The Digital Agency Growth Podcast Dan Englander

Jason Cutter is the CEO of Cutter Consulting Group, author of Selling With Authentic Persuasion: Transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker, and host of The Sales Experience Podcast. He sees himself as a Sales Success Architect for companies and individuals, providing coaching, training, and consulting for companies around the world who want to dramatically improve their selling effectiveness.







Some things we covered:







The pitfalls of hiring sales veterans. The Follow-up Trap and How to Avoid It. Why "script" is not a dirty word.Exercises in abundance thinking in the face of scarcity. How to set the stage for a new sales hire.































Links:







Jason Cutter







Cutter Consulting Group







Selling with Authentic Persuasion

Holly Spaeth is the Director of Corporate Branding and Partnerships at Polaris Inc., a publicly-traded leader in powersports offering products including boats, off-road vehicles, commercial vehicles, motorcycles and more. Previously, Holly comes from the boutique agency space, where she served in leadership roles at several organizations.







Some things we covered:







A day in the life of a marketing exec and what agencies neglect.What it's like working in a 50 person-agency marketing organization. The need for outside brains and big ideas. How the best agencies keep in touch. Specialization and why it matters (if you don't believe me believe Holly!).































Links:







Polaris







Holly Spaeth

Justin Brown is Co-Founder of Motion, an agency that helps technology companies get noticed, engage prospects and become thought leaders. Motion also runs Tech Qualified - a B2B Tech Marketing podcast that delivers interviews with the best and brightest in the space.







Some things we covered:







The "hub and spoke" service model (my term not Justin's). The under-appreciated undertaking of selling to clients with lots of money and no time. How to finally get clients to create content. B2B software and where it's going.































Links:







Motion







Tech Qualified Podcast

Marcel Petitpas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Parakeeto, a software solution that helps agencies and consultancies automatically create accurate, data-driven estimates for their projects using their historic Harvest data.







Some things we covered:







The top agency time tracking blindspots. Marcel's Four Step Flywheel Framework. The right cadence for looking at time tracking data.How to empower your team to make operational decisions based on the data.Examples of big, high-leverage wins from better time tracking.































Links:







Parakeeto







The Agency Profit Podcast

The new year is right around the corner — have you hashed out your agency’s 2021 new business plan yet? 







Whether your answer is ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘sorta’, this episode will set you on the right path.







Just like most areas of marketing and sales, what worked last year may not work for much longer. Plus, there are scores of new agencies entering the market — some estimates go as high as 120,000 for the number of US marketing service companies (not to mention freelancers and in-house resources). All this is to say, it’s more important than ever to build the brand relationship today instead of tomorrow.  







This episode will cover the biggest agency new business trends we observed over the last 12 months, and what we expect for our clients and our space for the rest of 2020 and beyond. 















What You Will Learn: 















The new most-effective angles for direct outreach. How to build human connections, even if you’re using digital tools. Why specializing directly translates to more wins.  Message deliverability and what it means for your campaigns. How to leverage timing in every prospect interaction. Data driven insights to help you win your next proposal.

This is first in a continuing series of posts and podcast episodes referencing concepts from our new comprehensive online course - The Agency Lead Generation Course.  If you’d like to get updates on the next open enrollment period, sign-up here.







If there is a silver lining to quarantines, lockdowns, and so on, it’s that all of this might just free up space for agencies to take a step back, think more deeply about the problems they’re solving, and innovate.







“Innovate” is such a highfalutin word that sometimes we feel silly using it for everyday process improvements in a service business - we leave the term for Silicon Valley and various “disruptors”.  But innovate is what we’re doing, and we should all give ourselves more credit. 







Here at Sales Schema, if I had to sum up “our year in innovation”, in our weird little world of agency-focused outreach and appointment-setting, I’d describe it by way of simplification and semi-automation. 







In this post, I’ll cover what I mean and hopefully there will be at least one or two things that you can bring into your agency to plug more deals into the pipeline.







There are a couple of over-arching approaches to outreach and appointment-setting - both are viable and each have pros and cons.







Approach A. The Flashlight. 















From 2014 through the beginning of 2020, 80% of our campaigns that focus on selling agencies to marketing decision-makers at brands looked something like this:







Many verticals (“Clusters” in our parlance). Many distinct copy templates. High volume of sends across multiple channels.  Relatively high degree of automation.Location of The Work: back-end / optimization. Pros: when it works it REALLY works - you get a lot of meetings.Cons: hard to get started, and this… 







The Flashlight stopped working in most cases.







This played out with a decline in response and meeting rates, and I can’t tell you how many times we heard, “We used to do outreach and then it stopped working, and we have no idea why.”







We heard this from agencies as well as colleagues in the wider world of B2B sales. 







At face value, there are boring technical reasons for a decline in this numbers game approach - email filters at Google and Microsoft improving and so on; in other words, par for the course.







But the bigger picture, as always, is more interesting.







Why Automation is Over-Valued in B2B Sales (Especially Now)







As the entire world shifted to digital and drove into the limited number of thoroughfares like LinkedIn, email, and FB/Instagram, the competition for attention skyrocketed.  







Obviously this trend is old news, but the treadmill just got turned up to eleven. 







Across the board, we're hearing, “We used to go to tradeshows (or host events, or take people out to lunch, or whatever) and we can’t do that anymore, so now we have to figure out digital.”







This dynamic is playing out across the entire economy.







So with fierce competition for attention, ‘numbers game thinking’ doesn’t cut it, and automation often means tripping over dollars to pick up pennies. 







Although the robots, VA's, and fancy processes have their place, they have to be used a lot more strategically because we all demand a higher level of conscientiousness from those who don’t know us but would like to. 







Enter the buzzword “personalization” - in this case, the word is worth the buzz.







Now you might feel a knot forming in your stomach....