Keep Clients Longer: 2 Key Elements of Effective Client Communication with Tim Riddle| Ep #786

Keep Clients Longer: 2 Key Elements of Effective Client Communication with Tim Riddle| Ep #786 Speaker 3: I want you to stop working for free. If you're tired of getting ghosted on proposals, the endless follow-ups and We'll think about it as a response. There's a better way. The top agencies aren't sending proposals. They're getting paid to pitch and close bigger deals way faster. I want you to grab this free resource I just put together at agencymastery360.com slash strategy. That's agencymastery360.com slash strategy and you'll learn how to flip the script if you want to get paid for your expertise instead of giving it away for free. Speaker 4: Hey Tim, welcome to the show. Speaker 1: Thanks. Great to be here. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. Tell us who you are and what you do. Speaker 1: My name is Tim Riddle and I started a company about six years ago called Discover Blind Spots. It's a marketing agency, weird name, I know, but it was inspired by a book I wrote about seven or eight years ago called Blind Spots, What You Don't See Can Hurt You. And although that was not a marketing book, it was a book about how do you eliminate blind spots in your life to kind of be all that you can be. And when I was writing that book, I did the unofficial, you know, anytime you're writing, you're doing the unofficial poll where you're asking people, Hey, what are some of the top blind spots that You know, you experienced or whatever, and it seemed like communication was on everybody's list. And so what came out of that was maybe there's a company here that we could help businesses or organizations uncover blind spots in their marketing and messaging. And then it quickly dovetailed into our work solely with financial advisors. Speaker 4: Now, how'd you start the agency? What made you go, I want to jump into the agency business? Speaker 1: Maybe one day I'll write a book about this is not the way you're supposed to do it. When we started, when I started the business six years ago, it was obviously just me. And I just had a vision of, obviously at the beginning, it was if you were breathing and you had a little extra money, you were probably a viable candidate for us. And I just, I don't know. I felt like it was something, you know, before my time on this earth was done, I remember standing in my kitchen and I said to my wife, I was going to change careers and I was like, we have no client. Nobody knows what we're going to do. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to do business with us. But I don't think I could go to my grave and not at least try this. And she's always been a great trooper. She was like, I'm with you, whatever you want to do. So it started and first client was, hey, can I do this for you for free? And you'll just say something nice about me. And the second client was, can I do something for like half price? And you say a little bit of nice things. But really where the business began and started Where it is today, a good friend of mine is a financial advisor. I never had plans to target that market. And we ride bikes together, bicycles together, and we've ridden thousands of miles over the years. It was a Friday afternoon and, you know, either he called me or I called him and said, Hey, let's go out for a ride this afternoon. And I met him not too far from my house. There was a, there's like a little park. And so he brought his bike park there. We hopped on. We're doing the slow pedal thing at the beginning. How's your family? How's business? How are things going? And I said to him, I said, Jeff, how do you nurture relationships with your clients and potential prospects? And I remember like yesterday, he turned and looked at me like, why are you asking me that? He said, I don't know. I mean, I take him to lunch or I meet with him. Speaker 4: Send him a newsletter every once in a while. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And then I asked him a second question. I said, well, how many clients do you have in your database? Let's just start with that. And he said, yeah, probably about 350 or so. And then I asked this last, which I didn't realize it was going to be the proverbial question that launched everything is I said, how many lunches you have last year? And he smiled and said, not that many. Tell me more. And that's when I said to him, I said, well, I've got this idea. What if we could help you communicate to your audience, but using your voice, not canned content? So that it's you, it's authentically you, use video, written copy, you know, a lot of that, a lot through email nurturing. And he said, I'm in, if you can get it through compliance. And naively at that time, I thought, well, that's not that hard. 11 months later, we were the first approved to work with Raymond James Independent Advisors. You know, they're what they call their RJFS division. And that's really where it began. He was our very, very first client. Speaker 4: That's awesome. That's, that's great. So obviously the first client was free. Second client was kind of half off. So what was the price? Speaker 1: Yeah, the first client was free, which actually wasn't a financial advisor. Jeff was free too. And he made some introductions for us and that kind of thing. Prior to that, I think somebody like maybe 500 bucks for a project. Speaker 4: I laugh because every couple of guests I ask, what did