Boosting Sales and Confidence Through Organization with Brandon Ward

Welcome to the Agency Journey podcast, where.

We connect with agency leaders to uncover.

The hidden systems and processes that drive their success. Now let's dive into today's show. Hey, as we're diving into today's episode of Agency Journey, let me tell you real quickly about our sponsor, Aribi. Aribi is a super cool on one marketing analytics tool. They've got Google Analytics squarely in their sites right now. And I can remember setting up Google Analytics as a sophomore in college and thinking this was just the coolest platform. And as it's matured, it's still super powerful, but it's become so complex to deal with. And Aribi has a value prop totally aside from this. But what I absolutely love about my experience plugging Aribi into zenpilot.com is I didn't have to mess around with setting up what events I wanted to capture and tracking all my changes. And if I messed up a view, then it would. It would delete all the data that I had. I just plugged it in, it crawled it captured all our. All of our events, made it super easy to see our funnel, and it just works. I love being able to see, for example, how many people read the definitive guide to click up for agencies, a blog post that I wrote, I don't know, six months ago. See where those folks come from, how that influences the buying process, the funnel, the way that it works out. So super excited to have Aribi as a sponsor. You can check it out. Go to Aribi IO AgencyJourney. It's all one word. If you spin up a free trial there, use the coupon code. AgencyJourney. Same thing, all one word. That'll give you 20% off any plan, which is super generous of them. And remember, they can track all of our conversions, so check them out. That's a reb IO. We appreciate their sponsorship. Let's get on with the episode. All right. Welcome into another episode of Agency Journey. I'm Gray Mackenzie. This week I have a special guest bringing on Brandon Ward, who is, believe it or not, an agency advisor here at Zenpilot. Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Gray. My fearless leader. It's good to be here.

I'm excited to have you on. So you and I first met probably close to two years ago now.

Yeah.

You're running an agency at the time, and you've been just to kind of set the stage for everyone. You've been part of the team here at Zenpilot for the last three, four months. We're going on four months to wrap it up four months right now. But our first full time hire on you get a little bit of a mix of a role but really it's on the sales front and, and so helping agencies, just getting on the phone with agencies, figuring out where they are now, where they are trying to get to what's the gap in between that? Are we part of that problem? Is there other folks who should be part of solving that, that problem for them and going from there? So let's, but let's do give people a chance to get to know you a little bit, share your story. So immediately prior to this you were running an agency, but what's the quick, the Brandon Ward life story here?

The life story, the quick and dirty. So been in marketing for several years. Studied marketing at university. Was in various marketing roles at growing companies. Actually was a CEO at a growing CBD company at one point a few years back. So I've kind of lived in the marketing space and after I got out of that CBD role I had a lot of kind of bad experiences with digital agencies myself and recognized that I was kind of tired of how there's a lot of shady practices in the space. So I made a decision to jump in and kind of do things the way I would have liked to have been engaged with in an in the agency life. We had one good agency that we worked with during that time period. So it kind of like out of the, you know, we Talked with over 10 like so it was just, you know, one out of 10 is not good. Right.

So. And that could have been a.

What's. Yeah, it's, it's not a very good batting average. So, but so for me that's, I kind of, I started like basically freelancing effectively me and another gal and then grew from there as, as we started to gain some traction with clients and driving some results for them and did a little bit of full service more, more SEO focus and web design things of that nature. But, but yeah it was a lot of fun. Learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, you know, learned a lot about myself in that time period. So after some self reflection you and I continued to talk. Ended up joining Zenpilot. But. But yeah. So Advisory Cure was the, the old school. The agency.

The agency. I feel like you get the classic look. The story is either I was working at an agency, I saw how much money was coming in the top line and how little I was getting paid so I went and started my own or I worked in marketing and I just hated all the agencies I was out there. So I'm building the anti agency. Or you've got the accidental, like, hey, I happen to be good at this one thing. And people kept paying me. And then I had too many people trying to pay me and I couldn't do it. And then I accidentally, I was like, well, I gotta hire somebody. And then it just fell into having five people on my team. And now I'm running an agency with all kinds of different things.

So it really is kind of like those three buckets, isn't it?

It is 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And you're in the, you're in the anti agency camp. Like I can, I definitely can do it better than these guys.

Certain. Yep. Well, you learn. It's easier said than done too. Right. There's a lot of complexity that goes into running a successful agency, which has been interesting, kind of seeing where we are with Zenpilot and the things that we do, kind of getting a look under the hood of some successful agencies, the agencies that are doing things well. And you know, hindsight is 20 20, as they say, looking back at like all the dumb things that I was doing that I thought I was doing well, you know, so it's just, it's, it's been interesting.

Yeah. That's cool to have that perspective. I want to circle back to that and ask you some questions. Do you remember the first time that we talked though? We did a good connection. You were living out in San Diego at the time, right? Yep. Yep. Were you in San Diego before when you were CEO, Were you in San Diego at that point or did you.

Yep.

You were okay?

Yep. I spent a ton of time in Toronto though. Like that's where the company was based. So I was traveling a ton during that time period.

San Diego to Toronto.

Yes. It's literally like, you know, opposite ends, top different. So time zone changes. Although over time I, I really came to love Air Canada and their, their flight, so. But it's quite the, quite the whole, so.

And now you're in North Carolina. When did you. You guys moved back? What. We're recording this in July 2021. You guys moved back home a little less than a year ago, or almost a year ago.

Yeah, it'll be a year in September. We made the move. My wife and I made the move out here, you know, started a young family. We just had our first baby girl, which is super exciting. Also exhausting as you guys, as you know, you've got four yourself, but yeah, North Carolina. We're living about 35 minutes north of Charlotte area. It's just such a great place to raise a family close to Lake Norman. And so it's just. Yeah, we love it out here.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Do miss San Diego, though. There are things about San Diego I miss, for sure.

Insert the weather joke here.

Yes.

Yeah.

Burritos. Burritos.

Well, it's funny that you came on board, obviously. We work super closely with ClickUp, who's headquartered in San Diego. You got out of there just before. Just before coming on board. But what's super cool about your story is you've done a bunch of different things. You've been in the marketing space, you've been in the agency space, you've been in business leadership capacity, but at the agency you were actually running ClickUp, and that's how we originally got connected was. I think you had, didn't you? You came across our manifesto, right? The Agency Freedom Manifesto, originally. Yep.

And that really just opened my mind to the way you should be thinking about running an agency. The operational component that I had not yet grasped fully and the how specific you guys were applying that to the agency world was what was a huge, huge upside. So that drew me to you guys.

And then we connected. We had a really good conversation. I'm going to pull up, as we're talking here. I'm going to pull up my notes that I took about you.

Nice.

But then we spoke. I don't know, we stayed in touch. We talked again about jumping into a ClickUp program, potentially. You held off. And then we wound up getting connected again. We were looking for someone in sales you were thinking about, especially maybe on the way, moving into, like, this is where what you want to pursue and what you want to master this stage of your life. And so anyways, it's kind of just perfect timing. We're really blessed to find you at that point in time and be able to go through kind of the discovery process and figure out, hey, what could this make sense? Could this work? Could this not work? You had a bunch of other options that you were looking at and. And wound up bringing you out of the team, which we're super excited about. And I'm trying to find where these notes are that I took right now. But the first time that you and I talked, see if I can find this. I took some funny notes about where you were at as an agency. But maybe you could just, from your perspective, we could talk a little bit about some of the things that you've learned now because you've had hundreds of conversations with agency owners just in the last couple of months here, kind of if you have to put some of the common themes that you see from them and overlay that on your own personal experience, what are some of the lessons that you've learned here on the backside of that experience?

So I would say, well, one, knowing yourself and what's important for who you are and where you are in life and the focus you want to have in your career is very important. And that's like for me, the shift into, into a sales growth component was a big part of that. So coming out of the agency world, so that would be one. But then from a, from an agency perspective, I missed the mark so much on like I was using ClickUp. That was one of the things, right. Running the. And I thought I was really ahead of the curve with ClickUp. I was not. But the structure, the processes, the systems are so critical. And without those things in place, it's just very difficult to, to run an agency at a, in a scalable way. Otherwise, you're just. Because you're always figuring it out. Like as you onboard new clients, if you don't have this stuff mapped out in a process to go through delivery, it's just very difficult to consistently drive results for agent or for clients. And so for me, I hear that conversation a lot. People are trying to map out their processes. Nobody likes mapping out processes because it's heavy, hard work, but it's crucial. And I think the thing that shifted for me, and we've talked about e myth ready myth a couple of times actually. But it's funny how it kind of resurfaces. And so the way I've been thinking about it now though, is as agency owners thinking about your business almost like a franchise. And so by doing that, you're building systems, processes and operations so that you can get out of the way and somebody else can come in and step into those roles. And so without that structure, it's just very difficult to get beyond a handful of clients with a small group of freelancers or a team that you have. So I think for me it's just, you got to have that system in place, man, it's easy to see it now and. But man, it's huge lesson though.

Yeah. Been cool to see a lot of agencies gain because we get a mix. We get some agencies who come to us because sales are kind of going gangbusters. And it's like, hey, our delivery needs to figure out how in the world we're going to catch up and have something that works here as we're as a rolling. And I'd say that's, I don't know, maybe 60% of the folks who we wind up working with are in that situation where it's like, hey, sales is kind of dialed in and we're ready to go. But we've got another side of the coin, which is we haven't poured the gas on, on the sales side yet and we're doing well, but we're not, you know, we're not. It's not rocket fuel here that we're, that we're living off of. And what's been really cool is to see agencies go through the process of getting their infrastructure built out. And you got another person, you got one personality type in the agency space that's very comfortable selling something and saying, I'll come back and I'll figure out how to do it afterwards.

Which was me.

That was me. Yeah. And then you got the other side. It's like, you know, it's clear that they don't have the confidence to go sell consistently because the infrastructure's not in place. And so we've had a lot of case studies where folks have come to us needing to get the delivery stuff figured out to give them the level of confidence to go sell. And I think either personality type, there's a confidence jump that happens either way. Once, you know, hey, I know that I've got confidence now that we're going to deliver a great product not just once, not just a couple times, not hit or miss, but consistently every time this is going to come out and, and be quality work. There's still a lot of variables in any type of marketing or business growth. So it may not mean that it's a home run every time, but we know that we'll give clients what they paid for and we'll deliver good work product in exchange for what they've paid us. But some people start at a high level and that gets amplified. And some people start at a much lower level. In terms of the innate confidence that we have, I think a lot of it's tied to how we're, how we're wired as individuals. It's funny to hear you. You say you're in the kind of in the first camp as an agent theater, which probably led to a lot of the. You were doing a number of different services at the time, even though it's focused around SEO and web, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Well.

And as you know, often when you're early in the game, you're just trying to figure out where you might Fall. Right. Like what clients make sense, like industry wise or what services make sense in terms of what you're providing for them. And, and something I did find over time that I ended up working well with like physical therapists, kind of health practitioners, people of that nature, like doing their web work, getting their web presence up to date, working on their content, things of that nature. The challenge was though is because lacking those processes, I didn't have clear. I struggled to delegate to my team for clear clear roadmaps on what we need to be doing and what needs to be happening on a consistent basis. And without that visibility into a process, it's hard to grow and push. And so it's. And it's funny too, like how you're talking about the two groups, right. How the one has is super confident selling but the delivery is kind of lacking and then you flip it. But when you put operations in place for the salesperson, the team benefits a ton because now they're. They have a lot more like happiness and satisfaction in their day to day. On the other side, the team gets that structure, but then the salesperson has this huge boost in confidence, usually the owner.

Right.

So it's kind of funny how it pushes in different directions but ultimately ends up creating a very similar result once you get it done.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Why? What's driving the desire to move into more of a sales like go out of hey, I've got my finger in everything and I'm doing everything now into hey, I'm going to master sales and the art of kind of the consulting. It's really an art of consulting and helping people and figuring out what's the problem is that like is there a role for us to fill? Does the client truly want our help? And then what's the. How do we make that connection?

So a couple of things. One, well, with a growing family, you know, I'm the financial provider for my family. That's a decision we've made internally. So the incentive, the financial incentive in a sales role, obviously you kind of, you hunt and kill, you kind of eat what you kill. Right, Right. I love that component. I love the simplicity of sale. It's a very, it's a very. The metrics of sales, your activities, what you're doing, your outreach, it's very clear, you know, like there's a lot of ways to kind of be accountable. So I love the accountability bit, the upside for earning, but then the mastery component. I love people, man. Like I love being of service. And I think. And even when I was young, my favorite class in college was actually a sales class and I loved reading about like, I read a ton of sales books and I just. What I found was that when I was young, I didn't recognize the importance of being in a company where you bought into what you were selling. So I discounted sales very early in my career because I was doing things I didn't enjoy necessarily. So coming back to kind of where we are now, sales, when done, I think in a meaningful way, you're genuinely trying to help people direct them to a solution that's going to make their life better. Not trying to push things down people's throats or force them to do something like that. Style doesn't work in an information driven world that we have now. So my love of people and wanting to be of service and also that focal point of mastery is like really what it comes down to. So, like, knowing that I can drive growth for my family, knowing that I can make an impact at our company and the companies that we're working with and kind of be this guy that drives results on both sides, like, is a very powerful thing. Right?

That's awesome. That's cool to see. From what I said, what's been. I haven't asked you this question yet. What's been the weirdest part of moving from doing your own thing to being part of a team now at 10 pilot?

Well, I'm stubborn, so sometimes. And, but luckily, and I mean, I mean, I work for you guys, but you guys are genuinely some of the smartest guys I've ever worked with. And I have a ton of respect for what you're doing. You give me a ton of autonomy to do what I'm doing. So I think what I've learned is I need entrepreneurial elements in the work that I'm doing. I don't necessarily need to be the guy in charge. And to be frank, I'd like the freedom that I'm not the guy that it all falls to now. I mean, you guys have a lot on your plate. So for me, the work life balance that it provides is a big shift, which I really enjoyed.

So.

And I like the focal point, you know, like when you're the boss, you have all the things that nobody else can figure out comes to you like, so that's a tough spot to be in, man.

For sure. What. So end of this year, looking forward in the future, we talked a lot about what some of the goals are for Zen Pilot and some of the stuff that you're working on. Right? Now, in terms of refining your skills on the sales side, if we look at kind of the theme of the next, I don't know, quarter, a couple quarters, what are some of the things you're most excited about and building out and achieving here on the team?

Our outbound, our outreach. You guys have done such a great job of creating content and have built a business effectively solely off of content and inbound. I'm excited to kind of be able to pull that lever and throw some fire or some gasoline on our fire in terms of that. So I think having the opportunity to build out a powerful outreach program is one big thing that I'm super excited about. I know we're expanding our implementation team too, so I'm excited to see how our services has evolved because since we first talked a couple of years ago, you guys have come a long way too, in terms of the offering. So I think there's a lot more clarity on who we can help and how we can help them and where we can help them. So it's those two pieces. So our evolution of services and then my ability to make an impact for us as a company, as at a company level.

I think one thing that we should have done earlier was we bought in early, way back in 2012 in the HubSpot Partner Program and at the time, such a strong ethos of inbound. Inbound's the way to go. It's the only ethical way. If you do outbound, you're committing a mortal sin. Why'd you do outbound?

How dare they?

And, you know, young and dumb. And I'm still young and dumb, but younger and dumber. There's an element of like, yeah, this is what I want to do. And I still love the ethos of inbound, but I'm realizing there's a lot of people out there who are struggling. We're in such a super specific niche. It's not like, hey, we're a full service digital agency and you can throw a rock in any town of 10,000 plus people as at least one of those or a couple of those. We are. If you're an agency and you need to get your systems and processes right, we're one in. There might be 100 different competitors in that light of a space. But then if you go into, we can help you get your systems and processes right and we'll help you streamline all that inside one core tool that's a smaller number. And then that core tool is ClickUp that number. There's one right now that is us who's your focus is? We're going to work with agencies exclusively so we know all the ins and outs of their problems and we're going to work exclusively on one platform so we become best in class and the best implementation partner in that specific tool set. And so you realize that because we're one of a kind right now there's an awful lot of agencies out there who are trying to move to ClickUp and who are struggling through it. And so I think figuring out how to find those people and get in front of them and just let them know, hey, we're here if you need help, we'd be happy to talk. I'm super excited about that. And not just relying inbound and content is awesome for that as well. But there's an additional market there of folks who we should be serving and can be serving. So I'm excited to see you lead the charge and build that out here as we, as we move forward.

Yeah, exactly. Because I mean we're, we're, we're planting our flag and getting out there and letting people know because ultimately you, you don't know what some, if you don't know things don't exist and how can you get the help that you might not even know you need? So that's the fun part.

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you going on. You mentioned a couple things that we should give a quick plug to. One, we're hiring, we're hiring on the. If you go to careers zenpilot.com you can see our open positions. But at the moment we are hiring for a super important position which is our client coach position. That's kind of a technical account management role. It's the person who is the direct line of contact between client and our entire implementation team. So that's a, that's a critical role as part of the business recruiting on the growth side of the business as well. So you go to careers.zenpilot.com you can check it out. If you'd like to speak with Brandon directly, learn more about what we're doing. Zenpilot.com demo is the easiest way to get them. And Brandon, for people who want to reach you personally, they want to grill you on what a terrible boss I am or whatever else, what's the best way for them to grab you?

LinkedIn. LinkedIn.

Yep.

So Brandon Ward at Zenpilot, you'll see me there. Agency Advisor.

Great. Thanks for coming on, Brandon. This is fun to do with you.

Appreciate you, Greg.

Thanks for listening to the Agency Journey podcast. Visit agencyjourneyinsiders.com to join the podcast community, and be sure to subscribe for future episodes.