How Marketing Agencies Get Clients
Episode 35: How Marketing Agencies Get Clients, with Hannah Roth
View this episode on:
How marketing agencies get clients? Listen to this podcast. Learn about the approach of Predictive ROI on how marketing agencies get clients.
Stephen Woessner is the founder and CEO of Predictive ROI, a digital marketing agency, and the host of Onward Nation and Sell With Authority Podcasts.
How marketing agencies get clients? Let’s start with a little bit of history.
Since the advent of the commercial Internet, Stephen has collected tens of thousands of data points that have given him the ability to identify what he calls the “”8 Money Draining Mistakes”” and the “”8 Money Making Opportunities.”” Darren Hardy, then-publisher of SUCCESS Magazine, interviewed Stephen to discuss how business owners can identify and fix the mistakes.
Stephen served in the United States Air Force, spent six years at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse as a full-time academic staff member and taught digital marketing classes to small business owners throughout the state including the prestigious School of Business at UW-Madison, has owned five businesses, and is the author of three books, “The Small Business Owner’s Handbook to Search Engine Optimization”, “Increase Online Sales Through Viral Social Networking”, and “Profitable Podcasting.”
His digital marketing insights and discussions on how marketing agencies get clients have been featured in Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, The Washington Post, and Inc. Magazine.
Hannah Roth is currently Predictive Roi’s Mad Scientist and Strategist. Hannah has a background as a wildlife biologist, and she started her own home decor and carpentry business that she ran quite successfully for 6 years, which segued into her current position with PROI.
Hannah loves her work family, clients, and the fast paced environment of the agency world. She believes there is nothing quite as rewarding as walking alongside someone while they achieve their business goals.
What you will learn about in this episode on how marketing agencies get clients:
- Predictive ROI’s origin story and a snippet on how marketing agencies get clients
- What the Predictive team does differently for their clients
- The transformation that comes with confidently stepping into your smarts
- The importance and benefits of PROI’s full transparency approach
- Stephen’s advice for instilling confidence and trust with clients that come from all points of the business spectrum
- The impact of being within a community that fosters collaboration and inspiration
Resources:
- Continue your learning on how marketing agencies get clients by finding your ideal client next
- Newly expanded “Resource Library”: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
- “How to Fill Your Sales Pipeline” Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/b2bsalesfunnel
- LinkedIn:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephenwoessner
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PredictiveROI
- Read this blog on how marketing agencies get clients and engage with them
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Full Episode Transcript
How marketing agencies get clients? Then welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI, and we’re going to do something different for this episode, something that we actually haven’t done in hundreds and hundreds of episodes. So actually way back in episode 100 of Onward Nation, when we’re when we are quickly approaching that number 100. So this is back in mid-2015, if you will.
July 2015, August of 2015, to be exact. I was in Seattle with our owner group as part of the Agency Management Institute and just trying to think of something to do that would be special to kind of mark Episode 100. Andrew McLellan from Agency Management Institute said, Hey, you know what we should do if you’re game for this, how about if I put you in the hot seat?
How about if I interview you for episode 100? Because then your audience will get a chance to maybe hear some things, that kind of stuff. Maybe some insights that you wouldn’t normally share. I’m like, Okay, that sounds awesome. And it was a whole lot of fun. I mean, it was a ton of fun. So we’re going to take that idea and do the same thing here today.
So Hannah Roth from our Predictive ROI team, her official title inside Predictive, honest to goodness, is a mad scientist and strategist. So she’s going to turn the tables on me, turn the microphone on the tables. She’s going to be asking the questions. I have no idea what she’s going to ask me. So if you’ve ever attended one of our collabs and cocktails or our Wednesday Q&A or our Write for Clients event that we did in June that we hosted back in June, if you’ve attended any of those events, you’ve likely crossed paths with Hannah.
So through this episode, I’m super excited that you’re going to get to know Hannah a little bit better. You’re going to learn some of her insights and wisdom along the way in this conversation, which I think is going to be super helpful to you in your business as well. So I’m really excited for you to hear this conversation.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Hannah Roth’s Introduction
So, okay, here we go. Hannah Roth and yours truly for this episode of the Sell with Authority podcast. Hey, so with Authority listeners, thank you so much for tuning in today. Obviously, I am not Stephen Woessner. My name is Hannah, and I’m here to put my boss, teammate, and mentor Stephen in the hot seat. So buckle up because I’m going to be asking him some questions that I want to know and I would imagine you guys want to know.
So did you really just say hot seat? Yes. Okay. All right. I don’t know if you’re ever in the hot seat, though, as you pass it is always freezing. So lukewarm now. Now I am incredibly uncomfortable and very nervous. Well, you should be. No, I’m just kidding. I’ll be nice. All right, Well, I’m looking forward to the conversation, Hannah.
