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#91: Listen as JJ Russell, the Co-Owner and Director of the Best Damn Agency Mastermind, discusses building an offer. JJ helps agencies worldwide grow and scale their organization with a fantastic mastermind program and shares how to make building out a sales organization a lot easier.
Explore the human side of sales and business with host Tyler Lindley. Leaders in their field share a dose of inspiration through stories about life and business. Sales professionals provide tactical tips you can put into practice today. It all comes together to help you chart your path forward.
Achieve your goals on your terms — get inspired by stories from extraordinary people, elevate your performance with the latest outbound tactics, and find the lift you need to take your career to the next level.
The Sales Lift Podcast
Episode #91
Building a Foot-in-the-Door Sales Offer w/ JJ Russell
Hosted by: Tyler Lindley
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[00:00:00] Tyler Lindley: Hey, Sales Lift Nation, it's your host, Tyler Lindley. Today, I have JJ Russell on the podcast. Hey JJ, how you
[00:00:08] JJ Russell: doing new? An awesome Tyler. Appreciate you having me. I
[00:00:11] Tyler Lindley: appreciate you. Coming on. JJ is the co-owner and director of the best damn agency mastermind, helping agencies all across the world, grow and scale their organization with a fantastic mastermind program.
And today our main topic is going to be building an offer. Or a foot in the door service that you do for your company that can help make building out your sales organization a lot easier. And I know you've got a lot of thoughts on this JJ and experience doing this. What does that even mean? How can offer creation impact you building a new sales work from scratch?
[00:00:45] JJ Russell: Big question. There's a lot that you could throw in there, but I'll start with this. I think for any company, especially a sales team at any company in general, your offer is your differential. It's the unique value that you're bringing to market, how you're uniquely positioning yourself to me, a solid offer can make or break a sale before it even gets into motion.
And so I think for owners, CEOs, founders, thinking through how you craft your offer, how you maximize dream outcomes, a minimum. Sacrifices or things that people have to give up along the way to achieve that said perceived outcome. You can really take your business to the next level, but I think you can also, and this is where we're going today by setting up an offer correctly or incorrectly.
And by tearing down that offer into what we're going to call a foot in the door offer for today, or a trip wire offer, you could set your sales team. Uniquely to succeed in a way that a lot of companies haven't. And so I think there's a larger scale conversation of your offer in general and how that positions your company uniquely for success, but then the sales tool, which is the foot in the door offer.
[00:01:43] Tyler Lindley: Yeah, for sure. It's interesting. You say your offer can be your differentiator because I don't think a lot of people think about that in terms of what their actual offer services dig into that a little bit deeper. How does it differentiate you from the competitor besides.
[00:01:58] JJ Russell: Depending on what industry you're playing in.
A lot of us have become commoditized. Red ocean is everywhere. There's a lot of blood in the water. Everybody's selling the same thing. It's a race to the bottom. If you're solely competing on price, or if you're just trying to do the same thing. Iota better than the person standing next to you. That's a very difficult race to win and in a race to the bottom, if you stole the competing on price and nobody wins, I think it's when you're able to buy what you offer, how you deliver it.
Maybe it's a guarantee that's attached to it. Maybe it's the timeframe within which you deliver it. Maybe it's the white glove experience that you provide along the way. Positioning your offer. Unique. To your market, it gives you something fresh to sell to me. That's what I want to do. I don't want to sell the same thing as everybody else in the same way that everybody else is doing it.
I want to swim, not in a red ocean, but in a blue ocean where there's space. But I think to get there, you have to differentiate your offer and do something uniquely different than everybody else. Yeah.
[00:02:51] Tyler Lindley: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It seems like you think that just by differentiating your offer and how you're going to market, you can almost move.
From those red ocean from that very competitive space where people are having a tough time telling the difference between you and the other five people that they're talking. To more of a blue ocean where your offer can almost be that differentiator that just puts you in your own swim lane, if you will, and makes it a lot easier to have these conversations.
And I guess it also just makes it easier for customers to see that difference clearly.
[00:03:21] JJ Russell: I'll speak to that for a second. There's a lot to this conversation. Let's talk agencies specifically. I think we could tackle any industry out there, but I work specifically with agencies. Let's niche that down to performance marketing agency is, or somebody that's selling search engine optimization, SEO, which most people listening to this podcast will at least be familiar with to some degree, the three tiered packages.
Pricing. That model is one that got really popular, really overdone. So a cheap option, high tier option and law of psychology. Everyone's going to pick the one in the middle. They're going to pick your middle tier up. Good. Better, best deal. Yeah, that's right. Good. Better, best. But people are offering a productized service and that it's just a pre-packaged set of.
Yep. That's your assigning some dollar value to, and then you're going to market with that. Where I see people really differentiate is where they lead, not with a suite of services or a list of their offerings, but they lead with strategy. They lead with consultative selling and they come in and they really die.
Hey, what does your company actually need us to do? Where do you actually want to go? And based on our expertise in the market, what do we believe it's going to take to get you there versus bureau potential customer. And you're coming to me saying, Hey, I need SEO. Part of this is really educating your buyer.
Do you actually need SEO? What does that even mean? Dollars in you need traffic to your website, but you actually need people on your website who are ready to convert, you know, what's it gonna take to get those conversions? What's it going to take to get dollars in, maybe it's different than you as the potential buyer previously thought by custom scoping by doing the strategy on the front end and selling that and not some pre-packaged.
Bundle of services. That's a really quick way to differentiate yourself from what everybody else out there is doing. And now all of a sudden you've positioned yourself as an authority and you've positioned yourself as somebody who has the goods. You've got a process and Intel into this business, that's going to allow you to sell at a much higher ticket than you would otherwise.
[00:05:10] Tyler Lindley: And that's what you were alluding to earlier when you said a foot in the door, or you mentioned tripwire is sometimes called a tripwire. That is essentially what you're talking about is you're basically selling. That short, smaller strategy engagement on the front end. That then you would try to lead to selling some larger engagement after that smaller engagement was finished.
Is that right?
[00:05:32] JJ Russell: You're totally right. And I think where most people get this wrong, in my opinion, is they do the foot in the door process. But they just sell it as a part of their full engagement. They lump it all together. They lump it together. Let's just say, for example, sake that you're not selling pre-packaged sets of services.
You're not selling a bundle of goods. You are doing some strategy, you're doing some kind of audit. You're being more strategic with the services you provide. You're probably running a two week strategy session. You're getting into your clients tools or whatever. I'm talking from an agency standpoint, whatever that means for you and your industry.
[00:06:04] Tyler Lindley: Okay. We'll be onboarding could be strategy, but there's some kind of initial period. You're just gathering information so that you can inform what the rest of the engagement is going to look like.
[00:06:13] JJ Russell: That goes wrong for a couple of reasons. One is it slows the on-ramp to results during the full engagement.
If I signed on to get SEO results, I want to see visitors to my page. I want to see. I want to rank for page one or whatever. That's not realistic. First of all, in the first 90 days, there's going to be an on-ramp, but it's definitely not realistic in the first 30 days, because so much of that is strategy.
If you're not selling the foot in the door separately, you've taken those two to three weeks to do all of the deep dive and the analysis and the things, and you've gotten zero results. And I think by selling it on the front end, it makes the full engagement way more enticing. When you're able to turn around week one or week two and say, Hey, we are already moving the needle towards the desired outcome.
I think the other problem is what does it require? Have you to do this kind of analysis? My guess is you're pulling in your delivery team. You're pulling in really valuable employees, whose time is worth a lot of money. And they're having to get into the weeds to do work for free. They're doing work for free.
[00:07:08] Tyler Lindley: When you say they're doing it for free. You're talking about this is during the sales process, or this is at the beginning of a longer-term
[00:07:14] JJ Russell: engagement. I think either way you see. But definitely if it's in the sales process, if you're doing any kind of analysis in the sales process, they're 1000% doing work for free.
Oh yeah.
[00:07:23] Tyler Lindley: That happens a lot. Free consulting happens all the time. And a lot of prospects know that, which is why they go out shopping at the store. And they're comparing you against the five other competitors. They're trying to basically understand the strategy they should be thinking about during the sales process, before any money exchanges.
100%, which can be a huge suck on there, all your resources, all those people that delivery teams getting pulled in for the strategy. And you're doing all that work for free. That's right. It's just hard to justify those dollars. Sometimes
[00:07:52] JJ Russell: 100% lop that off. If you're doing that already through your sales process or as the first two to three weeks of your full paid engagement, lop that off bundling.
Into an offer and sell that thing. And that is what I would consider the tripwire gateway foot in the door offer that I think that every company, especially in the SMB space needs to have,
[00:08:13] Tyler Lindley: if you're a services based business, this should be the first step and a smaller services based SMB agency, any kind of smaller.
Where you provide services, you're B2B and you provide services. This is how you should create it. If that is the strategy that you recommend, just lumping off that first portion. So you're not doing that free consulting during the sales process. And then you're not also just lumping it into the beginning of a larger engagement.
What do you think? Good looks like there. I know it's going to depend a lot on the industry and the situation and what are some good practices you've seen in terms of how long does it take and how much does it cost and what does that actually look like
[00:08:48] JJ Russell: for. A couple of big bucket principles first is where I would start.
And so I think if we're talking offer creation, we're talking specifically about the foot in the door, but a book that everybody should read is a hundred million dollar offers by Alex Farmasi it's genius and it's 200 pages, but he has a. Offer creation formula that he uses to evaluate the value of any offer that he himself builds.
And so it is the value of the dream outcome. So how valuable is set of thing times the perceived completion or tainment of said dream outcome? How likely is this to actually happen from the prospect's point of view? And then you'd divide that. So you've multiply those two things. You divide that by a denominator.
Time to completion and sacrifice. What do I have to give up? To achieve set things. So the goal would be you increase the value of the desired outcome. You increase the perceived likelihood of achievement and you decrease the time it takes to get there and the sacrifice. What does somebody have to give up to get there?
I think that is a great formula for building any off. Um, but I think, especially if you look at the foot in the door offer, it's got to have value. They have to think that you're going to knock this out of the park for them. Hey, we've done this a thousand times. Here's why it's successful. Yada, yada, yada.
It's got to be in the shortest timeframe possible. Yep. I think sometimes people get confused and they think for this process to feel robust enough for this engagement to feel like it's worth their time. We've got to take two weeks or whatever. I think that's a fallacy. I think that they want the results.
As long as that information is action packed and they can actually work with it. In their hands as soon as possible. So shrink that timeframe and then make it as tailored and done for them as absolutely possible. So that they're not having to give up additional time to get the outcome. Those are some basic principles, I would say in terms of pricing, what we've seen work really well, and we've done.
200 to 250 times, whether it's us building them for clients or consulting to help them build their own five to 10% of whatever you charge for your full engagement. Okay. And let's say your average length of a contract is two to three years. I would say percentage of price for your one. Okay. Your thing costs a hundred grand charge, five to 10 or six to six.
Got it. And then in terms of what goes into this thing, there's a few categories that all of them have that add to the value of the tool. One is a diagnostic portion. So you get really into the weeds of whatever you do, what is their current state of that thing? So if you build sales, operations, what's the current state of their sales operation.
If you're a marketing agency, what's the current state of their marketing department. Yep. Then you have to define where. Going to their dream state, their dream outcome. What does this actually look like? Yep. And then you have to paint a really clear picture of all of the things that you were going to do or that it would take them to do to get there.
So what are the hundred steps to get from where you currently are to where you want to be? And the last thing I would just add is what is the value of achieving said goal. That's where for us. We build an impact proforma for clients that says when you get here 12 months down the road, after we work with you, we believe that your revenue will be X based on these 15 factors that are industry averages that we know because we've worked with hundreds of agencies.
Just to say that again, where are you now? Where do you want to go? What are all the things that it's going to take to get you there? And what's the value, if you do get there. Got it.
[00:12:07] Tyler Lindley: That makes sense. And essentially by creating this, you're giving them. Uh, playbook. You're giving them that diagnostic of where they are today, but you're also giving them a roadmap of here's where they can go.
And then are you in essence, JJ, essentially creating those hundred steps to get there, and then you just attach a dollar value to that. Does that live actually in that foot, in the door offer or is that follow-up conversation? Because obviously the goal isn't just this one initial offer, the goal would be to now do the larger engage.
But do you just sneak that into that? Or is that a separate conversation or what do you think best practices there
[00:12:44] JJ Russell: depends on who you sell to. If you're selling into enterprise or fortune 500 or whatever, they're going to probably have a more robust approval process. You're going to have to back and forth on the proposal.
If you're selling to small businesses, other small businesses, I think that you're putting into our offer can 1000% be your proposal. And I think it serves a lot of functions in that specific way. One, it scopes the project. Very granularly. Yes. And your delivery team will. Thank you. You're going to know if you've got a junior or even a relatively seasoned sales rep scoping projects on calls, the room for errors.
Massive. You've seen it. I'm sure people have seen it, but if you get into this deep dive diagnostic portion, prescriptive portion, building the plan and their foot in the door process, like, you know exactly what's going to go into it and you can plan accordingly and price accordingly. The other piece is it does serve as a proposal.
So when somebody comes back to you and they say, Hey, Exactly what you guys are going to do again, you're like here's the 150 bullet points. I can point to it exactly how this is going to go. The third piece is there's an overwhelm factor to it that I cannot overplay how important this actually is in the marketing agency world specifically, which I know.
It is a really hard, a lot of time. Let's say that you're a marketing agency that sells to HVHC companies. It's really hard to help them understand all that you are going to do. They're like we just want a website. Here's all the things that go into building a website. And then here's all the things that go into pushing traffic there.
It's hard to communicate that in a sales conversation in a way that they really see the value you bring, but if you bullet point that thing out and you can show them the 150 steps that it's going to take them on their own to get there while all of a sudden. $50,000 for you to go and do it for them, seems like a way better deal.
It seems
[00:14:22] Tyler Lindley: pretty reasonable. Also another advantage we touched on, but I want to go a little bit deeper is a lot of times when these founders of these smaller startups and agencies and smaller organisms. When they're trying to build out a sales organization themselves, it's hard for them to hand off the reins to another sales rep.
Part of the pushback that I hear is how can I impart all of the knowledge that I have about for sure, my prospects and about this industry and about what we do for our prospects and clients and all this work. And they have all of this tribal knowledge that lives up here. And they think that just impossible for them to going to be celled as full engagement.
It's a hundred thousand dollars. Because there's just so many things that they don't know that only I know, but if you shrink the sales process for this new rep down to just selling this foot in the door offer, and now they're selling, like you said, one 10th of the, they're just selling that one one-off small project that becomes a lot easier to onboard that new rep.
And do they really need to know. All of those things that live in that founder or CEO or sales leaders head, do they really need to know all those things then
[00:15:30] JJ Russell: here's, what's really cool. The answer is no early on in the process, they can just sell the robot. They have to understand your market and the services that you provide.
Well enough explain outcomes or soft problems in the sales conversation. Here's how we solve your problem. But first we're going to step in. Foot in the door process. But I would say that the migration or evolution of a new hire sales rep was being onboarded is first selling this foot in the door. But what they're doing from day one is they are sitting in on these backend calls, where you as the founder or the senior sales person is walking them through this massive proposal, essentially, which is the foot in the door offer.
And they're hearing all the questions answered. They're hearing all of the details of the services that you provide. They're hearing you back and forth with the prospect. And so really what they're gaining is very in depth product market training throughout the foot in the door process. Even if they're not the ones closing the full engagement on the back end.
So I think it accelerates the timeline within which they can be selling the full thing
[00:16:23] Tyler Lindley: themselves. And that makes a lot of sense, essentially becomes part of your onboarding of that new rep. It's just having them sit in on that process. And I want to dig into that process a little bit. Who's actually doing what's the best practice or who should be doing this building of this foot in the door actually offers.
Should it be the sales rep that sold it? Should it be the delivery team? Should it be a combination of the two? But one thing
[00:16:48] JJ Russell: we haven't touched on yet is I view these as a loss leader. Meaning I view these as a Brit. They're a breakeven man. We're not making any money on this. Got it. The goal is we want to convert 75% on the backend of this Gar conversion rate into the roadmap is fairly high and it is for our clients too, because you're selling a bite-size thing, but I want to convert incredibly high on the back end of the roadmap.
I'm okay. If it costs us $5,000 to put the. And we charged $5,000 for it, right? That's point number one, point number two is where does that $5,000 go? Some of it goes into cost for lead generation and cost for our sales team or STRs or whatever. But the other costs goes to the fulfillment team, the people building this thing, and that for us and most clients of ours is the delivery team you're pulling in a paid ad specialist or a strategist or somebody.
And they're given a couple hours of their time. To build this thing out. I think another key component to successful delivery and to shrinking the cost and to shrinking the timeline to actually delivering and bringing in the roadmap or presenting the roadmap to your client. If I say roadmap again, I'm going to slap myself.
It's a foot in the door. I'm so inundated with. And when JJ has
[00:17:57] Tyler Lindley: been saying the roadmap, that's the internal term that use that is that foot in the door offer the trip wire, the gateway, the roadmap, the audit. You're going to hear it, call it a lot of different things. All of those words mean the same thing.
It's the small engagement on the front end that we're trying to lump off of the larger engagement.
[00:18:12] JJ Russell: I was going to say by templatizing. Yeah. Enough of this by having enough boiler plate pieces. That internally, you are only having to have your delivery team, spend a few hours on this thing. You can come back with what feels like a ton of value, but what took your team a couple hours to put together?
And then you, as the founder CEO and your sales team, they're not having to waste. I say waste, cause I really do feel like it's a waste. Their precious time, basically scoping a project really intently, scoping apart.
[00:18:40] Tyler Lindley: Exactly. And it sounds like a portion of this too, is just doing some discovery with the actual client at that point.
To better understand their situation. Part of this is just that diagnostic of their current state. And then that's, what's used to then inform that strategy that a hundred steps to get there of that desired future state. I
[00:18:59] JJ Russell: think one thing that people could throw into their sales process, their sales conversations, their scripts, their messaging, whatever is a really easy way to get into this it's reverse psychology piece too.
So let's say you do sell high ticket. You do sell consultatively and you get to the back end of either a first call or a follow-up call. For example sake that your fee is 75 grand for the full engagement and somebody nodding along with you, or even if they're not the conversation's moving. I end every conversation with, let me tell you what the next steps look like.
Even if you wanted to throw $75,000 at me today, if you thought we were the perfect people to solve this problem, I couldn't in good conscience. Take it. It's not part of our process. I know that in order for us to drive the results that we need to get, and you need to get, we need to get under the. Yeah, we need to figure out what you have.
That's great. What you don't have, what we need to build from scratch, where you want to go and what it's gonna take to get you there. But I think that line of, Hey, if you wanted to pony up and pay today, I couldn't let you here's our next step. I think that's a pretty cool role reversal on the prospect of like, Hey, I'm not taking your money today.
I really want to funnel you into this other process, which is our foot in the
[00:19:54] Tyler Lindley: door. And it's another thing that differentiates you from probably everyone else to go back to our original point of building this offer. If your offer differentiates you and if, how you're positioning it and selling it differentiates you from everyone else, then they're going to have that one option where you're over here in the blue ocean and everyone else is fighting in the Reddit.
And now you really do stand out and it's, we've got four options over here that all look and feel the same. They're all promising the same thing. I don't know. The conversations were somewhere. I think they could all do the work well, but then this option is very different. It's a much smaller ask, but they just want to get to know our team and understand if we can even help them and lay out a roadmap.
Almost you're separating yourself just by doing that. The prospect has another option and it's meaningfully
[00:20:36] JJ Russell: different. I think you're spot on. And I think what you have to define for yourself is who you want to be as a company and who you want to sell to, because there are plenty of people out there.
Plenty of people listening. You're fine. Swimming in a red ocean. You're fine. A productized service. You're fine selling it. The XYZ price point, this bundle of goods. If that's you, you don't need a foot in the door offer. That's just not going to be your competitive edge. But what's funny is it does actually, it works the opposite of what you just said sometimes too.
So if you're going to really lean into, we are going to differentiate, we're going to sell highly consultatively. We're going to be super strategic on the front end. You're going to have to sell high ticket as a result. You're gonna have to be a premium price in the market, but people will come in and they'll say, Hey, I just want you to tell me what your price.
Kevin's all the time. People who are just shopping. If you say, that's not really how we do things here, you're going to lose some potential buyers. But what you have to be ready to do is reeducate your buyers. That's an objection that you need to handle in. Hey, if you want to shop for what everybody else is shopping for, we're not for you.
We do things totally different here. And because of that, we can stand on the fact that we get better results than anybody else in a similar market. You're going to have to be ready to have that conversation. Exactly.
[00:21:40] Tyler Lindley: And how many times. Somebody just going straight to price. Usually that's the buyer that it's not very serious and comparison shopping.
They might just be comparing you to their current vendor. It's usually that doesn't end up well, JJ, any parting words of advice as people try to think about this, offer creation foot in the door, offer anything else we haven't touched on that you want to let
[00:21:58] JJ Russell: our audience know why not beta test it. Why not give this a shot?
It might not be part of your current sales process, but that doesn't mean you couldn't try to sell five and see how it goes. If you're going to do that, sell it before. Big fan of this ideology and practice build out a theoretical foot in the door offer, give it some bullet points, but don't build the full thing.
See if you can sell a few of them. And then if it seems to get traction in your market, then go out and build the thing. Have an idea of exactly what you want to build and what that would take, but don't go build some new offer that you're not sure your market's going to be hungry for. So beta test it.
And I would say sell it before you build it.
[00:22:33] Tyler Lindley: It makes a lot of sense, JJ, great conversation today. If my listeners want to find out more about you online, how can they.
[00:22:39] JJ Russell: Did I am the most anti-social media human being, which I know is not very good sales practice in 2022. I'm sorry, it's just not good for my mental health.
You can find me on LinkedIn, JJ Russell on LinkedIn. Okay. Best damn agency mastermind. And then you can also go to best dam agency.co not.com.co. If you want to see some of the cool stuff that we're doing for our agency clients. Perfect.
[00:22:58] Tyler Lindley: We'll link to both of those in the show notes. Thanks so much for coming on JJ.
I appreciate it.
[00:23:02] JJ Russell: I appreciate it. Tyler. It's been fun. Thanks, man. All right.
[00:23:08] Tyler Lindley: Thank you so much for listening to today's show, you can find all the links discussed and the show notes@thesaleslift.com. That's the T H E sales S a L. Lift L I F t.com have questions for me. Email me@tyleratthesaleslift.com. We look forward to seeing you back here next week, and we hope today's show brings you the sales lift.
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