Joe Troyer 0:37
a lot to unpack in there a lot of nuggets in there, Chris. So you mentioned your tech stack and the breakthrough there. What was the name of the software again? Eliza?
Cris Rodriguez 0:46
Eliza? Yeah.
Joe Troyer 0:47
How do you spell that? You know, E L. Iz
Cris Rodriguez 0:49
a perfect. So
Joe Troyer 0:51
essentially, am I correct in stating it just did a better job of organizing all the data and kind of dialing so that you guys were more efficient? Is that the right way to put it?
Cris Rodriguez 1:02
100%. So what Eliza does is let’s say your agent has 20 accounts, all of those accounts, communications, all of their tax are in just one dashboard for you. So you could you know, answer client A’s prospect right in the client B’s right in the client sees and you’re not having to switch to different accounts, which took a really long time. They also have FAQs that you can build out because every client has a different offer different location, different style of martial arts, different schedule, that’s a lot of information to remember. So you can actually build in the answers into Eliza. So it’s a copy and paste kind of, you know, process that is happening. So it made the texting much more efficient. And we also my own fault. We’re not aware of high levels power dialer prior to this process. So about four months in, we learned about the power dialer, somebody was like you’re not using a power dialer. And I was like, no. So we built out the workflows. And that instantly made it much more efficient for us. So I mean, at the end of the day, you know, I probably should have got a coach that had a call center, that probably would have been the best thing for me to do. And I know that there’s call center software out there. But we were we were really needing to make this work with high level because that’s what our clients are using.
Joe Troyer 2:19
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. What What’s the call to action when you guys are calling out? So I guess let’s back it up to step. These leads are coming in from like a Facebook campaign or Google
Cris Rodriguez 2:30
Ads Facebook ad Google ads campaign, yep. Okay, to
Joe Troyer 2:33
a lead form of some kind. And then you guys are booking an appointment? What’s the goal of the appointment? Get somebody
Cris Rodriguez 2:39
just to get them to come in. All of our clients have different offers, what we see works the best is the free offer, right? I mean, how hard is it to book a free appointment. But we do have clients that do not want us booking appointments without them making some form of a financial commitment. So in the martial arts world, usually they’ll offer like four weeks of martial arts for $49 or two weeks for $29. We do not sell over the phone. But what we will do is send them the link for them to purchase and then we can have them book through that. But yeah, the goal is just to get them in the door, because every business owner tells you all you got to do is get him in the door, and then all stall and rolling. And I’m like really like you sure you have 100% conversion rate. But that’s our goal is just to get them in the door. And typically, most of our clients offer a free lesson free one on one, or at least a tour of the facility for them to come in.
Joe Troyer 3:33
Perfect. Yeah. So makes a whole lot of fun. It’s how you’re doing it and how you guys are getting the wins, I guess. So. When a new lead comes in, you mentioned that come through Slack. So that’s how you get back to somebody in five minutes. Right? You’re just picking up the phone, one time dialing, and then the follow up the six more attempts happen with the power dialer, inside jhL. Right?
Cris Rodriguez 3:54
Yeah, power dialer and texting. So lots of tags that had to get created based off of what stage are they in? Are they in follow up one follow up two, follow up three. And again, that’s what you know, took the longest and also testing it out. Because initially, I wanted to be able to call that lead twice in the same day. Right? If the lead comes in, in the morning, let me call them in the morning. If they don’t pick up let me call at night. Well that works when you only have three, four or five clients when you have 20 clients. And you know, you’ve got 80 leads that came in that one day, that would be 160 calls just for the leads that came in that day, not including all of the calls and follow ups that had to happen for the previous leads that came in. And at the end of the day, the easiest thing for me to do to increase my gross profit margin would be just to raise my rates. However, I understand the industry that I’m in and you know what people are really going to be willing to pay.
Joe Troyer 4:49
You guys handle incoming then as well.
Cris Rodriguez 4:53
No, we do not offer no. Gotcha. So
Joe Troyer 4:57
when you call somebody and it’s a missed call Right, and they call back that’s gonna go back to you know, the studio.
Cris Rodriguez 5:05
It does. Yeah. And there was a lot of education that had to occur on the clients part because the prospect is like you just called me and they’re like, What are you talking about? It’s like, oh, our agents call. So
Joe Troyer 5:19
that’s awesome. You’ve mentioned a couple of times your gross profit goals, you said, was it 74%? Is that what
Cris Rodriguez 5:26
you said? Yeah, for the gross profit margin. That’s a number that Ben McAdams has given us as our like financial coach inside of growth Pro, I have a little bench strength right now. Because we’ve had some hiccups with, with concierge and people being out and people having to cover a lot of accounts. So like gross profit margins at 71% right now, but it’s not too far off where I’d like I’d like it to be.
