Q&A with Agency Leaders: Lessons You Shouldn't Miss

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 the episode.

Welcome in, guys. Welcome in.

Hey, guys.

So, I have with us here on the call, Mr. Oliver Kenyon, and I'm going to give a quick intro and then I'm going to pass it over to him. Really, the call today is going to be Q&A, getting your questions answered. Oliver said he may, if you're asking nicely, he might take a look at like your funnels or your landing pages and share his insight. He was in London all weekend giving workshops to agency founders. So, he is hot off the press. But this is Oliver. He's the CEO and co-founder of ConversionWise. By the way, he's also a qualified chef. He's been working online for 20 years, built the largest affiliate community in the world, and actually then did business with Neil with that community. But right now, he has a team of over 60 people on his team, $400,000 to $500,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And he's built more landing page designs than literally any other agency. So he is here with us today to answer all your questions. Oliver, welcome in.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me in there. Nailed the intro. Perfect.

Love it.

Very, very cool.

Awesome. Well, why don't we start with this? Like, if you wanna share a little bit about what you were doing this weekend and maybe what you were talking about, the agency owners in London that you were leading the workshop this weekend.

I'd love to kick it off there. Yeah, absolutely. So we were at an event called Hydra. I'm not sure if any of you guys are familiar with Hydra Council. So I was asked to talk there, and I did a panel, which was really interesting. I've spoken at a lot of conferences, a lot of events over the last 5 to 10 years, and I must say, like, it was genuinely one of the most enjoyable weekends I've had because It was very interactive. Um, you know, we were talking just now before we let people in and we were like, you know, QA is probably one of the most effective ways for people to just get value. And although I did a kind of talk, um, it was very much a kind of two-way talk. So, you know, it was a small room. There was 50 agency founders in that room and the agency founders during the talk had an opportunity to literally just shout out and interrupt us. Which is really nice. So there was like a 2-way thing. They could get advice, they could ask for help. And I think that people get a lot more value, whereas when you stand on like a stage or a conference and you're just delivering a 20-minute talk to 500 people, often you're like constricted by time. You then do your talk and you walk off, and then you might see them later at the event. But by that time, so many people are coming up to you, you don't really get that one-on-one. So I really enjoyed London this weekend because it gave me the chance to Really kind of do workshops and really have a one-on-one conversation with several people and hopefully, hopefully help them. If you take one kind of snippet away from these events, it can definitely transform your business and that's what I'm here on this call for. So yeah, like really happy to answer any questions. Just for context, brilliant intro. I've been in the online space for about 20 years, full-time for about— how old am I now? I'm 37 now, just over 11 years. So around about the age of 26, I was able to go full-time because I generated more money than I did being a chef. And as people know who's been in the culinary world, you don't get paid much as a chef. And from the age of 26 to 30, I built an affiliate community online and it turned out to be the largest affiliate community online, which I sold to Neil Patel back in 2017. That was my first exit. And I actually co-founded this community and found my co-founder through that community. And now I run my agency with my co-founder. We've had this business for 12 years and we've just exited this business about 6 months ago as well. But we're on a kind of a very aggressive kind of earnout, performance-backed. So again, very happy to talk about that as well because a lot of people have lots of questions around like, can I even exit my agency? What would that even be worth? How is that deal set up? So guys, I'm gonna open the floor. No questions too big, no questions too small. You won't offend me in any way, shape, or form. I've been here and done it before. So, um, Who can I help?

I think Peck jumped in first.

Let's go, Peck. What have you got?

Sure. Hi, Oliver. Thank you for doing this and thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. In terms of thinking about, you know, most, I would say most of our revenue has historically been through my relationships. You know, it's very relationships-based from my own experience. And then Sometimes through big SaaS partnerships. So partnerships historically have come and gone, like, you know, they'll have periods where they're great feeding, they give you lots of leads and then, you know, they have their natural life cycle and then we have to develop new partnerships. How do you, you know, I would say I've been very weak at marketing and, you know, just getting customers off the street, if you will. How do you think about those type of businesses and, you know, kind of given your expertise, how do you think of growing that beyond relationships? And yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I think your primary lead source is always gonna be relationships. I would be definitely kind of getting involved with fractional type. We hear this all the time now, like fractional CMOs, fractional CTOs, fractional COOs, fractional CFOs. We found really great relationships with like, instead of building one relationship, you build a very powerful relationship with someone who's fractional, who may then be, you know, in charge of say 5, 6 businesses at a time. And typically if you do well for one business, they might put you in those 4 or 5 or put you forward. So I definitely would explore relationships with fractional type people. It's not a word I generally like, but I think it works. And we found really good sources of leads from like someone who we just nurtured the middleman effectively because that's kind of what—

Yeah.

Yeah, you're not going direct to a software, you're going to someone who represents multiple softwares and finding those people. We found dinners worked very well, especially for more high-ticket services. So what we'll tend to do per quarter, either as an independent, as a company, or with other complementary agencies, is set up dinners. Now, When you think of dinners, and we found this in the— we work primarily in the e-com space. E-com founders get invited to dinners probably 2 a week, right? Especially if you're like in London or New York or a busy city. We did something that was somewhat blue ocean. So when we put on dinners, we try and make those dinners completely different to any other dinner. So 9 times out of 10, dinners are like 3-course set menu and some drinks. What we did is we said, no, we're gonna find like the coolest restaurant in town. We're gonna find a restaurant that offers like a tasting menu, a wine pairing, and we're gonna go above and beyond and stick out from the crowd and, and really kind of like try to wow these people first and foremost. So I think dinners work really well. You can use cold outreach on LinkedIn effectively. We use Sales Navigator, a mix of Sales Navigator and a software called Duck Soup. There's Meet Alfred, there's Duck Soup, different softwares. And what you do is within I have done some of this, but in, yeah, Duck Soup, perfect. Within Sales Navigator, you build your ICP. So you make sure that people are active. You make sure that they're founders or co-founders or just key decision makers within the company, C-level. So whatever you might, if you talk to CTOs and they're the decision makers, that's who you target. You then can segment via state if you're in the US or segment via location. And you can then filter via job type. So if they're an MD or whatever they might be and whatever space you want to then look for, you can use keywords to do like SaaS or whatever it may be. Just be like really relaxed with the outreach. So message 1 is just connection. It's like, good morning, name. We're hosting a dinner in, let's say, Vegas in 10 days' time. it's not gonna be a normal dinner. We're talking high-end, 10-course tasting menu, wine pairing, entertainment. By the way, this is all free and on us. We just wanna get like-minded people in the room and don't position it as like companies hosting a dinner. Position it as like the e-com founders group, the e-com Q1 e-com founders chat. So they just think they're gonna be immersed around other people within e-com, which is true when you get like these SaaS founders or whoever it may be immersed in the room. And then you turn up and, you know, you don't pitch. It's just all about that relationship. It's just a really good way to get people in a room. You then have that personal connection with them. And then the follow-up from that we found that works really well is like, I don't know how this would work in your world because I'm not in your space, but some form of like audit. So deliver them value instead of like going, let's get on a phone call. Here's the pitch. This is how much we charge. It's like, let's wow you with what we think we can do for your company. as a visual. So we use Miro as a kind of, as a Miro board. We literally break down their funnels. We add Post-it notes to where we think we could change their funnel and generate more revenue. And we almost like overwhelm them on that call because they're turning up on that call thinking, I'm just gonna get pitched. And we're like, no, this is everything. But if you want us to do it for you, this is how much it costs. So yeah, I would definitely focus on dinners. Dinners definitely work. But I think Because you are more high-ticket B2B, it's not the easiest place to like just go out and be broad about. I think for me it would be like trying to build connections with people who have multiple connections. And then, you know, I would be looking at software aggregators, directories, people who are kind of have software podcasts, et cetera, and building those relationships instead of going direct to the softwares themselves.

If you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster, check out the Agency Owners Association. that's hosted by my podcast co-host, Neil Patel, and myself. And we have other agency owners that are doing 8 figures a year. They were doing 9 figures a year. They sold their business for hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're going to share their experiences with you. There's a whole host of other benefits. And the cool thing is that there's a 7-day free trial, and you should check it out now because we're going to take the prices up. So just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we'll see you inside.

Thank you. Fractionals are a good one. Yeah, we've been— we found that a good referral source are the fractionals because they don't— want to do all the work themselves. They have a couple of clients and yeah, we also found that it's usually like an 80/20 rule where, you know, 20% of all the, or less than that, you know, are actually active trying to refer us business and then the other 90-95% are just, you know, kicking the tires.

I do see that, but then I think that also comes down to your relationship with them. So one thing I would definitely say is like reward people, so incentivize people to refer, definitely pay referral fees. And don't just be one of those persons who's like, hey, you know, Bill, if you send someone over, we'll definitely give you 10%. And then you like never follow up, you don't track it. Like, get strategic, like having sheets tracking it, sending that every single month. And like, and then I would just make it your, um, so if you have a sales team or partnership team, like their KPI should just be like, how many phone calls can you have with these fractional people per month to like Just keep that relationship, go out for lunch and just make it like non, non, you know, salesy. Just, just, just build further on that relationship. Yep.

Yep. Thank you.

Man, that's wild. I think we actually had a conversation about dinners a couple calls ago, right, Peck? Or—

We did. Yeah, I did one or two dinners and they turned out pretty good. Two dinners, one in Vegas actually, Oliver.

And that turned out to be—

we got, we got a lead. And we built a new relationship. So yes, I think dinners are really good ideas. I want to scale that to, yeah, probably try to do once a month. Yeah, that's kind of gone dormant and you kind of plus one on that idea.

Yeah, I think it's all about setting that expectation to you or your team. So like we will do this at the beginning, well, we'll do at the end of this year, we'll come up with like a 2025 calendar and we're like almost commit. One thing we've done before is actually like just paid deposits on the restaurants. because it like forces you to go in and just find people. Um, I, I always— I think people always perform best when their back's against the wall. So like, you know, just put your money where your mouth is. Even, you know, even if you at the moment you did 2 this year, don't go and do 1 a month next year, but let's go do 6 next year. So let's do 1 every couple of months. Let's book it in. Let's pay the deposit. Let's get really committed to doing it. And then, um, yeah, just, just go fill those rooms and don't ever be afraid of like inviting people back who, who maybe you haven't worked with from, from another dinner because sometimes people take more than 1 touchpoint to kind of like You know, trust you and want to work with you. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

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Okay. John Paul had a question.

We're just an average digital agency, but you mentioned, you know, the pricing, you know, pricing people out. So I was just kind of curious. I mean, what I'm probably really underpricing conversion rate optimization. Yeah, I do it for most small companies. I've got a couple of large customers who actually help them build their team, but I have no idea what the market pays for these kinds of services these days. And you've obviously built something really successful doing this. So I'm just curious if you can reveal some of that information.

Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing I would say is like we can probably afford to charge a slight premium because we are the CRO agency where, you know, obviously you specialize in lots of different things and that might not be your like dedicated expertise. I'm not saying you're not good at it, by the way, but we can probably charge a slight premium. So we won't work with anyone who's not doing over 100,000 sessions per month just because we can't quantify a test quick enough. So we typically will work with like anyone who's doing either over 100,000 sessions per month or $1 million plus per year in revenue as an e-com brand. And then our rates will typically start from around about $5K fixed per month depending on volume of scale. So If they're doing more traffic, it kind of scales up because we have more additional cost because we're running the test through software that charges per impression. And obviously the bigger clients take bigger skill sets, more of our senior people. We've got a team of 65, so we kind of work in different pods and you'll put like, you know, the bigger clients with obviously the more experienced people and we have to charge a premium for that. So yeah, there's different models. A lot of agencies will go like fixed fee plus performance. A lot of people will go like performance only. Some people will ask for big contracts, small contracts. I always wanted it to make it as easy as possible for people to work with us because we deliver fantastic results. So we actually, and this probably goes against everything you might have been taught or other people say, but we actually scrapped our minimum contract, our minimum term. The reason is because I don't want my team to get comfortable in thinking like we've got these guys for 6 months regardless of the results. Plus it becomes a very good value add and sell on the front end people to commit to us quite quickly. So we are, we are beasts when it comes to sales. Um, we are very good at selling, but I think it's because we tend to sometimes— again, that blue ocean strategy— we tend to sometimes go against the norm where we're like, I want to put everyone under pressure to get you guys results, and I'm not thinking about what happens in 6 months' time. I want to get results now, and I want you to be here for 6 years, not 6 months. So we've kind of flipped it on our head a little bit. We might be a little bit Thank you.

Of course.