The Client Retention Playbook for Digital Marketing Agencies

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson. All right. Hello and welcome. I'm super excited for today's session. We're gonna be talking all about client retention, and we know in, in our digital marketing agencies, one of the biggest struggles, one of the toughest things we all have to contend with is we get the client, we go do our thing, whether it's websites, SEO, pay-per-click, social media. We pour our heart and soul into getting them results. And eventually, unfortunately, we get the email or the call that says, hey, you know what, we're going a different direction. Hey, we're gonna change things up. Give me a yes if you hate to get that call, you hate to get that message. It always feels like a stab in the side when the client says they're gonna be, moving on. And so while I don't have a promise to completely eliminate churn from your business, I'm gonna talk about some key strategies to reduce the churn and to maximize your client retention rates. And so, like Esteban said, if you could rename yourself real quick, your name plus your company name, that helps give us a little bit of context as to who you are, type of agency that you run. But my promise to you on today's session is While I can't eliminate churn completely, I'm gonna show a plan that if fall will help you increase your monthly retention to 97% or higher. Or another way to look at that is to reduce your churn to no more than 3% per month. And you know why? I'd love to say you'll never lose another client again, but let's face it, right? This is a very competitive industry. There's lots of moving parts. A lot of the clients we churn today are because they got acquired, you know, by some larger organization. Or somebody on their team, you know, decided to start their own agency and they've got like a personal relationship. These types of things happen. What we want to really minimize is the amount of churn that we get from our fault, right? And, and, you know, it's one thing to lose because they got acquired. It's another thing to lose because, and I know we've all done this because there's no perfect people in this world, because we accidentally put the wrong company name on the website. Or because we had the wrong tracking number ringing to the wrong place, or because we messed something up with what we posted on their social profiles, or because we just didn't communicate with them. Give me a 1 if you're willing to be honest, if you've ever lost clients on your own fault. Like, you know, if you introspectively look, they left because we didn't deliver the goods, because we dropped the ball in some way. Yes, we all— I should see 83+ 1s 'cause we have 83+ people on with us today. And so really what we're gonna talk about today is how to craft an experience and how to put the processes in place so that we can retain it at least a 97% monthly retention. And I can tell you I have a plan for this based on real-world experience because, yes, I've been able to take our agency from at one point, Plumbing HVAC SEO, we struggled at like a 92, 93% average monthly retention. We made a lot of changes. We made a lot of shifts. We made a lot of adjustments that helped us improve the experience, improve, improve the communication process, and get our average retention above 97%. But that's not just me. You know, at this point in, in 7-figure agency, we coach hundreds of digital marketing agencies. Many of them have gone to multiple 7 figures. And, you know, Jim Malin from Move for Marketers and Austin Hauser from Base Coat Marketing and Chris Rodriguez from GrowPro. You know, these are all examples of people that have gone to multiple 7 figures and put the process in place to maximize their retention. So is it okay with you guys if I share some of those examples and some of those case studies as we teach through this? Is my video blurred or am I looking okay? Like on my screen, it's coming in weird. Are you guys able to see me and my backdrop here? You're okay, Josh. You're good. I think it was someone else like mirroring my video and it's like kind of freaked me out for a second. Okay, so I'll share some of those examples as we go. This, this session is brought to you by 7 Figure Agency, our coaching, mentorship, and mastermind. Really at this point we got 300, almost 300 members, 298 members. Over 118 agencies have grown to 7 figures with the ideas, strategies, techniques, accountability, and coaching that we brought to the table. 26 members at multiple 7 figures, cumulatively 7-figure agency. Agencies produce over $250 million per year. And so, you know, what I'm gonna be sharing with you is not based on, you know, an isolated instance or something that I read somewhere. It's based on the cumulative experience of some of the top digital marketing agencies in the entire country. And, you know, our whole philosophy at 7 Figure Agency, as it relates to growing and scaling your agency, is that we want a business that provides money, that provides freedom, and that provides impact. And the way we do that is by having a process to land clients on a consistent basis, to deliver world-class results where we generate a great return on investment for our clients with what we do. And then ultimately, we retain those clients long-term by creating the right experience. And so really, that's what we're gonna be talking about today is that, that client retention strategy to keep the clients with you to improve the lifetime value and to really just be as sticky as possible. And if you think about our growth system, which I've talked about on other videos and other trainings, you know, the spurting things we want to do on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis to fill our funnel. And then we want to make sure we've got a great appointment funnel and a great, a great sales process to convert. And those 2 things are kind of the sexy sauce, but the reality is if you want to grow a 7-figure or multiple 7-figure agency, Yes, you have to land clients, but you also have to retain, right? And that's really where we're gonna be focused on how to create that onboarding process, how to communicate effectively, and then ultimately how to build the structure and the team so that you're not the only person talking to the clients. You're not the only person, you know, trying to have those tough conversations when the client is unhappy. And so let's get into it. We're gonna dive into the, the client retention playbook. I'm gonna unpack our best ideas, strategies, and techniques. On how to maximize retention in the, in the guise of a digital marketing agency. Sometimes we're like, I don't know what's good or what's bad. I don't know if I'm terrible with retention or if I'm crushing it with retention. Sometimes we don't even track, right? And that's, that's a big problem, right? You can't improve what you don't measure and you should absolutely know down to the, down to the month, down to the quarter, down to the year, what's our average retention rate? And so I'm gonna be walking you through how to track that. If you don't already. But really the benchmark we're shooting for is 97% or more in retention, which means we're losing no more than 3% of our client base in a given month. If you're above 95%, which means you're churning at about 5% or less per month, you're doing pretty good. Right? I believe that the industry norm, if you look at the averages in digital marketing, it's about a 7 or 8% average attrition rate. I can tell you though, if you get this right and you have the right model, you can absolutely get it 3% or less. I would say when you drop below 95% and you start to turn 6, 7, 8%, I think that's a red flag. I think that's like, something might be a little bit off with what we're selling, how we're delivering it, the results that we're getting. Something's not quite right and you really wanna focus on it at that moment in time. And then if you're turning more than 10% or your retention is less than 90%, I think that's— stop everything you're doing, right? There is something drastically wrong with either the market you're selling to, the promise that you're making, the way that you're selling it, the way that you're onboarding, or the actual results that you're getting for your client base. And so I'd love to know for those of you that are on that track this closely, what is your retention right now? Are you know, on an average month, are you retaining 97%, 93%? Drop a number in there. It's always helpful to get some perspective if you feel like having a little bit of accountability. Okay. I see some, I see some numbers. 100% for 6 clients. Now, yes, I should say the caveat that 97% at scale, right? We're assuming you've got, you know, a 6 or 7-figure agency. You know, we can all have 100% early on. It starts to get harder as the company grows. And as there starts to become more and more things at play. PPC Foundry, 95%. That's fantastic. Brian, 85%. Hamid, good to see you. Thanks for being on here. So, so here's the problem that we want to solve for on today's session. Problem number 1 is, is clients will cancel. Like, there's nothing you can do about it. It's such a competitive market. There's so many different opportunities. There's so many different things that happen in any local small business. You're gonna have cancellation. What I do find though is that if you're losing clients for the wrong reasons, like because you didn't deliver, because you didn't get them results, it can start to kill your confidence. Right? And you start to wonder, maybe we don't actually know what we're doing. Maybe we aren't actually doing what we promised for the clients. Maybe we shouldn't even be selling new people and you start to doubt yourself, which will absolutely slow down your momentum. It will slow down your marketing momentum. It will slow down your sales momentum. And we know in a retainer-based business like this, it's all about retention. If we can't land clients and retain the clients, it'll feel often like we're taking one step forward and one step back, almost like this dude on the, on the treadmill, and you're like just going forward, but you're not getting anywhere. So we have to be retaining more clients than we're losing by a, by a nice margin in order to actually be in momentum and growth. In our agencies. You know, the other big component of why focusing on retention is so important, why we need to dial this in, is because in a niche, which I teach is you're gonna be in a very specific, specific niche, whether it's plumbing or roofing or AC or dentistry, the good word goes fast, right? People say good things about you, they refer you to others, you become known, and it grows quickly. The same thing can happen in a niche if you don't do great work and there is bad word about you. That negative word spreads really, really quickly. So it's important that we dial in our retention strategies for all of those reasons. And so I'd love to know from you guys in the comments, and I do appreciate those of you that have your webcams on and you're chatting with me. Just introspectively, you know, what is the hardest part about retention for you right now? If you can put that in the comments, is it what you report? Is it how often you meet with the clients? Is it the delivery? Like, you just don't feel like you're actually getting the results? What's the hardest part for you when it comes to retention? Say Michael says delivery. Delivery. Reporting. Some delivery. Okay, awesome. Good. I appreciate you guys engaging because I don't want to just talk at you for an hour here. I want you guys to think about it and kind of walk away with clear insights and distinctions. So what we want, and really what we're gonna be focused on in today's session, is clients come on board, they're happy, and they stick around long term. Right? We kick things off on a really good footing where we've come out of the gates and they're super impressed, they're super excited about what we can bring to the table. We keep them on board. And let's face it, if we do a good job and we're retaining our clients, obviously that includes our— improves our revenue, it improves our profitability, but it also improves the good word, right? They're more likely to refer us. They're more likely to say something good about us. And that's a marketing strategy that most of us don't consider. The reputation that you have in the marketplace and the virality of how you show up in the world will absolutely be an accelerator or a detractor to your marketing strategy. So there was a, a study done by Bain and Company, and what they found was a 5% increase in retention can increase your profits by as much as 25 to 95%. And so, you know, as marketers, we tend to focus and think more about sales and marketing and business growth, but revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. And so if you're focused on your profitability, which is how much money you actually keep from the revenues that you generate, energy and time that you're investing today in retention is money, is energy well spent. So when we think about retention, what do you think the number 1 reason clients leave is? Let me know in the comments. What's the number 1 reason? Would love to hear from you guys in the comments what you think that reason is. Why do they cancel? Why do they stop their monthly retainer? Indifference, says Dominic. Expectations, says Can't pronounce the name. Tom says not delivering. No results, says Melissa. Tiffany says lose sight of value created. Nikki says sometimes too high of expectations. Perfect. All the reasons we hear, right? Not because we don't get them results. You know, they, they don't like us. They, there's too much competition. Research shows the number 1 reason clients leave is actually perceived indifference, right? At the end of the day, yes, they'll leave because of results. Yes, they'll leave because of a variety of reasons. But the number one reason they leave is perceived indifference, which means they feel like you don't care about them anymore. They feel like they're just a number on your shelf of people that they're working with. And so knowing that, we can be really proactive with how we communicate with our clients, how we show that we care, how we show that we're paying attention. Because if we could take the number 1 reason off the shelf, that in and of itself is going to have an impact on our, on our retention. And so there's really 2 sides of this, this scale that we always want to be thinking about from a retention perspective, and that's results and service. Right? Most of us, I know I feel this way, think the number one reason that they stay with us is because the results. Right? And so we have to make sure we're good at what we do with our website, SEO, pay-per-click, tracking, proving value. And we think we're here to make it rain. And that's absolutely true. It's absolutely important. But there's been many cases as I look back in my over a decade in our agency Plumbing and HVAC SEO where we had clients where we were crushing it. They had lots of leads. They had lots of return on investment. They were ranking for the most important terms, but because we weren't on top of the ball, because we weren't making sure they understood that, because we weren't communicating, they would reach out and cancel. Right? And so you have to have good results. But at the same time, you also have to have that great service, right, where you're communicating, where you're showing the value, where you're showing the love. And it's gotta be a balance because if you've got great service, let's just say you get an amazing account management team. They're all You know, beautiful people, great personalities. They send gifts. They know the kids of the clients that you happen to work with. But the results aren't there. Do you think they're gonna stay? No. Right? So it has to be a healthy balance between generating consistent measurable results, showing your value, and providing a great experience and showing them that you love and care for them as a client. So I wanna hit some of the, the client retention fundamentals, and then we're gonna get into onboarding and the other things that I really like to focus on for retention. But I feel like if you don't have the fundamentals right, it's, it's not gonna work out. So I know this is a hard screen for me to see. So I'm gonna share my other screen if I can get to