How To Scale Your Agency to $10+ Million (Proven Frameworks)
In this extensive presentation, Eric Siu walks agency owners through the complete roadmap for growing a marketing agency to $10 million+ in annual revenue. He begins by emphasizing the importance of discovering a clear "edge" or unique selling point, illustrating his own journey from a generalist SEO consultant to a SaaS‑focused marketing authority. He then details how to translate that edge into a compelling brand promise, messaging, and visual positioning, using Single Grain, ClientBoost, and VaynerMedia as case studies. The core of the talk focuses on crafting irresistible offers and pricing models: from flat‑fee and performance‑based structures to value‑based pricing that ties fees to the monetary impact of goals. Siu outlines concrete steps for client acquisition—leveraging LinkedIn, Quora, freelancer platforms, Loom outreach, and tools like BuiltWith, Crunchbase, and PredictLeads—to find where prospects hang out and deliver hyper‑relevant, low‑risk offers. He contrasts traditional funnels with a perpetual flywheel, showing how to optimize conversion rates on the website, build simple webinar‑driven funnels, and continuously reinvest revenue into content, hiring, and R&D. Retention strategies are covered next, highlighting over‑delivery, relationship capital, personalized follow‑ups (including the 9‑word email), and increasing switching costs through bundled services. Throughout, Siu intersperses actionable homework, pricing calculators, and a promotion for the Leveling Up Accelerator community. The overall narrative equips founders with a step‑by‑step framework to define their edge, position their agency, create high‑value offers, acquire clients efficiently, optimize funnels, and build a self‑reinforcing growth flywheel.
Chapters
I'm going to show you how you can grow your marketing agency to $10 million plus annually. I've been there, I've done that. I'm sharing actual experiences with you. If you stay till the very end, you're going to get more than enough. You're going to get a little special goodie. Stay till the very end. And without further ado, let's get into it so you can grow your agency. When you think about your edge, really it's what makes you stand apart from other people. Okay? What's your, you can call it your unique selling point. Like what is it that What is it where you feel like you have an advantage over other people? Okay. And when people used to say this to me early in my career, I'm like, what edge are you talking about? So when you're starting out, you might be thinking, Eric, like, I don't have an edge right now. What are you talking about? Right? But rest assured, as you continue to develop through your career, as you continue to build and build, you will naturally develop that edge. Okay. So that might seem like a cop-out answer, but let me tell you how I did it. Initially, so I never had an edge in the very beginning. And when I had started my first consultancy called Evergreen Search, Evergreen Search—I mean, I was doing everything right. I was I was really focused on SEO, but I was trying to reach out to every single company out there. So I'd work with a t-shirt company over here, a media company over here, and you know this—it was just a bunch of different things, right? It was a Mickey Mouse kind of compilation of different things. It was a mix, and it was kind of confusing because. When you don't have your— when you don't have kind of your edge defined, you're really ultimately going to serve everyone. And that's what you have to do in the very beginning, by the way. When you're starting your consultancy, you have to bring in revenue to put food on the table. As you continue to grow further and further, let's say you get to 6 figures, 7 figures or so, that's when you can just start to define who you want to work with more, right? So there's little nuances to all of this, but the point of this is that you have to develop that edge at a certain point. So for me, at about age 25 or 26 or so, I had started working in tech, and specifically I started working in SaaS. Now, I first started with my foundation around SEO. I would consider myself a pretty well-rounded marketer, but I started in SEO first. So SEO would probably be my strongest point. And then I started working in tech, which I was originally hired for this tech company, this software company, to be their head of SEO. But eventually I just took over as the head of marketing because they had faith in me, and I really thank them for that. But you can see I started with the foundation of SEO, then I started working in tech. So I started to kind of marry the two of SEO and software, right? And so from there, I became kind of known as the SEO guy in tech. And I didn't intend it that way, but it just happened to kind of develop that way, right? And so what I'll say is this, and you can see now that we have our own software, it's called ClickFlow. This is because of, it's a culmination of my background in tech, right? This is not to brag, but you can see the software tends to focus around content marketing and SEO, which is my foundation as well. So you can see my history is kind of in here too. Now, the other thing too is I, as I continue to progress in my career, I started to speak at SaaS conferences, right? So software conferences. So you can see for SaaStr over here, you know, they mentioned, I never talk of myself as, you know, an SEO firm. And by the way, Single Grain actually does a lot more paid media than SEO. But you can see here where it's highlighted. It says Eric Siu, CEO of top-tier SEO firm Single Grain. Nowhere on my website does it say it's an SEO firm, right? You can see over here for Single Grain, we drive persistent growth for remarkable companies. And so it doesn't talk about it anywhere. But right here, you can see we've worked with a couple of SaaS. Amazon, we worked on the SaaS side. They have their own SaaS. Drift, same deal here. Crunchbase would be another one. Intuit would be another one. Nextiva would be another one. Salesforce would be another one. So We have that background, okay? And so my point here is I slowly leveled up to be able to speak at the biggest SaaS conferences in the world. You can see here I'm speaking at SaaS Stock, which is another SaaS conference. This one is in Ireland. And, you know, over here I'm doing a little workshop for them too, right? And then here's the roundtable, one of the roundtables that I did for SaaStr. But my point is I started to establish my foothold over time. And even for SaaS marketing agency, we ranked number, I'm pretty sure we'll get this back to number 1, but we're number 3 for it right now. Now, again, this is all not to brag. This is just to say that your experience, your, the intersection of your experiences will define who you are and kind of what your edge is, right? So for me, again, it's starting with SEO and then, you know, you layer it on with SaaS and then that's kind of the unique ability, even though Single Grain does a lot more than that, even though I consider myself a lot more well-rounded than just doing SEO, right? I used to hate the fact that people called me just an SEO because I was like, I can do a lot more than that, right? But you have to understand that once people start to label you in a certain way, it's actually more convenient for them to, to look at you that way. And now I don't hate it as much anymore because I'm like, okay, that's a label and that's at least a conversation starter, right? And if you don't want to be labeled that way, you could certainly change that later. There are some people that are known for product-led growth. So for example, when you look at OpenView Ventures, they're really well known for talking about, you know, building products, you know, making a freemium, and then giving people access to it. And then they kind of own that, right? HubSpot owns— their edge is around inbound marketing. They own that phrase, right? Drift owns conversational marketing, right? For ClickFlow, we have content intelligence, right? And then Single Grain is, you know, you can call it a SaaS marketing agency, even though we serve e-commerce, we serve education, we can kind of, you know, That's kind of our messaging, that's our edge over there. And we do have an edge because we live and breathe that, right? And so, you know, what is that to you? And what I'm really getting at here too is that this is a narrative, and everything is a narrative. It's the story that you confidently tell other people, and for the most part, people will believe that story, right? So, you know, you can— even though your ego tells you, and I will say it's the ego, your ego tells you, and it's probably true that you're good at a lot of different things, You have to narrow it down and make it very simple for people, okay? It's just like how people look at, oh, the lizard, that's the GEICO lizard, right? Or, you know, when they look at, oh, that's the podcast guy, like when you look at John Lee Dumas, who's a friend, he's the podcast guy. When people look at Neil Patel and I, my podcast co-host, they look at us as just SEOs, right? When in fact, I would argue that we're actually better business people now than we are SEOs. So just keep that in mind. You know how perception is everything, right? So how you spin that narrative, how you tell that narrative is everything. So you know it's really important to to continue to hone that