Video 2: The Agency Concierge Profit Plan

Well, hey guys, this is Joshua Nelson and Chris Johnstone. Thanks for joining us on this second video. In the last video, we talked about one of the biggest challenges facing us as digital marketing agencies, which is the fact that we generate leads for the clients, those leads don't convert, and kind of this new opportunity that exists to, to help with that part of the equation.

Yeah, absolutely. We learned about the gap, and the big reason why our clients aren't generating the results is because We're giving them the leads and they don't know how to turn the leads into customers. And we also talked about how to solve that problem with a new executive concierge. Then we unpacked the blueprint for how to make sure that that concierge is also getting results not only for your clients but for you as well, and how to double your sales in your agency so that you're getting paid even more to bring clients in on this agency concierge. So thank you so much for the comments after the video and your feedback. It's been just phenomenal to be in the comments and interacting with everybody. Please continue to share those comments on this video as we learn today. We absolutely love that part of the interaction of everything.

So what we want to do on this video is we want to dive into, you know, what this actually looks like, right? We know, we, we know there's an opportunity to put somebody in place to follow up on these leads and to put somebody in place to follow up with our leads that's going to make us stickier with the client base. Joshua generate better results and retain at a higher level. Today we wanna talk you through exactly, you know, financially kind of how that works, how you would charge for it, how the profitability model works. So Chris, let's dive into it.

Yeah, absolutely, let's go.

All right, so let's dive right into this. Like what we talked about last time was kind of this fact that we're generating leads for clients and then it creates this gap, right? 'Cause they're not converting those leads. And so we kind of bridge that gap by putting a concierge in place, and then Chris was nice enough to walk us through the revenue and profitability in his business. Like, literally over 23 months in putting this in place, test the concept, sold it to clients, validated that they're willing to pay for this service and that there's a tangible measurable result that they get when you actually are doing this correctly, generated over $1 million in revenue, $1,040,023, and almost $1 million in profitability, $849,000 in profitability. Now, this sounds great. What I wanted to have Chris do on this video is walk us through the details, like how much do we charge for it, how much do we pay the concierge, and so let's, let's dive right into it.

Absolutely. Awesome. And one thing I do want to point about, about the revenue and the profit side of things is this is while we were figuring it out as well. Like, it ramped up. It was like on a big curve for us as we started to figure this stuff out. And so all of all of that learning and the stubbing of the toes and all of the heartache that we went through in our agency, I'm hoping in this video series you don't have to go through those same struggles and waste the money that we did in order to fix this stuff. And the other thing that I really want to mention on that point is that again, we would give this service away to our clients for free, but it's so valuable we get to charge great profitable— great profitability products to them in order to deliver it to them. But ultimately what we were trying to solve is the that our agency had was we would sign somebody up on an ads program and in 90 days they would cancel because the leads were no good, or it was hard to keep them motivated about the SEO program because it took us time to generate results and we didn't have anything before they got on the front page of Google that would keep them enticed, that would keep them with us. So this is actually a strategy to retain your clients for longer charge them more while they're with you, and actually create a better experience so that your reputation in your industry goes up. It allows you to sell to a higher value client when you have the concierge service. So there's all kinds of benefits to it. It's not just this profit plan. So what I want to show you here— and we'll hide the, the juicy part at the bottom that we're going to get to— but a concierge in your business should make between 100 and 150 calls a day. Now remember, this is a professional that we're hiring who already has experience making calls. This isn't subcontracted out to another agency. You definitely don't want to do that. We'll talk about that in video number 3, but you don't want to outsource this. You want to keep this in-house. That person makes between 150— 100 to 150 calls a day, and they should book 5 to 10 appointments a day. So those are actual sales opportunities, either for you in your agency or your clients in their business. Now, you may be sitting there thinking, "That would be a dramatic shift from what we're generating right now," because what we've done is by crossing over the gap, we've actually started to change our language with our clients from, "Here's how many leads I generated for you," to, "Here's how many sales I generated for you." And when you speak in that language and you have the confidence, you actually have the product to deliver the results of the increased customers to your business, Everything changes. And that's where it comes from. It comes from pre-vetted, qualified appointments showing up in your client's business as a result of the work that you're doing. Or I should say, the result of the work that the concierge is doing. You get freedom while they're actually delivering the product. Now, that means that our concierge is gonna make about 2,250 calls per month, give or take, right? That's 140 appointments per month per concierge agent that goes out. Now, here's the really fun part, because when we implemented this in our business, we actually went through a whole bunch of different pricing strategies. Our original way that we launched this out to the marketplace was we started charging per appointment. So we went out and we said, hey, rather than buying leads from us, buy appointments from us, and we'll generate the leads and generate the appointments for you. We spent over $274,000 on our own ad spend on Google and Facebook generating the leads, then turn those leads into appointments. And we were selling the appointments to people in the mortgage industry. Now again, that didn't work, and we don't need to unpack necessarily why, but it wasn't nearly as profitable. My profit margins were very thin running that type of model. So what we said is, okay, what we know is we can make these calls and we can book these appointments, so let's sell that. As the product. So again, that's a huge takeaway for you in today's presentation. Don't sell the appointments, sell the service of the concierge. And there's again a big reason why we're doing that. We're gonna get to that in just a couple minutes. But productizing that, this is how the math works out. So we're charging our clients $750 per month per 200 calls. And I will, I'll release a little bit of what's coming. Those calls aren't just to the online leads anymore. We made a massive discovery, and now we're making calls that are even more valuable to the client as part of those 200 calls, and the results that we're generating are just off the charts. So this is a tremendous value to the client. They— this is one of those services where if we were to take it away, they would call us and complain about it. And that's huge shift in our agency from the other products that we used to. So that means that per concierge, you have 11 clients a month that each concierge agent can manage for you in your business. Well, the revenue that you generate from those 11 clients at $750 is $8,250. The cost to run a concierge is about $2,600 to $3,000 a month. Now, in each marketplace, it might fluctuate a little bit, uh, based on the job market. But we're hiring North American-based dialers. We are not outsourcing overseas. We're getting professionals that know how to do the job in the marketplace for between $12 to $15 per hour, and then we pay them a small bonus per appointment that they book each day. So you can budget there $2,600 to $3,000 a month. If you want to be more aggressive with your people, you can be, but that's the rough math of what we're running in our agency. And that gives us $5,650 per month per concierge profit that we install in the business. Keeping in mind, this is to deliver a product that we would give away for free because it generates better results for our clients. They stick with us longer. This is just almost like a cherry on top of the agency, which is really cool. So Josh, any questions about that?

Yeah, I do. I think this is awesome and Let us know in the comments if you like that he broke this math down, 'cause I know a lot of us trying to bridge the gap between, "Yes, I wanna hire concierges," to, "How am I gonna charge for that? How's that gonna make me money?" This kinda makes that a lot clearer. Couple things that I like. I like the fact that it's predictable, reliable revenue, as opposed to per lead that you generate, per appointment that you book. That can get a little bit hairy, like you've experienced. I also like that you know, you've got a fixed amount of calls per concierge. So you can really like iron out, here's my cost, here's my revenue, here's my gross margin, and becomes very scalable in that way.

That's right. Absolutely. And the interesting thing about this pricing model is this is where we start with like our mass market product. So what we've experienced in our agency is now we're running ads just for the concierge product. We're bringing in those clients because it's attracting a totally different type of customer. Somebody who already has a successful business, somebody who already has more leads than they can handle, somebody who already has more business than they can handle. We're just solving that large problem that they have of wanting to turn more of what they have into more customers. So we're bringing people in, selling them just this product, and then they're buying the Facebook ads and the Google ads and the SEO. So it's another pathway into the agency that you can use to to scale as well. But one more thing before we get into the next, um, uh, bit of teaching I have for you today is that this model created an ascension model for us in our business. Because these clients that come in at $750 for 200 calls, we have clients that come to us and say, Chris, I need you to make 4,000 calls a month for me. What can you do on that program to get me into that. And that's where we get consulting retainers, and that's where we're actually able to do JV deals, where we come in and we come— become a partner in the business and say, we're gonna make the calls for you, but we would like a little bit of profit for every deal that you do in your business. And that is a whole other side of the agency that we're gonna talk about in just a minute here.

