How to Keep Clients Longer Without Chasing Them with Darby Copenhaver | Ep #813

How to Keep Clients Longer Without Chasing Them with Darby Copenhaver | Ep #813 Speaker 1: Hey, real quick, before we dive in, if you're an agency owner who's doing everything yourself, I want to let you know about this seven day free trial opening up for the agency playbook. This is our full eight system framework that over 20,000 agency owners have used to scale smarter. This is the exact system that I normally sell for over $1,600, but right now you can dive in. If you're ready to stop winging it and start building an agency that runs without you, head over to jasonswenk.com slash playbook. That's jasonswenk.com slash playbook. You're listening to the Smart Agency Masterclass with me, Jason Swenk, and we're bringing you this episode courtesy of our friends at Wix Studio. Let's go ahead and get into the show. All right. Well, we have a special show of my good friend Darby, our agency scale specialist. Darby, welcome to the show. Speaker 2: Thanks. Glad to be here. Speaker 1: Yeah, we've used a ton of agencies over the past couple years, and not in our mastermind. We don't use anybody in our mastermind just to keep that church and state separate. And what are some of the gaps that we've seen with the agencies that we've used? And just to let everyone know, this is not And today, we're going to be talking about how to make sure you're not doing this and lessons. Because as agents, we don't see it in the eyes of our clients. And that's what we want for this episode. Speaker 2: Yep. The whole goal is just to really make you think harder about your onboarding process, about your communication, the way that you're talking to your clients, the way that you're sharing your successes, your failures, and just really taking a good hard look at. Just making sure your clients are happy at the end of the day, right? Because just like you said, many times, you know, buyer's remorse kicks in immediately with most of these engagements, right? So you've got to head that off very, very quickly. And you do that through strong communication. You do that through a strong onboarding. So we just want to get into the elements of that and what we see working within our members and their agencies and what we've experienced to the contrary in some regards. So the whole goal is just to Kind of just make you think and maybe make some changes. So let's start with communication. That's a big thing with us. It's pretty simple, right? Do what you say, do it on time, and be transparent. So let's talk about that. What have been your frustrations, Jason, with what we've seen? Speaker 1: We really haven't seen communication, right? And we've told them in the very beginning. You know, when they start putting us through their onboarding process, which here's one thing I don't like and I don't think clients like, but we met two or three times and you've asked me a lot of this stuff. Why couldn't you fill this out ahead of time? Why couldn't you build this with us? Why are you putting all the work on us in order to do your job or at least do it with us versus just put me in a dark room? Fill out an 80 payment. And then, you know, on that document, a lot of times they ask, what is the best way of communication? And even when they talk, like I'll introduce them to the rest of the team, you and Stacey and Jody. And what do you guys always tell them? Whatever you tell Jason on the date, you're going to get something to him. Make sure it's done. For example, one of the agencies we use, they were like, do you remember this? Like they go, Jason, we'll get it to you by the end of day Thursday. Great. Speaker 2: Awesome. Speaker 1: Friday morning comes. Hey, it looks like you missed the deadline for yesterday. Going forward, if you're going to miss, let us know. Do you remember what happened? Speaker 2: I don't. Well, this has happened a couple of times, so I'm not even sure exactly which one you're talking about. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. You're going to have to get into that. Speaker 1: Obviously, I caught this agency on a bad day. Obviously, I apologize later on. But on Slack, you can only send five minutes of audio at a time. He sent me three audio messages because he kept like timing out at five minutes. And let me just kind of start off how it is. I am not your freaky or effing, you know, employee, an agency partner, and you don't talk to me this way and just start ripping me. And I literally sent it to Darby and I sent the message sent because he saw it on Slack, like, hey, going forward, you know, just let me know. And I couldn't believe it. I literally was like, who's this Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde going forward? So lesson learned, don't send long audio messages and it's hard to respond, but I'll keep cussing out your clients. Speaker 2: I think that should probably go without saying, but you know, let's talk about how people are certain that their clients are happy. What measures or what things do you have in place as an agency to ensure Not just assume that you know your clients are happy, not just with the results that you're getting, but with the communication, with just the feels, right? That they feel the things that they've hired you for are being done and communicated properly. Speaker 1: Well, I mean, that's the thing. Like, even if you're getting results for your clients, if you indicate that to them, they're not going to know. And you can't just rely on what your account managers or project managers say. A lot of times they don't know the pulse of their client. How many times I've talked to a mastermind member, And, you know, they'll be like, man, I'm having issues with this one account manager. They keep saying that the accounts are great. And then the clients cancel. Obviously there's a huge disconnect. So, you know, a lot of agencies do net promoter score, but I don't think they do it often enough. So a lot of the things that we help people with is getting the owner to a point where they're bringing in deals that they haven't sold. They're also delivering amazing results to their clients that they haven't even been a part of. The client knows who the CEO of that agency is. So what if, oh, this is a hypothetical. What if you would actually call the clients that you didn't sell, that you didn't deliver and just occasionally, you know, say, Hey, I'm Jason. I'm the CEO of, we really respect your business. I've heard a lot of good things. Here's my personal cell phone. If you ever need anything that would go a huge way. Another thing would be. What if you actually went out to your clients and sat down with them and really just exchange stories back and forth and be human? When they go to cut the budget, they're more likely to cut someone that they've only met a couple times over Zoom rather than someone they've gone to dinner with. And you can get a pulse of what's going on. Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to get back into the onboarding thing too. Just, you know, as we're talking about this, we're talking about How do you make your clients' life easier? Because ultimately, that's what you're there to do, right? It's not just about getting results, but it's about getting them to a place where they can't get to be on their own. And if you're creating more work for them, i.e. a big lengthy homework assignment right out of the gates once they've signed a contract, now they have to do all this work that's redundant from a bunch of crap you probably already told them during the first few calls, it gets the relationship off From a point of frustration instead of a point of or ease or relaxation or optimism, so, you know. Let's talk about the onboarding process a little bit and, you know, what are the right things and what are the wrong things that agencies should be doing when they're onboarding new clients? Speaker 1: Well, think about someone hires an agency. A lot of the CMOs and the partners you guys work with can do a lot of what you're doing, but they don't have the time and they want to put their time into other things. So they're hiring you not just to get results, but to save them time. And so, when you have this length onboarding thing that you put on them, if that's a word, made them do, it's going against what they hired you for. So, the best onboarding I've seen is in phases, right? And so, yes, you always need to have onboarding. And, you know, there was a speaker that we had at one of our agency experiences, Joey, recommend his book, How to Never Lose a Client Again. And he really talks about the first hundred days are really important because it's going to make or break that relationship going forward. And so what I would always like to see is you meet with me for the first meeting and you reset expectations. Jason, you told us you want to get more lead in agency mastery. We're going to run some Facebook ads, some meta ads, you know, help you with posting on LinkedIn, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Yes, that's exactly what I want. And Jason, here's how we're going to measure this. Here's the communication schedule that we're going to do. Here's the timeline that we're going to hit. And we're going to let you know, if we're going to miss a timeline, we're going to let you know. And just want to confirm everything. Are we on the same page? Absolutely. And then they'll say, Well, there's some information we haven't gotten from you, and then you can go through that. But think about all the tools, Darby, that we have, right? So let's say we have two or three pre-calls beforehand over Zoom or some kind of video conferencing. Why are you not transcribing this? Let's see. Why are you not putting this into AI to break that down? And then why are you not creating this AI agent? Scan all those transcripts, bring all the stuff you need in, create a document of all the things you still need, and then do the onboarding. Take that transcript again and match that in order to come up with the most amazing strategy. Not using AI to come up with all of the strategy, but just to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Think about one of the things I'm so excited about is you live in a world of all this data. But a lot of times, if you're like me, which a lot of people are, like ADHD, you look at numbers, you look at all this data, and you get overwhelmed. But now AI can take that. And so if you're not having your onboarding team, even there's tools out there that look for sentiment of how often you're talking. Like, if you even have a sales agent that is, you know, going, you talked on this, this, this, this, this mark, right? Maybe you talked a little bit more, right? Like using this to help you. Speaker 2: I think it could be even as simple as creating a little custom GPT and using your onboarding questionnaire as your knowledge base. You can upload that document right to that custom GPT and then you can just prompt the GPT to look through the transcripts of the calls and answer those questions for you and spit it back out and tell you exactly which things you have and which things you still need to gather. And then you've just cut the work down for the client that just signed a contract into a fraction of what it would have been otherwise. And again, just making their lives easier. The other thing I want to talk about too is setting the expectations you mentioned during the onboarding process. And then not only that, but then, you know, you need to customize your communication style to your client. And even when you get, you know, a large number of clients, it's still not overly complicated to do that. Some people need a Loom video once a week, analyzing the data that's shown in the dashboard, because certain people are going to see a dashboard and it's going to be meaningless to them. And I think too many agencies tend to have this cookie-cutter approach to account management where they, oh yeah, we send them a report every month or we send them this every month and they do the same thing for every client. And in reality, month after month after month, these clients that are oblivious to interpretation of that dashboard have no idea what's going on. They're just writing a check. And I heard somebody say recently when we said, how do you know that your clients are happy? Speaker 1: I pay every month. Speaker 2: I don't know that that's really a clear indicator on how satisfied they are. So, you know, let's kind of dig into that a little bit. Speaker 1: You know, a clear indicator of how satisfied they are is if those counts are growing and they're paying you more. And a clear indicator, if you position your agency in the right way, is do they come to you with problems rather than tasks? And the problem could be something that's not even related to marketing. That's the clear indicator that you've built trust, a C value. If they're just barking orders to you, I can promise you they're going to replace you and you're going to be irrelevant. Speaker 2: And I think one of the most overlooked paths to being able to scale your business is capitalizing on your existing relationships, right? We have tons of data and we see more often than not, the number one thing an agency says their biggest challenge is not enough leads, right? I need more leads. I need better clients. I need more opportunities. When in reality, they're not positioning themselves in a way to fully realize the opportunities they already have in front of them, just like you just said, right? When you can position yourself to be in that trusted advisor role as a problem solver for their business that they know, whatever my challenge is, I can go to Jason or I can go to Philip and I can say, hey, Man, we've really been struggling with this. What are you seeing here? And then that's a great opportunity for you as the agency owner or the account manager to be strategic and to guide them and say, hey, I can connect you with somebody who I know who's really great at this. Or this is something that actually we can handle. Or here's a little something that you can do independently that I can guide you on. And that just reinforces the value to the client of the importance of the relationship. Because again, The results are awesome, but the value of the relationship is really, really important because then, again, when things are tight or there's economic uncertainty and cuts are being made, what are the things that are relationship-based, like we talked about with getting to know your clients as people, and then what are the things that are transactional, that are just, hey, we're paying money for a result, and we're not even maybe clear or sure on what that result is. Speaker 1: Look, your agency adapts for every client, right? Your builder should do the same. That's why Wix Studio is built for the way you actually create. AI-powered site mapping lets you get straight down to the design. Whether you shape things in Figma or start in Studio, your vision's coming to life quicker with no-code animations and built-in responsiveness. And for client growth that actually scale, you've got extendable business solutions and a dynamic CMS. Scale your agency at WixStudio.com. You should be going to them with ideas. I would never bring on, it goes back to, are they the right prospect for you? A lot of agencies are selling people that they can never upsell later on. They can never grow those accounts. And so I look at that as that's a bad prospect. I would only want to bring on people that I knew I could help and I can grow their accounts and they want to grow. Knowing who you can help and that you can help someone, make them a good client. They have to want the help. You know, if I hired a trainer, I want to lose weight, but I also like to eat food. I also like to eat a lot. So any trainers out there listening to this, I'm not the right client for you right now. Speaker 2: I mean, you can join the gym, but you got to put in the work at the end of the day, right? Hiring the client that's just joining the gym, so to speak, you're kind of destined for failure from the start. And I think something that's really important to remember, too, is virtually every interaction you have with a client should be some sort of ongoing discovery. Discovery is not just in the early phases of the sales process of a client engagement. It's imperative in those early phases to kind of map out where you need to go. But as you bring success to the client, as their situation changes, as their business evolves, as it grows, as it declines, their needs are going to change. And unless you are being strategic and performing some sort of discovery As you go, you're going to be blind to these needs and to these changes, which then, again, doesn't put you in the position to be that advisor, to make suggestions, to suggest adjustments, to do the things that are going to be necessary to continue to push them forward. Because at the end of the day, When they hire you in month one and you get to month four, there's a lot that's probably changed in their business in that time. And if you think that the status quo of what they hired you for in the beginning is going to be sufficient at this point, that's where things start to go off the rails. So I challenge everybody to really think about how are they ensuring they are clear and understanding to what's going on in their clients' businesses and in their lives and how those things are changing on a regular basis that enable them to make suggestions to help them continue to move forward. Because what worked three months ago is maybe not working for them today. Speaker 1: The other thing too, if you think about there's always a disconnect of who do I reach out to for what? And I always like one of our mastermind members, Travis. He always lays it out really easy for the clients and communicates this to their clients. He goes, look, like just looking for information from the team. I want you to reach out to the account manager or the project manager. If it's a 911 emergency, I want you to reach out to the salesperson. And just that easy communication, that makes it so easy to me as a client, working with an agency, be like, hey, dude, the Facebook ad of Audra created this thing in AI, and it was like a newspaper article. And it had one of our members, Audra, that's done amazing results, went from like, 300 grand when she started with us to well over 3 million and not working over 30 hours. And so they created like this news article ad. Well, this news article ad, first off, it was like, we've all put our picture and put me in a pose of this. It's been horrible, right? It doesn't even look anything like... So that was mistake number one. And they were supposed to get our approval for all these ads. And so they just put it out there. And I was like, that's a 911. And here's the other thing. I know we're gonna make mistakes. We all do. I make mistakes all day long. Own it. And so I fully expected... That agency called me the next day. They're like, Jason, man, I'm sorry. This is what we're doing. Speaker 2: If you're so embarrassed, like this was, this was a rough, I can't believe this happened either. Right. Speaker 1: Exactly. They hid in a freaking corner. They never called. They sent one Slack message. Oh, we didn't spend that much. Not many people saw it. No, no. A lot of people saw it because like we saw it a number of years ago. Hey, I saw this. Speaker 2: I saw it. That's enough, right? Like it was brutal. Like it was the typos were brutal. It, I mean, it screamed. Just AI effort zero. I mean, it was it was rough. Like it was it was embarrassing. Speaker 1: Yeah. So when you make mistakes, well, I guess there's two lessons on that part of the story. Let people know who to contact. The other part is own your fucking mistakes. All the client, if you hide in the corner, like it's only going to make it worse. Speaker 2: I said it earlier to, you know, risk of being redundant. It just makes me question Today, we're going to talk about the validity of the information that's being shared, right? Because if everything you're sharing is so great all the time, and we're seeing all these great things and all this great movement, but yet we're still not really seeing the results that we were after. And granted, we're still pretty early and we were optimistic. But I just, I don't feel like I'm getting the full story. And if I'm not getting the full story, that's when my mind starts to wander. Speaker 1: My mind starts to wander. Speaker 2: That's not a good thing. You know, I overthink things to a fault. So just, again, humanizing things, right? This is the theme of the whole conversation, right? It's just the human element because humans make mistakes. Humans need to be connecting with humans. And if you just make your relationships just more human in general, when it comes to the way you're communicating, the relationship you're building, That's where long term relationships are made. Yeah. Speaker 1: The other thing I want to kind of switch a little bit of focus off of onboarding. Most people want their and look, I think agencies have a negative constitute using AI as just writing articles and creating bad images like we just talked about. Right. And it does. Right. For the people that use it really poorly. And so a survey that to all these brands and the brand said, I want my agencies, the agencies I work with to use AI to get us better results. And so think about these