Unpacking Our Client Retention Blueprint | Scaling Together

The number one reason that a client's gonna cancel or churn is perceived indifference. That's gonna be the number one reason they're gonna leave.

When a mistake happens, sometimes people trust you more, like they're more in because of the way that you responded to the mistake.

Mm-hmm. If you make a mistake in your agency, you need to own it and not hide behind it or try and pretend like it didn't happen. Reach out, acknowledge the problem, and own it.

If you could give your younger self one tip on retention, what would that be?

I would say— Welcome to another episode of the Scaling Together podcast, where we're kind of sharing how we've grown and scaled our agency as a couple. And on today's episode, we want to talk a lot about retention and really the key strategies you want to put in place to create a world-class experience and retain your clients long-term. And this is something we've worked on together as a couple, and, um, I've brought ideas and she's brought amazing insights. And We'd like to share that and kind of what's working best for us from a client retention perspective today.

So the first question is, how do you create a wow client experience beyond just the results that you provide for clients?

Yeah, I'd love for you to speak to this first because, like, you're the one that— like, I'm very, you know, if you think about our dynamic as a couple running the business, I'm let's grow the company, let's grow the revenue, let's go land new clients. And, you know, I understand retention's important, but you're always the one that's like really thinking about the personal side of the equation, the wow experience. So would love to hear your perspective on that.

I'm very passionate about the emotional side of things, caring for our clients and creating an amazing experience. So for us, right out of the gates, when we're creating an onboarding experience, for example, like our— for the first window into, okay, you just signed up a client and they're trusting you for the first time. What are you going to do in that one, that first 48-hour window. And, um, we were planning on creating a box, but it wasn't just going to be like a, hey, thanks for joining us, uh, look forward to seeing you soon and working on your account. It's sending an entire box that had things pertaining to, uh, stuff that means something. So for example, um, I mean, if we're talking about plumbing and HVAC SEO, it's a t-shirt and it's a mug, uh, and we— it's important to go with high-quality items. You don't want to just go with the cheapest option, guys. The— yes, that's an option out there, but you shouldn't go for it. You should always go with high-quality things. And if it's too expensive for your budget, then limit how many number of items you have, but never go with cheap quality, ever. And so, um, if it's a water canister, it's Yeti. It's going to be the brand that people recognize. If it's a sporting thing, it's Nike. If it's, um, a t-shirt, it's New Era. You know, we go with the high-quality items. So that's what we like to contribute and, and say, we appreciate your business and we're— we care about you. And, um, we put notepads in there and things like that. So it's, it's more of an experience, and we bring that into all of our client, you know, interactions, um, throughout the business.

I think when it comes to a wow experience, right, the way you come out of the gates is mission critical, right? I mean, literally, the first minutes after they've signed up, the first 24 hours, the first 48 hours. And then it's really the touches that they wouldn't expect, right? As digital marketing agencies, they're paying you to generate revenue growth, right? They're paying you to grow the business. And those things are the expected. It's the unexpected things like the gifts, the stuff in the mail, you know, that go a really, really long ways.

Yeah, one of the things that we do is our team is on social media and they friend every client because that's how we feel about it. We feel like we know you personally. If you're in our world, we wanna know like, are you getting married? We wanna know when you're having kids. We wanna know, If there's a hospital situation, we want, we care about you as a human being when you enter our orbit. And so one of the things that we like to do is gift them and find these opportunities. So if somebody's getting married, then we send them something and we congratulate them. And if somebody is having a new child, we want to be part of that experience, 'cause that's what, We see it from a window, we're like, oh, that's so awesome, look at so-and-so is having a baby. Oh my gosh, that's so cute. Oh, that's going to change your dynamic. That's going to be so fun and exciting for them. And so it's our way of like showing them like how we feel about it behind closed doors, um, in a way that's, that's fun and surprising. And they are not expecting anything from us, but it's cool when it does show up and, and they let us know that it got there and, and and how it affected their lives and stuff. So it's very fun.

Yeah, I think the number one reason that a client's going to cancel or churn is perceived indifference. Like, you could be checking all the boxes. You could be getting great results. But if they feel like you don't care about them, you're not paying attention to them, that's going to be the number one reason they're going to leave because there are so many other agencies that they could choose. Oh, yeah. 100%. And so doing strategic gifting, Showing that you care, it just goes such a long ways to solve for that perceived indifference portion of the equation.

Yes. If someone doesn't hear from the person that they're connecting with for service, they're like, oh, I haven't heard from these people. And they're getting banged on the door from every angle via mail, in-person thing, events and things like that, and over the phone, Zoom calls scheduled. So there's so many ways that other competitors are trying to attract these clients. And if they don't hear from you, it's like crickets, then it's not going to be much time that that person no longer is a client of yours. And so the special touches, the personality, pouring yourself and them knowing like, oh, this person's in my corner. They actually do care about me.

Yeah.

It's not just about the business, it's about you as an individual. That's what people want. And even in this new AI technology world that we're living in, uh, that's gonna become even more important as we rely more and more on technology. That one-on-one personal touch is gonna stand out even more as time passes.

Yeah. 100%. And I think what we're not saying is results don't matter, because yes, your results is going to be the number one dictator of, of retention in your agency, right? You have to make sure you knock it out of the park, that what you do makes it rain for your clients. But in addition to that, it's all of the, the non-tangibles that go super long. And we try and bring that to the 7-figure agency business as well as the plumbing and HVAC SEO business.

Let's talk about now how we track satisfaction, because that is a big piece of the puzzle, to be aware of numbers, to be aware of, you know, who's engaging, who's not engaging, and being proactive towards it versus waiting around for someone to cancel and be like, oh, what? Why did the person cancel? I don't understand. I don't know what happened. Um, so the more you are invested and care and have eyes and put people's roles into paying attention to how people are engaging with your service and seeing the results that they're getting and things like that, they're more apt to stay with you. And you can see things from a mile away of like, oh, wait a minute, these are some red flags that this person is showing because you've picked up on the little nuances of what makes somebody all in and enjoy the service versus, oh wait, this is not working out for this person. I think 'cause of the way that you can see the signs early if you're paying attention.

I would say I'll talk, I'll talk about the plumbing and HVAC SEO side of that equation and maybe you talk about the 7-Figure Agency side of that equation. First and foremost, you can't improve what you don't measure. So you have to be tracking your churn rate. If you don't know what that number is on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, on an annual basis, you're flying blind. And I'll tell you, at Plumbing HVAC SEO, we had this track record where we were landing 5 or 6 clients every single month. And that was the only metric that mattered. It was like, are we growing the recurring revenue? And it wasn't until we probably had 50 or 60 clients that we started to be like, well, are we losing too many of these clients? Like, what's the number here? And so it's a simple equation that you can easily track. And if you want to know a benchmark that you should shoot for as you're listening to this, in your agency, you want to be retaining at least 97% monthly average, so churning no more than 3%. If it's above 5%, that's a red flag. So you can't improve what you don't measure. From there, you know, once you're measuring your churn rate, you've got to, you've got to measure the checkpoints as well. So if we want to keep our agency clients long term, you know, we need to be meeting with them on a monthly basis. We need to be reporting things that they care about. We need to be showing the results and the return on investment. And so it— as the company grew and I stepped away from account management and you stepped away from account management, and we had all of these account managers in place, we had to start to figure out a way to manage and track that at scale. And so what we set up was what we call a monthly touches tracking sheet. And this is a relatively simple concept, but you've got all your clients on a spreadsheet, you've got the name of the account manager, and you literally on a month-over-month basis track how many times was that customer or that client touched. So did they have a live meeting? Did we send a monthly email recap? Did we shoot them a video? And that gives you a really good way to track those touchpoints and to keep an eye on how things are progressing.

Another thing is to take, to make sure first of all that our, the sales calls are getting recorded as well as account manager calls. And those recordings can be placed inside of an AI platform like ChatGPT, Project, things like that. And be able to pull certain questions out of it to make sure that the account managers are mentioning certain things. Like if you have a top 3 core value strategies that you wanna make sure that every account manager is following, you can upload these recordings and ask the chat to look for these specific items in the calls. And that can help show any flags for the manager who's managing the account management department and sales department as well. Are the prospecting, is anything showing up in the calls that are kind of red flags that you should have conversation with your salesperson about? Are they missing those top 3 core things that they need to be looking for? Those kinds of stuff. Another thing that we use is a spreadsheet of red, green, yellow light that we all know. To making sure that you're monitoring and creating KPIs as to what are those benchmarks, what are the things that we feel, you look at the person who's 100% engaged and your top clients and you invest in figuring out what makes those people a great fit and you look for patterns. And so once you find out, Okay, this is the ideal person. They interact with us like this. And so now you have a benchmark to go against and you can see those checkpoints along the way of, okay, this person's not fitting that process. So that's a red flag. Let's put them under yellow. Or this person has a lot more of those red flags. Let's put them as a red because maybe they might cancel soon. And so what is the strategy that we're going to create to follow up with these red and yellows? to make sure that they stay green. And so things like that that we can do to be proactive and not just sit back and like hope that everything— hope is not a good strategy.

Yeah.

You know, you want to be proactive and make sure that you're intentional in the way that you keep your clients happy.

