Agency Acceleration: LinkedIn Strategy, Client Retention, and Offers

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you guys Hope enjoy. you enjoy the episode. Marcos, did you have a question? I don't know if we got to you.

Yeah, I did. Um, it's— so my question was, I'm trying to figure out what the best plan of attack is to scale. Um, like, for context, we're always hovering between 12 and 14 clients and an average deal size of about $6,500-$7,000. I'm trying to figure out if I should be focused on increasing my deal size On average, so focusing on the performance to $10K, for example, or trying to increase my capacity to 21 or 22 clients, or should I be doing both? And I'm trying to figure out where I should be putting my effort.

Marcos, what's your performance?

I have to focus.

What's your churn right now? Your monthly churn? How many are you, how many clients are you losing?

So last month we lost zero. This month we lost one. So 8%.

Okay.

I put a lot of focus into getting my churn down to as close to zero as possible recently by getting a creative director.

Got it.

Okay.

Because reality for everyone is if your churn is even 5%, you have to replace about 50% of your customers every year. So agency churn, ideally, like, I think it's still a shitty economy right now, but if you can get 15 to 20% annual churn, so we're talking like, you know, 85, 80% retention or so, then you're in a really good spot. And you can be a little more conservative. You might even say 70% or so. But even again, just for the record, especially in the info product world, people in the info product world are like, whoa, 5% churn, we're so good. It's like, it's not that good. But I would focus on, take a look at your churn over the last 12 months or so. That's the first thing I would focus on. And then if you can think about expansion, yeah, the more The one thing we have, there's a book called Seven Powers and it talks about the strategic advantages of like, what does Toyota have? They have their process power with Kanban, right? Or like, sorry, it's not even Kanban. It's the way they go about making their, building their cars is a very specialized process and everyone tried to copy it, right? Everyone in Detroit tried to copy it. And then like Coca-Cola has brand power at the end of the day. The only real power that an agency has is switch the power of switching costs. And that means the more things you can layer on, Marcos, that are value add. So for example, right now there's a lot of people coming to us, we need help with community management. We want to do what you're doing with organic social. We want this, we want this, we want this. We're just looking at, hey, like one, do we have the capacity for it to your point? But 2, where can we actually do a really good job and not try to do everything at once, right? So I think just taking it slowly and not trying to overwhelm yourself, kind of going back to Alian again, you can think about expanding there because there's a lot of stuff you can do with the ghostwriter. Writing, um, in terms of add-ons. But I'll turn it back over to you. Looks like you wanna say something.

Yeah. So, um, just to clarify, when you say like 80% retain retention, that's like for the entire year, right? So like, for example, if we're at, I don't know, 12 clients, you want us to, you, you're saying you basically retain 10 of your clients for the whole year. Mm-hmm. I get it. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's what you should be, by the way, the dude that I talked to yesterday from, from YPO, he, um, he's the guy, you know how you, when you, if you guys go to Nordstrom, has everyone here kind of shopped at Nordstrom? Maybe not you, Allian. Okay, so you go to Nordstrom, what's the deal, Austin? You get to return your shit and like what happens?

You return it for free, right?

Yeah, exactly. Or they'll even get like, they'll, they might even pay you in some cases, right? And so this is the guy that came up with it and what he told me yesterday is like, dude, forget about customer satisfaction. It's all about customer delight at the end of the day. 'Cause delight means like they'll actually talk about you to other people. So how, how, how much are you delighting your customers?

Oh, and I, this whole time my goal was fuck the customer.

I need to change my—

geez.

Yeah, that's good advice because, you know, we operate off like 70% referrals. I don't do a ton of marketing, but our retention, I'd say we retain probably like 7 to 8 consistently, basically since the beginning of the agency. And then we're always trying to, I feel like we're always rotating those last 4 to 5 spots to find the people who fit that core group. And so it makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's, um, the trap for agencies is like, it becomes really easy to say yes to starting new service lines. Or taking on customers that you probably shouldn't be taking on. And so I think the more boundaries you can put around your business and then like be a little more— I think I was probably too aggressive in the earlier years. I think being a little more, I guess, vigilant, that will help you go a long way because like, again, the game here, at least for me, is like, how do you play this game for decades? And as long as you stay alive for multiple decades, And you're constantly learning, there's no way you shouldn't be able to build this into at least an 8-figure business. Okay.

I appreciate that. That's really good advice. Thank you.

Yep. I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

Cool.

David's got a question here. So it says, David, you know what? I'm actually going to just let you read it out.

Go for it.

Yeah, sure. But before that, just some insights on the way we do our business, right? So, and I think this dovetails to the question earlier, right? So how do you sustain clients over time? Because people do churn. And like you said, if 5% churn, you basically have to replace 50. I mean, I Yes. For us, it's not like we have clients and services. We basically sell leads, right? So we sell calls and we sell form leads. And within that space, our clients actually go in and out, right? So they can be in the mood for buying leads this month, they could churn and they could come back. And it's because it's pay for performance. It's pretty easy to sell them, right? Like we just send them a doc, they send the budget in and we're off and doing business. It usually just takes one phone call for a transaction to happen.

David, one question on that. So if it's pay for performance, why do they stop?

Because the CPSs might be high. So we're selling to both aggregators and direct. So with aggregators, some people might just buy it because they're reselling it. So the CPS for that particular buy that they have might be high. So they might have a different buyer or the budget of that buyer might Decreased, or they might actually have a higher budget and now they're willing to take a higher CPS, but they do come in and out, right? So you sometimes you just have to like email everybody and say, hey, anything new? And they basically send you out here campaign.

And who do you work with primarily?

So we work mostly financial products. So insurance, for example, like enterprise or regional insurance agents, then some mortgage companies, some home services companies. So it's pretty easy to, you know, to— again, we sell product, right? We say we're an agency, but we actually sell product. So the sales process is pretty easy and they do come back anyways. So the point there is, is there a way for you to do something similar, right? For example, with Marco, if you're selling ghostwriting services, you're basically selling on an article basis. I'm just thinking out loud, right? And you productize that way. So going to my question, right? So LinkedIn and using LinkedIn, and this is also like something from Marcos, what Marcos said, we try to reach out and find new clients on LinkedIn and basically say, hey, do you want leads? Do you want calls? Stuff like that. But knowing that everybody gets picked up by that type of InMail from sellers on LinkedIn, Well, they usually just say ignore or archive or delete, right? So are there, you know, how would you approach that? Yeah. Like how would you build credibility so they respond to you?

I'm going to answer your question second and I'm going to go with something I thought of first. Like, so I have a friend that does pay for performance. His agency has like 40 people. They do $40 million in profit, not revenue, profit. And it's all pay for performance. And you know, the way he works, he works with financial services companies, more so like debt companies, and he sells them leads, right? So he makes all the landing pages, he drives all the And then if that client decides, hey, like, I don't want to pay you anymore, he'll be like, okay, yeah, great. We're going to take this entire funnel and we're going to give it to your competitor, right? So they'll just slide over to the competitor. That usually doesn't happen. Their clients have stayed with them for, we're talking like probably decades or so, or at least over a decade, I should say. And so like that might get your mind to think about something in the long term because the pay— I do believe the best marketers, if you're best in the world, you can operate on a pay-for-performance or maybe like a pay-per-usage basis, especially in the next 5 to 10 years. So that's high level, right? That's something for you to think about out there. But to answer your question on the LinkedIn InMails front, to stand out, it's really with emails or InMails, it's how good is your offer at the end of the day? And so, you know, recently the last couple years people have been sending Amazon gift cards. Those Amazon gift cards still work, by the way. The response rates on those are still pretty decent. Some people have been sending out these AirPods. I think the AirPods don't work anymore. In fact, I think it's I did that like in 2017. It's not fresh anymore, right? Like David, like to me it's like if you're sending leads, really, if the leads are really good, they should be renewing with you. So something is not adding up in my head, but if they are in fact really good, let's say you sell the leads to agencies, everybody here, right? Imagine everybody here. Hey everybody, I'm going to give you 3 leads in the next 30 days or so. And if you like it, let me know. And like if it's Brennan, it's like 3 really high qualified leads. He'd be stupid not to come back to you and say, hey, like, I need more of that stuff. You know what I mean? It's like a drug.

Yeah.

Right. It's gotta be a good drug.

If you can do that, I'm in. Same thing with the drugs too. Just line it all up.

The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find.

The churn number is— so what were you saying? You said retain what annually?

So a good agency, let's say in like the better years, right? You'd be retaining 80 to 85% of your customers annually.

And that's revenue or customer count?

That's on your revenue.

Okay.

Yeah.

Cool. I'm happy then.

Yeah. Sounds like you're doing well there.

I keep challenging my character.

Maybe Eric— oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Brandon.

No, all good. You're good. My thing's not important.

I just wanted— how does the Amazon gift card work, Eric, on LinkedIn?

Yeah. Well, before we do that, you should go on Amazon and you should buy the Alex Hormozi workbook, not the actual book, but here's another. So here's an exercise for you, homework for you, right? Alex Hormozi has his $100 Million Offers book. You don't need that book. Just get the workbook. The workbook, like in one page will tell you, hey, here's what a good offer looks like, right? But the rest of it is a workbook. So then any of you that have a crappy offer right now, and I'm not saying we have the best offer necessarily, but if you want to learn how to craft a good offer, use the workbook. That's the first thing. The second thing is the Amazon gift card. So you can offer like, hey Scott, I'm going to, you know, how about You know, if we, we jump on a call for 15, 30 minutes or so, I, I give you a $100 Amazon gift card, right? And that, that tends to get pretty decent response rates. All right, so Marcus, did you have a separate question? Personal brand authority increases response rate. Also try to switch to outbound connection requests, 40 a day versus InMail, and have a conversational approach versus a cold pitch. Oh, that's advice.

Got it. Can you run that for people, Marcus?

No, we just write viral tweets, man.

Well, you said what?

We just, we just write the viral posts. We don't, we don't do the outbound, but we just—

That's a good headline. We just, we just write viral posts, man. I'd like that.

Yeah, we're very focused. I don't even, I don't know any of this client acquisition stuff. I'm a noob to that stuff. I write viral tweets.

What type of agencies are in here? Like, I'm curious.

Yeah, type in the chat, um, what type of agency you are. I know Adam's got the experiential. Marcus, Viral Tweet Man Agency. I like that. Lead gen, experiential. I think experiential, by the way, there's a premium on those agencies right now, Adam. I don't know if you know that. Oh, I didn't know that. I think it's, um, um, I saw somewhere that it's like, if it's like has significant scale, it's like 17x.

Time to sell.

Well, my theory is the more, you know, AI takes over the world, the more important the real experiences are gonna be. So that's kind of in line with that. Yeah. Because it's harder to break through. I mean, that's why everyone's here today is like, how do we break through in digital and LinkedIn? It's getting crowded and crowded. And then so they're looking to do things out there, you know, in the public sphere. So the demand is there.