"I get all my work from word of mouth. Never needed marketing." You've heard it. Most agency owners either argue with him or agree with him... but both lose the deal. The reason why is because he's overconfident in his ability to solve the problem on his own. As long as he believes that, he has zero reason to pay you. So you lower his confidence. Now, you can't do it by challenging him. You do it by asking a rapid string of specific, technical business questions he probably can't answer, because he's been running on feel for years and it's worked well enough that nobody ever made him check. Let's say, for example, you're on with a roofer doing a couple million a year, all referrals. "How many leads came in the week before last?" "Not sure... I'd have to check." "You don't have that tracked? Got it. Well what percentage of your estimates turn into signed jobs?" "Pretty high, I'd say." "How many more jobs could your crews handle in a month before you'd need to hire?" "Honestly, not sure." Three "I don't know"s in a row. And he heard every one of them come out of his own mouth. (If you've been on my weekly Agency Sales coaching calls here in the group, you might have heard me say 'Their word is gospel, your word is garbage') That's what makes this work. You never argued with him once. He lowered his own confidence, so there's nothing for him to push back on. Two or three of those in a row and he opens right up. So, before your next call, write down five numbers a successful owner in your niche usually doesn't track, and then you can ask those quick numbers questions in discovery to lower an overconfident prospect's self-belief, thereby setting them up to be open to working with you.

There's a book called The Outsiders by William Thorndike. It follows eight CEOs who beat the market by a mile over their careers. The thread between them wasn't charisma or vision. It was that they treated deciding where every dollar of profit goes as the actual job. Most agency owners never make that decision on purpose. Profit comes in and it goes to whatever's loudest that month. Another hire cuz the team feels stretched. A new tool. A new offer cuz the old one got boring. Thorndike's CEOs asked the same boring question every time: what does this dollar return if I put it here instead of there? Sometimes the answer was do nothing and wait. For an agency the menu is short. Hire, spend on getting clients, build something you own, pay down debt, or pay yourself. Every one of those has a return. A hire that frees you to sell might be the best money you spend all year. A hire that just absorbs work the offer created might be the worst. Most of us never write the number down, so we never find out which one it was. Where did your last $10k of profit actually go, and would you make that call again?

When we let buyers bid on leads instead of paying a set price, I figured the cap was a formality. Minimum bid was $200, you went up in $50 steps, and we capped it at $1,000 cuz nobody was going to pay that for one lead. In some counties buyers hit the cap. We didn't get smarter about pricing. We just stopped telling the buyer what the lead was worth and let the ones who knew their own numbers tell us. It was second-price too, so the winner paid based on the next highest bid, not their own max. That took the games out of it. People bid what a lead was actually worth to them. Most agencies price off what they think the client will tolerate. The client who knows his close rate and his average job will usually pay more than you'd ever have the nerve to ask. How are you setting your price right now, off your costs or off what one customer is worth to the client?

Agency Sales w Aaron Brewer been uploaded in the course! Here’s the recap of what we went over if you missed it: 🚀 Sales Mastery: Framing, Objections & Detachment Recap 🌟 Wins to Kick Off - One member signed a client for $1,500/month and has officially moved from appointment setting into closing deals. - Philip reached $9K in recurring revenue, turned his B2B acquisition back on, and found a winning ad that is booking significantly more appointments. - The group continued sharpening sales skills around two-call closes, objection handling, framing, and outbound sales. 🖥️ Training / Coaching Highlights - Commission structure: A 15% upfront + 10% of months 1–3 structure isn't necessarily bad; the bigger issue is low cash collected. Close rates become much more meaningful when the upfront cash collected is higher. - Two-call closes: For agency offers above roughly $3K–$3.5K, Aaron recommends the two-call process because it can improve conversion, allow prospects time to process the conversation, disqualify poor-fit leads earlier, and increase cash collected. - The first call is about selling the next call. Don't make the intro call feel like an interrogation where the prospect gives you information but receives nothing in return. - Instead, sell the value of clarity and certainty: explain that the next call will involve research, a strategy, and a clear picture of what they need to do—even if they don't end up working with you. - Strong framing matters. If prospects don't feel that you can confidently lead the conversation, they will naturally try to take control of the call. - Tonality, certainty, eliminating filler words, and confidently following the process are all part of establishing leadership on the call. Pasted text 🎯 Frameworks & Strategies - Marketing Manager / Non-Decision-Maker Framework - Don't automatically dismiss someone because they're not the owner. - First determine whether they can actually make the decision. - If they can't, uncover what's personally valuable to them about solving the problem. - Turn them into an ambassador who wants to sell your solution internally. - Don't necessarily give them the full offer or investment; position a conversation with the owner as the logical next step.

At our peak we had about 450 clients and a client-facing team of 3. The whole company was around 16 people. People hear that and assume we had genius account managers. We had good ones, but that's not why it worked. It worked cuz there was almost nothing to manage. No monthly report to build. No strategy call to sit through. No retainer to justify every 30 days. Clients put money in a wallet, leads showed up, and if a lead was truly bad they returned it under a clear policy. About 15% come back and that's just part of the math. When a retainer agency starts feeling stretched, the first move is usually hiring another account manager. Sometimes that's right. But a lot of the time the work is coming from the offer, not the clients. Every custom thing you promise on the sales call is a meeting somebody has to run later. I'm not saying burn your retainers. Kyle's old agency ran about 20 clients with the same headcount we had for 450, and he sold it. It just had a different ceiling. What's the one deliverable you promise every client that eats the most of your team's week?