it. Give me 1 second. Almost there. Hang with me. Alright, so these are the client retention fundamentals. I really want you guys to realize There's some little decisions you can make that will make a big difference. The first is to focus on impact and ensure that your program actually generates a tangible measurable result. You can do a website, you can do SEO, you can do pay-per-click, but sometimes we just do it activity-based services. Are we gonna post your social profile once, once a week or daily? Or we're gonna send out an email newsletter every month and Knowing that those don't actually do anything for the client and might not actually move the needle, but it's just so we can check a box. Be sure that you've created a program that does provide tangible, measurable results. Number 2 is if you can go wider with what you do, you can be more consistent with the results you get, generate, and be more sticky with the client base. So that's, don't just do SEO and don't just do pay-per-click or don't just do Facebook ads. If you can go cross-channel and be involved in a number of different things within their company, you can generate better results and you can actually eliminate the stress of them having to work with multiple providers. We started at Plumbing and HVAC SEO as an SEO company, right? Plumbing companies paid us to build their website and get it ranked. And we struggled with retention because sometimes they would get ranked and sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes we needed some paid ads. Sometimes we needed other things we could do to blend the result and to be more consistent with the result that we generated. And so by going with a broader program offering, we could have a bigger impact with, which absolutely improved our retention. The third thing I want to emphasize from a retention perspective that was a game changer for me from a realization perspective, and that's the clients you choose can make or break your retention. So you get to choose, am I working with the startup operation? Am I working with a one-man operator or am I working with a more established, more professional business? And so using ourselves as the example, our agency works with plumbing and HVAC companies. When we started, we thought it was all plumbing and HVAC companies. So we would get a lot of one-man operators, right? And they would spend the money and they would, you know, stress us out. They would say they got too many leads and leads didn't convert. And it was a very inconsistent retention with those clients. And we started to get some of the larger companies, the million, $5 million, $10 million plumbing and HVAC companies. And it's a completely different world. The owner of that type of business is an entrepreneur. They understand they need to build a team. They understand capacity planning and making sure that they've got, you know, stuff in place. And so, Once we decided we're not gonna work with the one-man operators anymore, we're gonna work with these larger, more established companies, that was a game changer for us. And so if you're struggling with retention, this may be the main thing you need to focus on. That you just need to choose larger clients, right? It will make your life so much easier. You'll— they'll pay more. They'll stick around longer. And then the other thing I'll say from a retention perspective that made a big difference for us is the expectations that you set will make or break you. So if you're coming into a business relationship and the expectation is, hey, you know what, let's try it out for a month. Let's, you know, I'll set this up for you. I'll do the work. You know, we'll check in next month and we'll see how it goes. They're mentally checked in for a month, right? And they're probably going to cancel if you don't like just wow them out of the, out of the park. And so either setting a 12-month expectation or actually having them sign a 12-month contract can make a big difference in your retention, how well you retain your clients. For me, this was a big sticking point at Plumbing HVAC SEO because we were month to month and I was so confident, look, we're gonna build the website, we're gonna get it ranked, you're gonna love working with us so much, you would never wanna cancel. And so it's all month to month for that reason. And again, we did struggle with retention for a variety of reasons. And a mentor said, look, you should move to an annual contract where they're agreeing to a year. And I resisted it. I was like, I don't know, this feels like too much pressure. I don't like it. But he was like, hey, look, just try it out. Let's, for the next 3 months, tell people it's a 1-year commitment and let's see what happens. And what I found was out of most of the people that I talked with, Like 9 out of 10, they didn't even care. They were like, okay, fine, let's go with the 1-year thing. It wasn't even an issue. It was in my head that it was an issue. And then on that 1 person that maybe did have an issue with it, I could always negotiate. I'd be like, hey, you know what? No worries in your case, because I think you're going to be a good fit. We'll waive the 1-year commitment, right? So I actually didn't lose any opportunities, but I gained the commitment and the mental buy-in that I got from all of the clients that we worked with. Give me a yes if that makes sense. I know this is not super strategy-oriented, but these little tweaks can make a big difference in, in kind of how you actually retain your client base. Alright, Eric says yes. Michael says yes. Okay, good. Fantastic. I, I'm glad that that resonated. So the client retention roadmap, really what we found, the key things you need to implement to maximize your client retention boils down to onboarding, communication, And success management. And we're gonna get into each of these. I'm gonna share examples and specific things you can do in each of these different areas to really improve your retention. But I'd love to know from, from you, like, in the comments, what do you think the opportunity is for you right now? The biggest opportunity. Is it on the onboarding process? Is it on your communication flow and how you're communicating and what you're reporting back to the client? Or is it more on the success management side and kind of how you build your account management team? Zoom into the slides, it's a little blurry. Is it blurry for everybody? Onboarding says, Catalyst Digital. Yeah, it's blurry. Okay, cool. I'm gonna just go off my slides then if it's a little blurry for everybody. Okay, this should be much better. Alright, so let's get into world-class onboarding and the key things you can do to create a world-class onboarding process. 5 key principles. Number 1 is to welcome with a bang and appreciation. By welcome with a bang and appreciation, I mean, why not send something in the mail to the client that signed up? So you just sold them $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 a month program to manage their online marketing. Typically, they're gonna get an email, they're gonna get a call from an account manager, and it all happens in a digital sphere. Most people don't receive anything in the mail, or they receive very little. Things in the mail. And so when I say welcome with a bang and appreciation, like send them a, an actual box like this where they get something physical in the mail and inside of it, it's got, you know, it's got stuff they want, right? It's got a branded t-shirt, it's got your book if you have one published. You can get creative with what you put in your welcome box. We have a box like this for Plumbing and HVAC SEO. I didn't happen to have it next to me, But that goes a long way because they're like, wow, they just sent me something. I wasn't expecting that. And I'm actually pretty excited about working with this company. The other thing I would recommend is sending something edible because through a service like Sherry's Berries or gourmetgiftbaskets.com, you can literally sign the client up, have your assistant go on that website, place an order, and that afternoon they receive something edible either to their house or to their office. And it just anchors in the relationship, right? Out of the, out of the, the first 24 hours after you sign up for anything, you get buyer's remorse. You start to be like, man, I don't know if I did the right thing. I don't know if, man, I hope, I hope they do what they said. Now, that same afternoon, you get a ring at the office and they're, they've just dropped a welcome package and you're like, wow, all right, this is a good company. I'm at a good place. That's what you want to do, right? And then a box like this takes a little bit longer. You still gonna take like a couple days at least to get out to their office. So I do both. We'll send a Sherry's Berries, and then we send a welcome kit that's got a program overview. It's got testimonials and everything they need. So we want to welcome with a bang and appreciation. Number 2 is we want to make sure we get all the details in a seamless and professional manner, right? Which is the client signs up. We know we need Usernames, passwords, USP, services. We need their photos and their logo. We need all this stuff. And regardless of how systematized you've got this, most agencies wind up making it cumbersome for the client. So they give them a 15-page document to fill out or a 15-page web form to submit. And the client feels like, oh man, I hired these guys to do this for me. And now I've got to do all this work. And what I really want you to think about is how can you make that simpler for the client? How can you get on their side of the table and, and carry some of the weight so that they feel like, man, this was easy. I signed my agreement and they took the ball and they ran with it as opposed to leaving to-do list on my plate. Alright, number 3 is we wanna map out the first week, the first 30 days, the first 90 days. And ensure that there's a great experience. I'm gonna show you guys how we do this, but we really wanna make sure that we thought like, what are the touchpoints in that first week? What emails did they receive? What did they receive in the mail? What are they receiving in the second week in terms of live calls, in terms of communication? And what are the deliverables that we're actually generating that they're seeing and they're feeling in addition to what we're doing behind the scenes as we do our thing? Number 4 is we want to engineer quick wins. You know, and a quick win is a tangible, measurable result. And I really want to encourage you, regardless of what you do within your agency, regardless of what your package includes, you can engineer tangible, measurable things like kicking off a paid search campaign for a handful of terms to know that they're gonna get a couple of inbound leads and calls. You can kick off a database reactivation campaign to their past customer base. Making an offer and generate some leads and some sales. And so in addition to whatever it is you do, let's say you're like us and you're building a website and you're optimizing the content and you're trying to get ranked organically. Do some of these other things so that in the first month, ideally they're getting leads and they're getting sales while the rest of it builds. The, the micro wins that they get will buy you time. They will buy you grace. They will buy you a lot of retention in the, in the ultimate long term. And the number 5 is I want to encourage you to communicate every step of the way. So usually we've got things we do, right? We're gonna build the website, we're gonna write the content, we're gonna claim the directories, we're gonna load the photos, we're gonna add these citations, we're gonna set up this paid search campaign. And we're doing a lot of things, but the client doesn't really feel any of that. Maybe they had an onboard call with an account manager yourself. And you had a conversation about expectations, what we wanna make sure we're doing is as those things get done, make sure we're communicating, hey, we just did this. Hey, we just launched that. Hey, this was just implemented. And we can programmatically add that to our project management system. So as these tasks get completed, it can automatically trigger an email to the client, or you can just have it on a sequence, like a new client launch sequence where these emails happen based on time because you know that's approximately when these things are gonna happen. And that really will make a great impact in how you come out of the gates for the clients. And so when you think about your current welcome process and your current onboard process, what's missing? Where's the opportunity? And while you're thinking about that, I'll answer Nikki's question. Nikki says, what's in your welcome kit? So we've got a customized box. It's got a copy of our book, How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Internet Marketing Right. It's got a pamphlet that's the program overview. That sets the expectation. Here's what we're gonna do right away. Here's what's gonna happen in the first month. Here's what's gonna happen in the next 3 months. Here's what the ongoing process looks like with a bunch of testimonials and case studies. It's got a Plumber SEO t-shirt in it. It's got a, like, one of these tumblers with our logo on it. And it's, it's all branded to us. I think there's, there's a place for gifting them specifically, which would be more like Edible Arrangements and making something that they would really enjoy. And then there's more getting your brand in their world with the stuff they don't want to throw away and they feel proud to have in their office. Nikki, give me a yes if that helps or if that answered that question. Okay, great. Awesome. So here's how it's done. I'm just gonna show you some visuals of this stuff on the onboarding side of the equation that I want you to think about. Again, we want to map out that experience the first 7 days, 30 days, 90 days ongoing. What we like to do is usually they're gonna have an authorization form they need to fill in. And we wanna take them to a page after they filled that in or after our sales guy completed it that says welcome aboard, right? And there's a video of me and my business partner Dean as just basically, hey, welcome aboard, real excited to work with you. Next step is we need to get as much details as we can from you. So if you could fill out the form below. Now, we've tried to chunk that into multiple forms. So it's not everything in one. We've kind of broken it up. And we also recognize that Some clients have this stuff. They've got the username for GoDaddy. They know what their Yelp login was. They've got their USP. And others only have like 10% of it. And so we encourage them, do the best you can with that on your launch call. We're gonna, we're gonna get all this stuff together, right? And so our account managers are trained on that call. It's not, hey, wait until they give us every last piece of information, otherwise we can't start. No, it's let's get on a call and it's gonna take as long as it needs to take. We gotta call GoDaddy together and do a joint meeting and, you know, get the PIN code or whatever we need. We're gonna push through that way our team has what we need to execute and it takes a lot of the pressure off the client. In terms of mapping these touchpoints, we're gonna send a personal email. Hey, welcome. So glad you signed up. Excited about working with you. We're gonna get them the onboard form. We're gonna kick off a welcome sequence, which if you think about how you market yourself, Usually somebody opts into your world and they get into a welcome sequence or an onboarding sequence that markets to them until they schedule an appointment, right? And then markets to them until they say yes. I want to encourage you to have a sequence like that after the client signs up. That's, hey, welcome aboard. Hey, I'd like you to meet our team. Hey, here's some of the tools we're gonna be rolling out for you. Hey, you know, we should be launching the website soon. You know, here's some things you can expect. Like, pre-engineer those communications so that in addition to what your account manager is doing, in addition to the communication you actually have to have, they feel like you're, you're being super proactive. There's really two places a client could be. They could either be feeling like, you know what, they kinda went radio silent. I'm not 100% sure. I, I wish they would communicate more. Or they're, they're probably gonna feel like, wow, you guys are on top of the ball. Maybe you're overcommunicating. I feel like I'm getting a message from you every day. I'd much rather that than them feeling like I went radio silent. Give me a 1 in the comments if that makes sense. Kinda like having a welcome sequence so that we can be sure that we're super communicative. Awesome. Then we got a launch call and I want, I want you to think about what that conversation looks like. Most of us have a scripted sales process to the questions we ask, the way we set the expectations, the way we pivot to the offer. And we've got that, maybe it's not a script that our sales team reads, but there's a framework that we follow. And then when it comes to the launch, it's like, hey, welcome aboard. I've got this checklist. I'm gonna fill this information in. I want you to script out that launch call. I want you to script it out so that you or your account manager can follow the flow and specific questions you ask, specific ways you reignite the interest and keep them excited about what they just signed up for. You set the expectations and the problems that are gonna come up. And of course you get the usernames and passwords and you solve those problems. But a lot of us could do a much better job mapping out what that onboarding call sounds like and the questions we ask and the way we, we kind of set the proper expectations. So this is all typically within the first 3 to 5 days. And then, you know, around a weekend, they're getting their welcome basket. You know, and that's, you know, like Sherri's Berries welcome basket, welcome box. We try to launch their pay-per-click campaign by 2 weeks in. So while it takes us longer than that to build the website and to do everything else, there's no reason we can't set up a landing page We can't pick some keywords, start to drive some traffic, and start to generate some calls, start to generate some leads. That's a quick win strategy we can implement. We set up review tracking to show them where they've got reviews, where the reviews are missing. By the time we get to the 3rd week, we want to try and have their design comp ready, which is, hey, we've been working hard on the website. Here's what we came up with the homepage, the internal page, and it's not asking for permission. It's showing them what we did, explaining why we did it. And we kind of orchestrate all of these conversations so that in that first month, they're getting lots of communication, lots of touches. We schedule a separate call to review the tools. Like in our case, we're adding them to Yext. We're adding them to a reputation management platform. We're adding them to NearbyNow where we're checking in and creating heat map data. We're setting up call tracking so we can see exactly how many calls came in. We're syncing up with their, their dispatch system so that we can show them their actual return on investment. And so we like to schedule a call to review those tools so they understand why we set them up. They understand what the value is and they understand how they're gonna be interacting with that. And typically by the time we get to that 6th week, we're launching the website, which of course is an exciting point, which is of course a kind of a win moment, a crescendo in a relationship together. And so what I want you to think about is what are your touch points with your client in that first 4 to 6 weeks? Because The way that you come out of the gates will dictate whether they're with you a ways down the road. And so like this is what our personal message looks like. It's just a, hey, wanted to send you a quick note. Very excited about working with you. Very personal, you know, nothing, nothing, you know, super crazy. We've got an onboard sequence that we kick off inside HighLevel, which I know we got a lot of HighLevel users in the community. As if you become a member of 7 Figure Agents, we actually give you these snapshots and things that way you can roll them out. They get scheduled in with their account manager. We've tested a couple of ways. They sign up and then they get an email that says, hey, let's schedule your kickoff call, and they pick it on the calendar. And the other thing we've tested is right after the sale is completed, calling the client, say, hey, welcome, so excited to have you. Hey, by the way, let's go ahead and schedule your kickoff call now and connect them with their, their launch coordinator. We found that to be much better, right? Because sometimes they get busy and they don't schedule it. That kickoff call is mission critical. And if we can get it done, you know, in 24 to 48 hours, that's gonna speed up everything else we could do for the client. So to encourage you, if they fill out a form, yes, have some automation, but still have somebody hop on the call and try and schedule that physically. And if you close over the phone, which a lot of our deals are closed over the phone, have that salesperson actually pull up the calendar and schedule the launch call right then and there. So that's what that looks like. So then we've got the welcome sequence with the emails, text messages, communications out of the gates. Somebody was asking about the welcome box. These are the things we have in there. We got the book and the t-shirt and a little binder. Just something that's impressive that they're like, wow. You know, this is not usual for the agencies that I've hired elsewhere. We've got an amazing new client launch call process. You want to think through like what those questions are and script it out in a way that you can follow it and you can train against it. And then you want to be sending them stuff in the mail. Right? And so we send a lot of gifts and a lot of goodies in the mail for our clients. 2 services we use for that onboarding. We use gourmet gift baskets for quite some time. Now we kind of lean towards Shari's Berries just because it's super quick. It's a little bit healthier and it's really fun. So onboarding. Again, I could probably spend the day and a half just on onboarding, but I want to hit the key things, the 80/20 principle. These are the things you want to set up, right? These are the things you want to get going. Give me a yes in the comments if you got at least one thing that you feel like you could take away and implement from your launch process and that onboarding process that you have with clients. Carol says 50. Alright, good. I'm getting lots of yeses. Let's see, from Dominic, what happens if a customer cancels? A 1-year contract if they don't like the results they're getting? Um, do we enforce the contract? Okay, so the way we structure it is we include the website in their build, and if they cancel early, they have to pay a fee to get access to the website. Um, if somebody's going to, you know, say, hey, look, I didn't get results at month 10 or month 4, and they want to cancel out, in most cases, we're not going to go to court and make a big problem out of it. It's more just having that agreement sets the mental expectation that this is a long-term business relationship. So hopefully that made sense. So like I said, I wanna share some examples of, you know, these, these strategies being played out in the real world. And so one of the members we've had the opportunity to work with here in 7 Figure Agency is Austin Hauser, and he runs an agency called Base Coat Marketing. It works with painting contractors across the country. And He's been able to grow that from a startup. He was actually negative $2K in, in the hole, kind of with credit card debt. And over the last 12, 24 months, he's grown to $92,000 in monthly recurring revenue serving that niche. Of course, he's implemented the growth system, right? And he's gotten really good with the sales and marketing. But what he says is if he didn't dial in the onboarding the way we show, there's no way he would have been able to retain the clients the way that he did. He had 100% retention over the course of the first year. And a lot of that is these key strategies that I've just showed you here. So investing in this can make a big difference in how well you retain. Alright. Covered a lot there in terms of onboarding. Give me a 1 in the comments if you're good to shift gears now into your ongoing retention, your ongoing communication process. Just give me a 1 because I wanna, I wanna make sure I'm not just dumping on you guys here. Our catalyst is good to go. Nikki says one. What about the rest of you? There's hundreds of you on here. Alright, good. We're good. Awesome. Alright, effective communication. Like I said before, number one reason your client leaves is perceived indifference, right? I want to make sure as we think about the ongoing communication process, You know, this is where this comes into play most. And so that being the case, we absolutely have to make sure that they get results and then we make them feel pursued, loved, and cared for. Like legitimately, that's what we want to do. That's how we're gonna maximize our retention. And so we also need to think about reporting and what we report to the clients. And typically when I talk with agencies, hey, so what does your reporting look like today? Tell me in the comments, I know this will take a second, but let me know in the comments, what does your reporting look like today? Like, what is it that you actually report to your clients? And while you guys are typing in, I'll say what I typically hear. Well, we set up Google Analytics, we set up keyword tracking, we set up call reporting, and we, we, we like have punches of automated reports that go out from Agency Analytics. Or Ninja Cat, and we just, we flood them with information. Right? SEO stats and things like that. And that, and that's great. Right? And we used to do the same thing. We had Plumbing and HVAC SEO. That was, that was our go-to. Like, we're gonna rank and report every week and we're gonna show them everything. And what we had to realize was, what is it that the client really wants? Why do they hire you? What's their desired outcome? Let me know real quick. What is it that they want? April says they want leads and sales. Right? They want revenue, right? They want to invest in you and whatever it is that you do and get a tangible measurable return on the other side of the equation. That's why they pay you. You're there to make it rain. And so the other question you have to ask yourself is do they actually care about the technical mumbo jumbo? They don't, right? Most of them don't. There are people in their certain circumstances, but really what they care about is You know, how much did I spend? How many leads did I generate? What's my return on investment? And if you can answer that confidently and concisely, they're like, yes, these guys have it. These guys are doing a great job. They're right on top of the ball. And so what we moved to in terms of our reporting went from like all of these technical graphs and reports, ranking reports that opened up Pandora's box of questions and issues that went into hour-long conversations with the clients. And we, we paired it back to just, all right, Mr. Nixco Plumbing, one of our clients, how much do we spend? We spent $5,671. That's our management fee plus whatever spend we had on Google or Facebook. For that, we generated 503 tracked leads, which if we divide that out is $11.72 per lead. Pretty good, right? How do you feel about that? Awesome. Where do the leads come from? Well, some came from organic, some came from pay-per-click. Some came directly from the Google map, and that's kind of the distribution of where those leads and opportunities came from. And then, oops, let's help you bridge the gap here, right? So based on what you've told me in the past, Mr. Customer, your average conversion rate's 85%, which means you would have had 363 booked jobs. Your technician closing ratio in the field's like about 75%, which means you would have had 273 closed jobs. So that 273 jobs, you told me your average transaction value is about $450. Then you should have generated $122,000 in revenue. And based on our $5,000 spend, that's a 21-time return on investment. Right? And so, yes, we could get into ranking reports. Yes, we get into analytics. Yes, we can get into, you know, GBP data. But if we can show them that and they can kind of match that to their, to the records and see, yeah, you're right. We're doing great. They feel really good about that. And so what I want to encourage you is to try and figure out how do you get your tracking dialed in to the place they're not guessing, but they're really seeing the results and they're seeing the return on investment in addition to a great client experience, in addition to a great monthly review process. So in my mind, that's the kind of reporting that you want to have. You lead with those key performance data, and then you have the other information available, right? Yes, you need to have your ranking report, whether you're using, you know, BrightLocal or Local Falcon or whatever platform you use. Yeah, you have to have Google Analytics ready to rock and roll. Yeah, you want to have, you know, if you're spending money on Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you want to have that data ready. But only if they want to go to that level. What we find is most of our executive clients, so they're the owner of the business, they don't care. They just want the high-level information. When they get large enough that there's a marketing director involved, or there's some type of marketing person, that person's typically the one that's like, hey, but I need to see analytics. And hey, I need to see the ranking report. And that's okay. You just need to understand that there's different buyer styles, there's different people you're dealing with, and meet them where they're at. Awesome. So great results alone don't ensure retention, right? Even if you're crushing it with a 21-time return on investment, Oftentimes a client will, will, will still want to cancel if they don't feel like you care, if they don't feel like you're paying attention, right? It comes back to that area of perceived indifference. And so if you're not doing this, you or somebody on your sheet, your team should have a meeting, meeting ritual where you're meeting with the client once, once a month, ideally on Zoom, and you're saying, hey, look, I've got an agenda for this meeting. Here's what we're gonna cover. We're gonna look at last month. We're gonna look at the data. We'll talk a little bit about what kind of what the results have been. And then we'll shift gears to what we're focused on the next 90 days. Some things we need from you and get their buy-in, keep it moving, keep it productive, review the rankings, review the progress, discuss what you need from them, see the vision. Like the number 1 thing every one of your monthly review calls has to do is see the vision. After perceived indifference, the main reason they leave is because they feel like their vision for their company surpassed what you can bring to the table. So you have to always be like, hey, look, here's what we're working on next. Here's what we're seeing happening in the marketplace and see that you're a partner in their growth and continue to see that as you go. And that's what that monthly review process should look like. One caveat to this, and I, there's a bullet for this, but I wanna make sure it's, it's known. Not every client wants to meet with you every month. Right? At this point, let's say we've got 212 clients for plumbing and HVAC SEO. We track this meticulously, and most of these clients are paying between $3,000 and $5,000 per month. They've got a dedicated account manager that's there available to meet. And only about 70% of our clients take the meeting despite that we reach out, despite that we offer the call, despite the fact that we actually try and schedule it after the previous call. And for a while, we let that kind of be an excuse not to meet with the clients, right? We let that be a reason. It's like, hey, you know what? They didn't meet, so it's cool, right? We'll just keep doing our thing. And what inevitably would happen 3 months, 4 months down the road, we get an email. Hey, you know what? You know, we've moved in a different direction. Haven't heard from you guys for a while. Ah, we're like, but we sent you all these emails. We sent you all those automatic reports. We asked for the meeting. And so what we did was we shifted to our account managers have to touch the clients at least twice physically, call, email, SMS. And if the client doesn't meet by the end of the month, every client gets a monthly recap video. So they didn't meet, they're gonna pull up the same report, the same information that they would've. They're gonna make it a little shorter and they record a Loom video. Just like, hey, Mr. Client, sorry you were busy this month and we couldn't connect. Not a problem. Just wanted to show you, hey, here's what we saw with the reporting. Here's what we're working on. Here's what we got from the last one. Here's where we're headed next. And that monthly check-in shows that we cared, shows that we're actually paying attention despite the fact that they weren't engaging with us. And it's really helped us from a retention perspective. So let me know if you can do that. Type video in the comments. If you can add a little catch-all, don't make the video be the only thing because the live interaction is still better than, than no interaction. But the video will help for those people that are just too busy and don't have an interest. In a meeting? Awesome. Cool. Very good. Appreciate you guys engaging with me here. Okay. So we actually have a training, you know, in, in 7 Figure Agency called the, the Account Manager Advantage. And it's exactly how we kind of work our way through these monthly calls, how we set up the call, how we set the agenda, how we give them the homework, and then how we do those monthly reviews. And so a really good example of this strategy in play is, is Jim and Brian from Roofer Marketers. They started with 7 Figure Agency back in 2013. They had just decided they were gonna focus on the roofing niche. And they saw kind of what I was up to with plumbing and HVAC SEO, decided they would hop in, participate, plug in, and, you know, following the systems, ideas, strategies, and kind of implementing every step of the way. They, they're now over $400,000 in monthly recurring revenue, recently sold to the, the big CRM in their space. And if you talk with Brian and Jim, really one of the key things that helped them grow was the retention, right? They, they latched on the idea of the launch process. They latched on to the idea of the monthly review call and really systematized their reporting down to the basic fundamentals. And they've had great retention in one of the most competitive niches. And it's, it's a lot of it is these strategies that you're learning here. Today. So when it comes to, when it comes to your communication process, what do you need to implement? I'd love to hear like one thing in the chat here. What's like one thing that you can implement? Maybe it's reduce the amount of things you report. Maybe it's shoot a video for those clients that don't meet. Maybe it's setting up a tracking mechanism where you see every client for every single month and which ones have had a meeting and which ones haven't. Right? That was a big monthly touches process that we put in place that really helped us get visibility on which clients were flying under the radar. Come on, guys, comment with me if you're paying attention and getting value. Give me some feedback here in the chats. Okay, good. Improve the onboarding. Uh, Josh, we have a, we have a question that showed up. Okay, perfect. In the chat. How do you keep track of who should be called each month? How do we technically do that? Yeah, so we've got a thing that we call a, our monthly touches report. And so what that is, it's a spreadsheet. There's tabs along the bottom for each one of the clients. And then we've got a list of all the clients. Who the account manager is. And then touch 1 checkbox, touch 2, Checkbox, meeting, yes or no. And then recap video, yes or no. You can look at this on HighLevel, you can look at it in whatever CRM that you want. It's very hard to see from a glance which clients have met and which ones haven't. And so having it on a Google Sheet like this and seeing a fresh sheet every month, you can see exactly who's met and who hasn't. And you can use some logic to show like what percentage of our clients did we meet with? What was our churn rate for the month? What was our churn rate by account manager? And so this is something we engineered and then we obviously we share with our account, our 7 Figure Agency members. We'd happy to share that with you guys if you decide to, to participate. But hopefully that gives you enough, like, you could build something like that. It's not super complicated. And, and it gives you a much better visibility who's meeting and who isn't. Give me one in the comments if that was helpful to kind of think through that much monthly touches. Process. Excellent. Alright, next up is client success management. And really, this is like after we onboard the clients, after we have these monthly touches in this monthly communication, eventually, if you really want to scale your agency, you can't be the person managing the clients. You have to have a client success management process, which is like, how do we hire account managers? How do we train those account managers? What KPIs do we look at in order to make sure that the standard that you would expect is actually better than if you were managing the clients yourself? And so this is what I call the account manager advantage. What I found is that most agency owners tend to cap out around 10 to 15 clients. At 10 to 15 clients, if you're still involved in the operations, if you're still dealing with the client base, you will not have the bandwidth to continue to think about the future, to continue to market and sell and grow the business. And so you really have to decide at that level, do I want to grow this and have a business that creates freedom, or do I just want to keep things the way they are? Do I want to just keep the job that I have? And so what we found is a typical full-time account manager, somebody fully dedicated to this, managing the clients, reviewing the reports, retaining the relationships, can handle between 25 to 30 accounts. And you're gonna wanna plan for a new account manager every 20 to 25 clients. Assuming you've got a consistent clip where you're adding clients on a consistent basis, for every 20 to 25 clients, you wanna start hiring that next account manager and training them up. This is one of the most important roles you hire for in your agency. First is operations, right? If you really want a business and not a job, you should have somebody doing the operations for you, an operations director. The second is account management because it takes a lot of time and energy to check in with the client to be available to answer those calls. And so we do have a deeper dive training on this as part of the 7 Figure Agents coaching and mentorship, which really walks you through how to structure the compensation, how to recruit, hire, and unretain. And we actually have an account management excellence training portal, which is the training I put new account managers through at Plumbing and HVAC SEO. So how they learn about SEO and pay-per-click and what their job is and what the responsibilities are, how to do a launch call, how to do a monthly review call, what to do in various situations. And we give that to our 7 Figure Agency members. It's the Account Management Excellence training. So you cannot improve what you don't measure. And so I just want a yes or no in here. Yes, if you're tracking retention and you know exactly what it is. Honestly though, no, if you're not tracking it today. It's like, you know what, I know I should be tracking it. I don't know exactly what my retention is. I have some idea what it is. Alright, so we got some yeses. We got some nos. Okay. The formula for tracking retention is pretty simple. It's basically the number of customers at the end of a period, the number of customers acquired during that period, and the number of customers at the start of the next period. So there's a little formula for it. An easier way to, is to kind of track your churn. Which is how many clients lost divided by how many clients we had at the beginning of the period. That's your churn rate. And if you subtract that from 100, that's your retention rate. But to make this super easy for you guys, I've got a sales retention tracking sheet that I'm gonna offer as my gift to all of you if you go to 7figureagency.com/tracking. It's literally just a Google Sheet that for every month of the year, you'd say how many clients you're trying to get, You put in how many clients you expect to churn, and then you put, here's how many clients we landed, here's how many clients we lost. You actually put the names of the companies and the amounts. And this will show you not only how you're trending against growth, but it'll actually show you your, your churn rate for the, for the month. This is something I use every day at Plumbing HVAC SEO. It's instrumental to our growth. And just about all of the members use this very, very consistently. So just give me a tracking in the comments if you think that's gonna be helpful and that's something you're actually gonna use. In your agency. All right. Fantastic. Valuable asset for those of you that are decided to attend and participate in today's session live. So we talked about the retention, you know, focus. We're looking for 97% plus. That's really ideally where you want to be hanging out in your agency. And you can get it a little bit better. I've seen at scale 98%. 98.5, but there's, there's a diminishing return. There's only so much you could do above 97% that makes a big difference. From a client success management perspective, one of the best things you can do is to put a, a success system board in place. And so really what that is, it's just thinking about all of your clients in terms of green, yellow, and red. And so if you've got 10 clients or you've got 100 clients or you've got 500 clients, they're all gonna be in one of these classifications. Green, they're happy customer, they're getting good results. I have no reason to think they're upset about anything. They're a promoter of our service, right? Those are our green clients. Then you've got yellow clients where, you know, maybe results aren't great or maybe they're not checking in or, or kind of getting back to us. They're yellow. You know, it's like you're not 100% sure, they may be one foot out the door. And then you've got clients that are red, right? That you know something's not right. Either they're getting terrible results, they've just recently called to complain, they, maybe they ask for their usernames and passwords. They're red. And what I found is, you know, it's hard to look at a spreadsheet and know what's the sentiment of our client base, especially when I've got 3, 4, 5 account managers that are dealing with the clients. And so moving to a traffic light system like this, you can, you can do— I'm gonna mute you down. Alright. Sorry about that, guys. So you can put it on a system like this, like Trello. You can actually do this as a pipeline inside of HighLevel. But it— what it does is it gives you a singular view to see Here's our new clients. We can drag them in and they're green while they're happy. And then, oh, you know what? These are the ones that are yellow. And then you bake into your client account management process where every week this board gets reviewed, it gets updated, and then your, your account management process, your account management approach is, alright, we got some red clients. What's going on? What can we do? How can we get those clients back on board? Do we need the owner to jump on a call? Do we need to send them something in the mail? Do we need to throw a Hail Mary pass? Something we're doing with the paid search campaign. And you can prioritize the clients that are most at need. And as we started doing this and we started zeroing in on our yellows, especially on our reds, we were able to move a lot of those that might have been 1 or 2 months away from cancellation back to the green box, back to long-term client retention. So this is a simple concept that has a really big ramification in terms of your ability to retain your client base. So when it comes to client success management, what do you need? Yeah, you can— anything that's got a Kanban process can do this. So ClickUp can do it. You know, Trello. If you have all your clients in, in, on a pipeline inside of HighLevel, you can do it there as well. Tiffany asked, is this being updated weekly? Yes. Ideally, so operationally, you got a leadership team meeting that's happening every single week and you've got team, like, functional team meetings that happen every week. So in the account management team meeting or the client success team meeting, they would go through, they would re-rate the customers. Ideally, I want them to spend 10 or 15 minutes moving people on the board and the rest of the time figuring out what they're gonna do to move the yellows back to green and, and really making proactive decisions to move things forward. Awesome. So we talked through the, the client retention roadmap, world-class onboarding, effective communication, client success management. If you had to rate what I've covered so far on a scale from 1 to 10, you know, 1 being like, well, this is a waste of my time. I, I thought this was gonna be good. 10 being this has been great. You really enjoyed it. You feel like you got great value. Alright, I got some 10s. I got a 9. I got a 15. Awesome. I appreciate the feedback, really appreciate you guys engaging and sharing with me. There's a great checklist I'll send you guys after with the replay that kind of checks through the things you want to do— onboarding, customer communication, client success management. I will say, you know, there's so much I can give for free, right? I feel like I gave a lot here for free. We've got a lot of resources that we offer to people that are part of the 7 Figure Agency. Like literally our entire onboarding process or onboarding automation in HighLevel. The new client kickoff call, the actual swipe and deploy for all of the stuff you'd put in a welcome box, the, the monthly communication, how we've set up our reporting and everything in between. We also have an account management snapshot specifically for HighLevel. What we found was trying to manage client relationships and sales in one snapshot started to get a little bit hairy. And so we created a separate snapshot specifically for our clients. And so our account management team's in there. And we're able to really have the entire client lifecycle from their onboarding to their monthly communication reminders to their client success tracking board on HighLevel and a pipeline to quarterly check-ins and surveys to get feedback and really move them based on their responses. Are they unhappy? That moves them back to red on our Kanban board all the way through to client cancellation and offboarding. And this is an extremely powerful asset that we'd love to put into your hands. And so another great example of this whole process kind of in, in, you know, in its totality is Chris Rodriguez. She runs an amazing agency working with dojos, martial arts schools. Started with us at about $30 grand. She had a nice Facebook ad-centric agency. But just wasn't getting the type of accelerated growth she wanted and was struggling with retention. And so She plugged in, she implemented this entire growth system and came in with a lot of her own innovations as well. Today she's doing over $270,000 in monthly recurring in that niche. And she'll say it's a lot of it has to do with, yes, the growth stuff, but also what she's doing to retain the clients and keep them engaged and keep them on board. So would love to know from you guys in the comments, what will you commit to with your retention? Let me know in the comments, what will you commit to with retention? Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for being on here. Thank you for hanging out with me. I truly, you know, I have a passion for sharing this information. I wanna see you grow your agency. I wanna see you serve your clients at a higher level. I wanna see you retain in a way that you feel proud. And so hopefully you took some ideas and insights that will move you forward and help you grow and help you scale. So thank you guys so much for sticking around and for being part of today's session.