Deep specialization_Episode 95_Audio_V1
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[00:00:00] Corey Quinn: And as you begin to build expertise in the market serving that vertical market, you'll be able to build a better product, a better experience for your clients. Of course, then you'll be able to attract better clients and charge more, which will turn into ultimately a great business for you. Welcome to the Deep Specialization Podcast, the show where we blend focus, strategy, and client intimacy in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our lives.
[00:00:25] Corey Quinn: I'm your host, Cory Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Hey guys. Cory here. Welcome to the Deep Specialization Podcast. Today I am on the campus of the Ohio State University. I'm here in Ohio to speak at a conference called Locality with my good friend and previous colleague Jamie Adams. I wanted to record this episode here because I have.
[00:00:52] Corey Quinn: A topic that's been on my mind that I think would be beneficial for this podcast for the listeners. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. I wanna borrow a concept from the SaaS or software world where, which I believe can help you to think potentially differently about your agency and how you are growing your agency.
[00:01:14] Corey Quinn: And this topic and this, this concept is being. Sales led versus product led, right? In the world of software, there are companies like Canva and Zoom that are more, let's call it product led. They lead with free freemium services, free trials, and then upsell over time versus in again, software world sales led probably you can think of.
[00:01:41] Corey Quinn: salesforce.com where they have a sales team, and I wanted to apply this, again, predominantly SaaS based concept to the world of agencies. And to do that, first I want to sort of define a product led agency versus more of a sales led agency, and kinda give you a sense of how each of them operates. Some pros and cons, and then I wanna leave you with some additional final thoughts.
[00:02:13] Corey Quinn: So starting with a product led agency model, the product led agencies are typically focusing heavily on the product itself as the main driver of growth. So your product, or in this case of an agency, your services and your packages kind of speak for themselves. A lot of the business is driven by referrals and word of mouth, and of course the founder is often still quite in the middle of the sales motion, right?
[00:02:48] Corey Quinn: They're driving the sales, whether it be through networking or through referrals or dr. Helping to drive word of mouth. The sales led agency on the other hand, is one which relies. Heavily on their sales team to drive customer acquisition and growth, and that's where you get that growth is through a sales channel versus more of, again, product led or referral based.
[00:03:17] Corey Quinn: Right. Typically what you'll see, especially I think about my time at Scorpion, but also other agencies who have this more sales led motion, which is where you have a high touch sales process, you have demos, presentations, you have a, an in-house sales team that. Focuses on educating the prospect, talking about value creation solutions, being a trusted advisor, you know, doing custom proposals, scoping for each project.
[00:03:48] Corey Quinn: And where I think a lot of agencies are today is that I think most agencies believe or think of themselves as sales led, but when you think about it, they are actually operating more like a product led business. And I think that that is part of a natural growth of an agency where you see a lot of agencies start with the founder and they build the agency around the founder's expertise, and that really drives the core offering of what they're providing.
[00:04:24] Corey Quinn: And founders, of course, are bringing on their first clients and doing amazing work for them, and as a result of doing amazing work. You know, the word spreads and referrals come in, but then eventually growth hits a ceiling when the referral network really saturates. And that's where I talk about this in my book, anyone, not everyone, but it's really about that founder led sales role where you get stuck as a generalist as well as you just begin to run out of options for leads.
[00:05:00] Corey Quinn: It becomes. More and more difficult for you to drive new business. And again, I think this is a natural part of how to start an agency. And while some agencies are very happy staying in this sort of product led or founder led approach, some agencies really wanna break out of that. They want to truly scale to the next level, and yet they find themselves.
[00:05:30] Corey Quinn: Stuck because the product knowledge is typically trapped within either the delivery team or the founder. There's a lack of a systematized proven sales process, and even when you do bring in sales teams, it's difficult to to match the founder's expertise and passion. So I wanna share a couple of strengths and weaknesses.
[00:05:53] Corey Quinn: Really compare and contrast these two approaches. Product led. Versus sales led. Let's, let's start with the strengths of a product led agency. Number one is a strength. A really strong, big strength is you have strong client relationships. You also typically have high retention rates, low sales costs, and you are also to build sort of more of a, a natural authority position, and you have a passionate delivery team.
[00:06:23] Corey Quinn: Some weaknesses when it comes to being product led as an agency is that your growth is really limited to the expansion and your reach of your reputation. You, again, have founder dependency when it comes to sales, and it becomes difficult to scale beyond the founder's network. Of course, that leads to a lack of predictability in the sales.
[00:06:48] Corey Quinn: Process. Hey, it's Corey. I wanted to take a quick break from the show to say that if you're an agency owner looking for a strategic and reliable white label partner, you should check out E two M. They offer website design, WordPress development, e-commerce solutions. S-E-O-P-P-C and content writing and they are trusted by over 300 agencies.
[00:07:10] Corey Quinn: You could check out E two M's. Transparent and Flexible pricing model at E two M solutions.com/the Deep Specialization podcast. For limited time, E two M is offering a special 20% discount. For the Deep Specialization podcast listeners on your first month, go check them out. Now back to the show.
[00:07:33] Corey Quinn: Now let's talk about some strengths when it comes to a sales led agency. Well, when you have a agency that truly has a sales function built out, you're able to build a more predictable and systematic approach to your growth. You have less de pound dependency on the founder. Doesn't mean that you don't have dependency on the founder.
[00:07:56] Corey Quinn: Doesn't mean the founder can't be involved in sales if they want to be, but there's not a pure dependency on the founder. You're able to actually tap into a greater market because you're not just depending on word of mouth and reputation and referrals, which tends to happen maybe quickly to begin with, but over time it slows down quite a bit.
[00:08:16] Corey Quinn: You're able to have a more scalable acquisition model. Right. We're thinking about what we did at Scorpion. We started off with six, six or seven sellers, and today I just got off stage with Jamie. He just shared that there are 56 salespeople today. You're able to add in more salespeople, you wanna drive more revenue, add in more salespeople, and you have a system for them to plug into, and of course, that leads to more consistent revenue.
[00:08:41] Corey Quinn: A couple weaknesses when it comes to having a sales led agency is that. Costs go up. You have to hire a sales team. You have to do marketing and list building and all these resources to make sure that they are being productive. There's costs in that, so your cost per acquisition is typically higher. You have a risk of them going rogue, the sales team going rogue and starting to promise things that, uh, maybe you can't deliver on.
[00:09:04] Corey Quinn: Right? So over promising becomes a challenge and scope creep and those challenges being able to maintain quality at scale. So you have to really have a really process driven product team and delivery team to make sure that you're able to deliver quality at scale when you ramp up revenue and new, new clients.
[00:09:23] Corey Quinn: And always, always eyes. I don't care how big of an agency you are, there's always gonna be challenges when it comes to sales and delivery. Alignment. Sales say one thing, delivery. Delivery, delivering something else, expectations, product training, so on and so forth. So those are some things for you to think about.
[00:09:43] Corey Quinn: When it comes to what I am passionate about and where I really love helping agencies is those agencies that have really depended more on a product led, or let's call it a founder led model, where they may have a really charismatic or. Smart founder who's built up a great product or solution in the marketplace, and they've done great work.
[00:10:07] Corey Quinn: They have a good reputation in the market. They're, they're generating referrals, but those referrals are just not delivering the volume of sales that you want to have, or maybe the predictability of the sales that you have. Right? There's not enough, not enough of a, of a mechanism in your agency to, to drive consistent new revenue, and you want to solve that problem.
[00:10:31] Corey Quinn: I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about how my approach to doing that. Typically the first thing that we do is we identify a vertical market to specialize in. And this doesn't mean you fire all your non vertical clients, but it means that you identify a industry that you could become an expert in, that you could focus in on, not only from a sales and marketing perspective, but also from a product perspective.
[00:10:55] Corey Quinn: When you focus on. Serving a vertical market, let's call it attorneys. You know automatically which list to build, which content to write, which podcast to launch, you know, what products to build, right? All of a sudden it becomes a lot more focused around your sales and marketing. And because you're serving one specific type of client, IE an attorney solving one specific problem, maybe lead gen.
[00:11:23] Corey Quinn: You're able to strip out a lot of the founder dependency from the sales process, and of course, over time you could have a more formal sales process that is heavily focused on solving specific problems for attorneys that. You could plug people into, you could train them up and get them to be productive in the short run.
[00:11:42] Corey Quinn: So of course, finding the vertical market is number one. Number two is doing some positioning and messaging, making sure that you understand their unique pain points, their buying journey, the triggers behind which cause people in that vertical market to buy. What are the attributes, the things that they care about specifically.
[00:11:59] Corey Quinn: So you could begin to develop empathic messaging that speaks to their hearts and minds of those buyers in that vertical market. And then from there it's about going out and starting to do outbound sales. I don't have a lot of. Time right now to go into that whole playbook. But effectively what I teach is gift based outbound, which is taking a small list of high value prospects and sending great gifts to them as a way to establish trust, but also get on a sales call and begin to build new sales opportunities through outbound.
[00:12:29] Corey Quinn: But then secondarily, after you have the outbound in place, then you want to build out an inbound engine, which is about building your authority in that vertical market through content and conferences and a bunch of other things. And then from there. It's just about execution. And as you begin to build expertise in the market serving that vertical market, you'll be able to build a better product, a better experience for your clients.
[00:12:52] Corey Quinn: Of course, then you'll be able to attract better clients and charge more, which will turn into ultimately a great business for you. So, uh, will leave that there. I'll leave that conversation here. I think the takeaways for you is to ask yourself. Are you today more of a product led agency or are you a sales led agency?
[00:13:15] Corey Quinn: And if you are interested in transitioning from purely a product led agency into more of a maybe a hybrid or maybe even more exclusively something like Scorpion Built, which is very much a sales focused agency, then I encourage you to do things like specialize in a vertical market and of course I'll leave you with a resource to do that.
[00:13:37] Corey Quinn: You can download my audio book. For free. You can go to anyone, not everyone, dot com. That's anyone, not everyone, dot com, and you get my process from going for more of this product-led generalist agency to a vertical market specialist. Do outbound, like gift based, outbound, and other cool things. Okay. Hope this is helpful.
[00:13:55] Corey Quinn: Thanks. Thanks for tuning in to the Deep Specialization Podcast. If you haven't checked out my bestselling book, anyone, not everyone, you can download the audiobook for free right now by going to anyone, not everyone.com. That's anyone, not everyone.com. And finally, a special thank you to our sponsor, E two M.
[00:14:17] Corey Quinn: We'll see you in the next episode.
