How to Attract New Clients: Strategies That Actually Work!

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 wanna learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Adam, what's going on, man?

Well, my question was for Eric, but I'll put it out to everybody else because you probably have some interesting insights on it. Maybe he can put it up in the, in the online board. But a while back, he mentioned that he was offering a free marketing plan to attract new clients. And I think it was on the podcast. And I went on his website today and I didn't see it anywhere. He just had like, hey, book a time to work with us or chat or something. So I was wondering how that was going. This first part of the question. The second one is, how did he go about doing that if he had, like, let's say, 12 inquiries a week? Is it something that's automated that maybe he's using? Maybe you guys are using AI. It's like, okay, here's all our services. AI knows everything. Here's the brand. AI analyzes it.

Boom.

Here's a marketing plan that it cranks out. So I'm just curious if anyone else Is doing that, hey, free marketing plan for your brand and how you're doing it.

Yeah, good question.

I can share. I've spoken to Eric about this a while back. So I'm gonna assume nothing has really changed, but I can also share how we've been doing it internally too. We don't put on a website, it's typically on a sales call. And if it's a logo we really want, Then we're willing to eat the cost of that. And off— what I do is I don't position it as free. I'll say, hey, the value of this is typically $10,000. You're going to pay for it. But if you decide to continue working with us afterward, it's going to be credited to the ongoing implementation of the strategy. And so it's kind of free in that way. There are very few instances where we just straight up offer it for free because, yeah, we don't want to cheapen Our services. But we recently actually just pitched a client on this because they were going back and forth with leadership, and leadership was having trouble eating the cost. And we're like, all right, how do we de-risk this for them? And so we did the whole like, hey, we'll credit this to the ongoing engagement verbiage, and it seems to be moving things forward. Yet to see how it plays out, but that's how we typically position it.

Thank you, David.

Anybody else?

Okay, on to the next.

I thought Kevin was trying to talk, but he was on the phone.

My apologies.

Okay, cool.

Just say that from my perspective, I think it's similar to when you hire an accounting firm or a law firm, you expect some kind of a free consultation, somebody to look at your case, you know, if it's a lawyer and whatnot, or look at the numbers, you know, if you offer digital ad services or SEO, you have software where you can do competitive benchmarking. So, you know, I would do maybe competitive benchmarking. I would do— I would go to a few tools, but I wouldn't spend more than half an hour on it. And I think when you start giving away stuff for free, it just attracts certain type of clients that maybe expect that, and they're going to be you know, asking for free stuff or discounts all the time. So, you know, I would say from my perspective, a free consultation, maybe a follow-up, some kind of a report that you can get out of a software product that maybe they don't have a subscription. Like, for example, right now we got a subscription to Semrush. They have Ad Clarity, which is a great sort of like a digital ads display programmatic competitive insights tool, and we just use that in a proposal, in a pitch where we were able to show what the competitors are doing or things of that nature. I hope that helps.

Thank you.

Peck or Rebecca, did you want to chime in there in the last minute? Yeah, either or, and we can extend this minute.

Mine's really easy because I feel like maybe you guys already did this, and I've been here. I'm on a— I threatened Austin with, I'm gonna do this for a month, and if I get zero value, I'm leaving. And I don't feel that way at all. He knows I did threaten that, and I wasn't kidding. I mean, it's not a small amount of money, you know, in general. So anyways, I agree with Kevin. I've gotten a good tip or tool that has been incredibly valuable every meeting, and I thank all of you tremendously. I feel like I'm seeing some light from hearing all these conversations, so I do appreciate all your feedback. So my question is easy. We've had to change from a— I won't go into a huge backstory, but we had a really nice business, very high margin. It has changed into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not the kind of business we want to be in, but it's the kind of business we have right now.

Fair enough.

So our struggle is our systems. And so we had things fairly automated for the other business, but now we need to get a lot more automation. And so I am very curious, and it came up in the last meeting that Eric said his, his system, his company was on coda.io. I'm very curious, even from around robin, like if everybody shouts out to me like, oh, I use Jira with Google Sheets and, and just blood, you know, if you just tell me, or we're totally integrated on ClickUp through some person, you know, if you just tell me that, that gives me enough clues to keep digging around. So I'm wondering if that would be an okay way to do it, Austin. Okay, so do you want me to call your name or— and we all go, or what do you want to do here?

I think if people unmute themselves and, and it looks like—

Just let me know if you're comfortable sharing and I'll know whether to like maybe bug you a little bit because it's intriguing or whatever. So, um, David Kim, would you please start? I have no problems calling people out.

Is there anything specific you're trying to automate or— Yes.

Project management and onboarding new clients.

Uh, for onboarding, coincidentally, I just shared like my Zapier in the, the group today. It's like a—

Oh.

20-step Zap that might be helpful.

We, we have one of those. Yes. Thanks. Where I wanna see yours. Yeah.

Unfortunately, yeah, we're not, we're not fully integrated on just one tool. We're using like ClickUp and Airtable for different use cases.

We use those for different use cases. Just say it all. ClickUp, Airtable. That's fine.

Notion. Tested out Coda, but decided it was too similar to Notion. And then just a hell of a lot of Zapier and Google Sheets.

Okay. Zapier and Google Sheets. That's all I want to hear because it makes me feel better because I'm a little bit duct tape and popsicle sticks. But, um, you are using ClickUp. Is that how you do day-to-day tasks in your projects?

We use ClickUp for internal task management and Airtable is significantly easier for client-facing.

That was actually brilliant, right?

Yeah, and Airtable has its own set of client-facing automations that I can share with you as well.

Yes, thank you so much. Would somebody else have a combination of tools that they like? That was exactly what I wanted. Like Norman?

I'm liking Clay and Airops. So Clay for research, you could probably use Make as well. Yeah, that's just personal preference.

And Airops, did you say?

Airops is another one. But I'm looking for tools to help automate stuff.

Do you have— what do you guys use for— I'm specifically looking at project management and onboarding and managing clients. Anybody? Matt?

monday.com.

Monday. Okay. I wish I'd done that instead of ClickUp. That's a whole long story. Anybody else?

Yeah, we use Asana.

Asana.

And I'm trying to consolidate. I feel like having a lot of tools, it just becomes overwhelming. So recently, and Asana is like everything is happening in Asana. If it's not in Asana, it's not happening in my company right now. So we started, you know, transition time tracking to Asana. And that's, you know, that right now is being a big part of also seeing client utilization, project utilization, resource utilization. It's not perfect for time tracking. We're still trying to find the best way to integrate. But Asana for internal works pretty well, you know, with clients. It's really hard to get them on a tool and they—

Oh, I know.

So for them, we actually use Google Sheets like a lot of people.

Yeah, I'm not trying. I'm just trying to keep myself from, you know, jumping off a cliff.

Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people, and you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. And we'll see you on the other side.

Hey, Rebecca. Um, Kevin? Yeah, I was, yeah, I was gonna jump in. Um, so we, I've been, I've been doing this about 12 years. I think I've tried everything.

Yes.

Um, and, um, definitely, I mean, everything's Asana. When we first tried it, sucked. Now it's a lot better. It's more like Trello and it's got, you know, more project management and stuff.

Nice.

Um, but we use Basecamp. We went back to Basecamp. Did you really? Yeah, the primary reason it's not the greatest project management tool from a reporting perspective, like for me as an owner and seeing what's going on, but for my clients, they love it because it's really streamlined communications.

Okay.

It really solves a lot of problems for us in that, you know, he said, she said, or I sent an email, and there's all these different things and nobody's really up to speed with Basecamp, everybody's responsible for knowing what's going on. They're included or not included in the thread.

Okay.

It's always there. If we have new people joining the project, they can go to the project, everything right there. Yeah. So it's sound— it's going backwards a little bit. Like monday.com is awesome if you're a PMP project manager, but you only use 10% of the features if you're a normal agency. Yeah. And the same with ClickUp.

You know, that's my problem with ClickUp right now.

Yeah, I went ClickUp. It's beautiful. It's got all these things, but you only end up using— it's like Microsoft Word. How many people do macros in Microsoft Word? We don't, you know, kind of thing. So that's my experience.

Thank you guys for your shoutouts, and I appreciate that. Just, it just helps. We're working on improvement right now, and I really appreciate the chance to roundtable this. Thank you.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for that, Rebecca. And you're actually solving one of the other things in the poll is like, do you want to learn about new tools and networking? Like, this This is great.

No, it's really helpful. Really helpful. Thank you.

Keep them coming. Matt, what's going on, man?

Yeah, so I am actually, I was excited to join the call because I wanted to ask this question. I am trying to really level up our sales operation and it's just been me and I've, you know, as all of the founders on the call, I'm very efficient, but It's just hard for me to keep track of whom am I, you know, am I meeting, following up with, and I have it in many different places. So I'm trying to implement the CRM solution. But I'm also not looking for a lot of automation in terms of, you know, outreach and cold emails and whatnot. I'm just looking to organize my contacts, make notes. So maybe it's just like a piece of whether it's Salesforce or some other CRM platform, but I just wanted to ask what CRM you guys are using and in my situation if there's anything you could recommend for like a starter, for a starter solution.

Close.io is a really easy and simple one that I've used quite a bit.

I'm gonna talk over all of you. It's HubSpot Sales Starter. You know, I sell HubSpot for a living, but that's That's the way it goes. It's so cheap. It's $15 a month. Close.io is a $12 million company or something like that. HubSpot's $2 billion. They're investing a lot in their sales tools, but Close is exactly the same. It's a point solution. And then HubSpot, you have other things hanging off it. I can sell this all day. That's what I do.

What is it called, this program that you mentioned?

HubSpot Sales Starter. I'll drop the link to it.

That's what we use.

Yeah, it's so easy. I would literally have a call and show you what to do.

Okay.

Do you mind if I reach out?

I don't mind.

Okay.

I'm happy to help struggling agency people because I am one.

So if you get this, you know, whether it's Close or HubSpot, what you guys are talking about, this is like, for example, for HubSpot, the $25 a month, that only gives CRM. Correct.

Uh, it's a long story. I could take you offline. And Close is perfect. It does exactly the same. HubSpot's just different. It's a whole different ballgame.

I just switched to one called Client Joy.

It's interesting.

It's, it's a new, it's a new up-and-coming one. But man, all the— I, I used to implement salesforce.com. Uh, they were our client. We did all— we used to manage all their server rooms. I've done all the big CRMs. It's overkill.

Yes.

It's just like we were talking about. Most CRMs are too— there's too much there and nobody ever uses them, right? So if you're going from spreadsheets or something like that to something, what you want is more of a system than you want a CRM. And, uh, this, uh, what I like about ClientJoy, it allows you— it's It's really plain. It's like PipeDrive. We used to use PipeDrive, if you haven't heard of that. But it's managing your pipe a little bit, you know, from a flow. And so this has that built in, but it's like lead in. Did I talk to them? You know where they're at in the stage. It's like so dummy-proof. And I don't have— unlike you, I'm the bottleneck. I'm the sales, business development, and I don't trust anybody to do everything I do. It's just they're not good enough. But the guys that I do have setting up appointment stuff can follow this, where before it was too— I've tried HubSpot. I used to be a HubSpot reseller in the early days. Again, it was, it was too much upselling all the time. I didn't like, like, upgrade, upgrade, and, you know, all these things. This is just a really clean thing, and I played with a lot of them. So that's, that's— I'm just rolling it out myself. So if I could share anything, I would. Not anti-HubSpot, but It's just all these have a lot more features than sometimes you need.

I appreciate it, Kevin. Does, does anybody here actually have a sales team or, you know, beyond the founder doing the sales? I see that, I think Pac is nodding.

Yeah, I have an appointment setter. So like, let's say I'm trying to get a hold of Rebecca and she's not responding. I used to be that, that, that person who just like would send the emails and the sequences and, you know, that takes a lot of toll on you as well. Like, you know, and then let's say like, here, here's a great example. It took me 6 months to get an appointment with Walmart, somebody at Walmart, and it was like an old client, but it took me 6 months. If I did that personally, by the time I took the meeting, I would be so have some baggage, emotional baggage, because it took me 6 months to get a hold of him. Took my assistant 6 months. I just show up fresh, right? No emotional baggage, like, and no stress to me. It's like, oh, we finally got a meeting with Walmart. Walmart, done. So biggest lever is that follow-upper, that person who's gonna like run the sequence. And then when the sequence turns out, keeps hounding them, you know, at the cadence you want. Yeah, like that's the low-value work that you can either automate or delegate.

What CRM are you using, Pac?

I use HubSpot and they have a seat in, so they see all the activity, so they see all the email activity and stuff like that. You know, my assistant does.

Yeah.

Thank you.

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.

Is anybody using LinkedIn Sales Navigator for anything? Okay. Rebecca is. Beck is. All right. Awesome.

Not a CRM though.

No, it's definitely not a CRM. Prospecting tool for sure. That's what I'm using.

How much is it? How much is it?

Million dollars. Uh, yeah, it's $99 a month, but I'm on the free trial right now.

I was grandfathered in early on. I can never leave because I'm— it's $75. But if I leave, I can't ever come back for $75 a month.

Dang.

I pay a lot. I feel like I'm high because I, I have it with the HubSpot integration, which is amazing. Like I do everything in HubSpot, including connecting and messaging. It's unreal, but I have to pay via on a higher pricing plan. They should give me commission because I sell that to everybody, that integration. Love it.

You can send LinkedIn Sales Navigator messages through HubSpot?

Yes. Yes, it's so freaking amazing. I should demo it to you guys because I die. Like, people fall over when I show them. Like, I'll set up tasks and I'll set up connect tasks and they'll just be running and HubSpot will open. It'll bring up the LinkedIn record and I connect with them.

It's insane.

Wow.

I didn't know this existed. Why don't they surface this better?

I just found it.

They can't surface anything. It's too— they've done too much. They, they release too much. We have a hard time keeping up with it. Like we, on Mondays, we go over all the new feature releases. We're losing our minds.

I used to work there and I couldn't keep up with what we were doing.

Right? It's worse.

Sounds stressful. Awesome. Thanks for that, Rebecca. Thank you.