How Chris DOUBLED His Client’s Results & Revenue By Adding Appointment Setting Services

What is up? Welcome. This is Josh Nelson with the 7 Figure Agency, and I wanna welcome you to another really exciting episode of the 7 Figure Agency Podcast where we're interviewing highly successful digital marketing agencies from across the country on what they're doing to land clients, deliver world-class results, retain the clients that they have, and scale their agencies. And I'm really excited to have Chris Johnstone back with us. In the past, we had Chris Johnstone on and he talked about how he built a multiple 7-figure agency in the mortgage industry and some really innovative things he's doing to retain his clients and generate better results for those clients. And we had such great feedback from that interview, and we actually launched a training program called the Agency Concierge Mastermind, which really shows agencies how to add this, this element that he discovered in terms of actually putting appointment setters on the back end of the leads they generate that I wanted to have Chris back on to kind of unpack this further, some of the new insights, some of the new learnings. So Chris, thanks so much for being here.

I am pleased to be here, Josh. Thank you for having me back, and hello everybody.

So if you're excited to kind of learn some of these like new insights, give me a yes in the comments. Let's try and keep this interactive. So Chris, we were talking about this before we got started. At this point right now, you've got a proven model where you've pretty much doubled the results for your clients by adding this appointment setting service. You've also doubled your revenue as a result, which is really high-profit revenue. Um, kind of bring us up to speed with some of the latest things that are happening in your business and with this appointment setting concierge model.

Yeah, absolutely. So the concierge has grown to be our primary offer and our primary thing that we are pushing out as far as all of our lead generation, booking all of our consultations, driving all of the leads that we have in our agency. And we're still selling traditional agency services like, you know, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, SEO. But what we've found is that especially in the mortgage industry, it's so saturated with everybody selling into that market with lead generation. And we've reached a point in the market where there's a stigma attached with lead generation. Pretty much everybody has either heard of Facebook funnels and lead generation or Google Leads and Google Funnels. And everybody's already made their mind up about it. They've either bought a service from somebody and got burned or whatever it is. So when we transitioned and we stopped talking about, hey, we're going to build your funnel, we're going to generate your leads, all of that, to we book qualified appointments in your calendar, change— make that small shift in our languaging created this fantastic offer that we're now getting a great response response from. Um, on average, for every dollar that we put into advertising, uh, we're getting back about $2.14 on actual acquired customers. And it's because we now have this offer that differentiates us completely from all of the other agencies that are selling into our space. So it's great for us, but the thing that I love about it most is what actually happens to the customers that we have with us, because it has been absolutely phenomenal for retention. Because what we've done is— and we talk about the gap where our clients— what we used to do is we would generate the leads, we would put them into our branded HighLevel account and kind of send them over, and it was like, okay, it's up to you. And our clients wouldn't respond to the leads in time, they certainly wouldn't convert them in real time. And so we would get churn because they would say, hey, the leads are no good, And ultimately it was them not following up on the leads. So now what we're able to do is to say not only will we generate the leads, and we can take any leads that you're getting from any provider. So in the mortgage industry, if they're open to lead gen, they're most likely also buying leads from Zillow or a competitor of ours, or they've already got something going as far as lead gen. And we're able to come in and say Hey, we can generate the leads, but what we're really going to do is we're going to double the amount of appointments that are qualified in your calendar from the leads that we generate, but also all of the leads that you generate in the business. And adding in the appointment setting service doubles the amount of revenue that we generate on our sales because they buy the agency services plus they buy what we call the concierge service but the leads that they generate, we're able to take roughly double the amount of appointments that they would generate on their own and double the amount of appointments with no new ad spend, no additional cost. And the leads are better qualified and they get much better results, and therefore they stay with us longer while paying us basically double the amount every month, which is pretty cool.

So good. It's so good. And like, it just makes logical sense, right? Like, for those of you listening, watching, how however you happen to be consuming this content, just let me know in the comments, do you ever feel like that's the scenario? Like you're really good at the SEO, pay-per-click, Facebook ads, lead generation side, but sometimes the clients churn because they say like, we can't convert these leads. And you know that that gap exists, that gap between you're giving them leads, but they're not following up effectively, they're not converting them into whatever it is for them, right? A booked appointment, a booked job, a new patient, right? Just give me a yes in the comments if you have perceived that gap. I know we experience it at Plumbing and HVAC SEO. And so, you know, this creates that opportunity to solve that problem like Chris has just said, but also, also really just stand out in the marketplace, right? Talk to me a little bit about, like, we know that this generates at least the doubling of the conversion rate of the leads that they already get. Which is huge. Like your performance is better than other agencies. Talk to me about how receptive your prospects are when you come in and you're not just saying, hey, I've got this newfangled Facebook ad strategy or this new crazy SEO thing I can do. Like forget that, I'm gonna help you convert leads. Like how are your clients responding to that?

