2 Systems To Get Time Back In Your Agency

While we can talk about all the whiz bang funnels and automation most of it isn’t needed. 

As an agency owner, the thing that will get you your most time back is well…

Systemizing the areas where you spend the most time. 

I know, 🚀science, right? 

In this video, I break down the FIRST two spots you should install systems and automation in your business. 

Sales and Fulfillment. 

​Transcript / MP3

As an agency owner, you likely spend most of your time in selling and you know the sales process and or fulfillment, the delivery of your service. So if we want to be able to increase our capacity, we need to free up time in those areas. We need to get our time back. We need to be more efficient, we need to be more systemized, we need to harness automation because if we can just free that time up to allocate it towards serving more clients, uh, and or getting more clients or upgrading more clients, we're gonna actually be working on more areas that are going to lead to our growth. So if you've been in a situation where you've said, man, I really would love to take on this client right now. I actually, I have clients in my pipeline right now that I could close, but I'm kind of afraid because if I bring them in, I don't really have the bandwidth or capacity to, to really serve them and give them the results that they would deserve....

And the last time I did that, I had to give, I had to provide a refund. And give, give them their money back after I did all of the work because I just couldn't turn it around fast enough. If you've said anything like that before, your growth is capped because of how much time you are spending in sales and fulfillment. And so what I want to look at today is the two systems that, or two areas we need to actually install systems in our business to get time back so that we can focus on the growth activities. And so let's look at those two. So I've already kind of alluded to the two areas. One being selling. This is where you're spending most of your time and or whoops, fulfillment. So right now you probably spend, I'd, I'd guess somewhere between 75 plus percent in selling and fulfillment in your business right now, which means that if you want to get your time back focusing on things like lead generation and retention and upsell, these are areas that probably are going to be out of sequence for you. So if we're spending most of our time in sales and fulfillment, we obviously want to install systems here first. Now, depending upon where you start, well, kind of dictate a little bit about what other assets or skill sets you have in your business. So I'm going to kind of talk through both of those right now. But really when we look at this area, when we look at all right, we spend most of our time in getting the right clients enrolled into our services and also getting our clients the result that they came to us for delivering the thing that they already gave us money for. We want to not only just look at systems, but this is also where we want to look to bring in people and things like automation, right? And when you focus on these three things, we're actually going to create leverage in the sales and fulfillment process, which again is going to give you most of your time back. So if you're focused on on anything other than sales and fulfillment and things, feel pretty manual and clunky right there. Literally cut everything else out that you're doing. And I want you to focus on these two areas. And when we look at fulfillment, what I want to actually look at is the obvious solution of getting your clients the results. And I look at really two core areas of of fulfillment. And the first starts with onboarding. In most agency businesses, you're in a situation where a client comes in and you have a kickoff call and the work starts, but there's this gap between, there's this gap between when they give you the money and when work actually starts and it's in this gap where you experience a lot of scope creep. You really either set or don't set the expectations and most agencies don't set good expectations. And this is where they get taken advantage of. This is where they have multiple kickoff calls. This is where fulfillment takes a really long time. So we want to, we want to put a system inside of this gap, which is what I was just saying of onboarding. So what we do is we give our clients one video that they go through that they're going to earn, that they go through, that they create following a specific framework that we call the ready client. And they go through the ready client experience and they create one video that takes them through a specific script that will eliminate scope creep, will set the expectations so that they're in control and really dictate how you work so that you don't get taken advantage of. But you still get your clients results. And when they show up for this call, the work has already been started and they're also doing it right, like the client actually has done some of the work for you. The second area of this is really just your, I'll just say your general fulfillment, um, process. This is an area we want to look at and when we work with our clients, we help them create a hybrid agency, which really allows them to install a couple of specific systems and structure to their fulfillment process that allows them to serve their client in as little as two hours a week. Even up to, I'll say five hours a week. And the great thing about this, imagine all of your fulfillment now taking two to five hours. But what's amazing is it works. Whether you have one client or you have 50 plus clients. So imagine spending two to five hours a week on fulfillment and that process supports up to 50 clients, so not two to five hours a week per client, but you have a way to actually serve multiple clients where the amount of work doesn't change. Whether you're serving one or 50 sounds pretty good, right? You're going to get a lot of time back. If you can serve all of these amount of clients in the exact same same time, and if you're bringing on 50 clients with the exact same amount of fulfillment, you're going to probably make making a lot more money than if you just brought on that one client.

All right, so two tips here is focus on preparing your client for the work by following a specific onboarding process. Again, for us, we did this with one video and then the structure of fulfillment on how do you get your clients the results where fulfillment only takes two to five hours a week. That comes from the structure that we call the hybrid agency. Now the next area is selling right? A lot of agencies and service providers rely on networking and referrals and word of mouth and so there's a lot of unpredictability around the number of clients that are going to come in or prospects that are going to come in each month. And when that's the case, what we usually see end up happening is that you'll get on a lot of calls that aren't really qualified because you're kind of desperate for the next deal.

And so we actually end up wasting a lot of our time in the sales process just talking to the wrong people because it's very manual. And so when it comes to selling, what we want to focus on is two key systems. We want to focus on. One, a system that is qualifying a qualifying system and to a prep system. So the qualifying system, we just have a process called qualifying prospects and there is a process that we install for our clients where it's mostly automated. I'd say probably 85% automated with the balance being a process that a human on either yourself or your team could, could manage to make sure that you're only getting on the phone with the right people. So the number of calls might go down, but the quality of the calls will go up. Thus you'll see your closing percentage go up and your time is maximized.

Now the prep is also really important as a part of this process. So the qualification, think of it as like a strainer where you're pouring in all the people you could get on the phone with and it's sifting through and only the qualified stay. Well, we want to make sure that that call ends up being really powerful for our prospect and that we're able to lead them to a result. I'm not talking about sales scripts or anything like that. I'm talking about a specific set of content. Um, and this could be achieved in as little as one, I'll say two, three videos, one to three videos, um, with I'll say plus one homework assignment that you're going to give to your prospect before they show up to the call. And this is my little, my little phone, right to the point where we've already set the expectation of what's going to happen on the call.

They're prepared for the call, they know more about what we do and how we work and really we can spend most of our time identifying if that is a prospect that we can help truly help and that we want to work with them and it becomes more about fit than it does a sale. And what this does is really puts you in control mainly because now you get to work with who you want to work with and the glory and the bent, the gold behind these two systems is it's done mostly without you being there. So all of this stuff, like, like I said about we'll say 80% of the qualifying process is done using automation and technology and the prep process is happening automatically as well. Using automation, directing them to these strategic pieces of content and assignments that they will have to do and using automation will know if they do it or not before they ever show up for the call.

And so you can get on the call and say, Hey, did you do your homework? And if they didn't, that's probably going to be an indicator of how they're going to show up when they become a client also. So we want to want to start installing systems that are really auditioning our clients and preparing them for the call and taking out the manual, um, kind of laborious activities that we used to do as humans in the process. So if you don't currently have a, a system for making sure that you're only getting on the phone with the right prospects that are qualified to work with you, that you know you can help. And also for making sure that they show up empowered to make a decision. And uh, it's uh, a useful conversation versus just interesting. We should chat. I'm going to put a link below this video.

We can schedule a quick call, but I want you to comment below sales. If you need a sales system and we can chat about that and, or if you're stuck in fulfillment and you'd love to hear about the ready client process or the ready, ready client experience, we can chat about that to put fulfillment. So right now you're in one of these two situations. If your a better implementer, you probably are going to be leaning towards your fulfillment already. And so you might need a sale system and vice. So really depending upon who's on your team, what your skill sets are will dictate which of these is maybe the weaker of the two. But regardless, you're spending most of your time in these two areas and that's what we want to solve for to get you most of your time back. So imagine you could get back, probably say, you know, at least five to 10 hours a week from the activities that you're spending here to be able to focus on actually growing your business versus being inside of your client's business. If that sounds interesting, comment below sales or fulfillment and we'll reach out to you and we'll see if we can help. Hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll talk to you soon.

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