Word of Mouth Marketing

Transcript: Word of Mouth Marketing

Speaker 1:

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional, digital, media buying, web dev, PR, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. That’s why Agency Management Institute started the Build a Better Agency podcast a few years ago. We help agencies just like yours, grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money and keep more of what you’ve made. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody Drew McLellan here with Agency Management Institute. Welcome back to another episode of Build a Better Agency. I’m super excited that you are here. Just a couple of housekeeping things. Just a reminder. Remember, we are giving away one seat every month to one of our workshops, or you can choose access to one of our online courses, if you would prefer that. And all it takes to be entered into the drawing is to leave us a rating or a review on one of the bazillions of different podcast hosting sites, iTunes, Stitcher, Google, lots of others where you may be downloading the podcast. And a couple of hints for you, it’d awesome if you shoot us an email and let us know that you’ve left them. Sometimes your username doesn’t really equate to your actual name and so we have a hard time identifying who the winner is, and I want to make sure that we are able to give that seat away every month.

So, go ahead and do that if you are so interested and we greatly appreciate those ratings and reviews. So, this week, what I want to talk about is this idea of referrals. So, when I talk to most agency owners and I say to them, “Tell me about your business.” They tell me about their agency, maybe what they specialize in, how long they’ve been around, how many people they have. And then when I say, “So, how do you get new clients?” Without exception, almost every single time, I can think of maybe… No, I can not think of a single exception. Every agency owner says to me, “Well, most of our business comes to us through word of mouth and referrals, and we find that those are the best clients.” And you know what? I don’t necessarily disagree with it. I think that there is something awesome about a client who comes to you already pre-sold, who already believes in you, who already trusts you because someone they have confidence in has given you the gold seal of approval.

The challenge with that is a couple of things. Number one, you can’t control how often it comes in. So, if you’re sitting back just waiting for the referral machine to work or the phone to ring, that can be a really challenging and worrisome position to be in, if things are a little soft in your agency, if maybe you’re a little overstaffed, if a client walks on you. So, the passiveness of that makes me anxious. And the other part of that, that makes me a little nervous for agencies is what that means is you’re actually actively building your business. You’re not determining who you should serve, and who’s the best fit for you, who is that sweet spot client and going after those folks. When you sit back and you wait to see who walks in the door, then by default, you have to serve whoever walks in the door and I just want there to be a better way for you.

So, that’s why I have invited Steve Gordon to come on the show today. So, Steve is a bestselling author. He started a company called the Unstoppable CEO, and he also hosts a podcast by that same name, the Unstoppable CEO. And he does a lot of work for service businesses. So, what’s interesting is the way he got his start is right out of college, he started working for an engineering firm who interestingly, not unlike most agencies grew their business at that time, mostly by referrals and word of mouth. And he was charged with growing that business and ended up growing it by about 10 times what its gross revenue was. 10 years later, it took him a while to get that done. But what he did was he sort of solved the mystery of, “Is there a way to be more assertive, to be more in control of word of mouth and referrals? Can you take what is the best part of word of mouth and referrals, and can you leverage it in a way that you do have more control over not only how often the leads come in, but which leads come in?”

And so, I am going to pick his brain about all of those things. Interestingly, some of their clients work with our agency. So, I think you’re going to hear a lot of stories around how referrals can be a great way to develop your agency, but maybe there’s a better sort of 2019, 2020 version of how we do the referral game, so that it’s more in our control, and it works more to our favor. So, with that, let’s jump into the conversation. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Gordon:

Hey, Drew, I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. So, early in your career, your story sounds so typical to what a lot of agency employees and owners experience, which is you walked into an existing business, in this case, it was an engineering firm, if I understand it right, and they were doing fine. They were mostly growing by word of mouth and referral, but you were charged with really growing the business and having to look beyond that word of mouth and referrals. So, talk to me about what you learned in that sort of baptism by fire moment, and what are some of the takeaways that you now coach and teach clients and then also have shown up in your podcast and your books?

Steve Gordon:

Well, I learned that there was an awful lot that I didn’t know and it really took me several years. So, I walked in to that that firm, I was the 10th employee in the firm and right out of college. And after about four years, I got pulled aside by the founder and he said, “When you come back [inaudible 00:06:02] to be out with the birth of our first child and I was off and he called me and he said, “When you come back, you’re taking over.” I was caught off guard by all of that. So, I came back and all of a sudden, you know, here we are, we have this successful firm and I’ve got to figure out now, “How do we keep the party going?” It took me a little while. It took a year or two before I started to wrap my head around this whole thing of marketing and sales.

Now, I think a lot of agency owners have an advantage in that you’re already in the marketing business, you’ve got some idea of how all of this works, but for me coming from an engineering background, I had really no idea. I mean, about the best we could do was hope that the phone would ring from a referral, and it did often enough that we kept growing, but we didn’t know what day it was going to ring. Some days it would ring off the hook. We might go for a month or two without it ringing at all. So, we didn’t have any control or even influence over that process.

Drew McLellan:

Many agencies live on the word of mouth and referral new business strategy, and my concern with that is, yes, there’s nothing wrong with filling in the gaps with that sort of business. But a couple of issues, one, to the point that you’ve made, which it’s completely out of your control. It shows up when it shows up. So, if there’s an urgency on your side, there’s nothing you can do to trigger an urgency on the other side. And my bigger concern honestly, is what it means is you’re not really building your business on purpose. You’re taking whatever walks in the door as opposed to really identifying who are the sweet spot clients that you can delight and you can create an ongoing relationship with because they have the right set of needs for what you can deliver so that you have a sustainable business. That’s tough to do in just the referral and word of mouth side of the business.

Steve Gordon:

Well, I actually disagree. I think when people talk about referral and word of mouth and they say, “Well, it’s unpredictable and you don’t have a lot of influence over.” What they’re talking about is this passive word of mouth.

Drew McLellan:

Which is what most of them mean, right?

Steve Gordon:

Yeah. That’s what most people mean by it. But if you do referrals and word of mouth the right way, and I think we’ll get to this, it’s something that’s very intentional and it’s something that actually can scale, at least far enough for most service businesses without you having to get into a lot of the paid acquisition channels and it’s got a lot less risk. And so, we can get into all that, but the big mistake people make with word of mouth and referrals is that they just sit back and hope that it happens. It’s like, I show up, “I did a really great job for you Drew. I’m going to sit back and just believe that if I keep doing that really great job for you, you’re going to send somebody my way,” and it doesn’t work like that.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think that’s what I mean is that my concern is that it’s such a passive way. Most agency owners probably like most people in the engineering world, aren’t super excited about sales. And when they think of sales, they think of it as being intrusive and that they have to cold call and all the things that make somebody go, “No, I’m just going to stick with word of mouth.” So, I know that in some of the things that you teach, you have some methodologies around how to take a passive tactic, like referral and word of mouth, and actually put some action behind it so that you do have more control over it. So, let’s talk a little bit about that. So, how does someone take something that typically is, as you said, I’m going to sit back and wait and create some fire underneath it.

Steve Gordon:

Well, the big problem is in the way that we view referrals. So, for most of us, when we talk about referrals, what we mean is that one of your clients has held someone by the hand that they know, and that they care about and who, they, have now realized has a problem you can solve. And they’ve taken them by the hand, they’ve driven them over to your office, they’ve sat them down in front of you with checkbook in hand and said, “You need to hire this agency.”

They’re pre-sold, they’re ready to go and it’s easy. And those are great because as you, I think, very accurately pointed out, most agency owners aren’t that excited about sales. The problem with that is that we’ve delegated then the most difficult job in the business to an unpaid and untrained sales force.

Drew McLellan:

Outside of our control.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, totally outside of our control. And they’re not that motivated to do it because they’re just as uncomfortable with selling as you are in most cases. If they’re another business owner, they’re struggling to do it for their own business, let alone do it for yours. So, that’s really the dynamic that we’ve tried to rely on here is this unpaid and untrained sales force and the hope that they’re going to go out and prospect well for us and pre-sell those people and all of that.

Drew McLellan:

And by the way, do it to the right people who are going to be a good fit for us, right?

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, your clients have no idea. Most of them don’t even understand what you do, frankly.

Drew McLellan:

Or understand a sliver of what you do. Whatever you did for them, they think, “Oh, you’re that, that’s what you do.”

Steve Gordon:

Exactly. So, that becomes a big problem. You’ve now abdicated your responsibility as the business owner and put it off on this other group. And if we change the way that we think about referral from this bottom of the funnel, pre-sold ready to do business person and start thinking about referrals as a way to generate leads, and then take the responsibility to take that lead and move them through an entire process that educates them on the problem that they have, the consequences of it, the solution that you offer, the whole normal marketing process. But instead of taking them from where they’re pre-sold, we take them further back in the buying process, and then we take responsibility for shepherding them all the way through, we’re going to have a lot more success. So, that’s the first big shift and what I found in working with business owners is it takes a little while for them to rewire how they think about referral in that way.

So, that’s the first piece of it. Now, when you get to the point where you say, “All right. Well, a referral isn’t this pre-sold person. It’s really just a lead that comes to me from someone that I know that already trusts me.” Then you can begin thinking about, “Well, how can I facilitate that? How can I make that process easy?” And we can talk about a whole host of ways of doing that but that’s really, then the question you want to start asking is, “When I look out to my network, when I look out to my client base, how can I make them introducing me in the least risky way? Something that would be within their interest to do.”

Drew McLellan:

So, your definition of referral is not that somebody says literally or figuratively, “I’m going to drive you over to this agency’s office.” Or, “Here, let me dial your cell phone for you, so you can talk to the agency owner.” But it’s really just dropping someone into the top of a sales funnel and that that you have a funnel that then facilitates. So, it’s really just another way to get someone into the funnel, right?

Steve Gordon:

Absolutely. That’s a powerful way to do it too because they’re coming based on recommendation.

Drew McLellan:

So, there’s some trust built in, absolutely. So, let’s talk a little bit about what are some ways that you can make it easy or encourage your referral sources, your raving fans, to talk about you and move a prospect to the edge of the sales funnel and then give them a loving shove right in.

Steve Gordon:

Sure. So, the key to doing this is having a point of view. “This is how we do things. This is why we do it in this particular way.” And every business I’ve ever come across has that because every business owner will look around at all of their competitors and go, “They’re doing it wrong for all of these reasons. So, we have our way of doing it.” Then we’ve got to articulate that. And the best way to do that is through content. And for agencies, this ought to be a relatively easy thing to do because you’re in this business. You get the whole idea of content marketing.

Drew McLellan:

And this by the way is the subject of a book that I just co-authored, that’s coming out this summer, which is this exact idea of all the people on the planet who should be able to do content well, it should be us, right?

Steve Gordon:

Right. And so, really all that you’re doing is putting that content together in an organized way and making it look valuable to the end prospect that you want it to go to. And it needs to look really valuable to the client or the person in your network that you want to pass it on, and we’ve found a couple of formats work really well. Books probably are the best. It doesn’t have to be a long book. Short books work really, really well. One of the first clients we took through this process, he put this book together and literally it was 12 types of pages in Microsoft Word, but it was good. He was marketing to physicians and it had all of the different scenarios for how they make financial decisions, which is what he did for them.

And in 12 type pages, he had this great piece of content and he went out and used that to generate 98 referrals in a month, like real, legitimate, good referrals who were introduced to him as the author of a book. So, that’s one way of doing it. Now, what we’ve found over the last, I guess it’s been four years now since I wrote my book Unstoppable Referrals where we talked about this approach, and I talked a lot about using a book that we found that most people don’t want to use a book because they get scared of writing a book. So, presentations work really, really well. So, you can do a lunch and learn where the client invites people that they know, and you help them curate this list of who to invite.

I mean, you don’t even leave it to chance to have them figure that out, but if you can sit down with them and say, “Look, I’ve been so grateful that we’ve been able to work with you and solve this particular problem. And I know you must know other businesses that are faced with this. What do you say, I buy lunch. We bring them into your conference room. Let’s sit down together, either with your LinkedIn or your Outlook or wherever you keep your contacts, and let’s pick a few people that we can invite to this. They’re going to love you for inviting them, and we’re not going to give them many big sales pitch, but we’re going to help educate them on this topic.” And so, you can do it with a presentation in much the same way. And those are usually relatively easy to pull off and a little less scary than putting a book together. But you can package it in any number of ways, but those are probably the two most common.

Drew McLellan:

So, I know one of the things that you talk about are that there are some common challenges that get in the way of attracting prospects and also keeping and growing clients. So, walk us through what some of those obstacles are and what leapfrogs over those obstacles.

Steve Gordon:

I think, the biggest obstacles are just the way that we approach trying to get clients. Most of the time, in an agency business, we’re running constantly from one project to another, to another, trying to serve the clients we have, right?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. It’s firefighting all day long. Where’s the biggest? I run and I put out that fire, then I run to the next fire and put out that fire, right?

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. So, we get caught in that and we don’t spend enough time on the marketing side and really getting out there and building relationship over time. So, then we get to a point where maybe some clients graduate or we lose them, they get taken away for whatever reason, we get in a tough spot and we go, “Oh no, we need clients.” So, then we get all frantic about going and getting clients. The problem with that is that we’ve forgotten the factor of time. See, when we go and get a client in this business, we’re asking them to invest generally a fairly large amount of money, and trust us with the growth of their business. That’s not an inconsequential ask. So, we think we can just rush out and automatically manifest these clients somehow, and one of the key factors is time. And so, the big barrier is not doing this consistently all along where once you’ve generated that lead, whether it’s through referral or ad or whatever, staying in touch, being in front of them, being valuable, and sometimes that might mean for years.

Drew McLellan:

When I talk to agency owners, I say, “Your business efforts can pay off in a day or a decade or somewhere in between. And you never… It’s sort of like dollar cost averaging. You have to be out there every day doing something because you have no idea if today’s the day.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And the difficult thing with that… So, one of the things I learned in growing my first business which granted it was an engineering firm, but the model is virtually the same [crosstalk 00:19:30]

Drew McLellan:

Well, honestly, I think the customers are sort of the same. You’re selling something intangible. You’re selling something that’s intellectual property. You’re selling advice and strategy for a high ticket. So, in a lot of ways, it’s absolutely parallel to an agency.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. And the way that we’re taught to go about and do business development, I think, it’s a method that’s hard to sustain in a service business for all the reasons that we’ve just talked about. So, you’re constantly running from fire to fire, trying to put those out. Well, the way that we’re taught to do business development is to be out in the community or out in our market, networking, doing that, one-to-one spending a lot of time doing it, and those two things don’t generally go together.

Drew McLellan:

It’s not that that methodology doesn’t work. It just doesn’t-

Steve Gordon:

Oh, no.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, it works great, but is it sustainable for you? After about 10 years of running the engineering firm, we’d grown that up into the low seven figures. We had a good team in place, and I had a team that freed me up from having to fight the fires. And so, I could spend a lot of time out networking and it absolutely worked. I’d spend 25%, 30% of my time out doing that sort of thing.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. But tough for a small entrepreneur to carve out that time to do that, right?

Steve Gordon:

You’re right. It took me a decade to get to that point, and that was with a business that was already existing, doing okay. So, the business has been around for… At that point, it had been around for 20 years. So, yeah, really tough in the beginning. One of the things that we’ve really leaned on lately both in our firm and with our clients is networking in a little bit different way, that’s more leveraged. And it piggybacks on this idea of creating content and following up over time. So, we’ve taken podcasts which I think is a fantastic medium and I’m sure you do it as well because you’ve got a successful one and using interviews as a way to network. In fact, we started doing this long before podcasts were around. We did them back in a few times in the engineering world where we’d interview people, put it on a CD and mail it out. [crosstalk 00:21:55]

Drew McLellan:

So, one of the Agency Management Institute clients coined the phrase, Trojan Horse of Sales. And that’s exactly what he’s talking about, right? So, you have this platform, this channel, and you invite your prospects in who want the editorial coverage in the spotlight of being on your channel and they really don’t perceive it as a sales event, even though it really is, an early sales event that starts to create a relationship that you then can go back and sell them later, right?

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. And so, we use it in two ways. We use it for prospecting and just like you’ve described, and it works incredibly effectively. In fact, we’ve got clients who have tailored their entire podcasts at… You know, their podcasts have very little to do with what they do for a living. It’s completely tailored to their prospects. And we call it being the success journalist for the industry. So, if you’re going after a particular industry, your agency say you market to tech companies, you’re now the success journalist for CEOs of tech companies or whoever is your buyer, and then you’re going to go interview them on what made them successful. Well, it’s pretty rare, especially in a business to business situation where you’re not going to be able to get a business owner, even a busy one to show up for 20 or 30 minutes and talk [crosstalk 00:23:14]

Drew McLellan:

Talk about themselves.

Steve Gordon:

… to promote the business, right?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Steve Gordon:

So, it works incredibly well, and as you say, it’s a Trojan horse. The other way that we use it, which is more of a referral approach is you can go out to the influencers in your network and you can do this on a big, big scale. So, we’ve interviewed all kinds of people on our own podcast that have big audiences, and then you can certainly go that route or you can go local. And so, we’ve got a lot of businesses that are doing this on a local level where they’re just going around and interviewing all the key influencers in the business community and the podcast isn’t relevant to anybody outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan or something. But they interview those key people. They build those relationships and two things happen there.

Number one, the person they interview will share that interview. So, you get an immediate kind of passive referral, which is great. But two, you build a relationship with that person. If you don’t know them, it’s a way to get in without having to go spend all your time doing the charity events, going to the networking events and doing all that. You can really focus your time. And then as you build that relationship through the interview, it’s really easy to come back and say, “We just put your podcast out there. We’ve got some great feedback. And I tell you, I’d love to be able to give back to your network like you’ve given to mine. What do you say? You know, we put together a presentation that would really help all the people that on XYZ topic.”

And if you’ve got a good topic and you’ve got a good hook, they’re going to say yes to that. And so, now you’re creating these opportunities to get referred. So, going back to what we’ve talked about at the beginning, where you’re using referrals and thinking of it more as a top of the funnel process, now, you’re able to use these interviews and this networking, which is highly leveraged to now create large referral events. And we’ve seen those work where somebody will do a presentation and get 20 or 30 people show up. We’ve done them ourselves where we’ve had over a thousand people on a presentation that was all through that model. And so, when people talk about the fact that referrals don’t scale, it’s usually just because you’re not doing it right.

Drew McLellan:

Well, it’s interesting, and now we’ve got social media and all of that. So, it scales in a lot of ways. I’ve run my own agency for about 25 years and early on before social media was a thing, which makes me sound like a grandfather, but we held these things every month called the Branding Breakfast. So, we were an ARRA brand agency. And so, we would host breakfast, which would cost us maybe a hundred bucks. And then, through our newsletter and other things, and through clients, we would invite people once a month to come to this breakfast, and I would give a 20 minute presentation on some aspect of branding.

And the other thing that was interesting about that, so not only did it do exactly what you’re talking about, but people started coming because they were interested in the other people who were there. So, it also became this networking event that was outside of us, but we were the connectors. We got credit, if you will, for making those connections. So, it was a great sort of 360 referral model. Not only did it refer business to us, but people started doing business with each other.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s one of the reasons that we’ve really stuck to these sorts of strategies and looked to how can we really optimize the strategies and get them to scale in ways that are authentic? Because we’ve done some Facebook ads to grow our own agency now, we’ve done some LinkedIn ads, we’ve done some of that stuff, it’s all great. But whatever we’ve figured out that work today is guaranteed to be different by Friday. And these things that we’re talking about, you did them long before the internet probably. I did them long [crosstalk 00:27:15]

Drew McLellan:

The caveman days, right?

Steve Gordon:

Yeah. I mean, we were doing some of these things in a real basic way back in the nineties and they worked fantastically and why did they work? Because they’re built on human nature and that’s not changing anytime soon.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. You know, a lot of what we’re talking about feels a little local. So, I have a lot of agencies that are listening, that they may have a subject matter expertise. That means that none of their clients are in their local geography. So, how do you scale this when you serve a certain industry and they aren’t all going to be able to come to a lunch or a breakfast or a thing, because they’re scattered all over the country or all over the globe?

Steve Gordon:

The easy answer is through webinars. So, you do the same presentation, but you do it in a group format. That is typically how we do in our own agency. So, we’ve got clients all over the country and a few in Europe. And when we interview someone on our podcast, we’ll have a conversation with them afterwards about, “Well, would you be willing to host a webinar,” and do they all say, “Yes?” No, they don’t all say, “Yes.” But enough say, “Yes,” that we book these things out throughout the year.

And so, that’s how you overcome that distance problem. Now, if you’re… Excuse me, if you’re selling to a specific position inside of a company, you can do it in a lot of different ways. I mean, we’ve seen people put these together as like mini virtual roundtable meetings. So, it’s not a hundred people on a webinar, but it’s maybe 10 peers on a Zoom call, much like you’re describing with your breakfast. So, there are a lot of different ways to do it, if you get creative.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I’ve also seen some agencies host events like this on a day that’s adjacent to a national trade show or something like that where they know most of the players are going to be in one place, which is not common. So, they’re going to bring in a subject matter expert, or they’re going to be the subject matter expert and they’re going to do something the day before or on a free evening or something like that inside of an event that already exists.

Steve Gordon:

Absolutely. And one of the advantages of building all of that on the back of a media platform, like a podcast is that it gives you the authority to bring that group together. It’s not going to be viewed just as a selling opportunity for you. And that positioning is really important to the success of all of this. It allows you to go out to influencers in the industry that’s if you’re going to do it around a conference and bring them in and then let other people know, “Well, here’s, who’s going to be at the event and here’s why you want to attend.” So, there are ways that you can leverage it, but you’ve got to have some kind of media platform, I think, to build on to be able to make it work.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I think then you have sort of media credentials, so it’s different. It doesn’t look like you’re just inviting them in for a sales pitch. It looks like you are in essence, as you called it a success journalist, and you are bringing these people together to create more content for your channel, which also allows you to demonstrate your expertise.

Steve Gordon:

Absolutely. We’ve mentioned podcasts a number of times, one of the reasons that we are such big advocates of it is that we work with clients who have real businesses. And every client we get already has 110% full allotment of their hours for the week. So, they don’t have time to sit and write articles and do a lot of the things that would be a content, maybe best practice. But they might have time to fit in a couple of 30 minute or 45 minute interviews during the month. And they don’t have to be a great writer, they don’t have to feel like they have that skill. They just have to be able to do what you and I are doing right now, which is having a fun conversation.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. They just have to be curious, I think. Yeah, ask good questions.

Steve Gordon:

Absolutely. One of the things that we… The question that we get all the time from our clients as they’re starting out is, “Well, what questions am I going to ask them?” We keep telling them, “Well, you’re not Barbara Walters.”

Drew McLellan:

There’s no probing involved in this, right?

Steve Gordon:

No, that would be way too uncomfortable. Literally, it’s like you’re having a cup of coffee with somebody. And I think you said this perfectly at the beginning of our call, “We’re just going to have a cup of coffee and let the world eavesdrop.”

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, that’s my goal with every podcast is that it just feels like somebody is sitting in the booth next to us. I think one of the things that is probably true for all of your clients, and I know for most people who have successful podcasts is if you’re genuinely interested in the topic and you come at it from your audience’s point of view, you’re going to ask the questions that they want to ask. And so, therefore, the content creates itself.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. So, I want to ask you a little bit about… You talk in, I think, one of your books about the idea of getting true freedom in your business and so, I want to probe on that. But let’s first take a quick break.

I want to take just a quick second and remind you that if you head over to the agencymanagementinstitute.com website, one of the things you’ll find there in our effort to support agency owners is some on-demand training. We know that many of you want to attend our live workshops, but for some that doesn’t work out, maybe you’re outside of the US or maybe you have little kids and it’s tough to travel, or it may just be that our calendar and your calendar do not align. And so, what we’ve done is we now have three courses that we either regularly or occasionally offer as a live workshop.

And now we’ve got them in an on demand training version. So, you can now find a Biz Dev workshop, our agency new business blueprint course, you can also find our AE Bootcamp, and our most recent addition is the Money Matters workshop. So, all of those are available. If you head over to the website and you go under training, you will see on demand training under that tab, and you can check out all three of those courses. And obviously those are courses that you can take at your leisure. You can get through the whole thing in a weekend, which I don’t recommend, or you can space it out over time. You can do it individually. You can do it with your leadership team, whenever serves your agency best. We just want to make sure that you know that they are there and available for you.

All right. Let’s get back to the episode. All right, welcome back everybody. I am still here with Steve Gordon and we are talking about how to scale referrals, how to grow your business. And right before the break, I hinted at a provocative question. So, in some of Steve’s work, he talks about, “True freedom in your business.” And so, I want to poke on that a little bit and see what it means. So, can you define that for us? What does true freedom look like? Because I think everybody… It sounds awesome, but I’m not sure I know what it is enough to know that I want it.

Steve Gordon:

Well, I think the first answer there is you need to spend a little bit of time with yourself to figure out what it is for you. For most business owners, we’ve found over the years that there are really three dimensions to freedom. And the first is financial freedom, and then the second is freedom of time, and the third is really freedom of relationships. So, really, if you think about that, it’s, “I need to make enough money so that I can buy back my time to be free. And I have the ability to only work with the people that I want to work with.” To me, that’s a pretty good definition of freedom. Now, there’s specifics there and that’s where I would encourage you as you listen to this, to go get a cup of coffee or something stronger and really think about what it means to you specifically. But what I found in building the first firm, and then in starting this company, which I have to tell you in taking over an agency or a affirm that was in existence and running and growing, it was far easier than starting one.

Drew McLellan:

Yes. [crosstalk 00:35:27]

Steve Gordon:

And I didn’t think it was going to be quite that big of a shock, but what I’ve learned through both of those experiences is that to get to the point of having some of that freedom, you can build a team and there’s a lot talked about building a team, building a system and having the systems and the team sort of drive the business. On the operational side, that’s really fairly easy to do. A lot of people may be listening to this thinking like, “I could never do that,” but trust me, that part is relatively easy. The difficult part is getting to the point where the selling happens when you’re not there and figuring out, “Well, how do I multiply my effort? If I put in an hour here, how do I get the most bang for the buck out of that?”

And so, that’s where I think a lot of people get tripped up because they think they’ve got to be at every networking event, if they’re not there, the business isn’t growing. They’re the only one that can sell and all that kind of stuff. And so, our answer to that is, number one, get the operational stuff off your plate as quickly as you can. And if you’re just starting out and you don’t have a lot of funds and you don’t have a big team, the best advice I ever got was to hire an assistant. I had a mentor who had been a CEO of several companies and he said, “When you start this thing, the very first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to go hire an assistant.” And it took me about six months and I wish I’d done it after about six days.

Drew McLellan:

Great. Well, you know, what you’re talking about is sort of working on the business, not in the business, which I think a lot of… Everybody knows it’s the right answer, but it’s a challenge to get out from under it. But without that, you don’t get that freedom. So, as you were listing that you need financial freedom so that you have time freedoms so that you can create the relationships you want to.

So, I have a good friend who’s been actually a mastermind partner of mine for almost 15 years now. And he talks about the four legacies and the fourth legacy is when you have money freedom and time freedom, and you are in a good place with relationships, that’s when you start to leave a legacy that matters. And you can begin to think about, “What is the legacy that you want to leave? What’s the mark that you want to leave on the world?” And you have the resources to be able to focus on that. And so, for all of us, I think you’re right, we have to define what… For me, what is a life well lived? And what does that look like? And what’s the output of that? And then how do we get to it?

Steve Gordon:

Absolutely. And knowing that, then you can sort of reverse engineer what the business needs to look like to get you there. And it doesn’t happen overnight, but without that vision in place, I don’t think you’ll ever get there. And I think that’s where a lot of business owners get stuck. And so, the first answer is to be intentional about it. And then I think the second answer is begin to steal as much time as you can away from the operational side to begin to build some marketing and sales assets that multiply your time. And some of the things that we’ve already talked about will do that, but you want to be thinking in terms of, “How do I put in an hour’s worth of effort here that is going to allow me to either nurture a hundred relationships in that hour, or be an asset that’s there for a long time that’s going to get used over and over and over again?” And so, it’s that change in thinking that gets you there.

Drew McLellan:

Well, you know, a lot of owners will say to me, “You know what? I’ve tried this. I’ve tried that,” or whatever. But the thing that works best for us is when I’m out and about, and I create a relationship with someone and I earn their trust over time and therefore the sale gets easier. They don’t go out to RFP, they just pick up the phone and they say, “Babbette, I’m ready to hire an agency, and you’re the only agency I want to hire,” which I totally agree with. I agree that there is nothing wrong with that methodology, but to your point it doesn’t scale.

So, for me, part of the solution in all of this… And I’m curious about how you guide your clients around this, part of the solution is how do you capture the essence of that, which is that they get a sense of who you are. What you were talking about before, what is your point of view? What would it be like to work with you? How do they get a sense of you in your Biz Dev content, if you will, whatever that is, so that you are creating the same experience, where they feel like they know you, even though in some cases maybe they’ve never laid eyes on you before.

Steve Gordon:

I’m going to come back to the medium that we’re in right now, audio. I think there is some magic to this medium and I think the magic can to an extent go away when you go to video because when you have video, there’s more information and more can be distracting sometimes, but when there’s audio and they can hear your voice, the brain is forced to process it a little bit differently. And it’s different than texts. I mean, I kind of started marketing in copywriting, and I know how difficult it is to sometimes put the emotion and voice into text. There’s some skill there that takes development. But none of us have that issue in audio. We all, from a very early age, if we can talk, we have the ability to put that in there.

And I just think it’s a very powerful medium and that’s one of the reasons we steer our clients towards it because they don’t need any particular gift when it comes to marketing, to be able to show up in audio and give clients that experience. So, within the last month, we published the hundredth episode of our podcast which means that we’ve got a back catalog out there. And the back catalog is a little bit of a special thing when you get to that point, because we now have sales calls where a prospect will tell me, “My buddy so-and-so said I should start listening to your podcast three weeks ago or whatever. And I had a car trip to a conference and so I downloaded a bunch of them and the whole way there, and the whole way back, I listened to your podcast. So, I listened to 20 episodes.” Well, our episodes are about 30 minutes a piece. So, I just spent 10 hours with that prospect. When I’m out networking, it’d take me four years to spend 10 hours in a conversation with somebody most of the time.

Drew McLellan:

And odds are you’re probably not being as helpful in person as you are on the podcast because the podcast has a specific sort of… You’re trying to get to the end zone of, “I’m trying to deliver value for these folks,” as opposed to a networking event where it’s a little more chat, chat, “I love your hat,” right?

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. And if you’re going to have a sales conversation with someone at some point, it’s a conversation and every time you’re on a podcast and they’re hearing you, two things happen. Number one, they see you as an authority because you’re the one who owns this media platform [inaudible 00:42:32] organized it. But they also hear your voice. They hear you in conversation. It’s like they’re sitting in that little third chair at the desk, across the table from you not saying anything, but they’re in the conversation. So, by the time they get on the phone with you, they are already have a good sense of your demeanor. They feel like they have rapport with you. All of this stuff that we try and use all these tactics to build up in a sales call, you’ve already torn down so many of those barriers.

And so, we’re working with clients on how do you get yourself to the point where you can have some of that freedom from all the sales and Biz Dev stuff, it’s really how can we create and experience that pre-sales, the prospect on the very first sale they need to make? And the first sale you’ve got to make to any client is that they’ve got to buy you. And until they buy you, it really doesn’t matter what you’re offering. And these are the tools that we use to create that experience and to get them to buy into you. We haven’t found anything that works better. If we do, we’ll start using it, but this is what we’ve found to work best. And you can just create such a great experience for the prospect. I don’t know about you Drew, but I go to conferences and people will come up to me and they’ll have conversations with me as if we’re old friends because they’ve listened to the podcast.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. I have people walk up and go, “Oh my God. I recognize… Like I have my back to them and they’ll go, “Drew?” And I turn around and they’re like, “Oh, I totally knew your voice. I knew it was you.” And you’re right. They do feel there is a familiarity, which I love. I love that shorthand to actually already feeling a connection to somebody. One of the things I think about though is what’s amazing about voice is that it also allows somebody to multitask. So, I have listeners out there that I know every week I walk their dog with them or I’m on the treadmill with them, or I’m on the subway with them. So, I think, unlike video and some of the other formats, it allows someone to multitask while consuming your content.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. Just recently for something that my wife and I are trying to do together, we bought an online course. And with this online course, it’s great, but it’s just a guy and a talking head, there’s no presentation, there’s no other material. I didn’t need his head there. And so, I’ll go on a run or something and I’ll want to listen to this and it’s actually a really aggravating experience because my phone keeps turning the video off and I can’t just listen to him, but with a podcast or with other audio, your prospects aren’t going to have that experience.

And so, I think it’s a powerful medium. I think there are a lot of people out there doing it now. I know there’s a lot of focus on video and it certainly has its place. But if you’re looking to develop relationships over the long haul with a large group of prospects, do it in a scaled way. I think audio has a really unique spot there. And the by-product of all of this, you get to go out and do your prospecting through these interviews, you get to go out and do your networking through these interviews because you’ve recorded them. You now get to send it out to all of your other prospects. Well, who do you think they want to listen to? They want to listen to other people in their industry that were successful, right?

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the key to this, because I’m hearing my agency owners in my head saying, “Yeah, this is great, but there are a million podcasts out there.” And I think the key to this though, is you do have to have a very clear understanding of who you serve best and your unique point of view because otherwise you’re right, you’re just one of the 97 leadership podcasts out there. So, you do have to narrow the focus, you do have to know who your core audience needs to be, and you need to go add it in a way that, that brings a unique value, which I think is part of what gets in the way of people jumping on board.

Steve Gordon:

It’s interesting that that comes up and it does come up a lot because you really didn’t hear that when there were 5 billion blogs, out there, when somebody wanted to create the next one. There are a lot of podcasts out there, but there are a lot fewer podcasts than there are blogs and articles sites. So, in the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot less competition. But I think the thing for people, particularly agency owners, if you’re thinking about like, “How am I going to go out and market my business?” You need to start thinking small and focused and not big and broad because the fastest way to get lost in the crowd is to go big and broad. And the mistake with podcasts around that is focusing on the consumption side. It’s easy to sit there and think that, “I’ve got to have 10,000 downloads per episode, like Drew does, if I’m going to be successful.” First of all, you probably didn’t start off with 10,000 downloads. I mean, let’s [crosstalk 00:47:20]

Drew McLellan:

No. I’m pretty sure it was just my mom.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah, that’s the way it always works. So, it’s only our mom, or maybe your dog if we force him and it grows from there. But if you do an interview podcast and you focus on the interviews and the relationships that you’re creating there, and you’re creating them strategically, you’re going to find early success with the podcast.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. You have to pay attention to the right metrics and you’re right, the right metric for this methodology is not downloads, it’s engagement, it’s conversations, it’s opportunities. And by the way, most of you listening, you can’t take on a hundred new clients. So, having 10,000 downloads is meaningless [inaudible 00:47:58] You can take on a handful of right size, good fit clients every year to grow your business. You don’t need 10 million new clients. In fact, you can’t do it. So, it’s not a volume game. It really is a quality game.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah. Most of the agencies that we work with, they’re really happy if they bring on 2, 3, 4 clients a month, at the top end 4 or 5. So, if you think about that over the course of the year, if you’ve got your podcast on a weekly or a bi-monthly basis into the hands of a hundred really great potential clients-

Drew McLellan:

And [crosstalk 00:48:35]

Steve Gordon:

… then that’d be a move. It’d be a huge [inaudible 00:48:38]

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I agree. You and I could probably chat for another hour and a half, but I need to let you get back to work and I’m sure my listeners are ready to get off the treadmill. So, any last thoughts for… As people have been absorbing what you and I have been talking about and of course I think the human nature is to go, “Yeah. But, yeah, but, yeah.” What’s a way that you would recommend somebody to dip their toe into some of the things that we’ve been talking about just to get an early success or an early win to begin to understand the potential of what we’ve talked about today.

Steve Gordon:

Well, you don’t need anything fancy to go do it. You don’t need to have a podcast yet to go do an interview with someone. The strategy that we’re talking about is ages old. Our largest client right now actually did this to launch her business, but she took all the interviews and put them in a book, but same strategy. So, you don’t need anything special to go do the interviews. You can just go find someone that would be interesting to talk with.

And I recommend you start with someone that you have a little bit of a relationship with. You know, you’re not going completely cold because you want to be set up for success the first time out and go interview them. And then take that interview and send it out in an email. You don’t even need a fancy email marketing to do that. You just need to stick the link on Dropbox or Google Drive and then put the link in an email and send it out to all your prospects. “Hey, I just interviewed Drew and he’s the most successful guy in this industry and he’s shared some things that would be really helpful to you. I thought you might be interested. Let me know what you think.”

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, you’re right. I think just getting a reaction from that might trigger folks to take the next step.

Steve Gordon:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. This has been awesome. I really appreciate your time. I know how busy you are. If folks want to find out more about you, if they want to start listening to your podcast, if they want to find out about the books that you’ve written, what’s the best place for them to go to learn more.

Steve Gordon:

Yeah. So, what we’ve done, we’ve put together a page on our site just for all of your listeners. And so, they can go to unstoppableceo.net/build. So, they can go on unstoppableceo.net/build and there they’ll find several resources. One of which I think will give them some more detail on what we’re talking about here. I actually wrote a book on this called the Exponential Network Strategy. It’s short little book, you can read it in an hour and it basically will give you all the details for how to use interviews. You can get that completely free in eBook, audio book, and video, if you go to that page. And hopefully that’ll help to bring some clarity to everything that we’ve talked about and how it might fit into your business.

Drew McLellan:

Awesome. Thank you so much for your generosity. I’m grateful that you gave us the time and you gave people lots to think about. So, there is no shortage my friends of actionable items in this episode. So, as always, I encourage you not to just listen, but to do something with what you’ve heard in the last hour. So, Steve, thank you again very much, I appreciate it.

Steve Gordon:

Thanks Drew. It’s been fun.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. All right, guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. I will be back next week with another guest to challenge you, to push you, to cajole you into building the agency of your dreams, which gets to that whole legacy thing that Steve and I were talking about, this idea of freedom in all kinds of ways, that you can make sure that you’re living a life that is a life well worth living, and that you feel good about the legacy that you’re leaving.

If you need to track me down, you know where to find me. I’m [email protected]. Otherwise, I’ll be back next week. As always, do not forget, every month we give away one workshop seat to somebody who leaves a rating or a review. Because there are so many sites out there, it will behoove you. We try and get to a mall to see who’s left a rating and a review, but it would not be a bad idea for you to email me and let me know where you left it and what your username is. Sometimes we have a hard time matching a username with a human. So, anything you can do to help us give you that free seat would be awesome. I’ll see you next week.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to check out our workshops, coaching packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.

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