How to Retain Agency Clients By Showing Them Success

Iris Shoor is the founder and CEO of Oribi, a web analytics tool. After two successful startups, she is growing her third startup. Oribi, an AI-based web analytics tool dedicated to making analytics easy for everyone, without the help from analysts and developers. (And, no code needed!) Iris is passionate about simple products, creative marketing, great UX, building a unique culture, and most of all—people. She's on the show talking about how she helps her team aspire to reach their goals with personal development. She also shares how your digital agency can show clients success on their funnels and campaigns by using a new analytics tool.

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3 Golden Nuggets

1. The best way to inspire your team is by understanding their personal needs for professional development. Understand their career goals and meet them there to encourage growth. Perks like free food and amenities are nice, ultimately not what retains really great team members.
2.  Clients don't benefit from reports on their funnels and campaigns. They need to understand where the customers are coming from and why. This helps your clients
3. It's important to set goals with your clients for what success looks like, then measure and benchmark results throughout so clients understand the value you're bringing to the table.

Oribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency

Show Transcripts

Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an amazing entrepreneur that's in her third business. She's a rockstar. She talks about personal development of your employees, how to keep them. But most importantly, we talk about how to prove your value. To your clients, so you can actually charge more. I think all of us need to do that. We're always constantly wondering how do we prove our value to our clients? Well, this is the episode for you and it will prove your worth. Hey, Iris. Welcome to the show.

Iris: [00:00:40] Hey Jason.

Jason: [00:00:41] I'm excited to have you on and, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Iris:: [00:00:46] Okay. So I'm CEO for Oribi. I'm a serial entrepreneur. This is my third startup for the other two companies that have been leading the product and marketing. Um, I love marketing and I was always amazed that with how difficult it is to measure marketing. And that's why I started the Oribi and we raised 27 million dollars today. And worked with thousands of customers around the world. And we were doing marketing under the tech set, hopefully, better than other tools.

Jason: [00:01:19] Oh, it's awesome. Yeah. Definitely check out the tool and it was very cool. But before we get into the tool, I wanted to ask you because a lot of agency owners, obviously everyone listening, we're hiring people, we're always hiring people. And I read a blog post that you had on your blog. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. Tell us a little bit about, you know, just giving people pizza and feeding them is not really what will keep them.

Iris: [00:01:43] Yeah. I feel it's something like I find that baby ironic about this is that we want to hire the best people, the smartest vehicles, the most innovative people and treat them like a small children. And you need to be very cautious with them and you need to give them beer and pizza. And do you want the smartest people? And they usually want to, to lead interesting innovations, they want to grow. They want to learn new things. And for some reason, most of the work environment are mostly about just conquering people and their employees. And it's something that you really trying to do at Oribi, is to focus more on the personal development and giving them more independence. And. The way I see my role as a manager is to really let people shine. And to find their unique voice and to help them do it rather than having like lots of Ben and Jerry's and the kitchen. So, yeah, that's how I see it.

Jason: [00:02:48] Yeah. For many years, you know, I thought it was like, Hey, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll bring in lines, you know, like the Googles of the world, right? Like, especially that one movie of the internship with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson right there, like I can have five bananas it's free. And I think. That will draw in the wrong people. Sometimes it won't keep them.

Iris: [00:03:10] Yeah. Also we can like, um, it's all standard. So it's not that you have like a free pizza and ice cream and everybody will stay because of it. So, yeah, I agree with like, we have nice food over here, but this is not the main thing that we do. And they see that people are looking for something more personal and more deep.

Jason: [00:03:32] Yup. Let's talk about a little bit about personal development, right? Since we're on the topic of keeping our employees, right? Like we're attracting the right ones. How do you guys help out with personal development? Because I feel, you know, when people come in, if you're just expecting them just to do their job, right. They're going to be like, okay, like, they're going to be excited for a little while. Like I remember when I sold my agency, I was very motivated. To help out with the new company. And then when the dream squashers came in and started, you know, squashing our dreams, I started getting de-motivated and I was an, A- player. And I literally went to like an F- player. I'm like, you know, you better sell this company or I'm going to be the worst employee ever. And I find a lot of people are like that. So what's some things that you can help out employees with on personal development?

Iris: [00:04:24] Yeah. So, so that's a very interesting question. It seems like for me, the main thing that I benefit from being a certain type of entrepreneur and going fast was a rollercoaster every day is that I feel that it really challenged me with, learning new stuff all the time, inventing staff being creative, and they really feel that a huge part of my personal development is, me being forced to learning, uh, sales and marketing and different types of marketing and then managing and firing people. And I really wanted to give this experience to my employees. So instead of thinking of it as a funnel for rollercoaster also, it's something that they can step up using this platform. And an interesting story is that when it started at Oribi a few years ago, we actually had the budget for each employee for personal development. And I asked each one of them, what do you want to work on? If it's like a writing, public speaking, learning how to design. And then I have a list of like 50 things that they want to learn. And I was amazed to see that like half of their flow is new, what they want to work on, but we didn't have a clue. So they said, okay, so as a developer and not interested in public speaking or writing or anything else. So funny that they did learn is that most people don't really understand what they want to work on, but they do want the encouragement and the platform. When something arrives to, to really go in-depth . So tell me to do this change, how this program and receive the results have been really worked out well. And today it's more about working with employees on their personal challenges. Yes. Within the professional environment, what do they find challenging? How do they want to work on it? And sometimes we, we do help with them with top coaching. Is there internal or external? And, but the main thing is just about seeing them. Like for me, it's about things that unique voice of each one of the employees, and really try to encourage them to speak in this voice rather than being part of the company and where we are within the same box.

Jason: [00:06:34] Awesome. Great. Let's kind of change, focus. And let's talk about, because I know a lot of agencies because I chat with them all day long. A lot of times they have a hard time showing their clients results. And I think that's, if you look at it like a stoplight, that's a red light. That's something that you really need to work on because if you can't show your clients results, then they don't know the value, which means you're going to lose them. And you're just literally trying to hold onto them rather than going. This is what's working. This is not what's working. So talk to me a little bit about how did you come up with the current company now of really making it very easy for agencies to see what's currently working. Like, you know, when I was going through the tool and going through the funnel, I was like, that's pretty cool. Like, I could literally go, hey, here's the starting page and here's the page I want them to get to. What's my percentage and all that. So talk a little bit about that.

Iris: [00:07:34] Yeah. So, yeah, I do agree. This is like the main challenge. So today about 30% of our customers are agencies and probably most of the other 70% of the customers are working with agencies. So we hear those from agencies that they're unable t