So I love the mathematics of this. I think if it was just following up with your existing leads that you're generating for clients, you're gonna be stickier, you're gonna make them more money. I think that's a slam dunk. I love the fact that it gives you a differentiated offer in the marketplace.

Yes.

Not just doing websites, SEO, pay-per-click, but you're doing something in addition that's different, right? It's one of the most powerful things you can have. And really what stood out to me here was this, the fact that these 200 calls, some of them are to a unique pocket that are generating exponential results. I really want to hear more about that.

Let's get into it. And what we're talking about here is the leads that you're generating for your clients. You're going to be able to double the results that you're generating from the existing leads that you have by just doubling the the amount of appointments and opportunities that you're generating for your clients. Now, with your database, we all know if you call the past customer database of your past clients, they're going to generate more business. But while you're making those calls, you're really achieving 3 main goals for that client that generates them a result, which makes your product more sticky, which makes them want to pay you more for this service every month. And the first is actually generating business from the client themselves. Um, there may be something that they need, just that helpful check-in, but oftentimes we get referrals right on that call of somebody they know that can be using the service. So you get business right away by making those calls. But what you're also doing is you're positioning your client's business at that higher level where they've reached back out to a client or a customer. I mean, how often do you get a call from somebody that you've done business with? It almost never happens. So you're building the bond and the relationship with that person, and that creates more referrals over time. Those people go out into the marketplace, thinking about opportunities and ways to refer more business. So your client's business grows that way. The third opportunity that you're presenting to your client by calling the database is getting 5-star ratings and reviews on their Google Business Profile from happy past customers. So they exponentially grow the amount of online reviews that they get, which helps your service then generate even more results into leads, which then turn into more appointments for you. And the third is referrals. Now, I'll give an example from the mortgage industry. So, a lot of people in the mortgage business generate the majority of their business from realtors, financial planners, investment advisors, insurance professionals. So what we do is we call out to qualified lists of those people, cold calls that our concierge makes, and we set up networking appointments where the loan officer and the realtor, or whoever it is, they get on the phone together. We give them a little bit of a script to follow, and they end up getting referrals. And that's exponential business because a realtor could send 4 deals, 6 deals, 10 deals a year. So every one win that you generate in a referral partner creates exponential results for your clients. So Josh, you're in the plumbing and HVAC niche. What's a— to help our viewers brainstorm here, what's a way that a plumbing and HVAC agency could take that and use it?

Yeah, so I mean, this can apply to almost any vertical, but if we're thinking about plumbing, Like, who refers to a plumber? Could be the local realtor, somebody new moved in, right? Planting seeds in that way.

Yeah.

Could be after the assessment of the home, you know, when they— before they moved in, the assessor recognizes that there's something wrong with the plumbing or the foundation that needs to be changed. And so rather than just working the leads, looking for those strategic relationships and planting those relationships for the business.

Absolutely. And I would love to know in the comments about your business, because every business has strategic opportunities in it. Let us know what niche are you in and brainstorm out 2 or 3 different opportunities where you could go out and generate those referral appointments if you had a concierge in the agency. Again, keeping in mind on the fact that we've just transformed from— in the agency business, we're actually some of the best marketers in the world because what we're doing is we're taking the hardest to close leads, we're generating them and having success with our clients. But if you look at where the majority of the business comes from your clients, it comes from their past customer database. It comes from people that refer them business. So we as agency owners are actually focused on the hardest problem to solve and the hardest solution to provide. What we want you to open up to here is the fact that it can be easier to generate a better result, and you can get paid more on a product that has better margins for you in your agency, and it helps you sell all of your other services at the same time. That's the experience that we went through. Again, I kind of stumbled across this stuff, but us here in the agency world, we can really take this and turn this into something that's exponential for our agencies.

