Client Churn: From Reactive to Proactive (with Brett Linnenkohl & Josh Koeller)

Agency growth gets expensive when every new client replaces one who just left. Brett Linnenkohl, fractional COO and founder of Evergreen Strategic Systems, and Josh Koeller, co-founder of The Customer Profit Engine, join Dr. William Attaway to unpack a more useful way to manage customer churn. Their work helps account managers move beyond subjective health-color ratings by finding the signals already buried in calls, CRM activity, support, and customer conversations. They share how a pilot reduced churn by four percentage points in ninety days, why proactive coaching produces stronger client relationships, and how the right data can uncover retention and expansion opportunities before a customer has one foot out the door.

Chapters
00:00 Welcome and why retention matters
02:45 From fractional COO to customer focus
07:20 The three numbers agencies miss
09:02 Turning customer health into data
14:05 The problem with CRM notes
20:29 Connecting Slack, calls, and email signals
22:06 Pilot wins a $6K upsell
26:04 Escaping the churn treadmill
29:19 Proactive coaching beats reactive firefighting
31:10 Beyond agencies, MSP, solar, and more
35:18 Coaching CSMs without breaking trust
41:37 Mining past churn for hidden revenue
45:39 Beta offer guarantee and next steps

Connect with Brett and Josh
Explore the Customer Profit Engine and the Account Manager Profit Accelerator at customerprofitengine.com. Connect with Brett Linnenkohl and Josh Koeller on LinkedIn.

I want to invite you to check out the Committed Mastermind, a community I help lead along with world-class leaders like JC and Karen Hite, Vinnie Fisher, and Jonathan Mast, plus incredible mentors like Dr. Gary Chapman, author of The 5 Love Languages, and many others.

This is for entrepreneurs who want to build a thriving business without sacrificing their faith, their family, or their health.

Check out the Committed Mastermind at https://committedmastermind.com/

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Transcript

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Welcome And Why Retention Matters

Intro 1:23

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host, author, and leadership and executive coach, Dr. William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway 1:41

It is an honor today to have Brett Lennon Cole and Josh Keller on the podcast. I'm so excited about this conversation. This is going to be a little bit different, guys. And where I want to start is with you sharing a little bit of your story, a little bit of your background with our listeners. How did you get where you are?

SPEAKER_01 1:59

No, well, uh first up, I just want to say, William, thanks for having us on. It's um I've known you for, boy, quite a while now, I feel like. And just watching this show and just what you've been able to do as you rise up. And I don't know, it's just uh being here is just truly such an honor. It's just crazy and we're really excited. And uh yeah, uh I'll I'll start myself and then I'll hand it over to you, Josh. So yeah, I'm Brett. And my story, I am a fractional COO. Specifically, I've worked with agencies. About 80% of my roster has been agencies, what I love. Um, and my specialty has been is turning operations into math, right? Uh things that are objective and very clear so that teams uh can actually be productive and they can all know exactly what's going on. Visionaries,

From Fractional COO To Customer Focus

SPEAKER_01 2:45

they can make it very complicated. So that's what I do. And I'm gonna transition to the star of the show in a lot of ways, which we'll be getting into, and that is my partner, Josh. So I ran into Josh as a fractional COO. Josh was also a fractional COO, and learning his story, just incredible, just incredible his insight and how he takes what a lot of people take for granted and flips on the head to show that, hey, something like customer service, these low-ly customer service team members or account managers, they can actually drive your business. And in fact, as you'll find today, they kind of actually are your business. So, so much hidden revenue, so much really cool insight that's brought us into this today that we'll share with you. And with that, Josh, let me pass to you and you can tell a little bit about your background.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Uh thanks, Brett. And thanks, William, for uh for having us today and just uh getting us on and yeah, allowing us the opportunity to talk about us and what we're doing. Uh so yeah, as as Brett alluded to, I have spent the last 15 years in the corporate world. I started off at L'Oreal working as one of those lowly customer service uh agents, uh team members, answering phones, responding to emails. And uh yeah, that's where I started my career. I and so as as Brett also alluded to, I I eventually ended my career uh and continued my career as a fractional COO. So obviously there was a transition from lowly customer agent to now a leader. And so I worked my way up through L'Oreal through the ranks, becoming a team lead, then supervisor, then manager, then director of the entire customer service team. And through this whole process, I discovered not only what it means to be a leader in the leadership space and how to effectively do that, but I understood from a very intimate position how important customer service really is and how important each of those aspects of the customer relationship and building relationships, even in a quick moment, like a phone call, actually is to growing a business. And so from my L'Oreal days, I did transition into an actual COO role for an agency, digital marketing agency out of Colorado, and absolutely loved it. And through that experience, I actually helped the team focus, by the team, I mean the entire company, focus on customer service and what that really meant to the company. And uh was able to impact it in ways where churn went from 7% on a regular basis to below 2% on a regular basis, and seeing how impactful that was financially for the business, but also relationship-wise for the customer service team and how effective they were able to do their jobs as well. So, yeah, my experience is vast, but it's always been surrounded by this idea of the customer service team and highlighting the importance of what they do and how they do it. And as Brett said before too, they do drive the business, right? They're the ones who make businesses tick. You may think it's sales, you may think it's marketing that brings all the money in. But in reality, if you change the way you think about customer service and how they impact a business, that's what really changes businesses around and helps grow them far more than anything else.

Dr. William Attaway 5:59

This is this is not uncommon. What you're describing there, Josh, you know, a 7% churn rate. I've seen significantly higher than that with some of the agencies that I've looked at. And one of the biggest problems I think that is that is so often unaddressed, people are chasing top line revenue. They're chasing MRR. And in agency world, that's kind of the gold standard in a lot of ways. I would argue that your profitability should be a number you track right alongside your top line revenue because you can have a fantastic top line, but if you're only one or two percent profitable, this is not a business I'd want to be a part of. And I don't know an owner that would. But the churn number is the third number that I look at. And if that is not healthy, then man, you are chasing the wind. You guys have come up with something that I think is incredibly powerful. And this is why I invited you to be on the show, because I want you to talk about this. You know, every agency that I'm aware of that's really focusing on this has some type of methodology to track customer experience, right? And they're they're giving people the red, yellow, green label every time from the from the account managers. What however they're doing it, but so often it is incredibly subjective. I think they're green. Yeah, we had a good conversation. Everybody seemed happy. I think they're green. Yeah, you know, they have a complaint, so we'll call them green.

The Three Numbers Agencies Miss

Dr. William Attaway 7:20

Or, well, we had one complaint this month, so maybe, maybe, you know, yellow, green. You know, it's so incredibly subjective. You guys have found a way and have come up with a tool to help move this out of the subjective realm into a way that it's data-driven. I would love for you to share about this.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Yeah, so um I'll I'll talk a little bit about that because you're exactly right, William. Churn is a significant number that nobody wants to look at, but is so very important to look at and to rectify and fix. So when it comes to customer health, really should be the determining factor of whether a client's going to churn or not. You're exactly right. Most teams, if not all teams, at this point in the business world look at it very subjectively. It's a gut feel. Hey, I feel like this customer is doing really well. I just had a conversation with them and they seemed happy. They seemed to enjoy the experience, but in reality, two or three days later, they churn. You go, what? What just happened? It was a big surprise, and it it should never have happened. Because the reality of the fact is that that customer was giving off signals 60 to 90 days prior that they were going to churn. The CSM just didn't see it. The customer service team didn't hear it. Or they did hear it, but they didn't know what to do with it, or they heard a mixed signal and they didn't understand it. So there are so many things that go into why a customer turns, and most of those things happen in secret or happen from a tone change or happen from an engagement shift, right? Not actually happening where it's like, oh, like I had a call and they just chewed me out. And they're

Turning Customer Health Into Data

SPEAKER_00 9:02

very unhappy. Like, well, yeah, of course, it's a big glaring signal in your face. It's the other signals that they're not gonna tell you right in your face that is the reason that they actually churn. And so through this whole experience of subjective gut feel type, you know, health scores during my days at L'Oreal, I decided to make a shift and be like, there's gotta be a better way to look at this. There's gotta be more of an objective, data-driven way to look at churn and the reasons why people churn and predicting it before it happens and overall customer health. So I developed a way to look at four different segments.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

I think it's tough to actually know what we built without kind of knowing the context and uh Josh and his expertise. I'll I'll just tell quickly about when we first started engaging and what blew me away. So again, just like you, William, I also know agencies, right? I go in specifically, I get helicoptered in when they are just in pain, things are clunked up, and everything's bottlenecked on. And there was one part of the agency I've always struggled to nail. And that is the subjective area that is the account manager, right? And it's great. It it lifts your time when you're able to place and rely on an account manager as an agency owner, right? You don't have to answer the reactive questions, you're finally out of the heat of having to always be in touch with a client. But as you said, that leaves so much wiggle room for subjective opinion, right? And you have to rely on their opinion not only to know are they green, whatever that means, are they yellow, are they red? Yeah, I talked to them two days ago. That was my first call of the day of seven, and I think I remember them being kind of happy, so we're good. And that's really the way it goes. And that that is what happens. So uh the same that we're all bringing it to, right? When you're in a a visionary agency and you have your numbers on, what's my pipeline? What are my sales? What do I have? You have that whole, you know, dashboarded out and in the backside, you know nothing about the profitability of your actual customer base, let alone what they're actually doing. So that's exactly what it was. What I found with Josh and what you're alluding to, going kind of more on the weeds, because Josh, believe me, William, as we get into this, and anyone listening will be blown away like I was about some of the ways you can flip, you know, the whole science of account management on its head with uh what you've uncovered, Josh. But what struck out to me in his 15 years, the end of it, to get the results of the 7.5% down to 1.8% churn, to get the results of 3 million to 10 million in a division and bringing profit with no new sales only by training the account managers, it all comes down to what Josh, you call, you called in the first time I heard it to me, the five profit playbooks. And one of those, as we're talking, being the staple, which is retention. You gotta get clients on your side. So that really, when you talk about our software and what we've built in what's actually called the customer profit engine, that is the term of what we've built and how we bring in retention, that's the science behind it. Josh has found a way to find all those signals that customers give off when they're not happy, when they're not using something, when they're uh, you know, just these little idiosyncrasies. And he's categorized them into signals that, if explored, if the account manager is aware of them and they can go dig into it and enrich those signals, they can actually populate on a dashboard. You, the owner, can actually see it, we can rate it, and we can try to get that score up objectively with our coaching. And that's what this is all about. And that's again what brings us here today. So hopefully, William, again, we're we're kind of in the weeds of it as we bring this out, and we just appreciate you bringing out of our head. But I'd be curious, you know, and and your typical listener base, how how else are they approaching? You know, what and what else have you seen that maybe we can share today that just helps show the value of what we built? Because there's a lot in there. Again, credit to you, Josh.

Dr. William Attaway 12:44

I mean, the pain point here is the unknown. It's the subjective unknown. Without the data to know where those signals are, what those signals are, when those signals are firing, the account managers and thus the owners with the information that's passed to them are kind of fired blind and saying, yeah, I think that's I think they're green. Yeah. Well, they might be yellow, maybe we'll give them a little extra attention this month. I think it's incredibly subjective. And even with agencies that I have seen that try to dial this in and really try to use metrics to say, okay, what is yellow, what is green, what's dark green, what's light green? And I've seen some of that, and that's great. They're trying to dial this in. I still haven't seen anything like what you guys have built. A dashboard that is able to take the information and leveraging the power of looking across the entire data stream and firing a flare and saying, hey, wait a minute. Have you noticed this thread, this conversation, this word was used, this this piece here, this data point? Hey, the lights flashing. I I've I haven't seen that anywhere else. Like, have you used this with an agency? Have you seen this particular

The Problem With CRM Notes

Dr. William Attaway 14:05

product that you've come up with? Have you seen this used to good effect?

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yeah. Well, we was so it is innovative and new as far as I've ever seen, right? There were a few softwares, and actually the company we're partnering with, you know, Brad Ferris and others may know him, AGT, very top of class, you know, world-class agency placements. And um, that was one of the things, you know, that I know he pointed out. He said, I know this software and that software, and nothing comes close. You know, those were in the past. And what's unique about this one is we've taken Josh's five profit playbooks. And along with our other partner, Omar, he's been a 25-year uh, you know, dev shop owner. He's built just countless softwares. He's launched blockchain, all kinds of emerging technology, augmented tech, IoT, really knows just what the limits in a sci-fi way are. And he's built these, what he calls his AI crews, to go through agency and business data, conversations, Slack, CRM, any transcripts, calls, emails, phone numbers, text messages. And with the agentic cruise, it actually does all the work for you. Whereas Josh, of course, it took you months to go in a company, train everyone, find the signals, how to log them, where to put them, how to coordinate, and actually see the profit. This program, it takes all that data now, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and it and it uh standardizes it. And that's how we get the magic. That's how we produce these intelligent signals. That's how we rate and have a standard objective that we can measure against to ensure that customers are always getting more value, you know, understanding the value that your agency is providing to them and countless other things, you know, that we call intelligence, right? It's like you got this mound of dirt, we go in and we put it on a machine, and then we get all this gold. And that's not really the end of it either. What do you do with that intelligence once you actually have it? Uh, right. And and again, I know we'll we'll get into that as well.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

You sp you spoke to a very, I guess, challenging thing for me. William, you did it first, and then I think you elaborated on it very well, Brett. And this idea of having a piece of technology that can do all the manual work that I used to do for me. So when you think about an objective health score, as we discussed before, all this data, where does it come from? Where does it go? How do we log it? Where do we put it? Right? You should have seen the the number of spreadsheets, Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets that I had to try to log all this stuff and get it figured out and put it into these nice fancy graphs to ensure that I was seeing the right data. Now, I had the advantage of being a part of big corporate teams who had big expensive CRMs where I could get some of this data rather easily, but I still had to organize it very manually. Whereas what Omar and the team here has built is such an automated and innovative way to collect all this information and all this data, the signals, the intelligence. Where before I was relying a lot on my customer service team, who was very well trained, but still very human and would miss things, would miss signals, would miss uh pieces of information to contribute to those health scores. And while they were very objective comparative to what a lot of people see today, uh they still held that margin of error, you could call it. And with what we have here, there is little to no margin of error when it comes to how objective these health scores can be and how important and really valuable the intelligence is coming out of these AI crews that uh that is hand delivered to each CSM and each agency.

Dr. William Attaway 19:00

So talk about this for a minute, because you you know, y'all have mentioned something in passing. This is connecting into the CRM. This is connecting into every transcript, every conversation, call recordings, Slack. And this is pulling from all of that data to look for these signals.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

That's it. You know, when we first started this project, it was actually it was a big topic of discussion. Are we just rebuilding a CRM? Is that what we're actually doing? You know, and we had a lot of discussion. And what we realized, and there's really two approaches. One, it seems like you have to have a super dialed-in team to actually use a CRM the correct way and update it and log it, right? But on top of that, the CRM is only one little piece of the picture. Again, going back to subjectivity, who's loading notes in the CRM, right? Who's actually giving their opinion? Of course, you can these days have AI and give updates, et cetera, but it's not running through that filter to say, this is what really matters. This was a signal that you may not have picked up on that this client may not be happy. And we got to dig into that. And that's really where it picks up. That's where the coaching begins. But we call it an augmented uh intelligence platform. That that's really what we've set out to build and give as an unfair advantage to any agency owner that is trying to focus on sales, but wants to know what the heck is actually going on? What is the health of my customer base? And of course, tidied that into a nice little dashboard that actually shows how much profit have we made this month based on the actions and the effort of

Connecting Slack Calls And Email Signals

SPEAKER_01 20:29

my account manager.

Dr. William Attaway 20:30

So so tell me about like where you've seen this in in real action. Like what kind of results have you seen this produce?

SPEAKER_00 20:37

So we've been we've been working with uh a couple agencies now, and one of our pilot agencies that we work with, we were you know, they were gracious enough to allow this kind of to be a pilot, to be a kind of a test and and okay, let's just let's connect things and start going through it. And and they've helped us shape what we've built in large part, which is which is really neat. But the uh the give back was obviously the intelligence and all of the things that are baked into what we've built, plus a consistent trainingslash consultancy from me and being able to tap into real human intelligence and learn from all of that. All of the 15 years of experience that I've built up and and grown from now poured into CSM teams at uh at this agency.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

And we did this pilot, the one that Josh mentioned. So it was a three-month pilot. At the very first week, we hooked this thing up, we taught the CSMs, this is what we're gonna be doing. Here's what intelligence looks like. And in the first week, we found a hidden signal that a CSM kind of remembered, but it totally, you know, had forgotten about. She was blind to a hidden signal of a client that had a desire to actually like look better online, and he didn't even know how to say it. And Josh, right, I remember distinctly you saying, What is this? Tell me about it. We broke it down, we started chatting about it. Well, turns out she was able to investigate it from that one piece of intelligence and flip it into a $6,000 upsell, a website.

Pilot Wins A $6K Upsell

SPEAKER_01 22:06

And that's when I personally was like, okay, this actually works, right? That's what gave me the confidence. What was nice about the pilot, we gave him the pilot beta price saying, hey, help us out. And it turned, we paid for the whole thing, right, within a week. And um, from there, the results of the pilot were very exciting as well. And and honestly, to be dead honest, it's a pilot, right? We didn't even know what we were doing. We ended with a 4% reduction in churn.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

And, you know, I think the quote, Josh, and I know that was only after three months, too. That was, you know, 90 days for for uh 4% reduction in churn.

Dr. William Attaway 22:40

So 4% reduction in churn in 90 days. Correct. I just don't want to run past that. No, I know a whole lot of agencies that would be clapping like a seal over a 4% reduction in churn in 90 days.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Exactly. And William, when we get in these dialogues, Josh again is a depth guy. He's the guy that gets in front of CX teams and just goes off because of experience. And it's easy to look over this, but for you, Josh, I think you also, yeah, from 7.5% to 1.8%, 4%. But it is in an agency world, and I I do want to expand on that my own opinion and what I've seen and why. But 4% that equaled about 52k ARR and saved money. And what does that mean? That means this business owner at the end of the year is going to be able to look at their Stripe account and notice well, it's $52,000 free dollars. And what's even better is that compounds. As long as we keep momentum, which we are, we'll talk about um a few other experimental features we're unrolling for this beta part of this program. But that that's all compounding money and really it's just cool. It's just getting started.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

And on top of that, yeah, on top of that, Brett, too. Like, think about the I call it the churn treadmill, right? You get five new sales this month, but at the end of the month, you're like, oh, but shoot, I just churned five people. So now those sales mean absolutely nothing. It's just replacing what you've already churned, right? That's right. So you can finally get off this churn treadmill and make every new sale count. Every new sale counts as new business and new money in your pocket versus this idea like, okay, I churned five people last month or five people over the last six months. Now I got to figure out a way to replace those people. Now I have to go up my game on the sales side to ensure I'm getting that money just to stay flat, not to gain anything, but just to stay absolutely flat. Now you solve the problem at the root and the back end from customer service and retention side of point side of things. And every s every new sale now means a whole heck of a lot more.

Dr. William Attaway 24:35

Yeah, that's that's the key. You know, what you just said there. Like you gain five, you lose five. You just wasted a whole lot of energy and effort to stay exactly the same.

unknown 24:47

Yeah.

Dr. William Attaway 24:47

And that's not even- I've seen this.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Yeah. That's not even saying that. I mean, some people are negative, right? They lose five and you only gain three. Or they lose ten and they gain five. So now you're working, now you're moving backwards on this treadmill. You're not even staying like the same pace. That's it. Yeah. Imagine getting ahead of that and seeing this churn 60, 90 days before it happens. Having your CSMs have those conversations well before it happens so they can fix the problems that are truly on the customer's minds. Not a guess, not a subject subjective gut feel, but actual like, I know what you're worried about. I'm here to fix it for you. I'm here to help you and having those conversations well before it happens.

Dr. William Attaway 25:26

Yeah, this is a major pain point, guys. I mean, really, I think this is something that every agency that I know of thinks about if they're wanting to grow and to scale. If you do not get retention right, right, it does not matter really if your sales are just off the chart. Because you've got an incredibly leaky backdoor that's not going to serve anybody.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Nope. Well, and and William, talking about agency owners specifically, right? And again, knowing the world. So again, just as we unfold all context, Josh, Josh has been your agency, Josh, was a 97 team

Escaping The Churn Treadmill

SPEAKER_01 26:04

corporate agency, right? So a little bit different of a beast than the ones that William and I work with that maybe founded it, started it, lifestyle business. But an interesting thing that I found and really adapted the mindset of through this pilot and through Josh's training, that if I'm an agency owner outer, this is probably one of the thoughts I have in my head, right? When we talk about churn and you look at it, this is how I used to look at it, right? The the same hammer with the nail, right? I'm not going to switch my tool. Is, you know, it's like, it's what is retention? Well, it's just results, right? They just want to get results. That's what retention all is about. And what Josh has taught me and what we've embedded in the coaching of this, crazy enough with strong customer service teams and account managers, with strong enough relationships, particularly ones that are proactive, where you get ahead of everything. It's crazy the amount of business and the and the leaky churn you can save just by focusing on that, right? Even if you're getting bad results, they will stay with you because they love you, because they love the relationship. And of course, that shoes off to another subject of don't you hate it when your retent when your uh account manager leaves and they have the tight relationship and you have to figure out how do I replace them? How do I not lose that business? That's another huge problem that, of course, this solves and allows the scalability of. But that point there, it's more than just results. It really is. It's the client feeling like, man, I am family to these people. They are always looking out for me and they're always trying to do something. And the way we see it, you know, like even in that tiny little realm of profit side of the playbook in retention, you keep someone for one more month on average and hopefully have a chance to keep going and get them results, it's it pays for itself, right? And that's kind of the bottom line.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Yeah. You triggered me, Brett, what you said, reactive to proactive. And I'll just touch on this really quickly. But it's much like leadership in a lot of ways. As I was developing my career and becoming the leader that I eventually became and is still becoming in a lot of in a lot of regards. One of the things I discovered was I have to be more proactive with my team members. I have to invest more of my time into them so that I'm cutting down on the reactivity. A lot of times I'd have lines at my desk saying, Josh, can you solve this problem for me? Hey, Josh, this customer's escalated. Can you take over? Whatever it was. And I'm like, well, how do I stop the reactivity? How do I stop, you know, having to solve all these problems for my team? Well, it took me actually proactively coaching them and being like, let me come alongside you and actually teach you and coach you on how to do this or how to solve these problems or how to think critically on your own, how to build a leader yourself in your own little world before I was able to stop being reactive because then they were on their own and they could do it themselves. Same with customer service. How do you stop being a reactive team? That was the biggest question I got when I joined the agency that I joined. Yeah, the big corporate, but or larger corporate, but the big question was well, Josh, how do we get the customer service team to stop being reactive? And I told them very straight, well, be more proactive. Well, what does that mean? Reach out. Well, isn't that more time consuming? Like, yeah, but you you invest that time now, then the reactivity stops. The problems stop. You solve them at the root proactively right now, you're gonna get less problems in the future. It is more time consuming in the now. We can figure out how to adjust their schedules so that they can fit that in. But we have to pursue that before we can become more

Proactive Coaching Beats Reactive Firefighting

SPEAKER_00 29:19

proactive. And sure enough, we did, and that was why we resulted in a far significant decrease in churn and other things. So, yeah, this tool is pinnacle in helping teams in a much easier way than what I had to do without the tool to becoming proactive versus reactive and just essentially gives them the intelligence and data that they need to go and do it now.

Dr. William Attaway 29:41

You know, we've been focusing on the agency market, and that's something that we all know well. But this actually has applications far beyond just digital marketing agencies. This can be used in any company that is focused on providing a world-class customer experience, increasing their retention and lowering their turn, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:01

100%.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Totally. Yeah. So our strategy as we unroll it, and as you know, William, we're we're still fairly early days. I feel like any startup in the first five years, always early days, right? We're always testing, we're always trying applications. Knowing the agency world myself, and then Josh having five years at a big agency, we figured it was a good place to start, a great sandbox. Um, agency owners are very fast to learn, very open to new innovative ideas and applying technology. So that is the reason we're starting here, but you're absolutely right. Any, any business that has customers, which basically is nearly any business, is applicable. And here let me tell you why, and I'll give you a couple examples. So, two conversations we're having that would be a good example. One is MSP providers. So, MSP, if you're familiar, very good retention rates in that industry, right? You get in, it's very sticky, and you have to pull all your tech out. So they don't have much of a retention problem. For them, yeah, retention, we're good. But how do you make your money as an MSP? How do you grow the business? What's in upsells, right? For them, they have to find the needs of the clients and then be able to provide packaged uh, you know, products that they can upsell

Beyond Agencies MSP Solar And More

SPEAKER_01 31:10

and escalate. And that all comes from understanding the needs of your customers as a whole. Now, you got a choice when you do that. You can go interview individual customers, ask your customer service members what's the problem, what's the issue, what's the X, Y, Z. But at the end of the day, this tool and where we're shaping it in those conversations is to uh is another part of your playbooks, Josh, right? It's a soak intelligence, right? It's the click of a button ability to look at every conversation, have a button, and say, here are the main prioritized needs that we need to repackage a product around. Or this is why maybe for another industry, anyone of let's apply it to sales, right? Why did you sign with us over competitors? They won't tell the salesperson that, but they might tell the CX person if they're trained and coached to go get whatever info. So varying uh industries. We talked with the number two solar company and we're an engaging, yeah, number two solar installation company in the US and engaging conversations with them of applying it. What was interesting is uh in that industry, from door knock to signing to actual installation, they lost, they lose a lot of business, right? The trust there is not huge. And essentially, you know, 40% churn, churn from a door knock from a signing to actually install, but that's 35 days that we can engineer a customer experience and collect data in order to increase that. And for them, right? Solar companies, that's a hundred thousand, you know, whatever it is, install one percent, you know, one percentage point, just huge, huge gains in them. So yeah, any any company really there is an application and it's really fun uh with what I get to do of just look at and say, how how can we innovate to match the needs of any separate industry and the using customer service?

SPEAKER_00 32:55

And two, like to that point as well, and to answer your question, William, the five profit playbooks, 75% of it was built from my corporate experience at L'Oreal. So that's call center environment, you know, 50 to 60 agents. So talk about multi-billion dollar big corporation type feel. The the whole core, 75% of the core of this was built for that. But it's the unique thing is like Brett had mentioned, everybody has customers. And as I mentioned before, the customer is the core of your business. Uh, even if you don't think so, it is like we can flex, we can flex the the playbooks to fit your corporation, to fit your business. Um, and it's not just for one single like business type, one single agency type. It's it's really meant to be flexible for any business that has customers.

Dr. William Attaway 33:48

This isn't just a subscription that people buy into, plug it in, and then you kind of forget about it. You know, you guys are you've mentioned several times the coaching that you provide as a part of this. Talk about that for a minute.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Yeah. So so again, on this hunt to bring this to market, and as we kind of find what works best and how to best deliver value, one thing definitely that stands out is uh someone going into this, it can be kind of overwhelming. You have all these different ways of things I got to investigate, all these intelligence dashboards, right? And um, and so what is very important to us is to make clear, right, when we take that data and bring the intelligence, that's not where it ends. It's really what just where it starts. It's all those months of work to give you, you know, give account managers that. And the real magic in our program, in the account manager profit accelerator that we're doing with AGT, uh, we take Josh actually hops in with your team, right? And we help hold your team accountable to digging in. And he gets to tell them, you see this, let's investigate this. Here's how we go, find XYZ. And it's the feedback loop, right? Where by him showing how to not only use the intelligence and attack profitable signals, but also telling him how to enrich that data, right? The more ask this question, ask that question, it just starts populating, you know, your platform with all kinds of custom intelligence about your your your base. And and yeah, so in

Coaching CSMs Without Breaking Trust

SPEAKER_01 35:18

this program, that's it is, you know, um account managers, right? Just helping, like who in which company has actual coaching, right, for account managers. And so we really wanted to bring that and ensure that they really could actually get results out of it. I also will mention, and Josh, if you have something on that as well, but it's uh one thing we built that I think is really valuable to not only the decision maker, right? The agency owner, the business owner, but also to speeding up the feedback loop of ensuring we actually get results is we built a dashboard, right? We have a dashboard that we actually send out to the owner, and it just shows the five different ways that you're actually, you know, in pr increasing profit by retention. One we haven't talked about, you know, referrals. Uh, there's a whole science for that. There's upsells, expansion opportunities is what you call them, Josh, intelligence. So there's just a massive way. And we know business owners, right? When you make decisions, it's about ROI. That's the way business should be run. But you should always know from the actions we're coaching your team to go out and hunt and put effort into. You should know what's coming back from that, right? And you should be able to see the fruits of that. And I know we have so much, William, that we haven't even unpacked here. But one thing I'll mention as a part of that, that we're testing with this beta. So anyone coming in and hearing this while this beta is still going is that this came from a quick story in Josh's company. At one point, he had a CSM when he implemented this program, right? In the marketing company. Well, she made this account manager, apparently was a rock star, right, Josh? She made an extra 40K from a simple retention commission program that Josh put into place, right? And when I heard that, and and knowing anyone's human psychology, if you have a base of people like account managers who are there to build trust and they just need to put in a little more effort to build more and more and more, why shouldn't they be rewarded for keeping accounts long term? And I thought that was a really good piece of the measurement that we've implemented in this and are testing commission for the win-win structure.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Let's make more money, let's, you know, make this business more stable and let's add to the Yeah, and to kind of pile on to that as well, you mentioned it's somewhat of an accountability coaching, but I think it's even more than that, right? I help fast track CSMs to become legendary, to become world-class CSMs, world-class experienced deliverers, right? They're not only their main focus, it is not new sales, is not upsells. I even like that word. I know you mentioned that word before, Brett, it made me cringe, but customer service and CSMs and CX, they're not meant. They're not built to be salespeople, right? They're hired and engineered and trained to be the best relationship providers, relationship managers that are out there. And you don't hire a customer service agent because they're really good at sales. No, you hire a salesperson to do that. The problem with upsells is any selling activity is a trust-breaking activity. And the main goal of a CSM is to build trust. So why would you implement something that is trust-breaking activity, even though it may lead to new dollars and profit and revenue later on? Why would you implement anything that would break trust from a CSM standpoint in their role and from a customer standpoint? That why would you implement that when ultimately it's going to hurt your overall LTV, long lifetime value of that customer? It's going to start them, start that trust-breaking signal. And they're really going to be the qu the the questions start to appear in the customer's mind. Does this, does this uh CSM really care about me? Like now they're just selling trying to sell me something. Like, do they really care about the relationship at all? And they start questioning it, and that leads to eventual churn. Even the best customers churn because they felt oversold to by their CSM. So rather, it's more of a natural conversation. If a customer is ready for expansion, those signals will happen. And your CSM should be trained on how to pick up on the signals. And if they are trained on the signals, they can pick them up. If they miss those signals, well, that's what the tool's for as well. It picks up on those signals as well. Hey, this person's ready. And as Brett mentioned before, as we found with our, with our with our the pilot that we did, right? This one CSM heard the signal, forgot about it. She understood it, but she forgot about it. And the the tool picked it up and said, Hey, remember this? Yeah, go and talk about this again. They're ready for it. You just have to have the right conversation. And so my my training and my coaching helps have those conversations without being a salesperson. It helps have better, more rich relationship-building conversations and activities versus just plugging in a sales conversation. Oh, this is have you tried this? Like, step on down. Like now you become a used car salesman. And who trusts used car salesman these days? Nobody, let's be honest.

Dr. William Attaway 40:08

You know, we've been talking uh this whole time about forward thinking, forward progress. And I think that's important. But one of the things you guys mentioned to me previously was that this can also be used in a look back way. That you can think about this the same way we think about a database reactivation. We look back at previous customers or previous clients or previous relationships. And you can actually go back and mine that data and discover things that you missed the first time around. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Yeah. Brett, I want you to speak to your experience uh with the pilot in that regard, but I want to point something out right away first uh when it comes to looking back, right? As a leader in the customer service world, for as long as I've been it's always been such a crutch not to have or not to be able to gather data on customers who have already churned, right? So you think about the the list of previous churn customers, we call it the post-mortem, right? How often are we sending out those churn surveys or those cancellation surveys, right? Sure, all of you have them. If you don't, well, there's a reason why you don't because they're rarely sent back. Hey, you know, sorry you left. Here's a survey, quick, fill it out, tell us why you left. Like they're they left for a reason. They're not gonna waste their time on telling you why they left. You have to try to figure that out for yourself. But the cool thing is, is what if, and just imagine this, what if you could have a return, an automatic return survey

Mining Past Churn For Hidden Revenue

SPEAKER_00 41:37

for every client who left historically and know exactly why they left and what built up to them saying, you know what, I'm done. I mean, your world would change because now you can make adjustments in how you market, you can make adjustments in how you how you fulfill, you can make adjustments in how you care for your customers from a relationship standpoint. And that's exactly what this tool gives you, which is just mind-blowing in in my mind. Just is an added like bonus that I didn't even think of when we started building it. I'm like, whoa, this is really cool. So yeah, Brett, go ahead and uh yeah, go on about how we went through that with our pilot program.

SPEAKER_01 42:09

Yeah. No, it's uh it was really interesting when we hooked it up. And it was something I noticed actually, because it wasn't even part of the five profit playbooks, kind of more applicable here. But basically 10 years worth of data for this agency had been in operation. And we noticed it went in and soaked out the data from those past clients, right? And of course, if you have high churn, you're gonna have a lot of past clients. But the reason they left might be salvageable, right? We found what was it? Something like, you know, it was like two, I cannot even remember the number, honestly. The total ARR was two million. Yeah, I think we found two million in past churn accounts that had they stayed, that they could have been collecting, right? And it was really eye-opening. And um what we tried to do with that actually was not successful in this pass, but looking through, we noticed different variables, right? They had a past CX, a past account manager who just was not up to fluff. They weren't fulfilling expectations. And so um what it was really cool. What Omar built is a little tag, CX issue, right? Or uh didn't get what they needed. But uh yeah, it was just a nice little dashboard feature we built, knowing that, hey, there might be something salvable here. Maybe there's an offer we can bring people back and say, now we've matured, now we're more you know, into whatever the problem is. There uh, you know, there's certainly a chunk in every agency that someone's gone, the grass is greener, and maybe it wasn't, and we can woo them back. But how painful is that? Having to go through each party or CSM, find different clients, right? When it's all right there, and you can press a button and know exactly sentiment score-wise, why they left.

Dr. William Attaway 43:43

So definitely something we're exploring and adding because we'd love for this to be profitable immediately just from the You know, I know we could talk for another hour or two about all the things that you're seeing and the potential, in addition to the case studies of what you've already seen. I think this has been a fantastic problem. And I'm confident there are a whole lot of people who are like, okay, how do I take a next step here? Like, how do I jump in on this?

unknown 44:09

Yeah.

Dr. William Attaway 44:10

What's the best way for folks to connect with you and talk about how they can begin to see these types of results?

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Yeah. So our website, uh customerprofitengine.com, there's a little link there, and you can just click in and put your info and uh to get results to and basically ask, you know, what is our offer now? What's our program? So we are doing a program, it's called the Account Manager Profit Accelerator, mentioned it earlier. And for that, whether if you have an account manager, if you have multiple account managers, or even if you don't have one and you want to bring one up to speed quickly, and sorry, to sidetrack, like very cool with this software is we can soak your data and train your CSM on your customers within weeks, not within months. You don't have to have these objective convos. I think this person's still happy, and that whole handoff, it's there in minutes. So if you're looking even just to place somebody and get them up to speed quickly, we would absolutely love to work with you. We are moving um with this program. Uh, we're calling it our beta, all right? We're looking for 10 agencies, honestly, probably more at the speed at which we're moving. And uh it it's like we are practically giving it away, to be honest, William. We we really are. We think it's worth a lot more. We have plans for these industries and corporate, but for agencies specifically. If this is something you're you're interested in at all, all we're asking for is 90 days in this program. And in that three months, we're going to hook up the software. We're gonna help you set a win-win, like a like a heck yeah, commission program, both for you and and your account managers to be like, I want to do

Beta Offer Guarantee And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 45:39

this, I want to use this intelligence. You will see them, you know, skying and excited. And we'll set that up with you. Commission, we'll set the tech. And then we have a group session every single week where we invite your account manager and all we do is we dig into that intelligence in your company and we teach them to go and enrich it and bring in profit. And past that, we hand you a dashboard, we show you the actual results of what they're doing. And at the end of the day, we show you profit. And in fact, so much so, from the results of this pilot, from everything Josh has done in his past, we are 100% confident on a guarantee, right? And the guarantee is this if you don't 2x your investment in that 90 days of being in this program, we will work with you and your account manager for free until you do, right? And here's the really, really best part the pennies on the dollar, William, for any of these early movers who see the advantage and know that, like, hey, yeah, I could try to build this myself, sure. Or I could just get the fast version and have a multi, you know, someone who builds it for billion-dollar enterprises uh just go and plug it in and make it profitable. It's $1,000 a month. So if you're an agency owner, you want to even get your turn rate down a point, you got $3000 and you give us 90 days and you want to jump in, we will make a difference. We'll bring that 6K back in 90 days. Well, with the other one, maybe even in the first week. And uh and we just want to show you the power of this and also bring you into what is even possible once you have that data running and your account manager team running. So I don't know if I missed anything on the exact offer of this, but truly, we are looking for those innovative types that want to make a difference to their bottom line, who know there's opportunity, starting with retention and then growing from there, bringing in all the profit from your base.

Dr. William Attaway 47:25

Well, I'll I'll tell you, I've seen a demo of this, I've I've looked at your case study. Here's what I know. This is a very real pain point, a very real need. And I believe you guys are adding a tremendous amount of value. That is a no-brainer offer. And I'm just gonna put my voice behind this and say if you are in a position to do this and you want to see your churn drop and your retention climb, you need to talk to these guys. Step out. We're gonna have that link in the show notes. I'm gonna encourage you, go do this. This is something that is going to help you to build something healthy and sustainable over time that will scale. Guys, thank you for your time, for the expertise that you have brought in putting this together and for the value that you are adding and are going to add to so many businesses. I cannot wait to see where you go from here.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

Yeah. Well, likewise, thank you, William. Thanks for having us on and our, you know, hive-like minds of going in every which direction and keeping us on it. But at the end of the day, we are very excited, very pumped to bring value. And anyone that joins from here just truly cannot wait to have you in and show you the power of this thing and the power of what the system can do for your business.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

Yeah, likewise. I I'm so thrilled about what what we're building and even more thrilled to start connecting and talking to even more CSMs and customer service teams, and honestly, changing mindsets and changing businesses along the way.