they charge for their first client? And it's always 500 bucks. Mine was 500 bucks too. Speaker 3: I don't know why. Speaker 4: Is 500 small enough, but not big enough? Speaker 1: Yeah, it was 500 bucks. And then ironically, we had a couple of those. And then, and again, not this is before financial advisor side, but I connected with through a friend of a friend of a friend, a huge company in the Northeast that was a software I teach security company and somehow I got recommended and I went in and met with their C-suite and helped them on their branding and their messaging. I was clueless. I mean, I was, I was faking it until I could make it, you know, kind of thing. But I, I stood in there and did it. And then they said, well, we want you to come back. Literally flew me back. You know, they. They bring a car to the airport to pick me up and I'm like, what in the world? And then they're like, I think we want to keep working. So can you pull together like a monthly retainer? And I don't know what brought the nerve on, but I was like, yeah, I can do that. And so the next, that price was like five grand a month, which was Like a gazillion dollars to me, you know, kind of thing. And they signed like a six month contract. And this I think happens with a lot of companies. They probably used me. Two percent of the time, like I was like, hey, don't you need some? Yeah, we're going to get to you. We're going to get to you. But, you know, sometimes those companies, it's like they just want the comfort of knowing you're available, even if you're not doing a lot of work for them. It was a short term gig, but it filled a nice gap, you know, for about six months. Yeah. Speaker 4: Let's talk about some gaps in communication. It's really big with me on really all parts. Of things from when I'm buying, because that's one of the biggest frustrations. For example, I just bought a new car a little while ago and the dealership, you know, they send you a survey. And I think they want all perfect scores, but they barely communicated. I asked them a bunch of questions after the sale and they never got back to me. Before they were very responsive. Afterwards they're like, we got your money. We don't need. So I put that in the survey and they immediately called, well, how can we get the perfect? Like I'm getting paid commission on this. I'm like, Your communication was horrible, right? And I see that with, you know, a lot of the agencies I've hired. And that's the hard thing too, is like all the agencies I hire, I never hire from my mastermind because I don't want to eat where I, and so I've always been having a hard time. Like the communication is so bad. So what are some gaps? How do we improve as agencies? How can we make sure we're not missing some of the blind spots in communication? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't know that I have a perfect answer. I will tell you that the bar is pretty low. Speaker 4: Very low. You know, so just return my calls or return an email. Speaker 1: Yeah, when we started the business, I'm a big values guy, like more than mission vision. I'm not anti-mission vision, but I think a lot of mission vision statements get written and put in a drawer and nobody really knows what they are or whatever. But I always say your values influence your character, which influences how you interact with people. So if you live out your values, then you do it. So our top value is to be highly responsive. And I admit when we started doing that and I kind of announced that, okay, this was going to be, it was sort of like, why is that one? And I said, because 99% of the people are not. So we're going to be that much ahead of the game. And, but back specifically to answer your question, I think there are two things. I do think that responsiveness is helpful. I don't think it has to be, you know, long drawn out kind of things, but I always say silence is our enemy. I've had this where somebody is supposed to communicate with me and they're not. What do you do? You immediately start to connect dots about that relationship. They probably aren't true, but you do, right? And so I always say, so why would you give up your voice? To whatever, to allow somebody to start thinking that. Why? I don't understand that. So just trying to be able to be able to, you don't have to have all the answers, but to be able to respond. And sometimes I find that it's even helpful if somebody asks something like, can't deal with that right now, is to be able to say, hey, I'm sorry, I got your message. I'm slammed for three days, but I'll get back to you kind of thing. It doesn't mean you got to drop everything all the time, but just that little piece of knowing, I don't want people to think, what is he doing? You know, we work off of a retainer and I always tell our client, I say, our number one response value is to be highly responsive. If we are not, you can call me out on that. I never want you to wake up one morning and say, I wonder what they're doing. Like I haven't heard from them in forever. I think that's the quickest way to lose. And then the other thing I'll say this about communication that I think we forget is that I think we all have a communication style and no two are the same. And I think one of the problems is that we expect everybody to communicate with us exactly the way we like to communicate. And so some of the things we've tried to do at the beginning when we on ramp a new client is say, how's the best way to communicate with you? Are you a text person? Are you an email person? Are you a phone call person? We will adapt to you. You let us know. And I remember I had a friend one time who was a sales guy and he was terrible at communication. And I realized I was beating my head against the wall. And I was like, wait a minute, I'm trying to make him be something he's not. But why don't I figure out how, what's his best mode of communicating? And that would lower my blood pressure because I can adapt. It's easier for me to adapt and try to make everybody adapt to my system. Speaker 3: Hi there, agency owners. Let me ask you, are you ready to scale your agency without increasing your overhead costs? If yes, then you need to know about E2M Solutions. Now, E2M is the number one most reliable white label partner for agencies. They specialize in web design, WordPress development, e-commerce, SEO, and content writing. They basically do all the heavy lifting, which frees you up to focus on growing your agency. Now, here's the best part. E2M is just not another vendor. With over 10 years of experience, their team of over 300 experts has a track record of delivering for more than 300 agencies. They're your strategic partner. They deliver on time every time so you can focus on what you do best. Now, E2M's mission is simple, to help 500 agencies increase their revenue and profit margins with white label services that actually work. And to help you get started, they're offering a special deal, 10% off for the first three months. But act fast because it's only a limited time offer. So head over to e2msolutions.com slash Smart Agency to check out their transparent and their flexible pricing. Trust me, if you're ready to grow without burning out, e2m is the partner you've been looking for. That's e2msolutions.com slash Smart Agency. Go check them out and tell them Jason Swenk sent you. Speaker 4: Yeah, I hired an agency many years ago, and this was before I had Slack. You know, we do Slack for all our communities. And, you know, Slack was probably rather new at this time. And they were like, all of our communication is going to be over Slack. Like they forced me to do that. And I did not understand Slack. Speaker 3: I hated it. Speaker 4: So I couldn't communicate. Speaker 3: So every time. Speaker 4: I had to ask a question or answer a question. I had to go on this platform that I had anxiety on, that I hated, versus if we were working with you, it'd be like, hey, like, I just like a phone call. I'm not going to keep you on the phone for a half hour. If I have a question, I just want it answered in two minutes. And then I'll be like, cool. Speaker 3: Thanks, Tim. Bye. Speaker 4: People like just don't understand that. Like, I love the, I had Joey Coleman on the show a couple of years ago and he spoke at one of our events and he talked about the first hundred days are so important. And asking how you want to be communicated in the onboarding is so important because what clients are thinking when you're celebrating, clients are automatically going into buyer's remorse. Did I make the right decision? Speaker 3: Did I make the wrong decision? Speaker 4: And like, for example, if an agency, like I'm waiting for an agency to respond to me today on doing some ads for us because they said they'd have the plan. Speaker 3: I don't have the plan yet. Speaker 4: So if I don't get the plan today, I'd be like, well, great. I've already broken a promise and it gets pretty stressful. So it's very simple. And as owners, like we're all owners listening, we kind of make sure, and I'm glad you said that's part of your core values. It's not like your company's core values. It's yours that are translated to everyone else's. So you should be evaluating all of your employees going, if responsiveness, which that's one of ours too, I always tell our community, if you ask me a question and you don't hear back from me in a day, I'm either dead or I didn't see it. So hit me up again. Right. Cause I cannot stand that. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I agree. I totally agree. I think a lot of it is really common sense kind of stuff. And yeah, I'm kind of a big disc kind of, you know, personality. Yeah, I'm not. I've taken probably every personality inventory. I kind of find those intriguing, but the disc stuff I kind of like because it doesn't say, oh, you're just this or you're a combination of all those. And once you start doing it, you start to identify, oh, you're a high D. All right. So what does that mean? That means that I don't want to give you the 82 page document that has all the minor detail. But, oh, you're a high C. Well, you know, you're that compliance guy saying, I don't want to give you the bullets of here's the four things and that's it, you know, kind of thing. So that's in the same vein of trying to adapt. You know, what's their style of receiving communication? Well, how much extra effort does it take me to just put it in that style? And I get to the finish line quicker than me beating my head against the wall, frustrated that we're going back and forth because we're just not communicating in the right way. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: If you, if you send me an 80 page report, Oh my gosh, I'm literally going to be like, no, I'll probably try to put it in chat GBT and be like, and then I'd probably still be bored by it. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 4: Versus you just go jump on a phone and be like, all right, Hey, we're doing this, this, this, this is what we're questionable. I'm like, yeah, go for it. Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and those cues are not that, I mean, you can ask people that, but those cues are not that hard when you start to think that way. Even if I didn't ask you what's the best way to communicate, if you just pay attention, that's a little bit of our blind spot thing, you know, this whole awareness thing. If you just pay attention, you pretty much can quickly figure out how somebody wants to be communicated to. If I send you three emails and you don't respond to anything, like you don't even say got it, whatever, I pretty much know you're not an email person. And it's not like there's 82 different things, you know, I mean, it's either email, text, phone, or maybe social media, you know, DM kind of deal. But, you know, usually you can round it out. You can kind of narrow it down by just being aware of the person you're talking to. Speaker 4: Well, I think, too, I mean, if we all start looking at what are the biggest frustrations in our industry that clients have? And I chat about this brand a lot on the podcast because I just like how they're reinventing everything. The Savannah Bananas. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 4: What they're doing, they just go, what are all the frustrations around this? And then how do we eliminate them? And if we just started asking our team members, our leaders, asking ourselves, even asking our clients, what is your biggest frustration with this? And then see about how can we eliminate that? Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. Speaker 4: I mean, you're light years ahead of everybody else. You'll still have turnover and there'll still be problems. Like whenever any members join our community, I always tell them, I'm like, look, we're going to solve your biggest challenge you're having now, but that's going to create more challenges. It's never going to be perfect. It's always just moving the ball a little bit, getting a little closer and all this kind of stuff. I think if we look at just the basics, we try to overcomplicate things and we think there's a silver bullet. And, um, and it's just like, well, that's just not, not it. Speaker 1: Yeah. I, you know, I find, uh, you know, back to kind of communication thing. I find that, you know, if you're a business owner and you got some sales and you, you want, what you want to do, you want to sell, right? And when we on-ramp a new client, I have like a two-hour session that we go through and I have this big massive mind map and I ask them a thousand questions about different things. So I try to do as little talking as I can, but I have an agenda, right? So in other words, we're going to do this and do this and then we walk out of that with, okay, here's our next 90-day action plan because we don't want to be You know, kind of staring at each other's navels, you know, 90 days from now, not getting anywhere. But recently what I've started doing is when I get ready to do that, I start by saying, Hey, let me just take a minute. And why don't you just tell me a little bit of your story? Just tell me a little bit about you. They start talking and I found that that makes the whole two hours go. I don't know. It just seems like it kind of smooths things out. They get more relaxed. They don't feel like they're having to be put in a corner and forced to answer a question a certain way. It's just like, yeah, no rule. Tell me a little bit of your story. Sometimes they'll do it in five minutes and sometimes they'll do it in 30 minutes. And I just got to let it go, but it just smooths the conversation point from that point forward. Speaker 4: Well, I think the reason why that works is people want to be heard and they don't want to be talking to and too many agencies, they don't listen. They don't ask the right questions and they just go this. And then the person's like, well, even though. Let's say you go after financial service industry, so you know everything about that. And probably within the first five minutes, you could go to them, hey, look, Jason, I know exactly what we need to do. But if you did that, they're not going to trust you. So you need to sit back for two hours. And you remember that show, I used to love it when I was really young, Columbo? Speaker 2: Well, recently I was in an attorney's office and he wasn't there. And it turns out that the secretary is in a lady's room. So I took advantage of this moment of privacy to go into his inner office and go through his wastepaper basket. Speaker 1: Oh yeah. Speaker 4: He always knew the answers, but he'd always act dumb and he'd ask the questions. I always learn when I watched that I learned from him like, ah, but he already knows the answer. He just needs to help them come up with it. And that's kind of always been my process of going, look, I can look at your agency in five minutes and tell you exactly what you need to go do. There's not like of all the things, but I need to sit back for a while, let you tell a story because you're the, you're the superstar. And if I'm the superstar that makes you Robin, no one wants to wear those ugly green tights. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. We have a client that we work with and he's had some tremendous success and Works hard. I mean, you know, works hard. We, we were fortunate. We've been working with him for about three years and, and I think we've had a little bit to do with, with what he's done, but he's a hard worker himself. I always say we're not a magic bullet. It's usually a combination of a whole bunch of things go right. You know, when you have, but we can be a part of that cog in that wheel. But I asked him one time and I said, his name is Chad. I said, Chad, what's the secret to your success? And he said, Tim. He's financial services, right? He said, 90% of what I do, everybody else does the exact same thing. He said, but that's why I focus on the 10% that makes us different. And I love that. And you know what his 10% is? And I wrote about this in the book, but his 10% is, and I was in his office, it's the elderly gentleman who walked into his office and said, Hey, Chad, I bought a brand new car. It's got all this technology and I don't know how to use it. Would you walk out and show me how to do that? And I said, Chad's not a car expert, but his client thinks he is. And it's the, it's the couple that was sitting at his desk and they were like, Hey, Chad, we're thinking about taking a dream vacation, you know, kind of thing. And where do you think we should go? And he sat there with them and, well, have you ever been here? Have you ever done that? And, you know, I said, yeah, he's not a travel agent. But his clients think he is. And that relational piece is part of that 10% of what he does. And he'll say, and then this other one was great. There was an elderly gentleman who was sitting in a chair and we were shooting some content while we were there. And when he finished, he got up and he started to walk out. I thought he was leaving. And I looked at him, I said, Hey, it was nice to meet you. I hope maybe we'll get a chance to meet again. And he said, Oh, I'm not leaving. I'm going around the corner. And I thought, oh, he's going to the bathroom. And he walked out and Chad looked at me, he goes, no, this is the tradition. I said, what do you mean? He said, every time a client leaves. They walk out of this conference room and they go around the corner and there's a front office with a window opening. It's not a window, but it's cut open. And he said, our two ladies who are part of the team that sit up there, they know as soon as they walk around the corner, they stop everything they're doing and they come to that window and they love on them for about 10 or 15 minutes. And he said, and then they leave, you know, but it's like, that's our tradition. We got to go around and spend time. He said, that's our 10%. You know, he's financial services and nothing of what he just said has anything to do with that. But I love his I love his heart on that. Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, I mean, you just got to care about people, especially in the professional service. If you're going after lawyers, what makes them tick? Like, what are they trying to get? You just got to focus on on them and not focus on you. And and it will all come back. Well, Tim, this has all been a lot of fun and I enjoyed hanging out with you. Tim eats lots of desserts. I kept sending him desserts at this event. He was like, I don't know if I should get two. And so I kept bringing him desserts and he kept eating them. So I was laughing, but it was fun hanging out with you there. Is there anything I didn't ask you on the podcast that you think would benefit the listeners listening in? Speaker 1: I always say from a marketing standpoint with our clients, one of the things that we, it took us a while to get the language right for them. Obviously we're passionate about communication. In fact, when people say you're a marketing company and I say, eh, not really. We're a relationship building company that hopefully leads to sale. You know, you earn the right to ask for the sale, but I always tell people, I say, listen, in our business, I say, you're in a relationship business. Don't put a transactional marketing strategy over a relationship. That's the worst thing you could do. Now, if you're selling a product and it's a transaction, great, nothing wrong with that. But understand there are different levels of that and figure out where you are and figure out what that right fit is. And that's helped us to kind of identify, to not frustrate clients when they'll say, okay, we hire you, we're going to triple our business in 90 days, right? I'm like, no, probably not. You need to go pay that money to somebody else to make that promise because we're probably not your answer for that. Speaker 4: Yeah, awesome. Well, Tim, thanks so much for coming on the show and for everyone listening. If you want to hang out with other amazing people like Tim, where we can see, I'm going to use your terminology, see your blind spots. One of the things when I was running my first agency that I really wish I had was a community of people I can get together with on an ongoing basis and really have a lot of fun. And one of the things that What we've been doing over the past couple of years is creating really cool events for agency owners. And if any of you guys want to meet other amazing agency owners that are vetted and have a lot to contribute and haven't figured everything out either, they're not the know-it-alls and they all are very humble. If you want to hang out with us, make sure you go to our website, go to agencymastery.io and click on events and see the events that we're coming up with. Speaker 3: We'd love to have you guys there. And until next time, have a Swenk day.