Introduction

Transcript

Joe Troyer: I want to take you guys through this formula that I’ve been working on and that I use when I really think about an agency, alright? So here we go. So first and foremost is your core offer, okay? So your core offer, guys, is this is the main thing that you sell. This is the thing that makes you 95% of your revenue, so in terms of a core offer your core offer should always be a monthly residual. If you don’t have a monthly residual in this business I think that you’re absolutely … I’m just going to be frank. I think that you’re shitting the bed. I think that you’re missing the boat and ultimately, you’re going to kick yourself in the ass three months, six months, twelve months down the road from now when you have a bad month and can barely survive, right?

Joe Troyer: I was just speaking with a really good friend of mine, he’s my videographer. How many of you guys saw the video I posted, I think it went out yesterday, talking about the different events I’m going to and such. That video was filmed by him, like great, really talented dude and I was speaking with him and he’s like telling me that July was like his worst month since he started as a freelancer. Like just nobody did business and he was kicking himself in the butt, like his business model obviously is not recurring and he went from crushing it every month superceding for like the last year, last year and a half, and just getting bigger and bigger and bigger to that abrupt of quite literally no deals happening the entire month of July.

Joe Troyer: If you haven’t felt that yet, you’re going to feel it and you’re going to have this experience, so let me save you some trouble, let me save you some angst and definitely build a core offering. I put /MO here, that just means monthly recurring and for me, guys, I wouldn’t do anything less than $1,000 a month, okay? $1,000 a month. That should really be like the starting price point for you, okay? .

Joe Troyer: Ultimately, over time as you get clients and as you retain clients and you’re getting them awesome results, that monthly recurring needs to go up so you need to go from $1,000 to $1,500 to $2,000 or $1,000 to $1,000. From $2,000 to $3,000, and your pricing as you get bigger and as you get bigger and as you need less and less customers, your pricing should go up, okay? This is just the monthly minimum to start, okay? So your core offer should have a minimum of $1,000 a month, alright?

Joe Troyer: Next up what I want to talk about is your ideal prospects. Okay? Ideal prospects. Then after ideal prospects we’re really going to get into foot in the door offers, so we’re going to look at problems and opportunities that your prospects, your ideal prospects have, right? What are the problems right now that you can see, that you can diagnose, that you can look at, and that you can see as an indicator for you to build goodwill with that, okay? And I call this the go giver method. We want to find a problem, we want to find an opportunity that a lot of our ideal prospects have and we want to help them with that and get our foot in the door, right? Long term amazing goodwill builder and also gives us the ability to go right into helping them and fixing it and into a pitch as well, so it can be a great way to pull on clients really quickly.

Joe Troyer: Next up after foot in the door offers, we really want to go through … Don’t tell me that’s gone. There we go. After foot in the door offers we really want to then take you guys through … I want to take you guys through your targeting and the fact of the matter is is most of you guys are spraying and praying and what I mean by that is you’re lucky if you even have thought through your ideal prospects. You’re lucky if you’re though through your foot in the door offers that you can actually go out and do as goodwill to get people interested in your business and get them to know, like, and trust you, and even just to hear about your business, right? But ultimately, even fewer of you then have thought about how you’re going to target these people and reach out to them.

Joe Troyer: Am I hitting a vein here? Is this sounding like a good use of the next 45 minutes or an hour or so of our time? However long it ends up being. Let me know in the chat.

Joe Troyer: Then after that we’re going to go after and really talk about your demo or your offer, so once you’re in front of the prospect what do you say? Right? What’s the sales process that you take somebody through? Okay? Is it an action plan? Is it a strategy session? Do you show and forecast the ROI? Are you future pacing? Are you implementing risk reversal?

Joe Troyer: Next up is a biggie. Next one is a biggie for sure and that’s proof. At the end of the day when I speak with most failing agencies, and what I mean by failing is just they’re not onboarding customers and really they have yet to pass go, and so they have very little revenue, if any revenue, and when I talk to them about what’s wrong they feel like they just don’t have any proof and that’s what’s holding them back, so we’re going to nail that today and make sure that you guys have a system to get proof and to get proof fast and then talk about ideally what kind of proof you want, alright?

Joe Troyer: Then last but not least, as long as we can get to it we’re going to actually reflect on my last twelve years … Or not last twelve years, last twelve months of me creating content and I’m going to teach you guys how to create a content marketing plan that wraps all of this up in a nice bow that makes you guys look like the default, makes you guys look like the expert in the niche. So if that sounds like a good use of the next hour or so of our time let me know in the chat, that’d be great. So content plan.

Core Offer

Transcript:

Joe Troyer: First things first, going back to the core offer. At the end of the day, again, you need $1,000 a month minimum for your core offer. Frankly, if I was going to jump into a new niche or new vertical, I would really challenge that number. What’s up, Brian Holder? Good to see you, Chris Vise. I would really challenge this number and I would be looking at potentially even starting at 2,000 plus a month. Your profit margin on these numbers is almost as important as that $1,000 a month marker, that minimum recurring revenue mark. I would say that at the end of the day, you should be looking at 75% plus margins on this.

Joe Troyer: If your margins are the opposite, if you got 75% cost of goods sold, trust me when I say you’ve got a big fricking problem. You’re not doing yourself any justice and the fact of the matter is probably in six months you’re going to be done with the client because you’re not making any money. You’re going to be sick of it and you’re going to be doing a crappy job. How many of you guys have at least a 75% margin right now when you look at your current customer base and your current revenue? Give me a one for a yes. Give me a two for no.

Joe Troyer: Greg Stillman, yepper. All right. All right. Phil says, yep. Good. I was talking with a friend of mine, well a friend of a friend and this guy recently took some coaching from me. Literally, in the course of 30 days, we took his profit margin from a 25% profit margin to a 75% profit margin. The dude right now is at between 38 and $40,000 a month recurring. Think about what just happened for him and his life in his family. That is fricking crazy. That is bananas. Huge difference. So make sure that you got that profit margin. I know some of you guys are already thinking like, Joe, how’s that possible?

Joe Troyer: How do I get that profit margin? By all means, you guys can add on things like paper click advertising that have a smaller profit margin, but say that they’re going to actually put up the spend. Then if you wanted to, you could roll in the management into your service. But keep out all the things that costs a lot of money. Keep those out of your core packages. You guys should be at 75% plus margins. The other thing in terms of a core offer, as we’re going to make sure that it’s proven to keep customers for at least six months, or that you believe you can keep customers for six months.

Joe Troyer: Because at the end of the day, if it just churns people out and it burns people and they’re sick of your program in six months and they’re gone, I think you probably could find a much better core offer. If I’m going to build a “traditional SEO agency”. By traditional SEO agency, I’ll kind of walk you guys through what I would put in my core offer. First off, I would put SEO obviously and that would consist of on page and off page. Most likely, I’m going to go after local as well, so that’s going to include me building out like city-based landing pages so I can rank for all of the different variations and all the different cities and towns and service offerings and those combinations together.

Joe Troyer: Google Maps is obviously a big, big part of local still to this day. Most of your call volumes going to come from Google Maps. But, SEO on page and off page, I believe full heartedly is actually going to help you rank and rank higher actually inside of Google Maps. They are inside on page and off page SEO. Traditional SEO is going to help you actually rank higher in Google Maps, so I think they belong together. I think they’re one in the same at least when you’re selling to local. All right. For me, Google Maps would definitely be inside of this package.

Joe Troyer: As well in here is going to be called tracking. Not just for SEO and whatever I’m doing, I’m going to want to try to be consultative. I’m going to try to help as many of them as possible, as many traffic sources as possible so that I can help the business owner understand what’s happening. Call tracking is super fricking cheap. A couple bucks, a phone number, and a couple of pennies a minute. By all means, if you see that creeping into your margin, you got a client that that is getting a shitload of phone calls, then by all means have them start paying.

Joe Troyer: But maybe you’d just include, we’ll include five phone numbers for you every month and we’ll include the first X amount of minutes for free. If it becomes a problem, then deal with it. After call tracking, I would also implement reviews. At the end of the day, ranking in Google Maps is great, but really where you’re going to get the most call volume, which your clients want, they want results, which means phone calls, which means the leads. You need to have a good reputation in Google. You need the most amount of reviews that are in the three pack and you need the best aggregate score.

Joe Troyer: You want a four and a half or better and you want to make sure that you trump everybody else in the total quantity of reviews. You might be thinking, yeah, Joe, that’s reputation management. Yeah. But at the end of the day, if that can swing my calls 30 or 40% up or down in terms call volume, you better, best believe that I’m going to be talking about reputation and using reputation inside of my local SEO package. So far, does that make sense to everybody, kind of what this package would look like? Totally. Any questions, thoughts, concerns before we move on?

