Agency Forward

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Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Tim Kilroy. Tim is the founder of build your agency better, and with over two decades of experience in the digital marketing industry, Tim has founded, scaled and sold several agencies, and now he's focused on coaching agency owners to grow their sales, profit and happiness without working harder or longer. I was very excited to get Tim on so you could share his insights on creating irresistible offers. And he doesn't disappoint. In this episode, we discuss how to craft an offer that aligns with your client's business needs. The biggest mistakes agencies make in their sales process, how focusing on value can turn prospects into long term clients and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools while streamlining operations so your team can move from chaos to clarity. You can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward,

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and now. Tim Kilroy,

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it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.

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I is understanding a prospects business crucial for creating a great offer. You know,

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for a long time, you know, first cash was king, and then, you know, then, then content was king. We know it's King right now, or queen or emperor or whatever. It's context

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like, relevance is king or queen or ruler supreme, because it doesn't matter how good your offer is,

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if,

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quite honestly, it's not relevant to me. So for instance, I'm sure just like me, you get a bazillion people on LinkedIn reaching out saying, Hey, would you like 40 sales calls guaranteed this month, or you don't pay.

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Yeah, and I would love them. Oh no, actually, no, actually, 40 sales calls I would hate.

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Oh, yeah, right, because,

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right,

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but, but, like, 40 sales calls, that's a like, that's, that's that, you know, that's, that's quantity over quality, right? Because I don't actually want to get on a sales call and make an offer to someone until they know a lot about me I know a lot about them, and so that I know that I can help, and they understand the help that I can give, and that is the key to making an offer that sticks. So in order to create a great offer, you have to know and understand what your prospect needs.

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Now, many, many, many people focus on the thing that they do, like, 40 sales calls this month, right? That would be, you know, if you're making an offer, that's my output, but I don't actually buy your output like you're not, you're not a cookie factory, right? You know, you are like you buy the result that you get from your vendor, right? So it doesn't I don't care. Honestly, I don't really care what you do. I don't care how you do it, necessarily. I just want to know that if I buy something from you, I'm going to get the result that I want.

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And what's really, really, really important if you're going to make an offer is that you have a really good idea of what makes sense for me. Because if you don't know what's important to me,

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how can you possibly sell anything to me? By the way that's, that's my dog, Fred. That's his butt back there.

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And I'm pretty sure in just a minute he's gonna start barking, but because he's out there looking for squirrels. But that's okay. It's, it's ambience, yeah,

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yeah,

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yeah. And so and so the like,

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you know, as a perfect example. Um, so let's imagine that you're an email marketing agency,

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and you have a great service. It is amazing, like it is so cool and awesome, and that's like the best in the whole world. And you.

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Are and you are, you know, engaging with a business that is entirely focused on new customer acquisition.

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Do you think that they're gonna buy an email marketing service

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if their headspace is 100% on new acquisition?

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No, like it doesn't matter how good your service is,

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but it's not relevant to them at this moment. Now, it might be someday in the future, but right now, you need to understand what it is that your target

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person needs. And I don't really like to say target you know your ideal client profile, even though I use those terms, because

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what you have is

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every ideal client profile is too big,

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because what you were looking for inside of that ideal client profile is something that's really specific, like I am looking for. In my case, I'm looking for agency owners who are either at the very beginning of their journey and don't know what the heck they're doing, or I'm looking for those people who are

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transitioning from

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a participate, a major participant, in their delivery business, into somebody who leads their business like those are the two spots where I have the most impact.

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So

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can I help a $25 million agency with something absolutely

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is that my best offer to them? Am I the most relevant person for them?

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No, because they can hire somebody to to work on the specific thing that they want or need or their particular problem, and so I could make the best coaching offer in the entire world,

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to

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Mike mothner, who is the the the chairman of W promote, I could make the best coaching offer in the whole world, but I am completely irrelevant to him.

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You know, my experience and his experience, we're, they're not like,

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Could I help him with something? Sure, I guess I probably could,

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but I'm not going to be able to, you know, I'm not Bill Campbell, the trillion dollar coach or what. You know, I'm not going to be able to help him in the way, in the specific way that he needs to be helped.

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And so

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that means I should not waste my time making offers to people that I don't think that I can help. So in order to be able to make a great offer, I gotta know

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what the impact that you are looking for and how what I do supplies that,

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right? Yeah, that's one of the things I work on.

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So with my clients, it's not necessarily niching. We're just trying to figure out, like, what is that one problem that we solve? Yeah, for one audience, right? So now, like within that, right? Even I could pick a problem, like, I help HR departments solve this one, one issue, yeah, right. But when we go to the audience, that's going to be looked at very differently, between a manufacturing company and a tech company, yeah, and so and so, even how we talk about the problem in the problem and the context around the problem does shift entirely just through that lens. And then your service being able to actually deliver on top of that, right? Makes it chaotic, if, if all those things aren't all aligned, yeah, yeah, I

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agree entirely, you know. And there's, there's, there's two ways you can think about your target audience, or the problem that actually the problem that you solve, you can think about it vertically, which is, I help e commerce, retailers who are in this situation, right? Right? That's cool, and that's kind of a vertical offer. You know, you don't pay a lot of attention to people, you know, to insurance agents or, you know, to school teachers, right? You just, you're working with with E commerce, retailers. That's awesome. However, there is, like, a horizontal problem,

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much like

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Google, my business profile optimization, like, it doesn't really matter

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who you help there, but you are helping businesses who are at a particular stage across all industries. That's like a horizontal problem.

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Now, the hard thing about horizontal thinking

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is that you got to learn a bunch of stuff, and you have to understand the language as you were saying. You have to be able to make.

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The benefit of what you do relevant to in a bunch of different contexts. That's why it's easier

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to actually, to sort of focus on a particular, you know, a vertical, you know, a vertical rather than a horizontal. Problem.

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You know, it's not necessarily better. It's just easier,

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because most, most wildly successful agencies,

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you know, like everybody who works you know, all the companies inside of WPP, for instance, like, that's a horizontal solution to marketing problems, like, they service every conceivable industry,

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right? So they have marketing solutions horizontally,

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you know, there, it's not just like they are, you know, that like they're, they're, you know, vertical, and they only work with these certain kinds of businesses. They work with all sorts of businesses. I mean, there's probably with WPP, there's probably a scale. If you do like, they're not gonna, they're not gonna work with that $2,000 month client, but, right?

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Yeah. And if you can find that intersection between the horizontal and vertical, right, you can now get very specific on an offer. You just got to make sure that the TAM is large enough to be able to support, you know, whatever you're trying to do with your business. Yeah, and, and. So one thing to say is there is not an audience in this world that is so narrow that you can't make a 5 million or ten million agency out

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of it. It is really just about your ability to do so. So, so worrying about tam is probably not worth many people's times, because Tam, that is a that's a scale issue, right? Like that is a that's like a macro economic issue that does should not influence your day to day engagement.

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So just know that that every market

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is big,

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and every market is really, really noisy and crowded.

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So there are no simple niches. There are no

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blue oceans or whatever. Everything's a red ocean. Like, just deal with it, right? Like there's, there is no untapped opportunity unless you're inventing some kind of new technology, there's no there is no untapped opportunity in the service world,

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your success comes down to your ability to to advocate your message and execute on Your promise.

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Yeah. So

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I had one client who wanted to do like National SEO, or just, yeah, right, like hit SEO for national stuff, because he was really worried about the the ability to grow his business if he only focused on a locality. However, all of his current wins were around one specific city in the US, and so we were able to pull up just Chamber of Commerce information and show just for the three types of companies that he wanted to work with in that specific city, he could be a $6 million agency, and that was for, like, if he won 3%

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of of those companies and stuff. So it's very conservative in the numbers, but yeah, that just more credit to what you're saying, right? And like, you can become a five plus million dollar agency with almost any audience, absolutely. Just, how do you make it happen? Absolutely?

