Ep 001: How Will Deane from Unstoppable is Driving Millions in Sales For Clients

Will Deane, Owner of Unstoppable, opens up on how he's growing his agency with top clients like Ikonick (investors include Gary Vaynerchuk, Scooter Braun, etc). Will discusses the strategies and tactics he uses to drive millions in sales for his clients.

Will's agency --> https://www.unstoppable.co/home

Will Deane Linkedin --> https://www.linkedin.com/in/willdeane

If you like video, here's that version:

Transcription:

Will Deane: 00:00 Okay,

Ryan Shank: 00:01 all right guys, welcome to growing your agency with Ryan today. This is our first ever episode. I am delighted to be joined by the one and only a founder and CEO of an agency in Austin, Texas called unstoppable will. Thanks for being with us today.

Will Deane: 00:21 Thanks for having me. Super excited. Heard a lot about it. Uh, and you of course. And let's, let's do it.

Ryan Shank: 00:27 Yeah Man, let's, uh, let's dive in. So I want to just kind of give everyone a quick background of yourself and before you give your your own background, I just want to give everyone a will and I actually used to work together almost 10 years ago, uh, at a, uh, at a marketing company, Sas Company and so we've known each other a long time and I've seen will kind of progress throughout his career and go to some cool ecommerce companies. But we'll tell, tell everyone, you know, I just wanted to kind of set the stage that, you know, we, we've known each other for a while, but tell, tell everyone, uh, you know, about the background and what you're up to now.

Will Deane: 01:00 Sure. So yeah, Ryan and I have known each other for a long time. I'll mention the first company that we met, which is yext, which is destroying it right now, crushing it, crushing it. So we had a really good group of people that all went out and kind of did their own thing and became, um, kind of a unique in their own way and all in different markets. And so since then, um, as taking this entrepreneurial journey, I launched a company in the ecommerce space. I ended up selling that company in 2014, what? We had 16 employees when it got to take us, there was digital marketing. So I really didn't want to become a marketer, but a week,

Ryan Shank: 01:38 by the way, not to cut you off, but I remember when you were doing that, I used to tell everyone I was like, man, my buddy found this niche, right? Emergency Lights, exit light selling direct to consumer emergency lights online. And I remember you were showing me when you first were starting at the Seo game that you were doing with the descriptions and stuff and it's genius, right? And everyone talks about now, but a five year niche people are selling even niche products. But I mean like that's a massive business though.

Will Deane: 02:05 Yeah, I mean every single building in the United States needs them. It was very weird how I fell into it as a whole nother story for another day. But everybody's going after this big pie in the sky. And what we forget to realize is that if you just own one thing, if you try to become the top and one thing, you're going to be successful. And so many people are moving horizontally not vertically. And by doing that they want to be good at this. They want to be good at this. And what ends up happening is you turn 40 and you haven't dominated one thing. And the people that I know that the most successful, whether they're brilliant book smarts or come from a good family or not, the people that are the most successful have focused on one thing. And so, um, for me in particular, it was like I had a buddy who kind of opened this world up to the light end game.

Will Deane: 02:54 I went into it and we crushed it, uh, ended up selling it in 2014 and when I was building it, um, I figured the best skill for me to hone while going through this process is going to be marketing because that's something I can take with me after this. Uh, and, you know, obviously the environment's changed in the marketing world, but it's allowed me to kind of take that and help other companies grow their, their businesses and just a lot of opportunities have opened up because I think we're at the forefront of the marketing space, whether it's paid traffic or it's, you know, an influencer, whatever it is, data science, all of these things matter now. And um, because I, because of my past experiences, I was really able to take that, own it and start growing other people's companies.

