Ben Zettler - Pricing Tactics For Digital Agencies

Ben Zettler, owner and founder of Zettler Digital, joined me on Ditching Hourly to discuss pricing tactics for agencies.

Ben's Links:

• Zettler Digital
• Ben's LinkedIn

AI-Generated Stuff:

SUMMARY

Ben Zettler, owner and founder of Zettler Digital, joins Jonathan Stark to discuss value pricing for agencies. Ben shares his background in sports and how he transitioned into building his agency. They discuss the initial conversations with potential clients, the importance of understanding their needs and goals, and how to convert those conversations into proposals. Ben also talks about the value of offering free work, conducting audits, and providing strategy sessions to build trust with clients. They explore the use of data to quantify the potential impact of their services and the challenges of pricing for smaller businesses. Ben Zettler discusses the ideal clients for his agency and the different options he offers them. He emphasizes the importance of working with decision-makers and the challenges of communicating value in proposals. Ben also talks about the shift in his business from project-oriented work to retained services. He shares his experience with client churn and the need to constantly find new opportunities. Ben provides insights into pricing and the difficulties of structuring fees for ongoing services. He concludes by highlighting the value of LinkedIn for marketing and networking.

TAKEAWAYS

• Understanding the client's needs and goals is crucial in creating a proposal for value pricing.
• Offering free work, such as audits and strategy sessions, can help build trust with potential clients.
• Quantifying the potential impact of services using data can help justify pricing.
• Smaller businesses may be more hesitant to share revenue information, but it is important to understand the potential impact of services.
• The market has shifted towards longer decision timelines and more evaluation of service providers. Working with decision-makers is ideal in most situations, regardless of the size of the business.
• Communicating value in proposals can be challenging, especially when clients compare prices to other services.
• Shifting from project-oriented work to retained services can provide stability and consistent revenue.
• Client churn is inevitable, so it's important to constantly find new opportunities and maintain a marketing engine.
• Pricing ongoing services can be difficult, and it's important to consider the value provided and the client's budget.
• LinkedIn is a valuable platform for marketing and networking in the services industry.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 Introduction and Background
• 08:14 Offering Free Work to Build Trust
• 17:17 Converting Conversations into Proposals
• 23:03 Quantifying the Potential Impact of Services
• 27:26 Challenges of Pricing for Smaller Businesses
• 31:07 The Shifting Market for Service Providers
• 35:44 Shifting to Retained Services
• 41:15 Dealing with Client Churn
• 46:19 Pricing Ongoing Services
• 53:11 Leveraging LinkedIn

----

Do you have questions about how to improve your business?

Things like:

• Value pricing your work instead of billing for your time?
• Positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space?
• Productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal?

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Creators & Guests

Host

Jonathan Stark

The Ditching Hourly Guy • For freelancers, consultants, and other experts who want to make more and work less w/o hiring

Guest

Ben Zettler

Helping brands grow with Email/SMS + Ads + Websites @zettlerdigital | Shopify Plus, Klaviyo Elite, Meta, Google Partner | #Terps | Dad 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦@staceyzettler

What is Ditching Hourly?

For solo consultants who want to make more and work less without hiring.

Jonathan (00:01.372)
Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I am joined by guest Ben Zettler. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Zettler (00:08.541)
Thanks for having me on, I really appreciate

Jonathan (00:10.812)
So this kicked off from a LinkedIn post that you tagged me in where you talked about value pricing being the, I think you said the best way for agencies to price their work. And of course that got my attention. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. But first, Ben, could you tell folks who haven't heard your name before who you are and what you do?

Ben Zettler (00:33.467)
Absolutely. So I am the owner and founder of Zettler Digital. It is a digital marketing and e -commerce agency primarily focused on working with folks that are selling e -commerce built on Shopify. And we support them across services, anything from site development to email and SMS management, as well as advertising Facebook and Instagram and Google ads.

Jonathan (00:57.85)
Wow, OK, so full spectrum. So you said a little bit about it's e -commerce on Shopify, but I've noticed a lot of sports stuff on your website. Do you have a particular niche that you like to work with?

Ben Zettler (01:00.901)
Yeah,

Ben Zettler (01:14.085)
Yeah, you know, we, sometimes I get tagged as a sports guy, just from my background. going way back to, to college, I worked for the university of Maryland baseball team, both as an undergrad and then post -grad, was kind of my first, my first job out of school. And, I, you know, I always wanted to work in sports and I wanted to, I wanted to be a sports agent and I decided, law school wasn't something I was interested

Then I figured, okay, I could work for a team or maybe work for a league, but it's a tough, tough game, you know, for lack of better word. Um, and you know, I got started on the journey to ultimately building this agency, um, just after, um, the 2013 baseball season when, um, you know, I got home and I actually had a job lined up for the Macy's executive development program that I started

You know, after deciding I didn't want to spend two years training inside of a department store, I just, it wasn't for me. I quit after two days. The first, the first thing that I've ever quit in my life. you know, I was at a fairly low point and I just decided while I was searching for a full -time job that I wanted to start a business. and I decided to create a sunglasses company. I took my bar mitzvah money. and I used that to build a website, ultimately found Shopify

do that to secure inventory and a product mold from Taiwan. you know, fast forward nine months later, and I have this business that, know, grew to a certain degree over the course of about five years. And I was fortunate enough actually to sell that business. But, while there wasn't some, you know, multi -million dollar windfall from that, what it, what I really got most out of was,

Being able to understand the ins and outs of Shopify and marketing business. And that kind of set me on the path. but to go back to your question, sorry. The, the sports experience did kind of continue. ultimately ended up working full time for a company called Steiner sports, which was the largest autographed sports memorabilia company of its kind in the world. I was the company's first full time hire dedicated to social and digital marketing. We took what was

Jonathan (03:23.993)
Mm.

Ben Zettler (03:30.365)
50 ,000 follower cumulative following when I first started there to over two and a half million in my first, I'd say three years or so. And, um, social really led the charge in helping to grow other areas of the business. And then my role expanded from not just overseeing social, but paid advertising and affiliate marketing and email marketing and eventually our entire e -commerce operations. So, you know, a of the experience there very much has informed, um, what I do on the agency side of things, but then

You know, also got to work with, you know, a number of fairly prominent athletes and, that, that in itself has also allowed us now as an agency to, work with a few different folks in that world with relationships that I've got

Jonathan (04:14.664)
Gotcha. Wow, that's great. I love the through line. Totally makes sense. Yeah, I think Shaq's fairly well known.

Ben Zettler (04:22.333)
Yeah, people always like to put that one up on my website. That's a fun one. We had a we had a fun day with him. We did a recreation of his size 22 sneaker from his from his rookie year and he came in and he was he was great. He was really fun to work

Jonathan (04:36.124)
That's awesome. Okay, so thank you for that background that really sets the scene. So when you first started, how many years ago was it that you started Zettler Digital? I think you said you saw a video of me maybe five years ago, so it seems like it's been a while.

Ben Zettler (04:52.027)
Yeah, so that was that was probably right around you right right before right after it became a full -time endeavor for me now prior to that You know, I was working the job at Steiner and I even before that work I was there for five years but before that worked at a PR firm, but almost immediately after starting that sunglasses company It was first, know, like friend of a friend. They need help because they're deciding to start a business. So they want to build a website

They want to do some Facebook ads, maybe they want to do some MailChimp email, like they want to do some social. And, you know, at the time and for the better part of, I'd say four or five years, I would charge hourly. Like, okay, well, this year I'm charging $50 an hour. And then a couple of months later, while I'm getting enough, let me charge $55 an hour. See if people still pay for it. Maybe charge $70 an hour and just kept going and going and going. You know, there was a point where

I wasn't yet married, but she was almost my wife. Like she was kind of, I was probably driving her crazy because I was working a full time job. had the sunglasses thing. I was also working, I guess what was technically part time because I was charging hourly for, you know, some clients that, that I, you know, I was, I was working for and doing a lot of time with, but, also bringing a lot of, and we'll come to this, right? A lot of value to the table.

as far as the services that I was covering for them. And I just kind of hit this wall of like, how am I gonna turn what I'm doing now into a legitimate business if I'm just going after that dollar for that hour and trying to find the work and when I'm not working, I'm not making money. It was just driving me absolutely crazy. And so I saw and I can't, for the life of me, I cannot remember.

what interview you were doing. but I stumbled across something and you were, you were talking about, you know, pitching value and, you know, doing away with the hourly model. And it was like an immediate, like real realization that like, my God, I have to immediately change and completely change everything that we're doing and how it's structured. And, cause the hourly thing carried through to the point of,

Ben Zettler (07:17.551)
When I took the agency full time, which was five years ago, Steiner Sports as a business was bought out by fanatics. I was doing enough work then to justify making the leap and not get a new full time job, which was very nice. and you know, we're doing some projects and some things that we're charging on like, okay, if we're to build a website, it's going to be X amount. And that's just the flat number that we're going to charge. but what.

what that interview kind of really struck for me and we've kind of carried through till now is, you when it comes to, for the most part for us, a, like marketing, service, a marketing services agreement, something where we're going to be doing recurring work for a client, something where there are, quantifiable deliverables and things that we're going to be doing. And, you know, different folks on my team involved and how we're going to structure stuff like,

man, the hourly thing just doesn't work when like you're about to help somebody make like a million dollars or $5 million. And, you know, you're, you're frankly being taken advantage of in a lot of situations. So yeah, I'll stop there and pause for free to kind of dive a little deeper on it. But but yeah, it's been a game changer.

Jonathan (08:32.668)
Sure, yeah. Yeah, that's great. My guess is it was probably the future with Chris Doe that a lot of people saw that video back around that time. But yeah. So how do you, let's get into the specifics because a lot of people...

Ben Zettler (08:42.683)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, might have been it. Yep.

Jonathan (08:53.978)
don't use the term value pricing the same. they mean different things or it's a mix of things, a mix of different non -hourly or non -daily rate types of things. So when someone, when a new prospect comes to you, what does the initial conversation look like?

Ben Zettler (09:12.285)
So first, depending on what it is, I guess the example that we'll use to kind of go further with this is, let's say someone comes to us for an email marketing services retainer, which is a fairly common thing, especially in the last two, three years for us as an agency, where we do a lot of work specifically on Klaviyo as a platform and we've got a really great partnership with them and I'm sort of fairly deep knowledge there, but we work with sort of any platform.

So yeah, we may get an email marketing services inquiry. So the first thing that I'm going to do when getting on the phone with somebody is trying to understand what is it that they need? What is the gap that needs to be filled? Do they have in -house people that are currently doing something? Are they working with another agency? What are the typical weekly and monthly deliverables that they're looking for? What are the typical weekly and monthly deliverables that they should really be thinking about? If maybe we'd recommend structuring what they're doing in a different way

sending more campaigns or sending less campaigns. And so it's usually a conversation or two or audit of where things are to understand like, okay, what's the size and scale of this business? What's the potential impact that we can have? And then from there, we kind of back into, okay, here's how we're going to structure a proposal. Here's how we're going to lay out costs for what we

are and are not going to cover at different tiers. And the tier thing actually is actually what one of the things that sparked me from that interview with you a few years ago is, you you have one option, kind of the baseline option, the thing that, you know, you can do and you can have some impact, but it's relatively low lift for you, but still value for them. And then the middle tier, which most folks are ultimately going to go for in most cases, that

brings more that you're doing to the table, you're charging a little bit more for that. And then that third option that's sort of like the pie in the sky, like let's, let's have a little fun and throw a number out there and you know, highlight what you can do. And in some ways you kind of figure it out after and, we've taken that to heart. We've actually done that. And, and you know, you get the occasional person that says like on that third one, all right, sign me up. and that's joking aside, kind of where you understand like,

Ben Zettler (11:39.473)
where I think your understanding of like the limits of what you can do and how you can structure something and what companies are willing to pay for can kind of change and it can kind of help to shift your perspective on what makes sense.

Jonathan (11:52.398)
It's pretty eye -opening when people are picking three a lot. You're like, whoa, way, way underpricing myself. let's just keep drilling in here. Let's stick with the example of somebody who comes to you, want ongoing email marketing for their e -commerce store or site or business. Or do they typically?

Ben Zettler (11:55.259)
Yeah.

Ben Zettler (11:59.183)
Right, exactly.

Jonathan (12:16.998)
come to you with like a pretty clear idea of what they think they want and then you generally agree with it or is it kind of like they don't like why why are they talking to you about email marketing they already believe that that's the thing that they need and they've got they've done some research or maybe they've done it in the past or they they pretty much know enough to be dangerous and don't really know what they're talking about

Ben Zettler (12:39.549)
Yeah, I'd say 80 % of the conversations that we have are folks that most maybe are already doing email, but even if they're not, they have an understanding that, okay, we need to be doing something here or we're doing something here and it's not right or we're already working with folks and we're not happy with them, but we know that this is important. And then there's a smaller subset of folks that we talk to that

it's a little bit more of a pitch to help them just see the value of making an effort on email, like regardless of what we might do and what we might charge. yeah, most folks are coming in with this idea that, we understand that we need to do something here and we have to figure out how much we're ultimately willing to pay for it relative to what we're asking for.

Jonathan (13:31.97)
Right. And what are they looking at that tells them that whatever their current email marketing efforts are is, is not good. Like they must be looking at some number, like they're sending out X emails per day and it's, it has done nothing for revenue from before they even started. like, what is, what are they looking at? Open rates, conversions, click throughs.

Ben Zettler (13:56.315)
Yeah, you know, it's a lot of things, a lot of more technical things, I think now more than ever, especially with if you're familiar with it, like Google and Yahoo sender requirements updates that happened earlier this year and a lot of brands knowing that like, hey, if I send the wrong email or structure segmentation in the wrong way that I might be sending all my content to spam and I don't necessarily know how to navigate the technicalities of that.

so that's what a lot of people ultimately do talk about. it's folks that will say like, yeah, our, our open rates are tanking or our click rates are tanking. And now we're having all these bounced addresses and we don't know what to do or, or even on the, the opposite side of like it being more of a content focus, like we know we can do more with email and we hate how our emails look and we want, you know, we want that to be designed in a more effective way. And email is very much like, it's a technical discipline.

Jonathan (14:35.908)
Yep, okay.

Ben Zettler (14:53.177)
It's also, it's a visual discipline. It's, it's kind of these two things that are very much a yin and yang with each other. And honestly, when a brand comes to us and they're looking for help, I, you know, I've never spoken to anybody that's like, would say like, nah, there's nothing you could be doing any different. You guys are doing great. There's always an opportunity to do something more.

Jonathan (15:15.233)
Right. Well, that's what I like about about that is that, especially in the first case, but in both cases, they mentioned something that they're dissatisfied with, they're open rates or click throughs, or they're tanking, said, or we don't, we just don't like the way our emails look. They're, they're not on brand or whatever. We just hate them. So that's an

Ben Zettler (15:36.381)
Yeah, and sometimes there's a bonus one too, which is kind of related to the first two, but it's really more of on who they're working with, they're, who is currently running that for them, whether it's an in -house resource or whether it is a third party agency. This happens more often when it is an agency where they're like, Hey, we're just not happy. You know, we're not happy with the working processes that they've established. Maybe we're not happy with the price that we're paying and they start shopping around. So that's definitely

part of it as well, especially in situations where a brand has a little bit more of an understanding of the ins and outs of email or any service, but it comes down to service from the provider and communication and things like that that are less about the work itself, but just as important when it comes to closing business and maintaining those relationships with clients.

Jonathan (16:31.334)
Great, yeah, perfect. Okay, so when, so you get this information from them and how do you convert that sort of, the probably easiest one to talk about is like all of our emails are going to spam, our open rates are tanking.

How do you convert that into what's the conversation look like that allows you to kind of size up the company across the table and be like, okay, well, if their open rates weren't tanking, what kind of an effect would it have in absolute or rough rough guesstimate in absolute dollars for this kind of a company? how do you how do you that's the tricky part for most people is like, how do I translate this needle that they want me to move and I'm confident that I can move into a number?

Ben Zettler (17:17.585)
Yeah, there's a few ways to think about it and a few ways that we approach it as far as how we actually pitch the work. So I've always been pretty firmly on the side of I'm allergic to free work and I won't do anything for anybody unless they're paying me for it. Fortunately, it's probably unfortunately, the market has dictated that, we've got to do a little bit of free work.

because that's just sort of what folks expect nowadays. I have had thousands, literally thousands of conversations over the last 10 years with brands that we could potentially work with that in the past, things have been like sort of an, I'll call it easy, dare I say easy, one call close sort of situation. Like they reach out, we schedule a call, we get on a call, here's what we can do, here's what we charge.

Okay, great. Send me a contract. To where now it has really, really shifted. And I'd say for businesses of all sizes, kind of your SMVs, but even larger enterprise brands where teams are evaluating many different service providers and maybe it's macroeconomic effects, but slow decision timelines

really wanting to drill in on information and what can you provide and what can you do for us? And then you audit accounts and you do reports and you do proposals and then, thanks so much. We're gonna go with somebody else or thanks so much. We're not gonna hire anybody or that's only if you're lucky enough to get a response, you know, it's okay. Thanks. Great for sending. We'll let you know next week. And then you follow up three months later to then never still get a response about, about what you could potentially do for

So I mentioned all that because one of the things that has really changed in more recent time, so I'd say the last 10 months, specifically, like it's kind of shifted last summer, is some level of free work, frankly. Usually what we'll do, the way that I handle it is if we're evaluating a business to work with for email and SMS,

Jonathan (19:25.626)
Mm -hmm.

Ben Zettler (19:41.349)
I'll ask to at least do a high level review of those accounts to understand or to validate if you know what they're telling me is really you know what the case is here and I've had certain situations where I kind of go into an account and I say like well you said this was a problem doesn't look like a problem and you said this was a problem it doesn't really look like a problem but yeah like I said before more often than not like you're gonna go in there and there's gonna be areas of opportunity where they can improve there's gonna be some things

you kind of you check the box like, yeah, this is exactly what's going on that what you said or like, wait, look what you're not excluding any segments on any of your email campaigns. And so you're sending out to users that don't often engage with your messages. You're sending to users that often bounce. Like you're doing some things that at the end of the day and are not rocket science to fix, but can be really, really impactful. And then what we'll do is I will record a loom video.

do like a screen recording, depending on what the account is, it could be 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. I went overboard with one the other day, it was like an hour and 15, but do that and that just sort of informs our proposal. And that helps us to lay out a few different options for how we could work together. In fact, right before I hopped on this podcast with you, I sent one out to a potential client that we're hopeful to work with.

Jonathan (20:47.312)
You

Ben Zettler (21:04.345)
And you know what, we got a we got a rejection from somebody this morning that I haven't heard from in three weeks because you know, they went with somebody that they thought had more experience in a particular category, which was unfortunate, but you know, is what it is. But that's kind of been table stakes in the past. You know, if I were to do something like that, I would immediately talk about, you know, charging somebody for it. But that's just

what the market is right now. And now at the same time, what that enables us is to uncover maybe some opportunities that we didn't necessarily see from that first conversation. And does allow us to give, I think a wider range of options for how we could work with a potential client. So we can, you maybe lay some things out that are on, we'll call it kind of the lower end of things that they were asking for, but, you're not doing this, you're not doing this, you're not doing this.

And then, you know, we can give that that higher end package and that higher end package can be a little bit more informed than if we were just kind of pulling it out of that conversation from what they told us. Now to answer your original question about how are we quantifying all this and then creating a number and seeing what value we can have. Depending on the opportunity, we may go as far as to kind of do an analysis of

understanding what conversion on your website is for users that don't sign up for email versus users that do sign up for email and the same for SMS, which becomes a really key point in understanding. Well, your pop -ups aren't formatted in a way that's optimal for form submissions. Maybe if you did this and made this change to the design or if you started to

integrate a question to prompt users to enter zero party data, which we are doing across all of our accounts this year and has been massively impactful. So zero party data, information about someone. So something where you would ask a question that they would supply to you. Like if it's a coffee company, do you prefer ground beans or beans or coffee grounds or K cups?

Jonathan (23:03.702)
I've never heard that term with zero party data.

Ben Zettler (23:23.453)
Um, and having them answer that question in a pop -up before entering their email for their 10 % off their first order. It's like as simple as, as simple as that. Yeah. I mean, that that's what we've done across literally every account that we work with. And then there's tools that are out there that, um, can take that a step further in a dynamically, like essentially asking users different questions based on their previous responses, but then also be reporting on the.

Jonathan (23:30.69)
Okay, it's like pre -segmenting them.

Ben Zettler (23:53.181)
reporting on performance based on what users have responded with. But what that does is it allows you to to better identify users and personalize communications for them inside the body of your email and SMS, flows, automations, as well as your campaigns, but then also just leads to higher form submissions. So if we can say to a client, now that we have a pretty good data set from clients that we work with now, so I should say a potential client, if we can say to them

If you make this change and you increase your form submission rates, you 2X or 3X or 4X, then this is what you could expect from a revenue perspective and what the difference may be if you didn't make this change. You know, again, like depending on the opportunity, we may or may not go that far because, you know, for some where

maybe they're not the largest of businesses. Maybe they're only doing like 40, $50 ,000 a month in total across their entire business. Um, you know, if I start to supply too much information, then they're at the end of the day, just just going to take it and, um, try to self implement. And some folks do that. And then some folks then six months later come back and say, Hey, we tried it and didn't work for us. And we'd still love you to bring you in. But unfortunately that's fewer and further between. Um, so we,

Jonathan (25:03.6)
Yeah, they're gonna

Jonathan (25:15.324)
Yeah. So that, but that 40, $40, $50 ,000 month number, is that something that they would share with you during the sales process or during your, sort of free audit? Or can you just tell by looking like they've got a million people on their mailing list and they sell mattresses or something. And you're like, Oh, these guys are printing money.

Ben Zettler (25:27.094)
it can be both.

Ben Zettler (25:36.463)
Yeah, you know, you can tell pretty quickly by how a conversation goes, like kind of where, where a business might be. And sometimes folks are pretty open on that first call of giving you that information and, others are fairly protective over it. And what I find is that the smaller business is more protective over sharing that number and the larger business is not. Cause I think folks that are a little bit more seasoned and have a little bit of a larger business have an understanding that

I don't care what the number is. I just need to know what the number is to understand what the impact is that we can have. And you're asking for our help. Well, let me understand how we can help you. But again, I get it. I'm always happy to sign an NDA and get into it. But yeah, usually we're going to learn that information in a first conversation. And for the folks that are hesitant to share

What revenue are you driving currently across your business? Is that just D2C? Is that D2C versus Amazon? Are you present in retail? How much are you driving specifically with your email and SMS marketing? If that's the number that you're giving us, what are you using to measure? Is that last click in GA4? Is that in platform performance? Is that through a third party reporting tool and business intelligence tool? So there's

all these different questions and different ways that a conversation like that can go. Again, sort of depending on what the opportunity is. Like it's sort of split second decisions that I make on a call with many different questions floating through my head. But the reality is it's pretty quick and over time, cause you yeah, I've had, I've had thousands of these discussions over the last 10 years that, you know, it becomes a lot easier just to see, okay, what

Jonathan (27:13.093)
Yeah.

Jonathan (27:21.797)
Mm -hmm.

Ben Zettler (27:26.321)
what's a legitimate opportunity and what isn't. And for the ones that are, you end up going a little bit further from a, you know, call it free services perspective, but, but you got to do that. And then there's others too that come to the table with like, Hey, you know, we're happy to engage you for either an audit or strategy sessions. You know, you get on a screen share and go through things and, we love those cause cause what I like to do, and this is sort of my, is always my answer for free work is, you

we have a good conversation. You can tell that I know what I'm talking about. I like you as the brand. Okay, great. Everything's all good, but you're hesitant maybe to commit to a larger piece of work. Well, then you can bring me on or bring someone from our team on to do a strategy session, something to review something with you over the course of an hour. And then you move forward with a bigger piece of work. We credit that cost back. And we do that a lot. And I like that because

Jonathan (28:18.726)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Ben Zettler (28:22.917)
When folks that become clients that do that, to me that's a signal that like, they have some level of respect for my time and expertise. And then I can, with a little bit less pressure, give them advice, give them guidance, spend the time to do it. And then if they've decided to move forward with something, then great. It didn't cost you anything.

Jonathan (28:30.947)
Right. Yeah.

Jonathan (28:48.124)
Who is the ideal person for you to work with? Like, do you want to be working directly with the founder? Like, in the initial call anyway, when you set up a call, do you want the CEO or the owner, whoever the top dog is on that call? Or is it more like, is it someone, maybe a CMO or something?

Ben Zettler (29:10.375)
Whoever the decision maker is would be ideal in pretty much all situations, regardless of size of business. Obviously that's not always so practical. depend, depending on the size of the business, but you know, what I found is in e -commerce, at least there are, regardless of level, the size of your business or how many folks are actually on the team. There are a lot of similarities between let's say.

a single solo founder or two co -founders operating out of their apartment and doing something and drop shipping through a 3PL can be very similar to a fairly large household name brand that has a team running e -commerce. Usually an e -commerce team, and it's just changing over the course of last few years for the better, but usually a fairly

overworked team with limited resources. Again, this is not every case, but I find it happening often where the path to get to a decision maker is generally pretty short. So that's all a sort of good thing. It represents, I think for us, an opportunity where we can have impact because they may not have full -time staff running their social media. They may not have the person that's in -house that's running their email.

that is doing that right now may also be doing five other things. So if we're not talking to the person that's gonna say yes to a contract, if at the very least we're talking to the person that is currently doing the work being talked about getting replaced, that's great because then you can kind of relate to them, I think, on a little bit of a different level versus times where somebody might reach

they may be just kind of the fact finder. And when it's just the fact finder, then a lot of things can get lost in translation as far as what we do, the services that we provide, the value that we can bring to the table. Because then it's like a game of telephone. It's gonna get translated through them and through any other conversations that we're having with other potential service providers. And it's really hard to fight through that wall.

Jonathan (31:24.592)
Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah.

Jonathan (31:36.004)
Agreed, yeah. So let's talk about the three options. So you talk to somebody, maybe you do this sort of pro bono audit of their situation that ends up informing what you think the value might be. You set three prices based on the value. What is the, what are the, in a typical case, there is such thing as a typical case. It sounds like you do so many different things. Are the,

Is the lowest option, what are some common lowest options? Like do you ever put anything in there like, it's just a two hour strategy thing or a workshop where we'll train your internal person how to do it. Like is your option one ever something that's not you doing the work, it's you sharing your expertise in some other way? Like what different kinds of things do you put at that first level?

Ben Zettler (32:25.179)
Yeah. You know, it's funny you asking that question is making me rethink how I physically present this inside of our proposal documents. So the way that I typically present it, like the physical, how it looks in the thing that a potential client sees is when they get to like the pricing pages, they'll see a page that highlights usually title it as like audit options. And that could mean one of,

sometimes two, usually three things. The first one, the lowest of those options is just like a loom recording. Like the thing that I would in most cases make as part of a proposal, if it's clear from the initial phone conversation that that might be the extent of their budget, that might be the only thing that we might be able to help them with. I'm not just going to give it away for free. I'm either going to tell them, hey, we're not the best service provider for you, or I'm going to give them a proposal that says,

Hey, for $400 or whatever that number might be usually around there, I'm gonna go into your Clayview account or I'm gonna go into your Shopify account, I'm gonna go into your advertising account and take 20 to 30 minutes and give you like, here's all the things that you need to change right away. A second option within this audit or consultative pieces would be, I'm gonna do that, but I'm gonna do that on a live call with you, a screen shared session.

And for something like that, I might charge $750 to $850 is usually like somewhere within that that sort of bucket. And you know, during that time, it's whatever it is you want to cover during that time, whatever questions you have, great. Now I've had it's funny because I've had so many situations over the years where a brand will be like, great, sign us up. We'll do it. No

And then, you know, just one even the other day, but it's happened so many times where someone will also say, and this is what stemmed the post that had you then respond to me, they'll say, you know, that's more than I charge, I could get charged from a good lawyer in New York. And that example has actually been used on me on more than one occasion. But, you know, it'll be something to that effect where it's like, man, you charge that hourly. It's like,

Ben Zettler (34:45.789)
hourly, you know, how do you want to look at hourly? Like, are you looking to bring on a junior level resource? Are you going to looking to bring on someone that's got 10 years of experience working with over 400 different businesses, specifically in e commerce and doing exactly what it is that you're trying to do? And, you know, it's an opportunity for me to understand like, okay, how can I better pitch the value of that session? But that's another thing that we offer. And then a third, which I don't always present.

is a more formal audit. So something that's kind of an accumulation of a few different screen recordings and written report and a little bit more of data analysis on past performance. And is generally like, I call it fairly significant, you know, for whatever that means in relative terms, but it's something that's like a mid -four to high four figure job, depending on the opportunity.

Frankly, I don't do many of those. And even when I have conversations, I use it as kind of like an anchor point, like, hey, I could charge you if you want me to do this. And this is what I would, know, this is what you would pay me for it. But do you need that? And most brands don't. And some do and some go for it. But other than that, they might opt for something lower. Now, that's sort of like piece one. And piece two is the more tactical work of like, we might be managing the process for you.

we're running your email and SMS program. And here are some package options for how we would do that, which how we differentiate those is, for the most part, like what the deliverables are, on a lower end package where it might be, we're running a weekly campaign and we're taking care of, updating the sort of core automations, like a welcome flow, abandoned checkout flow, a browse abandonment flow. But then

That's sort of the extent of what we do. And then a higher level plan might be higher frequency of messaging. It would be, we're not going to charge you for dev work on your Shopify storefront for the integration of tools that will then integrate with your Clayview account and start to send data into that account so that we can send more effective automations in various forms. And then, you know, I said before that the question kind of sparked me to think, you know, rework how we structure it.

Ben Zettler (37:11.195)
I've kind of at certain points shifted away from like the three option thing and it's just kind of presented as two options and number two is just kind of like, like loaded with more that we're doing at a not significantly higher cost, but maybe, maybe it means presenting an audit option sort of anchored down on that page for someone so that they can see differences. something definitely to consider. then what I do also often do, because we'll have a lot of conversations with folks about.

Not just taking on email and SMS, but in combination with that potentially also taking on advertising work. And so what we do also often use as kind of a third option is, okay, well we've already, let's say presented, structured advertising work,

I haven't quite figured out pricing wise. know, I, at one point was doing sort of fixed rate and another point now have been doing for a long time. Like it's basically a fixed rate, but if you hit like a really high level of ad spend, then we start to charge you on percentage of ad spend, which I don't love and nobody loves, but a lot of folks that we're managing, like never reached that level anyway. So it doesn't necessarily matter, but then are we charging enough for what we're doing? So I have to rework that a little bit,

Jonathan (38:28.366)
Yeah, that one's tricky. I was actually going to ask you about that because you mentioned pay -per -click earlier. And one of the things that I find helpful to include in proposals, back when I was doing software stuff, sometimes there are going to be ongoing expenses that are just part of the thing that I'm building. it's not money that goes to me. But usually, those prices are comically low compared to how much they're paying me.

paper click That might not be the case It probably isn't the case for really big companies where they're spending way more on the ads themselves than whatever they're paying you to manage it I'm just guessing but I mean since it's kind of like so imagine a situation where I don't have an answer for this I'm just maybe we could just explore for a second where you're recommending to someone that

your recommendation is like, well, if you spend a quarter million dollars a year on ads, it's going to have this effect on your conversion rate or your whatever. Like I'm confident, me pretending to be you to the client. I'm confident that if you spent this much money in situation like you're in, it is going to be net positive, at least X percent, but maybe Y percent, which would be a huge home run. And

Yeah, I just it just the the percentage of the spend Would if you were good if if you if I was the client and you said that to me I'd be like well in my head I'd be like well you're getting a percentage of this spend so you're gonna be incentivized to maximize my ad spend So I hate that I don't want that I want I wouldn't want

Maybe the person you're talking to that's at that level doesn't care. It's not their money anyway. And they trust you that it is going to have, you know, they're going to get a promotion because it's going to work. Like they they're convinced that it's going to work too. They just don't want to do it themselves or they don't know how to do it themselves. But that's always that's always been a real head scratcher for me, because whenever I've been in a position in an advisory position with a client and I find myself.

Jonathan (40:45.236)
in a place where I'm like, well, the thing I need to advise, advise them the best thing I could advise them to do is to spend more money with me. It's really awkward. It's really awkward. And so, so it's kind of like, it's kind of like where what is the nature of the engagement? Is it? It's not in your case, it's not advisory. It's some of the some of the earlier stuff, the Loom videos and those sorts of things. Those are advisory. But then once you get into this ongoing

social media management, email management, and you're doing this like for some period of time, but what the paper, paper click one, it just, to me, that is a tough nut to crack. Like, yeah.

Ben Zettler (41:26.481)
Yep, it's hard. We've had similar, I'll call it difficulties in just determining like, A, how should we charge and then B, even once we get to the point of doing so of moving forward on a piece of work, then I would probably guess that there have been situations with clients that we've worked with where we haven't spent enough

It's not because I brought something to them and they've said, no, like I've probably myself been hesitant to bring a suggestion or my team might have been hesitant to bring a suggestion because then it's going to be that awkward conversation of like, well, we need to, maybe if we spent $10 ,000 more or $5 ,000 more or $20 ,000 more or whatever it might be, it doesn't, um, it creates this like weird thing. Now, one of the things that I'll do when trying

Jonathan (42:13.028)
Yeah, it critical mass or something.

Ben Zettler (42:21.909)
anchor down to certain prices and develop packages that we might be offering. When it comes to that combination of ads management, email, SMS, that's where I think we can sort of give a lot of value at a controlled price. So what I try to usually anchor to is like, know, this a package that we're combining the two together, we're either

knocking out the percentage of ad spend thing altogether or we're significantly modifying it so that, you know, until you get to like expend even further than what it was before, it's going to be a total non -factor. you know, a lot of the questions that I get, well, you're incentivized to just make us spend more money. My response is always, you know, if you spend more money than it doesn't work, then you're not going to keep working with us. So

you know, it's really a matter of like spending the money where it makes sense to and for the folks that do hire us, you know, that that generally works out fine for, you know, the folks that don't I think maybe that's one reason why they don't perhaps. So it's definitely something to look at as far as like how we

Jonathan (43:33.882)
Yeah, I mean, the only thing I could think of and I don't know if this would be profitable would be that it was all inclusive. So if your fee was all inclusive and it was results oriented and not deliverables oriented and you said, well, I'm going to you're going to give me a quarter of a million dollars and I'm going to increase some number that you feel like that they feel is important and you feel like you can control like traffic or conversion rate on

what's it called, new visitors. And then you just decide how to spend the money. Maybe you don't even do pay -per -click. Or maybe you do. Maybe you put all the money into pay -per -click. Or, you know, 50 % of it into pay -per -click. And it works. And then you're like, great, I'm done. So in theory, I don't know, I've never heard of anybody doing that. But, Ian, I also don't know if that like violates, you know, Google or Facebook's terms of service, if you're paying for some other person's ads or something.

Ben Zettler (44:32.955)
Yeah, you technically can. You as an agency can pay from your payment method to an ad account, but honestly, I would never want to do that ever. I never want to get into a thing of the clients paying us to run their ads. I could see it's getting so messy so quickly simply because...

A, well, one, just the accounting of that is gonna create a nightmare for my accountant and he's not gonna love me for it. But B, and this is the bigger thing for me is, I just getting people to pay their invoices is difficult enough. You know, it's just, it's, I, yeah, of course. It's just, it's just like, man, it's a whole nother hour that we could do on, you know, like, I'll.

Jonathan (45:14.365)
yeah, yeah. You'd have to get paid for that in advance. It's not your job to be a bank for them.

Jonathan (45:26.595)
Yeah, the risk is insane. that's why I, but if you imagine if somebody came to you and they said, Ben, we need to take our conversion rate from 20 % to 40%. And here's a quarter of million dollars to do it. We'll make five, if you can do that, we'll happily pay you that every year forever.

And, and then they just don't even say, we want you to do email, we want you to do tracking, we want you to do AV testing, we want you to do paper, they don't, they're like, I don't care what you do. We just want to increase this number from 20 to 40. Can you for a quarter million dollars, can you figure that out? And then you could just do whatever you want it. Maybe you do pay per click, maybe you don't. But the risk, you know, but the risk is you have to keep working until that number is achieved.

Maybe it takes maybe it takes two months. Maybe it takes two years. Maybe it takes 20 years. Maybe you never get there. So that's that's the risk with any kind of results oriented kind of promise, I guess proposal.

Ben Zettler (46:27.697)
Yeah.

Ben Zettler (46:33.137)
Yeah, that and I think also like what you'd actually be in charge of in that situation. So, you very often a lot of things that will come to the table and suggest to a client, even if we're only handling one single area of service, comes back to like the website, for example. We do a lot of that type of work, but if a client already has an in -house team or they already have an agency that they're working with for CRO

if they just decide like, we're happy with where things are and we don't want to make any changes. You know, when it comes to having that type of an impact on a business of like really growing things to a certain level, that's usually where we need to have some level of control across different areas of the business. You know, the landing pages that, right, the landing pages that might be created for an ad or for an email campaign or automation or

Jonathan (47:20.698)
Yeah, you'd need a massive amount of access to all of it.

Ben Zettler (47:29.785)
for structure for a product page or functional issues with the site or all these things that it just, it can get like, and we're happy to partner with folks like that and we do. There's folks that we work with that we're kind of like an outsourced marketing department and it's great, but most folks I find they just don't go for that because they have different.

Jonathan (47:34.896)
their DNS settings. Yeah.

Ben Zettler (47:57.799)
They have different resources in place and they have this expensive allocated in different places. So yeah.

Jonathan (48:01.05)
Yeah, they don't need it. what's the what are the well, like to look at the case, we're getting up to time, there's sort of one question that I know everybody's always curious about. Can you talk a little bit? Do you have any things that are?

monthly subscription type stuff like these recurring we're going to do your social media on an open ended basis and every month it's x dollars or do you do you is everything like a time boxed project

Ben Zettler (48:32.061)
Most of actually is that like obviously that changes for any inquiries that come through. Hey, we need this. We have an in -house resource and we're just going to manage it, but we'd like you to get it to a certain foundational level. But most engagements that we propose and also those that close and that we take on are more of, we're going to manage this process for you and we're going to do this for as long as you want us to.

Ben Zettler (49:00.829)
at the end of the day, like for growing the agency that has been really impactful thing of like bringing those services to the table. Like a few years ago, I think the majority of our work, have it on like a little chart here, about 50 % was project oriented work, raw revenue. And then today, year to date, we're not even just flipped,

at like 80 % of revenue is from like retained services. Like we're just, we're managing X on a monthly basis for you and we're running that as long as you want us to. And the things that change over time is a lot of times business might grow to a certain degree and they decide like, Hey, we want to bring in an in -house resource and give this a shot. Or the folks say like, Hey, this agency pitched us on something. We're going to try them because

I didn't we didn't tell you but we're not so satisfied with X, Y and Z and then four months later they come back and like this happened last year like somebody that we worked with for a few years went to a competitor agency of ours who we know well and a lot of people over there. They got pitched on you know all these things that they were going to do for them at a lower price than us and four months later I kind of took a look at things and say hey,

Jonathan (50:00.026)
Yeah

Ben Zettler (50:24.861)
this abandoned checkout flow that we put in place and this browse abandonment flow we put in place and this signup pop up and all these different things. It's all the same. It's all the things that I did for you two years ago. What's going on? And they said, well, you know, it's not working out. Can you give us a new proposal? But can you do it a 50 % less than what you were doing before? And I didn't do it a 50 % less. I did lower price and kind of structured things in a way that would incentivize us as a team over time. But then they didn't do it.

Jonathan (50:53.116)
Yeah, that's it.

Ben Zettler (50:54.363)
So it's just, it's kind of crazy like how that stuff sort of happens. And it's just stuff also that you have no control over. Nothing is permanent. Nothing, the same way that like you work a nine to five job that you are expendable no matter who you are. In the services business, nothing is permanent. And so for us, we're a smaller nimble team. Like I'm actually, and I haven't said this yet.

I am the only full -time employee though we do have a team of 27. We, a contractor, we've got folks all over the world, both US and abroad. Some folks that are doing anywhere from 35 to 40 hours a week and then others that I might just tap for a project here and there when it comes along and when it might be relevant for their skillset. But for me,

being that this is my business and I'm the only W2, I'm sales, higher level customer support, we'll call it. on the sales piece, it's always trying to find new folks. Yes, we're trying to service our current clients well, absolutely. with especially the way in the last 10 months that things have changed with how brands are evaluating potential partners,

just the volume of what we have to do and the conversations that we're having and these audits that we're performing, all these other pieces, we have to constantly be finding the next opportunity because, you know, like I use that example, like a long standing client been with us for two years, doing a lot of great work for them, helped them make millions upon millions of dollars with their email marketing. And they decided to go to somebody else and then it didn't work out anyway. So it just, you never know what can happen.

Jonathan (52:46.374)
I mean, that's pretty normal in my experience is that with someone who does know what they're doing, the big value comes early in the relationship, like where you get everything squared away, you set everything up the way it should be. And then the ongoing execution work is much lower value, but it's good revenue, it's stable and...

Ben Zettler (52:58.545)
Yep.

Jonathan (53:11.13)
And, but, but it's just not, it's seen as a cost. Usually it doesn't even, even with what you're doing, where it could be pretty easily tracked to revenue downstream. It's pretty normal for me, like whenever, whenever I was doing advisory retainers, it was like it, if it goes for three years, that's a long, that's a long engagement.

Usually it was like, you know, one or two, you know, I would guess I didn't ever look to look, but it feels like my advisory changes were around 18 months before they started to get like.

Like, what should we give Stark to do? We like having around, but we don't have anything for him to do right now because everything's squared away. And it's natural to part ways at that point. But obviously that's why you need to keep up the marketing engine and still be doing sales and going after these opportunities because they're going to churn. So yeah, it's inevitable.

Ben Zettler (53:52.241)
Mm -hmm.

Ben Zettler (54:09.573)
Yeah, it's inevitable. It's inevitable for sure.

Jonathan (54:14.47)
Well, cool, this has been super helpful. sure everyone's gonna love it. Can you tell folks, sorry, where can people go online to find out more about what you're doing? Maybe check out your website and see that picture of Shaq. And Mark Cuban too, I think I saw.

Ben Zettler (54:26.179)
absolutely. Yeah, Shaq, Mark Cuban, I think the picture of Wayne Gretzky is up there too. So zetlerdigital .com, Z -E -T -T -L -E -R, that is our agency website. And again, we support folks with three core services of site development, email and SMS, advertising, you can even throw social media in there just giving my background, primarily e -commerce brands that we work with though.

We are super fortunate to have a lot of really great relationships with athletes and do a lot of like personal branding type of stuff as well. but I'm super active on LinkedIn and Twitter, just at Ben Zettler, always happy to engage with folks and kind of, you know, put, put, you know, a lot, a lot of discussion out there in this fear, which is how we got sort of connected here. And, know, selfishly, I'll, I'll say this because I have over the last year gotten significantly more active, particularly on LinkedIn,

You know, there, there, there is a motivation to doing that. Like the reason why I am is because I recognize the impact that LinkedIn and sharing content about our business and best practices for the tactical things that we can do for folks, um, can add value to people reading it, but can also lead to, um, know, us getting potential work opportunities. And some of our biggest, um, some of our biggest clients that we've had in the last 10 years have

come because they found me on LinkedIn. And that's something that people should like really embrace to be honest with you. I mean, it just it's so impactful and it's so important. And if you're going to say that you can do all these things on at least as far as like online marketing goes, then you have to be able to able and willing to to market the same for yourself. So I hope I hope that folks can connect with me. And if anybody is curious about like our approaches to anything, you know, I'm trying

try to be as open of a book as possible and I'm always out there to have good conversations.

Jonathan (56:30.544)
That's great. Thanks so much, Ben.

Ben Zettler (56:33.103)
Awesome. Thank you. Thanks again for having me and I'll look forward to seeing the episode.

Jonathan (56:37.893)
Excellent. Alright folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Bye.