← The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast
The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast
Agency Growth Starts with Existing Clients
00:22:54
Upsell and retain clients to drive agency growth with smarter pricing and strategy.
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- [00:01]
Duct Tape Marketing Host
Let me ask you a few things. Do you feel like you know what differentiates your business from every other business out there? Can you confidently charge a premium for what you offer? Are you working from a plan, a marketing roadmap that allows you to know precisely what to do next? Look, don't worry if you can't answer yes to any or all of these questions. You're not alone. See, marketers today get so focused on the tactic of the week staring them right in the face that they forget to look at the big picture. The overarching strategy needed to consistently grow their business. Over the years, I've worked with thousands of businesses helping them do just that. Create the perfect marketing strategy and plan that gives total clarity about what to do next, confidence to charge ahead and charge more, and complete control of the marketing tactics they choose. I would love to help you and your team do the same. Look to find out if our Strategy first program is right for you. Visit DTM World Grow and request a free consultation. That's DTM World Grow.
- [01:20]
John Chance
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Chance and my guest today is Max Traylor. He helps agencies upsell and cross sell their existing clients. His approach centers on building relationships with decision makers and aligning with their business objectives, which ultimately leads to long term retention and growth. Max is also the host of Beers with Max podcast where he interviews other agency advisors and the author of the Agency Survival Guide book series. So, Max, welcome to the show.
- [01:51]
Max Traylor
Yeah, I didn't realize the intro was so long.
- [01:54]
John Chance
I cut some out, believe it or.
- [01:56]
Max Traylor
Not, but yeah, you nailed it. You got it all. What do we do?
- [02:00]
John Chance
You know what? I stumbled on my name actually, because this is my third show today, so I think I'm struggling. So. Did I also see you drink a beer?
- [02:09]
Max Traylor
No, that was water. You caught me with some kombucha.
- [02:13]
John Chance
Oh, okay. I was kind of hoping it was a beer, but.
- [02:16]
Max Traylor
Yeah, me too. But I, you know, I'm on. I'm on ten and a half weeks after breaking my foot and I got out of the boot. I got out of the big walkie boot thing two days ago.
- [02:26]
John Chance
Oh, wow.
- [02:27]
Max Traylor
And yeah, beer does not help with the healing of bones, so I'm really trying.
- [02:34]
John Chance
Yeah, yeah, no, no, you. You gotta do it. You gotta get back out there. So there's a lot of trepidation in the agency world right now. Our mutual friend, I think I saw you comment on Marcus Sheridan, had a recent post basically saying the agency world is over, that, you know, AI is replacing a lot of the things that agencies traditionally have done. Where do you stand on, on that kind of sky is falling approach?
- [02:59]
Max Traylor
Yeah, I mean I, I was, I was, I was saying that 10 years ago and that's when I started. I think there's always a healthy dose of one thing going out the door. But you know, I, I was originally, I was seeing what was going on in the, in the Martech boost. So you got a lot of. It reduced the barriers of entry for agencies down to zero. So a lot of new entries into the market. They knew how to design things because it was, you know, CMS world of like low code sites so people could look like they knew what they were doing very easily. And it causes prices, it caused prices to drop across the board. Then you had that surge of gig network websites which I think was the first sort of chop at the tactical deliverable work that agencies were doing. And then I think, I think AI just gave it the, you know, the 1, 2 knockout punch I would say.
- [03:52]
John Chance
Of aversion in there, squeezed in there somewhere. Or you had all the folks that had a team in Philippines, you know, doing work and that, you know, really eroded pricing as well.
- [04:01]
Max Traylor
Sure, yeah. So just all the, But I mean I've, I've always been in on team strategic work. I think that the, the value of a third party is in their expertise, not what they can do. And the, the doing of things will always go up and down in terms of you need a specialist to do it or some piece of technology just took that person's job. I think it's very difficult to have a long term sustainable professional service business where the service you provide is constantly changing, whether that's being taken by AI or whatever it is. But if you have something strategic, if you specialize in understanding the way people buy, I mean that might change a little bit over the course of 10 years and that's where you can really build up some expertise and monetize it.
- [04:46]
John Chance
Yeah. You know, you see, I've been doing this for a long time, so I've seen the wave of digital marketing agencies, social marketing agencies, you know, that just like kind of. And now you're seeing AI agencies, people just kind of hopping on the latest train and they eventually all get wiped out, don't they?
- [05:02]
Max Traylor
Yes, the train does leave the station eventually and you're caught reinventing yourself. Nobody knows who you are, you're, you're, you're cutting, cutting prices. Yeah, so that's, that's sort of the narrative that I keep talking about. Is like be careful aligning yourself with the tactical work. It will constantly change, it will constantly be undercut, it is low margin. It's a volume game and unless you're a volume player, which most of us in this game are not, then we're gonna get hurt out there.
- [05:35]
John Chance
So I have been preaching that because I think what's, what's happening is not only strategy become more important. I think especially in the small to mid sized business that really doesn't have a marketing structure, certainly no marketing leadership. That, that actually providing marketing leadership as a service I think is sort of the next level of what being strategic means. I'm, I'm curious what you think about that idea.
- [05:59]
Max Traylor
I agree with that. However, I continue to find that leadership in general, decision making in general is at a, is at an all time low. So if the idea is that we're going to provide marketing leadership and come up alongside sales leadership, product leadership, what I'm finding is that leadership just isn't there. There's rarely a defined decision making process. There's rarely a delegation of authority to the members of that leadership team. There's nothing that says, okay, this is the information we're going to look at and we're going to make a decision every quarter for our budget in this regard. So if that's not there, then what are you coming up alongside as a marketing leader?
- [06:45]
John Chance
Well, I guess my point is I agree with you. There's nothing to come alongside. So why don't you bring it to them?
- [06:53]
Max Traylor
Yes. And so it's a yes. And I don't think your task is to bring marketing leadership. I think your task is to bring leadership and you should be prepared for the first time to facilitate a leadership planning session. So I think it's one I think you need to skip or just recognize that you're not just leading marketing as the person that, that owns that space. You're also needing to facilitate, probably for the first time, a decision making process, a planning cadence. And so you need to be well versed in the other departments in the business. And you can't, you can't just assume that everything's going to function the way you think it should function.
- [07:34]
John Chance
Oh, I think you should assume completely.
- [07:36]
Max Traylor
The opposite of course, assume complete dysfunction. That is, that is the way you know most. Sometimes I talk to smaller agencies and they believe that going up market they're going to have, you know, those clients are going to have their stuff together. And you and I both know that it's more chaotic the larger the organizations get, which Makes it a lot easier to provide value in a strategic way because they're so dysfunctional.
- [08:00]
John Chance
So, yeah, yeah, it's just more meetings. That's what I've found.
- [08:03]
Max Traylor
It is. More meetings. That's correct. Yeah.
- [08:06]
John Chance
So let's get to your favorite topic, shall we? I know that you have been for some amount of time talking about this idea of, here's an idea. You've got a client already. Why don't you get more business out of them? Scale the relationship that you already have. So talk a little bit about. And I know you've got some success stories you could talk about, but talk a little bit about, like, that mindset shift, even.
- [08:31]
Max Traylor
Yeah, I mean, we want to make. I. We want to make revenue. Let's start there. We can all agree. We're at the. We're at the fireplace. Cool. You get revenue from two sides of the business. You get new clients, and you upsell cross sell to existing clients. That's the only way to get revenue. It's the only way to grow revenue. And all of the studies are showing a downward trend in the number of new meetings, a downward trend in the number of new logos coming on. It is getting harder. Person I was interviewing the other day had, you know, some study in his hand. They all do. And it was, you know, meetings are across the board, down 30% in 2024, and it's only getting worse in 2025. The numbers are irrelevant. Just go ask people. You and I talk to enough people. New logos are getting harder. That's the theme of 23, 2020, 23, 2024. Everything was sunshine and rainbows before that. So my question to everyone out there is, when new logos are hard, why can't we look at upsell cross sell as a reliable revenue growth engine? And the reason is no one's paying attention to it. No one's incentivizing for it. No one's training for it. No one's holding people accountable. We're completely asleep at the wheel. It's as if we hired a bunch of salespeople without incentivizing them or training them. And by the way, they've never worked in sales before. That's what's going on in the agency space.
- [09:55]
John Chance
All right, so. So I'm. Let's talk about mistakes on this, because that seems like a simple concept, but it also seems like there's ways to screw it up. Because I've seen agencies that have business development folks, and they're like, no, that's my job is. But. But they have no real relationship with the client. Whereas like the account manager or whoever, project manager, whatever you call them, is working with the client every day. So what, how, how, how do you see that working? Is it a business development function or is it train your account managers to look for opportunities?
- [10:24]
Max Traylor
I think that if it, if it had to be a business account function, that would be better than it is today. Because I, I don't see what, what you've just described where, where an account executive that is responsible for a revenue quota is going, okay, I could sell to new logos. Okay, my pipeline's a little dry. What do we have for existing clients? Who can I upsell there? That is not the mindset. Because what typically happens is the principal assigns, and I say assigns in big sarcastic quotes. Assigns, upsell, cross sell client retention to the services side of the business. And it's actually a no fly zone. It's a no fly zone. It's a, don't go there. It's not your job. You won't be incentivized for it. That's the attitude towards the sales team in an effort to make sure they focus on getting new logos. And so honestly, if, if we just broke down the barriers and just admitted that our service people aren't willing to, aren't willing or able at the moment to pull their weight and upsell clients, and you just unleashed the sales team on existing clients, I think they'd get pretty far. I think they do pretty well.
- [11:35]
John Chance
Yeah, but it's not happening. How are they going to identify the opportunities? I mean, theoretically, the account executive is in there going, oh, they should do this. We should do this. Here's an opportunity. How's a salesperson going to identify those opportunities?
- [11:48]
Max Traylor
Well, I don't care who it is, but to identify sales opportunities, you ask questions.
- [11:52]
John Chance
Yeah.
- [11:53]
Max Traylor
And right now agencies are spending months, if not years not asking questions at all. They're delivering reports on clicks and whatever we think the client says is their business objectives, which they're never, we're never delivering against business objectives. We're delivering some marketing metric. We're talking about the things that we have delivered. We haven't had a business conversation since the sales process. That's the reality for most clients.
- [12:18]
John Chance
Right.
- [12:19]
Max Traylor
So I don't care who does it, I don't care what dress you put on it. I don't care if you bring in a third party. If it's sales, you come in and you say, hey, I want to ask you some questions about your business. Business. What are you, what are you? What initiatives Are you investing in across the board? Let's talk about sales, let's talk about product, let's talk about finance, let's talk about anything that's not marketing. Like let's, let's just, let's talk about real stuff here. You ask questions, you understand what they're spending money on and then you say, hm, how can I add value to those business objectives? Like that's what sale, that's sales. So that's what we gotta do.
- [12:55]
John Chance
So a lot of agencies structure their fees around retainers. I know how you feel about this, so I'm just gonna let you have this one.
- [13:04]
Max Traylor
Did I say that before? I don't know.
- [13:08]
John Chance
What about, what do you tell that agency says, well, we're locked into this retainer. I, I, I, I'm, I'll set you up. I think. You think retainers are not the right way.
- [13:17]
Max Traylor
Well, like, you know when you go bowling and then there's the people with the bumpers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, or, or you're riding a bike and there's training wheels. Yeah. Retainers are for the non confident. It. Retainers are a trade off. First of all, we all know that any retainer relationship is going to get less profitable as time goes on because the client is incentivized to get more and more from you for what they're paying. Great. So profitability goes down. The other challenge is it's nearly impossible to grow or expand that account when you're on retainer. Because the whole point is we're on retainer and you get whatever you need from us. So there's no upsell. Retainer also breeds this sort of complacency throughout the entire account team. And all they're thinking about is how do I hang on to this? It's a very defensive posture. Ultimately, the client starts to gain control. They start to set scope and tell agency what to do. You've lost control, you're done, you're going to lose, you're going to lose that account. So you see a lot of agencies that are not confident in their upsell motion go after retainers. And honestly it's the, I think it's a false, a false sense of security because if a client is going to cancel after month three, they're going to cancel. The fact that you have a contract that lasts a year is completely irrelevant. They could, they could berate you across the Internet and you'll be begging to get out of that contract. So let's be real.
- [14:42]
John Chance
Yeah.
- [14:43]
Max Traylor
What is much more profitable and naturally breeds upsell is projects. Everybody hates projects because you have to keep selling them. There is a middle ground. I always tell agencies, look, you want to have that long term conversation. You want to create a roadmap that aligns with their business objectives for the course of the year because that's when they decide how budget, how much budget is going to be allocated to say marketing. But what I wouldn't do is say okay, here's exactly what I'm going to do with that budget for the course of the year. I'm going to say look, we as, as an, as your new marketing leader and I know organization that you don't have a planning cadence but as your new marketing leader, I suggest that once a quarter we as a leadership team get together and decide how this budget will be allocated.
- [15:25]
John Chance
Yeah.
- [15:26]
Max Traylor
We'll create a plan that says here are the goals, here are the roles, the timeline, the budget considerations. And what that does is it gives you the benefit of a project because you can scope that out very defined so you maintain your margins and you maintain control of the client account. But it also forces the leadership team, the budget holding decision makers to come to the table once a quarter and you sit and you listen.
- [15:52]
John Chance
The sort of relates to that we work with a lot of end up. I have end up having a lot of conversations with agencies that feel like they, you know, they can't get what they're worth or what, you know, they're always in this competitive environment. How do you. A lot of times it's just they won't charge what they're worth because they're afraid they won't get the work.
- [16:08]
Max Traylor
Yeah. Honestly, step one, you don't even have to, you don't have to pay me. You don't have to pay John. Just raise your prices. It's a sobering exercise. There's somewhere in between what you're charging today and what you're worth and you gotta find that. But yes, that's step one for many people.
- [16:25]
John Chance
Seth Godin in his last book, and I never heard it this put so succinctly, he said pricing is how you pick your clients and how you pick your competitors. And I was like, yeah, that's, that's very real. You know.
- [16:37]
Max Traylor
Yeah, my, my dad always said, you know, if, if you get a yes that all you've learned is that you didn't charge enough. No is the beginning of getting to the price that they're willing to pay.
- [16:47]
John Chance
We went through a period and I don't know if we're out of it or still in it, you know, where a lot of agencies were very much trying to productize their approach, you know, package their, their approach, their deliverables, you know, that they could say, well, if we charge this for this deliverable, we know what our margin is fall on that type of approach. I still see a lot of it seems like it's waning a little. Where do you fall on that?
- [17:08]
Max Traylor
Yeah, I mean, my, my first book was how to productize your consulting services. I mean, I think the term productize, it gets confused a lot. What I really mean is be an adult, responsible service provider. Like, you can't just say it's chaos. You can't say it's different for every client. No, grow up. You need a service process. Of course clients are going to get, you know, different deliverables and things. But you have to decide, these are the companies I'm working with, this is the process we're going to use to deliver the value. And you have to make some decisions on what piece of the value proposition that you want to contribute to. So for years there's been a general lack of decision making on positioning and on service process. It's been complete chaos. So yes, I've used that term, productize just to say you deliver the same thing to the same people for the same price or you don't have a business, you have operational chaos. What I've, what I, I guess what I've seen is yes, more and more companies have done that. And let's say 10 years ago, sales consultancy world was very mature in this area. The world did not need another sales methodology. Right. There was 25 million books on this is the sales methodology. And clients got tired of that. They were like, look, I don't care what, I don't care what your methodology is. Just what are you going to do? For me, marketing was about 10 years behind. We had 10 years of taking chaos into these named methodologies and oh, this is our inbound thing now. Every buzzword in the English language has been claimed. Clients are fatigued. Yes. I think there's no longer this, oh, we have this proprietary named thing. So no, I, I don't think there's that, there's that lure to it from a sales standpoint. But you still need to create that product mindset within your services team to get, to get repeatable operations, to be able to set and meet expectations with clients. You still have to do it. It's just not, you're not putting it in bright lights and going, look at what we can do. It's like, yeah, look, AI can tell me that too.
- [19:12]
John Chance
All right, so your answer may be don't. But if somebody were listening to this and saying, I'm going to start a consulting agency today, how, what would you tell them? Where would you tell them to go? What would you tell them they had to have to be thinking about? What would you tell them they pos, you know, can't possibly do?
- [19:31]
Max Traylor
Well, the, the first, the first thing I would do is ask myself, where do I have experience? My, my grandfather always said you have to know the territory. And the worst thing that people do, like you have perfectly capable business owners out there that start agencies, but they go through this phase of oh, we're going to see what works and you know, they ask for some referrals and they'll spend years in chaos, not really developing an identity for themselves. And whatever identity they do develop is completely tactical, replaceable, marginalized by people in decision making seats. So they have to just look at their career and say, what business acumen do I have? Okay, I'm gonna do that. And they have to make that scary decision. And when they make that scary decision, you gotta spend the first year talking to as many people as you can in that space, figure out what they need, do that for them. Those are, those are the basics that I just don't see people, people doing. I think you can develop an incredibly successful business if you A, choose your target market and B, are relentless about speaking to them, understanding what their needs are. Those two things. I think you're good. I think agency is in a great place, but not for most. Given the mindset that I encounter day in and day out.
- [20:49]
John Chance
Said a billion times, people don't want what we sell. They want their problem solved. I think that's what we have to continue.
- [20:55]
Max Traylor
Yeah, so you are problem finders. So you gotta pick your thing and you gotta go figure out what their problem is and then you gotta help them solve the problem. I would still say that, you know, there are two steps to solving a problem. It's helping the client understand how to solve that problem. That I think is where the money is. That's selling knowledge, that's selling expertise. Then there's the doing of that thing. That's the commoditized area. That's either going to be by AI or you know, shark price chops, chum water. With whatever generation is entering the market now, I can't keep track of it.
- [21:31]
John Chance
But those guys, those people, yeah, whatever comes after Z. I don't know what comes after Z. Right. Do we start over yet.
- [21:39]
Max Traylor
But they're out there. Prices.
- [21:41]
John Chance
That's right. Awesome. Well, Max, it was awesome for you to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is there some place that you'd invite people to find out more about your work and connect with you as a.
- [21:51]
Max Traylor
Great new social network? LinkedIn. Yeah.
- [21:54]
John Chance
Okay.
- [21:54]
Max Traylor
Yeah, Max, trailer LinkedIn. I'm always saying opinionated things and posting videos.
- [22:00]
John Chance
Your feed is lively and interesting. How's that?
- [22:05]
Max Traylor
Thank you.
- [22:06]
John Chance
That was a compliment.
- [22:08]
Max Traylor
Yes, I took it as such.
- [22:10]
John Chance
Okay, that's how it was meant as well. Again, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.
- [22:16]
Max Traylor
Cheers.
- [22:21]
Duct Tape Marketing Host
Let me ask you a few things. You feel like you know what differentiates your business from every other business out there? Can you confidently charge a premium for what you offer? Are you working from a plan, a marketing roadmap that allows you to know precisely what to do next? Look, don't worry if you can't answer yes to any or all of these questions. You're not alone. See, marketers today get so focused on the tactic of the week staring them right in the face that they forget to look at the big picture. The overarching strategy needed to consistently grow their business. Over the years, I've worked with thousands of businesses helping them do just that. Create the perfect marketing strategy and plan that gives total clarity about what to do next, confidence to charge ahead and charge more, and complete control of the marketing tactics they choose. I would love to help you and your team do the same. Look to find out if our Strategy first program is right for you. Visit DTM World Grow and request a free consultation. That's DTM World Growing.