Jeremy Weisz 14:55
From a personality perspective. You know, the bubbly, nice personality, but serious and holds someone accountable personality. What kind of things do you use to assess that? Because, you know, probably some of your clients are on with a maybe a hard-charging CEO talking about stuff, and so the person has to be nice, but they probably sometimes have to push back when they see someone not following whatever the strategy or methodology of that agency. So what do you use to assess personality? Or, how do you, you know, how does that work in the interview process?
Taylor McMaster 15:35
Yeah, we use a bunch of different techniques, I guess, like, we’re looking for little elements throughout the entire process. So it’s not just like three questions you can ask, it’s thread throughout the entire process, down to, how quickly are you responding to us? How are you dealing with the difficult situations that we throw at you? How are you dealing with like, it’s just, it’s throughout the whole process. And it’s kind of, it ties into that dot vibe.
One of our core values is persistent, and so that is something that we’re looking for. You know how, a big piece of our role is quick to respond, professional, fully thought through, articulate all of these things that our process allows for us to see through, you know, the initial application to sending in videos of yourself, telling us why you’d be a great fit through our training process, doing assessments on interview one, on interview two, we’re looking for those things. So it’s kind of one of these things that you have to push people and to see how far they push back. And that’s just something you have to kind of thread throughout your process.
Jeremy Weisz 16:52
I know you have a hiring checklist somewhere on your website. I don’t know if you want to point people to that. Where can they find that?
Taylor McMaster 17:03
Yeah, we do have a hiring checklist. We have a client onboarding checklist that you can grab, but we have a hiring checklist. I can drop you the link. It’s more or less just an understanding of what this role really should look like, what you need to make sure you have in place before you hire somebody, something that I talked about at the Elevate event, Jason’s event that you and I were recently at, was actually the cost to hire somebody. And I think most people don’t realize how expensive an account manager costs to hire. So when you’re thinking about this hiring checklist, also about the cost, like we spend around $10,000 to hire one account manager, and so if you’re thinking about hiring, you do really need to think about that cost as well. And another thing to think about when it comes to the hiring checklist is time. We used to say it takes around two weeks, but it’s closer to four to six weeks to really get an account manager hired and then training after that. So I would allow yourself a lot of time. We have a full stack team who does hiring full time here at DOT, because this role, like you said, is a unicorn role. It takes a lot more time than I wish it did. So as you’re kind of preparing a checklist for your own agency, just consider the time that it really takes to find these people.
Jeremy Weisz 18:33
So Taylor, we go from hiring, now someone or you bring them on, what are some key elements of the training that maybe before, again, you didn’t realize how important some of them were early on, and now you know how important some of these pieces are from the training perspective.
Taylor McMaster 18:51
Yeah. So the biggest thing that we see is the person should be 80% there by the time they start working in your agency. They should understand marketing, and they should check all those boxes right? The other 20% needs to be best practices. So how do you want them to do account management within your agency? So when we start working with an agency, we really look at the holistic agency structure. So we go through our four pillar framework to really understand what’s working well and where are the gaps, and then those are the things we need to hit first. But when it comes to training the account manager, those account managers need to learn how to go into an agency and identify what’s working and what’s not working right. Because oftentimes we’ll go into an agency and we’re expected just to kind of fall to the systems that they have and fall to the expectations that the agency owner might set out however they’re hiring us, because we are the experts. So it’s being able to step into an agency, look at what’s going on, and say, Okay, that’s cool, that this is how it’s been working. But here’s our recommendation on how we should change this.
And really being able to come fully loaded into an agency and make an impact quickly. So that’s what we’re training them on. It’s kind of like the best practices of what we do at DOT, how we’ve identified things that work and don’t work across agencies. And they need to kind of learn how they can arm themselves to kind of go have those conversations.
Jeremy Weisz 20:23
You refer to the four pillar framework, what’s that?
Taylor McMaster 20:30
So we look at four key pieces of account management. It is agency structure. So in that pillar, we’re looking at essentially how the nuts and bolts of the agency go together. Communication, who goes to for what? Who’s responsible for what? What are everyone’s KPIs, how are we tracking things, that kind of thing, kind of the setup.
Then we’re looking at onboarding. So to me, onboarding is the most important piece, because this is when, this is when your client expects to get something right. You’ve sold them. This is the point where they actually want to receive something for what they’ve invested in. So the whole onboarding process is really crucial. So we wanted to really understand, how are you currently onboarding agencies, and how can we improve that process?
The next pillar is project management. So a key piece of our role is managing the projects, ensuring that, you know, everything is running smoothly and nothing is falling through the cracks, and we are responsible at the end of the day for that client relationship. So we want to make sure that that is really buttoned up and that we’re owning that process. And oftentimes, you know, we might work with an agency where they use an Excel spreadsheet, and then we might work with an agency where they are fully built in clickup. So we just want to understand that whole process.
And the last is client retention. So we want to understand where the holes are, how do we fix them? How do we improve churn, reduce churn and optimize the whole client experience? So in a nutshell, those four key components allow us to really understand what’s going on in the agency and how we can kind of make some improvements. And that’s kind of where we start.
Jeremy Weisz 22:13
I love that. Yeah. I’m going to start in reverse for a second from the client retention piece, because we were talking about before we hit record, about reducing churn, and what are some things that you’ve seen that help reduce client churn?
Taylor McMaster 22:34
Yeah, client churn is a huge topic, obviously, because if you have a leaky bucket, you can’t scale your agency. A huge piece of the account management function within an agency should be responsible for churn a lot of times. You know, clients may leave because of the results, and as much as I would love to say, well, that’s the fulfillment team’s fault, at the end of the day, we’re responsible for the client experience, so we need to kind of own that and improve that in future. But a lot of times it’s a misalignment in terms of expectations. The client doesn’t feel heard. They don’t feel like you understand their business. And a lot of that comes back to proper proactive communication, really spending time with that client, sitting down and really understanding what means success to that client. And so those are some of the key things that I would look for in an agency who is struggling with churn, is how much time are you spending with your clients, and what does that time look like? And what are you doing with them?
In terms of reducing churn, it’s this whole user experience that we want to look at, everything from client onboarding to offboarding and everything in between. But there’s some elements that happen throughout the client journey that can allow you to really step up and get ahead of churn. So things like setting quarterly strategy calls with your clients, realigning on what the expectations are quarterly, but then kind of working back from that. Is it a monthly touch base? What are your weekly communications? What are your daily communications looking like and ensuring that your team is providing the client with the handhold that they actually need? Because my thought process is, I don’t know what you think, Jeremy, but as days go on, while you’re not communicating with your clients, they think you’re doing nothing for them, and if you’re not proactively communicating your value, then over time, the value diminishes, and then they leave. So your team should be constantly looking for ways to wow them, show the value and show how much value you’re providing to the client. And a really strong account manager should be able to do that.
And then some different strategies, things like de-escalation, you know, we had a client that wanted to leave the other day, for example, and, you know, we got on the phone with him and and we just kind of opened up the conversation and said, like, listen, I I’m not here to try and save you as a client. I really just want to have an open conversation and really understand where we went wrong and how we can learn from this experience, and how we can help you and your agency, and we kind of just allow them to have an open conversation with us. And through that experience, they were able to spill their guts of like, this is all the things that aren’t working, and here’s the misalignment and expectations. And we were able to successfully get aligned and continue working with that client, because we were able to use the strategies of really just understanding them, understanding what’s working, what’s not working, and just realign. And instead of just allowing them to walk out the back door, we took the time to sit down with that client and really get on the same level. And so having those strategies as an account team are really crucial, because there are going to be times when, even though you feel like you check every box and you do to everything you could throughout that relationship, there’s going to be a time where someone wants to leave, and as long as you have the tools in your tool belt to really feel like you did all you could to save that relationship, not only will you impress the agency owner, but you’ll you’ll keep that door open on a positive note for that client in the long term, and maybe that’ll encourage referrals, or the client might come back. So there’s ways that you can really manage the relationship in a really meaningful way.
Jeremy Weisz 26:51
That’s Taylor, really helpful. I love that question. I don’t know if you have any other, I don’t know if we call it de-escalation questions. I think you have another awesome checklist on your hands if that’s the case. But I love where do we go wrong as a question. Are there any other questions that you or the team uses, you know, for your clients, while you’re working on their behalf from a de-escalation perspective?
Taylor McMaster 27:20
That’s a good question. Something that we use proactively is the one thing initiative. I don’t know if we made this up or if it’s like a thing in the industry, but something that we use is called the one thing initiative. And instead of giving our clients, you know these big surveys, well, this is a really easy thing you could do. You can have your account manager reach out to your clients frequently and say, what’s one thing we’re doing well, what’s one thing we could do better, and what’s one thing you want to see more of from us?
It’s a really easy way to get a gut check on how you’re doing, what you could be doing better. It’s not a huge lift for the client, and it’s just quick and easy, right? And if you open up, if you have a really good relationship with your clients, they’ll feel comfortable providing great feedback. It’s easy, and it allows you to really stay on top of things. Another thing that I recommend for account managers to have is a client dashboard that you use high level. You should know where your clients are at at all times. You should know if they’re happy, if they’re at risk, if they’re, you know, green, yellow, red. And you should be able to back that up with something because as an agency owner, I want to be able to high level, see where all my clients are at. So if you can kind of provide, you know, high level for your agency owner, the health of the business, the health of the client roster. That is just the cherry on top.
Jeremy Weisz 28:45
You mentioned one of the pillars is onboarding. And I know you also have a checklist for Client Onboarding, so we can point people to there. I’m not sure you know, they can obviously go to dotandcompany.co, I’m not sure if there’s a certain place they could find that, but I’d love for you to point out where they could find it. But also, what are, what’s an element or two that you find to be, you know, really essential in that client onboarding process?
Taylor McMaster 29:14
Yeah. So you can go to dotandcompany.co/checklist, this is a Client Onboarding Checklist that we have given to agencies for, I think, five, four or five years now. And what I’ll say about a checklist, a checklist is great. It is a tool that you can use, but what I would say is it’s not really about the tools and the processes. It’s more about having the right person take the client through the journey. And the biggest mistake we see across most agencies is the sales team hand over to account management and the expectations that are set in the sales process being handed over to the account manager and there’s oftentimes issues. So what I would say is the checklist is awesome. Have those in have that in your process, in your project management software, however, you want to make sure that your account manager is responsible in taking the ownership for the entire client experience, and you want the account manager to be able to work with the sales team to bring that client through, to have that really amazing experience for your clients. So I would say the checklist is like the tip of the mountain, but having the account strategy is everything underneath the water, the tip of the iceberg, I should say. And having the account manager is the whole package.
Jeremy Weisz 30:50
So Taylor, what’s, I’m sure you’ve seen this many times, and you’ve probably worked with agencies and probably gave them some tips on this, but what mistakes have you seen with the handoff from the sales to the account team?
Taylor McMaster 31:106
It’s expectation setting. It’s always expectations. The sales team has a goal of getting the client to sign the agreement, and then that’s it. And a really strong salesperson sees the long term vision of the agency. They see the whole process, but sometimes you have sales people who don’t, and I think where the gap often happens is between sales and fulfillment and account management obviously kind of oversees that whole process, but if the sales team understands the whole vision of the client experience they can better speak to expectations with the client. So for example, we work with a fractional Sales Director, Corey. He owns Sales Haven absolutely amazing, totally crushing it. But what I love about him and his team is they understand the whole journey. They want to understand why clients are leaving on the other end, what is happening like they want to understand the full experience so that they can backtrack and really set expectations on the front end. And that is what I think a really strong sales team should be able to do, but at the end of the day, the account manager is responsible for ensuring that the expectations are aligned from the get go. So oftentimes, we encourage our account managers that if there are issues in that handoff, they feed those back to the sales team to ensure that it doesn’t happen in the future. But I’d say that’s a huge gap that I see across most agencies.
Jeremy Weisz 32:45
Taylor, we are also talking about leveraging specialists, right? You obviously have a specific specialty in what you do, and I’d love to talk about leveraging specialist agencies. And we work with a lot of agencies, and we have a lot of agency partners as well. And we refer out versus in house, right? Because someone’s like thinking, no matter what type of agency someone’s a company is thinking, Well, I can leverage their specialty as an agency, or I can try and do this in house. So speak to that for a second.
Taylor McMaster 33:23
Yeah, yeah. It’s an interesting concept, because I think in today’s age, we have access to so many more specialists than we’ve ever had. And, you know, we leverage specialists, like I said, we work with factual sales directors, because I don’t have the time or expertise to go train somebody to do this role. Nor do I want to, and it’s going to cost my business a lot more money. And on the flip side, for example, our team agencies come to us because not only do they have an account manager and a project manager being placed in their agency, but they don’t have to manage that person. We take care of the management of the account managers and the hiring and the training, which, as I said, costs a lot of money. So I think where we see agencies scale the fastest and see the most success, not only on the growth side, but on their margins, is when they leverage specialists rather than taking on the full time higher and having to do all of that management and training themselves. I think if there’s areas that you can outsource, it totally makes sense, you know, like, even if you’re a small or a big agency, you have to think about the trade off of of hiring somebody and training them and managing them yourself, not to say it doesn’t work, and it does, you know, but people work with Rise25 for their podcast because they don’t want to have to train somebody to do all of the back end. And I can tell you, it’s a lot of work. Having people so that you can find specialists to buy back your time is literally the most important thing as you’re growing a business. So I think if you can leverage specialists and it makes sense for your business, do it.
Jeremy Weisz 35:08
There was Taylor, a company you worked with. I’d love to hear more details. It was a nonprofit marketing company and what happened there?
Taylor McMaster 35:17
Yeah. So we’ve been working with this agency for over three years, and he was actually quite reluctant to hire us, because he had a full time in house account manager, but he’d heard great things about us, and so we’d kind of chatted, and he was really nervous, and we started working together. We put an account manager into his agency, and within six months, he came to us, and he was like, I am saving over 60 hours a month, and now I’m able to go take an afternoon off and go smoke cigars in the backyard, because that’s what he’s into. And he was able to just focus on the business instead of in the business. And he came to me and said, you know, I love my team and everything, and you know, as we go through ups and downs in agency life, the last person that I would get rid of is my account manager with DOT & Co. And it wasn’t just because she was doing an amazing job and saving him all this time. It was also the risk. He didn’t have to have full time staff members. He was able to outsource to a team like us, and it really took the risk off of him and his agency, which was a really great iwin for him. And so those people, those agency owners, who are able to leverage specialists and fractional models like I think it just is such a great opportunity.
Jeremy Weisz 36:46
Yeah, one of the things you talk about, too, in the onboarding and in the process from clients, is client gifting. So I’d love to hear some of your favorite gifts you’ve seen people use, or that you’ve used throughout the years.
Taylor McMaster 37:02
Yeah, gifting should be a strategy. In my opinion. I don’t think it should be something that’s just like random. Obviously, there’s going to be elements of random, opportunities to surprise and delight a client, but it should be a little strategic. You should be looking for things.
I actually sent a really cool gift to a client when I was an account manager, the agency owner came to me, and they’re like, hey, I want to send something really nice to this client. I don’t know what. And so I started to kind of dig into, you know, what are they into? We went layers deep, right? Trying to figure out what this person was into. They were really into vintage books, and they were really into baseball. So we sent them this like vintage signed book from eBay that I went into the trenches and found and shipped it to their house. And they were floored. They couldn’t believe that we A found it, but B thought to send them something so unique. And so obviously they’re going to keep that, and they’re always going to be reminded of that agency owner.
And so I think that you have to have a budget for your account managers to be able to do this. So we give all of our account managers a quarterly budget and spend it, or you lose it. So you have to look for opportunities. And it shouldn’t just be like a gift basket or some flowers, although I love that. But another example is I was like, you said I was on the Perpetual Traffic Podcast a couple of years ago. So ahead of that podcast, I sent them custom cookies to their offices with, you know, their logo on it and my logo. And was just like, I’m so excited to podcast. It’s gonna be awesome. And they, I think, still call me the cookie girl. They did mention another episode as well. Yeah, so they, they loved it, and it was just a little surprise and delight, just little opportunities that don’t take that much effort. But when you do do it, maybe you have your executive assistant send a nice gift, and it just goes a long way.
Jeremy Weisz 39:02
So personalization, obviously, sticks out for me in those stories, like really, you researched it and you tried to make something that’s highly personal?
Taylor McMaster 39:16
Yeah, exactly. The more personal, the better. And don’t just send your clients like a hat with your business logo on it. Make it about them.
Jeremy Weisz 39:27
Taylor, you mentioned Fiji in the very beginning, and I’d love to hear, because it sounds like one of the reasons you went to the event is maybe a mentor. So I’d love to hear maybe some of your mentors throughout the years, and maybe a lesson you learned from them.
Taylor McMaster 39:44
Yeah, I’ve worked with a few different people throughout the years, and the biggest thing that I’ve learned is that you have to stay laser focused on what you’re working towards. And in our industry, there’s so many shiny objects. And for me, the first three years, I don’t think I listened to any business podcast. I didn’t listen to biz books. I didn’t want to get confused with what was out there. And that really allowed us to say, really laser focused on our offer and just getting better and better at what we were doing versus, I’m very I’m like a sponge. I like, listen to other people’s talks or presentations or podcasts. Like, I need to implement this now. I need to do this like, and I didn’t want to give my team a whiplash and I didn’t want to be all over the place. And I think that is the biggest lesson that I learned from mentors or anybody, really, is just to stay really focused on what you’re doing until you hit a point where you can then look for other shiny objects.
Jeremy Weisz 40:51
Talk about working with a spouse. Someone may be working with a family member or spouse, and some of the things that you found that have helped.
Taylor McMaster 41:00
Yeah, that’s a good question. So my husband and I both co-own our business together. I started it, and he came in three years in, although he was there the whole time in the background, but wasn’t full time in the business, and it’s been amazing. And I think why a lot of people go into business with partners is because they want to have that person, right, who’s in it with them, who can bounce ideas off of and who’s really in it with you, and that has been us, like we’ve been able to grow together and work through things together. You definitely have to have boundaries, for sure, in terms of your life and work, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been so so good, and we have different, completely different skill sets that complement each other. And I don’t think you’d ever have the level of trust with anybody other than maybe a business partner or a spouse or family member.
Jeremy Weisz 42:01
I’m sure that helps. But talk about the boundaries for a second, it probably helps that you both kind of deal with different aspects of the business itself.
Taylor McMaster 42:12
Yeah, we both have our lanes and we don’t cross, but we just kind of have an open communication loop where it’s like, if you don’t want to talk about work, just say it and I won’t be offended. Or if we’re hanging out in the house, I say, like, can I ask you a quick business question? And if he says, No, I’m like, okay, great, we’ll talk about it later. Like, we just kind of set that up where it’s like, I’m not going to be mad, and I have to respect you so and we also, I thread this throughout our entire organization, but even though you think something’s urgent, it’s not that urgent. So like, relax for a second. We’re not saving babies. Let’s just take a deep breath and we’ll deal with it later.
Jeremy Weisz 42:52
Yeah, Taylor, I have one last question before I ask it. I just want to thank you for sharing your lessons and knowledge. It’s been really valuable, and I want to encourage people to check out dotandcompany.co, to learn more. And you can check out the dotandcompany.co/checklist for what Taylor was referring to earlier.
I love to hear some of your favorite resources. It could be software, it could be podcasts, it could be books. And also, it’s kind of like just a dual question I’m going to ask you as a follow up, some of your favorite episodes on your podcast, but some of your favorite resources, first could be podcasts, books, software.
Taylor McMaster 43:38
So my favorite book that I recently read is called Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. He’s actually from the east coast of Canada, where I’m from, and I recently read it, and I think it’s my favorite business book I’ve ever read. It’s the most practical, laser focused book I’ve ever read. So highly recommend that.
On my podcast, we talk a lot about account management, of course, but our hiring process we go into a deep level and what we look for. So I would recommend listening to that. And yeah, I would say that would probably be the best one.
Jeremy Weisz 44:04
It looks like you have an episode with Todd Taskey, so I haven’t seen that one, I’ll watch that one. Also with Corey Quinn as well. So both have been in the podcast and are both good guests. I’ll have to check those out. But Taylor, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing. Everyone, check out dotandcompany.co to learn more, and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, Taylor. Thanks everyone.