Ryan Shank: 03:41 So. So when you were, you were at an emergency light business, you, you are basically the marketing guy there, right? You were, you took, you learned, you learned the game before that and there I would say that's where you got your Mba in digital marketing. Um, and then you were able to say like, look what I'm doing here, I can apply to all these other businesses and now you've created a company around just applying those marketing tactics. Is that right? Yeah,

Will Deane: 04:07 yeah, I mean very close. Uh, I would say when building the company, there was a lot of facets. So I train this way. I wasn't saying you're just. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean what I, what I like to take away from that question is more so like I hate the term agency just in general, like I don't like that because I think that it's more than just driving traffic and a lot of people get this in their mindset that an agency just drives traffic. And what, what I learned in the past was more so building a business from the ground floor. So even when we talk to clients now, I don't just go, hey, I can drive you great traffic from facebook or ad words or bing or Gemini or whatever it is. I literally go like, what's your gross profit?

Will Deane: 04:46 Like what are your margins look like? Which you know, look like, how is your business operating? Where are you putting your own money? Because that all ties into how we do it on the marketing side and so I really take a holistic approach of why. Why is your business successful, how could it become more successful, and then take that and use that as the feed into how we do our marketing, right? If [inaudible], because marketing is a chess game, you don't just move the best pieces right away. You actually have to strategically understand why you're going to go into a situation and then use the best tools at your disposal to make sure you succeed in that situation. So knowing every single part of the equation before you take your move is very important. And, and a lot of times a business owner actually doesn't know these things, so a business owner is so good at what they do.

Will Deane: 05:33 They might be product focused, they might be service focused. They just, a lot of times don't have the knowhow or don't or just so tunnel visioned that they don't look at things that every marketer or business owner should be looking at like the P and l or like, you know, gross profit or talking down the margins, the manufacturer or whatever the case may be. And so, um, yeah, so I mean, the company that I built and ended up selling, there was a lot of learning experiences, but towards the middle end of it, it was really like what's moving the needle sales, what drives sales marketing. And then I said, this applies to every business. There's not a business out there where sales doesn't drive the growth of the company. And then alternatively, marketing feed sales. Not all the time for every company, but pretty much. And so I decided that's what I'm going to focus on and that's what I was going to become the best at.

Ryan Shank: 06:23 So you're focusing on the closed loop, right? All the way from top of funnel marketing to the sale to the revenue. And then tying back the attribution and, and really the return on the ad spend to revenue though. It's so funny, I, I talked to so many marketers. It's also interesting that you say you don't like the term agency. I am starting to notice that you can be a marketer, you can drive traffic, you can do brand stuff and you're like a marketer, you don't want to call yourself an agency. Right. Agency has that stigma to it and you know, you find a lot. I'm starting to see a lot of just even like freelance agencies, but they're just marketing guys. Right. And they're able to use the tools that are out there, but so many people aren't tracking it to the sale. And I think that's what kind of gives some people, some people in the industry, a bad rep because they, you know, they're, they're tracking it to top of funnel and they can kind of give these fluff fluff numbers. Tell. Talk to me, I guess a little bit about, you know, so you work with what ecommerce, what type of clients are you working with? ECOMMERCE.

Will Deane: 07:22 That's a really good point. So I would consider myself a performance marketer only because I think churn, unless you're dealing with like a brand like adidas or red bull where you're not going direct to consumer and you're kind of just doing brand awareness plays, which are great more power to you, like you don't have to worry about the sales bottom line and you just have to have someone a number of that every month and all, you have to prove clickthrough rates. Great. You did a good job getting a great client. But my thing is you got to be able to show your value, uh, or you're going to have a fast churn like, like my relationships. Sure. People love me. That's great. Why relationships are wholeheartedly dependent on what I can do. And the way I, the way I say is, I'm your best salesman. Oh, my team is your best salesman.

Will Deane: 08:04 And so we track all the way from top of funnel to the bottom. And then even lifetime value. And there's times this goes for a lot. A lot of people only think about front end sales right now. They're like, oh, facebook or google, like how much did you make on this much spent great, but we need a cornerstone number one for sale, number one for sale, number one. A lot of people, this is, it's not even looking at what's their lifetime value, what's the repeat customer rate? And it's funny because we eventually or like running their business for them. Now I'm not, I'm not trying to say, oh we, we run the businesses better, but we start to have to look at all these numbers to prove our worth or value when we're destroying it and not because they don't think we are, but because they're not looking at it holistically like, hey, even if we're just doing two x Rojas across the board on marketing spend and where maybe we have like 10 percent or 20 left in net profit, which is great. And there, you know, what's, what truly has the net profit of the customer of the lifetime value. Right? And people aren't looking at that

