Lindsay Grinstead & Bill Boris-Schacter have lived and breathed the experiential marketing space collectively for over 50 years. They started Tonic Consulting Group to take that experience and help other live event agencies, and their partners, grow both their top and bottom line. Through their combined experience, they bring an operations and sales expertise to their clients.
Lindsay has worn a sales & marketing hat for her clients and her agency throughout her career. In her 15 years at Jack Morton Worldwide, she grew small accounts into huge ones and created a few award-winning programs along the way. Lindsay understands the challenges in finding and winning new business and how to organically grow business. She expertly navigated Fortune 500 companies, maximizing opportunities for revenue growth.
Every client calls Tonic looking to "grow". Lindsay & Bill help their clients identify what is hampering their growth, develop a roadmap to success and then roll up their sleeves & help implement the recommended changes.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Treating your employees as your first audience
- The importance of continually refining your agency’s message
- Why your agency must specialize
- Why agencies struggle seeing themselves (and their problems) clearly
- What happens to your agency if you take an opportunity that doesn’t fit your niche
- Using working documents to continually hone your agency’s message and why you need to have your team define your agency in their own words
- Why your clients need to have relationships with more than just one person inside your agency
- The dangers of keeping around employees that aren’t pulling their weight (even if they’ve been incredibly loyal to your agency for a long time)
- Why social media may not be the best place to get on your prospects’ radar screens
- Increasing the amount of work you do for clients who already love you
- Learning how to build your budgets and staff accordingly with the AOR relationships on the decline
Ways to contact Lindsay Grinstead:
- Website: www.tonicconsultinggroup.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/10478278
- Email: lindsay@tonicconsultinggroup.com
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Drew McLellan is the CEO at Agency Management Institute. For the past 23+ years, he has also owned and operated his own agency. Drew’s unique vantage point as being both an active agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year gives him a unique perspective on running an agency today.
AMI works with agency owners by:
- Leading agency owner peer groups
- Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
- Offering AE bootcamps
- Conducting individual agency owner coaching
- Doing on-site consulting
- Offering online courses in agency new business and account service
Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Agency ownership is challenging – be sure you maximize the benefits as well
- Get real about your compensation – chart out all of the ways the agency compensates you with pre-tax dollars for things you’d spend post tax dollars on otherwise
- All of our compensation isn’t monetary. You also have other amazing benefits and perks that come with owning the joint
- Putting your agency at the core of your retirement plan -- even if it doesn’t sell (most don’t)
- Building your wealth outside your agency while you still own it
- The danger of leaving too much of your own money inside the business
- Ways to invest your agency profits
Ways to contact Drew McLellan:
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Based in Dallas, Stephanie Chung and Associates offer sales training, executive coaching, and small business mentorship services nationwide. Among her products is the High Ticket Selling Made Simple course, designed to help small business owners sell more and make more. As a former sales executive in the aviation and private jet industry, Stephanie has mastered the art of high ticket selling and has mentored, coached, and developed some of the highest paid, most elite, sales professionals in the country.
Serving business leaders, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals, Stephanie Chung uses her proven executive coaching and sales training expertise to drive your top line sales. Chung is an executive coach, trainer and advisor backed by more than 25 years of team management, business development, and sales leadership experience. Chung is also a public speaker, a contributor on ABC, CBS, NBC and author of “Profit Like a Girl: A Woman's Guide to Kicking Butt in Sales and Leadership” and “Embrace the Suck: How to Grow and Succeed in Business.”
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Doing sales right by caring about who you’re selling to and solving their problem
- How to identify your ideal prospects and actually get in front of them
- The importance of adding value beyond what you broadcast on your website
- How letting people talk about themselves increases the chance of a sale
- Why the agency owner is the best person to make the sale
- What to do to get comfortable with sales
- The five stages of sales
- Making the close extremely easy by setting it up from the beginning
- The importance of not being vague about when you’re going to follow up
- The preemptive strike: overcoming common objections from buyers by bringing them up yourself first
- Using silence as a tool when selling
- Why you can’t afford to spend time chasing people around
- How to get people to want to be your client
Ways to contact Betsy McLarney:
- Website: www.stephaniechung.com
- Book (free download): "Profit Like A Girl: A Woman's Guide to Kicking Butt in Sales and Leadership"
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
With 19 years of Outdoor Advertising experience, Betsy McLarney has planned, managed, and executed many fully integrated Out of Home (OOH) advertising campaigns throughout North America and worldwide.
Today she leads a team of experienced, dedicated strategists who help clients maximize the potential of Outdoor advertising (OOH), by complementing a robust integrated media plan. EMC Outdoor works seamlessly with their agency clients or direct with a brand’s media department to deliver pitch-perfect programs and outstanding results each and every time. Complete client satisfaction is their ultimate goal.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Out of Home (OOH) media: what is it?
- How digital outdoor advertising really makes the experience come alive for consumers
- Using OOH to hit consumers with messages at multiple touch points throughout their day
- It’s not just for B2C: how B2B can utilize OOH to enhance their campaigns
- Using street teams effectively to get your message out to live people
- Why OOH isn’t just for national brands and can be used effectively for even local campaigns
- Matching the budget to where the OOH campaign can be the most effective
- Can OOH still be the main means of advertising?
- How OOH makes digital advertising more effective
- Creating buzz by finding creative ways to place ads outdoors
- Why outdoors isn’t the place to tell a big story
Ways to contact Betsy McLarney:
- Website: www.emcoutdoor.com
- Email: bjm@emcoutdoor.com
Resources:
- Outdoor Advertising Association of America: oaaa.org
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!