Joe Troyer 0:48
Hey everybody, it’s Joe Troyer, and welcome to another episode of show me the nuggets today we have on agency coach Dan Englander, Dan, we were just talking about before we kicked off the show. He’s from New York, I’m living in Ohio, we’re practically neighbors. And Dan, without further ado, man, welcome to the show. Joe. Thank you, I appreciate it. So you’re the founder and CEO of sales schema, give us a little background, real quick little snippet on what sales schema does. Yeah.
Dan Englander 1:17
So basically, we’re a fractional new business team for for agencies and other b2b organizations kind of going after, usually, you know, funding startups all the way up to the biggest companies on Earth. And what that means is a fancy way of saying, we’re going out to the market on behalf of our clients, get the meetings and keep the pipeline full, regardless of what’s going on there. And basically,
Joe Troyer 1:35
cool, really excited to dive deep in there and talk about what’s working right now inside of that side of your business. But before we do that, let’s let’s, let’s go back. Tell us about your background. How did you get into digital marketing in this crazy world of agency?
Dan Englander 1:49
Yeah, so I basically at a college moved to New York, and like this would have been 2010 and didn’t really know what I wanted to do exactly kind of worked a couple like BS internships, I worked at a, I was just talking to my fiance about this, I worked at a music promotions company, and I got fired because I wasn’t cool enough, you know, that’s pretty much the reason. But anyway, like, from there, I kind of like be answered and found myself and into working at an ad agency, and I was, this would have been, you know, the earlier days of social media, when you could just say, hey, we do social and then companies would be like, here’s all of our money and, and that was like, literally the the guy that was answering, you know, problems that people had about their product on a Facebook walls, a certain consumer electronics brand.
You know, it was this was when community manager was a title you could have. So from there, you know, kind of moved on to a different gig. And I was at a smaller company, Creative Services Agency, focusing on animated video selling animation to enterprise and to brands and everything in between. And I was kind of in the classic sales client service shuffle role, I was officially an account manager. So learned a lot about that I learned a lot about how to balance outreach, and actually like, really what works for selling something that’s intangible or selling a complex service to a big, big company, self published a business book about that.
And in sort of built a prep built sales schema in round 2014. I’d like quit my job to Doulton various thing for a while traveled Asia, started sales schema in 2014, I realized pretty early, I was sort of like, okay, everybody is trying to get leads, everybody’s trying to get beyond referrals and is having a lot of trouble with that. Maybe that’s something I can help with, and then started building the company from there. And the rest is history, as they say.
Joe Troyer 3:28
Cool, man. So give us a high level overview of what sales schema looks like, right now, how many clients? Do you guys have kind of top line? You know, how many team members you have? Etc?
Dan Englander 3:38
Yeah, yeah. So we probably have about 15 clients right now, our biggest or biggest verticals, is marketing advertising. So especially the agency space, but we also have lots of software businesses and others that are usually looking to reach big enterprises. We have relatively small, you know, core team have around five employees based, you know, primarily stateside, and then we have, you know, a lot a lot of contractors and everything going to helping with with list building and that sort of thing from there. Yeah, I’ll leave it at that for now. But there’s a lot I can get into in terms of how we’re how we’re doing things.
Joe Troyer 4:07
Yeah, that’s so that’s super interesting. So you said that you got a small team, you’re mostly going after kind of enterprise clients, for your agencies tell us a little bit more about kind of who the bread and butter is or who the main audience is that you guys are going after in terms of enterprise clients? What’s
Dan Englander 4:24
that look like? Yeah, so So usually, you know, our client could be like an agency or software business, and they’re usually looking to reach anything from like a funded startup all the way to, you know, fortune 500 company or something like that. And what we’re so mechanically what we’re doing is we’re reaching out on behalf of the salesperson who’s going to be the one like getting on the call and closing the deal and all that sort of thing.
So there’s, you know, dozens of common 1000s of lead generation companies that do this that are probably in your inbox and in my inbox right now. The thing that makes us different is we used to do the classic cold outreach approach. There’s a lot of different people saying, you know, do this tactic do that one, use this channel use another. And what we’ve we’ve experienced, I’m not disparaging anybody or saying that never works. But what we’ve experienced is like if you’re in a service that’s generally like well understood, like the agency world, that the scarce resources is skepticism is is rather trust.
It’s not it’s not information. And for that the the sort of like funnels and all this automation kind of resorts to the same thing, which is essentially going in cold and beating your head against the wall, trying to get somebody that’s skeptical to talk to you. And then they’re not saying yes, unless they have a need right then, which is really rare. It’s not really sustainable way to do outreach. So I’ll pause in a second. But the way that we’re, that we’re thinking about it is called relationship sales at scale. And it’s more about identifying the prospects who already likely to talk to our clients, because they’re already in our clients circles of influence, and kind of starting there. So that’s kind of our thinking about it.
