How to Retain Agency Clients By Showing Them Success

Iris Shoor is the founder and CEO of Oribi, a web analytics tool. After two successful startups, she is growing her third startup. Oribi, an AI-based web analytics tool dedicated to making analytics easy for everyone, without the help from analysts and developers. (And, no code needed!) Iris is passionate about simple products, creative marketing, great UX, building a unique culture, and most of all—people. She's on the show talking about how she helps her team aspire to reach their goals with personal development. She also shares how your digital agency can show clients success on their funnels and campaigns by using a new analytics tool.

 

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3 Golden Nuggets

1. The best way to inspire your team is by understanding their personal needs for professional development. Understand their career goals and meet them there to encourage growth. Perks like free food and amenities are nice, ultimately not what retains really great team members.
2.  Clients don't benefit from reports on their funnels and campaigns. They need to understand where the customers are coming from and why. This helps your clients
3. It's important to set goals with your clients for what success looks like, then measure and benchmark results throughout so clients understand the value you're bringing to the table.

Sponsors and Resources

Oribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency

Show Transcripts

Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an amazing entrepreneur that's in her third business. She's a rockstar. She talks about personal development of your employees, how to keep them. But most importantly, we talk about how to prove your value. To your clients, so you can actually charge more. I think all of us need to do that. We're always constantly wondering how do we prove our value to our clients? Well, this is the episode for you and it will prove your worth. Hey, Iris. Welcome to the show.

Iris: [00:00:40] Hey Jason.

Jason: [00:00:41] I'm excited to have you on and, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Iris:: [00:00:46] Okay. So I'm CEO for Oribi. I'm a serial entrepreneur. This is my third startup for the other two companies that have been leading the product and marketing. Um, I love marketing and I was always amazed that with how difficult it is to measure marketing. And that's why I started the Oribi and we raised 27 million dollars today. And worked with thousands of customers around the world. And we were doing marketing under the tech set, hopefully, better than other tools.

Jason: [00:01:19] Oh, it's awesome. Yeah. Definitely check out the tool and it was very cool. But before we get into the tool, I wanted to ask you because a lot of agency owners, obviously everyone listening, we're hiring people, we're always hiring people. And I read a blog post that you had on your blog. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. Tell us a little bit about, you know, just giving people pizza and feeding them is not really what will keep them.

Iris: [00:01:43] Yeah. I feel it's something like I find that baby ironic about this is that we want to hire the best people, the smartest vehicles, the most innovative people and treat them like a small children. And you need to be very cautious with them and you need to give them beer and pizza. And do you want the smartest people? And they usually want to, to lead interesting innovations, they want to grow. They want to learn new things. And for some reason, most of the work environment are mostly about just conquering people and their employees. And it's something that you really trying to do at Oribi, is to focus more on the personal development and giving them more independence. And. The way I see my role as a manager is to really let people shine. And to find their unique voice and to help them do it rather than having like lots of Ben and Jerry's and the kitchen. So, yeah, that's how I see it.

Jason: [00:02:48] Yeah. For many years, you know, I thought it was like, Hey, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll bring in lines, you know, like the Googles of the world, right? Like, especially that one movie of the internship with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson right there, like I can have five bananas it's free. And I think. That will draw in the wrong people. Sometimes it won't keep them.

Iris: [00:03:10] Yeah. Also we can like, um, it's all standard. So it's not that you have like a free pizza and ice cream and everybody will stay because of it. So, yeah, I agree with like, we have nice food over here, but this is not the main thing that we do. And they see that people are looking for something more personal and more deep.

Jason: [00:03:32] Yup. Let's talk about a little bit about personal development, right? Since we're on the topic of keeping our employees, right? Like we're attracting the right ones. How do you guys help out with personal development? Because I feel, you know, when people come in, if you're just expecting them just to do their job, right. They're going to be like, okay, like, they're going to be excited for a little while. Like I remember when I sold my agency, I was very motivated. To help out with the new company. And then when the dream squashers came in and started, you know, squashing our dreams, I started getting de-motivated and I was an, A- player. And I literally went to like an F- player. I'm like, you know, you better sell this company or I'm going to be the worst employee ever. And I find a lot of people are like that. So what's some things that you can help out employees with on personal development?

Iris: [00:04:24] Yeah. So, so that's a very interesting question. It seems like for me, the main thing that I benefit from being a certain type of entrepreneur and going fast was a rollercoaster every day is that I feel that it really challenged me with, learning new stuff all the time, inventing staff being creative, and they really feel that a huge part of my personal development is, me being forced to learning, uh, sales and marketing and different types of marketing and then managing and firing people. And I really wanted to give this experience to my employees. So instead of thinking of it as a funnel for rollercoaster also, it's something that they can step up using this platform. And an interesting story is that when it started at Oribi a few years ago, we actually had the budget for each employee for personal development. And I asked each one of them, what do you want to work on? If it's like a writing, public speaking, learning how to design. And then I have a list of like 50 things that they want to learn. And I was amazed to see that like half of their flow is new, what they want to work on, but we didn't have a clue. So they said, okay, so as a developer and not interested in public speaking or writing or anything else. So funny that they did learn is that most people don't really understand what they want to work on, but they do want the encouragement and the platform. When something arrives to, to really go in-depth . So tell me to do this change, how this program and receive the results have been really worked out well. And today it's more about working with employees on their personal challenges. Yes. Within the professional environment, what do they find challenging? How do they want to work on it? And sometimes we, we do help with them with top coaching. Is there internal or external? And, but the main thing is just about seeing them. Like for me, it's about things that unique voice of each one of the employees, and really try to encourage them to speak in this voice rather than being part of the company and where we are within the same box.

Jason: [00:06:34] Awesome. Great. Let's kind of change, focus. And let's talk about, because I know a lot of agencies because I chat with them all day long. A lot of times they have a hard time showing their clients results. And I think that's, if you look at it like a stoplight, that's a red light. That's something that you really need to work on because if you can't show your clients results, then they don't know the value, which means you're going to lose them. And you're just literally trying to hold onto them rather than going. This is what's working. This is not what's working. So talk to me a little bit about how did you come up with the current company now of really making it very easy for agencies to see what's currently working. Like, you know, when I was going through the tool and going through the funnel, I was like, that's pretty cool. Like, I could literally go, hey, here's the starting page and here's the page I want them to get to. What's my percentage and all that. So talk a little bit about that.

Iris: [00:07:34] Yeah. So, yeah, I do agree. This is like the main challenge. So today about 30% of our customers are agencies and probably most of the other 70% of the customers are working with agencies. So we hear those from agencies that they're unable to communicate their amazing work to the customers. And we also hear a lot from customers of agencies. If they're, they don't trust the agency, they don't really understand what they're doing and in my opinion, the main, the main challenge is how big can the agency go ? Cause something that happens a lot is agencies want to deliver the best results, but in many cases, they really stay up the funnel. So they drive traffic or they drive sign-ups and they're sure they're doing like amazing work. That's e-commerce show up or the companies that don't see an increase in sales. And the immediate result is a distrust. And they don't understand what they're doing. And they said it's the key thing for, for both parties to work well together, to understand which results they're measuring. And in most cases, it will be the sales-qualified leads. And in most cases, it's not very easy to track it. So the dimension that we're doing it really different things than other tools. It's creating a very simple solution. For defining all the different events. So instead of using code, you can easily understand what is the qualifying lead, how many people requested a demo? How many of them paid later? How many of them churn? How many of those approaches, which product, how many of them returned? And they say that once the agency can then create a high-level picture and can go into the entire funnel, the entire flow, understand all the different metrics. The communication is much better. They can understand what's working well. Does there, like an example I can give you is like two years ago where I was working with an agency and they manage my Facebook ads, I've been on maternity leave. So I haven't used the results for like months. And they told me it's doing amazingly well. They managed to reduce the cost by 50%. Then I entered the numbers and I saw that the sign-ups are actually. The cost per signup is much lower but that, hardly no one converts and it's so that they use like ads of like kittens. Everybody clicks sign up it very simple, but nobody really converted. And if they could have seen like the entire funnel easily to understand what's converting, who isn't, and compare it with other time periods, they would have been able to understand what they're doing wrong. So it's mostly about creating like a very solid ground for communication and for seeing all the important KPIs.

Jason: [00:10:23] Yeah. I totally agree with you. It's you know, if I was an agency right now, You know, a lot of times you need to test out the waters with your prospects. And I remember this and I see this all the time. I would take on the wrong clients and the client would tell me one thing. They'd be like, oh, we're driving, you know, this much traffic and we're converting at this. Like, we can get them to this page. They're going to convert. And if it was me, what I would do now, And I guess you can sort of do it through Google tag manager, but that's very, it's kind of like, you have to be a mad scientist. I feel like they'll make that work. Uh, like I don't understand. I'm like, wow. Like I throw up in my hands, but I haven't been in the weeds in a while, but like, if you could set up the tracking and the measuring ahead of time and you do like a test project with the client, like don't even do anything other than just set up analytic tracking and the dashboard and then go back to them and go, here's our recommendation based on the past 30 days, then I think you could blow your competition out of the water. You both probably have a lot happier clients, because you're only taking on the right ones rather than taking on the living, breathing ones for now. Right. There'll be dead later.

Iris: [00:11:44] Yeah, definitely. So yeah, I really like setting up the goals and mutual goals is super important and how to measure them. And now to see that they feel that it's doing this injustice for both parties is attribution and which became much more challenging from one year to another. And then in many cases like the agency and things, they're doing amazing work, how are they in the conversions, the agencies, so that, okay, everybody we're exposed to your brand from Facebook ads and, that they both met her via direct as a company says that the hard content in convert and coming from Facebook ads over here as well, I've seen that, um, there's many companies or agencies. They try to really like try to attribute to every single conversion it's really, really hard today. So, and when you facing the numbers coming from Facebook and Google, it's becoming even more challenging. So it's more about understanding the trends. If you're doing like a massive change, even if you can attribute everything, you can see how impacted, if you're working with different channels, you can understand the correlation between them.

Jason: [00:12:56] Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about like, when someone can dive deeper into the analytics and amazes me too, or maybe it's just because it's been complex up until this point with really. Kind of diving into the analytics, like why do you feel that more agencies don't really dive into that to really understand it, to deliver the best value? Because I truly believe that people want to deliver their best stuff, but sometimes they just, they don't.

Iris: [00:13:26] Yeah, I think it's mainly because it's a, it's a lot of work.. And as I told you before, like the, the main goal for me with Oribi is to help companies answer is the very trivial questions in a simple way. So it always amaze me that I try to answer questions, like where do my best customers come from and how is campaigns really doing. So the other, like exactly the same question that every company asks and today it's still lots of work. So you need developers to define events and every time it changed the website, you need to change it into maintaining and, um, So I seen it today. It's mostly about if the process is pretty complex, we need developers, as it takes time. I don't believe it's because people don't want to see the full picture or the people don't want to be data-driven. I say that today, something that we really see that even marketers, that they're not really into numbers and they love writing content and be more on the creative side, they really want to understand what is the impact of the work and to measure it and to understand what to do home.

Jason: [00:14:38] So tell us a little bit more about why people need to check this tool out? Cause I checked it out. It was really pretty amazing. I was like, Oh, I didn't know I needed to change this and that. And it gave me some insights that weren't available to me before.

Iris: [00:14:55] Yeah. So today, I guess it's most of the listeners are using Google analytics. It's always fascinated me that with Google analytics, we choose the market and there are other like very high end tools, that are very, very extensive require local integrations. And you can find some tools that are more around like max or just like landing pages, but there isn't like a good solution for marketing. And what they're doing at Oribi is creating marketing analytics that doesn't require developers, so he can define all the events without using code. You can do it yourself. You can get to more interesting events that we can create different rules for different rules, and then you can easily create finance and correlations and to analyze a user behavior and to do everything yourself, it's very simple. And also to export this data, to Facebook ads or to Google ads and to email automation, so you can create better audiences. And yeah, our main goal is to really give the power to the marketing team. And two they're very dependent on developers. If you're a part of a small company, usually we don't have developers. If you're part of a larger company, usually you need to wait like two months until they have time to, and the new event or, or change something. And is it for me, like the inspiration or company, like Shopify for where you can build your own e-commerce store, to change it, and to do the same for, analytics.

Jason: [00:16:32] Awesome. Is there a special offer that you have for our audience listening in if they want to check you guys out, which I highly recommend everyone go do.

Iris: [00:16:41] Yeah, definitely. So can enter Oribi.io then sign up for the free trial. The installation is super simple. If you're using like Wordpress or Shopify, it's just plug-in. If not, you can edit scripts, you can enjoy a free trial. When you decide to purchase Oribi, you can enjoy a 20% off discount for the first three months. And just write us on chat or email that you arrived via this podcast, and we'll be happy to provide a discount.

Jason: [00:17:08] Awesome. Well, great. Well, everyone go check that out. Iris, is there anything I did not ask you that you think would benefit the audience?

Iris: [00:17:15] I would say that something that I find pretty amazing is that most people will put tons of time in creating like the best content and videos and a stunning website. And we'll hardly measure it.. So I think there is much to do with like funnel optimization and website optimization. Okay. And let's say for example, that you invest a lot in writing content for SEO and getting direct traffic, and you probably can find out with two weeks of fare, changing the website, making some AB tests and changing the messaging and the call to action. You will be able to increase the conversion rate by 70%, by 50%. So I would say that most people's they're really into the content itself and the efforts themselves. And don't put enough time in optimizing the funnel, like the conversion. So there are a lot of low-hanging fruits over there and lots of opportunities to get you to great results.

Jason: [00:18:19] Awesome. Well, Iris, thanks so much for coming on the show and everybody listening. If you guys want to check out Oribi, go to Oribi.io and check it out, do the free trial. And then, uh, if you guys want to take it on, uh, even more, make sure you reach out to them and say, Hey, I heard of you guys from the Smart Agency Master Class, and they'll give you 20% off for the first three months. And, uh, until next time have a Swenk day. Thanks, Iris. Thank you.