How To Systematize Referrals and AI Integration

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy. Hope you enjoy the episode.

How much of the business as you see it right now in the next, let's say, 12 months is going to have some component of AI integrated into it? Like all of it or 50% to make it more efficient?

On the marketing side, I see a lot. Uh, you know, I've been using Clay for also outreach by doing, um, scaling outreach and research data enrichment. To, to find, you know, fine-tune the, the audience and, and the people we reach out to. On the coding end, my, my folks, you know, some folks have been— not everyone's been, you know, some people still like to hand crank everything, but some, some of my team members, they're able to, you know, more than 10x their productivity with, you know, the tools like Copilot and stuff like that.

Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of apps like that. What they're— I think everybody's trying to figure out how to implement AI into their products. And it's not always generative AI. It could be just features that where AI is making it easier and, you know, giving more visibility into their product. Like we use a product called Waybook for onboarding employees. It's kind of like a Notion kind of thing, but, um, it— they're rolling out AI where like I have a new employee in California, it'll spin up a California employee handbook, um, and then we look at— we can edit it then, um, and do that. So it'll— it's using AI to kind of help with the workflow that would normally— hey, I need a handbook or an employee handbook for this state, can you upload it? Now it's doing it for you, you know, kind of thing. So I'm seeing more and more of that kind of implementation of AI into the product workflow, um, with a lot of the different tools that we use.

Super cool. Any, any other like tools or new discoveries that Anyone would like to share this week? Noman, I saw you unmuted yourself.

Yeah, I just had a quick question. It's like, just kind of what people are using for, you know, doing follow-ups with leads and prospects, like what tools people are using. I'm trying to find things that work within the Google Workspace. So if there's anything, any ideas people have, I'd love to hear it. I use a human. It's been a great unlock for me. Like, as we speak, I, you know, if I were to look at my inbox, things are being followed up on right now while I'm at this meeting. Yeah, just have an EA.

Yeah.

Is that offshore or is that—

Offshore.

Yeah, offshore, but they work US hours.

How do you manage security?

I guess, is there any sensitive information they get access to or no? Well, they— this is not like a— this is essentially like an offshore employee, a remote employee. Yeah, they have a salary, they have access, they have a seat in HubSpot. They have their own email to do follow-ups. And for LinkedIn, they remote into a machine that I— that's, you know, the LinkedIn is logged in as me, and sometimes that gets logged out. I remote into that machine, do my 2-factor authentication, but then they use LinkedIn on my behalf. There too. Share the IP.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So they just remote desktop into that machine. Yeah. So they don't actually have my LinkedIn login. And even if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to log in, you know, without the 2-factor authentication. Yeah.

Okay.

Noman, you might want to look at a tool called SalesForza. With the Z. Um, I haven't personally used it. It was kind of pitched to me. It's a— it's kind of a CRM for Google Workspace, and it kind of has that mail merge built-in, auto follow-up using Google Workspace. Um, but I, I'm just pointing there. I can't vet— I haven't vetted it for you. So, um, but SalesForza. I'll see if I— here's a— I'll send you— I'll put a link to a video, like a quick 1-minute or 2-minute video that explains it. And, um, oops, no, that's not it. What I was going to say too, guys, If, um, you're not already an addict, um, an AppSumo addict, um, AppSumo is a great marketplace for, um, agency owners, you know, to be— if you're on the forefront of tools and want— you get a lifetime usually offering to, uh, software that's pretty new. It's kind of not fully out in the marketplace yet. I look at it like buying crypto a little bit. It's kind of like I'm buying it very at the bottom, and then about a year later, it's like really cruising along. We got Zapier years ago, full lifetime to Zapier that came through AppSumo. So I've been a longtime AppSumo user. I've probably spent thousands of dollars on software, but it's paid off because it's like being a VC. Every once in a while, you'll land ones that are real. And it, and it allows you to play with them, obviously, because you own— you get 60 days for free to— not free, you pay for it. You get 60 days. If you don't like it, you can return it. But, um, we've bought about 5 AI chatbots, you know, when AI chatbots were coming out there. And, uh, that just really allowed us— we have lifetime unlimited chatbots, so we use them as demos, uh, to demo wow people, and then we convert them to like a VoiceFlow full AI chatbot kind of commercial system kind of thing. So you'll find ways to use it. But if, if you haven't used AppSumo, become a member and check it out.