Yeah. Yeah. So practically speaking, they're like having a traffic light system, whether it's on a spreadsheet or whether it's on ClickUp or a tracking board. It's called a Kanban board, right? So you'd have 3 columns, red, yellow, green, right? And green is your happy clients, yellow is your, I don't know, the kind of in between, and red being the ones that are problematic. They've just sent an email that they might cancel, or they've just asked for their usernames and passwords. That, as the owner from a bird's eye view, gives you a glance, OK, how are we doing with our account sentiment? And then having a routine where your account management team meets every single week to review, recategorize and prioritize. How do we get those reds back to green? How do we get those yellows back to green? Can make a big difference in your retention.

Yes. So let's switch gears now, 'cause we were talking about what we do to make clients happy.

Mm-hmm.

But what about when the inevitable happens sometimes and it's an unhappy client? And what do we do in that scenario? Specifically, can you name a time where you had an unhappy client and instead turn it into a raving fan?

Yeah, I can think of a couple examples. One that comes to mind, well, I'll give a principle and then I'll give an example. So if you make a mistake in your agency, which inevitably can happen, right? Like you're gonna put the wrong phone number somewhere or you're going to do something that messes things up, you need to own it.

The best agencies make mistakes.

Yeah, all of us make mistakes. So you need to own it, right? And not hide behind it or try and, pretend like it didn't happen. Reach out, acknowledge the problem, and own it. So a good example is one of our longtime clients, S&D Plumbing out of the Austin, Texas market. Love that family. When we took over their account, we switched the hosting, and we changed the email settings. This was while we were still kind of green. We didn't, like, really pay close attention to email settings. And this was a large company with dozens and dozens of— email addresses and things like that. And so all their email went down and their internal communications wasn't working, and they were, they were pretty upset, right? And I had to hop right on that meeting and say, hey, I'm really sorry, like, here's like what we did, here's how we're going to fix it. And we, we owned it. And because we owned it and because we worked quickly to resolve the issue, um, they were a longtime client and we had a great business relationship together. So I think Just owning the situation, whether it's an email screw-up or poor results, own it, but then also paint the vision for like, "Hey, here's why you guys hired us. Here's where we're trying to go, and here's what the plan is in the immediate term that we're gonna start working on and make that a reality." The interesting thing, serendipitously, that when a mistake happens, sometimes people trust you more.

Like they care, like, they're more in because of the way that you responded to the mistake than if a mistake had never occurred. Yeah, because sometimes when there's hiccups, that's where you really— people's true colors come out, right? And so it's a great opportunity when a mistake happens to really show who you are and to step up to the plate. Yeah, and I love what you just said about being transparent and being authentic and saying, look, I screwed up. And sometimes that whole feel of like maybe it wasn't a mistake on your end, but you still, even if it was like a third party, like some other thing that was out of your control, the weather, whatever, you still say, hey, I'm sorry. We teach our kids that sometimes too, where they get into arguments. Oh, I accidentally bumped him. I'm like, well, you still say sorry because you're You know, you're not happy that this person got hurt. So apologizing first is always the right strategy to do and being there for the person, seeing how we can fix it. Mm-hmm. How do we train our team to deliver consistently great client communication? I love this question.

Yeah, I think one of the most important roles you're going to hire for as you grow and scale your agency is account managers. Or client success team or whatever you call them in your agency, it's the people talking to the client. And you have to find the right personality trait. You know, so I think your DiSC profile as well as your Kolbe profile, at least from our experience, are really important. From a DiSC profile perspective, you're looking for somebody that's relatively high I, which means they like to communicate, They like to be on the phone. They're gregarious. They like having conversations. And then relatively high D. So they need to be a little bit assertive and be able to stand their ground. Because if you don't have a strong account manager, and even if you do amazing work, like you get great results and good phone calls, there's going to be times where the clients come in and saying, hey, you didn't do this, and I'm not getting any results, and what are you guys doing anyways? And if you don't have somebody with a relatively strong back backbone to say, no, here's actually what's happening, here's what we're doing on our end, here's why this is gonna turn around, you will churn clients. And then from a Kolbe perspective, if you're looking at Kolbe, you want somebody that's relatively high fact find, that they'll research, they'll understand how SEO works or paid search works or how AI is playing into the agency game, but also high follow-through. That's really important because they're going to be having these conversations with clients, they're going to be getting requests, they're going to be building action plans. And if you don't have somebody that's going to follow up, follow through, close loops, that can, that can really impact results. And so hiring the right people on the front end is important, but then the way that you train them is really taking them through a structured training process, having them do like simulated launch calls, simulated monthly review calls, and then grading like, like you talked about earlier, actually grading the calls that they have. And are they hitting the right, the right key points?

It also starts with leadership and it comes— the great communication that a team member is going to have with your clients is directly resulting in how the business owner, how we interact with our team. If we don't treat our team well, we can't expect our team to in turn treat our clients great, you know. So, uh, heavy investment in leadership training as the CEO, as the owner of the company, to make sure that you yourself are a good leader, right? And none of us are born leaders where we know exactly how to lead, like how to take care of other people and raise them up. And our focus is, like you said, on serving the community. And we hire people to help us with that. And it does take intentionality and to really also make sure that the team that we're putting in place that are our extended arm of support, that in order for them to have the same feeling and everything that we have towards our clients, we need to as well shine that onto our team members.

Mm-hmm.

So it's super important to lead first and set the example and invest in being a good leader. And if we have team members that were leaving, if you're in a situation where you have team members who have churned, to humbly recognize that potentially it is a leadership issue. And so really investing into reading books in this area and focusing on how it is that we communicate ourselves. Are we short with team members? Are we direct? Do we praise? Do we compliment? Do we say ourselves, hey, I'm sorry that I I messed up on that. You know, are we clear and transparent with our team so that they can mirror the same thing with the clients and they know, oh, this is how this owner operates. I'm going to mimic the same thing because I've been placed in this position as an extension of the owner. So it starts with leadership.

Mm-hmm.

What is your upsell strategy that feels helpful not salesy.

I think most of us, if you're running the agency following what we suggest here at 7 Figure Agency, are selling a monthly retainer-based service, right? They're paying us $2,500, $5,000, whatever it is per month, plus ad spend. For a long time, we didn't have an upsell strategy. It was like, that was our fixed monthly fee, and it was like, whatever they wanted, we'll just try and lump it in. And that actually led to some churn. Because the clients want to grow. And if they're growing and, you know, like they want to go to the next level, you have to be able to bring additional strategies, additional ideas to the table. Otherwise they will jump shift. And they actually do have more money typically to invest than we— any of us imagine or any of us think as they grow. And so the best upsell strategy in my mind is to just go back through a consultative connection with the client. Hey, so let's like, let's check in. Where are you right now in the business? How much revenue? Great. Where, where do you want to be in the next 12 months? What's the goal? All right, let's look at the metrics we have in place today. Let's look at where we're at. Like, how many leads are we generating? How many sales are we generating? What would it require to get to that next level? And maybe we need to spend more on ads. Maybe we need to implement new strategies. Maybe we need to have like a second location approach. And when you upsell in that way and it's like, hey, we've added retargeting, want to pay an extra $500 a month at random, but it's like, hey, let's connect back to where you were at, let's talk about your goal, and then hey, based on that, here's the other things we need to implement. That doesn't feel salesy. It feels very consultative. And it's going to be in the best interest of the client and the agency, right? Because we're creating increased value and we're also creating increased results and an increase in, in revenue for the business.

One of the things that we also tell our members all the time is if they're struggling financially to support the team, to hire a new team member because they're not charging enough, what would you say is the right strategy for communicating and bringing up to new prospects or to current clients that a price change? How do you handle those?

I think price changes, we all have different opinions, right? There's a lot of people that they just keep the price the same and they grandfather people in. And I've kind of leaned more towards that over the years. We're going to increase the price for every new client based on the value that we bring to the equation. That's a really easy way to increase your price. Just your next 5 clients, the new price is whatever instead of $2,000 a month, now it's $2,200 per month. But you can absolutely go back to your existing client base and say, hey, look, based on the increase in value, based on the increasing in cost, right, everybody's getting more money in this business. You know, we're increasing our price, right? And if you don't get back to us by this date, that's going to be your new price going forward. We've done that many times over the years. And in every single case, the increase in revenue and profitability far outpaces the churn or the fallout from that increase.

Let's wrap up with this one question. If you could give your younger self one tip on retention, what would that be?

Hmm. I would say really dial in the process, the onboarding, the monthly check-in, the strategic reporting, having the right people in place to handle it. But I think if there was one other really key thing that massively drives retention, it's understanding in sales, we all know people buy based on emotion and they justify with logic. We know that. But then on the retention side of the equation, we are trying to retain exclusively based on logic. At least this is what we did for— hey, logically you're paying us $2,500 a month. This is how many leads we generated for you. This is the great results that we've had. The ROI should be there. Logically, you should never leave. But they're going to stay for the same reason that they bought, which is the emotional charge. Do they like you? Do they see where you're headed? Do they feel like you care about them? Do they feel connected to you in the community? And so really leaning into that can have a big impact on retention. So I would say to me, to like, how can we better connect with the clients? How can we better create community, whether that's in a Facebook group or through live events to improve retention?

100%. Retention isn't magic. It happens with consistency over time. And we are working with people at the end of the day, even though it is a business that you're working with, it's an owner of that business and that person is who you're really having a service exchange with. And so the more we make all of our, all of our steps and all of our action that we take tied to the person's emotion and how, you know, we're serving them, we're here to serve. And the more everything is tied to us serving the community, you're gonna make all the right decisions. If it's based on helping that person the best way that we can. And I'll also end on a great book, is Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman. Fantastic read on this exact topic, was very helpful for us. So good.

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