So, you're getting all these leads. Are you seeing a lot of results in the conversions? Or are you finding it challenging to convert those into sales? Entrepreneur Andriy Borchuk joins Dave for consulting on sales and lead generation. Does putting your pricing on your website help or hurt? What is consultative selling? This conversation breaks it all down. Website: https://flowium.com/team/andriy-boychuk/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andriyboychuk/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Flowium/videos Our goal is for you to solve and scale your lead generation. Welcome to the InWork Podcast.
Dave: Andre, I'm so excited to have you here, brother. I cannot wait to get into it. All right, so your biggest struggle, you own an email marketing agency, and the thing that you're struggling, by the way, your website's gorgeous, Andre.
6
00:18
Thank you.
5
00:19
That's very well done.
1
00:20
Thank you. Your biggest struggle right now, which is a struggle that a lot of agencies have is sales. So why don't you walk me through right now, how many leads are you generating right now every month, where are they coming from, are your clients coming from referrals? Just give me an overview, how are you getting your customers and clients right now?
2
00:45
So exact number, I don't remember, it's hard to, on top of my mind, to say the exact number, but I think every week we get probably close to 100 or more leads. And we are very diverse in terms of getting leads. But probably like 30% comes from Google, like organic search, and from partnerships, from referrals, from YouTube, from podcasts, like many different sources. Great.
1
01:23
So you guys are getting all these leads. Are you seeing a lot of results in the conversions? Or are you finding it challenging to convert those into sales?
2
01:34
We are pretty new in terms of sales team. We have a sales team of I believe close to nine people. So we're a well-established agency in terms of operations, delivering the product service to our clients. But in terms of sales, we are like newbies. We just started building our full-blown sales team only this year. So we see challenge in terms of conversion. Conversion, they schedule a call with us, we give them the presentation, and they kind of like it, but then either they disappear or dragging their feet. Cool.
1
02:23
All right, so that's great. Oh, this is gonna be a fun conversation brother. This is gonna be so great man all right, so when you go into a sales conversation Tell me a little bit like what's your average client paying you that's number one I'm not saying high-end or low-end, but what's to the average? It's like five thousand a month five thousand a month. Okay, great so I when you get these people that are coming in to the to the conversation, my guess is that there's a lot of people that don't have 5,000 a month to give you. And-
2
02:59
I would kind of disagree on that because we have our prices pricing on the website, so we don't kind of, we advertise all over the website how much we charge. But maybe you're right.
1
03:14
Yeah, when I looked at the website, so here's what's funny, Andrei. I put our pricing on our websites too and people don't look at it. And then we talked to them and we found, because we take so many calls also, we're not taking 100 a week, we found for us a sweet spot for the agencies that I own, the companies that I own, is about 150 every month, is what works for us really well. And what we've seen in the data is of 42% of the people that come through our stuff, and most of our leads are coming through one-to-one marketing or they're coming through cold email outreach, 42% of them are not checking out the pricing page, which means 42% of the people that we talk to on a regular basis have no idea what our pricing is. And so it becomes a conversation issue. So one of the things, and by the way, we price our stuff on average, it's about 5K a month too, for the agencies that I own. So whenever I looked at the plans and kind of what you guys have going on, I was like, you know, on the 2,500 a month plan, that's very accessible to a lot of people. So then it makes me wonder, all right, so what are the sales conversations like? Andrei, you're the founder, I'm assuming that you did a lot of the selling early on, is that correct? Correct, correct. Yeah. So when you were doing the selling, were you seeing a higher conversion rate than you are now moving to your sales team?
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04:47
I would say the same, yes, probably a higher conversion when I did this because we have the same number of deals we're closing per month but more leads. So yeah, so the conversion went down.
1
05:05
Yeah, so when I did this in my first agency and then I did this in other agencies, what I found was whenever I would take a call, I could close them about 38% of the time, and then whenever my, when I brought in a sales staff, they were converting about 20% of the calls. And so, what I started to do was I realized, one, there's something special about being the owner and founder, right? Like you're going to have some cachet that other people, well, you know, because everyone wants to talk to the owner-founder, like that makes them feel special. You know, and you can also give stories and case studies because it's in you, this is your business, it's your baby. So one of the things that we started to do was I started to take my team through a training process on consultative selling. Have you ever heard about consultative selling?
2
05:56
Kind of, maybe not sure with all in details about this, but I think I heard about it.
1
06:04
I'll lay it out, because this is how we run all of our companies now, is with the same sales model. And what we saw when we did this was the conversion rate that they were getting went from 20% to 33%. So it was a huge jump, made a big difference.
3
06:21
Yeah, yeah.
1
06:22
And so basically here's how it works. So people come in and for the first, we always do 30 minute calls. How long do you do your calls for, those initial conversations?
2
06:31
I think also 30 to 45. Perfect.
1
06:36
So what we would do is for the first 10 to 15 minutes of a 30 minute call, we would ask a series of questions. And the way that we'd set it up is this. We'd say, hey, listen, Andre, on these calls we disqualify 60% of the people that we talk to. They're not a good fit to work with us. Now that's real, I didn't make that number up, that's a real true story. Here's what's going to happen, after the first 10-15 minutes I'm going to know if you qualify or not. And I will say at that end of that time, hey listen, you don't qualify, you're a great person, you're just not a good fit for our process, our product, our service. So I'm gonna let you, give you 10, 15 minutes back of your day. We're gonna end this conversation now, okay? Or you're gonna qualify like 40% of our prospects do and at that point I'm gonna make you an offer so good it's gonna be impossible for you to say no. Does that sound good? To which the prospect goes, absolutely, that sounds amazing, great. So then I say, hey, I took a look at your website, I have an idea of what you're up to, tell me in detail what your business is about and what you have going on. And so then they talk to us and then we're just asking them questions. So for you, I know that you guys use Clavio a lot, correct?
3
07:55
Yes, yes.
1
07:56
Yeah, so I mean some of that's just going to be easy conversations of, hey, are you married to you know, what what email sending platform are you using? Oh, we're using MailChimp Okay, are you married to using MailChimp? Well, no if I can get better results in some other platform open great Okay, so now they checked one box. So then I'm just asking questions Like if I were you I'd be going how many email campaigns are you sending out every month? What are the results that you're getting? How old is your list? Are you updating it constantly? Is it segmented? You're gonna be asking on you guys may already do this, is this stuff that you're already
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08:28
doing?
2
08:29
No, I mean we ask some questions but not in such details.
1
08:33
I think that the details, because listen, people want to talk to you first. They want to be heard. One of the things that I see some agencies do and a lot of SaaS companies do is they bring in people to a conversation and they go, hey, let me show you what our program looks like. And they start going through a slide deck. And what it does is, instead of being engaged in the conversation, the prospect is already sitting back here and they're going, okay, yeah, let me see if this is gonna work for me. And so, we ask those questions, and we're getting those details on the front end so that we understand the problem. Then this is the key. So then we say, alright, so based off what you're telling me, how much money do you think you are losing because your email marketing isn't as good as it could be? And they're gonna say, I don't know. Promise. And so you say, okay, what's your average purchase? Like, what's the dollar amount for your average purchase? And they're, I don't know, they may say $200, let's say. Easy round number. Great. Okay, so our fee normally is $5,000 a month. You have a list of 20,000 people. You're seeing a conversion rate of a quarter of a percent. Our average client sees it, you know, a conversion rate of half a percent. So if we're just doing math here, it sounds like you have a pretty expensive problem because you're performing at half the rate that our average client does. So if I could get you an extra quarter of a percent of 20,000 would be what? 1% would be 200, so an extra 50 purchases at 200 bucks a month, an extra 50 purchases, that'd be 10 grand. So if I charge you $5,000, but you make an extra 10 grand, would that work for you? And they're gonna go, yeah, probably, yeah, that'd be great. Great, so I just fixed your problem, you're gonna make more money, let me tell you how we do it. And then you go into, here's why our solution works, here's why we're great, here's what we do, this is what makes us different from other people, and probably different than what you're up to. But that first little step is how much is it costing you? And it may be costing them a million dollars. I've done these conversations a lot, Andre, and they're like, yeah, my problem. I don't know, if I guess at it, it's probably costing me 20 clients a month or 100 clients a month. And yeah, if you could help me solve it, a client for us is worth five grand a month. So if you get me 20 new clients, that's $100,000 a month, wow. And I'm like, great, well my solution only costs 50 a year. And they go, whoa, that's amazing. And I say, yeah, so my solution is 50 grand, but the upside for you is 1.2 million over the same time period. Does that work for you? And everybody goes, yeah, that maps out. And then I go, great, let's go into it. Let me show you how this works. And what ends up happening is we have such a high close rate because we took the steps to set up the client, the customer, for success. And most of the time, it's just working them through the logic that's gonna help them see what's true.
4
12:00
Does this make sense?
1
12:02
Does this help? It sounds like a few different than what you guys are doing.
2
12:05
Yeah, it does make sense. Yes, it's different than what we do now.
1
12:11
So, if you've started to do this, one of the things I'd recommend, Andrei, is that you start to go do this first. Go take some sales calls with your team, and have another salesperson on the call. It could be your head of sales. Do you have a head of sales?
2
12:30
Yes, we do.
1
12:31
Okay, perfect. Take them with a head of sales and go through the process of going, and I'll send you a format after we get off this call that you guys can just take and make it your own. But I would go through and just start to go, okay, how can we ask questions and make the prospect talk to us so that they feel heard. Interesting stat, HubSpot found this from Gong.io that the top salespeople only speak 54% of the time. The bottom salespeople speak 66% of the time. What does that mean? They're talking too much, they're not listening enough. So, needs to get closer to even.
2
13:17
So was the free consultation call, it makes total sense, but also we have one offer where we get a lot of leads from, like we do free email marketing audits for our clients. So basically we go to their accounts and we do the, it's not cookie cutters, we kind of do it, other agencies charge for that. But the challenge for us, it's easier to get to their account, easy to do the audit, easy to present them everything that we found. And even we have the calculator showing them how much they money they losing. The uplift, like uplift when we implement this. But then we have a kind of challenge to convert them to the clients, to the customers.
1
14:09
So, why do you think that is? What's the disconnect there?
3
14:13
I mean, in some cases, the odds are so good
2
14:16
that they just take it and implement it themselves. Yeah. The other things, I don't have much experience to answer that question, so I don't understand why.
1
14:25
So, what may be interesting there, Andrei, is if you do the free audit, as a way to incentivize Tell them that you will give them the first month at the half cost because you already did the audit, it's already done, and that that's a huge part of your work. What it's going to do is it's going to increase your customer acquisition, your client acquisition. It's going to cost you some money in the beginning, but you already put money in by doing a free audit.
3
15:00
Yes.
1
15:01
Yes. So why not just discount and say, listen, I'll discount the first month and let's do this. You don't want to run this anymore. This would be some of the things I'd say. You don't want to run this anymore. You're busy. You've got other things to do. That may be another way that you can start to frame this. If you weren't writing emails, what would you be doing? That may be a really good phrase for your sales team. If you weren't having to handle the email situation, where would you spend your time?
2
15:40
But also, our clients is not founders also. Like sometimes we work with enterprise or medium-sized businesses where they have teams and there's many layers before the founder. Absolutely. So it's not, sometimes it's like part of their job to manage this. Yeah, and so that may be a way for you to start dequeuing some of those free audits.
1
16:01
It could be, hey, is this a core function of your job to send out cold emails?
3
16:06
Yes.
1
16:07
If they say yes, then I don't know. Maybe it's not an audit. Maybe it's a conversation first. And you say, well, okay, so if we took this over, what would you do? Because that may need to start to be a conversation. And that may be something where they say, Andre, you know, actually I am doing emails right now, but the company really wants to move this off to somebody else, and so I'm gonna be moving into a new role. Great, well let's talk. But if somebody's coming to you and they're like, I need a free email audit, oh, well, but I'm the email marketer. Well, they're not gonna hire you. Because that's their job. So I think that there may be a conversation somewhere in the middle where you go, hey listen, owner-founders are great, they typically don't have enough money if they're sending out emails, so not a great customer. I'm sure that the clients that do come through that are larger, they have more scale and budget, those ones are great combos to have and there needs to be some sort of like, hey, are you trying, and maybe this is a better way to phrase it, are you trying to get email marketing off your plate so that you don't have to do it, or are you just trying to improve it and keep running it? Because if they're just trying to improve it, then you may be doing a lot of free audits and helping a lot of people a lot, and the reality is, it's not helping your business.
3
17:35
Okay, makes sense.
1
17:37
I found this, by the way, and I'm telling you this because I used to do three free meetings booked with my SDR agency. And I'd have people come in, they'd get the three meetings and they'd move on. And they wouldn't even have a conversation. It'd be like, hey, how were the meetings? They had no intention of signing on. So what I started doing was I said, hey, listen, book a call and we'll give you three meetings free. And so then I'd take a salesperson, I'd take a sales call with them, and they'd say, hey, tell me about your, and they'd do the consultative selling, and then at the end, they'd say, well, I want the three free meetings. We'd go, great, we're gonna have you sign an agreement to get the three free meetings. If you don't engage with us after the three free meetings, like you don't say, hey, listen, I'm not gonna move forward, then we're gonna charge you our monthly amount at the time is $4,500. We're going to charge you the monthly amount after the three free unless you tell us that you don't want to. We'll give you 72 hours to do so. We got a credit card on file every time with each of these clients. And so then they were a little bit more committed. Then what we started doing to even up it a little bit more is I said, look, we're going to take a thousand dollar deposit. It's fully refundable. I'll give you three meetings for free. If you don't want to engage after that, I'll give you the $1,000 back. But if you do, I'll just credit it to your first invoice. So it's $1,000 off your first invoice because you already paid it. There may be some ways for you to increase that conversion rate by starting to look at what are the things that are holding it back from going higher. Because I love the free audit, it's so good. That's such a good offer. And it seems like that may be hurting you.
3
19:19
Okay. Does that sound good? Yes, yes.
2
19:22
Cool man.
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19:24
Any other questions or thoughts on this? No, not really. Okay, well if people wanted to check out Flowium, if they want to check you out, where can they do that, Andrei?
2
19:44
Yeah, just simply go to flowium.com. It's F-L-O-W-I-U-M dot com.
1
19:52
All the information is there. And I'll just say this to the people that are listening. I've checked out Andrei's site. I've checked out some of his case studies. Their work is immaculate. If you're looking to grow, scale, change up your email marketing, go give them a look. I'm really impressed with what they have going on. And yeah, thanks so much for coming on, brother. Good chatting with you. Good chatting with you.
2
20:15
Thank you, thank you, Dave.