How To Build An Agency Sales System (with Lee Goff from Marketing Agency Coach)

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Ben Aston: So, do you ever find yourself stuck in a cycle of responding to RFPs, of creating custom quotes, new business, suck up all your time? Well, what you need to do to help you in this is an effective system and effective sales system. So if you want to save time, if you want to help a new business team and develop your agency sales, keep listening to today’s podcast to learn how to develop a proper agency sales system. Today, I’m joined by Lee Goff and Lee is a former agency owner and now he’s turned agency, coach.  Hey, Lee thank you so much for joining us today.

Lee Goff: Thank you so much for having me on.

Ben Aston: I want to just start by digging into your story a bit. How did you go from starting an agency to owning an agency to becoming a coach? What does that process like?

Lee Goff: A lot of hard work and a lot of times, so, um, but it all started in 2000. Uh, why don’t, I’m getting a job with a technical company. Um, at the time it was system internet app. Now it’s cloud, and that would be a cloud-based app, but, uh, for restaurants like Chick-fil-A and burger King and things like that. And so it’s kind of how I cut my teeth and technology. And then I moved on and became an executive in another company in Oklahoma city. And we hired a company to build us out a web app for our clients. And this, this, this, this company basically did some illegal activity. It did attempted to extort money out of this. Uh, I wrote an app, and then it would, after people would log in, it would countdown. And after a countdown, if we didn’t pay them, then we. Then it would shut off, right? Uh, obviously highly illegal. So the CEO got ahold of them with the, with the, an attorney. And then, uh, they, they, they cleaned up their act pretty quickly, but in the process we needed somebody to finish that project. And so, uh, I told the CEO, I was like, give it to me. He’s like, you can’t write any code. I was like, I know, but I know what it takes to get it done. And so went out and got the people to come in and do it.

And that’s it. That’s how it started. And that was in. March of 2003, uh, that was the very first contract. I had no idea I’ll still be owning a digital agency at that time. Um, it was just kind of, uh, an accident that, you know, I think a lot of people out there can kinda relate to that. Then jump ahead five years in 2008, the financial situation hits up until then we had been doing more custom programming website, kind of higher-end stuff. I found myself being miserable. I am not a programmer. And so, uh, gutted the entire company and the first, um, first quarter of 2009 and turned it into a. Very high-end marketing digital marketing agency. And it just took off from there. Uh, retired, you know, breakfast, seven-figure Mark. And within a couple of years from that two or three years from that, uh, retired from that agency, uh, the age of 40. Uh, so I pretty much was on automobile agency with an autopilot. That was what’s called running it by the numbers KPIs and had my leadership team in place. And then I decided to exit that in June of 2016. From there, uh, took some time off, spend some time with my family, and had some health issues. Get my health back into work and a dove head first into creating the world’s most comprehensive with the most tools and the most bite-size, uh, what I call micro-content chunks. You can get out there for building an agency, make it an easier when you guys and girls out there

Ben Aston: Cool. And so just to give it some context, so you are able to take your agency to a place where you’re as you’d call it, running it by the numbers. And what kind of, so what kind of agency was it? You talked about it being a marketing agency, but what were the kinds of things that you were delivering for clients, and what was the kind of work that you were doing? Or how are you able to build a seven-figure agency?

Lee Goff: We niched out into what’s called a platform and that’s Infusionsoft now keep. And so we became the world’s largest at that time, a lot thinking it still, I think it still is the world’s largest Infusionsoft partner, right. Certified partner, where we did more, uh, implementations out there than any other agency on the planet. And so that’s it, you know, we built out very complex and also very simple, uh, just marketing automation. Uh, one example is a LASIK LASIK company, actually in Vancouver, I flew up towards you, um, King LASIK. You might’ve heard of them up that way. And, uh, uh, you know, they hired it to do what’s called a preop and postop.

And so we would build out all the automated systems where all the tags. People came in and did this, it would do this. If it did this, it would do this and that decreased their no-shows. Um, as you know, for later, you have to go in and get exams. I think like 25 or 30%, it doesn’t qualify her for whatever. So you have to find out if you qualify and they were having a major problem with theirs. Very expensive doctors sitting there idle for like a half a day on these days that they would do this. And so we would build out systems that, that, that basically it didn’t eliminate no shows, but it got rid of probably 80 to 90% of them. Uh, we would do landing pages, websites, anything digital asset-related. We didn’t really get into the media buying traffic side. It was more just the infrastructure side.

Ben Aston: Cool. And so when we’re going to dig into the sales system and the sales process, but in terms of the delivery process as well, because that’s, that’s kind of part of automating everything or not automating it, but at least creating a process for it and making it so that you can deliver it efficiently, which is the key. So definitely that is definitely the key. So, and so how did you. I mean, I’m guessing. How did you build out that process to begin with and how did you begin to optimize the process over time so that you began to deliver things more efficiently? How did you, how did you go about that?

Lee Goff: On the first few years of running my agency, I took a little bit of a different approach and a lot of people are out there trying to find. The really good technical people or the really good copywriters are really good. You know, the skill I call skillset people, uh, me, I was on a mission to find my leadership team. I was on a mission to find the person that’s gonna run sales without me being involved on a mission to find my operations manager on a mission to my one really good technical person that would dictate and oversee all technical, uh, advice and engineering like that. But, you know, he, that was, that was the one person oversold the technical. I didn’t have to worry about that. So. With me taking a different approach. Um, you know, this came out of traditional business. Uh, you know, get people around you there’s forms and you’re right. You know, that kind of traditional business building mentality. So yeah, again, me, not me coming into the industry with not a technical background. I didn’t look at this like a, like a technical, uh, like a technical job kind of thing. I looked at it as like a business and I built that business. I aggressively went out to get the right kind of leaders and put them in place.

And to, to help me with my weaknesses. Okay. And so that’s exactly what I did. I got the people in place and we started building out the systems and processes. We remained focused on the Infusionsoft niche and automation, marketing automation, uh, uh, specific service niche. And by doing that, it allowed us to partner with people that would have product lines, like, uh, one for a real estate automation. Package or a CrossFit automation package. And so having a product like that would allow us to standardize it. We can do very precise SOP. And so by providing a product line like that, it allowed us to standardize everything. And then from there we actually figured out, okay, great. We can actually do this with our services as well. Right. So district traditional services. And so we went down that path and we got into very precise employee, uh, optimization algorithms. KPIs Tom tracking, what’s called your daily huddles. Your I’m sorry, tailgating daily downloads your company meeting rhythm. And I dove headfirst and the leadership and let them handle the systems and processes and developments on that. So each department has its own unique, uh, different processes that they would do. And then those would boil up a bubble up to the top through KPIs to two-mile level on overview and kind of make sure. Well, that’s a quality of me where I wanted it to be so

Ben Aston: I think this is quite an interesting story in terms of like building an agency because most people who start an agency start because they love the creative or they love the technical. Um, there’s, there’s normally one of those. I say, it’s normally one of those people, or even a project manager, who’s decided that, Hey, they know how to run projects. So it’s interesting to me that you yep. Started this thinking of this, more like a business and getting the people in place. So I’m curious, a couple of things, firstly. Getting that kind of key hires. Those are expensive people to hire traditionally or typically. So I’m curious at how you are able to afford that. And then secondly, I guess my question is how did you kind of, where did you get your inspiration from, to build out a, the agency kind of model like that? Because I think it is quite different to the way that most agencies, I would say start, which is a couple of people get together who were really good at what they do and start trying to hustle on the side or. Um, start trying to win their first clients, but this seems like you approached it from much more of a business perspective than a typical agency perspective. Yeah.

Lee Goff: That’s actually, you hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what I did. And honestly, I think my nativity is what made me do that. Uh, I was raised, uh, my grandfather and my father were entrepreneurs. And so I was immersed in, in entrepreneurial, uh, lifestyle, uh, quality of life, you know, type of lifestyle. Gosh, you know, since the age of being born, I guess, you know, literally like one, I mean, that’s going to run it on my dad’s office and helping them take out the trash and you know, that, that whole thing. So I knew that I would be a business owner. I just didn’t know what type of business it would be.

And when I saw the unethical and lack of integrity, Type of actions that were pervasive in our industry. They’re still bad, but they were not as bad as they were then. I mean, there were a lot of people that there just taking a lot of money from a lot of people. And honestly, it pissed me off. And actually right here over my shoulder, right there, you see a painting. My mom’s an artist. And if you see that painting, you’ll see to the left. It has like a purse, a little red thing. That’s kind of blurred right below the old logo. That’s a purse and that’s like small to small business, a small town USA, small business, and over to the right, you can’t read it, but it has like wall street journal and like, you know, us world bank and that’s like big business. That’s like the big business. And so my purpose was to level the playing field between big business, small business. That’s what drove me. That’s what inspired me. I honestly, I was pissed off that other small traditional small business owners were getting ripped off and I was hell-bent on fixing that.

And so, uh, that is exactly what propelled me forward. And by taking that very business approach really made all the difference in the world. Uh, one part of that question was how could I afford to get the talent? Well, uh, I am, uh, I’m a, I’m a sales. Everybody has, uh, you know, I’m a business, I’m a CEO guy. Don’t get me wrong, but everybody’s got a natural personality that, that leans into whether it be programming, creative, technical sales, detailed oriented, you know, whatever it might be. Um, Mon. It was relationships and negotiations. And so I basically kissed a lot of frogs until I could find the ones that are, that fit, what I wanted to get done. Ironically, two of them came straight out of college. Uh, I got them for really, really cheap and, uh, I told all of them. That you stick with me. You have to go to the scene. I will award you some sweat equity down the road. And I did, I did. I awarded all, all the people who did our work, sweat equity. They are also the people who eventually bought me out. So they, they, they, they’re running at these three people. I’m talking about over to that, to the owner. They run it a hundred percent own it, and they’re running it now. And so, uh, it didn’t. If you have a strong vision and you believe in where you’re going to go, when you live and die, that vision every single day, you’d be surprised the quality of talent you can get on board with you because they feel it too. They see it and they want to be a part of it. Um, and so the sales guy that came on had a lot more experience. That guy was $120,000 a year guy. I couldn’t afford 120,000 a year, but I found out what his pain points were.

Right. And I knew that there were certain things that he wanted, um, uh, Uh, to make that kind of money, he had to drive in, you know, to do certain things. And then he didn’t want to do it, took time away from his family. And I said, I’ll tell you what I can do. I can’t pay that money, but I can give you performance space and I can honor these two things around, you know, the quality of life you wanna live. And it worked right. So I’ve got him and I got the two, um, um, Uh, recently graduated college kids and, uh, and hit the ground running. You know, they, they, they, we all kind of groomed each other who, you know, we all kinda, we all kinda, you know, uh, there was no coach out there. Do you know, coaching on how to do this at the time? So we. Had to find other people that was that, we looked up to and take what they do and then adapt it to our business model because it’s definitely a unique model doing digital. Right. And so, uh, basically just formed those relationships and, um, um, and you know, not on the Hill with the vision. So this is, this is by the way, one, a vision and a purpose other than money or profit is such a big deal. You know, people feel that people, you know, people feel it and they know

Ben Aston: So let’s dive into the agency sales system, uh, cause this is what you help people now create and enable them to run businesses or run their sales process a bit more. Uh, well with a bit more automation, let’s say, so what, what is an agency sales system and how does it work?

Lee Goff: Well, uh, when I came into the coaching space, we had a good system at money agency and I have to admit, I was again, back to the night activity part, but, um, I thought that most agencies would have a, you know, a good, a good sales and marketing system and for themselves. And, uh, that’s not the case. It’s not because they don’t know how, uh, some don’t know how, but in some do it’s because like Culver’s dollar, right. You know, they don’t have time to make their own shoes for, for their, for their kids because they’re. Too busy, making them for their paying clients. So websites, things like that. They have time to do that for other people, but not so much for themselves. And so what I did for the first two and a half years of running my coaching businesses, I was kind of watched and remember, keep in mind. Now I built, you know, one of the world’s largest and one of the most advanced marketing automation companies out there. So all I did was look at the pain points of what everybody needed. Like really needed from to get more leads and close more deals without it consuming all of their time. And I applied that to my, you know, at that 18 forever, I’m dating myself here, but you know what, 15 years of marketing automation experience. And so this is kind of an essence, what it does. One, there are four pillars to it.

The first one is what’s called lead magnet and lead source diversification. Okay. You have to have the ability to be able to create lead metrics really quickly and test them out. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to put their lead magnets out there. Perfect. They’ll spend a month or two or three or whatever it might be. They go to market and it flops. Dang, why didn’t everybody like it? Right. Well, Truth is the market. Doesn’t really care. What you think is perfect. And by the way, perfect is a perception that you won’t, nobody else sees perfection the way you do. It’s an individual thing. So if you’re striving for perfection, 99% of the time, you’re striving to make yourself happy. Not your clients. That’s just, that’s just the facts. This is the way it works. And so what you have to do is you have to isolate the pain points of your target audience and throw lead magnets out very quickly.

Okay. So you have, you have to create lead by next very quickly and test those out. Very quickly when you do that, it allows you to hit multiple pain points at one time. So now by default, instead of having just a schedule [00:16:00] now, or a free consult button, you have five, a pain point lead magnets, plus the schedule now, or the free consultant, literally, and probably 90% of the people who implement myself system, their leads double or triple the day that they put, put all the lead, makes everything up on their website. That’s pillar one, pillar two is the ability to manage the call to actions on your website quickly and aggressively. So exit popups, sliders, footers, ribbons, all of that page takeover, scroll, takeovers, things like that. Right. And split testing, because we all know the name of the game to conversions, right. This testing. Right. And so there are lead management systems out there.

Now that, that. Uh, lead and call to action management systems, lead management systems that are WordPress plugins. I use thrive. Uh, there are a bunch of them out there, um, that allow you to not only get these lead magnets done quickly but deploy them. In matter of seconds instead of hours for having even having a technical team in place. So now your marketing and advertising department is very agile. They don’t have to have any technical skills. They don’t have to wait on anybody to do it.

They themselves can go in there and call it, float out.

Try I on another page. Didn’t work. Take it down. All of that is in-house. I’m sorry. In just strictly in the marketing department, marketing advertising department. So now you can create lead magnets really quickly. You can manage those on your website with split testing very quickly. And then that gets to phase three. I’m sorry, pillar three. So now that you’re harvesting more of these leads, you’ve got to be at a prospect vet because you’re getting a lot of tire-kickers. Now we can’t waste our time with characters. So you have to have an advanced prospect vetting process. We do this quizzes, phone numbers, scheduling, things like that when the prospect is that it to the point that it was worthy of your time with the system automatically knows we have a what’s called a trust gap.

Kind of a metric and we, once we get to a certain level on the trust gap that tells us that they’re a buying unit, or they’re going to be making a purchase on something within the next 90 days. From there we create. A deal or an opportunity in your CRM. It kicks off all the automation. It eliminates follow-up failure. And so every single time a lead comes into your basket, guaranteed. It’s gonna be followed up with 60 days. And if they’re a hot buyer, it’ll bubble up and it’ll notify you automatically call and reschedule or be whatever. And then the fourth one, uh, pillar number four is tracking and measuring success with your KPIs. And we have what’s called a real-time KPI dashboard is a game-changer. It is bad-ass. It’s awesome. Uh, you literally can contract down to the individual ad and Facebook and lead source tracking, whether it be Google, LinkedIn, organic PPC, you name it. And the reason that’s such a big deal is because, well, I think everybody understands the value of KPIs, but you have to know what’s working. What’s not working where your money’s coming from.

Um, Best example, uh, in, uh, in what this ultimately is, is what’s called a closed-loop cell system. [00:19:00] And what that means is that from the point of contact, until the time you take money and actually get a referral from that person, it all can associate them the revenue back to the actual lead source, wherein the lead magnet, where it came from. So now you know where to spend your money. So you’re getting more leads. You’re converting more leads. You’re eliminating and follow-up failure. You’re only talking to the hot buyers and you’re eliminating the lead sources that are sucking money.

You it’s not a get rich quick thing. This is a system. This is a process. And once you get it in place, he just keeps building and building and building and building and building and building. So once you get that in place, you can easily eliminate the lead magnets and the lead sources that are costing you money and wasting time. Can you do that over a year or two? You’re going to end up with four or five lead sources and four or five lead magnets that are A-plus rockstars. You can dial up traffic, dial it back down. So you can now, or in 100% control of your sales as an agency.

Ben Aston: Nice. And so obviously this works, this is kind of an inbound, um, based on inbound marketing, uh, or based on lead generation. So. How are you? I understand the idea of creating these lead magnets and then optimizing those. Um, but I mean, and you touched on, you know, adjusting the dials with Facebook ads or something else, but how is that, how you, uh, generating traffic to the website in order to test these lead magnets in the first place, how are you, um, how are you driving traffic to test them out?

Lee Goff: Well, um, I’m big in niching out. And so that really, really is determined by what niche you’re in. Okay. Um, but the obvious answer is going to be Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn. Okay. And so, yes, you are, uh, doing some paid traffic over there. Now my preferred source of traffic will be with full referral partner marketing. And if you’re in a niche, okay. Then it’s very easy to find older people who are servicing that same niche without having competitive overlap, uh, golf clubs. You know, there are a ton of people out there that sell lawnmowers to golf clubs, right? Or fertilizer or food or whatever it might be.

There are vendors out there that service your target audience get to know offer to do webinars offer, be blogs, paid for sponsorships, pay for advertisements. What you’re gonna find out is it does a couple things. One. And lowers your customer acquisition costs because you’re only marketing to people who are your target audience. And typically it’s a lot cheaper to go straight to the source than it is to go to Facebook, Google, and other platforms too. You can now say as seen on. Uh, you know, whatever I, this is also building your positioning elements because you’re in front of these large associations or public publications, magazines, you know, conferences, whatever it might be.

So again, back on that sales system, you, you, you go out there and you line up referral partners one or two a month, and you go through that process for six months, eight months, nine months, 10 months, whatever it might be. And the next thing, you know, just like the lead source and the lead magnets. You now have a Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, whichever one is converting for you. You have four or five referral partners. Okay. And then, of course, you can do your live events, things like that. So now you’ve got three traffic-proven traffic sources that, you know, again, you can just dial-up and dial back down as you see fit.

Ben Aston: So this, I mean, this system seems, um, like, like pretty logical, like it makes sense, but how, when, when this falls apart, why does it fall apart when this fails? Why does it fail? What, what do you see people getting wrong? When they try to develop a sales system like this, where do, where do things typically go wrong? And why is that?

Lee Goff: Typically they’re trying to pull from different systems. So they’ll hear in my Facebook group do this. No, here in that Facebook group could do that. They’ll read this on somebody’s [00:23:00] blog and their conduct. Hodgepodging it. Right. Well, that is never S almost hardly ever going to work because well, this system is built to hand the ball off to the next Lego and the next Lego and the next Lego. And so when you pull this Lego out of this system and this Lego out of this system, They don’t, they don’t match. Right. So, um, that’s probably one of the biggest mistakes is that people are trying to kind of, you know, duck take this thing. And whenever you’re putting in, you know, whenever you’re trying to put in a system like this, you have to look, if you know, you have to look at it holistically from beginning to end, okay.

You can’t have fall off that. That is what, that’s what’s called follow-up failure. And you have to eliminate that aggressively. So I get the lead magnet, it hands the ball off to the prospect, vetting the prospect meeting. If they pass through their actions, hands the ball off to, uh, you know, a deal or automation. And then the hands of on, off, you know, it is logically hands the ball off. But if you don’t have a comprehensive system with all that mapped out and then logically thought through, okay, then you will have major, uh, what’s called up failure. And then of course at that point complacency and, um, Uh, uh, people were like, ah, man, it’s not working. Or, you know, there’s many different reasons why people kind of, uh, kind of start to give up on things. Right. Um, uh, and so people kind of start to give up on things. And so I would caution you against that.

I would caution you to get a full system in place. Uh, and by the way, one of the, in my opinion, one of the best things about myself is from this effect, that it only requires two touchpoints by humans, by the agency owners one, that’s actually making the phone calls and getting in the car and in the, in the sales calls, Whenever the prospect raises their hand and through their actions show you that they’re buying unit to manually tracking the revenue. So you can go in there and say, I took the money via PayPal somewhere else and putting it in the CRM.

So that way it gets all the KPIs throughout. I did that on purpose because I know that agencies owners are super busy and if they gotta do 50 things, every time they get a lead or try to make a sale, it will, well, it will happen. It just won’t happen. So I built it in a way that automation takes care of everything. But leave the perfect amount of the personal touch, the rapport-building phase, the consultative, the stuff that we all love out there talking to other business owners and then the KPIs, and it just kind of wraps it all up on the boat.

Ben Aston: Nice. And so how do you see, how do you see your sales system evolving? Like what’s the future, obviously, there’s new technology coming out all the time. Um, Buying habits are changing. Uh, the way that people engage with service providers is also evolving as well. So how do you see the sales system evolving and also your, I guess, process evolving your system evolving over the next few years?

Lee Goff: Excuse me. Um, we are working on that right now. Um, uh, one of the beauties of having a product is we’re a what’s in, what’s in called the, um, we’re optimizing the deliverables of this. And so we’re not going to get it down. Get the price down low. We’re going to try to work very hard on getting the price down as low as we possibly can, because we want it to be very affordable, prevalent, and we’re going to optimize the deliverables. We can be kind of overly over-deliver on value. Now the next steps are we are putting very advanced, um, lead source tracking in there. That’s going to be in there for sure. Uh, and I honestly, right now for the next year, we’re working on just making sure that we deliver it. Perfect. Every single time. I’m just kind of getting just really nailing it down. Right. Uh, in the North start adding a little more advanced features and stuff down the road. Uh, we are right now offering a done for you version and then a lab workshop. Like I do a four-day workshop on this. And so the four-day workshop is where I’m working with you, but you physically go do all the work that they’ve done for you is you just hire us, we knock it out for you. And then we’re doing a digital version of the workshop where it’s just, you bought and you knock it out. So that’s kind of the evolution of it. We don’t have major, um, uh, major plans to add a whole lot more other than, uh, the advanced tracking on the front answer. We get better KPIs at this point. So we’re just gonna work on making it the best we can, what we got so.

Ben Aston: Nice. Well, Lee it’s sounds like you’ve got a, a really cool system set up and I think what’s refreshing about it is rethinking the way that we engage with potential clients and stakeholders. And. Yeah, putting automation in there so that actually we don’t have to spend all our time responding to RFPs and let the leads come to you, filter through them and, um, and use automation to, to give, to help less work, which is something that we all want a whole lot less stress. So Lee, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lee Goff: You’re very welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

Ben Aston: And I’d love to know what you guys think, who are listening, watching today. Uh, tell me about your sales process. Uh, let us know in the comments, um, joined the discussion in the forum as well, but if you want to learn more and get ahead in creating a better system, uh, checkout, uh, Lee site, we’ll put the link in the show notes and also head to our members section as well. thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership where you’ll find hundreds of digital PMs, people who are delivering projects in a digital world, having discussions about things like this, working out better ways to deliver projects, manage their teams and stakeholders.  But until next time, thanks so much for listening.