Video - Paul Sullivan - Create 60 Leads in 8 Weeks
"VIDEO: 39:09 mins
AUTHOR: Paul Sullivan
A quick-fire GYDA Talks episode, in which Robert Craven catches up with Paul Sullivan Founder and CEO of BIAS Digital — a London based inbound marketing agency that achieves success through an inbound marketing strategy. Their topic: 'Create 60 Leads in 8 Weeks'. So what is the secret sauce of generating sales in current times? A must watch ...
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:07
So we've got full solving of this right now. So Paul created it, it's almost like a piece of clickbait. I know it wasn't. But there was a message on our Facebook group, which goes, Hi, does anyone have some advice on hiring business biz dev for their agency at the moment? It is just me that handles the sales side of the business. I'm looking to make the business less reliant on the things I'm interested in including finding a good person, and what their day to day should include posts. And Paul replied very provocatively, but he replied, I will happily share how we're doing things. We've created 60 Working leads in the last eight weeks. And 213 follow ups. Come on, Paul.
Paul Sullivan 00:53
Thanks. Thanks for that, Robert. Good intro, I think it was quite easy for us. I'm an avid reader. And I think that the kind of books that I've been reading have played a part into why I chose to make the decision that I did. And when COVID kind of was announced and locked down went down, I just said, quite honestly, to hell with marketing, like, like, no one really is going to need more marketing, because my assumption was that everyone wasn't going through LinkedIn, they were gonna flood LinkedIn with as much content as possible. But, you know, I think, for me, I've always kind of looked at digital marketing as a bridge, or, or something that you use when people just aren't ready to buy. And I know that standard, and it makes sense. But a lot of agencies, you know, get behind their own digital strategies, which often means that they're getting in their own way. And then what they do is they will lie on their digital, and then you get back to the same stories, you know, I've got the right business Dev, or, you know, we haven't got the right time to do what we're doing. And actually, it just comes down to a lack of structure, because there are opportunities to digitize your outreach. And that means that you know, I've heard horror stories of I've got friends and agencies, quite large agencies when said, you know, you've taken someone on there, give them a right decent basic six months in, they're like, what's this? This guy, Donald, this lady darlin, you know, then they have to sack them again. And quite honestly, I think that sales has to have its own funnel. And I know, there's this thing about Inbound, doing the whole crossover between sales and marketing. But quite honestly, I think that any kind of process should look like, you make the assumption that customers on your website, because all the prospects are safe on your website, because they're looking for something like what you do, they don't wander onto an agency website looking for shopping, you know? So make that assumption, and then you have to be able to say, are you ready to buy now? Or do I need to nurture you, whereas the approach last four or five years has been, let me nurture you down my funnel, and when you've done 15, or 16, things, I'm gonna get my business person to reach out to you. And I fundamentally don't agree with it. I kind of think you should ask the question first, are you here to buy, and then if not great, let me send you to some of our great content. And that will help nurture them down the line, right. So based on that, and the fact that most successful business owners you hear just went against the grain, when, you know, a market was going to pieces, or there was a there was a you know, a global recession, where they just say, I'm not going to carry on doing what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna go quite aggressive and start prospecting for business. So coming back to what I was saying earlier, my assumption was that everyone was going to use LinkedIn, and therefore it was gonna become inundated with probably what isn't a lot of good content, and I've probably seen lots of it, and therefore, you're just in amongst it all. So why don't you just start asking people outright? What is your problem? And that's literally what we did. So we systemized our outreach. So we put it actually into a workflow as much as you would you know, like an automation process, I suppose. And then we decided that we were just going to be straightforward. So none of this, Oh, I see. We've got some great connections. Let's be friends on LinkedIn, because to be honest, there's not one person probably that thinks that's a really good connection. And don't get me wrong. We do use an automation platform to do that. And I'm sure some of you might have already received examples where people have reached out to you and I've got one I've had one or two where people said, Paul, I'm looking to speak to an accountant, can we make an appointment to have a chat? And I'm like, what profile differences agency owner and I'm definitely not like an accountant. So we know that like anyone, if people kind of do it badly, they kind of do it badly. But literally, the Saturday before lockdown was announced we all left the office. I decided to work from home. So we've got him kind of aligned with all our systems and whatnot came home. And then I was like, right, I'm just gonna put this on automatic. We don't have a business dev person, I literally do most of the sales, prospecting for the business. So effectively I do that and a bit of strategy well and most of the strategy, but that's just not sustainable. But no, neither is potentially hiring the wrong person. And I think that when you're a business and you're trying to take measured steps to grow the business, there is a default position that some man or woman can do this better if this is their sole job. There are a lot of bad salespeople out there. And there's a lot of bad practice. And I think that two things that we need to consider is, whilst there are bad salespeople, not everyone's a bad salesperson, so there is a level of how good is the business sales structure set up? And is that systemized and if it's not, and it's all kind of bit gung ho, there is no way to measure your success, you're just looking for, you know, a salesperson to guide how well you're doing when that shouldn't, that doesn't give you an opportunity to learn where you're falling over or, you know, the conversations are going. So think taking that into consideration, taking the fact that, you know, we don't have mistakes and says the budget to just take someone on and take that risk, it has to be measured, we decided we'll do it protect first and see where we went. And right now I really can't keep up. So that's kind of a really good place to be. So when the comment was put into the group, and I saw it, I was just like, Well, look, to be fair, you can go and work out how to do this yourself. So the fact that nobody's doing it just means no one's looking at doing it this way. So therefore, the secret sauce is basically within all of us. It's not, there's nothing that I can't do that everyone else can't do. So why can't I share because you know, I'm well down the line with it. But effectively, we organised a strategy, which then looked like an Outreach Programme, I was straight up front, I was like, Look, I'm Paul, this is we're from buyers. We specialise in inbound marketing, sales support. For financial services business, that's kind of FinTech and finance is where we sit. And I'd love to connect with you, because we're working with lots of companies that might be facing challenges like glue. And don't get me wrong. I think that, for me, was about as straightforward. There might not be word for word, but that's the general gist of the first outreach. And that, that just opened a lot of doors, people quite open to connecting with people that they thought were genuine. That doesn't mean that everyone wanted to chat to me, but I certainly felt that.
Robert Craven 07:50
So what you're doing all the time is you're, you're challenging people to go left or right. So if you're all the way back to the website, the website says, Do you want to buy now or later? That's kind of like a standard hardball sale pitch, which, and they do that loads in the States? Which is, would you like to buy from us? If you do, that's fantastic. The opening gambit is $35,000 of our team will be with you for three days, yes, goes off 90% of the people that that's, that's fine, because they're never gonna buy from you.
Paul Sullivan 08:22
Exactly. And this is what it's worth it, you don't look, if you're, if you're bothered about numbers, like I know, I've got a couple of agency owner friends, and they love the fact they've got 10-11,000 peoples in their CRM, but you've got like 20 customers. So what's the point of having 10,000 peoples, you got 20 customers, it's like, Don't get caught up in having large numbers of people, however, like coming back to what you said, I've been straight up and told him what my conversations are going to be around. But then most certainly, the second follow up, goes out and it says something like that. I'm glad we connected a few days back, I did mention that we're looking, we're looking to talk to people that have identified challenges within sales and marketing. And we've got a few case studies. And if you are, if you've recognised this, then we want to talk to you, we're quite clear that we're not really looking for someone who doesn't know, if they've got a problem, we want to talk to you if you know you've got a problem. Maybe you're not talking to someone like me that that is or maybe they're talking to other people like me, but maybe you're just open to having the third perspective, whatever that might look like. And then I think in about a week after that, we kind of spell it out. Look, I don't want to keep being too busy while I've left it for a little while. But these are the challenges in marketing we solve and these are the challenges in sounds we solve. Do you recognise that? And if not, just let me know. And then I'll just stop dropping into your inbox and at which point most people have come back and said, You know, I have no point, I'm not interested or, which was obviously the main reason so let's not lie, you get a lot of noses, but it's not personal. You know, people just want to do what they do. And but we have 60 I think we've got something like 64. Now 65 Straight into poor, let's have a chat, what do we do? What did you do? Let's look which meant that we had to change what we were doing. I've never had a company get one, for example, I had to get one created, because all of a sudden people have had similar effects. And it's like most of my business had come up with referrals and other clients and, you know, people in industry that I might have worked with 10 years ago, and that's great. But it's not a business building. Right? Isn't and referrals
Robert Craven 10:32
Have you introduced? How many to get your 60? Yeah. How many? How many of those initial contacts? How many? Hi, I'd like to talk to you. And then how many people reply. Let's just go through what the numbers were.
Paul Sullivan 10:48
Okay. Let me say right now. We sent out 1771 invites. As of right now, this moment, 724 of those people accepted my connection request.
Robert Craven 11:11
1700 invites did you say
Paul Sullivan 11:13
1771? So I'll send out 1771 invites. I had 724 peoples accept a connection request. And then if you just bear with me, so we haven't. I've got 97. So in our system, we've got 97, unassigned replies at the moment, which basically means that I need to associate them to either not interested or follow up. Yeah. So that now looks like our 700 and whatever that was, we had 681 conversations 310 peoples at the moment have said, No, sorry, I'm not interested. We've got 213 qualified, Paul, ended a month, mid June, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, to follow up with. And we've got 63 Interested conversations. And those numbers might not add up, as I say, I've got quite a number of emails to take into those sections, that I'm looking at my dashboard. That's where we are. So in six weeks, I've probably generated as much pipeline as I've, as I've probably in the last two years in terms of that number of conversations and number of people in the pipeline. What's
Robert Craven 12:29
What's really interesting is you can't go just beneath the obnoxious if that makes sense. You know, this thing where someone says, I'd like to connect the show to the network, and yeah, yeah. And then 32 seconds later you get I saw, I saw PPC five for me. And me and my friends in India are very, very good. Yeah. And you just wait a minute. I do it. Yeah. So you're not doing that you'll be straightforward. You're being honest. And if people don't, or people aren't interested, they just bat you away. So this is actually a real marketing piece about getting the voice just accessible to an individual. Personal enough? Not this pure. I did this. I did this. LinkedIn 730000 reads in about two hours, because I'd said that businesses in difficulty will be revealed by the recession. Yeah. And the whole world kicked off about how do I sleep well at night, and don't try to people. All that, all that stuff. So it's just about finding the level. So that so that people go, Oh, I like to cut this, these people's job, even though it's a five liner on LinkedIn. What have I got to lose? Oh, actually, I quite like them. I'm presumably then doing their due diligence, you know, somewhere in between that they're going back to your LinkedIn profile, and then back to your website. And going okay.
Paul Sullivan 14:08
So there's some good numbers that you mentioned there. My website. Let me just quickly log in. I swear that yesterday when I looked at that five and a half 1000 page views, basically to tie in at the same time as we started doing what we've done. So the bounce rates are down, so my bounce rate is down to 1.27% on the website. And that's simply because I'm just working with my personas, right? I'm not I'm not random and sporadic with what I'm doing. We have we have a certain industry and where there's three people we talked to Heather said I was head of marketing, head of business development, and maybe on the odd occasion a CEO that I know I talked to and I know what messaging works for home.
Robert Craven 14:46
using Sales Navigator.
Paul Sullivan 14:49
I have to use a Sales Navigator. So we've definitely got that account. And you know what's really interesting? I've got help from my prospects. So as these messages are going out I got complimented on how good it was. But also, I had people come back to me and say, Paul, you know, I wouldn't use this language, I would use this sort of language. So people are obviously recognising that the out of the workflow that we put together was pretty good, right? I mean, the numbers are speaking for themselves anyway. So it's got to be pretty decent. The rest of it's down to me.
Robert Craven 15:19
So how many people would write that one that I wrote back? It is spam.
Paul Sullivan 15:23
So I must admit that number, I've probably had 30 or 40. People say, Paul, can you stop spamming me? And that's fine. Because it's, it's people's objection to being interrupted. And that's kind of the whole thing about Inbound, right? It was like, you just educate me and pull me in. Whereas when you're doing this, you have to admit to yourself, some people are gonna get upset, some people will be okay. And some people are just gonna just be nice and connect with you and never ever communicate with you. Because they don't want it. They're just generally nice. And also, some people are a bit like how early Facebook was, I just wanted to show that I had all these big numbers of friends in the network.