Joe Troyer: Yes, it looks good. All right. Guys, so for me, I’m going to take my own advice. I would be starting out at $2,000 a month minimum. Here at the end of the day, if that is not acceptable in a niche and my ideal prospects, which we’re going to talk about next, we’re going to run the other way. We’re going to go find another vertical that can afford to pay it. Next up and guys, 75% margin in that package is amazing. Let’s talk about fulfillment real quick in that package. On page is going to be labor intensive, but there’s no other costs of goods sold and that’s a one time per account thing.

Joe Troyer: No problem. City-based landing pages is a bit of content and no problem. You don’t have to do a hundred in a month, just drip them out and ensure that you can hit that 75% profitability. Next up is Google Maps. You’re going to do one full audit, fix the items that are wrong, optimize the GMB. Then you’re going to order your citations and you’re going to be golden. That’s about all that you can do in terms of maps. Now every month moving forward, we can do some map embeds and we can do some other strategies. We can power up the citations with more backlinks. But at the end of the day, that’s about all that we can really do.

Joe Troyer: Call tracking. Obviously, once we set up it’s kind of set and forget. Then reviews as well. We’re going to run some type of review boost campaign. What I mean by that is like we’re going to have something that’s going to get reviews a fast. All right. And so we’re going to want to implement a campaign that very quickly puts us ahead of the competition in terms of total reviews and also aggregate score. We’re going to want to be, again, four and a half reviews or better or four and a half stars or better and also be beating them in terms of the total number of reviews that we have.

Joe Troyer: I’ve given you guys my review strategy backwards and forwards here on the YouTube channel and on the blog, so go grab it, rip it. You guys can just use that. Then what we’d want to do is implement some type of review monitoring program that is automated. As soon as they get done dealing with the customer, they put them inside a CRM where it connects with the CRM and it automatically is requesting a review. That, folks, if you think about it, is very front and loaded. First 90 days is critical. First 90 days is critical. If you can keep your cost of goods at 25% and your profit margin at 75% in the first 90 days, you’ll absolutely crush it after that.

Ideal Prospects

Transcript:

Joe Troyer: All right So next up is your ideal prospects.

Joe Troyer: How many of you guys, I’m curious, that are joining me live, have really thought through and said, “Here’s who I’m doing business with and here’s who I’m not.” Give me some feedback in the chat. And I mean past just like a niche. I mean, first step is a niche. First step is a niche. And for me, if you would ask me three years ago, what do I think about when it comes to niche qualification or what do I like in a niche? For me, I would say that I don’t want to chase people. I’ve always said that. So for me, I’m not such a fan of white collar types of verticals. I’d rather go after blue collar.

Joe Troyer: I would still say that today, but I would push that even further and say whoever it is that I’m working with, I have to like. I have to like the general type of person that we’re going to sell and that needs to be the criteria. If I think the guy’s the biggest asshole ever, the rule is don’t onboard him and I don’t wanna do business with him. I would want 100% have a no asshole policy and I almost just said hassle. No asshole.

Joe Troyer: Okay, but what else can we deem necessary? So we can say that they’re at least a $1 million business. And depending on the vertical that you’re going after understand that a million is kind of a very blanketed statement. That’s kind of bullshit. Think about a florist doing $1 million and what that would take versus a roofing company doing $1 million. Obviously the average ticket is night and day different. If you’re a roofing company and you’re not doing $1 million, something’s wrong. You just started the business yesterday.

Joe Troyer: So $1 million could be a good thing to talk about. But I think that you’ll find in your specific niche, I think that you’ll find better criteria. So let’s say you’re going after insurance agents, you’re going to want to make sure that they have at least five agents. Or if you’re going after dentists, it’s a practice that has at least three dentists. If you’re going after a roofing company, they have at least two crews and they have at least 10 sales guys.

Joe Troyer: And the other criteria that I would make in that circumstance is that they’re not storm chasing. Storm chasers aren’t set up to take inbound phone calls and then convert them into paid customers. Their business is set up to: a storm happens, they get on the road, they don’t care how far they have to drive. It could be a day drive, it could be five days drive, and then they go canvas the entire neighborhoods that were messed up by storm. Door to door. That’s their business model. So obviously that’s not going to work with our services and what we can offer somebody.

Joe Troyer: So we want to come up with our criteria. So it could be a million dollar business, it could be X amount of technicians, it could be what else? X amount of dentists. It could be that they have a marketing director or somebody that runs their marketing. That could be important to you. So we want to build out this ideal prospect pool. And the reason that I say this is because as we keep building and stacking and layering different components in here, in my experience, if you’re not very, very careful, you’ll end up prospecting at the end to people that you never would want to do business with because it just fit your criteria.

Joe Troyer: And longterm, I don’t think that there’s anything more important than happiness when it comes to entrepreneurship or just life in general. I think that’s the most important thing. If you hate waking up and going into the office everyday or working every day, what do you think your results are going to be like? You might be able to deal with it for a certain amount of time, but then you’re going to just fricking hate life.

Joe Troyer: Let’s see what you guys said in the chat. Totally. Yes. Looks good. Okay. Carolyn said she had some issues getting on today. Yeah, Carolyn, welcome. I’m sorry you had some issues with that. I had some issues as well. I didn’t even know if I was going to be able to get the webinar started in time, but glad you made it.

Joe Troyer: So at the end of the day, one thing that I like to talk about when it comes to ideal prospects is that I don’t want to be the savior and what I mean by that is that they’re not relying on our relationship, meaning business owner or owners and I and my agency to pull them out of a horrible situation or they’re going to have huge ramifications inside their business. How many of you guys, I’m curious, have taken on a deal like that? Give me a nine in the chat.

Joe Troyer: How did that, for those of you guys that are giving me a nine, how did that turn out longterm? I’m curious. Did that work out in your favor or did it blow up in your face? Every single time I’ve ever done that, guys, it’s blown up in my face. Every single time. I’m not going to be the savior. At the end of the day, it’s way too much stress, way too much stress. It’s horrible. Trust me when I say you really don’t want that feeling.

Joe Troyer: Somebody needs to teach me how to use this thing. There we go. All right, so not the savior. And I would also put in here some type of characteristics that they’re spending money on advertising. And it sounds silly, But if they have no expectations in terms of advertising and they have no advertising that’s working, how are you as a marketer supposed to make it better and do your job? Your job is not to help them figure out what’s lacking when they get a meeting with a prospect and they go pitch their services. If they don’t have that figured out and you just pour gas on the marketing and get them more phone calls and get them more meetings, is that going to result in them getting more business and being able to see a return on investment from what you helped them with? Of course not.

Joe Troyer: So let’s not be naive if they don’t have a practice of turning a prospect into a customer and have that proven specifically with cold traffic run the other way. So even past spent the money on advertising, I would say converting cold traffic. Any other thoughts, concerns, suggestions, questions on ideal prospects before we move on?

Joe Troyer: Give you guys a second here. Andre just jumped on and said he was having problems would GoTo. Yeah, man, I’m so sorry. GoTo’s screwing up today. We barely got the call started in time. All right, fantastic. Good stuff.

FITD Offer

Transcript:

Joe Troyer: Next up is our foot in the door offer. Again, what I want to make sure is super clear is all of this stuff should line up. If we’re trying to sell this SEO agency services that we just mocked up, we obviously want to ensure that our foot in the door puts people in a prime position, in a prime buying environment, to buy our core offer. If it doesn’t do that, and we then have to explain what it is and what we do and prove ourself after we give our foot in the door service, we’ve blown it all.

Joe Troyer: When you’re thinking about your foot in the door, it has to naturally lead into your core offer. The best place typically to start with this is to really look at your core offer and think about … Why I can’t go back? Think about the deliverables that you have in your core offer and splinter out and separate out a couple of the options. Look, if you’re going to do something for 90% of your prospects in month one, two, or three, and you can move that out as a foot in the door product and that sets you up as an expert and it brings good will to you, and it’s really super easy to do, then why wouldn’t you do that? You’re going to do it later if you win them as a client anyway.

Joe Troyer: First and foremost is that it has to naturally lead into your core offer. Next up for me, this has evolved over time, but for me, this really has to be done in an hour or less. Ideally this should be able to be done by you, not by a specialist, or it should be able to be done by a VA. You shouldn’t need like a developer to do this because you don’t know how. What happens if you get a prospect that right here right now wants to jump on a phone call with you and wants to see that you’re an expert, but yet you can’t show him over the shoulder how this is done? This needs to be simple.

