👾 Leveling Up 👾

Welcome to Leveling Up. Today’s newsletter is a 4-minute read. 

Here’s what we’re going to cover: 

• How to find out the most relevant topics online

• Customer-Generated Content (CGC)

• The secret to agency success

Just so you know, the Agency Owners Association (AOA) is hosting another Q&A soon. Make sure you join today (join here). 

Thanks,

Eric Siu :)

Actionable Tip

Have you heard of ExplodingTopics?

It’s a site where you can check the most relevant topics on search right now.

You can see on the homepage what people are looking for (link).

Combined with AnswerThePublic, and Google Trends, you can take a reading of what people are interested in at the moment.

Give it a try!

Links You Might Like

Here are some great links I found since our last email.

💌 Email

7 evergreen email subject lines (link)

🤖 AI

An infographic of all the newest AI models (link)

📊 Social Media

10 ways to create high-converting Facebook ads (link)

📊 Marketing

Is Customer-Generated Content the new UGC? (link)

🏢 Business

Netflix uploaded a full film to YouTube (link)

Deep Dive: Secret to Agency Success

Here's the simple secret to success with agency sales. 

This works well from $0 to $100M+ in revenue.

Let's just get the first part out of the way -- nobody is ever going to beat the founder at sales. That's a fact.

Agency founders typically try to step out of sales too early and end up hiring a salesperson.

Usually, they end up firing that salesperson a few months later. Why?

Because they typically hire solutions-based salespeople instead of consultative salespeople.

If you're selling services, you have to think of yourself as a doctor. You're diagnosing different issues. Oftentimes, your patients will come in with a self-diagnosis when in fact they are off by a mile.

It's your job as a doctor to course-correct them and recommend the proper solution. They'll appreciate you more for that at the end of the day. 

I've hired salespeople who were good at selling SMB agency solutions or SaaS products, but they all ended up failing because they just weren't practitioners. They focused on selling one solution and didn't try to dive deep into the problem (because they couldn't).

The simple solution? 

If you're doing consultative selling, you're going to see a lot more success with practitioners doing the selling for you.

If you're selling SEO services, hire a personable SEO who no longer wants to do client work. Float to them that they can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and ask them if they're interested.

If they say yes, pitch them on the idea and see where it goes. I've seen this work time and time again. 

Recently, I had dinner with a guy from an agency holding company who closed $6M last quarter. Not bad.

His background? Affiliate marketing.

His prospects trust him because he can talk the game and he's not just another 'sales guy'.

So that's the move -- hire practitioners to close and you'll see far more success. 

If you're a founder, you can step away from sales but you can never step away completely if you want your company to grow as quickly as possible. 

Gary Vee still stays involved with pitches today even though they have thousands of employees worldwide.

How I Can Help You

If you enjoy this newsletter and would like to collaborate with me, there are a few options available:

1. You can apply to work with my agency (link)

2. You can join my Skool community (link)

3. You can apply to join my mastermind (link)

Interested in working at Single Grain? We have some new open roles:

• Paid Media Manager (link)

• SEO Manager (link)