Thanks for inviting me. And as I mentioned in the intro, you know, hijacking the show is pretty cool because it gives us a chance to sort of reverse the roles and then I’ll answer whatever questions I can. That’ll be helpful. Awesome. Yes. Well, thank you for letting me do this. I am excited to be here and excited to ask you some of these questions.
So we’re going to start with a zinger, and then I’m going to pepper in some fun questions along the way. So I will keep you guessing. But my first question is kind of just setting the foundation. So my first question is what is PRO’s reason for existing? So when you started Predictive, why did you start Predictive? Well, I think like many in our audience, it sort of happened, I don’t want to say by accident, kind of accident.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Reach The Right Audience
And as you know, I was working at the University of Wisconsin on the lacrosse campus. I was part of the faculty and academic staff, and I’d been there for about six years. And I wrote my first couple of books. So the first one was the Small Business Owners Handbook to Search Engine Optimization. The second one was to increase online sales through viral social networking.
And when those first two books were published, you know, they started getting some attention and that kind of stuff in the broader business community and started teaching some classes on campus around those books. And that was awesome. And what I didn’t expect was I walked back to my office at the university one day and there was a voicemail from a writer for Ink magazine.
And when I listened to it, I thought it was like a friend of mine just messing with me. I’m like, That’s not even funny, because I was an avid reader of Ink magazine. I’m like, “Come on.” And anyway, so the person left, you know, a phone number and that kind of stuff. And of course I called the person back and that turned into a feature in Ink magazine, you know, the actual tangible magazine.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Don’t Just Teach, Do the Thing
That’s awesome. And right. And it just sort of blew me away. And then because of that, you know, the book sold more and I started getting some consulting requests. And for a while I just said thanks, but no. And then after a while, it came to a point where it’s like, wow, this could be something interesting. Maybe there’s something here.
And one day, Christine, my wife, Christine, we were actually outside hanging Christmas lights for one year. And she said to me, she goes, you know, people are asking you to do the stuff, like to do the thing, not just teach the thing, you know, Would you ever want to just do the thing? And I’m like, maybe. And so I started doing the thing.
And then well, and naturally, when you’re putting up Christmas lights, you want to do anything other than that. So that makes total sense. I’ll just say yes. So we can start doing this. Yes. So, you know, one project turned into another, project turned into another project. And pretty soon in short order, like many of our listeners, you wake up, you’re like, ”Hey, I’m running an agency,” right?
It’s like, I need this teammate to help me with this thing. And all of a sudden there’s a cast of characters and it’s like, Wow, this is kind of amazing. So I left the university and, and so going back to and we’ve built it now over the last 13 years and, and we are very blessed in many different ways.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Be Patient in Growing Your Agency
So going back to the purpose of existing, we believe that most agency owners, business coaches, strategic consultants, that’s who we serve today. That is our tribe here Predictive that they go about business development in or if you fancy word for sales they go about sales in the least effective most painful way possible. And we believe there’s a better way in the early days of Predictive. It was all about, you know, data analysis, analytics and putting predictive models into place.
Right. If we do this and these variables stay the same, then we can start to predict conversion and sales. And now today we’ve evolved that into the soul. Well, that’s already the methodology. So, why we exist is because we know there’s a better way to grow an agency, to grow coaching practice, to grow consultancy. And we really, as you know, because you’re one of the teachers to that, we really enjoy teaching and sharing and helping people get better in doing that and full transparency, it’s pretty rewarding.
Yeah, absolutely. That’s awesome. Yeah. So that leads me into my next question. You know, talking about how marketing agencies get clients and customers first, what difference if you had to pick one or two differences that you say we make for our clients in your own words, what differences do you think our clients get from Predictive from working with us? Okay, so I’m going to answer that in two different ways.
Okay. One, there’s I’m going to answer it from a business perspective and then from a personal perspective, from a business perspective, they plant their flag in authority deep into a niche over time, of course, because you don’t fall to the top of the mountain, you have to climb and claw your way there up a jagged path sometimes, yes.
But it takes a lot of effort to scale the mountain. And so helping them plant their flag of authority so they become the known expert in the niche that they want to serve. And then second is that they can monetize their position, that that turns into a steady stream of rate fit prospects flowing into their sales pipeline so they can confidently look at where the next client is going to come from.
How marketing agencies get clients can be easy especially if you know where to look. Or even better yet, they’ve got prospective clients who are the right fit knocking on the door saying, Hey, how about giving me a hand? Can you be helpful to us in this situation? We’ve heard you tease this thing, and we think that’s right. So like, that’s the business aspect, right? They become the known experts in their niche and there’s a steady stream of people saying, Hey, how’s about giving me a hand?
