Rethinking agency biz dev part 3: The 6 kisses of death to avoid with Drew McLellan

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s, Build a Better Agency Podcast presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to midsize 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 McClellan:

Hey, everybody. Drew McClellan here from Agency Management Institute. Thanks for coming back. Welcome to another episode of Build a Better Agency. As I told you a couple weeks ago, I am shaking things up in 2022, a couple of reasons. Number one, I am challenging myself to challenge the status quo and shake things up in general and this is one of the ways I’m doing it, but two, because I know how important biz dev is to you and I know that for many of you, you’ve been a little quiet on the biz dev front over the holidays and I want to help you gear back up. And so I’m doing a concentrated series of just you and me podcast episodes, all focused biz dev. This is the third one in the series. Honestly, I haven’t decided how many are going to be in the series. I’m just going to keep recording them until I feel like I’ve set you up well and there’s nothing else to tell.

So we’ll see how it goes, but before I jump into today’s topic, I want to tell you about a workshop that we have coming up in March is one of the two workshops that you can attend to be eligible to be in one of our live peer groups. So we have Money Matters in the winter which is usually in December. And then we have Running Your Agency for Growth and Profit which is this year, March 14th and 15th in Chicago. Here’s what that workshop looks like. That workshop, we look at everything from how you’re compensating yourself. We talk about money. We talk about biz dev. We talk about leadership. We talk about growing up a leadership team inside your organization. We talk about your agency’s mission, vision, and values, but mostly we talk about how are you operating your agency and are there ways and efficiencies that would allow you to operate the business differently and better?

So it’s two days of really behind the scenes, back of the house kinds of things that I think most agency owners find very insightful, very valuable, lots of best practices, lots of tips and tricks around all aspects of your business. So biz dev, leadership, money, operations, getting it done, that sort of thing. So we cover a wide gamut of topics, but all really aimed at the agency owner. So again, that’s March 14th and 15th in Chicago, would love to have you join us. To register or read more about it, head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com/… No, I guess you don’t have to do slash. Agencymanagementinstitute.com and then under the tab, how we help, find the workshops section and look for running your agency for growth and profit. So would love to see you there.

All right. So let’s talk a little bit about what I want to cover today. When we teach biz dev workshops, one of the things that I find fascinating or when I’m talking to agency owners, one of the things I find fascinating is you all know a lot of what we teach and what we talk about. In fact, you teach and talk about it. So this is going to be a little group participation part of the podcast. I’m going to ask you a question and then I want you to either pause the podcast or jot something down or ignore me completely and just keep listening, I’d rather you didn’t do the last one, but I know you guys. So here’s the deal. Here’s the first question I want to ask you. What do you tell your clients about the importance of being findable today? In terms of their findability, in terms of how they rank for certain keywords, what people would search for from them or about them? What does that look like? I’m actually going to be taking sips of coffee up while I pretend that you’re answering me.

I think most of us would agree that what we tell our clients is that if they don’t know about you and they can’t find you, then you can’t be in the consideration set. And depending on what our clients do, in most cases, people aren’t looking for the generic word and then slash a city or a location. They’re looking for something a little more specific. They’re looking for someone who can solve a specific problem for them. And the reality is today, as I shared with you in the last podcast, I don’t really care where we live. If you remember more than half of the respondents to our research said that their agency was more than 200 miles away and the number of clients who said their agency was more than 200 miles away, ratcheted up the bigger their budget. We got into high numbers by the time we were talking a million or more in dollars.

So they’re looking for somebody who has an expertise or a skillset that’s going to help them solve some specific problems or they have heard about you somewhere else. They saw you speak at a conference or they got a referral, whatever, but if you are not findable in some way, shape, or form, they can’t possibly invite you to participate in an RFP or to come chat with them or to just hire you. So that’s true for us too, right? So we tell our clients that, but it is as true for us as it is for them.

All right. Next question. What do you tell your clients about their customers’ buying journey? I’m just going to have another sip of coffee while I pretend you think about that. Here’s the deal. We know that first of all, a buying journey is not linear. We know there are spots along the way where a client or a prospect may stay for a very, very long time that they may literally swim around in that section of the buying journey consuming our content, we’re not aware of them, but they’re aware of us or maybe we are aware of them, but they’re just not ready to buy. They can sit there for a day or a decade.

And this is one of the things I think that we get wrong. We produce a white paper a year or we put out two or three pieces of new content a year, or we update our case studies once a year and we think that’s enough, but the reality is if somebody is in that spot in the buyer’s journey that they’re just splashing around in the water and in essence, they’re taking our temperature. They’re checking us out. They’re deciding whether or not we have relevance for them. And again, day or a decade, we have to keep feeding them new stuff. And we’re not great at that.

The other part of this truth is that there’s nothing we can do to incent them to move along the buyer’s journey and to be ready to buy before they’re ready to buy. So that’s true of any considered purchase and we certainly are that. If they don’t need a new fridge and they don’t want a new fridge, nothing, not even a discount or a sale it’s going to make someone go, you know what? I’m going to drop a couple grand on a fridge. Same thing for us. We can be the most attractive agency out there to them, we can be spot on in terms of exactly what they need, but until they decide they need it, there’s nothing we can do to move them along. And so we have to keep them connected to us.

If you remember from an episode or two ago, I talked about being interesting versus interested. And this is the critical component of that is, we have to be in sting for as long as it takes them to, if you remember the analogy, walk close enough to our patio, to have the deer walk close enough to our patio to eat out of our hand and that may take years. So we have to keep putting out the food and we have to keep staying interesting and relevant to them because if we don’t, they’re going to just fade away into the woods. And then we have to earn their way back when they’re ready to buy. So that’s something important for us to think about too.

Okay. Next question. What do you tell your clients about marketing at prospects versus helping prospects? This is the new paradigm. I’m going to take a sip of coffee again. This is me pretending that you’re participating. If we were hanging out in a coffee shop, we would be chatting and drinking at the same time so it feels perfectly natural to me to do that with all the lights on and my microphone in front of me. All right, back to my question. What do you tell your clients about marketing at prospects versus helping prospects?

This is the new way to sell. The new way to sell is to be relevant and helpful and to help our prospects long before they hire us, but to help them do their job better every single day. And we do that through great, compelling content, by being a subject matter expert, by sharing our expertise, by having that strong point of view, when we help our clients, when they know that they can come to us over and over and over again and we’re helping them be better at their job, accomplish their goals, get that bonus or promotion, when they’re ready to hire us, when they’re ready to move out of that spot that they’re in the buyer’s journey wherever that is and they’re actually ready to move to a purchase, we have a huge leg up on our competition because we have already been relevant and meaningful to them. And that that is today’s way of selling.

And so if you’re not doing that, if you’re not being helpful, if you are not coaching in essence from afar even though you don’t know who’s out there, then the likelihood of them putting you in the consideration set when they get ready to interview agencies is my smaller.

All right. Last question for you. What do you tell your clients about how far into the purchase decision their prospects are by the time your clients actually are aware that the prospect is out there? The truth of the matter today is again for a considered purchase like us, it’s 70%, 75%. Your prospects have been doing their shopping, have been looking around, have been poking around on your website. Maybe they’ve been subscribers to your newsletter for years, but something is happening on their end that is propelling them towards the position to be you ready to hire you, but they’ve already decided a whole bunch of things about you by the time that they pick up the phone or send you an email or fill out a form on your website. They are already pretty far down the path.

And so the only way you have to influence them when they’re out there, you don’t know they’re out there and they are actually shopping, the only way you can influence them again is the content that you create and the stuff that you put out on your website, on your social channels, things like that. And so again, the opportunity to be interesting versus interested and to give them a sense of your personality, your brand personality, what it’s like to work with you, client testimonials, all of that sort of thing, you got to do that in the dark.

You have to do that without knowing who they or where they are or the fact that they are shopping because honestly, you may have an idea who’s coming to your website. You may be tracking some of that, but you don’t know exactly who it is. And you’re not really in a position to engage in conversation with them because they’re in stealth mode and it freaks people out if they get an email from you saying, I see you’ve been on our website three times this week. We have to be patient and we have to stay interesting while they get to that point, but again, 70%, 75% is where they’re at before they even reach out. We don’t like to talk to anybody anymore if we don’t have to. And so they’re going to do as much of that due diligence ahead of time as they possibly can.

So my point in asking those questions is, you give great advice and counsel to your clients about biz dev and about their efforts to market and sell. And yet, somehow we don’t take that to heart when it comes to our own efforts which I think is fascinating, right? We don’t practice what we preach. And so I think we can do it better. I know we can do it better. I have seen agencies that answer those questions just like you did, that followed the feast and famine model or relied on referrals even though the reality is word of mouth and referrals means that whatever swims in your net, you have to eat. And so you cast a net out there, but you passively wait to see what swims in your net.

And so what that means is some days you get tuna or salmon and other days you get a boot and I want you to spearfish. I want you to go after exactly the kinds of clients that are the right fit for you. And to do that, you A need to know who they are and B you need to go proactively out to get them. And that’s what really this series of podcast is all about is, how do you know who to go after? How do you prospect for them? How do you stay interesting to them? And how do you attract them to you? So let’s talk a little bit about that.

So there are six, what I call biz dev kisses of death. They are mistakes that we make over it over and over again. And that’s really what I want to focus on in this podcast are, what are those six mistakes and how do we course correct for them? So the first one, the biz dev kiss of death number one is that you are inconsistently inconsistent in key aspects of biz dev. And what I mean by that is you start off with great intentions and usually it’s about this time of year. If you’re listening real time, this is going to be late January by the time this airs, you have great intentions and you probably have a really robust plan right now. And probably it’s too robust by the way, but you get started and then you don’t maintain it for long enough.

And so what you do is you set yourself up to fail and you set yourself up to fail colossally in front of your prospects, because once you start putting out the weekly video or the newsletter or whatever the thing is, they’re watching for it. And when it starts to get inconsistent in its delivery, what you’re saying to them is, we don’t have our act together. We are not even able to produce our own content. And you can say, well, every agency sucks at this and for the most part, that is true, but your prospects don’t know that, they think you are a marketing professional running an agency of marketing professionals and surely anyone above and beyond you who would be better at doing monthly newsletters or weekly videos or fill in the blank? You have all the tools at your disposals. So of course, you should be able to be good at this and be consistent at this.

So when you’re inconsistent on your own stuff, what you’re saying is we can’t even get it right for ourselves so it’s probably not a good idea for you to have a lot of confidence that we can get it right for you. And that’s how they interpret it. So that’s why this is so critical. I would rather have you do something less often or do fewer things, but them consistently. It is a far better path, a far better recipe for biz dev than to be everywhere at all times for everyone. And then you drop the ball and what you convey is this isn’t that important to us which is the last thing in the world, of course, that you want to convey.

The second biz dev kiss of death is, your agency looks and sounds like everyone else out there. So when I’m teaching workshops I’ll have people stand up and introduce themselves. And I do this at a bootcamp, I do this at the owner workshops and 75% of the people who stand up will say some variation of we are a full service integrated marketing agency. We look and sound the same. So our website say things like, we’re a great partner. We lead with strategy. We deliver results. We’re a full service integrated marketing department, whatever that is, but we say the same things about ourselves. And so again, remember your prospect is out there and they’re doing 70% to 75% of their shopping unaided by you or anyone else.

So imagine you’re the seventh or eighth agency whose website there checking out and it sounds and looks the same. You have dog pictures in your bios, you talk about the fact that you keep clients for a long time and that you partner with your clients. You know the stuff that we all say about ourselves and the truth of the matter is, everybody says it, which means the prospect has no tools to differentiate. And when you look like everyone else, and you don’t own your position of authority, your subject matter expertise, and you don’t demonstrate to me in your case studies and other things that you actually have that expertise then when you look like everybody else, the only way I can differentiate you from the other agencies is you have the cuter dog which is a big factor in my opinion.

And two, ultimately what I’m going to wonder is, are you less expensive than the other guys? Because you all look kind of the same so why spend more than I have to, to get the same thing? So that’s why this is such a critical thing for us to fix and so few agencies have the courage to fix this.

Biz dev kiss of death number three is, you create… Again, this goes back to you not wanting to plant a flag, to own a position, to say to the world, this is who we are for, which means we’re not for everybody else. And so you create generic content, you create Pantone color of the year content. Your content is haphazard in how often you produce it. And you often just throw a link out there without much comment or context. And so again, this is, I guess, kiss of death mistake 2.5, you look like everybody else. You’re trying to talk to everyone. And so by doing that, by talking to everyone, you really don’t say anything super relevant to anyone.

The agencies that are crushing a content strategy that are leveraging content to literally have people pick up the phone or shoot them an email and say, I need to hire you, do you have time to talk today? Which happens every day, I hear about it every single day. The agencies that are doing that, are agencies whose content is not haphazard and is very focused. And so the reality is for a lot of people out there, they’re irrelevant because they are talking with such specificity that they are super relevant to a small audience and irrelevant to the rest. And by the way, this does not negate your ability to get walk-ins or to get referrals because people are talking about other things about you. They’re talking about your response time or how smart and creative your creative is or whatever they’re talking about, but they are raving about you in other ways than your subject matter expertise unless you happen to be in their niche.

But if you’re not in their niche and you’re just a long time client, they still are saying good things about you and they’ll still drive business your way. And in the beginning, because remember moving from being a generalist to a specialist is an evolution not a revolution, in the beginning, you’ll take that business, but sooner or later you’re going to get to a point where you say, you know what, we’re actually an agency that only specializes in pharma products for women over 50. So I’m really sorry. It was really great that Baba introduced you to me, but I’m really, but we’re just not the agency for you. Let me introduce you to my friend Bob who owns a generalist agency who I think is going to be a great fit for you. But we often err on the side of what trying to look available and like a possibility for everyone which means that we don’t tell our very best prospects, our right fit prospects, that we are perfect for them.

Biz dev mistake number four is, and this is such a common one, you’re committed to a niche or a point of view. And what I mean by that is, well, for a lot of you, you have like five niches, like, oh, well we work in healthcare and fitness and pharma and outdoor living and women’s shoes, right? So you either have a litany, a list of niches which means really you’re not niching down. The fewest number of niches really, that makes sense where you can really mind those niches and have those serve you well, maybe two or three, but you’re committed to a niche or a point of view. So either you have this litany of niches or you whisper it, right? So you say, well, we’re actually an agency for pharma products for women over 50, but it’s not on your website. Your content is generic. It’s not what you talk about on LinkedIn. It is not the focus of your video series. Your video series is about general marketing advice.

So you whisper it and if somebody asks in the industry you say, oh, absolutely, 80% of our clients, 70% of our clients, whatever the number is, are in the pharma space. And all of them are for women over 50. So in the inner circle, you’ll admit it, you’ll shout it, but when you are out in public, you don’t shout it, you whisper it. And so for most people, they just miss it or they think that you do that plus a bunch of other things. So you don’t claim your subject matter expertise, your position of authority, and that’s the whole reason for niching, right? The whole reason for niching is so you can say here’s who we are and here’s what we have a depth of expertise in. And then here’s who we’re not. And so we don’t do that kind of work.

I know, and we’ve talked about this in earlier episodes, I know that this takes courage, but I think what you’re going to find is, and I know it feels limiting, but actually what it does is, instead of being a mile wide and an inch deep, you’re just mile and miles and miles deep. And there’s plenty of prospects for you there for you to find. And so if you’re going to niche or have a strong point of view, you got to own it and you got to own it, you got to be loud and proud because otherwise it becomes a detriment rather than something that propels you forward that gives you even greater success at a faster rate. When you’re half in half out, you’re straddling the fence then it becomes a liability as opposed to a huge advantage.

But one of the reasons why you don’t do this is because of biz dev kiss of death number five which is, you have in your head that you need a lot more in your business than you actually do. So it’s paralyzing for you. The numbers get so big whether you write them down or not, the numbers get so big in your head that you think you have to be a generalist, that you have to try and get everybody on the planet to know who your agency is and to want to hire you. Honestly, that’s just not true. For most of you, if you are targeting the right size prospect, so somebody who’s between 2% and 8% of your AGI, your agency’s AGI, if their spend is between 2% and 10%, you need two of those a year and two or three if they’re on the small side three, if they’re closer to 5% to 10% two because those clients take a while to onboard and take a while to put their course in order.

And growing more than 20% or 25% a year crushes an agency, it crushes your resources. It kills your people because you can’t hire fast enough to keep up with the demand and so everybody’s working stretched. And after a while, you walk in to announce that you’ve gotten a new client and your whole team is like, oh, because they feel so burdened with every new client. So you only want two or three new ones a year, but you want the right ones. And again, that’s where the content comes in. That’s where the position of authority comes in, all of those things, but one of the things I want you to do is I want you to do the math and I want you to figure out really realistically how many clients do we need and what ballpark should their budgets be?

So A, you’re going after the right prospects, but B now you have reality in front of you and you see that is daunting a task to hit your new business goals as you thought. And by the way, don’t just pull a number out of the air, do the math, what is 20% growth? So most agencies will lose a client or so a year or so, look at 2021s year and AGI and make sure that it’s in alignment, that it can support the agency that you have. So do you have about $150,000 of AGI per FTE? And let’s say that’s $1 million. Well, odds are, you’re going to lose about 10% of that business over the course of the year. So you’re going to lose $100,000 and let’s say you want to get $1 million too. So now what that means is your go get is $300,000, that’s it, right?

And by the way, some of that $300,000 could and should come from your existing clients. So let’s say of the $300,000 you have to go get $200,000 in prospects, people who have never done any work with you. Now you got to go get a couple hundred thousand dollars, $250,000 of new business, that’s it for you to have a killer year, a killer growth year. So don’t get fooled by your math muddled brain to think that you have to go out and win 10 new clients. And by the way, all of you should have a minimum and a maximum, like we don’t take clients that spend less than X, but we also don’t take clients that spend more than Y. Why should you have those two numbers? Because those are the brackets that you can live in and you can delight your clients.

We all know that little clients take up as much time and energy as big clients. They are far less profitable. Often they’re far less sophisticated. So for you and your agency, if the minimum spend has to be $50,000 or $100,000 or whatever, don’t be shy about that. That’s how you can… Keep in mind the whole reason why you’re running the agency is to make money. So why do you have a number at the top of this scale? Because at a certain point in time, clients are too big and you scramble to try and make them happy and you put a huge gorilla in your house and you now have to caut out to that gorilla.

So I’m not saying that you never take a client bigger than that number, but I want you to be really thoughtful about it. And I want you to think through whether or not that actually makes sense for you. So the high and low number are basically bumpers that allow you to make a better informed decision. So am I saying you absolutely can’t or shouldn’t take clients that are smaller or larger than your bumpers? No, but I want you to have a really thoughtful conversation with your team before you do. And you certainly want to put your prospects inside those windows so that you are targeting in your outbound efforts, clients that are the right size, but the bottom line is, you don’t need anywhere near as much new business as you think which hopefully frees you up to breathe a little and do the things that we teach and that you would tell your clients to do because it’s better to have fewer, but more perfectly fit clients than it is to go get a million little guys. In fact, the million little guys will kill you. They will just drown you.

And the last biz death kiss of death is the one that most of you are guilty of which is, you’re passively waiting for new clients to walk in the door. So you’re counting on that word of mouth, a referral or you just know in air quotes that that’s how you’ve always gotten in business is, you don’t have to go out and prospect because the business just walks in the door, but again, you’re casting the net and then you’re just eating whatever swims into the net. So some days nothing swims in the net, as you know, and things get a little dicey. And other times it’s a boot or it’s a bottom feeder fish or it’s something you don’t really want to eat, but you have to eat it because you have mouths to feed.

And so really what I want you to do is I want you to think through these kisses of death and they’re all so fixable, they really are. And some of it’s just a mental mind shift. Some of it is you actually have to be a little more proactive and we’re going to get into that later in the series, but I want you to avoid these six kisses of death. And I want you to see what they do to your agency and how they cripple you without you really realizing that it’s happening. It’s very much, put the frog in the cold water and slowly turn up the heat kind of a thing. You don’t realize that every one of these kisses of death, everyone of these mistakes that we make every single day is diminishing our agency, is diminishing our ability to attract clients, is diminishing our capacity to earn and grow the business.

So I want you to stop diminishing the agency’s capabilities, the agency’s opportunities, and instead what I want you to do is I want you to really focus on how do we eliminate these mistakes and tee ourselves up to be super successful from a biz dev point of view, that’s it. And I promise it’s nowhere near as hard as it sounds. I think we make it so much more complicated than we have to. I’m going to wrap here for today. I want you to think about these mistakes. I want you to recognize them as you’re making them throughout the week. I want you to know that I’m going to come back next week with some proactive things for you to think about and to do. And then we’re going to just keep pushing ahead and we’re going to get your biz dev program off the ground and we’re going to make 2022 a kick here.

All right, before I let you go, a couple things. First, as always, huge thanks to our friends at White Label IQ, they’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. As you know they do White Label Design Dev and PPC. They’re killing it for a bunch of AMI agencies and I’m sure other agencies that are not a part of the AMI family. I hear rave reviews about them all the time. People just can’t help, but talk about how good their work is, but even more than that, how easy they are to work with. And so I highly recommend you go to WhitelabelIQ.com/ami. If you go there, you’re going to find that on your first project, they’re going to give you some free hours to get that work started. So check them out.

In the meantime, you know how to get ahold of me. I’m [email protected], really the longest URL on the planet. And I’ll be back next week to talk more about all of this stuff, but know that I am here, know that I am in your corner, that I believe I’m teaching this stuff because I know it works and I know you’re capable of putting it to work and I just want to help you accelerate that process. So I’ll be back next week and I’ll talk to you then. Thanks for listening.

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s 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 midsized agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.