really work with large organizations that need to be dealing with a human resource professional, you know, somebody in sales training or consulting and, and you realize that that that there’s an internal company style vocabulary, mixology way of dealing with each other that gives me nightmares.

 

I’m like, oh, no, no, no, no, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We don’t work like this. But for somebody else to feel super comfortable in that environment. Yeah, I think it’s really about knowing yourself. Right. Yeah. It’s all about knowing yourself. And listen, you’re absolutely guaranteed to have red velvet rope policy failures along the way, even if you’re well aware of it.

 

You know, this is this is the number one technical. You say, I’m sorry that I’ve been preaching for 15 years now, and still to this day, sometimes I go, well, that it is a juicy contract and maybe it’ll be okay this time. Kind of know. And I think if you’ve been running an agency for more than a few years, you get you’ve got to check in with yourself.

 

Yeah. I say you get that, you get that weird Spidey sense like, this is this is not going to go as well as I want it to. Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds wooly, but, you know, good people can have bad days as well, which is why we talk about inherent characteristics rather than circumstances. Sure. Right. My client is coachable versus my client has money.

 

Well, he might have money today. But you know last week they didn’t and next year they might not. But they’re good decent human being and so on. And so they’re going to allow us free reign, you know. And sometimes you can dictate, you know, you can come into my, you know, red velvet rope. It’s typically used in a nightclub.

 

Right. And and the criteria for entry into the nightclub might be, are you wearing smart shoes or they might be. Do you look like you? You got a good vibe, right? You know, there’s a place, a famous nightclub in Berlin where the door policy is absolutely opaque. They won’t tell you. It’s just based upon the chief doorman vibe.

 

Check. But if we take two, two identical to two establishments on the same street. One is perhaps a bar that caters to hard rock fans. And the other one is a champagne and ballroom establishment is going to attract to both. But each of these, you’re going to have a door policy that attracts a very, very different clientele. Yeah, but each group of that clientele will know whether they’re in the right place or the wrong place.

 

So if you’re in your hard rock bar, throwing pints of lager around the place and, you know, wearing your big leather boots and your long hair, you walk in there and everybody looks the same, you know that you’re going to have a great night. And so is everybody else in there. If you walk in with your high heels and your fur coat in your tiara, you’re going to say, oh, I don’t feel comfortable.

 

I’m not in the right place. And guess what? Everybody else in the bar is going to say, oh, what’s she doing now? I don’t feel great because he didn’t, you know, maybe he should be in the bar down the road. So it’s absolutely individual. And, you know, we also say if you’re if you currently feel like you would rather sleep in than do that meeting with the client on a regular basis, finance is allowing you should look to offer both.

 

Yeah. And it’s much easier to do when you know that you’ve got a steady pipeline of future prospects. Sure. Terrifying to let a big fish go if that’s the only fish that’s feeding you. Your family, your family can be quite large. We go into self-employment. We decide to own our own companies, in part because we’re slightly unemployable, I think.

 

And if we find ourselves in what is essentially an employee, it should be an agency client relationship. There’s so many service providers. Relationships with their clients look like employer, employee. There’s going to be a lot of a lot of friction there. And I don’t like being told what to do. You’re not valuing my expertise. No, I’m not going to come to this bloody meeting.

 

Okay? This meeting could be an email. And I think this is a personal opinion. I really think anybody who’s running an agency or running a consulting business should absolutely come in and like the bank say, this is the way that we do things around here, and you’re hiring us for our expertise, our insight. And that doesn’t need to be a meeting.

 

Yeah. Well, I, I was thinking, as you were using the bar analogy, a lot of this is on us to make sure that the signage and the decor of the bar make it very clear about what happens when you come inside. Right? So it’s it’s look as if you want a lot of layers and formality and blah, blah, blah.

 

That’s not us. Or if you want somebody who doesn’t, who has a depth of expertise in the automotive marketing industry, that’s us. Like a part of it is really part of knowing who you serve is having a really clear understanding of who you are and how you serve. I think because your point is well taken, the employee employer relationship in our world is we’re treated like a vendor rather than a partner.

 

And, you know, I’ve never, ever met an agency was like, I love being treated like a vendor. I love that that’s that’s not why we went into the agency business. We went into the agency business because we love that consultative strategic relationship where we are a true partner to our client. So your your points well taken, having the confidence to to be aware of your style and the way that you do things most effectively and communicate that into the pre purchase relation, experience or relationship is absolutely critical for congruence.

 

I wrote a book 20 years ago now, many years ago, 12, 15 years ago called How to Get a Grip, and it was a very sweary self-help book, and I knew everything because I was 27 when I wrote it, you know, I knew absolutely everything. So it became a point where I was smart then, right? Yes. So I have no idea.

 

But it was rereleased. The publisher has changed hands a few times. I got contacted by a stranger who said, when rereleasing your book, because we own it and it’s going to have the F-word in the title, so now it’s going to be Get a Grip, which is a signpost to the reader. Yeah, right. What it means baked on the inside.

 

Because I wasn’t mad keen, I thought, well, you know, I might be a bit derivative now, even though my book came out before all of the self-help, all of the sweary self-help titles, it was definitely a precursor to that. I said, I don’t know how I feel, and then the publisher said, look, it just indicates to the reader what genre they can expect to read under the cover.

 

And I always thought, you know, I always said, well, perhaps my next book, which is bookish, I’m selling it for cabbages and consultants. Perhaps my next book will be something that actually feeds me leads. Right? Because Get a Grip sold thousands of thousands of copies, but there wasn’t much crossover. But here’s what I did do. Somebody who was looking for a small business marketing consultant who saw that I had written a sweary self-help book, immediately knew whether they were more into me or more running away from me within a second.

 

Right. My name’s Matthew Kimberley. I gave business advice and I wrote a sweary self-help book. Well, that’s going to turn off, I think, a good number of people and that’s great. It’s very controversial. I know, you know, kicking kittens and putting them on YouTube. It’s but it is polarizing. And I think it’s very difficult to appeal to everybody.

 

Yeah. Kind of praising nobody and to, to put you to put your European flag firmly into the ground and say, this is the kind of experience you can get with me this is what I stand for. This is how I express myself. This is what I’m like. What I’m truly self expressed allows people to choose you. And it will.

 

You will be polarizing, you will attract some people and you’re repel some others. But of course that makes you more magnetic and it does make things easier. But it’s a bit bold. And when I started my first agency, it was, you know, technology recruitment agency. It was super corporate. We used words that I don’t use in real life.

 

On our website. We talked about skill sets and harmonizing synergy and energy purposes. You know, I, I was looking I was at my local discount supermarket here in Malta and it said, if I remember correctly, something along the lines of we are currently seeking to engage new employees for our store. We are currently seeking to engage new employees for our store.

 

And I thought, why don’t you just say we’re hiring, right? Do you want a job? I said, you know, this is the kind of corporate crap that we find all over when I was a recruiter, because I’m all over seeing these. You’re trying to sell a version of yourself. You’re not. To somebody who wants to buy a version of you.

 

The David realized it’s much easier to get booked solid if you say, this is me, this is what I’m good at, and this is what it’s going to be like. But it takes a little bit of deprogramming. I believe, particularly if you’ve gone out through corporate. Yeah, yeah. All right. I want to take a break. And then when we come back we want to talk about all right now, now I know who I am.

 

I know who I want to cross the red velvet velvet rope and who I don’t. How do I find them? How do I attract them? So let’s take a quick break, and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about the principles in the book that helped me attract the right people and stay in contact with them until they’re ready to buy.

 

So we’ll be right back. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening today. Before I get back to the interview, I just want to remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops. And you can see the whole schedule at Agency Management institute.com 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 them out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show.

 

All right. We are back. And we are talking about the newest version in the book yourself. Solid series specifically for us consultants. And I think all of you, whether you make a lot of things for clients, whether you’re a PR firm that never makes a thing, whether you are an influencer agency. The point is that our work starts as a consulting firm.

 

That then leads to execution of some of our ideas. And so that’s why I think this book and the specific tenets of the book are so applicable to us. So, Kathy, before we, before we took a break, I said, all right, I know who I am, I know who I do and don’t want as a client. Now, what?

 

Well, we firmly believe that people make investments and prospects. Clients make investments in us that are directly proportionate to the amount of trust that we’ve earned. And trust develops at different speeds for different individuals. By means of example, you may attend, and that speaks from my own experience. You may attend an expo or a conference for your industry, and you get to do a speaking slot, and you speak for 20 minutes, and at the end of that 20 minutes, somebody comes up to you and says, I was absolutely blown away.