It’s such a wonderful feeling when your prospects come to you to knock on your door to ask for help. It doesn’t feel, you know, salesy and gross. I know that’s something we really talk about a lot internally and externally here at Predictive, how you don’t want to feel salesy and gross. So it’s all about relationship building.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Transforming The Passion of Other People
Well, so great, great combination. So let me touch on that and then I’ll go to the personal side. Like you said, two magic words there, salesy, because I don’t want to show up that way ever, because when you do, it feels GROSS. Right. It feels gross when you’re doing it, you know that you’re showing up salesy and it feels gross like it feels gross to yourself.
And then, you know, the person on the other end, it feels gross to them. So nobody likes it. So let’s not do that, right? So on the personal side, the second side or second part of your question, I think is confidence. I think I think, you know, one of our clients, we interviewed her. She’s so wicked smart.
And when we shared her episode in our Facebook group, she dropped me a note and said, I’ve never sounded that smart before. No. Or she’s smart because of the interview. No. Right. Smart. All day long. It had nothing to do with us. Right. What’s really great and what’s really awesome from a personal standpoint is when you see your clients on either stand on stage or get interviewed or something, and they step into their smartness, that has always been there for their confidence is growing, and then they feel even more of a passion to share and teach and help their audience grow and become better.
And when you see your client and you may have played a small role in sort of giving them the nudge to do that, Holy bananas, Is that rewarding? Yes, so rewarding. I see that with our clients all the time that it’s definitely one of my favorite parts of what we do, because I love when people come in, you know, it’s like you said, they have the smarts, they have the knowledge, they have the brainpower and the passion.
And sometimes, you just need a little confidence boost. I think everybody needs that at different points in their lives, in their careers, both personally and professionally. So I love that you talk about that, and just watching the transformation from unconfident to confident is incredible. It’s transformational for our clients. It’s transformational for us as we get to watch it.
I think that’s awesome. So yeah, it’s in that transforming passion that happens for them personally. That’s what leaks into from a sales perspective. That’s what leaks into the sales pipeline their prospective clients like, that’s contagious. So then that transformation using your word that transformation that also happens to their sales pipeline it then transforms from dry to a steady stream.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Be Yourself When Making an Introduction to Clients
Yeah I’m definitely a firm believer. I would imagine that you are too, that whatever you live personally is what you live professionally. So I think when you have that transformation in your personal life, you become confident. You step into a room with the authority position that we want to give our clients. I think that’s just so powerful. And like you said, it’s magnetic.
People are drawn to that. When you live out your personal beliefs professionally as well. And a funny story about Darren Hardy who used to be well. He’s the former publisher of Success magazine, but in the early days of Predictive, he was on our board of advisors for about a year or so and learned lots of great things from Darren.
And one day he was sharing a story about how he went when he was still a success magazine. He went to go interview the CEO at the time of the Marriott Corporation, and so he went to the headquarters and, you know, walked in the front door and everybody was like, you know, very helpful, very friendly. And Marriott is the one that kind of I don’t know if they’re the one, but sort of famous for the whole response of my pleasure.
And, you know, thank you, and my pleasure. Happy to do that for you. You know. Mr. Hardy. My pleasure. You know, that kind of stuff. So anyway, I mean, it was sort of like inundated with all the friendliness, right, waiting for the CEO so that he could do the interview. So the CEO shows up, they shake hands, they go into their office.
And before the interview, Darren says, okay, I just got to ask you, like seriously, what type of training program or what do you do that you have all of these friendly, happy people? Like, how do you do that? You got them from Chick-Fil-A? No, I’m just kidding. And the CEO says, Darren, we just hire friendly people. There’s no formula, right?
It was like one of those light bulb moments. It’s like, so I just I find it amazing when because again, when you show up like that, when you show up friendly, when you show up helpful, and when you’re doing that in front of your prospective clients and it’s truly who you are, you’re not trying to be somebody different, but when you show up and you’re generous and you’re trustworthy, you have integrity, and you want to see them win, they see that.
Yeah. And then they respond to that. It’s not some sort of gamesmanship or whatever. It’s like, be that in front of your audience and then they will say, Wow, yeah, I enjoy learning from you. And then, of course, right? Yes or no. That’s so true. People, I think a lot of people have really got intuition where, you know, people know if you’re putting on a show or they know if you’re not being genuine, they know if you’re not being authentic.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Distinguish What Kind of Clients You’re Going to Have
And that kind of goes back to that salesy, you know, gross feeling that we were talking about before. So, yeah, I think when you live out your values and, you know, as the CEO of Marriott said, just hire friendly people, you know, just be friendly, live your values, be who you are on and off camera or on and off stage or on and off meeting.
So I think that’s great advice. And it seems so simple, but it really makes a difference. Amen. It does make a difference. And it is simple and yet it trips up so many people. Yeah. So that kind of leads into my next topic that I kind of wanted to talk about here because I feel so predictive.
How marketing agencies get clients faster? Obviously, we work with a ton of agencies, coaches, consultants. We see all types of people come through our doors meeting, you know, help in various ways. And one thing that I’ve noticed is that our clients typically are on two ends of a spectrum. So we’ve got clients that walk into our door who are so exuberant, excited, and happy.
And I love, you know, seeing clients like that, it’s awesome. But sometimes with clients like that, it’s hard to distinguish what’s a good idea and what’s a bad idea because they’re excited about everything and they’re so pumped to try this and this. And it’s kind of like the focus is scattered. And so they think that everything is just a good idea.
On the other end of that spectrum, you have clients that maybe come in with that and then somewhere along the way they’ve been burned or have lost trust, and then they kind of turn into this like cynical attitude where it’s like, okay, everything that sounds too good to be true is too good to be true. And then they kind of turn into I don’t want to say cynical, but they’re just a lot more skeptical.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Understand If a Client Has Distrusts on Agencies
So when we talk about trust and we talk about showing up as who you are, what advice would you give to our listeners about how do you know who to trust? How do you know what’s a good idea? What’s a bad idea? How can you have confidence? And then once you’ve been burned, how do you get that confidence back in people?
So, can you touch on that for a little bit? Okay. Wow. This is an amazing, multifaceted question. It’s kind of a lot. Sorry. I packed, as we say, £5 into it or 10,000 if I come back. Well, I think. Okay. So part of it is, well, there are lots of parts. The first part is really understanding where somebody is at and why and then how you can be helpful because of where they’re at and coming into a situation.
So for example, the was a good idea from a bad idea, not knowing that in not being able to distinguish and so if somebody came to us and said, you know, I’ve got all of these good ideas or I think they’re good ideas, but I’m not sure what is a good idea or a bad idea, can you help me decipher that?
Great. So now we know that that person might be a little bit analytical to them. Maybe it’s data points, and maybe it’s third-party research, maybe it’s their own like study to help kind of figure out where they should be at and better understand their audience. For somebody who is jaded or burned before or whatever, there’s obviously a reason for that and being able to understand why they have that point of view and what happened, and because it could be they worked with another agency like Predictive and it turned into a train wreck.
Right. Or dumpster fire. Definitely seen a lot of people that have, you know, horror stories about, yeah, we worked with this person, and basically they took our money and we didn’t see any results. So we’ve definitely heard that before. And I think I want to just add in something real quick here because I love your idea of meeting people where they’re at.
I think that’s kind of what this whole thing is, is just meeting people where they’re at in their journey. And I think that, you know, one of the things I love about Predictive is that we’re so transparent about our successes and our failures. And I have listened to the On Road Nation podcast. I listened to some other episodes.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Learn From Your Past Mistakes
It’s all with authority and you’re always so candid about, you know, the things that you’ve tried in the past, the things that didn’t work. Obviously, there was the predictive lie that, you know, the situation and so I just think it’s awesome because, you know, this idea of meeting people where they’re at. The reason that I think you’re so passionate about doing that and so capable of doing that is because you’ve been in a lot of those situations where you feel like, my gosh, you know, I’ve made a mistake.
How do I get myself out of this? So I just love that idea. I think so too. And so understanding where somebody is at in their story is not only important just to connect and build rapport and so that that person knows that you’re in it for them and not yourself, right? That you say that you’re in it for them, but you have your finger in their wallet that feels gross, Right?
Okay. So and then that’s how you can be the most helpful, like when you truly understand where they’re coming from or what their story is, that’s how you can be the most helpful. And I think that you do that through or one of the ways that you do that is by teaching the successes and the lessons around those and also being transparent and courageous enough to teach the foibles.
You teach the big mistakes. What happens when you don’t pay attention to the audience like Predictive ROI? I live, and you lose a $2 million opportunity and a couple hundred thousand dollars in actual cash being sucked out of the business. And because when you teach that and you stand in front of your audience, they’re like, holy bananas.
Was that a dumpster fire? And this is why and these are the lessons that we learned in the audience. Sometimes it’s like, I can’t believe that he’s actually sharing that in. The whole team is talking about it. I think I can trust them. Yes, because they can. Right. Because we have seen relatability, you know, because I’m sure that there have been things that, you know, everyone every business owner has stories that they’d rather not tell or they’d rather forget about.
So I think that it’s so relatable to share those things. It’s important. It is important. And so what I love about your question and how you presented this offered up this spectrum is because, as you know, we talk about that spectrum and we talk about how the agency owner, the business coach, the strategic consultant who we call Harry and Sally because I loved the movie When Harry Met Sally.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Make Your Clients Have Trust Again
But anyway, sort of the male-female version of this avatar, if you will, is, you know, they’re wicked smart business owners, but they don’t know a good idea for a bad idea. And it isn’t because they’re not smart. It’s because there’s this deluge of stuff that’s hitting them every single day. They’re ambitious, and they know there’s more growth out there, but they’re frustrated because they don’t know how to get it.
And to your point, they’ve been burned before. So everything sounds too good to be true. Yeah, right. So, we approach our audience knowing these characteristics. We approach our audience in full transparency, teaching everything that we possibly can about it. We don’t leave any nuggets or any stone unturned because it matters for Harry and Sally. Yeah, absolutely. So, when we go back to this idea of trust, what would you say?
What advice would you give about what key indicators, I guess, is what I’m asking, what key indicators of trust or what makes you trust somebody? How do people know who to trust when they know everybody’s saying similar or the same things? Like what is a key indicator for you? That’s like, yes, this person is trustworthy. This is something I learned actually way back when in basic training, when I was in Lackland Air Force Base.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Prove To Them That You’re Trustworthy and Why You’re Different from Other Agencies
For anyone who’s been in the Air Force, you know, you go through basic training in Lackland, in San Antonio, Texas, and I learned this trustworthy lesson there. So, while we were probably maybe halfway through our training, we learned a few things. Our confidence was starting to grow. We’d been beaten down for weeks and weeks and weeks, but we were starting to kind of get built back up again.
And then we got a visit. We got a visit from two cadets from the Air Force Academy. Three cadets from the Air Force Academy. No disrespect to my brothers and sisters who have served and gone through the Air Force Academy, but they were like one or two year cadets, right? So they didn’t know anything. Right. And they didn’t know anything about things like leading a squadron bus or a flight of airmen.
And so it became painfully obvious that they knew nothing they could do maneuvers with us. They couldn’t like I mean, just very simple things they couldn’t do. Okay, in my respect for them, plummeted, of course. And I had zero confidence in, to your point, trust because they were going to march us into a circle. I mean, it was ridiculous, right?
And so they may have outranked our technical instructor, but we respected them immensely because they had the scars on their face to back it up. And so for me, when you asked me, like, how do I gain trust in somebody, it’s proved to me there’s work to show me the data points that are backing up that recommendation.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Show Evidence That You Can Deliver Results
Show me that you’ve done this before. Give me the evidence that I can believe what you’re saying is true. Otherwise, it sounds like hyperbole. Yes. Yeah, I love that. And I think that, you know, one of the ways you demonstrate that to in Predictive, you know, from your basic training and learning that lesson of respect, you know, saying prove it or show me, you know. Obviously anyone who has been in our ecosphere for any amount of time hears you talk about the Predictive lab.
And, you know, this is what we’re doing in the lab. This is the experiment we’re running on ourselves. And I think that’s, you know, such a good foundation of trust because we’ve tested everything that we offer to our clients first on ourselves. And I think what some people may not realize is that by the time we roll something out, it has been tested and tried, you know, four or five different versions or iterations of it because we do test things on ourselves.
So that way, when we do step into a conversation, we can say, Hey, this is what we’ve tried again, this is what works, this is what didn’t work. We’ve done this on ourselves. So can you just elaborate a little bit more on your philosophy of, okay, let’s use ourselves as the guinea pigs? Because I think for some people that’s very intimidating.
It’s it’s you know, what? If we fail or what if we lose money? So how did you kind of overcome those fears to consistently do this in Predictive? Okay, I’m going to answer your question, but I’m just letting you know I’m going to turn the tables on you and ask you that same question. You’re supposed to be in the hot seat now.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Embrace New Ideas
Well, well, I’m just putting you on the edge of the hot seat once I’m finished. Okay? Okay. We’re going to go back to the Facebook experiment that we did leading into RC 3.0. Okay. So everything, so how did we get to that point? Candidly, I wasn’t always in that camp, which is odd based on the nature of this conversation so far.
And here’s what I mean by that. So I got to give Erik Jensen, who I know, obviously very well, and many of our audience know very well my amazing business partner here at Predictive. And so we’ve been running Predictive together for the last ten years in Predictive as an agency, 13 years old, but early on, so let’s call it ten years ago, we had made some sort of mistake or whatever.
