A new tool to add to your agency’s sales strategy with Jeff Winters

Speaker 1:

[Music playing 00:00:04 If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too. Welcome to Agency Management Institutes Build A Better Agency podcast, presented by white label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market. We’ll show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. We want to help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable, and if you want, down the road sellable. With 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host Drew McClellan.]

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build A Better Agency. Welcome, glad that you are making the time to do this. I know that for many of you, this is a time of great uncertainty and worry. If you’re listening to this real time, we are right in the middle of the Coronavirus storm here in the States. I know many of you across the world are also facing your own work from home situations and things like that. Know that I’m thinking about you, know that we are trying to create assets to be helpful for you. If you are not getting the newsletter every week, now it’d be a great time to shoot me an email and make sure we get you on the list, because we are producing videos and other things, tools that can be helpful.

Please do not be shy about asking. We are here to help you, and we are here to make sure that every agency gets through the storm and into the calm waters, so stick with us, stick close, and let me know if we can be helpful. This week’s podcast episode is about selling, and I know that for many of you you’re thinking, this isn’t the time to sell, nobody’s buying right now. That may very well be true for this temporary season, but, keep in mind that this is temporary. One of the things I’m hoping you’re doing with this window of time when clients aren’t as demanding, and other things aren’t pressing on your time, is that you are at least spending a little bit of time thinking about how do we come out of this? How do we come out of this storm?

Our ship is now in calm water. How do we gear up? How do we get wind in our sails? How do we build up and replace the income that we’ve lost as quickly as possible? That’s why I thought that our guest today was a great choice. Jeff Winters created a company called Sapper, and Sapper is a service that works with agencies and brands to help them with their outbound email marketing and sales efforts. There are a lot of people out there who will say to an agency that they can help them get appointments, and that is absolutely what Jeff’s company does as well. But what I want to talk to him about is the methodology, because they boast some very impressive numbers. Their goal is to exceed their client’s spend by a multiplier factor. That’s pretty significant.

When I met Jeff and I started talking to him on the phone, I was like, “Well, how do you do it? What’s the methodology?” Thinking that whether you engage a company like Jeff’s, or you do it on your own, you understanding the recipe that they use. The model that they’ve built their success on, means that you can do this at home for yourself, or if you want to, you can reach out to Jeff and his company or someone else to do this for you. We’re going to talk about outbound sales, but really what we’re going to talk about is what does that look like, and what does success look like and how do you measure it, and what are those emails and phone calls look like? How does success happen when we are an industry that really does not often boast a lot of success from cold calls?

Jeff has a lot of agencies on his roster, on his client roster, and they’re doing some things that are different than what I suspect many of you are doing. My goal for today is to pick Jeff’s brain and to find out exactly what they’re doing, so you could do it at home. All right, let’s get to it. Jeff, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Jeff Winters:

Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Drew McLellan:

Give everybody a little bit of a background on the company, and what you do, and who you serve before we dig into the conversation.

Jeff Winters:

Sure. I’ll tell you a little story about the company founding. I started Sapper Consulting about six and a half years ago. I’ll take you back to my job right before I started the company, I was hired as basically the chief revenue officer at this SAS company. I was 25 or 26 years old, and I thought that CEO of this company had found me out of relative obscurity and seen all the potential that my mother always told me that I had. I take this job and I’m all excited. On the first day I figure out a few things. I figure out that the product wasn’t exactly done, that I was going to be selling. Two, it had never officially been sold to anybody for money, and three I was supposed to sell it to primarily chief human resources officers at fortune 1000 companies.

Drew McLellan:

Piece of cake.

Jeff Winters:

Too easy, right?

Drew McLellan:

It’s like you’re stealing their money.

Jeff Winters:

Why aren’t you still there, Jeff? I can’t get a hold of anybody for months. Nobody’s assistant will take my call. Until finally I start waking up at two or three in the morning and sending out what I thought were funny emails, and this was no automation, if you can believe it. During this time I get 170 meetings. I’m flying around the country to Google, and Amazon, Netflix, and every meeting’s going the same way. They’re going, “Jeff, thanks for coming. Excited to see you. How in the world did you get this meeting? Like we got your email, we got a chuckle, but folks like us just don’t meet with folks like you, that don’t have customers.”

After that happened 150 times I quit, and I started Sapper, because I thought I’d get meetings for anybody with anybody. Fast forward, six and a half years, what we do is really simple. We help our clients get amazing sales meetings that end up in closed deals, at a really high rate. We’re doing it on behalf of about 600 customers, representing brands as big as AT&T, and GE, and Salesforce, but also as small as one to two person consulting shops. Of course in that mix are a whole lot of agencies and a whole lot of agency clients. That’s our business.

Drew McLellan:

I think everybody has an origin story where your back is against the wall and you got to figure it out. I think that’s one of the things that I love about entrepreneurs, is that we don’t get stuck in place, we pivot, and it sounds that’s what you did.

