Sales Driven Agency: Helping Founders Become Predictable, Sustainable and Scalable with Joey Gilkey on Episode #0285

Joey Gilkey [0:00]
Hi, this is Joey Gilkey with salesdrivenagency.com and you were listening to EA Interviews.

Intro [0:05]
EA interviews, Episode 285, inspiration, transformation success stories and the Imperfect Action Round seven days a week. Join Mario Fachini for today’s Expert Authority Effect Interview.

Mario Fachini [0:18]
Sales you probably want more for your company. I know I do. And it’s something that me and my team are always thinking about. And I am super excited to have CEO Joey Gilkey here today to be talking about sales in his company’s sales driven agency, because he’s done some impressive things and he’s going to be sharing them with you. Right after we thank our sponsor.

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Mario Fachini [0:57]
Here he is. Ladies and gentlemen, Joey Gilkey Joey, how are you feeling today?

Joey Gilkey [1:01]
What’s up, Mario ?appreciate you having me on. I feel pretty, pretty honored and humbled to share the stage with you here.

Mario Fachini [1:08]
Well, I appreciate that. I always appreciate the kind words but the pleasure and honor is mine because I was looking at your one sheet and I don’t want to read off of it. But holy smokes, you’ve done so many good things, working with such big companies, and increasing the sales and growing those companies. So let’s just dive in and talk about how sales are vital. They’re the lifeblood for any company. What would you say most people are doing wrong with them? And what can they improve?

Joey Gilkey [1:36]
Yeah, I think honestly, man, there’s, again, there’s b2c, there’s b2b, there’s high ticket, there’s low ticket, there’s all these different sales that we can make, right? I operate mostly in the high ticket b2b. However, a lot of principles we talked about are very applicable across the spectrum, the biggest mistake honestly, is just not knowing who you serve. There’s no shiny object there. There’s no software tool that helps you get there, it’s who is your tribe, who is it that you can serve, but anyone else, because when you can really nail down on the dream client, understanding who it is you serve, you understand their pain points, their goals, etc, the opportunities for sales open up tremendously. And you can have shiny objects and have the tactics and the strategies. But if you’re not talking to your audience, how they want to be talked to, if you’re not solving the pain points that they have, you’re not helping them achieve the goals that they want to achieve. The tactics, the strategies, all those things kind of fall to the wayside, they’re not gonna be effective. So the biggest thing is just not knowing who it is you serve?

Mario Fachini [2:35]
How many companies do you deal with? Really don’t know that or don’t have it dialed in to the point where it’s very little work for you? Do you have to walk everyone through some sort of an exercise to dial it in? Or do most of the companies come to you already knowing who they’re serving?

Joey Gilkey [2:52]
Yeah, I would say that we have a fairly aggressive qualification process internally in terms of who we actually even allowed to get in the room with us and that, I think that there’s a level of ego and arrogance there right or do they even deserve to be in the room. But there is some qualification process for us of certain things that we’re looking for, in an ideal customer, right, we’re dialed into who our tribe is. And part of our tribe is someone who does either have an aggressive desire to dial it in, and they want help with that, or they already have it dialed in. And we can just take off from day one. And so I would say for us, 80%, 70% have fairly data on at least a general idea of who they want to serve. And they want to kind of turn that up to level 10. And we can help them with that, before we start getting into all the sales operations and helping hire, train and manage salespeople and all that fun stuff. That’s number one, if they don’t have that foundation, they’re just not likely going to be a good fit and the other 30% who don’t have it figured out, they’re aggressively trying to figure it out. And they’re, they’re asking for help and say, Hey, we get that we see the value. In really niching down, we see the value in really defining who it is. We just don’t know how to practically do that. But we’re willing to let you captain that with us. To help us get there.

Mario Fachini [4:07]
I want to dive deeper in this part. And I’m gonna ask you about PCM next, but this is so vitally important because I think a lot of people like you’re saying they might have an idea, but it’s just not super crystal concrete. And I’ve heard of scenarios to where you do exercises, you do this, you dial it in, and then 6, 12 months, something changes, the market changes, the business changes, and you have to re-adjust because now you’re also going after a new audience or super refining the one you existingly we have. So if someone’s out there right now and expert authority world going, hey, we’re doing we’re doing good business, we have an idea. Do you have some steps or a checklist or what are the things you look for when you’re going? Here’s how we’re going to take you from that 70, 80% to 90,95. How do you refine it to that point?

Joey Gilkey [4:58]
Yeah, so there’s really two main categories when I’m when we’re making an ideal customer profile or a dream customer profile, depending on on how small of a niche you’re willing to go after, you know, I look at first three things before we talk about those two categories, the three things I look for is, who are the folks who I have. So if you could draw three circles, and in the circles, I want you to think about who have I enjoyed working with the most? What were the most profitable projects I’ve ever done, or projects or deals or whatever. And third, who have I solved, the biggest problems won’t have the best results for And typically, if there’s an overlap in all three of those, that’s probably someone that’s operating in your ideal dream markets you want to go for. That’s, that’s a very brief exercise, you can just scratch that on a piece of paper, once you actually get a little bit close to who that is. Some of the exercises we’re looking for is defining the demographics, which are the things that we always typically wanted to find, right? The location, the size, the revenue, the titles of the decision makers, how many types of decision makers are there. But then there’s the psychographics, which a lot of that’s not the stuff that’s just plastered on a website. It’s not plastered on LinkedIn, necessarily. That takes deeper research that takes really knowing your tribe, asking the hard questions. The psychographics are the internal things, why do they make their decisions? What does their day to day look like? What pain points come with that day to day? What are the goals that they really want to achieve based on where they’re at as a demographic, right? So if they’re at a certain size, certain location, certain whatever, on the demographic side? What, what goals typically come with that? Or what pain points typically arise from that. Other things are like, what content? Are these people consuming? What channels are they present on? All these things are going to really play into your sales process, right? If you know, what they’re consuming, their pain points, their goals, what channels they’re operating on, you now have a pretty solid…you have the bones of a solid campaign already. Because you know where they’re spending time. Okay, well, that’s you’re going to go find them, you know, the content they’re consuming, okay. That’s the content we need to create, you know, their pain points and goals. Well, that’s how you provide your solution to either solve that pain point or help them achieve that goal. And so when you can start nailing that down and asking the hard questions, not just demographically, but also psychographically. If you don’t know that, ask him. It’s really easy to bribe 20 people in your ideal market to ask them questions, people are a lot more willing to give you information than you probably think.

Mario Fachini [7:25]
What would you say is a good way to let’s say, entice them? To do that, do you offer them hey, a gift card? Do you say hey, take the survey, just because… do you say well, yeah, just straight up cash? What have you found works best to get these?

Joey Gilkey [7:42]
So all we do have I mean, we’ve done a wide array of things. So when I created my, what I would consider my greatest success, in terms of me starting a business that was super profitable. For us to create, I knew who I wanted to serve, right, that was that was pretty nailed down. But in terms of knowing exactly what they needed, I knew the lane in which they probably needed, but I didn’t know the specifics and how I’m going to create the offer on that. And so what I did was, I built a list of 100. In that list of 100, pretty simply put, I said, hey, like I know, you probably get asked to go out for coffee all the time. I know you probably get asked to go out for drinks all the time. Obviously, we don’t live in the same city, right. And so what I’d love to do is I’m going to send you a coffee, and so that they don’t drink coffee or tea or whatever. You can use a service like blue, it’s called thanks.io or postal.io, where you can actually just virtually send them a gift card. And you’d be surprised. I mean, a lot of dealers like I don’t want the coffee, but I’ll give you 10 minutes, right? That’s all I’m asking for. And it’s the way that I position right? So I said, hey, so say I’m reaching out to Sally, hey, Sally, I operate in your space. I’d be lying to say if you weren’t an ideal customer, but I don’t today have anything to sell you. However, what I do want to do and is understand how I can better serve your market better than what I’m currently doing today. And I know that’s a tall ask because I know you’re super busy. However, if you’d give me 10 minutes to just rattle off 20 questions, I can gather some information from you. I would love to send you a thank you, a gift card, etc. And so I don’t over glamorize the gift card. It’s more about serving their space than it is about the gift card that they’ll take a flyer on you.

Mario Fachini [9:32]
Now, do you do this on video, the phone, is their best way you found to make it simple and easy for them.

Joey Gilkey [9:38]
I do both. You know I use calendly for scheduling and calendly allows you can set it up to where the person can choose their preference and so 50-50 sell to zoom someone whose phone call I just for something like that, right? If it’s not my sales process, and it’s more about me doing research and they’re really doing me a favor. let them choose, I have my preferences, I always want to see someone and be in front of someone and talk to someone. But if it’s not a prospect call, it’s not a call working someone through a sales process. And it’s more than doing a favor, I’m going to let them kind of make that preference. So calendly allows you to do that. But usually a phone call is pretty sufficient.

Mario Fachini [10:18]
What is the point when you know you are so refined that you feel confident you’ve identified the ideal prospect, their list, you got all this data? Because I’ve heard of people going into scenarios where you go, oh, we’re refining it, we’re doing these things? And then you just get in this rabbit trail of doing so much of it. When do you flip back and start implementing it?

Joey Gilkey [10:40]
Yeah, for me, it’s actually interesting. So of those 100 people, the first five, I’m going to think about what my offer is going to be, as it relates to that ideal customer profile already having a general idea, right? And so I’m gonna ask a bunch of questions, but then I’m going to actually pitch them. So here’s what I was thinking about joining, can you please shoot holes in this, tell me what your thoughts would be here. And then they helped me refine it on those first five calls. And then I kind of refine it, and I go to the next five calls and do the same thing. By the time I’m done with 20 of those calls, that cost me 200 bucks, right? $10 gift cards, 20 people 200 bucks, and I’ve got a refined offer. And to be quite honest, this is not necessarily the goal of doing it this way. But I’ve probably got six or seven prospects out of those 20 calls, because like, if you can actually do that for me, when you actually roll it out where you let me know. And so not only does it help me create an offer, but it also helps me create the first few clients if I really wanted to roll out something new, right. And, listen, I haven’t rolled out anything new in a long time outside of, you know, additions to what I’ve already currently been doing. But if you’re thinking about niching down and creating a specific offer for a specific market, that’s a fantastic strategy to not just not only just gather data and help you refine an offer, but also potentially to get the first, you know, a couple of customers out of it.

Mario Fachini [11:55]
When you’re working on offers for yourself, and you’re taking this data from existing people, you know, maybe you’ve helped them, maybe you’re not maybe you just know, you can help them solve the problem. Do you have people ask you questions? Do you just do all of this on your own? Is there a best way to achieve this without wasting your time? So that way, you get the maximum result?

Joey Gilkey [12:19]
Yes, I mean, I usually have a fairly scripted amount of questions, but I also let it kind of go where it wants to go. Right. And people are going to allow me to… or they’re going to say things in those calls that I wasn’t even thinking about. Like you kind of the last question you asked how do you kind of protect yourself from just always reiterating and going down the rabbit hole? It’s very easy to do that. And as entrepreneurs, we kind of do have shiny object syndrome. So we always think the grass is greener in the next field or whatever. I’m a big fan of project done versus project perfect. If you could, I’d rather ship a project, get it going and get data back. And then if I have to make an iteration, I’m going to make an iteration that isn’t 20 iterations. If you guys have heard of preto principles, or 80, 20, I always want to see how I maximize what I’m charging someone and the results that I’m getting for them while minimizing the amount of effort or things that have to go into it. That’s how we increase our profit margin. on it that answered your question. But that’s, for me, that’s kind of how I’m thinking through. How do I protect my time? How do I also create offers around that time with them?

Mario Fachini [13:32]
Yeah, and that’s great insight, because it’s fun to get that data back. And I’ve done surveys and different things myself. But it’s very easy to start going down that path going well, I got 80, maybe I should go for 200, 300, whatever the case is, and you have to implement it. Like you’re saying, You can’t just have all this data and stare at it and have this beautiful spreadsheet of whatever I mean, you’d be better served if you did eight of them and implemented it and never made it to 10 or 20. Now, I’m not saying to stop it at under 20. But the implementers always win. So when it comes time to implement, do you work with your team on that? Do you get some help? Okay, so you’re not trying to do all this on your own and process it?

Joey Gilkey [14:18]
No, I mean, thankfully, I’ve been fortunate enough to be at a place now where I’ve got a fantastic team. They do a lot of the day to day in the weeds. I would say today as a sense that I’m talking you know, everything we’ve been talking about before things that I’ve done in the past, before we got to where we’re at today, I would say I operate far more in the CEO role now where it’s captain the ship, leading the team, motivating the team, making sure that all the directors are doing what they should be doing and making sure they’re aligned with our core core values. So I do have the team that kind of does that. Now if you’re a solo shopper, get a one or two person shop and you’re spread pretty thin. You know, do what you can, but you’re exactly right, ship it. Do implement what you found. And you can iterate down the road and prioritize getting revenue in the door, because revenue opens up more freedom and opportunity and flexibility for you to then have that playground to play on to optimize your offers, and then grow your team. Exactly. Yeah. You know, delegation is an art. A lot of folks don’t understand how difficult it has to delegate. But once you’ve done it a few times, it becomes a lot easier, right? I should say, it’s not hard. or excuse me, it’s not difficult to delegate. It’s just hard, right? That’s what I really mean to say is, delegation is really just having documented processes for your team to do trusting your team to do it. Which is the difficult part, right? The hard part is relinquishing control.

Mario Fachini [15:43]
Until you get the right people in place, because I agree 100%, the first iteration of my team years ago was, man, what if they messed this up? It’s like, well, you’re not that great at 90% of what you’re doing anyway, because I wasn’t in my zone of genius. Because you’re just doing everything when you start. There were times I’m like, they flat out told me, I think I’m gonna mess this up. I assure you, you can’t do it any worse than I am. Literally, because I know what I’m good at. This is one of the things I’m really good at. Some of the other stuff, I frankly, have just fired myself. I’m like, I shouldn’t touch that.

Joey Gilkey [16:23]
Yep. So and most people should, they should fire that that’s actually what’s funny is I have a fire yourself academy is one of our lower ticket offers. Yeah.

Mario Fachini [16:34]
That’s fantastic. Because when you get the right people in place, like my team that I have now I’m very thankful for, because I can, you know, it’s taken a minute or two. But I’m very thankful now because especially with the production of the show, and our author clients, and the SAS that I developed, there’s things I just hate, I need this. And it’s like a message through basecamp. It’s not this big thing that really involves me and I have to micromanage it. If I have to do any of that. I’m like, what can I be doing better with the processes, and systems because I shouldn’t even be involved. This is not my strength, I don’t want to do it, but it has to get done. And what I love is hiring the people that love doing, whatever it is, that the thing is, because there’s you know, we can all do stuff. But I’m not the best at graphic design. I know how to do Photoshop, though, but I love having people that love it day in day out.

Joey Gilkey [17:37]
Well, even you know, as your company progresses, like I would say that, you know, and you talked about my one shooter, like I have had a very fortunate and very successful career in sales, I could be the best salesperson at my company. By far, it’s easy for me to sell. I’m also the owner, which comes with some authority, it’s a little bit easier to close the deal than it is for a salesperson whose only job is to close the deal. However, what I’ve learned from mentors and coaches in the past is that if I want to get to a certain level, I’ve got to be willing to relinquish control of things that I’m good at, right and even things that I enjoy to some degree if I really want to progress. And I can jump in whenever I want, right like I’ve built my company to where I can jump into a really big deal. If a deal comes in at a quarter million dollars cool, I’m probably gonna jump into that deal because it’s a bigger deal. And I want to make sure that not that I’ll trust my team, but it’s just that I love that hunt. Still, I love the I love the close. So I still get that dopamine hit. However, for me to really relinquish control of even something that I know the best at in my particular company, I had to realize that’s an investment that I need to make a sacrifice to make, to achieve my dreams. One thing I’ve realized is a quote that I really enjoyed is you’ve got to sacrifice for your dreams, otherwise your dream becomes the sacrifice. And for me, I had bigger aspirations and dreams that I needed to get out of the cockpit of sales and move more to a leadership CEO role in order for me to actually go after that dream at all, which is a sacrifice.

Mario Fachini [19:07]
Wow, that’s a great expert authority insight. And that’s inspiring me to be honest, because I recently shared something and people got a kick out of it because I said, I just got promoted to head of sales. And there were like three people out of hundreds. They’re like, isn’t it your company? Well, yeah, but I found myself slipping back into doing just a bunch of everything. And I’m like, I already have over a dozen people that do stuff for me. I guess I was bored or who knows what but you know what I mean? It’s like it’s easy to slip back in and I go no, you know, this year I’m doing just this I’m doing I narrow down the zone of genius. This is one of the things I do. There’s a few others and that’s inspiring to say okay, now I mean, I can’t even imagine someone else hosting my show. It’s like, would you still do? Would you still be doing that? I know the thing is a thought exercise to go even if you’re good at it. What should you be focusing your time on? What is the highest and best use of your time?

Joey Gilkey [20:17]
That’s right. Yeah. And listen, people have different goals, right? If you’re if you’re achieving the goals you want, you’re happy, and you’re and you’re filled with joy. And you’re still in a sales role. Like, that’s great. That’s what I want for you. But for me, like, I know myself, I know what I want, deep down from my life, from my personal life, or my investments, or my company’s for my employees. And I know that we couldn’t get there. If I stayed in this space. What’s funny is, by releasing myself from that, and becoming that more CEO, leader, I realized that’s my actual zone of genius now. It’s a new one, I didn’t really know that was mine, until I took it on. And now it’s like, this is I’m better at this than I am at sales. And so now I’m in a different zone of genius I didn’t even know existed for me. Which has been really cool. Really cool to explore that.

Mario Fachini [21:07]
Yeah, it’s interesting, because there’s been a few times where I’ve literally fired myself, like I said, and just focused. And every time I’ve done it, things just work easier, the less I touch.

Joey Gilkey [21:19]
Yep. On my team, I live , there are software’s and tools like my project management tool that we use. We just clicked up in our company, and I think the last time I logged in was maybe six or eight months ago. If I get in there, my team’s like, please don’t touch anything. Touch the templates, don’t touch the workflows, won’t touch the projects, you can look…

Mario Fachini [21:41]
But don’t touch.

Joey Gilkey [21:43]
They’ve actually joked about like, we’re just gonna give you a read only access. How about that?

Mario Fachini [21:47]
Well, that’s funny.

Joey Gilkey [21:49]
It’s like as a visionary, as someone who’s got ideas for days, my temptation is to go and fix everything. And it’s like, you know, honestly, if I go in and fix things, I break them. And then I have to fix what I broke. And by fixing it, I mean, my team will have to fix it. And I will leave them in a wasteland of broken processes. And so I have taught my team and empowered my team, to tell me to go away in certain parts of my company, which I think is incredibly freeing, believe it or not.

Mario Fachini [22:24]
Yeah, it’s interesting. We think we’re doing a good job. And I can tell you two out of the two times, the server’s crashed years ago, because I felt like I was needing to touch them, and I didn’t need to do so.

Joey Gilkey [22:38]
You just can’t help yourself.

Mario Fachini [22:40]
I got an idea. Let’s implement it right this second? No, how about doing anything but this, you already have people? I want to ask you now that we’re talking about it, what are your zones of genius that you know, here’s where I play? Here’s what I do. No one else does this, but me? Yeah. And the rest? I just leave alone.

Joey Gilkey [23:01]
Yeah, honestly, for me, my day to day is two things. Well, three things, I guess you can live through them together. One is, if I have, I have always had natural leadership abilities. So I played sports. From the age of three until I graduated college, I played division one football. And I’ve always had that leadership, just naturally, if no one’s going to take leadership, I’m going to step up, that’s just kind of what I’ve been. And as I was early on, in my career, my early on of my journey, I didn’t really get the flex that muscle because in my career, I did but not in my business, right. So I’m starting from scratch, I’m building everything out, I try to wear 1000 hats, I’d say the past three to four years, as I’ve kind of really made it into this, this role as more of a CEO, captain of the ship type of thing. My zone of genius is just empowering people. I think really sitting down with the people on my team, especially as it relates to the growth side of things. So my sales, my marketing, and really empowering them to take ownership of their role really empowering them to take ownership of their outcomes, right. That being said, a great leader does not necessarily make a great manager. And so I am, though my zone of genius is leading, I need to have management in place because I’m not a great manager. I look at it from a metaphorical perspective. I’m ready to captain the ship and turn the wheel and get everyone excited about the destination we’re heading towards. I’m not good at walking the deck and looking at all the rowers and making sure we’re running and in sync and those types of things. So that’s more or less my zone of genius. The other right now it’s just a content creation strategy. So I think I really excel and again, a lot of it is because I know my market super well. And so for me creating content is basically my day. It’s why we built out the studio because I want to be able to come in here, click a couple buttons and just rock and roll and create high quality content for my market. Create courses, create coaching, do my webinars and all the teaching I do online. And then also just serve clients super well through that. So I have moved into a zone of genius of content creation and strategy and leadership and empowering people.

Mario Fachini [25:13]
Excellent. And the new studio which looks great, by the way, was that your sole focus for buying the building or a large part of it?

Joey Gilkey [25:21]
Honestly, I bought this building not… So I have an awesome office building that’s in another part of town. And I bought this building as surely as an investment. It’s 5000 square feet is two storeys. The top floor was offices that kind of were like, they were apartments that were converted to offices. I reconverted them back to apartments and I and I rented them Airbnb and brb upstairs, that’s about 1800 square feet, the downstairs is about 2500 square feet. And that’s now the office is well. When I bought the building, there was a tenant already at the bottom. And they were going to stay when I bought it, I bought it for a steal. And then I had to increase prices just to kind of make the pro forma work with my bank. And they said we can’t afford it. So they left. And I was basically left with a dump. The bottom was a train wreck. And I was like, I’m not going to rent this out, I can rent this out. For what it is, since I ended up deciding I’m going to renovate this and move our offices over here. And just the way it worked out was like this room in the back is perfect, it has no windows, you can control the lighting to paint everything black will do the foam on every wall and bring that in. So it wasn’t actually my intention. It just happened to align really well with my transition to my company to where I was going to begin creating a lot more content with having the ability now to have a studio where I can do that.

Mario Fachini [26:47]
That’s fantastic. And what I’m hearing there is a lot of resourcefulness. Because everyone thinks that you need to let me rephrase that. Not everyone, there’s a niche people that I like to think we think for ourselves and don’t just whatever. But they think everything has to be perfect.

Joey Gilkey [27:07]
That’s right.

Mario Fachini [27:08]
I’ve heard people say it’s a goal, I want to build a studio, I want to do this. And there’s nothing wrong with that. However, if you get stuck with something like you did, what’s a good way to turn it into something more valuable. And I love that. I love doing that too. Because not everyone can take a lump of coal and turn it into a diamond, they just see the lump of coal and they go it’s trash.

Joey Gilkey [27:35]
Yep.

Mario Fachini [27:35]
But the people who can transform that it’s like I consider it like a superpower because most people do walk and buy. And then two years later, when you have a whole new thing that’s completely there. Like when did this thing come up there?

Joey Gilkey [27:48]
That’s hilarious. I mean, and the amount of people that come by the building and like man, I remember this building back in the day, Knoxville is a fairly small town, a couple 100,000. And they like to remember this building and now they see it now they’re like this place is like an event space, right? It’s this massive, very cool hip coworking, we’ve got a stage for acoustic concerts. We’ve got TVs everywhere, and digital whiteboards, and these glass wall conference rooms and cool studios on the back. And it’s pretty cool to see someone had a vision for this building. And it happened to me. And people got pretty excited about that. So yeah, I want to say I’m a creative in the sense that I’m not like an agency creative, where I’m like a digital, marketing type of creative, but I am a creative in terms of I’m very strategic and how I think and I think I’m a master problem solver. And so I think you’re right there probably is a gift there. But what’s something you said was you don’t need to have resources. A phrase that I used to live by before I had resources was you don’t need resources to be resourceful. Resourcefulness is not tied to having resources. Now that I have resources, I just get to basically pour gas on it and turn it up 10 notches, but that’s something that people can take away, you don’t need to have. I mean, this studio, you know, I had resources when I bought this building, I started off with very simple equipment. If you look back at some of the earlier content from it, it was not nearly as nice as it is today. And I’m sure it’ll be even nicer a year from now, what’s actually funny is a tenant who wants to move into the building and the video production agency. And they want to use a studio and they want to supply even more equipment. So maybe I’ll get even better stuff next time you see me.

Mario Fachini [29:32]
See and that’s what’s so great because not only did you make it better already and add that value, but whenever you decide to exit from it. It’s already worth more already. And it’s only going to continue to go up because now other people are seeing it in the value came from you know your head it came from it’s pretty cool to see in it.

Joey Gilkey [29:54]
It was really cool. Yeah, it worked out perfectly. And what’s funny is I still have the other office buildings that can sound like a really iconic building in town, and I didn’t want to let go of it. But I’ve gotten creative with that too, to where I’m subletting it to a point where it pays for what I would pay. And I still get to use it whenever I want.

Mario Fachini [30:12]
Oh, nice.

Joey Gilkey [30:13]
Again resourceful creative, strategic thinking there.

Mario Fachini [30:17]
So this also, I love that we’re talking about the vision. I love that we’re talking about dialing in, and no one who you’re talking to, because you can do a $100 million campaign, you’re talking to the wrong person. Kind of pointless. Yeah, let’s talk about the PCM. How important is this? And how can people do it better?

Joey Gilkey [30:36]
Yeah, so and refresh me on PCM?

Mario Fachini [30:40]
The profits conversions margin?

Joey Gilkey [30:43]
Oh, got it. Yeah, we changed the letter. This was hilarious. He said that. So we changed it to. For us, we call it the exponential growth formula, or exponential revenue growth formula in it, we change the letters around. So that sounds super familiar. What is it, so it actually leads times win rate times client value. So when we think about growth, we think about growth differently. So most folks, when they think I want to take my business from let’s just use a round number a million, I want to double my bids to 2 million. So going from 1 million to 2 million is a tall task. To get 100% growth in a year is tough for some folks. And when you say hey, I want to go for a million to 2 million. What do most people think of when they want to do that? I need more leads, right? Instantly goes well, let’s just do easy math here. If 10 leads per month closing at 20% average deal is $50,000. And I close. That means I’m closing two deals per month, which means I’m closing $100,000 in business per month times 12 months, roughly 1.2 million. Okay. So therefore, if I want to double my business, I need to go from 10 leads a month to 20. Easy math, right? Just double my leads, I’m gonna keep my conversion rate the same as my client. But what we find is, that’s really difficult, right? It’s more expensive for how am I going to get twice as many leads.

Mario Fachini [32:10]
All you have to do is run a Facebook campaign on ads and update your limit on the credit card. Right?

Joey Gilkey [32:15]
Super easy, you can just up your prices. And so that’s how most people think, though, and that’s why they’re always chasing these silver bullets of I need to try this thing, right. LinkedIn automation, I just tried this next thing, which is account based marketing, I need to try whatever it is. And I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m not saying leads are bad. However, I think a lot of us are struggling with what we call lead disease. You know, lead disease is the other 80% of that 20% win rate. Whereas the other 80% Why are they falling out? If they’re qualified? Why are you not closing eight of those 10 deals and you’re only closing two? Well, that’s one way to grow. I can there’s three categories, we have leads, we have win rate, win rate is how many of those leads are we closing? And then we have client value? What is the average annualized value of a client for your business. And so the three ways you can grow is you can double any one of those categories, right? I can go from 10 leads to 20. Leads hard to do, I can go from closing 20% to closing 40%. also hard to do going from $50,000 in client value to $200,000 in client value, hard to do. Right? All those things will get you from 1 million to 2 million, however, about sustainable, predictable, scalable growth. That doesn’t go away overnight, right. And so the way that I think about it is the magic numbers I want you to remember is 26%. If I can increase all three of those categories, how many leads I have the client, or the win rate and the client value by only 26%. If you multiply all three of those after you’ve grown them 26%, you’re going to double your business overnight. And so all that is if you think well, the number 10 leads, instead of going from 10 to 20. 10 to 12 and a half. Yeah. 13. So that’s not hard. How do I find two to three extra leads a month? Close rate I want to get from point 20 40 ago from 20 to 25. Right? So instead of closing one of our five deals, how do we get better at our sales process to close one of every four deals? And then the last one is client value instead of just doubling our prices overnight, which is inevitably going to hurt our conversion rate. Why don’t we work on getting it up from 50,000 to 62,500, or getting it from 10,000 to 12,500 on an average deal. So if you do all three of those and you do the multiplication, feel free to scrape on a napkin, I promise you it’s going to be double what your first number was. And is more sustainable, it’s not going to go away overnight. And I promise you you keep increasing by 26%. That’s when you start seeing that excess we call exponential revenue growth formula because you’ll start seeing exponential revenue growth you’ll go from one to two, two to four, four to eight to 16 really fast by just doing 26% incremental growth.

Mario Fachini [34:53]
That’s a compound effect going into effect that the banks are taking advantage of for the compound interest.

Joey Gilkey [35:01]
That’s right. That’s no different than anything in the finance world, you can do it in your business growth model. Just think of it as there’s three levers I need to pull on, instead of always obsessing over leads and having lead disease.

Mario Fachini [35:13]
And also we should be capitalizing in our own finances, not just the banks, I want to make that clear as well.

Joey Gilkey [35:18]
Very clear.

Mario Fachini [35:20]
So do you do this 26% year over year?

Joey Gilkey [35:24]
Yeah. So it is what you want it to be, or I’m just throwing your business out? You know, that’s the thing I’m always trying to do is how do I double my business. So you know, the next year, and again, this is all averages, I’m looking at 10 leads per month, I want to get to a 12 and a half lead per month, average over the course of this year. When I do that, and I do the same thing with win rate and descending client value, it’s a double my business, then the next year, my goal. And I might get there a lot faster. And I think right, the more you emphasize the sales process, the more you get really strategic with how you do sales, and the more dialed in you get, the easier it is to make that 26% jump. And then I go from 12 and a half leads to roughly 15 and a half, you know, 16 leads the next year, or per month on average. And then I go from a 25% close rate to a 31% close rate. How do we go from closing one every four to one of our three at some point, you’re going to hit a cap. And then it is a matter of pouring on the leads. And it’s a matter of growing clients and I but most people who are probably listening to this are probably not to the point where they’ve hit that cap in all three categories. And so yes, my goal is to year over year grow at least double.

Mario Fachini [36:32]
That’s fantastic. That’s very fantastic. Because it doesn’t seem like a big deal when you’re doing it one year at a time. Now, if you’re impatient and can’t delay gratification, of course, let’s go grow 10,000% this month, okay, but when you break it over five or 10 years, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s just natural progress that you’d be doing anyway.

Joey Gilkey [36:54]
Yep. And it’s more sustainable, right, like growing by 10,000%, you probably found some silver bullet that worked for today or this quarter or this half of this year. But what happens when an algorithm change happens? What happens when that growth channel is saturated with everyone else who figured it out just like you did? And so that’s my thing is if you grow sustainably, you’re actually gonna it’s the tortoise and the hare kind of, you know, what’s funny is, it’s got a little bit of both. It’s both tortoise and Hare. It’s the stability of the tortoise, right? Because it’s slow and steady is what I think is very stable and how he’s going about his race. But at a certain point, if you can grow each one of us by 26%, and double your business, there’s a little bit of hair involved there, too.

Mario Fachini [37:38]
Yeah, and it’s year after year, like you said, you might grow a ton one year, and then hopefully, in the worst case scenario, you just don’t grow again. But generally what I hear happen is you grow that 10,000% in the next year, you’re worse off because of it.

Joey Gilkey [37:56]
Yes, yeah, honestly. Because what happens is what happens when you’re 10,000%, you’re gonna massively skyrocket your overhead, the amount of people you hire, you’re gonna hire so fast that you’re gonna make so many mistakes, you have to build processes and systems with duct tape that are eventually going to break. And so what happens when you do that is like you said, yeah, you’re gonna have a massive success for 10,000. And if you’re a SaaS company, you’re looking for an exit in the next 24 months, great, cool, pack the books full revenue, that’s great. But most of us want longevity, most of us want something a lot bigger, most of us probably aren’t running a saas company who’s looking to exit for, you know, 100 million, a billion dollars in the next 24 months. And so that’s what I would encourage you to start thinking about is prioritizing not not slow growth, but safe growth?

Mario Fachini [38:49]
Would you ever advise So would you ever advise some obviously the 26%, would you advise someone to do both where you’re doing this and your stability plan is for 10 years? But if there is an opportunity go for it.

Joey Gilkey [39:03]
And what’s your what’s going to happen? Typically, the reason I’m talking about 20% is really for people to wrap their mind around the possibility of incremental growth equals exponential growth, if you combine it with all three categories, when you start getting under the hood, you’re going to start figuring things out and you’re going to be able to your leads are gonna increase quite a bit, right? If you could figure out how to grow your leads by 20%, you can probably figure out how to grow by 50. If you can figure out how to grow by 50, you could probably figure out how to grow by 100. However, I don’t want to just get obsessed with that one category, because you know, you can grow it. Also think about the others, right? Because we think about conversion rate optimization like these ecommerce companies, they’re obsessed with traffic. And they know that if I do one thing, if I have 1000 people visiting my website today, and I have a 1% conversion rate that I’m going to close 10 sales worth this much money. And they’re like, well, let’s just pour on the gas for ads and let’s go after 2000 people to our website per day so I can have 1% conversion rate and close 20 sales. Cool, that’s a way to do it. Well, what happens if you go from 1% to 3%, with the same traffic at 1000, people closing at 3%, and I’ve got 30 sales in a day, what happens now when I figured out how to double my traffic and go from 1000 to 2000. And I’m also converting a 3% conversion rate, you went from 10 sales a day to 60 sales a day. Really fast, right?

Mario Fachini [40:18]
And so I have the people in place to handle it.

Joey Gilkey [40:30]
Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Mario Fachini [40:26]
Unless it’s all automated, or it is a SAS or some sort of training or something. You’re just pumping them in and it’s automated.

Joey Gilkey [40:37]
And so having the scalability is the other part, a lot of people think of scalability, as you know, we’re moving superfast. We just had this exponential growth curve. It’s a hockey stick. That’s not, yes, that is technically scalable. But if something breaks, then it’s no longer scalable. And so that’s where I think people make the mistake, we get obsessed with scale. It drives me nuts with the amount of people who are like to scale this scale that lets scale, you know, and it’s like, yeah, it’s scalable to a point, but the moment something breaks, you’re, you’re kind of up a creek, and you got to fix it again, and so that

Mario Fachini
There’s no recovery built into it.

Joey Gilkey [41:12]
That’s right. That’s right.

Mario Fachini [41:14]
That’s how I thought about that, when I was even designing the show and the workflow in the production of it. Because as like, I personally, I’m very much akin to you where, hey, let’s go shoot 20,40,5080, let’s do a year’s worth of episodes this week. However, all you need is the power to go out and you have a big problem versus a controllable problem. That’s recoverable from even in between the shows, it’s like how many you know, or people that do back to back sales meetings, Oh, I got 15 meetings back to back all day. Did you give yourself a lunch break, because at some point, you’re not going to be able to maintain this pace. I love figuring out the frequencies.

Joey Gilkey [41:56]
You can’t even the pace. But it’s also usually there’s a level of fatigue. And so you might have 15 calls, and you might be optimal for seven or eight of them and you start losing your optimal and then your conversion rate takes a hit on the second day, you’d almost be better off doing eight calls a day, and be consistent there than you…

Mario Fachini [42:14]
That has only taken 10 or 20% of your energy instead of draining your gas tank.

Joey Gilkey [42:18]
Exactly. And so it’s all about that, that balance. And yes, you can pour in you could push the throttle down on any one of these categories at any given time. But most of us haven’t focused on all three, I would say if you are focusing on all three, and you’re cognizant of all three, and you know that you’re able to move the needle for all three of them, then you’ve probably earned the right to start pouring the gas on one or the other that you know, you can really impact and usually that’s leads. But I usually tell it this way because most people are just going to get obsessed with leads because it’s the easy way out. Or at least it seems like the easy way.

Mario Fachini [42:51]
If you, especially if you have a SAS or training or something automated where it’s literally going through Infusionsoft and it swipes the card, everyone’s happy they get delivered. I mean, who wouldn’t want to increase the MRR. But at the same point, you’re dealing with people at some point, even if it’s a SAS or computer or anything software related, more technical, you’re dealing with people at the end of the date. And not everyone is the terminator and wants to walk around like a robot just you know what I mean?

Joey Gilkey [43:26]
Pressing buttons, and sales. Yep, that’s exactly right. And I think the other thing too, is people don’t even the last part of that the client value part people aren’t afraid to to increase the prices. And so that’s why they get so focused on leads is because they don’t want to focus on client value. There’s a great analogy of the savvy businessman who went to this barber shop, and he’s been going there for 10 years. And he’s really good friends with the owner of the barber and got the same haircut 10 years straight. And you are sitting there talking to the barber and he’s like, hey, john, you seem like you’re stressed out today. The barbers like yeah, that’s just back to back to back all day long. I have no margin in my life. Because a savvy businessman goes, Well, just double your prices. I’ve been coming for 10 years, you’ve been charging me 10 bucks or a haircut surcharge and Tony goes double my prices, I’ll lose half my customers. It’s like, Yeah, well, that’s the same revenue. That’s the same revenue, and now you have more margin to grow on top of that. And so it’s just less work and less work. And so you can you can choose to pack your schedule again now with $20 haircuts instead of 10. And then double your prices again, or increase your prices again and you might lose half. But you’re doing the same on revenue. And so it’s just a matter of iterations and incremental growth. And a lot of us are just afraid to do that. We have stuck in our ways.

Mario Fachini [44:50]
And to the point we started this great conversation on you’re also going to be attracting, I would say a higher caliber of clientele. If you No all I’m gonna lose half the people while someone that’s willing to pay 20. But you know, someone that’s willing to pay 10, but not 20 that’s a different person. And conversely, someone that’s willing to pay 20 and not 40.

Joey Gilkey [45:13]
100%. And you’re starting to get more in your niche, right, of who you actually want to serve. I mean, if someone brought a Ferrari to me and said, hey, this is 30 grand, I’d be like, What’s wrong with it? Right? Whereas if someone said, hey, it’s $380,000, like, okay, probably that’s about right. That’s on that clientele. And so a $30,000, Ferrari wouldn’t make sense to me. And I would instantly say what’s wrong with it, and a lot of us treat our price in the same way. We think that the cheaper we are, the easier it is to make the sale. Sometimes it’s the adverse effect people might look at and say it’s cheap, therefore, it’s probably not optimal.

Mario Fachini [45:49]
That is a great expert authority insight. And I encourage everyone to do that. Because I’ve said some of this before, because it’s like, why do you want to have 10,000 people at $10? I didn’t bring it up. While you were saying it, I wanted to let you roll. But you’re saying, hey, let’s just go from 10 leads a month to 12, or whatever. If they’re 50 or $100,000 deals, it’s a pretty good month, you don’t grab 10,000 leads.

Joey Gilkey [46:18]
That’s right. And so stop focusing so much there. Again, don’t neglect it. But don’t obsess about it. I think that’s what most of us are making decisions today, based on how we can grow our lead volume and grow our pipeline. And unfortunately, it’s just I think you’re leaving a lot on the table by pursuing putting more at the table, if that makes sense.

Mario Fachini [46:39]
Well, I appreciate everything you’ve been sharing so far. I want to ask you, though, how did you get into this?

Joey Gilkey [46:46]
That’s a great question.

Mario Fachini [46:48]
What’s the backstory? Because clearly, you know what you’re doing now?

Joey Gilkey [46:53]
For me, I kind of had fun with the wolves at a pretty young age. So I was in the fortune 100 world, working for what was an IT recruiting company, but there was a global IT Services Branch, this company. And as a pretty young kid, I believe I was 2324, I did really well in sales. And they moved me into a more leadership role to the global IT services side of this company, and ended up helping build out the southeastern division of this global IT services company handed a lot more responsibility than I probably deserve to be quite honest, got my teeth kicked in a few times. And helped grow a 115 person sales team for the southeastern division. So that’s why I really got into the sales operations, sales, hiring, training, managing a target to lead but I hated corporate. And so for me, life was too short, to do a job, I didn’t really feel like I enjoyed it much. And the reason I didn’t really enjoy it was not because it was corporate. But because what comes to corporate typically is boundaries of innovation and creativity. Right? There are things that I want to implement in my sales organization, that though we had a lot of zeros in our budget to pull it off, they did not want to do it because it was not according to protocol. And because it was a coordinate protocol. They were slow to move. It was like moving the Titanic. So I said I want to go to a more nimble environment. And so I started up a conversation with a gentleman who I knew from the church that I attend, who said, Hey, you know, we’re hiring for our agency. And this was not a digital marketing agency, which actually operates today. This is for a risk management consulting firm slash commercial insurance agency. Okay. And so I jumped in, took a VP of Sales role and built that from 1 million in revenue to nine and a half million in revenue in 18 months. And I knew at that point, I love being in the small business world, right, where I can operate and be flexible, and the budget has a lot less zeros. I could be innovative and creative, and I could do things how I want to do them. And I made a big impact. I mean, going from 1 million to nine and a half million, the owner of that company’s life has changed, right in terms of just his legacy, the wealth he built, which I thought was cool. Now, I wish I would have seen more of that upside down. And so that’s why I ended up leaving. I got posed to be the VP of sales of a digital marketing agency. If people are familiar with HubSpot, HubSpot agency, and ended up moving into that role, had very, very similar growth results. And that was the final time when I was like, You know what, I love growing these things, I’m good at it. I love seeing the families of these owners of these companies who took a chance and started a business on their own and they let me in. I love that they’ve changed the trajectory of their life. But I want that for myself. I want to build a legacy. I want to build wealth, not just making money as a sales leader. And so I ended up deciding I’m gonna leave and start my own thing. Initially, the first three months before I met a pivot, I thought to myself, because I know how to grow a digital marketing agency, I’m going to start a digital marketing agency. Right, that’s what I thought. What I didn’t know was I’m great at selling digital marketing services. I’m great at building a sales organization, an organization for a digital marketing agency. I don’t love delivering digital marketing services. And so though I was getting into these big accounts when I started my own thing, and I was getting into these massive SAS companies, and I hated the delivery side. And I said, you know what I’m freaking done with this. I’m not doing, I’m not running an agency anymore. But what happened was, in that time, I got in with a mastermind with other digital marketing agencies. And I really realized these are my people like, this is my tribe. And going back to the very beginning of picking your tribe and knowing who you serve. These are the people I really enjoyed. They’re creatives. They’re really enjoyable to be around, they’re down to earth. These are the people I want to serve. And I know I can, right? Because I took a different path to owning an agency than a traditional agency and a traditional agency owner is a creative their strategist or technician, they probably worked for someone at one time doing marketing, they probably got some side gigs at some point, probably became a 1099 contractor at some point, and then probably ended up starting an agency because they had a couple of projects that they got through word of mouth, but they never had a sales career, like I did decide to start an agency. So I said, okay, cool. This is my niche. These are the people I want to serve. I serve them uniquely, because I know how to sell digital agency services, they love delivering it, they don’t love selling it, I love selling it, don’t love delivering it. Perfect Match. So I ended up starting, what was my first successful business in the space, which was essentially an outsourced sales agency. So agencies would hire me and my team. And I would have the sales team that I would build for my company. And I would just basically outsource them to their so my team would go sell for them. And when super well, after that exit ended up saying I still want to stay in this space. And it’s basically where I am today, which is instead of being an outsourced sales agency, I am now essentially a consulting firm that builds internal sales operations at high ticket b2b companies, mostly digital marketing agencies.

Mario Fachini [52:18]
That’s impressive. And I want to ask you about the larger companies, even when you’re starting out, how do you approach the bigger companies versus most people who go after, you know, all the businesses across the country, the smaller businesses? Is it any harder to go after the big names than the small names? And how do you do it?

Joey Gilkey [52:37]
Yes, and no, it’s not harder to get attention, and opportunity in that space, it’s harder to get a deal done because they move so slow, and they have like RFP processes, and you’re not just going to deal with the CEO who can cut you a check when they’re ready to move forward, you’re going to deal with a department and they have a bunch of people that need to sign off. So it’s harder to get a deal. It’s a longer sales cycle and the enterprise world, right, I’ve sold into the fortune 10s of the world. And I have sold into the mom and pop shops down the street both have their pros and their cons, right, the mom and pop shop has a lower budget. So it’s harder to get them to part with their money to help you solve the problems. Enterprise has a ton of budget, but they move so slow, because they’re looking corporate. And so it’s not harder to get attention. If you know what you’re doing. The next question is, do you know what you’re doing? And that’s where I usually come in? Well, so we can go and talk about that if you’d like but up to you.

Mario Fachini [53:36]
Yeah, well, why don’t you touch on that for a minute or two?

Joey Gilkey [53:39]
Yeah, so the biggest thing, I look at sales, like fishing with spears, as opposed to fishing with nets. A lot of folks think about sales in terms of fishing for nets. And what I mean by that is, if you think about a tradition, I’m just gonna call it a sales funnel. I don’t mean necessarily like a Facebook funnel, or Click Funnels, I just mean a funnel, meaning there’s usually a wider top and a skinnier bottom right. And that represents working people from unqualified lead to qualified marketing lead to qualified sales lead to close deal. And it’s skinnier at the bottom because your conversion rate is not going to be 100%. So therefore, it’s skinnier than what it is at the top. And so the traditional way of doing sales is I’m going to go after 1000s and hope for 10s or dozens of sales out of that. And so I’m going to go after what we call spam your TAM. So you’re spamming your total addressable market. Spam your TAM is really this one too many sales approach. So it’s a lot of automation. It’s a lot of blasted campaigns, right sending out 100 emails a day hoping for a 1% conversion on that to get a meeting. That’s a way of selling that’s fishing with nets, right when you fish with nets. The downside is you don’t know what you’re going to get when you throw it out there. You throw it into a cove and whatever comes up, it could be minnows, it could be a bass, it could be whatever you If it comes up, it’s it is what you got your net. And so I don’t like doing that because it doesn’t fit my ideal customer profile perfectly. But with fishing with spears, you’re methodical, you’re systematic, you know where to go, you look for them, when you see them, you take your shot. And when you do, and it’s usually instantaneous, you know, when he got him. And so we talked about that funnel, and you flip it upside down really. Who do you want to fall at the bottom? Not who is going to fall at the bottom? Maybe I’m not sure it’s one of these 1000, 2000, 3000 who are the 20, 30, 40 customers that you really want to work with? You know, we call it you’ve heard of maybe dream 100 or dream 500, building your dream list of clients. And instead of saying I hope they fall out of a funnel that maybe they came through my ad or content or something like that. Or maybe they came through an automated email sequence. Instead of doing that, say, here’s the people I want. And now let’s create campaigns for each individual, one reverse engineer how we’re going to get them in the door. That’s how you need to start thinking about sales instead of going one to many. And yes, it takes more time per outreach. But your conversion rate is also astronomically higher. Right?

Mario Fachini [56:12]
When you say campaign, you don’t mean a specific campaign for that person with Facebook ads. And that’s the same mediums it could be. Who do I know that knows them? You know, it could be organic.

Joey Gilkey [56:25]
It could be network, it could be referral, it could be email, it could be social selling on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, it can be direct mail, it could be gifting. You can introduce video, handwritten letters, like all those things are tactical things that you can, once you know who you’re going after right now in your tribe, you can decide which of these grab bag am I going to go into and pick out to go after this in reverse engineer how to get these people in the door? And when you do it that way? Yes. If you go after 100 people versus going after 1000 people, if I go after 1000 people with the spam your time approach, and I get a 1% conversion rate conversion rate. That’s 10 deals. Well, what if I go after 100, and I’m methodical with the spear and I get a 20% conversion rate? Well, that’s 20 deals, that’s double the amount of deals that went after 1/10 the amount of people.

Mario Fachini [57:11]
I’d say they appreciate it more because it’s a higher level experience right from the start.

Joey Gilkey [57:17]
You never lose brand. The other downside of spamming your team is you hurt your brand, you don’t know who’s coming out the bottom, you’re typically a commodity, you’re not gonna be in charge as much. But when you come in with authority, right, expert authority show, here we go. When you come in with authority, and when you come in with value, right, and it’s obviously tailored, it’s obviously thought for it’s obviously something that can only be sent to this person. Like, they’re not going to be like, EFF off go away, like they would if you automate everything else, right? They’re gonna be appreciative at the very least. And what’s interesting is, even if someone’s appreciated it, but they don’t want to buy, they might have a referral for you. That’s ideal as well, because you’ve now provided value in the relationship even though you didn’t have to.

Mario Fachini [58:02]
This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing, and I am in 150% agreement. And it’s funny, you mentioned that with the expert authority effect, because I’ve been telling people for years, it’s less effort, it’s more profitable, it’s more enjoyable to the point of luck, who you attract, expert authority world, is Joey awesome, or what? It’s because he qualifies, and he has the heart and wants to give, I will never have someone on the show to fill space, I already have a waitlist. And I don’t want people who are just kicking it with a stick for just one screen time. This is who I wanted to attract. And it’s surreal right now in this moment, because you’re talking about everything I did years ago before I started this. And I’m so glad you are and I thank you because more people need to hear it. And clearly you’re successful with it. And I just see it as a way to free people’s lives up to the point that they have no margin to the barber. I don’t want people just working their tail off 24 seven, and I know there’s people who are successful, they have the money, but they have no time. They don’t have relationships. It’s like, work with the 10 or 20 or maybe 50 or whatever the amount is at a higher degree. I mean, it just pays dividends here.

Joey Gilkey [59:14]
It does, and you keep your sanity. You enjoy it, you do a lot more. You know, you don’t value your clients as much if they pay 10 bucks as you do if they pay you 1000.

Mario Fachini [59:18]
And they don’t value you. I mean, you’re bringing a massive value. Your commodity you’re just nonchalantly like, Yeah, I just bought this building and I did this thing. And we went from 1.5 to 9.5 and 18 months and I didn’t want to… I almost joked oh, it took 18 months. Why didn’t you do it at 12? Like, who cares if it took 24?

Joey Gilkey [59:49]
Yep.

Mario Fachini [59:28]
That’s awesome growth. And I’m pretty sure your clients are happy with you.

Joey Gilkey [59:54]
Yeah, I’d like to think so. We throw guarantees on our work and we have our Awesome, awesome, awesome customers, you know, I hire client success managers and client success people for the very reason of wanting to create experience, right? You pay us to, to get a return on your investment. And simultaneously, you don’t pay for the experience. But when we give you the experience it makes when we do the return that tenfold, right? It’s not just that we got what you hoped for, but you got more than you hoped for. And we over delivered and you’re excited to pass our name on to other ideal customers that we want to work with. Because it was a no-brainer, it was fantastic. We call it the Disney World experience when you go to Disney World, or you go to Harry Potter World or whatever you’re into. If you go to anything Disney related, you are immersed, that is the word immersed in the Disney culture, everything from the food you eat to the streets, you walk down to the employees, what they’re wearing to the name tags they have on. Everything is immersing into, it’s creating an experience for you. And I think thinking about your clients journey, very similarly is creating an experience for them.

Mario Fachini [1:01:06]
Yeah, it’s not just transactional.

Joey Gilkey [1:01:08]
No. And when you do that retention skyrockets, that’s just another growth lever that increases client value, right? It also decreases client acquisition, right? If you have a client renewing with you or buy again from you, it costs us $0 to have them renewed, if you treat, and whereas if you lose them, you have to spend money to then replace them with some other client. So the most profitable thing you can do is retain clients and have clients be able to refer to other clients because that is a $0 cost per acquisition, no ad budget, no marketing budget, you just treat people the right way, and you create an experience. And out of that came the fruit of a zero cost per acquisition deal.

Mario Fachini [1:01:50]
Another great expert authority insight. I want to ask you, one more thing before we Well, two more things before we go to the imperfect action around and thank our sponsor, one of them is what is the biggest success story you’ve had out of everyone you’ve mentioned, what’s the biggest one that comes to mind?

Joey Gilkey [1:02:08]
I mean, I can talk about revenue success, which is always fun. But you know, we ‘ll start there. So I’ll start there. And I’ll talk about a more sentimental one that’s probably more at this level of the folks who are listening. So we had one client who this was back when I was running tribe, which was our outsourced sales agency, right, we’d outsource our sales, or people outsource their sales to us and we go out and hunt. And we had one client who was a great company, probably doing four or 5 million in revenue, and out of Atlanta that was a very unique product, patented product, unique to the marketplace. A game changer if they can get in the door with the right companies. And with working with them. We went from starting with them to six months later, they had a pipeline valued at $150 million and deals as a $4 million company. A lot of that was just because we got down on who we served, right? What’s funny about that is the total amount of prospects that we went after in those six months to generate a $150 million pipeline was 36. 36 fish that we went with a spear after which generated $150 million in deals. That was a pretty awesome success story. But more tangible than that, I’d say there are daily success stories that I love in our company, where we are able to help a business owner more specifically, typically, an agency owner is a creative who’s a strategist who’s a technician who has to sell to pay the bills. And they’ve dreamed of being out of sales to either focus on their craft or go focus on being the leader of their company and scaling it. The successes that I love more than $150 million in pipeline is having an agency owner, like take that deep breath and say I don’t have to sell anymore. We’ve got the sales operation running. I’ve got sales people that are hired, trained and managed. Thank you, Joey and the sales driven agency team, I can now go do what I want to do like that, that is just one of those heartwarming, I would love to do that all day over work with these enterprise companies and make them hundreds of millions of dollars because it changed their life and changed their enjoyment of what they do. They could love their business again. And so for me that’s the success that I love seeing. You know, I’m privileged to see that on a regular basis.

Mario Fachini [1:04:35]
That’s incredible. I’m glad you have the heart for it. And it’s inspiring to get to the point where everyone I mean just hearing that on a daily basis. I’m thankful with the show I’m around awesome people like you, but not everyone has that benefit and to be delivering it consistently. Like you’re talking about, you might get a couple of hits and they’re good. advertise the heck out of them. Market, have the testimonials on video. However, when you are at the level of competency where you can, it’s predictable. It might get boring for you because it’s just every day. But that’s that level of mastery, you want to be at the expert authority level. And I think everyone should be at it. So thank you for being a great example. I got one quick question. And we’re gonna do the Imperfect Action Round is the Wheel of Whatever.

Joey Gilkey [1:05:25]
All right, let’s do it.

Mario Fachini [1:05:26]
Oh, look at that spin. Oh, yellow or black?

Joey Gilkey [1:05:30]
Let’s go with yellow.

Mario Fachini [1:05:33]
It’s interesting. Which one? This one? Yeah. Yellow. Well, on camera, it looks like there we go. It’s yellow. Nice. Painted at yellow on set. It’s yellow. So my question for you is with all you’ve accomplished. I mean, it sounds like you’ve done more in your lifetime already than most people do in a lifetime, which is awesome. Where are you going in the next 10 or 20 years? What’s your endgame?

Joey Gilkey [1:05:57]
That’s a great question. My endgame right now is I’m focused on my main company. In terms of the immediate… This next 12 months, we’ve got an awesome offer ladder that we’re really tightening up. But once I have that humming, my goal is to fire myself from CEO and hire a full time CEO that will take over the day to day. And then I want to go build a mergers and acquisitions play. And so my goal is to build a parent hub with my abilities, building sales operations and go and buying up companies that fit my profile of the companies that I want to own in my portfolio, but also the companies that I know that I can, that are good companies that just don’t have the sales operation. Case in point there was an agency that we worked with that they’re a unique agency in the sense that they’re about 4.2 million when we started with them. And they have a unique offer where they are essentially a back office financial agency, so they’re an outsourced back office company. So other companies will hire them. And they will essentially fractionally be a CFO, accountant, controller and bookkeeper all in one for a retainer. Well, they’re a fantastic company, but they didn’t have a sales operation, the moment that we applied our sales operation process to it, and we built it out, they grew by 2 million in the first 90 days, they grew by 10 million the first 12 months. And so what I want to do is only go by companies like that, and own them to take them from four to 14 million in 12 months. And so that’s kind of my 10 year goal is to really build more of a parent company that owns a lot of other companies that I know that I can help that just happened to, you know, build my legacy around the parent. Wow.

Mario Fachini [1:07:52]
Good for you. Congratulations, I have it in your belly, and you’re gonna do it. And I appreciate you for sharing that with us. Of course, we’re going to thank our sponsor, and come back for the Imperfect Action Round.

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Mario Fachini [1:09:36]
And we are back with the Imperfect Action Round. Joey, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Joey Gilkey [1:09:42]
Let’s rock and roll man.

Mario Fachini [1:09:44]
All right, three questions for you rapid fire 60 seconds or less answers: what is the fastest path to the profits?

Joey Gilkey [1:09:52]
Fastest path to the profits. Sell before you have the service or product done. My biggest thing is get paid to pre launch. So when you’re going after customers, or you’re launching something new, which again, if you’re going from zero to profit, the fastest thing you can do is, again, talk to your ideal customers craft an offer and then ship it, pre launch it, say, hey, we’re gonna launch this in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever, get people to prepay for it at a discount, right as a thank you for being a part of the pre launch, they know that they’re part of the first wave of people will get this, it gets money in the door, it will find you creating the offer, if it’s a course, if it’s a service, if it’s a product, whatever, get them to pre basically have them seed fund the offer that they bought from you. And so once you’ve done that, then you can pour gas on it, you have money for ads, you have money for sales campaigns, that’s what I would do is sell it before you have it. Obviously know that you can pull it off once you do sell it, but have a sell before you have it. A lot of people focus too much on perfecting it before they sell it. But you might get in there and find out no one wants to buy it or it’s just not the right pitch.

Mario Fachini [1:11:05]
Excellent, excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Joey Gilkey [1:11:14]
Biggest problem is hiring salespeople and not setting them up for success. So a lot of us obviously dream of firing ourselves from sales as the owner who’s selling. And we want to, you know, our natural inclination is well, I’ll just go hire a salesperson, I pay them salary, they bring me back money. That’s what we think the transactional relationship between hiring a salesperson looks like, unfortunately, there’s so much there that you need to have in place to make sure that those salespeople are successful, there’s nothing less profitable than going out and paying money for an employee that’s going to leave and 90 to 120 to 180 days from now, because you’ve invested time, money, resources into that person. And when they leave, you’re just at a deficit. And so make sure that they’re set up when they come in, having the processes, having the offers, having the content that they can learn from and the training, and having the infrastructure for them to actually go out and be successful for your company.

Mario Fachini [1:12:07]
Excellent. And number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Joey Gilkey [1:12:16]
Whoo, retention is absolutely up there. So in terms of maximum client value, right, if you have a 12 month contract, while the most profitable thing you can do is trade the experience that’s going to make them renew for another 12, and another 12, not 12, because then it goes from paid $1,000 for a $10,000 customer, to I paid $1,000 for a $40,000 customer. And so not only are you increasing your client value, your lifetime value, you’re also increasing your profit margin on acquisition. So the easiest thing to do is create the experience over emphasize the results. And on top of that, just charge more. That’s how you do it. Just decide today that you’re not charging enough. And go ahead and make the leap, increase your prices by 20, 30%. See what happens if no one buys cool. They know you probably just overshot your pricing, drop it back a little bit. If people are still buying, then keep increasing, right? That’s the easiest way for you to think through. This is how I’m going to do it. The other thing is to listen to your clients, right, I have so many clients is really interesting. I’ve created offers because we have finished with clients. On our contract, they have graduated from working with us, the goal is not retention. And they actually came back to me and said, hey, I would love it. If you did something like this, this or this. I had enough clients do that, to the point where I created a continuity offer on the back end of our project that maximizes the lifetime value.

Mario Fachini [1:13:43]
Great insights again, thank you for those, what books would you recommend to Expert Authority World?

Joey Gilkey [1:13:51]
I am a huge fan of The Go Giver. If you have not read The Go Giver by Bob Burg. Just a fantastic book about business principles. I’m a big fan and providing value and giving. And I think that it comes back to you and tenfold. That’s probably one that I would really think about. Another one just from a mindset perspective, there’s one called max out by Ed Mallett, which is really good. Ed Mallett is a fantastic business owner. He’s done nine figures in revenue, and he talks a lot about mindset. And he talks a lot about training your mind and training your brain. And I think honestly, the most powerful thing in business is mindset not skill set. I think we get so focused on the skill set, and we don’t focus enough on what’s our mental What’s our mindset behind it, because our mind can take us much further, oftentimes than our skill set.

Mario Fachini [1:14:46]
And you can get the right people to be doing the skill set anyway.

Joey Gilkey [1:14:51]
Yes, yes. And then the last one is the Four DS of execution. How do you become just just a militaristic execute When it comes to getting stuff done,

Mario Fachini [1:15:03]
Excellent. Well, you have smashed this one out of the park. I appreciate everything you’ve been sharing in the book recommendations are great. Also no exception there. Where would you like people to learn more?

Joey Gilkey [1:15:15]
Sure, if you are interested in someone building out your sales operation, you can go check us out at www.salesdrivenagency.com pretty easy, they’re pretty obvious how you can get in touch with our team, you’ll get put in touch with one of our senior advisors. Outside of that I am open to network on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect me on LinkedIn. If you do connect with me, please drop a note and say that you got sent from the expert authority, or through Mario and that way I’ll at least accept your I have like 1000 connection requests in my LinkedIn inbox that I don’t get to unless people write me a personal note that I know where they came from.

Mario Fachini [1:15:53]
I am very much the same way. I was just telling someone , someone recently sent me something that said, you’re probably sick of all the zoom calls. How about we just jumped on the phone? I was like, oh my gosh. It’s like the phone still works. You know, you can have a great conversation.

Joey Gilkey [1:16:11]
Oh, I was on a panel the other day and they said what’s the most innovative technology out there right now and sales? I said, your cell phone? It is the most innovative thing to pick up the phone and call someone right now. It is what is working the best. Believe it or not.

Mario Fachini [1:16:26]
No, it always has to have the phone. No, probably will. I absolutely love this. I love being able to see and interact and everything. But you know, we could also be sitting on the boat relaxing and having the same kind of great conversation.

Joey Gilkey [1:16:41]
That’s right. Yeah. And you know, to be put together, you just you talk. It’s awesome.

Mario Fachini [1:16:46]
Yeah, great people. That’s what it is. And I appreciate you for being one of them. This has been a complete pleasure and treasure. And I was gonna wait till we’re off the air. But no, I’m going to say one last thing. If I ever do a live event with speakers, I’m absolutely going to reach out to you because you’re phenomenal.

Joey Gilkey [1:17:09]
Well, I appreciate that, man. That is humbling. I appreciate you saying that. And it has been a pleasure to share the stage with you.

Mario Fachini [1:17:19]
Well, it’s truly been a pleasure. And thank you so much for your time, your expertise and everything you’ve shared with us. I really enjoyed it. So thank you again.

Joey Gilkey [1:17:30]
Good, man. Well, I thank you for having me on. Hope your audience found value in it. We’ll talk again.

Mario Fachini [1:17:36]
Alright, expert authority world. We have another great episode here today. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a great day. And God bless.

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www.EAInterviews.com [1:18:17]
Hey, thanks for listening to today’s episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven’t done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show. And also be sure to check out EAInterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience links to the resources we mentioned in more. Have a blessed day and I’ll see you tomorrow.