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Yeah, so I guess what are some of the biggest mistakes then, like, separate from maybe have not having the context.

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Are you seeing agencies make as they start building their offers,

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one of the biggest issues is

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they try to, they either try to make their initial offer

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meaningless.

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You know, we'll do a, we'll do an SEO audit for you for free, like, that's already that's like, that's our offer to attract you to talk to us. Well, you know, the functional value of an SEO offer to most companies is negative, like, it's just a waste of time because they can't do anything with it. They don't know how to do anything with it, and they don't understand what it means. So it is a great thing. Like, as an as an SEO agency, you know exactly the value of that, and you think you are giving something of I value,

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but if it's not something that is

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actionable or or understandable by your client, it's kind of meaningless, like they wouldn't be. They wouldn't have responded to you if there was not a problem that they thought you could solve, right? So, so the the the primary issue in that sort of initial attraction offer getting the attention offer is that people offer something that they think is high value, but the client does not, or the market does not,

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but when it comes down to the.

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Actual engagement offer. You know, how do you structure the engagement?

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They often focus on deliverables.

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Right? We will optimize this many pages, we will create this many ads. We'll write this many blog posts, whatever.

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And that's cool, because it creates some sort of accountability,

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but that's not what the client is buying like they do not care.

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Because, you know, if you if you make two ads and they are amazing,

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and they're killing it.

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Why do you worry like, why? Yeah, why do you why do you worry about making the other 14 that you obligated yourself to? Or, if you, you know, if you've obligated yourself to two blog posts a month, and those blog posts are not successful, it doesn't matter how good they are, for whatever reason, they're not successful.

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Well, why would you offer? Why would you keep that part of the offer? So what you need to do is create an offer that facilitates the desired outcome, and it helps from just from a delivery standpoint, if you can allow yourself some flexibility in the deliverables,

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meaning, you know, like, we can see 60 days ahead. So in months one and two, like we're going to deliver this, and then, you know, in month two, we're going to, you know, reevaluate, do strategies for months three and four, and just, you know, do it that way,

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or the the other thing is,

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people make offers that are delayed gratification,

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SEO, email

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and even even Facebook ads like they're oftentimes the things that people are selling is a future benefit that requires a long time to make work.

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And that might actually like that might be true, like it, yes, it does take time for you know, for your SEO strategy or content strategy or work however, like time to value or time to usefulness.

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It's so hard to create an offer that's saying, Pay me for three months and then I'll show you something

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so you so the offer, whatever offer you meet you make, needs to create some sort of tangible benefit,

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you know, like, sort of immediately after the kickoff meeting. You know, within the first couple of weeks, there's got to be some sort of win.

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And so

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often, agencies make these offers that

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are too conservative, like they're afraid of over promising. So they say this isn't going to work for 90 days, or, you know, it's going to take us, like you've got to spend $20,000 in media before the before the algorithm truly understands you or whatever

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you gotta figure out a way to fix something right now. So, because by the time you know if you're billing in advance, they have paid, you know, if they're if you have a setup fee, great, you know. But they've paid setup fee maybe month one, month two and month three, and then, you know, so they've made three or four payments to you, and then they're getting benefit.

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Like, it's really hard to justify that, because, you know, are you, if you're a marketing manager, you're going to go to your your boss, and say, Hey, listen, um, yeah, I know that. We're a small company, and we need, you know, return on investment, you know, within 60 days to keep our cash cycle working. But I would like you to approve this budget where we're not going to get any return, you know, for 90 days.

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Well, no one's going to say yes to that. But what's really crucial, what's what's crazy, is that agencies don't understand

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how other businesses work. So if a company has to have a 60 day cash cycle, where the money that they spend gets paid back to them within 60 days, offering them a 90 day solution does not work.

