Unpacking Our Winning Sales Strategies: A Deep Dive into Our Last 10 Deals with Zach Lawley

Welcome everybody to another episode of Payroll, and I'm joined today by that gentleman you just heard. His name is Zach Lawley. He's our Director of Business Development. And today we're going to go through a really cool exercise that I have been doing since 2008, and that is taking your last 10 deals, breaking them down. Where did they come from? How did you get in the door? What was the value? Who was the incumbent? What were some of the pains that you solved for that particular client? And then taking that information to help project forward. For your marketing, for your sales efforts, and to make sure the success of these organizations as they come on. Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now here's your host, Matt Vadie. Let's go. Thank you for joining me today, Zach. How you doing, brother?

You are welcome. I'm doing well. Appreciate you having me.

Of course. Of course. So, yeah, like I said, started doing this back in 2008. I remember the first time I ever did it. You know, I looked at my list of my last 10 deals that we had sold I had sold. That was, I was carrying a bag back then, and out of the 10 deals that I had sold, 8 out of those 10 were Paychex takeaways. And so this is back in Raleigh, and Paychex had a lot of reps out on the street there. And so that was a great opportunity for me to then turn around and go, dang, I didn't realize how much of these— we weren't intentional about it, just happened to be the way it worked out. Uh, so then I immediately turned around, did a Paychex takeaway campaign, referencing those accounts, the pains that those accounts had, the reasons why they went with us. And then I also was able to take that, create the same type of messaging to give to CPAs, centers of influence to help create more energy around taking away more accounts from Paychex. I wish, you know, for you Paychex reps that are in South Carolina, why don't you guys sell some business down here so we can take it away from you? I don't see you very often. I'm sure you're out there, but Hopefully they can pick up some accounts. I'm curious to see where some of these came from because we're doing this in real time. So Zach heads up our, our business development. I haven't talked through every one of these with him yet, so we're just going to go through this list and kind of get a sense of, you know, what the different solutions were, where they came from, and all that fun stuff. So Zach, any thoughts before we start to dive in?

No, I, you know, while there are some recurring themes that we'll hit on, each deal is a little bit different, so it'll be good to dive into Dive into each of them.

All right. So let's just— I'm going to first do a quick scan here. So of these 10 deals, it looks like 1, 2, 3 are PEO. What's that second to last one on the bottom there?

QRC. That's EPHR.

EPHR. So ASO. So we've got 3 PEO, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 ASO. So that's 7 out of the 10. 1, 2, 3, and 3. 2 Payroll Plus and 1 Simple Payroll. So in our world, Simple Payroll is just straight up payroll. Payroll Plus means that they added HR and timekeeping software into the fold as well. If you want to see, I mean, if you're listening to this right now and you want to see our breakdown of our services, we really have 4 levels. I just kind of laid them out, but they're on the website. We've got pricing up there. It's guru.co. There will be a pricing button right at the top. Go ahead and steal whatever you want to from there and go ahead and take a look at that. And if there's anything interesting or you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. But what are some of your general thoughts as you look at these deals as far as, you know, the solutions that they went on? Did everybody land where they originally kind of wanted to go? So for example, did any of these PayrollPlus or SimplePayrolls back down from an ASO or PEO, or were they initially coming in hot for payroll the whole way?

So all of the payroll deals besides one, so 2 out of 3 were set on this is what we need. One of them was, you know, a business that we currently work with, and they are essentially adding another division of the company in another state, one to get set up with payroll, timekeeping, onboarding. But there's one in there, a Payroll Plus, which again, for the audience, that's our payroll and HR system reactive model. The customer is going to utilize the technology, we're there on the back end. A big driver in one of those is scaling with us and looking at moving to the PEO at some point in the near future. He had a need to start with, let's take care of the payroll, current provider. They have the HR onboarding, but he hasn't spoke with them in a year. He wanted to go with someone local. Let's get into this model quickly here at the beginning of the year and then look at scaling into benefits because he's right around 15 folks and doesn't offer group health today.

So 7 out of 10 of these are on our premium offerings, PEO or ASO, which is fantastic. That's what we lead with. That's where we can really differentiate, you know, when we're coming in with that HR support, that extended team, becoming an extension of the client's team. I also noticed 2 of these are upsells. So to your point, one was sort of an additional business for an existing client. One was a client that was on simple payroll going up to PEO, pretty small group too. So that's fantastic to see. They've been with us for years. Let's look at this from an industry perspective. So I see that first one, are they software?

