[Top Agency Series] How to Remove Friction From Your Sales Process with John Doherty, Founder and CEO of Credo

John Doherty is the Founder and CEO of Credo, a company that he started in 2013 because he wanted to help businesses to avoid hiring bad marketing agencies. John is a veteran SEO and digital marketer and he ranked as one of the top 140 SEO experts that anyone should be following in an article by Search Engine Journal.

Through his company, Credo, top companies can meet the best pre-vetted digital marketing providers within a few days and they can trust that these agencies can help grow their businesses. They have helped over 4,500 businesses, including companies like the New York Times, Adobe, Lands’ End, and many more.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• John Doherty talks about how he helped a digital agency increase their conversion rate by 25-30% through Credo
• John discusses his philosophy on follow-ups and how it can lead to higher client conversions
• How to never miss a lead from your website for effective follow-up
• John discusses his CRM and the top tools that he recommends for agencies
• Why you should be qualifying leads upfront and how to avoid pricing down your services
• The different levels of Credo and how they serve their clients
• John talks about how Credo takes on new agencies
• How Credo serves businesses who are looking for online marketing professionals
• Should you hire an agency or hire an in-house team?
• The power and value of maintaining relationships

In this episode…

Are your leads inflow drying out? Or are you attracting unqualified leads and then struggling to convert them? These scenarios are oftentimes the result of a friction in your sales process, whether it be in the failure to qualify leads upfront or failing to add leads into your CRM and not being able to follow up with them. This then leads to low client intake and an underperforming bottom line. So how can you remove this friction and turn things around for your company?

On this episode of Inspired Insider, Dr. Jeremy Weisz talks with Credo Founder and CEO, John Doherty, about how to remove any existing friction in your sales process and why it’s so important for your business. They also discuss how you can block leaks in your leads intake system, John’s philosophy on follow-ups, the importance of qualifying leads upfront, negotiation tactics to avoid underpricing your services, and more. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned on this episode

• Credo
• John Doherty on LinkedIn
• SEMrush Guide – How to use SEMrush for SEO by John Doherty
• Free 30-day Trial of SEMrush Guru on InspiredInsider.com
• EditorNinja

John Doherty on Youtube:

• Should You Hire In-House or A Marketing Agency?
• Freelancers vs Consultant vs Agency–What’s The Difference?
• Dan Martell on LinkedIn
• Zack Onisko on LinkedIn

Past Episodes Mentioned:

• Wade Foster, Founder of Zapier, on Inspired Insider
• Urmas Purde, Co-Founder of Pipedrive, on Inspired Insider

 

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders and John I love the stories, not just the success stories, but the challenge stories and I had Pipedrive co founder, Urmas, on and he talked about we talked about pipe drive, right but at that point, it 10,000 paying customers now they have over 100,000 customers, but he talked about having brain surgery, getting married and moving from Estonia to the us all in the same year. So check out that episode and other episodes. It’s just a person in a company I just highly respect this episode. See On this episode, other episodes are brought to you by Ries25, which I co founded with my business partner John Corcoran, and at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 partnerships and clients and relationships by helping them run their podcast. So for me, John over the past, like since 2008 relation in general it relationships are the number one thing in my life and I’m always looking away to give to my best relationships. A podcast has been a way for me to profile other thought leaders in companies and give to them and I love learning from them to like yourself. So you know, we help if you have a question. If you’re thinking about launching a podcast or you have a podcast, you want to make sure it fits in the overall goals. Go to Rise25.com check out more email us. We worked with companies from a Berkshire Hathaway company to agencies to consultants to SaaS companies, you name it. So check it out. And I’m excited to introduce today’s guest. Before I do, big shout out to SEMrush who I use for research, and you can run your SEO, PPC, social media marketing. And probably over you know, John’s nodding because he knows it way better than I do with 40 plus advanced tools. And all you have to do is enter in a domain you know your competitors traffic sources, ranking social media and Johnny here how you’ve used it. They’ve over 6 million users. I look up John to see what other links out there should I be checking out as my research so I find one GetCredo.com, which I’ll introduce in a second has over 32,000 backlinks and they I saw a Search Engine Journal he was ranked one of the hundred and 40 top SEO experts you should be following which I would never have found otherwise. Because you know there’s just a lot of other information you have out there. So John Doherty is the founder and CEO of Credo you could check out GetCredo.com Credo started in 2013. Because John, like I said, a veteran of SEO and digital marketer, you know, digital marketer was frustrated, because he was seeing his friends and other businesses hire bad marketing agency. So he created Credo. So top companies meet the best pre vetted digital marketing providers within a few days, and who they can trust to grow their businesses. They’ve helped over 4500 businesses, companies like New York Times, Adobe, Lands’ End, and so many more. So John, thanks for joining me,

John Doherty

Jeremy. Thanks for having me. That is quite the introduction. I want you to be my height man, everywhere I go.

Jeremy Weisz

I would love to be your height man. And so you were nodding when I was saying sem rush.

John Doherty

You know, was it? I was I mean, I wrote a guide on sem rush. There’s a guide to using SEMrush on Credo. And obviously I did link that up. Yeah, feel free to full disclosure, I’m an affiliate for them, but I’ve known them forever. I use them since before they even really launched the SEM rush toolkit back when they was just SEO quake they’re like browser extension add on. So I’ve known that sem rush crew for a long time. I know a lot of people over there, you know, email with people from they’re probably ugly, but it’s my go to tool for over you know, for research for keyword research for you know, backlink analysis, you know, visibility analysis, I just did it today I was on a call a coaching call with someone and they were talking about one of their competitors and I was like, Hey, man, it actually looks like a really good time for you to to invest in SEO because this competitor, he said is your main competitor, according to sem rush lost 50% of their search visibility in a row. And he’s like what so I love sem rush it’s a great tool.

Jeremy Weisz

I may direct people to your link so I forgot to mention so I don’t get anything for this but if you go to inspired insider comm slash sem rush guru, you get a 30 day free trial with our Guru account which is no credit card required by the way, typically $200 a month and I don’t get any I don’t get any kickback on that at all. So I may just send them to John’s cuz he’s gonna get an affiliate commission. I don’t but But anyways, we’ll link that up too. But John, so, um, I want to talk about it’s time A dual sided marketplace is tough. So you companies come in. So if you’re a company out there looking to hire for digital marketing, you should check out GetCredo if you are a digital marketing agency, you should check out GetCredo. So let’s talk on the agency side of things. There was a company you started working with in 2017. What happened? How did they use Credo and your, your master skills?

John Doherty

Yeah, so this is this is one of my favorite one of my favorite stories. So as you said Credo, started in 2013. I started working on a full time in 2015. So I’ve been doing it full time for a little over five years. We’ve helped over 4500 businesses in their I say in their journey to hiring not all of them have hired but you know, good number have, and then over 500 agencies in that time. And this one I love because it’s an agency that they they got on decreto, early 2017, right, the founder was still running the business, he had a business partner head of sales, they got on an old model of Credo, which we were, you know trialing and and, you know, working and that model kind of let us get to a point where we could invest back into growth, I could hire people and that sort of thing. But they were doing about $600,000 in revenue, annual revenue at the time, which you know, for a team of a smallish team. That’s not bad, you know, but they wanted to grow. And so you know, over the years, they brought it You brought in the owner brought in a business partner. And long story short, that business partner as it has bought out the founder by this point, but in early 2019, we hopped, we hopped on a call, and he was like, look like you guys are sending me awesome leads. And they were closing with other agencies through Credo, but he’s like, I’m not closing them, like can you you know, can you help me out? So I’ve been working on honing this kind of sales process over the years that I used to sell multiple six figures, I think was around 500 k worth of my own consulting over a few years. And I was like, Look, let me walk you through this. And so I walked him through ourselves through the sales process and tweak something, change some of their messaging, look at their proposals kind of looked at all this stuff. And this year, they’re going to do about $4 million in revenue is close rates improved by like 25-30%, something like that. And that’s not just leads that we send them through Credo that’s all the inbound leads all the leads that they are getting from other places as well. So it’s had a huge impact on their business. I actually teach that sales process on my YouTube channel, I teach in our agency accelerator course, it’s module four in there. But But yeah, it’s you know, it’s it’s a joy to me to work with, you mentioned that relationships, drive your business relationships drive my business as well. And it’s been a real joy to be able to work with, with agencies like that, who, you know, they want to invest in their own growth, they want to invest in their own learning, and they want to do better and to really see, you know, their businesses just improve materially and substantially through the work that we’ve done together. You know, I, I love marketing, marketing, super interesting to me, I was an SEO just an SEO for a really long time, or, you know, quite a number of years. But you know, these days, man, I just love it. I love building businesses, and I love helping you know, entrepreneurs succeed.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah. And John, so I want to talk about the sales process for a second. Because you’ve is great video and you talk you in this one video, you really honed in on follow up. Hmm, you want to talk about your philosophy and follow up for a second.