Jeff Winters:

We did at the time, and necessity breeds invention, is that the saying?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Winters:

No, even that, the invention was funny emails in my mind.

Drew McLellan:

I know you work with a bunch of agencies, and there are a lot of companies out there that offer outbound agency sales services to varying degrees of success. How is the work you do different, and what about it do you think makes it work?

Jeff Winters:

I think it’s two questions with one answer. Over the last six and a half years, we’ve gathered this treasure trove of data. Billions of data points on how our emails land, sliced and diced by who the buyer is. For example, we know how the receptivity of an email to a VP of marketing, or a chief marketing officer at any varying degree of company size or revenue level. What we’ve done is we’ve taken that data, and we’ve put it into this tool called Reggie.

What Reggie does is enables you to go into our system, or our team would go into our system and say, “Hey, this agency wants to target CMOs at manufacturing companies doing more than 50 million in sales.” It will ask you a few questions about your value prop and your specifics, and your tone of voice, and your point of view on the world, and then it’ll immediately spit out 10 emails customized to what we would call that buyer persona. No one has that, and we do, and it gives us a great advantage in terms of our ability to go out to buyers and give us the highest degree of likelihood that they’re going to respond, and respond positively.

Drew McLellan:

I’m assuming that’s some machine learning or AI that is spitting out those emails, right?

Jeff Winters:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Can you give me an example of what would the content of one of those emails be?

Jeff Winters:

I think this gets into a really key point that I want to drive home for listeners today, around content and just a really key tactical thing that everyone should know and think about when they’re writing outbound messages. That is this differentiator of being casual and relevant, but not striving too hard to be personalized. Casual and relevant, but not striving too hard to be personalized. This is a little bit of a contrarian view, but our emails, our best practice, the best emails, the best performing email campaigns from an outbound standpoint are achieving two things. One they’re immediately informing the reader that this is not a computer sending out a zillion emails at a time, and number two, they’re introducing this very concrete pain solve. What’s the pain and how do we solve it?

Let me give you a very specific example of what I mean here. Something to the effect of at the beginning of your email, “Hey, Jeff, bouncing back from meeting to meeting today, but wanted to shoot over a quick note before I got into my next one. Hey, Jeff just popped onto an airplane. We’re about to take off, but I wanted to shoot over a note before we did.” Those kinds of little phrases, and I want to emphasize this, underscore it with your listeners. Those kinds of little phrases are the ticket, because that, and it has to be real. It has to be authentic. Whatever you’re doing, you have to relay that to your prospect, so they know this isn’t a computer. Otherwise it looks like automation and they’re out.

If I can share something, “Hey, just right before I go pick up the kids.” Anything like that, that I can share is a must. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. That’s the number one key I want to share with your listeners. Make sure you’ve got one of those casual phrases in the beginning of your email. The second thing I want to share is relevancy. All of the emails that Reggie will spit out will have that casual phrase and also have relevancy. Relevancy is pain solve. What’s the pain, how are you solving it? What I’d recommend for listeners very tactically, is find a decision maker or a buyer that meets that criteria in real life, and ask them. You only have to find a couple, but if you can start to get to pain solve, not what you think pain solve is, or what the actual pain solve is, you’ll be in a whole lot better shape. Two key takeaways here, number one, casual at the opening, make sure readers know you’re not a computer, and number two, have a real pain solve informed by an actual buyer.

Drew McLellan:

How long is that email typically?

Jeff Winters:

It depends on the buyer of course, and one way to slice and dice this in terms of thinking about the world is based on a very simple, like a disc profile. For your listeners just profile, I’m sure many are aware, it’s a personality tests, a Myers-Briggs type, where you can understand people at a deeper level. If you have somebody who’s a high D like I am, who wants bullet points, and straight to it, and facts, and data, then that’s what we deliver. But if you have another individual who’s maybe a high seat, who’s looking for a little more case study, social proof, needs to be a little more rigid in terms of how they approach the world and take in information in a very good way, then you might be a little bit longer. It all depends on the buyer.

Drew McLellan:

We just had an episode not too long ago with a gentleman who was talking about the crystal Chrome extension, and applying the disc to LinkedIn profiles. We just have been talking about that. If my listeners are listening in the order in the recent past. When you say it’s successful, what does that translate to in terms of percentages, and just help me understand, and then I want to dig into the methodology, but if somebody hires you to do the work that you’re talking about, what are the success metrics and what do they look like?

Jeff Winters:

Our business is one, it’s probably that I know is very similar to our agency friends who are listening today, which is, you’ve got two different kinds of outcomes. You’ve got product outcomes and you’ve got success outcomes. Product outcome for us is number of meetings. If you are a customer of ours, you sign up that we’re going to get you a certain number of meetings, and whether or not we hit that, speaks to whether or not we’ve achieved our product outcome. But then there’s this success outcome, and we all know this too well. It’s the idea that if we drive you 100 meetings and you close no deals, then we have not achieved our success outcome. It’s really a two step. It’s we want to achieve our product outcome, which is totally within our control, but then we want to help our customers.

