In this episode of Craft On Tap, Faustin and I break down exactly how we structure our team to solve this problem and what you can expect when working with Craft Impact.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss how we work with our clients.
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Transcript:
Stephen Beach: All right, folks. We're back, episode six of the Craft Impact Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Stephen Beach, and my cohost is Faustin Weber.
Today, we're gonna dive into what it looks like when we start working with new clients. Personally, I'm doing the sales calls, the exploratory calls when a prospect comes in via our website or if we have a referral. And a lot of times, the question comes up, you know, kind of how does your team work? Who works with me? Do I work with Stephen? Do I work with somebody else? If so, how do you ensure that there's not a drop-off in the kind of knowledge that Stephen has accumulated through the sales process?
So, to touch on that, we have a small number of clients. Let's start there. We have, at the moment, 13 RIA clients. And so myself as a co-founder and my wife and business partner, Traci as a co-founder, we're personally involved in every client relationship that we have. For us, we don't intend to get to a hundred clients.
Our short-term goal would be more to get to 20 clients, something in that range. So we're still gonna be personally involved in everything. So we deem ourselves the executive sponsors - fancy title to say you have my cell phone number, you can text me, you can Slack me, and I'll be personally involved in the project at least when we kick off.
But I think how do we ensure kind of that the knowledge that Stephen has built up about your business and any ideas we've come up with, any potential tactics we've come up with, how do we make sure that knowledge transfers to the client service team who then will be your main points of contact on a weekly basis?
We've worked really hard at this. Honestly, we didn't use to be great at it. But I think we have a pretty solid process now where all of our sales calls are recorded. Those go into an AI project where we can then extrapolate the key takeaways. We can drill down into strategies, tactics, even qualitative things, like what does success look like to you as the advisor that you've told this to Stephen, but now the service team needs to hear it.
And by service team, I mean like Faustin or another one of our marketing strategists, and then a project manager. So there's this handoff that occurs from Stephen to the service team. We have an internal call to go through, kind of here's what I've learned about this advisor's business, their growth goals, their challenges, their plans, their timelines, things they've tried in the past, things that they'd like to try. What success looks like to them.
And then when we have our kickoff call with you as the client, you'll be paired up with a strategist and a project manager who have very specific roles with you. The strategist is in charge of strategy. So, how do we align our marketing work to your business goals, and make sure that we're focused on the right things? The project manager is there to make sure that when we have 50 balls in the air, none of them fall through the cracks.
So we kind of set up from there, and then, especially during the first three months of working with a new client, I'm in on every meeting. Sometimes there's kinks in the onboarding process that we need to work out that I can kind of chip in on. Sometimes there's just insights that weren't covered in our handoff or that we did on the kickoff call. And I feel like I can contribute there.
I'm definitely involved there, and then I kind of slowly fade into the background. And then what I do is just touch base with you as the client on a quarterly basis to do kind of an informal engagement survey, which would just be to say, how are we doing? Are you pleased with our work? Are we driving enough value? What things can we get better at? And any other feedback you might have.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, I would say that was really well said. One thing I would add is just as you start to have those exploratory calls with potential clients, you do bring our team in and you're very transparent about some of the discussions that you're having and kind of give us a heads up that it may be coming our way.
And so we can start to get familiar with the marketing collateral, the website, the social platforms, everything that you're talking about with Stephen. The service handoff team has an opportunity to kind of get a little bit of a preview even before we have those internal workshop calls to talk about the kickoff and what the first three to six months look like.
So I would say that we've gotten much better to your point, Stephen, about this over time, and our proficiency at using the different AI tools has really helped. I was joking with somebody recently that marketing, in a lot of ways, maybe most professional services, have become a transcript-driven world. Like, we use transcripts for everything.
And so the combo of Stephen's notes and transcripts of the calls that he has with potential clients, combined together, consolidated together, can generate a really good output and summary that can be turned around with prompts that we've worked on to create a great handoff document to us internally.
So by the time we meet with you for that kickoff call, a lot of times clients are impressed by how much we already know. Like how much data, information, and knowledge has been shared from Stephen over to our team, because I know this is a point we talk about all the time, Stephen.
It's like how many times have people gone and met with agencies and had all these discussions, sometimes up to a year, and then you get turned over to a service team, and it's like they're meeting you for the first time. I know you've talked about that. I know that's been a pain point for you sometimes with vendors that you're working with, and so we really tried to make that better.
Stephen Beach: I think that's a big one, actually. Just how do I ensure I'm not gonna get turned over to an account rep who doesn't understand me, my business, or the industry, and I don't wanna have to restate everything, you know?
So I think as a business owner, one of the real challenges is when you're picking a marketing partner to work with. And it's an agency, not just a freelancer, which is very one-to-one. It's easy, there's no knowledge transfer needed. The freelancer that you've talked with during an exploratory call or during the sales process knows everything, and they're gonna be the one that's in charge.
So there's some benefit there when you're working with an agency. There's benefits of using an agency because we have more tools in our tool belt. We have subject matter experts like copywriters, graphic designers, developers, project managers, strategists, video folks, etc. So there's a lot of advantage to that, but to make sure that everybody's on the same page, that can be a challenge - to transfer the knowledge from a strategist, or in this case Stephen, who's doing the sales calls to the client service team who's gonna be working with you on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
And you don't want to have to restate what you've already said, and you don't have to slow down for people to learn your business or your goals, and so on. That is a real challenge in the agency space that we've seen. In addition to turnover, account rep turnover can be a challenge.
Yeah, I would just say we worked really hard to solve for that using the AI tools, using the transcripts, like you said, like we're in a transcript-driven world. I think that's a good way to put it. That helps get us probably 90% of the way there, I think in a lot of cases where it's not just stuck in my brain. It used to be stuck in Stephen's brain, and then the client service team is like, oh, we didn't understand that. Or we didn't even think about that. You guys had already talked about it.
It's 90, 95% of the way there already, just via our transcripts, and then we can plug in the gaps and fill in the little holes. And that's why I'm personally involved in the first three months of working with new clients, just to iron out anything that needs to be ironed out as we onboard and get up and running and start to adopt your brand and your message and take over as your marketing team.
So yeah, I think it's a common challenge and one that we've taken really seriously, both on the sales-to-service handoff. We call it a sales-to-client service handoff. And with our people, we don't have a lot of turnover. We have a team of less than 10 full-time employees, and then several contractors. And we don't churn through people because A, it's expensive. B, it leads to a really poor client experience.
And so we take that part really seriously as well. Your team, who's going to represent you and your brand and be your marketing department, if that team changes, even half of that team changes with any kind of frequency, it generally leads to less than ideal results, which we're obviously trying to prevent against.
Faustin Weber: Just shifting gears here a little bit. I know that a question that you get asked a lot, Stephen, is okay, so the service handoff happens, like what's the team look like? You mentioned this a couple of times, like you and co-founder Traci are executive sponsors, and then you've mentioned this word strategist a number of times.
So I thought it would be good just to maybe discuss the setup we have with our employees for each of our clients and what that looks like, depending on the level of engagement that we have.
Stephen Beach: Yeah. So I think, in general, for each client, what we have is kind of a two-prong team, a strategist such as yourself, Faustin, and a project manager. You might hear other agencies or other groups call this client success manager, account manager, we call them project managers.
The project manager is responsible for juggling all the different tasks and different things that are up in the air, making sure none fall through the cracks. And then the strategist is meant to be your CMO, your outsourced CMO, someone who's gonna align a marketing strategy to your business goals. Someone who cares about the results at the end of the day. Someone who is there to ensure client satisfaction, that you're getting a lot of value out of our partnership.
And then you have myself and or my wife who co-founded the business with me, to be the executive sponsor, where we can weigh in and we can kind of be that other layer of support to our team and to you.
