How Chris Dreyer grew his agency to $30M/Year serving the Legal Niche

Alright. Hello and welcome to the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. We're interviewing highly successful digital marketing agencies from across the country. And today, I'm super excited to have, for the second time on the podcast, Chris Dreyer from rankings.io. Runs an amazing agency, is a world-class individual, and just blown away. He's grown his agency to over $30 million per year serving the legal niche. And if you kind of look back at the interview we did, I guess it was like 3 years ago now, Chris, you were doing about 10. So that was already mind-blowing, you know, by most agency standards. And to have tripled the revenue over that time is just phenomenal. And so I'm really excited that you're here. You get to share with the agencies that are on with us, um, that are, that are listening. Uh, so if you're on with us live and you're excited to hear this, hit the like button and, uh, load your questions up because Chris says he's gonna be an open book today. He's gonna share what he's done, the lessons he's learned. Uh, and we'll open you guys— open up to you guys' questions as we go. So, uh, without further ado, Chris, thanks so much for being here, man.

Josh, thanks for having me. And hey, I, you know, I just want to start off— we are, just for numbers sake, just so everybody knows where we're at, we're— we'll probably hit 34 million this year. So, so haven't grown quite to 30 million yet, but I just, just in a value, transparency. That's kind of where our target is. So good, man.

I appreciate that. So, um, obviously we're gonna talk about the growth and how you land clients and how you deliver results, but tell us a little bit about the journey. Like, how'd you get into the agency game? Why did you choose legal? Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I was, I was a digital affiliate marketer back in the day. I was slinging everything on Amazon, ClickBank, CJ Advertising. I was doing it on the side. I was a detention room teacher. And by the end of my second year as a detention room teacher, I thought I was going to be a college basketball coach, do, you know, do those types of things. I was making about 4 times or more the amount that I was teaching. And so it was like a pretty, pretty hefty push to go into this, pursue it full-time. You know, back in the day, there weren't the classes, there weren't the resources like yourself to go out and build an agency or learn digital marketing. It was like you learned from the guy or the Warrior Forum, right? And you learn from doing. So I kind of went off and did that, and I did that for several years until I kind of got hit by that first Penguin algorithm. Because basically 50% of my backlinks were Ezine article links because they just worked back in the day. Yep. And so my income dropped, and I got onto Craigslist because that's where you went back in the day to get a, you know, to submit your resume and I got 3 job offers from 3 agencies. And, you know, most people would say, well, which agency did you choose? Which one did you choose? Well, I accepted all 3. And the reason I had an affiliate team from the— or sorry, a team from the Philippines had about 8 employees full-time. And so I ended up being the best employee at all 3 agencies. They're like, well, why can't you do what Chris is doing? Well, I had 8 people helping me and they loved me, right? And I— the clients loved it. And back in the day, there wasn't Zoom, there wasn't these things. There was like GoToMeeting and a little bit of project management on Basecamp. So I had a lot of output, but that's how I got started in the agency space before I started my own agency.

Interesting. So detention room teacher to affiliate to working multiple agency clients. And then when did you make the decision, I'm going to focus on legal and How did that impact the initial ascent?

It's a good question. I was bootstrapped, so I wasn't well capitalized. I think with the right strategy, I think you could have what you call a generalist agency as long as you vertically target specific industries, right? You still need to verticalize within a general agency, but I had no money. I had very little money, so I had to be very sniper approach, you know, very targeted. There's a few components of it. One, if I'm being honest, and, and I value transparency, is there's a status component of working in legal, right? I wanted to say that I worked and helped law firms grow, and so it was that. But it was also highly competitive, and I knew that— you hear all these, a lot of coaches and people will say like, well, we'll go to the blue ocean where nobody is. And like, that's fine if you're Peter Thiel or, you know, Zuckerberg and you're creating something new. But if you're, if you're in the agency space, like, I want to go where the red ocean is. Like, where is the war happening? There's a reason why the war is happening there, and it demands expertise. So I want to go right into the, in, into the battle. And that's how I look at things. I think a lot of times people think, oh, go to blue ocean, let me go I don't know, is that niche very good? Like, are they going to pay you? So that's kind of my, my approach and why I chose legal.

Amazing. So that's very contrarian, right? It's like, let's find the easiest path. You're like, no, let's find the hardest path and let's go be the best of the best in that industry. Because if it's a red ocean, there's money being spent. Let's optimize that spend. Let's be the best. Let's command the highest premium in that industry.

Absolutely. Demands expertise. That's the simplest thing that I would say. A lot of— they need you.

So, so around $30 million in revenue, what does the team structure look like? Like, and like how many clients does that mean? Like, talk to us about some of those metrics.

Right now, I think including contractors, we're around 150 people, which is, which is pretty crazy because I, I ran a really lean agency for the first 5 years or so, and I basically had project managers and I worked with strategic partners. But now Nearly everything is in-house. I mean, everything. And we've got a lot better hiring. We've got an HR team. We've got better processes, better leaders. So now pretty much everything's in-house. We have, let's see, counting, uh, 220-ish clients now. Uh, so a good amount. And yeah, so, so a decent-sized team.

And, and is the team— is it like a virtual team? Is it all in office? Is it a mix? What's the lay of the land operationally?

Yeah, it's 100% remote. Okay. There's a couple things there, you know, I'll, I'll say our tech stack that helps with this, right? And I think other people have varying opinions here, but we use Slack, we have Notion as our repository, and we use ClickUp for project management. Okay, the other thing that I try to do when I can is I try to hire in pockets. So try to hire a group of individuals from the Midwest, they can get together, they can hang out and have that personal connection. And you try to hire some from the West Coast and the East Coast. It always— it also benefits you from a regional territory type model for sales. It helps you from an account management perspective where you can meet your clients in person. There's a lot of value, those high-touch belly-to-belly scenarios.