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And so lack of understanding, not only of what your client wants, but of how your client works, is a real killer for so many agencies,

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right? Everything you're saying is music to my ears, because it's things that like I'm preaching to my

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clients. I'm glad I'm not singing. Can.

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It's because then everybody would, would, would shut this off right away if I started to

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say the it's funny. So Max trailer and I were had a done an episode of beers with Max, and we kind of gave him a conclusion. Like a lot of coaches, we all kind of think the same things, and it's like, Why does no one want to listen to us and just do these things.

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And it really takes going in and having the conversation face to face and being like, this is how we're gonna do it. Yeah? So, so, you know, it's, it's,

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it's,

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it's broccoli versus candy,

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right? Like, candy is awesome. Like, everyone wants the candy, and that's why the that's why these, these, like, 40 sales calls in a month, guaranteed. Like, that's candy. You know, it's bad. It's bad for your teeth. It's bad for your eyes. You know, it's not sustainable. You're gonna get sick eventually. You gotta eat some broccoli. So

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even if you were that agency that is selling, you know, the fact that we like, the real benefits are coming and, you know, three to five or six months from now? Cool. Well, you got to take that broccoli and you got to dip it in some cotton candy so it tastes good right now,

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you know. And I think the, and,

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you know that's the sad fact of the matter is you have to sell the things that people will buy

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and deliver the things that they need, right? And you're not being disingenuous, because you're gonna, you know you're gonna, you're gonna deliver those things that they think they want, but especially in a coaching or agency space, often your real job is to say, hey, you know what that problem that you think you have

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that's like, that's the symptom that's like, that's the drip, like blowing your nose does not cure your cold, like it gets not out of your nose, and that's awesome, but you still have a cold. And what most you know, what most people are looking to buy is the you know their their issues that they have a drippy nose. They don't want to drip your nose anymore,

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but they're not necessarily willing to hear you have a cold,

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yep, agreed. One of the something I've done with one client is we break up like the short term and the long term goals. And they actually sent a proposal to a client, and they were towards a higher end of the proposals that were received for this, but because they addressed the near term and said, Hey, this is what you need. Like, we need to do this. That's probably what everyone else is telling you, because it's pretty obvious, but we know that's going to take a while to actually come to fruition. And so we want to do these things in the short term that'll, you know, actually get you some return, so that you don't have to wait forever for this one thing, exactly. And and they the client went with that, because they were able to say, Hey, this is how we're going to be able to help you right now as well as in the future, right? And so a simple shift, and one other thing that that this goes back to agencies not really understanding how other businesses work.

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They need to understand

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how the client is going to apply the benefit that the agency can deliver, right? So, yeah, we we like, we'll go back to organic search. Great. We're going to double your traffic in the next 12 months. Cool, awesome.

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I mean, by the way, if you're an SEO agency, don't ever sell that because traffic is easy. The right traffic is hard. That's like this. But anyways, but

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if you're going to be able to, like, double their revenue from organic traffic, like, that's cool,

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but

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how were they going to use that benefit, right? They want to double their organic traffic because, like, they want to get more organic revenue for a reason. And the reason, by the way, is not revenue.

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Like, the reason is, well, you know, we think we get better LTV out of those clients, or we get you know better. We get you know better frequency of purchase. Or you know that allows us to, you know, deploy more profit

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into our ad spend so we can grow beyond what we can reach organically, right? There's like you need to be able to understand how the client perceives your benefit, because rarely is it revenue,

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right? Most of the time it is. It's either a solution to a, you know, a profit problem,

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or it's.

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Solution to a cost problem, and those are actually different,

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but

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by and large, for the most part, what you were selling as an agency is more profit or lower costs.

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And then knowing, knowing that also gives you this additional context to be able to look at your offer and start adding things to it that better facilitate, you know what you're looking at for that ultimate end goal. Yeah, so, but just another, another reason to get, collect that information, that context, yeah. And by the way, I'm gonna say something here that will get my, you know, online marketer,

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you know, ID card taken away. Please do not do a value stack.

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You know, the Russell Brunson, like, okay, like, you know, the base service is this, but then we're gonna give you this for free, and that for free, and the other thing for free. And the third thing you know, like, You're probably too young to know who Ron Popeil is,

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yeah, so back when I was so, back when I was a kid, we had these crazy things called infomercials. And there's this guy, Ron Popeil, who sold crazy products, like a, like, an at home chicken rotisserie thing, or,

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you know, a

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mandolin, a something that, or food processor slice things really, you know, really small. Or my favorite, and this is a product I owned, pocket fisherman, which was a teeny, tiny, little short fishing rod, which is freaking cool. But what he would do is be like, you know, like, are we gonna charge $79 for this? No, we're gonna charge 79 or 69 or 59 or 49 we're gonna charge $29

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and if you order in the next 10 minutes, we're gonna give you this thing, that thing, and the other thing, you know, a $17 trillion value for, you know, for 2999 plus shipping, right? When you start, when you take this offer that you have of fee for service, right? And you start layering other stuff on top of it, that you know, where you're saying, like, this is a 290 $7 value I'm giving to for nothing or like, first of all, nobody believes that at all, like, nobody believes that you ever sold that thing for 297, even if you did. Secondly,

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nobody wants to be sold to,

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except in very specific circumstances, if you're like, if you're at a conference and you're selling from the stage,

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you know, like that, that sort of value stack stuff, that's part of the performance, right? And that's a time when you can do it. But if you're selling, if you're a business, selling to other businesses, and you're both serious about your businesses, nobody's gonna fall for that load of crap. That is, here are your free bonuses.

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So please don't do that. Lots and lots of people do, or they choose to, you know, offer, like, money back guarantees or whatever performance guarantees, like, don't, don't do that either

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like, you can offer satisfaction guarantees. Like, hey, if we don't hit the goals we agreed on, like, we'll stop charging until we do. Like, that's cool. Or,

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or, you know, if we don't, like, or, you know, we're if, if we've signed a 12 month contract, and after three months we don't hit these milestones, like, yeah, you can, like, you can fire us without the 30 day notice. Like, those kind of guarantee. Like, those are fine, but the like, we guarantee to earn your money back. You know who? You know who

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takes those offers,

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the people who need their money back, right, right? People who need their money back like those are the people take those offers and and here's the this goes back to another, another issue. Lots of agencies end up selling to businesses that can't afford agencies

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and agencies owners, agency owners twist themselves into not trying to service the people that can't afford them,

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because they want that revenue, or they see some kind of big opportunity.

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Here's here's just a hard truth,

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a great agency cannot fix a broken business

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like agencies are very bad at getting from zero to one, like, they're really good at getting from one to five or one to 10, but zero very bad at zero to one. And so if you're talking to people who do not have a business, that makes sense already,

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you can't help them.

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Yeah, it doesn't matter how awesome you are,

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like they need to fix other problems before they can worry about approaching a broader market. Which is what agencies do. They help you find a broader market, right?

Unknown Speaker 30:19
Yeah. So on the value stacking. We just had this conversation internally because we're launching a workshop, and we had the exact same conclusion that you just went into which, like, nobody is going to believe that this worksheet is $500

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right? So, like, unless we can apply a an actual number based on the value that we're actually providing and the costs that, you know, are incurred with whatever like, we don't need to put a price on any of this stuff. We just have the overall offer. And here's everything that's included. And I think it's a much stronger appeal to the offer, rather than having people like, look at each item and be like, well, is that worth that much money? Because when everything is 2997 in this value stack, and I'm buying for 1000 bucks, it's like, okay, well, obviously you're losing a lot of money by giving me all this. So like, yeah. Now, by the way, I will admit right this very moment on my website, Tim kilroy.com there, there is a pop up on the home page that says, you can get my, you can get my cold email Compendium and the perfect proposal

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for free. And they say it's and it says on it that it's $127

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value. Well, that's true, because I did, in fact, sell many of the cold email like so, but they're older, and I'm working on new ones, so I'm giving them away for free right now. But just know that I have plenty of customers who paid me 97 bucks for the cold email Compendium and 29 bucks for the, you know, for the the so I just don't want to be called the hypocrite,

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right? Get it out now.

Unknown Speaker 32:04
No, I mean, that's the same we do. So we're doing a workshop for this landing page. And so we actually tallied up the hours that are going to go into the actual just delivery of the workshop, and said, How much is it worth for having all of these, you know, expert presenters? What would they be charging? And so, yeah, it's a $4,000 offer for based on just purely on their hours inside this workshop.

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Thanks for inviting me like thanks for having me. That's beyond

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that a couple times from people now.

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Just don't talk about it, you know, right? I understand now why people keep their weddings a secret so that they don't have to tell everyone. Yeah, like Sandra, we didn't like, we don't really like you, like you're a second tier, like you're the only you're the backup weekend planned, like you're not, you're not in the primary rotation. Sorry, right?

Unknown Speaker 33:01
Yeah, just a couple friends, right? That we're inviting 100 or so, right? And you just missed the cut. You were like, your number 704, right? I'll just say it's all from my wife's side. So yeah, which is the issue here, right? It was all from my wife side for the workshop and invitations. Okay, all right, fair enough. So

Unknown Speaker 33:22
with that out of the way, so what are some of the elements that are the components, I guess, that you'd be looking for in a great offer, now that you've got the context. And,

Unknown Speaker 33:32
yeah, so by the way, like, there's, there's three offers that you make during any two to three offers. The first one is the attraction offer, like, what am I getting? What is, what's the benefit to you to talk to me? Like, why would you voluntarily put yourself into my sales cycle? Right? And so that is, you know, that is something you know, hopefully, of of,

Unknown Speaker 33:59
of high value that can that's that gives the client, or the potential client, more information about their business or about what they're trying to achieve than they would have otherwise, right? And so that and so and so that might be, you know, whatever, like, I have a, I have a free or, you know, free, free book. You know, it might be, you know, it might be something like,

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you know, a CTA scan of your website saying, hey, you know you're not consistent what you're offering, or whatever. Like, something that helps them understand that you know what you're doing, right, like that. And so that's one thing to get their attention, to get them to that's the value that they get for subjecting themselves to your sales spiel, right?

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And then there's and depending upon how your conversation goes,

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there are two potential other offers.

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One is the upfront offer, which is sort of like the test.

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Offer. And I'm actually a big fan of these for most for most agencies,

Unknown Speaker 35:06
because most agencies do a very poor job of qualifying people. And so if you do this upfront offer, which is a like a narrow subset of what you do, some some small slice of what you do, or something that is very directly related to what you do,

Unknown Speaker 35:24
where you can work with the client for a short period of time, two to six weeks,

Unknown Speaker 35:31
and it's interactive. It's not like you go away and do something and come back to them, but you actually have to work with them

Unknown Speaker 35:40
so they understand your process, the way that you act. You understand their process, the way that they act, you know. And you're being paid for this, right? And so in the,

Unknown Speaker 35:52
in the when I work with Dev clients, you know, people who build websites and that sort of stuff, or technical things, you know, we basically, you know, say, like a, it's really the kind of like a paid scoping project notes, it's narrow, it's discrete. It has real value. You know, there's benefit from it. So,

Unknown Speaker 36:11
one of, one of my, one of the guys that I'm friendly with, Tim keen, you know, he used to do an upfront offer, which is, he did of Facebook ads. He said, You know what? We'll we'll install a, you know, a loyalty program, or you know, or rewards program you know,