And Erik’s like, Yeah, we should share that, We should teach that, or let’s do a beta project and say, Well, we don’t know if it’s going to work. And I’m like, Yeah, I don’t want to do that. And so we had this conversation around that, right, because I wanted to sell that next project, right? And, and he’s like, No, why don’t we call it a beta?
Why don’t we call it, you know, make sure that we set it up the right way? And I was a little resistant to it. And then I started thinking about it. I’m like, He’s right. He’s 100% right because, like, being an integrity, that’s what you would do, like early on in the business, like, you know, when the business is new and cash flow is tight and how are you going to make payroll and that kind of stuff, looking for the next sale.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Deal With Objections and Work Your Way Around It
And I found myself sort of like almost going up to the line of integrity and it felt uncomfortable. And so then when he said that, I’m like, Yeah, he’s 100% right. That’s going to keep us from doing something out of integrity. And so then, you know, I don’t remember exactly what the project was. We presented it in the way that Eric was talking about and it was refreshing.
Right. It wasn’t like, gosh, I hope they don’t ask us that question. You know, sometimes in sales when you’re talking about, you know, dealing with objections, Well, when you set up a project in the way that this is an experiment and you know, we didn’t talk about the lab then because it didn’t exist like it does today.
But when we set up the project in the correct way like, you know, we’re not really sure this is a beta, we’re going to do it this way because these are the data points of that kind of stuff or whatever. But we’re experimenting here. Yeah. Then, then the objections really turn into more like conversation and help me understand.
And what if we did it? It turns things into more collaborative work, and like, Wow, that was awesome. Awesome, Right? And so anyway, kudos to Erik because, you know, I’ve told him that before because it was just an amazing change about a decade ago. You know, it was just absolutely lovely. Okay, So here’s the hot question for you.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Do Some A/B Testing
All right. Okay. So just in full transparency. When we ran Facebook, the $7 Facebook funnel experiment to get ready for the RC 3.0 or right for class 3.0 that we taught on June 22nd of this year, you led that experiment. The results were not the way that you initially had thought that they might be or wanted them to be absolutely right afterwards.
And then afterward we had some conversations about that. And I, I suspect I’m a little projecting here, so I’m asking for you to validate or contradict us. I suspect that you thought it was a little bit nuts when I’m like any result is a great result. I’m right. So how did you feel about that? So yeah, so I have a science background for our audience that doesn’t know me yet.
So my background is in biology and so I do understand the concept of, you know, any result is a result. And although I was very optimistic and hopeful because candidly that was my first experiment that I had run in Predictive, you gave me, you know, a budget that obviously I wanted to leverage to get the most ROI and the most success.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: It’s All About the Results!
I had all these big goals and dreams, and you and Erik were so gracious about, you know, letting me know that, hey, it’s okay. Like there’s no failing in this experiment. There’s no failure outcome, and there’s no wrong outcome. So that obviously was very freeing for me because it took us a lot of the pressure off to make it succeed or, you know, basically bang my head into the wall to make it succeed.
So that was very awesome. But yeah, it was, I think, surprising for me working with you guys and you guys giving me the freedom. Again, obviously, you have seen this over the years that you’ve worked together. You’ve done this yourselves. You’ve had things you’ve tried that didn’t turn out the way that you wanted. And going back to that, relatability piece, it just made it so much more relatable to me to be like, okay, like, you know, we’re going to do this and we’re going to see what happens and then we’re going to share it with our audience and that in and of itself was the value.
It wasn’t the outcome necessarily that was going to make or break whether it was a good idea. I think the value was in the teaching aspect and the advice and the lessons that we learned. So it was just a very big shift from my background being results-driven to no matter what happens, we’re going to be able to teach and share and help someone in our audience that may be thinking of going down this path or maybe interested in, you know, doing this for themselves or may not have a lot of experience.
So I think the value there was obviously the results were not this, you know, grand return on investment that I had envisioned, but that in and of itself, I would imagine has probably saved quite a few dollars for other people that may have been thinking about pursuing that path. So yeah, that’s that. I hope that answers your question.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Show Integrity in Conducting Your Studies
I kind of rambled there for a minute and stayed away from the topic on how marketing agencies get clients. It does answer the question 100%. Right. So the result outcome wasn’t a return on investment from this funnel equaled X thousands of dollars in revenue. But what it did do was show the negative ROI. And how to not do that in reality is, after you talk and share that segment segment number three it RC 3.0.
You know, one of the audience members sent Erik an email right away and said, I want to talk with you guys now. It wasn’t a high risk for Facebook work because we were just shown how not to do that, right? But, because you stood there and presented this very meticulous study, it showed that you knew what you were doing and not afraid to present it when the data went in a different direction.
Yes. And that shows integrity. Yes, 100%. Well, I’m glad that you guys put me on the spot for my very first experiment. Made me talk about how I always sound off. So, I’m just kidding. Hey, that’s the model here. Predictive. We’re all in, guys. There is no trepidation, no tiptoeing into the pool. No, we just jump, right? Jump into the deep end. Cannonball. Yes. Well, sometimes we get pushed in, but that’s okay, too. But only in chlorinated water. No gators. That’s true. No games. Yeah, no gators. Awesome. Okay, so my next question is a very serious one. So, I’m putting you back in the hot seat. No, I’m just kidding. I promise. I’m fine. So, I have a question, and this doesn’t relate to anything.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: A Conversation About Favorite Fruit Flavors
Does this have to do with bananas? It doesn’t, actually, but I mean, it might. It depends on your answer. Pizza. What is your favorite flavor of Jolly Rancher? Okay, I’m not much of a Jolly Rancher fan, however. Yeah, but if I. If I had to choose, I would say Cherry. Cherry? Yeah. Okay. That’s acceptable. If you were going to say grape, I was going to, you know, in the conversation early.
But I also can’t. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hang on. I almost said grape. In fact, grape is in fact, grape is what I thought first. And I’m like, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m a big Cherry fan. Yes. So, like, you know, cherry jelly, all that kind of stuff is my favorite. Okay, So what’s with the aversion to grapes for you?
I just think anything that’s fake grape-flavored. Well, first of all, anybody that makes candy and decides on the flavors, like, have they ever had a great grape does not taste like grapes at all. Yeah. Yeah. See, and I think I don’t know. I think for me, grape, anything tastes like Robitussin or tastes like cough medicine. As a kid, everything was grape-flavored, so I think that’s my aversion to grapes.
We probably don’t have any, but we probably don’t have anybody from Smucker’s listening in, so I think we’re fine. Yeah, hopefully I mean, Smucker’s is a great brand. Their strawberry jelly, fantastic cherry preserves all the way. Yeah, I’m more of a strawberry fan myself. I think my favorite flavor is watermelon, which also doesn’t taste anything like watermelon.
So I don’t know. I guess that negates my whole previous rant. I don’t think these people have ever tasted fruit, but that’s just my inference. Okay, so back to business. Okay. I’m trying to think of other questions to ask because I feel like we’ve had such a good conversation, and now I’m like, Is there anything that you want to talk about that you haven’t touched on yet in this interview?
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Capture The Hearts of a Community
Well, so let me again turn the tables back, back to you for a second. And so when Erik and I, you know, were with Drew McLellan, CEO of Agency Management Institute, and he helps us through our quarterly leadership team meetings. You know, when we were in Denver on Monday for that session, you know, one of the things we talked about was how when you stepped into the Build a Better Agency summit in 2022.
So on May of 22 in Chicago, it was like life-changing, there was game-changing, you know, for you because you had this opportunity to step into a community. Yes. And a community of smart, generous, just amazing, really incredible people in the sort of the spectrum of success. But they all showed up in the same way.
So talk about why that was impactful for you. And the reason why I’m asking is because Drew has obviously done a really great job of creating community. But anybody can write like anybody could look at that and take those lessons and say, okay, whatever the niches that you serve, he obviously serves agency owners, ambassadors, agency owners, but whatever niche you serve, you could certainly build.
You could convene and build a type of community. So share a little bit more of your personal perspective around the community, how it made you feel and why it’s important. Okay. Yeah, I want to talk about this because I think community is so important. And you know, going back to our question that I asked before, from the spectrum of people that are super optimistic to the people that have kind of been burned.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Picking Yourself Up and Learning from Your Mistakes
So my story is that I have been burned before. I kind of fall on the side of, is this too good, be true? Are these people, you know, authentic? And so, you know, it’s one thing to work with a few people here and there that have all those good adjectives that you describe. They’re incredible. They’re amazing, they’re helpful, smart, all of those things.
It’s a different thing or a different feeling when you walk into a room with quite literally hundreds of people like that. I mean, it is, and I say this all the time. I don’t think it’s a dramatic statement to say that the Build a Better Agency summit was life-changing for it completely changed my perspective. It, you know, made me feel like I was in the right place.
It made me more confident to share some things with people that are also sharing their successes. And like we talked about their vulnerabilities. And I think that having a community like that is just so important because it allows for collaboration, it allows for these good ideas. I mean, no one lives in a vacuum. You know, no man is an island.
And I think that that’s such a true statement because when you have the opportunity and the ability to be with people that are as smart or smarter or have been through different experiences, I mean, there’s just so much value in that because you learn from them. You know, going back to what we were talking about with teaching, you learn from their mistakes, you learn from their successes, you’re inspired.
And I think that if I had to focus on one keyword from the builder, build a better agency summit, I would say that I was so inspired and so like the inspiration from these people. But I God, it was just overwhelming. It was incredible. I could talk about this for hours. I won’t because, you know, zero-hour audio editors might kill me, but I won’t go on for hours and hours.
But yeah, I think it’s important because it fosters collaboration. It helps build confidence. It keeps you from making some probably big, costly, expensive mistakes and it’s just nice to have a sense of community where if you’re wondering about something or if you’re thinking about something going back to, you know, how do you tell a good idea from a bad idea or how do you navigate the path of success when you have people that are willing to share and help you and mentor you and you know, you can see the path that they went down and some of the paths that you don’t want to go down.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Great Things Takes Time
It’s just so incredible to learn. You know, it’s just such a big learning environment. 100%. And that’s that right there. What you just shared with our listeners is, is the business case to do it. And so if you’re listening to Hannah right now and you and you heard those words and let them really sink in, that’s the business case for thinking about, okay, how can you take those next several steps to start building?
Certainly doesn’t happen overnight. You start building and convening a community and showing up in front of that community, sharing something smart, and connecting with other people inside the community. There are lots of different steps to take to achieve this, but the impact is exactly what Hannah just described in that 100%. And I think one of the things that’s really valuable to me, Andrew, does this in an excellent way, is that the focus is really on the community.
I think that your intentions have to be building and fostering other people and being helpful, just like all those things that you just described. Because I do think that in our culture of influencers and social media and all of this, there is sometimes the focus shifts and a lot of people, I think, shift it on themselves or they kind of step in and they’re like, okay, I can’t wait to share something smart and do all of the things which are wonderful.
But I think that your focus, if you’re stepping into this, really has to be on the people you’re serving because it’s not you know, I’m on stage. I’m this big persona that’s kind of not what we’re talking about here. It’s really about serving and serving your community, serving them well, serving them with love, serving them in a way that fosters collaboration, all of those things.
I think that when we talk about community, it’s important to say that we’re serving. It’s not about us. We’re building something. It’s not, you know, the focus is not on us. Okay, So let’s think about that for a second. I know we need to come in for a landing, but when you said that it’s not about us, but it is about serving.
How Marketing Agencies Get Clients: Surround Yourself with The Right People
So let’s return to the burn before the jaded, the skeptical. When you show up in the way that you just described, then somebody who might have had that experience before then has the impact that you had personally when you stepped into that room with those hundreds of people, you’re like, my gosh, I have found my people.
Yes, right. Yes, 100%. And just feeling so welcomed. So, I mean, just enveloped in smarts, in love, in caring, in helpfulness, just completely enveloped. And so I think that that is such a good benefit for the community. And again, inspired. I was so inspired. Remember that? Well, how do you think we should come in for a landing? All right, guys, I’m out now.
I’m just getting it. No, not that. No, honestly, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to let me put you in the hot seat and thank you for candidly sharing, you know, all of your answers, answering the questions I asked you with grace. And, you know, I just don’t know. Thank you for letting me be here.
And thank you for this opportunity. I love it. I love our time together. And I like to dig into your brain a little bit, too. So thank you. You are welcome. But the thank you also goes back to you too. So thank you, too for showing up with great questions. Thank you also for sharing with me. And because it’s really easy to be guarded and to be standoffish and all that kind of stuff.
Right. And you blasted right through. I mean, that’s not who you are, but you blasted through all that stuff and opened up and shared. And that’s important for our audience to hear. And taught. And you taught generously. So. So thank you for that, Hannah. And I’m looking forward to us doing that again. Yes, absolutely.
100%. Thank you, Stephen, and I appreciate it. Okay, everyone, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and listen to the words of wisdom that Hannah shared with you, the key is you have to take all of the nuggets or pearls of wisdom that you may have found in this conversation. Take it and apply it because if you do, you’ll accelerate your results.
And Hannah, again, thanks very much for turning the tables on me. I appreciate you being my co host, if you will, for this episode. So that was a whole heck of a lot of fun and I look forward to us doing it again next time 100%. Thank you, Stephen.
Fill Your Sales Pipeline Q&A
LIVE Wednesdays at 1:00 pm Eastern / 12 Noon Central
The Sell with Authority Podcast is for agency owners, business coaches, and strategic consultants who are looking to grow a thriving, profitable business that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality.