AOA Presents: Community Coaching with Eric and Neil

then we can go into Q&A. I think that's always interesting. So I know, so Neil and I, we just came back from HubSpot's Inbound last week. It was a fun time. And yeah, Neil, you want to kick it off with anything top of mind for you? I have a couple things that I might have, but you go first.

Sure.

So, you know, just in general with the agency world right now, I've been talking to a lot of people who've been trying to grow their agencies And the economy is really bad. And one thing that we've seen just consistently work, but I don't know why enough agencies don't do it. You guys can showcase your hands by just raising them. How many of you guys sell more than 3 services to a customer? And when I say 3 services, not that you offer more than 3 services, but they're actually paying for 3 or more of your services. All right, what we find is when customers pay for 4, 5, 6 services, 3 is the minimum, but you ideally want 4 or 5, churn starts drastically going down. And what we're finding is agencies offer a lot of services, but they're not getting customers to pay for a lot of services. And what I mean services is if you do SEO, content is not another service. SEO is just SEO. Paid ads, you know, would be another service. Organic social would be another service, right? Email marketing would be another service. And a lot of agencies don't offer a lot of these services, but they can cross-sell between other agencies that they can partner with, white label with, and you guys can do that with each other's clients. And it's a really fast way to A, grow revenue, and B, a way to reduce churn. Because what you got to think about is everyone in this group right here, You guys have different clients and some of you guys offer different services. If you can sell your clients on someone else's services and they can sell their clients on your services, you guys will grow much faster and actually have reduced churn and increase your valuation. And it's a stepping stone to getting into things like finding smaller tuck-ins that you can just buy. For example, Eric introduced me to a company that is just burnt out and they're fed up and they just want to get rid of their agency. And a lot of these agencies will do it for $0 because they're burnt out and they still may have $1 million, $2 million, $3 million in revenue, but not a ton in profit. And it's a really simple way to grow agencies, but it's boring, ugly, but it works. And it's what private equity does, but they just do it with money. Who says you need money to do it? You can do it at a much smaller scale without Tons of cash.

Yeah. You know, interestingly enough, Neil, I was in New York yesterday. I'm in DC right now and then back to LA tomorrow. But I was with one of our clients who has a lending business and he lends to businesses, right? A lending business that lends to businesses. And we were just talking about how you can get an SBA loan, so up to $5 million, and the rules with the Small Business Administration— this is only in the United States, but there's versions of this internationally as well. But you can actually, you know, get the owner to carry, you know, 5 to 10% of equity. You can roll over some equity, right? Which you couldn't do before. And you can also structure the deal in a way maybe where you defer the down payment. Like, you can come up with unique structures, whereas before you needed to— if you're going to take a $5 million loan, you needed to deploy all of it and the founder needed to be out. So these are some things that you can do that's available to everyone here. Maybe not if you're bigger, like, you know, At a certain point, you can't do it anymore. So keep in mind, the SBA does look hardcore at your numbers. So that's one thing, right? The second thing I would say is I'm in DC today because I have a couple of team members here in DC who I've never met before. So I thought I'd pop over here. And then, so I just, I'm like 30,000 steps in today or whatever. So I've had these like walking meetings with them. And the question, one of the questions I always like asking is, what's one thing we need to do to keep you at Single Grain forever? And we get a lot of different answers. One is like, one is money, of course, right? 2 is like growth, but 3 is like trust. Okay, interesting. Why trust? Like, what does that mean to you, right? I think it's important to understand everyone's motivations because everyone's different and we're all motivated by different things. And then also I ask, what's one thing I can do personally better as a leader of the company? And virtually all of them say the same thing. It's like, hey, we love your vision, but we need you to communicate it more. And then how we're getting closer to the vision, right? So it might be different for you, But constantly asking that question over, hey, what can I be doing better, right? That's something Neil and I, we ask each other all the time. Hey, what's one thing we can be doing better, right? When we get the HubSpot responses, like our reviews, it's like, oh, what can we do better, right? So I think, you know, couple takeaways, like those 2 questions are worth asking. What's one thing we can do to keep you at my company forever? What's one thing I can do better? And then, you know, the duh statement is in person is always amazing. And so I think one thing we learned last week, Neil, Being at the HubSpot event was just— it's really hard to replicate the in-person community piece of it. And, you know, it's pretty magical. So anything else you want to add before we open it up for Q&A?

Yeah, the in-person is where a lot of stuff happens. Client deals, deals to grow faster. For example, Eric and I were just walking. He introduces me to his friend David, which I already met the previous year at HubSpot, and he's just like, You guys should do a deal where your agency should end up, you know, becoming one, however you want to slice and dice it, whether we buy them or, you know, we work out a deal with them. And I'll tell him like, yeah, we're looking to buy agencies within your region. And they were in Spain specifically. And he's just like, yeah, let's set up a, you know, meeting and discuss more. And instead of long playing it and just beating around the bush. I was like, hey, what's your size? He tells me his size. What's your client type? He tells me his client type. And he's like, what do you pay? And I tell him roughly what we pay for companies. And we were kind of aligned, not fully aligned, but close enough to move forward because we're roughly on the same page, although details need to be worked out. And I don't know if it's a good fit and he doesn't know if it's a good fit. I was like, cool, let me introduce you to my head of M&A. And he's like, all right. I'm like, what's your phone number? get it right then and there on the spot, do a text introduction. They set up a call within a week. They have a great call. NDAs are signed. Their CFO is trying to send us all the data room. And then on our end, I already have my head of EMEA meeting up. He's like, oh, he's in London. I was like, oh, my head of EMEA is looking at another deal in London this Wednesday coming up. So next week, and I add him to a text chat. I'm like, hey, you should meet him while he's there because he's going to France to meet an agency that we're interested in looking at. He's going to London for another one that we're interested in, and both of those, there's a good chance we'll put out an offer. But all of a sudden, you know, that in-person, you can't replicate that. A lot of stuff just happens in person that you couldn't do elsewhere. But also speaking realistic, look, money is tight. This economy is bad. If I actually had to tell one thing for you guys to do, it would be to figure out how to partner with other agencies. I'm not— forget selling, forget buying or any of that. Your clients are different than another agency's clients. How can you sell all your services to their clients and vice versa? I know there's some overlap, but there's also a lot of things that don't overlap. And that's like one of the simplest ways to grow. Agencies keep thinking about getting new clients instead of continually landing and expanding.