Joe Troyer 5:56
Gotcha. That’s really cool. Yeah, I think like, today, man, the landscape is so different than when you got started, or when I got started, right? Like the world of, you know, you just said, we do social media, and it’s like, here’s all my money, go do it. Right, like just raising your hand and saying, like we do this used to be really powerful and used to get you a lot of clients.
Right. When this industry, you know, first started and as as waves came from, from different technology and platforms, you know, I was, I got started in the website building era when everybody wanted a website, but didn’t know why. Right? It was it was I do websites. Alright, great. Here’s some money. It was is that simple. And, you know, now, obviously, the landscape is very different. Right? The market sophistication level is very different.
Dan Englander 6:38
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. And I think that it’s like, even for new things. Like, for example, influencer, marketing was like, the cool new thing, whatever, a couple of years ago or something. And now like, that’s everybody understands what it is, it’s as the perception of being commoditized. So I think that markets are now moving faster towards that mature phase a lot sooner. And I think it’s like, just because you have something that’s just because you’re working in a mature market doesn’t mean you have a bad business, it just means you have to communicate differently. Right, and that there’s a lot more to talk about there. But that’s that informs like how we do a lot of outreach,
Joe Troyer 7:16
You know, 100% agree. I think a lot of a lot of agencies, a lot of businesses that come deaf in the marketplace, though, right? It’s super sophisticated. And they’re leaving with a message that’s very elementary, and then they’re wondering why, you know, the marketing message didn’t work when it worked two or three years ago. So love that. Tell us more about kind of this relationship based prospecting, I think is what you call it, right?
Dan Englander 7:38
Yeah, yeah. Relationship sales at scale is the way what we’re trying to trademark right now we’re in the process of and, and basically, it’s, it’s the idea that it’s like, okay, the goal is to just de risk that first conversation, you know, by any means necessary, you know, get on the same page about who we’re going after and do that first first conversation. So then the question becomes, how do you do that best. And what I think a lot of people are doing is sending people informations, and in case studies and that kind of thing, which doesn’t really work so well anymore, or they’re doing kind of this like on compelling personalization, right?
Where it’s like I saw you tweeted this, I read in the news, you’re doing that. And we you know, if you think about it, that doesn’t really that’s not really emotional. It’s not it’s easy to ignore that, that kind of email. So. So our hypothesis, and what we’ve experienced as well is that, you know, relationships are really kind of this timeless thing, for better or worse. There. There’s a lot of like positive and negative connotations to this idea of tribe, but it is really compelling. And it makes that outreach way harder to ignore, and you’re not trying to get everybody to say Yes, right away, but a much higher percentage, will it even the people that aren’t ready to talk are gonna have trouble ignoring an email that indicates that you’re within their circles right within your circles of influence.
So that’s what that kind of does to get more academic, and then I’ll actually get to how what we’re doing tangibly, there’s this idea of Dunbar’s number, right, which is like we have these circles of influence, we have our family or friends, five people. And then it tends to go out by thirds pass there and Dunbar’s number itself is about 150 acquaintances. So our whole feeling is that well what if it keeps going out by thirds?
What if there’s another you know, several 100 people that don’t know you but will be willing to talk to you because of a strong personal and or business commonality you have with them? So, for example, like a very common campaign that we do for clients is we say, Okay, we’re going after this list of whatever 1000s of specific companies that you really want to do business with your dream accounts. You have this great Rolodex over here because you’ve been building up your business from referrals Well, what about everyone they know you know, the knows somebody within these accounts. So the problem is, up until now, we’ve all just kind of had that happen into those referrals sporadically but there’s there’s technology and tools to actually like go after them more deliberately.
So one thing we do is we say, okay, export your contacts tell us everyone you’d feel comfortable connecting with, you know, already in order to get introduced. For some people, it’s 20 people. For others, it’s hundreds, whatever, people that you actually know, not like your fake connections on LinkedIn you’ve ever met or whatever, we all have those right. From there, what we’re able to do is map those people’s connections into those senior roles and those ideal accounts. And then we do a campaign that might last a few weeks that says,
Hey, Bob, hope you’ve been well, I noticed you’re connected to these, like specific people. Can we get on the phone real quick, I was wondering if you might help me out. I’m working on some some business development initiatives here. And you know, not everybody says yes, but a very high percentage, maybe like 20 to 50% was, uh, yeah, I can help you out if you’re specific enough about it. So it does take some work, it does take some muscle, but it’s a much more deliberate way to get to get introduced and just you come in with a very high degree of trust at that point. So it’s one of the best things we know. So that’s an example of, of one thing we’re up to.
Joe Troyer 10:49
That’s beautiful. I love it, you know, coming in as a referral, and almost kind of a programmatic referral kind of approach is brilliant. I love that almost coming in on their endorsement.
Dan Englander 11:00
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And just doing it, you know, just doing it more deliberately. So what we love about it is like, and we were part of the problem, so I’ll take some, some ownership, you know, how many times have you heard, like, referrals don’t work, you know, referrals aren’t enough. And they’re not enough alone, if you’re just sort of sort of being in reactive mode about them. But at the same time, you know, there’s this sort of like old school meets new new school, they know timeless stuff with the new stuff that I think’s really, really cool about this approach. Yeah,
Joe Troyer 11:24
that’s really interesting. Yeah, we, we have a marketing campaign that we’ve helped a lot of agencies from that’s really similar, that I think you might like or get value from, or might have another idea from or say, Yeah, we do something similar. We, you know, let’s say that we’re working with a marketing agency that that works with, let’s say, AC repair companies, right, we call up the supplier, right, and we ask them for referrals, right? We just say, we know, you’re not in the business of doing AC repair.
But we really need to find two or three contractors in this area that can take care of customers, you know, yada, yada, and we just need somebody that we can trust, and that we can count on who would you recommend? So we can cold call, get that? Get that person on the phone, get three or four referrals? And like nine times out of 10 with that person’s information, get through the gatekeeper and book an appointment? Yeah, so I can see how this would work really, really well.
Dan Englander 12:22
Yeah, no, that’s really cool. I love that approach. Because it’s just like, it’s so much leverage and so much bang for your buck. Because you’re getting, you know, potentially referred to multiple people, and then you have this, like, greater degree of trust, that’s gonna put you further ahead, you know, and the other thing that I think it’s like, less spoken about an approach like this, is, this isn’t like something that’s just going to go out of style tomorrow, right? Like, we’ve all seen this sort of arms race of sales tactics, where it’s like, the AI or the sort of like, I’m going to point to some little publicly available detail on your site and reference it, but it’s like, you know, then 500 people do it and sort of falls apart, but your relationships are something that, you know, is gonna just gonna continue to work. I think so.
Joe Troyer 13:03
Yeah, I love it. Like, the method that we gave is kind of a cop out, because the relationships aren’t real, right? They’re very surface level. Right? But but that works. So well. I can’t imagine how well, like real relationships would work. Right. Like, it seems like that would be quite an amazing door opener. And this other campaign already works well for us. So yeah, I would love to think about how to run a campaign like this. So how do you do this at scale? Because like, this seems like a lot of a lot of work to be honest.
Dan Englander 13:38
Yeah, totally. And I just push back a little like, I think that, you know, the the content, the the question of like real relationships, like, yeah, of course, there’s levels of degree, like the relationship you have with your best friends is not going to be the relationship you have with a business acquaintance. But I still think there’s more trust built into it than almost anything else, right? It’s just a matter of degree. But yeah, I get what you’re saying.
And But to answer your question about about scale, I think that the way the way, it’s not easy, it’s not like there’s just one button we push people ask where you’re getting the data, and yada yada proprietary this and that, but we have around 15 list builders and discovers that are kind of like making this work and getting different data for different campaigns and kind of putting it together to get the scale and we might be contacting like 50 to 200 people per business day. And to some people that might sound like a massive number.
To others. I think a lot of people it’s not it’s actually like a reasonable number to balance that personalization and that scale. But I think you know, even if people are listening and they never hire us, I think a way that you can think about this is front loading that work right because like up until now, if you’re thinking about doing outreach, it’s a lot of backloading it’s like yeah, I’m gonna go spit out a list, whatever CMOS of this type of industry company etc. And then I’m going to spend I’m gonna backload the work by spending so much time like tinkering with copy and like software products and stuff.
This is more about like, you don’t have to worry about the copy the copy matters, but you don’t have to worry about this complex funnel as much. It’s more about the identification and then writing this kind of madlib template that draws on those strong commonalities. So, for example, like if you’re listening and you’re di or thinking about DIY, this one really simple exercise doesn’t work for everyone.
And I’m not saying it’ll work for sure. But it tends to work really well is like, just just people in your backyard like, Okay, you have this list of dream accounts, you can find pretty easily the prospects that are in Denver or in Austin, saying, Hey, I’m right next to you, you know, we’re do we’ve done a lot of work in your field, that’s now going to get a much higher rate of response, then going in cold, right? Or finding, Okay, what about all the companies that went to the same tradeshow you did two years ago? And starting from that premise? So it’s going to take a little more legwork at the beginning, but it’s going to produce better returns? Yeah. Well, that’s kind of how we think about it, when more personable
Joe Troyer 15:51
for sure. 100%. Love that. So you’ve worked with a lot of more enterprise agencies, it seems, what are the commonalities of the most successful kind of enterprise agencies that you think are kind of thriving versus the ones that are maybe kind of stuck? Because you get to see kind of been behind the curtain, so to speak of a lot of different agencies working with them
Dan Englander 16:16
so closely? Yeah, no, it’s it’s a it’s a really good question. And it’s sort of it’s, it reminds me it was that Dostoevsky line like all all, happy families are the same. And all unhappy families are unique. And their unhappiness, I might be butchering that line. But it’s, it’s not like that. But I actually think thinking about it more of actually might be the inverse of that. Right. So I think that there’s a lot of ways to get it, right.
But also, it’s more easy to identify the ways in which agencies are doing it. But I think the big the big theme is specialization, right? I think the agencies that are on the rise now are, are specialized in some way. It could be niching, that’s like a really tried and true way to do it. It also could be something that you do that’s, that’s really unique, that’s tangible, and can apply to verticals that are kind of the same.
So I think it’s going to be hard to get away from that sort of specialization, I don’t think it’s, it’s a good time to be one of these big bloated HLRs agencies of record, like, it’s not not a really good spot for them right now. Beyond that, I think the other thing that like the you know, a lot of these agencies are getting right is just the consistency of sales efforts and a division of duties with those sales efforts.
And that’s something that we help with a lot. But you can companies that don’t hire us, they are not there, they’re thinking about first, you know, order of operations, like if you’re an owner, and you’re in that sales seat, getting the fulfillment off your plate, so you can sell, once you figured that out, you know, getting support at the top of the funnel.
And then once you figure that out, getting somebody else to sell for you and close those deals, as opposed to thinking of sales as something that you do in between projects, when you have time. That and then that sort of thing. So it’s a lot of just sort of like consistent everyday sales efforts is another thing, we see that the there’s probably a lot more there, but always
Joe Troyer 18:10
great. Now, those are some definitely some great tips when when you think about your clients, how long do you think their sales cycles are normally? Long? When he talks about enterprise clients? I assume that means long sales cycles for me, right, like, Yeah,
Dan Englander 18:25
I mean, it’s not necessarily just enterprise, but I think we tend to work with, you know, for context to be more specific, like deal sizes, where our clients are selling anything from like a 20k lifetime value at the very bottom up to like, you know, millions of dollars or whatever, but at the top. So for those sales cycles, I think, you know, it’s probably like what we see is like a three to 12 month sales cycle a lot of the times and of course, there’s exceptions, there’s people that neither right now, I think a lot of the times, you know, we’re working with agencies that have built themselves up on referrals, and they don’t really know what their numbers are, because they’re not really experiencing an opportunity till they’re, you know, till it’s an opportunity. So it’s ready to go and, and so on.
So I think that can kind of like give people a clouded view of sales cycle, you know, if you’re doing outreach, and you’re getting somebody at the problem aware stage, not the solution or stage that’s going to be that, you know, multi month sort of situation most of the time and it but it’s worth it because you’re you’re in control of your efforts, basically.
Joe Troyer 19:26
Yeah, I mean, what’s what’s difficult, and I’m sure you guys struggle with this or see this all the time, in those long sales cycles is just, you know, you go to test something new and it’s like, is this working? Right? It’s yeah. You know, having having the the willpower, if you will, to see it through to get enough data to see if it’s actually working, you know, running running like Google Ads campaigns, even for a faster sale cycle. You know, we’re always is this working? Are the numbers gonna pan out?
And we’re getting asked that question 30 days into an agreement with one of our vendors right or with one of our partners So when I think about long sales cycles, like they, they always spook me, right? Like I always steer away from them. Because I don’t want to have to keep resetting the prospect or in my mind, that’s what I tell myself. Right like that it will work. So like, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you like, how do you deal with running an agency? Where your clients have these long sales cycles?
Dan Englander 20:27
Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, I think one thing you have to do is you have to look, you have to judge the intermediary, falsifiable actions that happen, which sounds like a lot of jargon. But you have to look at Pipeline value, and you have to, like, look at Pipeline value in a way that is real and not just in that isn’t subject to to your own whims, right, because like, how many times you’ve you’ve heard, you know, MQL, SQL, all these different stages, that can mean anything to anyone. What we like to, we’d like to keep it just like really simple and just say, like,
Okay, how many appointments? Are we getting? What What steps have they gone through? Like, are they actually shown up, versus gone to the next stage of proposal and gotten all their decision makers on board versus, you know, obviously closed? So that’s, that’s really what you have to do is judge those middle stages.
But then, you know, our clients that have been at this for a while, they tend to get that because they’re like, Yeah, we’re selling, you know, multi million dollar lifetime values. When we get a client, it’s, it’s for a long time, I think that there’s not necessarily a right or wrong way to do it. If you’re going after small and medium sized businesses. Yeah, the sales cycle might be a little faster. But I think what, what sort of deadly is that like middle ground where you’re selling, you know, a low end service for like a very low fig, four figure amount or something.
But your sales cycle is still going to be long as you’re selling to like a small meet, whatever, not necessarily an SMB, but somebody where that’s going to be a serious consideration. And then you’re getting like the worst of both worlds, right? Where it’s like, you’re not making much, but also yourself, like as long so I think you can kind of go go either way.
But I think for outbound and just for, like the amount of time it takes to go through that process, like you might as well have a big enough pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And yes, selling to bigger companies has some unique challenges, but it’s not that much harder than selling to like the owner of a pizza shop, you know, it’s still humans. So for sure, that makes a lot of our thought on it. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 22:23
When a client says like, how long do you think, Dan, it’s gonna take for me to see a return on investment? Like, what were How do you answer that question being in a long sales cycle? Yeah, it’s
Dan Englander 22:34
a good question. So the first thing we say is like, look, the 250 I think this the supplier that probably you would sympathize with, as most of our clients do, as well, because they’re also agencies is like, we have to say, here are the things we have control over that you should hold us accountable to, and that’s meeting volume and meeting relevance meeting relevances, and right company, senior notes, those are the only things we can control.
That said, you know, what we tend to see with our clients, depending on their skill level, depending on the frankly, their motivation. And other things like that is probably like month six through 12, or when our clients are seeing ROI. And, you know, usually for us to be a fit, people have to be down for that. Yeah, that’s kind of kind of our thinking about it. But that’s but I think that that’s the case for any, you know, sales and marketing channel for a significant deal size, like the idea of somebody who’s going to come in and flip a switch. And now comes the business. It’s like, well, if they get really lucky, maybe, but it’s probably Yeah,
Joe Troyer 23:27
yeah, I completely agree. And that’s not an unrealistic timeframe at all. Yeah. So interesting. So we talked about some ideas for like the DI wire on how they can do some things like this. We talked about kind of what your team looks like how you ended up in this space.
You talked a little bit about kind of other things that you have to help your clients with in order for them to get the result, right. So you’re not just worrying about bringing them in the leads that are the right fit. What are some of those top things that you say, like you guys have to help with or trained for or help them do in order to get the result that they’re looking for, you know, from your guys’s service?
Dan Englander 24:05
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, I think the biggest one is just like time and motivation, you know, that’s one thing we really suss out before we agree to partner with somebody is, you know, I’d say about half the time of working with an owner. And sometimes it just has to be like that. And even in large agencies, sometimes the owner is still the main salesperson. So that’s not a deal breaker.
But assuming we’re in that situation, we have to make sure that they can block off significant time. There’s not one, you know, there’s not a specific amount of time, but if it’s like if you’ve have less than 10 hours a week to focus on the business, it’s going to be hard to make anything work and usually like people are fooling themselves that they have they have this ambitious growth goal, but they can’t really devote that amount of time. So that’s the most important thing.
Beyond that, you know, what we tend to say is like, okay, you know, you because a lot of people will come to us and they think they’re awesome at sales. And we’re like, we’ll see, you know, we’ll see how this goes. You haven’t really dealt with people outside of referrals yet. So from there for a few months in and we’re getting lots of the right types of prospects and but they’re not closing, then we might suggest coaches and other partners in our network that can help out help with like positioning and that sort of thing to move the process along. But the people, you know, some of some of whom we’ve interviewed on the show, like
Jhansi rackets, he has a successful agency in the web dev space. And as digital mastermind. They have processes that are very deliberate, you know, that are ironed out. They’re like John’s working on fine tuning that all the time. And it’s often involves not sort of being in this reactive mode. Like, if you have an agency that is very ROI centric, that’s one thing, you’d be like, great, you hire us we do a test, whatever we do a pilot, it’s gonna make you this result. I think what’s more challenging is if you have sort of a pull market agency, like we build giant websites, we build mobile apps, you still have to bring people in the door. And if the only action is like, well, you don’t have you don’t want to build a six figure site.
Now. I guess we’ll see you later. That’s tougher to make work. And what the best agencies in that mode? Have, they have a situation where it’s like, you know, can we can you pay us for a strategy, and we’ll show you exactly what we would build or some other thing. And they’re very proactive about, like, outlining all the benefits for that, showing it off and moving the process forward. So that’s kind of what we tend to see and through, you know, others in our network tend to work out with their clients. Yeah, that makes sense.
Joe Troyer 26:25
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. If you’re working with a brand new agency, or not a brand new agency, brand new sales team, right, they’re doing a fresh build out, because the owner has always been in charge of sales. They he’s always been the bottleneck. They’re doing good revenue, though, like they got a nice fulfillment team. Any advice on how they go about structuring a sales team who they hire first, what that looks like, based upon, you know, your kind of experience in this space?
Dan Englander 26:53
Yeah, it’s a it’s a really good question. I think the first thing is to not hire the driver to do until you have the car who’s kind of like the metaphor we use, right? So a lot of the times what we see is there’ll be an owner that’s in the sales seat, they’re bogged down with it, they don’t like sales, they don’t want to do it. So they’re like, I know, I’ll go hire the six figure person that says they have an amazing Rolodex. And they interview really well. And then they get them on. And they’re like, great, like, here’s our portfolio and case studies, they send them off out into the cold. And then like, six months later, they’ve produced nothing.
And then they’re like, oh, this person sucks. I got, I got burned, right? And the problem with that is like, well, that person probably what is successful and is good, but they’re, like, used to being successful within a context where they have lots of support, and they have an existing system, right? And that’s not really there.
And chances are, you’ve never had to really build that that yet. So to answer your question, I think the first thing is like, don’t step out of the sales seat too fast. If you’re an owner, it’s going to take a serious amount of time and resource investment to get to the place where you can actually step out of the sales seat. Some people say you never can, I don’t agree with that. I think that if you know,
I always say like, I’m in New York, I’m looking out on the sky on a skyline of, you know, complex service businesses that manage to hot train people out of scent and sell like, it’s, it’s definitely doable. So I think the first thing is to figure out top of funnel right to figure out like, how are we bringing in prospects, and then once they’re in, what is that repeatable sales process that I’m using, so I’m not switching it up each time to get people involved, there’s 100 years of, you know, sales training, that it probably doesn’t change that much that you can, you can leverage there.
And that could be through a company like ours, you know, helping with top of funnel or could be doing it in house, you know, which takes a while. From there, once that once that’s an order, and you’re getting prospects in reliably, and you have that process, then you’re thinking about that six figure plus role. And then your job becomes part sales trainer, you know, you’re not just gonna be able to hire that rolled step off like, we just had, we just hired a salesperson and that’s my job. part time job is sales training, basically, throughout the week. So that’s kind of kind of how I got my experience with it anyway.
Joe Troyer 29:07
Yep. Perfect. Love it. I think that all makes perfect sense, then would you advise and I think that this is what you’re saying, but correct me if I’m wrong. Dan, you you would advise first kind of working on getting the appointment set, right. And the the business owner then still closing those but getting somebody to take that over kind of the SDR role, if you will, and then long term pulling yourself out of sales. Is that right?
Dan Englander 29:29
Yeah, exactly. And the reason behind that is because like a lot of the times people were just like, well, we need sales and they they’re like lumping like 500 skill sets into like this one thing but the but the process of getting consistent meetings, teed up is like it’s a lot of skill sets that it’s unrealistic to find one single person, even if you could, that person is going to be stretched too thin and you want all you know, you want the high level closers, time spent closing, for example, like what we do in our company and if you DIY this, you know, you’re going to have to find these skill sets, it’s part operations. It’s part strategy and creative and it’s part hustle to get those meetings booked strategy and creatives and who recontacting?
And what are we saying to them? Operations is an I need to find a list builder and make this data go into this place and the software etc hustles. And I need to follow up with this person to get them to show up to the appointment. So you have all that then and then and then you have selling after that. So it’s like that that’s kind of how we see is like you need that division of duties, even if it’s just you splitting your time between those tasks. So now that’s that’s really
Joe Troyer 30:29
well put, you know, just throwing an SDR in without that strategy without that coaching without that leadership. You know, it’s never going to work, you know? So yeah, I think we’re talking the same language, I always recommend that agency start with that kind of leadership role and the strategical and to get some messaging that works, then pull on an SDR get out of it, right, play the leadership role, then get out of it. And then ultimately, you know, get get out of sales and in the long term, but it can definitely take a lot of time.
Dan Englander 31:02
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think yeah, I think it’s just about taking it one step at a time. And if you’re starting from zero, the first thing is actually getting is not trying to replace yourself or hire others is actually getting old might be hiring others, but getting the fulfillment off your plate, you know, getting as much of that that client work, and so on. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 31:21
Perfect, man. So in this personalized sales approach, I guess to wrap it, wrap it up, you know, we’re using relationships, we’re using referrals, we’re kind of doing it more, to some degree at scale, but not to a crazy degree. We’re running campaigns, you gave us a couple of great ideas, you know, you know, you’re just at this event, or you’re in the same city as us and reaching out with those angles. If you’re looking for more of the done for you approach. Are there any other kind of general campaigns that you guys like to run kind of high level ideas like that?
Dan Englander 31:53
Yeah, for sure. So, like, the craziest thing we ever did is we found people that played tennis in college, like our client ID, they were in, you know, the fortune 500. So I think a lot of it can just be like really personal stuff. I think like a lot of the times we like to trip ourselves up too much with the business thing, and it just doesn’t work as well. Like one thing we do a lot of our ego sighs we have clients that are that are expats, you know, from other places, we’ll find people you know, that they want to talk to you that are Vin diagrammed with their their market that are also from that place, and that tends to work really well. I’m trying to think of some others.
Another like one, one thing that actually on the more business side that we’ve done is, we felt like let’s say you have a client that’s like a large company or something, finding people that used to work there, they’re now gone to other places where you might like to do business and say, Hey, we’ve done so much work with Nike. So your your Reebok now that that can be really compelling. So it’s really just kind of finding these like strong common commonalities between individuals that don’t exist on a business level. That tends to work really well. Yeah, yeah. So that’s those are, those are a few things. We know that right.
Joe Troyer 32:59
Yep. So those campaigns are great. And then in terms of copy, we’re mentioning the the referral, so to speak, right in the copy. And that’ll be going right for the jugular, right. We’ve gone for a discovery call, we’re going for a sales call, how do we how do we bridge the gap? The gap between, you know, hey, you’re a referral to come and buy?
Dan Englander 33:19
Yeah, it’s a real question. So I think the short answer is like usually, yes. You know, I think that the barrier to getting a conversation is tough, but I think it’s not as tough as people think it is. Because we’ve sort of like gotten a lot of this propaganda about how like, well, people need to research and read a million articles before they’re ready to speak first and all this stuff and like, yes, that does happen. And some people are gonna wonder that there’s a certain minority that will want to do that and never will take the meeting. But like, what’s what’s underappreciated is how much people in buying roles don’t want to have to read a bunch of stuff.
And sometimes talking is actually easier. But the hell you’re having to get over is just that trust gap, right? Like, am I gonna have my time wasted? Is this person can this person be trusted? It’s like, okay, you’re an agency. I know, what agencies do. What makes us different, and really, that kind of vote of confidence, either from referral or some other connection with the commonality can be enough. So I think it’s like, it’s worth mentioning. Like, you don’t want to sell against yourself too much.
And just to put yourself in the same, the same context as is your your prospect is so so yeah, I think that that you can ask for the for that, especially if it’s referred. I mean, a lot of one campaign we do a lot of is just referencing people that our clients have in common and going direct and saying, Hey, we know these same people workspace comm Can we talk that will get you a much higher degree of meetings? Yeah.
Joe Troyer 34:45
So if we use the example that I gave earlier, like we’re gonna prospect like our clients as an agency, our heating and air contractors right across the US, like what we find is getting referrals from those heating Air contractors to other Heating and Air contractors is rare. Right? It’s It’s like pulling teeth. Usually where their minds go right away is like, they like introduce us to a competitor, right?
Like the alarm bells just go off like no way like, I’m not I’m not giving my marketing connection to a competitor. And a lot of them don’t seem to mastermind, your network kind of as much as we do in the digital marketing and agency space. Any tips or ideas on how we might make a campaign like that more effective? Yeah,
Dan Englander 35:32
I think it was kind of like what I was covering earlier, where you instantly you might not be able to like, if you think of like spokes around a hub, you might not be able to bounce from spokes spoke. But if you can talk to a lot of hubs, you’re gonna be able to get to all the spokes.
So it might be like, like you mentioned, I think you have a really solid campaign there like going to, you know, partners, and others kind of involved in that and think about a lot, that sort of thing. I think the thing that a lot of people are kind of doing that anyway, I think the thing that you’ve gotten, you’ve gotten really right, and that we’re working on as well is batching that up and just being able to like, know that that’s a high ROI activity and just kind of continuing to do it. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 36:12
Love that note like that. That answer was great. Dan, I got a big aha out of that. Right. Like, maybe instead of asking for the referrals, or if you get a a no on that, for the direct heating and cooling company, right. Ask for the hub, ask for the people that already have those clients, who are the other vendors that they’re working with and ask for recommendations into them, because they have lots of spokes that they can introduce you to. Right. Right. So I think that’s, that’s, that’s really valuable.
Dan Englander 36:38
Yeah. And I think like one thing that people will sometimes say, and I get it, because I feel it, too, is like, well, you know, is this greedy? Are you like, you know, working your network too much, or being selfish with this. And what I found is like, if you present it the right way, and you’re just like really honest about it, people will will help you.
And it actually doesn’t read as, as negative because it’s like, that’s what we’re all doing out here. And, and also, like, you know, you these are people that that you know, and you have a relationship with, and also just being willing to help as well, you know, coming in with with ideas and intros you can make really works well.
Joe Troyer 37:11
Awesome. Well, that’s a, that’s a lot of ideas on how people if they’re looking to DF ly, and do it themselves can do it. And obviously, if people are interested, they can come check you guys out at sales schema, have a conversation with you and see if there might be a set working together. You also run the digital agency growth podcast. Tell us a little bit about who, you know what that show is like, if you will?
Dan Englander 37:33
Yeah, for sure. So we’ve had that for a few years now. And we are basically looking to help agency owners with with growth and and all that sort of thing. And we but we tend to go pretty agnostic with the sorts of guests, we have all we’ve had CEOs of tech companies, we had this gen saves the CMO of Levi’s, make sure her titles actually gone up.
Now, she had some really interesting guests on we’ve had just like a lot of agency owners that have talked about their journey, you know, building and public, and also others that have gone from either the agency world to others other places and talk about transitioning companies. So we’ve had a lot, a lot of like, really, really interesting conversations on and we tried to go outside of just like nerdy sales tactics and that sort of thing.
Joe Troyer 38:16
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, we’ll definitely link that up for the show notes for you as well. Is there anything else that you think we’d be remiss not to chat about today? While while we’re here, Dan? Oh,
Dan Englander 38:26
yeah. Probably? I’m not sure exactly, I think just yeah, just kind of staying ahead of the way that the agency landscapes changing, like, I think right now, a lot of everything’s kind of morphing together in weird ways. So I don’t know, if we’re gonna have the exact same models that we’ve had for the last like 30 years. Like, for example, you have publishers, like the New York Times and stuff have started just full on agencies, you have software companies that are becoming publishers, you have agencies that are becoming software companies.
So I think that it’s kind of one of these, it’s sort of a space where you can, like, redefine what you’re doing pretty easily. Like, for example, we’re launching a sales engagement platform, we’ll see if it works, you know, a lot of people failed doing that. So see what happens. But But yeah, I think that’s that’s like a big topic, but just sort of, it’s a good time to broad frame, you know, how you want to serve your your audience.
Like I think Seth Godin has a really good quote, where it’s like, find, find products for your people, not product, not people for your products, kind of Yeah,
Joe Troyer 39:31
no, I love that. I think I tell agencies all the time, like stick in a niche and your job becomes like just to care about them to find the products and services that they need, find the solutions that they don’t have right and to give them that’s very similar to the golden scenario. So love that and yeah, I mean, this this industry is changing faster than ever.
And and I agree, you got to embrace the change, or you’re probably going to get left behind. Yeah, exactly. Love it. So man in wrapping up, Dan, this has been Great, thank you so much for joining us. I always ask the same question at the end. And instead of asking people to recommend three books that are like their favorite I just asked like, what’s the one favorite book? Like? What’s the one book that’s made the biggest impact on the way you do business or the way you live your life or as you look at your business as you look at life? Like what’s the one book that you see?
Dan Englander 40:22
Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s really hard there’s there’s so many so I’ll the one that comes to mind those The War of Art by co brassfield. Yeah, yeah, just just like really inspiring. And it’s just sort of like, get you in touch with you know, the resistance and doing the hard thing and the hard thinking. I know you just asked for one but another one that I’m reading right now that I’m really enjoying is the road less stupid by Keith Cunningham?
Yeah, yeah. Which I really like it because it’s sort of like there’s been these two kind of like schools of thought with business. There’s the there’s the E Myth revisited, which is like, you know, Hey, get out of the business don’t work on any things, you know, get others to so you just own this asset. And then there’s like, and then there’s the other side, which is like no, do do all the hard work like Gary Vee.
Just keep hustling and do all the jobs at once kind of thing. And key Cunningham’s perspective, just to sum it up is like, I might be he might disagree with this. But it’s sort of like, No, you have a job, like you have a job to do. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you don’t until you sell your business and you’re actually out of it. But that job doesn’t have to mean like arbitrary meaningless activities. It could mean sitting around thinking really hard about complex, difficult problems and doing a little less, making, like fewer bigger decisions. So I’m really liking it anyway. Yeah,
Joe Troyer 41:42
dude, I love both of those books. You know, the the first one, you know, doing the hard things and showing up every day. You know, I love that book so much that I actually downloaded a bunch of his other books to start going through as well.
And the road less stupid, definitely great has spurred me as well, I think like you said, to spend more time thinking about the business brainstorming about the business, instead of being involved in the business. And just thinking about it in different ways and measuring decisions and thinking through what are our next action steps, instead of just blindly kind of going into here. Here’s what we’re going to do for the quarter.
Dan Englander 42:18
Yeah, exactly. It’s been big. And it’s like, each one of those sections could you could just spend like a whole week on on one part of that book. So it’s really helpful. I like
Joe Troyer 42:27
taking a chapter of the book, and every two weeks, basically re going through that chapter and then having thinking time for that chapter. And it’s been really, really impactful in my business. Yeah, definitely agree with your recommendations.
Dan Englander 42:40
Yeah. Right. I’d love to hear your Rex at some point. Hopefully, we will have you on the show.
Joe Troyer 42:44
Yeah, we’ll have to do that. Thank you, Dan. We really appreciate it. Thanks for all the knowledge you guys know where to check it out. You guys can see the links down in the show notes.
