June 2020 Q&A Seminar with Adam Bell of Momentum
VIDEO: 1:10:59 mins
AUTHOR: Robert Craven and Adam Bell
In our June 2020 Q&A seminar Robert talked to our guest speaker Adam Bell of Moment on the state of play in agencies right now.
Robert Answers the questions:
Why do you get the customers you deserve
How to manage customer expectations
How to help customers understand which platforms to use
Client Reporting
Webinars
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:10
Hello, and this is the GYDA to talk Q&A. We have a small discreet group today very small and discreet group today, but we have questions which have come in already. So it's absolutely fine. Because those questions can still be answered, and people can still listen to what they are. So questions include, Robert, why did you say you get the customers you deserve? Which I can deal with? That's fine. And then I'm gonna flip through the list, which is a bunch round how to manage customer expectations? How do you help customers choose platforms, they're on client reporting, and using webinars as a lead magnet for agencies and I think Adams here from north of the border, he can answer virtually all these. So what we'll do is I'll do my first bit, then we'll Adam kind of come in on his better, more sophisticated answer. And then we can have a conversation with anything to do that. So the first thing was the you get the customers, you deserve statement from myself, which was originally you get the staff you deserve. And someone said, What on earth do I mean by you get the staff you deserve. And it's actually the same thing, which is, you recruit them, you put out the advert, you tell them what the job spec is, you train them, you show them how to do stuff, you reward them, you punish them, you show them what you want to do what you don't want to do, you give them the systems, you give them the process, you tell them what your values are, you help them to share their values. And so if they ended up going native on you, if they ended up being staff you don't want, the only person you can blame is yourself because it was the result of all your work. So I will say the same thing about your customers that you choose to talk to them, you choose to bring them in, you choose to write a proposal, you explain to them how you behave, you get an opportunity to interview and test them as much as they can interview and test you. You decide what deal and not negotiation you want to have with them and how you want to behave with them. And how do you make that clear. And so if you end up getting someone who goes native on you it's your fault. It's your fault for not having managed it for not having spotted it for not having had the right reporting in place for being too greedy to have I think about the word politically incorrect. But the poisoned dwarf clients that I've had in the past, they've been clients, which we didn't manage properly. And normally, we were incredibly greedy. We thought we could do something we couldn't do and got in above our necks in water. So that's my take on the you get the customers you deserve. So you have the right to say no, you have the right to to educate or tell the clients when they're wrong, you have the right to say to clients, if you want to contact us, the best time to do it is Monday morning between 10 and 12. That is the time to contact us. If you want something done this week. If you want something updated, give us 48 hours notice, whenever you educate your clients, and they're able to respond appropriately, if you don't educate them, then don't be surprised if they phone up at three o'clock on a Friday. And so could you just do this before close of play and have and blood pressure on you get the clients you deserve.
Adam Bell 03:38
Friday afternoon, this or worse than the Friday afternoon fly in the ointment is a horrendous thing.
Robert Craven 03:45
And it's never straightforward. It always it'll only take me 10 minutes. And then you get on and you realise that it's not on this laptop, or you've not got the password anymore because the passwords changed or Google decides to do a total refresh of your whole system. But it'll be back online in two hours time. And that promise of meeting your partner, wherever you're going to meet them not to meet people anymore. Out the window of his face.
Adam Bell 04:14
Okay, I'm guilty of sure do it that way round. I'm guilty of the Friday afternoon. You know, fly in the ointment. And quite often it's your own fine goes back to the you get the clients you deserve. I think because if you especially if you're an audit kind of role if you happen to do audit. So you're trying to do some work for a customer and you want to get it off your desk before you go away for the weekend. So, Friday afternoon, you finally get it done because you've procrastinated all week, you send it across to the client, they get done. And of course the client flows you up. You actually shoot yourself in the foot if you're not very very careful. Because something that took you lots of time or probably didn't take us Last time that you thought you procrastinated till the last thing on Friday, then shoots you in the foot because you sent it to them the last thing on Friday.
Robert Craven 05:08
Yeah, so you should have a big paste. It sort of says, Monday it's like, no, don't launch anything Friday, you know, don't anything new on a Friday, because you're going to end up spending Saturday morning, saying to your partner, I'm just popping down to the office for 20 minutes just to sort something out, which inevitably goes wrong. And yeah, my point was really simple, which is, I do fundamentally believe that we educate, we can educate our clients about how to get the best out of us. And we can get a sense of how inverted commas compliant they are. And I don't mean compliant as in, we manipulate them by mean, how much they get, how we work. And if they don't get how we work, and they don't get how to get great value from us, and we don't get what they want, then there's a poor fit. But I think it's our clients don't deliberately set out to be idiots, and they don't deliberately set out to screw you over. But I think we have a lot to answer for in terms of how we onboard them and how we run those relationships. So that's my piece on it. Let's move on to the other questions. So the first one, she's actually ironically boom, I just realised, it's how to, this is a question that came in, which is, how do you manage client expectations? It's as if that was a perfect piece. I'm going to go straight over to Adam on this. So Adam, until Toby about what your agency is. And then I'd be interested to know, how do you manage client expectations?