 

And I’m speaking from my own experience and blown away by by what you said. I need to bring you in-house immediately. Yeah. And you say, whoa, whoa, we’ve never exchanged the word. And they say, it doesn’t matter. We like everything about you. We like what you said. We need what you got. And this person didn’t know you from Adam half an hour previously.

 

Yep. So it took them 25 minutes to make perhaps a six figure buying decision without any backwards and forwards interaction. Meetings, phone calls, proposals, nothing. Then you go back to your hotel room and you check your emails and somebody says and you see an email, someone says, Matthew, listen, I’ve been on your mailing list for the last seven years and I want to let you know, I’ve just bought a copy of your book and you say, thanks very much.

 

So what we have here is an individual who took seven years of 20, 20 bucks to spend 20 bucks, and they’ve probably been absolutely devoted to you attention wise in that time. They’ve probably read every email you’ve written. She followed you on social media. Whatever it is that you’re doing, and it took them seven years to spend 20 bucks and obviously due to need, but is also due to trust.

 

In some industries we don’t need much trust to make buying decisions. Utilities, you know, monopoly, any anyone who’s got a monopoly, he’s gonna say, no, you’re going to pay us because we give you water. That’s great. But otherwise we get to hang around and have fun and organizations are made up of emotional individuals who can absolutely be swayed by the trust building activities.

 

Because of this sales disparity between trust and need and purchases, we don’t believe in the sanctity of a single way of getting customers or a funnel. Now we we think funnel is a great we think it work. The funnel should be within a sales cycle. Now, I say a cycle is not how long it takes you to get one individual client.

 

It’s more although it is that. But when I talk about it, it’s more like a carousel. It’s a carousel that says, hey, here you are. Which of these horses do you want to jump on? You want to jump on the big horse? Jump. Jump on the little horse, John. Jump on the door and you want to jump in the chariot because all of these are available to you.

 

Different options. But let’s hang out and stay in touch and keep in touch and find out. Maybe you want to spend 20 bucks on a book, or maybe you wanna spend $20,000 on a weekend workshop. You know, either of these two are entirely an option. Why don’t we just meet and see where we are? If somebody if to somebody who’s come up to you after your speaking gig and said, look, I want to bring you in-house on a retainer of 500 K a year.

 

If you believe in the sanctity in the funnel, you’re going to say, well, before you do that, I need to make sure that you’ve read my book. You’re not going to say that. You’re going to say absolutely. When do we stop? Right, right, right. We do the vibe check. So the idea that you have different investable opportunities is very important.

 

So imagine that you’re going into in a win a contract for a micro site for a, international soft drinks brand. They’re launching a new brand. And, you know, they’ve got a few million to throw at you to, to launch a new microsite campaign, and you don’t win it. And you might say, oh, well, it’s back to the drawing board.

 

Better luck next time. We’ll try again. Google might be something else that you can do for them, but are you keeping in touch with the individuals concerned for your site right on you? Because even a corporate do put up barriers to entry, barriers to protect the time of the decision maker. There’s various ways of hierarchy, gatekeepers, so on and so forth.

 

The very, very simple logic behind Keep in Touch means that you are more likely to be front of that front of mind than the day. Right? And if the last time you had any contact with them was when you filled in the RFP three years ago for the last call for tenders that they issued. So we are very, very, very straightforward.

 

Keep in touch. There’s there’s two types of keep in touch typically in this in in the world of marketing and sales, one is prospecting or sales related. Hey just check it. Anyone who’s been on a on the buying end of of services know that. Hey just checking if you need anything but bumping this to the top of your inbox.

 

Yeah, it’s not the worst. It’s important, it’s important. Right? It’s important. We know. You know, it’s direct outreach to potential buyers. Let’s do it. But what’s more important is the strength of our relationships, because we have three currencies when it comes to getting anything we want in life. But let’s take it through the purely commercial way of generating prospects for our three currencies to generate leads.

 

First one is financial. We can buy lead. That’s great. And if we’re in a position where we can buy a customer for less than we’re profiting from them, we’re on a different infinite loop of hand over fist money. That’s great, but it’s not that straightforward as we know, and it can be expensive. Maybe you don’t have the money to run the ad or pay for the sponsorship or whatever.

 

Then we’ve got sweat equity and energy, which is your cold calling, which is your making content, which is your strategy for showing up on social media or events or whatever that might be. And that’s important as well. And certainly, you know, if we cash poor at the beginning of a particular campaign or career, we’re gonna look to price deflation.

 

We’re going to look to attract attention to ourselves organically rather than using paid ads. But the third currency, which I believe makes both your money and your effort going all formal for that is your relationship capital. If you know the organizer of the conference, well, maybe you don’t need to buy sponsorship because you get that 15 minute speaking slot as a value add.

 

If you have a great relationship with the editor of the industry magazine because you’ve nurtured that relationship over the years, maybe you need to buy an ad when he’ll run a puff piece as long as is relevant to the industry. Or maybe it will be on call. Expert if you’ve nurtured relationships with industry newsletters. But sure, you can ask and get a discount on running an ad in their in their December issue.

 

But without those relationships, without those, without that person who can give you a boost up, make your money go a little bit further. Make your time and your energy go a little bit further. You’re really on a on a starter for nothing. And you might you might think this sounds too obvious and it really is that obvious. If you look at the most important roles in the largest organizations of the planet, they typically only have two jobs.

 

Today, the CEO of any organization is responsible for internal relationships. Who’s sitting where in the table and external relationships to do with who we partnering with, who are our vendors? Who are our suppliers, who are all lobbyists, who are also on for and of course, then they have to do the strategy that they’re paid for. But so much of that strategy is dependent upon relationships.

 

Yeah. And we believe that you should draw up a list of people who are important to your business and contact them at least once every 30 days, whether it’s a birthday card or just thinking about you, an invitation for a coffee or a congratulations on the latest thing that you did or whatever that is, you keep showing up and you don’t make an ask until it’s appropriate and relevant to make an ask.

 

Everything is better. You will receive more invitations. You will receive more opportunities. You’re basically raising your frequency in the world by identifying who are the I’m sure Malcolm Gladwell had a name for them. Maybe the sneezes or the spreaders or the influential people. The people who can pull strings, make things happen for you. And I’m not talking about being in a social activist.

 

We’re not talking about trying to climb the ladder in order for personal gain. We’re talking about business development and frankly, personal development strategy. The recognizes that there is always somebody you want to rung up on a certain ladder that will invite us to join them there as and when the opportunity comes. So long and short of it, that’s the reason why Arsenal CRM use is of absolutely essential importance.

 

If you’re going to go down the biggest selling route. So we have our sales CRM, but we also have our relationship correct. And one is just as important as the next. So I’m putting my I’m, I’m thinking like the listeners and I’m going, oh my God, that sounds like a lot of work. Like how many people, you know, like I’m immediately going, I barely have time to go to the bathroom during the day.

 

How am I going to send birthday cards or whatever? So when you’re talking about this, what when you think about it, what is the ideal universe? Are we talking 300 people? Are we talking 30 people? Are we talking to people? And what is what is that ongoing? So let’s say you’re on my list, right? So I reach out to you this month and I’m like, hey, Matthew, how are the kids?

 

And are they getting ready to go to school or whatever it is? Right. So how how do you guys advise that you stay relevant? And because I believe part of our job is to be interesting until they’re interested. Right. So how how do I stay interesting to those folks that are so critical that they are in my personal CRM?

 

So first of all, how many are we talking ballpark and two, how do I stay interesting to them so it doesn’t feel yucky? Which by the way is a very technical marketing term. Yucky idea. Yes, I’ll give you an interesting until you until they’re interested is important, but I really want to draw the line between doing commercial business development, which is trying to identify somebody who’s going to reach into their pocket and not bring important lifetime relationships.

 

So we’re going to talk about and lifetime relationships. So we got to list the first one we call the network of 90. And we recommend there are 90 names in there. And you might say as most people say, I don’t know, nine people, let alone 90, that’s okay. If you only know nine people, that’s a great place to start.

 

But let’s say I have several hundred in my in my list now. But the reason that we go with 90 people and if you look for them, you will find them. And they don’t all have to be Oprah Winfrey. They can be your local Chamber of Commerce head and be like, unless you know anyone who’s just got a little bit a foot in a world that you don’t have, perhaps, or inside your head or advantage 90 because if we contact three of them a day, then we cycle through the months, months, and, you know, various tools are available to any CRM tool will let you do this.

 

You know, contact this person every 30 days, basically what we’re looking at. But if you if you want a spreadsheet, it’s two columns. It’s your name and column A and the date last contact ID in column B update the day last contacted and sort by left. Yeah so by the person who needs it last contact and so if we got 90 people that’s great.

 

If you got 300 people as great as well. And what to say to them. Well there’s certainly during the calendar year there are certain opportunities that allow us to reach out anyway. It might be someone’s birthday, it might be somebody diversionary, it might be the 4th of July. They could be any any reason why it would be appropriate to drop a line and say, hey, thinking of you for this reason.

 

And then I always like to end with a little question which invites a little bit of backwards and forward. How’s life out of the kids? How’s business? Are you okay? The other opportunity that’s always afforded to us, we’re not always, but very frequently forwarded to us is social media. So what we typically get is we’ll scroll our social media feeds and it will say, you know, at least John’s birthday.

 

So you type on the wall on his wall. If I said what is called Happy birthday John, or you double tap the photo, well, how about if we just take that to a text message or to a personal message or to a voice message, auto function? Just getting that one set beyond it also gives us bricks for the middle of conversation starters.

 

Wow, Fiji looked amazing or really enjoyed the article you wrote. Now we talk about sharing three things on knowledge, which is I saw this specific thing and I thought it would be relevant to you. Yeah. Okay. Drew, you know, agencies in the UK seeing a 60% downturn in business since Brexit. So this made me thinking, how’s life? The secondly, we share compassion, which is how you feeling?

 

Happy anniversary. Sorry to hear about the death of your whatever you know so on and so forth. And and sometimes we bump into people in the street or by chance that we don’t forget to market by. How are you? How’s life? You wanna grab a coffee? Then they get knocked off in the CRM and we cycle through them very, very, very quickly, really the length of a text message.

 

And I like to do a lot of line by text. And actually, it’s also assumes that you have some personal relationship with them because you have their cell phone number. Right? You’re absolutely right. You and you took the words at my mouth. That is actually my criteria for whether or not they belong in this network of 90. If you’re in their cell phone number, do I know them well enough to send them a text message and it not be intrusive?

 

Would it be appropriate for me if I was in town to say, I’m in town? Do you want to grab a coffee? And could I reasonably expect to? Yes. So we know. So we have another strategy for making these. Okay, if I’m making making contacts this strong, right to have another structure, the third thing we can always do to share our general networks, I make the introductions and, you know, there’s a whole science around that.

 

You know, who’s an appropriate introduction to, you know, is your brother in law and the governor of the Bank of England, the appropriate introduction because you’re both interested in money? Well, probably don’t, but you end up using your discretion. You make appropriate introductions when requested, typically without surprises to anybody. And what happens then is you become if you introduce enough people in your network to each other, you really do become the center of the universe.

 

Because what they talk about, what everybody in the network has in common, is you. But they also know each other, which reinforces the bonds supporting you. If you imagine a line between everybody in your network with you in the middle, it’s a safer place to be. If if they’re all connected to each other and you, of course, they talk about you and they meet for the first time.

 

Yeah. So that’s your network of 90. It can be ten minutes a day, frankly. And you, you’d be amazed how many people you’re actually in touch with anyway. And you might find you doing 20 pieces of conversation with people that you kind of know. But let’s be diligent about it and proactive about it. Yeah, but then we have a list of 20, which is okay, what if I only know nine people?

 

Well, you don’t know nine people. You can still make about 100 introductions. Person one, person two through eight, person ten, and so on and so forth. But direct outreach, the list of 20 is 20 people you think it would be useful to have a relationship with, and useful is the right word. It doesn’t mean we’re going to be greedy or avaricious or calculating, which is going to be wearing our business development hat.

 

Do I know somebody who works in logistics? No. Oh well, that might be useful when it comes to transporting our way to the Dubai Trade Fair. Do I know somebody who works in in the press? No. Okay, well, I really admire that author. I think that would be a fantastic person to come speak in my organization one day.

 

So how do we get in contact with them? Social media helps. If it’s the local Chamber of commerce head. You just go to a few meetings and you introduce yourself. If it’s an author, let’s say it’s an author that you admire. Well, Twitter makes things easy. You can start to, you know, this specifically invites conversation, but also every author, no matter who they are in the world, has read every review that’s ever been put on Amazon about them.

 

Right? So if you want to get their attention, you can use a multi-pronged approach and then think you just pay for access. Yeah, certainly if there’s a speaker in a conference that I want to get to, then I’ll buy tickets to the conference and sit in the front row. I’ll take notes. I’m gonna have a thoughtful conversation afterwards.

 

I’ll tell them what I do and ask for permission to send them something. Copy of my book. Bunch of flowers. Recommendation for a restaurant in New York. Anything that can be value. But a lot of you know, I don’t. I think it’s a mistake to think I want to be friends with Oprah, I think is much smarter to say if I am seven steps removed or six steps removed from Oprah, who’s one step closer and you start to build these concentric circle of relationships?

 

Honestly, for me, doing free work for Michael bought for a year, made him eventually feel guilty to give me a job and then take over the company. And through that experience, I kind of I literally stood on his shoulders. He had a fantastic reputation. I showed myself up. I paid to be his client. First of all, I paid him, paid him money.

 

He told me we got to have a relationship. I raised my hand and volunteered to do some free stuff, and then I was corresponding with his peers as his right hand man. And I was Matthew from British South solid. And that opened a lot of doors. And then I paid to attend a few conferences where there were and I joined a mastermind where there were people in the room who very well can I take?

 

I showed them what I knew. They invited me to speak at their conferences, which invited me to speak at more conferences in different parts of the world. And they say you can only connect the dots looking back, but you can certainly lay the groundwork going down by being just a little bit strategic. If you stay home in your room all day long, you know, speak to anybody, you’re going to have a tough time using any kind of relationship leverage later on.

 

Well, I think to for a lot of agency owners, they hear all this and they’re like, I don’t have time. And the question is, okay, I think that’s because you’re doing other people’s job, right. I think it’s because you’re too involved in client work or too involved in something else, and you’re not you’re not recognizing that part of your currency is you are the owner of an agency.

 

You are someone a lot of people want to meet and have a relationship with. And that can be mutually beneficial. And I think the key to that is mutually beneficial is that when you, as I’m listening, do you talk? I’m thinking if I have a list of 20 or I have a list of 90 or whatever it is, my job is to be helpful.

 

My job is to make introductions. My job is to send them things that are of value to them, so that I am being interesting by helping them accomplish their goals, whatever that is. Personal or professional, which eventually means they’re going to lean in and want to help me back, right? They’re going to be I mean, they’re just human nature that when if I help you and I introduce you to five people and that’s fruitful for you, then now all of a sudden you are looking for ways to pay that forward back to me and the opportunity to be helpful back, even unconsciously.

 

If you see somebody very well connected that’s very attractive. I, you know, I challenge anybody to say the fact that this person is really well connected is not an attractive trait, which makes you, again, or magnetic more likely to pop up in conversations and invitations. Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. I think, you know, to to what you said.

 

True. If you’re not making time for business development, don’t be surprised if your business doesn’t develop to simply realize that, yeah, it’s the feast and famine cycle. Oh, because they’re busy servicing quite a when that contract came to an end, we had to put all hands on deck to try and find client bait. Yeah, obviously. Which is why we always try to learn.

 

And that’s the before we even go into sales pipelines and sales, CRM and so on and so forth. But having the right support network around you is going to get you an awful lot further than not having the right support network around you, assuming that you’re doing basic amount of of sales development that you should be doing. That was around us board of advisors, relationship support, network, whatever you want to call it, is sales environment on its own.

 

Yeah, you might be in for a long slog. Well, especially because most agencies will tell you the best clients for them are clients that that come to them through referrals. So if you don’t have a referral pipeline, if you don’t have people out there in the world that are talking about you and making those introductions, because two months ago you introduced them to somebody, then you know, that gets harder.

 

Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. They’re in the business of making it easier, get more clients. Even if you hate marketing and selling. Yeah. Make it easy for people to interact with. You look at interacting with the right type of people and find the right type of people so that you exist more in the world. Yeah, yeah, very, very true.

