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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Mikhail dia. Mikhail is a founder of funnel ETICS and a former agency owner as a previous user of funnel ETICS. Myself and a firm believer in the power of offers and was excited to get McCallum on the show to discuss how agencies can productize their offerings. In this episode, we discuss how to make data driven decisions in your marketing, how to better set client expectations through visualization, the need for specialization to develop repeatability, and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools while streamlining operations. So your team can move from chaos to clarity, you can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward. And now Mikhail dia, it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. Can you give us an overview of how you're seeing kind of AI or automation being used in marketing agencies today?
Speaker 1 1:23
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, we're seeing that little tasks like especially copywriting, and just just getting even design, etc, these these things are getting replaced, right? It's very easy. In fact, I actually just recently hired and we're testing this a VA pod for $1,500, where basically, for 1500 bucks a month, I get a full team eight vas, who are really ultimately leveraging AI, to do my social media, my blog content, my SEO, my video editing, like all of the things that you need to kind of do that are time consuming, that normally you could be highly paid for. But now with AI is just simplified it so much that you could just ask VAs to kind of do it. So there's a couple things that it helps agencies with number one, it helps agencies really streamline their operation, right. But then number two, it kind of forces agencies to no longer sell the deliverables and the tangible assets. But now to start thinking about how can I package these deliverables and positioning as an end result for my client? Right? Because otherwise, if all I'm doing is writing blog posts, well, you're gonna get replaced very, very soon. So yeah,
Chris DuBois 2:52
right. Outcomes over output, always,
Speaker 1 2:55
you have to think about results, you have to think about how, how is my that's why I like to tell agencies always sell systems, you can call them funnels, you can call them, you know, customer journeys, you can call them whatever the hell you want. But always you call it a growth engine, it doesn't really matter. But always sell the system that generates the end outcome that your, your client cares about. And being very, very specific as to what that outcome is, the more specific you are, the easier it is to convince your client that you have the right system for them. So for example, if you're going to use let's say, you're going after SAS companies, well make sure you call you say to them that your system helps them generate demo requests, because that's the terminology they use, right, versus, you know, consultations or appointments or something like that. Right? So, again, what is the outcome that your overall marketing strategies is driving?
Chris DuBois 3:56
And so I guess let's, let's do a little primer on funnel letters, and how you, the software actually helps people with their agencies with setting that up specifically, like what you were just talking about. So
Speaker 1 4:09
fundamentally, the reason we built funnel ETICS is I wanted a way to visualize that system, I wanted a way to visualize all of the different marketing assets that we put together in order to drive the end result for this particular client. And typically, you do that on some sort of whiteboard, right? You'll Okay, well map our Facebook ads, and that goes to a page and then there's some emails and there's a follow up, there's a sales page, and all of that somehow lands and leads to an order form and somebody making a purchase, right? Or whatever the end outcome is. So I would map this out on a whiteboard. But then in order to look at the results to look at performance to understand is this working or is it not? You have to log into like 15 different platforms, you have to build some spreadsheets you have to play with Google Analytics, which is a nice nightmare, I personally rather bash my head against the wall. So be honest, you kind of have this cool little system, this cool strategy laid out, but then you can't see the results. So what foul X allows you to do is combine these two things together. So you have this visual whiteboard that allows you to map out your strategy and show your clients. This is exactly what we will do for you. This is exactly how all of these pieces all these blog posts, all these pieces of content, these articles, whatever we create, is there to drive an end result. And one of the cool things you can do a funnel with X is you can actually forecast the profitability of this system. So I can say, if we spend this much on these ads, and, and on on organic, SEO content, and I can add my my own agency costs, and if these are the numbers and the conversions, we hit and this is the revenue you make per client, hey, check it out. It's profitable or whatever. But of course, a forecast is only as good as what happens when you compare it to real data. It's just a forecast. So with fun analytics, I can now pull in all of that data, using our tool and pull it all onto that same canvas. And you can start to see really, what is the performance of that system?
Chris DuBois 6:13
Yeah, the the forecasting features is going to be a game changer for a lot of agencies on this. I was a funnel ETICS user when running an agency, and it was awesome. Like we mapped out everything we were doing for our own brand. And what was great was at one point, we had a prospect come to us they watched we had a series of videos on the site for like different pages. And they they like follow the perfect buyers journey. Right? Right. Like usually people jump around, but this was like they did exactly what we want them to. They came to us and said, I love that experience. So much, I want you to build it for me nice. And we were actually able in like some of our discovery calls and everything right, pull up the actual like mapping of what we did and show them like, look, this is how how we did it. And like this is how it's converting, this is what's going on. And they were just like their eyes just opened up,
Speaker 1 7:04
you know, you know, the the the easiest sale in the world I've ever had to do. When I was running my agency and I had the first kind of version of funnel ETICS was, I would actually show like I had a similar process, I didn't have a three part video series, I just had kind of a core VSL. And but I would show a prospect this map of how he came through my funnel. And then finally, as you can look at an individual user, so I actually would pull up their name, click on it, and then it would show me the exact path that this person took. And as soon as I showed them that I said, Look, this is what we're going to do for you. And then they're like, it's done. It's done. I'm it was the easiest, easiest sale ever, because they're just like, Oh, you mean you're gonna show me how I'm getting customers. It's, it's what they want at the end of the day.
Chris DuBois 7:58
Right? And so the the level of kind of depth within the data that you're able to go now can really define that strategic direction, right, you're taking for everything, like if you have this mapped out, and you can actually see the numbers, you can make quick decisions on my head, this isn't working, we can prove it because we have this many visitors. You know, this is where they're actually branching off. Yep. Right, you can actually actually within funnel ETICS, you can even see the nice green lines versus the yellow lines that are moving around showing you, you know, where the traffic's actually going. How much do you think? Hey, man, I don't even know how to phrase this question like, are, I feel like agencies aren't using that level of strategic insights, to be able to, to kind of make the decisions that they need. They're not looking at the data at that level to be able to see like, oh, wow, I should actually scrap this entire portion of my funnel. And, and focus here. Is there. Is this something you're seeing as well, as probably different since you literally have the software to help people not do that. But I guess what's your experience?
Speaker 1 9:02
Yeah, you know, here's the here's the biggest challenge that agencies face. As an agency, my job is to grow my agency, even though the service I'm rendering is to help grow your business. So it's always this this balance that you're facing as an agency owner to either spend time optimizing somebody else's business, or spend time optimizing yours. The thing that I find that happens with most agencies is that if everything is green, for a client, I'm just gonna leave it right. It's green, we're moving in the right direction, things are moving and they're they're progressing. The problem is then something goes red, and then you get in trouble but you're not on top of it. So now you got to backtrack and you've got to basically figure out what went wrong. What do we need to fix etc. And that's when people start to kind of think about this. The agencies, what we try to teach with agencies is this continuous plan, measure optimize cycle, right? So you plan out your strategy for a client, but instead of thinking about selling them another plan, think about stacking optimization as your core retainer, right. And optimization maybe also includes sending traffic to that stage and whatever, but to that to that funnel, or that system, or whatever it may be. But by having optimization as one of your core line items in your retainer package, what it does is two things. Number one, it tells your client that no system is perfect. And it will require continuous optimization, right? It may not work today, when we first launch it, but because we continuously optimize, it will improve it. Number two, it puts you in the mindset of instead of trying to always do more and more and more. It's always about just refining this one system that you know, fundamentally works. However, it may not be working right away, but it keeps you on top of your numbers. It keeps you on top of hey, like how are these performing? What are we going to tweak next? What do we try next? Right. And it just makes things so much easier. So that's when we try to teach agencies but yeah, I mean, there's so many agencies who want just a simple dashboard, or like, we got you 10 leads this week, and we got you, you know, 15 purchases or whatever it may be, and it's not helpful. It's helpful at the very beginning, when you're telling somebody, look, here's my, you know, weekly report, this is what we've got. But it's not helpful when you need to dive into the strategy to understand like, how do we get from 10 leads to 20? Leads? How do we get from, you know, whatever, right? And that's where I think most agencies start to,
Unknown Speaker 12:07
you know, start to crumble.
Chris DuBois 12:11
Yeah, I need to echo the sentiment of, of optimizing. So like, something we did a lot of was, well, we're doing like a, we're a webshop. Right, we're doing a lot of web development. But then we also offer some growth marketing services on the back end. But part of that was like, if you're building an entire website, right, we scrapped everything you've had before we're building your new site, like we're taking a guess, right? Like we don't know, like, we're gonna do our best guess based on industry knowledge, like, we're asking you the right questions, we're gonna do the best copywriting and design we can. But like, we really don't know. And so once we launch this thing, the market is going to tell us if it works. So like, really, the only logical next step is to optimize what we built so that you're not having to do what most companies do, which is like, put a site up, wait a year to three years, and then put a new site up. And then it's like, that's not going to get you the win. But if we can continuously, you know, just improve everything totally. Now, you actually have a
Speaker 1 13:07
chance. Another thing I find agencies make a big mistake round is, and actually like, as we are forecasting tool really helps with this. And we're continuously making it better, because it's really important as
Speaker 2 13:24
people assume that I'm going to have a $10,000
Speaker 1 13:29
a month marketing budget or $50,000, a month marketing budget. And I'm going to make my money back tomorrow. Right? So like, I'm going to spend 10, and I'm going to make 30. And that's going to happen within the first 30 days, right? No, never does. That's not how it works. It's there's, there's delays in between steps in the journey that you have to factor in, there's recurring revenue, and potentially ROI based on lifetime value and recurring revenue. And I think this is where a lot of times agencies make a mistake is when they sell their service, they go and say, my services cost five grand a month, 10 grand a month, whatever it is. But in that they probably don't factor in what other expenses are, are necessary. And B don't factor in any sort of projections around ROI and time to ROI for their clients. And if they can show them that. Then number one, again, it sets the right expectations, right, it tells your client that look, first of all, yeah, my services are maybe 10 grand a month, but you're still going to need a $15,000 a month marketing budget. So really, it's 25 grand right? And on top of that, that 25 grand isn't going to make isn't going to make you money tomorrow like we're going to these parts of the funnel are going to be set up this and then once we start driving traffic, all of this is going to start seeing some results. Let's but your sales pipeline isn't gonna fill up and turn into actual customers for another 10 days, etc. If I can show them this, then again, expectations are set properly, which makes it easier for me to retain them and manage those expectations. And number two, it just makes you seem much more competent, right, much more data driven, which is like we kind of said at the very beginning now with AI and all that stuff, the name of the game is no longer can I just produce output? It's, can I get results, and the only way to show that I'm getting results is by being data driven. Right? If I can show the data that's, you know, leading to those results.
Unknown Speaker 15:46
That's how I can win as an agency. Yeah, and
Chris DuBois 15:49
I think being able to, so client expectations, teammate, like managing expectations, period is one of those critical skills, if you have that you're going to do better than someone who doesn't have it. Beyond the competency, so being able to tell someone what the next steps are, like, this is what's coming. Because I've seen it before, right? I've know, I've seen this pattern so many times, right? You do you you don't just look competent, like you look like an expert, right? The person that they need to be working with. And so you're, you're gonna find probably your churn goes down, because you're able to like point all of these little pieces out. So awesome. Yeah. So I guess, are good,
Speaker 1 16:27
I was just gonna say, this isn't the number one reason why niching down is so important. If you're, there's two paths that you can take as an agency, you can go the Gary Vaynerchuk, VaynerMedia. You know, we work with enterprise, you know, 100,000, to, you know, millions of dollar contracts, in which case, I'm going to build a whole team specifically for that one account, and everything is going to be custom, right. Or you can go the niche, double down on selling the same system over and over and over again. And that goes back to what you just said about being competent, knowing what's coming up. A lot of times, if I take on a lot of different types of clients, well, helping a SASS company generate demos, versus helping a SASS company, generate free trials that then convert into paid customers, versus helping an E commerce business trying to generate, you know, average order values and all that stuff. Like these are so different in terms of tactics and approaches, that it becomes hard to show that competency to show that this is what's coming up next. Unless you've done it so many freaking times. Right. So just something to think about when you're when you're deciding if you're niching down or not.
Chris DuBois 17:49
Are you noticing any other trends in the agency sphere as far as tech adoption, or how agencies are even selling their services?
Speaker 1 17:59
Yeah, so a big trend that we're seeing is is CMO, fractional CMO. So basically, the idea that you come in as a fractional CMO, and it's more of a hybrid type of model where you have an A team under you. So instead of basically selling kind of SEO Services, or or whatever you're selling strategy first, and you as the expert, are coming in, and basically saying to a client, look, you're gonna hire a CMO CMO is gonna cost you 300 grand a year. And then you still have to have the team under them. And they're gonna have to build a team and all that stuff. Or you can hire us now, the reason it's fractional is because I'm not going to be your dedicated, you know, CMO, one on one only with your company. But there's an advantage there. I come in with my cmo and my my high level strategic expertise, you have my entire team executing on this. And basically, you get the best of both worlds at a fraction of what it would cost you to build it in house. Right? So this is, this is one of those trends that we're starting to notice quite a bit. And then the other thing is, again, it kind of goes back to what I mentioned, this idea of like really niching down to that one system, where I can go and sell this over and over and over again. So, for example, I was speaking the other day to a person who the only thing they do is do marketing for short term rentals. And basically they just like kinda like Airbnb, but like, you know, people who want to own their own little sub sites for them. And that's all they do, right? They just have gotten and guess what, it just creates a referral. A recruiter creates kind of that word of mouth that expertise of like I know exactly what to do. When I can crank it out, and I can train my team and increase processes. So those are kind of the two core things that I'm really noticing in this in this space, with
Chris DuBois 20:10
with fractional CMOS is, are they just repositioning as like from agency to fractional CMO? Or is there an actual like restructuring that they're doing in house to be able to kind of sell that offer?
Speaker 1 20:25
So good question. So typically, what agencies will do is they'll say, like, five grand a month is our media buying, it's what we charge, right, you're gonna get an account executive, or you know, an account manager, that's going to work with your team, and they're going to build the landing page, and maybe they're going to set up the ads. Now, what we're, what we're there is basically happening is, I'm going to come in as the expert, I'm going to drive the strategy. So it's like, it'll still be a collaborative effort. But ultimately, I'm the one driving strategy. So I'm now going to charge you for that strategic component aspect. So typically, a retainer that's $5,000 is now bumped up to eight 910 1000 $1,000, because you get that strategic leadership. Now, that really is very dependent on the type of business you're going after, right, you're not going to go after a, you know, $50 million business as a hybrid fractional CMO, because they've already got a marketing team, they're already at that stage. And you're not also going to do the same, the same at like a business, that's under a million dollars, because they don't have the budget. And they probably don't even need a fractional CMO, they just need to make some sales, right? Where it really is that sweet spot is kind of the one to like, $5 million range. If you're going after that segment, they typically have a very small team. And that but that team is inexperienced, they just know how to do some things, right. They've they've gotten something that worked. So maybe they have, maybe they have a couple of agencies that they're working with, but it's kind of disjointed. And that's where you come in and kind of position that kind of fractional cmo offer.
Unknown Speaker 22:13
Right?
Chris DuBois 22:16
Are you seeing those as to opportunities? Are there bigger opportunities for agencies that you're seeing right now?
Speaker 1 22:26
I think that one of the biggest opportunities for agencies, especially in the kind of, because of this text, the world and everything that's happening is actually there's couple so the first one is just focusing in on a tech stack. So being very, very diligent, and saying, I only work with HubSpot, let's say or I only work with go high level or whatever it is, right? So where is a very solid customer base? And what is a tool that you know, every single one of them uses, right? And then just focusing in on that I have friends who have built massive agencies just using Click Funnels or kartra, or high level, right. So that's a that's an always an interesting one, because there's always so many tools coming. And there's just martec is one of the crazy landscape where it just never ends. The second one is really kind of thinking about data and thinking about how am I going to be data driven, right. So this trend around, people have been burned so much, I can go to Upwork right now and find somebody who is going to do Facebook ads for me for $5 An hour all the way to $500 an hour, right, I can go on Udemy. And I can find a course that teaches me how to do Facebook ads for free, right. So like the amount of people who have, quote, unquote, can talk the talk, but have no real experience, that are now selling marketing services. You have to now be able to back it up with numbers with data with proof not just your own proof, but also proof of like, we are data driven and how we approach things. I'm not just going to sit here and build you some Facebook ads and hope Facebook tells me these things. I'm going to look at the whole journey I'm going to be able to show you the numbers I'm going to be able to show you what's working, what's not. I'm going to give you recommendations, etc. Right. So being data driven, I think is also extremely important these days. And that is not a plug for for analytics.
Chris DuBois 24:38
I can make the plug with no Gil. Yeah, I think one of the what you're familiar with Alex or Mozi Yep, I'm sure his value equation where dream outcome times perceived likelihood of achievement on the top row. I don't know that a lot of companies in general not just agencies or look Getting at that perceived likelihood of achievement and really doubling down on it and saying, How do I just almost guarantee that people will look at my offer and say, I know they're the people to get me there. And so when you start thinking about it like that, and like, strategically, then you start piecing together all these things, right? Like you, you would use a tool like for analytics to make sure you can show that data and the actual mapping, you would go to, like, data box does their benchmark groups where they just they run these polls, and they collect all this information and this data from your target audience, so that you can say, Hey, I know, you know, 99 other companies like yours, and this is what they're seeing, this is how you would fit in, you know, to that. And it's just a mate. Like, if I have that level of knowledge about your business, it's like, you can pretty comfortably say like, oh, yeah, this guy probably knows what's going on. Right? Totally. So just why are we not getting more companies thinking that way, and instead, just throwing up a testimonial, like someone said, this one good thing about me once doesn't really have any relation to the project. But it was a good thing.
Unknown Speaker 26:00
Why,
Speaker 1 26:02
again, goes back to what I just mentioned, anyone, and everyone can go on YouTube, or go on Udemy, or go on Upwork, and basically become a Facebook ad specialist or an SEO specialist. And it's also
Unknown Speaker 26:19
one of the easiest,
Speaker 1 26:22
make money online opportunities, right, being able to sell a service being able to sell a skill that you've acquired. And that's the issue is that it's getting to that stage of being a data driven, being very systematic about how you approach things, requires ultimately, years of experience of working with clients realizing, man, I haven't gotten results for these clients, and these ones I did, or whatever it is, and that takes iterations and time. And then you evolve to kind of getting to that, that tear of like, okay, this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is the process we're going to
Speaker 2 27:05
deploy. But how many
Speaker 1 27:08
agencies really get to that three year mark, right, that five year mark, where they're still going, and they're still serving, and they've had those iterations, most of them have been an agency, they're not even an agency, let's be very honest. They're just freelancers, and self employed. However, you know, let's bucket them in the world of agencies. Most of them have been operating for six months, for three months for maybe a year, right? They're just getting started. But what am I supposed to do, I'm going to just going to sell Facebook ads, right, that I'm gonna do whatever it is, that's gonna make me $1 As soon as as soon as I can. And when you're in that early stage of your agency, it's very, very, very easy to accept whatever dollars somebody's willing to throw at you. Right? Like, it's just, I just want to make money at the end of the day. So I'm gonna accept whatever. I remember the first. The first dollar I made as an agency is the guy wrote me a check, like a physical check that I had to go and mail, then this wasn't that long ago, like, it's not like we were talking in, like, 2015, like 2014 2015. So it's not like, anyways. And it was like $2,000, or something like this. And I had like, sold him the world. Like I had sold him a website, new funnels, I was going to write the copy, I was going to set up his ads for him. And the whole thing was like two grand, and I was so ecstatic to make that two grand, until like, maybe two or three weeks later, after, like the the excitement of collecting $2,000 wore off, and realize how much more work I still had to do for that two grand that he paid, right. So. But that happens all the time. Right? It happens all the time. So leveling up who you go after in terms of clients, and then leveling yourself up as well are two things that need to happen.
Chris DuBois 29:09
Right? Yeah, I think one of the huge risks to of just accepting anyone's cash, especially at the start, is that while you are getting some reps in, like you were saying, right to see who am I best suited for? Yeah, there's good chance that you already have an idea of who you are best before. Like, just by knowing some of your competencies and what you're really good at what your team is good at. And if you start bringing in these people, you're not going to be able to get them a result. Like they're going to leave you negative reviews totally and, and they weren't even a great fit. And now they're, you know, your directory profiles and everything are showing, like four stars, three stars. Yep. And it's like the person wasn't a fit in the first way so yet you decided to work with them because you wanted to chase the money. Yeah, it's just gonna hurt you in the long run. You
Speaker 1 29:53
know what? It's funny because now I run a SASS company and I don't get to choose it's just people come in And it's funny because we're just dealing with this right now we have, we have a couple people on Trustpilot, who have given us some pretty negative reviews compared, like, if I look at my other, the other platforms, they're all very, very positive. But we went through this weird transition period in 2220 23, where we realized that our old customers weren't our ideal fit. And because they weren't using the platform, and, you
Speaker 2 30:29
know, there was a few reasons, but
Speaker 1 30:34
that just happened. And people would start leaving kind of these negative reviews. And again, it's just because it wasn't the ideal fit. The platform evolved, it became more expensive, they got pissed off and all anyways. But that's, that's what happens when you don't work with your ideal type of customer. And that's the key, though.
Chris DuBois 30:55
I can't remember which, which one of his books because he's written so many with Seth Godin, one of his books talks about how he just writes off one star reviews, because it's like, the it's just not for you, right? If you gave it one star, you probably just weren't a good fit. So if I'm someone going into review of product, I'm not looking at the one star reviews, I'll look at maybe some two star but really the three star Yeah, it's like where where I'm looking at anyways. Right? And so because like the five star perfect fit, they're getting everything they want. They couldn't be happier. It's like, I don't care about that review as much. But it does look nice to see like, Hey, if you are a good fit, we've got you covered. Look at our 1000 Plus five star reviews. Yeah, but yeah, so I don't know if other buyers are doing it too. But like I've been writing I don't think
Speaker 1 31:38
buyers, people love the people love drama man, people, I guarantee you most buyers are are going straight to the one stars to be like, right? What kind of shit Did they say? Like? Let's see, let's see what happened here.
Unknown Speaker 31:53
Right, it's just
Chris DuBois 31:55
an interesting study to with. They're looking at Amazon product listings. And having a five star, you know, like product with only say 100 reviews was purchased going to be purchased less frequently than something with like three stars, but 1000 reviews. And so that people put more gravity towards volume and number of like the sheer volume of reviews, which I thought was interesting, too.
Speaker 1 32:21
Yeah, it makes it makes perfect sense. I do too. Like when I like it's like when you go to especially in restaurants, right? Like, you're gonna go to, you're gonna look on Yelp or whatever, and you're gonna see a restaurant and one of them's like, oh, 4.8 stars, and had like four reviews. And then you go and like, Oh, this one's 4.2. But it's got like, 3000 reviews. Oh, right. I'm gonna go with the 4.2
Chris DuBois 32:46
Yeah, and I wonder if it's just that enough people care to leave a review that this place is probably worth trying. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 32:54
If that many people care, leave a review. Either the owners are really good marketer, or likely or somebody cares enough.
Chris DuBois 33:04
It was interesting. So I, I do some consulting for just businesses in general. But it's consulting for a restaurant here in town. They're kind of an upper scale but the document the owner, who said they didn't have enough local people, or they had only really local but like we're in a I'm in Southern Maine right so in the summer, there's ways blows up in the fall place blows up because everybody wants to go like leaf deep and and. And so what we did was just when you bring the will bring these little chocolates out with the slip, and so we just put a QR code on the on the bill SSA, if you enjoyed your experience, you know, leave a review, the end the chocolates, were there. So we had like this law of reciprocity, right? Like you're giving me something, can you just give us a review. Within a week, we tripled the number of reviews for the restaurant, which then started bringing in more people and they'd look up restaurants near me and stuff like that, which was pretty impressive. Anyway, yeah. We're getting into the fun little case study,
Speaker 1 34:00
hey, you know what, that is an agency and sell that every single, right, you know, that's what we mean by ces actually
Chris DuBois 34:06
get results. Exactly. And that was actually something we used to do at like we would very, we'd be very particular about how we timed our asks for those those reviews. Or even at certain parts of the project, being able to say, Hey, what are your concerns right now? Right? And so like in getting ahead of them and letting them know, like, I want your concern so that I can fix them before they become a problem. And, and we get ahead of them and if they have no concerns. It's like well, would you be interested in leaving a testimonial right now? And like giving them you know what you want, but yeah, you can bake that into a system and literally show someone like the step by step process. How do we do this? Exactly. And then in sell that, absolutely. Awesome. Okay, I got one more funnel ETICS focus question for you. Before we get to our final two, note, seeing all these trends and everything else, what are what's the future of funnel ETICS looking like Like,
Unknown Speaker 35:00
no.
Speaker 1 35:04
Falling says never, valance has always had the same vision since day one, it's taken us a long time to get to a stage where the product has caught up to the vision. And now the product is extremely powerful and solid. But we're still not quite at our vision. But the vision has always been around funnel x is your central command center to help you plan, measure and optimize your marketing strategies. It's always been what we're all about. That's what we focus on. That's everything that we do in terms of our product roadmap, we never want to focus on building stuff. So you know, really, it's the real cycle is plan, build, measure, optimize, but build. There's so many tools out there that build and write emails and blah, blah. So we'd rather be a platform agnostic and allow you to pull data into that into our tool. So we always kind of look at it in that cycle. So what features can we keep adding, that's going to help facilitate that, that cycle for for marketing teams. So that finally does become their command center? So for example, plan, well, can we do like real time collaboration, forecasting is a really good planning feature that we just released. On the Optimize side, can we build an AI copilot that can help you decipher your own landing page data and you know, as opposed to you having to figure it out yourself? AI can now do these things for you and help you with this. So but we're always constantly thinking about it in this way.
Chris DuBois 36:47
So much value that like to be had within the platform. And so I'm just thinking of other ways that I could have used it in an agency. But now how can I use it with my clients? Yeah, or help them get similar results? Anyway, final two questions for you. The first one being what book? Do you recommend every agency owner leader should read? Oh, wow.
Speaker 1 37:11
I did not anticipate that question. So let me just look, I don't have many books here. In my my books are all at home. Off the top of my head, my favorite business book. There's two right now. And the one I'm reading is called winners and losers. Very, very good. Because it's it's really, it's a book that is unlike any other book that talks about entrepreneurship, it's really talking about how entrepreneurship is really about losing more so than about winning, and like the struggle of entrepreneurship. So if you've, if you're a real entrepreneur, and you've gone through the shit that entrepreneurship can be, you will read this book, you'll be like, Oh, I'm not the only one. Like this is a it's a very like relieving book in that way. And it helps you kind of keep going and say, Okay, this is a good thing. Keep going. The next one is ready, fire aim. Ready Fire. Aim is an incredible book that talks about the journey and how to think about going from zero to one to 10 and 10 to $100 million. And the way it's broken down and written. I think it's by Michael MASTERSON. It's just a it's just a really good book that makes you like extremely excited. Very tactical.
Speaker 2 38:33
To the point. Yeah, I love that book. Yeah,
Chris DuBois 38:37
I love the the just the metaphor of ready fire aim. No, no, I love the book. But I was using that one, even when in the army. Yeah, it was just, you can take like, Ready Aim Fire. Yeah, it takes too long. Let's let's get so quick. And just like by iterating so many times, right that we get that that muscle memory. We can just Yeah, exactly. Iron. You're pretty close. And then we exactly, but then you'll know you'll hit it. Right? You're closer than you were. And generally speaking, off the metaphor, so works, but like the ones that first round goes down range, right? The enemy's gonna be ducking their head a little bit time to keep iterating like it's not it doesn't have to be perfect that first time. Yeah. Anyways, last question is, where can people find you if they want to learn more?
Speaker 1 39:23
Oh, yeah. So if you want to learn more about fun analytics, simply put, just go to Fennec fox.io. You'll learn about what we do and our platform there and you can sign up. And if you want to learn more about me or follow and I post quite a bit on LinkedIn. That's kind of my platform of choice. I ignore Facebook and Instagram and all those other platforms. So LinkedIn
Chris DuBois 39:46
fair. All right. Hello, thanks for joining.
Unknown Speaker 39:49
Thank you for having me. This is great.
Chris DuBois 39:56
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai