Ideas for agency lead generation

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Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And today we have some leads for you. Some leads on lead generation.

Gini Dietrich: Chip, you did it. I did it. Yes. If only listeners could be here to watch us record and see that it’s It took me literally four tries before I played the proper intro to this podcast. You’d think I had no clue what I was doing. And maybe I don’t because, yes, so I will, I will try to hold it together and not screw anything else up for the next 20 minutes or so while we give you those leads on lead generation.

Gini Dietrich: It was very funny. I’m sure it wasn’t you had to be there kind of thing, but it was very funny.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you got a good laugh at my expense.

Gini Dietrich: I did. It’s always fun to laugh at your expense.

Chip Griffin: It is, it is not the first time I will, I will, I will send you a bill.

All right. Uh, well, since I’ve had such a great success so far, uh, I’m going to have you introduce the topic because you know, I mean, how much worse could it go, right? Oh, sure. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t tempt fate.

Gini Dietrich: Let’s not tempt fate because there’s still a lot worse that could go wrong. Um, so one of the questions that we continually get.

Is how, how do you do lead generation for your agency right now? And you and I have had this conversation on this podcast before, and you and Drew and I had discussed it during a panel discussion for the RSW virtual conference a couple of weeks ago. So it’s definitely something that everybody’s thinking about.

And the question is really, it becomes a little bit more than that. I think, because I think what happens is, is this, and we’ve talked about this. An agency owner will say. Oh, things are going along great. We’re at capacity. My team’s doing great. And then all of a sudden, something happens. You lose a client and you have to replace the income or there’s a global pandemic and half of your business or more goes away.

You know, there’s something that happens and your pipeline isn’t full. So you freak out and you say, well, shoot, I have to replace this income really fast. So what do I do? What are your best tips for lead gen? Do you use personal and professional networks to Bring in business. Do you rely on a business development person slash salesperson?

Do you pay a commission? Are they salary? Like all of these things that people try to figure out when they’re in the moment of needing new business versus having a business development slash lead generation program that’s built and works regardless of you being at capacity or not.

Chip Griffin: Right. And we talked, uh, not too many episodes ago about sort of business development in general.

Right. And, and the importance of having conversations. But the, you know, there’s, there’s something different between sort of what I would call that general rainmaking activity and, and what we’re talking about today, which is specific leads, because there’s a, there’s a desire for many agencies in very much the situations that you’ve described where they just want to wave a magic wand and be able to, you know, to go Get leads and, and sometimes they think, okay, well, I can just buy the leads from somewhere, you know, do I just buy Facebook ads?

Do I, you know, just get myself listed on one of the agency directory sites? Maybe I, maybe I sponsor my listing there so that I pop right to the top and, and have people, you know, come right to me. But there, there is no magic bullet, silver bullet, simple answer that just. Makes those leads show up right on your doorstep.

Gini Dietrich: There’s not, unfortunately. And I, and you and I’ve had this conversation offline, but I know there are lots of people out there who will say, if you follow this process, you’ll have a 7 million business or seven figure business. If you do this, you’ll you like it’s. And I like to refer to those as the get rich quick or lose lots of weight fast, um, schemes, which may work in the short term, but it’s not.

Maybe, but they, there’s no, no longterm effect to that. And so, and what I’ve also found with that kind of stuff is you create this process that’s different from what your business does. And it may very well work in the short term. You may bring in some new clients, but that they’re not going to stay.

They’re not going to be, there’s not going to be any longevity and you’re not going to be able to continue to grow them year over year over year because they’re not the types of clients you would be working with. So to your point, there is not a magic silver bullet. It does take time. It does take effort and it has to be something you’re doing consistently.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, the, the kinds of programs that, that you and I have talked about, they certainly can work in the short term, but they’re essentially volume sales programs. And frankly, most agency owners I know. Don’t want to be in the volume sales business. They don’t want to be in the sales business, let alone doing it at volume.

And so you can do something that will generate revenue over the short term. And it can feel good, but eventually you end up with a business that you don’t like. Right. There’s a good chance your clients don’t like it because when you’re in that kind of a volume sales atmosphere, you tend to focus more on bringing new clients through the door than you do on the client service.

Because as a small agency owner, you have to focus your efforts somewhere. And, and if you’ve decided that you’re putting, you know, you’re all in on the sales side, well then who’s minding the store on the client service? They’re really, most small agencies need to have a good balance between client service and sales.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. And we’ve, when we talked about this from a business development perspective, two or three weeks ago, one of the things we talked about is splitting your time and making sure that you’re spending your some of your time on business development and some of your time on client service. It has, you can’t do all of one or what all of the other, you have to split your time.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think, I think one of the things that you always have to remember, too, is as you’re getting leads into the pipeline, you know, I was listening to, I forget whether it was a podcast or a video or something recently, and someone was talking about how, you know, you need to work to convince your prospects to become clients.

No. And I hate that word, convince. No, no. Right? It just, you do not, in the agency setting, you do not want to be convincing someone really to do anything, but particularly to become a client. You know, there is not a closing process per se in agency sales. You’re trying to find solutions that work for your prospects and, and you’re, you know, You need to paint the picture for them of why it will work.

And yes, you can do things to make sure that the process continues to move forward, but the process should be moving to a decision one way or the other. It’s not about convincing or closing someone. It’s about figuring out if it’s the right fit or if it’s not.

Gini Dietrich: So one of the things that I like to think about, and when people, when agency owners say to me, what are your best tips for lead generation?

I will say to them, when a client, when you’re doing client work, what kind of work are you doing to help them? improve their SEO, gain the attention of journalists, um, you know, gain market share, whatever it happens to be, what types of things are you doing? And they’ll tell me, you know, we do email marketing and we do content development and we do media relations.

And then I’ll say, okay, are you doing that for yourself? Well, that’s lead generation. You’re helping your clients generate leads, but you’re not doing that stuff for yourself. And I know, I mean, I’m an agency owner. I know how hard it is. To make that a priority, because clients always come first, they always come first.

So I know how hard it is, but you have to make it a priority for your business, and treat your own business like a client, because that’s the way you’re going to generate leads.

Chip Griffin: A thousand percent. And look, I mean, you know, what are most agencies asking their clients at the start of an engagement, at least if they’re likely to be successful?

You know, whether you’re doing media relations or you’re doing search marketing or whatever, one of the first questions that you ask is, Tell me about your customer. Tell me about who you’re trying to reach. And most agencies, when they’re thinking about lead generation, aren’t asking themselves that question.

They’re simply trying to find anyone who will pay. And so you really have to start with knowing, you know, specifically, what kind of lead do you want? And, and. You know, it doesn’t have to be fancy buyer personas, you know, you know, Sally is 32 years old and You know has 10 years of work. No, you don’t need that But you need to have a pretty clear picture of who an ideal client is who it isn’t so that you can You know start Doing the kind of targeting that you need to do in order to build a lead list You can’t do it if you if you can’t provide any definition

Gini Dietrich: No, you can’t and one of the things I like to to recommend is I want you to sit down and think about exactly that.

Who is your ideal client? What, what, what is their job title? What kind of company do they work in? What is the industry? What is the vertical? What types of things do they do and write it all down and then go through Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter’s a little harder, Instagram, your email, go through all of that stuff and see who you already know that fits that profile and start to create your list.

And I think. When we talked about business development a couple of weeks ago, I think you said the number is 200 to try to, is that right? To try to get to 200 people, prospective clients that fit your bailiwick, that are good for you. And then you can start to do some, some biz dev. But I think that’s, In addition to what I’m calling more traditional lead generation and lead generation comes, it comes from doing things on the web.

It comes from having a really call clear, call to action on your website. Not on your homepage, not 17 calls to action, not learn more or want to know more or anything like that. A very clear call to action that tells somebody what you want them to do. So in my case, it might be join the SpinSucks community.

Once you’ve joined the Spin Sucks community, then we can give you options and we can start to nurture you based on what you’re, um, how we’ve seg how we’ve segmented you and how you’ve sort of self selected too. But we can start to do that because you’ve joined the community. Alright. Maybe you’re not a prospect and you’ll go in there and you’ll have fun and do all that.

Or maybe you’re at one of the big brands that we’re trying to reach. So we, we segment all of that. So you have one really clear call to action on the, on the homepage. That’s it. And I think that’s one of the things that’s easiest to do right now, because almost everybody can do that themselves. And then you start to think about, okay, from there, Do we do our, how do we do content?

What kinds of content, what, what kind, what kinds of content is not already out there? How do we develop our list? And it goes in combination with your biz dev list. How do we do email marketing? How do we nurture those leads? And then how do we bring in new clients from all of that?

Chip Griffin: Right. And I, I think, you know, what we’ve sort of started to outline here is the importance of working backwards through your funnel.

So a lot of folks, when they start thinking about leads, they think about the, you know, the agency directories, the Facebook ads, the search engine. So you’re, you’re thinking at the very top of the funnel and what’s going to get people in. But, but you need to think about, you know, the, the latter stages, you know, who becomes a client before they become a client, you know, what have they gone through?

What, what information have they, you know, gleaned from your website? What resources have they taken from, you know, whatever blog or video or podcast content you’re creating? How have you gotten them into your, uh, into your nurture program in some fashion? Even if it’s not a formal nurture program, at least you, you know who they are, right?

So, you know, something like the Spin Sucks community is a great way to do that. Um, and then, and then from there, you, you continue to work backwards. The other place that can be helpful to work backwards is, is figure out what’s worked so far for you. And this is, you know, when I first go in and meet with an agency owner, I always like to say, you know, tell me how you got your last five clients.

Just, you know, most of them don’t have, you know, a formal tracking where they can say, you know, 10 percent of our leads are from referrals and 30 percent are from this or that. But if you just walk through the last five, just, you know, tell me what you know. Or what you’ve gleaned about the journey that they took.

You know, how long did it take? Where did they first hear about you? You know, those kinds of things. And that helps you understand, at least historically, what’s worked. It doesn’t mean you just want to do that. But it’s a good starting point, as opposed to just randomly trying new tactics. Know what you can point to and say, yeah, that got me, that got me business.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think, I would be surprised if they don’t say to you in that, that context. Oh, well, I just got a phone call or it’s word of mouth, which is fine. That’s great. Absolutely. And I think we’ve all grown our businesses that way. I got new clients that way last year. That is not my only strategy, but I did.

So I think that’s fine. But how do you marry that with more proactive business development and more proactively generation?

Chip Griffin: Right. I mean, you’re right. Word of mouth or they just called me are the two most common answers that you get. Which are, which are A, worthless and B, not usually the full story. Um, and, and so that’s why I asked my favorite question.

Why? Or who? Or what? Any question. Really just, you know, use those who, what, why, when, where, you know, whatever, all those. And

Gini Dietrich: You were, you almost got there.

Chip Griffin: I almost, I almost got them. I, you know, fortunately I’m not in like a journalism program, so I’m not going to flunk out for, for having, you know, not gotten it right off the top of my head here.

But, you know, we’ve already demonstrated that I’m just not fully with it today, Ginny, so. If the worst that I do is not come up with the right list of the five W’s. In any case, um, at least I knew there were five. How about that? There’s that, right? Something.

Gini Dietrich: You’re improving over the, you’ve improved over the last 20 minutes.

Chip Griffin: Wow. Thanks. Um, but, you know, so, so you do need to dig into it. And so if you’re doing this exercise yourself, you know, dig deeper and try to figure out, go back to your emails and see, you know, what was said in those first emails, because most agency sales processes take a matter of months to do. It’s not, you know, so if your last five clients, you’re probably dating back, the first conversation with someone is probably almost a year ago.

Um, For that, you know, the fifth most recent client, at least, right? Um, if you’re, you know, a fairly typical agency, but whatever it is, you know, you’re not going to have full recollection of it. And so if you’re not actively tracking it, go back to your emails, go back to notes that you may have and try to figure it out, because the more insights that you can glean from what’s actually happened, the more likely you are to figure out what lead generation tactics could work for you going forward.

Gini Dietrich: And one of the things I do is I ask people. Um, So, I’ll say, how did you find us? And, and, I mean,

Chip Griffin: Simple question.

Gini Dietrich: I always love this question, especially when you do it for clients, and you do it as a survey, because people will be like, I saw your billboard, and you’re like, yeah, we don’t have billboards. But okay.

Um, but you know, when

Chip Griffin: it, that is always my favorite when they say, Oh yeah, I, I saw you on this or heard you on that. I don’t correct them, but I know you didn’t cause I’ve never been on that show.

Gini Dietrich: You can also dig deeper onto that and say, Oh, well, you know, so, but I think from an agency perspective, you know, you’re not a big brand doing a huge market, uh, awareness, brand awareness survey.

But from our perspective, we can absolutely say when we’re on the phone with somebody, Hey. You know, how did you find me? And I get all sorts of answers. You know, I stumbled upon an article on LinkedIn that I really liked. And then I went to your website and I liked the way you’re, you, you develop your, I like your content and it really speaks to me like you ask those questions because they will give you the, the customer journey that they went through and that’s absolutely, you’ll start to see patterns and that’s absolutely where you should start.

Just start your lead gen program.

Chip Griffin: Right. And you have to remember that, that almost no agency sale is a single touch process. Right. So, so, you know, they may have heard about you one place, but then they were reminded about you somewhere else. And so the more you can ask those kinds of questions and understand it.

So, you know, for example, in my case, even though I’m not an agency today, you know, I often will find that someone has, you know, You know, gone through a lot of the content that I’ve created in addition to however, they first heard of me, you know, so, um, and, and so understanding, you know, those various touch points, whether it’s because you’re actively tracking them in your own systems or because they relay to you, Hey, you know, I, you know, I, I heard about you from so and so and then I saw, you know, your video on this or your article on that.

All of those data points help you to better understand what’s working, um, and, and it helps you, Make better decisions about what you should be doing more of and at some point it went when you gather enough data What you should do less of At the end of the day, though, a lot of it is just you got to pick some lead generation tactic and do it.

It almost doesn’t matter which one. So it’s sort of like the advice I always give people when they say, what CRM should I use? What project management tools should I use? I don’t care. Just pick one. Pick one you’re going to use. Right. If you, if you actually use it, it’s a success. Right. And, and same thing with lead generation.

Pick one that you’re going to actually do. So it has to be something that you’re comfortable with. You know, there are plenty of agencies that do really well because the owner likes dialing for dollars. There are plenty of agencies that would rather go out of business than dial for dollars. Yeah,

Gini Dietrich: I would, you would, I would never do that.

Chip Griffin: I would never do that. I mean, that’s, that’s just, that’s not my, it’s one of the reasons why I got out of politics because I didn’t want to dial for dollars. Oh, yeah. Terrible. Uh, one of, one of many reasons just to be clear, but you know, it’s, so you need to find things that, you know, That you know work that you’re comfortable with and that you will continue doing because those are the kinds of lead generation activities that will will bring people in the door so that you can continue to either grow your agency or at least, you know, maintain where you’re at, because you’re you always have to be growing.

Otherwise you’re shrinking. Um, and so I know a lot of agency owners say, I’m, you know, I’m happy at my current size. I don’t want to get much bigger. I don’t want to add more employees. That’s fine. But you still need to have a pipeline because you’re still going to lose clients for various reasons over time, no matter how good you are.

And by the way, you shouldn’t view losing a client as a failure. And that we can have a whole show about that. You know, having clients move on is not a bad thing. Having employees move on is not a bad thing. Obviously, there’s limits to how much you want to see of that. If you have 100 percent turnover, then yeah, okay, something’s wrong.

But it’s healthy to have some degree of of churn in your client base. And so that means you do have to have a pipeline, even if you want to stay at roughly your current size.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and it’s I mean, When, when you think about it from a client’s perspective, and I think we’ve all had this experience where we’ve wanted clients to participate in content creation.