Oh yeah.

So, but really it's fully remote out of the gate.

Love it. So, so good. So any of you that feel like it's only possible to grow 7 figures, multiple 7 figures in an in-office environment, Chris is absolutely living proof that you can go to multiple 8 figures and not do that, have a virtual team. So I think the main thing we wanna get into today was, Truly tremendous that you've had this growth, but I think a lot of agencies get stuck, you know, at $5 million, $6 million, $10 million tends to be like that ceiling where it's like, there's not much room above this and you've just blown past it. Talk to us about some of the key strategies that helped you break through that $10 million mark.

I think it's really challenging. There's a lot to this. Let me start with product market fit. Yeah, a lot of times agency owners think, well, I sell SEO, I know people, you know, want SEO, I have product-market fit. That's not reality, that's not the truth. It's like, how do you design your offer to be very specific for your ICP, for your avatar? You take things like the number of links that you need for a personal injury attorney, or the amount of content you need to produce or the challenges that they face from, you know, Google Business Profiles and spam and, and all these different scenarios. So all those little nuances add up for product market fit. It helps you to, to have the ability to deliver results. That's one component. I think the other thing is you have to invest on the front end. Agencies that have a disproportionate amount of spend and investment on the front end, meaning marketing and sales, are more likely to achieve success as opposed to kind of feast or famine from referral perspective. Or a, uh, you know, the biggest thing— and I know we're gonna dive really into this head, head, uh, you know, dive really deep into this— but when you're— when you have an inbound-only agency, and we were like that for like, I think like 8 years, it's— you're kind of hoping and praying that a good client comes in, and you're watching it, and everybody jumps on it when it comes in, right? You're doing Google Ads, you're doing social media, you're going to events, you're doing Facebook Ads, those things, but you're still hoping and praying, right? When you start to hunt and you're always hunting, you can control your own destiny, and it compounds just like SEO compounds those relationship— the relationship equity. You get better over time. When you first started doing SEO for your agency or Google Ads, you were, you know, maybe good at it, maybe you have a background in it, but you get better and better over time. The same thing occurs when you build an outbound model. For me as an agency owner, and I can speak really to my experience, from $1 to $5 million, there was challenges, but it's more like I'm learning to become a business owner. I'm learning, you know, I was a practitioner, right? I wasn't a business owner. I'm reading all the business books, I'm doing the Vistage thing, I'm going to masterminds. And I think that you can go $1 to $5. From 5 to 10 was really hard. My standards increased in regards to talent and what was required. I also had individuals— you've heard the saying, who got you there may not take you— whatever the saying is there. Yep. And I just, I started to realize I didn't have some of the right people. They were set in their ways, they closed-minded, and, and I needed to expand and get people that had already had that success. So to $10 million for me was the hardest. I mean, we scratched and clawed to get to $10 million, but now it's just like— the other thing that happens around $10 million is you start to get enough people that you need more non-revenue generating employees. So you need an HR team, you need, uh, financial capabilities, you need more mid-managers. All these people don't make you money. They're not working on the client work. They're, they're working with your team. And it's a necessary evil, evil to get to the next level. But that's what happened for me, $10 million. Once we got past that, it was— it started to develop this, this outbound engine. It's just been a rocket ship because now we're hunting every single day.

Love it. So it sounds like you, like, you built the foundation, the first $10 million in recurring revenue on inbound, being at the events, putting on your own events, doing podcasts. You know, all of that positioning yourself so that those attorneys saw you as an expert and came into your world prepositioned to buy. And then you flipped the switch and said, hey, I need to go build a team that's gonna reach out to and set appointments and close deals. And that was a big catalyst for that growth.

Absolutely. Now I wanna say one contrarian thing here too. I got pushed for like 6 years that we needed to go to events. And I was very resistant. And finally I hired an individual and we went to 29 events in a year. Wow. And we did okay, but what I discovered was a lot of the same clients go to all the events.

Same group. Yeah.

And it's like you're talking to the same people, the same vendors, over and over and over again. And then you play for these— like, some of the individuals don't want you to come unless you do at least a basic sponsorship, or they want you to get a booth, and it becomes like very expensive. So last year we're like, you know, we're doing our own event. So we had our own event, we went big, you know, set super high standards and what it was going to be about in regards to the experience. Did not save or plan for it. I'm just gonna be real, guys. It's not like I had—

it comes right out of a profit, right?

Yeah, it's like this is coming right out of profit. And the other thing I realized is like the expenses don't all come in like They're not all averaged out on a month to month. I remember that first February, it was like because we secured Michael Phelps and David Spade.

Oh, jeez.

And it was like, oh, here's their fees and they want them all.

Big shots.

And I'm like, oh, great. So we had our own conference and we could control who came and those buyer units. People go to conferences and they'll think, oh, it's got 500 people, but how many buyer units are there? How many actual individual firms are there? Yeah. So that's kind of my rant that I'm not a Now here's the thing, I got 2 event people right now at an event at PILMA, right, in Colorado, and it's a personal injury, uh, conference. But I am still today not the biggest proponent of attending other people's conference. I would rather throw your own party and invite people to that party.

Yeah, no, no doubt. If you can control the event, you can control the experience, you can bring in the guests that— and speakers that you want. That obviously there's more leverage there, but it sounds like you've built a lot of your business on the back of being at these other industry conferences, having the booth, doing the speaking engagements, and you still have invested time there, but you like, there's a diminishing return because the same group of people that go to this event, go to that same event every time. And over time, they either know you and have done business with you, or they've done business and went to someone else, or they're happy where they're at.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. You'll get a trickle. The other thing that happens is if you don't have a clear— if you're not clearly differentiated versus other agencies, you're going to have 8 other agencies all say, you know, begging, you know, begging these individuals to work with them. And, and it's just like, you have to be differentiated to, to be successful too.