Good recommendation, Kevin, for sure. Always being on the forefront.

Okay.

Awesome. Thank you for, for all the shares. I'm making sure to note everything here, and I'm definitely gonna post all those in the, in the community.

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

Something I thought might be fun today is to— if anyone has like a main challenge or an idea that they have, Uh, to do like a hot seat sort of a session. I'll pull up a timer. And the way that I've done these before is whoever's in the hot seat gets 2 minutes to explain their challenge or their idea. And at the 2-minute mark, other people are allowed to jump in. And then after that 2 minutes is up, uh, there's a 10-minute window where everybody can ask questions, share relevant experience. The goal is to either solve the challenge with experience or, or an idea. Or to take the idea and to 10x it. So just bring it to life, make it way bigger. And then at the end of 10 minutes, there's a 1-minute period that's kind of like a transition phase or like a recap phase or a tie-up phase. And then whoever has the next one will immediately start with the next 2 minutes. So with the time we have, we'll only be able to do about 2 of them. But if somebody has like a main challenge that they're looking to solve right now or an idea that they're kind of toying around with and want to take it off the ground? That would be awesome. Does anyone have something that comes top of mind? All right, Peck raised his hand. So let me pull up a timer here really quick. And that way we can— whenever you add the time aspect to anything, it always makes it more fun, I think. 2 minutes. Peck, you ready? Sure.

2 minutes.

Okay, here we go.

Right. So we found that referrals work, and referrals are probably— are still number one source of revenue. So I've intentionally started a referral program. We hand crank it today. I'd like to scale that. It's currently about 20% of our revenue. It's a very aggressive and generous referral program. It's like 10% first year revenue. Our clients are, you know, We look for big-ticket clients. So I'm curious, love any thoughts on how we would scale this. Ideally, I would like— right now it's about 20% of our revenue. Ideally, I'd like to flip that to make it 80% of our revenue so that it's not, you know, that makes the business much more interesting in terms of it's, you know, customers coming in not through You know, our, our own actions, but being referred. So I'm curious if anybody had some thoughts on how they would approach this. Any questions to follow up on that I can answer?

I think that's it. Let's start with the 10 minutes.

So, Peck, just kind of real quickly repeat that. Like, what's— what are you wanting out of that?

You want Yeah, I'd love to think like how, you know, if referrals today is 20% of our revenue, how do we, you know, and it's manual hand crank, like me and my EA will follow up on referral partners. Hey, you're working on this, you know, how's that going? You were going to introduce us to these people. How's that going? I'm curious to see how one, make this referral program much wider reaching, much broader, get more participation. You know, right now it's mostly from my, my network. What if we, you know, maybe is it possible to try to treat this as almost like an affiliate type thing where just people they don't even know, but maybe they learn about Impeccable and see if they want to be a referral partner? But just, yeah, just any thoughts on how we would scale a referral partnership?

I, I, I kind of have helped this with the client, and what we did is we kind of used, um, we created like not a newsletter but a communication with all the referral partners, and we shared case studies or use cases of successful referrals. Basically, we kind of took them through the journey, like, hey, want to just announce that this month we worked with this partner and here's the journey that we went through. Because some people get stuck through the journey. They, they don't know where to make the introduction or just dump it off. Are they part of the journey with, you know, through the thing? So the more you can, um, help people understand that full journey that they're gonna go on, I think, uh, creates FOMO too. You know, the outcome is like, hey, now we both have more business together. And, you know, what's the outcomes, you know, that are there? Most people we find take 3 to 5 of those before they start to jump on board. But you're subliminally injecting success stories into it, and people want to be part of successful journeys. It's kind of scary for people that have never done it to They probably have people, but they just don't know what that looks like. Is there going to be any awkwardness in their relationship too? So we try to address those kind of questions that come up. So that's something that we found has worked. I haven't done it for myself personally, but that was something we did with a client and it worked really well.

Yeah. So Austin asked, what's your process like now? Yeah, so we, we identify folks who Make my, you know, we, I pitch it to people. I look at their connections, you know, I have a Sales Navigator so I can see if they're well connected, see if they're interested. I, you know, schedule a meeting with them. I kind of give them the overview, the TLDR. If they're interested, we do a lot of the heavy work lifting for them where I'll go, you know, my team will go into Sales Navigator, look at like Their connections and say, hey, these people are a good fit. I then we schedule another call where we go through those connections because they've already expressed interest. They want to keep go with this. So they they they want that handholding. So I I go through the list and say, hey, who do you know well? And and you know we start stack ranking those the one the the list I put together, and if they don't know them well at all, we just throw those away or cross them. out and then think, oh, I went to college as this one. This was my co— ex-coworker. Oh, hey, this was my roommate, blah, blah, blah. Okay, they would totally take calls with that. And, and then, you know, we, we usually, if they ask, oh, how should we talk about Impeccable? We have case studies, we have decks, we have, you know, have a Google Doc with talking points. So we have the, the partner playbook that I give them access to. And then when they have a question, I just real-time answer it in the document so that it's always like this document that has tons of answers. The bottleneck in the process, well, I guess, you know, think— in thinking about what Kevin said, right? Like sharing the— some people are more engaged than others. I kind of find this even within the referral partner list, right? Is there's like an 80/20 rule where some partners You know, they say they're interested, and then they realize, oh man, this is a lot of work to follow up on these. You know, at first it sounds like good money, but then it's like, okay, I gotta actually do some emailing and contacting. So it's like an 80/20. Some people, 20%, are engaged. We usually schedule, like, try to schedule meetings, you know, 2 to 3 weeks out to say, hey, okay, you said you were gonna talk to these people. How's that going? How it's actually played out is some people, you know, they kind of just fall off and they never don't respond much. And then even the people who refer, they're not always engaged. So like, like successfully refer. So some of my most successful partners, I mean, I haven't talked to one of them since May, but, and they're, but they're getting checks. They they'll email me like, oh, I refer you know hey where because they successfully referred you know the only time they contact me is like hey where's that check? It's like okay well we haven't we're still waiting for the client to pay us. So so it's it's it's kind of weird that way.

Yeah.

But does that other than financial? Yeah, maybe it's. Status. Yeah, we don't have a leaderboard or gamification. We have added, you know, more milestone rewards to incentivize more quick wins to kind of gamify it a bit. So in the past, I don't know, 2, 3 months, we now added a $250— like, if you say you know this person, we said this is an ICP for us, ideal customer. We say, hey, I'd love an intro to this person. They make that intro. If that person takes a meeting, we will pay $250 for that. So, and then we tell the referrer immediately saying, hey, they took the meeting, you know, we need to pay you $250. So some people, that is like a quick win for them where they see some immediate value. Yeah.

And I don't have anything productive to tell you because it sounds— everything you're talking about is so good. You know, all my stuff just has to do with automation and, you know, website pages and stuff like that. And I'm sure you've thought about this in your personal work one-on-one with these people. You'd have to find somebody as good as you to help you do exactly right things. I mean, what you're describing is very good, in my opinion. It's just the problem is you, right? You're only one human.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, I don't mean to be discouraging or anything. I think it's great. I was just— this is not what you're looking for. I'm sticking in the chat, but it's a referral program on a tool that I'm actively participating in, and I've been really impressed with what they've done. I don't know if there'll be anything inspirational in there.

No, it right now it's hand cranked, so there's no tool or automation. So I'm, I don't know of, yeah, I'd love to see, oh, this looks like it's a HubSpot form. But yeah, any good other good patterns where there's some automation or stuff I think would be great.

Yeah.

You know, we don't even have a partner referral page, so that's one.

I mean, that's, it's the page. And so I, I go down the HubSpot template and sequences route, not, not into the automation of the email, but, you know, more, more long format email where, you know, like maybe you're providing information for the case study, and here's how, you know, I think Kevin was talking about FOMO or whatever. Here's what other people have done with this. We're really interested in expanding our whatever, whatever. Here's, you know, these longer emails rather than the short, like Buy my thing. And so, um, I mean, I would def— I have had success with that, just totally flipping the script on, on these stupid little short nasty emails. I think Kevin was talking about them. But yeah, as I go to my traditional tools, so I'm a wreck sometimes.

Yeah, the FOMO does definitely work. You know, I, I— it's not an email form, but when, when I pitch it and I say, hey, some of our partners, this is what they're making, And, you know, compared to, you know, this would be—

1 minute.

Very transformational in terms of kind of where, you know, if they have a successful referral, this would be decent, non-trivial revenue for them where, you know, I wouldn't say it's 100% passive, but once, you know, that introduction is made and these people buy, it's They're just collecting checks. So, so by communicating that as an email and dripping that, I think, and getting them, keeping them that excitement, right, versus just the initial pitch, I think it's important that we don't do today.

I think Matt had something to chime in, maybe. Matt, if you're still there, a couple of seconds.

Yeah, I don't, I can't do it in 9 seconds though.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah, so this is Matt and I'm new to the group, so I just wanted to say hello. I'm the founder of Affimatic and we are in Miami. And I would just say that, you know, you're looking at different groups of referrals. You know, the best referrals are client referrals, former clients or current clients. You know, when you think about agency partners, These are very transactional referrals. This is what you seem to be focused on. I would say that again, you just have to be transactional. You have to, you know, give to get. You have to offer financial incentives. You know, that's what you're kind of already doing. But I would encourage you to look at clients and former clients. One strategy that is somewhat, you know, at scale that I've tested is to send out a survey To your clients, and this could be with the way we kind of approached it. It was a a client satisfaction survey. Okay, so are you enjoying working with Alpha Medic? Are you happy with results? Yada yada yada. And you can just use Google Forms. We just use Google Forms and whatnot. And then we would put a question: You know, how likely are you to refer Alpha Medic to other clients? And first off, what this would trigger—it would trigger you being top of mind. Oh, maybe I should refer Alpha Medic. I don't. Didn't think of it. Next time they speak to somebody, you know, you might be top of mind, but also it will give you an indication that a client is likely to refer you. So you could call up the client, you know, hi Bob, I noticed that, you know, really appreciate first and foremost that you would even think about referring AlphaMatic. It's really flattering. Um, you know, I would love to be able to maybe offer you a discount on, you know, maybe one month free of service or 50% of one month if you refer a client and this client stays with us for 3 to 6 months. So you can still offer some incentive. Obviously with clients, you know, it's a little bit different, you know, former clients, you can use it this way as well. And then your employees are a source of referral as well. So, you know, you can talk to your employees and the way I try to approach it and we've had great clients that our own employees referred. We offer a financial incentive that is as long as they work with Alphamatic, you know, they're still getting that financial payments. And, you know, I encourage them, I look at the clients you used to work with, look at people you went to school with. I try to send them to conferences, you know, we print business cards for them and sort of empowering that group. I think the client, the the client group and the employee group is way more efficient in terms of time spent, in my view, than going after sort of like other agencies that are very transactional. And, you know, it's sort of like a, you know, you don't really have an edge in a lot of these situations unless you build great partnerships that can work as well. But, you know, I hope that this is useful. I don't know if anybody has any feedback.

This is very useful. Yeah, I think this is— yeah, the employee thing is, is promising. Um, I'm glad to, you know, so, you know, you're not the first person to say this. And, and yeah, cool.

I'm glad.

Awesome, guys. Um, Peck, what, uh, out of all those, is there a string that you, you'd like to pull to maybe unwrap all that challenge moving forward?

Well, I think there's A few action items on my end. You know, the easy ones is starting to share those stories at scale instead of, you know, during, you know, waiting to have that reconnect meeting to share those stories and just say, hey, this month, this client, you know, these clients, you know, these referrals, partners made, you know, you know, kind of call them out, right? And maybe share some wins so that it inspires them. And then on the employee side, On the employee side, I think, yeah, when maybe bringing it up on one-on-ones. In fact, right after this call, I have a one-on-one. So I was just gonna, as Matt was talking, I was like, oh, I should, you know, pull on that thread and see if the employee would be interested.

Yeah. Awesome.

Thank you.