And so we’ll see, we, we figure out different ways. Like you may have one client who is great in front of the camera, and you may have another client who doesn’t want to have anything to do with the camera, but doesn’t have a problem sitting with you for an hour and answering all your questions. So you can write some content that you can go straight for them.

It’s the same thing for you. If you love being in front of the camera. Do video. If you hate being in front of the camera when you love writing, do, you know, blog, blog writing. If you hate both of those things, but you don’t mind your, the sound of your voice, do podcasting. There are lots of different options.

You don’t have to do them all. Choose one thing that you’re going to actually get done.

Chip Griffin: But what if you love all three? I mean, what if you just love writing and you love the sound of your own voice and seeing yourself on camera? Should you do all three? No, you should not. Probably not, but I’m going to keep doing it anyway, so.

Um, but so in your, in the posts that you’ve had, you’ve had some, some particularly good examples of things that, that you can do. So let’s, as we wind down here, why don’t we give some people some concrete examples of some of the things that, that they can do as they’re looking to build lead generation programs.

So they have some ideas that they can start noodling on in addition to whatever feedback they get. Well, just go to spinsocks. com. It’s all right there. Well, of course. I mean, all, all of the answers are at spinsocks. com. There’s a few more at smallagencygrowth. com, but I mean, let’s face it, you know, this is really the Gini Dietrich show.

I’m just, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m the Ed McMahon here.

Gini Dietrich: You are. It’s amazing. Um, so a couple of things

Chip Griffin: listeners probably don’t even know who Ed McMahon is. I mean, that’s the, you know, so if you’re, if you’re one of those millennials, we’re not that old. Okay. I am. No, you’re not. I feel it.

All right, back to concrete suggestions before we, before we lose every listener that we have.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. So, so from, so the website, it gave you that, like, have one really call clear call to action on your homepage. Number two is content development. So really think about how are you creating the very best content on the internet for your topic.

And that means you’re answering questions. And I will give you one thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about because I’ve been talking to clients about this. Which is, every executive on earth, every one of them, has this weird perception about media relations. Somehow they think that you just pick up the phone, and you get them placed in the New York Times, and it takes 15 minutes and that’s it.

They don’t understand the process. So, when you think about, The kinds of content that you’re going to develop. Think about it from that perspective. You know, I have had client after client after client after client say to me things like PR firms are charities. You give them money, you never get a return.

Um, PR firms are black magic. Like you hear, I’ve heard all of it, all of it. So answer those questions. Talk about your process. Talk about the way in your content, because those are the kinds of things that are gonna do two things. It’s going to. Develop your leads, and it’s going to develop the qualified leads, and it’s going to educate your prospect on your process before they become a client.

Chip Griffin: But Gini, if I tell them what I do, they’re not going to hire me. They’re just going to do it themselves. Yeah,

Gini Dietrich: well, then they’re not the right client for you.

Chip Griffin: Bingo. Yeah, and frankly, I mean, most people aren’t going to do that, right? I mean, you know, you can post a video about, you know, how to do plumbing or electricity.

Most people are still going to hire a plumber or electrician. Either right away or after they try it and screw it up. Right, right. Yeah. I speak from experience here. So, so do I actually,

Gini Dietrich: um, and then number three is your list. So really think about and go back and listen to the business development, um, episode that we had from a couple of weeks ago, because we talked about how to create that list and what those prospects look like, and it’s easy. I would not market to them. But you can upload them into your marketing automation and tag them as prospects so that when they do come to the website, you can track them through and you can figure out what their customer journey is after they’ve come to the site.

So that’s number, number three, number four is email marketing. And, you know, I mean, we all should be doing email marketing. So you should be thinking about things like from an agency perspective, a new subscriber campaign. So what do you want them to know? And is it your process and how you think about things?

a re engagement campaign, which would, could be things that will re engage people who have gone dark. Triggered emails. So if, if a client, if a prospect does this, they get this. Um, and then your newsletter. So those are the four kinds of emails you can think about. And then you want to nurture and really think about, this is where I think people start to get in the process of, you know, overwhelmed because they overthink it.

So if you want a prospect to do, to, to, to hire you, what are the steps that they have to take to make that happen? And it could be that you want them to read five pieces of content or watch three videos or listen to two podcasts episodes, and you want them to download some content and you want them to fill out a form.

If they do those three things in some system, Okay. They’re qualified and you can pick up the phone and have a conversation with them, but you have to figure out what that looks like. And for you to figure that out, go back to what we talked about earlier, which is look at the last five clients that you won.

How did they find you and what was their journey? And then it’ll start to convert into

Chip Griffin: clients. And don’t let any of this overwhelm you because first of all, as you say, Gini, don’t overthink it, right? There’s no, I mean, just come up with something. But even before that, just take these one step at a time.

Do the simple things right? First, you’ve got to actually get their name, right? You’ve got to, you’ve got to research them or you’ve got to get them to sign up for your email list. Then you’ve just got to send an email. It doesn’t even matter if it’s a sequence, just send them something. Even if you just start with just a monthly newsletter.

That’s something you can build from there. So don’t feel like you have to build the entire nurture program out from the start, you know, just get started somewhere, start doing it consistently, and then gradually add on other things. It’s, it’s sort of like, you know, one of the things I do is I train Baseball umpires.

And one of the things we always say to new umpires is pick one thing in each game to work on. Don’t, you know, we’ll give you lots of feedback. We’ll tell you all the things that you need to work on, but each game, just pick one single thing. And that might be as simple as, you know, how you’re using your eyes to track the pitch or something like that.

Nothing fancy, just, and so work on that until you get that, then move on to the next thing on your list. If you try to do everything all at once, it’s all going to fail. Oh yeah, for

Gini Dietrich: sure. And I will tell you, just from my own experience, we have a new subscriber campaign that’s probably two years outdated.

I need to redo it. It’s absolutely on my list. Does it still convert? Yes. Will it convert better than when I update it? Yes. But

Chip Griffin: I can tell you at the start of the year, I turned mine off because it was so out of date. And so I need to redo it because, because it was, it was borderline. You’re actually, it was not borderline.

It was actually irrelevant, uh, for a lot of reasons, particularly since I had done the rebranding, uh, at the end of last year. So, uh, so that is, that is still on, on my list. Ashamedly. But, you know, but I’d rather not send out the wrong one than, you know, keep hitting the wrong button, kind of like I did at the start of today’s show.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, that

Chip Griffin: was very entertaining, I’m going to say. It wouldn’t be quite as entertaining if that’s what was going out to all the people on my email list, though, so. Sometimes it’s better to do nothing than to make yourself look like it. Actually, what does that say? Sometimes it’s better that people think you a fool than do something to prove it, or I don’t know what it is.

Something. Ha ha ha! Then open your, open your mouth and prove it. That’s right. That’s what it is. Um, in any case, well, so the, I, we will, assuming my addled mind remembers, I will include links to these articles in the show notes that you can find, of course, at agencyleadershippodcast. com. And, uh, I would encourage you to go read them because there’s lots more nuggets in there beyond what we’ve been able to talk about in today’s show.

But alas, we have reached the end of our available time. I know. You’re very disappointed. I am. You’ve run out of opportunity to heckle me today, so.

Gini Dietrich: I have a full week to prepare now.

Chip Griffin: I’m sure you will be well prepared. It doesn’t take a lot for you to prepare to do that, so. On that note, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends. for listening to the Agency Leadership Podcast. You can watch or listen to every episode by visiting agencyleadershippodcast. com or subscribing on your favorite podcast player. We would also love it if you would leave a rating or review at iTunes or wherever you go to find podcasts.

Be sure to check out Gini Dietrich at spinsucks. com And join the Spin Sucks community at spin sucks. com slash spin dash sucks dash community. You can learn more about me, Chip Griffin at smallagencygrowth.com, where you can also sign up for a free community membership to engage with other agency leaders.

The Agency Leadership Podcast is distributed on the FIR podcast network, where you can find lots of other communications oriented podcasts. Just visit www. firpodcast. com. F I R podcast network. com. We welcome your feedback and suggestions and look forward to being back with you again next week.