How to Overcome Proposal Anxiety and Win More Clients with Joe Ardeeser | Ep #755

How to Overcome Proposal Anxiety and Win More Clients with Joe Ardeeser | Ep #755 Speaker 2: Welcome to the Smart Agency Masterclass, a decade of interviewing the smartest agency owners all over the world to show you how to start, scale, and possibly sell your agency one day. I have a question for you. Are you tired of being stuck in the daily grind but you're scared to let go and really drive real growth because you don't know how? Now, it's time to break out of that rut and I want you to level up. I want you to join me and a select group of like-minded incredible agency owners for Elevate. Now, this just isn't another networking event. It's your chance to really transform into the leader and the agency CEO you've always wanted to be. Elevate is a place where you're going to make meaningful connections with other top-tier agency leaders who are openly sharing their game-changing strategies to really help gain clarity and boost your confidence while fostering relationships that will last beyond the event. Head over to elevatemyagency.com and grab your spot so you can level up. Go to elevatemyagency.com now. Hey Joe, welcome to the show. Speaker 1: Hey Jason, good to be here. Speaker 2: I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are, what you do. Speaker 1: Yeah. So I'm a former agency owner. I ran a web design shop. I have a high end WordPress shop for about 12 years. I've been an entrepreneur most of my life. And my most recent venture is Smart Pricing Table, kind of a play on proposals that we worked through at my old agency. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, we'll get into that in a little while, but how did you get into the agency business? What made you start your agency? Speaker 1: Well, you know, I think for like a lot of technical people, I just did not like having a boss. And I was working in Seattle at a medium-sized corporation. I had done a SAS product back in high school before SAS was really an acronym. It was online staff scheduling for fast food restaurants. And I did corporate for a couple of years and just wanted to get back to my entrepreneurial roots. So I quit. I planned on being a freelancer and I won't get into all the details, Jason, but I lost the ability to type. I had RSI, chronic back pain, like my whole body was just kind of messed up. And I only hired because it was my only option. And then I got, I got hooked. Other people advancing the mission. That's a very exciting thing. And that was, that was the beginning. And then my agency grew to probably about 10, 12 people at its peak. Awesome. Speaker 2: That's great. So how long did it take you to start hiring people for your agency? Speaker 1: Well, the first one again was out of necessity. I had some friends that were helping me while I couldn't type. I was mostly programming. At that point, I'd gotten a few contracts for my freelance operation. And I remember the first time I went and got a desk at IKEA and my employee, my very first one, it really hit me two hours after I'd been out of the office that the mission had been advancing, like he had continued to make progress. I think that's really what got me hooked. And then I realized that it's not actually that complicated. And when you start hiring, you start getting a lot more time back. And then you hire a developer to take over that work. Then you hire a designer. So you start doing design work. And then I promoted my lead designer to project manager. So now I'm not project managing. Holy cow, this is crazy. And then the icing on the top, Jason, was when I hired my first sales guy. I had some people tell me I was too small. I hired him when I was like six people. Oh my word, one of the best decisions I ever made to not like you already have the stress of revenue and then to have the stress of actually getting the jobs and closing the deals. Like I'm a big fan of distribution of labors and sometimes distribution of stress. That was a really big hire. And then my favorite thing, I'm sure some of your listeners can connect to this. That moment where a prospect became a customer and a project was completed and you don't actually know the client. That's a big day as the owner. Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's pretty exciting. And I also warn people a little bit about that too, right? Like when you hire all these people to get your time back, And you start going into meetings, oh, Jason or Joe, we don't need you in this meeting. And then you go into the next meeting and the next meeting and the next meeting. And they're like, we don't need you. And you're like, well, shit, you know, they don't need me anymore. And then you get depressed and then you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, they don't need me for all the old stupid shit I used to do. I have actually kind of transitioned from an owner to a CEO. Now I need to do CEO shit. Last week in our mastermind, we were chatting, I asked, I always like to open up in the first couple of minutes and really kind of ask a question to get, you know, the members talking. And I said, look, toward the end of the year, beginning of the year, what is your guy's agency domino? What's that one thing you get in place and then everything else starts getting easier, right? It's kind of like what you were saying. Like you hired this person. To do programming, then they did programming. You hired this person to do management. They didn't manage it. Hired the person to do sales, do sales. Like those are dominoes. Like you start getting one and then all the other dominoes just start falling. If, if anybody's old enough, remember it's playing with dominoes. Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like what I think it was, uh, Colin, Jim Collins, he talks about the big no. A company getting momentum. Those are some significant moments in that. Speaker 2: Now, we talked about momentum, which I always love. What were some things that took away momentum from you growing your agency? Speaker 1: There's two things that come to mind. One, I think for so many agencies, lead generation is the biggest pain point. We were fortunate enough to be highly rated on Clutch.co. I don't know how big that is these days, but we were top three. On an agency list of about, I think, 20,000. We're number one for a while. And I was paying, I think, four or five, $6,000 a month, maybe eight at one point. If you were to take away the sponsorship, we were still extremely highly rated. But we were early adopters. And so we got tons of bleeps from that. But I think that's the biggest, that is what so many agencies struggle with. Like, how do I get leads coming in? How do I close them? We were a lot of one-time work. I hadn't cracked the retainer. We were mostly one-time high-end WordPress sites. And so we, you know, my wife can attest, I often talked about the fiscal cliff with a lot of the one-time, one-and-done kind of work. So that was my biggest pain point. And then of course, you know, Jason, you know, I'm an enthusiast when it comes to proposal writing. I hated writing proposals. The intensity that came with it, the need to go quickly was always a very, very big pain point with my agency. Speaker 2: What about the proposal process that stressed you out or that you didn't like? Speaker 1: Yeah, the two main things are you need to go quick. You know, every day that goes by, your odds go down. And it's funny how often customers will literally just go with the first engaged vendor. It really, we overcomplicate sales. Like, no, just respond quickly. That's low hanging fruit. But so there's a tension there. And then the second thing is you need to be accurate. So your proposal, your scope, your expectations need to be accurate. Otherwise, you know, the project can blow up post sale and become a nightmare. So those two things, so I've got to go quick, but it also needs to be high quality. And those things come together to what I call proposal anxiety. One of the bigger stressors in agency life. Speaker 2: I remember when, you know, we got a lot of our business back in the day off Google from searches, we were highly ranked. And I remember that's when people would actually call us rather than filling out or sometimes they would fill out a form. When they would actually fill out a form and I'd see it, I would automatically have my salesperson or myself call them right away. I'd say, Hey, Joe, I'm so sorry. It took me so long to get back to you. They were still on my website. Like it was just like, really? I'm like, well, we're really fast. And then we just have like a little laugh, but it was amazing. Cause I remember winning deals. Like you said, it's about the speed. We'd get back to them really quick. We'd meet with them. We'd present the proposal to them. They'd sign the deal. And then when we'd be in the kickoff meeting, they would always joke with me, be like, Hey, I'm still getting proposals today, this morning. Speaker 1: It's funny, whenever as an agency, you're kind of on the reverse side, right? Like you're going to solicit a vendor. Next time you do that, think about how compelling or like the temptations to just go with the first one. I had an outreach campaign I was setting up and I talked to a company for 20 minutes and they weren't amazing, but they could do what I wanted them to do. And I just felt this like, I kind of had to slow myself down. Like, oh yeah, I'm talking to other people. I need to be careful to commit. And yet I struggle to do that. Speaker 2: Yeah. I think about the agencies I've hired in the past. The first one that gets back to me, I always go with them. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 2: There's other ones that get back to me like weeks later. I'm like, if you're going to get back to me weeks later and you're trying to get my business. Are you going to be when you actually have my business? Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: Right. It's nuts. Speaker 1: Yeah. Often it's like an indication. What can I expect when I'm working with you? Speaker 2: Exactly. Cool. And I want to talk a little bit more about the accuracy because, you know, I always tell everybody scope creep starts in the first conversation and really the proposal is what protects you. Because if you get a very generalized proposal to a prospect and then they sign it, they become a client. Well, now you have no guardrails. You have nothing protecting you. I remember signing up a deal. Joe signed up like this. I thought they had 20 pages. Like when I looked at their website, I'm like, yeah, they got 20 pages. You know, I gave them a price. And I didn't have any page limits on the time. This was the last proposal I ever sent without page limits. You want to take a guess how many pages they had? Speaker 1: I'm going to guess 10x that maybe, maybe 50x. Speaker 2: Keep going. They had over 11,000 pages. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: The great thing is, is that you're unlikely to make that mistake again. Speaker 2: Well, I never made that mistake again. Speaker 1: With that much pain. I describe that as having handles to grab onto. You've got to be detailed enough that you have handles to grab onto, but you don't want to be so detailed that it feels rigid and obnoxious. Vagueness leads to what I call the vague vortex where everything's getting sucked into it. You don't have limiters. You can't really call things to stop without either being arbitrary and being a jerk or you just have to take it. And it's a losing game either way. Speaker 2: Look, there's never a hundred percent that you can do it perfect. Even after this, this was probably maybe six months or maybe even a year later. I don't know. It was so long ago. I'm so old and decrepit now. I can't remember. But I just remember it was after this because I was like, I went to my business partner at the time. I was like, we are going to have the most detailed ass proposal. We were never going to get screwed ever again. And I remember coming into this one onboarding meeting because I always loved doing the first meeting. Like I just loved it. I didn't have to do it, but I wanted to do it. And I came into the meeting and I always review with the client what they purchased. I'll be like, all right, so we're going to do a 50 page website. We're going to do, or we're going to set up an e-commerce store so you can sell some of the stuff that you have. And then he goes, well, no, we didn't sign up for that. And I'm like, pull the proposal out. I show him the proposal. I go, Hey Joe, like this is what you signed up for. Oh no, I didn't sign up for that. And he goes, excuse me, young man. He told everyone on his team. Excuse everyone, I need to talk to this young man. I was probably like 28 at the time or something. And he just ripped into me. He's like, I didn't sign up for this. I was like, this is your signature. And then long story short, we just verbally went back and forth, like screaming at the top of our lungs. And he wound up becoming the best client after because I stood up to him because he's a big ass fucking bully, which I hate. I took a lot of his money and he listened to us. So detailed proposals can screw you, but you just got to make sure you stand up to them. Speaker 1: And I think sometimes it's the layout. So I've thought about this very in depth. If it's just all a wall of text, you've overwhelmed your prospect. They're not going to read it. And of course they're going to have expectation management issues. And so I think The layout of the proposal, the way it's set up so that the content is digestible is really key in that too. Speaker 2: So how much is too much text then? Or like, what do you recommend? You know, because we obviously have to have enough text to protect ourselves to let them know what we're going to do, what we're not going to do. Speaker 1: I'll answer that. The thing I'd say first, though, is you need to have a repository where you can take all the learnings from all the concrete you're eating as you hit, you know, the concrete with your face. Right. Like you need some kind of repository. And so I'm a really big fan of having reusable components, modules, line items that can get better over time as I stress test them through agency work. OK, so let's say, for instance, I am selling a blog or something like that. Typically, when I'm scoping out a line item like that, I'll say a summary sentence or two with what's the big idea. And then I'll say work included and then a bulleted list. The bulleted list is anywhere from three bullets to five or six. And then I might have some very specific limitations and I might have some upsells around that. But the reason why you need a repository is because you're going to test that with your customers, test that with projects, and you're going to come back and you're continuously going to improve that component so that it yields the result you want. Do I need to raise the price? Do I need to put another limitation? Do I need to adjust some of the structure here? I always tell the agencies that I consult, you want to define the spirit of the work. That'd be perfect, but you need to have, like, if you've defined the spirit of the work and it becomes 3x the size, you can push back and say, well, clearly that was not what was intended. But if you just say, I'm going to create a blog for a thousand bucks, yeah, good luck. You're going to be in pain. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a big component of creating a repository or like this huge template. That's kind of what we had. You know, we didn't have cool softwares like that you've created. We'll talk about in a second. You know, ours was a huge Word document that I had to go in and just kind of eliminate things. Boom, boom, boom. And it just made it very easy for us to create a proposal within well under the 30 minute mark, because I found like some people just spent So long on proposals and like you're wasting all this time. I'm like, what if you had all this already? But it takes some time to get there too, right? Like, like you said, you got to eat a lot of concrete or I like to say eat a lot of shit and then you figure out what you like. Speaker 1: Yeah. And for a lot of agencies, it's just, I need some baseline structure. If you're just shooting from the hip, if you're grabbing old proposals, duplicating them, Writing stuff from scratch all the time. That's not a system. You're going to be stuck there. You've got to pause. Like with so many things in agency life, you need to pause and say, what the heck am I doing? And start putting together that some kind of process. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. Well, let's talk about the software that you've created because it's really pretty cool. Tell us a little bit more of why you created it and how it works. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, if you think back to what I was talking about with proposal anxiety, you've got to go quick. It's got to be accurate. About eight years ago with my agency, this became an obsession. I wanted to crack this nut. How do I take this thing that is one of the worst parts of the job and make it actually enjoyable? And so that was our mission. About three years ago, we took it to the market. But Smart Pricing Table is interactive proposal software built for marketing agencies. I used to kind of have it a little bit wider than that. Not anymore. I know agencies. I ran an agency for 12 years. And so we have the type of features that agencies want, and we can give you the structure so that you can build things quickly, so you can respond quickly, but also super, super accurate. So it's a constant evolving product as we talk with hundreds and hundreds of agencies, and we keep making it better. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Well, you know, anything that makes our job easier, makes it faster, takes away, you know, the anxiety of figuring out like, did I put this in there and all that kind of stuff. You know, the, the software that you guys have created is, is really pretty neat. And I hope everyone listening, you know, goes to check it out. Is there a special link or a special thing that they can. Check it out. Speaker 1: Yeah. So smartpricingtable.com slash smartagency. And that's got more information on it. You'll see some sample proposals. And then we've also, we've got a deal, Jason, anyone that comes from the podcast. So smartpricingtable.com slash smartagency. There's a 50% off your first two months. So there's a 14 day free trial. Here's the big thing though. If you're curious about it at all, I would encourage your listeners, book a demo. I still do all the demos myself, Jason, which might come as a surprise, but I love it so much because that's how we've gotten so much feedback. I like taking all of that and then working it back into our system with my team. And so I typically do about a 15-minute demo, no obligation. If proposal points are a pain point, I'd love to chat with you. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Well, everyone go check out what Joe has built. It's really pretty cool. Book a demo with them. And that's pretty neat, Joe, that you still do the demos. You know, that's kind of like me where I always like that first meeting with the client. I didn't have to do it, but I enjoyed doing that. And when you're able to create that, that's just, it's, it's a more enjoyable business. Speaker 1: Yeah. It won't last forever, but it's going to be hard. I love just the feedback, getting, finding out different agency problems, but obviously won't scale to infinite. So. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Well, cool. Well, awesome. Well, everyone go check out Smart Pricing Table and tell them we sent you so you can get those discounts and all the great benefits. And until next time, have a Swenk day.