Strategizing your agency growth plan with Corey Quinn

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of what you make. The Build a Better Agency Podcast presented by White Label IQ, is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies survive and thrive in today’s market, bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute back with you again for another episode of Build a Better Agency. And we are going to continue on the theme of sales this week. And in fact, that’s actually the focus of the Agency Edge Research Series for 23. So as I’ve been promising you, I’m going to open every episode for the next few weeks telling you about a different speaker that we’re going to have at the Build a Better Agency Summit in Chicago, May 16th and 17th. We would love to have you join us. But one of the speakers actually is going to be myself and Susan Baier from Audience Audit. As you know, for the last decade, we’ve partnered with Audience Audit every year to go out into the field and do some proprietary research.

This year our focus is asking people who hire agencies, so clients, founders, business owners, CMOs, directors of marketing, those sort of folks, what makes them decide to spend more money with their current agency, what gets them to expand the scope of services or the volume of service or the depth of service. We’re going to really explore what gives them the confidence and the nudge to spend more money with you. And so we are going to unveil that research, those results at the summit. In the past several years we’ve waited until September to release our data when we were at Content Marketing World, but we’ve decided from now on we’re going to launch them earlier in the year at the summit. So that’ll always be the very first place you can hear the latest results of our survey.

We’re excited about this topic. It’s one that I know a lot of you are thinking a lot about. As you know, we teach that 60 to 70% of your net new revenue every year should come from existing clients. And so that takes a plan and an understanding of the client’s business. And we’re hoping to give you all kinds of insights with this research about how you can upsell your current clients. It’ll be great content for agency owners, agency leaders, department heads, especially around account service and creative, digital. We’re excited to unveil that for you at the summit, and we hope that you’re there to join us so you can hear what we find out. All right, that’s the summit thing.

So here’s the deal. If you want a ticket, head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com, Build a Better Agency Summit is the first navigation button on the left. You can grab it and buy your ticket. When you buy your ticket, also grab a hotel room because that room block’s going to sell out. Tickets are going to sell out, room block are going to sell out, so please don’t wait too long. We really want you with us. So please join us. Let me tell you a little bit about our guests. Corey Quinn was the CMO of an agency called Scorpion, and he’ll tell us more about Scorpion and what they were all about. But when he got there, they were doing in gross revenue, about $20 million in sales. And six years later when he departed, they were at $150 million in annual sales.

We’re going to talk about what they did to scale that fast, and then we’re going to talk about how, obviously they were a larger agency than many of you, probably not of all of you. I think they started off with about 100 people, but many of the tactics they used to grow are absolutely applicable regardless of your agency size. And he’s got some very down and dirty tactics of what they did to grow their book of business, and by the way, have an incredibly high retention rate of their existing clients. It wasn’t just a turn and burn where they’d sell and then the people would leave, sell, people would leave, they were retaining their clients.

I want to really dig into that and find out what they did and how we can take it and apply it to our agencies as well. All right? So let’s get him on the show. Let’s go. Corey, welcome to the podcast.

Corey Quinn:

Hey, Drew, super excited to be here.

Drew McLellan:

Tell everybody a little bit about your history, and we’re going to be talking about scaling your business, growing your business, and how you came to have this expertise.

Corey Quinn:

Absolutely. The full background is probably too much time too that we have today, but I’ll give the relevant background for this audience. I’ve been in an entrepreneur, business owner, then salesperson, then marketing, and then most recently I was the Chief Marketing Officer of a company called Scorpion, which is a digital marketing agency that targets SMBs, small, medium sized businesses, more specifically local service businesses like attorneys and home service businesses. And during my time there, I started in 2015 and I left at the end of 2021. During that time we took a business from about doing about 20 million in annual reoccurring revenue. It was a 100 person company, it was a 100 agency, I should say at that time. And it had a nine person sales team.

And by the time I left in 2021, it was a 1000 person agency, had 100 people in the sales team and we’re doing about 150 million in annual recurring business. And so during that time, it was a time of a tremendous amount of growth and excitement and learnings both by myself, the company. And so what I’m doing now is now that I’ve stepped away from that role, I’m now working with businesses and CEOs and founders who are looking to scale and grow, leveraging some of the learnings that I picked up along the way, specifically at my time at Scorpion.

Drew McLellan:

I’m assuming if you grew that rapidly, so we talk about agencies that they sort fall into two categories. One is the artisanal bakery, like everything is custom, and someone walks in and says, I want a lemon poppy seed cake in the shape of SpongeBob. And they say, we’ve never done that before, but we’ll do it for you. As opposed to the Wonder Bread factory, which is, look, we make bread and we make white bread, wheat bread and whole wheat bread, and you can get them in 10 slices or 20 slices, and that’s all we do. I’m assuming with the kind of rapid growth you had, you were more of the Wonder Bread factory than you were the artisanal bakery. Is that accurate?

Corey Quinn:

Well, I’d be lying to you, Drew, if I said we were perfect in that. But yes, you’re correct. We would call it the assembly line. We would have creative salespeople who would get a sale that wasn’t the attorney or the home service business eventually that we had built the assembly line for. And of course every time we did that, we put the Buick in the Tesla assembly line, it would break the whole assembly line, right? It would cause a lot of problems. But yeah, it was a discipline that we realized we needed to create if we wanted to grow to the size that we wanted to.

Drew McLellan:

So as you were saying, everyone has different feelings about growth and rapid growth. What was the impetus to the desire to grow that big, that fast? Was it just to get to a sale?

Corey Quinn:

The business is a founder led business. So the founder still there today, still the CEO. And he is a very ambitious human being who really has a big appetite to help a lot of businesses. He’s really driven by the desire to have an impact, positive impact on businesses. And by the time I had gotten there, the company had grown to, as I mentioned, 20 million with a customer attention rate of about 93%, which in agency life for SMB focused customers is very, very rare. It’s very rare.

Drew McLellan:

Amazing.

Corey Quinn:

And he had built this lightning in a bottle, and he wanted to find a way to use that formula that was working so far at the 20 million level, about 1,000 customers. How do we grow that? How do we expand that while maintaining the quality and the care for the customer as well as the retention rate?

Drew McLellan:

Let’s talk about some of the strategies, both the growth strategies and I think the retention strategies, because we talk a lot about the fact that for an agency, 60 to 70% of their net new revenue should be coming from existing clients.

Corey Quinn:

Correct.

Drew McLellan:

So sales comes from both existing clients and new clients. Let’s talk about some of the strategies that you deployed that are applicable for an agency of five people or 20 people or 50 people, because most of the listeners are nowhere near 1,000 people, and most of them probably aren’t even at 100 yet. Let’s talk about the existing client base first. What was in place that had such a high retention rate?

Corey Quinn:

What I walked into when I joined the company in 2015 was a business that was largely focused on a single vertical, which is attorneys and specifically personal injury attorneys, criminal offense and family law attorneys. And the business, what the product was is every new personal injury attorney would come in, they’d get a brand new website, they would get SEO, they would get PBC. And then eventually as the business grew, started in 2001, which was the early days of the internet, the service offering expanded with the internet, but eventually that turned into things like social media management and paid social and video and all those things.

And so a couple things that I inherited when I stepped into that business was, that was working really well, was, number one, they had a tremendous care for the customer. The dynamic at that time, and even still to today, attorneys are not particularly interested in becoming experts in marketing. They’re not particularly becoming experts at SEO. However, the world that we were living in and continue to live in was one where this part of their business became more and more important to their ability to grow and be effective. So what that means is the old days it was the yellow pages and networking, word of mouth, maybe a billboard. Now it was this concept of you have to have a website and you have to do SEO.

And so this was something that they had to find a trusted partner to be able to help them to be able to handle. That’s sort of the basic piece of it. The deeper part of that is that because we were specializing in attorneys and we had teams of people on the operational side, sort of the delivery or the client success side who were responsible for managing these clients, we would build the team so that we would have teams who only focused on personal injury attorneys. And over time, that team really began to understand the true nature of a personal injury attorney business. And so our ability to add value beyond just number of leads or number of clicks, went into really business consulting, where we would have a new personal injury attorney come in who didn’t know anything about the internet.

Well, we knew a lot about the internet, we also knew a lot about their business. So we were able to solve problems for them that they didn’t even realize that they had yet.

Drew McLellan:

Corey, what I’m hearing you say, and my listeners have never heard this from me, is that there’s power in niching and really focusing on a line of business, whether it’s an industry or an audience or a deliverable that allows you to be both business consultant and marketing partner.

Corey Quinn:

I would say yes, only if you care about retention and if you care about word of mouth, which is everyone.

Drew McLellan:

And growth, right?

Corey Quinn:

And growth.

Drew McLellan:

But other than that, if you don’t care about those…

Corey Quinn:

And the evidence was clear to me when I arrived at Scorpion that they had organically built this, and then the challenge was, well, how do we take what’s working in the legal vertical, maximize that, and then how do we, what’s next? And so we had to take that journey to figure out, well, how do we continue to grow revenue outside of attorneys without changing the dynamic and the success formula, if you will, that we had had created in the attorney market.

Drew McLellan:

So retention was, A, getting to know their business better. And then it sounds like having client service or account service people who were then engaging with them beyond just selling them stuff, but also talking about their business, talking about results, and then driving strategies to increase results.

Corey Quinn:

Correct. And so it became less of a transactional relationship and more of an advisor relationship where we were the experts on attorney marketing, and we could help them to think through and answer questions and solve problems and all these things that they had no experience with or familiarity with or even comfort with. And so it-

Drew McLellan:

Or desire to have any of those things, right?

Corey Quinn:

Desire. They want to be in the courtroom arguing the case in front of the judge, they don’t want to have to deal with this stuff in many cases. And so that concept expanded beyond the client services and into marketing and into actually sales where we would actually help to train salespeople to understand the true nature of a personal injury attorney business. And so as a salesperson who only sold into personal injury attorneys, they knew the big players, which is a relatively small market, even though there’s a lot of attorneys in the US, relatively small market, the people who everybody knows, if you could mention that way, well, they’re our customer too, or we know them or be able to talk at that level, begin to talk like an insider, be able to use their language.

What that does is that it helps to lower the friction in the sales process that exists no matter what, and it communicates, Hey, you could trust us because we understand you, we speak your language. And by the way, we specialize in solving the specific problems that you have, not the generic problems that you have, but the specific problems that you’re dealing with.

Drew McLellan:

So on the sales side, was it just dialing for dollars? Because that’s some exponential growth. Other than you had a lot of sales people, which obviously you did, what were the practices that you think led to that level of success in that very short period of time?

Corey Quinn:

Back in 2015, I joined right after we had hired a new head of sales. And the dynamic of the business at that time was that Rustin Kretz, who is the founder, and CEO of Scorpion had built the team, the company at that point, 100 people, very organically by hiring friends and family and people from the neighborhood where he grew up, high school buddies. And they were able to get that business to the 20 million level. But at a certain point, I think he realized that he wanted to bring some people who had different backgrounds in. So I came in on the marketing front. I have a previous background in agency on the sales and marketing front. And then he had brought in a sales leader from ReachLocal, which is sort of a long term agency that had been around for a long time as well.

And so that person, Jamie Adams and myself, he represented sales. I represented marketing. What we inherited was a nine person sales team that was subsisting exclusively on inbounds. Right? So the order takers, the traditional sales team, which is, there’s no right or wrong in my book, but if you wanted to grow quickly like we did, we couldn’t just wait for the phone to ring. We couldn’t wait for an inbound form to be filled in order to grow exponentially. And so what we had to do, one of the first things that we did as a team was to begin to change the culture from an inbound only to an inbound and outbound.

And one of the ways we did that was, there was a lot of things we did, but from a very tactical perspective, we brought in a sales trainer who brought in a methodology for outbound. We also did things for the very first time, like measured our TAM, which stands for a total addressable market. We tried to understand what is the total number of attorneys in the US, specifically personal injury, and went through a practice of understanding, okay, well today we have 2% of the market. What do we need to do to get the rest of the market or a bigger share of the market? We coupled the outbound sales approach with an outbound marketing approach where we would have a targeted list of businesses that the sales team would have allocation to.

But the marketing team that I represented, what we would do is we would do outbound gifting. So a big part of our strategy was specifically for attorneys, is we would send cookies to the gatekeeper before they even knew who we were. This was a first touch sales and marketing campaign that we would send a $30 tin of cookies that was branded with a personalized note out to let’s say, 3,000, 5,000 attorneys as an initial touchpoint in a multi-touch sales and marketing approach. So they’d get the cookies, the sales team would follow up. Hey, did you get the cookies? And begin to use that as a way to build rapport and build some engagement with these attorneys with who frankly are very busy and there’s a lot of agencies who are trying to talk to them at the same time. And so we use these cookies as a way to kind of soften the gatekeeper and build some early interest in having a discussion with us.

Drew McLellan:

And then from there, because we know sometimes they hire us first off, and sometimes it’s the 20th, 30th touch. From there what was the methodology that worked for you guys to actually get in front of them to get a conversation and then to lead them to consider hiring you?

Corey Quinn:

Because we understood the TAM, it was a finite number of attorneys that we wanted to talk to. And so we knew that over time, given enough time, that they were going to make a change on their website in digital marketing. And so we wanted to make sure that we were on the list of businesses that they were talking to. The way that we did that is every quarter they would get not more cookies, but they would get something from us. Video brochure, physical brochure, flowers, other types of cookies, doesn’t matter. But we wanted to make sure we were using physical mail as a way to stand out. So we did that every quarter, they would get something, ideally.

Secondarily what we would do is we would go to their conferences. We made sure that we had a booth, and we were hopefully speaking at the conference, or at least-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, very present.

Corey Quinn:

… having a present. Because what we learned is that, especially SMB local service businesses who are in a vertical or an industry, they want to do business belly to belly. And so we had to get out from behind the computer and we had to get in front of them and start talking to them and building a true relationship with them at the bar, at the club, to having events and having experiences with them so that they could build trust with us. And the other thing that we would do is the traditional inbound marketing around content about PPC, and just making sure that anytime that an attorney, a personal injury attorney was in the buying process, that we were visible.

You combine these three approaches, the outbound, the inbound, what I call the experiential, being involved in the conferences and the associations and just being present in the industry. We had a lot of at bats.

Drew McLellan:

Right. All right. I want to talk to you about what happened when you actually got an at bat. First, let’s take a quick break and then we’ll talk about how you engage. Once they raised their hand and said, okay, I will have a conversation, then what did that sales process look like? But first, let’s take a really quick break.

Hey there, just a quick interruption. I want to make sure that you are aware that you are cordially invited, not just invited, but cordially invited to join our Facebook group, our private Facebook group. All you have to do is go to Facebook and search for Build a Better Agency, and you’ll find the Facebook group. You have to answer three quick questions, you have to put in the agency URL, you have to talk about what you want to learn from the group, and you have to promise to behave yourself. And that’s it. And then we’ll let you in, and you can jump into the conversation with over 1,000 other agency owners and leaders. There’s a robust conversation happening every day. People are sharing resources and best practices and discussing everything from work, from home policies, to maternity and paternity policies, to biz dev strategies. So come join us and jump into the conversation. Right? Speaking of conversations, let’s head back.

All right, we’re back with Corey Quinn, and we’re talking about sales and how he as CMO at Scorpion grew the business from 20 million to 150 million in gross sales. We know that that would translate down to AGI, but nonetheless, that exponential growth is pretty spectacular. So all right, so before the break, we were talking about basically the marketing side of the equation, how you got on their radar screen, how you stayed on their radar screen so that on the day they were like, okay, we have to do something, then you guys at least were top of mind and you were in the consideration set.

Corey Quinn:

Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

What did it look like then when they demonstrated a modicum of interest?

Corey Quinn:

That interest would typically result in a sales phone call that we would call an uncovering. And the uncovering is understanding basically four things. Number one, their current situation, what are you doing now? Number two, your desired situation. And number three, your obstacles to getting your desired situation and your cost of inaction. And this is just a sales framework. There’s a lot of different types of them, but ultimately the sales team was trained on uncovering these four things. And then based on that, we would give them an overview of who Scorpion was, answer any questions, and then that would lead very quickly to a proposal of an engagement.

Typically at the time our engagements were a one year commitment that was based on a monthly reoccurring fee, that would be based on the size and the scope of the engagement.

Drew McLellan:

And part of the reason for that, I’m guessing that duration of contract was it was going to take you a while to deliver the results that were their desired outcome results, right?

Corey Quinn:

Correct. Exactly. And especially when it comes to SEO, those of us who are familiar with SEO, there’s a tremendous amount of value in SEO. However, it’s not like paid ads where you can get immediate value out of the gate. And so what we wanted to do is set the client up for success so that they weren’t doing something that was not good for their business, which is switching agency every three months because you’re really not going to get any real traction anywhere.

Drew McLellan:

Right. So when you were identifying your targets, did you decide that you were going to limit to X number per DMA or city, so that you weren’t working with competitors? Or was your philosophy, look, we understand this business, you injury attorney are different than the injury attorney down the street, we can help both of you? Which path did you take? And if you took the path of, nope, we’re going to work with your neighbor too, how did you dispel the concerns around that?

Corey Quinn:

Generally speaking, the approach we took was we let the market dictate any level of exclusivity. And so in any market, let’s say in Denver, Colorado, there are a finite number of personal injury attorneys. And we would have, assuming we didn’t have any, we would have a salesperson who would be focusing exclusively on personal injury attorneys in the Western Hemisphere, let’s say, of which Denver is one of the cities. And one of the ways that we incentivize them was closing new PI attorneys in each of the markets. And so they would be reaching out to all the personal injury attorneys in a very similar way, cookies and sales calls and outbound, all those things. And what would happen inevitably is that we would get one, two, three, and then if one or more of those personal injury attorneys were concerned about exclusivity, we would deal with it in a couple ways.

