Marketing-Agentur skalieren: Vertrieb ohne Burnout

0:00Unternehmer/Gast I've been following you for quite a while, so thank you. Um I sell digital marketing services and business management applications to home service providers. Okay. We do 580,000 in MRR. Great. Um Congratulations. 2% monthly churn, 100% uh net retention revenue. I would like to eventually be at 100 million. Sure. No rush for that. Biggest thing that's stopping us right now is figuring out the best way to scale.

0:28Uh my background, I come from an agency. I was a sales rep. >> Sure. Very high transactions and honestly it seems like it leads to a lot of burnout for those types of sales reps. It also seems like the goals aren't aligned. The reps are just doing high volume. Mhm. It's not what's best for the client. So what we started at our agency is it's kind of like the insurance model. You sell a client, you work with that client for life. Uh-huh.

0:52I think it's a lot more fulfilling. Um I'm told the best >> No, so we have a W-2 So they just do like they're the account rep. Yeah. All right. Um But yeah, I'm told like the best way to scale is to differentiate that and just split sales and split account management versus the way we are doing it. Uh wanted to get your thoughts on that if that's necessary or

1:17Alex >> So um given the size and the stuff that you have right now, >> [sighs] >> I almost want to plead the fifth because I would need more information. If you have 2% monthly churn for agency services, that's really good and I really wouldn't want to break that. And so we typically almost always separate customer service from sales, but I would imagine the way that you're running it is that the guys fill up their book and then they're kind of done and then that's all they manage. Is that about right? They sell if they need to.

1:45>> So our top rep has been with us 4 years and he's bringing in a total of 100,000 MRR. And we're giving them tools to you know, SDRs so he can continue to grow. Uh-huh. Uh we haven't seen somebody really tap out yet. So we don't really know where he's going to stop. >> So he keeps selling and he's able to keep the customers. >> Yeah, and his churn is staying below 2%.

2:09>> or what are you selling? SEO and paid ads. And paid. And then you have some sort of tool? Uh >> apps or applications. >> have some tools to make that very efficient. For the sales guys or for the home services? For the customers or the sales guys? >> the SEO services for very good costs. So you provide Right, so you centrally provide the SEO, right?

2:34And then the sales guys sell it. And then where does the application fit in? The what like the business management app? Sure. That's a optional. So some >> So that's not key to why the churn is low. No. Okay. So it's really just that the guys just do everything and >> low because the guys build really good relationships with the clients. Yeah. Got and SEO obviously works if your guys are Yeah. It's very it's 200, 300 bucks a month. Like our ARPU the last 6 months is 300, but historically it's 200.

3:03>> No, I'm familiar Yeah, yeah. I get it now. Uh the price is a big part of it though. Just a FYI, that like that's why churn is also so low. Like 300 bucks a month is where SMBs um will typically stay. You go up to 1,000, 1,200, uh you've got like another tier of churn and then above that is like the next kind of point is like 2,500 to 3,500 dollars a month. Um and then after that you're not selling SMBs anymore or you're selling to bigger businesses, right? >> Yeah. Um So all that to say, your question is how do I scale?

3:32Yeah, do I want to break it out so it's account managers and sales reps? >> you break the business. Yeah. I think you do more of what's working. Cool. If you have 100% revenue retention annually, then just add add more revenue. I guess my only question is how do we keep them from getting lazy and becoming turning from hunters to farmers? Is that something we just accept and hire more guys or >> Yeah, I think so. Do we add I mean you Basically there's problems on either model, right? Um but if you have 2% monthly churn in a in a business model that typically has churn way higher than that normally, um then you've solved something that many people have struggled to solve. And so that means you have 50-month average LTVs, right? So you have a 15,000 dollar LTV on the product um and then how many customers a month are you selling? 150.

4:16Yeah. So are you doing outbound? Yep. Yeah. So yeah, you just got to scale it up so cuz there was a guy um I think I told a story about this on a short, but uh guy I know uh well through mutual friend uh did basically this exact same model. He didn't do the fulfillment piece, but in terms of like it was 299 SEO and social media management for he just did all small businesses and they had a 38-month average LTV and what he would do is he'd take the first month, he'd spend that on Google Ads just so they saw some quick wins and then he never spent money on it again, but they decided it worked and then that's how he ran it. And uh he had like a 400-person call floor.

4:54He was doing like 12 million a month. And so I uh I say that to say uh I think you just need to do more of what's working. Cool. Yeah, and then you'll deal with the problem that you'll have some like fat and lazy farmers, but like if churn's not really affected, it doesn't really affect you, it affects them. One thing we are considering is based on your total book of business. So if your total book of business is smaller, then we have a quota for you, but once your book of business reaches a certain point, there's no longer a quota.

5:23Well, that would make fatter and lazier though. I mean if you could bring in consistently 100,000 dollars, I don't care what you do. Like you're going to have to >> then you've answered it. If you don't care what they do, then who cares? Yeah. Just bring more guys in. Okay. Sweet. Thank you. Yeah, you bet. If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the 100 million dollar scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstraint the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can book a call with my team and we will look at your business, see if we can help and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.