 

This has been fascinating. I’m hoping that it sort of gooses everybody to look at their calendar and, and find ways to do some of these things. So we’ve barely scratched the surface of the book, which I now. So I everyone knows where they buy their books so they can go find the copy of the book. But if folks want to follow you, Matthew, if they want to learn more about the work you do, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 

Well, I think if you go to delightful business.com and get give me your email address, then I’ll send you my, you know, short guide to how I proactively manage my relationships with the tools and the strategies and things like that. It’s called five things you need to do every morning to get more clients. And it’s it’s really a 25 page summary of what we’ve discussed today.

 

Guru is very, very practical a how to element. Awesome. This has been great. Thank you for coming back on the show. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I’ll come back whenever you like. A pleasure. All right. We will do it again. Thank you. All right, guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency.

 

Matthew gave you some very tactical, practical things to start thinking about. All of us. All of us are in the relationship business at the end of the day. So I think some core tenants of relationships are, number one, knowing who you are and what you have to offer in a relationship. Number two, knowing who you want to be in relationship with, who do you best connect with to Deuce?

 

Who can you serve best and to the last half of our conversation, which is how do you connect with people who can get you into those patterns, those circles easier, faster, better. So as as Matthew said, it’s not rocket science. It feels very basic. But you know what? Just because we know we should do it does not mean we are actually doing it.

 

So this episode is a reminder to us to do some of these core things that allow us to be the face of our agency, the face that creates opportunity and relationship. And so I love his vibe. I have things to do every day. So for sure reach out to him, get that you’re going to find it fascinating and honestly, pretty simple.

 

And and yet incredibly impactful. And so who doesn’t like simple and impactful, right. That’s a great combination. So check that out before I let you go. Two things. Thanks to our friends at White Label IQ. As you know they are the presenting sponsor of this podcast. So they do white label design, dev and PPC for agencies. All over the world.

 

So whether you have a small team or no team and you need some extra hands on some projects, they are a great resource. Head over to White label iq.com/am I? You can learn more about them. And last but certainly not least, I always like to remind you that I am very aware that you keep coming back, and I am grateful that you do.

 

This would be less fun if no one was listening. So thank you for coming back and helping us. Cash. We’re getting pretty close to episode 500, so thank you for supporting us and allowing us to keep doing this because honestly, I learned something with every conversation and I hope you did tube, so I appreciate you. I’ll be back next week.

 

I’ll see you there. Thanks for listening. I’m 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 opportunities at Agency Management institute.com.

 

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run. Traditional digital media buying, web dev, PR brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Bill to Better Agency podcast, presented by a white label like you, 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 McClellan.

 

Hey, everybody. Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency as we march to episode 500. Kind of excited about that. I have some big plans for that episode, but in the meantime, a great episode. Today we’re going to talk about sales. We’re going to talk about sales from the aspect of trust and how relational sales is, especially in a business like ours, where what we sell isn’t something somebody can hold.

 

And so how do we a understand who is the right fit for us and be? How do we build that trust that relationship not only so they’ll buy from us, but also so we can invigorate our referral chain as well. Have a great guest to talk about that today. So Matthew Kimberly has been on the show before. He has written several books.

 

He’s a business consultant. And most recently he partnered with Michael Porte to write the book Yourself Solid for coaches and consultants. Version of that book. If you haven’t read the book, it’s great. But, they’ve decided to sort of really narrow focus it, down to just individual types of businesses. So, I saw an advance copy and the consultant thing fits us to a tee that we are doing more consultative sales.

 

And so I think you’re going to find Matthew’s take on all of that super applicable to you. And very interesting. So that further ado, let’s welcome him to the show. Matthew, welcome back to the podcast. It’s good to have you back there. Thank you for inviting me. Nowhere I would rather be right now than with you. So you just finished a brand new book.

 

Tell us a little bit about it and kind of what prompted it. And then I want to unpack the content because I think they’re very pertinent for our audience. Absolutely. Well, some of your listeners and listeners might be familiar with the book yourself. Solid by Michael Port. It’s a book that came out about 20 years ago. Yeah. And it was a marketing system, a system for getting more clients.

 

And you can handle even if you hate marketing and selling. And it was right at the cusp of the the online revolution. I think it started as a system in Manhattan where Michael, who went on to be my business partner later in time, was helping gyms fill their rosters with with lots of lots of clients. And he realized, it seems, a personal trainer.

 

Anybody could actually take it to other gyms. And then people outside of the industry said, well, could you help us with our legal practice or our dentist’s office or whatever that might be? And so Michael codified this system, and it was released to shoot a claim, and it became one of the original small business marketing guides, I think.

 

And over the years there have been different iterations because technology moves very quickly. So the second edition update and that third edition and then the illustrated edition made it accessible to people of different learning styles. And then, yeah, the fourth edition came out, at which point we said, well, we can’t keep up with technology, so we’re going to provide principles and frameworks and guidelines rather than how to manage your Google+ page.

 

So we took the whole house and yeah, know it’s a terrible day, isn’t it. Terrible day for all the bosses. I remember back in the day, I paid $1,000 for a course on how to crush it on Google Plus, and I’d say it was money well spent. You know, having a short lived trade. We had to make money quick, right?

 

Absolutely right. And so over the years, we’ve seen the various. And my journey with Book Yourself started was I was a business owner. I ran an agency, a recruitment agency, and I needed all the help I can get. I was in my late 20s and I’ve been promoted to CEO by accident, owned a company, and marketing and sales advice was everything.

 

So bookshelf selling was a very popular book. I got on the mailing list and more and more in love with marketing the small business, and less and less in love with the agency side of recruitment and approached my and said, look, I’d like to be a like a representative for your brand and the rest is history. We became business partners.

 

I ended up owning the company for a while and the journey through Bristol started over the various years. I ended up with a couple of operational people now in charge of the organization. Michael was running heroic public speaking on do various consulting for organizations, tiny and quite large, from my base in Malta and the the current custodians of the brand said what we’d really like to do is introduce book yourself solving the systems in new markets.

 

So book yourself solid for coaches and consultancies. When I was approached about the Michael and I looked at the original text, tore apart and said, how can we make the proven system more specifically appropriate for the agent of change? The person who is specifically in the business of helping people move from A to B, so whether that’s a personal trainer or a business coach or somebody who does a corporate consulting, management consulting, and in fact, one of the questions we had to ask when we were putting the book together is, what do we call this person?

 

Because he’s a coach, consultant, trainer, speaker. Every time we mention it as this, any of those things. But we settled on a shorthand with an explainer that, you know, we’re going to say, coach, but if you are somebody who helps move people or organizations through the journey, then this is this is absolutely for you. It’s for people who generally deal with little inventory.

 

They’re not necessarily thinking about making stuff. Right, right, right. Instead, they merchants of wisdom and intellectual property. I say, yeah, yeah. And, you know, you and I were talking before we hit the record button. That is certainly the shift for agencies these days. So agencies are finding themselves being more and more commoditized for making the things. But the one thing that somebody on Fiverr or I can’t do is think strategically, like an agency owner or an agency leader can.

 

And so a lot of agencies are watching their their revenue shift from I make money when I, when I buy media or I make a widget for a client to do more work being done on the strategic side, the guidance side, the leading the client through all of the crazy change that we’re seeing, you know, post Covid so that when I saw that you and Michael were releasing the book, which is just out now, so folks can go to their favorite bookseller, whatever that may be, online or down the street and pick up the book.

 

I knew that it would be good for us to have the conversation. So what I really want to do is kind of unpack some of the things and that you and Michael thought were particularly pertinent to that consultant to to somebody who sells ideas and strategies and encouragement and, you know, as kind of guiding a client from where they are today.

 

You know, let’s figure out what the delta is. Guide the client from where they are today to where they want to go, which you know, is a challenging sale. It’s a you know, you have to trust that I’m smart enough to get you where you can’t get by yourself. That’s not easy. Right? So so let’s talk a little bit about some of the core tenants that you feel are critical for a consultant or someone who is in that consultancy kind of a role in terms of attracting, I will tell you, one of the challenges the agencies are facing right now is really long sales cycles.

 

So I know that part of the value of what you and Michael teach in the book is a way to create relationships that speed up the sales cycle, that that earn trust faster and allows somebody to raise their hand and go, yeah, I want to, I want to open up my wallet to you. So let’s talk a little bit about that.

