Enhance your marketing agency sales process for Inventory

How to create outlook signature

what's up digital marketing agency owners on today's video I want to talk about how to build a sales team to accelerate the growth within your digital marketing agency so you don't have to do all of the sales and do all of the heavy lifting so if you're excited about taking your agency to the next level removing yourself from the sales process you're going to want to watch this [Music] video when it comes to growing and scaling your digital marketing agency typically we get really good at marketing ourselves or at least keeping our calendar full enough so that we've got our our appointment funnel flowing and then we get good at sales right we get good at having those conversations with the prospects building the Rapport setting expectations and closing the deal right I don't know of any agency owner that's gone to seven figures that hasn't been able to solve for sales right you have to be able to have those conversations but typically we get so good at it and we get so comfortable with it that we don't want to take ourselves out of the sales process we figure you know what I'm the face of the company I'm the one they're going to want to do business with I need to be the one to sell them and what I want to encourage you to expand your mind on is that if you can remove yourself from the sales process which absolutely is possible um you can create a lot more freedom within your business and so that's what I want to talk about today and really if we think about the agency growth system uh lots of videos I've shared with you guys on this here on this channel and other places you know we want to we want to fill the funnel we have to land clients by having an appointment funnel where they show up preposition to buy and then a great sales process and then we have to re you know onboard them well have a great communication Rhythm and build our account management team so that the work gets done at a high level but what I want to talk about today is that kind of within this sales process how to take our ourselves out of being the person having those sales conversations over time and I want to tell you it really is one of the most amazing feelings if you haven't experienced it yet within your agency when a client signs up for your retainer-based service and you weren't involved in that conversation you weren't involved in that process I know for me the first time it happened it was just like wow this business now is a true business right if you remove yourself from the sales process ideally before that you removed yourself from the account management process before you before that you removed yourself from the U operations process you're not actually doing any of the work so now you've got a machine that can generate new client signs up they get onboarded the work gets done the the retention is happening and really usually this is the last or second to last piece you remove yourself from in the agency um as you grow and as you scale and it truly is a powerful powerful feeling and so I just want to share five quick keys on this so that you can start to think about building your sales team and what you need to do to bring that into reality within your agency U number one first you've got to make sure you've got enough deal flow right if you don't have enough opportunities flowing in you may not be ready to remove yourself from the sales process just yet um and really there's there's typically three roles within an agency when it comes to Business Development um and three types of sales and Business Development positions you might place the the hunter cold caller like kind of that Prospect salesperson that's going to go make calls is going to do Outreach they're going to try and set appointments then you've got the lead follow-up appointment setter which is more you've already got people opting in you've already got people on your list you've already got people interested you just need someone to chase them down and kind of kick them from interested to the calendar right um and then you've got the closer the consultative salesperson which would be the one that has those sales conversations takes them through the you know the the kind of what we can do and how we can help and asks for the business usually what I'm talking about in in the context of this particular session we want to have enough deal flow that we can put a closer in place and have them be busy and maybe they do a little bit of lead followup as well right since they're full-time and you maybe are selling part time while running the agency they should have enough time to be able to have those conversations follow up with the deals that were interested but didn't close in your hot lead followup and then also do some Outreach on a daily basis as part of their responsibility until they've got a completely slammed calendar now a completely different side of the equation would be a business development representative or somebody that's just hitting the phones hitting the industry lists and trying to set appointments up for the appointment setter so if you're in the place either where you don't have enough deal flow um and you want to try and put a a hunter in place or you've already got a sales team and you need some more action you need more opportunities in play then this Hunter role can work um I would like to to say as agencies you want to create great content you want to set up your funnel you want to create enough deal flow so that people are scheduling with you or your salesperson before you put this business development role in place uh but if you did put it in place ideally they would be able to generate business from the ground up um you might consider commission only um but typically you're going to be looking for somebody that is more entry level for this type of role and and can just hit the phones ideally give them some scripting give them a dedicated list give them an approach that you want them to follow uh in my mind if if you're trying to use this as your main mechanism the best thing to do would would be to build a dream 100 list of Ideal prospects that you want them to chip away at and they're just going to chip away at that list um via phone via mail via direct message on Facebook LinkedIn um Instagram developing relationships overtime so that's the hunter prospector role the next role that I think most agencies need um at some level in the game would be a followup slappointment Center so if you've got your agency funnel running right you got people opting in for your guide or opting in for your book or registering for your webinar or registering to attend your live client interviews and things like that typically we can let the system like whether it's high level or hub spot or whatever we can let the system nurture those leads and take them to appointment but if you can put somebody on your team that is fully dedicated to following up connecting moving people from opted in to scheduled appointment that's going to move things forward a lot lot faster and typically what I see with this role is you're going to give them a a base salary relatively low between $10 and $15 per hour um and then you're going to incentivize them based on the appointments so you know $25 to $50 per booked appointment and maybe $250 to $500 per closed deal if you've got good deal flow and you can keep them busy doing this type of work they can make a solid 5060 $70,000 income as an appointment setter in this type of role and this is somebody you could hire internationally actually in our agency we've got um appointment sets from Pakistan through uh through rep stack which is one of our our partner companies um and they make these calls they send these emails they push these prospects over the edge you could also hire somebody us-based um and and maybe have a little bit better inflection and tone in the voice but with proper training this is a position you could definitely have overseas um and then really when when it comes to the closing of the deal this is really where you're going to free yourself up the the hunter maybe can set appointments for you and your team the follow-up person can maybe set appointments for you and your team but typically you're the one sitting on Zoom having these conversations and asking for the business uh and so you want to hire a true closer that can have those conversations for you um and I really think that it's only appropriate to hire this type of closer if you've already got the deal flow which means there's already people scheduling in to the tune of 10 to 20 strategy sessions per month it's taking up a lot of your time you're not able to really follow through on everything and you're get to say boom hey closer this is you now you're going to take these calls I expect you to close at my level or higher and then I also expect you to create new opportunities that might not already exist um compensation for this you know could be between $30 and $40,000 per year could be higher if you got somebody more seasoned but mainly we want them to get compensated based on their their commission right we want them to get paid based on what they what they do the big mistake I see agencies make when it comes to putting a closer in place is they try and give them a residual a large residual on the close so hey these clients are going to sign up for 2500 bucks a month and you closer are going to get 10% monthly residual $250 per month per client I can tell you that's a recipe for disaster please don't do that right when they're closing a setup deal for you they should only get paid on the first month and that's where they should earn their money you're going to have lots of cost of goods sold you're going to have lots of overhead to retain those clients like account managers and actual team doing the work you cannot afford to have um a salesperson dragging all of that Revenue out of your organization um and if they perform 69 months down the road you're going to want to pull your hair out and you're going to have to restructure their compensation so what works better would be to give them like a large up front between 20 and 30% of the first month um and no more than maybe 1 to 2% on the monthly residual um I don't usually give the residual I don't recommend it but maybe if a rep's been with you for a year two years and they've done a great job um and they're asking for it at that point you can add that in as a as a retention play for that particular sale person so this is what we see works well compensation wise don't go too high with the base um but don't also try and go only commission right CU usually people need some money coming in so they can like pay their bills and they can be you know even Keel um and I haven't had a lot of success hiring commission only salespeople that will set proper expectations at one point we did have a commission only sales guy and we're like okay this is going to be great and he actually sold right he was hungry um and he sold but he was selling way out of whack expectations like the clients were thinking something different than what we delivered and so maybe pay a little bit of a base so that they're not so hardpressed to set these crazy expectations and you can get the right clients with proper expectations that actually stay with you long term so I think for a closer again you want between 10 and 15 strategy sessions per month ideally at least 50 optins so if you're running Facebook ads or you're doing SEO or Google ads and you've got optins for your lead magnets or cheat sheets your books if you get 50 or more that closure should be pretty busy following up with those leads um obviously people should be scheduling in if you've got this set up correctly and so they're taking preset appointments um and they can focus on closing the deal and following up with those appointments and so I I could go for 45 minutes on how to build your sales team I wanted to give you some of the key ideas around like what the right person would be what you would want to compensate them the distinction between there's really three different roles right yes there's the hunter there's also the appointment center and there's the closer but you need to understand what you need within your business right now at some point you might need all three but usually the stepping stone is follow up to fill your calendar more with a with an appointment setter and then once the calendar is full for yourself then you put a closer in place to close the deals uh so thinking about the ultimate agency fund we need at least 10 strategy sessions per month usually that's the minimum threshold to go out and hire an appointment setter when you're placing this position you've got to map the projections that closer that salesperson needs to know how much am I going to make if I hit my target so make sure you kind of plot out for them look here's your target if you hit this this is how much you'll make over the course of the year if you blow it out of the park here's how much you could make on the high side and then if you just you know roll out of bed and do the very Basics here's how much you'll earn this will help sell the salesperson on your opportunity and help get them on board um and you know in Our member portal we we share the job description um you know kind of that comp plan all of the details you need in order to build this out um make sure you hire a rockstar um Rockstar sales people are everywhere but you can post on a DED zip recruiter post to your personal profile like if you've got a following and you've kind of already started to build your brand um I'm a big fan of using a video-based application process when it comes to a salesperson I don't care about their resume I don't care about how write how well they write an email I need to hear their voice I need to hear the inflection and so using a video-based application process where they can record a video in advance and you can hear that before you waste any time interviewing them can be super powerful um psychologically like there's a particular profile we found works best for salesp people that you want to be looking for um I'm a big fan of Colby assessments High fact find is important for selling digital marketing Services right you want somebody that understands SEO understands payperclick will do the research to have intelligent conversation so they can set proper expectations so that they can not only sell the client but sell them in a way that they are sticky um and then they need to be at least a little bit high on follow through otherwise you're going to get bored of the same call the same conversation the same ritual day in and day out and for sales you absolutely need somebody that from a dis profile perspective is high dominance High interpersonal skills um that way they got the backbone to ask for the business and ask for the yes and expect it but they've also got the personality that they enjoy talking to people they enjoy having conversations they care about the person on the other side of the phone save yourself a lot of Heartache as you recruit for salese run a call assessment find out that they're at least a five on follow through run a a dis profile and make sure that they've got an even balance between the dominance and interpersonal if they're too dominant they're going to turn some people off right they may close bad deals uh if they're too interpersonal you know they're going to wind up just wanting to be best friends with everybody and having these long conversations that don't lead to business you want to find that healthy balance between those two personality traits um and then think in advance what the onboarding process is going to look like how are you going to set expectations how you going to help them feel excited about joining your organization and being part of your sales team how you going to ramp them up so that they know how to have those conversations you want to have some type of training portal in place and you have to track please don't put a salesperson in place until you've got a dashboard that you can easily see how many strategy sessions are they having per month what's their close ratio what's happening on those calls and make sure that you track that make sure that they're accountable for it I see a lot of agencies they're like hey I'm going to put a salesperson in place they don't ever Define hey here's your expectation here's how many strategy sessions here's what I expect your close ratio to be here's what I need you to report back to me on a weekly basis and here's the outbound activity I need you to do if you're not hitting those metrics if you don't have those four things you can put a put in salesperson in place hope for the best and wind up super frustrated and you have to look at those reports you have to track those metrics and when you do and you get the right person you're going to have consistent sales monthin month out without you having to be part of the process so hopefully this was helpful if you got value from this and some new insights on how to build your sales team hit the like button share this with another digital marketing agency that can benefit for from it um and if you like more ideas on how to grow and scale your agency take it to seven figures and multiple seven figures I got a training called the seven figureure agency roadmap app where I walk you through the big picture of how to grow to seven figures over the next 12 to 24 months and Beyond uh you can access that by going to S figure agents.com roadmap that's 7f fig.com roadmap would love to know what questions you have post those in the comments if you had a takeaway or something that was like man that really stood out I'm going to benefit from that please put that in the comments I post these videos every Monday at 10: a.m. we're talking about how to land clients deliver worldclass results retain your at the highest level possible and how to scale and I watch the comments so if you have a follow-up thought please post that in the comments be sure to subscribe for future videos and I look forward to talking with you again soon