#AgencyVision: Kill the Competition by Dialing in Your Agency Messaging and Positioning

And we are live. What's up, Dimmer? How are you doing, man?

What's up, buddy? I'm doing great today. Yeah, I'm a little short on sleep. The five week old, she's on a great schedule of like, every 90 minutes waking up. And I just feel like I'm in this season of light sleeping right now, so.

So this episode of Agency Vision is really a blurred vision episode.

This is Dimmer's blurred vision episode.

What's the sleep schedule like?

She's doing great from, like, down at 7, and then she gets up at like, sometimes it's 10:30, sometimes she'll go straight to 12. So she gets a solid stretch in there when, like, we're not ready to go to bed yet. So some nights I'm smart and I'm like, Ah, 8 o'.

Clock.

I'm going to bed now. And other nights it's like, I got stuff to do, so I'm not gonna go to bed just yet. But then after that, she's been probably three or four times up in the night. And Rachel and I both work through that together, so good time.

That's awesome.

But it's just a season, right, parents? It's just a season.

I think we can all agree on that. Well, hey, I. I know I put in the Facebook group this morning. And actually, while I'm sharing this, Demer, will you look at Killing Dropbox or anything else you got going on? I'll do the same thing on my end. You guys can all hear this live. I've got some audio cutting. It's been pretty good, but you can never be too safe with audio on this stuff. We've got a podcast announcement coming at you guys here, and we also have. Hey, you ever have this happen to you? By the way, I'm quitting a couple apps right now. I shut down Slack, and anytime I hit command Q and I'm on a call, I have a moment of like, I hope I was in the right application.

And he's gone.

Right?

Right.

Turns out Facebook Live is no longer live. So anyways, let's talk to the people about what we're doing with Agency Journey for next year. Based on what we've learned so far, you want to spill the beans there.

Done. Unh. Done. This is cool. This came out of this past season recording. We just. We did a batch day, and if you've been listening to Agency Journey for more than a couple months, you know that, like, we batch our episodes because we're process freaks. So what we do is take One day we schedule out all of our interviews. We take some, I take some and we do it. We got through this past one. Like, this is awesome. It would be cool to bring listeners into this experience and like go through this process with us because we're already doing like a mini summit right now. We've got all these experts in one spot. So this year, doing our very first Agency Journey Live. Very excited about that. It's coming out in January. I don't have the date in front of me. I'm not very prepared.

Wednesday, January 9th.

Wednesday, January 9th, from 9am Eastern till 4pM Eastern.

That is. Yeah, the time slot. You nailed it.

That's when we're launching our very first agency Journey Live. We're doing it right here inside of the Agency Journey Insiders Facebook group. So we've got some amazing talent. We're rolling out the guests here. They're all confirmed, they're all booked. But as smart marketers are going to be rolling that out over the next few weeks to help set the stage for that. And these are some really smart people coming on to share their experiences. And what is cool here about being an Agency Journey Insider if you're not yet one, if you're listening to the podcast right now, agencyjourneyinsider.com join the community there for a whopping 0.$00. It's completely free. And you can join this live summit and you can pick the brains, these experts and use that to explore your growth, move forward. So we're very excited about that. It's a full lineup. It's going to be awesome. It's just awesome.

I didn't know if you had another. Going to be awesome. We got a full lineup. There's something other. There's some more adjectives and highlights.

It's just that we took all these smart people we got on their calendars in one day and we just lined them up. Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome. And so as an agency owner, you've got the option, you can sit there and listen live, you can drop questions, you can chat with folks. If we get questions during a call, we're going to do like a recap at the end of it if we've got time to get their feedback on those questions. Covering all sorts of topics on agency operations, program processes, teams, growth. So we cover a whole gamut there. But then you can go back and we'll have all those recordings inside the group. You can go and catch them on your time. This is special. I don't know if anyone else is doing this gray.

I'm really excited to do it. I'm sure our first time running it, bouncing back with the calls lined up. We always do that where we line up calls back to back. But we're not trying to juggle Facebook Live. And not that it's challenging or as challenging as it once was. For me, it's still very challenging for anyone who actually does this stuff. Not challenging, but I'm excited because I feel like we've got a lineup too, of agency owners and agency experts who've done a lot. Like, we're hitting on team dynamics and how to run more effective remote teams, which is a huge, obviously, trend over the last couple years, especially like productizing and niching down, which we'll talk about here in a second. Just seeing like all kinds of account management, like, huge focus on how do we manage client expectations and run accounts better and more profitably. So I'm excited to dive into all that. We'll give you an update on topics and speakers here as we roll that out more. Is there anyone you wanted to share today? No, we'll be there. That should be good enough for you.

That's so true. We're going to do our own episode. It's going to be great.

That's right. All right, cool. So from there, here's the other thing that I want to hit on with you, and it's the niching down thing. We're just talking about this, going over some materials from an agency, accelerator agency, who's going through that program right now, and they just put together a bunch of collateral that they wanted to start using and had questions about does this match up with what our agency is going to look like here in a month or two months time, or should we hold off on using and implementing any of this stuff that we have right here? And it was beautifully designed, really well done. A lot of it made a lot of sense, but there were some key pieces that didn't make a lot of sense to me. They did make sense because I've made the same mistake in most agencies. Almost all of us are going to relate to this, but one of them was talking about the agency, who they serve and stuff on the Niche page. Like so many of them, there's so many examples of sites you could go to. And we should probably just use ourselves At Guavabox, remember when we put verticals on our site for the first time? Do you remember the five that we had on there?

It was a ton. I don't. I mean, if you condense the GDP of the five industries, you're looking at most of the United States.

No, we argued. We argued it down to five. We picked. We had healthcare, we had manufacturing, which, like, what is not. We had sporting goods just because we were interested in sports. We had professional services and technology. Maybe like, yeah, basically 90% of the economy, the world economy.

And you take those five industries and then you go to our service page, which I think was like 19 different individual pages, breaking down every single service that we offered. Because we thought if you can rank for SEO, it's going to be really helpful. And landing page design, too. And call to action design pages for all these different things, for all these different people, and wonder why it was so frustrating.

So. But here's the realization and what I was just explaining to you, and then we're like, now we're just gonna. What's that video? Can't say it here. We'll do it live.

I know what you're saying. I know what.

There we go. But obviously, what holds us back and what held us back from getting any more specific than 90%? We were like, oh, man, we're doing a good job here. We're saying we're these. And someone's magically gonna think, oh, they have technology. Like, I'm running a software business. Definitely there are experts there, despite the fact that they have the rest of the world listed here. And obviously, psychologically, it doesn't work that way. And it didn't work that way for us. And it left us very scattered in our marketing. When we finally picked a primary niche to niche into the manufacturing space, that was a big turning point for us and led us into traction. But the biggest thing that held us back and that holds everyone else back is just fear and uncertainty.

Yeah.

So I thought maybe we could just identify the fears first and then talk about. Because this is part of what we preach and teach and coach people through is one big element. Like what holds us back from doing that.

Yeah. Can I define a term before we get there?

Yep.

When we talk about this, when we say the word niching, what we mean is not just picking an industry, but there's two layers to it. There's, first of all, the solution that you provide and the idea of client that you serve. Those are the two layers to this conversation. So we're not just saying go pick real estate agents or go pick healthcare manufacturing companies and offer a suite of services to those people. We're going even deeper than that. So if you're squeamish as an industry, you better Take some Dramamine right now, because we're going to take you even deeper down the rabbit hole and put some even greater definition. That. And this goes back to the idea of, like, the Blue Ocean strategy. And how do you craft a message? How do you craft a story that speaks to a specific group of people that kills all competition that gets them raised their hand and say, these guys are preaching what I need to hear. These guys are thinking my thoughts. They're clarifying fears that I didn't even know I had. Are they reading my mind? Because this is getting a little bit freaky right now. When you get to that spot where you're speaking with clarity in your marketing and your sales calls, you'll thank the Lord that you got to that spot, because it changes how you do business. Now, let's say, how do we get to that spot? Great. Once we've defined what that feels like, how do we get there and what holds us back from getting there? You mentioned fear. It's got to be that fear is the biggest thing that holds us back. And what I hear over and over again is I don't want to let go of the possibility of working with all of these people. Because if I say I serve you, what I'm saying is, I don't serve everyone else out there. And how can I grow my business if I'm turning away all of that business? I'm just saying no to all of those checks.

Yeah, right. Crazy. Well, obviously the first question is, like, why aren't you getting those checks in the first place when you're not doing this?

Exactly.

But I think it's important to realize it's all fear, but there's different fears. And so identifying the specific ones, the one that you just said, is huge. I'm worried that I'll have that perfect, Mr. Perfect prospect who now doesn't come through because he's in a different industry. And so I don't get to work with him, even though I could have done that. But I think the other thing that holds a lot of people back and held us back is, and you were talking about, like, what's your. Who do you solve for? And then also, what do you solve? You mentioned solutions. And it really is the. It's not just the solutions. It's like, what pain specifically do you solve for them? So the other fear that holds Seal back is I don't know what specific fear or what specific pain. Rather, I can solve effectively for these people. I can do. I know I can build a website. I don't Know, if I actually drive as much traffic, leads and sales as I say I do, and even that we talk about traffic, leads, and sales, it's like, flip that on its head when you're marketing this. I realize traffic and leads come before sales, but we got to start looking at this the other way and talking about. About what our end customers want. Like, they want sales opportunities, they want deals that are going to close the right value of client and customer stuff.

And if you unpack this, you and you boil it down and you figure out, what are they actually looking for at the end of the day? What's my idea? If a client actually want at the end of the day, it's going to look vastly different across those five industries that we talked about earlier. A health care company, even within that, do they need new patients walking in the door? Do they need. Are they a healthcare technology company and they need new demos of their software? You know, are they a manufacturing company and they just need more inquiries or more RFQs? Like, what do they actually need at the end of the day to move the needle? And if you're in a spot where you're scared because you don't know that, that's okay. But we walk people through this all the time inside of agency accelerators. Like, you don't need to be the expert today. What you need to be is passionate to become the expert. And if you're at that spot where you're just not really sure you have an area where you've experienced success, or you look at something like, oh, I want to spend more time in this space and I want to become the expert in delivering this solution, but you're not there right now. Take a deep breath. That's okay. I would recommend Ryan Lok's book Ask on how to go out and do some market research in a very realistic and scalable way. How to do that quickly, using Facebook ads, using just some calls, using some message outreach to people in that space right now. Leverage your network, ask questions to figure out where are they right now? Where are they trying to go? That would be the very first step to just getting to know that ideal client and focusing their pain.

Yeah. Would you agree with this? The three main pains are like, fear of turning away people who would have been good customers, but they're in the wrong thing. Fear of I don't know how to deliver. Like, I don't know who I deliver the best service for. And the third one being just the fear of making a mistake. Like I say, specialize in manufacturing. Turns out I actually hate working in manufacturing or those. I'm not that good at providing the solution.

Yeah, I mean, the last one is it's kind of a twofold. I'm afraid I'm not going to like the people that I'm working with. And the second, the fourth it would be, I'm afraid I can't actually do what I say I'm going to do. I don't have a process. I'm not good at this yet. People are scared of that. So the only thing I would do is split those into two because I think there's different approaches that solve both of those problems. Do you want me to dive into that right now?

Well, let's talk about specifically. Let's assume that I'm an agency who's got a valuable solution to a pain and it can be something as generic as you mentioned, like people. I thought that your examples with health care. It's not necessarily that the solution is vastly different. It's that all the language and the terminology around it is different. The same principles are still going to work and apply. How they actually get executed will be different. So it is. It's not unrealistic to think that it's similar to us. Like our whole, our agency accelerator program is like all this, this whole programmatic thing that's built around agencies. But if we broke it down to its core fundamentals and had to apply it to a completely different industry, we could do that now. We'd have to redo everything that we've built because. And we'd have to learn the vernacular of whatever industry went into. But the same, a lot of the same principles still apply. How do you connect with customers? How do you service them scalably and how do you operate the whole thing profitably?

Yeah.

So I think the same thing happened. So it's not necessarily like there is. It's not this false dilemma of there's only one right vertical for me. Like, I was built to only serve one group of people because my solution can only serve one group of people. It's more. How does that play out? Do you already have an edge if you go somewhere like, what are the advantages you have? So let's assume that I have a solution that I could apply to multiple industries and I'm trying to pick. Well, first of all, do I pick them? Like, how am I going to get faster traction by picking one versus doing what I'm doing now and having my. I focus on these four different verticals. But then if anyone else not in those, don't worry we help all kinds of people, too.

Yeah. I think the first thing that you do is you identify, where do I have success? Or where do I have existing traction right now? And that's where I would start first, because you're going to have some case study to lean on, and you go there, and you go all in. You know Rob Bailey, who runs FIT Club Accelerator? He's got a program called Agency Alchemy. And through that, he unleashes this phrase called burning the boats. And it's just making decisive decisions and going all in on how you're going to help your clients. And I believe wholeheartedly in that. And I hear this a lot when we're coaching people through things is don't. There's the tendency of saying, okay, what if I narrow from 5 to 2 and I just go after 2 people? I want to do lawyers, and I want to do contractors. No, you've just defeated the entire purpose. You burn the boats, which means you go on the offensive. You land on the shores, you burn the boats. So there's no way home, and you become the agency for contractors or the agency for lawyers. And you try that for two or three months. And if you work with the clients and you're not seeing results, you see, I want to tweak my process or work with the clients, and you realize that most real estate agents are jerks or most doctors are jerks. Like, well, I'm going to make a pivot. That's okay. Because, like, picking a focus is not a tattoo. This is something that changes and evolves, and it's going to change and evolve and come to grip with the fact that that's just a part of business, that there is going to be change that we need to be comfortable with and make these decisions. The degree of change is going to be smaller and smaller as things go on. But at the beginning, it might seem like massive changes. Like, we're gonna have to redesign our website in two months. That's okay. We're making tweaks to find the groove here. And once you find your vein, that's when you're gonna start seeing success. And it's gonna have a snowball effect there. But first thing I would say is just, like, go where you have success, try it out, go all in on that, and then if you don't like it in a couple months, tweak it and try something different. It's not a tattoo. Be okay with changing it up, but leverage the past successes that you have in order to grow moving forward.

Yeah. Specifically on a sales side. What do you like? I'm worried right now. I've got 10 people coming through and filling out the contact form that I get in touch with every month. And they're from 10 different industries. So if I pick one now, I'm down to one who I say, who maybe still comes through. Maybe two of them come through and the other one just didn't take the time to read my site, which is pretty normal. Anyways. How am I getting back to 10 and I'm getting the right fit and I'm closing. Instead of closing one a month or half of one a month, I'm closing three of these each month.

Do you mean how do I build a stream of inbound?

Yeah. How do I then get in front of the. Right in front of that group of people?

It's a two fold approach. Like you're just getting started. You're not going to have the inbound, you know, base built up. So you're going to need to go old school and figure out how do I tap into my network and figure out who's out there that is in this space I want to. How do I tap into the past client that I've worked with and ask them for introductions? How can I reach out and do some discount test projects with some people to just get my foot in the door and prove this process works? Not free projects, but test projects to get in there and showcase how you do what you do. While you're doing that, you're telling that story and you're creating content and you're blogging and you're podcasting and you're doing video and you're showing up at their conferences and you're doing all of those activities. But what's different than what most agencies doing are doing is that when you're doing those activities, you're speaking directly to a specific group of people. Now you have content that you're leveraging in your cold outreach. You've got content that you're leveraging into the communities that are preexisting out there where these people are getting together. And so it's much more, it's a sharper sword when you're targeting a smaller group of people because it gets right to the heart of their pains and their issues and it gives you stuff that's actually helpful as opposed to the generic agency post of five tips to optimize your LinkedIn profile, like ditch the crap and go specific.

I guess the point I'm trying to get to too is that now you have Some direction on what do you do? Like if you're targeting every industry, you just keep pumping out the same old generic stuff because you can't focus in on anything. And you have this whole decision weight of I can go blog on the contractors, like I can go guest post or I can go interview or I can reach out to people, I can do LinkedIn prospecting or I can do all these, I can do cold outreach, I can do all these different things. And ultimately you have to prioritize anyways. Like you wind up picking, well, here's what I think maybe my best shot is. Or you just go after every like so many, like super small startups. This isn't meant to offend people, but it very well could be. Hopefully it speaks to your heart if you're in that situation like the classic community like marketing person who wants to start doing and they just start targeting every local small business. Yeah, you can certainly make a living, but you're not going to build a large valuable agency if you stay in that vein. So you wind up picking someplace anyways and saying here's my main one. And now all that you're doing is you're just diluting your identity and your brand authority once they come back and find you. If you're assuming that you're successful on driving anyone back to your site or learning about you as an, as an organization. So you lose all the decisions that you have to make about like once you make this decision one time, kind of like burning the boat. So you made one decision, now you go down that path and you back it up with the way that your whole brand looks. And so when you're reaching out to people, it's not just that I can build websites, but that I build websites that drive sales conversations for your sales team, specifically for people who are running software startups in the healthcare space or whatever else. I know the model that works to target this specific end Persona that you're selling to.

And another thing I think you mentioned that sets a lot of people back is like I don't know how to deliver the full solution. Like I can do this piece but if I time on this out, my client needs more than that. And so how to deliver that there's helpful, it's helpful to know that first of all you don't need, you shouldn't crash test dummy your clients, you should go out. If you don't have a strong process, you need to hire someone that has a strong process. And you can do that one of two ways. One, being like you Go and learn and you invest in yourself and teach yourself how to do something and you pay for that to leverage someone else's experience and apply that into your business to deliver your client's results faster. Or you partner with someone, another agency or another freelancer who can do that for you. So if you know that you work with the type of client that would benefit really well from doing like Facebook messenger ads and you don't do that, or you need someone who develops chatbots and you don't know how to do that yet, don't tell them that you know how to do it and then try to learn how to do it for them. Like that's the fastest recipe to get your butt canned. You want to go and work with someone who can teach you the process, then you emulate their process. And as you emulate it, you can begin to innovate on it because you bring it into your greater scope of things. So if you're scared as you don't offer the full solution yet, that's okay. There's ways to leverage what other people have already developed to still give your clients results they're looking for.

Yeah, meaning you still want to be able to be the strategic partner and be able to deliver or connect to the, to the right solutions, help them in that process. But yes, they focused on what you're doing. Cool. Well, there's a ton more we could unpack there. But the encouragement is, if this is holding you back right now, don't let that hold you back. There's lots of, you know, I've heard plenty of good arguments for why not to do that. And while you get different perspectives from different industries and you can bring value, but we don't accept that. You can take a lot of principles from basketball and apply them to lacrosse, but we don't tell our lacrosse kids to go play basketball. So they become, for the explicit reason of becoming better. And we don't say you can apply so many principles from another musical instrument back to whatever you play. But we don't tell our piano players to go learn the guitar so they become better pianists. If they're interested and they want to do that, that's great. And there are things that will come over, but it's not the fastest way to actually get where you're trying to go. It's not that we shouldn't be well rounded or not that you can't learn those without doing the services, but go get those from partners, go get those insights from other people. Don't go take on clients that eat up 30% of your time so that allegedly you're becoming better at what you do. I don't buy that train of logic because we just don't apply it in other places in life.

Yeah, yeah. So if this is we. There's a whole episode we could do this on, like the impacts of this conversation on your operation and how it simplifies your processes and how it streamlines all that stuff. But that's another episode. But I just say, hey, a call to action here. If you're frustrated with this stuff and you feel like, you know, I need to have this conversation, but I don't really know where to get started. We offer free strategy sessions to walk you through this conversation and figure out, where are you? Where do you want to go? What's that path forward for you? Because it is a little bit different for every agency and how they navigate this situation. So you can drop a comment on here if you want that. If you're on the podcast, you can just head to zenpilot.com apply book a time on our calendar to have that conversation and kind of contextualize all this for where you are, the type of agency you're in, the type of agency you want to build, figure out how we take this thing and like pour the jet fuel in and take it to the next level. That's what gets up and excited. So make it happen.

Yeah, I've got good news and bad news for everyone. The good news is we're coming up to the end of the year here, and that means leaning into tax time. Me as the operational thinker, that's what I'm always thinking about. So you want to save some money on your taxes. A great way to do that is to just go spend money. You got a little less profit there. But seriously, this is the time, if there's ever a time, to be thinking about investing in your business. So that's the good news is whatever you buy right now is 20, 30, depending on where you are in the world, 30% off when you take out taxes. The bad news is our strategy session is completely free. So I hate to do this to you if you want a write off, but really there's no reason, if you want help with this from people who've coached hundreds of agencies through it, lived through it ourselves, seen, connected, learned from a ton of people who have done it, and if you got someone else who can deliver that same stuff to you, go for it. It's not. There's lots of different ways to get there and people who you can use. But seriously, we should talk and help you out. And then the other thing is. Oh, back to Agency Journey Live. I'm bouncing around here. That is Wednesday, November 9th. That'll be kicking off at 9:00am Eastern Time, January 9th. January 9th, I'm going back a month instead of forward a month. Wednesday, January 9, there is an event in the Facebook group. If you are not yet a member of Agency Journey Insiders, go to agencyjourneyinsiders.com take you to the Facebook group. Join that thing. RSVP to the event. We'll see you there. That's gonna be a lot of fun and I'm pumped for it. Anything else here? Dimmer?

No. I hope it challenged you. Hope it pushed you out of your comfort zone. That's how you grow, is you need to get out of your comfort zone. So this is awesome. More on this vein. If you want more, let us know. What do you want from this time? Comment on the post. Let us know. That helps us drive what we're doing here. So this was fun, Greg.

Amen. Good stuff. All right, have a good rest of the week, everyone. We'll talk to you soon.