Deliver Better Agency Services by Gathering the Right Information in the Sales Process

In this episode of Happy Client Show, Ben and I are going to talk about how you can gather information from prospects during the sales process to set your client servicing team up for success. Here we go.

Guys. Welcome back. I know you've missed us. I know I've missed looking at Demer longing, longingly into his eyes to talk about client stuff. This is the Happy Client show, and we are back after a little hibernation. We had a little too much steak and fell asleep for a couple years, but we made it back and we have some caffeine to prove it.

You're right, Betty. Here we are. We're ready to roll. And in this season of Happy Client show, the whole theme is giving agency servicing pros the tools, tips, tricks, and encouragement that you need to effectively do your job well. Because we know it can be a grind down there in the trenches working with clients every single day. So we want to give you some processes, strategies, tips and tricks to make your life a little bit easier, maybe bring a little joy into your life. Ben, you think we can do that for folks joy?

I don't know about that. That's asking too much. Anyway, I could get you a coupon.

Well, we're fired up to be back here. Like Ben said, we took a little bit of a hiatus here from the Happy Client Show. Both of us are in brand new places right now. Ben is now the founder, head honcho over at Tophat. And Ben, give us a little bit of an update on where you've been for the past year and what you've been up to.

Well, I was in a military prison for actually, that's just the story they told me to tell. But yeah, founder client services director at Top Hat. It's a five person boutique agency in the Pittsburgh area. And so we specialize in creative marketing services, branding, web design, and communication strategy. And so being head of, you know, the client success for the agency, my entire shtick is that I deal with clients and, you know, really proven out that the success of your clients will be the success of your agency. So a lot of learning lessons there, and I'm really excited to share some of these things from this new trench.

Awesome. Well, Ben, you come from a website background. You worked with us at Guavabox where you had the inbound agency background. Now you guys move upstream and do a little more of the branding, graphic design, storytelling side of things. So good things are ahead here where we're going to bring a lot of different perspectives to the table to help folks, depending on what kind of an Agency you have, it's all about relationships, it's all about communication. And expectations is such a big part of that. So today we're going to talk about in the sales process, how can an agency really set the servicing team up for success to make sure they've got the tools that they need to hit the ground running. And Ben, I think one of the most important phases of client engagement or client management is that onboarding phase, the first 60 to 90 days. We're going to get into that a little bit more in the next episode on how to effectively gather information in that phase. But first we want to set that phase up for success here in the sales process by making sure that we've got the right information gathered. So from your side, what are some things that agencies should be thinking about when they start working with the agency sales team to gather the right information and really set everything up for success?

Yeah, this is where things fall off and really set up an agency and a client for failure, where there's misalignment of culture, of expectation, of budget, of timeline of all these different things. So in the sales process, the sales team shouldn't just be trying to close the deal, you know, by shooting for the moon and promising the moon, they should be really trying to get an understanding of is this client our, our best fit prospect and we are a best fit prospect for them. And so some of the questions that you should be evaluating is who are you going to be working with within the organization? Is it a lone wolf president who, you know, axed his entire marketing department? In some cases startups are, you know, this is just a necessity to live. They have someone who is a founder and probably in charge of marketing. But for $1 million corporation, that's a red flag. So finding out who is your point of contact, who are you going to be working with on an ongoing basis, what department are they from? What kind of leverage do they have? If you're dealing with some, you know, really small level coordinator who doesn't isn't able to drive the conversation, things are going to fail at some point. Also, you know, what is the budget? You know, before you even talk about the project, your agency, do they have budget to sustain this? Are they an organization that is budgeting at least 10% of their overall revenue back into communications type services, inbound marketing services, if they're not budgeting at least 10% into these services, you're going to see a long term malevolent effect to the relationship. So those types of things and also just the culture you know, is it an open, communicating culture? Is it a results driven? What is the culture and does it align with yours? Because we underestimate oftentimes the culture of another organization fitting with our own. And that's oftentimes where the biggest conflicts will be had. And I'm not saying that you should work with people exactly like yourself, company culture wise, but basic values, you know, those are some of the things that you should really start to tiptoe into before you even of course, dive into. Exactly what do you want from this relationship? What is the goal? And a red flag is if the organization says I just want to do this, that's going to come on your shoulders and that hammer is going to fall on your head.

Yeah, I totally agree with you Ben, on just tapping into the expectations and really getting a feel for where are they at and where are they coming from? Because if you start off and you think you're trying to accomplish one set of goals and the client thinks you're trying to accomplish another set of goals, that just makes life incredibly hard moving forward. So the mantra of this whole show is over, communicate every opportunity that you have. So we always want to be rehearsing. Here's what I heard, here's what I'm thinking, here are the notes. I'm going to send these over to you so that everyone can. There's multiple opportunities to catch missed expectations. That's really what we want to do. Because you're going to save so much time, so much energy, so much frustration if you just never work with a client to begin with if it's a bad fit. So everything I've been laid out there just about identifying your target Persona, figuring out is this person a good fit for the agency before we even start working with them. And this is a challenge that a lot of young agencies been. I know you and I have both been here where we bring in work that we really shouldn't have brought in and it winds up not only causing us a ton of pain, frustration and stress, but it drains our profitability because we're giving these people way too much time. They're sucking our creative energies down and they're really not a good fit for the agency from the get go.

Oh, I'd say this is most agencies to be honest with you, not just the young ones, but as a young agency you're really going to feel these type of things happen because you're often handedly short staffed, maybe your team hasn't fully matured and it spells disaster. And this is often the Point where agency owners start to burn out pretty easily and young. So it's really about communicating and having a structure and framework. And I find that oftentimes that, you know, we in agency world, we like to blame the client, pretend like they're the villain, but it's really, it's the agency. You know, the agency has to have a process and the client is coming in for your guidance. They want you to be their Sherpa. You know, it's not, hey, we're the agency. Tell us exactly how to work with you. It's, hey, let us show us. Let us show you the best method. And so, you know, some of those mistakes can often be. And hardships and heartaches can be avoided just by coming in with an intentional method and knowing those. But also at the same time, what you just said is you got to avoid those prospects that are going to be a disaster and that aren't going to fit for you.

Yeah, I think that bringing the conversation back to numbers wherever you can is a win for you, because the numbers don't lie. They are what they are. But in order to make that case and that conversation further down the line, you have to, as the agency, lead by kind of defining the key performance indicators that you are going to use to manage success and get the client to agree that these are our mutually agreed upon statistics that we are going to use to drive things forward. Because if you think that it's new leads generated, but the client thinks that it's website traffic, or they think it's, how many likes did my Facebook post get? Or how many likes does my page have? And you're saying, well, that doesn't mean anything because of these other numbers over here. You created tension there, and now there's so much animosity moving forward. So we wanted to find those numbers early on. And one tool that you can use, you can slide into your process is an inbound revenue calculator. And you can head over to doinbound.com IRC to get a free demo version of the inbound revenue calculator. You can play with that thing right on the site. You can use it in your sales process. And the idea here is to empower you to connect the vision of inbound or of a website redesign, whatever it is for your clients that they can see. We're not just doing this like Ben said, just because I want to do it, but we're doing this to move certain numbers on the dial. And if we can set the expectation that these are the numbers that we want to use to move the the dial. And we're going to bring those back every single month and measure based on those. Then we've really set the client up for success and we've united those expectations because at the end of the day, these are the numbers that we need to hit and these are the numbers that we want to base our decisions off of. So that can help really clarify communications and get you and the client on the same page. Now we've got tons of resources here in the Doinbound learning center. Just doinbound.com learning. If you want to learn more about how to sell with an inbound revenue calculator, we've got a whole podcast then for the inbound sales journey. But this year we want to talk about how do we collect the information from the client. So using assignment selling. And that's something that Marcus Sheridan over the sales line preaches a lot, giving the client homework to do during the sales process. And the inbound revenue calculator is a great piece of homework to send them during the sales process. Once you've figured out this is a good person that we could be working with, this is someone that I'd like to continue the relationship with moving forward. I'm now going to give them a piece of homework to get to show me that they're willing to put in time to kind of invest into this relationship. Because we don't want to be the salespeople that are always knocking on the door, always shooting them emails, always hitting them up with phone calls, but they don't care. We all know how those relationships work out. It needs to be a two way street there. So the IRC is a great piece of homework that you can send them to gather information early on and help set those joined expectations around. These are the numbers that we're going to use to define success. Ben, any other tips that you would share with folks about gathering info during the sales process as we wrap this thing up?

Yeah, I'd say some of the things you talked about, culture, team structure, things like that. But I think the single most important piece of information that you need to gather in this process and the thing that I see as the biggest pitfall is agencies will scope work without understanding the output that you're talking about here. And agencies will try to say it's 3,000amonth, but meanwhile they get into it and the client says we want to generate a million dollars per month. That's a red flag and probably not worth $3,000 per month. So really the best piece of information the most important is that expectation. What do you want to achieve, to what degree within what intensity and what amount of time? And if you can get that, you're going to be off to a great start in the relationship and it's going to save you a lot of heartache and trouble in the long run.

Well, if you want to grab a copy of the show notes for this episode, you can head over to doinbound.com learning and even download an interactive note taking guide there where you can just save as Google Drive. Type your notes up right there, keep all your stuff in one spot, save it and come back to it whenever you'd like. Head over to doinbound.com learning and head over to facebook.com doinbound if you want to stay tuned for all these videos there, you can do that right there. Same on YouTube, just search do Inbound. You can subscribe to the Happy Client show and catch every fresh episode that Ben and I pump out there. So we hope to see you again next time here on Happy Client Show. Have a good day.