Right.

The way we make our money at NP Digital is we'll close a big brand, and it may be a tiny amount of money, and then we land and expand them. We sell them on more regions, we sell them on more services, and then we sell more divisions. So, and it doesn't have to be a big corporation. There's a lot of mid-sized companies that you can do this with too. And I'll give you an easy big example because everyone is familiar with them. So let's say you want to work with LVMH, and you can start by working with Louis Vuitton. You close them in one region, you sell them on maybe SEO, you do well, you get them on SEO for many more regions, you do well, you say, hey, can we also start doing paid ads for you? CRO. Oh great, doing a good job. Hey, you guys also own Loro Piana. Can we get an introduction to that brand? Oh, you also own this brand here. Can we get an introduction to that brand? So then you're going after division after division after division and running the same playbook. All of a sudden you can get one client to pay you not just, you know, a million bucks, you can get them to pay you $4 million, $5 million, $10 million. It's a long play that takes many years, but it's a very effective strategy. And this is how the big holding companies make the majority of their revenue— land and expand. It's not, hey, live and die by the deal. What is the deal that's going to come in this month? A lot of it is we already have clients. How do we just get them to pay for more services and more divisions of their business?

Right.

So one other thing I'll say and then we can move into Q&A. So Neil, yesterday, let's just say I was working on a couple things, but I went to like a private, let's just call it like a watch showing or whatever, right? And I'm not into watches. Maybe you are more so than I am. Are you still into watches?

No, you don't care anymore.

Yeah, Neil used to have a pretty good watch set. But anyway, I digress. So it's this one meeting that had a couple of executives there that came from a lunch meeting on a Monday, a random lunch meeting, just saying, hey, I'm going to be in New York and that will lead to potentially a podcast deal, potentially some other deals there that I'll maybe fill you guys in on after these close. But basically we shook hands on it yesterday and that was just me being in New York. I had no expectations that that was going to happen in Boston. I met met one of the AOA members, David Kim, for dinner, right? That goes a long way too because we haven't had a chance— we get a chance to connect maybe once a year or whatever, but I think he got a lot from that meal. More than anything, I got a lot from that meal too because I asked him what's the main value of this group and he said it's this Q&A, right? So I'm like, oh shit, we probably need to do more Q&As. And so that's good feedback. So that being said, we'll turn it over to anybody here. Feel free to raise your hand or just type in the chat whatever question you have and We got like 45 minutes or so, I think. So, Scott.

Okay, so I'll go first. Just to follow up to what Neil was talking about. So obviously when you partner up, let's say in this setting, you have agencies that are doing various different services. And so when you partner up or you introduce each other to clients, there's no overlap in services. So that's great for acquisition and kind of growing You know, your revenue top line and whatnot. But when it comes to the one, the other points that you brought up is that offering three, four, five services. Now, when you bring in another agency and you set it up as a partnership, are you saying that you should white label it or you should introduce agency as a standalone agency? But then that would not really contribute to the deal.

You white label. You do not introduce as a stand alone. Standalone, you white label.

Yeah.

Okay, got it. Cool. Yeah, that was a question just to clarify.

Yeah, yeah.

No, and it makes a big difference on revenue because what you'll find is they're paying you more, but it's not in the more part because your margins are decreasing because a lot of that money's going out because you're just getting white labeled. But what you'll find is they stay a lot longer. See, Everyone in this room is generating revenue. Let's say you make $1 million and everyone has to keep filling up their pipe to keep getting more customers.

Yeah.

What happens if you had the same amount of customers, but instead of $1 million, they paid you $2 million? You're like, how? They're not gonna pay me double. No, I'm telling you, they just pay you twice as long. So if you had half the amount of churn and your revenue doubled over time because you just kept clients longer, your business really does change. The biggest problem with smaller agencies is not, Closing revenue. Everyone believes they need to close revenue. It's actually the problem of keeping the accounts. Very few of you guys are keeping accounts for 4 or 5 years, right? You may think you have some accounts that are long, but if you look at your average tenure of an account, it's much, much lower and churn is extremely high. Well, if you're losing half your clients per year, and instead you can— if you kept your clients instead of for 2 years, you kept them for 4 years, That makes a huge difference on revenue. And the easiest way to get them there is you sell them multiple services. Even if you're not collecting a lot of that money, you're still keeping them much longer, which in theory makes you more cash.

Okay, got it. Yep.

Cool. Awesome. Thanks for that, Scott. Terrell, you're up next.

Awesome. Awesome. All right. So I suppose it's a, it's an interesting question. So I have a dev background and experience, a lot of experience with product. If you guys were in this new AI age and you had a tech background, you have kind of a dev agency, what would you be looking at? Would you be looking at SMBs, be looking at startups, enterprise, and then also, you know, trying to keep deal cycle as short as possible so we can collect cash as kind of quick as possible?

I'll take it first. So Adam, I think what you're doing, because you said you're an AI dev shop, right? I would try to go more mid-market enterprise, basically upmarket. And to Neil's point on the partnership angle, like, you know, for example, someone like Neil, he has the logos that you're potentially interested in. And if you come up with a bunch of ideas, like, I'll tell you what, I was with a couple of— I was with the YPO client yesterday and he's like, dude, all the stuff you talk about with AI, like, we want to do all of it. Let us be your guinea pig. Another client said that a couple weeks ago, all the things you're talking about, we want to do it. Let us be your guinea pig. So people are throwing themselves out there right now. I think it's just a matter of who's actually receptive to doing it, but many of these businesses are open to doing it. So, Neal, do you have anything to add there?

No, I think you pretty much answered it spot on. There's just a lot of people that are willing to do deals. You just got to figure out who you can convince.

Yeah, Terrell, if you got some good stuff to send to Neil and I, like throw some, like 3 of your best ideas, take a look at Neil's logos, take a look at my logos, or you can even just ask in the community and that could be like a starting point for you.

Yeah, and I want you to start thinking about this in a very different way. Instead of thinking about it like, oh, I'm going to partner with these guys. Yeah, I got to pitch them to try to convince them. Start looking at it from the perspective of them. They have customers. Their customers want them to continually innovate and do different things than the competition. If you can help them do that, you're providing a lot of value and they'll see value in you.

Awesome.

All right, love it.

I'll definitely send some things your way.

Cool.

Looking forward to seeing you in the community. Um, I know Noman had posted in the chat, how do you ensure there is quality service? I think he was referring to Neil's comment on landing and expanding. And then expanding out different regions. Noman, did you want to just follow up on that really quick? Yeah.

So just partnering really does make a lot of sense. But sometimes what happens is if you white label a service, like they may not like adhere to the same level of customer service that your agency does. Or, you know, they might just say, hey, I just want to chat through Slack or, you know, WhatsApp channels, and that may not meet the needs. So how do you ensure there's quality engagement with your clients?

You have to vet all of that beforehand, and then the account management still needs to happen on your end. You control the client relationship. You don't want someone else to control your client relationship, so you still need to do the account management. Someone is doing the other work that you don't provide, and you are representing that work to the customer through your account managers. But you need to make sure the quality of the work is great, and the way you do that is you pre-vet people, look at their work, their case studies, Talk to some client references. This will all give you an idea if they're gonna be a good partner or not.

Thanks, guys.

Cool.

Let's send it over to Matt.

Yes. Hi. Happy Friday, everyone. So I'm in the process right now of improving our SOPs to basically being able to onboard new clients and staff more effectively and just to scale up. So my question for, for Eric and Neil is, how do you organize SOPs at your agencies? Do you use any tools? And how do you get employees on board so that they participate?

I'll keep it short. And then Neil, I don't know if you want to add anything, but we use Coda because everyone likes— so I'll give you the tool first. It's a nice dopamine hit, right? And then we tell people we will fire you if you don't— if you don't check our standards of excellence, you don't initial it. You don't read these things and initial it, we will fire you. So compliance, right? And like, we have something— I'll take it one step further, Carlos, because in the past when we've kind of been haphazard about it, when people are like, if you don't take it seriously, then they're not going to take it seriously. And so we haven't had to fire anybody for this, to be very honest. But when you say something like that, you know, people take it a lot more seriously. You don't have to do that. It's just what we do. It's what works for us. But Neil, feel free to add anything if you want.

It's also onboarding and training, creating the right expectations from day one really helps people follow processes.

So, Eric, that was— you said Coda with a K.

Can you drop it in the chat?

Is that a software?

I'll drop it in the chat. It's a software. So we used Notion before, but we found Notion kind of restricting, so we use Coda instead. So coda.io.

Awesome. And just a quick follow-up question, I think it's gonna be a quick one. When it comes to calculating EBITDA for digital agencies, is this just basically net profit? And how do you account for owner's salary when you do this calculation? If you can help me with that.

Owner salary is an expense, and that goes against your profit, your EBITDA. And you want to make sure it is accurate or not accurate. You want to make sure it's a market salary. See, if you're doing a deal and you're working with someone and they're saying, hey, I get paid $100 grand and my profit is $500,000. Well, if you know the reality is they should be getting paid $200 grand, you want to adjust it from $500,000 in profit to $400,000 in profit and then getting paid $200,000 because they're not going to continue working for you or with you if they're only getting paid $100,000 when the market rate is So why would you buy something with $500 in profit when it really is only $400?

Yeah, thank you for that.

And, and the reason you got to look at EBITDA is because a lot of people have debt.

There's—

during COVID a lot of countries put out stimulus programs, and a lot of startups and agencies took them. So a lot of people have debt on their balance sheet, and you got to pay that off. It's really hard to get deals done when they have too much debt and very little EBITDA.

Cool.

Thank you, guys.

Awesome. Good questions, Matt. Let's send it over to Nathan.

Cool.

Hey, good to see you guys. So I have like a landscape question. So we run growth for some of the big AI newsletters, and it's kind of been an open question, like, Are there big agencies or agencies in general that are doing a really good job of attacking the, like, process and tooling of, like, how do you take a big company and use AI better? And do you guys know anything about that landscape beyond just, like, the Accentures of the world, who I'm sure, you know, they already have the relationship with the CIO or the C— generally in a marketing and sales context, let's say, like those orgs, who's doing a good job of improving those orgs with AI?

The only one I would've given you was Accenture. But Neil, go for it.

Okay. McKinsey's trying to do some really cool stuff with AI. Actually, all the big players are, but what are they doing? Honestly, I don't know much. You're just reading the articles, but a lot of them are seeing a decline in growth, but they're growing because they're cross-selling a lot of AI stuff into these organizations, and that's how they're getting growth in this bad economy. Yeah.

