Azhar Siddiqui

Hey guys, how's everybody doing today?
 
Guest Speaker
Good. How are you doing?

Azhar Siddiqui
Excellent, excellent. I'm really excited about today's webinar. I'm not sure if you guys know a little about RepStack. But maybe I'll just give you guys a little quick introduction. My name is Azhar Siddiqui, the co-founder at RepStack, along with me is the amazing Jeff Fisher. He's our chief growth officer, we also invited some of our CSM, who are our account managers, on the call, just so that we can have a little chit-chat, you know, with the real deal. See what these guys are doing inside RepStack. And we'll also show you some of our client testimonials and some of the other account managers who are doing some amazing things. But a little brief about RepStack. You know, we're just about our one-year anniversary is coming up. But I'm a 13-year digital marketing agency owner myself, Jeff Fisher, has run multiple businesses, including amazing digital marketing agencies, and I'll let Jeff introduce himself as well, you know, I've been running my own digital marketing agency for the last 13 years. And, you know, RepStack kind of evolved out of that, because until I started taking care of, you know, offloading some of my plates, some of the stuff that I was doing, as the agency owner, you know, let's face it, we can all find web developers, SEO people, you know, these technical people for the fulfillment side of our agencies. But when it comes down to the marketing of our own agency, sales, and especially account management, which is the topic for today, we tend to delay these and we tend to do these jobs ourselves. So we, you know, we become glorified account managers, you know, you may be doing like I, I know, clients who are doing 500,000 $600,000 a year in revenue, and they're still doing their account management, they're still doing their sales. And some of these things you may still enjoy, like, you know, closing the deals. But, you know, the sooner we get these things off our plate, the sooner we activate massive growth inside our agencies, and we're seeing that with so many of our clients and, and I think that's part of the reason that we're hitting such a nerve with that digital marketing agency owners. First of all, we're only working with digital marketing agency owners, and we're only providing for these three roles. So if you come to us that, hey, I need a web developer or SEO person, we usually politely say, No, and we only focus on these things. Because, you know, we're over, you know, with our coaching, and over the course of my 13-year career, Jeff's huge, illustrious career, we've come to realize that, you know, as agency owners, we need to step back from the day to day after we've built up our agency initially. And you know, let some of these key roles, especially these key roles that I just talked about (Marketing Assistants, Sales Assistants, and Account Managers), be taken care of by people like Aimen, who's on the call with us right now. Jeff, do you want to just quickly give a brief intro about yourself?

Jeff Fisher

Yeah, so I've owned multiple small businesses, For nine years, I have a digital marketing agency that I sold over three years ago, I then moved into coaching digital marketing agencies, for three years. And that's where I met Azhar. And the interesting thing is, I never really asked them how this exactly happened. But probably every single coaching call that I did over my three years of coaching, the recommendation I always had was you need help, you need an extra set of hands. And you need to hire a Virtual Assistant. So when Azhar reached out early in this process, I guess, just 10 or 11 months ago, and he said I want to offer you know virtual assistance. And here's the three I want to do is like stars perfectly aligned. Finally, somebody is going to provide the support that every digital marketing agency needs. And the way I tell you how can you decide when you need and can afford one. And my bottom line is, if you have a consistent bottom line that has $3,000 every month of profit, you need to have a Virtual Assistant because that number will go up rapidly. It does not matter how many clients you have. Because if you have no clients, you need help with marketing. If you have a few clients because you've proven out that you can sell but you're not getting enough time selling you need a sales assistant, somebody that can help you sell. And then at some point when you get enough clients, you need somebody to help you set appointments, do calls, talk to the clients and that's the marketing or I'm sorry, the person that we're going to talk about today... “account manager” [Azhar adds in]... The account manager went totally blank. It all has something to do with the gray hair [Jeff continues]. So I'm excited to be here, I'm excited to be a part of RepStack as it continues to grow and evolve, and although not a founder, I'm proud that I was here at the very beginning to see this whole company evolve.

Azhar Siddiqui

Thanks, Jeff. So I'm going to share my screen, you guys should have the link to our workbook in the chat as well. So you're welcome to open that up, make a copy of this workbook and use it as you guys want. I'm going to walk us through this, you know, I'm going to interrupt Jeff and get him to maybe talk about a few things. And then we have our own account managers, Sana, and Aimen on the call as well. So you know, we'll talk to them about how they're doing all the client management. So today's Today's call is all about account managers. And, this particular role is extremely near and dear to my heart. Because, you know, as agency owners, I've been there done that, you know, usually the account management is I don't know why, but it's the last thing we let go of, maybe it's because we think that, you know, we have to be involved with every single client have to be, you know, therefore, every time they call us, or email us, we have to reply to them ourselves. Because maybe we close the deals, or maybe we know them personally, whatever the reason might be, I've done that and have so many of our clients that I know and friends that I know, they've been doing it. But account management is like, as soon as you have you know, you, you see that you have 345 plus clients, you should start thinking about account managers, because, you know, as entrepreneurs, we're heading these amazing digital marketing agencies. And we like to do a lot of things. And you know, we might be good at a few things, but you can tell me that you're good at sales, you're good at marketing, and you're good at account management as well. And, you know, we're going to walk you through some of these numbers as well, where it's actually going to cost you so for example, if you're doing a 300,400 $1,000 in annual revenue, then it's actually cheaper for you to hire for these three roles, instead of paying yourself because you're probably paying 100 $150,000 to yourself per year. But you can easily place a person in each one of these roles from you know, 1520 $25,000, sometimes you may want to hire locally as well. And we'll talk about all of those things as well. But, you know, it's actually cheaper, because all of a sudden, you freed up all your time to focus on the growth of your agency. And now you can go out and do other things. For you know, the $150,000 that you were spending on yourself doing account management, and sales and marketing, you can have three different people in these roles. And you can still save yourself some money, a lot of time, and you can now reinvest that time in the growth of your agency. So, So that this is a very, very important topic, account managers, and why we all need them. So we'll just dive right into this. First of all, I want to kind of, you know, the first slide that we're talking about is, do you even need to hire a Virtual Assistant? So we've kind of put this together this checklist. And if you go through this checklist, you know, some of the points like what Jeff was saying that if your bottom line is, at least at $3,000 a month, you should be looking at getting a Virtual Assistant for yourself. But for this particular role, we have are you making at least $10,000? In monthly recurring agency revenue, do you have at least two full-time employees? Do you want to hire a full-time employee? and not worry about contracts and W twos and things like that?

Are you interested in hiring a paid advertising specialist? So this, this would be related to the marketing assistant, then then the salesperson? And so do you want to focus? So you obviously if you want to focus on the strategic part of your agency and kind of step back from the day-to-day of your agency, would you want to, you know, play somebody in those roles? What are the things that you're doing right now? So you know, if you answer yes to three of these questions, then you know, you're good to continue further. Even if you're not ready right now, maybe down the road for sure. With some of the things that you know, an account manager, for example, can help you do free up time by letting you step back For the day-to-day activities of your agency. So, you know, this has been, I think the single most important thing that any client of ours that come to us realizes, is the amount of time that they can say, by placing a person like Aimen or Sana. On an account manager role, for example, you actually reduce cost, you know, I know and, you know, it may sound a little bit that difficult to perceive right now. But you do save money, because, you know, you're paying yourself 150 grand, but to do account management, and if you're doing account management inside your agency, you can get somebody like Aimen, and, you know, from 15 to $25,000, if they're outside of the US, and inside us, you can get somebody, I think the average, we did some math, and I think the average us account US-based account managers around, they start at around 40,000. And they go up from there. So, you know, just imagine the amount of time that you will be saving, which you can put towards the growth of your organization, quickly scaled, this is the fastest way to go up, I've been there, you know, get to that $300,000 mark. And just like, you know, it's a vicious circle, you're stuck, you're going and you're closing a deal, you first do some marketing activity, then you put your sales manager account on a hat on, and you do start doing some sales activity. And, and then as soon as you close some deals, now you start onboarding those clients, and you become that account manager. And as soon as you start dropping a couple of clients, you move back to the start of the cycle, marketing, sales, account management, we keep doing this over and over again, not realizing that help is just around the corner. Strengthen weak areas, as I said earlier, were entrepreneurs, I love to be, you know, on different at a 360, like, I'm getting this opportunity with this amazing organization to see things from you know, from afar right now. And that's an amazing feeling. Because there are so many things we can do like that, then we get to be involved in a whole bunch of stuff. While not actually be responsible for doing I remember, during my agency days, I think taking care of the clients. It was a love-hate relationship for me. Because, you know, like, I felt coming, you know, I just needed to do that somehow. And it was, I think one of the most difficult things I found that I had to do, but I trained myself to do it, as soon as a client replies, take care of their issues, right away, assign it to the web team, or the SEO team or the marketing team, and get that stuff taken care of. But I didn't realize that you know, an account manager would probably do that job for me a lot better. Because, you know, I was just forcing myself to do that, I thought that I had no other option. But there are a ton of options. And you know, like a person who is built for that job will allow you to provide customer service to your clients at a world-class level. So you know, we're thinking that we need to be involved in this thing all the time. But we're wrong. We just need to hire a person who is, you know, well versed, who is you know, who can live and breathe the values of your agency, so to speak. And, you know, and then you train them a little bit, and then you let them take care of that stuff, full time. And, you know, and they'll probably be doing a lot better at that job because we as owners are going to be split between all these three things, but their only requirement job requirement is to make sure that they retain your clients for you. Anything you'd like to add here. Jeff, as we start out this presentation.

Jeff Fisher

I think you've hit all the major areas. As he said, that nice little checklist there, go through those start answering those questions. Just three of them are all you need to know that you need somebody helping you out with an extra set of hands. So just so you know. That's it.

Azhar Siddiqui

Excellent, excellent. So what I'd like to do now is kind of tell you, he'll help you guys out. So the purpose of this webinar is you know, we're a placement company for digital marketing agencies, and we'd love you to come work with us. But we want to give you all the options that are out there for you right now as well. And we've kind of done the math for you. You've kind of pointed out some other some of these platforms you guys may already be familiar with, where we've also because we're hiring so many people were placed In one person a day right now, so we have a ton of experience. So the job posts that we've created, work extremely well. So you'll have access to these job posts, you can take them to your local job boards, if you want to hire somebody there, you can take him to Upwork you can take him to “onlinejobs.ph”, some of the platforms we recommend for hiring overseas. And you know, you can do pro a follow the process, we're gonna put this process in this, we have this process in this workbook. So you can just take this and run with it and get yourself some help in terms of an account manager. So you know, the position overview is listed out over here for you. I think the most important thing, correct me if I'm wrong here, Jeff, the most important thing for an account manager inside a digital marketing agency, in my opinion, is a person who can communicate effectively, you know, and who can build relationships with your clients? Are we on the right track here, Jeff?

Jeff Fisher

Yeah, the communication skills and attention to detail, because that client is going to express some concern or ask you to fix something on the website, or whatever the case may be. So as the account manager, I need to write that down, I have to ask my production team to get the work done. And then once the work is completed, reporting that back to the client. So the worst account manager you can have is one that loves the talk and loves the, you know, talk to hear themselves speak, but can't keep track of the details. Because that's not really accomplishing the primary goal, this person needs to communicate, track details report back to the client when it's completed, and be, you know, a problem solver.

Azhar Siddiqui

Yeah. And if you're an agency owner, and entrepreneur, you know, our personalities, I think are very different than account managers. We do love to talk and stuff like that, we may be able to build relationships. But I want to move from project to project I want to do some other thing in the next hour, not, you know, like a follow-through type person, you need somebody who can follow through, who can make relationships had taught the good dog, but also be extremely detail-oriented over here. So the job description is over here. You can also click on this link and grab that job description if you want. And just use this, as I said, on whichever platform you want, you plan on hiring this account manager. And this is the one that we use, we kind of put this together for you, the entire text is over here for this particular job post responsibilities. You know, all the good stuff, all you know, the good stuff is in here for you guys to just copy and paste may be changed a little bit because every agency is a little bit different. And you can go and start interviewing people right away