So it's funny because in our industry, and we've branched out, so now we're getting referrals into, let's call it financial services, but we're talking to insurance professionals, we're talking to financial planners, planners and generating results for all of them. And they all are traditionally salespeople, which obviously your agency customers are most likely from a sales background. And so when we're trying to have the conversation with them about lead gen and funnels and pipelines and automated follow-up, we have to speak to them and almost educate them on the language that we're using. We have to educate them on the funnel so they understand how it is that we're going to grow their business. But when our salespeople are on the phones and they're saying, hey, you're gonna have somebody that calls your business, fills out a web form, they're gonna go into the concierge, and the concierge is gonna ask them these questions, qualify them, and put them on your calendar as an appointment, and then you show up to the appointment. All of a sudden, we're speaking a language that they understand because they know how to sell somebody that they have on the phone. And anything before that, what we've realized they don't really care. Like, you can cold call them and get them an appointment. You can call their past clients and get them an appointment. You can call referral partners and get them an appointment. They don't really care about what's behind it. What they care about is how many people am I going to talk to and how many deals am I going to sell. So our ability to go into a consultation— and that we're getting shopped really hard, uh, especially with how competitive the mortgage market is and how tight the budgets are right now. So consults will openly tell us, hey, I've talked to 5 other companies, here's their pricing, how are you gonna, you know, come in and basically sell this to me for less? What's your Facebook program? And can you do it for $250 a month? And it allows our salespeople to be like, well, you know, Facebook ads can be a lead generation source for you, but what are you really trying to solve? Do you just want leads? To follow up on, or would you like sales appointments that close? And when you're on the phone with a prospect, how many appointments do you turn into business? And all of a sudden, we've— we're entirely different from every other agency that's tried to pitch them, because our conversation is, we can fill your calendar with these appointments, and how many of those appointments are you going to close into business? So then they can actually quantify The—

we lost, we lost you for a second, Chris, but we got— we left off at quantify.

So they're able to quantify the actual return on investment that they're going to get from the program, and they understand it. So it's no longer you're going to get 100 leads and you might get a return on investment. To, here's the numbers, here's how many appointments roughly you're going to book, how many sales do you think you're going to generate from that? And they can actually quantify a return on investment right then on the consult.

Yeah, 100%. It's clearly a game changer, right? You're generating better results, you're able to come to the market with a different service offering, and they're willing to pay a premium, you know, an additional— like, you could charge whatever your agency fee is plus your, your appointment setting or concierge fee on top of that Just makes a lot of really good business sense. And you created an amazing training called the Agency Concierge Mastermind, which we've since closed down, but it really walked agencies through how to set that up, how to implement it in their business. Can you talk a little bit about some of the people that came through that and some of the results that they've gotten? I know some members have really created some great success with this in a lot of different industries, not just in mortgage now.

Yeah, absolutely. And so that was called Concierge Mastermind, and we have reopened the landing page for that. If— so if you go to concierge-mastermind.com, there's a 4-part video training that you can get at that link in order to get more information about the model and see this, you know, scripts, templates, how we put the whole thing together. So, um, Josh and I released that program as a result of the members of the 7 Figure Agency. So to be completely clear, I am a member of the 7 Figure Agency. I joined, it was tremendously helpful in our agency hitting multiple 7 figures. And the members in there were like, hey, can we get some support on this? Can you help with us? So we put together some free training, sold the program, and then just, we haven't really done anything with it since that time. And so one of the members that came through and got in on that beta was Chris Rodriguez, who I'm a huge fan of. Last time I checked in, she has sold and now has over 60 customers on the monthly recurring program where she's adding the concierge services to the actual— so she sells like high volume lead generation, Facebook ads, and that sort of thing. So she's converted over 60 customers into now paying that monthly recurring revenue for the concierge services. Now, uh, she'll tell you that putting the process in place is a heavy lift. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot to understand. You've got to hire the people, you've got to certify them, train them, get them on HighLevel. You know, there's a lot that goes along with it. So I think that the training program and the weekly coaching that we do really accelerates that because I think in the agency world, really what we're introducing is a new model and everybody understands, hey, if I can turn 100 leads into 40 appointments rather than 20 appointments, I'll retain my customers for longer and I can make more money. But the problem then becomes, okay, I've got this valuable idea, but how do I actually implement it? How do I find the people? How do I hire the people? How do I train them? How do I actually deliver the service? And that's really what we're doing at ConciergeMastermind.com is just giving the agency owners the training and the support in order to make it happen. So Chris is a great example of that. We've also had other members that have just taken it from a, hey, I've got this whale client that I really want to retain. It was less about, I want to, you know, I'm going to do a massive launch to all these customers. It's, I'm going to hire one concierge agent and I'm going to pair them with my two largest customers because everybody's trying to poach those really high-value clients that I have, and I want to make myself 100% different than everybody else that's pitching them. So they've used it 100% as a retention strategy, and it's worked exceptionally well. We've got people that are in the, um, like the retirement home services niche, and, uh, and it's been absolutely fantastic for them. Uh, we've got some members that are in the, um, like what you— like roofers, contractor type agency stuff, and it's been absolutely fantastic for their lead gen. I'm thinking about one member that we have that sells specifically into plumbing and HVAC, not your business, Josh, but another one. And it's like the last thing in the world that the plumber, the guy who owns the HVAC agency, wants to do is to cold call a lead that came in from Facebook. It was a huge pain point. And so as soon as they came to them and said, hey, we can solve this problem for you, all of a sudden there was an opportunity from that, from that business that said, hey, I know 5 other people that are running plumbing companies that want the— that would just I don't have to pick up my phone and cold call leads anymore. I can refer you to 5 other people that would see value in this. So those are the types of responses that we've seen. So I've been super excited to see that the model works outside of financial services. We've got it going in, you know, karate studios or MMA studios. We've got it going in plumbing and HVAC. We've got it going with chiropractors, dentists, doctors, lawyers. We've got a member that, um, some successfully implemented it in the legal community. So this is a problem that almost every business has. And so that's what I've enjoyed the most about working with all of the people that got in on that beta program, is really seeing it successfully implemented outside of financial services.