We have different subject matter experts, that could be a developer, graphic designer, copywriter, video marketing editor, those kind of people. And likely you won't interface with them on a weekly, monthly basis. But there are people who are kind of specialists underneath that primary team that's paired with you that'd be executing the work.
So not all the work is being done by the strategist or the project manager. In fact, a lot of it is coming from kind of the support team. But that team as well needs to understand your business model and what makes you unique, and how we go to market, and what your brand looks like and feels like, and sounds like.
So I think there's a bit of a second layer there of people who are supporting from the back office, if you will.
It's funny because I used to think that I used to put more weight on the strategist portion of this. And frankly, I've come to realize the project management piece of this is every bit as important. What happens is you get on a call, we'll have great calls with our clients. We're talking about 30 different things, ideas, things in progress, things that we should eliminate, things that have been delegated, things that are in review with either you or with us.
And someone has to make sure that that all gets captured. It turns into action items with deadlines and assignees, and can come back to it the next week or the next month or whatever the timing is. There's a lot of work that goes into that, which is really important because we don't want - that makes it such that our advisors, our clients don't have to think, don't have to keep track of things, don't have to worry about that piece of it as much. That's really on us, that we're managing all that and you can rely on us to make sure that we're being thorough and we come back to the right topics in our next meeting.
So I give both of them equal weight now and that's why we've come with kind of that two-pronged approach so that we can have the yin and the yang there.
Faustin Weber: Yeah. You know, from a client perspective, if you had to kind of whittle down what you just said into just a line to describe the role of the strategist versus the project manager, you might say that the strategist is the one who decides and works with you collaboratively to figure out, okay, how are we going to accomplish our goals? What tactics are we gonna use? What's our overall strategy gonna be to get to our goals? And then what to prioritize in order to get us to those goals.
But then the project manager is the one that ensures that all those different tactics and all those different prioritizations actually happen.
And so it's so easy to talk through what the three to six month plan is going to look like. But actually pulling out approvals and getting dates set up and calendar meetings set with individual advisors - let's say if they want to have a discussion about a blog article or checking in on what needs to happen in order for priority C to get pulled across the finish line.
I mean, that is invaluable. And that's one of the great pieces of feedback that we tend to get, especially when we're early on in a relationship with a client, is they just so appreciate us taking, here's that word again, the mental load.
Stephen Beach: Yeah.
Faustin Weber: Us taking the mental load off of the clients to keep track of all that. And I think you made a really good point, Stephen, that someone could spend all day working through marketing, spend time learning the ins and outs of what's working and what's not. But it's a whole other beast to actually do that yourself and ensure that all of these ideas become executables that are actually published or content's actually being delivered.
And I think that the combo of the strategist sort of deciding what's gonna be published on what channels and to what extent and what's priority versus the project manager making sure all those things happen has worked out to be like a pretty efficient way of delivering great results for our clients.
Stephen Beach: Yeah. Last thing I'll add here is just the communication. I know we've touched on this before, but we want our clients to feel like we are embedded in their business. We do that in a number of ways. But the project manager, among all the things you just mentioned, like scheduling, ushering reviews, making sure the tasks are on time and being accomplished, and going through all the steps that are part of our processes.
Another thing that they're really like on the front lines of is communication with the client. So really you have two people. Ideally this is happening in Slack as well as email and of course phone calls. And then we have weekly Zoom calls, especially with our larger clients. We go weekly with our smaller clients. We go every other week.
Slack - if you have a question or if there's something that needs to be communicated quickly, you're gonna see a response within hours at most from either the project manager who's kind of on the front lines of communication or the strategist.
I mentioned that just because sometimes with a vendor, I've had relationships where it's like you send a request off or you send a thought off and then nobody replies for a little while and even an hour feels like an eternity in our society and just in our way of working.
And so even seeing somebody says, oh, okay, I got it. I'm gonna talk about it with the team and we'll get back to you. And the project manager will be doing that - taking it internally, putting it onto an internal agenda for us to discuss. And getting back to the client then on whatever the answer is.
Even just that, we've seen, it kind of puts clients at ease and that's the kind of relationship that we want. Where they feel like we're right there with them. And it's not like some separate thing. You gotta send a correspondence and then wait for hours or 24 hours or a day to get a response.
It should feel like we're just right there. So again, I think a project manager has a big piece in making sure that happens and ensuring the client feels that kind of embedded approach that we aim for.
Faustin Weber: So I think we had discussed talking about one more thing today, just in terms of our team, and that would just be our internal structure for how we continually develop as a team. And so we have this relationship with our clients where we have a project manager and a strategist. But we're also sharing across internally a lot of ideas and trends and things that are working and questions and problems. We're able to do that on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis so that we can stay abreast of all the things that are happening.
And I just think that's such a powerful thing as an agency in terms of what your eventual experience will look like as a client, because a problem that one strategist may have posed to the entire rest of the team in a structured way on a weekly call that we have set up every week, where we can dive deep into what that problem is, learn more about it. We're already familiar with you as a client because we spend so much time talking internally about all of our clients, and so we already have that knowledge.
It's so valuable because in contrast to potentially like a freelancer, someone like that, there's a lot of knowledge in the industry that can be shared pretty quickly and that can apply to whatever your situation is.
So I just wanted to mention that I think that there's some great structures that we're still working on, still trying to improve. But we've put a lot in place already that enhance the overall experience for new clients that come on board and for our current clients that we've been legacy clients with for the last three, four years.
So what that looks like is, we have a daily Slack channel for each of our clients, a daily Slack channel for any sort of learning, research, development trends that we're seeing. Everyone's encouraged to post on there to reflect and to think about the things that are being posted and to consume that information.
And then we have weekly meetings that are already structured where individuals, either project managers or strategists, can pose issues or problems or wins that they're seeing with their current clients. So that knowledge is shared across the entire team. And then on a monthly basis, we have these coordinated professional development workshops where individual team members can share things that they're learning about different market trends, AI tools that are being used, things that really worked well for one client or the other.
And then finally on a quarterly basis, we do an entire review and we have multiple in-person team meetings each year. And so these structures, obviously, they're internal to Craft Impact, but they end up benefiting directly clients that are working with us because we can apply knowledge from one thing that's working, experiment, and try it with another client for their particular audience or whoever they're going after. And I think that really helps to have that knowledge transfer, especially when you're talking about the financial services industry, that's so complicated.
So I just wanted to highlight that, Stephen, just as part of the overall team experience, because I think it makes a big impact on the service model that we're able to employ.
Stephen Beach: Love it. I think just as a real example of that, being able to share across our team what has worked and what hasn't worked and what we've tried for different clients and sharing that with others has been really great. That's really fun for me to see.
Like, even just something like the SEC's new marketing rule about allowing for testimonials and reviews and all the nuance around that. It's not a new rule anymore, I guess, but if we share internally, Faustin and Mary's asking Faustin or I'm asking Traci or somebody else, like, what have you guys done for soliciting reviews? What have you been able to put together?
Each firm has their own rules around compliance and so on. And we get that. But you can easily see across our clients, and now we have a growing list of clients. We've got some really good use cases. Okay. In this case, we were able to send an email invite out and ask people if they'd be willing to share their feedback. We put a video together in this case and then sent that out. We did a follow up email that actually generated some more reviews that we didn't get on the first round.
We then put the review widget on the website. We put it on a social channel. We put it here and here. Like how do we, what do we do with it? And there's so many different things there just around Google reviews. And starting to see that across clients, I think, is really helpful. Because, as you're putting together a strategy or if an advisor says to us, Hey, have you guys ever done anything with Google reviews? The answer is yes, we've done it for multiple clients in multiple different ways. And there's pros and cons to all these different things that now we can actually share and say, here's what we think would be best for you based on what's worked or hasn't worked for other clients.
That's just for Google reviews. So I think you could say the same thing for things like on-page SEO, AI search, email newsletters, social media, specifically LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook...
Faustin Weber: Well, I would say like the thing that jumps out at me is like how to handle advisor awards, like the individual awards versus the firm awards. What's the CNBC Top 100 look like versus a Forbes State? Like Best in State award versus a Newsweek Top 100 and is the licensing fee worth it? And what's the playbook?
I mean, that's a big one that we talk about, as if you're listening to this as an advisor, I'm sure you've been hit up 10 times in the last month by different people giving you some sort of award. And so it's hard to sometimes understand, okay, is this one credible, is it not? And then what do we do with it if we want to invest the four to $8,000 in that for the year to actually license it?
But that's a perfect example. And the Google Reviews one was too, that it's very specific to the space that we work in. It's a problem that only a marketing agency that works with you guys as RIAs is going to be able to understand. And so I think that that's a really key differentiator and being able to share that in a structured way is really valuable.
Stephen Beach: Yeah, I used to think when we first got into this industry, the industry awards were just a crock, you know, just a pile of crap. Like it's just somebody trying to generate three grand or five grand and you're put on these lists.
But in some cases, that's still true, right? You can kind of make up a list and say, I've got a Top 100, and you're on the Top 100, but in order to use it, you gotta pay me a fee. So, depending on the industry and the publication and the business, and so on.
But I've also been kind of enlightened by again, like sharing across clients, like seeing for some of our clients what we did, it was a Forbes award in this case. Our client asked us, Hey, is this really worth it? Should I pay the fee to be able to use their logo and graphics they give me and so on? Or is it just kind of a money grab?
And then what we did is ask, actually ask their clients, talk to their clients about how they viewed industry rewards for their advisor. And actually, I was kind of just enlightened by people saying, yeah, I do put stock in those, helps me when I see my advisor with that he's being promoted as like a Forbes Top 100. It makes me feel like he's credible and he is really at the top of his game and he is staying up on all the industry best practices. And he is leading from the front on all these things.
It's like, oh, okay. All right. Well, in that case, as far as client-facing marketing or marketing to your own clients, it is valuable, at least in that case for the given the fee that it was. And then, so then, okay, what do we do to maximize it? Because now you're gonna pay a fee. And how do we use the assets across channels and how do we make the most out of it and make a big splash with it and get people engaged in it? Because we may as well make it worth our while if we're gonna do it, and then sharing that.
I think that's a great example across clients because those come up almost weekly, if not weekly, they come up monthly. There's always gonna be some of these offers that are out there. And so I think what we're trying to do is share our perspective, our ways that we think about promoting and using industry awards, and deciding whether the value is there.
Depending on the advisor and the business, and who the award's coming from, and what all we're able to do with it. So all that gets baked into the decision. Should we pay Forbes four grand or not? Seems like a lot, but I think we take it pretty seriously to try to put as much thought into it as we can.
Faustin Weber: Nice. Very well said.
All right, well, thank you so much, everyone, for listening or watching, and if you have any follow-up questions, feel free to leave a comment on whatever platform you're watching this on or to send Stephen a direct message on LinkedIn.
Stephen Beach: Thanks so much.
Key Takeaways:
Here's what to expect from Craft Impact's client-focused approach:
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- Thorough Onboarding: A real-deal onboarding process, with co-founder participation, to make sure your team gets your business and goals from the start, minimizing the need to re-explain things.
- Dedicated Team Roles: Clients work with a Strategist for marketing planning and a Project Manager for task execution, supported by specialized marketing professionals.
- Responsive Communication: Expect prompt communication and regular meetings. Craft Impact will feel like an integrated part of your operations (not an afterthought).
- Shared Agency Knowledge: The agency’s internal sharing of industry trends, effective strategies, and best practices provides value to all clients.
- Consistent Service Quality: A focus on a limited number of clients and low staff turnover helps ensure dedicated attention and high-quality service.
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