Robert Craven 16:01
Yeah. Because I've been doing my thing often, often you can be asked, but basically often someone writes something and you go, Nate, I've just come across this fan? I don't think it is you? Well, actually, it's the way you'd say what you do in the third word, too. And you haven't asked me about what I do. If you'd actually bothered to look at my LinkedIn profile, you'd have noticed that, no, I'm not a dentist, and bla bla bla bla. Yeah. So so. And there are and there are several guys I know in America, who now have a link set up that they just send people to a link about, what, why you're wasting my time and why I hate people like you because it's cool, which is fine, because we all get it. But we kind of know, you know, when someone says, I think I can help your business. And you see that they've got I hate to say it, but it's just the truth, an Indian name and their business is in Bangalore, it's just at 99% certainty that within three minutes you can be hit with, we do very good websites, you know, we can get we can get cheap this for that.
Paul Sullivan 17:09
And yeah, and ultimately, what on that note, I think that one of the things that I started saying to people was like, Well, what's in it for me? I know, what do you mean? What's in it for you, you're gonna save money. I said, No, but I want a relationship where if I use you, you use me. So you're going to refer me to lots of marketing leads, and I can then work with you to build websites when I need them. Signups because that's what that's what we're looking for, right? But you know what, there's an infinite you sit there about the spam thing. And I think that what we stay true to, and I really want to be able to find my, so what I'm talking about, I'm gonna find the workflow, and I'm gonna share it with you, Robert, so that you can see it, but we were constantly asking them about them. Like, even if you haven't got a problem. Now, even if you've got a problem that you're not addressing now, and it's on the line for later in 2020 would still like to talk to you and share a little bit of information, maybe to give you some help up front. And I think that's where we were right. Really, absolutely. This can come across as like the crap that I get. And again, it's exactly what you said, here we go.
Robert Craven 18:16
You can be part of the problem. You're part of the problem, and the whole industry suffers from it because nearly everyone has a hammer. Hi, I do SEO. Oh, hello, hello, Mrs. Customer, you need SEO. It's like, there's no, actually actually your website needs sorting out first, or your products crap or anything like that. It's just I do SEO, you need SEO. So for that, to actually be an honest broker who says, you know, thanks a lot for reaching out to us, I totally get that you like to invest in SEO. However, you know, until you actually look at your website and your offer and your pitch and how you're pitching and who you're pitching to the SEO manager can be a waste of time. So can I recommend you go and talk to blardy blar, who's a marketing specialist who will sort out your proposition and then come back to us. Now the interesting thing about that approach is you end up being one of the good guys. And they do come back to you actually, they then come back to you and say thank you very much. By the way, before we do the essay, we also need you know, a graphics artist while you're at it, and you do and then you start sharing stuff around. I told the story the other day. I went to see this teacher who lives literally next door to a friend, a friend of mine in London in the days when you could do that because she was really upset. She was about to launch. Fantastic. Great. So bang on the door, go and have a cup of coffee. So tell me what's going on just like it's not not a painting or anything. And she said, Well, you know, we launched our website yesterday. Fantastic. Great. How much have you spent so far? 100,000 pounds. Okay, so what were you doing before we were both retired teachers? That's good. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. So you spent your redundancy. So what you spent on the web design was 20,000. Yeah, the graphics artists have 5000, the marketing consultant has 15,000, the content copywriter has 15,000. And they kind of went on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everyone took their money. No one at any point asked whether the proposition which was a proposition, which is never gonna work, was going to be okay. So she's in front of me in floods of tears. 100,000 pounds, I look at my website, and I've only got five people visit it, and they're all my family.
Robert Craven 20:35
I mean, it's so it's I was. It's disgraceful that the industry does that. It's disgraceful, you know, I know. It's like picking candy from a baby, and so on and so forth. But it's absolutely disgraceful that the none of those people or said, Actually, let's just look at this as to whether this is worth investing, because you don't want you don't need to be spending 100,000 quid and secondly, there are quick ways you could test this before you actually actually earn the money off.
Paul Sullivan 21:09
Screen. Yeah. So do you want to share the screen?
