Jason Rainbird, MD of Flowbird Agency on CRMs and Customer Retention tips

March 4, 2024 | Interview

Welcome to Rankwatch’s Marketing Lego thought leader interview. Today we will talk to Jason Rainbird , MD of Flowbird Agency, about his journey of creating a successful digital agency with a good customer retention rate. We also talk about CRMs and Customer Retention tips, and more to find out what that is.

 

Hi everyone. And welcome to today’s marketing Legos thought leader interview. My name is Harshit and I’m the director of business alliances of the brilliant marketing tool Rankwatch and Websignals. Today, we have a very special guest with us. His name is Jason, Managing Director of agency Flowbird, which has its core expertise into CRM, marketing automation, ERPs and, you know, one of the toughest things to do in the world, customer retention. Jason, a big welcome to you. And so happy to have you with us today.


Thank you very much. Thank you. Looking forward to it.

Jason, I have years of experience with you,
you know but we’d love to know a bit about your journey so far, how you got to where you are today?


Yeah, no worries at all. So basically, I started doing CRM way back before most people were kind of around, we were on a green screen and, you know, we were tapping away. And so it all started my passion sort of for CRM for customer management back then I then took a job back in the day and I started selling software.
Then I basically left out and went to work for a specialist company that was selling. And I was very involved. Sales, logistics, and gold mine, and act as CRM systems, helping with the whole process, helping with sort of mapping out what people were after mapping out, what their kind of requirements were, and then helping with the training and the implementation of those processes.
Eventually then I left that and I went to work for another company working there for a number of years as sort of a CRM manager. Later in 2013, I started Flowbird primarily as a CRM consultancy. That was the first thing. So we were helping clients with kind of getting them set up, getting them all up and running, doing sales.
What we call sales enablement, getting the sales people and the marketing people working together. And that was always the, obviously always been a challenge to get them to talk. So that’s part of our process now, so. Alright. Well

What are the initial tools that you started using like CRM when you started the flow?


Back in 2013, one of our first products that we are still actively involved in is an active campaign. I’m not sure, but I think we were one of the first partners to actually work with that as a product, which is a really good marketing automation tool. It has a very, very sort of special place. And we’ve been working with that system since then.
We’ve taken on a couple of others. So pipe drive is one of our main CRM systems and then HubSpot and SharpSpring. So what we do is we have an initial discussion with a client and then we basically decide, okay, this we think is the right fit for you and your business. And then we’ll help with the implementation and training and set up and ongoing services that we do as part of that process.
Right. So that’s what, and then the other thing is we are also quite keen to work. Third party, you know, people like, you know, SEO companies, PPC companies. We don’t do that as a service. We’re very clear about that with our clients up front, but we work really well with those types of industries, because obviously they’ve got traffic coming.
We then capture that traffic and then look to sort of maximise that as part of a process. So maybe like an outsourcing partner, that kind of thing that you do, or like you basically refer your clients to those, you know, agencies or software. Yeah, no, I mean, I say we’re very upfront with our clients about it.
We’re not looking to white label in that sense. We’re very much looking to say, well, okay, you know, got this company either.
They already have an. We’re working with them. If they don’t have an agency and they’re looking for someone we’ll say, right, okay. Based upon your business and our experience, we’re gonna recommend that you talk to these people and then they will put them in, directly in contact with the SEO company or the PPC company, to do what they need to do. Yeah. And that’s kind of how we, and it works really well from our perspective.

Let’s talk a bit more about Flowbird’s service offering, like what all you know about the agency?