Have you seen, it's just super cool. I've I see those firms, I used to work for one of them and generally it is, yeah, it's a lot of like hammers looking for nails. Is there anyone who is smaller that you've just seen logos pop up that are going after that?

Bounteous.

Check out Bounteous. It's another agency that's doing a lot with AI. They merged with another agency recently. I don't know what their headcount is, but I think they have like 4,000 or 5,000 people at this point. It's something ridiculous.

Nathan, check out sierra.ai. So this guy was, his name's Brett Taylor. He was high up at Facebook, high up at Salesforce. and a great investor. So he started this new conversational AI company and he's working with a lot of interesting logos. And I think he's really trying to custom, you know, build these for everyone. And I think that's the angle, right? If you're Accenture, you're McKinsey, you have the relationships, it's more so you and you understand our businesses well and you're just like, hey, have you thought about this angle? Have you thought about this angle? Hey, what if we did this over here? And then you're charging it basically at cost or maybe even for free saying, hey, like, you know, we're going to guinea pig this and you need to give us a little more slack here. And we're gonna make mistakes, and you gotta be okay with that. Is that cool? Okay, great. And you know, the bigger you are, the more you have to CYA, cover your ass.

Cool.

Thanks.

Awesome. Let's keep it rolling. Rebecca, I see your hand is raised.

Yep.

I have 2, like, easy questions that maybe, maybe the team has asked you guys before, but I'm new here. I've only been part of the group for a few weeks. So here's So HubSpot Agency SMB, primarily focused on startups and VC-backed startups, had a really rough year because of that. So we're a little bit in a bit of a pivot, but it's all good, man. So from an SEO perspective, so we're in the SMB, right? So it's smaller groups or, you know, up to $50 million. We, you know, we saw the big hit, and so everybody's looking at how they can get their SEO back. So we had— I told someone I would ask these questions of you. There's a rumor that too much content being posted beyond the industry standard in your area could get you deranked. For example, we have an Atlassian reseller who does a ton of blog posting and they cannot get their SEO back. Have you ever heard of Google being that smart?

So there's not necessarily an industry standard on how much content you can or can't have, right? The problem that you have is, let's say, call this Atlassian reseller. If they're just posting tons of content, the problem is, and I'm going to make an assumption here because I haven't seen the site, I bet you the majority of their content is crap, right? Where it's just like junk and they're just putting out a lot of me-too content. When I say me-too, I'm not talking about the MeToo movement. I'm talking about me-too, which they're putting out a lot of similar content. There's nothing really great or differentiating than all the other articles that have been around the web for a long time.

Okay.

And what ends up happening with Google is they'll look at your website and be like, oh, you got 5,000 pages of articles. A lot of them are junk and get no traffic. We shouldn't rank your website highly at all.

Yeah, basics 101s.

Okay. Yes. So what I would do in that case is I would go look at my Google Search Console and Google Analytics, look at all the pages that get no search traffic and figure out, do we actually need those pages? The reason I say need those pages, a lot of times you may need them like if you're a reseller and it's some technical support document that barely gets any traffic. But some of these pages you can noindex, some of them you can delete, some of them you could merge and prune. You can use the right redirects. That usually does help a lot of these sites recover in the long run.

Okay.

The second thing with that site that they're probably going to end up facing is if you're just cranking out tons of new content, when we did analysis of the best performing SEO sites or sites that are continually growing in SEO traffic, you know, looking at like the top 5, 10%, like the ones that are really growing in double-digit growth year over year consistently with all the algorithm changes, we saw that they spend 60-something percent of their time updating content and 30-something percent of their time creating new content. So when you have sites that have tons of content, a lot of times the issue is, is it's outdated, stale. It's like, would you, when you do a Google search, would you rather read a 3-year-old article or a 3-week-old article? And this is why Wikipedia does so well. A lot of their content is fresh, updated, right? That's one of the keys to doing extremely well.

Okay. And I'm not trying to dominate. The other question—

No, no, no, ask away.

No, the other question, and this all came up as an idea that my colleague heard from some other SEO agency, is that More positive inbound signals from many sites is helpful. Therefore, running dumb little campaigns inside of Facebook or Twitter or Outbrain or whatever creates inbound signals that would help Google. We're trying to help these tiny businesses.

Yeah.

So one of the factors in Google's algorithm is brand queries. Okay, how many people are typing in the company's name or product on Google and clicking on their result? So not just the number of people that are typing in the search, but what's the click-through rate of people clicking on your listing? If it's extremely high, that shows a really good signal. They love that. It helps with your rankings for all your terms in that case, right? Even the words that don't necessarily have as high of a click-through rate, especially when you have a strong brand. So when you're using a lot of things like Facebook and Instagram and Outbrain and all these other channels, people see the brand more often. You know, in marketing they call it the rule of 7. When someone sees your brand 7+ times, they're much more likely to buy from you, evangelize you. So you want to make sure that you're using these channels to help build up your brand.

Okay, last question, and then I'll take it to everybody else. This is a harder question, and you don't need to— you could direct me to a resource, So also in the SMB, also with this business, as I'm working through the pivot, I woke up and went, oh, LinkedIn appears to be really important. Where have I been? And so I've been working on LinkedIn this year and helping my founders. We work with a lot of founders, a lot of, you know, guys with cool tech toys, helping them. I'm trying to— I'm experimenting. I'm listening to all the videos, watching everybody, and trying to see What is the advice I could give to these founders on using their LinkedIn for lead generation and getting their voice proper? And I'm wondering if there's somebody you think I should watch or a paper that's relevant that kind of summarizes your strategy or your philosophy, because I'm just watching it all. I'm trying random things and I'm like, okay, I need a playbook here. Any thoughts?

Eric, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah.

Yeah. So go to, um, there's a guy named Justin Rowe who does a really good job with his own LinkedIn organic. And ironically, um, maybe it's not so ironic, but that's what, that's what gets him more LinkedIn paid media clients. Um, his, his LinkedIn agency is called Impactable, I believe. Um, I just— Impactable.

Yep. Justin Rowe. R-O-W-E. Thank you. I just need a guy with a good example that I can have everyone follow. So awesome.

Okay. David's nodding his head over there too.

Thank you, Ginger.

That's what I mean.

Good.

Thank you. There you go.

Perfect.

Thank you, guys.

Um, Matt, did you want to say something? I saw you unmute before we move it to Anita.

I was just gonna say, uh, Nick talked about his strategy a little bit yesterday if you want to watch.

Uh, I, I was listening to that too.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I just want to ask—

can you mention someone?

I wanted to ask the big dogs here.

Cool.

All right, over to Anita.

There we go. Hello. So going back to something that Neil said at the beginning of the call, I was listening to Jay Schwedelson yesterday and he was talking. You guys know who he is, the guru guy, right? No. He puts on that email marketing conference, the virtual conference every year. He does, um, subjectline.com. Anybody know him?

Yes, I know who you're talking about now.

Okay, cool. So he was talking about in the beginning days of starting his agency that he would go and pitch to clients and without success, and he was a full-service agency. So he said finally, after many a sales call, somebody said to him, You know what? The last thing you talked to me about was email marketing, and that was probably the thing that was most interesting to me. And maybe I would have hired you if you would have only talked about one thing, but you talked about so many different things that it was overwhelming. So Jay's point was, sometimes when you're trying to do everything, you do nothing. And so our agency, just for context, works in the property and casualty insurance space. for marketing, very difficult. These are non-marketing minds. And so if we were to go in— and so I'm curious, Neil, when you, you talked about how important it is to have more than one service, which we do. Most of our clients, we do 5, 6, 7 different things for, and we actually have a pretty low churn rate. But our bigger problem, especially right now in new client acquisition, is that we go in depth and listen to all of the things that our clients need, which is usually everything. Um, but you pitch that to them and they just can't get their head around it. So would you say that you would be better off to go in with a single service and then build from there? Because that's so— that feels so contrary to me, right? Like, if you choose one thing, What if somebody else comes in and chooses something else and that thing resonates more with them? You follow?

Yeah.

So I'm going to break down the response in 2 parts.

Okay.

If you look at the majority of the largest agencies in the world, they tend to offer all services and they deal with all verticals. When you're starting off, it is hard to do everything for all verticals well. So most people either pick stick to a specific marketing skill like SEO or email or paid ads, or they stick with a specific vertical. Like, I'm just going to do marketing for mortgages. I'm just going to do marketing for e-commerce, D2C, right? And then they'll say, we'll do SEO for them, paid ads, and the list goes on and on. It sounds like you're in the latter camp.

Mm-hmm.

And that's a great camp to be in, especially when you're starting off. Either one is fine, right? either specialize in a service or vertical. We tend to tell people earlier on, specialize in a vertical 'cause it just builds up a lot more case studies. It's faster to grow from what we've seen. And then eventually you can add on more verticals, right? But when you're pitching people, yes, they may be overwhelmed, but this is what I discussed a little bit earlier with land and expand is how you grow.

Mm-hmm.

Some clients will be big enough and will be ready and will be prepared to actually pay you for the whole suite of services and actually want that.

Mm-hmm.

Some you can tell when you talk to them, they're just overwhelmed. They just want to get started and they want to see a little bit of results before they invest more and dip their toes in. For those, you figure out which service do you think is going to have the biggest impact on their KPIs, right? Their key performance indicators. And you only pitch that service and you tell them, look at all these other services we offer and these are the results we're providing clients in your space. But for today, we want to focus on this service only. You're probably wondering why. Well, we think this is the one you need the most, and it can provide a lot of results. We think the others can too, but we want to tackle this first, and then eventually, if you're happy within 3, 4, or 5 months, discuss the other services and how we can make you even grow faster, right? But you're getting your foot in the door, and then you're expanding. It's much, much lower commitment, and it's easier pill for people to swallow.

I love that. Thank you.

Anita, one thing I'll share, maybe it's not even just for you, Anita, this is for everybody. So I did a podcast with Seth Godin on Monday and he said something really interesting. So he doesn't post to Instagram, he doesn't post to Twitter, he only blogs. That's all he does. And he does, he's on a book tour right now, so he's doing podcasts. And so his logic is, look, I can choose to be be pretty good at many different things, or I can be world-class at one thing. So I didn't know this, but he actually writes 4 to 5 blog posts per day, and it's like his little snippets of wisdom, and only one goes out. And he's been doing that for the longest time ever. And he's like, you know, I'd rather just be known for that. Sure, I can get pretty good at Twitter, but I'd rather just be known for one thing. And he's like, yeah, it's that focus that's helped me be successful. And I thought it was interesting because he's kind of like the godfather of marketing. So just wanted to share that story with you guys.

Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.

Of course.

Let's go to Austin. Actually, I don't know who to go to next. So you go for it.

I think Adam is up next. Mr. Adam Fisher.

All right. Thank you. So I've got 2 questions if we, if we have time, but first one, it's about testing software. So have a client, they're in the affiliate marketing space for like American Express and Chase. And I know the guy that does their paid media. And so they brought me on board because the paid media guy is really hard to work with. But I'm supposed to be the guy that helps implement like a testing methodology for them. This is not my core expertise at all. But I can work with the guy that does their paid media. So I think my question is like, how do I choose? They have like millions in traffic organically and with paid. I found like VWO looks like a really good testing, like sophisticated testing software platform. But the just a couple things like the company says, hey, we want to make sure this can meet all of our needs and we have complex needs and we want— I don't know why they want server-side rendering for the test approach. So that's something I don't understand. And then the other part is like, where will I house all the insights? In a systematic way? So kind of a vague, tough question, but wanted to put it out there.

For—

I don't know about server-side testing. A lot of us just use like VWO, and I think some people use like convert.com, and there's a lot of solutions like Optimizely. I don't know any server-side testing solutions. Eric, do you?

Nope. I just said we use convert.com. And so Adam, I know you have another question, but in the interest of time, I wanna give it to David and then carry it back over to you if that's okay.

But sorry, sorry we couldn't solve it for you, Adam. I honestly don't know the solution other than—

No, that's totally fine. But another part of that one question is just the, like, how do you store insights? Like, 'cause you're doing a lot of testing yourself. So I did, I used to do it the old-fashioned way in like a PowerPoint slide for clients, right? Like, This needs to be a lot more easy to store and gather. Like, how do you—

how do you do that?

I'll be honest, we use an Excel sheet to store it raw, right? And then the PowerPoint, if you want to make it all reportified and everything. I don't— a lot of things I don't think we need to overcomplicate, which is good old-fashioned PowerPoint, or sorry, Excel.

Excel. We use Excel a lot because— and then you can just put in notes and then you can have different tabs for different tests and date ranges. And then When you have new teams, because you can store Excel in the cloud, you can just give it to them and be like, here are all the tests we ran, because you can even include screenshots in Excel and just being like, here's all the tests we ran, here are the results, here's what worked, here's what didn't. And the stuff that didn't work, we even put notes on why we don't think it worked, not just the results. And the stuff that did win, what change did we make and why we thought it won, because all this helps influence future tests. So it's not about like how pretty it is. It's more so it's just stored in a way that's easily accessible because that's important so that way people can continually get access to it. But B is a way that people can easily understand even if it's not pretty.

That's helpful. Thanks.

I was gonna say, I have one thing to add on that. I would ask the client what their security protocol is because I work with clients where they have very high security protocol, like massive. And they might, if you ask the question, they'll say, oh, you know what? We're so glad you asked. We actually have a place we want you to put everything so that way competitors don't get access to it. That's a really important question asking about storage when you're dealing with providing them with insights, which in the hands of the wrong person, you know, or the wrong company, you know, they could, it could do some damage. You know what I'm saying? So they might even—

Relevant for this client too.

Yeah.

Yeah, they even offer you a separate laptop to work on. So when I was working with Axelon, it was— and Google, it was like that. Like, they gave me a laptop, and I, you know, because everything I did for them was on there, because they weren't gonna take a chance and, you know, let it get out anywhere else. I'm like, I wasn't able to use my own phone and my computer. So that's a— I love that you asked that question.

Nice.

That's even telling you how it's worked for me in the past.

Thanks.

Nice.

Cool.

Good discussion here, guys. David, let's pass it over to you.

Yeah. One quick thing on that too, Adam. I'd recommend reaching out to Ben Labbé at Spiro. They're a CRO agency. He's super open about the tools and everything that they've built. And I think some of it's overcomplicated what they've built, but he automates a lot of stuff from like Airtable directly into slides and like populates all the data and presentation and stuff. So Might be interesting to you. He's going to be hosting EXL, I believe, in a couple of weeks in Austin. So might want to take a look at that conference. So my question is around lead gen. We're fortunately in a position where like things are going pretty well, but because of that, we're paranoid and always trying to think ahead. And I know, Eric, you and Neil do like LinkedIn and a podcast and everything. We also do those things though on a much larger scale, but I'm curious, Do you have any systems in place to capture that attention and funnel it down into the sales cycle? Do you have people monitoring it or do you have something set up where they like your LinkedIn, it messages them and connects with them and all that stuff? What does that funnel look like for y'all?

Eric may probably have a much more advanced system than us. We don't do much on that. We do a lot of that for goodwill, and then we'll promote things like webinars and then get signups from there, and then that funnels into our system. But what we'll also do is see who we're connected with on LinkedIn on a regular basis and start messaging people. And we invite them to in-person events that we're throwing for free. So like, I'm in Malaysia right now. I was in Hong Kong yesterday or the day before. My time zones are all messed up. And then tomorrow I'll be in Singapore. But I did this in Hong Kong, I did this in Malaysia, and I'm doing this as well in Singapore where we have tons of companies coming. Like today or yesterday, we had 30-something companies at one of our offices here in Kuala Lumpur, and we ended up discussing what's happening with marketing, just very high level. And we have a mixture of current clients or prospects or mixture of both, or you can just have pure prospects if you don't have tons of clients and you just get to know people and build relationships. And over time, that's where we actually see a lot of our revenue come from.

Neil, what's— go ahead, finish your thought.

Yeah, we don't really get tons of revenue from things like SEO as much people, as most people would think. A lot of our revenue comes from just building relationships over time. Yeah. And we'll pay for events. Like people are like, oh, Neil, you get paid to speak. We'll do deals with like marketing associations and pay them $20,000, $30,000, $40,000. We'll pay for our own travel. They'll bring a lot of people and we'll speak and it's just our event with them. And that ends up getting us a lot of leads, but it takes like 6 months to a year plus to close a lot of that revenue. And it works. We just do that over time in a lot of regions and we consistently do that over time.

So a follow-up to that would be, what do you send to people when you're trying to get them onto your, what is it, your worldwide webinars?

Our worldwide webinars, that's a little bit different. We just send out an email blast and we just send out a message like on LinkedIn, like, you know, are you tired of— like, we may end up posting a post on LinkedIn. Have you noticed that when you post content on LinkedIn, it gets very little engagement and you keep posting content thinking one day you're going to get a lot of likes and shares, but it's not really happening? What's the problem? Why aren't you generating results no matter how many followers you have? Well, you're not alone. We're actually going to break down the right way to use LinkedIn and generate leads, customers, traffic, whatever you want to call it. It's going to happen at this time. It's free to attend. Click here to register. And we get a lot of people to just join the webinar. And it's just a numbers game. And we'll post that a few times before the webinar, send out email blasts.

Yeah.

I made that copy out of thin air. I just pulled it out of my Behind, right? But yeah, something that would probably be a little bit better than that. But yeah, that's what we just posted.

Emil, you should tell people what you do for the live events too. So for live events, I'm assuming you're saying, hey, this is a private event for CEOs or CXOs or whatever, just to lead you off a little bit.

Well, to go back to the webinar, and then I'll answer the other question, but to go back to webinar, we usually use Restream and we go live on all the platforms at once. So then that way we get extra people who may have not registered. As for the second thing, for the private events, we reach out to literally the decision makers within that company and we'll offer a lot of people to come for free. Most people ignore us and turn us down, but if you hit up 10 people, you may get one to show up. They don't care if you're Neil Patel.

A lot of people like private events.

It doesn't matter if you're Neil Patel or whoever Patel.

Exactly. It doesn't matter if you're Eric Siu or Neil Patel. They don't really care. What they care about is what's the content that you're presenting and who else is going to be in the room. So we'll tell them like, hey, there's a lot of other companies that are your size that are attending. We may name some of the brands that have agreed to come. This is what we're going to talk about. Here's some of the issues that you may be facing that a lot of people are facing that you're just going to be covering. And you hit up 10, at least one usually shows up.

That's pretty good. I'm not going to, in the interest of time, I think that's a good enough answer. So Carrie, we're going to move it over to you.

Okay, hello.

I run a YouTube marketing agency and we're organic first. So similar to like blogs and SEO, we create script and write, produce and publish videos onto YouTube so that they show up all on across all the search engines. And we work with companies from like D2C to SaaS to like like very heavy B2B companies that target like the Fortune 100s or Fortune 50 companies, as well as like a handful of individual creators on YouTube. But, you know, our like target ICP is larger organizations, specifically anyone in like SaaS or tech, because, you know, where video is a no— where video is absolutely helpful for these types of companies, and they're just really long-term clients that we've worked with for a while. So that's who we're trying to target. But whenever I get into these conversations, one is really heavily focused on like, what is the— how do we measure ROI of what you do? And I think similarly to SEO, where, you know, it's all organic, we run into the issue of proving direct ROI, which has been tough because I know that YouTube and video in itself is extremely important. I have my ways of measuring things right now, but I'd love to get some insight on how to better answer this question that I always get.

I can jump in first and then, Neil, you can go if you want. So, you know, I've talked about this guy Josh on the podcast, and this is a free promo for Josh again, but Josh works with YouTubers such as Ken McElroy. He works with like George Gammon. These guys are both YouTubers. And so, Ken owns like $3.2 billion in real estate. George does pretty well for himself. Neil, I think you met George as well. Neil, you can yawn. I can see it coming. So I think the thing with both George or like Robert Kiyosaki or like, you know, Ken McElroy is they all believe in YouTube already. That's like a major thing. And they're all driving revenue as well, not just AdSense revenue, but like Ken, like because he's got a, he's got a, like a real estate fund. He's actually driving more qualified applications. So I think before he was getting like 2 per month off his YouTube. Now he's getting like 42 or 50 per month or whatever. So I think number one, from what I've seen with Josh, because he only focuses on people that are really into YouTube and he thinks he can blow them up. And his deal is really good. He's like, dude, like, Eric, I can see you growing your channel to 3 million long-form views per month. I'm like, dude, yeah, sign me up. Like, do it for me, right? And he knows I believe in it already. So I think it's like, I think Trying to convince SaaS people, it's tougher because they might see like, oh yeah, things are going towards YouTube, but they haven't really truly tasted it yet versus George has been successful, Ken has been successful. So I don't know if SaaS is the right place. I think eventually they warm up to it, but that's my opinion. But yeah.

Essentially like wrapping up targeting people who already believe in YouTube.

Correct.

Okay.

And the other thing too is YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine showing people stats on that. showing people also direct clicks from YouTube. We're actually seeing it as a really popular referral source, right? And you can track signups from that as well.

Yeah.

I would also showcase how many people are watching the videos and typing in the brand name on YouTube as well as other channels, like their brand queries, if it's going up. And you also got to just get people to believe a little bit, right?

Yeah.

But it's a combo of all of that. And if you can showcase enough SaaS examples, or B2B examples of a few companies that have done really well and how they double down on it and how they spend a lot of money, you'll get other people to just do it because people move in herd mentalities.

Hmm.

But you just need a few really positive examples like here's what happened to, you know, Snowflake after they started using YouTube and just get, even if they're smaller, that's okay. And then use that to just start getting more and more over time.

Okay.

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but as Eric mentioned, you gotta get people here.

But I feel like I'm already doing that, but I think maybe it just like, so I have an idea of who like is the best type of client. But yeah, I mean, it's easier to convince someone who's already convinced and then here's the how versus like, here's you.

You also got to look at data like, look, look at your churn rate. Here's the problems that people are facing. We're creating content around how to do X, Y, and Z, which solves problems and all this kind of stuff, which can also decrease churn over time as well if we feed it into customers. You got to get people to believe. It's just a popular channel. It's like saying, hey, how are you not going to be on YouTube? Here's all the people that are on it. If you're not there, you're missing out. It's hard to track a direct ROI, but you're also not spending the majority of your marketing dollars on YouTube.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Thanks, guys.

Cool. I know we just have a couple more minutes here. I know Allian has his hand raised and so does Kevin. So Allian, let's go to you.

All right.

Thank you. So, Neil, it's— I think this question will be specific for you because you were— you're running a lot of offices in the global markets. So I often get— so just for context, I help DTC brand go global. That's what I'm kind of pivoting on.

You go from Japan to the rest of the world.

Yeah. And actually, I often get potential clients from a lot of different countries. And sometimes for some months, I get a lot more clients from other countries, the inbound, rather than the Japanese market. And so that countries are like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, They are the— that those are kind of countries and they want our expertise in that particular industry. And while they might be very strong in their local market, they are not really that good when we compare it to the US-based accounts in terms of their revenue, in terms of their marketing budget and all that. So, and they're quite budget conscious in that sense as well.

Do you—

so my question is that, do you adjust the prices to that specific country, to that local market, and when you are providing your services, or do you just sell at the same price as you're selling to the US-based firms?

It depends on the cost structure. If you're able to do it out of Brazil because you have people in Brazil that can help them with US, you price it that way. If you don't and you only have people in the United States where the cost is more expensive, you got to charge more because it's based on your cost structure. That may not be ideal for the customers, but you, you have to do whatever works for you until you can actually scale up and have enough people within those low-cost regions to make the economics work out better for them.

Right. That was actually an interesting answer because so it means that you have to gradually go to that route to have an economics or have people around in that local market and—

To make the numbers work. Yes, it's too hard to outsource to the United States and make the numbers work in the long run.

Yeah, I mean, it's almost impossible. Even in Japan, I cannot really sit here and deal with that, guys, because the profit margin is so low, but They're growing and we want to help. And I'm trying to see how we can squeeze that profit from those kind of accounts as well.

But yeah.

Okay. Thank you.

Cool. Good stuff. Awesome. Kevin, we'll have you be the last question.

Awesome.

I'll try to keep it quick. I'm bidding on a job right now. It's a $5 million company. They're wanting to grow to $10 million. They really haven't done any marketing. Kind of, it's a hospital smart office technology company. They're looking to double their revenue over the next year. I met the CEO, we connected. He likes what I'm pitching to him. So he's come to me with, I want SEO, PPC, email. He wants the whole shebang. And so I'm putting together the bid. It's— I normally do what's called a crawl, walk, run strategy. It's like, how do we crawl? How do we get the baseline going? How do we get you walking? And then how are we running? But I, I— and I don't want to scare the clients away sometimes with the budgets. Um, I'm bidding right now, it's about $250,000 a year. Um, it's basically content to SEO, PPC, ads management, the whole shebang. We can do it. Um, new website where I'm working with Peck to come up with, um, some calculators and stuff and like how to calculate a new smart room for your hospital, those kind of things. Um, it's, it's kind of a high— it's, it's on the higher end of jobs that I normally bid on. Um, my question is, presentation-wise, what's too much? Like, should I— like, if I go through the whole PowerPoint thing, we'll be there forever. If I give them kind of, uh, just a breakdown and a proposal, here's everything, let them read it— I'm gonna present it to them, but how do you guys deal with bigger presentations where there's lots of pieces to the pie?

It should be able to be done in a PowerPoint presentation within an hour. And 30 minutes for Q&A.

Okay.

If you can do it within an hour and a half and it can be interactive during the whole hour and a half, it doesn't have to be hour first of talking, then, you know, Q&A. And even if it's a multimillion dollar deal, it should be done within an hour and a half. Now, what you'll want to do is you don't want it to go more than an hour and a half. You may not be able to accomplish everything within an hour and a half, but you should be able to accomplish the majority of a certain thing like SEO within an hour call. Then you can do another call with pay-per-click, another call with email, and you can do multiple calls with them to break it all down so then they can learn. And then you get into proposals, right? You got to build that relationship and the rapport. So you can, on your end, they want to talk about everything. You would want to first do a presentation, SEO, what's wrong, what they can fix, what the results are, other people in the space doing it.

True.

And then you would want to do that with each one, but you may want to break it down to like, 2 or 3 calls and then you go into a proposal and everything like that. But you've had this time to educate them, but you've also had time to build that relationship with them as well.

That's fabulous. Yeah, I didn't think of that.

It's hard to close saying, hey, just gimme $250 grand, one presentation. You're also gonna lose them because it's gonna be overload of information. And if you just give a proposal and pricing, they're gonna be like, I don't know what I'm spending $250 grand on because no one really reads them.

Yeah, right. No, totally. You hit the nail on the head. Thank you so much. I thought you nailed it.

Appreciate it.

Cool. Well, that wraps it up. Neil, thank you so much for being here. I used to live in Kuala Lumpur, so I know how it is to commute on calls back and forth. But thank you for being here. Appreciate that.

Yeah, no problem.

Thank you, everyone. It was so great to see you in person and hear your voice in real life.

Thanks.

I love it. I love your smile.

Thank you. I need to come to Chicago one of these days. I think it was you who mentioned that.

Please, both of you, Eric, Neil, can you please? I will help you. I have a lot of friends here. I have a lot of connections. If you have— I know you can get a lot of money out of the city. So let's—

It's a great city.

Yeah, one day we'll have to do it.

I would love it.

Squeeze it.

Squeeze them out.

Awesome.

Well, all right, guys, that wraps up our call for today. If you're watching this live, you can always go to marketingschool.io/aoa. And you can apply for the community. We'll see you next time.