 

Talk to us about how we do that. How do we make that happen. So yeah, an analogy from the world of sports that I really like is that if the team is continually losing, then the coach is the one who gets fired up. So the way they and however yet the coach gets to decide who plays when. And I think the idea that the coach gets to decide who’s on his team is really, really critical.

 

And we have something in the book of some solid framework called the Red Velvet rope policy. We believe that there are some people who you may not work with and others not so much. One of the dangers for an agency owner, a consultant or a coach, particularly if they’re looking at a dwindling bank balance or they’re concerned that cash flow is going to be an issue, is that we tend to lower our standards for who we’re allowing onto the team, because we’re hoping for a Hail Mary.

 

I’m going to stop the sports analogy there because that’s about the that’s about the limit of my sporting knowledge. But there are some people who are coachable. There’s some organizations that we’re going to be able to do our best work with, and some organizations, by dint of the people in them they are going to do is more harm than good in the long term.

 

They’re going to pay us a check and the relationship might become fractious. Would you blame a doctor who who’s patient or sick in spite of the doctor’s advice? Okay, really important that you take these meds and you don’t eat these foods. And three months down the line, you’ve not taken the meds, you’re not eating the food. It’s not the doctor’s fault.

 

Well, this is a bad customer now. Great doctors. There’s a there’s a strong argument. The doctors, particularly in the, you know, primary health care industry should not choose their patients. But you certainly find doctors, coaches, consultants, medical professionals, mental health. You know, I had a conversation with my therapist and she’s like, I need to know if you’re going to be a good if you if you’re going to be a good client or not.

 

I need to know whether we’re going to whether we’re just going to spin our wheels, because I really want you to get a result. So I need to see whether you’re open to implementing the strategies that we suggest. So this idea of a red velvet rope policy, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you work with the kind of ideal client that you’re meant to serve, and it’s not based upon the industry they’re in or the amount of money that they’ve got or or who their recommendation is based upon their inherent characteristics, not their circumstances.

 

So a client company might be really down on their luck. They might be struggling to pay wages, but they might be the best possible client for you. Whereas an organization that’s absolutely drowning in cash and you’re saying, well, they’re going on my way. A list of of prospects. Well, they could be terrible communicators. They can do it. They can put you they could call.

 

She was a fourth rate citizen, you know, ignore all your calls until it’s time to get on the preferred vendors list and then make you sit tight for 24 months while you fill in forms and then say, well, now you now you’re in. We got your hostage. You know some of those. When I ran an agency, I refused to pay the preferred vendors, get a preferred supplies list.

 

It was a it was an unequal relationship. So we’re really looking for especially the smaller consultancies, smaller business, the coaches, the one that bands the partnerships. We’re looking for clients that see us as equals. When you do that, you do your best work with them and it enters into a virtuous cycle. So they like you, they walk away, they talk about you in glowing terms, and you in turn feel energized and inspired and are able to show better results.

 

And momentum counts for a lot. If you can get a little bit of momentum up here mentally as an operator, a partner in your agency, then you find that that counts for an awful lot when you’re out of momentum, when you’re trying to get back onto the bike, that’s a tough place to be in. And we can mitigate against that by having very strict criteria for the characteristics of the personalities involved that we’re prepared to work with and who we’re not.

 

So we should really look at auditioning our clients rather than auditioning for our clients. That would be the number one principle, I think. Yeah. You know, I think for a lot of agencies, you are right. They you know, you get that nagging feeling in your gut when you’re talking to a prospect and you’re like, this is this is not I don’t feel them leaning in.

 

I don’t feel them that they’re willing to take risks. I don’t feel that there. But to your point, we’ve been on a dry spell. We need to you know, this is one of the reasons why it’s so important to have an active pipeline so that you don’t have to take whatever swims in the net. You can choose the right prospect who turns into a good client because to your point, the client who will follow your advice, who will partner with you, is much more likely to get results, which then ends up being that they stay a client because they’re happy with the results.

 

They’re moving the the ball forward and they want more as opposed to, you know, what happens for a lot of agencies is you have a lot of upfront time with discovery and learning about them and all of that. And if if they’re not willing to do what you recommend, then the relationship is short lived and expensive for the agency because they never were able to recoup all the upfront time that they put into it.

 

So in the in the book, do you talk a little bit about, I’m assuming that there is a I believe anyway, every client is the right fit for somebody, but they may not be the right fit for us. So how do we determine right fit? So who gets past the red velvet. You know, rope for me versus somebody else.

 

Yeah. Completely different. And it’s also flexible. Yeah. The red velvet rope obviously if you’re doing a one off rebrand of a of a milk carton, you know, you might not need to have two great relationships with this person. The stakes are a bit lower right. If you’re a multi year you know cross media campaign that’s the stakes are slightly different.

 

If you’re inviting someone to have a cup of tea with you, it’s a bit different to advise someone to go on vacation with you, so you can have a little bit of flexibility in your red rope. Yeah, right. And you’re absolutely right. I would say it’s different for everybody. If I primarily do 1 to 1 consulting work, that’s pretty much what I do.

 

And my red velvet red criteria pretty simple, you know. Does this person show up on time? Most of the time there’s if you were like once or twice as great, if you’re habitually late or actually that’s a bit of a red flag for some of my core values regardless. But I just don’t think that our time is more valuable than everybody else’s.

 

I like to crack a joke occasionally, but possibly more when I was younger. I’ve grown into a bit of a more serious, bitter old man as time’s gone by, but I’d like to test the boundaries of my sense of humor with the person I’m talking to. Because, you know, one of my I need perpetual feedback. Yeah, I measure perpetual feedback, spoken and unspoken.

 

And I think that you can be comfortable in your skin is very, very important. So if if micron doesn’t laugh at my jokes or doesn’t laugh at some of my jokes, then I don’t know if we’re going to get on, you know, would I have a drink with this person? That’s a great criteria, but I want to sit down and have a cup of coffee or a dinner or a beer with this person.

 

That’s a great criteria. And other people have different styles. You know, I am not at all interested in being a puck in a game of corporate hockey. And one of the things that I’m working to really work with large organizations that need to be dealing with a human resource professional, you know, somebody in sales training or consulting and, and you realize that that that there’s an internal company style vocabulary, mixology way of dealing with each other that gives me nightmares.

 

I’m like, oh, no, no, no, no, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We don’t work like this. But for somebody else to feel super comfortable in that environment. Yeah, I think it’s really about knowing yourself. Right. Yeah. It’s all about knowing yourself. And listen, you’re absolutely guaranteed to have red velvet rope policy failures along the way, even if you’re well aware of it.

 

You know, this is this is the number one technical. You say, I’m sorry that I’ve been preaching for 15 years now, and still to this day, sometimes I go, well, that it is a juicy contract and maybe it’ll be okay this time. Kind of know. And I think if you’ve been running an agency for more than a few years, you get you’ve got to check in with yourself.

 

Yeah. I say you get that, you get that weird Spidey sense like, this is this is not going to go as well as I want it to. Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds wooly, but, you know, good people can have bad days as well, which is why we talk about inherent characteristics rather than circumstances. Sure. Right. My client is coachable versus my client has money.

 

Well, he might have money today. But you know last week they didn’t and next year they might not. But they’re good decent human being and so on. And so they’re going to allow us free reign, you know. And sometimes you can dictate, you know, you can come into my, you know, red velvet rope. It’s typically used in a nightclub.

 

Right. And and the criteria for entry into the nightclub might be, are you wearing smart shoes or they might be. Do you look like you? You got a good vibe, right? You know, there’s a place, a famous nightclub in Berlin where the door policy is absolutely opaque. They won’t tell you. It’s just based upon the chief doorman vibe.

 

Check. But if we take two, two identical to two establishments on the same street. One is perhaps a bar that caters to hard rock fans. And the other one is a champagne and ballroom establishment is going to attract to both. But each of these, you’re going to have a door policy that attracts a very, very different clientele. Yeah, but each group of that clientele will know whether they’re in the right place or the wrong place.

 

So if you’re in your hard rock bar, throwing pints of lager around the place and, you know, wearing your big leather boots and your long hair, you walk in there and everybody looks the same, you know that you’re going to have a great night. And so is everybody else in there. If you walk in with your high heels and your fur coat in your tiara, you’re going to say, oh, I don’t feel comfortable.

 

I’m not in the right place. And guess what? Everybody else in the bar is going to say, oh, what’s she doing now? I don’t feel great because he didn’t, you know, maybe he should be in the bar down the road. So it’s absolutely individual. And, you know, we also say if you’re if you currently feel like you would rather sleep in than do that meeting with the client on a regular basis, finance is allowing you should look to offer both.

 

Yeah. And it’s much easier to do when you know that you’ve got a steady pipeline of future prospects. Sure. Terrifying to let a big fish go if that’s the only fish that’s feeding you. Your family, your family can be quite large. We go into self-employment. We decide to own our own companies, in part because we’re slightly unemployable, I think.

 

And if we find ourselves in what is essentially an employee, it should be an agency client relationship. There’s so many service providers. Relationships with their clients look like employer, employee. There’s going to be a lot of a lot of friction there. And I don’t like being told what to do. You’re not valuing my expertise. No, I’m not going to come to this bloody meeting.

 

Okay? This meeting could be an email. And I think this is a personal opinion. I really think anybody who’s running an agency or running a consulting business should absolutely come in and like the bank say, this is the way that we do things around here, and you’re hiring us for our expertise, our insight. And that doesn’t need to be a meeting.

 

Yeah. Well, I, I was thinking, as you were using the bar analogy, a lot of this is on us to make sure that the signage and the decor of the bar make it very clear about what happens when you come inside. Right? So it’s it’s look as if you want a lot of layers and formality and blah, blah, blah.

 

That’s not us. Or if you want somebody who doesn’t, who has a depth of expertise in the automotive marketing industry, that’s us. Like a part of it is really part of knowing who you serve is having a really clear understanding of who you are and how you serve. I think because your point is well taken, the employee employer relationship in our world is we’re treated like a vendor rather than a partner.

 

And, you know, I’ve never, ever met an agency was like, I love being treated like a vendor. I love that that’s that’s not why we went into the agency business. We went into the agency business because we love that consultative strategic relationship where we are a true partner to our client. So your your points well taken, having the confidence to to be aware of your style and the way that you do things most effectively and communicate that into the pre purchase relation, experience or relationship is absolutely critical for congruence.

 

I wrote a book 20 years ago now, many years ago, 12, 15 years ago called How to Get a Grip, and it was a very sweary self-help book, and I knew everything because I was 27 when I wrote it, you know, I knew absolutely everything. So it became a point where I was smart then, right? Yes. So I have no idea.

 

But it was rereleased. The publisher has changed hands a few times. I got contacted by a stranger who said, when rereleasing your book, because we own it and it’s going to have the F-word in the title, so now it’s going to be Get a Grip, which is a signpost to the reader. Yeah, right. What it means baked on the inside.

 

Because I wasn’t mad keen, I thought, well, you know, I might be a bit derivative now, even though my book came out before all of the self-help, all of the sweary self-help titles, it was definitely a precursor to that. I said, I don’t know how I feel, and then the publisher said, look, it just indicates to the reader what genre they can expect to read under the cover.

 

And I always thought, you know, I always said, well, perhaps my next book, which is bookish, I’m selling it for cabbages and consultants. Perhaps my next book will be something that actually feeds me leads. Right? Because Get a Grip sold thousands of thousands of copies, but there wasn’t much crossover. But here’s what I did do. Somebody who was looking for a small business marketing consultant who saw that I had written a sweary self-help book, immediately knew whether they were more into me or more running away from me within a second.

 

Right. My name’s Matthew Kimberley. I gave business advice and I wrote a sweary self-help book. Well, that’s going to turn off, I think, a good number of people and that’s great. It’s very controversial. I know, you know, kicking kittens and putting them on YouTube. It’s but it is polarizing. And I think it’s very difficult to appeal to everybody.

 

Yeah. Kind of praising nobody and to, to put you to put your European flag firmly into the ground and say, this is the kind of experience you can get with me this is what I stand for. This is how I express myself. This is what I’m like. What I’m truly self expressed allows people to choose you. And it will.

 

You will be polarizing, you will attract some people and you’re repel some others. But of course that makes you more magnetic and it does make things easier. But it’s a bit bold. And when I started my first agency, it was, you know, technology recruitment agency. It was super corporate. We used words that I don’t use in real life.

 

On our website. We talked about skill sets and harmonizing synergy and energy purposes. You know, I, I was looking I was at my local discount supermarket here in Malta and it said, if I remember correctly, something along the lines of we are currently seeking to engage new employees for our store. We are currently seeking to engage new employees for our store.

 

And I thought, why don’t you just say we’re hiring, right? Do you want a job? I said, you know, this is the kind of corporate crap that we find all over when I was a recruiter, because I’m all over seeing these. You’re trying to sell a version of yourself. You’re not. To somebody who wants to buy a version of you.

 

The David realized it’s much easier to get booked solid if you say, this is me, this is what I’m good at, and this is what it’s going to be like. But it takes a little bit of deprogramming. I believe, particularly if you’ve gone out through corporate. Yeah, yeah. All right. I want to take a break. And then when we come back we want to talk about all right now, now I know who I am.

 

I know who I want to cross the red velvet velvet rope and who I don’t. How do I find them? How do I attract them? So let’s take a quick break, and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about the principles in the book that helped me attract the right people and stay in contact with them until they’re ready to buy.

 

So we’ll be right back. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening today. Before I get back to the interview, I just want to remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops. And you can see the whole schedule at Agency Management institute.com 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 them out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show.

 

All right. We are back. And we are talking about the newest version in the book yourself. Solid series specifically for us consultants. And I think all of you, whether you make a lot of things for clients, whether you’re a PR firm that never makes a thing, whether you are an influencer agency. The point is that our work starts as a consulting firm.

 

That then leads to execution of some of our ideas. And so that’s why I think this book and the specific tenets of the book are so applicable to us. So, Kathy, before we, before we took a break, I said, all right, I know who I am, I know who I do and don’t want as a client. Now, what?

 

Well, we firmly believe that people make investments and prospects. Clients make investments in us that are directly proportionate to the amount of trust that we’ve earned. And trust develops at different speeds for different individuals. By means of example, you may attend, and that speaks from my own experience. You may attend an expo or a conference for your industry, and you get to do a speaking slot, and you speak for 20 minutes, and at the end of that 20 minutes, somebody comes up to you and says, I was absolutely blown away.

 

And I’m speaking from my own experience and blown away by by what you said. I need to bring you in-house immediately. Yeah. And you say, whoa, whoa, we’ve never exchanged the word. And they say, it doesn’t matter. We like everything about you. We like what you said. We need what you got. And this person didn’t know you from Adam half an hour previously.

 

Yep. So it took them 25 minutes to make perhaps a six figure buying decision without any backwards and forwards interaction. Meetings, phone calls, proposals, nothing. Then you go back to your hotel room and you check your emails and somebody says and you see an email, someone says, Matthew, listen, I’ve been on your mailing list for the last seven years and I want to let you know, I’ve just bought a copy of your book and you say, thanks very much.

 

So what we have here is an individual who took seven years of 20, 20 bucks to spend 20 bucks, and they’ve probably been absolutely devoted to you attention wise in that time. They’ve probably read every email you’ve written. She followed you on social media. Whatever it is that you’re doing, and it took them seven years to spend 20 bucks and obviously due to need, but is also due to trust.

 

In some industries we don’t need much trust to make buying decisions. Utilities, you know, monopoly, any anyone who’s got a monopoly, he’s gonna say, no, you’re going to pay us because we give you water. That’s great. But otherwise we get to hang around and have fun and organizations are made up of emotional individuals who can absolutely be swayed by the trust building activities.

 

Because of this sales disparity between trust and need and purchases, we don’t believe in the sanctity of a single way of getting customers or a funnel. Now we we think funnel is a great we think it work. The funnel should be within a sales cycle. Now, I say a cycle is not how long it takes you to get one individual client.

 

It’s more although it is that. But when I talk about it, it’s more like a carousel. It’s a carousel that says, hey, here you are. Which of these horses do you want to jump on? You want to jump on the big horse? Jump. Jump on the little horse, John. Jump on the door and you want to jump in the chariot because all of these are available to you.

 

Different options. But let’s hang out and stay in touch and keep in touch and find out. Maybe you want to spend 20 bucks on a book, or maybe you wanna spend $20,000 on a weekend workshop. You know, either of these two are entirely an option. Why don’t we just meet and see where we are? If somebody if to somebody who’s come up to you after your speaking gig and said, look, I want to bring you in-house on a retainer of 500 K a year.

 

If you believe in the sanctity in the funnel, you’re going to say, well, before you do that, I need to make sure that you’ve read my book. You’re not going to say that. You’re going to say absolutely. When do we stop? Right, right, right. We do the vibe check. So the idea that you have different investable opportunities is very important.

 

So imagine that you’re going into in a win a contract for a micro site for a, international soft drinks brand. They’re launching a new brand. And, you know, they’ve got a few million to throw at you to, to launch a new microsite campaign, and you don’t win it. And you might say, oh, well, it’s back to the drawing board.

 

Better luck next time. We’ll try again. Google might be something else that you can do for them, but are you keeping in touch with the individuals concerned for your site right on you? Because even a corporate do put up barriers to entry, barriers to protect the time of the decision maker. There’s various ways of hierarchy, gatekeepers, so on and so forth.

 

The very, very simple logic behind Keep in Touch means that you are more likely to be front of that front of mind than the day. Right? And if the last time you had any contact with them was when you filled in the RFP three years ago for the last call for tenders that they issued. So we are very, very, very straightforward.

 

Keep in touch. There’s there’s two types of keep in touch typically in this in in the world of marketing and sales, one is prospecting or sales related. Hey just check it. Anyone who’s been on a on the buying end of of services know that. Hey just checking if you need anything but bumping this to the top of your inbox.

 

Yeah, it’s not the worst. It’s important, it’s important. Right? It’s important. We know. You know, it’s direct outreach to potential buyers. Let’s do it. But what’s more important is the strength of our relationships, because we have three currencies when it comes to getting anything we want in life. But let’s take it through the purely commercial way of generating prospects for our three currencies to generate leads.

 

First one is financial. We can buy lead. That’s great. And if we’re in a position where we can buy a customer for less than we’re profiting from them, we’re on a different infinite loop of hand over fist money. That’s great, but it’s not that straightforward as we know, and it can be expensive. Maybe you don’t have the money to run the ad or pay for the sponsorship or whatever.

 

Then we’ve got sweat equity and energy, which is your cold calling, which is your making content, which is your strategy for showing up on social media or events or whatever that might be. And that’s important as well. And certainly, you know, if we cash poor at the beginning of a particular campaign or career, we’re gonna look to price deflation.

 

We’re going to look to attract attention to ourselves organically rather than using paid ads. But the third currency, which I believe makes both your money and your effort going all formal for that is your relationship capital. If you know the organizer of the conference, well, maybe you don’t need to buy sponsorship because you get that 15 minute speaking slot as a value add.

 

If you have a great relationship with the editor of the industry magazine because you’ve nurtured that relationship over the years, maybe you need to buy an ad when he’ll run a puff piece as long as is relevant to the industry. Or maybe it will be on call. Expert if you’ve nurtured relationships with industry newsletters. But sure, you can ask and get a discount on running an ad in their in their December issue.

 

But without those relationships, without those, without that person who can give you a boost up, make your money go a little bit further. Make your time and your energy go a little bit further. You’re really on a on a starter for nothing. And you might you might think this sounds too obvious and it really is that obvious. If you look at the most important roles in the largest organizations of the planet, they typically only have two jobs.

 

Today, the CEO of any organization is responsible for internal relationships. Who’s sitting where in the table and external relationships to do with who we partnering with, who are our vendors? Who are our suppliers, who are all lobbyists, who are also on for and of course, then they have to do the strategy that they’re paid for. But so much of that strategy is dependent upon relationships.

 

Yeah. And we believe that you should draw up a list of people who are important to your business and contact them at least once every 30 days, whether it’s a birthday card or just thinking about you, an invitation for a coffee or a congratulations on the latest thing that you did or whatever that is, you keep showing up and you don’t make an ask until it’s appropriate and relevant to make an ask.

 

Everything is better. You will receive more invitations. You will receive more opportunities. You’re basically raising your frequency in the world by identifying who are the I’m sure Malcolm Gladwell had a name for them. Maybe the sneezes or the spreaders or the influential people. The people who can pull strings, make things happen for you. And I’m not talking about being in a social activist.

 

We’re not talking about trying to climb the ladder in order for personal gain. We’re talking about business development and frankly, personal development strategy. The recognizes that there is always somebody you want to rung up on a certain ladder that will invite us to join them there as and when the opportunity comes. So long and short of it, that’s the reason why Arsenal CRM use is of absolutely essential importance.

 

If you’re going to go down the biggest selling route. So we have our sales CRM, but we also have our relationship correct. And one is just as important as the next. So I’m putting my I’m, I’m thinking like the listeners and I’m going, oh my God, that sounds like a lot of work. Like how many people, you know, like I’m immediately going, I barely have time to go to the bathroom during the day.

 

How am I going to send birthday cards or whatever? So when you’re talking about this, what when you think about it, what is the ideal universe? Are we talking 300 people? Are we talking 30 people? Are we talking to people? And what is what is that ongoing? So let’s say you’re on my list, right? So I reach out to you this month and I’m like, hey, Matthew, how are the kids?

 

And are they getting ready to go to school or whatever it is? Right. So how how do you guys advise that you stay relevant? And because I believe part of our job is to be interesting until they’re interested. Right. So how how do I stay interesting to those folks that are so critical that they are in my personal CRM?

 

So first of all, how many are we talking ballpark and two, how do I stay interesting to them so it doesn’t feel yucky? Which by the way is a very technical marketing term. Yucky idea. Yes, I’ll give you an interesting until you until they’re interested is important, but I really want to draw the line between doing commercial business development, which is trying to identify somebody who’s going to reach into their pocket and not bring important lifetime relationships.

 

So we’re going to talk about and lifetime relationships. So we got to list the first one we call the network of 90. And we recommend there are 90 names in there. And you might say as most people say, I don’t know, nine people, let alone 90, that’s okay. If you only know nine people, that’s a great place to start.

 

But let’s say I have several hundred in my in my list now. But the reason that we go with 90 people and if you look for them, you will find them. And they don’t all have to be Oprah Winfrey. They can be your local Chamber of Commerce head and be like, unless you know anyone who’s just got a little bit a foot in a world that you don’t have, perhaps, or inside your head or advantage 90 because if we contact three of them a day, then we cycle through the months, months, and, you know, various tools are available to any CRM tool will let you do this.

 

You know, contact this person every 30 days, basically what we’re looking at. But if you if you want a spreadsheet, it’s two columns. It’s your name and column A and the date last contact ID in column B update the day last contacted and sort by left. Yeah so by the person who needs it last contact and so if we got 90 people that’s great.

 

If you got 300 people as great as well. And what to say to them. Well there’s certainly during the calendar year there are certain opportunities that allow us to reach out anyway. It might be someone’s birthday, it might be somebody diversionary, it might be the 4th of July. They could be any any reason why it would be appropriate to drop a line and say, hey, thinking of you for this reason.

 

And then I always like to end with a little question which invites a little bit of backwards and forward. How’s life out of the kids? How’s business? Are you okay? The other opportunity that’s always afforded to us, we’re not always, but very frequently forwarded to us is social media. So what we typically get is we’ll scroll our social media feeds and it will say, you know, at least John’s birthday.

 

So you type on the wall on his wall. If I said what is called Happy birthday John, or you double tap the photo, well, how about if we just take that to a text message or to a personal message or to a voice message, auto function? Just getting that one set beyond it also gives us bricks for the middle of conversation starters.

 

Wow, Fiji looked amazing or really enjoyed the article you wrote. Now we talk about sharing three things on knowledge, which is I saw this specific thing and I thought it would be relevant to you. Yeah. Okay. Drew, you know, agencies in the UK seeing a 60% downturn in business since Brexit. So this made me thinking, how’s life? The secondly, we share compassion, which is how you feeling?

 

Happy anniversary. Sorry to hear about the death of your whatever you know so on and so forth. And and sometimes we bump into people in the street or by chance that we don’t forget to market by. How are you? How’s life? You wanna grab a coffee? Then they get knocked off in the CRM and we cycle through them very, very, very quickly, really the length of a text message.

 

And I like to do a lot of line by text. And actually, it’s also assumes that you have some personal relationship with them because you have their cell phone number. Right? You’re absolutely right. You and you took the words at my mouth. That is actually my criteria for whether or not they belong in this network of 90. If you’re in their cell phone number, do I know them well enough to send them a text message and it not be intrusive?