So good, love it. I love to hear examples outside of yours. Like, it's great that it's worked for you, and it's also great to see, like, you put together this training and now You know, if you run an agency and you're in home services, or you happen to be in professional services, or healthcare, or pretty much any vertical you can imagine, if you're generating leads for the clients through whatever mechanism— website, SEO, pay-per-click, social media— um, and you can help them convert those leads into money, you're going to be more valuable, right? They're going to be willing to pay you more, they're going to stay with you longer, and you're going to be able to land more clients because you're going to be able to say something that all the other agencies aren't, right? If you're coming in with the same exact service offering and the same exact messaging as your competition, even if you're in the niche, you don't stand out. It's like, okay, you become a commodity. It just becomes, okay, which of you is gonna do it for less, right? The last thing you wanna be is a commodity. This gives you the ability to say, we're totally different, right? It creates, you know, there's this analogy, right? The blue ocean and the red ocean, right? And the red ocean, is the niche, whatever plumbing companies that everybody's already sold to and the waters are just completely bloody. So it's very hard. It's very hard to sell clients. It's very hard to create. And so what we used to do is try to like, let's find the niche that's not already red. Let's go find the niche that nobody's going after. And that might've been funeral homes or decorative concrete, right? But now pretty much every niche is a red ocean, right? Because everybody's selling the same thing. And so this gives you the ability to create that blue ocean for yourself because you're saying something different. Hey, look, yeah, we're different because we're not just going to generate leads for you. We're going to actually put callers, we're going to put text messengers on the back end to convert those leads into sales. And that message resonates and it makes you stand out from the competition.

Yeah, 100%. And so it's funny because Really, ultimately, when I kind of decided to figure this out, it was out of necessity because I wanted to provide the most value as possible to our clients, and I had a problem with churn in our agency. That was really why I started putting people on the phone to convert the leads. And then what I discovered, Josh, and this may resonate with some agency owners, sometimes it takes a couple of minutes for the ball to drop and an aha moment to happen. But if my goal is to provide the highest value service to my customers, looking at where we can provide value in their businesses outside of just lead generation becomes incredibly valuable. And I actually stumbled across this, but what I discovered is that in the mortgage industry, roughly 80% of their business comes from referrals and past customers. And so if you talk to your clients and your customers, and when you're on the initial consult with them, ask them this one question. Just say, where does the majority of your business come from right now? And if it is the majority of businesses in North America, the answer to that question is, oh, we get referrals, right? Many businesses don't exist on a paid marketing funnel. They exist on clients and customers. They do a great job for them. Those people come back, they do repeat business. I mean, if you follow Dan Kennedy, who I'm a huge Dan Kennedy believer, the, the number one campaign that Dan Kennedy recommends is a customer reactivation pathway, right? And so here we are as digital marketing agencies solving the hardest to solve problem that exists in the industry. Funnels are incredibly complicated. You've gotta figure out Facebook and Instagram and SEO, and it takes time to get these funnels up and running. We all know, you get that call 20 days in, like, "I haven't closed a deal yet, what's going on?" And so when we look at, I need to provide the best result for my clients, what we discovered with the Concierge is that putting a customer reactivation pathway in place, and then adding to our SEO services a service where we reach out and get their 5-star ratings and reviews for them on their Google profile. It transforms the SEO results, ranks the websites faster, but also produces more customers at the end of the month than necessarily what we might be doing on paid ads, because our paid ads is totally limited by the amount of budget that the client is willing to put into a budget. Whereas if they will let us call their past customers, which again is something that we can upsell and charge more for, we can reactivate old clients, generate referrals, and get ratings and reviews. So yesterday I was on the phone with one of our clients, his name is Vince, and last year Vince did $416,000 $1,000 in revenue because of our concierge agent calling out to his past clients and customers asking for repeat and 5-star reviews on his Google profile. We had one client, we generated 63 5-star ratings and reviews in less than 7 days by having a concierge call the clients. They would agree to leave the 5-star review, they would text them the link, and then wait with them on the phone while they were actually leaving the review. So if you take a look at how you can leverage the concierge not only for the inbound lead generation but also to generate business from assets that they already have, you don't have to set— you don't have to sell ad spend anymore. It's, have you called your past clients in the last 90 days? No, I don't do that. Well, do you agree that you would make far more money if you called your past clients? Yes, I do. Would you like us to do that for you? It's like the easiest add-on or upsell with the concierge. And that's something that I absolutely love and that we've started to see results outside of just financial services. But that's something that every single business needs that you can then provide, which again makes you completely different from any other agency that's trying to pitch them products or services.

Love it, love it. And you put together a really great training, a free training really, that walks people through conceptually how this works, right? Yes, obviously it makes financial sense, but how will we find the concierge or the appointment setter? How will we train them? How much would we pay them? How do you charge for that so it's profitable? Um, and that's available. You've opened it back up at concierge-mastermind.com. So if you're listening to this, watching this, you're like, hey, I'd like to get more details on the how-to of that, go to conciergeMastermind.com. You can register. There's a 3-part video series where Chris and I kind of unpack this model for you and show you exactly, you know, how to actually put it in place in your agency.

Yeah, absolutely. And so what else, Josh? How can I— how else can I help?

So part of my promise here, as I teed this up, was we're going to share kind of what's new with the concierge model. How you were able to double your revenues. Can you just walk the group through, like, we know that you work with mortgage companies, like, what does your program look like today? Like, when you get a new mortgage company or a new financial services company on the horn and they're interested in what you do, like, what's the package look like?

Yes, so we have our concierge service. And so that concierge service, we charge an upfront setup fee of $1,500. And that is to take that person through 2 onboarding calls where we customize the scripts with them, choose which pathways of their business that we're going to have the concierge calling. And to be completely clear, there's 3 ways that we grow businesses with the concierge when we're selling this to our clients. So the first is we're going to double the amount of appointments that you get from the inbound leads that you're generating. And it can be through our funnels. You can add on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and we'll generate those leads and convert those into appointments. But you can be buying leads from Zillow, or you can be buying leads from our biggest competitor, and we'll take double those leads and turn them into appointments. Because, Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner, do you call your leads back within the first 5 minutes? And do you have at least 7 touch points that's going out to those leads? And they say no, no. Okay, well, it's an obvious fit for us. Even if you're not buying the leads from us, you need to have this service to convert more of your leads. So the first thing that we do is we double the appointments they get from their leads. The second, we call their past clients and customers to generate repeats, referrals from the database, and 5-star ratings and reviews. And then the third thing that we do is we will go out and identify a list of perfect referral partners for that business. And then we make the calls out to those other businesses with scripts that we include in the Concierge Mastermind training. And we make those calls to those businesses and set them up with referral relationships. So we started by having our dialers, our concierge agents, calling out to realtors, and we would get a list of verified realtors. So we knew they were doing production, and we would set up an appointment between the realtor and the mortgage professional, and that would generate relationships. Actually, I've got a testimonial here from Parker that I got at the end of December. One year on the program, he was paying us for the concierge, 200 calls a month. So, um, we'll talk about pricing in a little bit of what they pay us, but basically Parker's paying us $1,000 a month to make those phone calls, right? We set him up enough appointments that he now has 26 new realtors that are all sending— they've all sent him at least one deal that is closed and funded. So he was on our concierge program, got more than 2 realtors per month on average to start sending him business. Which ended up being $11.5 million in closed funded mortgage deals for him.

Wow.

An average loan officer makes 1.5 to 2.5% on that total volume. So Parker's return on investment, somewhere in the range of like $150,000 to over $200,000 just from those relationships. And he's getting referrals from them every single month. So that's again a service. So we'll set you up with a referral partner. Now what we discovered is that that works for pretty much every business. We had somebody who came through the Concierge Mastermind and they were working with orthodontists. So the concierge agent is calling dentists and setting up networking appointments between the orthodontist and the dentist. If you think about home services contractors, We have people that are doing landscaping contracts and they're calling out to pool companies, gutter cleaning companies, roofers, all of the other people that are stopping by their perfect customers every single day and just setting up referral relationships. So that's the third thing that we do is we set up referral relationships. So people come in, that one of those three things hits them with the feels of just like, that's my major pain point, I want that. Then we charge $1,500 for the setup and $1,000 for 200 contacts. Um, and so that's how we package it together. We've—

$1,000 a month. So they're paying you $1,000 a month. You're going to take your caller, and that caller is going to make 200 outbound dials or 200, you know, connections, and that's what they're going to pay for. And that's highly profitable for you on the back end.

Exactly. And the, the— what we've done there, and I don't want listeners to miss this, is we've put— we've packaged it together as 200 contacts because we have companies that will come to us and say, okay, well, I need 1,000 contacts a month. I was like, okay, great, well, that's $5,000 a month. And so it allows us to have a scalable monthly recurring revenue but still get the rebill every month on those contacts.

Yeah, I think that's an important nuance because one mistake I think that could happen with this is I'm gonna hire the concierge for 2 grand a month, $2,500 a month, whatever it is, and then I'm gonna charge 10 clients a flat fee of $500 a month or $750 a month. And while it seems like that's good, eventually their volume is gonna outpace the cost, right? And your profitability starts to drop to nothing. And so that variable price model really starts to make financial sense for them and you as the business. And you want to make sure it makes sense for you as the business as well.

That's right, that's right. And so, uh, we also have an upsell because I want to be completely transparent. Uh, we also have a program that's called the Executive. So we will have people that come to us and say, hey Chris, um, I don't just want 1,000 calls a month or 1,000 contacts a month, I need 10,000 contacts per month. And so we'll talk to large branches. We helped one of the largest rate sites in the nation set up a concierge system in their business. Um, so that was all inbound lead gen. So they're getting a ton of leads from the internet and sending them directly to the loan officers, and none of the loan officers were making the calls. It's the exact same problem that your customer has with your lead gen— nobody's making the calls. So they paid us to come in and place 3 full-time concierge agents that work for them exclusively. So we hired them, placed them in their agency. In the first 90 days, they did over $580,000 in new revenue from leads that wouldn't have been followed up on if the concierge wasn't in place. And what we do is we have a set fee structure for that. So it's— you're going to, you know, one concierge agent is going to be $5,500 a month that we're going to place in the agency. They cost us somewhere in the range of $3,000 a month, and we've got a fixed spread, and the concierge agent is just in there. And then what I've also done is with larger clients like that, we've started setting up a relationship where we have a small piece of the total revenue that's being generated, and we're also compensated on a percentage of the revenue growth that we're generating for the actual business itself. So we're paid on performance, but we're also paid you know, that set monthly profit every single month for housing and managing the concierge agents within the business.

Love it, love it. So one of the key things you shared there was, you know, as an agency owner that generates leads, one of the first things we think about is we're going to follow up the leads that you generate, like the inbound inquiries, the inbound calls. We're going to make sure they get followed up with quickly and they get booked in and that there's a follow-through on those opportunities. You're seeing that double the conversion rates. But really, the other piece of it is also use your energy, use your callers to call out to past customers. That's usually untapped opportunity that can generate exponential returns. And then also looking at referral partners that you can connect them with. And I think those are the more strategic opportunities that most agencies don't want to mess around with, but can have massive impact for the client. So you said it's a $1,500 setup, it's $1,000 per month for 200 contacts. Is this what you're leading with every day, or is it, you know, depending upon their situation, maybe they do want to generate SEO results or pay-per-click results? Like, how does that factor into the equation in your business as it sits today?

Yep. So we always lead with the Concierge today. So we are known within the industry as kind of like the online lead generation. So we get a number of consults that will come to us and say, hey, I got referred by somebody that I know, or I saw a, you know, a YouTube video you put out 2 years ago and I want Facebook leads. And then we asked them 3 core questions in the consultation. We said, great, no problem, we can totally help you with that. But in order to make sure that you get the greatest value possible from our time together here today, I've got some diagnostic questions. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? Great. So Where do you get the majority of your business from right now? Well, I get 80% of my business from past customers. Okay, great. But we're focusing on, on lead gen— generation to fill the pipeline. Yes. Okay, great. Uh, but you did mention the majority of your business comes from XYZ, whatever it is, wherever they get their customers from. And then we ask them, have you called your past clients in the last 90 days? And 95% of the time they'll say No, I send emails to them, but we don't call them. And it's like, okay, great. Well, what would happen in your business if you were to call your past clients and ask for that business? Do you think that you would generate business from referrals? Yes. How much do you think that would be? They tell us, and then we ask them, do you have a pipeline for generating referral partners? And then what are you doing for lead generation right now? And we have them tell us 1, 2, 3, because really there's only 3 pathways to grow the business. You've got past customers, you've got referral partners, and you've got marketing and advertising. So we get them to tell us what they're doing in all three, and then we do the math for them. And we just say, okay, here's your conversion ratios, here's what it looks like on your database, how many past customers do you have? If we were to convert 4% of them, how many deals would that be? What's a deal worth to you? And then we actually quantify what their actual revenue collected per per source would be. And then at the end of the consult, we say, okay, well, here's how much revenue you have sitting in your database, here's how much revenue you have from referral partners, and here's how much revenue we feel that we'd confidently be able to generate for you from a paid marketing system. Which of these would you like to purchase from us? And we let them choose.

And in most cases, they're like, you know, let's call the past customers. If you think that's where the money is, let's focus on that. And then you've got this monthly fee. Are you finding that clients start there and then they add some of the digital marketing services down the road? So this becomes like a backdoor into their business?

100%. And SEO is our most popular offer right now because as soon as we start pumping up the ratings and reviews, they're starting to see movement in their Google rankings. And then we're able to come in and just say, hey, with a little bit of backlinking, with a little bit of site structure, a little bit of a redesign, and adding live chat onto your website through, you know, our white-labeled version of HighLevel that we provide with our services, we can really ramp this thing up. So SEO is a very, you know, within 60 days we're able to go back and upsell SEO services into the program. And then oftentimes what happens is they're coming to us because they have already bought some type of lead generation from a competitor of ours. So they've already bought Facebook ads or Google ads or whatever it is from a competitor. It didn't work. They're at their end of their 90-day or 6-month contract or whatever it is. They feel like they got burned, and that's why they're researching us. And so what we'll also say to them is, hey, we can take those old dead leads that you generated from that other company we reactivate them. You know, it might work, it might not, but have you called them at least 7 times? Did you call them in real time? You know, you're, you're unhappy with those results, but maybe we can generate some extra money from you, and that's just money that's sitting on the table. So why don't we have your concierge work that as well? We're able to turn those leads into appointments and then say, well, let's talk about paid marketing, because there is money over there now that you've got the right follow-up system in place. So let's re-engage on some Facebook ads and some Google ads, but we do it from a results perspective first. So we show them in advance that we can turn online leads into appointments. Then it's very easy for them to say, okay, I'm willing to reallocate budget to that. But we're not trying to sell it up front and overcome all the objections that an agency normally has to sell against. We're proving in advance that we can actually turn it into money for them and then just guiding them into the additional services.

Love it, love it. That makes a lot of sense. I think an important, you know, psychological thing to understand that he just said is that in any vertical that you might be in, home services, roofing, healthcare, anywhere, your clients have done digital marketing, right? They've invested in ReachLocal or in Scorpion or in whatever it is. They've spent a lot of money in SEO and pay-per-click and social media. If they haven't, they're probably not the kind of client that you wanna work with anyways. And so understanding that you're not gonna be selling them digital marketing and they're gonna be excited unless you've got some new angle that you can bring to the table is huge, right? And so, you know, Chris just tells them, look, let's monetize the leads that you generated that didn't convert, you know, by calling them, by making them an offer, and then let's follow up with your past customer base. And he's got this gradual, results engine that leads to the digital marketing services on the back end.

