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Running a digital marketing agency, scaling it, and keeping it profitable is no child’s play. With increasing competition, things are getting even more nutsy in the market.
It requires a strategy, mindset, and a specific course of action. This article will discuss all these and many other proven tactics that we implement at our very own DashClicks and Social Agency.
It includes a brief itinerary of the Social Agency. It’s an interesting story that will motivate you to succeed. It also includes the things that we learnt along this journey — what to do and what not to.
The Synopsis of the Article
The article covers:
- How We Started “Social Agency”: A Chronology?
- Personality Traits and Mindset You Need to Succeed
- How Did I Make My First $4000 in Sales?
- Prospecting & Sales: Core Concepts & Best Practices
- The First Step: How Do You Get Multiple Calls Booked on Your Calendar?
- Prospecting Streams That Worked for Us
- Prospecting Tools to Use
- What Is Sales?
- What’s a Value Ladder?
- Our Core Service Offerings
- Our Sales Team Structure
- The Communication Paths We Used to Sell
- The Contract Terms We Offered
- Our Monthly Price Offerings
- What Is Fulfillment?
- How Do Most Agencies Operate?
- Top Reasons Why Most Agencies Fail
- Our Fulfillment Retention Measures
- Core Strategies: The Whiteboard Session
- The Right Prospecting Strategies
- Make Your Life Easy With Deal Automations
- How to Scale?
- The Proven Sales Strategies
- How to Close More Deals?
- How to Use an Irresistible Offer?
- How to Become a Seven-Figure Marketing Agency?
- Questions & Answers
In this article, we’ll try to decode everything I did that made us a successful, profitable, multi-million-dollar revenue-generating digital marketing agency.
So, if you’re pumped up, and if that sounds like something you’d like to learn about, read on.
I’ve split this presentation into two sections to set some context.
The first half is more like a slide deck presentation, chronological in order. It’ll be more of a full-blown whiteboard session in the second half of this presentation. In this session, I’ll go through the core strategies that we implemented in our marketing agency that got us to over $100k a year in sales and, later on, over a million dollars a year in sales. Soon, it expanded to a multi-million dollar corporation.
We have our fantastic team members, Daniel Matthews and Gil Golan from our dashboards team, here in the session. They will also answer your questions.
How to Make $100,000 in Sales in 12 Months?
If I lost everything and had to start all over again from scratch, this is what I would do to get $100,000 in sales.
My name is Chad Kodary, and I'm the CEO of two multiple seven-figure marketing companies DashClicks and our retail agency Social Agency, which has been running since 2009. So, let's begin with a chronology of how the Social Agency was launched and how things unfolded to make it a multi-million dollar company.
1. How We Started “Social Agency”: A Chronology?
To understand the future, we have to start with the past. So, let’s go ahead and take the time machine back to 2009 to see how it all started.
On September 13, 2009, I started my digital marketing agency Social Agency. I started my marketing agency from a bedroom in my parents’ house.
I was about 21 years old when I started my marketing agency. This was almost 12 years ago. So, you can see I had no experience doing this. I jumped into this industry with no training or formal education in digital marketing.
I started from scratch, and this is where I think most of you are today.
Personality Traits and Mindset You Need to Succeed
I want to set some expectations for everybody, fast-forwarding almost 12 years later. If you’re getting into this industry or starting your own business, remember, the first thing is to eat & breathe it. Your business drive should embody everything you are — including all of your traits. You become the brand, the visionary, and the creator.
So, unless you’re ready to take this head-on, this article is not for you. This post is specifically for entrepreneurs, people who want to start a digital marketing agency, and people looking to build a successful career in this industry.
How Did I Make My First $4000 in Sales?
From this desk in 2009, I made a whopping $4000 in sales annually the entire year.
I sat at that desk, working every day for 10 to 15 hours. I sweated days, weekends, and nights and made about $4000 in my first year in business.
Most of you may think it was a failure earning just $4000 a year, but to me then, it was not. I was laying the foundation of an ambitious startup.
Four years later, on August 2, 2013, I moved into my first office, a shared office.
I shared it with one of my good friends.
On October 20, 2014, I opened my second office.
Then, we hired multiple people, and expanded our operations into sales and a fulfillment team. Those were the two main avenues that we were focused on.
On October 16, 2016, we opened another office and expanded again. We hired more people and took our sales to the next level.
We opened up our first call center, which you can see in the picture below on the bottom right. We had probably about 20 to 25 employees in this office at this time.
Let's fast forward again on February 9, 2017, I had a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night and started mocking up what we know today as DashClicks. This was my first wireframe and my first mockup. Imagine if DashClicks looked like this today; that'd not be very pleasant. And, that vision became a reality.
On October 1, 2018, we launched DashClicks v1, which looked like this.
Fast forward once again, almost ten years later, from that bedroom seat in 2009, on July 1, 2019, I was out of the country, and I got a call from one of our partners. He said, “Chad! The office next door just moved out, and I think this is the expansion time.”
This was the time to break down the wall and double up, precisely what we did. We broke down the wall to the next-door office and took the space. We hired more people, built more offices, and expanded our business again. We took chances, and I can tell you from this 10-year journey that looking at making big moves and taking chances is part of being an entrepreneur.
Today, I have a growing business. I’m making money, I’m my own boss, I have thousands of customers, full-time employees, ample office space, a dream car, and a dream wife.
And I’m not saying this to brag because I want you to go back in time again and look at where I started. I’m simply showing you that your dreams can become a reality, and I am living proof of that.
I went from being home at mama’s house as a 21-year old making four thousand dollars a year annually to a successful entrepreneur speaking on stages in front of hundreds and thousands of people at conferences.
In 2019, I made $1.64 million from sales.
Keep in mind that results like these will not happen for you unless you work for them.
Pro Tip #1: Take risks. Everything that I’ve done until today or that you’ve seen in the last 12 years is the result of taking chances, bold steps, and calculated risks. During this time, I was working and taking big shots. I made big moves and took big gambles, which got me to where I am today.
I want the same for you now.
Pro Tip #2: Hire full-time employees instead of highly-paid freelancers.
Pro Tip #3: Capitalize your prospecting framework to create a multi-stream automated lead generation approach.
2. Prospecting & Sales: Core Concepts & Best Practices
Here are some of the core concepts and strategies you need to understand to succeed in the agency business. It covers all aspects of prospecting & sales. It will also include tips on how to retain your clients for a long time. So, let’s begin with prospecting.
A. The First Step: How Do You Get Multiple Calls Booked on Your Calendar?
This is where it all begins. First, let’s understand that prospecting is the first step in your sales process which consists of identifying potential customers, aka prospects.
The goal of prospecting is to develop a database of likely customers and then systematically communicate with them to convert them from potential customers to paid customers.
Let me show you how we used to prospect in Social Agency. We had multiple prospecting streams.
Pro Tip: The more fishing lines you have out in the ocean, the more fish you will catch. It is as self-explanatory as that.
B. Prospecting Streams that Worked for Us
Here are the prospecting streams we used at the Social Agency.
Here are the streams that worked the most for us.
C. Prospecting Tools to Use
Here are the prospecting tools that we used.
Here are the prospecting tools that worked the most for us ā CRM system, InstaSites, and InstaReports.
Here is the following framework that is known as sales.
D. What Is Sales?
Here is the basic definition of sales that will clear misconceptions.
E. What's a Value Ladder?
It's crucial to rise up the value ladder in order to survive and stay profitable in the long run. Companies that don't rise lose their appeal soon.
F. Our Core Service Offerings
Here are our core service offerings. SEO, directory listings, and website design were the most sold and in-demand of our services.
G. Our Sales Team Structure
Here is our sales team structure. Fronters are the people who make the first contact and set appointments. They can be telecallers, whereas closers are the sales reps who close the deals. Focus on the fronters here.
H. The Communication Paths We Used to Sell
Here are the communication paths we used to sell. Phone calls worked the best.
I. The Contract Terms We Offered
Here are the four contract terms we offered. The 6-month contract worked the best.
J. Our Monthly Price Offerings
Here are our monthly price offerings. The $699 per month package was the most popular.
K. What Is Fulfillment?
Fulfillment is the latest concept in the agency business. Most agencies specialize in one or two streams such as SEO or social media. However, the clients may need various other services. White-label fulfillment comes as a life-saver for such agencies. It allows you to accommodate more clients and bigger portfolios without expanding your core teams unnecessarily.
L. How Do Most Agencies Operate?
Most agencies are busy with their daily grind and hardly have the time to review their strategies. So, they can never think out of the box, which is a crucial step to succeed. It also involves making big moves. You can't achieve that without right partnerships and strategies.
M. Top Reasons Why Most Agencies Fail
Here are the top reasons why most agencies fail. Setting impossible expectations is the major one.
N. Our Fulfillment Retention Measures
Here are our fulfillment retention measures. Setting proper expectations helped us the most in retention. In fact, unrealistic expectations are responsible for a majority of the churn that happens.
3. Core Strategies: The Whiteboard Session
Now, we will discuss the strategy part in whiteboard format.
A. The Right Prospecting Strategies
Secrets to success are simple – a phone and good communications skills. Use prospecting methods like InstaSites and InstaReports and start fishing on the phone. You can start with as low as $200 to get your foot in the door. Introduce yourself and hook the people with what you have to offer.
Book 5 to 10 appointments each day, add them to your CRM system, and start making your sales pipeline. Keep it simple. I did that for months and years. Doing it consistently will surely help you get good results.
B. Make Your Life Easy With Deal Automations
Deal automation can make life simple for you. Create deal automation on the first stage and automatically build an InstaSite when a new deal gets created. Send the website access through email or SMS to your prospect.
It will hardly take one or two hours.
C. How to Scale?
Now, it’s time to scale. So, instead of making 150 calls a day, you’re going to make 200. You can go from 7 to 14 scheduled calls a day. You can also use InstaSites or InstaReports to get people on your calendar. If they become interested in the Instasite, send them the link.
You can add, “By the way, I’d like to have one of our website activation specialists join you on a call so they can show you the website. It’ll only be a 20 or 30-minute phone call.”
You can give them an approximate time frame, whatever it is. The website expert will walk them through the website, and if you do it right, they are highly likely to ask for access. You can say, “The website design itself is completely free. Just let me know, and I’ll schedule a day and time. What day and time is good for you?”
That’s where your scheduling system comes and you can use Calendly. Just create a free calendar account on it and jot down all your scheduled appointments.
Aim to get five appointments everyday on your calendar.
You cannot sell anything if you have no one to sell to. So, if you have no appointments on your calendar and nobody to speak to, you won’t make any money.
Nothing else will work if this part doesn’t work, including sales.
D. The Proven Sales Strategies
I turned over millions of dollars in revenue in my digital marketing agency with these strategies. So, these are proven and tested. My name is Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks, and I’m excited to help you in your entrepreneurial journey and get you a ton of revenue. However, I would recommend you take baby steps in the beginning.
First of all, you need to have your calendar all filled up. We usually have five to ten scheduled calls on our calendar every day. It gives me immense happiness when I have a calendar full of scheduled demos every morning.
But, if you think that this is not your cup of tea and you can’t pick up the phone and do cold-calling, or you can’t work on weekends and non-working hours, this webinar is not for you.
This webinar is for serious entrepreneurs who can do what it takes and get it done. This is what you need to do.
You should have at least five to ten calls booked on your calendar to get into the sales mode. This is called a calendar full of leads.
To be in the “beast mode,” you should start selling the big things that involve collecting credit cards and processing transactions.
Receiving payments feels like ecstasy for an entrepreneur, akin to getting high on a drug. But, it doesn’t make you tired. It makes you rich and happy. It builds up momentum.
I have a team of people for prospecting. They book calls on my calendar, and I do what I enjoy the most – sales, all day long. However, you should start selling only when you have at least 100 leads.
You can move to the sales environment from prospecting, which is step two.
So, here we are at step two – selling the website. We’ll next discuss how to close a deal.
Many people have their calendars filled up, but they can’t close the deal. And it’s a widespread problem. If that’s you, here’s how you can help it.
E. How to Close More Deals?
If you’re not closing deals, you need to dissect your sales structure. Ninety percent of the time, you don’t have a good offer. That’s the primary reason you’re not able to close the deal.
In the rest 10% of the cases, you might have a great offer, but you’re not an efficient salesperson. Still, you manage to close tons of sales.
It emphasizes the fact that your actual offer is exceptionally crucial.
You can be the worst salesperson in the world. Still, people may want to buy from you.
But, entrepreneurship is not for you if you’ve got a deep-rooted belief that you are a lousy salesperson and can’t do cold calling.
You can afford to be a lousy salesperson if you have an excellent sales offer. You’ll sell like crazy.
During the Black Friday sale at Walmart, they give away five T.V.s out of their inventory (like 3000) in their warehouse for a hundred dollars. All of Walmart is filled up. People join the rampages to get a $100 TV, where only five are available. It happens because the offer is so good that it attracts everyone, which is the secret to closing a deal.
You also need to make sure that your offer is not the same as everyone else’s offer.
It has to be unique and creative.
You can sell them a website that’s excellent and fun to use. You’ll make $300 for each website, which will be great.
You can sell it for a slightly higher price, but I don’t recommend going over $500. If you want to do it on a bigger scale, I recommend you start creating a bundle of products and services. Your bundled sweet spot is $699. That’s where you should be, so you want to make an offer with this in mind.
The best offer that got us the most revenue is $699 a month. In this deal, the client gets a website with our InstaSites tool, which is also SEO friendly. Besides that, you can also charge a one-time setup fee of $199.
So, you get $900 in the first month.
You can run your client’s credit card every month for $699, and you’ll get this amount for the next six months as it’s your deal.
F. How to Use an Irresistible Offer?
In this deal, you’re leveraging an enticing offer, and that’s the website. Your client gets a $5000 website for free, and they just pay $699 a month for SEO.
The website is free as it comes with the bundle offer. Bundle offers make things appealing. Imagine getting an Internet connection with your house phone as a bundle offer. Now split the two, and most people won’t buy the house phone.
They will prefer an Internet connection, but when they know that they might have to pay $180 a month just for the Internet instead of $100 as a bundle, they’ll go for the bundle offer.
That’s why companies create so much hype around bundle offers and use heavy promotion.
The offers attract as they’re only for a limited period of time. You can’t say “no” when you get a $5000 website virtually free of cost with the SEO bundle offer for just $699 a month and a setup fee of $199; you just can’t say “no.”
So, you can not only sell everything, but you can port it to a fulfillment company like DashClicks. Allow us to do the heavy lifting and focus on profit and revenue generation.
If you hire DashClicks’ white label SEO fulfillment services, you just need to pay $225 a month ($199 a month for SEO and $25 for Instasites,) and pocket the $699 a month you get from the customer.
So, DashClicks will take care of everything, and you’ll earn a 70% margin on the fee. Not a bad deal now, is it?
That’s insane when you try to scale your business. For example, you can hire more fronters and sales reps and 10x your revenues every month.
It’s not difficult to multiply your sales every month. I’ve done it every single month for years. At one point, I was handling the sales alone, and I used to close more than ten bundle sales every month. I added sales reps to close even more deals. It’s known as the stack effect.
I’ll also discuss how to close more deals and consistently and predictably grow your digital marketing agency with enough paying clients to call it a real business.
G. How to Become a Seven-Figure Marketing Agency?
Do you know what needs to be done to scale a seven-figure marketing agency or even a six-figure marketing agency?
You need to set up a strategic value ladder that’s proven to work It will not only change your life, but also impact others’.
You should also have the ability to keep clients for years if you want to turbocharge your business. A good company also generates many jobs, which is always a good factor.
Clarity on the services you’re offering and knowing how to sell and scale them will help you scale your digital marketing agency.
Book a Call With My Team
If all of this sounds exciting and try-worthy to you, I want to become your partner, and I want you to book a call with my team.
You can call us on +1 (866) 600-3369 to know the killer strategies to succeed in agency business and partner with us.
It will be a 30-minute private zoom strategy session to see where you’re stuck and how we can help you.
After this private zoom strategy call, I’m sure you’ll get some clarity.
And wait, did we tell you that your zoom strategy consultation call is free?
You don’t need a credit card for this call, so put your wallets away. This is not a paid call. This is a 30-minute call, and it’s free!
Refresh the page, and you’ll see that only a couple of appointments are left on the 12th. I’m available for the next two weeks.
The objective of this call is to:
- Analyze your agency strategy
- Know your mindset and your external and internal beliefs
- Know the limiting beliefs that are preventing you from hitting six-figure revenues
- Get more clarity around your core offer and the value ladder you’re on
We believe that you should be able to grow your agency from zero to $100,000 within 12 months. And there is no reason to doubt that.
You’ll not be able to do this if you don’t have clarity. I will help you get that clarity. So, if you’re interested in partnering with me and learning more about what we have to offer and how everything works with our partnership, schedule a call with us today.
Strategies for Selling Just the Software
Looking back to the time when I was selling these bundles, we didn’t have DashClicks, so I was mostly freewheeling on the back of my sales skills and the limited offers that we had then.
But now, with DashClicks, you can create an even sweeter option in that bundle. So, with a basic SEO plan, you can also offer a free website, an InstaSite, and free access to a sales marketing and automation tool.
So, now you get a CRM system and unique sales tools. In 90% of cases, you don’t need to be a good salesperson. You just have to have a reasonable offer, and you’ll make it all look good. You can build your whole marketing strategy around it.
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