So good. Love it, guys. So put in the comments here what niche you're in. If you're stuck on this, how you would call back the database, What referrals, opportunities, and sources you could source for them? Put it in the comments and we'll help you kinda brainstorm through that.

And any other questions that you have as well.

Alright, this is great stuff. We got a lot of questions coming in the comments from this video and the last video. One of the questions that seems to come up, and it comes up in my mind, is our clients already have call centers, right? They've already got like the lady at the front and maybe they've got a whole CSR team. Do they really need someone to call their leads? Talk me through that. Like, is there really a need for this?

Absolutely. So that was another transformation that we discovered when we started calling the database and the referral partners. Because most inside sales agents are only working new inbound leads. And so there's a couple of ways that we've gotten over that as well. So to provide even more value, what we'll say is, why don't you give us 30 days and let's split the leads and give half to us and give half to yours. And if you guys outperform us, Great, no problem, but what I would really love to do for you is, have you called your database in the last 90 days? And that's a very important strategic question. It's not, do you call your database? 'Cause everybody calls their database, right? Have you called your database in the last 90 days? And I think you'll find 9 times out of 10 that they're not actually calling their database, and every business owner knows that's where the true money is, but those are the calls that they're not making. So you can differentiate your offer with, hey, we're already calling our leads. Okay, great, well you can test us against that, But what about this low-hanging fruit that may have slipped through the cracks at this point? And again, that makes you a much more valuable offer and much more valuable to that client.

Love it, makes a lot of sense, for sure. So the next question is, I got my database, right, these people we've done business with in the past, what does that call look like? Like, what would the concierge say to turn that into a relevant conversation?

Yeah, so, and we get that pushback from clients sometimes, they're like, I don't want you calling my database, these people are very important to me, what are you gonna say on the phone? Script it for each individual client, and that script follows a framework. So basically what we're doing is we're opening up the conversation by reaching out and saying, "Hey, XYZ business owner came into the office this morning. They asked me to give you a call. They're really busy right now, but they wanted me to reach out and see how you're doing. How are you?" And we're opening up the conversation 100% based on the relationship, and then the concierge is trained to sit, listen, empathize, and actually have the conversation. A lot of people are just like, "I'm fine, why are you calling?" And it's like, "We really appreciate your business, and right now there is..." And then there's a reason for the call. So in the mortgage industry, you know, rates went up, rates went down. We do offer an annual mortgage checkup. Most niches will probably use some type of checkup, but it's like, "Hey, it's time for you to change your furnace filter." [Speaker:JOSH] Right. There's the reason for the call, and we just wanted to check in and make sure that you got that value-add service that we provide to all of our clients. So all of a sudden, you've gone out of your way, you've been proactive, it's a service you're delivering, they feel value from the call. Then there's the transition to, oh, by the way, I noticed here on your file, it looks like you had a 5-star experience with us in the past. And then they just sit and they wait. And people say, yeah, I did. Say, great. Well, we didn't actually see that come through on the Google Business Profile. If I text you the link to our Google profile, would you leave that for me right now? And they'll agree to get the 5-star rating and review. And then we wrap the call up at the end by saying, do you or anyone you care about need XYZ services? And one of the things that can be an advanced strategy for you is we've started to get clients to go into private Facebook groups. So what we'll do is we— do you know anyone online or offline that's looking for a realtor or whatever it is? So the script is, do you know anybody that is looking for this potential service? And what we're doing is maybe 5% of the people will be like, yeah, I do know somebody, and then you actually get the referral. But what we're doing is we're planting the seed so that long-term they know and understand that we're asking for the business and we want their referrals long-term. So that's the framework of the call script, and it gets great feedback from the clients.

Love it. Create a great experience for the, the customer's customer, generating some reviews, generating some referrals, and maybe generating that, that person that was in need right at that moment.

Exactly.

So, so good. Hopefully that helped to bridge that gap because I know it was a question in my mind. The next question is So I can see we've got calls that we're making, right, to the leads. Yep, we're calling to the database, we're calling referrals, and the concierge is slated to do 200 calls per month.

That's right.

For the client.

That's right, you got it.

What happens when those 200 calls are used up? 'Cause it seems like you could go burn through that pretty quick.

Oh, absolutely you can, and that's a great problem to have because as soon as we've established the results for the client, those are sold in packages. So it's like you can have 200 calls or you can have 1,000 calls and it's just they pay per package and they understand that they're buying a certain allotment of them. So you will have some clients that come back, try out the service, get great results and come back and say, hey, I want 2,000 calls a month or 3,000 calls a month. And then you can package it together and give them a little bit of a discount. But essentially what you're doing is you're selling the time of the concierge in blocks of making those particular calls. And that's how we scale up. That's how we get to to that profitability, and that is a regular ascension path, which we are going to talk about in video number 3 of how to architect that ascension path to get yourself to those really high monthly retainers on the service.

I love it. So you're not just pigeonholing yourself to the $700 a month, to the $750 a month. As you prove value, as you do more, you can scale while generating more revenue and profitability for that same client.

Yeah, that's right.

Love it. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the referrals, right? Because there's all of these referral partners that we're going to be calling into. Is that really productive? Could you maybe like map out the numbers for us on, on that a little bit? Yeah, for sure.

So when we're calling out to referral partners, the first step in that process is making sure that we actually have a qualified list of contacts to reach out to. And there's lots of great services out there where you can get those lists. This, but in the mortgage and real estate industry, what we'll do is we'll go look at— there's a lot of realtors in the marketplace, but really the top 20 to 25% are doing the majority of the business. So we'll go in and we'll check and see who's actually doing the business. Now there's a process that you can run with your clients where they can help brainstorm that list with you, or there are data providers where you can go and get that information. So then we're making calls out to those referral businesses. We talk to roughly 15% of the people that we call. So when we make those outbound calls, if we make 100 calls, we talk to about 15 people as a result of those calls. Now, a concierge agent with a quality script and somebody who knows how to open up a conversation, build value within that conversation, and then book that appointment— we book 25% of those calls into actual networking appointments for the clients, and those have about an 80% show-up rate. So again, if you have a concierge agent making 100 to 150 calls a day between calling the leads and booking appointments from the leads, which would be like our, um, great opportunity, but actually from making the money for the clients, it's the least return on investment that they get. Some of those appointments are going to come from the leads. Then the deals that come from the database are going to stack up even greater results. And then these referral appointments are actually where they win a lot of those larger tickets because these people have multiple exponential deals to send into the agency. So between the 100 and 150 calls, you're going to get some here, some here, some here every day. But it stacks up, and the client loves it because it's not just one type of opportunity. You're creating multiple opportunities from multiple sources every single day in their business.

I love it. I think that bridges the gap to this opportunity amplifier concept, right? We're not just calling the leads, we're creating new opportunities. And what you said, you really transform the results for the client. That's right. Which is super exciting. So great answers to these questions. If you have questions on this, post them in the comments. We'll get Chris back on video and try and unpack it for you a little bit further. If you know other agencies that could benefit from this, I think this is a huge opportunity for the digital marketing agency that's trying to figure out how do we retain the clients that we have?

Yeah.

How do we generate results that are above average?

Yes.

Where we're tangibly, measurably saying you've given me a dollar and I'm turning it into 3 to 5 to 10, right? I'm actually tangibly generating result. So if you know somebody that could benefit from this information that Chris is, is so graciously sharing, be sure to share this with them.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure you tune in to video number 3 because I've got some incredible content that's going to show you how to take what we've learned in these first 2 videos and just take it to the next level. And I'm really looking forward to seeing you there.

Yeah, I think what I want to see on that 3rd video is we've got the concept, right? It would make sense to have a caller that's gonna call on the leads for our customers. We've seen the math, how we can charge for that, and kind of like how that's profitable. Really what I wanna see on this next video is what are the logistics to make that happen? What tools do we use? How do we hire the people? How do we train them? How do we hold them accountable to make sure if they're supposed to make 150 calls a day that those calls actually happen? So if you're excited for that and you're ready to get into the actual logistics of making this work, um, be sure to tune in for video 3.