I think agencies all agree with me here, we want to help them achieve their success outcomes because ultimately whether or not we get retained or fired, comes down to the success outcomes at some point. We want to make sure the meetings are of such high quality, that the opportunity to achieve success outcomes goes up, the probability increases. Those are the metrics we think about with our clients. At the end of the day, the ultimate outcome is a measure of ROI. Three times your spend, three and a half times your spend. What’s your ROI on your spend with Sapper?

Drew McLellan:

What I’m asking you is, how often do you hit it?

Jeff Winters:

It’s a great question. We last year generated $36 million in sales on behalf of our clients, and that represented a 3.6 times ROI across our client population. We generated 3.6 times as much money for our clients as they paid us. We feel really good about that, as you would expect.

Drew McLellan:

I would expect that you would. I’m curious, how do agencies perform? Then this is my last question specifically about your business, and then I want to have you help me break down your process for agencies that want to do this themselves. How do your agency clients perform versus your brand clients?

Jeff Winters:

It depends to tell you the truth, but our agency clients on average perform very similar to our average client. I’ll share that the agency clients who are really dialed in on their niche, or their differentiator, perform really well. That’s the key for us. If your agency has a space in the world where you are great, and you can tell the story about why, it makes our job a whole lot easier. I’m sure all your agency listeners are thinking the same thing of what’s our sustainable, durable, competitive advantage, what’s our differentiator. Then how do we exploit that in a positive way in the marketplace? When we have agency clients who know that, and where their customers know that, and where they’ve got data to show that their differentiator is real and impactful for their clients, we can be really successful.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I’m sure my listeners are tired of me preaching the whole niche thing, but it is the way of agency sales in the future, is you have to look different from everybody else.

Jeff Winters:

It’s exactly right. You and I didn’t prep this, so we’re not in coordination here, but we see the same. Where you have a niche, where you have specialty, where you have expertise, where you have differentiation, that’s where you’re going to see more and more success. Not that you can’t, if you don’t. But it certainly helps a whole lot if you do.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. If people are saying, this sounds great, but dang it, I want to do it myself. Let’s talk about how they think about their list, and how they approach their list. I know you have this tiered program or tiered idea of how you approach your prospects. Can you walk us through that?

Jeff Winters:

Sure. I’m going to even pull it back for one second and talk a little higher level and then get right into the tier. The first thing I would suggest in a very tactical way, is to set up your customer acquisition funnel, set it up, use the metaphor of an engine. The idea is how much gas do I need to put into that engine in order to get whatever amount of performance out of the backside of that engine. Think about it that way, and separate that engine into different compartments, so you can start to dial in on what knobs you need to twist in which areas in order to achieve success. Because at the end of the day, what you’re trying to do for your customer acquisition engine, is you’re trying to get to a place like your end state. What you’re seeking to achieve is a place where you can turn up top of funnel activities, how many prospects do I reach out to? You know exactly how many customers you’re going to get at the end of your funnel.

You’re trying to get that dialed in. That is the goal. That’s the first step on this journey is mapping out your engine, and knowing how many prospects convert to how many meetings, convert to how many proposals, convert to how many new customers, and get that so dialed in. Once we have that and we start to, and doesn’t have to be perfect. Start with good, but get it mapped out in that way, so you know, all I got to do is tweak the amount of prospects we’re reaching out to, and I know exactly how many customers I’m going to have after my sales cycle is complete. Once we have that, let’s get into the account model of how we’d go about executing a outbound strategy. The first thing I’d recommend to the listeners is dividing your prospects into three tiers. You’ve got tier one, tier two and tier three. I’ve come up with very creative names for this.

Drew McLellan:

Very nicely done.

Jeff Winters:

As a marketer myself, I take great pride in those things. So tier one, tier two and tier three. The key here is that we’re going to treat these prospects from a resource standpoint, very different. Tier one prospects are our top priority prospects. They are right in the bulls eye of our ideal customer. It’s the right size. It’s the right industry. It’s the right geography. It’s within our niche. These are perfect customers. Then take it down to tier three customers who would benefit greatly from our services, but not exactly precise. Then you’ve got tier two somewhere in the middle. What we want to do is we want to treat these prospects very differently from a resource allocation perspective. For example, an outcome-

Drew McLellan:

Hang on a sec, Jeff. I am going to predict that you are about to describe what at AMI, we call the macro micro and nano funnel. I’m putting that out there before you speak it, but the way you’re setting it up, I believe you are exactly about to teach what we teach, but with the specificity of, with the specifics, that’s how I’m going to just change the word.

Jeff Winters:

Specific, specificity, it’s all the same, yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Of your expertise and the way you’re seeing it from your model. All right, now go ahead. We’re going to divide these tiers.

