What All $10m + Agencies Have in Common (Pt 1)

Alright AgencyGo fam, let me geek out with you for a few minutes.

I'm obsessed with figuring out how to scale agencies.

It's what I think about morning, noon, and night.

Not only do I run my own $2m digital marketing agency (Twiz), but I also work with some of the largest agencies on the planet (Abstrakt Management, Neil Patel, etc).

I've learned a lot from both experiences.

Having my AgencyGo membership of over 250 digital marketing agencies has also helped my learning a TON.

There are a number of different trends that emerge through a cross-sectional analysis of different fast growing agencies.

While I can't dive into the specific, sensitive details of any of the brands I work with.

I can give you a macro view of the agency landscape and what it takes to build a $10m + agency.

Because I can't cover everything I've learned in one article, I will be breaking this down into multiple articles.

This article (part 1) will be on the first macro trend I've seen emerge with all $10m agencies...

MASTERING THE OUTBOUND FUNNEL

Here's the thing, when I crossed $180k in monthly sales for the first time in June 2021, the first thing I thought to myself was "man I can not WAIT to stop outbound sales."

Even though I had long since scaled myself out of the outbound sales process, I was still overseeing a team of 10+ sales reps at any given time.

Each rep had a quota based on their function.

For example, the inbound closers had to close 1 account every 20 hours that they worked. The outbound prospectors had to book 1 meeting every 5 hours they worked.

Sometimes they would hit the quota, sometimes they would blow through it.

Point being, it was hard, and I wanted it to stop ASAP.

Because we were getting a TON of leads from inbound Google Ads and Facebook Ads, I thought "well hey, now that we are an established agency we can stop outbound sales."

I was, unfortunately, sorely mistaken...

The moment we stopped doing as much outbound sales, our company took a hit.

We were able to recover, but we were not able to get as many sales with a purely inbound / partner / referral strategy as we were with outbound leading the charge.

This really bummed me out.

"I was a product guy", I thought. "I'm ready to pour myself into software development and stop this sales stuff."

However, as much as I wanted to get out of sales, I loved making money more. The pattern I saw was too obvious to ignore.

What's more, around that time we started teaching other companies how to implement the same outbound strategies that have enabled us to grow our agency so fast with ZERO debt.

This only confirmed my hunch that I needed to get back into the outbound sales saddle.

One of the companies I worked with was worth over $1,000,000,000 and though I can't disclose their name, they had an EXTREMELY efficient outbound funnel.

In fact, their inbound was kind of crap.

Same thing goes for the other $100m + valuation companies I ran campaigns for.

For some publicly available data on this, check out this interview with Scott Scully of ABSTRAKT Management.

You can also check out this comment he left on my post recently about this.

In both instances, he discusses how his $54M PER YEAR AGENCY completely crushes it on outbound.

This theme kept coming up again and again with the largest companies I worked with, so I knew I needed to go back to my scrappy outbound strategies.

Luckily for me I learned this just in time to turn around our company's growth and we have been growing ever since.

WHY OUTBOUND WORKS

I know you, like most business owners, are probably like me.

You probably HATE outbound too.

"Ugh! I hate cold calling, if I have to pick up another phone again and dial someone I might quit running my business."

I know it sucks...

But, it's necessary.

After eventually realizing this myself, I put together a few principles as to WHY outbound works so well and why you NEED to execute it if you want to build a $10m agency.

REASON #1 - Outbound never dies. No matter what's going on with paid ads or organic search, you will always have access to a telephone or inbox.

REASON #2 - It's forever cheap and fixed in cost. Unlike other channels which can fluctuate based on supply and demand, the cost of a booked meeting outbound usually stays the same. This is because the compensation of a purely outbound rep rarely fluctuates.

REASON #3 - You have virtually ZERO uptime or management. Unlike with ads or other marketing, you really don't need to do much management for outbound sales reps. Once they are trained and up and running (less than 1 week), you pretty much let them loose.

REASON #4 - Better leads. I don't know what it is, but I definitely find that our agency gets better leads from outbound than inbound. Even though the inbound leads are highly interested, they are usually comparing us to other vendors when leads we get outbound have our full attention.

WRAPPING IT ALL UP

Again, if you don't believe me believe the data.

One of the ways that I come to decisions is by comparing my performance to large agencies who have far exceeded me in revenue.

I think the success from companies like ABSTRAKT show that you can not sleep on outbound sales or else your growth is always going to be slower.

Don't get me wrong, I think you still need a SOLID inbound strategy.

I'll be going into building a massive brand and inbound strategy in next week's article.

Like I said, I am on a mission to uncover the SECRETS of $10m + agencies and share them with you.

Not only do I want to help you out, I want to get to $10m ourselves.

Last year, we did $1.72m in revenue, I want to grow SUPER fast and I will not rest until I get there.

If you would like to get all the lead generation scripts that I used to scale my agency to $185k per month in revenue for FREE please visit agencygo.io/leads

Until next time folks, Lucas out.