Number one, we let them know that we have separate teams for account management for businesses who are in the same geography. So there’s no crossover, it’s independent team, no sharing of data. And so there’s no real risk of contamination or sharing of specific best practices for a specific business. Typically that would satisfy them. In some cases that would not. And for those that wanted an exclusive deal, it was typically not something we would offer, but when it made sense for us and the customer, we would negotiate that as part of the deal.

Drew McLellan:

I’m assuming that was part of based on spend or depth of relationship, length of commitment, all of that sort of thing.

Corey Quinn:

Correct. Because there was a downside to Scorpion limiting the number of the PI attorneys that we could work with in a specific market, and so it had to make commercial sense for Scorpion to be able to agree to doing that.

Drew McLellan:

Right. So all of that worked well clearly if they got to $150 million. So now in your new role, as you step back and you help business owners, like the listeners figure out how they’re going to do this. What are some of the common mistakes that you see people making when they are responsible for their own sales and growth?

Corey Quinn:

What I would say is that it’s generally okay, in my book, in my experience, it’s okay for businesses to say yes to a lot of different clients, because as you’re starting off a new business it’s hard to know really what your sweet spot is. So by saying yes a lot you’re going to get down the road and you’re going to be able to identify, hey, my agency, my people, my process works really well for this specific kind of customer. They stay with us, they love us, we love them, it’s great. We have a lot of other clients. But they get stuck at that point where they say yes to too many customers and they don’t know how to start saying no and take it from more of a horizontal business to a vertical business.

And that’s really the challenge that I come in and I help them to do, which is to help them identify who truly is your best fit customer, and how do we build a go-to-market strategy around specifically that customer going forward without breaking the bank or without tanking the business and going all in on one.

Drew McLellan:

And of course, I’m sure you hear what I hear, which is, I don’t want to leave money on the table. We can help a lot of people. How do you coach clients through that thought process? Because it feels to them like they are minimizing the sales pool as opposed to when they think about the depth of it actually expanding the sales pool.

Corey Quinn:

I think it goes back to a couple of the things we were saying about earlier in jest about retention and about ultimately word of mouth, which is that the way that I’ve seen businesses like Scorpion grow dramatically and quickly is ultimately through word of mouth. And word of mouth is based on customers who have an outstanding experience and they’re going, you can’t pay for word of mouth. True organic word of mouth happens based on a true differential between what they’re paying and the value they’re getting. And my experience is that you could only create that amount of amazing value if you are specialized or if you’re verticalized. And when I hear business owners say, well, I don’t want to just focus on plumbers.

Well, the reality is that there’s 275,000 plumbers in the United States today, and if you could own 1%, 2% of that market, it’s a multimillion, I’d say an eight figure business, over 10 million a year that any agency owner would be very happy to have. And by the way, the margins are very good when you can not only do sales and marketing to a specific vertical, but you can operationalize your business a lot better through systems and software and all those things when you’re doing the same service for a large number of the same type of customer.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Well, and I think a lot of people flinch at the idea of niching down or narrowing their focus because it’s not going to be, it feels less creative. But the reality is, the better you understand an industry or again, an audience or something else, the more creative you can be with your solutions, the more value you can add, which also then exponentially ties to profit and sales and all of that.

Corey Quinn:

Correct. It is when you’re, let’s say you have an agency that you’ve been able to really hone in on the dental market and you provide a specific service. Well, let’s say you have that business, well, there’s nothing stopping you from adding additional value, adding more services that are similar to your current, and your cost per acquisition is zero. You’re selling into your current client base. This is what Scorpion’s doing today. It’s basically increasing the share of wallet that they’re doing with their current customers in addition to growing more customers as well. So that is a great way for, as you mentioned, I think it’s an important point, which is to have true impact, have that word of mouth through creating amazing value, then at that point you’re able to add additional value that’s next to and adjacent to the current products that you have.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I also think when you think about word of mouth, as you were saying about trade shows and conferences, people who do a certain thing tend to hang out with other people who do the same thing. They come to those events to learn from each other. And so you are more likely to get a referral from one plumber talking to another plumber at a conference than a plumber talking to a lawyer in the line at the grocery store or at a chamber event. One of the other things that we really love about niching, is it makes geography irrelevant. So if you’re going to serve the local butcher baker and candlestick maker, it means that there is a footprint that you can’t expand beyond because there’s somebody just like you in every market.

But when you are a specialist in dental marketing or plumber marketing or personal injury attorney marketing, now all of a sudden they don’t really care where your agency is. And what they care about is that you understand their business more than the guy down the street who also who has an agency but he’s a generalist.

Corey Quinn:

There’s a community aspect to verticals and all the verticals you’re mentioning, and the way that humans work is that we want to see what’s working for other people. And the strategic way to approach this is go close the big whales in any industry because everyone else in that industry is looking to them to what they’re doing, right? And so you put extra effort there and all of a sudden you have a tremendous amount of credibility in the market that you would otherwise have to really work hard for.

Drew McLellan:

So what other mistakes do you see when you start to work with a client? What other mistakes are we making when it comes to, we say we want to grow and we want to drive sales, but we’re still doing what?

Corey Quinn:

We are not ready to commit to a specific vertical. I’ll give you an example. I’m working with a client right now. It’s actually in the SaaS space, and it’s an interesting business because it is, let’s call it an employee wellness app for businesses. And when I started working with them, they’re doing about $3 million a year in revenue, and they could not grow. They just could not get past the $3 million mark. And the challenge for them was that they were in, what I uncovered is that they’re in 29 different verticals. They’re serving 29 different customers, and as a relatively small $3 million company building product and selling into a horizontal play. And what I mean by horizontal is, anyone who has employees could use this app theoretically.

So what they were doing is they were marketing very broadly and they were not getting a lot of traction. So I helped them to specialize specifically in restaurants. And so we have a restaurant go to market, but the challenge that the CEO is facing is, well, I don’t want to forget about all these other verticals, right? I want to market. There’s business there. And so really helping to change those bad habits of wanting to say yes to all things-

Drew McLellan:

Chasing good money and bad money.

Corey Quinn:

Right. Exactly. And so I think it is a real challenge, especially if it’s worked for you to a certain extent. So it’s really just this concept, this idea of what’s gotten you here is no longer going to get you there. So it’s just a challenging habit to break, and as my client’s coach is helping to keep them focused on what’s going to ultimately get him what he wants, which is to be a much bigger company.

Drew McLellan:

I think the other thing that you and I were talking about before we hit the record button is that many business owners or sales teams are pretty content to sit back and wait for the word of mouth to come or the content of work as opposed to having both a push and pull strategy, which is, yes, we’re going to have inbound and we’re going to be thought leaders and we’re going to create content that draws right fit clients to us, but I also have to have a targeted list of people that I’m going to reach out to, again, whether it’s with cookies or books or whatever it is.

Corey Quinn:

So if you look at the research, they say that only 5% of a market is actively buying at any one point. Let’s just do some quick math. Let’s say the total addressable market and is 1,000 customers that you could potentially do business with, only 50 of them are in the market today. And let’s say you have 20 competitors or you’re one of 20 competitors, so that means that the 50 leads or the 50 deals that are going to happen have to be spread across the 20 deals. Well, if you do straight math, that’s 2.5 deals, which is not that exciting. However, in reality, majority of those 50 deals are not going to go evenly across all those competitors, they are going to go to a couple competitors.

And so the reality is that if you do want to scale and grow your business aggressively to whatever extent that makes sense for you, in my opinion, you cannot rely on inbounds alone to be able to really make that growth. You have to go into what I call the zone of indifference. I’ll explain what that is, which if you take a normal distribution curve, which is where you have a tail on one end and a big lump in the middle, and then a tail on the other, I call that distribution curve, the happiness curve. And for example, let’s say we’re selling into plumbers, and you put the entire market in that happiness curve. What you’ll find is that on the far end of one of the ends of the distribution curve, the happiness curve, what you have is customers, plumbers who are extremely happy with their current solution.

Let’s say it’s an agency, they love them, they know the founder, they were maybe investors in it, and they’re promoting it to their plumbing networks and so on and so forth. They’re extremely happy. That market is not going to move. There’s no point in prospecting those because they’re just never going to move. Look at the far other end of the distribution curve. At the other end of the tail, you’re going to have the 5% that’s actively in the market. They’re the ones who are shopping and they’re on Google, and those are the ones that your inbounds are going to catch. In the middle is what I call the zone of indifference. The people who are not so unhappy that they’re shopping and so happy that they’re never going to shop, and so they’re indifferent.

And so I’ll give you an example about my wife and the zone of indifference. She has the iPhone X. Today I think the current model is the iPhone 14. And the iPhone X, it’s slow. The apps crash, the hard drive’s full. She can’t take any more photos, and she complains about it, but I ask her, honey, why don’t you just go to Verizon and just go get a new phone? She says, yeah, I’ll take care of it some other time. And she’s living in the zone of indifference for the phone, meaning it’s bad, but it’s not bad enough for her to have to go through the hassle of going through the buying process. And what’s interesting is that the majority of the market is in that zone of indifference.

And so the job of outbound is really reaching out to those plumbers or whomever your target audience is in such a way that you help to raise the awareness of the issue that they may be currently indifferent about, but bringing it more to the forefront of their minds and helping them to understand the value of actually making an active change today and how that will help their business to achieve their goals better.

Drew McLellan:

And again, for you that that’s the mix of they’re not out shopping. They might be consuming content, but it’s more haphazard. They’re not searching for a solution or another partner, so we have to go to them.

Corey Quinn:

We have to go to them. And the way that we did it at Scorpion, as an example, as I mentioned, is we did something that, we deployed this concept of using USIs. And USI stands for uniquely striking impression. Goes back to, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Seth Godin and the Purple Cow. The concept is that you want to stand out, you want to be remarkable. Well, in our industry, the agency world, there are, you can call it 87,000 marketing services and software companies in the US and some percentage of those are trying to target the same exact market that you are. And they’re calling them, they’re emailing them, they’re doing all the things that we’re talking about here. And so the challenge is how do you stand out and be remarkable and be noticed? And so we would do the things like the cookies, as I mentioned.

Drew McLellan:

Lumpy mail, right?

Corey Quinn:

Lumpy mail and being a guide and not being a pushy salesperson, but more being helpful in providing information, content through that perspective. Over a long enough period of time you’ll be noticed and you’ll be able to have an opportunity to have a sales conversation.

Drew McLellan:

So if somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, okay, I’m ready to sort of, 23 is the year that I really want to have exponential growth. What are the two or three things that you would say to them, here are the things you got to do first to get going, to tear yourself up. And then how do you jump off the cliff?

Corey Quinn:

Number one, if you are not currently verticalized or you have a specific target audience that is an industry or a specialization, I would go into your current book of business and look across all of the different types of customers that you have and take an analytical look at your business and try and uncover and identify who are we working today that, gosh, if we could just fill our business with this customer, we would be so happy, because we know that we would do a great job. We know that they would be happy, and our employees, everyone across the board would be really happy. Identify who that customer is, that customer type, and then do the qualitative research to understand, is there a large enough market for me to go after them?

And then if there is, then that’s an invitation for you to find a way to go deeper with them. And the ways that I coach my clients to do that is through customer interviews, meeting with them and understanding what was their buying process, what were the things that they were looking for when they came to you, so that you can codify that and bring that into more of an overt specific sales and marketing campaign that’s targeted towards that specific vertical. And the way to do that really simply is you allocate some level of resources. You don’t have to bet the farm, but find one of your sellers and have them start to prospect in there, leverage some of the case studies and the success stories that you have from that vertical and begin to do maybe some lumpy mail and really commit to building a business around this focus.

Drew McLellan:

Great advice. And while I’m thinking about it, listeners, so we’ve built a tool that will help you evaluate. So you’re going to look across your book of business and you’re going to start to evaluate, well, do I want to do plumbers or lawyers or whatever it is. We’ve built a tool where you basically grade each potential vertical and you can see where you have the quickest sort of leverage to get going. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes while I’m thinking about it.

Corey Quinn:

That is fantastic, Drew. I love hearing that. It’s so important, because if you ask a founder, what’s your best vertical? They’re going to have an answer. They’re going to know for sure, but it still makes sense to go through that process, to go through that survey and that tool, because you may be surprised that there may be another one you weren’t thinking of, but when you added up and you look at the numbers and everything, like, oh, well, I hadn’t thought about that, but it actually makes a lot of sense for deeper investigation.

Drew McLellan:

Well, I think a lot of times when somebody just thinks about where their vertical should be, it often is the one that we like to do the most.

Corey Quinn:

Correct.

Drew McLellan:

Which isn’t necessarily objectively the most profitable or the largest group or where you have the most differentiation or is most recession proof. There are objective questions to ask yourself to see whether or not a niche really is the right one for you. And so that’s I think what the tool does, is help you take the subjectivity out of it.

Corey Quinn:

Correct.

Drew McLellan:

At least to look at the data, and then you can still make a subjective decision if you want.

Corey Quinn:

Sure. Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

But at least with data in front of you.

Corey Quinn:

That’s exactly right.

Drew McLellan:

I’m curious, in the outbound effort, when did you guys go, you know what, we’ve been talking at this personal injury attorney for three years or a year, or a day. When did you decide to bail on a prospect or were you the, look, until they call us and say, don’t send another cookie, we’re just going to keep at it?

Corey Quinn:

It’s a judgment call, and no, it wasn’t a scientific necessarily formula, and the way we would know is that the salesperson would be like, enough with this guy. I just haven’t heard from him and it’s not worth me following up anymore. And so there was some subjectivity in there. Obviously the salesperson’s motivated to work on leads that are responsive, and so we would get that signal from them.

Drew McLellan:

And then would you put them on any sort of a drip campaign or a nurturing campaign?

Corey Quinn:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. We would sort of a more of a nurture content led right monthly drip that would be relevant content around, every month we would do some kind of content that would be showcased in the email as a follow-up.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Yep. All right. So figure out your vertical, figure out both your inbound and your outbound strategy. And then how much time do you think, especially if we’re talking about the agency owner doing this, right? So they don’t have salespeople, they don’t have a sales team yet there’s 10 people in the shop. How much time should they devote to this effort?

Corey Quinn:

Assuming that they have evidence that the vertical that they want to go after or they’re going after is going to be a good fit for them, assuming they have that, I would say they should dedicate a large percentage of their time, because they really have to own the process of getting into the market. It requires not just a landing page, it requires more of an approach around who are the associations that we need to get involved in? Who are the people we need to start to build relationships with? What are the conferences we need to go to? I think most importantly, who is the buyer and what is their primary pain point that we’re solving that we can get an intimate understanding around? And that has to start with the owner.

Drew McLellan:

I love it. So our recommendation, just FYI, is 50% of the agency owner’s time should be spent on Biz Dev. And again, that might be going to a conference, it might be being on the phone, might be taking a current client out to dinner or drinks to have a conversation about their business, but 50% of their time should be spent on growth.

Corey Quinn:

I think that makes sense because any salesperson that you bring in eventually, if that’s part of your growth plan, is going to look to you as the owner and as the subject matter expert on how to be successful. And if you don’t know it, then good chances of success are diminished.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, agreed. This has been awesome, Corey. Thanks for coming on the show. If folks want to learn more about you, they want to follow your content, they want to learn more about your coaching, how can they find you and learn more about all of that?

Corey Quinn:

I would point you to my newsletter. I have a daily newsletter that goes out five days a week, and what you get is all of this type of content. And you’ll also hear things about podcasts I’ve got coming up. I’ve got a book coming up called Focus Vertical. It talks all about this strategy that you could run. And so you could join the newsletter by going to coreyquinn.com/newsletter. And I’ll spell my name. It’s coreyquinn.com/newsletter. I’d love for you to join.

Drew McLellan:

That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your story. I’m sure that we will continue to talk and have you back on the show at some point. But this was really great. Thank you for giving us good practical advice that people can put into play right away.

Corey Quinn:

Thank you so much, Drew, for the opportunity.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. All right, guys, another episode with to-dos. I like episodes with to-dos and to don’ts, like stop doing this, start doing this. But we are at the front end of the year, all of you have sales goals, and I’m sure there are lofty but achievable, and I think Corey gave you a lot of tools that will help you really strategize how you want to go after growth and what growth looks like for you. We can talk another time about managing your growth. In fact, that would be a great solocast. I should do that. You can grow too fast and there are challenges with that. And you also can get to a point where you get stagnant and stuck. And so each of you have to evaluate how quickly you want to grow. But whether it’s slow or fast, I still think these tactics make sense.

And I think you, based on Corey’s experience at Scorpion, obviously they work in the agency space, but there’s some choices you need to make. So take this to heart, give it some thought, and then come back to your team with a plan and let’s make 23 a year where you really have a handle on your Biz Dev and your growth. Okay? All right. Huge shout out to our friends at White Label IQ. As you know they’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast, so they make it possible for us to hang out every week. So I’m super grateful to them. They do White label, PPC, Design and Dev for many, many agencies. Oftentimes they’re the digital department for smaller shops. So good people reach out to them at whitelabeliq.com/ami. And as I have told you before, they have a special deal on that website. If you’ve never been their client before, there’s some free hours for your first project. So check that out.

And as always, I want to just pause and say thanks for coming every week. I appreciate you being here. I love having these conversations. I feel like we’re having them together, even though you’re not talking so much, but you get back to me. You let me know what you love. I love your feedback, and I’m grateful that we get to do this together. I’ll be back next week, and I hope you will too. All right, talk to you then. Thanks for listening. That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agencymanagementinstitute.com, to check out our workshops, coaching packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.