🔥 This Week’s Agency Insight

From Jordan Ross @ 8 Figure Agency

December, 10th 2023

Weekly Insight

I can take any skilled person and turn their business from 6 to 7 figures

I can take any 7 figure business and turn it into 8 figures

Business is a video game. If you know the right steps, you can win…as long as you give yourself enough time to play

Follow this to unlock millions

Preface:

There are four bottlenecks that prevent growth in a business

That is it

If you can identify which bottleneck you have, and build a process to alleviate it, you can keep growing

They are:

• Lead generation

• Sales

• Capacity

• Lifetime value 

Let's dive into how you can play at each level

1-Lead generation

There are only a handful of ways you can generate leads for your business

• Ads

• Content

• Cold outreach

• Warm outreach

My system relies on content, cold & warm

Cold outreach alone rarely works nowadays

If you send cold emails/cold DMs, there is a strong likelihood your prospect will go check out your website or content

If you don't have content to capture their attention, they're lost

The name of the game in 2024 is to build a content-backed following

Follow these steps:

A- Top of funnel

Every week, you need to produce strong top-of-funnel content

This content is the type of value that will be shared

This moves strangers into followers

This content is top of funnel 

B- Middle of funnel

These are short-form posts- YT shorts, tweets

These pieces of content nurture your prospects to continue to follow you, enabling you to stay top of mind when they have a buying need

After weeks or months of following you, if they have a genuine need for your service, and see your content, they will be more inclined to book a call

C- Bottom of funnel

These are CTA posts

Hard sells: Encourage prospects to book a call, leveraging some form of scarcity

Soft sells: Leveraging social proof to encourage leads to book a call

Hard sell example:

Soft sell example: 

Once you have people following your content, the goal is to make CTAs either in the content or on some platforms, below the content, to drive your followers into your funnel

You can drive them to:

• Give their email in exchange for an ebook

• Consume more content

• Book a call

Give their email in exchange for an ebook

Book a call example

Once you have a following, you can reach out to your followers via warm outreach

At 8F, we scrape all our followers on Twitter, move them into an Airtable form, categorize them into ICP vs not, and then begin DMing those that meet our ICP

This one process books us 20 calls/mo on Twitter (on average) 

Our goal after the initial DM, if they aren't aligned, is to DM 3-4 times annually to see if they have a business need

Because they follow my content, I should no longer be a stranger, and when I reach out in the future

Content nurture 

DMs book calls (if they don't go book inbound)

2- Sales

Most agencies are selling very ineffectively

The best way to sell nowadays is not to sell, it is to consult

At 8F, I am currently training a sales professional on how to identify specific pains in a call by asking the right questions and then how to tie those pains to our models

In total, the training takes many hours (probably close to 20-40 hours on call in total of actual training) 

But when my sales professional is ready, when he gets onto a call, he follows this exact process:

• Build rapport

• Ask questions 

• Identify a need

• Consult on the problem

• Offer to show how the problem that we just consulted on ca be solved with our services

By the last point in the call, we aren't pitching but merely showing how we can implement the solution we displayed in the call

It's more of an invitation to collaborate

In addition to this, we track the following metrics to improve sales conversion

• % of no shows on call 1 (shouldn't be higher than 25%)

• Offers made

  • We have an admin scrape pipeline daily to ensure we don't fall behind

• % deals close

  • If this is below 30% we review and audit calls to identify what the miss is

• Average cycle time (how long the sales process goes)

By tracking all of these things, we identify where the issue is (if there ever is one) in the sales process and focus on improving it to increase the closing rate

Remember, business is a video game and the answers to the next task is in the data

3- Capacity 

Capacity is defined as the amount of clients you can:

• Onboard in one month

• Fulfill without quality going down

The biggest indicator to be able to define this is measuring:

How many accounts can each role manage?

In a pod (a pod is defined as a team that works on an account), we identify the pod capacity by identifying the role with the lowest capacity

Example clients each role can manage:

• Strategist: 12

• Media buyer: 15 

• Project Manager: 20

• Graphic Designer: 20

In the above example, the strategist would be the role with the lowest capacity, meaning that will be the first role we need to hire for

Once we hire a strategist and increase pod capacity, we’ll shortly need to hire a media buyer 

Here is how we can forecast this simply:

Look at your business's current state client

Forecast what your business will need to look like in its current state and then several future states

This is how we can leverage the org chart to begin forecasting

In the example here, you can see that with the change of moving from 15 clients to 25 clients, the founder can clearly forecast and see how his roles in his business can change 

TWITTER

Knowing this, you can then begin to source talent in advance to ensure you never hit capacity

I made an e-book on how to do this, click here to grab it now

Important note on sourcing: Many agency owners feel the absolute need to hire FT employees in advance

DO NOT DO THIS

At 8F, we always have multiple job posts up to source talent

Following the 8-Figure Talent Funnel model, we bring talent on contracted and train them on 1-2 accounts

When we do this, we can train talent up on a micro level, identifying if they're a fit, showing them how we like to operate, and ensuring they are bought in before scaling them up

When this happens, by the time we do need to ramp up a new role, they're already trained up and ready to go, so we can convert them into PT or FT work like turning on a light switch 

Do this to stay ahead of your capacity issues 

One more footnote:

If talent leaves you, you will be back to square one for recruiting, my biggest recommendation is to track the following items for each employee, performance and manage around it to ensure they don’t leave:

• Income goals short & long-term 

• Personal short & long-term goals

• Professional short & long-term goals

• Love languages (seriously, some people want a high five, others want you to say good job) 

Track these items & help employees accomplish them…your talent will never leave, enabling you to continually scale capacity 

4- LTV

LTV may be the hardest one of them all

If this is your bottleneck, follow the following process:

1- Identify current LTV

LTV is calculated by: Average price/churn percent

Example: $2000/12% churn = $16,666

That means, if this business has no onboarding form, the average client will stay 8ish months

Now, if you have multiple teams and multiple offers, you can calculate this per each one

2- Create a target LTV that will alleviate this bottleneck 

Reminder, your business will only grow as large as its biggest constraint 

Make this number large enough that it won't be a constraint for a while

The way you can define that is by doing the following equation to calculate the MRR cap:

(Average new clients per month * avg price)/ Churn= MRR cap

Example: (12 new clients per month *$2000)/ 12%= $200 MRR

This business will cap out at $200k annually

Now, if churn goes down, new clients go up or the price increases, the ceiling of the business goes up

More examples:

Ex 1.2: (15 new clients per month * $2000)/12% churn= $250k MRR

Ex 1.3: (12 new clients per month * 2000)/8% churn= $300k MRR

3- Receive specific feedback each time a client churns 

When a client churns, reach out for an exit interview 

If they decline that, ask why they left and get as specific as possible

4- Create a board of the specific initiatives you need to work on (in order of priority to increase client LTV)

List all of the issues and proposed ideas on how you can solve the issues/reasons why clients churn 

LTV is a function of two things:

A- Your company's ability to deliver

B- Phycology 

If you were able to deliver results, but unable to retain clients, here are the specific things to consider:

1- Onboarding

During onboarding did we:

1.1- Prime the clients the second the deal was closed (congratulating them)

1.2- Send an onboarding video/email explaining the next steps in our process

1.3- Send a clear visual roadmap of what the client can expect over the next 90 days

2- After onboarding:

2.1- Remind the client of expectations and how you operate (video or email)

2.2-Have account managers tie their actions to the clients desired goals and end results stated during onboarding 

2.3- Complete a monthly business review and quarterly business review, showing ROI and forecasted ROI

2.4- Have account managers celebrate weekly wins & monthly wins as they occur to continually show the winning streak they are on

Major key here

Every single reason a client leaves should create an initiative for you and your team to improve your psychological process or delivery process

The game of business is a never ending one

You are on an endless flywheel going from one constraint to the next

Develop the attitude and process to continually fix and improve your constraints, and you’ve already won

If you want help finding your next constraint to fix click here to schedule a meeting.

Killer Content (My favorite pieces of content from last week):

• Podcast Ultimate: How to Build an Agency as a Freelancer 

• Long Form Youtube: How I 20x A Business After A Single 30-Minute Call

• Short Form Youtube: How Does a Turn key Approach Maximize Business Success?

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Stay Happy

Stay Hungry,

Jordan Ross

CEO & Founder @ 8 Figure Agency

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