The Only Agency Sales Training You’ll Ever Need ($40M Closed)

Over the past decade, we've closed over $40 million in agency services using a sales process that's now been proven across hundreds of other agencies that we've helped. And today I'm gonna break down exactly how the sales process works and how you can implement it in your own agency as well. I truly think this will be the only video you need to watch about agency sales. So let's get into it. One of the biggest shifts you need to make as it comes to your overall sales process is it's not about selling SEO, pay-per-click, web design. It's about selling transformational results. Clients buy outcomes, not services. That's the only way you can sell high-ticket solutions and demand the type of premiums that you deserve. There was a long time where my first agency, I just sold websites and hosting and I was like, I'm going to build a website and it's going to be pretty and it's going to make you look nice and nobody wanted it, right? And they wouldn't pay more than $1,000. We transitioned to helping them understand digital marketing and look, we're going to put a digital marketing strategy in place to help you grow your sales, to grow your revenue, to accomplish these outcomes. I was able to start to sell $2,500 to $5,000 per month programs. So just a fundamental mental shift. You're not selling the deliverable, you're selling the outcome. You don't want to think of yourself as a salesman, you want to think of yourself as an advisor. You're not a vendor, but a trusted advisor. Position yourself as an expert from the beginning. Your job is to guide them in the right direction, not convince them. If you're coming as a salesperson that just wants to close the deal, you're in a very different position. It's much harder to convert opportunities. Now, before I go into our $40 million sales process, I wanted to mention real quick, if you're an agency owner looking to get to 7 figures, we're currently offering free agency acceleration sessions where you can hop on on a call with us. We'll analyze your current situation and create a custom game plan that you can use to scale to the next level. Just click the link in the description and book your free session now. Now let's get into how the sales process works. There's a couple of steps that you want to take basically every single prospect through. Number one is we've got to get prospects to raise their hand, right? We have to, you know, not just be cold chasing people. We get people that express interest in what we can do. And we do that by creating content that positions you as the authority, right? That's webinars, it's podcasts, it's PDFs, it's guides, it's case studies. When you put content in, out that your prospective clients would find interesting, then they're going to express interest, right? They'll either opt in or they'll reply back to your message or they'll engage with you in some way. And so when you start to focus on adding value in advance and creating authority-based positioning, you can build a funnel that gets clients to come to you pre-position to buy and pre-qualifies them through the process. Step 2 is qualification and discovery. Different agencies do this in different ways. Some agencies do a full discovery call where they'll meet with the prospect real quick, have a quick conversation, talk about their goals, talk about what they're trying to accomplish, and just see if they're a good fit, right? Are they doing enough revenue? Do they already invest in marketing? They have a problem we can solve. And our funnel, we're asking those questions before they even see our calendar so we can weed out like a one-man operator doing less than half a million dollars per year, not advertising at all. You know, at this moment, that's not going to be a good fit for us. And so we just tell them, you know, hey, sorry, thanks for your interest. Not a good fit. But if they answer those questions, we know they're a plumbing HVAC company. We know they're doing over $1 million per year. We know that they're a good fit. Then they go straight to our calendar. That triggers our team that we've got a qualified opportunity and we're going to do some research. We're going to show up to that meeting. Prepared. And so that's where step 3 comes into it. That's the actual strategy session. One of the most important components of the strategy session is the pre-meeting work, because we know they're a good fit, because we know that it's going to be a legitimate person on the other side that actually has a problem we're looking at, they're looking to solve. We want to do our due diligence on the front end. So we research the company, we run ranking reports, we analyze their website, we develop the raw materials so that when we get to the place in the meeting where they've asked, all right, so how can you help? We can show them, hey, look, we did this research in advance. These are the issues we found. These are the things that are good. But these are the problems that are preventing you from getting the goals that you're trying to accomplish. So the meeting structure, once we're on the call with the prospect, we've got to spend some time at the beginning building rapport, talking about them. They don't care about how much you know until they know how much you care. And so we spend a little time, though, you know, at the beginning, just connect with them as a human and then set the agenda and expectations. That's where you take ownership of the meeting and say, hey, we've got a very specific structure we follow for these calls. I'm going to spend a little time getting to know you. I'm going to like really spend some time showing you what we found in our analysis and where we think there's room for improvement. And if it makes sense, we'll show you how we can help. Does that work for you? And now you've taken ownership of the meeting. They know there's a process they're going to be taken through, right? So we want to get buy-in that, yes, this is what I'm here for. Yes, I'd like to go through this. The first thing we want to do then is, is establish the gap, right? If there's not a gap or a bleeding neck problem between where they are today and where they're looking to go, and they can't perceive that gap, there's no sale, right? No problem, no sale. So we've got to spend some time establishing the gap. We do that by spending a little bit of time understanding their current situation. So, all right, great, Mr. Prospect, again, thanks so much for taking the time to get together. Tell me a little bit about your company, like what's the revenue, what's the goal for the company? How many trucks do you have? What kind of marketing things have you tried in the past? Where are you trying to go? Like, what's the goal? Where are you trying to get to within the organization? You need to spend the time on the front end asking these questions, really drilling down to create urgency as they answer. Okay, so that you're right now you're at a million, the goal is to get to 2.5 million. You know, why is that important? How is your life different, better once that's achieved? Let them talk about that. Let them talk about why that's the situation. Tell me a little bit about, you know, the companies you've tried in the past. Why are you looking to make a change? How important is it for you to make a change? Like, is this just like, you know, maybe you'll do it, or like, is this a high priority? And let them like say, no, this is a 10 out of 10. Like, we've got this goal, we have to accomplish it. This is why my life's going to be different and better once it's done. This is why staying where we're at right now isn't an option. You're getting them to say what's wrong and why they have to change and why this is a now thing. It makes a lot of sense to say, hey, great, thanks so much. Now I have a great understanding of where you're at, what you've tried, what you're looking to accomplish. Our team did a bunch of due diligence coming to this meeting. We pulled up your website, we pulled up your online rankings. Is it okay with you if I show you kind of some of the gaps that identified. And usually you're going to say, absolutely, let's get into it. All right, we pull up our screens. We're going to start by walking them through our model. Look, there's 3 things we have to do, right? We have to drive leads, we have to maximize conversion, and we have to optimize return on investment. There's a couple of things we do to drive leads, right? We've got to optimize for organic, we got to drive paid search, and then we got to market to our existing database. What are you doing on that front? And usually they're like, well, the website's okay, the SEO, you know, it's not so great and we're not really doing much with database. We can talk about, oh man, there's lots of opportunities here. Awesome. The other things we have to do is in order to maximize conversion, we've got to really optimize your online reputation. We have to make sure your website is built to convert and we have to leverage automation. We can use automation to follow up with leads quicker. How quickly are you guys following up with your leads today? What happens if Linda is not available? As you're going through this, you're starting to identify gaps. I'm not doing database marketing. Oh, my website probably doesn't come up for all that stuff. Yeah, my website is okay, but I'm not using automation to follow up with my leads. You're creating gaps in what they're trying. And if they're here, they're there because of a reason. What they've done in their business marketing-wise has gotten them to here. To get them to the next level, something is missing. If you can show that those elements that are missing, you can bring to the table, all of a sudden you become the answer to accomplishing the goal. And so we say, okay, great. Well, hey, look, let's pull up your website right now. And usually we don't like— we don't go too technical into the weeds, but we want to point to some very specific things. So here's what's going on with your website today. You know, there's no personality here. So that's, that's not really resonating. We're not using two-way chat. So people have the opportunity to two-way chat or book directly online. Talk about the key missing elements. Since organic is a big part of what we talk about, we'll pull up a ranking report that says, hey, You know, we work with 190 other plumbing and HVAC companies. We've done lots of work on this front, so we know what the keywords are. We put together a list of the most commonly searched keywords, ran a ranking report to see how you're coming up in your local market for those keywords. Would you like to look at it? Absolutely. Right. So we pull up that report. We're looking at— we're showing like, look, here's some of the keywords you come up well for, but here's all of the keywords where we're not coming up in the— not even in the first page or in the first 15 results. There's less search volume for this stuff. And if we were coming up, do you agree you'd get more leads and you get more sales opportunities? Absolutely. Absolutely right. So why is the website not ranking? And then we can pull up their website and look at the content strategy. Hey, we don't have pages for those things. There's not enough authority in terms of links or citation, or the site speed is low. We do our due diligence in advance so that we can create the case. This is the keywords you need to rank for. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. This is why we're not coming up. And then we can talk a little bit about paid strategy. We can talk about lead follow-up. If you're really smart, you're going to call that number and see if you get a live answer and you're going to record it. You're going to submit a web form in advance and you're going to see how long did it take before somebody replied back, before somebody called. And you can bring that up and say, hey, look, you know, You know, when it comes to the conversion side of things, the most important thing is speed to lead, diligence in following up the opportunities that are generated. You know, obviously we're not generating as many leads as we could because we're not coming up organically or because these deficiencies in the paid strategy. But we've also got a leaky bucket in conversion. We can put some very specific strategies in place to make sure that you're coming up organically, to make sure that every one of those leads gets followed up within 5 minutes or less. And do you see how that's going to help generate more leads that actually convert into book jobs? And they're shaking their head yes. And then we also try and wrap up with, you know, hey, look, how do you track how many leads you got, how much revenue is generated, what the return on investment is. And they're like, I get this report and tells me how many clicks we got. They're flying blind. It's like, so it feels to me, you know, like you guys are flying blind on this at some level. And they're like, yeah, yeah, we are. Okay, let me show you our reporting. Right? We pull up our reporting and then it shows here's how much the client spent. Here's how many leads they generated. Here was your average cost per lead. Here's the projected return on investment. Would it be helpful if you had this kind of reporting and you could know down to the dollar where your money went and what the actual outcome was? Absolutely. Right. Do you see how if we were able to help you get ranked better, we're going to make the website convert better, we're able to put some marketing automation in place, place to increase the speed to lead so we can convert more of those leads and we can really track everything where you can confidently know and put a dial on here's how much spend is, here's my results so that you could scale that up as you look to grow from $1 million to $3 million over the next couple of years. They're saying, absolutely. Would you like me to walk you through our program? And they'll say, absolutely, sure, let's do it. And then walk them through. I'm not going to show our specific program, but we walk them through the program and, you know, here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to get it done. Here's some examples of like other clients and how we did it. How does this all sound to you? Does this all look good? They're saying, yes, Sounds amazing. Awesome. Based on everything we've covered, last thing we need to do is ask for the business. And you're not going to close one deal if you don't ask for the business. And so what you like to say at the end of the meeting is, are you comfortable with everything we've covered so far? Yes. Were there any questions you still want to cover? You want to get those objections out? Hey, you know, I was wondering about this, or I was concerned about that, whatever. Okay. Where do you think we should go from here? And let them say, and kind of let them pull them into this opportunity. Well, how much does it cost? Like, where do we go from here? At that point, you recap the value, you recap where they're looking to go and kind of where they're at, where they're looking to go, and you recap cap all the things you're gonna do— website, SEO, paid search, marketing automation— all for whatever your fee is. In our case, we usually say there's a $5,000 setup fee, and then it's $3,500 per month plus the ad spend. However, if we can make a decision right now, we can waive the $5,000 setup fee. Does that sound good? We use that usually within a 2-week span of time, but that creates some urgency on that sales call. Usually they're going to say, it sounds great, fantastic. Next step, let's go ahead and schedule your kickoff call. I've got availability on Thursday at 2 The kickoff call is where we're going to gather usernames, passwords, hit the ground running. You'll meet your account manager, you'll meet the team Thursday at 2:00. Does that work? This is what they used to call an assumptive close. This is very assumptively saying, let's schedule your kickoff call. And if they say yes to that, they've said yes. The deal is basically done. All right. So we picked the date and time. Awesome. Hey, what kind of credit card do you want to use for this? And so we can take care of the payment, right? And we get the credit card details. If you ask for the credit card details first, that creates a lot of pressure. It creates like, wait, I haven't really decided yet. Now I'm giving their credit card and a lot of friction. Lead with the kickoff call, then get the credit card details. And then of course say, all right, great. I just need to have you also, like before the kickoff call, we're going to send you an agreement. Just need you to digital sign that with agreeing to the terms and conditions. Especially in our case, we're doing a 12-month agreement. Goes month to month after that. Like they need to sign off on that document. That is a great domino effect on how to create the value, ask for the business, and have closed opportunities in play. Now, of course, some people say, hey, you know, I need some time to think about it. I'd like to review everything. Not a problem. You know, what are the specific things you need to review? Worst case scenario, always schedule the follow-up call right on that call. So if Hey, look, I know you're going to get busy. I'm going to get busy. Can we go ahead and schedule the follow-up call? Just next steps. Can we schedule that for Tuesday at 3 o'clock? Perfect. Never end a sales opportunity without having that next call on the schedule. And then I would encourage you for those meetings that don't close right on the initial call to set up what we call a hot lead follow-up campaign. This would just be a sequence of communication after the initial call, text message, email over a 2-week window of time. That is basically just reverse engineering back to the deal is off after 2 weeks for you and them. This creates urgency. It gives you a reason to say, hey, you know what? You know, we agreed we'd make a decision by this date. I guess you've decided not to move forward. And if they were thinking about it, now they're moving forward because the takeaway is extremely powerful. But if they weren't interested and they don't respond to that, or they say, hey, yeah, thanks, you know, we went in a different direction, at least that frees up space in your pipeline or your sales team's pipeline. Every opportunity has a 2-week hard disconnect, and you can always sell them again in the future. But during that 2 weeks, it keeps your pipeline fresh. That's the sales process. Now, the other side of the equation is scaling the team. How do I get myself out of the sales process? And today we are growing at the space we're growing, and I haven't done a sales call for probably at least 7 years, right? Because I have a great sales team in place to take those sales calls and have those conversations. So when and how do you add salespeople to your, to your agency? You're going to want to wait until you have about 10 to 15 appointments per month before hiring your first closer. So you've already got deal flow from your inbound marketing and the other marketing initiatives that you put in place. You've got that 15 to 20 coming in like clockwork. That's when you want to put a closer in place. And you might also want to then add an appointment setter that's also following up on opportunities. Typically you're going to pay 20 to 30% of the first month revenue and then maybe a small salary. Don't get involved in big residuals, especially if you've got inbound marketing and you're going to be handing it off to an account management team. Let them get paid on the front end, and that's where they make their money every month by closing new opportunities. And then of course your agency and your team has to fulfill everything on the back end. You need to create systems for this, you know, knowing how to compensate the salesperson, knowing kind of, you know, what the structure is. You can't just say, hey, all right, good luck buddy, go, go sell, right? We need to put process in place. And so ideally you'd have a sales script that you follow, not word for word, because I don't follow a script and I don't use a sales deck, but I've got a framework that like, here's how I open the call, here's how I transition to showing the deficiency in the current strategy, here's how we demonstrate like where their issues are and how we can help. You want to have that framework and you want to record yourself doing 2 or 3 or 4 converted sales opportunities. You can hand that off to the salesperson. Your sales training process is, hey, you know, I think you're the right person. We agree on the financials and kind of what the upside potential is for you if you hit your sales targets. First things first, I want you to study this sales script. I want you to watch recordings of me and we're going to do a simulation, right? Simulation, meaning they're going to pretend like they're selling you, right? And you can hear, are they asking the right questions? Do they understand the pattern? Do they have the right flow? And during that initial couple of weeks, have them sit on sales calls with you. So you're still selling. They're sitting on the sales call. They're not speaking. They're not doing anything. They're just experiencing the process in real time. And then afterwards you ask questions, you get feedback until eventually they've sold to you. You feel confident and a couple of sales calls, you let them lead and, but you're on there, right? So they're talking to the prospect, they're asking the questions, they're taking them through the sales process and you're just listening in, right? And if you need to jump in, you can jump in and you can convert the opportunity. But eventually they get to the place where they, they had a great conversation. They ask all the right questions. They close the business, they've got their confidence up. And now you've got a salesperson that can take your sales calls and continue to have your revenue grow without you personally having to be on calls, make sure that you put some clear KPIs in place, which is how many appointments are they getting per month, what's their conversion ratio, and what's their outbound activity if they're off track. Ideally, our marketing is creating enough opportunity to keep them busy. Ideally, they're hitting their, their whatever, their 25 to 35% opportunity to sales ratio. But you also want to have, if they're below target, how many calls, how many, you know, outbound should they be doing in their downtime to make sure that they're on track. And so as you think about removing yourself yourself from the sales process. You want to test your new person. You want to do weekly sales pipeline meetings and you want to create a dashboard that will track those key metrics: leads, appointments, show-up rates, close ratios, and revenue. That was our process. Like I was selling in that way for, you know, the first couple of years in the business. Removed myself from the sales process, got a great salesperson in place, starting to build the team around it. That ritual, that rhythm is what's grown our agency to $7 million per year. And there you have it. The exact strategy we use to sell over $40 million in agency services. Apart from the sales process, there's a lot more that went into this. After helping over 153 agencies scale to 7 figures and beyond, I confidently say that the only way to build a million-dollar agency is by nailing everything from the offer to client acquisition to sales, operations, team building, and client retention. And that's exactly what we help agencies work with inside our 7 Figure Agency Program. So if you're serious about hitting a million dollars with your agency. Click the first link in the description and book a free Agency Acceleration call with us. During that call, we'll analyze your agency and craft a plan to 7 figures that you can take and implement. It's completely free. So click that link and book your call. We'll talk to you soon.