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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 0:01
Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Danielle foto. Danielle is a revenue generation strategist who helps agencies build proactive, Team Driven growth systems. She works with agency leaders to decentralize lead generation, build internal marketing consistency and drive client expansion. Danielle is the founder of momentum consulting, and has helped numerous firms improve their sales systems, scorecard tracking and team alignment. I wanted to have Danielle on because too many agency owners carry all of the sales burden themselves, and she offers a path to scale that that doesn't depend on the founder. In this episode, we discuss turning lead generation into a shared team effort, using scorecards to track and motivate consistent sales behavior, structuring internal marketing like a client account and more. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested and right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join a dynamic agency dot community and now, Danielle. Photo, 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. How do you turn lead generation into a team sport?
Danielle Fauteaux 1:49
This is a really great question, Chris, and it's really foundational to the entire approach that your agency can take. Because when you view rev Gen as a team sport, not only are you taking all of the weight and all of the burden off of just you, the leader, the owner, and you're distributing it among people that have strengths that maybe you don't have. You're making it something that people have a shared goal that they're working towards. So you're bringing cohesion into your team culture, and you're providing avenues for people to grow and level up their skills as well. So when you make that conscious choice to view rev Gen as a team sport, you're saying, Hey, we know that everyone has a part to play. We know that it's not just up to a salesperson or me, the owner, the leader, to bring in revenue. It's up to all of us to contribute in the ways that we can, to bring opportunities and revenue in the door. And so it creates a lot of cohesion, and you you find more opportunities that way too, because think about how many times project managers who tend to be closest to clients, closest to projects, they're going to hear about opportunities, but most of them are not trained with active listening skills, which is a really good soft skill to train them on. They're not trained to actually identify and follow up on conversations most of the time too, because they don't have incentive to, because it just means more work for them. So you have to figure out how to make it valuable to your project managers and help them understand like, when our clients win when we do more good work for clients, I win too, and here's how. So keep that in mind as well, because your project managers can identify some really good opportunities to pursue and follow through on, even if they're not doing all of the follow up items on them.
Chris DuBois 3:35
Yeah, it's how do you, I guess, break the silos initially and get someone actually started on this path.
Danielle Fauteaux 3:42
Yeah, lots of conversations internally, and really just level setting like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? What does that mean to you? What questions do you have about how it'll impact you? What do you think you bring to the table? What are your strengths? What are the things that you want to do? And just having those open, honest conversations. So if you don't have a team culture that is that way already, you got to start there and build up.
Chris DuBois 4:11
Makes sense. Something, something we did at the agency I was running was we didn't have account managers and project managers. Granted, we were a smaller, relatively smaller team. We ended up getting up to 30 team members, ish, but the everyone, all of the marketers were assigned to an account, were the account manager and the lead marketer for that account. So they're managing their own projects. We did have some, like, operations kind of assistants who would help with, you know, formatting things and click out, making sure everything was set up so that the marketer wasn't spending all their time just building the system, but doing work. But we found they were more set to actually like to find those opportunities and then be able to act on them. But they were still struggling with like, the sales portion of that. How do I get someone to accept. This new opportunity, I guess. What are your thoughts on just that structure? Or how would, how would? How might you tackle that differently?
Danielle Fauteaux 5:07
Yeah, I would tackle it much the same way, and then add another layer onto it. So when you're working with a small team, say, you're around 1,000,002 million in annual revenue, you've got a team of like, five to 10 people. You have people wearing multiple hats, and that's just the nature of the business, and one of the benefits of that is you don't have to create as many feedback loops, because the feedback loops exist inside that one person. So you can leverage that to identify the opportunities, and you can train your marketing strategists or the whoever is handling that role, however you've defined it, you can train them with some sales playbooks and do intentional like once every two weeks, have an intentional team meeting that's dedicated to how would you position this solution to this problem that is common among our clients, and provide them the opportunities to think about it and learn and engage with their peers, others in the organization that are also trying to solve for that and get more opportunities in the door. So you can create those team setups where you've got that structure happening, and then you as a leader, you can act as the we'll kind of consider this, the marketing strategist role being the opener of the opportunity, and you helping BE THE CLOSER of the opportunity. You can still come in and bring that deal to the finish line, even if you're not the one initiating everything on the front end, and you do want to delegate as much of that as possible, so having them scope it out, you can help run through with approval and final figures and then handling any client objections that your marketing strategist or whoever's in that seat can't seem to answer or overcome and push that deal to the finish line.
Chris DuBois 6:54
Awesome. So what are some of the revenue generation myths that agencies still believe.
Danielle Fauteaux 7:02
Yeah, there's, there's several big ones, but at the top of the list, the biggest of them all, in my view, is that you that I, as an agency, my clients are the most important, and that myth creates so many headwinds for your own business development and lead generation efforts, and to break that mindset is really important. So I always recommend that you view your agency as if it's your number one client, because if you're not getting revenue in the door, you can't service your other clients anyways, because you have to grow. You have to continue getting revenue in the door. So treating yourself as your number one client is very important. What this often looks like, Chris, and maybe you can share some of the ways that you've seen this applied as well, but some of the ways that I've seen it applied and that I think are really helpful is creating the same kind of project, board or documentation and onboarding setup tools for your agency as if you would for a client, so that you have that foundational structure in place as well. Using scorecards is really helpful too. We can get into that a little bit more in depth. But what have you seen? Chris, that works really well.
Chris DuBois 8:19
Yeah. So when running an agency, we took that on. We had our own internal marketing team, and we would usually put the more junior hires on that so that they were working directly with the founder myself, to train them essentially. This is how we do marketing. Do it for the company, like for our agency, and then we can set you off, and you can go do it for our clients now. And so it worked really well as, like, a proving ground, I guess. But also we got to guinea pig ourselves on on things like, hey, let's try this for SEO, but with all of my clients now, it's like, who? Who is the one person that's gonna be responsible for marketing? Because most of them don't have anybody. And so, yeah, everything you just said is exactly true, yeah,
Danielle Fauteaux 9:02
yeah, that project management piece is important, especially when you're delegating. So you might have three different people working on the marketing and business dev efforts for your agency, but they're doing it where they're spending, you know, four to eight hours a week, and they have other responsibilities. So having that central project management is really, really important. I would also call out that when when you're thinking about other myths, that people believe it's also that they think that they can just do the same things that they do for clients and get the same results for their agency, but that's not always the case. So when you're, for example, a marketing agency that's servicing product based businesses, whereas you're a service based business, the playbook that you use to generate leads and revenue is probably going to look different than the playbook that you use. For your product based clients. So you need to keep that in mind a lot too, because this whole concept of like, well, we have to eat our own dog food, it has some validity, but it can also create a lot of shackles and distractions away from the strategies and tactics that will actually drive impact for your agency.
Chris DuBois 10:19
Definitely, yeah, there's a huge difference between running anything service space is a lot more of a trust based sale. Absolutely, much longer build up versus if you buy this, you can grab this off the shelf. And so,
Danielle Fauteaux 10:31
yeah, it's so much more relational.
Chris DuBois 10:35
But, uh, yeah, so I guess for setting that up for or even just being able to monitor your own kind of marketing growth and putting team members on that specifically the initially you would set up whatever incentive program right make sure that they know they see the results in whatever they're doing and they want to keep attacking that job on top of whatever other responsibilities they might have, so they're not just saying or falling into that myth of, oh, I should go focus on my clients now, because they're more important to the business, when in reality, we need it all. Let's get into the scoreboard side of this in order to actually track it and kind of build some of that motivation behind everything.
Danielle Fauteaux 11:14
Yeah, sure. So the premise of scorecards, and if you're familiar with Eos, this will probably sound relatively familiar to you as well. Familiar to as well, but these are designed to be kind of this dashboard view from a leadership level, as well as a weekly tracker of the core activities and some of the outcomes that are being driven from the small activities that just need to happen on a regular basis to drive momentum forward. So the really important component of a score card is that you keep it simple and that you're using it to align your team on the priorities that are going to matter most, the things that are going to move the needle the most. In the work that I do with clients, we have individual scorecards for things like sales, so tracking the number of meetings scheduled, the number of meetings that are conducted, the number of proposals that are sent, the number of new clients won, even clients that are churned those kinds of activities that's separate from a relationship building scorecard, which is much more that front End, top of the funnel, kind of activity of sending LinkedIn connection requests and going to networking events, speaking at events, having some of those other touch points where you're just sending, like, Oh, hey, thought of you because I saw this article, then I know that you're interested in this, like, those kinds of touch points as well. So the relationship building aspect, which is also different. You can have a scorecard for Account Based Marketing, which I highly recommend as a pillar strategy for agencies, in addition to your inbound marketing and content marketing strategies. But with your Account Based Marketing scorecard, you're looking at the touch points that you've made with specific accounts that you're trying to get work in the door for so you can be tracking those items. You can have a score card for your inbound marketing activities. So setting your target like here's the number of blog posts we want to publish each month, here's the number of posts we want to get out. Here's what our email marketing strategy cadence is going to look like. And so you can set those targets and then, on a monthly basis, be tracking if you're actually following through on what you said you were going to do at the outset of the year. And I do recommend that you look at these on an annual basis and adjust them and refine them.
Chris DuBois 13:29
Do you recommend having so having like, the activity based metrics that we want to track make sure we're doing it? Do you tie that like into a monthly review as well of the actual metrics behind the PErforM, like the performance metrics, I guess behind those activities. How are you bringing that up with teams? You
Danielle Fauteaux 13:47
will probably do a performance view at different cadences for different score cards. So like a sales score card, you're going to do a more frequent performance review on those activities, and then you would do for like a relationship building or an inbound marketing scorecard, but one of the foundational components is also having a weekly stand up meeting where you can review with the core people that are actually implementing the activities for that scorecard. Just touch base. Make sure that the numbers are in there, that they're doing what they need to be doing, keeping it top of mind. The other reason, which I think is kind of a sub question, maybe, and if not, please clarify the reason to track the activities and the behaviors that you're doing over performance. And performance only is because the behaviors and activities are what's going to drive performance. And so it's those little steps that you take every single day that eventually build up to those performance metrics, and it's really easy to get caught blindsided with like, oh wow, our performance is down. Well, why is that? Oh, well, we haven't been doing this thing for the last three months that we really needed to have been doing. So trying to take more of that, if you're familiar with the book four disciplines of execution. And this will make sense to you, and if not, it's a great book that I also recommend. But in that model, you're looking at the leading activities that drive the lagging results that will help you achieve your wildly important goal. And so this approach that you're taking of activities, first behaviors, first performance. Second, is in line with that, that thinking as well,
Chris DuBois 15:27
something that I'm noticing across a lot of my clients right now, and maybe I just didn't notice it before, but it was that something will happen in their business, and they'll want to make changes immediately. Yeah, and so it could just be one person not liking their offer. It's like, it didn't land. What do we need to change now? Yeah, and I have to keep bringing bringing them back to, like, well, let's actually set decision criteria around this, right? Like, we actually need maybe 10 people to say no, this offer isn't resonating before we actually go change the offer. And so just the idea of, like, setting up experiments, like, we have a hypothesis for what's going to happen here. Let's actually see it through, see the results, whether it's, you know, positive result, negative or inconclusive. And again, to you know what you were saying, right? Focusing on the actual actions that we're taking is the only way that we're going to be able to see the results. Where most people would have that knee jerk reaction of like, Oh, we're not seeing the results. Do something else, and it's like, yeah. And I think most agency founders tend to fall into that path specifically, and so, yeah, very change is not a fear for them. It's like it is the way of doing business. But then their team is like cringing at everything, yes,
Danielle Fauteaux 16:34
and this is a huge missed opportunity, and potentially to go, so far as to say, a mistake, because when you are not consistently activating the same activities for consistent amount of time, you're just not going to get the results out of it that you want to get. It's that consistency over time. It's the compounding effect, just like when you're generating interest off of your savings like it's the same concept. Everything about this is a compounding effect, and so you have to lean into it for the long haul. Now, does that mean that you should never pivot, never change strategies? Absolutely not. But you need to give it the time that it's due to actually generate results out of it.
Chris DuBois 17:22
Something we did in the army that I've kind of merged into some of my coaching is that we would set decision points within any of our operational planning and so we can say, hey, when we hit this point of the operation, if all of these conditions are met, then this is our next step. If not, then we have to either come up with a new plan or we're going to do one of these contingencies. Yeah, so even just baking that into how we're how we're doing this, like, Hey, we're going to set these activity levels if we don't hit, you know, if we've done 1000 sales calls and we're not getting the result that we're after, and we specify those, then we'll go do this. And it's like something so simple within the planning process that can actually make your life easier.