Joe Troyer 5:51
Yeah, that’s crazy. I think that’s probably that’s better than many things. Almost any agency that I know, I think some some really profitable agencies, you know, just using kind of the Facebook, the Facebook only as a service, including GHL, as follow up, charging 1000 1500 A month I’ve seen, you know, like those agencies, you know, do really, really well, really high margins like yours, but yeah, those are those are great numbers.
Cris Rodriguez 6:23
Thanks for worked hard to get there. Math has not always been my favorite subject. And I’ve worked closely with Ben, as well. Ben’s really helped us with improving those percentages.
Joe Troyer 6:34
Yeah, that’s great. Great. So the show producer, podcast show producer, Eduardo found something about your six step closer framework and said, We should be asking you about that on the show. Would you mind kind of giving us high level an idea of what that means?
Cris Rodriguez 6:52
Yeah, for sure. So it’s actually a customer journey. So this is something I’m really, really passionate about. I think oftentimes, as business owners, we are so stuck in our perspective of what the client is doing, we forget what the client is actually going through. And, you know, if you can train your team on understanding where your prospect or customer is, is in the journey, what they’re feeling, what questions they have, what objectives they have, and what you can do on your end, to move them from one stage to the next, it makes it a lot easier, I think we’re all so focused on that purchase stage, let me get a new client, let me get a new client, you wouldn’t need as many new clients if you just kept the ones that you have. So there’s basically six stages in my customer journey. First one is awareness. Gotta get them aware. Right. And that has to do with how many lines out in the ocean, Dan Kennedy has a story about this. Basically, if we’re going fishing, I got 10 fishing poles, you got one fishing pole on catching more fish, right? So awareness is just getting out there. And then what we need to do is we need to get them to consider us. And it’s not just, you know, consider are our services good or not, it’s compared to the other people that are checking out if they’re Googling digital marketing agencies, they’re not just finding me. So what can we do to get them to consider us and this is really where Google reviews in case studies and testimonials, and the branding, and the messaging that you have out is going to help you do that. The next stage number three is purchase, right, we want to get them to commit to our programs, we have a really, really solid sales process, we do a one call close, we can do that. Because of the ticket size, it’s much lower, we’re not trying to sell a five 710 $1,000 a month program. But we offer a free marketing audit. And it’s so funny because marketers are like you got to change your offer every like we’ve had the same offer. Since I started the company. That’s our offer you hop on we do a marketing audit of your Facebook page, your ads, your Google business profile, and where you’re on on the search engine results page, we provide value we let you know, these are the areas that we can help you with. And you know, it’s not a hard push, then we go into our discovery call. So right there, like you know, first 30 minutes is the marketing audit last 30 minutes is the you know, these are our programs. And this is how we can help you and my sales guy has an 80% close rate. He’s a rock star, he had zero sales experience. He was a beekeeper. a beekeeper what a job prior to coming on. And yes, so that’s the purchase stage, right. And then where most people dropped the ball because they just go and look for another client as the onboarding, you know how you make your customers feel from the second that that credit card goes through. And those first kind of 90 to 100 days are going to make or break the length of the you know, the stay that they’re with you. So the onboarding process has got to be super sharp. And then you go into retention, right? How can I keep this client and the best way to keep the client is to deliver on your promises, right? You don’t need all this fancy stuff. Are you doing what they paid you to do? And then you could start adding on the other stuff, you know, sending the Sherry’s berries that One year sending the anniversary cards and the birthday cards. But guys, you gotta deliver on your promise. That’s how you retain your clients. And the ultimate goal is to get them to the sixth stage, which is advocacy, I want every single one of my clients to become walking billboards for my company, creating brand ambassadors that helped me attract more like minded clients. And this is where you know, referral programs come into place. This is where I think going to events, right, I think most people look at events, you know, in conferences as ways to gain clients. And you can absolutely do that. But it’s also a great way for you to develop the relationships with the clients that are there as well. So we’re really big on setting up booths, we’ll go over 12 events this year alone, setting up booth sponsoring, and if we get a couple clients out of it great. But the fact that we got to shake hands with 20 3040 of our clients at those events, means much more to me. So those are the six stages of the customer journey.