Adam Bell 07:00
Yeah, it's a really good question, isn't it? So our businesses moment, modern marketing agencies, so integrated multi service, you'd like to call it the very broadly search, social email media planning and buying real for marketing analytics. I think actually, the focus on marketing analytics comes in some way to managing customer expectations. And I think, almost anything, and it maps perfectly to everything you were just saying about getting the customers you deserve, there's a the front end to that, and then you do get what you deserve. You're advertising you're speaking to people, what you put in a proposal is all the first steps is setting an expectation. So the you know, if your proposals very high level, and kind of wishy washy, but some clients are willing to sign off on that, and then you find in three months time that you're not really sure what you're doing. And clients aren't very happy because they don't feel like they're getting value. And that is entirely down to your, I would say sales process. But I think there's a few things that around the proposal stage are really critical. Actually having this if you are a multi service business being very clear about which channels are being engaged upon exactly what that means. In our local market, that's been a huge challenge. Because people don't know the difference between doing LinkedIn and doing LinkedIn ads, or doing Facebook ordering. The more specific you can be about deliverables upfront, you're setting yourself off, I think on a path to success. And then it's about having ongoing management processes for that. So we've got a robust theory around monthly meetings, which are very tactical look back look forward. And quarterly business reviews which are a bit more strategic, what what's gone well, recently and what's coming up in the month, anywhere up to a year ahead for say retail businesses where you're you need to start planning Christmas in January, etc. So having those checkpoints having robust project management so we use Basecamp now have floated through a variety of tools in previous roles, but they camp was the one that fitted us best and seems to fit the clients that we needs to work with best, as well. So that's become a key part of our toolkit. The thing, yeah, you need to set yourself up for success at the beginning. And then it's your ability to manage that process on an ongoing basis, as well.
Robert Craven 10:19
What do you what our clients coming to you with? How educated our clients do you? Do you have a kind of a, oh, this is a to one client. In other words, they know about AdWords, they've done it before. And they want more or better versus these people who don't know what they want? They've never been there before. But they've heard about me, how do you segment? How do you shop up your clients according to their education when they arrive with you.
Adam Bell 10:55
Been a really interesting journey coming back north of the border, as we say for me. So having worked and done agency staffs in London, Melbourne, means more recently, and then backup in Aberdeen, the difference has been startling. One of the biggest changes that I'll often comment on is that we don't typically receive brief. So I think on two occasions, so far, we've actually had a brief from the client that said, here is my challenge, here is how I feel marketing can help. If your agency capable of supporting me with the services that you offer. In 95% of cases, it's been a case of identifying businesses that are ineffective, where we have experienced, approaching those businesses, highlighting some challenges that we can see that they have with their website or communications that are visible. And then building a solution rang them. So in a way that puts you more in the driving seat. But it's no less important that you are setting the expectation that we're saying these are the right channels. And we're kind of hanging our own hands on that. Because if it turns out that they're not, then you're not going to work on time. So that's been a big difference. The more recently and if we thought of, as we spread ourselves a bit further afield, with telecommuting, etc. We are in a bumping up against you know, the Edinburgh Glasgow type clients where they have done Google ads, they're less happy. And that's an easier sell in a way if you can prove that you can do it better. Yeah, different.
Robert Craven 12:59
Kind of leads me on to the next question. How do you help clients choose platforms? My argument is always clients don't wake up in the morning and say, I want some LinkedIn advertising, or I want some work done on Instagram, or I want some Google ads. They wake up in the morning thinking, How the hell can I get more customers? Yeah. And one of the biggest mistakes I think agencies make is that they are under this naive belief that the customers, the majority of customers actually care how you feed them with leads. Now, clearly, there are sophisticated educated brand managers who are well educated, and that they want an agency to do the doing for them. But the majority of people go to an agency on the assumption that the agency has specialisation and skill and at the same time, the reason you sit through endless webinars, seminars and meetings with HubSpot, and Google and Bing on so on and so forth, is to become an expert in your field so that you're able to just select what's required. But the client has still I had to call just before now. I just actually go through it because it's a classic example. Where first round funding, we've got 600- 700k. We've got this app, it's fantastic app, it's going to blow the world apart. And what we need is we need to get access to influences. Yes, like so like, What do you mean by influencers and the conversation just goes on and on and on? Can you help me put me in touch with agencies who can help me do this? And it's like He's chucking out social media words, that makes sense, without really understanding. It's like, do you want to pay for influencer? Or do you want just to talk to people who are influential? Do you want? What is it you're trying to achieve? And you can see that as I sent him to think you're sending him to different agencies, there was everything from the small nimble relatively recently started up who will work their little cotton socks off, but maybe don't have the depth of experience all the way through to the much more expensive, but I mean, we're still talking independent, much more expensive, more experience, more guarantee they're gonna get more they're gonna, but I mean, just start off with how many of your clients, potential clients are educated versus not educated about the options? And then how do you push them in the right direction?