 

Would it be appropriate for me if I was in town to say, I’m in town? Do you want to grab a coffee? And could I reasonably expect to? Yes. So we know. So we have another strategy for making these. Okay, if I’m making making contacts this strong, right to have another structure, the third thing we can always do to share our general networks, I make the introductions and, you know, there’s a whole science around that.

 

You know, who’s an appropriate introduction to, you know, is your brother in law and the governor of the Bank of England, the appropriate introduction because you’re both interested in money? Well, probably don’t, but you end up using your discretion. You make appropriate introductions when requested, typically without surprises to anybody. And what happens then is you become if you introduce enough people in your network to each other, you really do become the center of the universe.

 

Because what they talk about, what everybody in the network has in common, is you. But they also know each other, which reinforces the bonds supporting you. If you imagine a line between everybody in your network with you in the middle, it’s a safer place to be. If if they’re all connected to each other and you, of course, they talk about you and they meet for the first time.

 

Yeah. So that’s your network of 90. It can be ten minutes a day, frankly. And you, you’d be amazed how many people you’re actually in touch with anyway. And you might find you doing 20 pieces of conversation with people that you kind of know. But let’s be diligent about it and proactive about it. Yeah, but then we have a list of 20, which is okay, what if I only know nine people?

 

Well, you don’t know nine people. You can still make about 100 introductions. Person one, person two through eight, person ten, and so on and so forth. But direct outreach, the list of 20 is 20 people you think it would be useful to have a relationship with, and useful is the right word. It doesn’t mean we’re going to be greedy or avaricious or calculating, which is going to be wearing our business development hat.

 

Do I know somebody who works in logistics? No. Oh well, that might be useful when it comes to transporting our way to the Dubai Trade Fair. Do I know somebody who works in in the press? No. Okay, well, I really admire that author. I think that would be a fantastic person to come speak in my organization one day.

 

So how do we get in contact with them? Social media helps. If it’s the local Chamber of commerce head. You just go to a few meetings and you introduce yourself. If it’s an author, let’s say it’s an author that you admire. Well, Twitter makes things easy. You can start to, you know, this specifically invites conversation, but also every author, no matter who they are in the world, has read every review that’s ever been put on Amazon about them.

 

Right? So if you want to get their attention, you can use a multi-pronged approach and then think you just pay for access. Yeah, certainly if there’s a speaker in a conference that I want to get to, then I’ll buy tickets to the conference and sit in the front row. I’ll take notes. I’m gonna have a thoughtful conversation afterwards.

 

I’ll tell them what I do and ask for permission to send them something. Copy of my book. Bunch of flowers. Recommendation for a restaurant in New York. Anything that can be value. But a lot of you know, I don’t. I think it’s a mistake to think I want to be friends with Oprah, I think is much smarter to say if I am seven steps removed or six steps removed from Oprah, who’s one step closer and you start to build these concentric circle of relationships?

 

Honestly, for me, doing free work for Michael bought for a year, made him eventually feel guilty to give me a job and then take over the company. And through that experience, I kind of I literally stood on his shoulders. He had a fantastic reputation. I showed myself up. I paid to be his client. First of all, I paid him, paid him money.

 

He told me we got to have a relationship. I raised my hand and volunteered to do some free stuff, and then I was corresponding with his peers as his right hand man. And I was Matthew from British South solid. And that opened a lot of doors. And then I paid to attend a few conferences where there were and I joined a mastermind where there were people in the room who very well can I take?

 

I showed them what I knew. They invited me to speak at their conferences, which invited me to speak at more conferences in different parts of the world. And they say you can only connect the dots looking back, but you can certainly lay the groundwork going down by being just a little bit strategic. If you stay home in your room all day long, you know, speak to anybody, you’re going to have a tough time using any kind of relationship leverage later on.

 

Well, I think to for a lot of agency owners, they hear all this and they’re like, I don’t have time. And the question is, okay, I think that’s because you’re doing other people’s job, right. I think it’s because you’re too involved in client work or too involved in something else, and you’re not you’re not recognizing that part of your currency is you are the owner of an agency.

 

You are someone a lot of people want to meet and have a relationship with. And that can be mutually beneficial. And I think the key to that is mutually beneficial is that when you, as I’m listening, do you talk? I’m thinking if I have a list of 20 or I have a list of 90 or whatever it is, my job is to be helpful.

 

My job is to make introductions. My job is to send them things that are of value to them, so that I am being interesting by helping them accomplish their goals, whatever that is. Personal or professional, which eventually means they’re going to lean in and want to help me back, right? They’re going to be I mean, they’re just human nature that when if I help you and I introduce you to five people and that’s fruitful for you, then now all of a sudden you are looking for ways to pay that forward back to me and the opportunity to be helpful back, even unconsciously.

 

If you see somebody very well connected that’s very attractive. I, you know, I challenge anybody to say the fact that this person is really well connected is not an attractive trait, which makes you, again, or magnetic more likely to pop up in conversations and invitations. Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. I think, you know, to to what you said.

 

True. If you’re not making time for business development, don’t be surprised if your business doesn’t develop to simply realize that, yeah, it’s the feast and famine cycle. Oh, because they’re busy servicing quite a when that contract came to an end, we had to put all hands on deck to try and find client bait. Yeah, obviously. Which is why we always try to learn.

 

And that’s the before we even go into sales pipelines and sales, CRM and so on and so forth. But having the right support network around you is going to get you an awful lot further than not having the right support network around you, assuming that you’re doing basic amount of of sales development that you should be doing. That was around us board of advisors, relationship support, network, whatever you want to call it, is sales environment on its own.

 

Yeah, you might be in for a long slog. Well, especially because most agencies will tell you the best clients for them are clients that that come to them through referrals. So if you don’t have a referral pipeline, if you don’t have people out there in the world that are talking about you and making those introductions, because two months ago you introduced them to somebody, then you know, that gets harder.

 

Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. They’re in the business of making it easier, get more clients. Even if you hate marketing and selling. Yeah. Make it easy for people to interact with. You look at interacting with the right type of people and find the right type of people so that you exist more in the world. Yeah, yeah, very, very true.

 

This has been fascinating. I’m hoping that it sort of gooses everybody to look at their calendar and, and find ways to do some of these things. So we’ve barely scratched the surface of the book, which I now. So I everyone knows where they buy their books so they can go find the copy of the book. But if folks want to follow you, Matthew, if they want to learn more about the work you do, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 

Well, I think if you go to delightful business.com and get give me your email address, then I’ll send you my, you know, short guide to how I proactively manage my relationships with the tools and the strategies and things like that. It’s called five things you need to do every morning to get more clients. And it’s it’s really a 25 page summary of what we’ve discussed today.

 

Guru is very, very practical a how to element. Awesome. This has been great. Thank you for coming back on the show. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I’ll come back whenever you like. A pleasure. All right. We will do it again. Thank you. All right, guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency.

 

Matthew gave you some very tactical, practical things to start thinking about. All of us. All of us are in the relationship business at the end of the day. So I think some core tenants of relationships are, number one, knowing who you are and what you have to offer in a relationship. Number two, knowing who you want to be in relationship with, who do you best connect with to Deuce?

 

Who can you serve best and to the last half of our conversation, which is how do you connect with people who can get you into those patterns, those circles easier, faster, better. So as as Matthew said, it’s not rocket science. It feels very basic. But you know what? Just because we know we should do it does not mean we are actually doing it.

 

So this episode is a reminder to us to do some of these core things that allow us to be the face of our agency, the face that creates opportunity and relationship. And so I love his vibe. I have things to do every day. So for sure reach out to him, get that you’re going to find it fascinating and honestly, pretty simple.

 

And and yet incredibly impactful. And so who doesn’t like simple and impactful, right. That’s a great combination. So check that out before I let you go. Two things. Thanks to our friends at White Label IQ. As you know they are the presenting sponsor of this podcast. So they do white label design, dev and PPC for agencies. All over the world.

 

So whether you have a small team or no team and you need some extra hands on some projects, they are a great resource. Head over to White label iq.com/am I? You can learn more about them. And last but certainly not least, I always like to remind you that I am very aware that you keep coming back, and I am grateful that you do.

 

This would be less fun if no one was listening. So thank you for coming back and helping us. Cash. We’re getting pretty close to episode 500, so thank you for supporting us and allowing us to keep doing this because honestly, I learned something with every conversation and I hope you did tube, so I appreciate you. I’ll be back next week.

 

I’ll see you there. Thanks for listening. I’m 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 opportunities at Agency Management institute.com.