Joe Troyer 10:57
I love that. That’s awesome. Yeah, I think most people don’t really think through the customer journey whatsoever. So it’s refreshing, you know, to see you start from the beginning and take it through the end, and be able to articulate that back. Obviously, it really is something that’s important to you, and not just something that you talked about. That’s really cool. So I wanted to make sure that we really talked about the concierge service. Is there anything else that you think, you know, in terms of ad 20, that you would share with another agency owner, if they were wanting to start the concierge service and really getting into that to help their clients?
Cris Rodriguez 11:36
I would make sure that you’re not having shiny object syndrome, and that you are in a place to be able to offer this service. If your basic programs and packages that you’re offering, you’re not crushing it with? I wouldn’t consider doing this, I think you need to have the foundation of the agency laid out first. Because otherwise, you know, it’s, it’s going to be very, very difficult. The other thing would be get a mentor, you know, I did go through the concierge agency mastermind with Chris Johnstone. His model is very different. They typically do their with their with real estate industry, and they’re doing outbound calls on lists that are given to them. That’s a lot different than doing notification goes off, got to stop what I’m doing and do the follow up, right. But the concierge agent mastermind and having Chris to lean on and ask questions was, you know, very helpful. So with anything in life, you know, you want to, if you want to accomplish something, go find the person that accomplished it, and is in the place in life that you want to be. And also as the values that you have, I think that’s really important that doesn’t get spoken enough about when finding mentors, right, you want to find somebody whose values are aligned with you. So yeah, make sure that you’ve got your foundational pieces in place in the agency, go find a mentor to help you. And for me, you know, I think people have, you know, paralysis by analysis in every industry, and you want everything to be perfect. I am a ready fire aim person. I mean, it’s written out on the walls in our, in our office. And, you know, when when I think when you have that mentality, you’re you’re just not just going to sit on your hands waiting for the perfect moment, because there’s never a perfect moment. So those are the three pieces of advice that I would say.
Joe Troyer 13:25
That’s awesome. Perfect. All right. So on wrapping this up, I’m excited to ask you this question. Because I feel like I’m always giving you some love on Instagram when you’re sharing your books. So instead of asking you to recommend three books, which I feel like is like everybody’s question at the end of a podcast, right? I always just ask, what’s the one book right, that you feel like is made the biggest impact on how you see the world how you do business? And why?
Cris Rodriguez 13:53
Yeah, it was the very first personal development book that I ever read. And it was the compound effect Tech, I think that we focus so hard on, you know, Jim Rohn says, work harder on yourself than you do your job. And you can develop all of these amazing skills on your computer and learn all these software’s and know. But if you don’t have your personal stuff together, it’s going to be very difficult for you to you know, just for you to get it done. So for the compound effect, you know, it’s small Smart Choices done consistently over time yields drastic results. I know you’re really big into health and prioritizing your health right? We’re always sending fire emojis when we’re working out and stuff like that. And the compound effect tells you hey, you go to the gym for three months, you’re not just gonna magically be in shape right? This is a lifelong practice. And I look at that the same thing you know, with business so those small smart choices every single day like are you holding you know, your meetings with yourself? That’s one of the biggest game changers for me, I have a three hour time block period every single day. That is a meeting with myself. My notifications get turned off and It’s a deep work. And I just don’t think that enough people understand the power of that of making those smart habits doing it consistently over time and you see drastic results. People look at me like, oh, like overnight, you know, like overnight, you blew up your agency was like, Dude, I was, you know, like mopping mats in a martial arts school developing the skills to be able to do this. Right. So Compound Effect 100% is the book that I would recommend.
Joe Troyer 15:26
Yeah, fantastic book. If you haven’t read it, read it. Definitely. Definitely do it. Can’t agree more. Fantastic, fantastic book. Chris will link up to grow pro agency in the shownotes. And also your Instagram. It seems like that’s where you’re most active these days. Is there anywhere else you’d like to have linked up?
Cris Rodriguez 15:47
Yeah, I mean, I know you’re not a fan of Facebook, but Facebook as well.
Joe Troyer 15:52
Look, Thank you, Chris, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing so much. I think there’s a lot that people are gonna be able to take away from this episode. And we look forward to watching the journey.
Cris Rodriguez 16:04
All right. Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it. Alright, guys,
Joe Troyer 16:07
you saw it here. We’ll see you on the next one.