Adam Bell 16:03
Yeah,. I think, that map's very much back to think it maps back to geographically, where we find ourselves as well, which is both a challenge and an opportunity for the last, the last year, we've had a real focus on doing that education piece. So working with the local Chamber of Commerce and the local council and getting speaking for events and more recently on virtual events. Where we are coming with the topic with the Rockies, your modern marketing mix, and we have that word, modern as a slight ploy on the fact that marketing around here really is understood to be that ad, you've put in the paper for the last 20 years, that you're not sure if you get anything from it, but you're too scared not to do it anymore, because maybe your whole business hinges on it, then you're not actually quite sure. And I think it's it in a way. So Scott, who works on our team, her background is very much in media planning and buying in London did that for a number of years, and was kind of in London, sort of 8 to 10 years ago, when the big shift happened. And for the first time, your traditional media budgets, and you're talking about big budget, went mostly digital for the first time. And I think having lived through that transition, coming back to somewhere, we're actually marketing budgets for pretty much the four shows that you do, or you use the print ads that you do. And maybe you've actually done some local radio to going. So the internet exists. So it's a platform you can mark it on. And there are various methods for engaging on that. One we've started using recently is pushing poll. So Google's a really good polling channel, where you're understanding what people are actually looking for and calling them in. And then you've got a lot of push channels like social media, social media advertising. And if you're a business to business company, maybe that's slightly better on LinkedIn, and if you're in business to consumer company made me slightly better on Instagram is very much coming from on the whole that level. And walking through the journey with people. I think, again, you're probably in the last six months, we've started to be able to go into areas just having more, as you say, tenure as with us as an agency to be able to approach bigger clients who maybe have been doing different things. Sometimes it's bigger agencies, bigger Scottish agencies, admittedly, but with much higher average retainers than we currently have. And actually being able to dissect some of that work. And so you're paying hundreds of pounds a month for a press release that goes to the chamber newsletter. And actually, maybe if he spent a few 100 quid more on LinkedIn, and so you'd actually get some leads that you can then follow up. So, the level of understanding of, especially digital marketing as a topic, I think, is really quite low. Even with companies who are spending a lot extensively on marketing whichever challenge but also a large opportunity, as we found, so I think that the key was in that is being able to give people a roadmap. So in terms of high D, then recommend channels, how can we recommend channels, that means clients, one on one, start working with us, but then you're gonna want to keep working with us in the long term. And we're very much about start small and grow and all of that philosophy. So my catchphrase, which Gordon will be sick of hearing is, start with search, start with search, the search is a good place to start, because it's intent driven, if you can use what you learn about search to understand about what your customers are asking, that's a really good starting point, if you've got no data, it's a way of getting data in very quickly, easily, and tapping the water.
Adam Bell 20:57
And then you can build on top of that. So once you've got some intel, then you could develop a social media strategy, an email marketing strategy, then if you look at how advertising fits on top of that, and then going through the ceiling, etc. But not being afraid to say, you know, for some really, really niche, subsea oil and gas companies, engineers just don't search for their solutions. So actually, still starting with CI can very quickly disqualify Google as well. Because you can say, well, actually, people aren't looking for this. And then we need to come up with another method for putting it in front of them.
Robert Craven 21:39
Isn't the issue that you're talking about less sophisticated clients, that they're kind of expecting you to be the sorcerer or the magician. They've heard about it, believe it works. They've seen endlessly on their Facebook feed, you know, for 10 pounds, you can reach a hundred people, and all that kind of stuff. And so they have this belief that they can throw some money at you and you will magics new clients out of nowhere. So Dixon asks, quite rightly, thank you, Dixon. Isn't it the role of the agency rather than the customer? To define the lead gen process? To turn, please reach influences to we will do this, which changes the dial which insert process here. I mean, what you're saying that Dixon is the it's almost like going to the doctor and saying, Doctor, Doctor, I've looked on Google. And I think I probably having a heart attack, because I got all the right symptoms. And the doctor says, Well, let me just have a look at what's going on. And yes, the symptoms do fit a heart attack, but they also fit chronic indigestion. So let's rule out heart attack, because you're still walking around. And, in fact, your hands weren't numb, blah, blah, blah. But we can now tell you what we think you've really got, and I think as a client, myself coming in, going to see digital agencies, some of the work that we have, you know, it is, this is what I think we've gotten is where I think we need to go. Are we right? Or are we wrong? Slipping that, whether you're dealing with young, immature, small businesses, or sophisticated brands, the issue is about whether you want to end up being a supplier where they say, Hello, we want to spend 500 quid a month on Google, can you do it for us? Or whether you want to be involved in the conversation, which is, here's our product mix. And we think that we're going to be selling product two and three, but you may understand the market and how the market works better than us. Can we have this grown up strategic conversation, the trusted advisor piece, and I guess, it's about how, yeah, how we've managed that conversation. I would always say, you don't want to be the person just selling a couple of hours you want to be the person having that higher level conversation. Alexandri says, we encountered two types of clients. One, I want some SEO type of work, type work client, to I don't understand anything you Do whatever you want. I want results, client guarantees. We do better with type one, which is I want some SEO type of client, because we can develop something from that. But I think these conversations all kind of go back to the opening thing about the customers you deserve. So if you say please stand up and say, you can have some SEO or PPC work from 100 pound a month. And we'll do it all for you. You're setting up your store, in an entirely different way from we work in the boards of challenger brands, bringing the challenger brand to a new market using quick, fast, furious tactics to grow turbocharged and grow the brand, customer base, you're just like, setting yourself and setting yourself in a different space. So I guess it's kind of you get the customers you deserve. I'll still get back to that. Because anytime you can say no. So you can have a filter. So you'll filter if it's in PPC, the filter is: Hello. We'd like you to do some work for us. Fantastic. Can you give me access to your NNC? No. Okay, in that case, we can't tell you whether we can help you or not. So we can't help you. You know, so you can have a really clean filter to filter out whether they're serious or not. Or you can have a filter, which might be the Americans call it hardball selling which is. So there's a site in the states which says it says if you want to work with us, you join our three day audit discovery session with all of our team, okay, which will be $26,000. That's kind of their opening gambit on the top of the first page. 95% of people go, I'm not willing to put $26,000 into an audit. But one or two people will go. This is the sort of agency I want to bring the whole team into a room for three days to understand me, to me. And I have $26,000 Because I've got a budget of 300k. So yes, and that filtering is incredibly effective. You know, if you're after a particular people, and I guess part of the problem is, most of us are too. We're not enthusiastic enough about saying no often enough, so we end up saying maybe we can do that. Anymore thoughts and your thoughts, Dixon?