working with agencies, they want to get the best result. They want to put the least amount of time into it. An example I did yesterday, right? For a weekly meeting, I put like four screenshots from TubeStats and I uploaded it to our agent or our assistant and it gave us amazing feedback. I also took the report from Facebook because we're very fresh off FireNC that did this bad work and bad communication. And I uploaded all the stats from that. It told me, man, these ads are not working. I had to put this in. The agency should be putting all this data in and doing what they used to do six weeks ago. Stuff is, you know, fucking extinct. Use AI to import all this data of what you're doing. Every month I get a report, a financial report from our bookkeepers and accountants. I look at this report. I go, how am I doing? It's like, hey, revenue went down a little bit. Expenses went up a little bit because you paid the wigwam, which looks like that was for your elevator, like all this stuff. But that's what I want an agency I'm using to be leveraging all this data and coming and then interpreting what that said and then what you know and then present it to me. Speaker 2: I found that stat you're talking about and it was shared by one of our members, Natalie, and it was from a company called Audience Audit. And it basically said that 77% of brands are more likely to hire an agency that's a recognized AI expert. However, only 32% of brands feel like their current agency is an expert when it comes to AI. So there's a pretty big gap there, and it's a very telling thing in terms of where we're going in the industry. People need to know that this is being utilized in a way that's going to drive results forward. And again, we were at a conference recently, and I think we've said this so many times at this point, but a guy's, you know, it's like, hey, who here likes to eat steak? And, you know, most of the people in the audience raised their hand. The next question is like, Who here likes to butcher cattle? And obviously nobody raised their hand and it's kind of the same thing. You don't need to get into the granular details of how you're doing these things and how you're utilizing AI. You want to do it at a high level and you want to be transparent with it and how it's making you able or enabling you to drive results quicker, faster, better, make micro adjustments that in long term make big shifts as opposed to big adjustments periodically, things like that. But it's got to be there. People want to see it and you've got to share it, but you don't have to get too in the weeds with it. Speaker 1: There's always that conversation. I see these young that are just setting up AI to do everything, right? And AI can create and create images and can make better decisions as you train it, all this kind of stuff. And I have it going out, getting leads, chat with them, and then it does all the work for my clients. They're going to hit a cap and that is not a legitimate business. It's a business, but it's not a legitimate agency because brands want a toll. They want to go back to what we were talking about, like if you can sit and have dinner or lunch with them and talk about their business, that's the benefit of what agencies have. And then if you can use the power of AI to help you and streamline that, right? Like, so, you know, go back to, you know, the solar days of, you know, the first agency, a hundred people. Two years ago, could have built the same amount of agency with probably 40 people. Today, you probably could do it with 20. So, the people are going, my job's going to be replaced, the agency's replaced. We launched a And today, we're going to talk about a video about how their platform is not going to need agencies. Speaker 2: I think you're exactly right. There's a small segment of people that will want to get in the weeds and learn that stuff and utilize that technology and do things independently. But I think there's a much larger segment of brands and people out there Just want a done-for-you solution and they want to know and have the certainty that you're utilizing the best tools available to you to drive those results and do it for them. They don't want to think about it. They don't want to do it. That's what you're there for. You're hired to make it easy, to make it simple, and to get the result. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I think we covered a lot. For everyone listening, I want you to really think about it with your client's perspective. And just don't listen to your team about, well, it needs to be this way because it's easier for us. That doesn't mean it's necessarily better for the client, but I want you to be more client focused on onboarding, communication. Yeah, just doing what you say you're going to do. That sets you about 99% of the agencies out there that we've worked with. Now, we might need to start breaking our rules and start working with the amazing agency owners. I know they get results, but until then, I guess I'll still suffer. But if you've listened to this and you're like, go really audit your whole process, start to finish, your whole customer journey. Really audit all that. And put some time into it. I feel that if you do that, now you're setting your agency up for success now going forward. So do that. And thanks for coming on the show again. And until next time, have a Swenk day.