Episode 460
As agency owners, one of the things we fundamentally get wrong in sales is how heavily trust plays a role in the process. We’re selling intangible services and solutions to people with a high price tag, and we expect prospects to trust that we’ll deliver on our promises.
It’s a risky proposition, especially for the ones putting their trust (and wallets) in our hands.
This week, I’m sharing how agency owners can earn and leverage their trust with client referrals to increase sales. When you sit back and watch the sales come in simply because someone knows, likes, and trusts you enough to recommend you to others, it’s a beautiful thing.
I’ll share the four things we need in any sales process: the etiquette of social proof and earning client referrals, and how to ethically become part of a community without becoming a billboard for your agency.
When you earn people’s trust by being genuinely helpful, knowledgeable, and a pleasure to do business with, you won’t have to lift a finger to make a sale.
For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
In This Episode:
- Putting ourselves in the shoes of the buyers
- The role of psychological discomfort and decision fatigue in the buying process
- 4 things we need in any sales process to be successful
- The pros and cons of waiting on referrals
- The etiquette behind social proof and referrals
- What does it mean to belong?
- What it takes to earn someone’s trust enough to earn a referral from them
“Let's put ourselves in our buyers’ shoes for a minute. If they hire the wrong agency, at the least, they face social and professional embarrassment. At the worst, they lose their job.” @DrewMcLellan Share on X
“When the potential risks are high, psychological discomfort increases, and our buyers are more likely to hesitate or abandon the purchase.” @DrewMcLellan Share on X
“When we aggressively pursue sales, we're going for nothing but net, and we miss more often than we score.” @DrewMcLellan Share on X
“When we are in a safe place with other people, our body's chemistry acknowledges our need to walk out our lives in community.” @DrewMcLellan Share on X
“You are a reflection of the people you choose to associate with and even more so of the people you choose to refer.” @DrewMcLellan Share on X
Ways to contact Drew:
- Email: [email protected]
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/drewmclellan
- Website: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/
Resources:
- Book: Sell With Authority
- AMI Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/agencymanagementinstitute
- AMI Preferred Partners: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/ami-preferred-partners/
- Agency Edge Research Series: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/agency-tools/agency-edge-research-series/
- Upcoming workshops: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/advertising-agency-training/workshop-calendar/
- Weekly Newsletter: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/newsletter-sign-up-form/
- Agency Coaching and Consulting: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/advertising-agency-consulting/agency-coaching-consulting/
- BaBA Summit 2025: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/babasummit/
Hey everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol, and then Agency Management Institute, all one word.
Subscribe and search the existing video database for all sorts of actionable topics that you can implement in your shop today. Alright, let’s get to the show.
It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional digital media buying, web dev, PRR brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build, a Better, Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ will expose you to the best practices that drive growth, client and employee retention and profitability, bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.
Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute back with another episode of Build a Better Agency. As we march closer and closer to episode 500, this is one of my solo casts. So unlike a typical show, no guests, just you and me talking about something that’s either been on my mind or more likely has been on your mind and I’ve been having conversations with agency owners and I wanna broaden that conversation to involve all of you. Before I tell you a little more about what I want to talk about today. As always, on the solo cast, we always draw a name outta the hat, the proverbial hat of people who have left a rating or review for the show.
So here’s how it works. You go wherever you download the show and you leave a rating and a review, take a screenshot of that rating and review and email it to me at [email protected] and you are officially in the drawing. You stay in the drawing until you win. So sometimes it happens quick, sometimes it takes a couple years, but for five or 10 minutes worth of effort, you can win a free seat at one of our live workshops. So what that means is that you’re winning a $2,000 two day workshop seat just for leaving a rating and review.
So if you’re interested, go do that. The winner for this podcast or this solo cast is Ashley Robinson. Ashley is CEO and founder of the Green Cardigan Marketing out of Fort Lauderdale. So Ashley, I’ll be reaching out to you and letting you know you won. Congratulations, and we look forward to hosting you here in Denver at one of our workshops very soon. So this is, that’s all it takes. You guys. Super easy, so my eyes will try it. Alright, what I want to talk about today is sales, but I want to talk about it in a way that we have not talked about it, at least not in depth before.
So I’m, I’m excited to have this conversation with you and to plant some seeds for you to think about as you march to the final couple quarters of 2024. You know, for many of you, 2023 was brutal. In fact, almost 50% of agencies in the US had a decline in gross revenue and a GI. Nope, some of you didn’t. Many of you though, reported that you did not land one new client in 2023. Those of you that had a good year dodged the bullet by focusing on your existing client base and growing your share of wallet with them, which by the way should always be a focus area.
Some of you have told us that 2023 was a good sales year for you, but you are feeling the pressure and the brunt of the shift this year in 2024. The truth is whether it was 2023 or 2024, sales is hard always. The truth of the matter is there are more agencies out there. Businesses are feeling a lot of uncertainty and that has them clinging to their dollars. Technology keeps changing how we do the work and the regulations keep putting restrictions on how we do the work. If I could show you the easiest way to consistently land new clients who are in your sweet spot, who will say yes faster and with more confidence, I would be a very wealthy man.
Well, you know what? Here’s the deal. I can show you, and that’s what I want us to talk about today for absolutely no charge. The question I want to answer today is, how in the world do we make it easier to sell more? Now, there are three things that are true about most agency owners. Number one, most of you are accidental business owners. Number two, you are sometimes to a ridiculous level generous to your employees. Your heart often out argues your wallet or logic. Number three, for many of you, sales is just not your jam.
I’m not suggesting that you aren’t good at sales. Most of you are the defacto salesperson for your agency. Your sales prowess is what got you to where you’re at, but you don’t love it. Agency sales are always hard. Let’s be honest, we’re a considered purchase and for our clients, a significant spend that if they get it wrong, could cost them their business or their job all for hiring the wrong agency. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this before, but let’s put ourselves in the shoes of our buyers for a minute. If they hire the wrong agency or spend their marketing dollars ineffectively at the least they face social and professional embarrassment at the worst, they lose their job.
Or if the owner of the business, it’s their money down the drain, not having confidence in the agency that you hire creates a lot of anxiety. How many of us have received at one point or another, the 2:00 AM email from a client who can’t sleep because they’re worried? They have a lot riding on this decision. Add to that, we’re trying to sell them something intangible. They can’t hold it in their hand. They in many cases have no idea how to tell if something we do is good or not. On top of that, we’re hardly a bargain. Selling it for a lot of money makes it even harder, and the work we do if we wanna do it with excellence and surround ourselves with a team of highly skilled professionals requires us to sell it for a lot of money more so than ever before.
The cost of doing business as an agency owner is elevated. For many of you. You haven’t raised your rates in over a decade until over the last couple years we’ve been banging the drum and saying, you’ve got to raise your rates because every other cost tied to you running your business has gone up. So the truth of the matter is, we’re even more expensive than we used to be. When Stephen Westerner and I wrote the book Sell With Authority back in 2020, we talked about how agency sales had changed that the proliferation of competition, the easy availability of information on the internet and the shift in buyer behavior where 75% of the buying decision were all B2B services, including us, are done before the buyer first contacts the potential seller all meant we had to find a way to be interesting until the day the buyer was interested.
A huge shift for us in the agency space, we actually have them to chase us because they’re in control. We have no way to make someone want to hire us before they need us. You know, president’s Day sale, no, buy one, get one free coupon, but there’s another side. Motivation isn’t enough, right? The truth of the matter is risk and the motivation to buy have an inverse relationship. Let’s look at this through the lens of psychological comfort and decision fatigue.
When the potential risks are high, psychological discomfort increases and our buyers are more likely to hesitate or abandon the purchase to avoid potential negative outcomes. This is where we get ghosted. We have to reduce the risk. We all know there’s an inverse relationship between risk and the motivation to take action. The less risk, the more likely I am to buy and the quicker we’ll get through the sales cycle, almost to all of us re reference the no like trust factors. When we talk to clients, we explain to clients that if they can’t check all three boxes, they aren’t gonna make the sale.
Same is true for us, no, like trust is even more important in a B2B sale where what we deliver is intangible and can’t be held in a client’s hand. Trust equals reducing the risk. This is why referrals and word of mouth work. When I ask you, any of you where your best and fastest sales come from, you very confidently say referrals and word of mouth, which I believe to be true. When someone recommends our agency, they’re creating familiarity where it doesn’t actually exist. They’re in essence doing the four things we need in any sales process.
Number one, they’re providing credibility, which leads to trust. Number two, they’re offering their assurance that we’re a good choice and this serves like a relational guarantee. Number three, their showcasing social proof. There are testimonials, there are user reviews. They are staking their reputation on the fact that we’ll do a good job, and number four, they’re personalizing the sales approach by not only telling the prospect about us, but in most cases they’re also telling us about them.
They’re literally relieving the weight of the buying decision. This idea is often linked to the psychological principle known as the familiarity principle or the mere exposure effect, which suggests that people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they’re familiar with them. This relationship is particularly pertinent in a field like ours where the outcomes of what we do can initially seem so uncertain. We can’t guarantee our work or the results of our work or the results that our work will deliver, but by strategically reducing perceived risk, we can enhance the attractiveness of our offering and motivate our buyers to commit.
On the flip side, when the risks are perceived as low because someone, the buyer has vouched for us, the psychological barrier decreases making the decision making process feel safer In most cases. When we talk about no, what we mean is no of them, right? They’ve heard of us, but one of the reasons why we all love referrals so much is because we get to skip over the no right to like someone that our prospect knows has vouched for us and told the prospect all about us and their experience with us.
That for the prospect truly checks the no box and they give a deep reassurance to the buyer that they can be confident that they can trust us. After all the referer does, so why wouldn’t they? Referrals and word of mouth are basically the bank shots of sales. When we aggressively pursue sales, we’re going for nothing but net and we miss more often than we score, but when we wait for the sales to come to us through referrals and word of mouth, it’s a bank shot, they put the ball into the net for us.
Did you know that bank shots are actually 20% more effective than direct shots? The backboard at the game of basketball provides a larger target area and bank shots require less precision from the shooter because the backboard does a lot of the work. The source of the referral significantly reduces the risk for the buyer. They’re the backboard and they ease the ball into the net, which is golden for us all because the referral source gave us their endorsement so our buyer could cast aside their fear of the potential risk.
Today, the buyers are in control and we have to be of interest to them for as long as it takes for them to take an interest in us because when they’re finally ready, if we’ve held their interest, they will knock on our proverbial door. Imagine that right? Fit clients actually proactively seeking you out to buy from you when they’re ready. Now, there’s still a problem while referrals may speed up sales and the sales process, the other problem is we have no control over them. We can’t artificially create referrals, nor can we control if the referral is actually a good fit for what we do.
How many of us to help a professional colleague or friend have met with one of their buddies who wanted to hire us but they were so not ready for an agency or they weren’t ready for our agency? We’ve all been there. Sitting around waiting for referrals is like casting a fisherman’s net in open water and being committed to eating whatever happens to move into the net. Someday it’s a tuna and other days it’s a rubber boot. That is not ideal for referrals and word of mouth to actually be a viable business strategy. We have to improve our odds, view our boots or tuna, and that’s when we decide to do things like attend trade shows, sit on boards, join associations, and seek out the ponds where our prospects flourish.
In other words, we join their community. Human beings are meant to belong more succinctly. We need to belong for our survival, and by the way, this is not just about our survival as humans. It’s also I believe about our survival as business owners and leaders and it’s the easiest way to sell more. It’s not a magic bullet. Referrals can reduce our risk as owners and the buyer’s risk, but those aren’t the only risks we need to worry about. Metaphorically, raise your hand or if you’re in a place where you could really raise your hand, go ahead and do it.
If you’ve ever given a referral and that recommendation did not go so well, do you remember how that felt? You felt responsible. You felt obligated to get into the middle of it and fix it and you were embarrassed. That referral cost you. It cost you the confidence of the person who is disappointed by your referral. It might have cost you a sliver of your reputation depending on how badly it went, and it cost you the trust that you had in the company that you referred. That’s what I really want to dig into today. When we think about referrals, the one person we don’t really factor into the equation is the person making the referral, the referrer, if you will.
We may not have been paying enough attention in our pursuit of referrals and our desires to make sales easier to the risk that we put the refer in when they refer us to someone. What’s worse sometimes how we’re trying to get those referrals actually risks. What those hope for referrals are based on, yet the same principle applies. The more risk that the referrer feels, the less motivated they are to refer you and sales become harder, not easier. So the very thing that we think makes sales easier, we can accidentally make it worse.
At the 2023 summit, we had a first time sponsor who cost us a great deal. I know at many events anyone can be a sponsor, but not at ours. We make potential sponsors read some information about you, our community, we make them sign a contract that makes it clear that we will not give them a list of the attendees in advance or after the event and that we welcome them to join us, learn with us, and cultivate relationships with attendees, but they are not allowed to sell to our attendees at the event it’s in writing. If I don’t know the sponsor, I make sure that one of us has a verbal conversation to make sure that they understand what was in writing and that they understand our expectations.
Why? Because us allowing them to be a sponsor is an implied endorsement. In an implied referral. You can guess how this story ends. We got a lot of feedback from attendees that there was a sponsor at the 2023 summit that their interactions with this sponsor were less than ideal, that there was a lot of selling and post-summit, the selling continued. When I talked to them about it, it didn’t apologize. They denied that it happened and then they came back to us this year expecting to be allowed to be a sponsor at the 2024 summit.
They were not there and they will never be there. Now that cost us money, but their behavior cost us far more. Their conduct cost us. It made people feel less comfortable and less safe. Being at the summit, it made them wary of our sponsors, which isn’t fair to the sponsors who do honor our rules and it made them question our judgment. We got fooled by that sponsor. It cost me some social standing, some trust, some confidence in my ability to keep our community safe and a sales free zone. It also, to be honest, made me more hesitant to bring new sponsors to the summit.
Those poor people this year had to endure even more scrutiny. They had to understand that we are not like other conferences and that Danielle and I are not quick to risk what we’ve worked so hard to create this safe place that is the a MI community. You know, in cell with authority, Steven and I emphasize the importance of becoming an authority by being a teacher, by giving away everything you’ve got by asking yourself each time you are about to say something or hit the publish button, is this gonna help my community be better at their job today? What we never say is join their community so you can sell stuff to them, and the reason we’ve never said it is because it doesn’t work.
Here’s the deal with communities. We have to understand how they work before we can make them work for us. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Before I get back to the interview, I just wanna remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops and you can see the whole [email protected] on the navigation head to how we help scroll down and you’ll see workshops and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop. They are all in Denver and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account execs, agency leaders, CFOs.
We have a little something for everybody no matter what it is that you’re struggling with, people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered, so check ’em out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show. We are wired to connect. Everything about us as human beings is built to form relationships, connection and community. Our bodies literally physically are drawn to people and we create different chemical compositions. When we are in a safe place with other people, our body’s very chemistry acknowledges our need to walk out our lives in community.
Maslow’s hierarchy tells us that other than food, water, shelter and basic safety, the most important element of being a healthy human is belonging and love. And there have been many studies that focus on this need. We all know that humans are meant to belong, so let’s define what that means. Belonging is about being part of a tribe or a community. That community is a social unit with shared significant characteristics such as place a set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, common interests or worries or identity that we share.
Each of us belong to many communities, some we were born into and others we have joined by choice. That’s where our family, our friend groups, people we share an experience with, be it our childhood neighborhood, our our college or work, and then there’s the community built around, shared beliefs, be that political, religious or something we’re passionate about. And finally, we all probably have some tribes where we have shared interests or worries, could be a hobby or work, a health challenge, shared goal like losing weight or running marathons on the surface. Communities are about that first layer of connection at a MI.
We come together as a professional community because we all do the same thing for a living. We come together to learn how to be better at our craft, but communities are not surface based entities. They come to be to meet a deeply held need that need to belong, that need to be with people who are like us. So the fact that we’re in the same business doesn’t meet the need criteria. If that alone was a need, every conference on the planet would be packed to the gills that we share. A professional alliance, a religious faith or grew up in the same neighborhood or even our siblings doesn’t actually turn a group of people into a community but turns them into a community is the root system.
It’s what happens underneath the surface. So redwoods are the tallest trees on the planet. They are also among the strongest. They grow as tall as a 35 story building and yet they can survive on just the moisture they extract from fog, from fog. So the fog’s mist condenses against the trunk and that creates what are called fr fog drips. Are I saying that 10 times fast fog drips, the fog drips roll down, the grooves of the trees bark down into the root structure. But the real secret to these trees, survival is that root structure.
I don’t know about you, but my instincts are that if I’m building something that is over 300 feet tall, I would want the foundation to be buried deep underground, but that is actually not how redwoods do it. Redwood roots are actually very shallow in comparison, maybe five or six feet deep, but they’re wide. In fact, a redwoods roots can reach over 100 feet away from the trunk of the tree and they intertwine with the other trees’, root systems, and actually fuse together. That is the key.
They intertwine with all the other trees’, root systems in the forest and they fuse together. Now you have the strength of many as the foundation. They survive because they are so interwoven. That’s why redwoods can withstand high winds and raging floods, but it’s not just strength. It’s also how they nurture one another. When those fog drips reach the root structure, it doesn’t just serve one tree, it serves the entire network or community of trees through their shared root system.
Here’s where the analogy gets a little weird, but we’re gonna go there because nutrients are scarce. One of the ways that redwoods help each other survive is that when a redwood tree dies, it decays and the nutrients it is absorbed over. The ages are released back into the community through the roots nourishing all the other trees. With that surplus of nutrients, the community is able to send up new sprouts up from the roots. In other words, redwoods are the strongest and tallest trees in the world because they’re in it together.
One of the cool things about nature is the entire ecosystem is created on an assumption of shared goodwill. We help and serve each other that we help and serve each other. That assumptive understanding that we are here not just for our own selfish needs, but to help one another is how a community builds a strong root foundation and how we get our needs met by being selfless, by helping, by not taking more than what is offered. And now we add that as human beings, we are hardwired down to our DNA to belong, to seek community.
It’s essential for our survival as humans and as business owners and leaders, which means what? It means that we are not going to risk our survival very quickly or very easily. The cost is way too high. You are a reflection of the people you choose to associate with and even more so of the people you choose to refer even if the referral is implied. My mom used to always say to me, drew, you are judged by the company you keep. So choose wisely.
Which is why it killed me when one of our sponsors violated our no selling rule because it risked my position in our community and that hurt me badly like kidney stone, bad. Remember that risk has an inverse relationship with the motivation to buy or to make the referral, and now we’re joining our prospects in their community, which they’re hardwired to value and in some cases cherish. It will cause them pain if they’re standing in their community as compromised, and the reason we join the community in the first place is because we want them to risk it all to refer us.
In other words, we just jacked the risk factor to the roof. Given that risk and the motivation to buy have an inverse relationship, does that really seem like a great plan? I believe that it is. I believe that being a part of a community where you can serve and help but also find referral sources is a great plan, but it doesn’t work unless we’re addressing and accounting for everyone’s risk, especially the referrers.
That leads to one more nuance to all of this that we have not talked about yet. Let’s talk about trust and what it takes to earn someone’s trust enough that they will risk something they hold near and dear to make a referral. We know that what motivates us to buy is emotion. We use the facts to justify the purchase, but every purchase from toothpaste to a huge piece of farming equipment or the cooling system for a manufacturing plant is ultimately about a deeply held motion. When we look back at the know like trust model, no is intellectual.
It’s the fact finding part of the buying process. It gives us reasons and rationale to later justify the purchase, like begins to create the emotional connection. It’s the emotional or DRE to wet our appetite to try to trust, but trust is more complex, trust is layered, and this is the part we get wrong. We do not understand trust. The intellectual layer of trust is respect. Respect is fundamentally about acknowledging the professional ability, ethical standards, and overall integrity of a person or business.
It involves a recognition of competence and an adherence to ethical practices. Respect is earned through consistent, reliable actions that align with professional and moral standards. Respect is intellectual proof points, testimonials, ROI driven case studies. The emotional layer of trust is regard. Regard on the other hand goes far beyond respect to encompass admiration and a deeper personal endorsement. It implies a level of esteem that includes not only professional capabilities but also a personal affinity or alignment with the values, personality or the unique offerings of the professional or the business.
Holding someone in high regard often stems from exceptional experiences or achievements that resonate on a more personal or emotional level with the other person. High regard is knowing that if you make a referral, the person that you are introducing the person or business to will be treated the way you would treat them. When I respect someone, I believe they are competent, even good at what they do and if my level of trust stops at respect, I mean there’s that. It means that there is something about how they do it or how they come across or create connections that does not quite feel right.
I can’t get to the place where I hold them in high regard. We all have people and businesses in our lives where we know they’re good at whatever they do, but for some reason it feels very uncomfortable. It feels risky to recommend them to someone else. There’s something we often can’t explain that holds us. For me, one of the things that I know, even if it’s somebody I have high respect for, if I feel like they are pushy in their sales or they are constantly sticking their hand back in someone’s pocket, I cannot hold them in high regard.
It’s one of the reasons why we have such a firm no sales culture policy in the a AMI community because I personally and Danielle personally can’t stomach it. It keeps us from holding someone in high regard. Now, that’s true everywhere, but it becomes even more true inside a community. That difference between respect and regard. When we are a member of a community or in our case the leader of a community, the stakes get much higher. We’re no longer talking about casual peer-to-peer referrals. We’re talking about putting one of our core needs at risk, belonging, and love inside a community.
There are norms spoken in, unspoken rules and expectations, and the number one rule in every community is don’t put me in a compromising position within the community because if I get it wrong, if I get the referral wrong inside a community, that is important to me. The risks are too great inside a community. The only way I will make a recommendation or a referral is if I hold that person or that business. In high regard, inside a community, referrals are regard made real.
When you are held in high regard that regard ripples throughout the community and it’s contagious inside a community, a referral is a reflection and an extension of your own reputation, much more so than in the outside world as the referrer. If you are making the referral, it is on you that this goes well. This is you risking your standing in a community that’s important to you to endorse someone else. The upside of that is that the buyer is inside the community too, so they understand the risk that you’re taking, which means it has an even more significant impact on their level of risk because the risk of making a referral is higher, the risk of having confidence in that referral and making the purchase is even lower.
The buyer also understands that when a referral comes from a place of high regard, that the person making the referral isn’t just sharing a contact, they’re sharing an experience they highly valued themselves. The higher the regard, the lower the risk for both the buyer and the person making the referral. So the real answer to the question I asked at the beginning of this solo cast is how do you make sales easier? The real answer to making sales easier is absolutely to either build your own community or seek out communities where your prospects are, but you have to get into that community and raise your regard, which means operate in alignment with the community that you’re a part of.
The question of course is how do we earn being held in high regard? There are some universal truths and then each community will have its own unspoken and spoken rules. For example, if you are a member of the BNI community, you’d be expected to not only become a customer of the other members, but to actually drive referrals their way. It’s actually in their rules, so they’re selling inside the community is not okay. It’s expected. In the a MI community, as I have mentioned earlier, that gets you shown the door. You need to understand the nuances of the community.
Each one is going to be different, but when you join a community and one of the reasons that you’re joining is because your prospects are there, you have to realize for a while the other members are gonna take a trust but verify stance. They’ve seen this play before and sadly in most cases the member with something to sell gets it wrong. They sell in a no sell zone because let’s face it, our prospects probably did not join that community, so they could be sales targets. They joined because they have a shared affinity to the other members and dodging sales pitches is not gonna be their idea of a satisfying experience.
For most of us, and this is critical for most of us, any community worth selling into is exactly the community that we cannot sell into. In other words, you have to be there, you have to help, you have to serve, you have to earn your high regard. Then you don’t have to sell. On the other hand, if you show up in any community like a redwood ready to serve and support the other members ready to care more about the greater good than your own needs and wants, you will first earn the respect and then eventually the regard of your fellow members.
You’re the member who raises their hand to serve on a committee, a committee plan an event, welcome new members, or celebrate other successes. You go out of your way to build the community’s resources. You are raising your hand to teach and share what you know. You’re offering your insights and expertise without putting out your hand. In fact, and this is where most people get it wrong, you avoid at all costs. Putting out your hand and asking for the sale being held in high regard creates ripples that flow through a community. The higher the regard, the lower the risk.
You will start earning a referral or two, which by the way is very different than putting someone in the awkward position of you asking them to make referrals for you inside your shared community. If you have not earned their regard yet, that is a sure way and never get it, and if you can sustain that high regard, you won’t need their referrals anyway. Pretty soon, exactly what you wanted to happen will start to happen. Those right fit prospects will so deep into the know, like trust journey with you. That trust will be layered with both respect and regard, which means you just became your own referral source.
You lowered the risk, you are the testimonial, you are the proof points and the social proof. Being in a shared community and observing how you show up has earned their steam without you knowing it, they’re working through that 75% of the buying decision that happens before we even know they’re shopping and they will come to you. You’ll be the obvious choice. The only choice, risk and motivation to buy have an inverse relationship. The most powerful way to not only reduce the risk for your buyer, but to eliminate it altogether when you are in a shared community is to earn and keep their high regard.
Once you do that, you will know that the easiest way to sell more is actually to not sell at all. It’s simply to be part of a community where you can contribute, where they can benefit from your smarts, your experience, and then they will come to you. That is the easiest way to make sales, right fit prospects when they’re ready to buy, far less pitching, far less RFPs. They just knock on your door because they hold you in high regard and honestly, isn’t that the way we wanna start a new relationship with a client?
Sounds simple, but as I see every day in our own community and others, hard to do so I hope that this has you thinking a little differently about how you go about sales, how you go about sharing your expertise and how you go about earning not only the respect of the communities in which you are a part, but the high regard. That’s what I got for you. Hopefully that was helpful. You know what? Couple things before I let you go. First and foremost, I’ll be back next week with a guest for us to pick their brain and learn from, so I’m excited about that.
I am super grateful as always, that you are with me and that you keep coming back and we keep learning together. I love your feedback. I love the questions you ask. I love when you show up at our q and as to ask more questions. I love that you’re a part of this community and I love all the ways that you contribute to making everybody better at what they do at their craft because you understand the concept of being respected and held in high regard. I’m grateful for that every single day day, and I’m grateful that you keep listening. Huge shout out and thank you to our friends at White Label IQ a great example of a community partner that shows up to be helpful every day.
As you know, they do white label design dev and PPC. You can learn more about them and how they serve agencies all over the world, many, many AAMI agencies by going to White Label IQ dot com slash aami. That’s what I got. Thanks for spending some time with me. See you next week.
Come back next week for another episode designed to help you build a stronger, more stable and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and other professional development [email protected].