Unlocking Agency Growth: Corey's Blueprint for Escaping Founder-Led Sales

And Brett, you think it's bad now, wait till AI is in two, three years where it's just like that stuff.

It's going to be crazy.

And the generic outreach is going to be.

Think it works now?

A little bit.

It's going to.

It's going to get much worse.

And so therefore, being able to build some kind of relationship with the folks that you're going to reach out to before you ever actually reach out to them is, I think, a superior way of going forward, building a brand and building a pipeline for your agency.

That's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

I'm your host, Brett Deisser, and if you could please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review.

It really does help with the rankings and let me know how I'm doing.

But this week we're gonna be talking about B2B marketing.

Yes, I always say this and it's always true.

It's the not as fun part of marketing as this, B2C marketing.

Because we all think of it as boring.

Because we all think B2B is boring.

But it's still very exciting in its own way.

And I have Corey with me and he is a former CMO of Scorpion and now dedicated agency coach.

Corey specializes in helping agency founders scale revenue.

At Scorpion, he played a pivotal role in growing the agency revenue eight times in five years to remarkable $150 million.

Corey is also an author of Anyone Not Everyone, a comprehensive guide for agency founders looking to simplify growth and escape founder led sales.

So welcome to the show, Corey.

Brad, I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty exciting to me.

I love all things B2B marketing.

Come on.

What more could you get excited about?

We're talking about escaping founder led sales.

Come on.

Hey, I get excited about coffee brews and people will call it boring.

So everything.

You might find things exciting and people might find what you find exciting boring.

So it's always that dichotomy.

Yes, but the first question, that's all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I am a coffee and tea drinker.

I have my coffee here.

Even though it is as we're shooting this one 35, I'm still finishing up my.

My pot of coffee here.

You nice.

I'm both too.

Mostly coffee, but I'll drink both.

I'm a little bit more particular about my.

I'm actually particular about both.

If I really want a good cup of coffee, I will do a pour over, but I will not.

And if I Just need coffee and I'm out and about.

I'll suffer with Starbucks, but I rather not.

If I can find something else, I will find something else.

For tea.

I was a barista and a while ago and we had Art of Tea and it was actually like the best tea I've ever had.

So that's only the really one I really like.

I'll have tea but that's the one I really.

They're a bit expensive.

Yeah.

But they're really good.

And basically their descriptions on their actual like tea on what it is, pretty close to what it is.

They have a Earl Grey creme which is actually pretty good.

It's pretty like it's got this like creaminess to it even though it doesn't have any cream in it type of a thing.

So I don't know how they do it, but it's actually pretty good.

Yeah.

Nice.

Is that your favorite tea?

I'm a big tea drinker.

I.

It's funny, back in college I dated a barista who worked at Pete's Coffee and Tea, which pizza I don't know about these days but a really good cup of coffee back in the day.

But she got me into all these amazing teas, Chinese teas, Japanese teas.

In any event, I got a taste for jasmine green.

That's my go to.

Like I can sip on that all day.

How about you?

Yeah, it doesn't really matter too much to me as long as good.

I had the art of tea.

Had actually Jasmine pearls.

Yes.

Those little ball things.

Yeah, they were hand rolled apparently too.

That's why it was so expensive.

But it was really good.

You could taste the jasmine.

That's my jam.

I love the pearls.

Yeah.

And so anyways, I gave a brief explanation about your expertise.

Can you give your listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Yeah, sure.

So quick, quick history on me.

I've worked for most of my career.

I've either been an entrepreneur or worked on a team at an entrepreneur's business helping them to grow their small business.

My experience is heavily in the sort of the sales and marketing aspect of entrepreneurship.

For instance, out of college I launched a business with my best friend and I.

We raised $6 million to start a streaming media business.

He was the CTO guy and I was the sales and marketing guy and it was an interesting time to do that.

That was about when mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for a billion dollars.

That's how he made his money.

Was about the same time that I start this other streaming media business.

Unfortunately, we didn't have the same exit that he did.

It was still a good experience.

I spent 17 years in the agency space helping digital agencies grow.

I recently left my last role as Scorpion.

You mentioned in the intro where I was a chief marketing officer, we grew from 20 million to 150 million in six years.

And really now what I'm doing is I'm spending a lot of time working with agency founders who are stuck in the founder led motion.

They're in the, they're trying to scale up an agency, but despite their best efforts, they can never truly escape sales.

The big problem.

We figured it out at Scorpion, as I mentioned, we scaled it up.

And the answer, the short answer to fixing that is three things you need to first focus in on a vertical market.

So choose dentists or attorneys or some other vertical market.

Then position your agency so that you are a specialist in that vertical market.

And then, and only then should you start to do go to market strategies like inbound, outbound conferences, those type of things.

That's basically the work I do is I help them to transition from a generalist to a vertical market specialist.

How do they, as you said, founder exit?

Like how do they exit from just being a sales guy to actually being a founder?

Because it seems to be a hard transition because as a founder you're always told to always keep selling, to keep hustling, blah, blah, blah.

But it doesn't seem to make sense if you're always hustling or if you're always selling.

I think it's a, it's a great point and I think there's nothing wrong with a CEO hustling and selling.

Some CEOs are technical founders, that is, they're like SEOs who turned into an agency owner or sometimes they're more of the marketing and sales type who are great at networking or very extroverted and so on and so forth.

The challenge becomes at a certain point in a agency founder's life cycle of their business where they have demands on their time that require them to not be as heavily involved in sales.

And so somehow they have to find a way to get the same or better results from sales organization at their agency without them intimately being involved.

And what I've found in doing this for a couple years now is that there's three things that keep them, that keep them in the sales motion.

Number one is not having a focus.

And what I mean by that is that they are a jack of all trades.

They'll do a little bit of anything, they'll serve A large variety of different clients.

And as a result of that, the actual sales conversation needs to be bespoke.

It needs to.

They need to be able to maneuver the conversation, be able to provide a very custom solution.

And to have a sort of a salesperson do that confidently and effectively without over committing the agency or making false promises becomes very difficult.

And so that's, number one is the lack of focus.

And the number two is having water repositioning.

And what I mean by water repositioning is that most people who hire agencies are not technical buyers.

They don't have a real good way to understand what makes your agency different than the other 10 agencies that are basically saying the same thing.

And what ends up happening is that you end up competing on price and you lose deals to lesser agencies who are more slick and selling potentially snake oil.

So the watery positioning always gets the founder right back in.

The founder has to rely on their network to get those kind of deals going.

And then the third thing, first one was lack of focus.

Number two is lack of or having watery positioning.

And the third one is just not having a clear or consistent way to generate more deals, more opportunity, more pipeline when the founder is not actively working their network and selling.

I call it the peanut butter strategy.

A lot of agencies take their very small, typically marketing budget and just spread it all across a bunch of different channels and have a very generic message.

And as a result it's just not that effective.

So that's those three things.

When you have all those three things happening in an agency, which happens unfortunately quite a bit, the founders always sucked right back into that sales role because if they're not selling the company or the agency is not getting new business.

So how do they get stuck out?

Or not stuck, but how do they get out of that role?

How do they get unstuck from that role?

Because it's easy.

It's stuck in it.

Because if you're doing a day in, day out, habits form.

And then when habits form, you forget how to not do it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so I think most agency founders really don't want to.

I would say, let me caveat this by.

In a certain stage in an agency's life cycle, they genuinely want to get out of the founder led motion as it relates to sales.

They don't.

They want to be able to contribute to sales and be a part of that, but not be dependent on sales.

And so what agency founders will typically do is they will hire third party cold callers or third party email providers, or they'll do LinkedIn lead gen.

Again, using these third party services, they may even hire an SDR or a couple SDRs or even a sales leader.

And it's only once those things fail that they realize that they need to focus, they need to niche down.

And the specific kind of niching that I work with is finding a vertical market which is an industry, like I said, like dentists or manufacturers or attorneys or any of these type of industries that they can become, they can choose to become a vertical market specialist in.

The formula that I talk about is having what I call deep specialization, having focus, which means saying yes to one vertical and saying no to others so you can actually have some repeatability in your business.

Number two is having the strategy, which is a massive action plan designed to give you a durable competitive advantage.

Warren, excuse me, Warren Buffett talks about this idea of having a moat around your business, right?

Having some kind of protective layer that's durable.

And then when you become a vertical market specialist, you're able to build more of that moat.

And then the third one is having empathy.

This isn't typically talked about in positioning or in choosing a target audience.

Typically you look at a spreadsheet and you say, what's the biggest audience with the biggest spend?

Let's go into that market.

And the challenge is that there's no industry that hasn't been or isn't currently today, as we speak, being pursued by a lot of very aggressive agencies.

And it's only those agencies that have committed themselves to not only be an agency, but also join that industry, that target vertical as a member of that industry.

And they've really, they have empathy for the buyer, they have empathy for the industry that they're truly able to, that they're truly able to differentiate and stand out as a trusted and reliable source.

So they need to focus.

Short answer number two, they need to have razor sharp positioning.

This is where they're able to have to position their agency such that they are seen as a member of the community, that they are specialists, that they're experts in solving a specific problem for the people in that industry.

And then they need to have again a massive action plan to be able to generate leads and pipeline without the founder, which I've found there are 26 different tactics you can take at a vertical level to generate new pipeline.

But most agencies are just, like I said, they're just doing the peanut butter strategy.

They're trying to do a little bit of everything.

Shotgun approaches, everybody else calls it as well too.

We just.

Shotgun blast.

Yeah, yeah, shotgun or I call it net fishing, which is a term from.

I forget his name.

From inevitable to impossible.

He's the author of that book.

And what I talk a lot about is more about spear phishing.

Identifying who is a vertical market you want to target that you have empathy for, you care about.

But even then, within that market, who are the 20% of businesses that can provide the most value for your agency and drive the most revenue?

There's a concept called your dream 100, which is getting really clear on the 100 best prospective clients for your agency and spending in proportionate number of amount of time, money and resource into generating those a hundred businesses or opportunities as your clients versus the rest of the market.

So it's not giving me like this like long 1200 word or 12,000 word message about how awesome you are and how you can help me edit my podcast videos.

Even though I already know how to edit my podcast videos, I know how to do it.

I spend time and I'm like, you don't even know what I need.

So you're just like, you're just giving it to everybody.

And it stopped doing that because not everybody needs your stuff.

And Brett, you think it's bad now, wait till AI is in two, three years where it's just like that stuff.

It's going to be crazy.

And the generic outreach is going to.

If you think it works now a little bit, it's going to.

It's going to get much worse.

And so therefore, being able to build some kind of relationship with the folks that you're going to reach out to before you ever actually reach out to them is, I think, a superior way of going forward, building a brand and building a pipeline for your agency?

Yeah.

So it's almost like that.

Talking about AI, should you use it for information gathering of maybe some prospective clients, maybe on LinkedIn, but not really using it as like the push to pitch, maybe to help you correct, create or draft the first pitch and you look it over and be like, I'm going to change this, I'm going to change that and that type of thing.

Yeah, I think AI is really good for, yeah, getting from a content development perspective, like a generative AI perspective, creating content kind of about 70 to 80% of the way there, depending on the quality of the prompt that you give it.

But I also think about things like competitive intelligence going in and asking ChatGPT to analyze, let's say your top five competitors try to understand like what is their primary focus from a positioning and a messaging perspective.

I think that's a really smart way to use that tool, those tools, because it can take a whole bunch of data and summarize a lot of that data in a way that requires a lot more effort from a human perspective.

So with just a couple of prompts, I can be able to get a real sharp image of exactly what are what my competitors are saying and how they're positioning themselves so that I could find some white space in the market to talk about how we're different than the rest of the companies that are competing for the business.

And almost what I do is I use AI to cut up the video content and then share it on that because that's easier to do and that's not really pushing.

And you're using AI in a better way than just send me or push out 10,000 pitch notes or pitch messages to all these people and you hope to get one it exactly.

I'm a podcaster too, and being able to have it suggest show notes and timestamps and even titles of podcasts, half the time it's not spot on, but it is a really great start.

Like I said, 70%, 78% of the way there, sometimes worse than that.

But it allows me to really focus on fine tuning versus coming up with just the source material in the first place.

So it's very powerful.

And talking about that and talking and just talking in general about kind of the economy where we're at, where inflation has really just hit businesses, hit everybody really hard.

And let's say you're an SaaS business.

How do you like pitch that?

Where a company say, we need your service and we'll pay this much money because everybody's looking at their bottom line, be like, do I need this reoccurring service charge?

How do you use the empathy or use your connections to keep them going?

Being like, look at, this is what we're doing, this is how we help you out.

Is there ways of doing that?

Because I'm pretty sure every business is looking at their bottom line going, what can I cut?

Yeah, I would say a really powerful way to leverage AI in that regard from an operations perspective is for it to create something that are called SOPs, standard operating procedures.

You could feed it video, you could feed it a bunch of text and have it spit out a standard operating procedure.

And the idea behind a standard operating procedure, it's real simple.

You follow, you give a procedure which is on a document, you give it to a new person.

If they follow the specific steps in order on the piece of paper or on the digital piece of paper, they're going to get the same outcome every time.

And so as a result of that, you don't need to rely on more expensive folks who have a lot of experience and a lot of judgment.

You take the judgment out of it, you create a process and you're able to reduce your overall overhead, potentially leverage things like resources overseas where the costs for those services are less.

You're going to maintain the high level of quality because you are using a standardized process versus leaving it up to people's judgment.

So that's a really powerful way to leverage it as well.

And even from a business side, how do you not piss off your customers?

Because Adobe seems to be doing that pretty well right now with their AI and their privacy policies.

They basically said in their new one that anybody or basically all your private or anything that you put up in their cloud is free to use for them.

And everybody's like, wait, what?

So how do you not do the Adobe as a small agency?

Or how do you not do that where you just completely miss who your customers are and piss them off so much they're like, I'm gonna find somebody new?

Yeah, I think it has to come with customer intimacy.

And when you talk about agency services, it's a service business and the agencies that have empathy and intimacy with their clients will probably be more intentional about rolling out some of those products that may be questionable or may damage the trust that they have.

And so if you are a business, I don't care if you're an agency or whatnot, if you're very self focused on what you need and less focused about what the client needs, then you run the risk of communicating that your clients are not the most important thing.

It was my belief that customer intimacy is a superpower and it is something that definitely differentiates businesses.

It's.

For me it's a must have.

Should you like use some super users and be like, hey, we want to, we're going to do this update.

What do you guys think about this before you completely roll it out?

Because I feel like a lot of times things can be avoided without you doing it to the entire public.

A strategy is.

This is the last question.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to jump after this.

But a strategy to do that is something's called a client advisory board.

It's more sophisticated.

Larger companies do this.

But what you have is a small group of clients and then you let them guide your product roadmap.

You say, hey, we have these ideas.

Clients, what do you think about them?

Are they good or bad or hey, we want to roll this out, but what do you think?

So you get that feedback from that sort of the intimate group of clients who care about you and your success before it ever goes to market.

All right, and final question is where can people find you online?

Go to my book, anyone, not everyone.com, and there you'll be able to download a free version of the audiobook so you can start listening today.

All right.

Thank you, Corey, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brewing, sharing your knowledge on B2B marketing.

Absolutely.

Thanks for the opportunity, Brett.

We'll talk soon.

Yes, and thank you as always.

Please subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast, leave a five star review.

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Let us know know how we're doing and join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR and marketing industry.

All right, guys, stay safe, get to understanding your business and escape the monotony of just selling all the time and see you next week later.