Danielle Fauteaux 18:01
And did you do that in the agency that you were running
Chris DuBois 18:06
minorly? I think I matured a lot as I was coaching others and seeing now all the different variables. And so I've probably done it more, more with clients, and then I did it with a with my own stuff.
Danielle Fauteaux 18:18
Yeah, and that's fair. It's a lot easier to see the forest, and not just the trees, when you get to take that step outside of it,
Chris DuBois 18:27
yeah, and yeah, the lens completely changes where you're not thinking about every little thing you have on your plate. It's just I'm looking at how can I help you from my 30,000 foot view,
Danielle Fauteaux 18:36
absolutely,
Chris DuBois 18:39
yeah, so let's talk a structure of the agency then. So if we're we have a lot that we need to do. We have to be able to focus on on the agency and building that out. How does that influence of the actual structure of how you might organize a team?
Danielle Fauteaux 18:59
You can you can operate with a rev Gen as a team to work mindset no matter what the structure of your team is. And there are so many different kinds of agencies that different structures might be needed for. So there's not a one size fits all, but there are some general guidelines you might use. Pod structures can be helpful for client delivery and then also defining that for your own organization. You might consider doing that if you are more of a team of subject matter experts, not a traditional pod structure. You can still create the space in your team members calendars and set the expectation of like what they're working on and how they're working on it for your agency. So I like to take the approach of allocating about 10% of your resources to your own biz dev and marketing. And that means financial resources, and it means time resources. So for every person on your team, that's full time, they should be dedicating about. Four hours a week to your own agency, rev Gen and biz dev activities, at least they can, of course, do more, especially if their utilization happens to be low at the time, and you might do sprints that are seasonal. Maybe you have slower summers, so you really focus on your biz dev and marketing planning in the summertime, so finding creative ways to not add more to your plate, but just create space and expectations around how the work is getting done and who's doing what, to spread it out a little bit better. I
Chris DuBois 20:33
wanna highlight that one point of when things are slow, being able to spend more time actually working on the business. I think a lot of people go right into like, I just got to find more leads and try tackling it from that way. But if you use that capacity to actually do some projects, even for free, because you have the extra capacity that could potentially lead to more engagement. ELIGHT ruble has a great example of this, when they redid the exit five website. They volunteered to do it for free, as long as the exit five team would promote his agency, and they just happened to be light on work at the time. So they did it, and they ended up filling or having millions in pipeline that was drawn through that, and they closed a good percentage of it, and it was like, Look, we filled our pipeline just with this extra space that we had in our calendar, I think a lot of agencies kind of leave that on the table.
Danielle Fauteaux 21:27
I think too, this component of leading with value, we haven't touched on this yet. So leading with value, whether that's like you just mentioned, Chris providing value with pro bono work or free services in exchange for heavy promotion and referrals and connections, or if you're providing value based off of the industry that you serve, by doing some research that helps you really inform some of the problems that your ideal customer profile is trying to solve and get answers for providing that to them. Putting some pricing calculators up on your website to reduce barriers in your sales process, putting additional resources that are those traditional lead capture campaigns, but might, instead of providing the resource offhand, connect people to have a discovery conversation in order to get that resource so that you're opening that door to conversation first, and creating that connection point. All of those things are really foundational to your inbound marketing, and also your Account Based Marketing approach, where you're taking that value to brands or companies that you want to do work for, and positioning yourself as an advisor to them as well.
Chris DuBois 22:41
Yeah, like that. So I guess what. What do you think is next for agencies within the revenue generation game? What should they be paying attention to right now?
Danielle Fauteaux 22:52
Yeah, so it's there's always going to be shiny new tactics, so focus first on strategies and then focus on tactics second, because those are going to change. And really make sure that you remember that marketing is about building trusting relationships. So one of the things I think that happened over the last, call it 20 years or so, is that agencies got so fixated on everything that was coming out of like the HubSpot inbound marketing world and digital marketing world that they kind of forgot, that there's a lot of things that you should be doing to drive impact for your revenues that can't be tracked by digital marketing metrics. So things like the relationship building component, things like your customer experience, those are really key drivers of revenue for agencies that you can't necessarily put on a pretty dashboard from your website performance metrics or anything like that. So you have to create ways of having intention behind those. So with customer experience, for example, creating client continuity books can be really helpful. So you get a dashboard view at you. You have a military background, so you might be familiar with that concept of a continuity book, but for those that aren't familiar, the focus is creating a single page document that gives an overview of everything that you need to know about the client, what they prefer, how you interact with them, where certain resources are, assets are, so that if there's ever transition, or you're bringing someone additional into the fold on serving that account, it's really easy to get them up to speed. But part of that, when we think about customer experience, is also having space in that continuity book where there can be basically like a green, yellow, red light system for what the status of the relationship is with the client, because then you as a leader, you can go in, you can look at those on whatever cadence you decide. Maybe it's quarterly, maybe it's monthly. And evaluate like, Are there any clients that are a little bit rocky right now? Do I need to do any relationship repair before things get worse, for example? Or are there any clients that are really, really happy right now that we could probably go collect a testimonial from to leverage for our own marketing and positioning as well, even for defining like, what would be a good case study, and who can we go to for that? So you can use those for overseeing customer experience and have those conversations with your team of what does good customer experience look like? What are their minimum expectations versus what do they view as delighter moments? And define that out, because it's going to be different for each industry and each ideal customer profile, but if you can define what that is for your agency, you can get some foothold in there and really deliver a trusting, positive experience for your clients.
Chris DuBois 25:55
So I love everything you just said, but it forces someone to be very proactive. And I've noticed that most agencies stay in this reactive mindset and just tackling the day to day. How do you help them get out of that reactive mindset so they can actually do everything that you just went through?
Danielle Fauteaux 26:12
Yeah, you manage what you measure, so creating the space, so walking out the time on counter, if someone's working with me, or if they're working with me, or if they're working with you, Chris, they've got space on their calendar where they're having these conversations. So that's a win in and of itself, because that space has been created. The second component is defining like, what are the things that you're looking at, and then actually going back and looking at it on a regular basis. So for customer experience, having those client continuity books is really helpful. Smaller teams, if you are more that one to $2 million revenue size, you could do monthly team meetings where you're talking about it wins with clients, struggles with clients. You have a small enough team size where you can do an effective like hour to 90 minute meeting, and you'll get a ton of richness out of that meeting to help inform your next steps with clients as well. So you can also consider that kind of approach.
Chris DuBois 27:10
Yeah, I like it. I'm always looking for other ways to help.
Danielle Fauteaux 27:13
Yeah, what are some of the Chris I'm curious to hear.
Chris DuBois 27:17
I just force them to be putting it on your calendar. You're going to start thinking about these things. About these things. I found the blunt approach is usually the easiest for me to get across. Usually we have to talk about the cost of inaction, not doing these things, and highlighting the pain that's going to come from them staying where they currently are. But usually it's pretty quick to break out
Danielle Fauteaux 27:41
absolutely Well, I think too, in having this expectation that people are growing and adding more and more value to relationships, I think that's a mindset that every service business should have, especially agencies. And so instilling that culture into your team members solves a lot of this problem of the reactive versus proactive situations?
Chris DuBois 28:04
Yeah. So I got two questions as we started rounding this out with the first being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?
Speaker 1 28:13
Oh, I have to pick one.
Chris DuBois 28:17
Yeah, it's a loaded question. I'll allow two.
Danielle Fauteaux 28:23
I'm gonna and I'll tell you why I'm choosing this one. It's the One Minute Manager. The reason I'm choosing this one is because when you are leading a team, you need to be building them up to be critical thinkers and action takers in and of themselves, so that you don't have to be the one telling everyone what to do all the time. You need people to be independently, taking initiative, so locking in that answer the One Minute Manager. All
Chris DuBois 28:49
right, that's a good one. The last question is, where can people find you?
Danielle Fauteaux 28:53
Sure? So people can find me on LinkedIn, Danielle photo, they can also find me at getting momentum.com and my email is simply Danielle at getting momentum.com if you'd like to reach me that way, too
Chris DuBois 29:06
awesome, and we'll get all that in the show notes. But Danielle, thanks for joining
Danielle Fauteaux 29:10
Chris, thanks for having me.
Chris DuBois 29:17
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.
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