narrative and continue to develop your story, right? And here's another example that you might want to think about here too: is we talked about NFTs and how they're they're a trend, right? And and they're they're they're probably here to stay. So what if you did NFT marketing for athletes, right? What if you were the brand person for athletes? Or when you look at Jerry Maguire, he's a sports agent, right? Or when you look at Jordan Belfort, he's the penny stock guy, right? Like from The Wolf of Wall Street, right? The penny stock guy. So you gotta be very clear with who you are and what you do. Make it very simple, maybe a one-liner or so, right? So as an example, you know, and actually I'm gonna leave this example for the next video, but in the next video we're gonna be talking about the brand promise, messaging, and positioning, right? But this is an element of positioning over here, and this is your edge. At the end of the day, when it comes to marketing psychology, it's much easier for someone to just understand you as the person that does that one thing. And then once you get the conversations going, you can layer on and branch on other things, right? The key thing is to get that conversation going, build that relationship, because we talk about the importance of relationships, and then you can start to level up into other areas. Okay. So when you think about brand promise, what does that mean exactly? A lot of these concepts, they tend to be kind of theoretical. They tend to be conceptual. They tend to be vague, right? So I'm going to try to crystallize this for you a little bit. And then ultimately, when it comes to conceptual stuff, I just want you to do stuff, right? So I'm going to give you homework assignments and you better do these homework assignments, right? Not just watch these videos because watching the videos is just planting the seed to get you to take an action. Okay. So When it comes to the single grain brand promise, and let me just pull this up on my screen over here. When I think about our brand promise, it's our brand promise is to help people help brands get more customers. Okay, that's that's it's very simple. All right, and that's you know we we keep it a little broader because there's a lot of things that are that happen with marketing, right? Even though we strictly focus on three services right now: SEO, paid media, and and CRO, we might. potentially add stuff later, right? And the brand promise can evolve over time too. Now, when you think about, I'll just come back to this for a second. When you think about the brand promise around Airbnb, their brand promise is to, it's really to help people belong anywhere, okay? And it's very different than like a Marriott or very different than a Hilton, as an example, okay? And then when you think about, brand promise can also, in my opinion, also be tied to a mission as well. So when you think about Google's mission, it's to organize the world's information. When you think about Facebook's mission, it's to connect the world, right? And then SpaceX's mission is to, you know, go to Mars, okay? So, you have a lot of these, these are just, you know, highly conceptual things, and you have to start to, that's the highest level, right? You gotta bring it down a couple levels too. So, when we come back to Single Grain over here, our website, this is the messaging over here. We drive persistent growth for remarkable companies, okay? So, you know, our messaging here is we're not your traditional, Digital marketing agency. We're not satisfied with doing the bare minimum. We'll set you up with a specialist, not an account manager. So these the words here already are setting us apart from other agencies because we're talking about persistent growth, right? That that's one thing. We're going to keep driving growth. The other thing is we are only going to work with remarkable companies. So if the company is not remarkable, we're not going to work with you. Period. Okay. Now the other thing is when we say we're not your traditional agency, yeah, we don't you know on the account manager side. You know, we actually have the people that are the people doing the work. They're the ones that are the account managers, right? They're the ones that are talking to you. And we're not satisfied with doing the bare minimum, which is why we continue to get renewals, which is why we continue to get referrals, right? But, you know, that's kind of the wording there too, but, you know, that's— the messaging is also part of the positioning too. And I'm going to show you a couple other examples as well, but what I want to talk about too is also the positioning. So, the way your site is designed, The way your copy is written, okay? The type of clients that you work with—that is, that does, that does tie in directly with their positioning. So you can see here, the look that we have here is more of a premium look, okay? And we're not trying to do too much on our website. You can see the logos here that we've worked with, okay? So that adds credibility. And you can see the font that we chose, the way we're writing our copy—all that's in here, okay? And then you can see we layer in our testimonials over here, and you can see. The companies that we work with here, Lever, that's a software company. Amazon, that's a software company. Nextiva, that's a software company. Castlight Health, that's also software. That's tech as well. Sandvik is basically, that's e-commerce. Fundera is tech as well, right? So there's a lot of different examples over here. And so we're trying to convey that we're going to only work with premium brands. And a lot is in tech, a lot's in software. And we're going to call out things too. Like we're not, You know, this is kind of we're going to be in your face. Like we rank number one for keywords like marketing trends and influencer marketing, right? You know, not many other agencies can do that. So you know, we're we're willing to call out some of our successes. We're willing to call out the testimonials again. The way we've designed the website is very purposeful as well, and so we're aiming for that that premium look because we want to work with premium clients, right? And then we're also putting out content as well, and the content that we're putting out does relate with potentially getting more customers. We talk about B to B. We talk about software, and then we also talk about other areas around general marketing too, okay? So that is our positioning, our logos, our design, our content, and our pricing is not exactly cheap either, right? And we're gonna talk about how to price your offer later in this module. But I'm showing you Single Grain over here. I wanna show you some other ones too. So this is my friend's agency, ClientBoost. They do really well, and theirs is different. Their website, look, they're the performance marketing agency that moves fast and breaks things. So you know exactly what you're going to get there. And they like to move quickly. Okay. And you can see the types of companies that they worked with over here. And their, the look of their website is generally more fun. It's cartoony. Okay. And oh, guess what? They also know where we came from too. So you can see the different opportunities that they found. So this is a nice touch as well. And Look, it's a cartoony look. It's not exactly you know what we do, and they but at the same time it shows that they're fun, and it shows that you know it's actually people behind it, right? Some agencies don't do that. Okay, and so that's client boost, and they've got a different look. Okay, and it tells a different story. And when you take a look at VaynerMedia as an example, they tell a different story. So they're an actual. So the word actual—they're an actual creative and media agency that you're looking for. Meaning that most creative agencies are just, maybe they're not that good. But you can see in the background here, they're calling out all their examples. These are Super Bowl commercials, by the way, all right? And so they're telling a different story that they actually know what they're doing when it comes to creative, when it actually comes to media, okay? And so that's their brand promise, and their positioning is different than a KlientBoost or a Single Grain. And their pricing is also very premium too. Okay, and the content that they're putting out, it's really Gary Vee that's driving a lot of that. With ClientBoost, you know, they put out a lot of content for SEO purposes. Same thing with Single Grain, right? And then you have— I put out a lot of content from a YouTube perspective and also the podcast perspective as well. So everything that you do, right, how you do anything is how you do everything. And this applies to just life in general, but in this sense, same thing. How you decide to choose your logo, How you decide to design your website, all these things do factor into the long term. Now, that being said, I do want to add a caveat here. When you are starting out, a lot of this stuff like a good logo, a really good-looking website, that stuff doesn't matter as much. What matters is you getting more clients, okay? What matters is can you deliver results and can you get more clients and can you keep that flywheel moving? And then you can start to level up into doing these other things like these different websites over here, okay? Now, You have to kind of define your mission, okay? So again, I'm gonna reiterate the Single Grain mission here. Our mission on the Single Grain side is to help brands get more customers. It's very simple. That's kind of our brand promise, okay? Number 2, the messaging here on the website. Ideally, you have it on your headline on the homepage. We drive persistent growth for remarkable companies. So we've got a container in there from which we can do the work, right? It's not, we're not everything to everyone. We're not gonna take every single client. And then from there, when we start to have conversations with people, because they've interacted with the website already, when they talk to us, we're not gonna just charge you $500 a month. Get ready for us to charge you a percentage of ad spend, get ready for us to charge you at least 10, 20, 30 grand a month, and that's how we do it, right? And I'm not saying it was like this the whole time. You've gotta evolve, you gotta level up, right? Like I said earlier, we're gonna talk about your website a little later, but to get to this website, it took us time, and we're about to go through a redesign too. So, I'm gonna talk about a really easy way to get a website going, and then kind of a more complex way, like what we're doing right now. But there are levels to everything and you have to decide, you know, you have to be very intentional about how you go about your brand promise, your messaging, and your positioning, right? So everything you do ties in with your positioning. In the agency world, the business model is already established. It's not like you're building a brand new tech startup, right? You're building new AI technologies or anything like that where you might have to do customer development. You already have proof that the business model is working because you have competitors out there. Now, all you have to do is stand out from your competitors. Now, that's easier said than done, but we're going to show you how you can do that, okay? So, before I start going into all the tools that you can use to help you find customers, it's, A, it's important to understand that there's already a market that's available for the most part, unless it's a brand new service. But if it's something that Well, let's use NFTs as an example. Okay, so NFTs are this newer technology in the world of blockchain, and a lot of new people are starting to mint NFTs, and these are known as digital collectibles. Now, I believe that will become a service and more people are willing to pay for that, right? Because they, they need the work done and they don't know what to do. They don't have the expertise, so they need an agency to go out there and do that, right? Same thing with influencer marketing. So As long as people need help doing something, there's always going to be agencies. So you don't necessarily need to worry about that. What you do need to worry about though is if the service itself is actually trending downwards, right? So if you were in a business that was helping people with newspaper advertising, that is trending downwards now, right? Because newspapers, everyone's going digital, right? Or if you had someone where you— something where you were repairing public phones, public telephones, nobody really uses those anymore because we all have smartphones, right? So you have to also look at the trends there. Now, when it comes to figuring out how to go about finding your customers, I'll tell you what I did initially. Now, in the early days of, well, starting an agency, back when I— before I had Single Grain, I had a company called Evergreen Search, right? And within Evergreen Search, the way I found my customers was by going to different job boards that were out there, And these were more kind of freelancer boards, right, where I can, I can kind of bid on people's projects. And in addition to that, I was also putting out content. In addition to that, I was also putting out videos, okay? So I'm— this is just really much more of an introduction video here, but I just want to plant the seed for a couple of concepts here that can really get you going on finding customers, okay? What really matters at the end of the day when you're looking for customers is, A, you have to know where they're hanging out, okay? Just because I recommend a couple tools for you, or I tell you what I did, doesn't necessarily mean that your customers are hanging out there. So you need to understand the psychology of your customer and where they're hanging out. So as an example here, when I think about the world of software or SaaS, I'm— I have a foothold established in SaaS, but let's say I didn't have a foothold there. What I would do is I would go out there to people that are hanging out on LinkedIn. Okay, and then I would message these people on LinkedIn because when it comes to B2B, when it comes to SaaS, B2B is business to business when it comes to software. A lot of these people are hanging out on LinkedIn. Now, not only that, I can't just reach out and say, hey, I have this agency. Do you want to do work with us? Right? Your offer needs to be very compelling and it needs to get to the point. Okay, so an example of this might be, hey, we do software paid advertising. Okay, so we run paid advertising for software companies. Okay. That's okay. It's okay in the sense that you do paid advertising, which everyone does, okay? But you do it for SaaS companies, so that's a little niche down a little bit, right? And we'll talk about that in a future video, but that's the first step. Now, the second step is how do you make that offer compelling? So the next thing might be, oh, well, you know, we do paid advertising for SaaS companies, and you don't need to pay us for the first 3 months or so. So that's a little more compelling now. Okay, so that's good. Now what's much better would be, hey, we do paid advertising for SaaS companies on a performance basis only, meaning that you don't pay until we perform. How does that sound? Okay, so that offer sounds a lot better now. Okay, and what's even better than that? The best version would be, hey, we'll tell you what, if we do that for you, if we do pay for performance, you don't pay until we perform. Tell you what, if we don't perform over a 3-month period, we won't even pay you. The time, okay? We will even pay you ten grand. We'll pay you fifteen grand for not performing. So that's even more risk on your side, right? But you're you're making your offer so compelling that people can't help but to say yes, or maybe I'll take a look at this. Maybe I'll consider it, right? So your offer matters a lot. That's the first thing, okay? Second thing is you have to know where your people are hanging out. You shouldn't try to hit all the channels just because people are talking about TikTok. People are talking about you know Quora. They're talking about YouTube. They're talking about Pinterest. You should focus on where are you most likely to get people to respond, and then reach out with a very compelling offer, okay? So, in terms of validating your offer, you're going to have to continue to test your offer. But in terms of validating your business, are there customers? There definitely are customers out there. The fact that you have competitors out there shows that you have customers, okay? That there is a market for this. Now, I want to show you a couple of tools that work for me. I want to go back to the early days, and tell you what worked for me and how I got retainers. I'm not going to say this is going to work for you today because some of these channels might not work as well anymore. But my point is, I want to establish the fact that you have to try, okay? You have to try different things. And by testing a lot of different things, I found my groove. And some— by the way, some of the things I might have tested before that didn't work, they might work today, okay? So the name of the game is that you might— you have to be open-ended, you have to be very flexible, And you can't be pigheaded. You can't be dogmatic about your views, okay, when it comes to this stuff. Now, if you look at my screen here, this is not what I was looking for here, but basically I'm on Quora, okay? So on Quora here, I used to— this is maybe, it's got to be 10 years ago now. I was using Quora and I was responding to people that were writing search engine optimization type of questions, okay? And I remember that I responded to one question And one person ended up reaching out to me saying that, hey, he found me from Quora. And from that, he— we ended up doing a deal where he would pay me $30,000 a month to do SEO for him, to do SEO for his website, okay? And that was good, because I was basically, you know, I was leveraging kind of the growth of Quora, and Quora is a lot more saturated now, but the foundational piece here is understanding that you're being helpful, you are helping in public, Okay, and people are reaching out to you whether you're helping on Twitter, whether you're helping out on LinkedIn, whether you're helping out on YouTube, you are helping out. Okay, and this is something that we'll talk about later. Now, Quorum was great. And the other thing I want to call out too is back in the day, I used a tool called— or before it became Upwork, it used to be called Elance. Okay, so you can see here upwork.com. And the beauty of this is that people are looking for— people are looking to hire freelancers. Okay, so if you're a graphic designer, you can use a service like Dribbble as well. So there's Dribbble, there's Behance.net, okay? So there's Behance.net, these are basically sites where you can put up your portfolio. Dribbble is over here as well, these are 2 sites where you can put up your portfolio. Upwork is great if you're a developer, Upwork's great if you're a marketer, if you're a salesperson, if you're looking to help with influencer marketing stuff, that's also available as well. You can also use a website like Toptal, okay? So Toptal.com, just, there's a lot of these freelancer platforms out here, there's also Freelancer.com. The key here is to spread as much as you can. Okay. The other thing I'll call out too is that there might be companies that are looking to hire people. You can reach out to these companies because they're looking to hire people and say, hey, I know you're looking for someone full-time, but I can cover exactly what you're doing. And by the way, I've actually created a couple of things for you already just to front-load the work. Like that's kind of showing you already did the work for them. That's a really good offer, right? So you got to constantly be thinking about how can I craft such a no-brainer offer that people want to work with me? Because that's what it's going to take to stand out in the early days. Now later, you might kind of taper down the offer a little bit and make it simpler where you're not losing as much margin. But in the very early days, you got to sacrifice as much as you can, right? So coming back to Upwork, when it used to be Elance, I actually was doing freelancing for this one client and they actually ended up offering me about $250,000 for a full-time job and 5% profit sharing. That company does You know, they do well. They do about $20 million a year right now. And you know what I would say to that is I'm glad I didn't take it, but those offers will pop up. I mean, $30,000 kind of contracts, retainers, that type of stuff. So these marketplaces, don't look down on them. They— I mean, they're a very good way. The demand's already there, and you can satisfy that demand by— you can fulfill that demand for people. Okay, the other thing I want to call out here is Loom. Okay, so loom.com, back in the day, I did not have the ability, I didn't have the ability to make screencasts very easily. So, there weren't tools like Loom available, loom.com, that gives you the ability to easily make screencasts and they'll copy a link for you and you can share those links with other people. The beauty of that now is you can reach out to other people saying, hey, I found a couple things that are wrong with your website over here. Let's say you're doing conversion rate optimization, maybe you're doing SEO. Whatever it is exactly, I found a couple things that are wrong with your website, and here are three things. Let me know if you'd like to talk about it. Okay, so that's another example of you frontloading the work. Okay, and now Loom makes it really easy. Back in the day, I had to record these fifteen twenty minute things. I had to upload them as well. It just took forever. Loom makes it a lot easier. Okay, so the final thing I want to call out here—actually, there's a couple things I want to call out—is. I remember when I had someone reach out to work for me. His name is Raghav. He's now the director of brand strategy for Gary Vaynerchuk. Okay, those of you that know Gary Vaynerchuk, he's got a $200 million plus agency. So they do pretty well. I'd recommend taking a look at what they do. But when Raghav reached out to me initially, he wrote an 8,000-word blog post and talked about what he would do. And that stood out to me. So how do you stand out? A good offer will stand out. You doing an analysis will stand out. Okay, you have a lot of different options that are available. You just got to actually put in the work, right? So coming back to my screen over here, we called out a couple different tools that you can use. And you know, again, you have to figure out where your people are hanging out first and then kind of, you know, work from there. But LinkedIn is definitely a tool that you can use. You can reach out to people, you can sign up for the premium version and reach out to people, but make it compelling. Don't just say I have an agency and I want you to work with me. That's me, me, me, me, me. How can you make it them, them, them, them, them, and then bring it back to you. Okay. And there's another tool here called BuiltWith. If you are technology focused, let's say you're a developer, you're looking to work with sites that have Shopify as an example, you can do that. BuiltWith will show you websites that are using Shopify. Okay. Shopify, you download list of all websites using Shopify. You can kind of filter from there. Right. And we talked about LinkedIn. If you're in B2B, Not even B2B, but you can use predictleads.com. They'll help you find company intelligence data. Maybe a certain company hired, you can find companies that have just recently hired VP of sales or VPs of marketing or VPs of design, whatever it is exactly, okay? And then Crunchbase, if you're in B2B, look at this old picture of me. But you can see, okay, based on this week in Crunchbase, 451 funding rounds, bunch of acquisitions that happened. If a company raised money recently and they hired people recently, they're probably looking to start working with people, okay? Meaning that they're looking to make changes, looking to make changes with their marketing department and all that. So that's all, that's all available, right? Through Crunchbase. So there's a lot of different tools here. I would recommend, highly recommend that you rewatch this video and/or come back to this video later because there's a lot that we covered here. Don't try to do too much at once, okay? Focus first on, on where your audience is hanging out, and then you can start to think about, you know, how you might want to reach these people, right? But it's one step at a time. I'm giving you a lot of information, but I want you to only act on one thing right now, which is thinking about where your audience is hanging out. Hey, so I wanted to take a quick break to tell you about the Leveling Up Accelerator. So that is basically a group of like-minded agency owners such as yourself that want to take their business to the next level. So they want to take it to 6 figures, right? And maybe above that. So that's what this group is for. And in the group, well, you could just learn more about it. Just go to levelingup.com/accelerator to learn more, or you can click on the link below. And without further ado, back to the content. This is what it's going to take to set your consultancy or your agency or your coaching business apart from everyone else's out there, right? And so when you think about your offer, it is by far next to pricing. It's one of the biggest levers that you can pull. Okay, so I'm going to draw your attention over here to my my iPad of truth and justice over here. And so when you think about your offer, what is everyone else offering? So I am going to offer. I'm going to talk about this in the context of single grain. Okay, so on single grain paid media, virtually everybody. Is doing this $5K or 15% type of thing, okay? Meaning that if a client's spending $100,000, then we will collect $15,000, okay? Which is a nice outcome, but the problem with that is if you're literally offering what everyone else is offering and you're starting out, how are you going to stand out from other people? Because you haven't built the relationships that, for example, a Single Grain or a Client Boost or Neil Patel Digital might have built up. You haven't built up that goodwill yet, right? So The way you can stand out in the very beginning, bar none, is by having a really good offer, okay? So, if everyone's offering this, okay, and then you come in and you try to offer this too, because, okay, so, you know, let's just do this. On the single ring side, we have this, plus we have relationships, okay? And plus, we have SEO, right? So the relationships help with referrals, the relationships help with upsells as well, SEO helps with more leads, and then we have our other content too, okay? So we have these other engines over here, but you do not have these engines, okay? So, you know, if we have this, our offer is actually, you know, combined with all the other elements that we have. It's not exactly goes into our offer, but we have all these other elements that help lift us. If you don't have that, you cannot afford to charge the same thing. And so what you could do in the very beginning is you might say, okay, this is that single-grain paid media, you, you might say, okay, instead of $5K or 15%, right, I am going to eliminate— I'm going to eliminate the percentage, okay, and we're going to do a flat fee. Or you can go even lower and say, you know what, let's just go do $2.5K, okay? And that's the example that we shared earlier. But what ends up happening is you end up undercutting yourself, okay, because you're fighting a price war. And you ideally don't want to do this. This is certainly something you can do to put food on the table in the very beginning. I'm not going to dismiss this strategy completely, but what you could be doing long-term is figuring out how you can price based on value, okay? And we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about it in the next video, but think about how can you price on value, and that has to do with the conversation that you're going to have, right? But right now, you can see with this offer over here, this is not exactly the best offer right now because it doesn't stand out, right? This one over here, okay, maybe it does like, you know, we'll give it one checkmark, okay? But what would really make it stand out is if you offer, maybe you do $2.5K, and then you offer an SEO audit, okay? And then you offer a CRO audit, all right? And maybe you freaking fly to the customer to do a 1-day strategy session, okay? 1-day strategy session, okay? And maybe you offer, you say, hey, If you don't get value in the first month, money-back guarantee, okay? So now, instead of them looking at, okay, working with a single brand as an example, where they're not gonna get this stuff, it's just $5K or 15%, and, you know, take it or leave it. Now you're gonna offer for $2,500, for $2,500, you will offer an SEO audit, you will offer a CRO audit, you offer a 1-day strategy session where you're gonna pay the expenses and fly out over there, And you're gonna offer money-back guarantee, 30-day money-back guarantee. 30-day money-back guarantee, I couldn't even say it, right? And so, look, this might be a loss leader for you, but you know what? Your offer is so damn good, how can anyone refuse that, right? And maybe you started off with $0 first, because what if it's a huge client like Amazon, for example, or let's say it is a dream, you know, your dream football team or whatever, okay? And they wanna work with you. Right? This is a way to get in because they see everyone has put in the time and effort before. They've all started from the bottom. People respect that, right? And so your offer now, this one over here, let's give it 3 checkmarks. It's a lot more compelling than what Single Grain has over here, okay? So that's how, I mean, you bundle in a bunch of things and you figure out how can you make it such a no-brainer offer that they'd be a fool to not take it, right? So you have to think again, what is everyone else offering right now? So in this example, you can see Single Grain is offering that, and I would tell you most paid media agencies, that's how they operate, okay? So how do you bundle a bunch of things together? Okay, we can talk about pay for performance, all that stuff later, we can talk about value-based pricing, but we're talking about what are you actually gonna bundle inside of this, okay? Now, if you're doing design services as an example, so let's go over here, design services, okay? Maybe instead of just saying, you know, we're going to do a, we're going to do a web design for you, okay? Let's say, you know, redesign for you. Maybe you offer that CRO audit, okay? And then maybe you offer, maybe you offer a, let's say, you offer a strategy session as well, okay? And then you can talk about a brand strategy session, okay? There you go. Brand strategy session or design strategy session, okay? And that's worth maybe $10,000 or $50,000 or so, whatever you want to price it at, okay? But when you do that, again, what can you bundle in to make it stand out from other people, okay? And so, you know, the other heuristic that you can use here is let's say if you were to, let's say your price right now is $10,000, okay? Right? So that's your first, that's the first level. I don't know why that just happened, let's do that. That's that's your first offer, and then let's say if you're to ten extra prices, so now it's a hundred thousand dollar offer. Okay, now for ten thousand dollars, if we think about let's think about this consulting school program as an example. Okay, so let's say you're in coaching, right? And so for consulting school, for ten thousand dollars, maybe you get one virtual session. Okay, and maybe you get you get level one. And you get level 2, which is the more advanced session to help people get to 7 figures, right? So you got one virtual session, one level 1, level 2, right? And then maybe you get, you know, one group call. I'm just making things up right now, okay? Now, if you were to charge 10x, what would you offer here? Okay, so maybe it's one live mastermind, okay? And I would argue maybe even 2. So 2 live masterminds a year. Okay, and maybe you get 2 virtual sessions, okay? And these are group sessions. All right, you get level 1, you get level 2, and you get a— let's say you get a— you get to spend 1 day with Eric, okay? 1 day with Eric, okay? Now, what else can I throw in here? I can throw in, you know, ClickFlow, okay? That's our software, okay? I can throw in one day to shadow agency executives, right? So if you were— if your agency is doing, let's say, 7 figures or so, maybe it's doing $1 million, $2 million, $3 million or so, and you put up this investment of $100K, do you think it will yield you more than $1 million, like 10x? Okay, answer is probably yes. If not, you're not going to do this offer, right? And so now you look at this, it's like, okay, How can you take this heuristic and apply it to what you're doing? So you're charging $1,000 right now. If you 10x your prices to $10,000, what else can you throw in there to make it such a no-brainer offer, right? And so, you know, to give you another example, or a couple examples here, let's say, here's an example of a bad offer, okay? So a bad offer would be, you know, we do paid media, Sorry, it's raining over here too. For all companies, and you know, at $5K or 15%. Okay, so that's a bad offer. Let me tell you why. Because one, it's the same price as everyone else, and B, you're offering for all companies out there. So how are you— how are you gonna stand out? Because the name of the game here is Marketing psychology right here is how do you stand out? Okay, now a good offer would be this. So a good offer would be we do paid media for SaaS companies. Okay, so now you're niching down a little bit. And not only that, for free for month 1. Okay, that offer is better now because you're— it's compelling because You are targeting a very specific niche, and free for a month sounds pretty damn good versus like you know they have to go to other people. All right, so better would be this. Better would be the same offer but for three months. Okay, so for free but for three months. Okay, that's pretty good. Pretty good. Okay, now best would be this, and we're going to talk about this later. Pay for performance. Okay, so you don't pay us until we perform, and we only do it for SaaS companies, that's it. And we only take on a select amount of clients per year. Maybe we only take on 6 clients per year. That's it, and we're picking you. Do you want to do it or not? You don't pay us until we perform. How does that sound? And so that is, you're going to get people's attention because people now, maybe you've worked with all these amazing SaaS companies, they know who you are, you're vetted, you're credible, and I mean, this is a no-brainer offer. Why would they not work with— why would they not at least give you a shot for a month, 2 months, 3 months or so, right? And so that's the best offer. And bear in mind, again, we got to be realistic here. If you're starting out right now, you cannot say, I'm just gonna do pay for performance, okay? Maybe, maybe you might say— you might test it out on 1 or 2 clients out of a portfolio of 10 clients because you want to de-risk yourself, right? You want to say 1 or 2, this is a stock portfolio, this is how we're gonna do it, okay? Okay, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but I just want to tell you that, you know, the— what you layer in into what you bundle into your offer, that's a piece of it, but also the terms of your offer are very important as well. Okay. So there are a lot of different ways to price, and I'm gonna go back to my iPad of truth and justice over here. And so When you think about how to price in general, you have a lot of different options. I'm going to talk about how we price and then how you might be able to kind of draw inspiration from it. So on the Single Grain side, so Single Grain pricing, how we price when it comes to running, let's say paid media, we talked about that in the last one. So this one's easy to start with. And we charge $5K at the minimum or 15%. And we require a budget of at least, I think it's actually now $50K per month. Right? So $50K per month budget, and that's how it works. So that's how we price that. And when it comes to SEO, we charge at least $10,000 a month because we do have hard costs on our side. And in general, we kind of map out, you know, what our costs are internally before we price this out. Generally, we try to go for at least a 60% margin or so on this one, gross margins, because we are using a lot of different other providers out there. Okay. So at least $10,000, and then you know goes up to you know $50,000 plus per month. All right, so that's SEO and conversion rate optimization. This is more of we we kind of we have different packages. We have different levels here, right? So you know we might do a small, medium, large starting at $5,000. So small might be you know you know we'll just do it like this: five K, and then you know we do medium that would be let's call it ten K, and then large that might be. You know, $20K plus. Okay, we just signed a client recently, and I believe it's it's it's $33 grand a month or something like that. Okay, so CRO, you know, we just kind of price it like that. And then, you know, within each one we have different deliverables, right? And we've talked about different deliverables in the past. You might offer like this one, you know, one test per month, two tests, and then this one you maybe you get like three tests a month, right? And I'm just making stuff up over there. You might know. You're I mean your deliverables are obviously going to be different. Okay, if you're doing like landing pages, things like that, if you're doing designs, how many revisions are you offering? You're going to have to figure out what the key value points, the key lever points are, and then you have to package them accordingly. But you know something like paid media you can charge on a percentage, and then same thing with SEO as well. And we've talked about performance, which will come will come to to later. But you know what I would challenge you too is not just to look at what other agencies are doing. You can certainly. Secret shop other agencies, meaning that you can call them and figure out the pricing, you can act like a customer. But that, you know, I think the problem with that strategy is that you're kind of lagging behind other people. And that's fine if you're starting out, but if you want to get ahead of the curve, what you got to figure out is how you can capture the most value by asking value-based questions, okay? So value-based pricing. Let's say I'm on a sales call with you. So on a sales call, you know, we might be talking and I'm gonna ask about your goals, right? So, you know, on a sales call, it's important to ask about the goals because it's You know, budget authority needs timing, and this is something we'll come back to later. But needs, okay? You're defining what their needs are. Okay, what are your goals exactly? Okay, so I'm gonna write this down. So, you know, what are your goals? Okay, and they might say, you know, we want, you know, 100 more sales per month. Okay, and then you might ask, okay, Mr. Customer, what is the value? Of this goal, okay? And actually, even before that, you know, what I would say is, is this. So you might do this over here. Let me just move this down. And so we come back, we say, okay, what is your conversion rate? What is your AOV, your average order value? And then the traffic to your website right now, okay? So I might say traffic's $100K a month, AOV is $500. And then conversion rate is, let's call it 1%, okay? And so the value of this goal, they might say, you know, I don't know, but you have the numbers now, okay? So if I were to come back, if we were to say they want 100 more sales, okay? So 100 more sales, and you know, average order value is $500. I mean, because the conversion rate's 1% already, if we're able to double the conversion rate to, let's say this is a CRO type of thing, okay? If we can double the conversion rate from 1% to 2%, that just basically means we're gonna drive $50,000 in more sales, 'cause it's just double this, right? So if we just double this, it's $100,000, right? So the value of hitting this goal is an additional $50,000 per month. So we know, because we ask good questions, that this is now $50K per month, okay? So, you know, we're talking about CRO right now basically, and we say, okay, Mr. Customer, So if we are, we can guarantee that we're able to raise the conversion rate from 1% to 2% and add $50,000 in additional revenue, so that's $600,000 a year, would you pay us $60,000? Okay, so on $600K a year, so 10% equals $60K, okay? And they'll say, yes, of course, right? And you know, because you're so good at CRO that the value, the odds of you hitting that are 100%, basically. Okay, if you want to be conservative, you can call it 50%. So you would just take $60,000 times 50%, which means $30,000. Okay, so let's be conservative here. So $60K times 50% equals $30K. And then what you would do now is you would divide. Okay, you would you would divide the the $30K over a 12-month period. Okay, so I believe that's $2,500. So $30K. Divided by 12 equals 2,500 a month. Okay, so your your highest tier retainer. Okay, so your large retainer is going to be that amount. Okay, so I'm oversimplifying this, and we can make the numbers bigger to help you to show you how much more value you can capture. But I'm just going to stick with this example for now. So let's say you're large. So large would be. $2.5K, okay? And your medium would be half of that, okay? So $1.25K. And then your small would be, your small would be, let's just call it like $500, okay? So now you have value-based pricing, you're capturing the value here, all right? Now, if the numbers were just a little bigger, let's say they wanted 1,000 more sales, okay? Then all of a sudden, the $2.5K, becomes, well, instead of $2,500, it becomes $25,000, okay? And your medium becomes $12,500. So instead of just saying we charge $5,000 a month or whatever, you're actually now capturing more value. And what ends up happening here is most people end up picking the medium level, okay? And just, you gotta think about this again, okay? So just, I'm gonna recap it for you. What are the goals? What are the values of reaching that goal? And then internally you do a calculation with your team or yourself Saying, okay, the odds of us hitting this is 50%. So that's what, that's what the highest tier is going to be priced at, you know, 50% times the value of the goal. We're gonna divide it over 12 months, and then we have a small, medium, and large, and let them choose. And you can bundle different deliverables in there. Okay. And then that's how you can craft a value-based offering that makes sense. Okay. In the last video, we talked about the offer. Now we're talking about the pricing here. Okay. So this is how to price based on value. You know, we talked about the different retainers and things like that. You can charge hourly. I'm gonna leave hourly alone for the sake of this because I'm trying to get you to the 6 figures and then the 7 figures a lot faster. If you only charge hourly, you're gonna struggle, bar none. You cannot sell your time for money, okay? We talked about the wealth ladder earlier. No way you can do that. That's not healthy for you. You're not gonna be able to scale your business that way, okay? I don't care. Like, if there's anything at all that you get from this video alone, you cannot charge long-term. You cannot charge based on hours. I've done that in the beginning. It's painful, okay? You cannot sell your time for money. It's just not the way to scale, all right? So small, medium, large, and then we're gonna eventually come back to pay for performance again, but I want you to again think of your pricing, the way you price as a stock portfolio, right? The different business models that you have. Maybe some for pay for performance, maybe one for kind of the standard retainers like this, but value-based pricing, value-based questions. Know the right questions to ask, let people talk, just shut up, and you will be fine, all right? Hey, so I wanted to take a quick break to tell you about the Leveling Up Academy. Accelerator. So that is basically a group of like-minded agency owners such as yourself that want to take their business to the next level. So they want to take it to 6 figures, right, and maybe above that. So that's what this group is for. And in the group, well, you could just learn more about it. Just go to levelingup.com/accelerator to learn more, or you can click on the link below. And without further ado, back to the content. I want to walk through kind of how our funnel works and how you can build a very simple funnel for yourself where it's not super complex, right? I'm going to show you how we do it right now where it's a little more advanced and how you can do it, okay? So you get kind of 2 perspectives here, because perspective is what it's all about, all right? So let's go back to looking at the Single Grain website. So I want to give you a quick recap over here, and I'm going to kind of draw out what our flywheel looks like, okay? So this is our website, you land on the homepage, and the whole idea here is because these buttons over here contrast, our job is to get you to fill out a free consultation, okay? And not a lot of people click that button, okay? So, you know, free consultation, get started in 1 minute, and, you know, what's your name over here, name, email, phone number, role, monthly marketing budget, and website URL. That's what we're looking for. And the reason we have a 2-step form is because if they fill out this part but not the next part, we at least have their information, okay? So, that's what our funnel looks like. And when you have Google Analytics, which is completely free, you can look at our site over here, Again, the number of people reaching our homepage is really not that much. Okay, so 150,000 people, which is a good amount, but it's not the majority of the people that hit our site, right? So of the 150,000 people here, 32% proceeded to services. And you can see of, you know, some more people came in and, you know, 4 people left and then 32% proceeded to fill out the form, okay? Which is a good amount of people that actually fill out the form. So 89% of people that see that form, so 89% of people that see this form over here, they will actually complete it, which means we have a pretty good conversion rate there. And so that leads to this 0.11% funnel conversion rate on all the traffic that we have, right? Which in the grand scheme of things is not bad. But the biggest issue is this one over here. You can see such a big drop-off over here. Even if we can get this to just 1% or so, that's gonna be a massive difference, right? And so if we can somehow raise this, then you know we're going to get a lot more leads. Okay, so you know one divided by point zero two is fifty, right? So the fifty x, right? So you know can we get maybe it's not I mean it would be fifty x if we can get it to one percent or so. But let's just be conservative. Let's say we can get it to you know let's get it five x more. So if we get to five x more. If we can get this conversion rate over here, this one over here, 0.02, 5x more, which is the 0.1% overall, we can get 810 free consultations. So you see the power of conversion rate optimization over here, okay? And what can we do with our website? We can, on our blogs, on other areas, maybe we can add more call to actions to the free consultation. We can remove a lot of the distractions and just focus on free consultations, and I'm sure we can get this a little higher, okay? And we can get more leads coming in. And if we get more leads, that means we get more revenue for the business, which means we can hire more people, which means we can do more with the revenue that we have, okay? So that's one way to think about your funnel, just understanding the different drop-off points. We've talked about this earlier, but now you can actually visualize this by seeing when you go into Google Analytics, you go into goals, you go into funnel visualization, you can see what's going on, okay? Now, you know, earlier in the last video we talked about, using Notion and Super.so, using the templates and combining them. And then, you know, building out like an agency site like this. And, you know, you'll have some analytics to take a look at, right? They might not be as sophisticated as this, but you at least should be able to have a sense of how people are converting, okay? So when you think about the funnel, that's how it looks. Now, how we do it, Now let me move over to the iPad over here. So our flywheel, single grain flywheel, and this is for 3.6, okay? So our flywheel really, the way it works is like this, okay? So because we're based on leveling people up, we start with content up here, okay? So we educate people. And through that, we are able to then, through the content, then we are able to serve people based on their needs. Right? So serve the audience, okay? So whether it's through marketing services or, you know, marketing software, whatever it is exactly, we can serve the audience that way, okay? And then what happens is once we're able to— once we're able to serve the audience, well, then what happens is we can hire more people, okay? We can hire more people, and then we can do more R&D, and then we go back to content again, right? So R&D could be, you know, buying other companies or doing research on new products or building new products or even just hiring more people, right? Or investing back into our own people. So this is a flywheel that just continues to repeat over and over. So also, it's also important for you to think about, okay, so you have, this is what a cycle looks like, right? So this is a cycle, right? Or a flywheel, whatever you want to call it, okay? It continues in perpetuity. Okay, now a funnel is like this, right? A funnel actually ends. There's an endpoint to a funnel, okay? You can see what happens there. So what you eventually want to do is you want to create a flywheel. We've talked about the importance of SEO, we talked about the importance of content marketing, and we're going to go into even more detail later. But you do content, you serve the audience, you hire, R&D, and it just keeps repeating over and over, okay? Now a funnel, you might have someone come to, you know, the homepage, And then they go to the services page, and then they fill out a form, all right? But what happens after that, right? You want the cycle to continue, but, you know, I'm giving you this concept right now that's kind of beside the point, but I just want to plant the seed for you over here. So, going back to funnels again, that's what we look like right now, but in terms of how we'd optimize, if I was starting right now, in terms of how I would optimize, I'll go back and use Notion, and what I would do is I would build a simple website. You can use you can use Unbounce for this. You can use ClickFunnels for this as well, right? And what I would do is I would build a webinar. Okay, so I'm going to come back to this over here. So let us say I'm going to draw a new funnel over here. So maybe simple funnel. For starters, okay? So let's say you're starting out right now. So what I would do is for this funnel, what I would do is I would drive traffic in first, right? So I would drive paid media traffic in, all right? And a lot of you found this program through paid media, by the way. So you drive paid media traffic in first, okay? You have a good creative, good offer. If your offer is really good, your creative doesn't even need to be that good because your offer is so good, right? Like I'm gonna do your work for free, or I'm gonna fly to you, that type of stuff, right? So paid media, and then what happens is you drive them to a webinar, right? Which is, most of you have seen the webinar for consulting school, that's how you came through. So you do a webinar, all right? And then after the webinar, it goes straight to a call, right? And so they can book the call using a tool like Calendly, all right? And for the webinar, you can just record it, right? You can just record it, And then put it onto Wistia, okay? And then over here it might be Facebook ads plus Google, right? And then what happens after the call is you convert them into a client, right? And then hopefully afterwards you're asking them for referrals, right? But it's super simple here. Look, you run ads, you run it to a— you run it to your— it could be your Notion website or to your Unbounce website, and I'll put that up there. To put this over here. So, you know, site tools. So we can use Notion plus Super. And we can also use Unbounce. We can also use ClickFunnels. Okay, so you have a lot of options available to you. And then all you would do, I mean, coming back to this again, is you don't need to, you don't need all the bells and whistles, you could, you have a really good offer, and you send some ads. And you drive them to this webinar, you have them book a call, and then before you know it, boom, all of a sudden you have maybe 5 clients, 10 clients or so, right? And then your business is moving, the flywheel is beginning to move, okay? So you don't need to overcomplicate this, you don't need to go crazy like what I've shown you with our funnel, but what you do need to do is you do need to track, you do need to continue to talk to customers, you do need to continue to refine your offer, right? You do need to continue to do conversion rate optimization, and You're just going to keep tweaking. You're going to keep tweaking until this thing is really humming along, and then you're just going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. Why do you want to retain clients for the long term? Well, when you think about your— any type of consulting business or agency business, if you're not delivering, the client's going to leave. And the whole name of the game here is ideally you have some type of recurring service, okay? So the client's paying you monthly instead of project-based, right? And you can certainly productize your services to do that. And that's something we talked about in a previous video. Now, there are a couple of things that you can do to retain customers for the long term. And what I would say is one thing you can do is we've talked about the importance of having an email list or perhaps an SMS list, or however you stay in contact with your customers, think about how you can continually provide value to them. Okay, so one example of this would be if you have an email list, well, when you're emailing, you want to aim for a 4 to 1 ratio. So what does that mean exactly? That means for every 4 value-added emails that you send, you have 1 ask, right? So, you know, Gary Vee has a saying around jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? So in this case, it'd be jab, jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? So you want to, you want to deposit more into the bank than you're withdrawing, okay? That's how you got to look at the art of kind of, you know, retaining a customer or continuing to hold that relationship, okay? And so, how can you retain that relationship? It's by creating content. So that entire content flywheel that we talked about, that framework around, you know, if you're good at LinkedIn, write on LinkedIn. If you're good at Instagram, write on Instagram. If you're good at Twitter, write on Twitter, right? If you're good at podcasts, do that. But then eventually, you want to bring people back to your email list, and then you can continue to keep in touch with them. Or your SMS list, whatever it is exactly, okay? So that's how people can continue to remember you, and that's how you can continue to stay top of mind. Because if you, people are busy. If you're not constantly staying top of mind with at least maybe one touchpoint per week on like, hey, here's some interesting things I found, or here's some content that we put out that might be helpful for you, then people will forget you, okay? You don't want people to forget you. And you wanna, and the way you can, again, continue to keep people top of mind or keep people remembering you is to be top of mind by producing that content and being helpful, right? So that's the name of the game here. And then for maybe every 4 asks or every 8 asks or so— sorry, every 4 pieces of content or every 4 times that you help someone, you can ask for something, okay? So you can say, hey, maybe check out our webinar over here, or maybe check out this offer we have, or maybe you can book a call, a strategy call. We're taking some more clients right now, right? You can definitely do that. Sometimes you can share case studies when you're keeping in touch with people, right? So that's what you can do in terms of nurturing a relationship and nurturing your list. What I would also say too is when you're thinking about email in general, when you're thinking about people that you've spoken to on a sales call, a lot of times people aren't necessarily ready to take an action. And so what you want to do is put people on the email list and nurture them. And maybe every now and then you're checking in with them, okay? Because John Maxwell says that the fortune is in the follow-up, okay? A lot of deals that you're gonna do in the future, you gotta keep track of people, right? And we're gonna talk about kind of, you know, sales enablement and different tools that you can be using for that later. But you gotta keep in mind, if you're not following up with people, and then we're gonna be talking about like different follow-up frameworks, you are gonna be missing a lot of money. You're gonna be leaving a lot of money on the table, okay? So one of the key things you can do is when you have an email list, or maybe you have someone's phone number, is you can follow up with them every 90 days or so. And this is something I recommend everyone use, okay? And this is known as the 9-word email. And what the 9-word email is, and this is popularized by a copywriter, his name is Dean Jackson. And, you know, his example of this was when he had a customer that they sold yachts and people would you know, sign up for the newsletter on the yacht website, and every 90 days or so he'll just reach out and say, hey, um, are you still interested in a yacht? Right? And then maybe the headline, the subject line for that, that email would be, still interested? Question mark, right? So when you, when you ask a question, you're evoking curiosity. And when it's a simple one-sentence or two-sentence email, that's what they call the 9-word email, you're able to elicit a good response rate there. And oftentimes you're going to be— you're going to see people that are like, Hey, I wasn't ready before, but now I'm ready to talk. Okay, so the key thing here again is making sure that you follow up and you want to be tasteful with how you follow up. Okay, if you're just you're you're pestering people, you're saying, "Hey, just following up here, just circling back here, just wanted to follow up again." Instead of doing that, maybe you're following up with points of value. So if someone reaches out to you, they say they say, "Hey, I want help with web design," and maybe what you do is maybe they're ready to buy. Maybe you continue to send helpful. Pieces on web design. Okay, maybe you share some data around how the web design industry is changing, and then these are the new— these are the latest trends, or what you're seeing with clients, you know, what designs tend to convert very well. Maybe that's proprietary data for yourself, but every time you are reaching out, you are trying to provide value. And then maybe every once in a while say, hey, like, are you still interested in the service, right? So there's a lot of different ways to play this. And what I would also say too is If someone has reached out to you and talked to you on the phone, you might have their email address, okay? You can email them with a follow-up providing some value, or maybe you can text them with some value as well, even though I'd say that's a little more invasive. But try different ways of staying in touch with people, adding them on LinkedIn, adding them on Twitter as well, right? These are all different ways to, you know, kind of nurture your list or nurture people to, you know, get them as a client. Now the second part of this video is talking about how you can retain clients for the long term. And so an easy way of doing this, it's very simple. All you have to do is overdeliver, okay? So you might say, okay, I'm going to offer you, you know, conversion rate optimization services, and you're going to get 2 tests per month and 1 landing page. But what if you did this? What if you said, hey, this month we're going to give you, you know, 2 more tests because we think there's a lot of room to grow here, and, you know, we're going to give you another landing page just because we want to raise that conversion rate faster. How does that sound? And how do you think that other person is going to feel? How do you think the client is going to feel when you are going above and beyond? You know, my mom in real estate, when she would sell houses, she would oftentimes buy people their washer and dryer and she would decorate the place. She would offer flowers and then she would also send gifts, not just during Christmas time or whatever, but also just kind of randomly, right? And then the gifts would be relevant in terms of what they're interested in, right? So for example, let's say, Someone bought a house for my mom, and maybe they're having a baby soon. So maybe my mom will be very thoughtful and buy them like a baby chair, as an example, right? So, you know, the way you can nurture a relationship and how you can keep a customer for long-term is by, one is over-delivering, but also over-delivering in other ways, by staying interested, by trying to build that quote-unquote relationship, which is what we talked about at the last video of the first module, right? Relationship capital is very important, and that's something that's gonna stick with you for the rest of your life, right? Even if the client decides to move on, you know, what if they move on to another company and they want to work with you, right? And so establishing that relationship, going above and beyond just the business standpoint, goes a long way. And going the extra mile too means that, you know, trying to meet up with these people every now and then and take them out to dinner, take them out for drinks, as an example. I don't drink much, but, you know, trying to go beyond just the business relationship, going to the personal side and understanding What drives them? So for example, you might find out that they might like Manchester City as a football team, right? Or maybe they like American football, they like the Seattle Seahawks. So can you get them something that's autographed or something that's near and dear to their heart? Okay, also following up with people on Twitter too, or looking at what they're talking about on Twitter, looking at what they're talking about on LinkedIn, their social graph. What are they interested in, right? You can— there's so much information that's being shared now. So what can you do to dive deeper there? Okay, also, you know, we're gonna go a little deeper into this down the road, but talking about switching costs, okay? You know, when you first start out, we talked about starting with one service, but as you continue to get stronger and stronger, bigger and bigger, as you level up the business, well, you can layer on other services too. And so as you layer on other services, you— they become more entrenched with you, and this is known as switching costs, okay? It becomes harder to switch out from you when you— when you're adding so much value, okay? Which is why a lot of agencies are full-service. Now, I don't recommend that, but I'm saying You can maybe layer on, you know, a couple of different things and just add additional value to the customer. And again, go above and beyond, establish that personal relationship, you know, keep in touch with them, see what else you can do, see what other introductions you can make too, right? And then they're gonna see you as this resource that they can't get enough of, right? The other thing too is, you know, you wanna make sure that you're aligning incentives, okay? So, you know, down the road, you know, we're gonna go a little— we talked about pay for performance a little bit, that aligns incentives, okay? So how can you structure the deal where maybe a part of the deal is very aligned with incentives? Maybe part of it's pay for performance, part of it is, you know, retainer-based. So you can be very creative with how you set up the terms of the deal, right? And it doesn't take a lot for you to stand out from other people because most people aren't willing to go that extra mile. And the extra mile is really where that money is made because that's where people are gonna talk about you. You're gonna be remarkable, and that's where you're gonna capture you know, immensely more of, uh, a much larger lifetime value. Okay, that's the name of the game here. You're trying to continue to grow the lifetime value so you can grow the enterprise value of the company and you can do whatever you want with it down the road. Okay. All right, so that's it for this video. Let us know what you think in the comments. And once again, if you want to join a community of agency owners to help you scale your agency faster, just go to levelingup.com/accelerator or click on the link and we will see you inside.