Yeah, no we’re so we basically break it down into what I call four categories, five categories, if you include the thing. So the first one is what we call the sales enablement process.
So that’s literally implementing a CRM system. So we’ll talk to them about the sales process. We’ll talk to them about the integration with other bits and pieces. We will train the sales people on how to use the CRM system and we’ll take them forward. And that, to me, is one of the most important things that determines who your customers are, who your prospects are?, who your suspects are, and puts them into a central location to manage them. It still stags me today that so many businesses run their sales process in Excel spreadsheets and in other spreadsheet systems or, you know, even bits of card floating around the office.
And so we are very much, you know, centralising it. Get it working, we then move on to kind of the next stages we call them programs. We’ve got four programs within our process. So we’ve got the capture process. So that’s literally right. How are we gonna get more people into the system? How are we gonna capture more inquiries?
And we’re looking at things like call to actions on the website. We’re looking at forms on the website. We’re looking at lead magnets, pulling people in the next process. Then the next program is nurture. So we’re now looking at how we nurture those people? You may come, you may fill in a form on the website.
You may get in contact, but you may not necessarily be ready to buy today. You know, it could be a year down the road. I think the longest campaign we’ve run with one of our clients was seven years before they actually bought. And he had a funny story. He was like, you know, I’m so pleased. You kept in contact because eventually, you know, you, we came back and we did business.
So who knows, but then the nurturing processes. Guiding them through. What’s called the buyer’s journey, getting them more information, providing the data, monitoring them as they sort of dip in and dip out. You know, we find a lot of people come to the website. They will slow down a bit, so we’ve gotta keep them. It’s enough information to provide them with what they need, but not too much where they’re gonna unsubscribe and disappear.
So a really fine balance that you have to build the next stage then is the convert. Very simple. How do we convert those people into customers? How do we get them into the sales pipeline? How do we get the sales person to now sort of pick up that personal work with them? It’s an important part. I’m a massive believer in, you know, automation is not the way of selling, particularly in the B2B market.
You want these people to be, picking up the phone, talking to people, engaging on a human base. All we are doing is we are preparing them with that sort of information. They need to make a decision getting them in then we are off. And then the final stage for us, which is the retention stage, is the retain program.
How do we name, how do we now maintain that relationship? How do we grow the business? Both in terms of revenue, frequency of purchase, how do we grow in terms of, you know, the portfolio products that they’re taking from our clients? So, you know, if they’re a mortgage broker, you know, are they taking the mortgage, are they taking the life insurance?
Are they taking the sort of protection they need generally? And so all of those things were guiding those people through and we have a process which we call a revenue. Okay. Which is a clever way of monitoring.
Whether people are slowly dropping off and no longer buying from you and what we need to do and obviously it’s a mixture of leads. It’s a mixture of engagement as well. What do we do to keep these people on board? I think we all know that, you know, we all know the stats. It’s six times cheaper to keep a retained client, but the drive is always the same. Oh, new business, new business leads. Leads well, actually.
If you look after that client base and grow that. Yep. It’s more effective, I have got a new service for you and you’ve got a new product for you. Yeah. We’ll take it and so retention is a massive part. It’s one of the reasons why we generally work with established businesses, you know, they’re turning up to us.
They have got an existing database. Yes. It could be an Excel. So we are gonna move that over and then we’re gonna manage that and grow that business. Right and then the top up of the new business is exactly that it’s a top up of that revenue stream. I think some companies, for whatever reason, are kind of scared to sort of upset their existing customers with the status or we don’t wanna be talking about that because you’ve already got this. Let’s see what we can do to grow those people.
All right. And we look at product development and we look at packaging, not packaging from a printing perspective, but packaging products together or services together that then you can then offer those out to your client.
All right. So one particular thing we did with one client, they were a physiotherapist, they were selling hours, 90 pounds an hour, whatever it was, and we packaged up a product for them. And I said to them, you may never sell this product. You know, it was like 6,000 pound services, but the reality of just because you’ve got it on your website and you’re promoting it, it lifts your whole profile up, you know, suddenly you’re not just an hour by hour sink.
So it’s one of the things that we are looking to do as part of the process.

I think one of the very good people that you mentioned was like, majority of the companies actually ignore the client retention part, not ignore, but like they focus less energy into it. And it is actually a gold mine, whatever you can, basically get the respect to revenue, all of your existing customers who actually trust you already, nothing like that.
That’s unfortunate. But yeah, I mean, a lot of companies should actually focus on that.


Frontier. And it is because we appreciate them from marketing. You know, people are after leads, leads, and leads. And for us it’s like, that’s brilliant. But you know, what about these, you know, thousand customers that you’ve got or these hundred customers you’ve got, what are you doing with them?
Well, you know, they just buy, okay. And you know, our joke is the only time you contact them is when you’re sending them an invoice. So let’s see if we can change that process a little bit. Let’s be nice to them and they’ll buy more from you. And, you know, we all get to say, I didn’t know you do that.
Didn’t know you did. Okay. That’s part of what we’re trying to overcome as well. So a big part of the process. So true.

Jason, please tell us a little bit about, you know, a new client journey in your agency like what exactly the first 30 days look like? and then, you know, the service fulfilment and what processes do you have in place to regularly keep the communication going with your clients?


So the first 30 days, the thing that we’re after in the first 30 days of a relationship is what we call a quick. So we want to prove to the client very quickly that, you know, we can generate some revenue, we can generate some business, we can get things going. And so the first stage is a quick audit.
So we look at what they’re doing. We look at mapping out, you know, kind of these other different stages. We’ll maybe put together a small campaign and we’re targeting either say existing clients, trying to get them bored. Or we’re targeting what we call the low hanging fruit.
And so that could be people that have been acquired, but never actually purchased.
And so we go through, we are very much to the opinion that we wanna do a little bit of work together before we talk about, you know, ongoing retainers and that side of it. So we do a quick project, get things going, settle down. It enables from our perspective and the client’s perspective, kind of can we work together?
You know, do we have an understanding? Do we like each other? And then we’ve established that within that process. And then we say, right. Now here’s what we’re gonna do every month for you. We will look at what the areas that they think are important. So we’ll look at the four programs and then we’ll say, right.
Okay. We think we should focus on for the first three months program one, two or three, whatever it may be.
And then we’ll implement that and then once that’s up and running, we’ll then look at the other programs as a sort of a bolting on we’re in it for the long term. You know, we understand that business is very complex, you know, clients come and go business, come and go.
So we are very much kind of working the background and outsourced service that we wanna provide to our clients and keep driving things forward, driving things forwards, driving things forwards, small changes. We’re after small incremental changes that over a period of time are gonna grow and grow.
Alright, and mask that up and the beauty of what we do is, you know, we put in a process or a campaign or an automation. It just stays in the background. It runs and then next month it’s running and next, the month after that it runs and it runs and it runs. And then we’re just tweaking that. So, you know, that work that we do.
Grows for years. It could last for years. So, and that’s our, that’s our process. And as we say, we may not necessarily decide on a platform that’s right. For them straight away. We might wait, you know, until we’ve had a thing and then we’ll decide, okay, we’ll look at your budget. We’ll look at your skill set internally.
We’ll look at what you wanna do. And then we’ll go, right? We reckon this is where we need to be going. And we’ll pick from one of our platforms too.

Right. Gotcha. Listen. Any specific CRM and automation tool that you use internally for your agency?


Internally, we use HubSpot as our CRM and marketing automation system.
It’s a brilliant CRM. It’s a brilliant marketing automation platform. We get all the social media integration, which is really good.
We get all the feedback. We get all the reporting. The CRM is really neat as well, in the way that we could do things. But it is that single platform that we want as part of the process.
So we won’t necessarily recommend that to a client if we don’t think that it’s right for them, but, you know, so it’s a case of their industry, their size, but internally that’s, all of our stuff comes out of that.

All I am is a bit curious. You know, when you recommend any new system to any of your clients, what exactly that process looks like, and you know, what parameters do you take into account? And this is the best fit for your organisation.


So a lot of it sometimes comes down to budget. Sometimes it’ll come down to using internal resources. So for example, you know, if they’re looking at, say something like HubSpot as a system, then having somebody internally, that’s gonna pick it up and work with it.
So an internal marketing manager or internal marketing person is absolutely critical because it, you know, it’s more expensive. But it comes with power. Some clients are just too small. You know, we have a guideline of, you know, on a turnover of business from a revenue perspective as to which way we think they should go.
And off we go on the pipe drive side of it. That’s really very easy for us. We have a sales manager or a sales director. They have a sales team. People could be one, could be 50. They need to know what their pipeline is. They need to know what their revenue is.
They’ve got a very resistant sales team and Pipedrive fits beautifully in for that.
Because it’s really easy to use. People, you know, the sales people love it. So, and it’s very much in the salesperson’s interest, use it.
And then we will basically work with the sales management team to say, look, stop harassing them about this. Because if they do this part of the process, their admin will drop, you know, they will have less admin, they have more selling time, but it is very much a case of what we think is right for that particular client.

All right. So, one of the biggest challenges, I’m sure. Like basically asking the client to invest in their new system. Maybe their top hierarchy level people might be convinced with the idea, but there’s always some kind of chaos that, you know, there are always challenges, adapting a new system within the internal employees altogether.
How do you tackle those situations?


It’s a bit, it is a big issue because obviously as. You know that most sales people in particular have this awareness that a CRM system is a management system it’s to control them. It’s the best thing. And so one of the processes we go through particular change control is getting the sales team involved really, really early up in the process.
And so we have a particular way that we go through. We want them to get, you know, to make the decisions as to what, you know, the system’s gonna do, how it’s gonna feel what it was, but the other benefit as well is to take away something else. So for example, if you sell you that you’ve gotta do your CRM system.
I’m not on then at the same time saying, right. I still need to do your sales forecast in Excel, you know, because there’s no win for that. You know, they just did. So we’ve gotta have some sort of compromise with the sales team or the sales management to say. You can’t do that anymore. If you want them to do this, take this away, you know, it’s, it’s the classic stick and carrot scenario.
We want them to be incentivized and we find relatively quickly that we get really good. Buy-in from it. A, they see that they’re involved in the process B they see that actually it’s gonna help them. It’s not for management. And I think, you know, that’s one of the reasons why the CRM systems that we pick for we’re very careful about things like mandatory fields, you know?
So for example, if I’m creating a lead record, I don’t want to say you have to have the postcode. I don’t know the postcode, you know, I’ve got a name and an email address of a bloke method, the networking party. I just need to get it into the system. I’ll find out later. Whereas if you’ve got a sort of a management system saying, well, gotta have the post.
Suddenly you kill the whole driver and that’s a really, really important part of that process. As you go through the sales process.
Absolutely. You start to collect more data. Let’s remove the friction as much as we can, because if you get the people to use it, you get the sales team to use it. The benefits are just massive.
You know, the increase in revenue, the increasing business is just much, much better for, for companies. So it’s really good. So, gotcha.

Listen, can you please, you know, share a few marketing automation tips, that is like a good bit.


For every business. Some of, I mean, there’s some very simple ones. Like this is what we call the welcome series.
So the welcome series is a simple process where any time you get a new contact into the database, there is a series of emails. Indoctrinate that new person into what you do as a company. So, you know, what are your philosophies? What do you believe in, why are you doing this process? You know, what services do you offer?
And then there’s over a period of time. You start to get to see the engagement levels. So they, they sign up, you know, There’s a concept of what we call buyers remorse. So we are kind of encouraging, like, we help you with this. This is the, you know, this is the technical support team. This is the customer services manager, you know?
Yes. You’ve bought this product from us, but did you know that we also do these other nine services? So you don’t know, you need to go and look for other services. You can come back to us. So it’s, is that sort of. Literally, it said it’s called a welcome series because that’s what it is. And the CRM, you get the inquiry in, goes to the system and that’s a critical thing for us.
And it does a lot of other things behind the scenes. It tests the engagement tests, where they’re on the website. It sees when they’re active. You know, some of us are night out. Some of us are sort of early morning locks. And it will also start that process as well as when you should be communicating with it.
So that would always be my first port call. Let’s get that in. Let’s get that running. Let’s talk to everybody on a regular basis. Let’s start that as a process. All right.

Just a bit more about, you know, how you go about building the sales cycle for your clients.


So the perfect sales cycle is a process really where every single, if you take every single person in your CRM system, they’re all at a particular place in the journey.
So they’re either a brand new inquiry and they’re just coming in or, you know, they’re a long, well established customer who’s been buying for years.
And in between that, you’ve got this whole process and so what we have done with the perfect sales cycle is basically say, well, This stage in the process, we what’s the next logical stage for this person.
So simple one, as I mentioned earlier, you know, somebody has made an inquiry before, but they’ve never actually purchased it. Okay. So, we have to then develop something that says, well, how are we gonna get them to become an inquiry and get on the pipeline today.
Then we’ve got the people who, as I say, who are in the pipeline at the moment, but for whatever reason, they’ve stalked, okay, how are we gonna move them to the next stage?
And so. Almost like, you know, moving dots on a map, you know, we’re saying right. Okay.
The load, the logical process for that one, just to go from here to here process for that is to go from here to here. And then, the perfect sales cycle is looking at all those different elements.
And then the automation is we’re telling the salesperson to pick the blinking phone up because, you know, so, and so’s not happening or send this email to this particular person, send a social media,or whatever it is to keep that person moving as fast as we.
The perfect sales cycle would assume that you win all your business. Obviously you don’t, but it’s doing its damn thing just to make sure that it, things are moving, that you’re keeping going, that contacts are not going stale.
Customers are not going stale and they’re not feeling left out. I think the stats around it say that, you know, 66% of customers leave because they feel unappreciated by the company.
So that’s a massive, massive thing to overcome. How do we overcome that? How do we move them through? And that’s the perfect sales cycle, for us as a team.

Gotcha! Just like you mentioned, customers do not feel valued and that’s one of the primary reasons that they leave. That brings to me exactly what and some useful tips that you can share for increasing the customer retention, especially for the marketing agencies know churn rate. Like that’s massive. I think the standard is somewhere around 70%. How do you tackle that? And, you know, some useful tips.


I think the most important thing. Don’t consider this a horrible thing to say, but don’t rely on your salespeople to nurture your customers. Sales people generally are interested in the hot inquiries.
They’re interested in what’s likely to drop soon. So the first thing is to say, create a campaign, create an account plan, rather for a customer. That’s gonna say, right, this is this customer here. Once again, what are the next logical steps for that customer?
Right. Well, they bought that service. They could also buy X, Y, and Z, and then feeding that information into the other thing, as I mentioned briefly, was what we call the revenue ratio as well. Keep a really careful eye on people that are dropping off in their sales revenue. Okay. And the reason for that is most companies.
Customers don’t leave straight away. You don’t get a phone call saying I’m off. I hate you. That’s it. What they generally do is they start buying from someone else. And so, you know, you will pick a simple number. A hundred pounds a month that you are making from them suddenly becomes 90 pounds a month, then 80 pounds a month.
And next thing you know, They’ve gone. So keep a really, really careful eye on those trend ratios. And we have a system that basically monitors those numbers, and then we go hold on a second. We’ve got a flag. We’ve got a problem with this kind. And that way you can jump in at a much earlier stage and go get on the phone.
There is something going on. They are spending less. Now you might jump on the phone and say, well, you’ve had a downturn in business. It’s fair, but at least you’ve expressed the interest.
So having monitoring systems running in the background is absolutely critical, cuz because you know, if you’re a reasonable size company, you won’t always see the fact that so and so dropped off.
You’ll just see, you know, it’ll be too late before, oh, we’ve gone with someone else now. And so that’s an important aspect of what you’re trying to do. I think the other thing, obviously simple things like regular communication, but even then you’ve gotta be a little bit careful with yourself. Can’t ring up every customer every month.
There’s not enough profit in the, you know, not being funny, but if a customer’s spending a hundred pounds a month and services and you ring them up every month, you blow that money. So also divide your customers up into sort of categories and it’s something back. I did some work many years ago on the period, what they called the pyramid structure.
And it’s very much along those lines, you know, top customers, big, medium, small suspects, prospects, right. And then deal with them in a different way.

I think for marketing agencies anyways, once the client is on board, a particular role of the sales person, kind of like they’re out of the picture and account managers basically take over the majority of the agencies big or small, right? Yeah. And that is where like, you know, the account manager, I think relationship is something that, again, plays a very crucial role. I’ve seen tons of cases where.
You know, the agency might be delivering good value when it comes to like any of the service offering, but then also the client might not be happy with another communication that is happening that might be huge, you know, no for that particular customer. Right. I think that makes sense.
I basically see it kind of like, And, you know, in each and every scenario and every business, I would say we’ve been running an agency for so long. And like marketing has always been like one of the core expertise of the agency as well.
One of the big things and a big part of marketing is definitely content, right? Your marketing content, every stage. Has that had a good impact, uh, on any of the campaigns that you’re running, how do you measure that? How do you plan and kind of like to improve on marketing?


I think the marketing content planning element is based upon if we go back to our four programs, it depends on a couple of things. So obviously we go back to the perfect sales cycle. We go back to parts of that process where we need content. Now that could be, I mean, we know most of us know the sort of term at the top of the funnel, middle funnel, bottom of the funnel type of process. So we’ve gotta think about, okay, we’ve got a problem.
We’re getting lots of inquiries, but we’re not closing that business down. Okay, so we need content. That’s gonna support that case studies are that blog articles are hints and tips and guides. What’s the element that we need to produce to get them over? And I think one of the things that we found is that if you have a sort of a general overview of everything, you lose that thing.
And so by devising these four programs, we can focus specifically on this, and then we. Benchmarks say, okay, we should be moving these people from here to here on a regular basis. If that’s not happening, we need some sort of supporting content. So, right. Let’s get a blog article written that overcomes that problem.
Let’s put together an ebook that overcomes that, you know, or express that let’s get another case study of one of our clients, you know, in this particular industry that we can use at that different stage. And so I don’t. I am not a great believer in having a 12 month. You know, right. This is what we’re gonna do because business changes, you know, if you’d have been March 9, 20, 19, 20 20, and the cut, you gotta have a rethink about how you do it.
Have a three month plan, but have a 12 month kind of long term, but be flexible, we need to overcome this problem. Now we need to overcome that problem, and make it a lot more fluid. And I think from an agency perspective, particularly the sort of what I call the graphic design type agencies.
That’s critical. You know, they’ve got a lot more fluid in what they’re trying to do, a lot more fluid in work, kind of what they’re producing. So nothing hard and fast let’s flow with it and see what we need at the time.

So, Gotcha. Just please share one of the most successful case studies where like your CRM and automation, consultation has done really well.


Yeah. I mean, it is interesting. I think one of the most successful we worked with, a surveying company and they had nothing in place at the time they were back to the Excel spreadsheet type environment. And so we implemented pipe drive and a marketing automation platform with them.
And it. It’s just revolutionising what they’ve done, because a lot of the time they were obviously getting inquiries coming in and then it’s very manual in the follow up process. So we automated a lot of that follow up process, get people booked in, get them follow up, get the referrals, get the process going.
So their referrals kind of, which is a big part of what their business is. Went up dramatically because we were catching people at the right time before. They would manually go in and say, oh, by the way, how did we do? But it was, you know, six months down the road, three months down the road. And by bringing that in the referrals, Dramat increased and they’ve grown and grown and grown.
And I think it’s really good, it wasn’t a particularly big company, but it’s really good getting all the processes in place, getting all the systems in place and then allowing this degree of automation. And the thing that we’ve also done for them is that they had a lot of people just making inquiries and kind of raising the bar a bit and saying, right.
Okay. We’ve had, we’ve got an inquiry now. They look hot. You know, they’ve been opening the emails they’ve been on the website.
They’ve booked stuff. Pick the phone up to these people and see if you can get them booked in. So also including the, we use lead scoring to do this. So lead scoring says, you know, this particular person is now worth a phone call.
That’s a really, really good fit for us. We’ve done other other systems where we work with sort of financial companies, investment banking, where once again, you know, we worked. Particular investment company and we turned up and they had, I think there’s some like 30 or 40 different outlooks set of contacts.
And so we stripped that all out. We removed all that. We put them into one CRM system, which is Pipedrive again, and now it’s much easier, right?
They got a list of all our clients. These are the list of all our suspects. These are the list of prospects. And it was really interesting from their perspective that a lot of the partners in the company were all talking to the same person the client knew, but the partners.
So suddenly like, you’re talking to and so that, that ability to pull them all in made that they could develop campaigns or account plans around a specific client, rather than having 10 phone calls from 10 different partners over a period of time. So that was a massive benefit to them as well and then the database, once again, is just growing and growing and growing as they get better control of that data.

Any horror story, you know, that you basically, stumbled across because you know definitely like you’ve been running an agency for so long.


I like to share, I’d love to tell you that, we have no horror stories, but obviously you, we both know we, we would be lying.
We have got a horror story. So I’ll tell you one in particular, I’m not gonna mention the company name for obvious reasons, but once again, they were in the financial services industry. We did an initial scope and we discussed what it is.
Their requirements were, but when it came down to the crunch, this project was a lot bigger than we thought with a lot of complications and a lot of elements to it, you know, in, I always say in fairness to us, you know, we then said, well, okay, it was our fault that we didn’t scope it according to plan.
And we ploughed on. It cost us a lot of money, a lot of money, but you. They have a first ask CRM system. Now a lot of automation is going on, but it, you know, it burnt a big hole in the pocket for that one. I think the lesson learned for that is to have a lot to do a lot more time around the sort of the audit and the control and, you know, When a client says, we wanna do this a lot more detail now is taken around a kind of, okay.
Can you explain exactly what you mean by that? Because on the surface, that seems very simple, but as you get underneath it, it looks a lot more complicated than is. So yeah, there’s definitely lessons learned that that’s one of our horror stories. We are now a lot more particular and are a lot more detailed in the way that we gather our information at the beginning.
So these sort of things don’t happen. So occasionally there is always the, I expected that. Where this is what you delivered and, you know, we come to a gentleman’s agreement and we work together on a particular process, but you know, most times it’s absolutely fine. It works well.

So that’s actually, you know, every point, you know, most of the agencies, what they do is the client’s budget. Even their initial auditor analysis, I would say, you know, that time depends on the client’s budget, but in your, how exactly does it work?


If you. It’s always an ongoing problem because obviously, you know, the more time we have to analyse exactly what they want and what exactly their clients are, is always gonna be a problem.
Because a client at that stage has no real concept of what it could lightly cost. And so one of the reasons we do the mini audits is we will pick a specific area, very, very specific area. And that’s when we’ll go, right.
Let’s just work on this one particular problem. The big picture. Yes. We know about the big picture.
We wanna kind of say some, let. Let’s solve one problem for you. Let’s get to that problem. I mean, I’ll give you an example of where we did.
We worked with a client, they came to us, they said they’ve spoken to two or three other people they’d even spoken to the vendor. In particular, I won’t mention the software.
And they said they can’t solve this particular problem. So they came to us, we sat out and we looked at it.
Then, you know, I think we’ve solved it pretty quickly within a day or so. And they were just like, that’s just brilliant. And so all we’ve done is we haven’t, we haven’t gone in and on a full all yet.
We haven’t looked at the whole process. We’ve solved one particular problem. And I think that’s it.
It is building that trust. It’s a building that trust in and then clients go. Okay. We’ll spend more money on the audit. Now we’ll spend more money on the process cuz then you, they trust you to do the next stages.
And even then we’re like, right, let’s do a little bit more, a little bit more, grow, grow, grow, and then, you know, you prove it.
Then you become a trusted partner for the long term. We’re not great believers in any kind of big plan. You know, you gotta sign up for a 12 month contract or we’re not talking because I think you’ve.
Develop a trust relationship with the clients and that’s how we do it.

So I think we are just coming to an end here and let’s do a quick, rapid fire. Are you ready for that?


Go on a bit like a mastermind. Do I get points at the end? Yeah.

Get a special gift also.


Perfect.

So let’s start, what motivates you the most?


I like happy customers. I know that sounds really crass, but there’s nothing better when you ring the client up and they say, just love what you’re doing, you know? And, and getting that, that satisfaction. That’s what drives me. It’s not the money, you know, it, it is that, that process at the end and say, take something small.
Boom! Get it done, get it working. Love it. So lovely. What’s your favourite book? My favourite book, a book that I think has had a lot of influence is a book called the mindset by Carol Dweck, where very simply she talks about the fact that you can either grow or you can just be fixed. You can just believe that what I know now I can’t learn anymore.
And I think it’s a great believer in the fact that we can always learn something new. We can always learn and grow off the back of that. So I think that’s the important part.

What is the most distracting thing in your life?


The most distracting thing in my life. Probably the thing that distracts me the most is probably my dog who takes no notice of anything that’s going on.
If he wants me, that’s it. Everything else gets pushed aside. So. What, uh, what is your next big goal?
I think a lot we’ve gone, we’ve gone through some quite major changes as a company. Um, and I think the next, the next goal for us really interestingly, is to stabilise in terms of platforms and services.
You know, we’ve had products that we’ve taken on that we, we kind of, we don’t wanna work with anymore. For whatever reason stabilisation you we’re, we’re in an interesting time worldwide from what we’re doing. And I think I’m just calm. Boom off we go. So that’s it. No, nothing great. Early ambitious it’s um, just to be steady, so a bit boring, but off we go,

One word that describes you the best.


Strategic Innovation.
That’s what, I’m good at the ability to kind of go, right. Okay. Let us do this. We could do this. We could do this. That’s definitely where my strengths are. Okay.

Jason, Do you mind sharing a few final thoughts with us?


You’re, I think, I think the thing is always having the customer in mind rather than the business.
I think that’s the most important thing, you know, we do, we do a lot of work sometimes that we sometimes don’t get paid for. You know, we’re in it for the long term. I always say to all clients that are coming back, we wanna work with you long term. And I think having that approach, you know, it’s not about the quick kill.
It’s not about making lots of money straight away. It’s about the long term goal for that. And I think any agency that’s working with any company doesn’t have a three month plan.You know, Where can we be in five years, time, 10 years time with this particular client, where are they gonna go? If they grow, you grow.
We’re all happy. That’s my LA party thoughts.

Okay, Jason! I really appreciate all the time and you know, all the valuable tips and information today. Thank you so for joining you’re welcome


Thank you very much.

Share Your Thoughts

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Read more articles

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

Loading

Try Rankwatch Today For FREE !

Start Your FREE 14 Days Trial

25,000+ Active customers in 25 countries use RankWatch as their primary SEO software