The Contrarian Bet on a Digital Agency

And so is that part of how you're working on the business? You're building the sales engine, the sales function?

Yes, it certainly is what has taken up the most of my time for the past several months.

Yeah, so you got to figure out first of all what your strategy is. Are you getting leads from ads? Are you getting leads from cold callers?

Are you getting leads from both? And then separate from those, you're getting leads from referrals. If you're getting leads from ads, then you know, you, you're hiring closers who are closing those ads.

If you're not, then you're hiring cold callers. And cold caller is usually seen as an undesirable position. If you, anyone who's not familiar with sales, just imagine making 200 calls a day where 180 of them, you know, probably luckily for you, don't pick up because who of us picks up an unknown number these days, but the 20 who do are so mad you've called them.

How dare you be bothering me while I'm working, while I'm at dinner, while I'm with my kids. And, and you're trying to overcome that to a. Get them to agree to give you a lot of money, thousands of dollars a month.

And so it's a pretty tough job. And, and high churn. And, and, and so, so despite all that, we decided we wanted to build out a cold calling function in addition to our ads which are running successfully.

So hiring cold callers takes a lot of time trying to find them, train them up quickly. There's just quick churn with cold callers. Either they don't want to do it or they're not doing it well.

And, and you've got to make sure they know that and then making sure the closers are in place to, to be able to, you know, close the leads wherever they are and that they know how to handle objections. They know our offers have been changing from SEO, which is what they've been selling for three years, to now aeo, to you know, AI based search.

And so knowing what that all means and how to explain that to someone who's not at all tech savvy in a way that gets them excited about it rather than throwing up their hands and turned off by the whole thing. And then as anyone who's good at sales will tell you, sales is in the follow up. So you're not going to cold call someone once and get a sale or get a lead off of the Internet and get on a…

You need to be calling them again and again and again and spending time with them and, and you know, especially these small business owners who, our small business owners, as I mentioned, are sometimes giving you their last 2000, 2500 that month, trusting that you're going to turn that into more for them, which, you know, which there are.