$5 Million Dollar Case Study through the Coronavirus | Ep 13

Speaker A

00:00:00.640 - 00:24:34.280

This is episode 13 and I dig into a recent case study with a $5 million client that I helped unlock growth through the coronavirus chaos. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. Hey. Hey. Welcome to the episode. It's been a while. I feel a little rusty. The month of May disappeared on me.

I feel like the distractions and the chaos through this coronavirus have interrupted lots of my patterns and lots of my effectiveness. I think it's common across the board.

A lot of us think that we're gonna have all this free time because we're on lockdown or we've got our business shut down or temporarily reduced, or our job's been furloughed or whatever, and we think we're going to get to all of this proactive stuff. But I think the instability of society right now is draining the mental ram out of us.

And I've just got too many friends, too many clients that we all can swap notes and feel like we're in the same spot. So back at it at the podcast. Got some good stuff to dig into today. Hope you're thriving wherever you're at.

Hope that your local jurisdiction is releasing the restrictions. As we head into June out here in Hawaii, it's as bizarre as ever. Our governor's doubling down, saying that the lockdown is going to continue.

Stores and restaurants can open in June, but no interisland travel is allowed. Currently, you've got a 14 day quarantine anytime you land somewhere.

And, and so anybody visiting, if you go back to the mainland to visit friends or family or go on business and come back, you've got a quarantine for 14 days. So I don't see that ending anytime soon.

So seeing that all of this distraction and uncertainty in society affects my productivity, I'm committed to sharing concepts and ideas that help you and get me back on focus. Because the thing I found is the more that I teach, the more that I share, the more that I do.

In the end, it's one of those things that it feels like the student learns the most, but in reality the teacher is the one that gets the most benefit, in my opinion. So I'm happy to continue sharing what works for me and my clients, what doesn't work and help you move ahead because just forces me to get shit done.

So today I want to talk about a project that just ended with a client. I'd call it a B Plus, but I think there were a lot of lessons to be learned and insights that can hopefully help you.

They're a company that's growing slowly through the $5 million revenue plateau.

And as I told them, and I've told every other business owner I've ever met in that spot, that I've never met a business owner of a $5 million company who's been happy. And these guys definitely weren't. And they were frustrated. They been doing this business for 15 years and it's a digital marketing agency.

And I'm not going to reveal their name or info because I think that airing everybody's dirty laundry or sharing insights or secrets or even some of the strategies doesn't help them to share that publicly. So it'll be anonymized and I'll do my best to still get you guys great details. And it's not anonymous.

I'm not making it anonymous because of anything bad.

I just find that unless I've got the owner's permission and they've reviewed everything I've written or talked about, I just don't like airing people's dirty laundry or airing people's private information without their permission. So they were creeping through the $5 million revenue plateau and they had got their operations dialed in.

But their sales and marketing was just always a challenge. And they've been working with me and Perry Marshall for the last year in one of our year long programs.

And in February, I just told them, I said, I think there's something really wrong with sales and marketing. Let me look at it. So they engaged me for a couple weeks. I got in and interviewed all their staff in sales and marketing, got some great insights.

There was a lot of low hanging fruit, just simple stuff. And I'll talk about some of that simple stuff in a minute. And I went to them and I said, hey, here's what I found.

Put it in my profit priorities process hierarchy, 23 points. They agreed with all of it. And they said, would you be interested in implementing this? And our fiscal year ends in June.

We'd like to see some if this could be solved. And so we started at the beginning of March and I took on the project. It was a performance based model and was something I was looking forward to.

But then Friday, February or March 13, we all know what happened. The world went on lockdown. And so, long story short, they took that as an opportunity to restructure some staff, got rid of some poor performers.

In the end, it was the right move and my role changed drastically. I was no Longer pushing to implement a lot of fixes and aggressive things.

It was more of advising them through all the chaos of the coronavirus and just kind of keeping sales and marketing going. What happened, though, was really interesting.

By cleaning out some low performers, freeing up the sales staff that was left to be more aggressive, collaborating with them on a regular basis, coming up with ideas of how to help improve their closing process, adjust some of their pricing. April turned out. Or March ended up being a great month, and April turned out to be an even better month. And lo and behold, May is their record month.

In the last three years, they've never sold, never gotten more clients, never made more revenue, new recurring revenue than May. And so when we were wrapping up this week and I was talking with the partners and we were looking at it, it was a combination of a lot of things.

And here are some of the insights that we got. First, we had to inspect everything.

The frustration that owners have of staff not hitting numbers, metrics not being achieved, revenue being inconsistent.

Those are all symptoms of underlying systems that aren't working, underlying processes, underlying activities that are just not being reviewed, not measured. There's no clear measurement. There's no overview of what matters.

And so by inspecting back in February, their sales and marketing efforts, I was able to find, like I said, 23 things.

One of them, which might seem ridiculously obvious to you guys, was that when they would get a lead, an inquiry of a prospect that wanted to engage with them, their sales staff would have to follow up to coordinate schedules. And the prospects are busy business owners, so trying to get a hold of them was effort in and of itself.

And I thought they already use calendly, which I'm a huge fan of, my favorite calendar tool out there, and they weren't putting those on the confirmation pages. So I said, let's just start there. Well, guess what? We took. It took them a couple weeks to get that set up.

But once they got it set up, the sales reps had calls booked into their calendar that prospects were showing up to massive time savings, right? Not having to chase people down. They're able to schedule it while they're inspired, while they're reaching out and asking for a quote.

And so that activity in and of itself saved the sales reps hours a week.

Then we started looking and we said, gosh, these proposals are really just long emails that are a brick of text, and they're not really making the sale. So let's start working on the proposal.

And one of the things that I talk about with a lot of clients Is proposals aren't meant to educate clients on every part of your business. They're meant to make the close by the time a proposal goes out, budget, qualifications, needs, all of that should already be assessed.

And so you can include some of those needs in the proposal and you can include the budget obviously, but don't include a history of your company. Don't include all of the other packages and options that they're not getting that they might be interested in later.

Don't just take a download of your website and put it in a proposal that's a distraction, that's overwhelmed, it's going to cause too many uncertainties and an uncertain prospect never moves forward. So we work to improve their proposal.

We finally got a proposal platform involved that integrated with their salesforce that the clients can sign and take action and trigger automations on the back end. One thing that we did add that I always think is so important is outlining what the next steps look like for your clients when they become a client.

Outline what the process looks like to onboard them.

Because you've made a lot of promises during the qualification and sales process, but right at the 11th hour, when they're getting ready to sign that agreement and send over money, the little voice in the back of their head saying, how are we going to get screwed in this? Are these guys just giving us a good pitch?

Is this just another timeshare sales pitch that looks like it's perfect, but when we go to use it, it's nothing but blackout dates?

So outlining the onboarding process, the timing, the next steps, even if you can say who their point of contact is going to be, it's going to go a long way to reassure that prospect that you know what you're doing and that they know what's coming next and they're not going to have to have any uncertainty about what they get when they sign that agreement.

Because unfortunately for so many businesses out there and so many companies and so many consumers, the sales pitch doesn't match up to the fulfillment process.

And so the more you can demonstrate clarity, confidence, certainty at that stage, at the closing process, the more you will go to reduce uncertainty and anxiety that causes prospects to back out. When you know it's a sure thing, when you know it's a perfect fit, when they know they're excited about it.

But that little voice in the back of their head's just been screaming too long and they've been screwed too many times. And so adding that onboarding process was really valuable.

Other things that we inspected, they Use Salesforce, they use Sharpspring, both of them are good platforms, but there are a lot of broken connections. There's a lot of just legacy crap in Salesforce that they had over the years. And so their Salesforce admin was a smart person but was not proactive.

And my guess was that they've been ignored too long, had too many ideas shut down and so they just went into passive mode. So it was a matter of pushing them to keep getting updates, keep fixing, keep creating reports that mattered.

There was a lot of reporting that was just manually done by both the marketing head and the sales head that was unnecessary. They were putting it into Excel spreadsheets every month and sending it off to various directors.

And when they started asking me for that stuff, I said, it's in Salesforce, let's just get a report created. And I'm not in the business of creating manual reports when the data is already in a system that is built for demonstrating it or sharing it.

So after cutting back some staff, getting rid of some non performers, fixing systems, the other thing that I saw that was so interesting was I was in charge of managing the sales team and marketing, kind of. Another manager stepped up and took over marketing and did a fantastic job. But I just made space.

I'd ask lots of questions of well, what do you need help with? Where are you at today? What's this proposal look like? What's this prospect's last response? Oh, simple stuff like we added text messaging.

They use RingCentral for their phone system and Salesforce, so they integrate and there's a SMS function right in Salesforce from RingCentral. And since the prospects they're dealing with are busy and hard to get a hold of, text message works great. And so the sales reps started using that.

They got better and better responses. So it was just all sorts of little things that added up to a worthwhile outcome.

But on the management side, just asking the staff, well, what do you need? What can I help with? Let's look at this deal, let's look at this prospect, let's make a make sense adjustment.

And so one of the sales reps felt like she needed some flexibility around pricing because of the uncertainty of the coronavirus and them getting started and all the onboarding and delays. And so I said, yeah, try this, try a delayed payment. You have three of them, you can use it up three times.

And just gave her permission to use it right on the spot. Didn't need to go check with anybody. It was nominal. If it blew up in my face the cost was low to the company and the two founders loved it.

She ended up using it twice, got good prospects in.

And so it was just making adjustments to, to help support the sales staff and get outside of policies that may not be a fit anymore, may not serve in the moment of coronavirus and all the uncertainty there. And so they were able to grow significantly even through the midst of this coronavirus.

And that gets along to another topic I've talked about recently. The concept of essential versus non essential businesses. Guess what?

All business is essential essential because somebody somewhere thinks that they need it and they're willing to part with their hard earned money for it to receive some value.

That's the point of commerce, that's the point of a free economic society is that we as consumers vote with our money as to what is essential and what is not.

And this bullshit by governors and politicians saying that Walmart and Target and Lowe's and Home Depot and Costco are essential and everybody else is non essential doesn't make any sense.

Because the policies that those businesses put in place to provide safe social distancing big air quotes because they think it's all horseshit is could be implemented just as easily with every mom and pop shop on earth. And maybe bars and restaurants might be the ones affected the most and maybe they would be hard to enforce.

But this essential versus non essential crap is just the worst. So these clients, this client of mine could have said that their business was non essential and could have gone into shutdown mode very easily.

A lot of their customers have businesses that were deemed non essential and they all could have created this cascading spiral effect that would have gone down the drain. But just like every other client I have, we've determined they're essential.

So we went through processes to say we're essential, we're going to keep operating. Thankfully, they're a distributed virtual works company anyway.

So they didn't have any offices to go to, they didn't have any major behaviors to change. But they stayed open, they stayed proactive and they kept making deals with prospects and kept making deals that fit the prospects businesses.

And the interesting thing was that they attracted more and more of their ideal prospects because those ideal prospects are the ones that are going to say, hey, I'm essential too. Let's start doing more proactive things to grow.

So as you think about in the future of how, how do you build a business that's virus or pandemic proof, how do you set up an essential business? The reality is you just decide that it's essential and you keep operating that way.

Now, for whatever reason, governments decided to make examples of hairstylists and salons. I don't know why. I'm sure there are plenty of hairstylists still making money. They're just doing it on the down low.

That's what happens when oppressive regulations come in is the black market shows up, the underground shows up. I mean, look at what Prohibition did in the early 1900s. It's not that beer and alcohol disappeared, it's just that it went under the radar.

And so I think if you have to operate that way to stay essential, then so be it. I think that's great. Obviously, don't go posting on social media all of the haircuts you're doing and bragging about it and getting flagged.

But I think the determination that you're an essential business is a key mindset as a leader to keep your company growing. So as they kept adjusting, we kept coming up with more and more innovative offers to test out on the front end that they're rolling out now.

And because it's a digital marketing agency, a lot of their work has been around whole package platform stuff like complete new website and all that stuff.

And we realized that there's so many other things they could do for clients that don't require them to transition so much of their digital infrastructure over. And as one of the partners said, it's like changing banks. Nobody wants to change banks because it's such a pain. And so that really freed them up.

And so one of the things that I heard from one of the partners by the end was he said, gosh, it really isn't a big breakthrough that we need. It's lots of little things we can improve to keep growing this.

And that was something that I had been beating in their head since last summer when I first met them was you don't have to come up with a new blue ocean opportunity to get to that will drive you to $100 million. That's not what most business owners are trying to accomplish when they're stuck in the Seven Figure Desert. Getting to 10 million is the key.

And getting a lot of things sorted out and optimized goes a long way.

Once you're past a million or 2 million, getting to 10 million becomes a systems and management problem, not an innovation and world changing business model problem. So those were some of the big breakthroughs that I saw for them. I think they're poised and in a position to really keep growing.

Like I said, May was their best month ever or in recent history and we've set them up with great potential for success going forward. And I think one of the powerful things was that one of the partners continued to get involved and keep inspecting things.

He got involved to handle sales and the. He saw all these broken parts of Salesforce even after we had fixed a bunch of stuff.

And so they're going to keep improving Salesforce and then thought, oh, you know, some of our financial controls probably could be improved. So we're going to keep improving that. And it's just a point of continuous innovation. I mean, Kaizen, right, is step by step improvement.

And so I think those were some of the biggest breakthroughs.

And the other shift was again one of the partners saying that he realized that he needs to balance authority with responsibility for his management staff. And that is just straight out of my book.

That's something that I've preached forever, that if you give staff responsibility for an outcome, but don't give them the authority to solve it in a way that makes sense for them or to do it in a timely manner, then you're just putting them in purgatory. Responsibility without commensurate levels of authority just create frustration and tension and burnout. And so I hope he sticks with it.

I'm confident he will. But yeah, I think that, I think it was a fun project. I think it was a fun win.

And I'm excited to stay in touch with them and get back involved with some other projects down the road.

But wanted to share this one with you so that you can see that other companies that might be just ahead of you or right where you're at, how you might be able to get things unlocked.

And so I think building off of the framework in my book where I had action items at the end of every chapter, I'm going to try to implement some action items at the end of these episodes. And so the first one I think is just review the proposals going out and how is the follow up with prospects happening.

I find that so many salespeople don't know what to say other than hey, have you made a decision? Hey, are there any questions I can answer?

And so just improving that process and coming up with more creative ways of following up text messaging, using email tracking. Oh, that was another thing we set up. They all used Max, so we set up Mailbutler, I think it was.

I use Mixmax in my Gmail system for email tracking to make sure that emails are being delivered, how many times they're being opened, when they were opened last. If anybody downloads the attachments and as a salesperson, that gives you so much more clarity of how to follow up.

So without any of that perspective, the salespeople were just being friendly customer service reps, essentially just saying, hey, do you have any more questions? Would you like to is there anything I can adjust on the proposal or whatever? And so getting away from that.

So review the proposals going out, add the onboarding process in in those proposals, just defining it, and then figure out how to have better follow up with prospects so that your sales staff are equipped to re engage them, restart the conversation. If it's more than a month, there's lots and lots and lots of leads that want to work with you.

But for whatever reason something caused them to pause and it doesn't mean that they're not interested. It just the timing wasn't right. And then the other is what offers can you innovate to make it easier to work with you?

Right now I have so many clients that are adjusting their offers that are winning and it's just use the excuse of the coronavirus to innovate whatever you want, change whatever you want, mix it up. Because now is the time to try all sorts of things that you don't have to have any excuses about.

You don't have to come up with any big reason of why you're changing it. Just try it out and blame it on coronavirus.

Say, you know, we've realized that there's a lot of things we could do better and we'd like to fit your needs better, Mr. Or Mrs. Prospect. And here's something that we're thinking is valuable, let us know and just keep innovating.

Little offers, tweaks that make it easier to work with you. So hope that's helpful. Hope you have a great day after you listen to this. Hope you take action.

And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me podcastsottleneckbreakthrough.com and if you haven't, I would appreciate it if you leave a review. I don't know if you can review on Spotify, but I know you can review on itunes or Apple Podcasts and I appreciate it.

This podcast theme music is an excerpt from Triptych of Snippets by Septah Helix. It's used under Creative Commons.