The Cookieless Future, pLTV AI, Personal Branding Tactics, and a ClickUp CRM with Paris Childress

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray Mackenzie from zenpilot. And this week I've got the pleasure of bringing on Paris Childress, who is the CEO of Hop Online. Paris, welcome to Agency Journey.

Thanks for having me, Gray.

I'm super excited to dig in. So you are running roughly 40 person agency. You guys do a ton in the. Actually, I'll let you give the profile, but you've got a background in SEO, in content, in paid acquisition, performance marketing. How do you describe Hop Online when folks ask you like, hey, give me the quick profile of the agency.

Yeah, well, in a nutshell, we are a performance agency for SaaS businesses, primarily B2B SaaS, and that encompasses paid media management, a lot of that is on Google and paid social, and also what we describe as organic growth services, which encompasses SEO, content marketing, email marketing, a little bit of account based marketing, and also conversion rate optimization. So it is in a, in a sense it is a full service, but we generally divide the teams into paid media and then the organic. Organic growth, yeah.

How do you decide when to add a new service like CRO, I would assume is one of the. Maybe not, but I would assume that's one of the newer services and ABM is probably the other one from. From what you shared that like, hey, these are probably two of the more recent ones. How do you decide when to attack on a new service?

I think it has to do with client need more than anything and also with the sense of where the industry is going. So with CRO it was more about client need and in some cases you have this feeling that if I am not able to provide a solution to this client for the service that they're asking for, it might go somewhere else and that other agency might also offer some of the stuff we're offering and put us under a little bit of pressure. So part of for CRO was a little bit more client driven, for ABM was more market driven, I'd say, because I really feel that for all B2B lead gen marketing, I think ABM now really is the answer. And I know that it's difficult, but we as an agency, we have to get good at that. So that's more of a market driven for abm.

Makes sense. Are you guys using Terminus or what's. What does that tech stack look like on the ABM side.

Right now? It's. Well, we, we use remarketing a little bit. It's driven by the client. So.

Sure.

Zoom Info is a popular tool that a couple of clients have and of course, we use LinkedIn as well, LinkedIn ads and, and remarketing there. But other than that, we don't. We haven't really built out much of a tech stack for pure ABM just yet.

Right, right. That makes sense. So B2B says, how did you wind up in that vertical? I know there's some, what we, what we market to like on the front door and what we accept in the back door is not always 100%. You know, we market hardcore to marketing agencies and then we work with a number of other teams, professional service providers as well. But how did you wind up in that vertical?

Well, it was about probably four or so years ago, I think, 2019, when we realized that our top two or three clients, the ones that not only were driving the most revenue and the best margins, but also the ones that our teams really enjoy working on the most, that we were getting the best results for, were SaaS businesses. And I always had a hunch even back then that we needed to niche down more and at least we needed to position ourselves publicly and we needed to market to a unique audience, regardless of whether we would accept clients from other verticals, which we still do. So we made the decision then that we wanted to try to reposition the agency for sas. I think in the last few years, that has gotten a little bit crowded and there's almost now a need to go one level deeper within a few different verticals. But we still are primarily focused on SaaS businesses and all of our marketing, including our podcast, we try to speak to SaaS marketers. But realistically, Gray, I think half, nearly half of our Clients are not SaaS companies.

Yeah, right.

And that comes from. Just from inbound, that leads that come inbound and they come from also referrals. So we do take a lot of that business if we think we can help them. And it's a, a good fit.

Right. Where. So inbound, I know that you do some speaking, and I want to bring up a talk that you gave a little bit later here today, but what else? I mean, is it like a lot of SEO and content on your own site? What is, what does inbound look like? Or is it mostly network? Like, where do most of those inbound leads come from?