Software.

Software, real estate, dentist, service business, construction. Tech parking company, tech, tech, that last one's kind of tech-enabled services, I would say. So, mostly falling into our kind of core target markets as it relates to white-collar professional services type businesses. When you look at some of these sales processes, how did we get in the door with most of these folks?

So every single one of these besides one, besides the real estate group, they actually just a timing play, connected with them on LinkedIn, was in the market to make a move, referencing LinkedIn content. Every other one of these deals was either from a direct partner or a current client word of mouth referral. And what was interesting about 8 out of those 9, they were not competitive. You know how it goes when you get a word-of-mouth referral and somebody's word that they do great work, they kind of stop— the busy business owners stop spending time on, let's take a look at 3 different options. And, you know, if these folks say they do a good job, then it'll make it much simpler. So I thought that was pretty interesting to see 8 out of 9 Yeah, they're zero competition.

That is wild. That's how we like it, right? Um, the— so when you say direct partner, what does that mean?

Direct partner, meaning two of these came from, you know, in our world, a reseller. So of our payroll and HR software, they had been reselling just that. For past year, 2 years, and had a few clients that have grown to about 10, 15, 20. And they were asking that— they were actually hearing some pain points about— they were in the outsourced HR model with Paychex, and they had been with them for 8, 9 months, still hadn't had— still had not had a handbook completed, no recurring meetings with their HR business partner. So those came from reseller models, and then everything else came from, you know, our core partners that we try and create in outbound efforts, which are health benefit brokers or CPAs, and then just centers of influence in general. If you look at the two down here locally where I'm at, those came from, you know, it's a staffing company in the area that you introduced us to, Matt, and we met with them more from a, hey, macro, we can partner with each other to refer business, but just more so we run in the same circles of entrepreneurs, tech companies, and they gave a soft introduction and I'm talking very soft, you know, hey, you should speak with him. We did all the rest of the legwork. But again, once they gave us that referral, no competition, just looking at Guru to see if it fits the needs.

Yeah. And Zach's about 2 hours up the road from me in Charleston, South Carolina. I'm in Columbia, South Carolina. Come visit if you get bored. The, um, so Yeah, and Zach kind of touched on something there that's important, is we've got these 3 models of partnership that we have kind of broken out over the years in an effort to categorize our partners. So we've got referrals, resellers, and white label clients. And referral partners are just what you'd expect of, you know, they refer business to us. Sometimes that's very informal and it's just a casual relationship and we just kind of market that way internally of understanding who they are. And how they partner with us. Other referral partners are set up for rev share and they'll send us business that they, you know, see as a good opportunity and they're going to get a percentage of the ongoing revenue. Did anybody fit into that category of a referral that came from a sort of more formal referral partner who's going to get a rev share?

Yeah. So you have, and the partner I mentioned was, as we've talked about before, a hybrid between the two. The white label and reseller. So those two construction companies from the Northeast, both on outsource payroll or paychecks model came from, yeah, whether you want to call it a white label or reseller.

Yeah, and that's, those are the next two tiers up. So we've always had this sort of white label model of our offering where we do all the backend administration, we brand the software to the payroll bureau or CPA or retirement company or whoever it is that's selling it. They, they sell, they serve, we provide tier 2 to support to the bureau. But then we started offering this reseller model. And I'd be curious to hear from some of you out there what your success has been with setting up these types of partnerships. But it is more of a, hey, they're just out there selling the product and we're doing all the onboarding, we're doing all the ongoing support. It's a little bit more of the sort of powered by Guru type of model. And yeah, a few of these fell into that., when we look at the last 10. And so effectively, Zach did go in on these because they were going up to ASO, uh, but typically a simple payroll, payroll plus, they're going to go out and sell that deal and close that deal on their own. Uh, some of our higher dollar offerings, they may bring us in at least for the first few until they get their sea legs under them and start learning how to, uh, speak to the value of the particular services. Um, who are some of the Go ahead.

I would, I would add that from a partner, Lynn, one of these deals, one of the dental practices came from one of our CPA partners who, as you've talked about on here before, you know, while we can position a revenue share, they're more of the mindset of, to me, it's all about being a trusted advisor. I don't need the rev share. Just want to make sure that if I refer you, you're going to be taking care of them. So it's not more headache for me on the back end. And I think, you know, you would attest that's something we see in the CPA world pretty often.

Was that of that same acquisition that happened down in the Lowcountry? Did that third one down come from that?

Yeah, exactly. It was essentially that they got referred by the first dental practice who was referred from the same CPA partner that we're talking about. And essentially we've seen in a few areas in South Carolina where larger providers came in and acquired a local provider. These, especially these dentists were used to phoning, calling in the all hours, and really more of it is they were used to talking to a few core members of the team. Now they're calling into a call center. They really can't figure out how to operate the system. So while they're coming to us, you know, we're still training them on the platform and how to use it. They're getting that dedicated support. So as you'd mentioned earlier, figuring out trends in how you are winning business. You know, just last week, obviously I went to all 20 CPAs' offices in that small town where that provider got acquired and left them some value, uh, to hopefully have a more partnership-related discussion.

Wait, I'm sorry, are my headphones broken? Did you say you actually went to somebody's office, Zach, in 2023? Uh, you weren't just posting on LinkedIn and praying for inbound leads to show up?

No, no. And You know, with that, I would say as we're looking and are building out a sales team, the physical drop isn't going to be as core of a piece as maybe it was 5, 10 years ago. You can still provide a tremendous amount of value. Like I'd mentioned, I stopped at 20 CPAs' office with a handwritten note, a business card, introducing myself, who I was, why I think I could provide them value, how we provided some other CPAs value. And then a one-pager. I spoke with 2 out of 20 on the spot, some awesome conversations. The rest were more of, hey, you know, here's some information. But here's the key thing: out of these 10 deals, I met one of these deals in person. But if you're dropping into a CPA's office by physically leaving something, well, that— we may never meet them in person, but they know, okay, Zach's local because he's sitting here handing stuff out physically.

How many of these 10 are in South Carolina?

7 out of 10.

Oh, wow. Okay. I look like a lot less based on this quick scan.

Skip 6, 6 out of 10.

Okay. Awesome. That is exciting. I love that. And yeah, you need a pretty mixed bag. I was thinking back to— I re-listened to the episode we did with Lee Roberts a couple of months back where he talked about, look, man, I'm not going to try to pin you into being a cold calling person or a show up in person or do this person like whatever you're best at. Do that thing and, you know, supplement it with other things as well. But make sure, you know, if, if you just crush it by walking in the door and going and seeing CPAs, going and cold calling on small businesses, well, don't stop doing that just because, you know, you're trying to get more into an electronic sales environment when in reality you just have a number to hit. And some days you got to get out in the car and go, go make some magic happen. So.

All right. And I would, and I would especially add, if you're looking at it from You know, whether or not you're carrying a full bag and you're calling on prospects, but also trying to develop partner relationships, especially if the focus is partners. You know, you're not going there to ask for the business, not that you would be with prospects, but it's much less invasive. You know, you're just there introducing yourself as a business partner, and you can certainly even word it that obviously you want to get to know their firm to understand how we can refer them businesses. As well.

I got so many public service announcements this episode. Okay, for those of you listening right now that have sales reps in territory or you're selling, for the love of Pete, if you're trying to sell somebody something, don't disguise every conversation under this guise of, can we sit down and talk about your 2023 business strategy and compare notes? Like, this type of nonsense. Like, what problem are you solving? What's your solution? Just, just hit me in the mouth with it. I already know you're a salesperson. The number of, like, fake sales calls I've got in the last week under the guise of like, you know, we've got a mutual friend and I just really want to try to understand your strategy. Now I just don't even like you before we sit down. And so just have some empathy towards the person that you're talking to in that they, they don't have the time and bandwidth to share their dang business strategy with you, man. Like, nor do they care to, or is there any value in it for them. So, you know, create some value, provide some value, but don't hide behind some guise of that you're not a salesperson when you really are. Like, there's no merit in that whatsoever, and you're not going to get any dang appointments with that mindset anyway. So anyhow, off that soapbox, it just came through this morning where somebody's really trying to like, you know, leverage some mutual relationships we have into getting an appointment. And it's like, dude, I know you're trying to sell me something. Just say what you're trying to sell me so that we can just all move on with our lives. I can tell you whether I'm interested in having the conversation or not.

You've been thinking about that one.

Dude, that one's locked and loaded. I was annoyed. All right. So the one other piece on this. So we just talked about that acquisition that occurred down in the Lowcountry. Unfortunately, we have not been down in that area long enough to have a really well-built-out CRM in the respect of, you know, having the conversations, knowing who the current provider is, knowing, you know, calling in, getting getting some intel. However, we did have a similar circumstance happen up here, I guess, 2 years ago in the Columbia office where we had spent a lot of time building out notes in the CRM. And most importantly, if y'all aren't having a CRM or don't have your CRM up to date or you're just not keeping up with it, maybe you're a smaller team. Here's the biggest reason why this makes so much sense. So we had tagged every one of these accounts that use this particular provider We had 42 of them tagged in the CRM. That, that provider gets acquired by their software company, and you may know who that is. You probably use them, some of y'all listening right now. And guess what? You're going to lose a bunch of accounts in that acquisition because their support is terrible. Every time they acquire somebody in our territory, we pick up new accounts just like these 3 Zach just mentioned. But so you keep your CRM loaded, you keep up to date with who the current provider is, and now I can easily run a report and a 10-touch campaign that is focused on working with somebody local because they're going to lose that local touch as soon as that acquisition occurs. They go from Julie's my payroll person, I love her, I talk to her once a month, once every 2 weeks, whenever I need it, to I got fired into a 1-800 number, nobody knows who I am, and it's helter skelter because they laid off all the people that used to service my account. And so if you can be there at that time when they have to make that transition, that's critical rather than kind of having to do what we're doing now, or we're having to try to unearth them after the fact. Uh, so keep up with that data in your CRM. It's, uh, definitely a critical component of your outbound campaigns for down the road. All right. So let's kind of plow through some of these. Um, uh, just look through the list. Where did— so we talked about the leads came from mostly referral partners. Who are the incumbents in these deals?

So we can go down the list. We've got Agusto, small tech company on Gusto, but truly looking at the PEO model, so that'll eliminate Agusto. You've got ADP in the next deal that they had not heard from in a year. And, you know, while we— you talk about it often— while sometimes they play the top of mind game. They didn't with this prospect. I think that's more from the partner standpoint. So ADP was the incumbent, not really even knowing that ADP had onboarding software, obviously, which we know they do. Then we have 2 iSolved, us in 2 for an upgrade, 2 Paychex ASO models, ADP payroll onlys in two of these cases. And while they knew they had the ASO model, their gripe there was they only have one person that represents one thing. So if we want to talk about the ASO, we gotta get five more people on a call, and we're tired of dealing with that. They really liked our model of, you know, folks representing the entire bag and being able to talk about health benefits or just simply doing the payroll. And then in the last one was a Heartland Payroll, which, uh, that's down in, down in Florida. We don't see that too much here in the Carolinas, but yep, that was a Heartland Payroll that had just been a bit of a dumpster fire.

Yeah, so that's interesting. So multiple ADP, multiple paychecks, um, multiple iSolved. So you kind of let the cat out of the bag there with the, uh, acquisition, huh? But I was trying to pussyfoot around it, Zach, and then you just kind of punched me in the nose with the iSolved acquisition there. So, so yeah, I don't know what your terms are, y'all, for all you iSolved franchisees, if when you get acquired, you know, how long your earnout takes or what percentage of the accounts. But man, we've seen some real train wrecks in our territory when they do get acquired. So, All right.

So one single— not one of these deals came from doing something they may have, may have been doing, you know, HR in-house, if you will. Most of them, you know, at an employee count where HR hasn't— as you and I know, HR can mean so much. It just had not been top of mind for them. But from a payroll perspective, they were all outsourcing that piece.

Yeah. And every one of these fits our typical target account of, you know, 10 to 49 employees, right in that, right in that band. Couple with below 10 employees, uh, but I don't think there's any over 50 in here, right? Or at least not—

no, 5, 5 to 35.

5 to 35. That's right where we want to swim. I know some of y'all move upstream, you know, you kind of heard we're, we're pushing that PEO, ASO, um, down market, and that's where we're going to continue to stay. We have no Uh, no vision whatsoever of moving upstream. We just had kind of, you know, typically what's the, what's the play in moving upstream? Well, I'm trying to increase the annual dollar value of my deals. Uh, for us, we went by expanding the relationship that we can have with the small business instead of pushing upstream and then just trying to be really, really good at what we do by focusing on only really a handful of industries if we can. And like you heard Zach talk to, with so much inbound, it's a little bit challenging to completely, um, control the industries, but I think we do a good job still of punting on a lot of restaurants and stuff like that. We've got a couple, but not many. So what were some of the biggest pains or— go ahead, Zach.

Sorry. I was just going to add that, um, in all of these scenarios, they obviously not only love the, the local story, the dedicated support, but us being niched down and being experts in not only the industries, as you mentioned, 6 out of 10 were in our target industries, but just knowing that our software, our technology was built to their needs, our service model was, that seemed to resonate more than anything.

Yeah, which is a big thing for us. I mean, we got on, you know, you've probably heard me talk about it in old episodes, but we got on one of these big enterprise pieces of software at one point in our journey of owning a payroll bureau where, you know, they're serving 10,000-employee companies on that software and we're trying to serve 10-man groups on there and it's just clunky as can be. So we've really, in the process of developing on our own platforms, have made sure that they're built just for those small businesses, that the focus is there. There's not a whole bunch of bells and whistles that don't apply to their world and kind of gone feature light in an effort to really solve the sort of core needs that we see from these small businesses. Um, so what were those core pains? Like when you look at these, you know, what were some of the common themes and how do those align with the typical pains we see?

Yeah, I'll start at the top. You know, there, that was a gusto 5-person company about to grow to 20 employees over the next 12 months. And they needed a much more dedicated support model. They were looking for a proactive HR business partner to help them build out policies. And the thing we always hear, we don't know what we don't know. So that was key there. Not only good software, but need more support as we grow. Didn't feel like the current provider could scale. And they knew the current provider's not built to provide more support. It truly is a technology and a reactive model. You look at the next, and the pain was wanting to have employee documentation stored correctly and have a chance to scale with the company into the PEO model. The current provider does it. It's ADP. They have that offering, but it got back to, haven't heard from them because as we all know, two payrolls, baby, and they're gone. Woo! They hadn't heard from him in a while.

How long were they with ADP? The rep probably hasn't worked there since after those two payrolls were processed.

Yeah, I think that he's got multiple businesses. I feel like probably all encompassing 5 years. So it's been a while. Yeah. Yeah.

That person is now working at Cintas selling uniforms.

You get down to some of these partner deals up in the Northeast and while they were with, they were with Paychex in the ASO model for a reason. They needed HR support rapidly in this sense, rapidly growing construction companies. You know, one company's grown from 0 to 11 employees in, in one year. And while he's grown, that business owner is still not out of the field. He is super busy. And while working with Paychex for 6 months, not a lot accomplished. And Matt, you can, you and I can attest to this in our ASO model. The value we bring is very labor intensive, a lot of value up front. I think that's a key takeaway there, that if you're doing the ASO model, you better be providing true real value in those up. They're thinking they're getting more than just a simple payroll model, and they certainly should. So there's really a myriad of different, um, scenarios, but it all comes back to a true pain and trying not to let them forget that throughout the process.

Yeah, it's an interesting point. Somebody reached out to me recently about connecting at the IPPA conference and talking about the ASO model deployment of that. And, you know, we hate to do contracts and honestly, we very rarely, if somebody wants to leave our company, we're not going to hold them hostage. Like, what are we going to do? Keep charging you for a service that you don't want and get into some kind of pissing match over our support and you don't like it or whatever. It's never really happened inside that first 12 months, which is what we do. We have folks that are on our, you know, we call it executive payroll and HR. It's our ASO model. They sign a 12-month agreement because that, and if they ever ask, why am I signing a 12-month agreement? It's because, man, that first 90 days is so dang labor intensive. We're going through our full HR diagnosis. We're looking at all the areas where they're out of compliance. We're looking at all the areas where they want to improve things. You know, they have the thing with an ASO or even the PEO is people come with this stockpile of what I call back burner issues that they've known that they need to fix for, you know, months or years. And if they just don't have the time or bandwidth, and then they start unloading all that stuff on the HR business partners during onboarding. And so that first 90 days is super labor intensive. And then it, you know, it doesn't really calm down until 6 months in. And so to hear that you didn't get anything done in the first 6 months is just like, you know, that, that's a pretty, pretty obvious sign to me that that company that they were working with was just overbooked and wasn't really given enough bandwidth to their, their HR business partners to go out and do their job. So we see that all the time. You're going to see that anytime you can find an ADP or a Paychex company on it, on their ASO, like that's prime pick and they're very rarely happy.

And I did want to add for the 3 PEO deals, while we were able to, you know, we got one client that's willing to give a testimonial video about, you know, he was not offering Group Health and what he spent out of pocket versus this year able to offer it, attract better talent, retain them, but also just his cost savings will be tremendous. And that was a Common theme across all 3, but the core theme with the benefits was, this is just too hard to figure out how to offer a good plan. It's just too much. It would take me 3 months of studying and learning and all of my time, energy, and resources to actually put a Group Health policy in place to offer, whereas they have never done that before. So, I thought that would be key to add.

Yeah, that's really good. And it kind of dovetails into how I want to wrap this up. But before we talk about that, I mean, I feel like we need to do a follow-up episode on those 20 drops in like 90 days and just see, you know, what shook out of those bad boys. Like, so keep that list handy. Uh, if savvy listeners will catch the callback here in 90 days when we come back to that episode, it'd be interesting to come back in, in 3 months ago. Hey, did Did any relationships get formed? Did any referrals get made and vice versa? And, um, yeah, it'd be, be interesting to come back to that, but let's talk about next steps. I mean, so what have you learned from this, you know, by this exercise, looking at this, what sort of campaigns, if anything, what can we do with the knowledge and understanding of what we've learned from these last 10 deals?

First and main, really important for us, Guru, as we're building out a team. We could have, and we saw it the other day, a large provider was really broadcasting that they had hit 1 million customers in the payroll and HR world. And there's just so much opportunity out there. We could have 10, 20, 30 more if, you know, as we're getting more to our outbound strategy, if we're just contacting more folks and letting them know of the pains that we're solving. So that would be my one, because if these didn't come from partners, would we have them? Definitely not all of them. Two is, yeah, if you can build a great partner referral relationship, it's going to make that deal quicker. It's going to make the deal larger, you know, because they're not just, oh, you know, maybe I'll just outsource my payroll. They're getting referred into, no, Your CPA saying your business is great for the PEO model. Here's why. Coming over here, it's taken a month to close a PEO deal versus if it's a cold outreach that could take, you know, 3 months to a year maybe to go through the renewal cycle with the current broker or PEO. So those would be my 2 huge takeaways is the amount of activity that you're gonna need to produce if you, if you do want to grow at a rapid rate. And two, the 1 plus 1 equals 11 model is alive and well and spend more time on that than you do prospect.

Yeah, it's interesting because we were all sort of brought up, if you're in sales and you're listening to this, you listen, you read The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Sale tells you that relationship builders are, you know, some of the lowest performing sales reps, which is absolutely true. And you do want to be more on that challenger side. You want to be bringing value. You want to bring data, you want to bring metrics, you want to bring benchmarks, whatever your thing is. But those relationships with those key referral partners are critical, right? And so you can still, you know, do the same thing, provide them with value in the form— in all those forms I mentioned. But you've got to build those relationships and those bridges because those are ultimately the reason why we say, you know, 8 out of 10 of these deals had no competition in them. And that's where it really starts to pay dividends. And I got a few thoughts here just on next steps from our side. And one of the cool things we just try to do, and we're going to do more of this, I love to hear from you guys, those of you that listen to this, drop me a note, matt@guru.co, or leave a chat on LinkedIn or whatever. We want to do more of these episodes where we're actually breaking down stuff that we do internally. I know for some of you, you're much larger than us and this may or may not be helpful. Others of you are much smaller and this may be helpful and kind of everything in between. Um, but a few next steps from my end. First of all, we got to make sure we've sent everyone a gift that referred us these deals, right? So we got to make sure we've, you know, if they're, if they're eligible for commissions, we've got them, uh, finances got their commission information. And if they're just somebody who's, you know, hey, a CPA that has revenue fidelity and will not take anything, well, we want to send them in, you know, typically we do an Amazon gift card, typically $100 Amazon gift card. Trying to do more in-person stuff. I used to love to be able to go out and kind of hand that gift card to somebody in person, face to face. Not always as convenient because these folks aren't all right next door to us. Uh, next up, I do think that there are some great campaigns that could be created from this to prospects and partners. So, A, pulling some of the quotes that you heard from some of these people, what were some of the commonalities? Even just in an email campaign, you know, to a to a CPA as an example saying, hey, just pulled, you know, of my last 10 new clients I brought on, 5 of them came off of ADP. Here's why they came off of ADP. If you know anybody that's struggling with these same things, you know, don't forget about us. And here are the industries we serve. And, you know, multi-touch campaign there as well. Testimonials, you kind of mentioned it already. One of these being a client upsell that went up to the CEO talking about doing a testimonial video. I think you guys are booking a time to do a Zoom video recording testimonial. Is that right?

Yeah, we're working on it.

All right, sick. And yeah, for us, that, that we've, we've tried to make that a little easier over the last couple years for our clients. And just, just do that, just a Zoom video where we've got 5 or 10 questions for them. We edit out the person asking the questions after the fact, saves us from doing this big, you know, production of showing up on site. If you go to our YouTube channel, you'll see, you know, we used to do these ones where we'd hire a local videographer and go out to their site and it'd be a whole big ordeal. It's a pain for the clients, pain for us, and quite frankly, they're typically less believable. Um, whereas if you come with just a, hey, a conversation recorded over Zoom, uh, tends to hit a little bit harder. An example of that, anytime you're on YouTube, what's the, what's the trend for every YouTube ad you see nowadays, right? It's not like super well-produced video. It's somebody that it looks like they're recording it on their phone and they're trying to make it look a little bit less produced because it just comes off as more believable. So testimonials and then Google reviews. So we, you know, we're a little hit or miss on this. We're trying to add it into and maybe we'll do another episode here coming up on all the stuff we're doing in our Zoho automation. And any of you out there that use Zoho, please connect with me so we can learn from you. But, you know, we always try to ask for those Google reviews in the first 90 days while we're still in a little bit of the honeymoon period. Right. So things are going well. They're coming out of a really good onboarding process. They're still excited about why they worked with us. Not saying they're not going to be in 8 months, but it's also, It's just easier to ask early on and it's easier to sort of weave into that workflow of sending that request typically right after implementation is done just to get it out there. And then, yeah, the last note I had was just thinking about these industries, kind of, you know, Dr. So-and-so, you know, Dennis, like you already talked about it. Well, I think you mentioned like 3 dentists that all came in as referrals from a similar thing. Well, how can we pull that thread and find more industry folks that kind of fit into the industries of a handful of these, uh, or geographically centric, or, or, you know, affiliated in some way where we can continue to make, make strides there. So those are some things that, that kind of came through my brain as we were going through this as good next steps to, to take when we looked at these last 10 deals. But anything else you want to add, brother?

Yeah, and I would say similarly to pulling out the key themes and using them in campaigns, pull out these stories, whether it's, you know, your deal or your rep's deals. Let's make other people, you know, really feel like they were a part of this process. And for Matt and I bringing in some account executives and building out a team, we want these folks to have detailed notes and be able to tell these stories from day one, like they're their current client. And they don't have to build out their own. So don't recreate the wheel, really take good notes, and you can, uh, yeah, I'd say help replicate them.

Yeah, that's a great point. And, and to further on that, of what we will typically do is we'll take a deal like this and we'll say, you know, we'll document out who is the— a lot of what we just covered— who is the incumbent, what were the pains they were facing. And the better that your teammate can tell that story, the more that prospect can see themselves as a client of yours because they see, you know, they identify with the person who was, you know, used to be with ADP and is now with Guru and was suffering from these pains and is, you know, they were alleviated by working with us. And like, the more we can kind of help them to see themselves in the story, the more likely we are to get action and to have them move forward in that process. So yeah, stories are everything. Great point, Zach. Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you coming on and diving into this with me and sharing some of the insight into these deals. And thank you for all of you out there listening and just holler at us if there's anything we do for you. Cheerio.