Joe Troyer: One of the criteria that is newer for me when it comes into the foot in the door is I’d really like to be able to do this live. Meaning, if I can reach out to a prospect and I can say, “Look, you have this problem. Here’s why it’s a problem. It’s a problem, but it’s an opportunity. If you can fix this, this is going to be one step in the right direction to help you get this result.” Who’s going to tell you no? I’m happy to jump on a phone call with you and do it with you. They say, “Yes,” you on the call can then showcase your expertise. You can start building rapport with them and they can see that you truly are an expert. Not that you just had some VA do it behind the scenes.

Joe Troyer: Give me a one if that last criteria makes sense. All right. Cool. What’s up, Willy? Good to see you brother. Hope that keto diet’s still going well man. You can see it’s going well for me. All right. Good stuff. Give you a little detail, and I don’t want you guys to overthink your foot in the door, but when you start, this is good enough criteria for a foot in the door. Longer term though, if you are going to have sales people helping you, I think that long term it’s great to implement this process just as is, give the foot in the door offer away. “Mr. Prospect, here’s the problem. Here’s the opportunity if you fix it. I’m happy to fix it.” You get on a call with them. You help them fix it.

Joe Troyer: While you’re fixing it, you’re building rapport. Then you’re done and you’re like, “Would you like, Mr. Prospect, if I’d share with you how to write 10X the results of your Google Maps campaign, or your Google Local campaign, or your SEO campaign?” You go into basically what you do in your package. You build the plan. Here’s what you should be doing. Here’s what you’re not. Then at the end they’re naturally going to ask how you can help them. The only time that I like to complicate this sales funnel is if it’s working, I’ll add one thing here that for me has made a big difference in one of my agencies. The other agency wasn’t like this, or my other agencies weren’t like this, but in one of my agencies we had a paid upsell to the foot in the door.

Joe Troyer: For example, we would help them do a GMB optimization and if they said, “Yes, I want you to do that,” then we could potentially upsell them the next thing for a couple hundred bucks. Typically what we would do here, and I talk about this in some of my paid training and go into it in much more detail, but we would do something from anywhere from 100 to $500. My pen is not working for shit at the moment for some reason. 100 to 500 bucks. The reason that we do this is this can be completely self-liquidating then. If we end up offering this and we are working with a sales team, we can pay out the sales team potentially up to 100% of this 100 to $500 every time they sell it. Then we don’t have to pay out the sales team on the $1,000 plus a month recurring.

Joe Troyer: Give me a three if that makes sense to everybody. If there’s a way that we can monetize the front end and have a self-liquidating offer and pay our sales team and pay our prospecting and pay our ads or however we’re getting the deal, if we can pay for that before we ever even get to the core offer, that’s obviously a win. Give me some feedback in the chat if you get that. The only piece of advice that I’m giving you is don’t over complicate the sales cycle to start. If it’s just you, don’t throw that into start. Start with just a free foot in the door. Build rapport, get to know the customers, get to know the ideal prospects, figure out the problems, figure out the opportunities, and then go from there.

Joe Troyer: Let me see what you guys said. All right. Fantastic. Good stuff. All right, so we got the core offer, we’ve got the ideal prospects, we got then a foot in the door offer. We talked about that criteria. Let’s talk about what the foot in the door offer could be for our local SEO local marketing package, if you will, that we’ve put out so far. Based upon what I’ve set up and what we’ve come up with so far, I’d like to hear your feedback. What do you guys think the foot in the door offers should be? I’m going to turn the tables a little bit and it’s back to you guys. I want you guys interacting. This is a good way for us to keep this thing going. Hmm.

Joe Troyer: Again, ideally we can show that there’s a problem and that there’s an opportunity. If they fix that problem, ideally that can be done pretty quickly and ultimately we can do that over the phone, would be a big win. Somebody said free citations. Frankie, free citations, I wouldn’t do. I’m not saying it’s horrible and I appreciate you giving feedback and being the first person to stand up and give an idea, but I don’t like this because you doing this manually, is going to take time on the phone. Then you’re going to have to like give the login. It’s not going to add instantaneous value. It could set up, though, that, “Hey, I need to go do this 200 more times and so pay me to do it.”

Joe Troyer: I don’t think it’s that much of a driver of success though, just personally. For you to have something or do something meaningful on that call, eh, I don’t know. I would rather see like a GMB optimization. You could just do a partial optimization. You could do images and you could like geo-tag them, for example. You could make sure that the category selection was correct. You could just do a mini-GMB optimization. What else you guys got in here? See, whenever I move my mouse instead of using my pencil is when it messes with the screen. Yup. What else? Let’s put it this way. Let me re-ask this question. What could we do in terms of Google my business or SEO that somebody could see a significant lift from our work where we can do that on the call with a customer?

Joe Troyer: I don’t know what the answer is. I’m just brainstorming with you guys. This is what you got to think about. You’re thinking this is your first interaction with the prospect. What the heck do you do? You want to, in 30 minutes, position yourself the best way possible. What’s going to position you the best way possible? I think results in advance, obviously. Whatever adds the most value. Let’s see. There we go. Update meta-data. Yeah. Frankie, that could be a good one. For example, let’s say that you had a … Stop moving. You could do some title tag updates, hypothetically. One of the biggest problems I find with local is that, most often, is they don’t even have the city name that they’re going after and that they want to rank for in the title tag.

Joe Troyer: That could be a good one. What else? Guys, what about call tracking? What if you simply offered call tracking as a foot in the door? Or maybe it was the upsell to the foot in the door. What if you could, whether they have citations or not, go right into the GMB listing, add a tracking phone number and then be able to share the results with them? Look, Mr. Business Owner, I see that you’re already ranking in Maps, but I don’t think you’re actually tracking calls. Let me help you with that. You could just sign them up and then be an affiliate for one of the other platforms too. Then you go in in a consultative type of role. I actually really like that. What else?

Joe Troyer: The category thing, by the way, is big. Most local businesses, in terms of Google Maps, have shit the bed, so to speak, with their categories. I’m going to try to open these questions in a bigger box. You could add Q&A into the GMB. Let’s see what else Jamie say, business photos. Double check the hours of operation. The business info in the description. Yeah, I mean, most of this stuff is never really thought out very well. If you just had like a 10 point checklist here, respond to reviews, teach them how to respond to reviews. Let’s see. Alan says that he’s using our review strategy that I teach, basically the text message strategy, and I give you guys that text message that works like crazy to get reviews.

Joe Troyer: You could do free SSLs. If they don’t have an SSL, you could do that. You could definitely do schema. If we’re going after people that are spending money on advertising, even if you’re not going to do Google Ads, you could potentially find some problems with that. In terms of Google Ads, like negative keyword check. This one’s funny. You could do like, “Worst plumber in,” or whatever, “Worst whatever,” in the city that you’re going after. That’s a big one. Cool.

Joe Troyer: You guys got the point. The thing is to make sure that you focus on the value. Don’t be too obsessive with your foot in the door offer. Get out there and start testing it and get out there and play with it. Talk to customers, make the offer to fix something and test it with your prospects. It could be two or three things that you bundle together and you just rattle through. It could be just a little mini audit that you help them through. Then when you reach out, you say, “There’s these five things that are wrong.”

Targeting

Transcript:

Joe Troyer: So next up we talked about the foot-in-the-door offers. Now let’s talk about targeting. The big thing with targeting is that we want to try to programmatically if possible, pro-gra-mmatically… find issues/opportunities. And essentially what I’m saying is whatever our foot-in-the-door product is that solves an issue, we want to try to be able to spot those programmatically. So if it’s that the GMB listing isn’t verified, if it’s that they only have four photos instead of 10 photos, if it’s that they’re missing Google Analytics or they’re missing Google Tag Manager, or they don’t have a Facebook Pixel or a Google Pixel. Or they don’t use their city name in their title tag, whatever it is that we came up with for our foot-in-the-door, in terms of targeting we need to make sure that we can find those quick and easy. Okay? So that’s the first thing in terms of targeting.

Joe Troyer: Also, obviously with targeting, we need to be able to find, preferably, I like to start testing my message with email. Okay? I think it’s a lot easier to test the message with email than for example, cold-calling prospects. What do you guys think? Brand new offer. You’ve never given it before and you’re just going to start cold-calling and asking people if they want it? Ah, I don’t think. And guys, I’m not knocking cold-calling. Actually I think that it can work and it can work gangbusters, but I think that you need a good message. Okay? And so I think the best way to start testing your message and get some scale out of it is with cold email.