Adam Bell 28:04
Well, now the one with the reason I sort of jumped in with the role of the agency, the question on the sort of, isn't it the role of the agency to, you know, be the ideation kind of person is that I've recently found myself surprised by a couple of instances where I've effectively been the supplier like you, Robert I was effectively or not the supplier was basically the customer and needed some stuff and I kind of was a little disappointed by the people I thought I knew well. In their ability to think for themselves and jump into it and help take my idea which might have been entirely as nebulous as the person that phoned you up before he came on to the air or of being a little bit vague with what I wanted. And I was just said that they didn't jump in and say okay, I get the idea. Now I'm going to pull this and you know, and put some flesh around Dixon's half baked idea. And I think that a customer wants that. If they don't want that, then they probably don't want a customer, they don't want you as an agency, they want a person they can tell do this, this, this, this this, which is probably better employed or fire up work or something like that. And both are fine. But I think if you want to get the top of the chain, you need to demonstrate not just the idea, but the process behind it that you're going to apply beyond the idea you can't expect just get the 26,000 pound audit without being able to demonstrate the 250,000 pounds worth of actual work that's going to follow that audit and that you're going to have the resources to bring that through if those your numbers, but that might numbers.
Robert Craven 30:01
But that's just about how you present the offer. And the offer is clearly, we want to be talking to people, you've got a 10 to 50k per month budget. They're just saying very clearly, that's where we are so if you've not got that budget, and we recognise, we're filtering to 5% of inquiry, but that's fine. If I look back at the last three or four bits of work that I've put out to tender, the one it hasn't worked, you know, it's, I think, we put out seven or eight pieces of work in the last three or four years. Okay. And I'd say that 85% of them, just writing down another 85% of them didn't work for us as customers. Now I know I wrote a book called customer is king. I don't think that I'm that unreasonable. I think I'm a human being, you're not being treated like a human being was common courtesy. So example number one is Member site to 20k Build. We said what we wanted a bit of co creation, they sent us a proposal basically said 20,000 pounds, and we will deliver the member site. And we said, fantastic. We love you. We love what you've done. We'd love to work with before we love your website, we've actually got the bloody chequebooks in our hand, we're going to actually, we're going to do this. But before we proceed, we'd just like to understand, can you just fill it in because we're a bit angry retentive. So let's just fill in what we get for the 20 Grand what the time dates are, when it happens have completed or be. And by return, we got an email that said, we don't think you're the sort of clients that will feel happy with us. And so we got sack before we even got going now you get the customers you deserve. So they didn't deserve us, which is cool. And there may have been a misunderstanding, and they could have put it right. And they didn't know that I knew people and had they manage that process a bit more carefully. I could have gone around. So they're an awesome company. They do 20k websites, not right for us, because we're too small to be big enough budget, whatever it is, but they're really great at what they do. If you've got, you know, 50k budget, and if they do do Rolls Royces at 50k. And then they shouldn't have offered as often as a master at 20. Anyhow, the second one is straightforward. We want to do a campaign we want to reach loads and loads of people. Yes, yes. Yes. That's very good conversation about profiling. Yes, that's very, very good. goes dead email to email to the person I'm talking to no response, email, again, no response email to the managing director. I'll get on to Fred, no response email against the managing director. I'll get on to Fred. Actually, you know, I know your agency's friends of mine, but like, I'm trying too hard to give you some money. You know, there are other people out there who can do third example at blood blinking Google, in front of 50 agencies all waving the things around. You know, we can do lead generation get we can get leads in hundred hundred quid a pop for what you're looking at, blah, blah, blah. That's all the conversation so stand up in front of them and say, fantastic, that's great. You say you can get these in front of me for hundred hundred quid I think that was a number it could have been wrong. I will I balance my chequebook, you know? Yeah, I want 10 leads a week 20 leads a week 30 leads a week and I will pay for them. Okay if you give them but that's the deal. I will pay you for lead gen, okay. And I wait at the end of the end of the session expecting half a dozen other 30 people coming up to me, having done the sons and figured out that 100 quid a lead and we can easily give him 30, 40, 50 leads a week. It's just a couple of buttons, and away we go. And they all avoided me. They weren't prepared to put skin in the game. They all wanted their hourly rate, which is cool, which is fine. But my point is that the buyer of digital agency, the digital agency world hasn't figured out how to go into its audience in a way that the audience doesn't feel. It's like a full throated apprentice thing. It's like, I'm gonna wear a black T shirt. I'm gonna have a ping pong table in the background. I mean, we're talking lots of very vague terms and you as a client get it? And actually, the agencies don't get it. Because the agencies have hammers. And they way too often treat the clients like nails. Oh, we are a Google PPC agency, you've come to us the answer if you need PPC from Google, but it may be you don't it may be that you're trying to appeal a really old to a really old audience. And that being would be better. Or it may be you're trying to appeal to a really young, old.
Adam Bell 35:30
I'm sorry, Robert, but Google is the old audience now.
Robert Craven 35:33
We've talked about tick tock, you know, before we got, you know, I spoke to a guy the other day Timothy armour, you know, he only sells into Gen Z. You know, that's and he's his agency is doing awesomely well, because the NHS, the British government, McDonald's, they all want to talk to Gen Z. And he's got an agency, which basically does most of his work on tick tock on a bit on Instagram. Yeah, they will use Google if they have to. Sorry, and of other things. Okay. So that's it should just talk about where you're at.
Adam Bell 36:15
But you're right. It's the value is not showing, it's fine to say, right, we need to judge our clients, and we want the ones that are 25,000 pounds, or 500 pounds, or, in my case, 50 pounds. And, but you've got to show value for that thing, and the agencies are all agencies of it. And I was when I was brought up in a proper agency side, I think I was bad at showing the value I was putting for the pitch that I was putting in there. And the as soon as I saw the agency saw and figured out what I was doing wrong and made it a lot better. And it is really interesting. I think it's a really interesting point I absolutely agree with what's being said there and certainly with point to bank, that is the process that it should be it is the agency's job to define the process, and then to be able to prove why we are recommending that process, because we've seen it happened this way before. Because this makes sense based on market research, etc.
Robert Craven 37:30
I think there's a bigger piece. And also I think it's an opportunity that standing there in front of agencies, and they're missing it. And I'll tell you a story to explain it. So the story is, I get phone to go and see this woman in Finchley, who's retired and she's set up this teaching website. She spent her redundancy money in her husband's pension fund from hundreds of 1000 Quick. And it's launching that day. I think they only had one viewer and she's in tears. And she's saying to me what the hell's going on? Why is it and when you actually picked into what how she spent the money. She went to a graphics artist who took the money to do the logo, she went to a marketing agency who did the brand, she went to web development who did the website, she went to all the specialists happily took their 15 or 20,000 quid, and no one at any point said is this business model and concept a good idea? No, it's not it's rubbish. But it doesn't matter. Because if you want to give me 15k To build a site, I'll take the 15k now the opportunity that's there is around what is it agents? What is it that clients want? What clients want is they want to grow their business. So the opportunity is going up the food chain. So thank you very much, Mr. Clark, you've come here because you want sales that we need to understand sales in the context of your marketing, and we need to understand your marketing and the concept of how marketing works. And then more importantly, how a business model works. So if you're able to have that business growth consulting piece, understanding our business growth works, you know, and Dixon here, you know, went to the trouble of understanding business by going off and doing an MBA you understand the business world, then your view of marketing and your view of sales is much more informed. And you're actually able to help the client far more than just standing there saying I've got to hammer your nail off. I got a hammer, and unfortunately all the platforms want you to sell their stuff. You know, I went into the HubSpot Academy today, which is actually great stuff on marketing, great stuff on sales, great stuff on lead gen and great stuff on. But it doesn't stretch out to models of growing a business, it doesn't stretch out in different ways of marketing, it doesn't the, how you get recuperated Long Term versus short term internal, but the role of the board and so on and so forth. And that I think is where the value can be added. Because at the moment, what happens is, you keep, we keep on pushing ourselves into the position of supplier, where we're here to give you leads on a plate, when in fact, I keep on going on about it, what I think we want is to be in the boardroom, when the boardroom say we've got these 12 products, and we don't know quite which product which will be selling and in which order and how and to whom, and where and why. And they kind of want someone to come in and say those three products are for old people use it, you know, that's just way you haven't, you've totally missed the boat, you haven't seen things change. I've done a really, really quick review of the industry of the market your competitors. And this is what your competitors are doing. This is what your customers are asking for. And this is what you're delivering. And you're not doing that. And when you do is, you know, one of the guys who works for me, in the general consultancy, every client, he goes to on the very first meeting. He's old school, this guy, you know, he likes to wear a jacket, and he does a presentation. And his presentation includes is your competitor, what your competitors are doing right now starting off with the bad ones and ending up with the really cool ones. And then a bit of research and what customers are asking for. And then a nice little matrix showing the competitors showing the customers and showing where you are. And if just like he wins business, because he's going overboard. And he's selling, you're selling sales function he's selling, you know, digital marketing, he's going overboard and explaining the context. I just don't think we spend enough time there. Partly because we've got very pointy heads.
Adam Bell 42:39
Great exactly that there was a great Margaret's in peace recently. Like where did marketing lose four P's. And like that says much in house marketing as it applies to agencies that marketing used to be part of all those conversations. It's not just promotion, it's the product of any good, where are we promoting it. And even price used to be part of that conversation. And it's become so far removed from that basic, like high school business class strategy. That yeah, I think that's where all this all these gaps are paid from.
Robert Craven 43:27
Well, that's but I think that you know, the opposite. I mean, the opportunity, but there's another conversation about whether the opportunity is becoming a full service agents, I don't think that's necessarily the case, I think you just need to recognise that if you're going to stay within preferred performance or stay within SEO, you need to understand how, why you're vulnerable and how you need to pick up on managing that one out. But I think there is an opportunity because as a customer. Yeah. It's kind of the same with the banks. It's the same with the accountant is like, I'm not a number on a person. Do you understand me as a person? In other words, what I want to do is play more guitar and I want to see my kids more. Do you understand business? Do you understand how business operates? Do you really understand what 20,000 pounds means to me? Would you really understand what not hitting these targets means to me? Means sorry? And then do you understand my business? In other words, do you understand the type of business that I work in? And Business Link, if you remember them? Banks and accountants, they don't understand me. They don't understand business. They don't understand my business. So if you're able to go in so understand your business, we've talked about what you're trying to achieve. We're trying to retire in five years time. We understand business, we've got MBAs or we're in business ourselves like yourselves, and More importantly, understand your business because we worked with five mouse manufacturers before we've worked in professional services before, so we can help you. And that just feels like that's the opportunity that maybe some of the agency that I'm working with needs to grab hold of. We talked about webinars is a lead magnet. I know that you've just done a couple. Everyone does. Adam and I were talking just before the call about everyone's kind of zoomed out in a way. But how are you , Adam? How are you using webinars to create leads? What's the process?
Adam Bell 45:48
I think it's, yeah, it's the theory that the webinar is not the answer. But it's part of a toolkit that leads to the answers. I think, if nothing else, we've been able to use extra capacity in the last few months to really go, how are we going to position ourselves? And what kind of marketing are we going to do to a deal, as all of this conversation has been about to the customers that we want to have? And webinars were? Yeah, there's been a lot of them, it's probably been a few lessons and in Aberdeen. And we had a few conversations that led to think mine could be some uptake. And I think it maps back to partly the education work that we've been doing for the last 12 - 18 months. In terms of you can't position it, that you can't position this specific topic as the overnight thing and expect people to get that. So it wasn't, we're now going to do a webinar on physical and that's that. It was positioned, as we've decided that we will do a series of webinars, and it's going to be focused on, you know, businesses are have been through something and they're going through something else, and no one has all the answers still. And it's going to be really different and really difficult for a long time. But we know that anecdotally, and at a high level, digital, and there's that digital thing that we probably need to be doing some more of, and it can maybe help very much position with a series of webinars helping businesses who maybe haven't done a lot of digital today to understand more about what the bits of the digital in a digital marketing ecosystem are. And that went out as a press release, etc, etc, etc. And then we came up with a schedule of events. And the first one was Google, because it maps to start the search and why search is good. And why actually, if you do nothing else, just spend some time on Google Trends. And in Keyword Planner, and actually just do it yourself. And you'll be amazed at what you can learn about what your potential customers are absolutely looking for. And answer the public looks like my favourite tool. Just focus on doing that. And then the second one was on social media and I think even less evolved digitally. Businesses are aware that social media is a thing and saying, Okay, well, look, we work with Sprout Social, and they've got all this global data that shows how engagement has changed on Facebook as a result of COVID-19 and how engagement changed on Instagram and how the different age groups are responding differently. So what does that then mean for you? What are the things you should mainly be focused on messaging at the moment? So I guess it was in that it's finding an ability to take a pretty high level thing that's going to broadly appeal to quite a lot of people. And then much as you do if you're doing the proposal process properly, as we were speaking about before, breaking it down into the chunks that some of those tracks are going to appeal to some more than others according to earlier stages. But there's an idea that all works together into the mix. And then very tactically, it's using the features that certain platforms give these are the ability to do polls. As part of a essay, you can ask some really high level questions. beautiful one. Do you currently know how your website ranks in Google? That then gives us the ability to follow up afterwards? The q&a sessions are always very good. And then we always have an email that sent afterwards with a particular thing.
Robert Craven 50:19
That asks, What do you like about the answer the public feature? What do you use it for?
Adam Bell 50:27
Yeah, I think there's probably more of a conversation to be had here. But it's the ability to give people in our, again, our market, something that they've never seen before, and the ability to go, you know, they know that they should probably do a blog. And they know that they should maybe do some search ads, because I've heard that that's something you can do, but they're not really actually sure what a Google ad is, and what an organic listing is. But they know that content has something to do with it that actually, gosh, if you start thinking about that, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life doing it. And that's not actually my job. So it's the ability to go to someone and say, well, actually, what is it you do? Okay, cool. Let's stick that in the tool. Let's see what the internet has to say about that subject. Okay, so if you talk about a content plan, that's going to map to an advertising strategy. And we can talk about landing pages, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, social media content and sharing. And it's the next step is to say, here's something you can actually see, we put it in. And here are the questions that people are asking, if you do. Come try not to use an actual client. If you do, X engineering process in the North Sea, what questions have historically been asked about that? And actually, if you can figure out that someone who is an engineer on an oil rig, who encounters issues every day, and sometimes they're searching for is there a solution to X Y, Z numerable. That's what your product does, actually isn't. So we can get some content together about that, and maybe an ad for it and start sharing about that on social media. It just is a next step to making it really tangible before going all the way into 50 slide presentation about something and and the reason I use it is to get the respondents as you could access that kind of information.
Robert Craven 52:47
Okay, cool. I just want to switch slightly into using LinkedIn. Because I use LinkedIn and Dixon uses LinkedIn. And so I'll share my approach, Dixon, you have to share your approach to the? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, first, me first. Okay, so Adams aware, we just started a advertising campaign within LinkedIn. But my primary DIY approach has been Monday, comment on 10 Interestingб potential targets, posts Tuesday. So hey, LinkedIn says we should connect, why don't we connect, I think it'd be a good idea. And then on Tuesday, I also look at 10 more and comment. And so every day you're adding 10 new requests to get people in, when they come on, when they are the ones that do come on board, then I use a loom video loom introduced a video saying, great to connect, here's a loom introducing video, it's hard, great, this is what we're doing love to talk more. And then if they come towards me, then we flip them over into the guy degree. And I've been doing some stats on this. And we're winning. I reckon in the last four weeks, we want to consultancy client every week, from I know taking six weeks, but from a cold start of in our instance and digital agency, Owner, Founder CEO or whatever the specific thing is, and that's just doing it on a free basis. And now that worked for me because we're about engagement, and we need to have conversation and therefore it needs to I would argue that piece needs to be relatively manual. So Dixon, share your approach because it's a different approach, but I copy it's not start copying.
Adam Bell 54:48
It's totally different actually, um, I think that I'd forgotten and, to be fair, Robert kicked me about a month ago. He said if you're not going out and doing sales, you're not bloody doing anything. And after I complained about that for about a week in my head, I finally decided that the difference for me is I've been in the industry a long, long time. And I've already got an awful lot of LinkedIn connections. In fact, when I searched LinkedIn connections for the phrase, SEO, first level connections only, I have 3500 of them. Now since my job right now is effectively being the agency for effort for links, which is trying to talk to SEO agencies, and people are involved in SEO, in house, wherever I've got 3500 potential people right there. And all I need to do, I say, all I need to do is turns out to be a bit harder than you think. But you know, is every day, go and approach 50 of them. And five or six of them will then want to come and do a demo. Now. demos are the great Legion. So you know, so literally, it's going through this list and saying, Hi, I'm just trying to get in contact with mail, all my SEO contacts, have you seen in links, and there's a video on the homepage Do you want to do on a demo. And then if you do not short URL that we can all remember, and I don't have to find every time from a calendar. And that's what I'm doing. Going through that, that and that the problems I've got are that it'squite manual, quite a bit of cut and paste. Now I've now I've thought the process through and got it down. It turns out to be very tedious. But of course the isn't my first level connections. And I cannot I don't want to give this to anybody else. Because other people don't know that we had a beer in Las Vegas in 2013. And I got drunk and promised never to talk about this particular topic or whatever it may be. And those things I need to try and remember. And so it's got to be personal for me. So it's not hard to it's a little bit hard to automate. But we have built something that I'm going to try and work on after I've got through those three and a half 1000 Because the other problem is actually sorting those three and a half 1000 It stopped off for 1000 I can't just go to page 98 I've gotta go click, click, click, click, click. So every morning, I got to wake up and go down. And after 100 pages 1000 results in won't let me go any further. So I'm gonna have to search by country, and then do it by country and stuff to find all my contacts, I can't just export them anymore, like you used to be able to. But the second thing that we're going to do, and we've done a really cool thing, we've realised that you can't just go and email everybody, but you can request quite a lot of introductions to people. So you can say, you know, if you can find the people, then you can request a connection. So what I've done is we've built a little report, so I can go identify should say this is shot. Oh, gosh, I'm the CEO, I can shoot yourself, right. So we've got a system now which I've got a brainy CTO where I can type in a market. So we've got a trend tracking tool. The reason I asked about it to the public, it's because we've got a thing that creates loads and loads of questions. And so and they're working categories, so now I can go and look at the automobile industry. Find out about using a Google API search instance and stuff, finding all a bunch of LinkedIn profiles that are relevant to the automobile industry and are market analysts in the automobile industry that comes out of the list. It then builds a specific report, which I can specifically give to them in a short URL, because I've only got 250 characters when I asked to connect with them. And so I can then go to them and say, Hi, I've done it, we've got a little report about the automobile industry that we've written for you specifically for you. It'll be online for three days, like to connect so start the connection with something else. And we can theoretically go and do that again and again and again again, and now I've given a targeted reason to connect because you can't do anything in my opinion until you've connected with basically done if I said too much really.
Robert Craven 58:32
Good a friend of mine. He just created a bunch of loom videos. Today, there'll be one for Adam wouldn't be one for Alexandra. And it just is literally Dave. Adam, whatever the popular name is one name just created introduced for you, because I want to talk to you about your business and how we can help you Dave. So Dave, this is what we're going to do today.
Adam Bell 59:58
He hasn't done one fixins.
Robert Craven 1:00:01
He recorded like 25 of them, one for each name. And then he sends it introduce it to Dave. As long as he gets it in the right order, he sends the Dave video to Dave and the other video to Adam, of course, there's always the problem when he doesn't send it to the right person. But I think what you're talking about Adam Dixon, and what I'm talking about is when you're in the business of taking advantage, or wishing to be engaged, I'm in the business, I want to be engaged with my clients. And because on the whole, we're selling consultancy, so I think in that instance, it can work. I think the issue is when you're trying to be a bit more transactional in what you're selling, that you possibly you're probably don't need, your all my time.
Adam Bell 1:00:57
I've identified a screw though, because I'm essentially I'm selling a technology, but I still the relationship with your customers are still the same.
Robert Craven 1:01:05
Mojo 25, he spends an hour a day on LinkedIn. That's what he does. And he's, that's a capitalised agency. And that's where he's making his that's where he's making his mark and what he's finding people. But he's got a really compelling proposition, you know, so his proposition is around US agencies, and you want to inhale, but you don't know how, let me show you how to do it. And it's like a really nice proposition. And it's kind of quite disruptive. So again, I think it can work, I think it's got its space. But I guess at the end of the day, I mean, for me, it's about just thinking you talk about it, you have pillars of marketing, you know, and you and you're never quite sure what, which bit works in which it doesn't work. And they only they work for a while, and then they stop working, and so on and so forth. So you have to kind of distribute your marketing spend in your marketing activity between paid and unpaid between LinkedIn grunt work and not, I'm always really nervous as of now, a single strand. I mean, if you're Tom Peters, you can only be on, you're able to only be on Twitter, because he's so awesomely big, that people were gonna find us mere mortals, we kind of do actually need to spread ourselves. Because we don't have a right where our customers are going to be. So it's what we're talking about is ROI. And I was on a call earlier on today, and someone was challenged me about LinkedIn. And so where's the ROI was the ROI, where's the ROI, and they just couldn't see it. But that's because their model, they were selling HR people. And they already had four and a half 1000 in database, you know, they have more than four and a half 1000 is more than enough people to have to, to make a tidy business.
Adam Bell 1:03:29
Just a very quick get be interested to know, in terms of a focus of time, probably this would be interested firms of basically sell frog and Dixon, how much time would you invest or effort or however you want to quantify it to maximising engagement with your existing connections, which is absolutely a sales strategy versus building the brand of your business, which has the potential to appeal to people who don't know you, how do you split that up in your head as workflows.
Adam Bell 1:04:24
So all I know is I was under doing the sales stuff before. So I was all about the story and the brand and the building a business and it's a brand it's a very new, so I love being right at the bottom of the thing, and it's technically advanced and, you know, hopefully, you know, somebody will find me out and buy me out before it gets too big. But I realised that I was underplaying the sale stuff, you know, I was assuming that my model was, has always been because it was the same with majestic, which is my history was, was get people in for a free account, one in X converts into a paid account, everything's grand, and then we do use a support system to do the upselling. So you know, so my support system doesn't become a cost, it becomes a lead gen centre. And that was my logic. And it did work it worked brilliantly with majestic, I have to say, but I wasn't doing the proper selling, I wasn't getting up and physically going and talking to each individual, I was standing up and doing the webinars or the conferences and stuff like that, and that was doing the job. I suspect if I had gone and talk to all those three and a half 1000 People 10 years ago, probably a lot less 10 years ago. But anyway, you know, every single one of them, and then done a demo with as many of those as I could have done, I probably would have gone further faster with Beckett back in the day with majestic, but this time round. What I'm doing now is it's painful amount of time because it only takes about half an hour to go and approach 50 People for the day on LinkedIn, it really that and then it's out there of those I don't know how many are going to respond, but it's probably going to be, you know, one, I'm hoping then that you know, I'll get half a dozen demos booked into Calendly. So basically all I then have to do to the calendar, and better chance everything else after that is reactive. And so it only takes 30 minutes a day and then checks to the people that want to chat whether they are interested or not. So it doesn't take that long once you've got the process down there. But it took me months to figure out that all I needed to do was talk to the people I already knew, you know, that took me I can't believe how long it took meto listen to the very obvious thing of you know, they didn't connect with you for no reason in the first place. You know, just get off your ass and just let them know how will they know if you don't talk to them. So I'd like to because I'm not spending that much. And I have to do the demos. So six demos is going to take the best part of best part of, but at least, you know, it's going to take me three or four hours. Somebody's ringing me, I might have to talk to them.
Robert Craven 1:07:25
But you do know what the IRI is I mean, you?
Adam Bell 1:07:27
Yeah, oh, that I've got, I've got such back of back of fat packet.
Robert Craven 1:07:31
So that was really reassuring for me, just as I think, well, actually, we have actually we've done for, I think, three definite pieces of work. And I look at the names of the people, and you only see them in LinkedIn. And there am I going, Hi, whatever version of my intro, whether it's Hi, Li says we should connect, I think it's a great idea or whether that's the more straightforward I run a community of and I'd like to. And you can see that was the starting point, you know, that maybe three or four weeks before, I'd said I'd searched into LinkedIn, SEO, digital agency, whatever it is touching, touching, and give it another month with you, then you'll start seeing what the numbers are. And I think those numbers are kind of everywhere. But my point about pillars is that those change in the old world. When we used to do conferences for a number of years, I did conferences with Barclays when we were a generalist consultancy prob about 10 years ago, and one conference on investing in businesses 100 business cards in the bucket remember the bucket? Yeah, for a prize for a free book leads to 15 conversations leads to 10 meetings, leads to 5 proposals leads to 3 pieces of work an average of 15,000 pound a piece of work, and the metric for several years was how much business do we want? So how many events will we do it for undernutrition people it was as simple as that. And then suddenly it stopped working. it's like one year, people came and they left and that's fine. You know, that's cool, but it was like, Hey people, we still did the business card thing blah, blah blah but the normal same thing I would argue with Zoom calls, you know that? 8 weeks ago I was guaranteed 100 people in a room and now everyone's offering bloody zoom, LinkedIn, webinar free things till the cows come home. Which is fine. I'm not gonna problem with that. Okay, so what else do we need to do? How do we need to do to get to? So this is kind of an interesting conversation because he started talking about how agencies promote themselves to their clients who ended up talking about how does a business, promote itself and getting in front of people, but I think it's relevant for agencies because they need to understand the world. The world that our cards are in is a Moveable Feast. And I think it's really really dangerous to have that one nail via SEO or be better Google PPC or whatever it is, because it just may or may not be the right thing, the right time, the right place.