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The Agency Hour
Calendars & Scheduled Success with Chase Buckner
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When you go sit down with a new client and you're like, hey, we're going to run ads for you, but we know that leads are not really what you want. You want bookings on a calendar. You don't have a system to book online yet. So we need to provide you with one. Or in the past, what you would say is, you should go get one, right? We recommend you use Calendly or Acuity or whatever it may be. And they say, okay, we're here to listen to you, the expert. So we're going to go to Acuity and put in our credit card and we're going to now pay Acuity, $30 a month or whatever. And you know, odds are, because we know if you're doing lead generation, that you're going to lose that client for your ad service in about three to six months. And when that happens, they're probably going to keep paying acuity, right? Because you set it up for them. It's working. They're like, this is great. I can book appointments. And so even though they've decided I don't want to do Facebook ads anymore, they're going to continue to pay acuity. Well, now with high level, that changes, right? Because now you're saying, hey, our system does online booking. And so even if they decide to cancel your Facebook ad service, they're going to continue to pay you for your software. Because, like Troy just pointed out, once it's set up and running, the pain of trying to switch away from that is too great to even consider.
SPEAKER_05If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, brought to you by Agency Mavericks.
SPEAKER_04Hey ladies and gentlemen, happy new year. Welcome to 2022.
unknownWoo!
SPEAKER_04Yes, it's very exciting. Uh, we have no funk music this morning. Um, my phone, for some reason, if I hit play on Spotify, this is this is what happens. It plays for like two seconds and then it stops. I think the phone knows that YouTube and Facebook keep telling us off for using music that we don't own the royalties to. I think the phone has some intel from Zuckerberg's minions, and that's why it's not working. So there's no funk music this morning. However, uh, what we do have is a couple of amazing guests to come and talk to us about some very cool stuff, uh uh, mainly getting appointments booked in your calendar so that you can talk to more prospects and sell more stuff. Uh, welcome to 2022. I'm very excited to have our guests here today. Of course, we had Chase from Go High Level earlier uh late last year came in and did uh a great session with us. And we're back now to talk about, I think we're talking about filling your calendar, your appointment, your calendar with appointments. I'm gonna start that again, put my teeth back in. I think we're talking about filling your calendar with appointments. Uh, I'm very excited to have Chase here. And he's brought a guest with him from High Level, Jake, who is sitting in an amazing looking office space. So please welcome Chase Buckner and Jake from Go High Level. Hey guys, how are you?
SPEAKER_02What's happening? Thanks for having us back.
SPEAKER_04Oh, thanks for being here, man. Jake, I'm envious of that space that you work in, dude. What first of all, what do you do at high level and where are you based and where are you working there?
SPEAKER_00So I'm pretty new. I'm the uh affiliate coordinator helping out on the affiliate side of things. Um out of Dallas right now. Yeah, it's a nice, nice setup. We got a little some snacks over there, and yeah.
SPEAKER_04And uh Chase was saying there's no one there because of COVID, everyone's working from home. So you've basically got the place to yourself, right?
SPEAKER_00I'm in here doing car deals and whatever I want.
SPEAKER_04Party Central. Uh, is Dallas the head office, Chase? Is that where head office is? Oh, cool.
SPEAKER_02It's actually fairly new. That's our new headquarters. And uh, as Jake alluded to, just to the right there is actually a sweet kitchen full of all sorts of snacks, and there's like this magic whiteboard where you can just write down requests and then like a couple of days later it's stocked up. So I'm much close when I see uh Jake over there in the office.
SPEAKER_04Right. You see, you've ruined things for me now, you know that, because Max is listening and uh he's now just gonna start putting in weird requests for blue MMs and warm towels coming your way, Max. Um, and so uh why are we here? And for those that have been living under a rock for the last couple of years and have no idea what high level is, just give us the too long didn't read version, Chase.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, for sure. So high level is uh the all-in-one sales and marketing platform for agencies. So we've got a couple of uh awesome things going our way. The first is that we're an all-in-one tool. So everything you need to build funnels uh to do lead gen campaigns, you know, I'm talking custom fields, form builders, landing page builders, automation, email builder, all that kind of stuff in one place. Um, but the best part is it's all white label. So we enable agencies to brand it with their uh logo and colors and then go sell it as their own software, which has opened up a whole new revenue stream for agencies. And we actually saw in 2021 over 11 million dollars get generated for our customers uh in just software. So outside of the normal services revenue that they're they're generating. So it was an exciting year, and this year we're we're pumped to take it even further.
SPEAKER_04I have to chime in here. I was skeptical, I've been skeptical of high level for a while, as you know, Chase, because you we've been stalking each other around the internet for a couple of years to make this partnership happen. But I was skeptical because it seemed like everyone was drinking the high-level Kool-Aid, and when everyone's drinking the Kool-Aid, I generally tend to run in the opposite direction. But I eventually came back and said, give me some of this Kool-Aid. And um, it's good, I must say. I'm fully drinking from the fire hose now. And there was another thing I was skeptical of was the funnel builder, right? I'm like, oh come on, funnel builder. Why would we do that? Click funnels just does it really well. And so what I did is I went away in December for a week. I usually take myself away a couple of times a year for a week just to clear my head and uh to str uh, you know, strategize for the year ahead. And um I decided that I wanted to get this all-in-one reporting thing happening. So I took one of our funnels from ClickFunnels and there's this cool feature in high level that I was very skeptical about, where you can import an entire funnel from ClickFunnels, and I thought this isn't gonna work, this is gonna be fun, but here we go. I'll I'll do this. And I imported an existing funnel from ClickFunnels into high level, and then it took me about 20 minutes. This is a four-page funnel. It then took me about 20 minutes to uh tweak it. There were a couple of things that didn't come across as expected. There I had to replace one of the forms, a couple of things that pop up, but it took me about 20 minutes to fix it, and I was well, I am super impressed with the funnel builder that you guys have got in high level. What I particularly love about it is that it integrates with the form builder, which I'm also impressed with, and the calendar appointment booking is all integrated. So there's no embed codes, there's none of that stupid stuff. I literally just choose a form and a calendar out of a drop-down. And then the tracking through the entire system shows me individual, not only does it show me conversion numbers and stats, but it shows me individual customer record cards that they've landed on this page, opted in this form, landed on this page, booked in this calendar appointment, and I was blown away. I was, I was, I was it exceed far exceeded my expectations. So wanted to give a shout out to the team there. You've done an amazing job on the funnel builder, and I can't wait to see what's coming next because everything you guys are doing and everything that I'm using so far, I'm I'm very impressed with.
SPEAKER_02Let me tell you a quick funny story. So I used to run an agency, and you know, before high level, it was tech stacks, right? You'd stack six different softwares together, tie them together through Zapier to deliver client campaigns and whatnot. And we used to use Active Campaign, right, as one of the pieces. And yeah, yeah. We were certified partners or whatever. And one year they actually said, Hey, can you fly up? We want to do a case study. So I flew up to their office, they made a video where I'm talking about how the future is uh, you know, not all in one, because I'd never seen an all-in-one that could actually do it, and was like tying things together. And flash forward like two years, I'm working at high level, and one of our customers is like, I just saw a Facebook ad with you in it for active campaign. And I'm like, Oh man, are they still running that? Like, because yeah, I saw the light too. I was very skeptical in the beginning as well, but um, we pulled it off and it's just getting better and better. And when you put it all in one place, things happen that you can't do, you know.
SPEAKER_04That's right. And but also there's a there's a hidden benefit to this, right? Let me explain. Uh the I've been chasing the all-in-one for years for the for two reasons. One is that well, the main reason is to reduce overwhelm, right? So I caught up, we went camping over Christmas, we're way off script here, but that's okay. We went camping off uh over Christmas and New Year period with some friends, and I was talking to a friend of mine who's like completely overwhelmed and experienced a bit of anxiety, and she said, I've got too many browser tabs open in my head.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04It's like, oh yeah, right. That's exactly I know I know exactly what you're saying. And that was the reason I've been chasing the all-in-one solution for so many years, is because I'm sick of logging into different browser tabs to try and find the data I need, right? And then you end up running like Supermetrics and Google Data Studio to all try and title it together. It's a shit show and it never works. So I went down the route of HubSpot and gave them an obscene amount of money over the last 12 months to try and get this all-in-one thing. And guess what? It's not all in one because you can't send text messages out of HubSpot without using a third-party solution. Their calendar booking up until a couple of weeks ago had no reschedule or cancel function, right? So it so we've canned HubSpot, and I'm having a bit of a debate with them at the moment about getting out of the contract, and we've moved everything over to high level because I mean, financially, it's a freaking no-brainer. But also, it just allows me to not have 12 browser tabs open to find the data I need. Like Calendly, gone, uh, you know, click funnels, gone, uh, you know, uh the all the form builders that we're using, gone. I'm just reducing software, which is reducing expense, but it's actually reducing overwhelm and helping us improve our productivity. So that if you're thinking about is something like an all-in-one solution right from an economic point of view, yes, but it's also just the the reducing overwhelm and improving your productivity that I think is the hidden benefit. And also having that data attached to a client record card, you can then trigger automations based on the behavior that that customer and the actions that that customer's taking, which is just you just can't do when you're trying to piecemeal things together with Zapier and and uh and sort of duct tape.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff like that. And and don't get me wrong, like we love HubSpot. HubSpot's an amazing company, incredible culture that they've built. We've taken a lot of cues from them for sure, but they're really scaling more enterprise, right? So what we've found is because we are agents, you know, we're for agencies, we come from the agency world. Um, we know the wants and the needs, and that's what we focus on. We find that like we're really kind of as they scale enterprise, the agencies that you and I know are can't afford that, and they see like, wait, the the mindset is changing here. This is more like towards corporations, um, and and high level is kind of come to be known as the much better fit for an agency because you know we're that's exactly what we're focused on.
SPEAKER_04So yeah, and the the reselling capability of high level is just the cream of the cake.
SPEAKER_02I mean, that's just the only ones doing it crazy enough to do that.
SPEAKER_04That's what I call the godfather offer, right? It's like, well, now this is just too good to refuse. So what are we talking about today specifically with high level? Which problem are we helping people solve and who is this right for?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. So um let me share my screen real quick and um share a slide to new. That's interesting.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so by the way, uh, if you're watching along here, let us know if you're currently using high level. If you're not, what tools are you using in your tech stack? What is your current frustration? What problem are you looking to solve? Uh, and in the meantime, Chase will share his screen and dive into some of the uh the details and the features in high level here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so can you see the my screen? Are we looking at the lead gen playbook? Yeah, we are. Got it. Okay, cool. So this is a project that my team's been working on for a few months now, and I'm super excited because basically I ran an agency for seven years. I've been at high level for three years now. We've worked with, I don't know, 30,000 agencies. Like if you're doing lead generation, you're doing Facebook ads, Google ads, or SEO for a client, like this is the playbook, right? We know what a successful agency does. And when you combine it with high level, you can take it to another level, right? And so the playbook is exactly that it's strategy plus instruction with actual like high-level instruction mixed in. And so the last time we talked, we we covered this automated win stuff, which is amazing. You know, if you didn't see that, hopefully uh you can check out the recording. Um, but the next piece of it is really scheduling. And we'll talk about why, because I'm actually kind of surprised at like how many agencies aren't focused on online scheduling yet, right? Because especially if you're a new agency, I feel like you'll you'll quickly find out that for 90% of businesses, booking something is a critical piece in the sales process, right? Like they have to book a consultation, a sales call, a first visit, whatever it may be. And a lot of times you'll get caught in this trap where you're you're going to prospect for new customers and they're telling you that they want leads. And so you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, lead gen. We do lead gen, we focus, yeah, and you get all hung up in lead gen. But you quickly end up in this scenario where you realize, wait a minute, they don't know what to do with leads, they don't want leads, they want bookings, right? That's what they really want. And so that's like the first light bulb that needs to go off in an agency is like, wait a minute, we we we don't want to pitch ourselves as lead gen, we deliver you bookings, right? And so um high level does amazing things with automating the nurture to booking and whatnot, and we'll talk about those in another on another day. But first, we're talking, we need to talk about booking, like the system of online scheduling, right? And so um let me share my screen again.
SPEAKER_04Can I just chime in here? Because the the number one con the number one question I get from agencies and freelancers who come to us, that the number one thing they say is, I need leads. For sure. And I challenge them every single time because I prove to them I can spend five minutes do a screen share and generate them 25 leads out of a system that we use, perfect clients. Okay, there you go, there's 25 leads. What are you gonna do now? And they have no idea. They have no idea what to do now. I'm like, you don't need leads. Leads are everywhere, right? You do not need leads, you need a system to take a stranger, nurture them, add credibility, show them you can help, and then turn them into a client. That's what's missing. You don't need lead. You think you need leads, you don't know what to do with leads. So what you need is you actually need a sales process and a system. Leads are everywhere, and you need a great offer because you have a really good sales process and a good offer, leads will fall into your lap. So I just want to echo what Chase is saying here. Number one conversation we have is I need more leads. And I'm challenging everyone here. If I gave you 25 leads right now of your perfect client, what would you do with them? Because if you can't answer that question, then you don't need leads.
SPEAKER_02A hundred percent. That's exactly it. And so when we look at the playbook, it's hey, set up automated software wins like web chat widgets, GMB chat, all that. It's amazing. You're gonna deliver automated success. But now let's dig into the meat of it. So we need a calendar, uh, then you want a pipeline, then we get into database reactivations, which we'll talk about on another call, I'm sure. Then we get into the cool nurture stuff, the fast five. Um, and then we can do some really amazing stuff with automation after an appointment is booked, then we'll go to reporting and scaling. But what we want to talk about today is scheduling success. And so if you don't know what online scheduling is by now, hopefully, you know, you need to get up to speed pretty quickly. But basically, we're in its essence, it's just a form with a date and a time picker, right? And it's usually synchronized to a business's, you know, somebody's personal calendar, somebody's Google calendar or outlook calendar. Um, and in high level, there are basically two types there are basic calendars and team calendars, and we'll we'll talk about both of those. But first, why is it so important? And we just kind of touched on that, which is that most small businesses think they want leads, but what they actually want are booked appointments. And, you know, Calendly really sort of brought this to the limelight, right? They were the ones that kind of took it mainstream, and everybody started thinking, like, oh, you know, I need I need a way for people to schedule. Um, if you haven't heard, Calendly is currently worth three billion dollars, and they do one thing, right? They give you a scheduling widget. Um, but the great news is with high level, your agency can now replace Calendly and you can take a piece of that pie. Love it. So the challenge with um scheduling is that it's really just one piece of the puzzle. Like you just did a really good job outlining, right? Like scheduling is critical, but single function apps like Calendly are just a piece of the puzzle, right? There's so much more that needs to go on. Um, and you said it, you nail the net hit the nail on the head. You need a great offer at the top, right? Then we need to nurture those leads into a booking. They need to be able to book something online, and then somebody needs to actually close the sale, right? And so the booking piece is absolutely critical because it really is your main uh first call to action, right? So if I run a campaign for a dentist and it's a you know, claim a free teeth whitening session, well, as soon as you claim it, what's my next action? It's hey Troy, thanks for claiming, but uh let's get you booked for a cleaning so that we can do your whitening, right? And so that process right there, let's get you booked. It has to be through online scheduling. Otherwise, you can't do any of the awesome automation stuff because you need a system that can see the day and time of the booking and whether or not it's been booked or not yet, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So in high level, basically we have two kinds, right? There are basic calendars, which are super easy to set up. They're great for like personal calendars if it's only for one person or like reservations for a restaurant, right? It doesn't, you know, there aren't multiple services or things going on, or businesses that really only run one service at a time.
SPEAKER_04Sure. I mean, it's fairly it's fairly straightforward setting up calendars in high level. There's a there's a there's one layer of complexity around team calendars. So let's talk about that difference.
SPEAKER_02So, first of all, you get a couple of settings, right? Like for our folks outside of the US, you can decide if you want like to start the day, the week on Saturday or Monday instead of Sunday. You can change the language of the booking, which or you could go to the 24-hour time format, which is nice. And then it's basically a three-step process, right? So we give it a name, a description, and then this stuff's kind of cool. I wanted to point it out. Like appointment title here, you can see we have a custom variable. This is gonna grab the person's name who made the booking, inject it here, along with any other text we put. So, like I always put like, you know, new, whatever, 15-minute call with, and then this. And then in my Google calendar, that's what I see, right? That's what comes across, which is amazing for people that aren't doing that kind of stuff, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02The location is where, you know, the link. Are we are we meeting on Zoom? Is it are we leaving it, letting Google spin up the the Gmeet calendar link or whatever? Um, and then uh down here we get to choose all right, are we syncing this to a specific Google calendar? Do we want it to be a two-way sync or a one-way sync?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, quick question from James Megatroid, who's based in Canada. How do you set Zoom as the default location? You do that in your own profile in high level, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'll show you that in a sec.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So for basic calendars, you would just do it here. Most people would just use a static link and throw it right there. But we'll talk about doing it um dynamic. So step two is your availability stuff, right? Like how long should the windows be? How frequently should the windows be available, right? Like, you know, on the hour, every 15 minutes, whatever. Um, do we want buffers? Buffers are really important for people to set for themselves so you're not getting back-to-back things booked. Minimum scheduling notice, maybe your client, you know, hey, I need at least a day heads up before, you know, because I have to schedule somebody to be here to run this appointment. Um, things like that. And then you just get your times and your hours and whatnot.
SPEAKER_04I want to ask you about office hours for a second. We have a calendar that is global. So we have a calendar that basically runs 24 hours a day. It's a round robin calendar.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_04Um, because it you it basically what happens is wherever you are in the world, you book in, it will book into whoever's available. Does high level acknowledge your work hours in Google Calendar?
SPEAKER_02Uh, well, let me show you. It does, yeah. But it you actually don't even need to go to Google for that. So I'll show you.
SPEAKER_04What so what we do here at office hours, if this is a team calendar, what we do is we just set the office hours basically from 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. Monday to Friday. So it's 24 hours a day. Seven days a week calendar. And then what it does is it looks to each individual agent's availability to see who can get booked in. That's right. Yep.
SPEAKER_02So I'll show you that in a sec. Perfect. So availability and then your confirmation stuff. So this is cool because it's like, hey, by default, it asks for your name and email. But if you want more information, you go build a custom form and then just select it here. And that's the form on the second step that it's going to use. You can do all sorts of stuff like can these appointments are they is the status automatically confirmed or should it be pending? And then you build automation to go notify somebody that they need to like check it and manually approve it. Here's what you were complaining about HubSpot. Can we allow rescheduling, allow cancellations?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The additional notes are awesome because this pushes into the notes of the Google Calendar event. So and again, we can use custom variables in there, right? So like if I ask a question in my custom form, I can grab the custom key for that question and throw it in here so that in my calendar in Google, I can see the details of what I'm about to jump into, you know?
SPEAKER_04By the way, quick note uh Amber Rushton's asking some questions here. When if you if you're using high level under our account, we've set up a couple of calendars for you already, right? So we just get it it with our snapshot, uh, reach out to support if you want to have a conversation. Otherwise, uh, someone on the team that's just dropped the link, go highlevel.com slash troydean. If you you get a a 30-day trial with our link as opposed to the standard 14-day trial. And if you install our snapshot uh with uh under our account, then you get our sales pipeline set up and you also get some calendars already set up for you. So that's just gonna help you fast track things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. So then we get a couple cool options, like you can throw a Facebook pixel on here. So if you want that to fire when a submission happens, that'll happen. You can throw custom JavaScript in here if you want to get crazy with it. And then down here, you just decide if you want it to redirect after they make a booking somewhere or just display a message. And so those are basic calendars. And you know, I'm always um, and then once you set it up, you get some options like do you want to just grab a link straight to it, or do you want to grab an embed code and and go and start on your website? But I'm always surprised at how many people don't set up a simple calendar for themselves, right? So, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my challenge to you. If you have high level and you haven't done this yet, I challenge you to go set yourself up with a page like this. So this is my 15-minute calendar page.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And what's cool as Troy put it pointed out, is our funnel builder is so easy to use that you can easily build a beautiful page around the calendar, right? And so this is in my email signature. This is what I share when you know I need to get something booked. And it, I mean, it looks really professional, right? And it takes five minutes to set these up. So, like, not only should you do this for yourself, but you should build a template like this that you put in your snapshot for your clients, right? So everybody nowadays needs a personal calendar that looks nice and professional. And so this is just a really easy win that you can pack into your offer and just put it in your snapshot. And when you're onboarding somebody, you know, you get a nice profile picture for them and you brand it to their business. And you know, now they look have a nice professional looking uh calendar page.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, love it.
SPEAKER_02So then we have team calendars, right? Or service calendars. And this is what um Troy's been alluding to. So basically, this is great because it's got tons of flexibility. It's great for teams or service type calendars that need to cross-reference availability or round robin the bookings. So, like this series that we're doing right now, Jake is booking with communities, um, you know, other communities from our customer bases, right? And so some of them want to book the whole series, but some just want to book pieces. So Jake can send them here, and they can say, okay, all of these are you know, lead gen calendars, but which one? Oh, I want five. And he could click into that and then get the calendar and book. And so this is an example of a team calendar or a service calendar, the way that we're using it in high level now. So the setup is basically the same, except it starts with your actual personal profile. And let me hop actually into a high-level account so you can see the whole screen because this is an important piece that a lot of people miss. So if I go into our main sub account here, and then I go to settings and I go to my profile, all of this is relative to me, right? And so here's like Troy was saying: let's say I worked for Troy and the office hours are all day and all night, 24 hours a day, right? But I don't want to take a booking at 10 p.m. my time. So I come here and I set my personal availability to be whatever, 10 to 4, like I have here. And so if I'm a team member of a team calendar, it's going to cross-reference my availability. If Troy goes to make a booking at 10, it's gonna look and say, Oh, well, Chase is out because his personal availability ended at four. So this is awesome. It opens up a ton of flexibility when we're talking about Teams. And then below this is where we do, like this is where I connect to I connected to my Google account, right? So my Google Calendar. And what's cool is you can also set conflict calendars. So I could say, look, not only do I need to be free on my calendar, but there also needs to be an opening on whatever this other calendar have like my personal calendar to make sure I don't have like lunch with my wife or something going on. Yeah, and so it will cross-reference all of these things and uh before it displays or before it makes a booking for somebody.
SPEAKER_04And you'll also yeah, I was that's exactly right. I was uh my microphone's just had a heart attack, it's so excited. Uh uh, that's where I was gonna say that's where you set your default Zoom location as well in your profile.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. So if I wanted to use a static link, I would just paste it here. Um but what I've done is integrated my Zoom. And so when we go to a calendar setting, so let's head over to a team calendar here. And when we come in here, uh, this is the next step. If I bounce back to my slides here, adding team members, and then oh we yeah, we should help. Next, you go build a team. So you create a team and you add all the people who could be um getting bookings from that team calendar, and then you end up here. And so this is where we decide, okay, look, all of these people are on the Legion playbook team, right? Like Kelsey will be doing one of the webinars, Jake will do some, et cetera. But this specific one, um, whatever one we're looking at, webinar number nine, the only people that are gonna do it are me and Paulson. And I want Paulson to get the majority of the bookings. So this is cool, right? We've got two options. We can optimize for availability or optimize for equal distribution. That one will balance it out. So if we're talking about a sales calendar and we don't want any one rep to get more bookings than any other rep, we can toggle over to here and it'll the system will actually make sure that each person is getting an equal amount of bookings. But what we want is no, we just want to make sure that the maximum amount of availability is shown, no matter whose availability it is, between these two people. And so we could say, all right, I want Paulson to get the majority of the bookings, and only if he's not available should it show my availability. And then this right here is where we've determined um our Zoom link. So when you set it to custom, it defaults back to your profile settings. And because I have Zoom integrated, it will dynamically spin up a meeting uh ID and URL, and that's what it'll spit into the calendar.
SPEAKER_04Your devs have done a great job on this, by the way. I don't know who's in charge of UI, but I like I've used just about every calendar booking platform on the planet. Most of them are freaking horrible when it comes to integrating with things like Zoom and doing round robin availabilities. And and when I went through, once I understood Teams in high level, and I'm like, okay, got it now. I need a team calendar. It's so flexible now and so easy. And so I just want to give a shout out to your UI and your dev team. They've done an amazing job making that really flexible and robust, but easy to configure.
SPEAKER_02You know, that's great to hear. And I'm gonna pass that along. But to be honest, it used to be even way like we used to not have team calendars, right? And then we rolled them out and and we've tweaked it a lot. And it's it's once you understand the order of like start with your profile, then go make a team, and then make the calendars, you're good to go. But really, it's still not easy enough. So we're actually in the process of rebuilding that flow to make it even more simple and straightforward. Um, but yeah, it's an incredible challenge. Like when you actually sit down and think about it, like you're talking about time zones and multiple availabilities and all this crazy stuff. Yeah, it's a lot that goes into it. And so, you know, there's a reason why Calendly was so successful. It took something really complex and made it pretty easy and accessible. Yep.
SPEAKER_04And the fact that you can white label it now, kids, and resell it to your clients. I hope you're paying attention. This is just a revenue, this is literally, as uh Mark Knopfler said in the 80s, this is money for nothing, kids, right? This is like standing on the shoulders of giants and leveraging the great work that high level have done and reselling it to your clients as a software solution. Software also makes clients sticky. It makes the relationship sticky because the pain of disconnect is once you get them in, once you start booking appointments for your, you start showing your clients how you're booking appointments in this calendar, they ain't going nowhere. They're never gonna leave because the pain of disconnect is too great, right?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And and that's you know, my slides were just kind of walking through the technical side of it and showing you what the features available and whatnot. But you're hitting the nail on the head here, which is the bigger picture is when you go sit down with a new client and you're like, hey, we're gonna run ads for you, but we know that leads are not really what you want. You want bookings on a calendar. You don't have a system to book online yet. So we need to provide you with one. Or in the past, what you would say is you should go get one, right? We recommend you use Calendly or Acuity or whatever it may be. And they say, okay, we're here to listen to you, the expert. So we're gonna go to acuity and put in our credit card, and we're gonna now pay acuity, $30 a month or whatever. And you know, odds are, because we know if you're doing lead generation, that you're gonna lose that client for your ad service in about three to six months. And when that happens, they're probably gonna keep paying acuity, right? Because you set it up for them, it's working. They're like, this is great, I can book appointments. And so even though they've decided I don't want to do Facebook ads anymore, they're gonna continue to pay acuity. Well, now with high level, that changes, right? Because now you're saying, hey, our system does online booking. And so even if they decide to cancel your Facebook ad service, they're gonna continue to pay you for your software. Because, like Troy just pointed out, once it's set up and running, the pain of trying to switch away from that is too great to even consider.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, ugly. Uh Tenu Ralsen says, I love high level in all caps. So she's a very happy customer. Excellent, excellent.
SPEAKER_02So, you know, that's all we have for this module is kind of really just um talking about, hey, are you doing online scheduling or not? Because if you're not, we need to start there, right? Do not just go run lead campaigns for clients without thinking about the next step, which is hey, we need to automate these leads into taking the next step, which is nine times out of ten of booking. And if you're not having those types of conversations with your client, which is like, hey, when we generate these leads, what then? That's when you'll really start digging in. Like, oh yeah, what we need is them to actually go through this qualifying call. So it would be great if you could actually just get them to book those. And now you're really talking, right? Um, the agencies that are doing that are the ones that aren't losing the client in three months because that client still thinks that they just need leads that are gonna magically like appear and show up and pay, which is obviously we know not the case. So you need to be starting there, and once you make that realization, hopefully you're on board with the idea that it should be your calendar that's being used and not a third party that you're gonna have to figure out how to integrate into other things. And so um, from here is when it starts to get really fun, and you know, hopefully um, we'll be back in a couple of weeks to talk about the next step, uh, which is pipelines, and then we go into the actual automation side of things, which is really, as Troy knows, the fast five is when it gets uh really exciting. What are you guys doing right now? Are you booking appointments for clients or are you stopping at the lead? Let's see where we're at because hopefully, if you're focused on the leads, hopefully this call today now has you thinking that, hey, we need to take it a little bit further here.
SPEAKER_04Well, let me let me just uh peel the layer back, uh peel the onion skin back another layer and give a shout out to uh Sheila Heard and Mike Hennan from Patient Boost to a dental marketing uh agency, clients of ours, they're high-level users. There, I've been coaching them uh uh sort of in um in stealth mode over the last few months, uh just over Voxer, full transparency. I've been sending the messages over Voxa and uh one of the, and they've been consuming a lot of our content. One of the things I spoke about last year was this concept of agency of the future. And what I talked about was really providing as much value to the client as possible that is that would be typically uh outside the scope of what you would think would be typical agency work. And let me give you the example. Uh what Sheila and Mike are doing now is setting their dental clients up with high level and recording the phone calls that either come in or go out from the dental practice, and then coaching the front of house dental clinic staff as and giving them best practices and giving them playbooks on how to conduct those phone calls to maximize the appointments, and then what's the follow-up sequence between booking the appointment in and getting the patient in, and how do we nurture them and pre-frame them. So by the time they're in the chair and the and the dentist is in their mouth, talking to them about cosmetic dentistry or some kind of upsell is is a no-brainer because they've already been pre-framed through the whole nurture sequence and the the first you know interaction with the front-of-house staff. And so they've kind of gone. Agencies don't coach front-of-house staff how to answer the phone, but we're going to because we're that that you know, like we're doing lead-gen and we're booking the appointments, but we want it, we want to maximize our chance of the dentist client in increasing the lifetime value of the of the customer. And part of that is coaching the front-of-house staff how to take those phone calls. So, and they're recording the calls in high level, of course.
SPEAKER_02And then when you record them, it's actually not that hard to coach on it, right? Because I used to think, well, I'm not a sales coach. Like, I we don't want to get into coaching. But when you actually start listening to the calls, you hear the dumbest stuff. And it's like no-brainer, like, okay, we need to talk about how this call was handled, right? Like they called and asked if this was um Bob's dentistry, and the receptionist said, No, sorry, this is Dave's dentistry. Bob's is across town. Click. And you're like, what? They're looking for a dentist in your town. Why would you just do that? And so just having the recordings to be able to go through provides so much value because you come across things like head scratches like that that are easily pokeable.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Uh, don't know. Nicholas Doglin asks, how do they do patient bookings? Practice management software is useless from an integration perspective, and dentists don't want to use another calendar. I have no idea how they're doing that. Uh, but that's a problem that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_02I can speak to this a little bit because we used to run into this a lot. And so, especially in like Cairo, Dental. Um, now our community have built most of these integrations. So uh we just did an interview yesterday with a guy who built the Cairo, Cairo Touch, I think is the main one that they use integration with high level. Um, there's a guy who did Dentrix, some of the other dentrix uh dentist platforms. So those integrations are there, but let's say it's some really old, wonky one. Um just sell above it. So we would just be like, yep, that's great. Use your crappy EEMR or EHR or whatever it is. Um, our system is a sales and marketing platform, it's gonna deliver new business, new patients. And so we're gonna get it to the point where they've requested an appointment through our calendar. Your staff's gonna be notified that an appointment request is pending. They just need to look at your EMR and see, is that open? And if so, hit confirm. And there you go. And and so that's right. Most business owners are gonna be like, got it. Like that extra two seconds that I need to make my staff do, yeah, they're gonna complain, but that's right.
SPEAKER_04And that correct. And even if someone's got to copy and paste a name and email and a phone number into the old clunky system from high level, well, that's the price of doing business. And uh, we've just delivered you a new client. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna complain and suck, or you're gonna put your big girl panties on and just get the job done. Um, that's that's what I'd be saying. Uh, and big quote out to April Weir, by the way, who taught me the big girl panties saying, I love it, I use it all the time.
SPEAKER_02Um, do you wanna maybe we should sneak peek the the nurture?
SPEAKER_04Because I think it it so my quit my next question was what uh and I haven't seen the webinar series that's coming up, by the way. This is new to me. Uh so is there what do we do? What is there a training around once we book someone in, how do we get them to show up? And how do we get them to show up in the right mindset that they're ready to buy? Like what what happens there?
SPEAKER_02100%. And that's when we'll we'll talk about the fast five and we'll go into a really important study that was done around leads and whatnot. But the gist of it is you got five minutes to close a lead.
SPEAKER_04Yep.
SPEAKER_02And so um when we when we get to that point, we're in automations here. And let me switch into a better account. And we're gonna roll up a recipe that we have. So this is pre-built, right? You can just launch this out of the box and then go customize it, which we like to call the fast five. So let me search for this real quick. Essentially, what we're doing is we're saying every time a new lead comes in, we want to do a couple of things, we'll talk about all of that. But immediately we need to send an email and a text message, and the email is gonna give them all the information, right? Hey, thanks for claiming that offer. The next step is to get you booked for something. And now that we have a calendar, right? And we have a link to either directly to the calendar or to the nice page that you've set up that's branded for your client and everything, we can dynamically insert that link here. So now they've got an email with everything they need to take the next step. We're gonna hit them with a text message that's basically asking them, is now a good time to get you booked. If they reply positively to that, then we send the link back in a text. Great. Here's the link to book. Grab any date and time that works for you. And so that's the ideal path conversion. And I think we'll stop there, right? We'll we'll go into the cool stuff on another webinar because there's a lot of like magic that happens if they don't reply to the text. But this this a percentage of the leads will follow this path, right? They'll just say, yeah, sure, or they'll click the link and book themselves. And now what happens, and again, we're gonna um we're gonna cover this one in the next chat, is they're here in a pipeline that your client can come and see, right? I've got, oh, this many people that are new leads being worked. Oh, look at how many people are booked, and they can come into the actual calendar and see them here, or they can look at them as a list of appointments and their statuses. And like you mentioned, you can see it in the contact. If I go into a contact record, I could see over here, you know, here's the journey they went through. There's the activity.
SPEAKER_04That there, ladies and gentlemen, that activity feed there on a client record card is worth the price of admission, right? Yeah, right there, because you can see the journey they've been through. So not only can you see the conversion, if you're using this in a in a funnel in high level, not only can you see the conversion rate of your funnel, but you can actually see the journey that an individual person went through. They're about Google Analytics giving you this kind of like vague data about users. You can see here that Florentia has been through this particular journey to get in the calendar. Look at that. There, Suzanne has been through this particular journey to get in the calendar and booked in. So uh if they've bounced around a bit and if you've got other funnels set up, you can see the journey that they've been through, which is just Yeah, we'll tell you where they came from.
SPEAKER_02So we'll tell you like paid ad, you know, Facebook ad, whatever. Um, there's all sorts of cool stuff that we'll cover when we get to the reporting module, but that's absolutely it. You can come here and kind of go backwards and figure out what happened and you know who went where and who did what. Um, but you could also come in here and view their appointments or make an appointment for somebody right here as well. So you know, that's as far as that we'll take it today, but that's the main point is that like you have to have a place where they can book in order to go do all the critical next stuff. That's right. Because that really is the main call to action after you've gotten a lead generated.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And I, you know, I was skeptical about so we changed the call to action on our website late last year to request a callback. Right. Because uh one of the things I'm I like that. Yeah, well, so I I'm like. I don't want to book in your calendar. I just want you to call me. I don't have time to book in your calendar. I just want you to call me, right? Okay, so or text me. So we have an automation now where if we have like and imagine the low-hanging fruit for dentists, by the way. Not that I give a shit about dental marketing, but I know I've I notice this all the time, right? Dentists send me a letter telling me that it's time for a checkup. Where do you think that letter goes? Right? I'd love to know the conversion rate of that thing. I get a better idea. Why don't you just ring me and leave a voice message? Right? Your conversion rate's gonna go through the roof. So one of the things that we do is we say, uh, request a callback. If someone requests a callback on our website, it goes through a high-level form, that triggers an automation. The first thing we do is I think we we wait like one minute or something and we send them a text message saying, uh, hey, hey Chase, just saw you requested a callback on our website. Is now a good time to call, which is automated, but looks like a person. And they say, if they say yes, then we call them straight up. Like, you know, one of our uh team will be watching the conversations tab, and if they say yes, then we call them. If they say no, it triggers an internal notification that hey Chase has requested a callback, now's not a good time. Get in touch with him and book him in. And then we just start the conversation over text uh in the in the conversations tab.
SPEAKER_02So you you brought up a good point that I like to talk about, which is once you do what we're talking about here, and you contrast it with what you used to do, right? Like in the early days of our agency, we were focused on lead generation and we were sending recap spreadsheets at the end of the month with all the leads. And I remember so many months where I'd hop on at the end of the first month with a new client and be like, all right, you know, Dr. Pobb or whoever, I see that we generated you like a hundred leads, you know, aren't you pumped? And he'd be like, What? Like nobody showed up, nobody paid me any money. These leads suck. And and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. Like, leads don't just show up. You have to work them and close them. Did you guys do anything? And it was like this battle of you suck, no, you suck. And when you move to a system like we're talking about now, it's completely different. You're you hop on a call and you're like, hey, Dr. Bob, I see we generated 100 leads for you. I see that 40 of them booked themselves for their cleaning. How awesome was that? And he's like, that was awesome. And I'm like, yeah. And then I see like 20 of them replied to the automation with questions. I see you see them there in the hot hot the hot leads column of your pipeline, right? And for you, this might be I see 20 of them requested a call back, you know. And so let's look at the call recordings. How come nobody's calling these people back, right? Like I only see three calls here, or you know, let's listen to these recordings of the calls that are being made because we can improve this here. And then it's like, oh, and then X percentage of the leads didn't do anything, that's normal. We put them in a long-term nurture and we're gonna email them every month for a year for you. How different of a sales conversation, of a recap conversation is that than hey, you know, I'd hop on the call like with my fingers crossed, like hoping they knew what to do with leads. Um, because if not, it was a brutal conversation every time.
SPEAKER_04Uh the amount of conversations I've had with ad agencies over the years where I know that they've just looked at our ad account five minutes before the call, yeah, we've jumped we've jumped on, and they've basically told me exactly what I can already see in my own Facebook ads account. Yeah. Right. And I'm like, dude, there is no value in this meeting whatsoever. Like, I know the ads aren't working, you know the ads aren't working. What are you doing to fix it? Like you just told me what my cost per lead is. I can see that. Like, completely useless. Um, so by the way, if you're watching this and you're thinking, well, this is really exciting, but there are some gaps in my knowledge here. I don't know how to, I don't know how to, you know, teach an osteopath or a chiropractor how to take a good sales call, or I don't know how to teach accountants how to close more deals, or I don't know how to write these MRs and automations. If you're thinking that this is something that you uh this is a path that you want to go down, but there are some gaps in your resources, let me promise you this. Any piece of this puzzle that you need, we have in our community and in our training. And this is not a pitch. I'm just, I'm just letting you know you are not alone here. Like if you, if you are going down this path and you want to generate leads and generate appointments and help your clients close more deals and you feel like there's a piece of the puzzle missing, reach out to us or tag me in this Digital Mavericks Facebook group and ask the question because we have this dialed in. We have, I, you know, I've spent the last probably four years deep in this world of sales processes and high level, I think, is the layer that brings it all together. But there is some strategy and there are some templates and there are some, there is a lot of psychology and stuff around this. So if you think you're missing anything, let us know and I'll get you connected to whatever resources we can to help you because we have this, we have this stuff dialed in. 100%.
SPEAKER_02Come on the journey. I would say come on the journey with us. It's a 14-day free trial with high-level, but you definitely want to sign up through Troy because you're gonna get access to all of his goodies and whatnot, um, which will help you kind of skip the line and skip the learning curve there. But that's our goal with this Legion playbook is to come back here every couple of weeks and go down this path together. And you'll see, you know, a lot of it you're probably doing it, some of it you're not. And hopefully, you know, that gets you thinking. But I promise you, the agencies that we and believe me, we see their Stripe accounts. The agencies that are crushing it are doing exactly these things in the order that we're gonna go through them. And the system is the critical piece to it. And what you know, Troy pointed out, the exciting thing is is it's a new revenue stream in addition to what you're already doing, right? It's software, which is the stickiest revenue. Um, it's the holy grail, right? Everything is moved to a subscription. Disney Plus, Netflix, think about it. And so, you know, now it's not, hey, I need you to go get these three accounts and let us know and send us the passwords. It's hey, this whole thing starts with our platform. Let's get you signed up. It's $2.99 a month for the platform or whatever, and the mobile app included. Um and then we'll talk about your ad services and whatnot. And so it's really the we know it's the future of the agency model. Absolutely. Um, yeah, we're excited to go on the journey together.
SPEAKER_04And you know, I we have a lot of agencies that are making recurring revenue out of care plans, and we have some agencies that are doing really well out of care plans. You're gonna struggle to sell a care plan for more than a couple of hundred bucks a month, right? Yep. Uh at the high end. Um, now I this is the opportunity to really grow your recurring revenue. And it like what I would do is I would be selling this package and this software and telling the client, oh, by the way, we're just gonna look after your website, that care plan stuff that everyone else is charging you 100 bucks a month for, we're just gonna take care of that for free, right? We're just gonna look after your website, do your content updates, do all that kind of stuff. Because 90% of the activity is gonna be in high level. If they want to update a blog post or add a staff profile or something to their website, just take care of that for them and throw it in as part of the package because you're gonna get more revenue out of a client with high level than you are a care plan because high level offers more value. And your cost is a fixed fee. You can have an unlimited number of clients using reselling high level to an unlimited number of clients for the same fee. And we haven't even talked about the uh the SAS level where you can actually resell text messages and emails and make a margin on that as well. That's a whole other conversation, right?
SPEAKER_02So yeah, yeah, we'll get there for sure.
SPEAKER_04But this is a huge, this is a huge opportunity for you guys.
SPEAKER_02All right. Um even Taco Bell has subscriptions now. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and you know what? Uh um Deliveroo, I just noticed the other day, Deliveroo uh have subscriptions now. If you're a Deliveroo member, your your delivery fee, so deliveries like Uber Eats, right? Uh in fact, they were the first uh food delivery uh company on the planet. They now have a membership um where if you pay five dollars a month or whatever it is, you get free delivery on all of your deliveries with deliveries.
SPEAKER_03The Amazon Prime model, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Right. The Amazon Prime Model. They also have a corporate membership where they'll deliver um, you know, lunch for a fixed fee per month, I'll deliver lunch, you know, twice a month or whatever it is. So everyone's moving towards subscriptions because recurring revenue is the holy grail. It gives you predictable cash flow and predictable revenue growth. Uh so if you don't have recurring revenue or you want to grow your recurring revenue high level, I believe is the rocket fuel that's going to help you get there.
SPEAKER_02And let's, I mean, let's finish with that. Exactly what you just said. So when I talk to people about marketing, especially people who are getting into it, that are new in their journey, I'm always like, look, don't overcomplicate it. Marketing is literally just building a database, continually building a database, and then activating it monthly. And high level as a platform is amazing for that. So you can take it and use it as the client database that you build for your clients and use it as the activation tool, right? You send text blasts, you send email blasts, and you reactivate those people into customers. Get your customer a Stripe account and integrate it with High Level and get their customers on subscriptions, right? Like you can literally do this for your customers and they will never ever leave you if you're the one that's continually getting people on a subscription for them. I mean, are you kidding me? So, you know, that's really the game is how are you building your clients' databases for them and then how are you activating it for them or how are you teaching them how to activate it each month? And uh, you know, we're gonna go deeper into that in the playbook as we as we move forward.
SPEAKER_04Love it. Awesome. Uh, Chase, thank you so much for being a part of it. Jake, you've been excellent moral support here, brother. Appreciate you and appreciate you being a part of it, and appreciate you guys looking after us as well. Your support, your customer support, and your account support is fantastic. So uh thank you for everything. Really appreciate you guys and look forward to having you back soon. Awesome. We'll see you guys soon. Happy new year, everyone.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, take care of it.
SPEAKER_04Thanks, gang. All right, uh, that's another episode of the Agency Hour here live in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group. Thanks for being a part of it. I gotta bounce out of here. Happy New Year, everyone. Keep the conversation going. Let us know if you've got any questions. We'll see you again next week. I'm Troy Dean. Have a great day.
SPEAKER_05Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast, Audible, and wherever you'd like to listen. You can catch all of the Agency Hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash agencymaveric. Or you can get involved. Check out our free Digital Mavericks Facebook group, where we broadcast these episodes live to our community every week, along with a free channel. Let's see that.