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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 Chris Marr. Chris is the founder of the authoritative coach and a trusted trainer for agency account management teams. He helps client facing teams move from order takers to trusted advisors with a focus on strategic communication, peer level leadership and account growth. His book, the authoritative coach offers a blueprint for turning account managers into confident client leaders. And I wanted to have Chris on because so many agency owners lose clients due to this, the soft skill gap on their team, and he knows exactly how to fix it. So in this episode, we discuss moving from people pleaser to peer level partner, the most critical and most missing account management skill, how agency owners sabotage account managers without realizing it and more. Lead Gen is the hardest part of running an agency. For most it's unpredictable, it's slow and it's usually expensive. Jia flips that. It's the all in one growth platform that turns your existing relationships and client work into a steady pipeline. Gia automates lead gen follow up and content, and it's all from the work you're already doing. You can check it out and get some free bonuses at get gia.ai/dynamic
Unknown Speaker 1:13
agency,
Unknown Speaker 1:15
and now Chris Mar
Unknown Speaker 1:18
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. So
Unknown Speaker 1:36
what's the difference between an order taker and a client leader in account management?
Chris Marr 1:41
Yeah, good place to start, I think, right this, this really encompasses my work, Chris, which is like, how do we get people from order taker to authority or from people pleaser to peer? Right? In other words, how can we have people walk into walk? I mean, most times these days, it's online. But how can we have our account managers appear present in every room, feeling truly like a peer and being treated like one as well? So this is all about perception, but that really comes from what's going on inside that person, right? So it's high level of self respect and self confidence and self assurance. So that's the difference, really, I'd say, like, broadly speaking, it's the difference between someone who has low self confidence, low self assurance, low self respect, and somebody who has high self respect and self confidence, those are two entirely can be the same person, but that's a journey we want to take people on knowing that the level of respect that you get from your clients can never be higher than the respect that you have for yourself. So we're on this journey to help people through that right, which is give them the skills, the competencies, everything. We're probably gonna talk about a bunch of this stuff today, to help them feel confident going into these rooms, knowing that they can handle any situation, like no matter what it is, and feel really good that my training will show up and I'll be able to, like, tackle this. So, you know, an order taker is a yes person. A people pleaser is, you know, sweeping things onto the carpet is not seen as like a strategic partner. It's not somebody that a client's going to go to and ask for strategic guidance, or maybe even, like, take some problems to as well. So, hey, could you help us, like, think through this problem? It's not going to be like that. The relationship. That. The relationship is going to be entirely different. And so someone who's like a client leader, you could say, or, you know, a peer or a trusted authority, is what I would call it, as somebody who's challenging their clients, like pushing back on their ideas.
Unknown Speaker 3:37
I always talk about this idea like, we want our account managers to be in a role where they're expediting decision making. So that means is like, instead of slowing decisions down, we're speeding them up, right? So we're challenging people to make choices now
Unknown Speaker 3:51
force clarity. So how can I help my clients to be more clear about what they want, what they need, how they're going to get it, and to set strong strategic goals, expert recommendations.
Unknown Speaker 4:04
Oftentimes this is also managing things like scope creep as well and boundaries, and also your ability to you know if you're if you're a client authority or a client leader, you're also really good at managing all the different stakeholders. So I see the account manager very much at the heart of the agency, managing the external stakeholders got to manage the internal stakeholders. Got to really understand and how to manage up towards agency ownership as well, whilst at the same time, you know, driving towards the result that the client's looking for as well. So there's quite a lot going on in an account manager role, more like when you start to really unpack it and think about it. It's actually quite a critical role. I don't know that it gets that critical look at it from the agency owner perspective. And I think it's time to perhaps put the agency account manager a little bit higher up on the pedestal so we can see this actually, these these people are playing, playing a critical role.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
So not just in the client relationship and their ability to drive results for the client, but also retention for the agency and growth for the agency.
Unknown Speaker 5:09
Yeah, I think that's, that's how I would, you know, talk about it and think about it, right? One of the, one of the things you brought up in
Unknown Speaker 5:19
there, the ability for an account manager to step into any situation, just have the confidence that they can work through that, yep, like, I've worked with a lot of agencies I don't like that is a very, very difficult skill for account managers to have, because the natural inclination is like, let me just give them what they want so that they're happy. My boss will be happy, right? They move into the people pleaser tendency. How do you help them shift away from that?
Unknown Speaker 5:48
Yeah, there's a lot. I think there's multiple factors here. I think you're hitting on something though, like, as originally, like, how that account manager is really set up to fail from the very beginning, which is, you know, Chris, you're really good with clients. I think you'd be a great Account Manager. In other words, you're polite, you're nice, you're friendly, you're all the things that in the people pleaser camp. And
Unknown Speaker 6:12
I think once you get into higher stakes situations with clients, you realize that those are not the skills that are going to help you. In fact, those are the skills that are going to hold you back from being successful in your role. And so I think it starts internally. You know, about the culture around what an account manager role is and the skills that are required to be really great at it. So I would start, I would absolutely start internally there. Like, what I hear a lot is keep the client happy. You know, some of these account management teams are called delight teams. Like, that's literally the name of their department, and their name of their role is is somewhat setting them up to fail as well. Like they're putting they're basically being positioned incorrectly. And so I think we need to look at how we position them, how we talk about that role, how we communicate that to the client. Like I would be looking at changing the job description, changing the job title, changing the bio on the website of the people that are in these roles, making sure that the account executives and the owners actually edify and have credibility statements for these people, so that they're not just simply here to make sure that you are going through the project successfully, or whatever it might be, but there's an actual critical element to the role and how it like links directly to the success of the client and the results that they're looking for that specifically answers your question. But close to mind, no, I think it was a loaded question, because I don't know there's any like one, lots of factors. Number one is, like, definitely, how we set it up from the beginning, I would say also there's, like, I think less something, like, less than 5% of account managers have had any formal communication training, right? So like that just screams massive problems, you know? And it's not just that they've never had formal communication training. It's just not like an area that agency owners are investing in either, because it's not, because it's not seen as a critical role, right? And then, and then it's just yeah, and then it's not, then they don't have a they're not willing to invest in it, so like there's no money going into and then no one gets the training. And then they wonder why we're losing these clients, or we're not able to have these or there's loads of escalations. Or like the agency owner, like, look at your life as an agency owner. You wake up in the morning worrying about what's going to go wrong today, what client fires you're going to have to put out, what escalations you're going to have to deal with, what cancelation conversations you're going to have with clients today. You should be asking yourself, why is my team not able to handle these high stakes conversations, and I call this the babysitter trap, is likely for agency owners that are listening is like the skills and the strengths that you had to build your agency are now your weakness, right? You, you know, solving client problems, bringing in strategic guidance, and closing deals, all that stuff that you did before is now you have to trust other people to do that work. So you can focus on direction and vision and growth of the agency. But if you're continuing to do all this work, put out these fires, jump in and save the day. They call it a god complex, you know, like, it's only like the way that someone might say this is like, if you want something done right, do it yourself. But as an agency owner, as your team grows, your ability to work through people and lead people is the strengths and the skills that you need to develop and allow other people to do it. So this babysitter trap becomes the lid and the reason why account managers can't grow, and it's also a reason why they leave as well. Like, it just they aren't going to stay in an agency where there's no growth for them. Like, if I'm not getting exposed to more and more challenging conversations and challenging client situations, then I'm I'm not going to grow. And if I'm not going to grow I'm not going to get promoted. And if I'm not going to get promoted I'm not going to make any money. And.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
More money, and so I go find other opportunities. And so I think really, I mean, when you when you pull it, when you peel it all back, it's this all starts with the agency owner and how they see the role their investment into that role, and how their own behaviors perhaps are affecting success in that role as well, right? So if they don't want to necessarily spend money on the training, I think a lot of agency owners are probably looking for the experiential like learning path. Yeah, is there a way that they can absolutely gonna set them up for success more? So yes, if that's the route they choose 100% so here's what I encourage every agency to do. They have to do really two things that are almost like the you know,
Unknown Speaker 10:48
that's just pushing on the door here that opens up everything else, which is
Unknown Speaker 10:52
role playing. Okay, so we want to do real role plays. So if you're an agent zeroer, and you've been building your agency for 10 years or longer, you're going to have a ton of client experience. You've got to know the good, bad and ugly of it. Ugly of every situation you've ever been in. Your job now is to play those scenarios out with your team and role play it with them from the lower stakes right through to the higher stakes, making it really difficult and challenge your team to respond to these situations. So the general rule is here is like, we don't want to practice on our clients. We want to practice on each other. So then we work with our clients. We're well practiced. So role playing, then knocks has a knock on effect to reps, right? Want to get more reps. Like, think, you know, think about practicing your backhand and tennis, right? It's like you've got to hit that ball 1000 2000 3000 4000 times, right? So we want to get reps in. So role playing naturally leads into more reps, and you as the owner are bringing in these scenarios and getting people to role play them out as that's one of the first things. So we want to create a culture of practice and improvement in there. So in other words, you could say we would really like our agency owners to be more coach like in their approach with their account management team. So how can I coach these guys to to grow and improve, and then, over time, releasing things? It's like, right? I'm not, I'm no longer going to deal with these situations. You're going to handle these now. So when this happens in the future, you don't say, I'll get Chris to help you with that. You say, I'm going to deal with this. And over time, your account management team are doing more of the more high stakes stuff, giving you the time back to go and do the more visionary and growth stuff for the agency. So that's number one. And the second thing is a culture of what I call, call swaps. So if you and I were on the same team, Chris, I would send you one of my client sessions to watch. You would send me one. I would watch yours. You would watch mine. I would give you feedback, you would give me feedback, but at the same time I'm watching you, I can see the things that you do better than me, and then I'm learning from you, and so on and so forth. That's just another like, another cultural shift that we're looking for this idea of like process, a learning culture, a learning organization. Those are the two things that, if those are happening, I know that the agency is growing both at the individual level and at the organizational level, so it's two examples of like, just cultural shift that we're looking for.
Unknown Speaker 13:13
You hear about sales teams all the time watching re watching calls, but yeah, I don't know that. I know any agency owners that are re watching client meetings to see what they could be doing better for from an account management Yeah, I would add one thing to that, which is high performing sales teams do it, right? Like, the reason that we have a successful sales coaching program is because most sales teams don't actually do it, which is interesting, but what you're saying there is true, right? It's like, where we typically see this is in sales teams. What we're doing is also saying that. Like, I mean, I mean, it's obvious when you say out loud, right? Of course, if we want to learn and we want to grow and we want to do that, like rate, right, want to want that steep learning curve, we absolutely need to throw ourselves into practicing
Unknown Speaker 13:58
the things that surprise us. Like, we don't want to get onto a client call, and the client says something, and we flinch. Then we're on the back foot. We're on our heels. The client's in control, and suddenly we're supplicant to the client. We don't want that. We want to practice these so we don't flinch, so that we can lean in. So that's why practice is so incredibly important. So when I'm working with account management teams, Chris, like partway through, mostly like, when we get halfway through the program, I teach them how to role play and do their call swaps, so that they can actually start embedding this stuff internally into the organization, so that the teachings actually stick right, so they actually make a difference over the long term. How
Unknown Speaker 14:36
do you recommend teams actually roll that out with like? So just looking across a lot of clients I have, they could definitely benefit from some account management training, sure, but when they look at how much they currently have on their plate, it's like they they don't have the extra time to be able to sit down and plan that unless they were to reprioritize everything. Yeah, I guess what's the what for?
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Step for an agency owner? Well, the first step is you've got to treat it with the level of importance. That's a priority, right? If it's not priority, you're definitely not going to do it. So you have, at some point, you're going to have to, you're going to have to just say this is a priority, and we're going to fit it in, and we're going to have to hire more people. I would say, nine times out of 10 the account managers I'm working with are absolutely no question about it. Got too many accounts. There's not enough time for like, even advancing their thinking like they're too busy just dealing with what's in front of them. They don't even have time to sit down go. What would be good advice for this client? Right? There's if we want our account managers to have the even the opportunity to be even more strategic with our clients, we're going to have to give them space to think and think and do things that aren't just being on review sessions with clients. So
Unknown Speaker 15:49
I don't know that this is this
Unknown Speaker 15:52
is something that agency owners
Unknown Speaker 15:55
need to understand. Is that? What is it? What does a learning culture look like within an agency,
Unknown Speaker 16:04
at some point, your agency is going to get to the point where, this is my core thought here, which is that action drives out thought, right? So if there's just lots of firefighting, everyone's super busy, and like, we don't seem to be growing, but everyone's busy, and we're making like, we're not making enough money, and revenue's not going up, but we're getting busy and busy. What's going what is going on? Something's wrong here, right? There's a, there's a there's a limiting factor somewhere, right? And if that's the case, there's absolutely no way that anybody individually is going to be growing professionally in the agency. And if nobody is individually, get the individual level, if they're not growing, your agency is not growing like your agency growth represents the individual. And so we want to make time for individual professional growth in the agency. These people are assets to agency over time. And so if we can invest in them and their coaching and their training, they're more likely to stay with us. They're more likely to add more value to the agency. And I mean, that's what we're really here for, isn't it, so that means you look after our people better. I think in that regard,
Unknown Speaker 17:16
lot of agencies will obviously the founder starts off as being the account manager and the one doing the work and doing everything, then they slowly start accruing team members. A lot of times, the account manager is also the person doing the marketing or whatever, whatever the account is. Is there a certain point or size where you recommend having, like, a deliberate account manager role that's separate from the person who's just doing everything, and it's just manage, focus on managing that account, helping to expand it. And, yeah, it's a good question a specific time. I don't know that I'd have a specific time you would want to if you have a comment on this as well, this is how I would approach it. You. Maybe you could give me a different perspective here. I would say that this should be for owners, are constant, like you should be constantly questioning yourself, like what you're doing. So when you look at your calendar, you should be asking yourself, where what am I growing out of that needs to come off my calendar and go into somebody else's so that I can have more time to add something else on. And here's where I think most owners. So when I say owners, a lot of the problems we're talking about, by the way, are true in any growing business, not just agencies. Like the lack of learning culture in most organizations is a problem, not just in agencies,
Unknown Speaker 18:34
but in this case, I would say, here's, here's. What I'm thinking is, when you hire new people, you can hire to increase capacity
Unknown Speaker 18:46
and or buy back your time. Okay, my sense is that a lot of agency owners are buying are hiring people to increase capacity,
Unknown Speaker 18:57
but at some point you need to be asking yourself, where what I need to hire to hire to buy back my time. So if you're looking at your calendar and you're doing like jobs, tasks that you were doing 10 years ago that are way below your pay grade and you shouldn't be doing, I would question that and say you need to hire now to buy back your time. And so when you're looking at this is just a cycle where you're saying to yourself, right, I'm too busy. I'm maxed out. I'm overwhelmed. I'm doing 80 hours a week, and I would say to your say to you, at this point, you're hitting a pain line. What is it that you've got to raise the floor now and say I'm no longer going to do these things. Either we need to get them off my plate, into the team, or we to hire somebody, or maybe more than one person, to do some of these jobs now so I can get that time back on my calendar. And so those are the two things I think about, are we hiring for capacity, or am I hiring to buy back my time and then raising the floor to make an agreement with yourself you're no longer going to do certain things so you can, and you're just, this is just a constant check in Chris. You're like constantly asking yourself, am I spending my time doing the most value?
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Work,
Unknown Speaker 20:01
or am I spending my time doing work that's below my pay grade, and as a result, I'm actually, you know, in some ways, stopping somebody else from earning a buck, right? Earning having a job because I'm doing it for them. So I would say that that is less about a specific time and more about a constant checking that I'm spending my time doing the most valuable work that I can do for the agency. Yeah, I can get behind that. I think one of the challenges there is the
Unknown Speaker 20:33
had a conversation with Nick Bennett on a podcast episodes ago, but we we talked about the people want to charge what they're worth. And so when you when you put like a value on your time, you might say, Well, I'm worth 200 an hour, sure. And a lot
Unknown Speaker 20:49
of times people don't. There's no that's not bad, like bound by any fact, it's just like, This is what I feel like, Sure. So I think a lot of agencies will jump into early hiring for some of those things,
Unknown Speaker 21:00
because their time might actually be worth 50 bucks an hour right now, and you're not actually as far along as you think you are, you don't have the skills to be able to train someone to do those tasks. You don't. You don't, might not even have a clear definition on what those tasks are. And so I agree. I think I like everything you just said. I think the challenge might be that an agency owner is not thinking through what, where they truly are within, like, the growth of their agency.
Unknown Speaker 21:26
Yeah, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 21:29
This is kind of like, way I think about it. It's like, it's almost like a replacement ladder, like, what should be your first hire be, right? Probably some type of assistant, right, General assistant that helps you with, generally with it things that person can help you build out your standard operating procedures and build out your roles. Then as that becomes more mature, you can hire other people, you know? So I think there's a, there's just Pro, it's just this, I have it as a loop. It's like a, you hit a pain line at some point, and you're gonna be you're like, right? I can't do any more. Something's gotta go. And it's like, who, like, what would be the best thing for me to do right now, hire this person to do this stuff. Great. Let's get that off my plate, and then I can then spend my time doing the next thing, and, you know, so on and so forth, to the point where you're getting your first sales person in the door, right? Like, that's probably one of the last people you'll hire is someone to sell, because you're probably pretty good at that as an agency owner, so, yeah, I think it's more like just this, checking in all the time and making sure that you're asking yourself, like,
Unknown Speaker 22:30
you know, it's all opportunity cost, isn't it? Like, if I'm dealing with client issues all the time and client work, you're not focused on strategy for your agency. You're not You're not You're not building your agency, are you? So it's an opportunity cost there. Yeah. So being able to identify what tasks are the most important for you to work on, yeah, one of one of the hiring it's like a loose model, instead of, like, using it's just the more, better, new idea. And so, like, your first hire is going to be someone who can help you do more what you're currently doing. In doing that, you're now collecting more data by doing more. And then you can start you can find someone help you do things better, because you have enough data to see what works what doesn't.
Unknown Speaker 23:10
If you've only got one client, right, you can't really say, All right, let's do this better. It's like an element I don't have two points on a map to even be able to like, see what the trend line looks like. And then finally, once you've done that, now it's we look at the new All right, we've like, fully optimized for everything. We've maximized what we can get. Now let's look at something new within the organization, and then you just kind of restart that cycle, and at some point it does become a, okay, well, right now, do we need more, better or new? And your hire is based on that, sure. So boost model. That's been helpful before. Yeah, yeah, that's good. I like that. I think it works quite nicely with the whole idea, am I hiring for capacity or buying time back as well? Can that could be another filter? Perhaps that comes in there, yep. But what you're, you know, what we're hitting on here as well, though, is like getting the time to think about this stuff. You know, it's like, you know, if we can make sure that our agency owners are protecting some of their time every week to at least think deeply about these different experiments. You know, one of the things I think a lot of people generally struggle with is like sitting with a blank piece of paper and just thinking about the decisions they want to make, and even being divergent about it, like people get in their own way about these decisions. They think, well, what if I just, like, sacked everybody? They're like, Oh, we can't do that because, and it's like, with that that what would what if, you know, they get into this idea of, like, it's reality, when actually, all you're doing is sitting with a blank piece of paper. Like you can, you can basically do anything with a blank piece of paper. You can really think through all your different options. And I think, I think would all benefit if our owners were able to have a bit more time to think, yeah, I 100% get behind that.
Unknown Speaker 24:57
If you're, let's say we're talking directly to an A.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Agency owner now sure they have, how do they know, like, what red flags are there to know when, like, an account manager has been kind of disarmed within the client relationship, and they might actually need to step in to get things back on track, or do do something else to fix to save that relationship? Yeah? So when you say disarm, they're basically ineffective. Yeah, right. Okay,
Unknown Speaker 25:26
well, I guess the first thing is, this is really back to the callback to what we've talked about already, is like, how would the agency owner know this, right? So likelihood is the client's going to go straight to the owner, perhaps, and express their, you know, frustrations or challenges directly with the owner. Or, you know, hopefully the owner is maybe watching some of these recordings and picking it up themselves. Or maybe there's some type of insight loop happening within the agency, where the account managers are reporting in on their concerns, or whatever, where they've mishandled something or not don't feel confident handling something. But you know, so I think you know, where does this coming from? But a red flag in client relationships are like,
Unknown Speaker 26:08
Yeah, I think where the conversation is becoming quite high stakes, right? So this could be like the client saying, you know, we're having these problems, or we're not getting the results that we're looking for, and they're continuing to be unhappy with what we're doing, but the account manager isn't able to have a breakthrough with them, right? Isn't able to go deeper into it. So I think there's like this inability, or a lack of skill around listening to a problem and then, and then, even when you don't know the answer, the solution to the problem being able to actually work through it with a client. So a lot of times, client comes to you with a problem, and we freeze like, I don't know how to solve this. You know, you're not always supposed to know how to solve it. Your job is to go tell me more about this. How long has it been happening? When did you first find out? Has this happened before? Has anything worked in the past? Has anything changed recently that could have caused this? Right? You see, we're going it's like these, this questioning skill, this ability to move through a problem and actually get on the same side of a table of a client with a client, actually look at the problem together. I think is a good sign that we've got a more mature account manager that they can actually embrace the frustrations and actually lean into it. So if you've got client that's like, if you've got an account manager that's like, sweeping all this under the carpet and not just going, Okay, that sounds, you know, it sounds rubbish, you know, blah, blah, blah, and isn't really getting into it, lots of justifying, lots of explaining. If you've got an account manager that seems to talk all the time, that's probably a red flag saying yes to everything and not managing scope, correctly accepting poor quality work, not pointing out mistakes that people are making, both internally and externally. If clients are doing that,
Unknown Speaker 27:52
letting clients dictate the plan. Let clients dictate the standards. These are all red flags, I would say where you know, if I was watching a call with, you know, a call recording, and I could see that the client was like, in control and was dictating everything. That would be a red flag.
Unknown Speaker 28:10
These are all things that come to mind for me certainly. Yeah, the account manager doesn't have their arms around it. They're not in control. They're behind instead of a head. They're on the their heels rather than the balls of their feet. You
Unknown Speaker 28:27
know, if I asked a, you know, if I was to, like, Spot check, you could say, like an account manager, if I say, hey, that client you were just speaking to there, tell me, what does success look like for them? What's their goal?
Unknown Speaker 28:37
Well, I don't really, what do you mean? That's a red flag. Like the rule should be that you should know the goal, and you should know what success looks like for the client. Every, every client should have a goal. And so those would be, those would also be red flags,
Unknown Speaker 28:51
another obvious one, maybe as well as like,
Unknown Speaker 28:55
like internally within the agency, the agency owner might say something, why didn't we know about this sooner.
Unknown Speaker 29:02
Why is the client bringing this problem to us when we should have spotted that earlier? That's a red flag.
Unknown Speaker 29:08
Yeah, yeah, those are all good ones. So I guess. What would you say is, if
Unknown Speaker 29:15
an account manager had to focus on one skill, to just say, if I could just crush this, it would solve a majority of the account management problems. What would that skill be? Skill?
Unknown Speaker 29:28
What would the skill be? The skill would be
Unknown Speaker 29:33
to
Unknown Speaker 29:34
be more curious, ask, don't tell.
Unknown Speaker 29:38
I think that broadly encapsulates what we're really want to do is to lean in to tension and frustrations and be much more curious about where all that's coming from. And I think it's less of it's a skill,
Unknown Speaker 29:53
it's more of a principle, you could say, or a method, a way to work with a client, is.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
This idea of question first, and then to go deep with questions as well and be absolutely comfortable asking questions of your client knowing that whoever's asking the questions is in control of the conversation. I think a lot of account managers really feel that if I'm doing all the talking, I'm in control, but that's not the case at all.
Unknown Speaker 30:20
So, you know, I think it's that skill, plus a number of things that we've talked about today, you know, being able to,
Unknown Speaker 30:29
you know, force clarity with a client, being able to get them more clear, been able to get them to articulate their goal and what success looks like, being able to raise the stakes with a client so that the work that we're doing feels important and meaningful to them. This is all and this is all like beyond, I would say this is like the outcome from your ability to ask really great questions. Yeah, so this one is not the most important skill, but it was a skill that I learned along the way that was stopping me from being curious and like, I would fill the game. It's basically called owning the silence. When you ask a question, it's being able to sit there silently and wait for someone to actually answer the question. We always feel this like obligation, like, oh, there's silence. I have to fill it with something. And when then you start talking over and like, and the client just knows you're going to talk, and so they don't actually have to answer the question. You never get to the heart of the matter. So sometimes just sitting there and, like, forcing it out of them, because people feel uncomfortable, right? Like, when there is silence, people want to fill it. You just got to let them own it. People need to slow down.
Unknown Speaker 31:39
This, the issue I've seen is like, we're going too fast, and we need to slow down, do less, but do it better, and that does mean asking good questions, and then being able to, like, be confident that the question you've asked is a good question, and that people need time to think as well, and just let let the conversation happen quite naturally.
Unknown Speaker 31:59
We get in our own way a lot about all of this, right? We, we we want to, like,
Unknown Speaker 32:05
we just get uncomfortable with all of this, but we need to. We need to step into it and embrace this. That's a part, like, part of the work I do is, like, we call imposter syndrome, right? It's just a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And really, the way to get there quickly is to lean into all the difficult and awkward situations. Is actually be like, actually, know what? I'm just going to sit in this tension this time round and really feel it and let myself work through it with the client. And that's going to be you proving to yourself that you don't have to, like, talk your way out of things that are difficult or, you know, try and pull away from them, you're actually going to lean into the tension and the difficulty. And I think that's one of the things I like to encourage people to do, is just, like, just step into it. You're going to, yeah, okay, it might go badly, but either way, you're, you're get a vote for yourself in terms of your ability to actually step into those things. So it's skills, and it's also exposure, you could say, like, a bit of exposure therapy in our work, as well as, like, not running away from it anymore, but actually stepping into it. Yeah, yeah. That's a good that is a great way to put it, exposure therapy, yeah, once you're once you've had enough clients, it's like, I've seen this before. You've seen it before, exactly. And most people aren't, like, nobody's going out their way to attack you, right? People are frustrated because they're unclear. They're misunderstood something. They're afraid of something. And as soon as you know that these are humans, these are human beings that you're working with, it's like your job is to disarm them, like through asking great questions and seeking to understand before being understood, it's like these are all timely, like classic, Evergreen communication principles, right? People aren't going out their way to deliberately attack you. They're frustrated because something's going on. Figure out what it is. Help them work through it, and they'll have a better experience with your agency than they ever have with anybody else, because of it
Unknown Speaker 34:02
awesome, and that's probably a good place for us to move into our last two questions, sure. First being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read? Oh, man, so many books, right? You know the book that comes to mind? I'm sure everybody, every agency has read. It is the business of expertise, by David Baker. I love that book. I think it's like a repeat read for everybody every year to just go back to and be like, right, how are we moving towards this idea of being an expert in our industry?
Unknown Speaker 34:32
I love that book, and I think he's I think it's all on point for agencies especially, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 34:39
yeah. We had Dave on at this point when this one goes, this one goes live, this will probably like 30 episodes ago, but, uh, awesome. Love that. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, going back to that podcast, I'm sure it would be good for for most people as well, but that's the book that certainly is front of mind for me. Yep, right now. Yeah, awesome.
Unknown Speaker 34:59
Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
And where can people actually grab a copy of your book? Yeah, just so everywhere, like it's on Amazon. And if you want to know a little bit more about it, go to the authoritative coach.com and you'll find a bit more about it there, and you can download some free chapters and all that good stuff as well. Awesome. We'll get that linked up in the show notes. And then finally, where can people find you, right? Yeah. So LinkedIn, Instagram, there's that's where I'm most present. So just the authoritative coach on both platforms. And if you DM me about anything, I'm there. So anything that you've picked up on the show today, if you want to know more about these things, they can drop into my DMs and ask me anything, and I'll be there. Yeah, awesome, Chris. Thanks for joining. Thanks, Chris, it was great conversation. Cheers.
Unknown Speaker 35:47
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai