How to Leverage Workshops to Grow Your Agency

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Welcome in to episode number 93 of inbound sales Journey. This week, Ryan and I are going to be diving into workshops and how you can leverage workshops to grow your agency. Ryan, how you feeling, man?

I am feeling well, Ryan.

This is fun being face to face, just getting to crush these out. The workshop thing that we're going to dive into here today and we've had, we had quite a few mentions of our boy Marcus Sheridan, aka the Sales Line over the past 92 episodes that we've done here. But we're gonna give them yet another shout out to Marcus, George and the team there at the sales line because they've really, I think, kind of led the way in the inbound agency community on emphasizing the value of workshops and then training agencies on how to give good workshops for clients. And I think that workshops have a lot of pot more than anything else. I think just to allow projects, relationships to start off with everybody being on board with what is going on, having clear expectations from the beginning, and then basically just setting you up for success as you move forward with things. There's certainly revenue potential here, there's potential to actually get a lot of good work done. But more than anything, I think you're just effectively setting a baseline with everyone on here's where we are today, here's where we're going and what the process is going to look like. So let's dive into how to leverage workshops and kick this one around a little bit with some of what we've learned, especially from agencies who have kind of combined workshops with the Discovery project that we've preached so much about and used those two things together, specifically the game plan that we have training on and have used those two to, to really scale their agencies. So I'll let you lead off with your thoughts and then I'll follow up from there.

Cool. So, yeah, this was kind of interesting. This actually was over a year ago now, I think was when the first agency came to me and said, hey, I was talking with Marcus and George at Inbound about these workshops and I think I'm going to Start offering these. And she. The woman who was came to me, was speaking to me, is an agency owner in California who's a dune bound customer, has gone through all the game plan training and stuff. And she said, you know, I think I'm going to use the game plan as the content for the workshop and do it instead of spreading it out, I'm just going to do it in a couple days. She actually had a client that was on the east coast, so she was flying across the country doing a workshop, cramming in the whole game plan into a couple of days, which is gold by the way.

Just to jump in here real quickly. That's one of the things that we've moved towards is hey, can we get in person? Can we get everyone around the table and fast track this? You can just get so much done in those focus blocks when you're face to face.

Yeah, it's a great. So there's kind of two ways. So we historically have done game plans spread out almost over the course of a month and not because it takes a full month to do it. I mean there's pros and cons to cramming things in together and spreading things out. But we have a lot of clients that are kind of all over the place. And so doing it with different meetings and stuff spread out into a few different meetings. And then building the game plan and presenting it to them and setting the expectation of a month made doing multiple of them at a time a little bit easier for us from an even flow standpoint. But then we didn't ever really consider too much for some of our local clients. We would do kind of in person game plans. And I don't even think we really thought they were workshops or that term workshops at first. And then we started seeing other agencies take the game plans, do workshops around them, make it a team, two, three day intensive process and kind of get everything done in that short time period. And that really tightens up the window on when you can start going ahead and as we say, build the engine and start kind of moving forward with the partnership or retainer from there. But I thought it was a great. When I was sitting there and I was listening at inbound to Georgia Marcus well and talking with those guys a little bit, I see their approach in shortening that up and really getting a lot of momentum going quickly off the bat, I was like, man, there's something to that. This is pretty smart. So yeah, I thought we, you know, doing an episode on it and just chatting about how maybe how to do that. The process to get started. If you guys listening have either attempted it or you haven't attempted it, but have thought about, hey, what's a great way to kind of kick off a client relationship, right, With a lot of value and doing it quickly, man, in person workshops are great. I don't know, Gray, A ton of agencies that are doing it digitally, I think it's kind of a lot to, you know, if you do a eight or ten hour day to digitally, it might not have quite as much of an impact. I mean, that's my personal opinion. I don't know if you know of a success story the other way.

Yeah, Well, I think eight or 10 hours, whether you're in person or remote, that's too much to go for. I know you can hardly stay awake for two hours straight if you're in a meeting. So I think one of the things that we've been experimenting with on the guava box side is going to a model where we'll split it up. We'll do two half days basically as the first couple meetings in our game plan process, getting everyone around the table in person. And that happens over the course of like it's an afternoon one day into the morning of the second day. In a couple cases, maybe do the one day, but no longer than a three hour block at a time of the actual hard work. It's just hard to keep people focused and engaged for a super long time. And that window that you have certainly goes down when you're doing it remotely, but you can still do that remotely and remote certainly gives you some other efficiencies that you don't have in person. There's pros and cons either way, like you mentioned. But experimenting with that, with hey, here's the two half day basically like lead into the discovery project and workshop and then on the back of that comes all the legwork. So there is still a ton of pretty technical legwork that goes into actually building out a solid game plan. And especially with the depth that the game plans that we build for our inbound marketing clients go into, I think that there is still going to be legwork. It still takes time. That's the stuff that you don't need everybody sitting around a table to crank that out. So leading off with the in person or remote and then diving into the actual hard work, that's a little bit more individualistic versus having the whole team to crank it out. And then you're going to get everyone together again to review that game plan at a couple points throughout certainly Persona discovery meetings, things like that. Obviously we're kind of talking about this in the framework of what does a game plan or inbound workshop look like. But you certainly don't need to use the same methodology. Same methodology of discovery projects, of workshops, of what that looks like. That applies across an awful lot. Large swath of service offerings. So that could certainly be any number of agency services. You're just kind of kicking it off with that and finding a way to get people a disproportionately large amount of value in a short time frame to hook them and get them bought into to what's coming up here.

That kind of leads me into, I guess, one of my. My first step one takeaways of this episode of how do I practically take this and then start offering or create a process for workshops at my agency? And so regardless of whether it's inbound or other services and things that you're offering, I think the first thing is realizing that you need to have a somewhat standardized process for onboarding clients and creating strategies for them. And that's really where it starts. So for us going through figuring out over the years a game plan process that we could take and apply to multiple industries, to multiple clients, in a process for really creating a great content roadmap for our customers. Without that, I mean, we wouldn't have a basis to do a workshop on. And so basically what I'm saying is, take a look at what is your process for getting clients up and running, for creating a strategy, for having an action plan moving forward, and create a process out of that. If you don't have it already, come up with a template and things that you can use that you can custom tailor to your clients. But that is kind of that boilerplate. This is what works and the recipe for success there. So we've had a lot of agencies take the game plan training that we offer and use that. But it's not the only way to do it. If you have another process or other services that you offer, that's kind of the place to start. So that's maybe the first. First key thing, I'd say gray for sure.

Yeah. I think if you have not gone through the DO in Bound game plan training, just go Google Let's Game Plan Training course or go on the DO Inbound site and search for the let's Game Plan Training course. And that just overview page walks through. There's a ton of content on there. Just walking you through what this process looks like. And I think there's a lot you can take away from that, obviously, if that makes sense. That's certainly a resource. That's one of the single most successful things that a ton of agencies have gone through with do inbound. So if that's something, if the game plan itself, or even just something close to that sounds like the right discovery project, if you're not doing one currently, then just to have all the training, all the templates, all the resources involved in that course, I think makes a ton of sense for you. And it's been really one of the most profitable investments a lot of agencies who have gone through that have made. And that's the feedback that we hear pretty frequently. So not to go all sales pitchy on you here on a sales podcast, but I'd definitely check out that course overview and rock and roll from there. But anyways, Ryan, I kind of cut you off there with step one. I'll let you kind of quickly go through what your process would look like and then we can. I'll throw in anything else and we'll go from there.

Yeah. So after I have the process in place for what the strategy is going to look like, what we're actually going to walk through and kind of mapping out, okay, if we have a two day intensive workshop, what are we going to go through, what's the objective and what we're going to do? The second step is promoting it on your website. So creating content, explaining what that process is like, creating landing pages, case studies, trying to build up and do it either for your current. So we talked last episode about upselling. You have someone that does a website, you already have a relationship with them and maybe your first workshop that you do is with them going through and creating a content strategy plan or whatever it is that your workshop's going to be based around for them. So you do that with a couple current clients, get some case studies and then you really just start promoting it. Don't hide it and not offer on your website. Get it out there, explain to people what it is and have a clear sales process for how you sell them. Might be a little bit different than selling up other services, but have a process in place from a sales standpoint. Step three, create a sales deck. Explain the value to the prospect, create videos, content, things like that around it. Even an intro course that helps them understand what the value is there and what it's like to go through that. For someone who's never worked with you before, having them see your face, you're explaining things to them and understanding a little bit of value. Up front is a good idea. And then number four, obviously figure out how you want to price it. So if you are doing them in person, there's potentially travel costs associated with that. So maybe it's just you have one standard price and then you throw in travel on top of that. The other thing is maybe it has like a tiered pricing model. So we've experimented with things around game plans where we have sold game plans personally from 5 to $10,000 just as a fixed cost. But we've also started experimenting with a new pricing model for game plans as well. That that process is what go like having the workshops and going through that. And that is a Persona based pricing model. So if you have, if you're a company that has two Personas, we're going to create and target and create a roadmap for you. You're going to pay less than someone that has four Personas. And so it's kind of a tiered pricing structure. So just trying to figure out what is your time worth to you and how that fits into that process, knowing roughly it's going to be two days, 10 hours total, something like that. So once you guys figure that out. So that's kind of the process getting set up. Create your strategy, your plan, your process, Create the content that you need to promote it and then also try to sell some maybe to current customers to get a few under your belt. Another great thing is if you aren't practicing kind of what you're preaching. I know this is the bane of a lot of agencies is you're busy, you don't have time to do this stuff for yourself. Run a workshop for your own agency and create a plan and an action plan for them. So those would be some of the things that I would say some practical tidbits to get started.

Nice. Good stuff, Ryan. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap up this episode right here, guys. If you are currently running workshops at your agency or considering that if you're running them, we'd love to hear about what's working, what's not working. If you're thinking about it, shoot us what questions you have. This is something that we're obviously continuing to learn about and experiment with right now. We've done a lot more on the workshop and cohorts type stuff on the do inbound side then on the guava box side to this point. So we are also picking the brains of a couple other folks who are doing this well right now, trying to learn more about what this looks like. So I'd love to hear what questions you guys have and help get answers for you there. Thanks for staying with us on this episode. Next week Ryan and I are going to be back and we're going to be talking about same side selling what that looks like and and diving into some more great sales resources. So we'll talk to you next week. In the meantime, go sell some stuff.

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