Yep, that's absolutely right. And okay, I don't want to—

we're going to say something. I don't want—

yeah, so one of the things, and I just want to add this really quickly because I know most digital marketing services are converting leads by offering a book, offering a free strategy call, or offering a webinar. And one of the things that was truly transformational in my agency with the concierge, because we have concierge agents, we generate leads, and then our concierge agents follow up on our leads to book our sales team consultations. Well, we doubled our own consultations from our webinars. So we actually went through our webinar stats from before when we were just doing email and text follow-up to webinar registrants and then people that had been on the webinar, then we added the concierge, we more than doubled the sales that we were generating from our online webinars just by having a concierge follow up because over 50% of the people that we have that register for our webinars, 'cause we run webinars every single month, Josh, we follow your model, it's the 7 Figure Agency Model, we're literally just following your blueprint. We get those people on that webinar every month but more than half of them don't show up. That's not a funnel problem. That's just the way that statistics are across pretty much the entire industry. Well, the reason why those people don't show up is because they don't have time to sit through a 1-hour presentation. Most likely, those are your best leads. Those are people that are running successful businesses. They're running those businesses, which is taking their time, so they don't have an hour to sit through the presentation. So when you have a concierge call and be like, you registered for this webinar, you had interest, would you like a one-on-one strategy call where we can condense that down into 15 or 20 minutes to see if this model is a really good fit for you? And we're doubling the amount of sales appointments that we're generating through leads that we wouldn't otherwise touch that are actually really good quality leads that are coming through our webinars. So that's one way that in your own agency, a concierge can actually help more— drive more sales within your agency not just results for your clients. And then the other thing that's been really transformational for us, which I really want other agency owners to understand, is that, I mean, I— there are much more professional salespeople out there than me. I would actually classify myself as a horrible salesperson because it's like, this is what I got. Do you want it? Do you not? Would you like it now? No? Okay, next. And I'm just on to the next consult. Like, I'll dump them in an email sequence afterwards, and we've got testimonials and stuff that follow up on them. But I would never call somebody who said maybe to my services 30 days ago. But we went back and we looked at the statistics and we started having the concierge call every single consult that we had done previously that hadn't yet filled out the payment form and become a customer. And just from making that follow-up last year, 47% of the sales that we made closed 60 days after we did the initial sales presentation. We almost doubled the amount of sales that we made within our agency because I paid somebody else to follow up on the sales presentations that we've already done. And so if you're in your agency and you're looking to bump up your sales in January or bump up your sales in February, having a concierge go back through the consultations that you've done in the last 6 months and just call those people. Hey, you had a consult with us, you sat through the presentation. Do you have any questions? Would you like to re-engage and get back on the phone with us? You've got money sitting in the agency right there, and you can make the calls yourself, but I just had somebody else make the calls for me. And the concierge, uh, can definitely help with sales on that side. So I just want people to know there's money in those databases, not only for your clients but for you as well. And the concierge helps you go get those.

Yeah, I think an interesting insight there on two fronts, you know, on the speed to lead aspect and the follow-up and follow-through on your existing opportunities that didn't convert. There's something powerful about actually being on the phone versus just sending an email or text message. You know, as marketers, we've been so desensitized to like, I send an email blast, put them into a follow-up sequence, send a text message. You've proven that having somebody real on the phone calling and saying, hey, how's it going? What's going on? Are you interested? Do you have any questions? Generates more sales. Do you have any ideas on why that is, or thoughts on why that is?

So it is that simple question that people won't ask. Like, when you— so text message is 100% the best response mechanism that we have as far as people getting back, but they won't ask those buying questions in an automated environment on a text message. But as soon as they can get that dialogue and they can say, well, what about this? And what about that? And really get those questions that are holding them back from taking that next step, they just get the assurance from a real person. And I want to be clear, these are all North American-based people. So we're not outsourcing this overseas. These are all North American-based people. And so that conversation is professional. It's timely. And the other thing, Josh, you mentioned speed to lead. We still generate a lot of conversions just from text message, but having the text message conversation in real time. So it's not a bot and it's not AI, it's not automation, which I'm not saying is bad, but if you can get a real person responding to somebody in a text message conversation, you will convert far more of those leads into somebody who clicks the link in the text message and actually books the appointment, as well as getting them on the phone and converting them as well. So it's the real-time communication and actually being able to get on the phone, overcome the objections, and move that person to the next stage of the sales process or wherever it is that you're trying to move them, whether it's for your clients or whether it's for you. So good.

So good. And what's cool is you do outline this in the, in the masterclass that you put together. Kind of the different angles, right? How do you use the concierge to generate more business for your own agency by having them on the phone, by booking them into your webinars, by following up the people that registered for the webinar but didn't attend? And then you also have the, like, here's how you sell this to your client to create an additional stream of revenue. So if you're watching this and you're listening to this and you're like, hey, look, I wanna learn more about how Chris actually does this, you can go to concierge-mastermind.com and there's a 3-part video series where Chris walks you exactly how to do this, and it's a free masterclass that you can, that you can check out at concierge-mastermind.com. Um, so this is, this would be great. We talked about the concierge model, we talked about kind of what your package looks like today, how you charge for it. Um, would love to hear a little bit about, um, how you're landing clients, what's working best for you today in your, in your niche selling these services. Like, what plays are working best to attract new clients into your agency?

Yes, we have two funnels that are working really well, and I try— I track these numbers really close. We keep our sales team and our marketing team pretty, uh, our scorecards— we follow EOS— our scorecards are all based on the actual results. So our first is a paid marketing funnel. We're running ads on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Those are our primary pathways, and we're targeting mortgage, financial services, which is, uh, wealth managers, insurance agents, that kind of niche. And so we run ads and we give away a free video training on the 3 pathways to generate more customers. So past customers, referral partners, and then doubling the amount of appointments that you get from lead gen. And basically I teach 2 different strategies on each of them. So our lead generation page says, learn the 6 ways that you can double the appointments in your business without spending an additional dime on advertising. So that's our hook. We run those ads, they go to a lead generation page generated through HighLevel, uh, there's a pop-up, they opt in, and on the other side is a 45-minute training. 45-minute training follows a very simple formula. Here are the 4 main pain points that you've got as somebody who's trying to double your appointments. If you double your appointments, you will double your sales. If you automate your appointment setting, you will generate far more appointments and therefore make more sales. So I have to get them to understand that first, and then I just show them the pathways that they already understand works. But every single time I show them a pathway, I then reiterate, you know, this works. I'm probably not teaching you something that you don't already know. The problem up until this point and why you haven't gotten results is because you're not making the phone calls. And that's not your fault because nobody makes the phone calls. But that's our greatest opportunity by having an automated system and a concierge to solve this problem. You don't have to make a single cold call. You don't have to chase a single lead. You don't have to spend any additional money on advertising. And yet you can double the amount of sales appointments that you're generating right now, which will double your sales. So I'm just constantly reinforcing that belief over all 6 of the points. And then at the end of the presentation, it's get on the phone for a one-on-one strategy call with one of our people, and we'll go through a customized roadmap of this. Discover which of these 6 pathways is gonna be the most profitable for you, show you how to do it, and then if you'd like information on how we can do it for you, we can talk about it at the end. So, that's our—

So, it's a very education-based funnel that you're running with Facebook, value-added content that creates this loop in their head. They're like, "Oh yeah, that, I know that works. I just haven't been doing that." And then leads them to, "Well, my next best play would be on the phone with these guys." 'If they've got a service that can do this for me, let's get on the phone and see how much it costs and if I can afford it.' That's right.

And so that thank you page has the video and then they can book right there. But every single lead that opts into our funnel gets a phone call almost immediately from one of our concierge agents. And then our concierge agents are following up to book those consultations. So we take roughly 40% of the leads that we generate through our paid marketing funnel, to a booked sales presentation. We get about 75% of the people that book a sales presentation with us to actually show up on the sales presentation. And then we close about 20% of the people that show up on a sales presentation to an actual client or customer after our sales team does the actual sales presentation themselves.

Great metrics. And really, probably the most impressive metric there is the percentage of people that opt in that actually schedule appointments, like 40%, that's super high. And it's because you're double hitting them, not just with the automation, you're also getting on the phone and saying, hey, you requested our, our 6 Ways to Double Your Sales training, did you want to jump on a call? And I'm sure a lot of those appointments come from that follow-up, that appointment chase mode that, that you guys put in place.

Yeah, far more come from the concierge than the automations that we put out. So that's pathway number 1. Um, and give us a yes in the comments if that's helpful.

He's just shared his 7-figure client attraction strategy that's working really well. Um, so that's pathway 1. I'd love to hear the other.

So pathway number 2 is, um, for the lack of a better term, we call it our Dream 100. Um, but that's used for multiple things, so I want to clarify exactly what it is. So what we do is we go out into the industries that we want customers in and we'll do the research and identify who the top 100 professionals are in that niche. And then we have our concierge agents that put them through a 12-week outreach program. So we drop them into a funnel inside HighLevel, and that funnel has the concierge agent reaching out once a week with follow-up emails and personalized text messages that they're sending to them. In order to book them on a strategy call. And it's our perfect customer. So we've gone through the exercise again, EOS-based, of determining who exactly want— we want to sell to, who we can provide the greatest results for, who has the budget to pay for our services, who's really our dream customer. And then we're making sure that we have outbound calls that are happening every single day to that list of our perfect customers. And we're just— I know that this sounds like You know, we're like, we're inventing the wheel or something. Like, it's like this is caveman-esque marketing, but we've gone so digital in the world that we're in today. Phone calls work. It's like, you know, it— I, I don't know how else to say it because it's ridiculously simple. Like, if you were to pick up the phone and make 150 phone calls a day, you will speak to 30 to 40 people And out of those 30 to 40 people, you will book 4 to 6 appointments. It's just math. And we do it every single day and have been for over a year now. And those are the numbers. A concierge agent makes 150 calls a day. They speak to 30 to 40 people, and they should book on average 5 appointments a day if they're calling out to those Dream 100 lists. And that's simple, but that's our, you know, our second greatest customer acquisition pathway.

So good. Love it, love it, love it. And, and well explained. You know, really, guys, you're getting great value here from Chris, he's kind of showing you exactly how he attracts clients in his niche, how he's grown this multiple 7-figure agency. We've talked about the concierge model, we've talked about how do you kind of package it and how you put it together, we've talked about how you're attracting clients. Any insights you can share on, you know, how you manage that level of scale, how you're retaining the client base in addition to obviously providing great results? Any tidbits you can share on that front before we wrap up?

Yeah, 100%. And, um, this is— I would say go to concierge-mastermind.com, opt in for that training. It does a phenomenal job of walking you through the pathway. But from a scale perspective, it starts with the people. And hiring is the hardest part of this whole thing, but it's also the most important part. Hiring the right people, getting the right people on the team, because as a, as a business owner, I'm really good at structure and systems. We use ClickUp. Every single client and every single task has a ClickUp board associated with it, and there's a checklist of what you do for your client. But if you don't have good people following the systems, the wheels are going to fall off. If you've got great people that already know how to book appointments, it transforms the agency. When I first launched the concierge, it was exceptionally frustrating. It was like herding cats, the first 5 people that I hired as concierge agents to come through. Because, hey, and, and again, I'm not, I'm not saying anything bad about hiring overseas. We have overseas contractors that help us at Connection Incorporated for things, But what I've discovered that specifically for the concierge role, finding somebody who's North American-based in roughly the same location as you're providing the services makes a tremendous difference, not only in the results that you generate, but you don't— that they don't disappear in the middle of the night. Their internet doesn't go down. I don't have to chase them. I know they're going to show up for work every day and I can trust them to have and build a good relationship with the client at the end of the day. And there's that level of professionalism that we've just found comes with that. So once I discovered there's this difference between a good marketer, a closer, and what sits in between those two people is the concierge, and it's actually a role and a specialty, and there's a, there's a subset of people in the world that are professionals at just booking appointments. And a lot of people don't know or understand this, but in the sales world, you've got the people that generate the leads, then you've got the people that book the appointments, and then you've got the people that close sales. And the people that close sales are your customers, right? You are the agency that generates the leads. There's that missing person in the middle. And when you get somebody who's already worked in an organization where they know how to make the phone calls, they know how to have the conversations, they know how to overcome the objections, they know how to qualify a lead, and they know how to book a qualified appointment, it changes everything. So I would say my number one tip is make sure that you're following a process and a structure to hiring the right people, and then give them the right certification, the right tools, and manage them every single day. Every single day you've got to have them on a call. How many calls did you make yesterday? How many people did you talk to? How many appointments did you book? And then you inspect what you expect. So they're going to tell you every single day, I made 150 calls, I talked to 30 people, and I booked my 5 appointments. Great. What does your HighLevel account say? How many calls did they actually make? How many people did they actually talk to? And how many appointments did they actually book? And once you've made sure that those people are actually doing the work and actually generating the results. At that point, you got the right person. And management for me is now a weekly meeting where I just check in because we have our team member who's actually managing all of the concierge agents for us. And that's one of the things that we deliver in the Concierge Mastermind is we'll actually help you attract the people, hire the people, and then we manage those people for you every single day. And I think that that is a huge part, we didn't initially have that as part of the program, discovered that it was a huge pain point for agencies and then solved it for the people that are in that program. So, Josh, I hope I'm not giving anything away, but I think this is great.

I think, you know, the whole idea that, you know, you have to get good quality people, you should hire North American-based, and they aren't just magically going to do the work, right? People will get away with as much as they can get away with, right? Even if they're good. And so you have to have the right management strategy in place to really know how many calls did they make, what's their benchmark, how many are they shooting for, and what are the expectations? And you have to be checking on that almost on a daily basis, right? And you have to keep them trained, you have to keep them inspired, and that's easier said than done. And it is a beautiful thing that you bring as part of the Concierge Mastermind is that rhythm where they can plug in daily, they could share those numbers, and they can be held to account, um, that they need to make that number of calls, schedule that many appointments, which is what makes the whole program work, right? The service work.

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. And so, um, I would love to be able to reopen that program and to, to bring more agencies into it. So right now at Concierge Mastermind, there, there is no pitch. There's, uh, there's nothing for sale there. Uh, but if you get on that list I would, well, keep an eye out, 'cause we might be launching something where we reopen that program soon.

So good. Well, Chris, this has been great. Thank you so much for sharing. Continue, you know, congratulations on your continued success in your agency and the great work you've done helping agencies figure out how to implement this. If you've listened to this point and you think this sounds interesting, you'd like to learn more about how you can implement this in your business, Again, go to conciergeMastermind.com. It's a completely free 3-part video series where Chris shows you exactly how he implemented this in his agency. You'll get lots of good insights. Anything you wanna say before we wrap up, Chris? This has been a great interview and I really appreciate your time.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. I've been running a digital marketing agency for 15 years and it's changing. I don't know if anybody else can feel it, feel it. But, you know, being a digital marketing agency 5 years ago was a unique thing. It was, you know, you could talk to people on the phone and they were excited about it. And we've seen enough and enough industries where we've reached that point where we've started to transition into a new economy when it comes to marketing agencies. It's my belief that this is the future. I truly believe that if you're running an agency Concierge services over the next 2 to 3 years are the blue ocean. They're gonna make you entirely unique, that are gonna open up that new profit center for you. That's why I'm sharing this information, because I wanna be the guy that in 3 years everybody was like, man, do you remember that Chris Johnstone guy who hooked up with Josh and taught the agency model for the first time? Like, that was cool. Like, I wanna be that guy and I wanna do the best job that I possibly can to share this message with the agency world. Because the change, I believe the change is here. I believe we gotta pivot quick, and I think that this is the best possible way to do it. So hopefully that helps, and much love.

100%, so good. Thank you guys for listening and/or watching. If you got value, be sure to put something in the comments, be sure to subscribe or like wherever it is you happen to be watching this, and go to concierge-mastermind.com, sign up for that 3-part video series, And, uh, we'll talk to you guys all again real soon.

Thanks for having me, Josh. Thanks for listening, everybody.