Joe Troyer: Frankie says he agrees. LinkedIn could be another one. BNI groups could be another one. Right? Anywhere where you got an introduction. And somebody’s asking you, “What do you do?” is another great way to start testing your messaging. Just not going in cold.

Joe Troyer: In terms of targeting I’m going to give you guys another idea too. This is higher level but at the end of the day, I think a lot of times we start to, with our prospecting and our marketing, we start to think about people as numbers instead of people, right? Does that make sense? So if I were you, I would create what people call a Dream 100 List. So I would look at my ideal prospect list, I’d move it backwards, I’d go find a list broker, and I would say, “I want a million plus, three plus dentists, five plus dentists, two crews.” Like, whatever criteria that you set up. And I would find over $1 million, or over $3 million or over 5 million or 2 million or whatever the criteria is, right? And I would go find who are the top 100 people in the market that I want to do business with, that are my ideal prospects.

Joe Troyer: And then I would implement a very strategic stalking type of campaign. Right? And I would treat that very different than just my run-of-the-mill cold email campaign, right? These are the people that, just a couple of these deals could quite literally be life changing. Okay? And you can do things with this Dream 100 List in terms of marketing and in terms of budget, in terms of time investment, that you would never want to do with the other 90% of the market. You could send personalized one-off emails, you could send gifts, you could send packages.

Joe Troyer: I was reading a case study the other day that, a guy quite literally sent a marketing manager of this company an iPad. And he sent him an iPad just to get a meeting with him, right? Because he was part of his ideal prospect and his ideal prospect pool. And now he’s got a pending contract in right now that they’re negotiating for 15,000 bucks a month. Like it got his attention. He knows his numbers. He knows that if he talks with one in four of these guys that they’re going to close.

Joe Troyer: So I’m not saying blow money foolishly, right? But longterm, you can afford to do things with these people that don’t scale quite so well. And this gets fun, in really thinking through this. And it’s one of the tactics that I just started implementing for our own agency as well.

Joe Troyer: So, other things is, when you’re thinking about targeting, one other tip, one other technique that I can give you guys is, when you’re using scrapers or any list building tools, is that there’s always going to be the bad emails or bad contact info/wrong details. And not short term, but longterm, you should go back to this list, right? And then you should pay, or I would highly suggest paying a VA to find and update this list. Okay? Go find who is the marketing manager or whoever the position is that you’re trying to reach out to and go update that list. Because if nobody has this data from a list that you bought or from a scraper that you scraped, the chances of you actually getting a hold of them are much higher because they’re not getting hit by every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the marketplace as well.

Joe Troyer: Okay let’s see where we’re at here. Frankie says, “OMG.” I hope that’s good man, not bad.

Joe Troyer: All right. So we need to catch up on the SCO offer a little bit. So based upon the criteria that we set, based upon the foot-in-the-doors that we set, based upon the targeting, let’s think this through a little bit. Give me a niche that meets all of that criteria for our local SCO agency. Give me some niches guys. And I’ll be blunt. I’ll tell you if I think it’s a bad idea, I’ll tell you if I think it’s a great idea. I’ll be raw and uncensored and we’ll just jot down the ones that make sense.

Joe Troyer: Plumbing. Yeah, definitely. Plumbing could be one. My friend, Josh Nelson, plumbing and HVAC, SCO. They don’t just do SCO all encompassing digital marketing, but they have a very, very successful agency primarily dealing in HVAC and plumbing. So that’s definitely been proven. And I think just over the last, I don’t know, two years maybe, started offering PPC and some other services as well, but definitely.

Joe Troyer: Water damage. So ideally guys, forgive me, but this should probably be on the previous slide, but we’re just going to put the niches here that we come up with. Water damage has great big value. Water damage per customer. Water damage as well from what I’ve seen… I’ve sold a heck of a lot of water damage agencies or a heck of a lot of water damage deals and to a lot of those customers or prospects. And from my findings, they’re very, very adamant to do more marketing because it is rain… It’s either like… What’s the analogy man that I’m trying to say? Blonde moment here. Forgive me. It’s either dry or it’s like monsooning. Either they have no business, or they have too much business.

Joe Troyer: And there’s this ebb and flow that happens in that industry. And every single time they go through a dry spell and they don’t have all these water jobs, they have to lay off all their contractors, and all their contractors then have no money. Right? And so all, they don’t have, they’re not able to feed their family. Then they got to go do other things and the business owners are put in really bad situations because of it, right? Like they feel bad. And so from what I’ve seen, nobody wants to have to keep going through that. So I’ve seen that water damage companies are very, very, very open to marketing conversations. As long as you can talk the talk and walk the walk, and show them that you got some marketing chops.

Joe Troyer: All right so, going to be blunt and going to be real with you guys as always. Somebody said, “electrician.” I would run from electricians. I don’t think it’s a B2C type of offer. It’s a B2B type of offer. The electricians are getting their jobs from builders, right? And from referrals and subcontractors. And subcontracting, that’s how they get most of their business, not business to consumer. And if you look at an electrician’s job that they do get from consumers instead of businesses, the job value from consumers, I’d assume the average ticket is in the shitter, right? It’s like, “Come fix my broken fan. Oh, hang this light. This one outlet doesn’t work.”

Joe Troyer: So I do not claim to be an expert in electrical, but just my own initial gut feeling, and I’ve talked with a couple people about this. I had an electrical contracting company come to me and they’re like, “Joe, we’ve looked you up, we’ve done your research, we want you to do our marketing.”.

Joe Troyer: And I flat out had this exact same conversation with them and I’m like, “No.” So, just my point of view on, on electrical. In order to get good search volume and be able to prove my worth, we need to be going truly B2C.

Joe Troyer: Oh yeah. Chiropractors, dentists, roofers, cosmetic surgeons are all opportunities. Definitely. Who said that? Jamie? Is that you Jamie? Yeah, Jamie Ludlow. So Jamie, thank you. Those are all great suggestions. I would just make sure that you pass them through your ideal client list then as well. Do they meet the criteria that you have set forward? Personally, I probably wouldn’t work with dentists and I probably wouldn’t work with cosmetic surgeons. Just not people that I would want to be surrounded with on a daily basis. I’d rather be surrounded by a roofer probably, or a chiropractor. Just my personal gut pushback. And that doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong, it’s just I know myself. And again, guys, I want you to think about what’s going to make you guys happy, not just dollars and cents. What’s going to keep you happy longterm so that you can build a real business and a sustainable business.

Joe Troyer: Home security, I would run from as well. Also pest control I would run from. And the reason why is that the average customer value is really, really low. And the only way that they make any money is if a customer stays onboard for a really long time. So justifying your return on investment on leads that you send? It’s going to be hard. At least it would be hard for me. So maybe you guys know something that I don’t, but I would stay away from those.

Joe Troyer: Let’s see. Any others? Mold removal. Yeah. Foundation repair. Yeah, that would be definitely big ticket.

Joe Troyer: Local restaurants. Personally, during college I was a prep cook or a line cook in restaurants. I don’t know. I would run the other way from restaurants, personally. Their margins are obviously super tiny. I haven’t had great experiences just personally in restaurants charging bigger retainers. I sold some lower ticket recurring stuff to restaurants and niches that I would consider similar and they’ve done okay.

Joe Troyer: Auto body repairs. So Margaret, that’s an interesting one to bring up. A point of consideration when you’re doing your niche research is how much of the niche is influenced by search versus outside factors? So auto body repair is I believe, a vertical that is very influenced by insurance. Right? So you get in a car wreck, you talk to your insurance company, a lot of times they’re negotiating or telling you where to go in terms of where to get your car fixed. Not all the time, but it’s definitely influenced by insurance.

Joe Troyer: And you can say the same thing about water damage or mold. But most people these days aren’t using insurance to find somebody to do mold. They used to in the past, and they used to use public adjusters a lot and they’d just call their insurance companies and say, “I have a mold or I have a brown spot.” But now they know that they need to either use a public adjuster, or they need to call somebody directly, like they’ll go to Google for it. So I would just wonder, Margaret, how much of that comes from insurance and referrals versus people searching in Google. And I could be wrong.

Joe Troyer: Fencing, I like. Pole barn builders I like. My only concern, Frankie, with pole barn builders is, is there a lot of volume? Am I going to be able to get them quantity? Definitely the average customer value is up. I would make sure definitely that, because there’s not going to be a lot of volume, that they have a proven system to take cold traffic again and turn them into revenue.

Joe Troyer: Landscapers could work, but again, I would be looking for bigger ticket type of landscapers, not like, “I’ll mow your lawn every week.” Just, I think that’s going to be a hard one to pencil out and show the return.

Demo/Offer

Transcript:

Joe Troyer: Next up is your demo, or your offer. What I mean by this is you could also say consult, or strategy session. These things to me, guys, are all the same thing. It’s just what’s the mechanism that you have, and that you use that’s a process of taking somebody from warm or cold, and turning them into a sale.

Joe Troyer: Way too many people in the agency space take their business for granted, and are simply operating out of like, “I’ll take any job that gets referred to me.” And, they’re being lazy with their marketing, right? Whatever falls in their lap, they’ll take. Ultimately I think that if you’re in that position, short term it might be okay. But, long term you are really, really losing so much money. It’s not even funny.

Joe Troyer: What I mean by that is if you’re always doing one off jobs, even if you do the same fulfillment but it’s one off, meaning different verticals, it’s going to be very hard to have a 75% plus margin. Unless you’re paying yourself to do the work, like five dollars an hour. Because every time, let’s say you’re doing SEO. Every time you’ve got keyword research to do. Every time you’ve got all the city research to do. Every time you’ve got to figure out what topics to write about. Every time you have to figure it out for the first time. Stop fucking doing it. Please, for the love of God. That is the most horrible, awful work ever, that you get no return from.

Joe Troyer: Unless you’re okay with paying yourself three dollars an hour, like knock it the hell off. Stand up for yourself, and accept better. Demand better. Stay in your freaking lane, all right? And, focus on having a system, right? A tactic, a strategy to take people from cold, to turn them to warm, and to get them to buy. Hey, if you do that and just stay in your lane in terms of what it is that you’re offering and who you serve, you will have a business that has a great profit margin, okay? Not only that, but you will have a business that one day that you can actually sell and step away from, versus you just having to run this thing forever.

Joe Troyer: Guys, you should be scared of having to run a business forever. You should be scared. What is the exit strategy? I’ll tell you that for all the baby boomers that are looking at getting out of a lot of businesses right now, and even the generation before them that are getting out of businesses right now, what are their options? They don’t have shit for options. A lot of them are trying to sell their businesses right now, and I’ll tell you what’s happening. Jacks happening, they’re getting robbed. Their businesses are being taken from them for pennies on the dollar, because they’re next of kin, their kids don’t want their business. And, they haven’t ran their business like a business, they’ve treated it like a hobby, and so it’s worth quite literally pennies on the dollar.

Joe Troyer: Give me a nine if you guys are seeing this in the marketplace. It is ridiculous. For me, guys, this scares the shit out of me. I want to have an exit. I’ve got to be able to get out some day some time, and I’ve got to be moving towards that, and building towards that. If you’re not, I just … I’m going to smack you, make you think about it. Do you really want to be doing this forever? Yeah. Al says, “Nine, also with farmers who have children who don’t want to buy the farm.” Yeah. Somebody said, “Sign shop,” earlier.

Joe Troyer: When I was just in Ohio I stopped and saw this sign shop, and I was talking to this sign shop, and they got the same problem, right? They got kids, the kids don’t want to take over the business. He’s got a daughter, daughter or son. Daughter or son doesn’t want to take over the business. It’s a great business, but the guy that runs it is the owner/operator, and nothing happens without him. He’s involved, like he’s got employees and such, but the business wouldn’t run without him. The business is worth like nothing because of it.

Joe Troyer: For me, again guys, sorry for the tangent. But, a business is a list of systems and processes, and the only way that I believe it’s a business and not just a hobby, right? Is if it can run without you. Step away for a week, step away for two weeks, right? And, you should come back and the business is stronger than when you left.

Joe Troyer: All right, so in this demo/offer/consult or strategy session. In this mechanism, what we want to do again, is be able to take somebody from cold, and talk to them about a promise, or a result, okay? Or, from a foot in the door, into this mechanism, right? This is the mechanism that converts prospects. So we have two different angles to get people into this to sell them. Without this, a sale doesn’t happen, right? We either have the foot in the door, okay? Or, we have basically direct pitch to a strategy session or a consult, right? Direct pitch into that call, okay? Or, by offering a foot in the door.

Joe Troyer: Those are the only two ways that these things happen, okay? This process, no matter if you got it from pitching it directly like head on, okay? Like this way, right? Or you got it from running a foot in the door offer, this should be 95% the same. Again, it needs to be something that is predictable, and that is proven to take customers from being cold or warm, to a close. If you’re doing a good job folks, I would guess that 75 … based on my experience, and from helping people implement this as well, that 75% of your sales are going to come from one call closes. Either that, or you’re doing it wrong, okay?

Joe Troyer: This is a metric that you should be looking at, okay? And, you should be closing, I believe … that’s the wrong. You should be closing roughly one in four, to one in five of your prospects. So, anywhere from 20 to 25% of the people that you bring into this call, and again I don’t care what you want to call it. It’s going to depend upon how you set this call up. It can be a demo, it can be an offer, it can be a consult, it can be a strategy session, okay? Understand that you can change the lingo. It can be an action plan, okay? But you should be converting anywhere from 20%, to 25%, okay? That should be the metrics that you’re looking for. It may not start there, okay? But that’s kind of the threshold that you should be looking for, okay?

Joe Troyer: This becomes really simple folks. There’s been a lot of experts that have talked about you don’t really have a business until you can pay X amount of dollars, okay? To get a sale. And so, really what we want to do long term, and what we should be thinking about strategically is, how much money, or how much time does it take to get somebody either on a foot in the door product, or on directly on a strategy session. Then, based upon that, how many people do we need to stick through this funnel, right? To get a sale out the other side. If it’s one in five, right? Then we need five. If it takes 10 bucks, right? To get somebody on a strategy session. It’s going to cost 50 bucks to get a sale. Okay?

Joe Troyer: I can tell you guys in more high ticket, more mainstream type of services, people are paying anywhere from 100, to 500 bucks to get a paid strategy session, right? Let’s break that down. If they’re paying at the high end, $500. Folks, that’s a lot. In my businesses I’ve never paid anywhere near fucking $500. Most of the time I’ve broken even on the front end, or I’ve made money, okay? But let’s think this through. If you spend 500 bucks to get a prospect to either be on a foot in the door call, or a strategy session call, and it takes five of those to get a deal that then is worth $2,000 a month. You are trading, you are trading $2,500, for $2,000 a month. The only question should become, how many of these do you want each and every month? Trust me when I say, you have a really big fucking problem if you can’t make that math work, or you aren’t willing to go in the hole for one month, and can’t finance that.

Joe Troyer: Jim Thorpe says, “Brilliant.” Chris Vye says, “What sort of multiples are you seeing when selling an agency? Thank you Joe, I have to head to a meeting, glad you enjoyed it out.” No problem. Okay, so in terms of multiples, multiples really depends, man. That’s a great question. Try to get this to open in a new tab here, or in a new page. Multiple’s going to depend on if you really have a business or not, right? At the end of the day, the multiple is really going to depend on a couple things, in my opinion. Let’s talk about this. Multiple’s really going to depend. Have you niched down, okay? Do you have a sales process, where you can stick five dollars in like we just talked about, and pull out $10 out the other side?

Joe Troyer: How important are you, the operator, right? Or, not the operator, the business owner, the entrepreneur. How important are you? The less important that you are, the more that you can just walk away and hand it to somebody else to run the bigger multiple that you’re going to get. The other thing that you have to think about though here, is who’s going to buy you, okay?

Joe Troyer: This really, is going to depend on the niche that you’re in, but it’s also going to depend on the revenue that you’re at, okay? What I mean by that is, you’re going to get involved in industry buyers who are buying simply because they’re in the industry, and they have other products or services to sell to that exact same industry, so bolting on a digital marketing company to a supply company, or somebody that sells software to that industry, right? They’re already in there, it makes sense, right? They can probably double the average customer value pretty quickly, or vise versa on either side. They can make huge incremental gains, okay?

Joe Troyer: But then, the other type of person that you’re going to see basically buying is like the Sally, or the Joe. And really, they’re buying, right? The average Joe, the average Sally or the average Joe. They’re buying because they want a business, right? To run. I would say the third are people that are doing huge wrap up type of deals, and they’re coming into an industry, and they’re gobbling up 10 like businesses that support each other, and they have obviously huge venture backed kind of backed companies, right? They have huge wallets.

Joe Troyer: Those are the three primary buyers that I see in the space. Anybody have any additions there? Does that make sense to everybody? Let me see. All right, cool. Here guys, your multiple is going to be crazy. Your multiple could be one times EBIDA, okay? Your multiple, right? That EBIDA could be, let’s say monthly, but let’s talk about yearly EBIDA, okay? It could be one, if you’ve done a really piss poor job like most agencies have, in all of these things, okay? Quite literally. That’s the scary thing that we’ve been talking about. If you make, let’s say if you take home half a million dollars a year, and let’s say that, that’s net and you only get one times. That’s half a million dollars, why would you ever sell that business? That’s the point. You’ve built a business that has no value.

Joe Troyer: This is happening, guys. Seriously, this is happening. In the market right now I see a lot of stuff at three times. If you’ve done a really good job you have IP, you’ve really taken yourself out of the business, I’m seeing stuff sell up to seven times. But, this is the mack daddy, and you’re going to have to work your tail off to get to that level, and to be frank it’s going to take longer probably, to sell at that, okay? It’s going to take probably a lot more effort to sell at that, versus three.

Joe Troyer: All right, so next up is, we’re still talking about the demo and the offer, okay? At the end of the day I think I want to give you guys a couple of takeaways on your demo, your offer, your strategy session is, you’ve got to understand that the goal of that call is to take somebody from where they’re at now, to where they want to go. We all have to understand that along the way, to get from where they are now to where they want to go, right? Or, their goal, is that there’s lots of things that they have to do.

Joe Troyer: Understand that all that you’re saying is that, “I can help you get there faster. I can accelerated this. I’ve been there, I’ve done that,” okay? If you can say that, right? Then do that. Your goal is to show them that you’re the gap. You can solve going from here to there, and doing it better and faster than they can.

Joe Troyer: At the end of the day way too many people that I speak with, and I look at their decks, I look at their pitches, they’re simply not doing that, right? They’re not showing them that there’s a void, that they have to do more than they’re doing right now to get to where they’re trying to go. If you don’t tell a prospect or show a prospect that there’s a gap that they have to fill to hit their goal, right? That, they’ve got five more things, they’ve got 10 more things that they need to hit and to hit well in order for them to hit their goal, and position yourself in the middle there to help them achieve that. I don’t even know why you’re getting on these calls.

Joe Troyer: If you’re selling SEO, the easy way to do that is to really talk about average customer value, right? And, to back out the system, right? How many customers then do you need, okay? Then, how many phone calls do you need, or web form submits do you need? Then, obviously we want to talk to them, or show them that, that’s possible, and how they can get there, and the time that it’s going to take to get there.

Joe Troyer: Now, we could do that by simply showing them case studies. We could do that by showing them the search volume, for example. But, the better that you can demonstrate this, the better. Makes sense, right? A big piece as well, that I see people not implementing is you got to back out the example ROI. When you do this and you back this all out, that’s great, and you’re getting the customer to see it. But, you need to think of this as an investment, because marketing is an investment, okay? What’s this investment going to yield? Folks, at the end of the day there is no better investment than local SEO and local advertising in terms of Google and Google search. There’s not, as long as you can simply get them results, okay?

Joe Troyer: Make sure that you break this down as an investment, okay? Because, they’re making money in their business, otherwise you shouldn’t be fucking talking to them. And, they’re doing something personally to invest in themselves. Why the hell shouldn’t they be investing in their business? You should be making this case, and you should be talking about the return on investment from SEO, and from what you’re doing, versus everything else. And, compare it to stocks and bonds, compare it to your 401K. Shit, compare it to real estate, compare it to any other vehicle that they want to compare it to, and you should be the undoubtable champ, or you need to go pick another freaking product to sell. Amen?

Joe Troyer: You should be able to without a doubt say that, “In X amount of months,” right? “The investment pays for itself.” I’ve listened to so many sales calls, people talking with pay per click prospects, SEO prospects, pay per call prospects, and they simply can’t answer the question, right? How long do I have to front this investment before it starts paying for itself? That is the most basic question ever. Be prepared, right?

Joe Troyer: Then, ultimately folks at the end of the day, you should be looking at how you can offer any type of risk reversal. Risk reversal comes in a lot of different ways. This could be a guarantee, this could simply be with SEO, like people want to see results and that you’re not going to stand around with your heads under your butt, not doing shit and getting paid, right? Everybody’s been burned in all of these industries that we’re targeting, so what do we want to do? We want to pull them in on a deal that makes sense to them, okay?

Joe Troyer: If you’re doing SEO for example, the big issue that you’re going to have is, it’s going to take a good 60 to 90 days to really show somebody what it is that you can do. To kind of prove yourself. You’re under the gun, but it also doesn’t take a year, okay? What I’ve done in SEO to kind of close that gap, and to help reverse the risk. I’m not saying that you need a money back guarantee, that’s not it, right? But, just help them reverse the risk, and pencil out this deal. They know that they need SEO, so what I’ve done in the past is I’ve given them a 90 day out.

Joe Troyer: I’ve done a 12 month contract, right? And, that 12 month contract auto renews every year too, unless they cancel, right? I get them thinking long term. But, in my pitch for SEO it’s simple. “Look Mr. Customer, I know you need to see results, and I know that you’ve probably been burned before. You’re probably paid somebody for months, and months, and months. Or, years, and years, and you’ve never seen shit in terms of a return on investment for traffic, and what they did. Here’s what I’m going to do, and here’s how I’m going to be different than everybody else.”

Joe Troyer: “My contract works like this. I really need 90 days to prove to you what i can do, and to put my money where my mouth is. So when you sign this contract today, what’s going to happen is you’re going to sign this 12 month contract, and it renews every year. I need to know I’ve got somebody long term. As long as I can show you, Mr. Business Owner, that this is going to pay for itself long term. Fair enough?” “Yep, fair enough.” “I need an out, or you need an out. I understand if I don’t do my job, is that fair?” “Yes, that’s fair.”

Joe Troyer: “So here’s what we’re going to do between day 75 and days 90, in our agreement you have the opportunity to cancel. I call this a 90 day out, so if you’re not happy with my results in 90 days, if I haven’t shown you that things are improving, and we are on the way to getting a return on investment, then I fully expect you to cancel.” We mitigate the risk. Guys, this took me from going month to month in my deals, right? Month to month, and having problems collecting payment in my first agency, right? To me getting people signing a 12 month contract that renews every year, right? Unless they cancel. Guys, cancellations are slim, right? It took me from getting paid very inconsistently, to 90% of the people that I brought into this deal, sticking around for at least a year.

Joe Troyer: Think about that for a second. At $2,000 a month, that goes for my average customer, value probably being let’s say 10 to $12,000, to being at least $24,000. I more than doubled my average customer value. Again, be creative when it comes to the guarantee, and when it comes to kind of the risk reversal. It doesn’t mean that you have to say, “If you sign on the dotted line and I don’t make you a million dollars in the next 30 days, I’ll refund all your money.” No, screw that. Or, a double money back guarantee. No, you don’t need to do that, okay? But, just think about risk reversal, okay? Think about how you can cut the risk from your prospects mind.

Joe Troyer: Let me check in here with you guys real quick. Good stuff. Yep, amen, that’s gold, that’s nice, on month 13 they can’t cancel until month 24. Yeah, so basically in your contract you give them like, “Hey, on month 13, in month 13 you can give me notice that you want to surrender, or you want to cancel the contract.” Right? “If not, it’s going to auto renew for another year.” Frankie says, “I always went month to month but this is pure gold.” Frankie, implement this, and if this doesn’t freaking double your business, I’ll give you a one day strategy session, and I’ll fly you out here if it doesn’t double your business. That’s how confident I am in it. This made all the difference in the world in my business and in my local agency.

Proof

Transcript:

Joe Troyer: So, next up is proof. I hear a lot of people bitch, and moan, and complain about proof. Right? They come into this agency, and they get stuck. They map out everything that I’ve taken you guys through. They get to the point where they’re ready to start actually selling prospects, and the first time they get pushback, “Show me who you’ve done this before with. Show me results that you’ve obtained in the past,” they immediately shut down ,or they don’t even start prospecting and they shut down. This could be you. We’re going to get over that here today, and I’m going to show you guys how to get proof in the next seven days for your agency. How many of you guys, if I can help you get proof, and results, and testimonials in the next seven days for your agency, you think that that will catapult you right now, that one fricking thing? Is that good stuff? Yeah. 100%?

Joe Troyer: First, let’s start and let’s get really clear on what kind of proof we want. I’m asking you guys. What kind of proof do you want? What’s the Holy Grail? What would be amazing? What kind of proof you want? Chris [Vies 00:01:19], dude, it’s good to see you on here, man. Been a long time. Hope all is well. Rankings, calls, increase in business rankings from similar businesses. Yeah. Again, stay in niche specific, but let’s say that we’re doing this whole local thing. We’re doing our monthly, local SEO service. Right? So what people want to see is relatable results. Really, when we think about results, would you guys agree that all that matters is that you can prove that people are getting phone calls from marketing? “Hey, this guy’s ranking in Google maps, and I helped him. This guy is getting 100 calls a month from Google maps.” Would that sell a prospect for you?

Joe Troyer: I want you guys to get really, really clear with me right now. No. I’m not joking. I know we’re at 4:30. I’ll stick in here and keep pushing with you guys, if you guys do. What proof do we need to sell a prospect? What would sell a customer for you in the niche that you picked out? How many phone calls in what timeframe? If we take phone calls as the metric. tell me. I’m going help you guys get that in the next seven to 10 days. No. Not so important. I know there’s a little lag, a little delay. Come on, guys. My mouse went dead. Five? How many? A handful a day. Give me a nine if you guys would agree that a handful of calls a day would prove that we’re … from let’s say Google Maps would be all the proof that you would need. Give me a five in the chat if that’s the case or a nine in the chat. I’m sorry. I forgot the number I was asking for. Yes. it does happen running these webinars. All right. Fantastic. Good. So, five phone calls a day.

Joe Troyer: How many of you guys have heard of the 80-20 principle? I better get something from each and every one of you guys in here. That 20% of your actions account for 80% of the results. That applies to like everything. I am fricking convinced. But it’s actually much deeper than that. If you haven’t heard this, go look it up. If you have heard this before, I’m going to add another layer. If you actually apply that principle to itself, it comes out to 64-4. 64% of your results come from 4% of your efforts. Dude, 80-20 ,when I first heard it, was like mind blown. 64-4 though, when you apply 80-20 to itself, that’s fricking nuts. I can get 64% of the results for 4% of the work. That’s working smart. Right? So, let’s think about 64-4.

Joe Troyer: How do we get five phone calls a day as proof coming from Google Maps as fast as humanly possible, right now? Assuming you are at where you are at now, how do you get let’s say three case studies that show five phone calls per day from Google Maps? You guys just told me that that’s all that matters, and that would basically sell your deals for you. So, what’s the 64-4? How do we do this? Let’s put away all the junk. Let’s put away all the bullshit. Let’s put away all the shiny objects. How do we do this as fast as possible in the next seven to 10 days? How do we do this? How do we show it?

Joe Troyer: Jamie’s getting it. I’m going to wait a second, so that the rest of you guys can get this. This is going to help so many of you guys fricking explode, if you just take this and run with it. Think about what matters. It’s that 4%. 64-4. All right, guys. What I would do … Yes. Fo’ free. Right? Offer a foot in the door, 30 days. You’ll track GMB phone calls. You’ll set up call tracking and run it for them for 30 days. Our approach is going to be we’re going to go after the targeting and the ideal prospects that we want in the niche that we want that are spending money on advertising, and finally, folks that are ranking in maps. Does that make sense?

Joe Troyer: Guys, we are all over complicating the crap out of everything, and it’s because we’re looking at our agency like this every day. It’s like, “Oh, Joe sent me an email ,and I’m going to come on a webinar. Oh, hey. How’s it going, Mr. Troyer?” It’s all too close. We got to step out and think about what matters. This is why, folks, at the end of the day, this is why at the end of the day, this is why masterminds and coaching is so important, having somebody on the outside looking at your business, giving you guidance. It’s made all the difference in my business in the world, and this is why I’ve committed to doing all of these AMAs and all the free content that I give out. Joe More Value Troyer is to help you guys make that next step and to help you guys figure out what’s holding you guys back.

Joe Troyer: Frankie says, “But don’t they know they’re already getting calls from GMB?” I talk to so many people, they have no idea. If they do think that they’re getting it, they have no idea how many calls they’re getting from GMB. I would imagine, Frankie, in most of the markets that you speak with, 90% of your ideal prospects aren’t tracking calls from GMB. Is that a big enough pool, yes or no, to go sell to? Is that the proof that you need? Yeah. Even if they’re already ranking. Yup. Alan [Pepperdine 00:00:09:25], I have a tutorial on the channel and on the Digital Triggers Blog that shows you guys exactly how to implement call tracking into Google My Business. In fact, if you look up on Google, probably just search for Google My Business call tracking or setting up call tracking with Google My Business, you’ll see me rank and walk you guys step by step through the process. For you guys to be an expert, folks, that’s all you really need. If it’s niche specific, it’s even easier. You need less testimonials. You need less results, and they go further with the prospect that you have.

Content Marketing Plan

Transcript:

Joe Troyer: All right, so then next up is the content marketing plan. Okay? Last topic here and we’re going to cut the webinar off. The last topic here is your content marketing plan. Guys, for me, I’ll tell you that content marketing was always something that I wasn’t good at. I could come up with content, but it took me a really, really, really long time to come up with content. It was a bear, an absolute bear, for me as well to get content to be consistent, meaning every week on a schedule I put out content like clockwork.

Joe Troyer: Why do you think that for the last 51 weeks I did an AMA, right? I knew that that was an issue and I saw an opportunity to better myself in that regard. So, I’m going to share with you guys some takeaways, and I want to share with you guys not just the 80/20 of how to create content marketing for your agency, but really the 64/4 as well. Okay.

Joe Troyer: First and foremost, let’s talk about the goals of our content marketing plan just so that we can get crystal clear. At the end of the day my content, when I do content marketing, I have a couple of goals, and I want to share those goals with you. I’ve gotten more crystal clear on these, and that’s why I’m actually changing up how I’m doing my content marketing is because I got crystal clear on these goals. Over time this has changed and it’s been adjusted, but I want to share with you guys where I’m at right now.

Joe Troyer: So first off, it needs to be a conversion mechanism. And what I mean by that is it needs to help me go from taking a prospect, AKA you guys, right? From cold and not knowing who the hell I am to giving you guys content and giving you guys results in advance so that when you guys are ready and when you’re looking for a mentor to help you take your business to the next level, that I’m the go-to guy by default. That’s the role of my content, and that should be the role of your content, number one. Okay?

Joe Troyer: Number two is that you should be going after rankings, right? You should be using this as a way to get in front of prospects. Okay? These are the two big reasons in my mind that you do content marketing. Anybody else have any other reasons why they do content marketing? All right. Rankings. I would say rankings slash traffic, and the reason I say that is because we get traffic at Digital Triggers now because we’ve been pumping out all this awesome content.

Joe Troyer: We get people that are linking to our content, and referring people, and sharing it on social media, and people that I would say are influencers or have some influence in this space, and they’re sharing the content with their audience because it’s good. So, if I’m not getting rankings directly from it, at least I’m getting the shares, right? Which is resulting in traffic to me. Any other reasons besides traffic, and rankings, and conversion that you see to create content?

Joe Troyer: I’ll give you guys a little countdown. Five, four, three, two, one. Let’s see here. Yeah, that’s it. Build trust and authority. For me, Jamie, that goes under the conversion mechanism, right? It is trust and authority, but that’s good. Yeah, and Google recognition, Alan, goes under rankings and traffic for me. So, at the end of the day, what you should be asking yourself is what’s the 64/4? Not just the 80/20, right?

Joe Troyer: We’re going to apply 80/20 to itself and what’s the 64/4 for us to start with? And if we’d like to then take it one step further, then we can go for the 80/20 if we want some more. If we want an extra 16% there, right? We can implement more work. Yeah, but what’s the 64/4 of content marketing? Okay. What I want to break down with you guys is a simple, simple way for you guys to crush content marketing, and help you guys get more conversions, and also get more rankings and traffic. Does that sound good?

Joe Troyer: That is our last topic of the day, so does that sound good? Is that worth the next 15 minutes or so as we break this out? And for all of you guys still with me, I appreciate it. Nobody has jumped off and we’ve been going for almost two freaking hours. So, this is the way that I wanted to end the weekly AMA is with a freaking bang, and I definitely think we did that today, so awesome. We appreciate you Joe Troyer. Thank you, Frankie. Appreciate it, boss.

Joe Troyer: All right, so the way that I would do this now looking back after 51 weeks of amazing content going out every day, this is what I would do differently. First and foremost is I believe that there’s a better conversion mechanism than I have used, and I especially think that this is true in an agency type of environment. Have you guys ever heard about The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter? Have I talked about this? Jamie says, “Keep going. I’ll stay all day.”

Joe Troyer: The webinar that doesn’t matter. I know that I’ve shared this a little bit, but I don’t think probably any of you guys have seen this. You guys heard me talk about The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter? I’m trying to get over to the question box. Sorry if it’s taking me a second. Evergreen webinars. No, man. “Joe, we joined late. What’s the link to the replacement program?” So Mel, keep joining on this webinar. We’re just going to change up the dates. It won’t be every week now. It’ll just be every month moving forward, and we’ll be updating the dates inside of GoTo, so you’ll get a notification on the dates. Thanks for asking, though.

Joe Troyer: All right. When you run a webinar, everybody gets super sketched out like, “Man, I’ve got to convert on the webinar, and it’s such a big stressful ordeal.” What if I told you guys that you guys could run a webinar every month and you didn’t have to worry about closing people on the webinar, and instead all that you had to do was worry about just adding value and educating your audience on a topic that you guys know about, right? And you could still close deals.

Joe Troyer: Would that take all the pressure off of doing webinars, and could you see yourself running a webinar just sharing marketing tactics with them? Right, and I would keep it super simple. So, it’d be like 25 to 30 minutes on any given marketing topic that you feel comfortable. Okay? One time per month. Would that take all the pressure off? No daily content. Just showing up for a webinar, having some slides, talking about let’s say Google organic and best practices, because I know you guys have been on a million of my webinars about Google, and you guys could quite literally just take the nuggets that I give you guys and repurpose them, and talk about that, and share that on a webinar.

Joe Troyer: Would that help? Yeah. Yeah, that would be easy. Right? And you wouldn’t have to worry about converting, meaning doing the dreaded pitch, and all the things you got to do in the pitch and, “Oh don’t, wait, but there’s more,” like the Billy Mays show. And you didn’t have to worry about the entire sales process of a webinar because guys, that’s daunting. It has taken me years to perfect webinars. Years, and years, and years. It is a crazy, crazy craft to polish.

Joe Troyer: So, The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter is simple, okay? One time a month, you run a webinar. Okay? If I were you, I would forecast out a couple of topics just so you didn’t have to think about it. You know, “This month I’m going to talk about on-page SEO. Next month I’m going to talk about off-page SEO. The third month I’m going to talk about Google My Business.” And now you’ve got three months of content you don’t even have to think about. You just show up with a couple of slides and that’s it. Okay? Now, here’s what’s important.

Joe Troyer: The reason that we call this The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter is because the webinar doesn’t matter. The thing that gets the sale isn’t the webinar. It’s the mechanism of you having a time, and a place, and a reason for somebody to show up. How many of you guys showed up today because I said, “Today at three o’clock Eastern, I’m running a webinar and I’m doing something interesting”? Give me a one in the chat. If you’re joining me live, give me a one in the chat because that’s why you showed up today because there was something to show up to.

Joe Troyer: Okay. Yeah, exactly. So, the way that we do this is once a month we send out an email to any of the current prospects or customers that we have on our list. Very simple, and you say, “I’m having a webinar.” You have a simple registration page. You guys can use whatever software you guys want to do this, and this doesn’t even matter, guys. You guys have seen my registration pages for webinar, I guarantee it, where my webinar has been a title. Learn How to Do This and This, and there’s no body. There’s not crazy amounts of copy.

Joe Troyer: That’s all you’ve got to have. Don’t over complicate it. Guys, I suck at copy. Horrible. The reason that you see me do videos all the time is because I suck at sales copy. The reason that I have really short and attention-grabbing emails is because I suck at sales copy, so I just lean into it. It’s okay and it works just fine. The reason that we call this The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter is because it doesn’t. The thank you page where you go after you register, this is what matters.

Joe Troyer: If you guys are all showing up right here, right now to join this webinar that’s about building an agency, growing an agency, scaling an agency, and then on the back of it I said, “Hey, thanks for registering, Chris, Alan, Frankie. If you’d like to meet one on one to help you build a game plan to double your agency and exit in under 24 months, schedule a action-packed strategy session below.” How many of you guys would have scheduled that strategy session to spend that time with me? Give me a zero in the chat. If I were to offer that to you guys when you went and registered for this webinar, how many of you guys would have said yes?

Joe Troyer: So, whether you call it a strategy session, right? You call it an action plan, it doesn’t matter, but let’s see. Let’s see what you guys said in the chat here. Yeah. Most of you guys said yes. I would say about 50% of you said yes. Folks, this is what I call The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter, and the reason that it doesn’t matter is because the content isn’t what’s doing the selling. It’s the thank you page. Okay? It’s putting people about thinking that they want to join a webinar about marketing, and then you give them the fast track on the thank you page to help them really speed up their marketing.

Joe Troyer: All right. I’m back. Sorry. I was coughing. Do me a favor and give me a zero if you guys can hear me again and we’re going to keep going on, okay? Alan Pepperdine says, “Where is the offer? I want to sign up.” Yeah, and so that’s all that you would use, guys, is that strategy session that we just put together and we talked about to sell to your people and because you’re niche-specific, everybody is going to want to show up to a webinar where you’re talking directly to the business owner or your target market about how ranking in Google can get them great results in their restoration business, in their plumbing business, in their whatever it is that that you specialize in. Right?

Joe Troyer: So, not only does this help you get customers, but you don’t have to worry about, again, the pitch, which is typically the most important part of the webinar. Instead, you can concentrate on just giving value. Okay? So, you could segment your webinar into a couple of sections, right? You could have the housekeeping, which is like, “If you need me, this is how you get ahold of me. If you have a question, here’s how you can answer a question.” Just like any of the little stuff that I do at the beginning of the webinar, right? “If you’d like to get on a call with us, here’s how you do it,” things like that, right?

Joe Troyer: Then you give an outline of what you’re going to cover. So, “Thank you guys for attending today. What we’re going to cover is how to go from A to B in your restoration company using Google Maps, and I’m going to share with you the seven takeaways, right?” And you put all seven there that you need to know and everything that you need to know about on-page optimization, okay? Each slide is one of these tips, okay?

Joe Troyer: You run the webinar like that, and at the end you talk about the action plan and, “If you’d like to register for an action plan or a strategy session,” whatever it is that you call it, right? “Go here,” and you just give them the URL. No pitch. No nothing. People are going to get off that webinar and they’re going to go, “What the hell just happened? I just joined Carolyn. I just joined Chris. They gave me 30 minutes of great content and then they just said, ‘Yeah, if you need help, I’m here to help.'”

Joe Troyer: It’s beautiful. It is an anti-pitch, and it works like gangbusters, and then they go, “Hmm. That person just gave me a lot of value. I should see if they could help me do what they just taught me.” Guys, this is absolutely, absolutely beautiful. Okay? So, now we’ve got a content piece that is helping us convert people into customers. If everybody sees that, they understand that, give me an eight in the chat.

Joe Troyer: Now we’re going to talk about content marketing and how to make the most of the content that we have. Jamie says, “Is there a best day or time to do these?” It’s going to depend on the niche. Don’t overthink it. Just get it done. All right. Fantastic. Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to take each of these tips, and we’re going to chop these into their own video. So, this becomes the first video that goes on our YouTube channel. This becomes the second, the third. This becomes the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and you scheduled these to go out one to two times per week.

Joe Troyer: When they go out on your YouTube channel, you also put them out on your blog. I would highly recommend that you also get them transcribed. There’s cheap services that are free. It can’t get cheaper than that, like Otter.ai that will help you with transcriptions, or if you want something that is very accurate, no spelling mistakes at all, you can pay for it with a service like Rev. Okay? So, we’ve pushed this to YouTube and the same day at the same time, we also publish it on our blog. This is going to get us YouTube rankings and get our site more traffic as it gets indexed inside of Google.

Joe Troyer: Now the two goals that we just set apart for our content marketing plan, the conversion mechanism is done with The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter, and then our rankings and traffic is completely done with The Webinar that Doesn’t Matter with the content from the six or seven tips that you give once a month. That is it. You asked for the 64/4. That is it, my friends. That is content marketing.

Joe Troyer: You purposefully dropping out content each and every week and you converting customers. Guys, this will cost you if you have a VA do it. You don’t even have to do it. You get some Canva.com templates for your images, for your featured images, and we have a bunch on the Digital Triggers site and on YouTube that we give away for free that I built. So, we got featured images. You’re going to pick a template, and then you can have a VA do this entire process. Okay? This will cost you under 100 bucks a month to do from A to Z if you want to outsource the whole thing, or you can do it and it’ll quite literally cost you no monies, no dinero.