This June, Triangle Marketing Club is more than happy to welcome Lee Goff of Marketing Agency Coach, as he shares his knowledge of marketing automation and sales control. I was fortunate enough to talk to Lee before his presentation this month, and he is a well-spoken, determined, driven, and incredibly skilled individual within his field. I am excited to share some of his words of wisdom with the TMC audience.
The Interview
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
“My name is Lee Goff and I own a company called MarketingAgencyCoach.com. I built this company as a result of me selling my first company and that was a large agency that had around 40 plus employees. I sold that agency in June of 2016 and then I started my new company with a purpose to help agency owners work less and make more. When I say ‘make more’ I don’t just mean make more money, I mean more time for their friends, family and themselves because we all know that entrepreneurs pour their blood, sweat and tears into their work. With all the pain and effort I went through in creating my first agency, I figured I could take a lot of that knowledge and transfer it to help improve the quality of life for other agencies.”
How did your upbringing and early experiences impact the career path you’ve taken?
“Well, I am officially unemployable, and I think I have to blame my upbringing on that. I was raised by an entrepreneur (My father), and my grandfather was an entrepreneur. So it really is in my blood. I don’t really know any different, I have always been brought up in, or I guess ‘surrounded by’ would be the better way to put it, small business owners. This instilled in me a hard work ethic, to have a never take ‘no’ as an answer type of mentality, to always doing the right thing, all that fun stuff. It is what made me start my first digital agency.”
Where did your passion for assisting and maintaining digital agencies come from?
“Part of my passion is that there are so many people who are so passionate about digital agencies. There are also a couple more things to add on to that and that is, you know, family and health. So I realized that I was working so much, and I was always active, always going to my daughters’ events, whatever it was, but I was not truly engaged. I was always checking my phone for emails, following up on things, making calls to employees, you know. I was there, I got the t-shirt, but I wasn’t truly engaged. So that led to when I had a massive heart attack. It is called the Widowmaker, I had 100% blockage in the main artery that provides the blood flow to your lower left ventricle, so I am extremely grateful that I am even here. That is why I am passionate about helping other digital agency owners work less and make more, and that is a lifestyle choice.
What is the overall objective of Marketing Agency Coach?
“The purpose is to bring world-class services and products to the market and to improve the overall quality of life.”
What is your advice on how to eliminate follow up failure in your sales cycle?
“Today everyone is fighting so hard, we are absolutely inundated with ads, whatever they are. Everywhere we go there are ads. So, the name of the game nowadays is not running one ad, expecting a phone call and then repeating the process. That is the old school way. And I am not saying that doesn’t work, it definitely still works, but with all the new options, people aren’t just picking up the phone anymore, they’re doing their homework. You have to touch people, and in marketing terms that just means getting your brand in front of them. Nowadays what you really need to do is to keep your brand in front of them and you need to harvest constantly. So instead of focusing on big advertising, you can still have big advertising, but you need to train your staff, ‘has everything been touched,’ ‘has everything been accomplished,’ ‘is there anything we need to get photos of,’ etc. This all must go into a Marketing Automation CRM, and there are a lot of them out there. So now you can really set up high-value content, you know, white papers, case studies, blog articles, and do it in a really high-value way to deliver world-class value over a period of time and let your prospects build that trust through education. When they are ready, they will reach out to you. That’s why content marketing and follow-up is so critical in today’s business climate. Phones calls aren’t the only way to do it anymore, and the old school method of run ads, get calls and close business is slowly fading away. Now, you can automate all of it; It is a lot of work to set up but after that, but once it is setup; it’s an asset that your company will have at its disposal for at least 7 – 10 years.”
How does a company, no matter the size, take care their sales processes?
“Well, it starts with that harvesting an eliminating follow-up failure, right? Sales, marketing, and advertising are three completely different things. With marketing you are you are utilizing your brand and you are educating, gaining trust, and positioning your brand. How I help people, and how a company can help themselves in the sales process is to visualize your sales pipeline. Most people have follow-up tabs or a spreadsheet or something along those lines. With a visualized sales pipeline, you can see everything that has happened every day and if you see an ‘uh-oh’ you can make a call and find out what happened. The simple act of standardizing your sales process and incorporating visualization aspects can do wonders for any company, no matter the size, to help improve closing percentages on sales.”
What do you wish for the TMC audience to take away from your presentation this June?
“Well, a lot of people come into presentations like this and try to write everything down with 10 pages of notes and I hope that they do NOT do that. I hope they come in there and leave with two or three really positive and powerful nuggets that they can take with them and get them done. Do one or two things that add to the foundation and infrastructure of your company from my presentation. I am going to have dozens of messages within the presentation and I hope that the members of the audience can find one, two, three things that make them think, ‘BAM,’ if they incorporate that and go back, get things done in a week or two, it’ll help their company move forward.”
I would like to deeply thank Lee Goff for taking the time to speak with me for this interview and for sharing his story with the TMC audience. We look forward to seeing you all this month, and do not forget to RSVP to listen to Lee speak about Sales & Marketing Automation on June 26th!