Unknown Speaker 36:29
you know, in your business, just as you know, and it's, whatever it's, I don't know how much you charge for it, like 2500 bucks or something. And it was short, discrete, so that people get the you know, that he would be allowed to see how their business works, and be able and then, you know, and then have real ideas about what to offer. And so that short like that upfront offer, everybody should have one. You should need to think about it sort of not as a downsell necessarily, but rather as something that

Unknown Speaker 37:01
primes the pump, right? So, if people, if, if people are, are, if you've not jumped over the trust hurdle yet,

Unknown Speaker 37:11
right? And they don't want to sign a contract,

Unknown Speaker 37:15
you know, that's two or three or five or 12 months long, whatever, like, you give them something that's that's not a lot of money relative to who they are, and it gives them the opportunity to work with you, and you get to, you get all access to all the data that you need, so that you can make them a really specific offer later.

Unknown Speaker 37:37
Right now, that's actually that's very not enough agencies have that. I wish everybody would have one, because it is so powerful, because number one, it gives you just way more exposure to a bunch of different ways of businesses that the businesses work, and you get more data so you understand a whole bunch more stuff about more businesses.

Unknown Speaker 38:01
And then there's the, you know, the actual engagement offer. Like, Yeah, we love you. You love us. You know, here's what we here's what we suppose, or here's what we propose.

Unknown Speaker 38:13
There's not much that you need to put into that,

Unknown Speaker 38:19
other than

Unknown Speaker 38:21
like, this is the process by which we do our job. This particulars don't matter, but you just, you know, you just want to, like, outline what you do,

Unknown Speaker 38:32
not how you do it, or the details or the deliverables, but you basically want to say, like, you know, our process is, you know, we gather data, we do some testing, whatever, whatever it is, right?

Unknown Speaker 38:44
But the offer is, you know, as we execute these things, here are the benefits that you specifically are going to achieve, which match up to the strategic things you told me you wanted to accomplish.

Unknown Speaker 38:59
And so

Unknown Speaker 39:00
if you were just promising, and if you're just promising revenue or return on ad spend or traffic, those things are not strategic. You've

Unknown Speaker 39:10
got to get really good at asking questions. Like, cool, you want to grow your revenue?

Unknown Speaker 39:17
Why? Like, okay, you need more profit. What do you need more profit for oh, you've got to expand the team, or we're not making enough now. Awesome, great. So everything that I'm going to tell you from here on out is going to have a direct line from the thing that I say to solving that strategic issue for you.

Unknown Speaker 39:35
And if you cannot draw a direct line from what you do to what they need, you don't have the right client. Like, it's not a fit,

Unknown Speaker 39:46
and so do not be satisfied with

Unknown Speaker 39:51
offering

Unknown Speaker 39:54
better return on ad spend or lower CAC. Like, those are the

Unknown Speaker 39:59
like, those are.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
The measuring sticks,

Unknown Speaker 40:03
like, but you know what? Like, what's the impact of a lower CAC on your clients and their business? Like, you have to understand that to be able to sell the transformation that you're offering, right? Because really, when, like,

Unknown Speaker 40:20
we're

Unknown Speaker 40:22
going to go back in, the way back machine again.

Unknown Speaker 40:26
You know these days, the bumblebee the transformer. He's like this cool Camaro that turns into a transformer. When I was a kid, he was a BW bug,

Unknown Speaker 40:39
but, but you know, what your client is really

Unknown Speaker 40:43
buying is turning their VW Bug into Bumblebee, right?

Unknown Speaker 40:49
Like, that's what they're buying. Like, they want to be able to know how what you do gets them from being an underpowered

Unknown Speaker 40:59
little car to something that's really powerful, right? Yeah, and so you got to know, like, how they're going to deploy

Unknown Speaker 41:10
the benefits in order to create to power that transformation.

Unknown Speaker 41:16
And if you don't understand that, you are not going to be able to make a sale that sticks, because you will be somebody who is simply as good as the performance on their last report.

Unknown Speaker 41:35
That

Unknown Speaker 41:37
feels like a good place to move into our last questions. All right, hit that one hard, right there the I guess the first one is, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read? There's two of them. I can just pick one, and one is one that you and I spoke about

Unknown Speaker 41:57
when we went chatted a little bit ago. It's Extreme Ownership by Jocko willing and Leif I forget what his last name is, yeah, yep,

Unknown Speaker 42:09
very specifically,

Unknown Speaker 42:12
it is the it's the the areas around decentralized decisioning, because that concept of making the entire clean clear, the entire plan, clear to everyone why you're executing this plan, everybody who's involved in the plan and all their parts supporting the plan.

Unknown Speaker 42:34
That's how organizations work. Most agencies are thinking like, I give you the SOP, you deliver the SOP, and then I yell at you because the SOP did not have the desired outcomes, and you didn't do another thing that I told you you should never do. So just follow the SOPs, you know. And that's and that's the way most people manage the other one. And this is, this is,

Unknown Speaker 43:00
this is for people who want to become both better

Unknown Speaker 43:07
leaders,

Unknown Speaker 43:10
better bosses and better people. It's dare to lead by Brene Brown,

Unknown Speaker 43:18
because it talks about

Unknown Speaker 43:21
the emotional side

Unknown Speaker 43:25
of leadership and the and the importance of showing up as you were,

Unknown Speaker 43:30
the importance of showing up without your defensive armor on,

Unknown Speaker 43:36
and that that dare to lead book, quite honestly, it can change your business relationships. It can change your your intimate relationships, and it can change your family relationships.

Unknown Speaker 43:52
Awesome, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 43:55
yeah. So here's the last question is, where can everyone find you? Tim killroy.com

Unknown Speaker 44:01
and one of to sort of follow on this, this idea that we just talked about as decentralized leadership. This is total promo pitch. Yep,

Unknown Speaker 44:14
I've actually just introduced a new program for smaller agencies so people, you know, under 20 on staff, probably maybe 25

Unknown Speaker 44:23
where

Unknown Speaker 44:25
we construct a demand gen and lead gen program

Unknown Speaker 44:31
that is not owned by you, the founder,

Unknown Speaker 44:35
and if you don't have a marketing or lead gen person on staff, we are able to distribute that work across the entire team

Unknown Speaker 44:44
in their spare time, like really spare time, not extra hours, but spare time, so that we create an environment where everybody knows what's going on, the growth of the business, everybody knows how it all works. Everybody gets to see the results. But.

Unknown Speaker 45:00
Coolest thing is more teamwork between the team, because they start working better together, because they have to, and then that spills over to the other parts, and

Unknown Speaker 45:10
it's a lot more fun because we do some ridiculous gamification. Like, you know, if you have the stupidest meme of the day or the campaign, like, you get the dad joke award, or, you know, it might be a cantaloupe, who knows, you know, just like really stupid stuff, but basically ways to invest in your team so that they can invest in your business,

Unknown Speaker 45:37
right? Awesome, and you can find that@timkilroy.com

Unknown Speaker 45:42
forward slash,

Unknown Speaker 45:44
demand, sorry. Gen plus,

Unknown Speaker 45:47
G, E, N, dash, P, L, U, S,

Unknown Speaker 45:52
awesome. I wish I had been able to get Chris dubois.com but apparently, a lot of Chris Dubois out there, so, oh, yeah. So, like, there's only, like, 250,000

Unknown Speaker 46:04
people named Kilroy on the entire planet. So there you go. Maybe I just, yeah, and I was, I was, I'm old, so I was, I, I got here really early, yeah, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 46:16
all right. And it might be, might be worth a lot of money later. There you go. No, I couldn't get kilroy.com which is really sad. And I actually approached the owner of that, which happens to be some really small company. They wanted $50,000 short. And I said, screw you suck it. Like, don't like, Good luck. Good luck. All right, hey, it was really nice talking to you, Chris, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for joining Tim, this is great. All right, take care.

Unknown Speaker 46:47
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai