Agency Forward

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone, today I have a solo cast for you where we are going to talk about referral reliance. It's a problem that I see a lot of agencies struggling with, and so I wanted to dive into some of the

Unknown Speaker 0:13
pros and cons of referrals and give you a system for helping to actually run your business where you're not reliant on referrals, where you're not sure they're actually going to come in. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested, and right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join a dynamic agency dot community,

Unknown Speaker 0:57
and now let's talk referral reliance.

Unknown Speaker 1:00
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. You

Unknown Speaker 1:27
so a lot of agencies assume that they have a sales problem or an operations problem, when in reality, a lot of them have a referral Reliance problem. Referral reliance is what is actually destroying a lot of agencies. I have worked with some at sub 1 million. I've worked with some at over 2 million, and a lot of them come to me because they have grown their business purely based on referrals. And they rode that wave as long as they could, and then those referrals dried up. Their business became incredibly hard for them to run. Now I have positioned my business to solve for that problem, and so that's why I talked to a lot of these agencies. The other agencies that I talked to who aren't potential fits for clients are the ones who have great demand gen engines. I've actually, I have worked with a couple of them purely to help with some messaging on other things, not for my normal curriculum through the dynamic agency Os,

Unknown Speaker 2:27
but what was just very apparent to me is that the agencies who spend the time figuring out their demand gen system get way further, way faster, and so that's What we're going to be talking about for this episode. So buckle up here. The first thing I want to get into is that at its simplest form, right? Business is essentially just supply and demand. And this comes up a lot when we're looking at like an E commerce business, right? We can only sell as many things as we actually have in our inventory. Same for any storefront. It's the same for a restaurant, right? We got 86 things on the menu. Agencies rarely have an actual supply issue because there are so many ways that they can actually refill their inventory. I used air quotes on that because we're doing knowledge work, right? It's our thinking, it's our strategic expertise, and so, like an agency can just hire more people. We can always, like, bring in more people. So we might have limited capacity right now, but it's not hard for us to to add that more people tomorrow and fill this obviously, they're hiring challenges, things like that, but we're not blocked necessarily in that way. Saying we can extend timelines. That is something very easy to do. We can, we can tell people who are coming in that, hey, we get a, you know, you're either you can be on the wait list, or we can get you the same result, but it's going to take twice as much time. We'll reduce, you know, the payment fees and everything for this to make sure that it actually matches. But now we can actually run this, and we can bring on more revenue without really having to make more changes. We can also, like, narrow our offer. We can tweak our offer. There's so many things that we can do in order to change how this comes out. And so rather than being a full service agency where we're stretched very thin trying to get results, I do not recommend being a full service agency, but we're trying to do everything for everyone, like if we just hone in on a very specific solution to a problem with one audience. Now it's very easy for us to increase the amount that we're making per client, because we have shown this expertise that we can give them. So supply is rarely the actual issue. Often it's demand that becomes the real bottleneck. If we have steady demand, it also means we get way more reps on what we're doing, and that's what sets agencies apart, because an agency can see a problem five times as many times as a normal brand within a month, because we.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Multiple clients who are all going through the same problem, and so we're able to

Unknown Speaker 5:06
actually work through it, see what solution works, try it again. Keep testing, keep iterating, and across all of our clients, we now know we have, like built in this knowledge system that tells us when things are actually working, when we're doing all the right stuff. And so separate yourself from another agency. It means we need more reps. We need you know, that's what's going to give us a faster learning, better iteration, sharper offers. The more reps we can get, the more we're going to stand out from everyone else, because we are then known as the experts right within the space. And that is ultimately why you're being hired as an agency, I guess, unless you are a full service agency, which then you're being hired for convenience. But that's a separate episode in itself. We want, we want all of those reps, because that's what's going to start building that compound growth right when we can spot the patterns faster than anyone else, that's when they want to come to us. And so we need demand for multiple reasons, and it's really to create this flywheel so that we can, you know, keep our business going. Now,

Unknown Speaker 6:07
the to define, I guess, referral reliance, right? This is when you're depending on someone else to send you business. There is a word stream study from a few years ago where they pulled, you know, 1000 plus agencies, and across those

Unknown Speaker 6:25
of the ways that they brought in leads, 60 plus percent were from referrals. So what that essentially tells me is that more than half of these people's businesses were being driven by something they have zero control over right? You can, you can say you have control over your referrals, but that's not actually true, because you still have to rely on someone else to connect some dots in their head to be able to refer you. And more importantly, they need to know someone who needs to be referred. And so there's so many variables that we're adding in here that it becomes very, very challenging. And one of the things that I've actually seen come up quite a few times with with agency referrals is that you might not offer something now, but a past client refers you business for something that they remember you doing, or they just say, yeah, these people can help you with that problem, and then they the business comes to you, and it's for something you have no control over, Like it's you don't know how to solve this problem. A lot of agencies will take on that work add that to their service menu. But that's just, you know, digging you into a deeper hole, and is ultimately pretty unethical, if you ask me, but, but,

Unknown Speaker 7:36
yeah, so when you do rely on referrals, right? You have zero predictability within your business, like you never know when someone's gonna give you a referral. And again, this isn't to say you shouldn't accept referrals. Referrals are great in the sense of, like, it's free business, right? There's no cost or acquisition. They're just coming in.

Unknown Speaker 7:59
Having a deliberate and intentional referral system is a must. You should still be trying to get referrals, but relying on referrals for a majority of your business is where the actual problem is

Unknown Speaker 8:11
with this. You also have like, this narrow kind of network ceiling, right? Your referrals will tap out at a certain scale, because, unfortunately, it's not a for every one client you get, you get three referrals. And so you can just keep expanding that exponentially, right? That's not how it works, because you'll get a bunch of clients who don't have referrals. You'll get some clients who don't think about you after the engagement at all. And so you can do things in order to help that, but you can't rely on that.

Unknown Speaker 8:41
There's also this, like complacency trap that I see a lot of agencies fall into when they're good at relying on referrals, and they just keep coming in and their business is growing, they just assume that they've got everything figured out and they're good to go. And it unfortunately, those dry up at some point, like the agencies I talked about earlier, they dry up completely, and then you're stuck floundering trying to figure out, how do I grow these accounts? How do I get new ones? Because really growing accounts becomes your only method for new business, because you don't have a system to actually bring business in

Unknown Speaker 9:16
and actually, quick aside, I just thought of if I was buying a business, and you can run yourself through this too. Would you rather have a an agency? Would you rather purchase an agency that is built purely on referrals, or one that has its own method of filling a pipeline, right? I think the answer is pretty obvious, that you want the latter. But then why are we not building a business that maintains our options in case we do want to sell in the future, right? No one, if I know that a majority of your business is only coming in from referrals, then I'm going to believe that as soon as you disappear from this equation, that I lose all those referrals. And so it's not a business that I want to get involved in. Let's talk about what the best agencies do.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Do Differently. Really, it's the opposite of relying on referrals, and it's building their own like demand gen system, right? They, they are trying to acquire their own leads. And I have a bunch of ways that I look at this, but ultimately they their channels are going to vary, but they are going to bring someone, they're going to help someone discover them, right? So ideally, we're talking about the problem with everything they do. They're going to then build trust, and then they're going to convert, and it's a simple, three step kind of process, right? The actual delivery of this is never simple, but at a high level, it's pretty simple,

Unknown Speaker 10:39
referrals for these agencies, right? Referrals are a byproduct of good work in the their demand gen system is more of a byproduct of like, a good strategy. They're actually thinking through, how do we attack this? And that's what's bringing in the business. So if you want to escape referral reliance. There's a couple things that you can do.

Unknown Speaker 11:03
One, and this is purely self serving, but it will also help you. You can hire us. We can work with you through the dynamic agency OS, which is a positioning operating system. And so we can help you actually go through some exercises, nail your positioning, so that when you go to market, it's actually way easier for you to attract the right people who are have the right problem that you have the right solution for, and so you can make a compelling offer bring them in that makes your life a whole lot easier. What you can also do, and this is what I'd recommend every agency do, period, if you are listening to this, is just look at your current lead gen, where, where are leads currently coming from? And do like a breakdown, right? What percentage are referrals? What are inbound? How many are outbound? How many, if you're not already tracking within your pipeline, like where people came from, where did they hear about you? Right? Do a full audit on that. Figure all of this out you might. And the reason that I want to separate this from Discovery Channels to trust building channels, then your conversion is because you might find out, like a lot of people are going to come to you and say, Yeah, I was following your LinkedIn and and I loved it, like, that's why we're talking now, right? Okay, awesome, but, but they don't say within that is that they actually heard you on someone else's podcast, and that's where they discovered you. Because no one is going onto LinkedIn and typing in their problem right? Every now and then, they might, they might have a peer in their network right, a second connection to you, or something that

Unknown Speaker 12:32
shares a post, likes a post, something that puts the content in front of them, and it just hits at the exact right time. And now, now you're in business. More often than not, they saw you on a stage somewhere, right? They're listening to your podcast. They're seeing a blog like people still go to Google, they go to AI to look for solutions or problems. So they're discovering you on a platform that's often different from where they're building trust with you. And so we want to track all of those things, and in this audit, you want to go through and monitor those, because there's a couple of things, right? First, if you have a if

Unknown Speaker 13:05
your issue is that not enough people know of you, like they're just not finding you, okay, that's one we need. Then we need to get a more pocket. We need to share other people's audiences, right? We need to find other opportunities like that. If people are finding you, and you're like, building up a follower base, you got to get an email list. But people aren't

Unknown Speaker 13:22
converting, right? That's a different problem. We can look at your offer. We can look at different things like that, but so we have to know where that's happening within your pipeline.

Unknown Speaker 13:31
Once you figure that out, double down on the channel, right? If you know that it is the discovery phase, then we're going to go all that. We're going to go on podcast tour, right? We're going to join do some like joint newsletters with people. Like, we're going to find ways to get you in front of other people so that, so you can solve for that. If it's trust building, then it's like, hey, we need better content. We need better

Unknown Speaker 13:52
like first touch offers to bring people in the door, stuff like that.

Unknown Speaker 13:58
Optimize what is currently working. Before you start adding new systems, right? You already have something going. Let's try pushing that snowball a little faster, get some momentum so that it heads down the hill and keeps building. You don't need to keep doing like new things all the time. The path of more, better new is one that I often come back to. We want to do more of what's currently working because that lets us build up a data set. When we have enough data, then we can go back and look at it through the lens of being better. Now, how do we actually improve all of that? Right? We can't. If you get two clients via one source, that's awesome, like, great. Good work on getting two clients, but if you had 10 clients all through that source, now we can actually look at multiple data points. It's not just like a single our trend line is going to look a lot different, right? Because we're able to, actually, we have more dots kind of plotted on this, this little chart. And so we do better. Then if once we've kind of maxed out how much we can optimize this, then we do something new. And so this is hard for a lot of agencies, because you just want to do what's new. You see some cool tactic, you.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Someone puts up some LinkedIn post saying, Hey, if you comment leads, I'm gonna give you my system that I built. Like, I didn't sleep for three days and just built this system using make.com like, No, it's all garbage. Don't look at it. It's actually very simple. Talk about the problem you solve. Show people the solution when they ask for it, and then you can convert them. So we walk through that and then finally test just one system, like, pick one system that you actually want to, like, keep iterating and optimizing from there. So, like, you might have some stuff that is already working, what we want to do is turn that into a full flow. So it's like, yeah, writing this type of content is getting a lot of conversations going on LinkedIn. Okay, now, how do we turn that into, like some sort of framework that we can follow with everything that we're doing?

Unknown Speaker 15:47
I would strongly recommend you go to snapoffer system.com,

Unknown Speaker 15:51
grab a free copy of that guide I've created. You can walk you through it. You can literally throw that into chatgpt, and it'll help you ideate and create your landing page. Everything you can do this very fast.

Unknown Speaker 16:03
In fact, they got just talked to a guy who followed this same approach and was getting leads same week that he launched it,

Unknown Speaker 16:12
with people booking calls on their calendar. And this was a recent one. This is not abnormal. A lot of my clients have used this system specifically to kick off their lead gen.

Unknown Speaker 16:24
So I would do that and then start, start running. Okay,

Unknown Speaker 16:28
let's, let's wrap this up the because I find myself just rambling at this point, and while I'm glad you're still here with me,

Unknown Speaker 16:35
I'll lose you at some point. So

Unknown Speaker 16:38
to reiterate, right, referrals are great. We like referrals. However, referral Reliance can be fatal to your business. We don't want to rely on others for a business. Take ownership of your agency and figure out how to build your own Lead Gen system. Growth comes from building a system that creates demand on purpose, right? We're not yet. You might actually grow some numbers for your business by relying on referrals, but at some when those dry up and you don't know what to do, it's a your it's like being caught in the ocean without your swim trunks when the tide goes out, right? There's some version of that metaphor that makes sense. So practice

Unknown Speaker 17:21
like going through your framework, seeing what works, what engages, what gets people excited

Unknown Speaker 17:28
to actually move into the next stage your pipeline. So from discovery to trust, building to conversion. Invite them to, you know, subscribe, share, like, do, whatever that element is, if it is, if they are in the discovery phase, maybe it's just sharing more that piece of content with more people. If it's a trust building phase, hey, it's like, actually book a call so we can talk about this. And then conversion, right? You're going one on one at that point. But referral reliance, not great. We got the solution for you. Hopefully this podcast helped, and we hope to do some more solo content like this coming up. So let us know if what you want to hear about

Unknown Speaker 18:08
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