No doubt. I definitely want to get into this, but I want to answer some of the questions as we go. So if you're listening, you're like, man, I'm really excited to hear what Chris, you know, learnings were as he built that outbound team, how he structured it. We're gonna get there, but I do wanna make sure we answer some of the questions. So Michael Vale asked Chris, did you go straight into personal injury niche or was it general at first?

[Speaker:CHRIS] So I went into general legal at first, and then about 5 or 6 years, I'm not exactly sure, I really focused on personal injury. And for a couple years we did just personal injury. I actually referred out anyone that didn't fit. Now we've opened the doors back up to criminal defense, family law, you know, all these other areas. But when we're hunting, we're hunting for PI. And I'll tell you, so behind me, you can't see it, I have a personal injury lawyer marketing book, I have a personal injury lawyer podcast, I have personal injury case studies, I've got the personal injury conference PIMCON. And so we're very intentional in our outbound teams, which we're going to get to it. We have a whole pod structure for just PI. Now, you know, after several, many years of doing this, now we have— we're vertically, you know, we target a different vertical. So now we're doing criminal defense, we're going to have a podcast, we're going to have— we're doing all the things. We're going to be really specific. We're not going to do criminal defense, family law, and employment. We're— the very next one's criminal defense. But guess what? We're still doing the, the PIMCON conference. We're still doing the podcast. So it's, it's being really intentional about your hunting.

Love that, Michael. Hopefully that answered the question. It's super, super clear in my mind. Uh, the other question here is, uh, from Michael is, how do you see AI taking attention, uh, from Google, and how have you, or are you adapting?

That's a really good question. So we went into our annual planning last year, and the key line was not, do we have a client concentration potential risk, do we have a service concentration risk. So we've been— many of my competitors have decided to sell to PE, you know, got the big payday.

Look, that's it, we're gonna post out, right?

Many of them. There's probably a few of them listening right now, and they've taken the bag. But, and I get it, because it's hard it's very hard to sell another service that's high quality. So when I was faced with the decision, am I going to keep rocking and rolling or am I going to sell, it was like, we have to get out of our comfort zone. We have to become, you know, more of a personal injury growth engine or a law firm growth engine. Yeah. And the podcast helped me understand like what the best marketing channels were. In the podcast that I host, it's It's like a feedback loop. And so we've made a very specific effort to launch other services intentionally, and we have the same incredibly high standards. You know, for me, it took me 8 to 10 years before I could say that we were incredible, A+, A+ at SEO. Well, I can't take 8 to 10 years to do that for these other services now. I gotta do that in less than a year. So that— but I'm better capitalized. I can hire the talent that's been there, and I can identify, you know, what needs to happen more quickly. But to answer your question, more services. Um, this— the SEO has changed. You're gonna have to think about more geo. I know one of my competitors is like, if you just do good SEO, it handles geo. No, it doesn't. It's a whole different type of marketing. And so you gotta evolve and take those punches and keep changing. Love it.

Great question. Great, great answer. So here, Jim's asking, so you just mentioned the podcast, and I do think if we look at the $10 million base that kind of got you to that level, I think it was the podcasting, the positioning, the books, very specific to that PI industry. So Jim's asking, does your podcast deliver many of your clients? If so, roughly what percentage would you guess?

So not directly. Here's the deal, marketing is really challenging to measure attribution because everything's so fragmented, right? Is it first touch? Are we last touch? And what's all in the middle, right? We, we now have a pre-qualification call where we will ask these individuals how they heard about us, and they'll tend to say several things, right? Here's what I can tell you. When I go to a conference now, many people know who I am. They know who I am. I also have a better understanding of the pains in my industry because of the podcast. Is it, when you think of Naval Ravikant and his 4 components of leverage, which is capital, collaboration, content, and—

Code.

Code, my man, Josh. A podcast has distribution. You can set, right now where we're at, we can distribute to thousands of people. When you go to a conference and you're speaking on stage, there might be, if you're lucky, 100 people, 200 people in the crowd, right? So you're giving a key— we're giving a keynote presentation right now, the equivalent of it from a distribution perspective. So, right, do we get a lot of directly attributed podcast guests? No. But right before the show, I just interviewed someone and he said he was a big fan. He's listened to 80% of the the podcasts that I've had.

Yeah. So attribution-wise, people aren't saying, "I signed up from a link in the podcast," but they've listened to the episodes, they've been influenced by your value, they've become aware of you because somebody that they know was interviewed on your podcast. And it's just one of the most powerful things you can do on a consistent basis. I often suggest any agency, regardless of niche, do at least one podcast episode per month, ideally more than that. What's your frequency of the podcast?

Right now it's a weekly show every Thursday. We've— it's really challenging from a time perspective being the CEO and having these other tasks and other things that I do to do more than one a week and still maintain the quality. So I am a big quantity and quality. I'm not an or person, I'm an and person. Having said that, what I notice is when I do more than one, I don't spend as much time researching the guests and I let people on that maybe aren't the right fit because I got to fill 2 a week.

Right. Just check the box.

Right. Yeah. And I think for us, it's better at once a week. Having said that, occasionally I have the energy, I have the calendar open, I'll do two. But that's what works for us. I mean, some people thrive and have the energy and maybe that's all you do and you could do a daily podcast. But for us, it's a weekly show.

So good. Great, great insights there. Kyle Clement says, Chris Dreyer is the GOAT. And I agree. So awesome stuff. So, Kyle, so we, we talked a little bit about like the, the base and then this transition to building an outbound team. Talk to us a little bit about how that evolved, how you set that up, how you structured it.

Let me tell you about burning money, Josh. So, you know, I— you listen to Corey Quinn, who, you know, was formerly from Scorpion, and their success, and everybody knows Scorpion and how successful they were at building an outbound team. And you look at some of these other agencies and you're like, yeah, I want that. So my— this is what I did, and I'll tell you guys what to do to avoid this. Um, so I went to one of the biggest— so first of all, I read this book, it was The Sales Development Playbook. Uh, I read all the sales books, right? And it was by Trish Bertuzzi, and she's a consultant. And I'm like, well, let me just contact her and ask her who I should hire to outsource my outbound sales. And she named a company. I'm not going to name the company just because I don't want to smash these guys and gals. But here's what's— what happens. I went to this company, I'm like, I'm not gonna hire just one SDR. I hired 8. It was like $40,000 a month. And because I wanted to spend enough capital and resources and time to determine if it works. And we're going to get into how to build an outbound team, but like, what, what I experienced was Number one, I get green, green younger reps on my team, and right when they start to understand your ICP and your message, your messaging, they get promoted off your account. That's the first thing happens. The second thing is you don't control the list. You don't know who they're contacting.

Oh wow.

Right? You, you can kind of give them ICP avatar, all the things, but you really don't have control. The, the third thing is the incentives. The incentives are entirely wrong. Most of these agencies are pay-per-appointment, so you're gonna get trash appointments. They would use messaging like, hey, we'll just— I know you're happy with your existing agency, but why don't you talk to this sales guy? You might learn something new. Like, they're not— there's interruption marketing, but there's also wasting your time. So I, you know, and you would think like, oh, Chris, you'd learn from your mistake. And I'm like, let's go, this one didn't work, let's hire another one. And I did the same deal for about $50,000 a month for several months. And outbound did not work from an outsource capacity for me. Okay, uh, did, did I sign some clients? Yes, I did, but it was a huge failure. And everything changed when I decided to bring it in-house. There's a ton of reasons for that, but that's when it really changed.

So, so the big takeaway here is a lot of us are like, well, let's, let's find a contractor. We can, you know, like, we want to build a sales team. I don't want to figure it out on my own. Somebody probably knows how to do this. I'm just going to pay big bucks and have someone do it for me. In your case, that didn't pan out. Like, it was like, yeah, we got people making calls, they were setting bad appointments, they weren't converting into the right kind of deals, and it was just a big waste of money and energy.

Yeah, there's so many, there's so many issues with it. I think depending upon the, the industry— I hate to contradict myself— but depending upon the industry, you could potentially work with an outsourced partner, at least maybe to start. I think there are some things, you know, on the scripts, the training, the KPIs that I was involved in with these outsourced agencies that made it easier to bring it in-house.

So maybe you do it for a few months, you kind of cut your teeth a little bit, you learn some things, you learn what didn't work right and kind of realized why it wasn't working.

I think that's what Hormozy— look, I love Hormozy, I listen to his podcast all the time, you know, his $100 Million Offers and then the $100 Million Leads book. And I hated— I'm sure every agency owner that read that chapter about just hire the agency, then bring it in-house, probably it's like, it's like, wait a minute, right? Come on, you're my bro, I've listened to all your podcasts and now you're just saying to bring it all in-house? And it's like, but it rings true here, right? I did learn, it helped me bring it in-house. I could have been more intentional about that out of the gate.

So just assuming you can hire it and it's just gonna work out, didn't work. So you came about it, you didn't just throw in the towel, like you decided to build the internal team. Talk to us about that and kind of what really got this humming in the right direction.

Really good question. And there's so much here. Um, you know, we're about 20-something salespeople now. Wow. And we've got a dedicated, uh, outbound team, the BDRs, by a director, you know, a director of outbound. We've got inbound and, you know, the people accepting the appointments, we call them our account executives. So we got, we got the BDR group, we got the AEs We also have a whole division for RevOps. So under that is a few members of sales enablement. We even have a client experience individual under that for super high touch, those, those whales that you want to gift, that you want to really be intentional about targeting, um, on, on a, you know, not a, not an expanded volume perspective, a more customized approach. Yeah, so 20-something people. But for me, it started— this is what I did. I hired a recruiting company, and my criteria was I wanted a VP of sales that had successfully built an outbound team, that was going to bring someone with them, because if you're a good leader, your sales reps want to come with you, and just had the same values that I had. I really didn't care about the, the legal industry specific experience. And by the way, I, you know, I talked to some of the Scorpion guys, right? Why not? They built it and they were successful. Possible. And, and I had some good combos. There were some killers that I talked to, and I ultimately made the decision to hire a younger VP of sales. But he just— something about him, he had, he had the grit, he had the values, and, and it's really worked out. So everything stemmed from him. He brought on a best friend that was a head of outbound at another company. They brought on several people. And, and what started to happen was, you know, in hiring I had always, you know, you put your stuff out on Workable or Indeed or whatever, and you kind of hope and pray good talent comes in. But we had a bench of Presidents Club winners that wanted to work for us. I, I want to say every, but there might be one that's not a Presidents Club winner. Every single one of them. So we're talking about talent.

The Rock.

Yes. Yep. So that's, that's the team component. It's We have rock stars. They have the correct incentives, and, and they're motivated. They, they're working on just your account. They're not sharing utilization with another business, and, you know, don't say your value props incorrectly and things like that. So it's— that's the talent component.

So I, I like the fact you, you came out about this from the perspective of, I need the leader for this particular thing that's done it before, that's got proven results. That can step in and like figure it out. So like you have— you haven't completely abdicated it to a third party, but you haven't said, I'm gonna get into the weeds, I'm gonna hire every last sales rep, I'm gonna train every, every sales rep. Yeah.

And you know, the other thing too, for— I want to talk about the pains, like the panic that I experienced, right? Let's not talk about all the, the shiny, the good stuff, the easy, right? I had a killer account executive that I still to this day love. Killer. Did not believe in outbound and, and was resistant. There was friction there. And unfortunately, this individual is no longer with me. And it's because you need to have someone that, that aligns with your vision, that can row in the same direction. And as soon as you got someone rowing against you, it's just hard. No matter how much you like them, no matter how much they were, were amazing for you in the past, and we, we thought we designed the perfect role for this individual but just could not get this individual on board. And unfortunately, we had to go a different direction. It goes back to the people who got you there won't get you— whatever this thing is— here won't get you there. And still to this day, love the guy, super talented, product knowledge expert, hard worker, all the benefits, but it just, it didn't work out. So I had some real pain there, and it still bothers me to this day, but You know, um, I had to make the change and, and, and fortunately it worked out. But, um, yeah, so I'll let you continue there, but that was a real pain that I experienced.

Okay, so I know we've got a couple touch points here, and so starting with the list, right? So you got this outbound team, you got BDRs and AEs, which I think BDRs are— they're calling, setting appointments. Your account executive is actually taking the meetings and closing the deals. And then you've got the client success team, right? I'm like those were the roles you kind of defined for this process. Um, it sounds like it starts with the list, right? If we're going to target high-end attorneys, talk to us about that and how you think through that list piece.

Yeah, the list component, it's controlling who you contact. Are the numbers going— are the phone numbers valid? Instead of just dialing numbers that are broken or, you know, they don't receive the call. Same for the emails. You know, nowadays, look at email deliverability and how, how important that is. So Everything starts with a list. But, you know, for us, and I think for many of the people listening, I, I hope and pray that everyone at least has some type of CRM, whether it's a Pipedrive or HubSpot or Salesforce or what have you.

HighLevel.

And HighLevel, yeah, HighLevel. There's, there's many, many great CRMs, but it starts with who's already reached out to you in the past that you just maybe haven't communicated with. Maybe you have different service offerings. Maybe, maybe you can just do a light touch. It's, it's the— it starts there, the email list. Maybe you have given away an ebook or did webinars or, you know, went to an event and got the list. That's kind of the next component. And then you start to get in the, the Zoom info, the Apollo, the different third-party, and those are expensive. Those are really expensive. So start with the people that have contacted you. That'll keep you busy for months. And, and then kind of expand from there.

So was that your BDRs were focusing on your past unconverted opportunities, checking in, seeing if there was an opportunity, setting appointments again, and that was the low-hanging fruit versus just, hey, we've picked 100, you know, dream prospects for each of you to cold-introduce yourselves to?

Yeah, they already know you. That one of the big things is trust, and they already, they already know you in some capacity. And it's, you know, at the time they may not be ready to buy, but maybe they are now. And so it's just a much easier conversation, and you can build off of that initial list to get— then get more contacts. All of us have probably been invited to some Northwestern Mutual lunch meal by a buddy that you went to high school with, and you think they're just wanting to catch up, and by the end of it they're trying to sell you life insurance. But, you know, They're always asking, you know, who else do you know that could benefit, right? Those are the types of conversations you can have. You know, who else? Maybe you're not ready to get marketing services, but do you know somebody who is? And just build off of that initial list.

So kind of working the warm list. Like, was there a component to this that was the, like the Corey Quinn gift-based outbound or the Dream 100 initiative where you're dropping gifts and you're reaching out? Talk to us a little bit about that and how do you segment energy from, you know, inbound opportunities and past prospects and then this like kind of very, you know, intentional outreach.

So it starts with sales enablement, and we have, like I said, 3 or 4 individuals that just work on the list. That's how important it is, making sure the numbers are good, making sure all the contact information stored, because you're going to talk to these individuals many, many times before they convert. Look, our, our inbound sales cycle is 26 days to win a deal. Our outbound, 62. It's just longer. You gotta— it takes more time. And but we have a dedicated employee that the only thing they do is work on the list. They're, they're an expert at it. They're constantly refining it. We've got the DNC list, the do not contact list, of people that were bad fits, um, or whatever, whatever reason there is. But that's, that's the segmentation. It— because it is so important, it starts with the list. In my opinion, you need a dedicated person. The worst thing in the world is to have your SDRs, your BDRs building their own list and trying to do these, these— validate these phone numbers when they should be hitting the phone or emailing or what have you to, to get these contacts.

Such a good, such a good insight. Yeah, because if they're wasting their time updating contact details or calling the wrong people, they're not, they're not hitting their metrics. Speaking of metrics, do you have any like key metrics that your SDRs are shooting for in terms of daily touches?

Yeah, so ours is lower. You know, some of these outbound companies are like, you need 120 dials a day. Right? Ours is we want 50. We want 50 quality dials. We would rather focus on the quality component of quality conversations than just your 100 dials. And even if— and look, my head of sales isn't listening, but I would say even if they hit 40 but they, but they got the appointments and they were really quality, I think it would be okay. We're more focused on that and the, the high quality, the qualified appointments. The other thing too, the metrics, the KPIs They basically keep your standards high. It allows competition, leaderboards. We have— look, we have a leaderboard. Everyone knows who the winner is and the loser is.

Is that by day, by week, by month?

I believe it's by week. Okay. And we called our internal Jumbotron— I kind of stole the name from Mike Morse at Fireproof, you know, in his book. But you know who the best who the best rep is and who's performing and who the worst is, right? So, so maybe you have this 50 dial minimum, right, but you're at the bottom, you might be cranking out 80 or some calls on the weekend to get your numbers up. The other thing too is, is holding incredibly high standards. And I'll give you a story here, Josh. Yeah, so we had our best, our best BDR hit a certain quota, meet certain criteria to be promoted to an account executive. Once they're an account executive, they missed quota. They, they didn't— they, they didn't— they didn't have the, um— they struggled to do that role. And I asked my head of sales, I'm like, what are we gonna do here? That it was our best BDR. Are we gonna move them back to be a BDR? And he's like, no, we're not going to set the standard that it's okay to fail. So we let him go. Wow. Our best one. And that's, that's the, that's the standards that we have. And we have to be okay with that. It's, it's up or out. You don't move backwards. So, you know, you may have an SEO specialist or what have you. It's, it's up and out. It's, it's the Peter Principle. It's, you know, it's, it's the employee's responsibility to make themselves indispensable, not yours.

Yeah, love that. So, so clear KPIs for all the roles in the organization and a, and a standard that needs to be met, right? And either the standard's met or it's not. And if it's not, like, that's not the right person for that seat at this point.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the other thing we touched on, this is like the trust before transaction. It's— you're doing interruption-based, right, marketing, right? Inbound, they want to work with you, they're reaching out. There is a lack of trust. It's like, who's calling me? Who's emailing me? So it's more calls, it's more time, it's more value. If you're getting asked for references, you haven't built enough trust. You may have to meet them in person. You may, you may have to do those things that, that don't quote unquote scale. We give a budget for our account managers and our sales reps to meet individuals person. Love that. It's wild, right? And it's just when you meet somebody in person, you shake their hand, you get belly to belly, you have lunch with them, you develop a relationship. And I think some of those things are going to stand out in this AI-powered world where maybe the AI agents are doing all the outbound calls, but, you know, are they—

is the Tesla bot gonna go chill at the hangout, have drinks, you know, it'll do the stuff after hours, build the relationship?

You know, that, that's for me too. It's like, even though we're, we're at the size that we are, we have these, you know, this A-list, these type whales. Well, 3 weeks ago I was in, in San Antonio. Like, I flew to San Antonio to go close a deal.

Wow.

And you just got to do what you got to do. You got to be willing to do the things that your competitors aren't willing to do.

Love that. So, so good. Yeah, and I think in this AI-powered world, we all need to be conscious that you can't replace human-to-human connection, and that could be your competitive advantage if everyone else takes their eye off of that ball. I love the idea of the, of the Jumbotron, and I think of that in a, in a physical office, right? We got a big board up and everybody's looking at it. In a virtual world, how does that, how does that materialize? Is it a Google Sheet? Is it a dashboard? And how does, how do you keep it ever-present for the team?

Yeah, we've got a Looker Studio dashboard. The other thing too is we have, we have excellent reporting in HubSpot. And so it's all really visible. And like I said, our, our leaders, they have very direct, candid conversations. I mean, conversations that would put some individuals on edge. But like, we just, we don't sugarcoat it. It's, hey, you're saying too many ums and ahs. Try to take a breath. Do this for your open. And, and there's a lot of coaching, a lot of coaching. You know, that's, that's the other thing. I think a lot of agencies, they hire these individuals and they, they give them 30 days training and off to the races, set and forget it.

Hopefully it works out.

Hope it works out. And the thing that— when you, when you spend more time on training, you have less errors, you have less mistakes, they get better. And so So we do boot camps, we do— we hire external coaches to do group coaching, we do one-on-one. Every single call is recorded, we, we review those, we do mock calls. So there is a lot, and I'm talking every single week. I had all of our sales reps go and get certified through Nathan Gotch's SEO training, and, and I'm not sure what, what training they're on now, but like, that's our sales reps. Right. So it's like table stakes if you're gonna do sales back to conversation, right? Right.

They get all on their own.

Mm-hmm. So it's their training.

So you gotta train them up, gotta hold them accountable, gotta set the tracking mechanism in place so that everybody can see who's where. When you think about the outbound, is it just phone or are you guys taking a phone, email, connect on LinkedIn and social profiles? Like what's the mix there in terms of those 50 connection points?

Well, so we want, we want them to do at least 50 dials. Okay. And we've got a dialer conversations, or I don't know, so I'm a little removed on this. I don't know the dialer that we use, but it's not HubSpot's dialer. What we found was HubSpot's outbound dialer, the numbers were burned. They're being transferred.

Spam call coming in.

Yeah, the deliverability wasn't good. So we had to, as much as we want to try to like fully integrate and, and use one piece of tech. We ended up having to use a different dialer. I'm not sure which dialer we're using now, but that was a big issue, honestly. The— so remind me the original question.

What was, um, are we thinking just dials or are they also trying to connect? Yeah, email, social media, and additional other touch points.

We want them to do 50 dials, but then outside of that it's kind of freedom. Okay. It's a lot, a lot of our team uses LinkedIn. And it depends on your, your ICP and your avatar. And I'll give you an example. Like, if you're— there's, there's the owner that makes decision, there's the marketing manager, there's the COO. There's, there's different messaging components for each of these.

Yeah.

If you're trying to target the owner, they're typically not on LinkedIn. It's probably the marketing manager that's going to be fielding those inbox messages. So you have to be cognizant of that and like what you're going to say in those messages. Versus, you know, for us— and this is really understanding your avatar, right? My avatar is still using Facebook. I know there's— I know there's Instagram, I know there's TikTok, I know there's— but they're on Facebook, right? So a Facebook message might go, go over better. Um, the age is a component, but we're, we're giving them a little bit of freedom. We do a lot of handwritten letters. We mail out my book to every single person that contacts us. Every single conversation, they get my book with a handwritten letter. Love it. The— it's a lot, a lot of book purchases.

So that's a lot of shipping costs, right? But obviously it's, it's paying.

And we look— we, we, you know, those external coaches, we got trained by Corey Quinn too, right, on the gifting tactics. And, and we're starting to introduce some of those types of components. And, uh, but to be, to be honest, at the beginning we didn't do any of that from a gifting perspective. It was It was just contact people that already knew you, try to provide value and try to stand out, be consistent. And that's what we started with.

Love it. So many great insights there. Let's talk a little bit about training. You mentioned like, obviously we're gonna coach them and role play with them, but the initial training, what does that look like to become an SDR in your agency?

Yeah, great question. So we have the account— the sales enablements role. So that role is getting them, you know, all set up with the tech, with the communications, with the processes. But we do a boot camp, I believe it's 2 weeks long, where it's just thrown to the fire out of the gate. But then there's ongoing coaching for all of them. In fact, I don't know the exact wording, but we have this whole sheet of like, if you miss these metrics, you are getting pipped. It's not like— I think people struggle with firing, hiring and firing, and holding people accountable. For me, my head hits the pillow when a KPI wasn't missed, and they know that they didn't miss it. It's not me, it's, it's the KP. Like, you missed this, right? And, and so they're trained on all of that.

The—

we are constantly getting more coaches. Constantly. And we, we've picked up coaches from TikTok, we've picked up coaches, you know, uh, we've worked with Corey, we worked with industry-specific people. Um, we're going to constantly bring in new coaches. And, and I'm also— look, I'm, I'm not frugal, so that's not the word for me, but I'm also cost-conscious that I'm not just shelling out a ton of blowing money on random consultants and things that don't produce an ROI. Yeah, yeah. So I think probably the best thing is listening to the calls and giving feedbacks one-on-one. Hey, did you hear this when you said this? This is what you could have said. And the mock calls, those go a long way, like letting them actually execute and then train them. Love it.

So grew to $10 million mostly inbound, mostly positioning yourself. Grew to $30 million, mostly outbound, obviously with not replacing the inbound stuff. You're still doing everything that had been—

Yeah.

—positioned you as an expert and you still get tons of inbound, but you're also being much more intentional with that outbound approach, which has created a massive catalyst for growth within the business. And it sounds like, you know, you started with the intention, or I wanna build this outbound sales team. You got that key leader that could run that within the organization. You set the KPIs, You hold the KPIs, you get the right talent, presidents, club-level people, train them up, hold them to the standards, and now you've got this machine that's setting appointments. I think the other critical piece, if you could talk about it briefly, is, is the career track. It sounded like there was some career track from you start here as a BDR, if you hit a certain metric, then you can become an account executive. Talk to us a little bit about that, that path for the, for the team members.

Yeah, I want to— so I'll talk about the career path. I want to— I want to just mention things, maybe we can talk about this after, but the blending of marketing and sales. Yes. And revenue, as opposed to, you know, keeping these siloed. So the career path, to answer your question, like when you hire a former President's Club winner, like they want to move up, they are hungry, they're competitive, they want to be the leader. So first we have the President's Club gets to go to our event, right? That's a Phoenician 5-star luxury event, right? They also have the opportunity to make money, so there's that. They start, you know, ours is BDR, Senior BDR, Key BDR. Each of those allows for more, uh, more capability of different types of people on their respective list. Right? I'm going to give the, the whales to the A-list, and you know, they're comped a little bit different. Then what we have, and this is a bit different, is we have what we call an AE1, an Account Executive 1. It— so after you go from BDR, Senior BDR, to Key BDR, you have the potential to be an AE1. So you're assigned to one specific AE, and you join all their calls, okay, before you become an AE. And so you're setting only for this individual, you're working with this individual on the proposals, you're on all the calls, you get to hear, you get a ton of immersion, you get that full immersion before they become the senior AE that then gets their AE1 and their set appointments from the BDRs. Now the, the BDRs, it's based upon capacity, right? So if I— that's why they're not assigned to just one. If, if I load up one AE's calendar. Well, I want to load up another person. I don't want to just keep beating the door down. And now, you know, the appointments are booked 2 to 3 weeks out. So, you know, they're— they share. The AE1 does not share. Okay, very cool.

I love— I love the clear track there so they can see their progression and how they can move up in the organization. Um, let's talk about the blend between sales and marketing.

Yeah, I was— I'm looking at the, the chat and the messages over on the side, and I felt like Chris Walker entered the chat, right? Yeah, those of you that know Chris Walker, we, we don't have a quote-unquote standalone marketing sales. We have a revenue, revenue department, and it's all kind of blended together to the point where It is truly omnichannel. And if I wasn't doing the inbound marketing, the Facebook ads, the retargeting, the all these different components, outbound would not work. It would be dry. Yeah, they'd be— it would be dry. You need the addition. They need to see you multiple times and join your list and, and, and go to webinars and have this opportunity to learn who you are. So there's this blending component. So we, you know, we don't have a CMO and a, you know, head of sales. We're moving more towards that CRO component. Now we have a senior VP of revenue that's on that track to CRO, but it really is truly blended. And that's how we look at our cost to acquire a lead, our cost to acquire a client, what the LTV is. It's a blended component. It's not to say that we don't set up our UTM codes in our HubSpot and, you know, look at first touch and last touch, but we're truly looking at it from a blended perspective.

So, so good. So many great insights and takeaways here, guys. If you're getting value, be sure to hit the like button. Uh, you know, not every day you get the opportunity to hear from someone that's grown from startup to $30 million in annualized revenue in a very specific vertical. Uh, we've got a couple of questions here, Chris. Are you okay if we do some rapid-fire Q&A? Yeah, do it. Guys, if you have questions, we're still live. You know, type your questions in here. If you happen to be watching after the fact, you can still ask the questions and I'll see if I can't get Chris to answer. So, Samuel's asking, if you had to go from $0 to $100,000 in 6 months in an agency, what would be your plan?

Oh boy. $0 to $100,000 in 6 months. Well, I would try to look internal about what I am the best at. Am I great at LinkedIn? Am I— I would really be— I would be one channel, one audience. That's what I would do. LinkedIn to criminal defense attorneys, you know, uh, something for dentists.

I would do one channel, one focus service to 100, until you get to that 100K, and then expand out to other things. Yeah, good question. Tyler's asking, I was wondering if you have any tips for cold outreach. And what's worked with— what's worked for you with follow-up?

Yeah, so all of this— list, offer, trust, talent, training, accountability, time— follow-up is, is the biggest thing. Is you need to get away from just following up, just checking in. Every single touchpoint should be a value touchpoint. You should, you should be actively trying to help these individuals because you build up this reciprocity currency. We're not talking about it, but if you help an individual enough times, they're willing to help you in return. Yeah. So good.

Don't go and just say, hey, you know, want more leads for your law firm, right? Let's schedule a time, right? It feels like Chris is reaching out with value in advance. His BDRs are trained to reach out with value in advance, whether that's a new document or sending a copy of the book or inviting them to listen to a podcast and getting that reciprocity, you know, as part of the process. Is that right, Chris?

Absolutely. Yeah, so good.

I'm not sure if you're comfortable speaking to this, but, um, Constructo Web Design is asking, can you talk a little bit about the pay structure for that sales team and the BDRs?

Hmm, okay. Uh, so on the BDR side, depending upon, you know, like when we're hiring President's Club winners, like you're not going to get them for, for low pay, and So our base is anywhere from 60 to 75 on a BDR perspective, but we want the OTE to always be above 100. Six-figure on top, on tracked earnings. For those any, for any role in sales, the OTE needs to be above 100. The, from an account executive perspective, we want our, you know, our base is higher and our, our variable is higher. So, you know, we want them OTE minimum $200K. We do, you know, we do 10% of the retainer for the first 6 months, um, if it's an inbound lead. Okay, right. So if you sell a $10,000 a month retainer, we pay our, our, uh, account executive $1,000 a month for 6 months. Now, if they churn in month 2, they only get the 2 first 2 months. Right? I do not like— I know some sales organizations will do 50% of the first month and that's it. You get that dopamine hit, but if they don't set expectations and they don't get the right fit, yeah, then it really hurts you.

So really incentivizing that sales team to sell the right fit, and you're going to get paid, but it's going to get paid over the time they're actually paying their monthly fees.

Yeah, and I also like segmenting sales and a client service. It's a different personality type. You know, you get these Type A drivers that are pushy versus, you know, the more paternal, nurturing farmer, you know. Um, not to say we don't have the, the, the super driver account managers, but, but it's a different type of personality overall.

Yeah, definitely. I think it looks like Daniel had the same question around compensation structure, which you just addressed, which was, which was great. Let's see here. This one's coming in from Dignan Design. Do you think it's worth focusing strictly on working with family law? Is that niche enough on Facebook, etc., or would you start with PI?

Both of them are great. PI is a bloodbath. My cost to acquire— Very, very, very—

Yeah, don't, don't, don't try and, you know, shift the Don't try to swim in those waters unless you've got lots of experience and you're ready to—

yeah, and I mean run headfirst into it, right? If you're really good at Facebook ads, um, you know, the— our cost to acquire a client in PI is like $40,000 to $50,000 to acquire the client. Uh, yes, you could do family law. Yes, you could do PI. Yes, you could do criminal. The key thing here is focus and really understand where they congregate, what their pains are, and try to do your best to create product-market fit before you start going out and trying to sling, you know, your service at them.

So, so good. I want to make sure we get, we get you wrapped up in time. There's one more question here we'll take. Rhino Marketer saying, what are your thoughts on someone starting the agency that doesn't have technical skills? Um, do they need to learn it, or is it okay to white label in your, in your opinion?

It depends. Like, I think your core should be in-house. I think you should have the technical expertise. Um, I heard this thing from the guy at Design Pickle of when to outsource and when to keep things in-house. If it's core, you want it in-house. If it's not core, you want to outsource it, because who you outsource it to can have it as their core. So I'll give you the perfect example. At the beginning, we, we outsourced all of our HR. It was not a core. We didn't have the people that own that. But, you know, there are specific HR companies that that's all they do. Yep. And it could be, you could take that same example for web design, Facebook ads, what have you. It's like when you can make it your core, I think you want to from a control perspective.

Love that. Never outsource your core competency. So if you're starting an agency and you don't have a core competency, then you're just, you're not really adding much value to the industry that you serve. Lots of ways to skin that cat. Chris, this has been phenomenal. Thanks for your generosity of spirit and coming on and sharing. How you've grown, what's worked for you. If listeners want to learn more about you or connect with you further, what's the best way?

Yeah, the best way is chris@rankings.io. I'm an inbox zero guy, so just shoot me an email. I'll get back to you. I may respond and may take a little bit of time, but if you have questions about what we discussed, hit me up.

Happy to share. And you got your book, Nicheing Up. If somebody wanted to get their hands on that, what's the best place to grab a copy?

Yeah, Amazon, Amazon. And if you get it, please leave me a review. That would be awesome.

The least you could do for Chris after everything he shared with you today is go get the book, post a review, and send him a thank you note on email and/or social media. Chris, if you had one last piece of wisdom to share with that agency owner that's, you know, just maybe at the million-dollar level and trying to get, you know, over the first plateau, what would it be?

I think the individuals with the highest standards are most likely to succeed in every role at your company. If your standards for client service are high, you're going to be very good at client service. If your standards for quality SEO are high, you're going to be very good at SEO. So the individuals with the highest standards often win.

Set your standards higher, do the work, go above and beyond for your clients. Guys, thanks for listening today. If you got value, hit the like button, Go get a copy of Chris's book and post that review. If you got follow-up questions, post them wherever you're watching and we'll try our best to get back to you. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.