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Joe Troyer

6 Core Things That an Agency Needs Part 3 – The Filter

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In Part 3 of the 6 Core Things That an Agency Needs, Joe outlines how to build a filtering mechanism that will allow you to pinpoint exactly who your core customers are. By setting up a filter, you can identify your ideal prospects and maximize your marketing efforts at the right places.

Topics Discussed

  • Why you need a filtering mechanism
  • Ideas for building your filter
  • The problem of missed calls
  • Looking at trailing indicators
  • Getting past the gatekeeper

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Joe Troyer 0:49

So next is the filter. And so when you pick a big niche, like chiropractic, the next thing we got to do is we've got to build our filtering mechanism. And the goal of this filtering mechanism is to know what 7080 90% of the market is not our customer. So you can do this by figuring out who it is that you want to work with, you can do this by figuring out that there's a specialist area that you want to target. You can do this by filtering out uneducated customers that maybe don't have a marketing budget, but you want to set a filter here, because you don't want to go after all the chiropractors, or all of whatever niche that you just decided.

It's too much, how do you mark it to, you know, 30,000 Window Replacement businesses, like talk about a spray and pray method? Like what if instead, we could top grade those, and you can figure out that really, at the end of the day, like you got 50 or 100, ideal prospects, and all you got to do is onboard 10 or 20 of those sounds a whole lot easier to me than the other side of the equation. So we want to get super crazy about our filter.

Okay. So I'll give you guys some ideas that you guys can use in your filter just to get your brain going. So, in roofing, as an example, I've been in the roofing business, my father owned a roofing business, I sold my father on doing marketing for his roofing business, and it went awful. Full disclosure went terribly wrong. The reason that it went terribly wrong is that they're not set up for retail. Well, they weren't at this time. And what I mean by that is they were storm chasers.

So the way that they do business is a storm hit scenario. It could be even a day away drive. And they will take their whole sales crew, they'll go transplant and pay for hotels, and food and transportation and all that for the entire time that they're there. And they will go door to door and they will canvass knock on doors, and they will get jobs from the people that have been affected by the storm.

Usually like hail storms as an example. Okay. The problem with this is their business is set up to run like that. They only pay their salespeople when they close a deal. And it's a percentage of the sale. So they're not set up for a retail environment. They're not set up to bid on Google or Facebook or get leads that come in to a phone number, then they take that they assign it to a regional sales rep. And then they have a follow up process to help the sales rep. They're not even monitoring what the sales reps are doing. It shouldn't seem obvious, right? But it's not right.

So I sold my father this and then it exploded quite literally in my face. These aren't fun scenarios, but we've all been in them. So for roofing, the filter that you could ask is do you do residential jobs? Are you storm chasers? And I got an exclamation point. Boom, that one's tough. Right? How many of you guys have worked with a client? Selling leads or selling calls or selling a product that gets them leads? Only to have a problem where they don't answer their phones 30% 40% Even 50% of the leads that you send them don't get answered. Some of you guys are like that doesn't happen, folks. That happens all day every day. In my last business, we owned a call tracking platform for those of you guys that don't know I sold that I exited. Okay.

But I was able to run data high level on all of you agencies that use the platform and all of your customers and see the percentage of calls that were missed and folks it was above 30%. Is that your ideal customer? Missing three out of the 10 opportunities that you send them? No that's asked Paying for problems. So what could you ask? What's the question that you could ask from the beginning? That would help you understand? What's the leading indicator? Is if they've solved this problem or not? Or whether this is even on their radar? Yeah, so do they have a sales team that answers the phone? Yeah. So you can say, how many people are in charge of answering the phone? And see how they respond. Oh, it's just me. Yep. Click. Right, I just cut bait. I'm not talking about roofer anymore.

Joe Troyer 5:44 Another way that you can do it is you can look at like trailing indicators. And what I mean by that is, in dental, for example, a question that you could ask that's very pointed, and that you could frankly, ask the receptionist when you call and that's where we want to get to, we want to get to a bigger question that we can ask directly to the gatekeeper directly to the receptionist, so that we don't have to try to get to the decision maker or the owner or the marketing director to ask this question. Why? Because if we can do this, we can pay somebody else to run this process for us. We can get a VA to run this process like I'm running right now. Okay, so if you're going after dentists, an example is how many dental?

And I don't know how to spell this. So we're gonna have to autocorrect it. How many dental hygienist Do you have? The reason that this is important, is this gives us the trailing indicator of do they have marketing in order? Do they have some capacity? Right? Are they answering the phone? All the things that we just talked about? If they have three plus dental hygienists? They have multiple doctors there, and they have got plenty of opportunity and lead flow and capacity.

So this question to start may be okay, and it may not be great. It may be two questions to start. But as you dig in, you want to make this filter this one question as easy as possible. And again, the goal should be that you could take a lead list, like I said, we we ran a lead list of 30,000 Window Replacement companies, and I could just pay a va $3 an hour to phone them up and ask one question, right, or 30,000 dentists and simply ask, how many dental hygienist Do you have? And if they don't answer three or more, we cut bait and we don't keep following up with them. So understand that this is this filter is going to keep getting more and more exact as you start to that look kind of strange. Sorry about that.

As you start to really deal with the niche as you start to have conversations with the business owners and the marketing directors, and you start to draw lines in the sand and understand the different players in the industry. But understand you need to have this filter criteria. So you start a conversation, right? And you're like, Hey, my name is Joe Troyer, you're at a networking event. What do you do all my dentist? Okay, great. How many dental hygienists Do you guys have? They're like two. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's great. Here's my card. If you ever need anything, let me know. See you later. I'm done. I'm cutting bait conversation is over. I'm on to the next. And you can also not ask such pointed questions. You asking the price Ring ring? Hello, dental office?

Do you guys do at least $1 million a year? Do you have a 5.0 reputation? And can you take on more business? How do you think that calls gonna go? Obviously, I'm being exaggerative. But it's not gonna go? Well, you can't ask that to a gatekeeper how they might cuss you out. So niche, then filter within that niche. Okay, and you may have even more criteria in here like that. They're a specialist of some kind. Right? If you find that you really like working with some type of specialists, right? Like roofing do you do residential or commercial? Great quick.

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