[Top Agency Series] Unlocking Referral Campaigns in Behavioral Health With Tim Zercher

Tim Zercher is the CEO and Owner of A-Train Marketing, a national firm providing marketing strategies and services to behavioral health groups. Under his leadership, the company has been featured in multiple national and international publications and has successfully built and grown over 400 brands across 34 states in the last 25 years. Tim has experience purchasing and merging agencies. He excels in creating deep, long-term partnerships and has a particular knack for developing effective referral campaigns within the healthcare sector. 

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

• [03:58] Tim Zercher discusses growing A-Train Marketing through M&A to dominate the behavioral health niche
• [07:11] Key transition strategies when converting a project-based client into a long-term partnership 
• [11:17] The profound impact of asking “why” three times to get to the heart of a client’s problem
• [14:37] Tim shares the secret behind successful referral campaigns in healthcare
• [17:54] The four phases of effective referral marketing campaigns 
• [29:53] Why Tim decided to acquire A-Train Marketing 
• [32:57] The challenges and lessons learned from acquiring and merging with another agency
• [40:31] The valuation and negotiation process
• [43:09] A-Train Marketing’s customer success stories

In this episode…

In the intriguing world of behavioral health marketing, the ability to adapt and innovate is not just a luxury, but a necessity. However, not all agencies have what it takes to help you navigate this space effectively. So, what strategies do successful agencies utilize to create long-term partnerships and effectively reach their target audiences?

Tim Zercher, a marketing expert, shares his journey from starting his marketing agency to acquiring A-Train and merging both entities to tackle the complex challenges of the behavioral health sector. He discusses how he initially ventured into marketing to make ends meet, learning and adapting along the way, eventually focusing on long-term strategic partnerships. Tim highlights the importance of asking the right questions and using a detailed, phased approach to create effective referral campaigns, particularly in healthcare, where relationships with primary referrers are crucial.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Tim Zercher, CEO and Owner of A-Train Marketing, about the nuances of behavioral health marketing. Tim discusses how he grew A-Train Marketing through M&A to dominate the behavioral health niche, key transition strategies when converting a project-based client into a long-term partnership, the four phases of effective referral marketing campaigns, and the challenges and lessons learned from acquiring and merging with another agency.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Tim Zercher on LinkedIn
• A-Train Marketing

Special Mention(s):

• The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible by Brian Tracy
• Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy
• Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness by Jeffrey Gitomer

Related episode(s):

• “Parent Guide to Helping Your Anxious Child (Plus Magic Tip To Avoid Three Hours of Tuck-in Time)” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Build a Business That Can Thrive Without You with John Warrillow of Built to Sell” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Selling a business is no joke, and buying a business never goes as smoothly as you think it will.”
• “We’d rather walk away from short-term money to get those long-term partnerships.”
• “We target only the people we want to talk to, using data from systems we use to deliver specific messages in a proper sequence.”
• “At the end of the day, marketing is about starting a pattern and not finishing it until you’ve taken the first step.”
• “Human nature is human nature. It’s the same now as 50-60 years ago.”

Action Steps:

1. Develop referral campaigns: Focus on creating targeted referral campaigns to establish partnerships with key local referrers.
2. Utilize multi-channel targeting: Implement a marketing strategy that includes a variety of channels — such as digital ads, direct mail, and email — to saturate your target audience from multiple angles.
3. Engage in iterative testing: This process allows for optimization of campaigns, ensuring that resources are directed toward the most effective strategies and messages.
4. Empower account managers: Train and empower account managers to act as the primary strategists for client accounts, giving them the autonomy to make decisions and drive results.
5. Focus on long-term partnerships: Aim to build enduring relationships with clients rather than focusing solely on one-off projects to ensure steady revenue.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:15 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Tim Zercher of A-Train Marketing. Tim, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. This is part of the top agency series, but since you really deal with behavioral health and addiction centers and those kinds of things, I remember I had Eli Lebowitz on, who has what’s called a space treatment. It’s not astronauts or NASA. It’s basically how parents can help their kids. So it’s not therapy, actually, per se, you’re nodding. Have you heard of this before?

Tim Zercher 1:12 

I know Eli, actually.

Jeremy Weisz 1:14 

Oh, I’m shocked, really?

Tim Zercher 1:16 

Yeah. Well, I think I do, at least if it’s the same Eli.

Jeremy Weisz 1:19 

I’m sure, yeah, Yale University. So people, it’s really interesting, if you have kids, it’s a really interesting episode. If you don’t, it’s still an interesting episode, I find. But check that one out, also from the agency side of things. I had Jason Swenk on. He was actually on twice. One talked about how he built his agency to eight figures and sold it. And then the second one was more talking about agencies in the valuation space. And he has had bought up agencies. That was interesting. Another one, Tim, that was good was Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech. He’s had an agency since 1995 so it was interesting to talk about the landscape of business, the landscape of the internet and obviously the agency evolution over time. So check that one out as well, and many more on inspiredinsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So Tim, kind of like what you are for addiction centers and behavioral health. We’re kind of like the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host so they can run their business and create amazing content and amazing relationships. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give and give to those relationships, and I’ve found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I am excited to introduce Tim Zercher, and he’s a CEO and owner of A-Train Marketing. And A-Train Marketing is a national firm that provides marketing strategy and services to behavioral health groups, Tim has actually been featured all over the place, multiple national, international publications for his work in marketing strategy, and his team has really worked to build and grow over 400 brands over the last 25 years. They currently have clients in 34 states. So Tim, thanks for joining me.

Tim Zercher 3:42 

Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Jeremy.

Jeremy Weisz 3:44 

Talk about A-Train Marketing and what you do. And there’s a video piece, so I’m gonna share my screen, so if people are listening to the audio and they wanna check out the video, there is that availability. So talk about A-Train.

Tim Zercher 3:58 

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so, A-Train, like you said, started 25 years ago. I didn’t buy it when I was five years old, though, a good story, though. Would have been cool. Would have been cool. Now, I started my agency about 10 years ago, and then purchased A-Train and merged both agencies together about three years ago. A-Train has a lot of unique pieces to it, but I think the biggest, the most exciting, the most fun, is our work with our behavioral health groups. You mentioned a lot of addiction groups, but also a lot of community health groups. North Range you have on the screen here is a great example of a large community health group that we work with that has 19 locations and tons of sub brands and complicated brands to manage, but it’s really great work that we get to enjoy.

Jeremy Weisz 4:47 

Let’s talk about the journey. When you started the agency, and we’ll talk about the evolution a little bit — what were you focused in on? And then we’ll talk about how you came into this niche with obviously, purchasing the company?

Tim Zercher 5:01 

Yeah, absolutely. So when I started my agency, it was really just to pay the bills, because no one wanted to hire me, because I was unproven, right? I was this new kid out of college, and no one wanted to take a risk on a brand new person like me who wanted to do marketing and marketing strategy when I didn’t really have any experience. I found that’s not true, though, if you start your own thing and you just say, hey, I can do this for you, and you don’t charge much, which is what I did to get started, right? So I did that for the first couple of years. Grew that a lot and then what kind of happened is we started with just social media marketing and marketing strategy, we then grew into also doing SEO, and then also digital ads, and then also website design. Now that I’m doing these things now, clients need new brands, and so I kind of was cobbling together an agency on accident, almost just by what clients were asking for.

And then about three and so we grew, grew, we’re zero to I think we had 25 clients, something like that, almost all in the state of Colorado, two or three out of state. And then three years ago, I was actually friends with the owners of A-Train through a mutual friend that we had, and they said, hey, it’s time to retire. They’re not old by any means. They were retiring at like 45 but because they’d had a successful career. And so they said, hey, it’s time for us to head out. We want to do something with the agency. And so approached me, and we kind of went that way. The big reason that I purchased A-Train was to get into this behavioral health vertical, and that worked out very, very well. I’d wanted into the space of healthcare marketing for a good probably four or five years before that, and this opportunity came up, and it worked perfectly. One of those situations where it kind of fell into, what made sense.

Jeremy Weisz 6:58 

Was there a common theme with yours? I know you weren’t focused on one niche at that time. Was there kind of more of a percentage of a type of client for you?

Tim Zercher 7:11 

Yeah. So we were called Z3 Digital back in the day. Z3 was different from most agencies in that we didn’t just do projects as they came in, right? A lot of groups would just be like, hey, you need a website. Bam, here’s a new website. We were very, very focused on long-term partnership, and that’s kind of the only thing I’m interested in. If you just want some quick hit thing, cool, we can do that as a first project, but this better be a long term relationship, or I’m not that interested, right? And so A-rain had a very similar bent to how they operated with I mean, some of the clients that are still clients of a train have been clients for, I think one is 15 years now.

So we’ve gone through three different marketing directors, two different CEOs were effectively their marketing department, right? And we’re just in the background working and we have been for their brand for a long, long time. And so that kind of deep, long term partnership, that was probably the biggest theme between the two, if that makes sense.

Jeremy Weisz 8:15 

Talk about how you — it’s really interesting to transition a client, right? So with Z3 someone come and they go, Tim, I just need a website. Right, and talk about maybe one of those stories on they came with one thing. They really just wanted this thing. And then through talking to them, you built it into more of a long term project, the holistic Because we know, we both know, like a website’s not gonna I mean, unless you drive traffic, you have SEO, you have paid. It’s just one piece of the puzzle. Do you remember one of those times where someone was adamant, I just need this?

Tim Zercher 9:00 

Oh yes, oh yes. Well, and so there’s a couple of different stories that come to mind. I think which one to pick, I’ll stick with one that’s fairly recent. This was last year. Guy came to me randomly because he actually saw my job posting and wanted to steal the words I used for the position I was hiring for, which is funny. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone call me up and say, Hey, I just stole your job description. But I really like you guys.

Jeremy Weisz 9:28 

Asking. He was just telling you.

Tim Zercher 9:30 

Exactly, exactly, it’s already mine. It’s already on my job description. But good job, good writing. So he kind of came to us and he was really thinking like, hey, I really need help with my website, right? Our website’s trash. I know it is. I know we need to work on it. What can you guys do? We ended up not even working on his website, because, after we asked all the questions, really, really what they needed was ways to start new relationships with new partners in specific regions, right? So they needed new partnerships in Florida and in North Carolina, I believe it was. I think they couldn’t penetrate those markets. They really needed help with that. And I was like, okay, that’s not a new website. That’s a referral campaign and some digital ads and a really powerful LinkedIn campaign, and a landing page that drives that, communicates the value, etc.

So that was a great example. Could have been a website project. Maybe for us, it would have made more money as a website project because it was a large site. It was a good $130,000 project, and we actually steered away from that. I said, look, that’s not what you need. What you really need is all of this stuff we can handle that as part of our retainer. Here’s our retainer model. I think it was like $7,000 a month, something like that, and off we march. And if that partnership works for two years, well, then that’s worth more. But generally, we’ll walk away from short term money in order to get those long term partnerships, and we do that over and over, but that’s probably a good example.

Jeremy Weisz 11:05 

Tim, talk about, it’s really important the questions you’re asking when you first start. So talk about some of those, because that really allows you to figure out and diagnose.

Tim Zercher 11:17 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a lot of different questions I use, and probably, like you, it kind of depends on where the conversation’s going, right? Which ones I pull out of my hat, my favorite. And there’s a, I can’t remember what the process is called, but it’s the asking, Why, three times in a row, right? So you need a website. Why do you need a website? Oh, we need more business and XYZ verticals. Why do you need business in those verticals? Oh, your last sales rep left, and he took a bunch of your clients. Okay, why is it like that? We need those clients back. Oh, it’s a super limited market, and there’s only 100 potential businesses. Okay, now I have the actual information we need to get in front of these 100 people, and we need to sell them on why the organization is what they need, not the relationship that left, right? So I’m a big fan of that method.

I’m also a big fan of, I don’t know if there’s a good term for this, but I zoom in and then I zoom out, and then I zoom in, and then I zoom out, right? So people come to us with one big problem that’s really taking them off whatever. My Google ads are costing me $400 per client, right? And that’s way too much, and I can’t afford it. Okay, cool. Let’s zoom in. We talk through Google ads and how they have it set up, and what are their systems, and what’s their historical patterns, etc, etc, etc. And then I say, okay, now back up. Let me zoom out here. Tell me about your whole marketing team. What do you have on your team? And whatever they got, one marketing guy, a digital ads guy and a content writer. Okay, right off the bat, I don’t hear any creative. Probably your Google ads don’t look great, right? Like I can immediately start to see part of the problem on the other piece. And then we’ll zoom in on other issues, and we kind of zoom out again and tell me about the business as a whole.

Where are we going? What do we need? Great, because doing that, we can get really specific with the individual issues, but we can also get the good broad picture so that I can identify problems that they didn’t even have, right, or that they didn’t even know was a problem. And that’s, I think, that’s when the kind of the light bulb goes off and deep partnerships form, at least for us, is when I come to you because of this, and I realize this is a symptom of these three key pieces that we need to have that we don’t have at all, and if we just fix that, then all the other problems fix themselves. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Jeremy Weisz 13:38 

Yeah, for sure. I love that, and I’m going to talk a little bit. We go deeper on the referral campaigns in a second, because I love to hear what you do with that. I mean, anyone listening, including myself, is interested in how do you do it? What are some of the strategies? What are some of the things you do? I was looking up. I don’t see any general term for it, Tim, I looked up. It says the Three whys. That’s all it says.

And then it says the theory that involves asking the question, why three times to get to the root of a problem. So again, there’s something else I’m not seeing on here, but the theory of the Three whys is termed. So referral campaigns to this company. I mean, in the end, people want clients, customers, referral partners. They don’t care how you do it, if it’s a website or if you wave a wand. Talk about the referral campaigns?

Tim Zercher 14:38 

Yeah, absolutely. So a referral campaign is something that we built out specifically for our behavioral health clients because in the behavioral health space, generally, at least 50% of all business in the door comes from a referral. Those can be referrals from a lot of different locations, because it depends on the individual service, right? But I’ll stick with one. I’ll stick with one. Example, we have a big addiction treatment group that we work with, and almost all of their referrals come from social workers and primary care physicians, right? Because those are often the ones that see, wow, you’re having some real issues. How often do you drink? Okay, you have an actual issue. You need to talk to someone. Here’s a great resource, right? Or social workers, it’s because they’ve gotten caught up in the legal system and it’s like, hey, you need help. Here’s where you should go.

There is generally not a very defined process for who the doctor can refer to. It’s just whoever pops in his head that is a good resource, right? Which is a great opportunity for us marketing for that space, right? Because we don’t have to get an official contract or memorandum of understanding with a doctor’s office. We just need them to understand who we are and why what we provide is really good. And so we built up this system to specifically target those individuals who are what we would call primary refers. It’s like an 18 step process, but it includes directly targeting individual IP addresses. So we literally target the doctor’s cell phone and laptop and only his so we don’t hit the janitor that’s in his office occasionally, and the front office staff that doesn’t ever handle the deep doctor patient confidentiality conversations, because those are — they’re wasted impressions, effectively. And so we only talk to the people that we really want to talk to.

We get that data from a number of systems that we use, and then we deliver messages to them in a kind of specific sequence that we built that has a warming phase, so you build awareness of the general brand of what we do that were in your community, that were right next door, etc. And then once they’ve shown engagement in that, we pull them out of that phase and drop them into the actual what we call engagement phase, which is where Tim calls up Jeremy and says, hey, Jeremy, I know you’re a local group here, and we’d love to work with you guys. Can I come by the office lunch and tell you about how we handle addiction treatment differently, right? Or whatever that first step in the referral relationship is. Most of these groups have a business development team, and they’re starving for conversation starters, right? They’re just, they’re cold knocking, they’re knocking on doors, they’re cold calling, they’re doing all that stuff that is effective, but very, very time consuming, and the system just amplifies the impact. Does that make sense? That was a long answer.

Jeremy Weisz 17:34 

Yeah, no. I love how you get into detail. And so you said there’s a couple of phases there. So does the warming phase, engagement phase, and would you say, is the warming is there anything before that, like the Reach Out phase, or it’s got kind of everything, kind of in the warming phase?

Tim Zercher 17:52 

Yeah, yeah. So you could say there’s to break it down simply, there’s four phases. There’s targeting, first, finding the right people, the right contact information, etc. And sometimes that’s done, you even need to do interviews to figure out who actually does refer things, right? And then there’s the warming phase. Then there’s the engagement phase. And often what happens is, of 2500 contacts, whatever, maybe 100 of them actually engage. That’s great. The last phase, then, is long term partnership engagement, and those can take the form of a lot of things.

One group we’re doing is doing a quarterly newsletter or a monthly newsletter, email that’s like just a partners, and it’s very medical focused, or very stat focused, right? Because they’re doctors in that case, and a quarterly mailed gift or swag item that is different every time. Just to kind of stay top of mind, stay interesting, if that makes sense. So that warming phase can last for as long as it’s reasonable, often at least a year.

Jeremy Weisz 18:55 

So it could be an online newsletter. It could be a physical newsletter. It could be a physical gift. What have you seen that has worked or that you’ve liked as far as the physical gifts go?

Tim Zercher 19:07 

Yeah, well, so we consider like mailers and physical gifts the same thing, because if a mailer is good, then it has actual value by itself, in our opinion. So one of our favorites that we’ve done, we did it for a local group that had on one side. It was basically a poster. It was really nicely designed poster that wasn’t super branded, right? So it was really just information focused. It had, like, the signs of that maybe your patient is struggling with addiction. So that’s like, for the doctor, for the nurse practitioner, etc, that they can have up in their office. That’s like, the 10 common signs and five good ways to start the conversation, and basic kind of tips like that.

And then on the other side, you flip it around, it’s questions for the patient to ask themselves if you wanted to put it up in your waiting room. Of like, hey, here’s some common signs that you should look for if a loved one is suffering from these things, right? So in that way. Is us giving to the actual office, giving information, giving interesting, valuable content, and then at the very bottom, in a really small it says we’re your primary partner for addiction treatment in the blah, blah County, right? And that worked really, really well. Got a ton of engagement because, I mean, if 10 or 15 doctors put that up, then you’ve won, because you’re in front of them every single day when they’re in their waiting room.

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