Yeah, well, we get a fair amount from our website. We, we try to blog pretty regularly. We always want to get better at that. There is now a Fair amount of LinkedIn activity contributing to inbound. It's not always easy to attribute that perfectly, but that could come from someone who winds up on our website, who initially saw us on LinkedIn or maybe has caught. Caught the podcast. But we do try to ask, qualitatively, we asked them when. When we had that first discovery call, how did you hear about us? How did you find us? And the responses are very interesting. Some people say, we found you on a list, on a listicle. And I always want to know, what was that? Where is that? And I'll try to Google it and figure out where it's ranking. Other people will say, we've heard of you, or we were doing some Google searches, and then I want to understand what keywords they were using. So you have to still dig deep to really attribute the source of inbound. And. But. But these are. These are still the best leads as well that typically have the highest closing rate and the fastest sales cycle.

For sure. You. We didn't mention the name of the podcast. It's Paris Talks Marketing. Right? Your podcast.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And you said you're 140 episodes plus into this thing over the last couple years.

Right.

What's the strat? Because I know that there's a lot of other agency owners or agency podcasters who listen to Agency Journey. Uh, so this is a selfish question for me and also for some folks who I know are tuning in, what's your approach with the podcast? Because I feel like there's a couple different tiers of ways to go. One is, you know, hey, I want to invite you on because I actually want to work with you. One is, I want to invite you on because I want to be seen as being in the same tier that you operate in. So it's kind of like trying to position ourselves, punch above our weight class a little bit. There's. There's a bunch of different approaches, but what's the. What's your approach or kind of the business plan behind the podcast? Kind of. Given the fact that I'm sure for you, like, for me, a lot of the podcast is just like, hey, this is fun, and this is interesting for me. So I want to have on people who I just want to talk to, regardless of the business strategy.

Yeah, you know, Gray, it's a mix of all those things. I'd say up until now, historically, we have not targeted folks that we necessarily want to work with, although a lot of the guests are from really awesome SaaS companies, and we do. Sometimes it happens naturally, but that's not really our aim. I think we probably could do a little bit more of that. I think it's a good idea and in fact, Jason Swank, I was on recorder for his show, the Agency Mastermind recently, and he also gave me that advice that I could be doing a little bit more of that. But really, the second thing that you mentioned is more about punching above the weight class and associating our brand with those other brands and kind of elevating our brand, hopefully by having these conversations and getting these people on the show. So we've had. We had the COO of ClickUp on a couple of years, maybe a year and a half ago. We've had the SVP of marketing from HubSpot on the show, and these were probably the biggest wins. And I think that helps also for the SaaS community to see that we're. We're driving the conversation with thought leaders at that level. The last thing that I'll mention is kind of to your point, this is probably the most fun that I have on any given week is getting. Getting onto the show and having a great discussion and learning things and opening my own thinking about certain aspects of the business that I probably never would have done. Even from speaking to clients or speaking to our team or reading blogs or newsletters in the industry, I think conversations have a way of giving me clarity of thought like no other source can. So selfishly, that's. That's probably still the number one reason why I've stuck with it.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think that's helpful to know. I think that's one of the keys to keeping anything going. You know, the vast majority of podcasts, just like anything else, die out, you know, before they hit 20 episodes. If it's not fun for you, if it's not interesting, it's gonna be really hard, regardless of the business outcomes, to keep up the momentum with it.

Yeah. I'll also mention one other thing that I think for agencies that are listening, it's important also to build a personal brand. And that's one of my goals with Paris Talks Marketing. And one of the reasons we gave it that name was to also try to build my personal brand so that it can also elevate our company brand and there can be a closer association between me and in the company. And I've seen a lot of inbound leads now that have come. I feels like they've come more through a personal brand, and that's a gateway to the agency brand, and then they see what the agency is all about, and then they want to get in touch. So personal branding, I think, for agency owners and CEOs is now very, very important. I think it's hard to hide behind a curtain, so to speak and just be an operator. I think the, it's really an imperative now to get yourself out there and, and create a personal brand for yourself.

So I kind of wrestle with that because I have a desire like on our. We run on EOS at Zen Pilot and our, on our. So the Vision Traction organizer is like the, you know, basically the, the two pager business. Two pager that it's just EOS parlance for, for what that looks like and we share that with our whole team. What's our, you know, what's our 10 year target and what's our three year, you know, kind of what does that three year picture look like? And on that three year picture at Zenpilot, one of the things on there is that myself and Andrew, my business partner are like the, the business doesn't rely on us for day to day operations in, you know, within three years. And so I wrestle with like I want to be able to have the anonymity or have the may not anonymity but I want the business to be able to run without us tied to exactly what you just said. Which is the biggest unfair advantage that we have as founders is putting our name out there in the market. People will always associate or give a lend a little extra credibility to you when it's the founder speaking than a marketer speaking. And so if we want to lean into you could do it without it. But the biggest unfair advantage that we have is the fact that we are founders. And I think that's a really good point. That's a key reason why I think founders and leaders at companies should actually be a big piece of the face if you want to have the most efficient growth possible.

Yeah, I think what you said is really interesting because my goal also is to be able to get myself out of the business and for the business to run effectively without me. And I think the distinction for me is that I really want to get myself out of sales. And when I think of getting myself operationally out of the business, it really, I've already gotten myself out of all of our projects and the delivery side of the business runs completely according to the systems that we've set up. But I'm still heavily involved in sales. And that's one of the things that I still don't really like is that I do know that I can swoop in as a CEO and founder and increase our win rates significantly. But we've got now a sales team and we're trying to build that up, and I need to let them eventually build the capability. So when I think about having the business run without me, I think mostly that sales delivery needs to run without me. It continues to do that. Sales needs to be able to run without me. But I can still be the face of the company from a marketing perspective. And.

Right.

I can still. I can still create content and go on speaking gigs and have my name and my face out there to benefit everything else that's happening. And I think that's really the ideal place that I'd like to be, is to be not 50 on sales and. And 30 marketing and 20 ops, but more like 80% marketing. 20%, maybe just strategy, let's say.

Right, right.

Ideally, I think that's.

I think it's a really good distinction. You still do it like you're kind of an individual contributor on the marketing side and the business isn't reliant on you. But you can keep running that podcast. Those two things are not actually conflicting, which is awesome. You mentioned ClickUp, and you guys were relatively early to the. To the ClickUp train. How did you come across ClickUp originally?

You know, I think it was a client that was using ClickUp. Yeah, that's what it was. There was a client that was using ClickUp. We were on Asana.

Yeah.

And they said, hey, well, we use ClickUp. We'd really like you to come over and join us on our ClickUp. And when the client says that, you kind of have to say yes. And that was our first introduction to ClickUp. And then we dug a little bit deeper. And that was in 2020, I think. And one of the things that always annoyed me a little bit about Asana was that I had to get another time tracking tool and bolt it on. And we do time tracking pretty religiously at our agency. And the first thing I noticed was that ClickUp had built in time tracking. So I said, oh, that's. That's a big plus. Let me take a look. I wasn't that serious at that time of really moving out of Asana because I thought switching costs are going to be a nightmare. But then I saw, well, at that time, I think the pricing has increased, but they were. They were priced at about half of Asana's price per seat with time tracking. And from what I could tell, they had everything that Asana had from a project management tool standpoint and even some extras, like they had Gantt charts. They had the. They had these. The different. They had the hierarchy structure. I think that gave a lot More flexibility than even Asana did. So then I started to imagine what would it look like if we really try to move all over from Asana. And then a few months later, we decided that we were gonna. We were gonna go for it. Actually, that's when we found you guys too, because we started looking for a little bit of help in that area. And you all certainly popped up immediately when we started looking, and we never looked back. Really. Don't, don't regret that move at all. And ClickUp has just continued to get better and better over the years. And now 3.0, I just got on 3.0 and it's amazing. I'm having a blast with that.

Yeah, that's awesome. So I remember at that point in our business, so we probably got connected towards the end of 2020. I don't. I don't remember. I should have looked it up to know exactly where it was. Probably that was when things started to shift for us a little bit. But up until that point and even throughout 2020, probably 80% of our clients were folks who were agencies looking for help operationally with project management. And we were introducing them to ClickUp. You know, hey, we've got this platform that we think you should use here. Let me share why I think this is superior to Asana or whatever. And the folks who are willing to kind of take the jump and kind of bet on working with us and move to ClickUp, that was the vast majority of the business that has since switched. And so you were one of the few folks who were coming in who were like, hey, we already know about ClickUp. You know, we, we want to, we want to do this and we just want to work with, you know, whoever can help us get the most out of it in an agency.

Yeah.

Context. So that's, that's fun to talk to people who are the early adopters and we're like, hey, you just.

Yeah, yeah, you know, I just remembered something too. That's pretty cool. Gray. What hooked me on Zen Pilot was that you all, you all did, I think, a co hosted webinar with ClickUp and you introduced the account dashboard, which I think it's really a centerpiece for what we do. Just this amazing dashboard with a bird's eye view into our whole portfolio with a lot of detail. And that was, I think that was what hooked us to want to talk to you all after watching that webinar. And still a great thing that we've got in ClickUp.

Yeah. And you guys have taken it quite a bit farther in terms of building out kind of the full CRM in the inside ClickUp. So are you using your CRM that you have built in ClickUp? Is that the entire CRM you're not plugged into HubSpot or Pipedrive or anything else as well?

We're not. We moved. We moved off of HubSpot and also something that I was very, very worried about that migration and the switching cost but it turned out to be pretty seamless really so we moved. That was probably about a little less than a year ago. So our entire CRM is in ClickUp. And also I don't regret that decision. I think it's for agencies that are listening and considering doing it. I think the biggest benefit is when you have like our agency you have a lot of people that are not directly responsible for sales but that are involved in sales. Sometimes it's like selling by committee where I can pull in our head of PPC to do some keyword research and a forecast for a prospect that's going to get presented. So the ability to connect sales deals to tasks in ClickUp and the ability to plug in everyone at the agency into into sales and give them full visibility that's really powerful because then you can effectively really harness everybody in the agency much more for sales. That's the number one reason why I don't regret moving over to ClickUp As a pure CRM you do make. There are some trade offs. That whole that trinity of contact organization and deal you don't have quite that same setup. You don't have. It's harder to have a contact database that you can quickly go into and export export out of. But we pretty much have replicated the flow of the deal flow which is basically we have a warm lead then we have discovery from discovery it moves to needs proposal and that's where it lives as long as it's being negotiated. When we close close one close, lost, postponed. So we've we've replicated the, the sales flow and the sales funnel pretty well and ClickUp and then inside every deal is a task basically in the subtasks are the actual to dos of the of the deal.

Right.

And then everything else goes in lots of custom fields and I, I don't see us moving off of that anytime soon now.

Yeah, I love it. I know we're going to do another co marketing piece together around what that looks like and I'm excited to dig in deeper into how you guys have built that out. In our internal kind of ClickUp CRM we are using those we are using deals, companies and contacts. So I love seeing kind of what, how other people are building out on it and what they're, what they're using across the three. The three pieces. So I've got a whole bunch that we could nerd out on there. But I wanted to talk about this conference that you did in Athens and you were talking about kind of the demise of third party cookies. You talked about acquisition strategy and like how does that change and agencies and maybe you could bring it. And I think all of that also has a tie into a product that you guys have built. So we could we kind of talk about that from either perspective. But how many. Well, I guess I'm selfishly also curious as we look at our event strategy for next year, how often are you going out and speaking at events? Is that unintentional? Is there like a plan for the year or is that kind of more optimistic?

It's a little more opportunistic. But I still want to be going out and speaking on average once per quarter. Yeah. So for about four times a year. I think from a pure travel perspective, I don't think I could do it once a month. If I really made more of an effort, I could probably apply to a lot of other conferences and probably get it up to once a month, but that would be a little bit too hard on me personally. So I think once a quarter is a good cadence and I believe I've been kind of sticking to that over the last couple of years. App post Covid. I'd say during, during COVID it wasn't clearly, but speaking. Speaking engagements are probably the best real way to build the personal brand, get visibility. I think it's the best one to many audience opportunity that you can get still. So once a quarter is the goal, more or less.

Yeah, that makes sense. Where has. I mean, is it from those from. From conversations at conferences or the podcast that kind of your interest and the work that you've done in AI and machine learning, like has that come from those kinds of connections or where does that come from? And maybe talk a little bit about what that looks like and what you guys are building.

Yeah, sure. Well, I'll start with the problem that I think the marketing, digital marketing industry at large isn't quite fully prepared. Prepared for as well as agencies. And that is the demise of third party cookies. And this has been some. This has been a can that Google has been kicking down the road for a few years and postponing it multiple times. And now the new date is 2024. It's probably going to be the beginning of Q4. So we're one year out from the demise of third party cookies. And most people listening probably know that third party cookies are a way of tracking people at the browser level, primarily in Chrome, so that you can target them individually based on their browsing history. And it's an extremely powerful tool that has been one of the major drivers of return on ad spend probably for the last 15 or maybe even 20 years in digital marketing, since the beginning. And I think people don't fully appreciate how influential that little cookie is when that goes away. Google has other plans, something called privacy sandbox. And that might work eventually. Okay. But I think that there's going to be a window where there's going to be a massive loss of signal. And in order to preserve return on ad spend, advertisers, particularly those that are spending good amounts with Google primarily, if they don't supplement that data loss with something else, then their return on ad spend potentially could tank. And what they need to substitute that with is their, their own first party data. And so we have been strong proponents for the last year, maybe year and a half of trying to work with clients not only to optimize their, their advertising in the platforms, but to, but to get their first party data and bring that first party data into the platforms. So it's more important I think in the years ahead to be able to understand how to craft a first party data strategy for clients and bring data that Google doesn't have into Google, as opposed to being a black belt at optimizing inside of the platforms. So that's a little bit of the preface. What we're building right now is something called pltv. It's a data science solution and it's based on machine learning on first party data. It stands for predictive lifetime value pltv. And we spun that out of the agency now because we also want to work with agencies to deliver this solution to their clients. So we have a separate brand and we've got the site PLTV AI. And what this does is effectively uses machine learning on first party data that's aggregated into a data warehouse to predict the future lifetime value of a new acquisition pretty much right at the moment of them being acquired and at the moment meaning somewhere between say 24 to 72 hours. So we're taking data that, we're taking zero party data that they, that gets captured as they're converting in forms and in the onboarding journeys. We're taking behavioral data for how they Use the product. We're getting other geographic demographic data and we're trying to crunch as much as we can very, very quickly at that point of acquisition so that we can get a predictive LTV and feed that back to Google. Right now, mostly we're working with Google. The reason why PLTV matters is that that can become a conversion event for value based bidding. Value based bidding is bidding on target, return on ad spend, which is how E Commerce has been doing it probably for the last 10 or 15 years. We want to bring this solution to SaaS marketers who have fixed recurring revenue streams, but they have a very difficult time knowing what is my cac, what is my CAC ceiling because I don't know the lifetime value. And I'm optimizing, I should be optimizing towards LTV to CAC and my investors want my LTV to CAC to be 3 to 1 or better. So I know what my CAC is obviously, but I don't know ltv. So we're trying to help companies with recurring revenue predict LTV at the point of acquisition so that they can lock in LTV to CAC ratios and they can optimize for that with their ad spend. And it's, it's been tough. It's, it's a lot of testing. Google has been very supportive themselves and they're really behind us. This particular solution has what's given me a lot of speaking opportunities at Google events and we're still in the early testing days. We've got mixed results, but I believe that when cookies finally sunset next year, I think people are going to be scrambling, including agencies, for these first, first party data solutions. Not only this, but a whole lot of other first party data solutions. So we're trying to get out ahead of that curve a little bit. Sometimes I feel like we're still a bit too early on this, but I think, I think we're heading in the right direction with pltv.

Yeah, that's awesome. So obviously the agency piece, I would assume agencies would want to use the PLTV platform, especially as we get closer and closer to, to kind of the deadline of what's happening to third party cookies here. So is that a white, like an agency white labeled solution or are they running it through the platform? How do you anticipate that playing out?

I think long term we're imagining this as a white label solution that becomes productized. We haven't fully gotten there yet. So right now we're partnering with agencies and we are working with the, their clients as well and they're introducing us to their clients and we have a clear agreement that under no circumstances would we ever work with those clients for any advertising services or any other agency services.

Right.

So there's, there's that guarantee. But I do envision this to be a white label service in the future which is more plug and play, maybe even API driven. That could be a SaaS product in its own right.

Right. So I think targeting agencies makes a lot of sense to me as kind of like hey, here's the, the go to market channel. How much, I mean you mentioned the golden ratio earlier and kind of LTV to CAC and what's your. Obviously a payback period ties into that as well. What are you going through any VCs or other? Like does that make any sense for you as a channel as well?

We have talked to a few VCs. Yeah. We haven't gotten too much traction but I still think that's a viable go to market channel. We really think about the go to market as 3, 3 potential channels. Now one would be direct to not only SaaS businesses but also any other type of even B2C E commerce subscription subscription E commerce businesses. So there's a direct route, there's the agency route and then there's also the VC route. And we're exploring all three. But right now what seems to be make the most sense is agencies. Because one of the reasons is because we as an agency ourselves, we know the pain points. I feel the most confident speaking to agencies about this and most of the agencies I speak to have at least one or two clients where they think, yeah, we've got the volume of conversion data, we've got the ad spend required and this is a business where either we plateaued or we're starting to see some degradation in the return on ad spend and we need some innovation. We want to bring something new to the client. And so I do, I do, I have the most confidence that, that that is going to be our primary go to market. But we're going to leave all the doors open also for the other two.

Right, here it goes. That's amazing. Well, the site is PLTV AI. We'll make sure it's in the show notes as well. Um, I would imagine there'll be plenty of questions around like how does this actually work under the surface? You know, like how, how in the world can we predict what LTV looks like? But I definitely see the, the market opportunity for that. Let me. So I'm switch gears here as we wrap up And Paris, I have two questions for you that I wanted by you. One is I'm going to ask you the. Our last question that I ask everybody is what's your number one tip for agency operators? But before we get to that one where. So other than the conversations that you're having, how are you primarily learning, ingesting data? Like where do, where do all these ideas come from? Is it podcasts? Books? Like what, what's. What drives your learning cycle?

Number one is podcasting, both doing the interviewing and also coming on as, as a guest and listening to shows like yours. By the way, I'm a big fan of, of the Agency Journey podcast. I've been listening for a couple of years, never miss an episode. So to me, that's the easiest way to consume the content that I need to consume because I can do it pretty much anywhere. And other than that, I used to read blogs, but I don't really do that anymore. I just have moved away from that. I'm still on a couple of newsletters, but I'd say podcast is the number one source for me to feel like I'm staying on top of, on top of things. And then even at some of the events that I attend to, that I attend conversations that I have with folks there. And I'd say maybe even a third way, which is through the natural sales process, getting on discovery calls probably for every new client that we win, there's five, six, seven other really good discovery calls that I've had and I get to do several of those per week. And just the questions, the Q and A there, it's. I get a lot of great insight there. I see how people are struggling and how they're thinking about, about the industry.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right, well, bring us home with this. What's your number one tip for agency operators?

The number one tip that I have for you all is hire a data scientist, if you haven't already. Really think about this. I think for performance agencies especially, and as this third party cookie demise is coming closer and closer, you could even argue that a lot of us are slowly becoming commoditized. The service of managing Google Ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn, and with the advent of AI now and generative AI getting more and more to share that work, performance agencies are going to need to pivot into data science, I believe. And this solution, solutions around helping clients leverage their data better for marketing. These are going to be the reasons why folks are hiring performance marketing agencies one year, two years out from now. So if you haven't already or haven't pulled the trigger, I'd say hire a data scientist. Even if you have to really explain to that person what digital marketing is all about from the very beginning like we did. I think it's a good long, long term investment.

That is the first time that's been offered as a tip. And that's a great one, I think. I don't think it's just agencies. I think like the amount of data that we deal with on a day to day basis, there's so many, so many different spaces where that's a great recommendation. So this has been awesome. Paris, I need to let you go because you are in the middle of a trip right now. But thank you so much for coming on and joining me on Agency Journey. This has been a blast.

Same here. Gray, thanks for having me.