Jeff Winters:

If you’re trying to make me feel better about my tier one, tier two, tier three naming convention, it’s not working.

Drew McLellan:

I promise I am not, but you’re welcome to use the macro micro and nano, if you would like in the future.

Jeff Winters:

Let’s talk through nano micro and macro with the tactics. Nano, center of the bullseye. We want to treat these prospects very differently from a resource allocation standpoint in our outbound work. Some tactics that you’ll use in this nano, for these nano prospects, will include more expensive, more time consuming tactics. You will have a sequence that includes tactics like email, you’ll include call, you may include handwritten letter, you may include gift, you may include more personalized voicemail. These are things that you’re going to use. Linkedin message, LinkedIn voicemail. These are things that are a little more time-consuming, but this is a bucket of tactics that you’ll use with your nano bucket of prospects. These are folks where you want to be spending time and money.

Now, let’s go to micro, or my tier two in my world. These are individuals where you’re going to want to scale down resources, but still give a very personalized touch. There, you’re going to want to continue to use tactics like email, like foam, like social outreach, and potentially handwritten letter or LinkedIn voicemail. Those are tactics here. In tier three or in macro, we’re going to want to move to almost full automation. Here you’re thinking almost entirely email only sequences, maybe mixing in some calls. We’ve got this continuum of nano, micro and macro, whereby you’ve got resource intensive prospecting for nano, and then full automation for macro. Then here’s what people miss. The idea here isn’t that nano, micro and macro prospects stay in those buckets forever.

You take your nano prospects, you run them through a sequence. Typically it’s 45 to 90 days of this resource intensive prospect. Then you take that group, you let them cool off for a period of time, call it 60 or 90 days, and then you can put them into the macro sequence fully automated, or you could put them into the micro sequence. You’re constantly rotating these buckets of prospects through these different sequence types. Typically we’ll see the macro prospects pretty much remain in a macro fully automated, or micro semi-automated sequence, but you’ll often see these micro prospects move into a very resource intensive nano prospecting sequence. That’s the key tactic that often people overlook.

Drew McLellan:

I’m curious, what are you seeing for timing of sales cycle? Just for those of you that are listening to this, whether you’re listening to it the week we publish it, or you’re listening to it a year later, Jeff and I are actually recording this on March 19th, 2020, so the world, and certainly the US is eyeball deep into the COVID-19 situation. I want to ask you prior to COVID-19, what were you seeing as the sales cycle length for your agency clients? Then we’ll eventually talk about COVID-19 stuff too, but for now, universally, what have you been seeing as the length of time from first email to sign purchase authorization?

Jeff Winters:

First of all, you brought up COVID-19, and I just want to say, I know we’re all thinking it, but this is a humanitarian crisis for second and third, way, way, way before any business implication, and that we’re thinking about those that have been effected, those that are sick, and anyone who’s been affected by this virus. Make sure we say it. As we move on to much less serious matters of business, I’ll share that of course the variable that all this depends on is project size. If you’re talking and I break it into 30K and below, and 30K to 100K, and 100K up, so look in the 100K up bucket, if you’re dealing with enterprise, we all know the hurdles of enterprise. But you’re typically looking at six to 18 months post-call. That’s what we see.

For 30 to 100K, typically again, there are always edge [inaudible 00:25:39] emergent need, but those can be between 90 days and a year. Then for deals that are 30K or less, I’ll give you an example. We are 30K or less deal. Our sales cycle is two weeks. It is not uncommon to have that short sales cycle anywhere two weeks to 90 days for SMB. 30K or less deals. That’s how we see it in the marketplace. We do our best to track it. Your agency owners are going to know better, but generally speaking, those are the buckets and how they break out based on our visibility.

Drew McLellan:

From your perspective, agencies hit those same numbers?

Jeff Winters:

Yeah. That’s what I’m giving you. From my perspective, look, the biggest variants bucket are the 100K plus, because 100K plus can go to many millions of dollars.

Drew McLellan:

It’s decided by committee and it’s go up to the CEO, and all that stuff.

Jeff Winters:

Sub 30K and 30 to 100, the 30 to 100, if you’re 90 days to 180 days or 220 days, somewhere in there is pretty typical what we see.

Drew McLellan:

If I was going through your system, what’s the frequency of the emails or the touches. Whether I’m at what you call tier one, which is getting the emails, the gifts, the calls, the handwritten note, all of that down to the tier three, what’s the frequency of contact?

Jeff Winters:

There’s great research on this. Just read a study, 200 million analyzed outbound sequences, and the data suggests the following. You’re going to have more activity upfront, and significantly less activity as the sequence draws out. It might be a 45 day sequence, but you’re going to front end load a lot of the touches, and there’s really great data to support that if you do what they call a double tap, a phone call and an email on the same day, three times in your high touch nano sequences, you’re going to drive significantly better results, than if you spread those touches out. Typically, you’re going to look to a 15 touch sequence inside of 45 days. It’ll be more front end loaded, and you’ll have three of those days where you’re having two touches in one day. ‘Double tap.’

Drew McLellan:

For the more automated only, so the ones where maybe you’re not doing a lot of phone calls, then what is best practice around that volume?

Jeff Winters:

Really good question. Here’s what we recommend. We’re recommending an automated only email sequence of eight to 10 touches, and we are recommending that over 45 days, and we also recommend the touches remain clustered across the first six, and then spread out eight, nine and 10. That’s best practice, it’s what we do.

Drew McLellan:

I want to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about what you do, what happens when somebody actually writes back. Now, do they go out of the automation sequence, and now you’re actually having real emails. I also want to talk a little bit more about the content of the emails that you recommend, but  let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back. Hey guys, sorry to interrupt the show, but I wanted to tell you about an opportunity that we have created for you, that I hope you’re going to be excited about. As many of you may know, Stephen Westner and I just finished and published our book called Sell With Authority. It’s available at Amazon and all other good bookstores, but what we’re trying to do especially because right now we had a big book launch planned and all of that, but that feels yucky right now, given that everyone is thinking about other things.

So, what we’re doing is instead reaching out to our community, you guys, and making this offer. If you will go to Amazon and buy a single copy of the book, and then after you read the book, leave a review, and then all you have to do is send me, forward me the Amazon receipt for the book or a picture of you holding the book I guess, and the copy of the review, that would be awesome. Then we’re going to do is we’re going to put you in a drawing for a seat for the Build A Better Agency summit. We’re going to give away three seats to the conference that we are having, the Build A Better Agency summit, and all you have to do is buy the book and leave us a review. Even if you think it sucks, that’s okay. It’ll make me cry a little, but it’s okay.

We’re just trying to generate more reviews on the book because as you know, that affects the algorithm of the book. Since we’re dark in terms of promoting it in other ways, we’re just looking for a little help from you. Most importantly, I really do believe, which is why I wrote the book, that you will find it valuable and hopefully inspirational in terms of how to position your agency and become an authority where prospects are actually seeking you out, rather than the other way around. If you’ll do that, that would be awesome. Again, buy the book, review the book, send me proof of both, and we will put you in the drawing for a seat to the Build A Better Agency summit. All right, let’s get back to the show.

All right. I am back with Jeff Winters, and we are talking about prospecting, and using email to open some doors, or emails and a variety of other things. Right before the break, I was saying to Jeff, that I want to talk a little bit about what happens when somebody actually answers your email. I think it’s like leaving voicemails. Emails, a lot of people don’t expect anyone to respond back. What happens when somebody actually responds back? Do you pull them out of the sequence I assume, and then you’re having a actual specific conversation with them?

Jeff Winters:

That’s exactly right. In our process as with your agencies, if they want to do it themselves, as soon as someone responds, there’s really two key tactics to share here. Number one is easy and obvious. If they respond and they want to schedule a meeting, let’s do it, let’s put it on the calendar. But let’s be a little more assumptive, and let’s take the back and forth out. If somebody says, ‘Yeah, how’s your Tuesday, Wednesday, look next week?” As opposed to some long back and forth, what we recommend as best practice saying, “Hey, Tuesday’s great. Got time at 10:00 AM. Throwing a meeting on your calendar for then. If it works great, if not, let me know a better time and I’ll adjust.” That saves you five emails in some cases. 10 o’clock. If you don’t do that, then you get into a situation of, Tuesday at two, and then Wednesday at three, well, I’m not busy. I’ve some work.

Just do it. Be assumptive and put time on calendar as soon as you get an inkling that you have a day and time that works. That’s best practice, and that’s easy and obvious in terms if somebody says, I want to schedule a meeting, schedule a meeting. What’s less easy and obvious is when someone says, “Hey, I’m interested.” You email them back and you go, “Great. Let’s set up a time.” No response. Okay, next day, “Hey, I know you’re interested. Everybody gets busy. I want to make sure we pin something down.” No response. Next day you give him a call, “Hey,” voicemail. “We just want to let you know really excited about our meeting. Want to get something pinned down on the calendar.” No response. This is a little trickier. In this case, what we recommend is a comes out of automation, comes into our human realm of communication, then we recommend going back into automation after five touches.

You do five human touches, and then we’ll go right back into automation, but the sequence is different. This is a no reply sequence. Now we’ve got someone who’s responded to us, shown interest. We’re so close to scheduling that meeting, and they’re not getting back to us. We’ve all been in this situation. We’ve probably all been in that situation recently. Those people go right back into automation, and that automation is very quick. It is very front-end loaded, but goes on for a long time, because that’s somebody that’s shown interest, and we want to make sure that we’re able to share with them all the great things that we can do for them in their business.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. Let’s talk a little bit more about the content of the emails. You talked about that personal, “hey Jeff, getting ready to hop on a plane, but wanted to send you this email.” Then let’s assume that the problem is they don’t have enough leads. That they don’t have enough top of the funnel activity, and we as an agency specialize in lead generation. What would the next segment of that email potentially look like?

Jeff Winters:

This is an area I know well, because we do lead generation.

Drew McLellan:

Sure, look at that.

Jeff Winters:

Yeah, exactly what that looks like. It’s three parts. It’s number one intro, and intro is quick. Hey, my name’s Jeff Winters. I’m the CEO at Sapper Consulting. We help our clients secure great sales meetings. Number two, it’s why you’re different, and number three, it’s a call to action. “Hey, we’d love to meet next Wednesday and talk for 30 minutes about how we can help you out and generate more leads.” It’s intro, what you do, how you’re different, and close. Let me talk about what this content doesn’t look like, because I think this is really important. I think as an agency, given all the things that agencies can bring to clients from a tactical standpoint, sometimes our agency clients are tempted to say all the [inaudible 00:35:34], the buffet of tactics that they can bring.

Drew McLellan:

Wait, wait. You’re saying they want to shove five pounds of information in a one pound bag? Our agency people want to do that?

Jeff Winters:

Not yours, but others.

Drew McLellan:

No, no, others. Not these listeners, but people who are not listening.

Jeff Winters:

The non listeners. If you are listening, you are outside of the Venn diagram here. I feel like people usually talk about this, a five pound, one pound, whatever bag on the sales call. I’m talking about it on prospecting. It’s tempting to go, we can help you generate leads through SEO, BBC. We can optimize your website. We can do email campaigns. That is ineffective. What is effective is going tactic by tactic in different emails. That’s the key. Don’t offer a lot in one email, offer a lot across emails. In email one for example, you might say, “We help our clients generate great sales meetings that result in a high percentage of closed deals, through our website optimization process. And we’re different than others in the space because we do X.”

Then in email two, you might say, “Hey Jeff, just jumped out of a board meeting and had it on my to do list to give you a shout today. Would love to sit down and chat about how we can help you generate more leads. We’re seeing a great deal of success in the manufacturing space, through Facebook ads.” Do it that way.

Drew McLellan:

It’s that brief though. Brevity is key here, yes?

Jeff Winters:

I’ll edit it a little bit. I’ll say that length of email is not consistent across the sequence. In email one, you should have a longer email, a full three paragraph email, versus email two, you might say something like, “Hey, just checking in on the above, hoping you got a chance to read.” Then in email three, you might have another longer, what we would call a re-introduction email. I wouldn’t get stuck on length. I think it’s tempting to get stuck on length, and think that brevity is key. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s the brevity and email too, that takes you to the depth of email one. We’re telling a story. This story has an arc.

Drew McLellan:

Given that we’re recording this on March 19th, how are you advising your clients to rethink their strategy given the fact that we are in this world pandemic?

Jeff Winters:

I’ll speak to agencies specifically. The first thing I’ll share is this. Look, we are all as business leaders, as department leaders, as great global citizens of the global community and the business community, we’re all struggling with the same tug of war here. How are we ensuring that we’re showing enough empathy for the times that we’re in, with our people and our outreach and our clients, while also recognizing that we need to do business, and then we need to stay in the game, and our clients need to stay in the game. I just want to acknowledge and call out that we’re all dealing with that tug of war in this current time.

Drew McLellan:

The whole idea of, I don’t want to look like I’m profiting from other people’s pain, but I also want to be helpful, but do I look insensitive if I still sell during the season? I think everyone’s wrestling with all of that.

Jeff Winters:

Yeah, and you know what? I don’t have the perfect answer.

Drew McLellan:

I don’t think anybody does right now. I think it’s just doing whatever you do with humanity and sensitivity in place.

Jeff Winters:

Yeah, and again, this is March 19th. This could ebb and flow a million times, but for today, for right now, what we’re sharing is the following. Number one is we’re talking to our agencies that white label our services, they’re flexing to outbound. They’re going back to clients. They are quickly reviewing, revising and optimizing strategy for this new world that we’re in, ensuring empathy, and they’re pushing to outbound over inbound as of right now. Companies are hunkering down, they are going into survival and cash hoard mode, as we all know, and we need to be ensuring that we are helping our clients, in my opinion, drive business in the fastest way they can, because that’s what our clients need. They need quick business wins and new business immediately. We’re seeing our agency clients white label, take retainers and move them more toward us, and toward white label, and toward outbound.

We’re also seeing agencies, CEOs that I talk to all day, who are friends and contemporaries, who do outbound themselves, move their clients to outbound quickly to drive fast results. Because at the end of the day, as we move into this reality that we’re in, clients need new business, because they’ve got business going out the back door, so only two ways. You can cut costs or you can flex to outbound, but then I’ll just share my perspective on this. That is that look, we’ve got to do as much as we can to be empathetic to our clients, to our people and to everyone during these times, but also we’ve got to keep ourselves in the game, and we’ve got to keep our clients in the game. That’s the balance.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. How is your machine learning? Are you changing the tone of the emails to reflect this season that we’re in?

Jeff Winters:

The first step is acknowledge. If you’re not starting off your emails with an acknowledgement of where we are in the world, I would say that you’re outside of best practice at this point. I don’t know when that’s going to end, but I know it is here now. That is exactly what we need to do, and that’s who we need to be as we’re, outreaching here, if you decide you want to outreach. Number two is we need to be sensitive to the fact that let’s have a call on Friday, is now let’s have a call next week, or let’s have a call in two weeks, or let’s have a call in three weeks. Those are the two key tactics I’d share with your listeners. Number one, acknowledge, and look, the majority of the world gets it. Again, this could change, but the vast majority of the world gets it. Everyone who’s in business needs to stay in business, and needs to do business as of today as of March 19. With that in mind, we need to empathize upfront and acknowledge, and then we need to elongate the timeframe for turnaround. Those are the two tactics I recommend.

Drew McLellan:

Whether we are in this season or we’ve gotten through this season because we will get through this. I was on a webinar last night with an agency owner from Asia, they’re a couple of months ahead of us in this cycle here in the States, and they are slowly but surely getting back to normal. They’re back eating out at restaurants, they are back doing face-to-face meetings with clients. There is calm waters ahead, we just have to get through the storm first. But, whether it’s now or later, I know one of the things that you help your clients learn how to do is, how do I use the call if they get a call with a prospect to really diagnose the pain that they’re going through, to temper that conversation. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jeff Winters:

Yeah, absolutely. I think to your point, this is any season, but as more and more people now are doing remote meetings, it’s probably really important for them to continue to evolve on their meeting, talk, track and cadence, if they’re used to in-person face-to-face because they’re different. I’ll just share best practice on the phone initial discovery call, or video conference initial discovery call, because I think that’s again, any season, but particularly pertinent this season. Everything I’m going to share is based on data. It’s based on data from gong.io, it’s a conversational intelligence platform, analyzes millions and millions of different recorded sales calls. I’m going to share some data from them that I think is so important.

Number one, when we’re on these calls, the best reps, the top performing reps, create the least amount of rapport throughout the call. I’ll say that again, they spend the least amount of time creating rapport throughout the calls. That’s what the data shows. It’s big, strong rapport upfront, but it is business throughout, and at the end, it’s almost no rapport. Whereas middle tier and lower tier performing salespeople create lots of rapport in the beginning, flex back to rapport throughout the call, and go back to rapport at the end of the call. I know.

Drew McLellan:

Why do you think that is? I’m asking for your opinion on the data, obviously.

Jeff Winters:

I’m going to share my opinion, and I appreciate that. My opinion is this, at the beginning of the call, it is natural and important to get into rapport with people, but I think we’ve got certain salespeople that think it’s people buy from people they like. That’s the mentality. People buy from people they like. I would flip that. I would say people don’t buy from people they dislike. To me, that’s the mental model I would use. You don’t need to be liked, you need to not be disliked and you need to drive value. I’m okay not being loved if they know I’m driving value, and I’m going to spend the vast majority of my time, not trying to be liked, but at the beginning, ensuring I’m not disliked, and the number two driving value and driving toward close business. Toward a yes or no. That’s my opinion.

I think people get to the end of sales calls and they want to talk, and at that point it’s about business, and it’s not about your closing in my opinion. There’s that. Second tip I’ll share is your discovery process should be between 10 and 14 questions. Say it again, 10 and 14 questions. Any fewer it’s probably not enough. I see individual salespeople all the time who think they’re going to identify pain in two questions, and they’re not.

Drew McLellan:

You mean the question what keeps you up at night isn’t enough of a discovery? I hate that question.

Jeff Winters:

Yeah, that’s brutal. We can’t do that. Look, it’s a conversation, and you’ve got to be driving credibility through questions.

Drew McLellan:

Do you come to the phone call with all of those questions prepared, or are you saying that some of those questions are natural followups to the four questions that you have prepared, and you just keep asking more questions off of that?

Jeff Winters:

First, let me say again, what I don’t do. I don’t come to calls prepared on the person to drop facts I’ve learned about them on social media. ‘Hey, I saw your son goes to Miami of Ohio. So did I?’ I do not do that, and I don’t recommend it. I’ll come to calls generally speaking, this is a style thing for me, I’ll have a few call ideas sketched out, but I want my mind to be a little clearer so I can flow through. To me, it’s about mindset, and it’s about a mindset of curiosity. If you’re genuinely curious, then you’ll get where you need to go by accident. That’s what I coach my people. Get into a mindset of genuine curiosity about the business.

Drew McLellan:

Your point is stay curious for longer than maybe it feels comfortable or natural to stay curious, until you really have gotten into that 10 to 14 questions, because now you’ve probably unearthed things that were underneath what you thought was the base of the problem.

Jeff Winters:

Inevitably. That’s a guarantee. Stay curious for a while. That would be my tactical recommendation here.

Drew McLellan:

Part of your thought around that is when you really, really, really understand what’s going on, then you can be much more precise in your recommendations or what you talk about in the followup, as opposed to littering all of your offerings in front of them. Again, you can say, “Because you told me this and this and this and this, here’s what I want to talk to you about, this very specific thing.” Yes?

Jeff Winters:

Absolutely right. I’ll say it even differently, if you’re littering all your offerings in front of them, you know in that moment you haven’t discovered well.

Drew McLellan:

How long does somebody stay in one of the tiers in your opinion? Is there a point where they just are never going to buy from you in your opinion, or is it if you have something relevant to say to them, you can keep talking to them for three years because they’re just aren’t ready to buy. One of the challenges for agencies is there’s nothing we can offer that is going to create a false sense of urgency. Our clients either need us or our prospects either need us or they doubt, and they’re either ready to buy today or they’re not, or they have authorization or they’re done with a contract so they legally can buy. There’s no coupon or buy one get one free deal that we can put in front of our prospects, so some of it is just timing, right?

Jeff Winters:

Absolutely. I’ll give you my frame of mind, my mental model on this. I’m a yes or no person. Look, the first step is to take one half step back. I need to know my prospects and what they need. If I am reaching out to you and I feel that I have value to share, it is my obligation to reach out to you until you say yes or no, period. I have no span of time across which that changes. I’ll share the vast majority of the meetings that we schedule for ourselves, and we schedule close to 500 meetings a month for us. The vast majority of prospects we’ve been reaching out to for years. We’re selling something that people really need to grow their business, and I firmly believe that, and as agency owners, we need to firmly believe that. If we do and reaching out to the right people, it’s a yes or no world.

Drew McLellan:

Any last thoughts for the audience? I feel like in some ways we’ve just scratched the surface, but I want to be mindful of your time, and also people can only be on the treadmill for so long, so they’re looking to us to wrap this up. Any last thoughts?

Jeff Winters:

No. I just wanted to summarize just some of the key things that I hope people take out of this. Number one is the three tiered account model, making sure that you’re delivering a lot of resources to prospects in the nano, and fewer in the macro. Number two is email writing. When you’re writing emails, you’re trying two very specific things. Number one, be casual, so the prospect doesn’t think you’re a computer, and number two, understand the pain solve and deliver the pain, solve. Number three, spread out your offerings and tactics over multiple emails. Don’t just spew them out in one. Lastly, during your discover calls, during your initial calls, or your discovery calls, discover longer than you think, it’ll help ensure you’re more precise when you’re prescribing the solve.

Drew McLellan:

Beautiful. This has been great. I appreciate you letting me pick your brain and thank you for being generous with sharing your methodology with everybody. If people want to learn more about your offerings, including what you do to white label for agencies, what’s the best way for them to track you down and learn more about it?

Jeff Winters:

Sure. I’ll give you three modes. Number one is of course website, www.sapperconsulting.com. Number two, email me, [email protected]. I’m a direct person, Email me direct. Then last would be to reach out to us on any social media. Sapper Consulting on Twitter, Sapper Consulting on LinkedIn. We monitor everything as you would suspect.

Drew McLellan:

Sapper by the way guys is S-A-P-P-E-R if you’re looking for that. Jeff, thank you so much. This has been awesome. I greatly appreciate you making the time and sharing all that you know.

Jeff Winters:

Awesome. We’ve really enjoyed this. Thanks so much.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. All right guys. This wraps up another episode of Build A Better Agency. A couple of things. One, huge shout out to our friends at white label IQ. They are as you know are the presenting sponsor of the show and make all of this possible, so if you are looking for white label design dev or PPC, they are your go-to. They’ve been a part of AMI as an agency for 20 some years. I know them personally, I know them well, and they are good people with amazing skills. Head over to whitelabeliq.com/ami, because they’ve got a special deal for you. Also want to remind you that we have all kinds of resources that we’ve been putting together, managing through the COVID-19 situation, we’ve got videos, we have a podcast, we’ll continue to provide you with best practices as this evolves.

Certainly we’re a little US centric because that’s where we’re based, but trying very hard to take into account what’s going on in the entire world. Because I know a lot of you listening are outside of the US, but if you have questions, if you have concerns, you know how to reach us. We’re just [email protected] comes right into my inbox. Otherwise, you can go to the website and find resources, but we want to be a resource for you. We want to get all of you through this, as we can get to those calm waters on the other side, because I know they’re there. We just have to get through the storm. All right, hang in there. Be good to your people. Be good to your clients, and come on back next week for another guest. Talk to you soon.

That’s all for this episode of AMIs, Build A Better Agency podcast. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.