Robert Craven 21:13
Yeah. Can you share the screen? Or do I need to do some button pressing
Paul Sullivan 21:17
Can you share the screen? So we can see this? Right. All right. Yeah, so this literally is our sequence. So you can prepare to steal it if you need to. Yeah, quite happy for anyone to look at it. And so I'd say it's true. So we use tokenization to personalise it, which is quite obvious. And it's we specialise in inbound marketing, sales and lead generation for your industry, I saw that you're the title that we obviously want to speak to, it'd be good to connect to share how we're helping solve challenges for companies like yours, basically. And if they connect, all is well and good. And then it's, you know, Thanks for accepting my request. This is what we do. Again, many companies are the same as yours, I thought it'd be good to connect. So I thought you may be facing similar challenges. So I'm, I'm talking about them all the time. I'm not even talking about us in terms of what I've let you know, what I've done, or what we do know, would you be interested in discussing this further as that is, and then as I said, that, I know, you must be busy. So get to the point. I know, in my last message, I mentioned that we are able to solve problems in marketing and sales and businesses like yours. And these are the problems that we're helping solve, right. So again, this is where it makes it really easy for people to have a say, or nine. And this is typically in this workflow, where we get the engagement is usually like, usually the knows happen a little bit further forward. So I've had people actually connect and then say, No, we're not interested. So you know, you'll get that but notes are good as well. And here is where the conversation starts getting into Let's book an appointment and can't make a decision now, because of COVID, which was a big part of those 200, non follow ups, or yeah, we've definitely got a problem. Can you send us some stuff about your company and your pricing? And I always differ from talking about the price and straight up? I say, yeah, here's, here's our company deck. So all of our sales enablement processes are, we've got what are PDFs on the desktop, and it's, you know, we can just attach that to the LinkedIn chat. So we're still not even trying at this point to say, give me your company email. So I can email you, because you could turn people away, quite easily attach a PDF to the LinkedIn chat. And therefore, you still leave those people feeling comfortable, but also, from your debt, they're probably going to gauge whether you're for them or not. And again, I don't think our mind people dropping away from you at this point, because what I'm looking for really, in the short term is just the people that are going to be easier to work, they're gonna say, Yeah, we recognise that we like the way your deck looks, because it spells out exactly what the process would be. And let's take this further. And that's, that's where we are. And then here's where I said, you know, I'd be really keen to book some time with you to learn about your current challenges or future objectives for 2020. So I left the door open for the length of the year anyway, because that's me hedging my bets. Seven days later, one final time. Just wanted to find out if any more communications resonated, please let me know if you want to be discussing. And I've had people still not come back here. So what we did is we put the 30 day follow up on and this is again, bombs and fruit. And this again, has got some absolute nose. So it's not designed to be overly intrusive. I think that the whole process goes across, probably to two working weeks before Well, actually, he's just able to work in weeks. And then 30 days later, I've got a follow up. It's not overly intrusive and also not one point has I said that I've definitely got the solution for you. I've always left it on them. And I think that's where we've kind of got this but I've shared this with you, Robert. Anyway, so you've got you've got the link to that
Robert Craven 25:00
So, so a couple of things. Of the 63. interested. How many do you think you'll convert?
Paul Sullivan 25:10
I'm probably into
Robert Craven 25:13
UK turn off
Paul Sullivan 25:14
the screen, share no problem, right. So at the moment, I'm into five strategy presentations. So it's five and five into six is, I think probably two of those, we'll go over of the five, one of them, most mostly a show up and the other one gave me a date. So even though we're doing a presentation, now, they've said that they can't sign off till September. But what came out of the whole process was that when we were sharing things like personas and all of that stuff, they went away and did their homework. So when they came back for the presentation they called me like that, we know we need to do our, our personas, we need to work out what that looks like which partner they'd need to be looking after which industry and so on and so forth. So it's already started to get in thinking and they were like, look, we want to do this piece of work over the next three months, because we're remote from each other. And then in September, we can kick off. So it's always a numbers game, the numbers of attrition are what most agencies don't know. I mean, I probably still don't know my numbers of attrition, before, you know, number of contacts, calls, presentation sounds right. But I've also now got to go back to these 200 people and start working out what is going to happen, you know, most of them said, Come back at the end of my Jun. And so therefore, it's going to be the time but again, I can automate that. And actually just draw the list out and just work out a new process.
Robert Craven 26:39
And how much and the other question. You haven't quite answered that question. Actually. You're 63 People who are interested? Yeah. How much work do you think you'd get out of those 63?
Paul Sullivan 26:49
Um, I probably would expect to get three, three to four.
Robert Craven 26:55
At what kind of value?
Paul Sullivan 26:57
Our average retainer is three to four grand a month. So, um.
Robert Craven 27:02
They stay with you for how long? What's the average? Average is probably a year. Okay, so each one's worth 86,000 quid. So you reckon you got 100,000 quids worth of business out of this?
Paul Sullivan 27:12
Potentially? Yeah. You know, there's still conversations to go on. That's
Robert Craven 27:17
That's six or eight weeks of marketing. So multiply that by eight. And that's, that's, that's a million pound turnover?
Paul Sullivan 27:26
Well, this is where I'm trying to get to, I'm trying to. So what for me, what I'm trying to do is, work out what works. So also if we do you know, as we start to grow, when we take on more business, we definitely want a sales process, which will be based on this and if we humanise it or not, or if we just stay with this, and we just continue to change. You know, I didn't go in with the whole COVID-19 messaging that decided to stay away from that. I thought the fear mongering was being perpetuated enough.
Robert Craven 27:54
How are you in these difficult times? Delete?
Paul Sullivan 27:59
Yeah, everyone's doing it right. And also, there is the rise of the LinkedIn marketer, right? There's the guys that just do all of the top of funnel stuff, selling it, pretty much what some of us agencies are doing a lot more work for. And they're getting places because people have got this lack of interest and lack of know-how round LinkedIn, which guy was me, because it's a social business platform. The reason that I've gone with the message in the way I win is because no one wants to be my friend. Like, if they're interested in what I've got to say, they want you to make it clear that this is what we want to talk to you about. And then I don't want to be your friend, I don't want to share my connections, because we've got a couple in common, all of that rubbish. outreaches just annoy people, and put me on the backfoot because I'm waiting for you to now pitch me
Robert Craven 28:46
Marketing, whatever I've written on my wall in front of me, because somehow I forgot, you know, content that makes my life faster, more efficient, cheaper, more profitable, or better.
Paul Sullivan 29:00
Yeah. So yeah, it's an interesting time. But I think what I was, I was talking to my partner, so my girlfriend's the head of content for money. 2020, which isn't recent, and quite lucky for me that we're both tied in in that FinTech space. But there you go. But what's really interesting is, what baby classes have good content, and what a lot of agencies, classes, good content, and a content person that is looking for speakers. He's often far more critical of the content that the speaker can talk about when they really care about their brand. And this is where it got really interesting because I brought her in to talk to a couple of the guys who were producing content, but it wasn't, wasn't there and I was I want them out what kind of training or direction or tips or guidance about reading because she basically worked with the CEOs of top brands before that she was at the World retail Congress. So you know, Ali Baba and all those kinds of high level CEOs. Oh, she's telling them what she feels is good quality content based on what they're about to tell on the soundstage. And there is a great overlap between what goes on stage and what should go out on the net. And I think yeah,
Robert Craven 30:17
It's like one of the things which always pick up cars me so I have I have a persona that I go after. And I recognised him from about 150 yards down to he, you know, Volvo four by four, and a BMW is stage five CFD, and they have 29 staff, he's bright as a button, he doesn't suffer fools gladly. And if I write my emails to Joe, yeah, Joe, literally just take out the word Joe at the top. Yeah, what's Joe worrying about? Now? You know, you've got problems knowing whether you're gonna get back to your ski chalet or not. And you wonder whether you could run your agency from your skis, if I write that not only is the you know, the click through rate much higher, but you get the engagement if Oh, my God is like you were talking to me? So it absolutely works for Joe. Joe? Yeah, what I can't start, I don't know why agencies to is you know, we work with SMEs and public corporations and charities, and startups, and not for profit, and, and voluntary organisation, every time you you do that baseness all your messaging on your website and so on and so forth, is bound to be bland and it's bound not to hit anyway. And you my point about your, your, your partner's conversation is your you recognise content beer on stage, which is my thing, or beer or beer written yet when someone's talking in those bland generalisations, which are it's tough, but you need to work harder versus someone who actually knows their chops. And, and you know, the great benefit of niching is, is you understand the market you understand the industry through I like the fact that you're just doing your infintech you understand what buttons to press, and in fact, you know, about your clients problems better than they do, because you've been around the block. I've got two friends who are coaches, one is a coach for anyone. And they're brilliant, because one day they're in front of a management consultant. The next day, they're in front of a sports shop in front of the fitness coach, and they're able to see another one who does nothing but dentists. guy who does dentists knows more about running a dental practice and a dentist has spent every day of his life in dental practices, seeing all the stuff going on, and what the problems are and what the issues are, and what key legislation is and how they're impacted by COVID and HF and blah, blah, blah. So the dentists are willing to pay four or five times more to work with the niche specialist who knows more about the industry than the generalist. You actually might be a much brighter bunny, because they're able to access stuff. But when they sit in front of a dentist, they don't know about the NHS white paper coming out in 2000 to understand the cost of adapting and the difficulty of security and hepatitis B or whatever that dentists are worried about. And yeah, and then and then A and then there is a contrast to that, which is the agencies which have done really well in these times are the ones that have had a really wide broad portfolio of clients. So they've not had, they've not had just hotels, restaurants and definitely been suffering. But they've had a wider portfolio. So that's, that's really interesting. If you even if you're doing a lot of work with one particular agency that specialise that they have, they have two opportunities, they can say we can take all that knowledge and skill that we have that we could apply to a dead industry, we're gonna actually lifted up and we're going to gain to do that somewhere else. And we didn't do it for lawyers or accountants easily done whatever. Or we're going to go even deeper into our industry which Okay, is in the doldrums right now. But, you know, in two years time those hotel rooms will be full again. Yeah, we can, we can get on that journey and we can be the good guy. So there are there are, we're going we're going
Paul Sullivan 34:38
sorry, just to just to back that up. I mean, you know, I come from a financial services background. So I didn't start off in marketing and choose finances and area. I literally worked for JP Morgan and I was more of changed the bank person. So you know, months, trading floors and all sorts. But what's really interesting is when you double down, we beat a I'm Ey and KPMG to a contract last year, I've just stopped just before Christmas. And we're actually helping build a new challenger bank. So taking all of that industry experience that we've had, and the knowledge and the running big projects, and then, you know, we were in front of this is fine, we told him to go and speak to those guys, this is probably a little bit out of our out of our sort of remit, but they actually came back asked us to pitch them. And, you know, throughout our network, and for a lot of time, we've, we've worked with a company, externally, developers and like, they work with people like Apple, and they're doing all this big FinTech development. And so we advise them on what this bank should actually look like, a business bank is not a high street bank at all. But these guys are really ready to try and shake up banking. And that's really interesting for me, because quite a lot of the time, as you say, when you look at an industry for so long, you're like, why isn't someone doing that? Why isn't someone doing that? And you know, it's good, because those agency owners that still feel entrepreneurial in their mindset when they're working with people probably give their clients far more benefit, because it excites you. And I think that it should excite you about what you're doing with other people you're working with.
Robert Craven 36:12
And that might be why the entrepreneur is better at doing the biz dev. Person. Yeah. Who is not who's never got there. What's on the line? Because actually, the reality of a lot of this, a lot of the biz dev stuff is can I look closer, closer to the whites of your eyes? And do I believe that you'll really go the extra mile for me? Yeah, and the standard sales biz dev guy who's gonna Yeah, may not be actually prepared to push the buttons and challenge because they're more interested in the sale than they are in, in the longevity of the relationship Exactly. This report, more than enough of your time, will share this and get this out. Brilliant. What are you just a wrap up? What are your top tips? What do you what is your gut feel, if you if you took another agency owner out for a drink, and you'd had a couple of bottles of wine and you're coming out of the coming out of the bar, your best friend for life, put your arm around him? As a few things, I'd like to tell you about running an agency, what kind of what's what's what's, what's the kind of the secret sauce, what's the juice?
Paul Sullivan 37:33
What would I tell him? I think it's a personal thing. So I am what I like to classify myself as a lifelong learner. I'm just doing that whole EOS thing at the moment, which is kind of starting to make a lot of sense. And I just feel that if at any point in the business, you feel like you're on top of it, I think you're kidding yourself. I think that is a real golden egg. If every time you might have a nice purple patch and it's plateauing. Great, but there is always something that you can do. Right? So I think that one tip is to always think about one step ahead. You know, as I said, the reason that we went quite aggressive with what we did was because you read too many of these books with the one person that did that when everyone else died shrivelling up and dying because, you know, that's probably not a really good term to use. But you know, everyone kind of got a little bit hesitant and I'm not spending any money and I don't know what's going on. Well, economy still needs to turn, agencies can always deliver digitally and in fact, what came out of that so we're doing quite low in America now. So you know that making the right decisions is about making measured decisions, but also, always try and surround yourself with people that know more than you do.
Robert Craven 38:51
You have an absolutely awesome day. Look after yourself."