Ryan Shank: 09:07 and it's interesting. It's fun. It's uh, so, so one of the things too, it's not just reorder rates, right? So it's a kind of depends again, what industry product, that sort of thing. So that customer, let's say just for instance, they buy a ticket from your website, a ticketing website, they might go to three games that year, three concerts that year. But the other thing that we're starting to see is people either using assumptions or if you can get the data saying like what if that happy customer, like how many people do they refer and that all ultimately should get attributed back to you

Will Deane: 09:35 the margin it. Sure. Again, business owners are looking at it from one to one dimensionally when they really shouldn't. They should really look at the starting attribution touch. Whether that's, you know, I'm worried even sending postcards out automatically now in our drip sequence. So like we're, we're literally a, someone purchases like someone will purchase one of these canvases and then in the drip sequence is that, is that, is that or do you sell or is that a client of yours? One of our clients that's iconic. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them.

Ryan Shank: 10:06 I cut the one that they just, ah, I see them on instagram all the time, but with a motivational canvas art, they just didn't, they just raise some money from Gary v and Scooter Braun.

Will Deane: 10:19 They're dialed in with those guys. Um, you know, and mark, he's one of the owners who had been my best friend since college. So like I don't consider them a client, I just consider them like we're, we're a team with them because we've been collaborating for years and so sure you got to a point where they are doing so well. They really wanted somebody call it in house, which is basically what we are for them. We're basically all a team. My team is their team, vice versa, they're actually coming out to Austin this weekend and um, you know, having an agency can get you so far, but I think when you have your team dialed in and super focused, um, it just takes it that much further. And with these guys in particular, uh, it's a very interesting life cycle. Very interesting customer lifecycle cycle. Um, return customer rate.

Ryan Shank: 11:04 That's what I was going to say. You got it with that, that the, uh, that, you know, there's going to be repeat purchases. I can imagine someone who is a happy customer buys just one piece of canvas and their entire one piece of art in their entire life. Right. There has to be, you know, additional. By the way, I'm, what do you talk, talk to me though about, you know, how you're doing it. I know a lot of agency owners are going to be listening to this and wanting to know like what tools you said you're sending postcards. I actually heard about some pebble post and some programmatic pr, you know, sending of cards. Talk to me about tools you're using. How are you reporting to them? Because it sounds like this is a major pain point by the way. Again, I talked with a lot of agency and marketers and like how are you proving to them what you're, what you're getting for them.

Will Deane: 11:48 So, so first and foremost, I like educating the business owner as much as possible. I think that a lot of agencies or marketers, they stopped after they get the deal and they just go and execute and I think that part of your job as a marketer is to also educate the business owner to help him grow it, like help them grow. He doesn't need to know how to use facebook ads or google, but he needs to understand why they're important and it needs to understand that there's like times are going to have non attributed revenue that he needs to look at like the whole accounts as a whole versus just one channel because facebook might feed ad-words, brand lift, right?

Will Deane: 12:23 So education totally get it. How are you doing it tactically or are you, is this a deck you sending someone? Is it. So, so it's, it's, it's a large conversation that we have openly. I'm very, very transparent in like what I'm seeing, what they should or shouldn't be doing, tying into their bottom line, what type of revenue that they're bringing in and how to fix certain equations. Um, once we established like what needs to be done and what was working in the past, then we typically just start on facebook, facebook, if it's a consumer product, facebook is our best. We'll start buying our brand keywords and terms to make sure that we're capturing traffic that's going back and searching and buying brand. So doing a brand campaign on adwords. Yeah, exactly. So like right, I don't use ad words right away because Edwards is going to be a higher cost per click even though it's intense, but it's super expensive.

Will Deane: 13:11 But like I'll use them as an example. I would never search for that but I would buy that. Well you don't know what we're searching for that. So like you might search dorm room art you'd but then you see 50 pieces, you don't know what you want. And so, so facebook is a perfect platform for a company like this because you're doing a lot of intent based searching. I'm sorry, interest based searching and take that out and use look alikes. But then past facebook there's other platforms like the Bulah, outbrain and some content marketing channels that we utilize. And making sure that you're tracking the distribution properly. So, uh, we use Klipfolio for reporting for our, for our reporting. So basically you get a Tablo, tablo for our internal reporting. Sure. Like for our client, we're tracking everything from our email marketing, all social channels, all paid acquisition channels. Are you using active campaign for email marketing stuff? No. Or they're using clavio.

Will Deane: 14:09 Clavio is more so the ecommerce platform and then we are doing some personalization as well as some super high level segmentation. I think that that's actually something people really miss right now. Everybody. And actually I'm in the process of writing something about how no one knows what the fuck they would do at facebook that like everybody's so used to facebook's algorithm actually making the decisions for them and finding the customers. No one actually that people start forgetting what true marketing is because they forget what your marketing is, your, they stopped utilizing all these other platforms and they just. A lot of these marketers actually wouldn't know, you know, their right arm, her left arm if they actually tried to start driving traffic from traffic junkie. We're driving driving traffic from the Tivo or any of these other places and they forget how to do really good marketing.

Will Deane: 15:04 And so that's Kinda the point is that you need to establish where your lowest hanging fruit is and then you need to see what's working and then you needed to extrapolate that across channels that you know, your audience is living on and then try to heighten the brand as much as possible while taking the conversation offline. Uh, when you take the conversation offline, you own the customer base, like whether it's email, whether it's sms, whether it's postcards or any of these things, uh, and then you can create personalization. So what I mean by personalization is that you're different than me in the sense of what you want and what you're going to buy. And I need to figure that out. Whether that's in the form of an ad or that's a form of a landing page I bring you to. I need to start segmenting out that audience. Really figuring out who they are, creating subsets in our email capture so that I have 400 segments in my email and when I send a blast it's not going to everybody.

Ryan Shank: 16:00 So. And you're moving customer so it'll start off in one if like, you know, buys one, they'll purchase one time so then you could send it to like greater than one purchase but less than two. So you can start to do kind of move people into like buckets like that.

Will Deane: 16:13 That's all. Like all like auto segmenting is. I'll give you an example. So call it lead scoring called the segmenting. Let's say I send a post out that has four images and I know and we tag those images with different demos that we understand. Men, women likes, beauty, you know, working out whatever it is. And they click through one of them. Well I'm adding auto tagging them with that. And so I can create these buckets on the back end to know what, what they like over time. And I create a very robust picture of, uh, of who our audiences. And then we speak to them directly and the clickthrough rate, the conversions, the overall acquisition, how we marketed them, just a being the return on ad spend and the return on marketing is just 10 x versus I'm just doing it the old school way now.

Will Deane: 17:03 It's interesting to me. I think there's so much opportunity out there because people are just used to you have a good product and a good company and you send an email blast out and you do 10 k, you're happy wrong with that. You're happy. But what people don't realize is that you could probably be doing 30 or 40 k, you just haven't taken the time or the knowhow to really deep dive into who your audience is, a survey them and really get to know them. And so that's kind of the next level at what we do. That's what we do with that comic. Um, as I said before, they're more of like a, you know, we're more of a one team than, than the uh, relationship. But that's kind of my world and how I report on everything and how I kinda helped scale appliance.

Ryan Shank: 17:45 Love it. Love it. Um, so just quickly tell me a little bit, um, how you charge your clients, um, you know, are you doing percentage of ad spend? Retainers is their tears talked to us about that? I think a lot of, you know, pricing is a huge conversation that I see all the time. I'm in a lot of groups with marketers and agencies and I think, you know, they're all trying to figure out pricing. So talk to me a little bit about that.

Will Deane: 18:08 Yeah. So first and foremost, even before pricing, I established a personal relationship with them and I'm also very transparent. I pretend like I'm the business owner, so I actually understand what they're going through and I understand that a lot of people have been burned and it's not my intention to burn anybody and we never do because I approached the situation like this, like hey look, if it doesn't make sense and it's not working, we'll part ways amicably. Right. But that's never been the case because I always do my research. I always do everything to make sure that we execute on the top level. And so when it comes to pricing, you can't fit everybody into the same box. It's just like the second that I hear an agency go here, our rates and our services, I'd walk out the door because we're not the same company as the company before good market, we have different CPCS, we have different, different like in per cost per thousand impressions like so. So like you can't just bundle your pricing, you should have a good idea of what it costs to operate your business so that you can price accordingly and you don't spend money on, you don't lose money on your time, sure. But you need to price based on what you're going after and you can give a price before you get a full deep dive in the business and look under the hood. And so in terms of pricing, we range anywhere from five k a month to 20 to 30 on. Honestly.

Ryan Shank: 19:30 Is it all retainer based though? Or it's a percentage sometimes.

Will Deane: 19:34 I don't do percentages spends. I know there's a lot of companies out there do percentage of spend. I just don't think that makes any sense. Like it's great for the business, I mean, sorry, it was great for the agency, but it doesn't make any logical sense to me. Like got it, got it. Did I mean you could work with a venture backed company that's willing to spend $100,000 a month and you get a percentage of spend, but if that $100,000 is a profitable like what the fuck are you doing? It's funny. It's actually like,

Ryan Shank: 19:59 and I just thought about this, it actually is more beneficial to the agency if you spend more because they used to get more data. They can optimize better. It's not like it's extra work. It's actually easier for them arguably. Maybe.

Will Deane: 20:10 No, you're, you're right. I just think that you're absolutely right. The more data the better, but I don't understand percentages spend and maybe I'm just seeing this the wrong way because I see. I pretend like I'm the business owner. I don't care if you have $20, million dollars in your bank and you're giving it to me to spend. I know one thing that you're going to have a perception based on results. It doesn't matter how much money you have in the bank, you're still going to have a perception based on the amount of revenue I'm driving to the company. And so my goal, my goal is to alleviate that by not just doing a percentage of spend. I mean literally I could go and do a broad targeting and I chess and all of your money and that would be a. obviously people are working hard for it, but I honestly think at disincentivizing the agency to get results or be in the trenches.

Will Deane: 20:59 So I don't do a percentage of spend. I will do several times several different things. So flat fees for some that just one flat fees. Uh, we do flat plus a percentage of sales. I'm top lines. We done. That's great. Um, some are, some are big sticklers and they want to see like actually attributed sales, which depending on the client, sometimes we'll do. But the problem with that is that there's a lot of non attributed sales happen. Like we'll drive tons of traffic on facebook and then all of a sudden we will only be able to track, you know, 200 k to facebook, but there's an extra $100,000 that came in that month. They'll be like, well, you know, you're not tracking it back to facebook, but I know that.

Ryan Shank: 21:40 Or they see desktop facebook, they search on their phone, you lose the tracking.

Will Deane: 21:43 And we literally were at facebook, um, two weeks ago we had a meeting for q four with them in their offices and they were like, you know, it's funny, the majority of our, our, our marketers revenue actually comes from not from facebook, it comes, it starts on facebook, they see an ad, but most facebook, most people are actually, they'll see it if they don't click, they will come back and search them out and that becomes revenue. And so, you know, so, so there's, there's flat fee plus percentage sales, flat fee plus percentage of attributed sales. And then we're, we're very interested in the sense that we're always open for other opportunities. If we see a product that works really, really well, you know, there's, there's just a lot of ways to slice it. So number one, we always value our time internally so we have to have some sort of a base to make sure that my team is available to work and do, but then we're, we really like to align ourselves with the company's best interest if we think we can crush it, uh, and then that makes them feel better. It helps them know that there's an incentive on our side and that's kind of how typically we structure a structure our rates.

Ryan Shank: 22:51 Awesome. So, so a lot of it is based on scope of work. It's not just flat fee, it's not, it's not just, there's a lot more that goes into it in terms of the actual work that you're going to be doing. A lot of times though, you will tie it into sales and it will be performance based as you, as you said about the agency or your marketing company in the beginning. Um, all right. So just three questions at the end. First question, a couple tools. What are some tools that you just started using that you're in love with?

Will Deane: 23:16 Um, let's see. So a, tablo, tablo, it's a marketing reporting tool that my data science guy uses. It's really, really powerful. Allows us to really chop up some of the data that we're seeing on the back end and make some informed decisions. Um, Claveo is awesome. Uh, if you're, if you're in the shopify game and you're not using Clavio, you should play in traffic because it's really good email marketing tool. However, we're using A. we're looking at some other stuff for personalization like drip. I'm very similar to active campaign. And then let me give you one more tool. Um, critio I play around with cardio a little bit. It's a marketing advertising platform. It's, I wouldn't call it a tool, but it's one of those things that was a really, really good job of picking up some of the, um, the, the leftovers. I'm around the Internet and it's really good for brand lift as well. So those are three tools or four tools that I would recommend to anybody.

Ryan Shank: 24:18 Love it. Second question, talk to me. What's your morning routine

Will Deane: 24:22 when entertaining? Wake up at six. I tried to get my energy going right away because I think creating some form of positive element in your world establishes the day. I know Jocko willink says like, make your bed, make your bed. You accomplished one thing. Once you have a sense of accomplishment, you're like in a whole different mind frame. So I like to get up, either go to the gym or run real quick. That just puts me in a mode of like positivity versus like, you know, just kind of linger in so that, that's, that's my first step in my morning routine and then I just literally go right to work.

Ryan Shank: 24:53 So I just, I literally just wake up at six to a workout, go right to work. There's no like meditation or any of those. Casey Neistat just released a video like two days ago on like why you should wake up at 4:30, but he wakes up between five and 7:00 AM every single day. It does something similar. Uh, puts his kid, kid goes to school, then he runs, runs, he goes to work. He runs like 15 miles a day.

Will Deane: 25:17 I mean, I'm telling you this like, it's, it's, it's so cliche because everybody says it, right? Like, Oh, you read about Bill Gates, you read about these, you know, everyone says it, but one of the best quotes I've ever heard was quoted money mindset of just like, you never meet an unsuccessful person at the gym at 5:00 AM.

Ryan Shank: 25:35 Right, exactly. Because it translates over. You're not just successful in one area of your life or you know, you're not just blended at the gym at five and then like a piece of shit all day. It's discipline. It's like discipline equals freedom. So it would, it's so resonated with me. It's like I've never heard. That's good. Holy Shit. Like you're right. Why would, how could you meet an unsuccessful person at 5:00 AM at the gym and saying, yes, that's good. I might, I might dice that for some micro content. And then last question, if you were just starting out, how would you break into the marketing scene? How, what would you do if you wanted to break in get clients and just start off my skill sets and you're saying to get clients already have. I'm not saying, of course. Yeah, exactly. Why don't you do. I will do it for free. I would do it for free or just percentage of sales. I'm an agency. Contact an agency and worked for them for free. Either an agency or a cup or a client or a customer. And literally it's just interesting client. I love it.

Will Deane: 26:37 That's how I built mine. I mean I had people coming to me and working with me when they weren't big people and then one came to me and was like, I'm just going to destroy it for you and give you everything I have that lead to an intro that led to another intro. I've never prospecting for a single client. It's all been personal reference and um, it's because I busted my ass. I think this goes back to something you said at the very beginning. A lot of people move horizontally versus vertically. Um, a lot of people are afraid to put all their eggs in one basket or to go all in on something and, or just kind of like, I don't want to work that hard. It freaking pays off, like there's no easy way to do things and if you keep looking for the easy way, you'll eventually wouldn't have accomplished anything.

Will Deane: 27:17 So at the very beginning it was like fuck it, like I'm just going to grind this shit out and I'm to do everything in my power because if I'm not successful they're going to see that my work ethic was something that they liked. And that turned into my first best client, which turned into everything else which I use as a framework to build my agency. That's amazing. Love it will. Thank you so much for being with us guys. Will Dean, unstoppable agency, Austin, Texas, performance based marketing agency a, if you want to check about the link to his website is going to be in the description. Thanks man. I appreciate it. Absolutely Ryan. Thank you. Alright later.