Mastering the Art of SEO Sales with Steven Khanna

[00:00:02] Intro & Outro: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

[00:00:23] Michael: Hi, guys.

[00:00:24] Michael: Welcome to the SEO show for another week. Michael here, and this week I'm bringing you a chat with Steven Khanner, who is a consultant, a sales coach for.

[00:00:35] Michael: SEO Consultants for SEO Specialists.

[00:00:37] Michael: Because in the SEO world we can be really good at technical stuff, but when it comes to selling, it's not always natural. You know, if you come from a background of working on the tools, selling can often be quite uncomfortable. And that's what Stephen specializes in. Now I connected with Steven at the SEO Mastery Summit over in Ho Chi Minh earlier this year and I thought he'd be good to bring on the show because he's got a interesting background in sales that he has applied to the SEO world. First working at a SEO vendor in a sales role and now as a coach to SEO specialists agencies about their sales process.

[00:01:16] Michael: So we had a really good wide.

[00:01:18] Michael: Ranging chat about all things SEO sales. So if you're into that kind of thing, let's throw to our chat now with Stephen Khanner.

[00:01:25] Michael: Hi, Steven, welcome to the SEO Show. We're here to talk sales today, but I thought it would be good if you could give us a bit of a background about yourself and I guess what you do, your history with SEO and we can get going from there.

[00:01:38] Steven Khanna: Yeah, brilliant. Michael, thank you very much first of all for having me here. Stephen Khanna. I've been in SEO war not too long, but five years, stumble across SEO. My background's really been actually running Michelin star restaurants back in the UK, which I did now for over 20 years. First five years of my life actually worked with the Gordon Ramsay. I was fresh out of uni. And then this is just before he becoming a celebrity. I saw him right next to him, you know, a 19 year old lanky kid just bossing food trays out of his kitchen into the main dining area. And then one thing led to another. I ended up working for him for like good five years and then kind of the career progressed from there. But very early on I already knew that the art of selling was kind of part of my DNA. So every time, no matter which restaurant I went to, if we were struggling with average spend, which equates like an average order value in the SEO space, a lot of those things used to pass on to me. And even when I became general manager quite quickly in a different establishment like the sales Entire funnel, the setup, the training and just being the top salesperson. Even though I didn't have to sell because there were other people there to sell, I just enjoyed selling beginning and I think that was because of the human interaction. And for me relationship building sales or ethical sales are quite important because I've noticed over time now that the LTV out of that is just incredible. And of course you still need to have your sales cap on and all of that. So yeah, I've kind of did that for 20 years. Then got married to a Polish lady, we moved here in Poland. This is where I live now. It's been 10 years and then yeah, just kind of stumble across SEO, which was with a company called Whitepress. They're like a link building marketplace. They offered me the job, took me six months to get my head around with the fuck is SEO. Always an anchor text, what to do, follow link and all of that. But finally the penny dropped and yeah, I've been loving it ever since, mate.

[00:03:56] Michael: Awesome. So you've combined your love of sales with a love of SEO and those two things don't always go hand in hand. Like I come from a background of being a technical SEO guy and I had to learn sales a long hard way, make so many mistakes along the way. So it's really cool to hear that you're in the sales space particularly focused on SEO agencies because I would hazard a guess that most SEOs aren't natural born salespeople like you might be. And it's probably something they need to.

[00:04:22] Steven Khanna: Learn a hundred percent.

[00:04:25] Michael: And working at whitepress you would have seen a lot of probably agencies selling to agencies, seen their processes. You've been around the traps. So maybe, maybe I'll start by asking a question to get things started because I'm going to pick your mind on SEO sales. It's really interesting to me and hopefully to our audience. But what would you say the number one mistake that SEOs make when it comes to sales?

[00:04:45] Steven Khanna: Most of the time, yeah. So obviously the standard answer would be they get too techy when they're pitching to clients but they at a very early stage they really don't understand the pain points where the business is going. So it's like they've got a blueprint of what they offer which is like 3, 4 packages of it could be technical audit, top 25 keywords, X amount of links, but they fail to, to construct that roadmap which would equate month on month with clear deliverables, the leads, the, the strategy, kind of working with Them what I call is the added touch of customer service against what they're going to, what they'll be paying. The SEO agency is where they miss out. So it's, it's this, you know, encyclopedia of what they should be doing. So it sounds more like an agony aunt moaning rather than saying summaring up into literally bullet points, mate. So this is what we're doing like, like a clear, clear roadmap but obviously with that understanding that you can't really give any guarantees because we're all at the mercy of Google anyways, you know. So I think the language where when you're pitching to these brands who actively do sales themselves and they might have a very clever sales team internally as well. So subconsciously these brand owners are literally measuring your SEO agency's lingo compared to what the internal systems they've got. So I think it'll be just to kind of rewind a little bit. Since I've kind of moved out of whitepress last few months, I've become a full time sales trainer and I help a lot of SEO agencies set up the sales structure, the SOPs, the templates, bring someone in as well, just to train that person. And the number one thing I've seen is the discovery calls are abysmal, like absolute shocking. There's no prep gone into those discovery calls. You haven't constructed a carefully orchestrated plan as to how much can a lead expect when they get on discovery call, which all funnels down into a one call close or a two call close. So what happens is they just talk jargon, the email's worse, the offer on it is even more dreadful. Yet all of that work they do boils down to how is your follow up cadence as well, which needs to be multi channel. So the relationship wasn't built quite early and then they give up after one one follow up. They're like, ah, these guys never respond to me. So what happens is even a warmed up lead, which probably requires knocking on the door two or three times, they just haven't had the patience or the capacity to do it. And there's a reason behind that. It's actually a psychological reason. Michael. A lot of founders, you know, they've got this, this self pride, this ego which goes into these sales calls and they're like, oh, if the brand doesn't care about me, fuck it, I'm not going to chase him either. But the sales guys don't think like that. So I think the number one mistake is when SEOs who have no idea to sell actually Try to be salespeople and that is just counterproductive. So if you're not good at that, just stay away from it. Because sales is a game of chess. Just hire a talented salespeople who salesperson who's done it for a while could be non SEO. Just give him or her the product knowledge and then let them run it and construct the sales environment for you.

[00:08:31] Michael: Yeah, love it. I think it's interesting you touched on qualification call because just so much flows from that, like the story you tell with the sale, the pain points you're trying to hit in your pitch. So I want to come back to that point. But you know, I asked you at the start, you know, what's the number one mistake that SEOs make? But what looking at it from the other angle, as a customer, what's, what's the number one thing that customers care about when they're engaging SEO and getting pitched by them? Because often they'll probably find there's a bit of a disconnect, right?

[00:09:03] Steven Khanna: There is. Not to mention a lot of times when they come to your agency, they might have been burned by other SEO agencies as well, you know, so trust is always the missing factor there. How quickly can you drive an ROI to that business is all they're interested in, right? And just be upfront and honest. Manage expectations, don't let them settle into a lock in contract where, you know, I'm sure you've heard horror stories where people are signed a 12 month contract, they can't get out, but the SEO agency then has total control on that poor bloke's website and because he wants to get out, because nothing's happening, with no clarity or account management going on, the poor block just has to go away and just start, start the business all over again. Like create another domain and try and replicate that. That's what people want to see is can I trust that person in this dodgy world of SEO? And I'm saying it in the most politest terms because SEO could be, you know, you know it, mate. There are plenty of cowboys out there who claim they've done so much. So trust is already a missing factor. When someone jumps on an SEO agency discovery call, they're always kind of, I'm not sure if I want to do SEO because clearly there is no robust ROI in there. So the quicker you're managing expectations based on where they exist, where the competitors are and where you could potentially go with them within the next three to six months, but then you're disarming a lot of that by saying, listen, don't believe a word I'm saying. Let's just put in a test order. You know, I'm happy to give you whatever 30% money back guarantee if this, if this, it doesn't work out. It just adds a lot of value. Fat Joe does this really well where on the first order they've got this 100% money back guarantee. If people are not happy with the silo, the links they're building, why did that come into place? It's because they realized after pitching to a lot of leads that this is the only way to get the foot in the door for someone to stop trusting us and then start giving us their entire budget. I, I hope I'll answer the question.

[00:11:22] Michael: No, absolutely. Trust in ROI. I think 100%. You can get so in the weeds as an SEO. You'd be talking to them about, you know, hreflang tags or canonicalization or whatever, whatever technical thing you want to get caught up on, but they don't care. They want to know, am I going to make more than I spend ultimately? And do I trust that you've got the proof, the runs on the board to show that you can do that? Which I agree with. I'm just curious. When you're coaching agencies, when you're working with agencies and I guess they're all different, some might be productized services, others are more, you know, bespoke services. But do you find most go through the process of qualification discovery type call, then they go away and prepare a pitch, then they present a pitch and then try close on that second call or what. What's the general flow that most agencies find work for them?

[00:12:11] Steven Khanna: Yeah, it depends at what growth stage that agency is. So some of the top names their lead flow through their Google Ads, Facebook ads, YouTube channels, like Julian Goldie does this fantastic job in there. So the leads kind of semi warmed up already. But then if you got that solid structure in place of setters and closers, then what you try and do is you aim for a first call close, tops two call close. But there's a lot of work which goes in the background, which means a lot of ahrefs leveraging screen share live data to see where someone is compared to where the competitors are and then match it with the growth trajectory by asking a lot of clever discovery questions. Okay, how much are you looking to add to your revenue by the end of this year? 25%. Let's assume the answer is or what would that 25% mean to you in terms of monetary Value and in terms of personal growth or having more time and you just keep digging, you keep digging. So you kind of walking hand in hand with that client to get them to that point where you then start pitching. So what also people miss out and they fail to understand is the Persona you're trying to do the discovery call with. So the language or the discovery call script would be very different if you're on discovery call with a founder compared to a CMO. And again, SEOs don't realize when they go on these discovery calls because it's just one standard pitch which probably they tried doing it themselves or ask Chachi Beauty to, to, to bring something up. And this is one thing again, I was lucky enough to be trained, live trained when I was in restaurants. Restaurants all about is the same menu, the same drinks, the same wines being served, but every customer sitting has, just has different expectations. So just to kind of read the profile, oh, that looks a troublemaker. So I need to do this, maybe get the drinks out a lot sooner. Just understanding who you're pitching to because yes, everyone speaks about icp, but that's just the starting point. You're just scratching the surface. The IEPs, ICPs then at a very granular level changes quite quickly who you're pitching to. My pitch to an outreach assistant to a cmo, to an outreach director, to a founder would be completely different. And that's what separates from agencies who are really smashing it in understanding those profiles and Personas, buyer Personas and tweaking those discovery calls, the follow up cadences, in order to just have a quicker sales rather than having the six to seven touch point in sales process. The idea is two touch points tops three and off you go.

[00:15:10] Michael: So you find that on these discovery calls you'll get people on, you'll start talking, you'll sort of either qualify or disqualify them pretty quickly. Probably talk budget or trying to broach the topic of budget. Like yeah, you're doing it, yeah, that, yeah.

[00:15:24] Steven Khanna: And then yeah, yeah, that should be the budget thing. It should be done earlier. So I'll give you an example of Fat Joe again. Right, so they obviously spend decent amount of money, but they've got a very carefully curated qualifying list of questions. Which budget's a big part of that. And if they don't match the minimum order value then they are disqualified quite quickly because is a bit of a waste of time. Now some people can say hang on, you should be having more conversations. Even though people might lie on that question of how much do they do they want to spend? Correct. And basically you need to find a sweet spot as to how many inbound leads you're getting or call outbound if you're doing it and just be on top of it day to day, week to week, with a lot of spreadsheets in there or just tagged into your CRM to realize what's the productivity against cost per acquisition and see how you can keep tweaking it. But the disqualified. The budget question should be part of the qualifying question list before someone books a call. And I used to do, I used to do that and a lot of clients used to book in $100, $500 to that. And right at the beginning some of my sales guys used to email them or just the setters on the call that thanks, thanks, thanking, blah, blah, blah. What are you trying to achieve? They used to say and say, listen, to achieve this you would at least need a spend of X, Y and Z. Is that something you've budgeted in for the next six months? If not, I would recommend we're not a good fit at this time. It's best you keep doing what you're doing with, with Google Ads and believe me, 8 out of 10 times they used to say, oh, actually, oh right. Oh, we, it's just that we were building spammy fiver links for the last three years so we thought $500 is enough. So again, you build the funnel up, but everything still has to be actioned, followed up at a time where it gives you a lot more data in order to tweak it and, and kind of move the lead through the funnel, which hopefully it loses.

[00:17:37] Michael: Yeah. And on that discovery call you're advocating for a sort of one core close and pulling up ahrefs. So am I right in saying you do it by Google Meet something like that. It's face to face. You chat, you qualify and then you might switch to screen share mode where you start pulling up tools, running their numbers there and then on the spot rather than preparing an actual pitch and walking them through it. Is that sort of your preferred method? Do you find that works better?

[00:18:03] Steven Khanna: That works. Some of the best performing SEO agencies currently do exactly the same thing. Few of them I actually work with. So some of the funnels, some of the systems I have set up for them, and literally there's a very carefully orchestrated framework which people need to kind of invest in quite quickly is you are in control of the call, it needs to be consultative, it needs to be value driven. But just, just be a good bloke on the call, even if it doesn't close now and you're not the right fit, they might come back. Why? Because again, we're hitting the trust factor. They need to trust you just because of the reputation the SEO world or the SEO space has. So just to kind of give you bite size sample, I would kick off a call by report building, but then also saying, oh, do we sell out the 30 to 45 minutes set aside for this meeting? Are you okay with that? They usually say, yeah, go for it, brilliant. And then you start going on a bit of discovery. So these are the answers you'd given to my setter. I just want to build on it based on the answers you've given. If there's something else which I'm missing because I've done, I've curated a mini strategy already, but I'll let you explain more. And then usually when you open that front up, they usually tell you a lot more as to what's really going on. You pitch in every now and then by making sure that they actually talk 70% of the times and you just asking the right questions. And then once it gets to a point where, okay, they've ranted enough, I know which solutions to pitch, then you go, we've got a perfect solution for you. We might not be the right fit in terms of budgets, but let me show you what you could do to improve your business. So it starts getting you 10, 12 qualified leads with, I don't know, 50% converting from it. And then you literally show, bring up ahrefs, show them the site health. You look at the doctor, you look at, let's assume if you were doing backlinks, for example, or content writing, you look at the backlinks, the number of backlinks against the number of referring domains, and ideally you're trying to tell them that it's one unique backlink per domain. You then look at the traffic which other backlinks are generating. So you're literally disqualifying 70% of the backlinks which they have acquired, which usually are shite. I mean, most of the calls I've been on, you just ended up spending stupid money on Fiverr or in silly marketplaces. So you basically driving the pain up. Looking at the content, looking at the website, looking at, on the, at their blog section, are they internal links, service pages? Do they have the FAQs, do they have the testimonials? Because these are signals, these are things which Google likes. If their doctor is below 30, clearly it should be 30 minimum and above. And Then you open up your keyword explorer, look at, ask them which keywords are you looking to rank for? They might have said that in the set of call notes anyways. And then you just look at the low hanging fruit. You know, if you put your keyword difficulty under 10, there are plenty of keywords you can rank for quite quickly. If they were looking to, you know, it was just backlink and content specific and just kind of do a 3 to 4 keyword analysis there as to how many backlinks, for example, you might need to start ranking on page one. Ask them then. Okay, if you get 50% of this traffic potential of 5,000 and let's say 5% converts, what's your average order value? What's your lifetime value? So they're on the call. By showing your calculator, you're literally showing what's your ROI compared to the investment you're going to make. And a lot of SEO agencies don't do that. Like I've audited discovery calls before I've taken over contracts and it's just dreadful. They're just simply having a chat with no clear value to it. And I've gone back and asked them, I said tell me about this, this and this lead. What happened? Did you ever hear back from them? No, nothing mate, I've been chasing because brands who take our time out of their calendar, it's just a 30 minute of chit chat with a stranger. Like you know, they just feel like why there is no clear value and if they can't perform on a discovery call, I'm not sure what they're going to do when we not watching and they, you know, it's, it boils down to the trust willingness.

[00:22:36] Michael: Well, absolutely. And look, trying to pitch on one call like that, it relies on, you know, building trust, listening, giving them the right responses, making them feel comfortable. And then of course closing, asking for the sale, which is, can be uncomfortable, you know, particularly if you're new to sales or if you're, you're coming from the tools and you know, you just know that someone needs links so you tell them you got to buy links but you're never going to close just doing that. So when it comes to closing, how do you go about getting from, you know, we're talking about all your traffic opportunity to actually getting them to commit on the call.

[00:23:13] Steven Khanna: Yeah. So the first question I've usually asked and the other people I've trained is right, have you set aside an X amount of budget for your SEO success and SEO growth? If that Sentence doesn't work. We say, listen, I'm sure you've budgeted for success. If even if they push back and say oh, this might be a bit too much for a way out of my comfort zone. Once you derived clear value and you've asked them the budget question and usually what people do and this is what I'd advise a lot of agencies would have some sort of packages, never really advise and pitch for the lowest one, go for the mid tier because psychologically, you know, 70% of the times it might be way out, out of their budget. But if they say oh maybe three, $3,000 might not be viable enough to go to, then you introduce your lower package. What a lot of less skilled salespeople or founder led agencies who've never done sales just to get that sale and just be a yes man, they go in with a starter package and then they discount it further and promise a lot of deliverables at the same time, which is a car crash waiting to happen, you know. So that pricing structure, it's a bit like the McDonald's philosophy. If you've ever, I'm sure everyone's gone to McDonald's a lot but if you go and you order a Big Mac and you say oh can I also get a portion of chips? They don't say would you like medium or large or small? They don't give you the small option. They say oh, would that be a large? So do you know, you see that psychology there? So that same thing applies on a discovery call with a budget question. Pitching the bid tier, then introducing the smaller one and be flexible at the same time. Maybe sometimes a cash flow would be an issue and if you've got the flexibility where people could pay half of it top of the month, half of it at the end of the month, then people should do that option and just you know, Gisan that additionally by saying do a test order with us, you should expect X, Y and Z and once that is done we can come back, have another chat at the end of the month or beginning of the next month to try and increase the the investment so you get a bit more or double down on the, on the roi.

[00:25:47] Michael: Yeah, so it sounds like that could be what I call a foot in the door type offer. You sell a lower price point service or single deliverable, build a bit of trust with a view to selling the ongoing service. Do you, do you find that sort of stuff works really well? And then I guess the second part of my question you touched on before selling, promising the world, promising all these extra deliverables discounting on yourself, do you find there's often a disconnect where salespeople might do that, but then the delivery team that are putting this work together have to deal with the pain of mismatched expectations. And how do you deal with that? Do you find you just have to have it really productized up, Your pricing, your deliverables, all of that?

[00:26:29] Steven Khanna: Yeah, yeah. Again, part of the training and consulting I do with agencies like their websites and the product I service just looks dreadful or the pricing structure is completely wrong. So people, the founders need to be really, really shrewd in what profit margins are they doing, what are the other competitors charging, how early you are in a very crowded market. And there needs to be some sort of a usb. You can't be extremely identical to everyone out there. The exact same deliverables. You need to find your usb. And it could be as granular as even if you were doing links, for example, your turnaround times have to be clearly mentioned. How quickly you can get that would needs to be tied back into quicker turnaround times means you start ranking a lot quicker, which means leads start falling into the basket a lot sooner. Which is what you're telling them is, even though SEO, the myth is it takes too long. Actually, it doesn't take too long with us, but this is kind of part of the education which needs to be shown in a consultative manner. Again, whether it's through an email, follow up, through a phone call, but most definitely on a discovery call. I think a lot of people end up losing the sale because the discovery call is just haphazard. It's all over the place. They don't know what they're trying to do. Yeah, I keep coming back with discovery goal.

[00:28:13] Michael: Yeah, it's a massive one. What about objection handling? Because that'll always come up. I've got to check with my business partner or, you know, I've got to see if my wife is on board and she wasn't on the call, that sort of stuff. Are you. How are you dealing with these types of objections? You trying to get all the decision makers on this call to begin with? I guess that would be one. But what other. What other common objections do you see and how do you deal with them?

[00:28:34] Steven Khanna: Yeah, so I'll answer that one. When he said, I need to check with my business partner or with my wife or whatever. So a lot of standard SEO agencies would go, yeah, not a problem, that's fine. I'll probably follow up with you next week in a couple of weeks time and see where things stand, but what you should be doing. Oh, okay. Now I completely understand that. Would it add a bit more value if we can schedule a call with your partner? Let's say Wednesday today is whatever, Tuesday, Monday, I can't remember what day of the week it is, but let's say two days after at 10am, 11am which is called a bam farm, which is book a meeting from a meeting. So the loop has to close very, very quickly. So, and then say, right, what do you think your business partner might be looking at? So that when I'm on the call with them, I can of course talk about half of the stuff I've spoken about and probably bring in more so there's no time wasting going on or they're feeling a bit shy of what question to ask, blah, blah, blah. Ask them on a scale to scale of 1 to 10, where do you sit currently without offering us being your preferred partner? And that gives you a warmish enough answer to be sure of and just get them on a call very quickly. So the Bamfams are extremely important and a lot of people do not do that. Standard answer is that's fine. You know, they try to be extra nice and say I'll chase up with you in, in the next week, 10 days and hopefully we'll be a good fit. And that's it, mate. The leads fizzled off very quickly.

[00:30:15] Michael: Yeah, big fan of Bamfam. We talk about that all the time with our team. What do you think you touched on guarantees earlier or the fact that with SEO there are no guarantees? We don't control Google, you know, we're just relying on Google, responding to what we think is going to work, but then putting ourselves in the prospect's shoes. They always want to feel good about their investment, you know. And I find it weird because in the SEO space I feel guarantees are requested a lot by prospects, but if they were buying a billboard or a radio ad, they wouldn't be asking for a guarantee of results. But yeah, in the digital space they do quite a lot. How do you sort of deal with that? What do you find is good risk reversals that you can deliver on, which is the most important part and be it I guess aren't too overburdening for your business. You know, you need to be able to sort of handle these, these guarantees.

[00:31:08] Steven Khanna: Yeah. So I normally arm the sentence of there are no guarantees because we all don't work for Google. However, within your niche we've got these X amount of case studies with a Similar growth trajectory and we've made them X amount of money. I'll, I'll. Let me show it to you or I'll attach it. I'll attach a couple of them on an email and I'll probably drop a two minute loom video as well for you to quickly skim through the success they've had when they joined us and where they were after that. Work with us for six months. So we ultra confident what we'll do in terms of strategy would work. But I wouldn't like to guarantee stuff, you know, I'm saying. So you counter balancing of what you said, the guarantee stuff because they, they'll catch you up very quickly. Sorry mate, you, you guaranteed that stuff because I don't want them asking the next question or you just guaranteed me this. Can you put this on the contract then can you add this on an email and then can we tie the payments against the guarantees you're performing? It just opens up a can of worms, you know. So I kind of counterbalance it based on that, based on testimonials and I also say listen, if you want a couple of trade references, I'm happy to pass on a couple of details of, to other people who've been in the relevant niche and if you are that agency who and you've done a bit of work up until that point, you should have a great relation with some of your clients where the account managers can end up telling the CMO or the founder of that brand or that agency and say listen, you might get a call from X, Y and Z if you could help us out and then you know, scratch my back, scratch yours in, in, in an honest manner, you know, I'm saying relationship building, sales, where you say do that mate. Obviously I'm meeting you next month in the conference. Let's have a cheaty gin and tonic after day two. Or happy to give you two extra links or an extra blog of 800 words next month because if you've done your pricing and your numbers accurately, there are enough profit margins to hand out a few goodies here and there just to keep scaling.

[00:33:29] Michael: Yeah. So you're sort of touching on our rapport building a little bit there on calls. I would hazard a guess again that in the SEO space not every technically great SEO is going to be good at rapport building. Naturally. Do you have any little tips and tricks or little go tos that you like to weave into a chat to build rapport with people?

[00:33:50] Steven Khanna: Yeah. So the standard classic repo building which everyone tends to do, which Is getting a bit boring. Is talking about the weather. You know, it's like they're even expected. It's not even funny. I usually have a thing of laughing at myself so I usually, I might have done something over the weekend which is kind of every weekend, something funny last night out, whatever. So just bring up a hilarious story which breaks the exterior. Just crack a joke, a bit of banter as we do with with mates when we go out that just loosen them up, that makes them feel quite comfortable because all that is strategic. If they feel that oh you're human enough which means I can trust him then clearly all the next questions when it comes to discovery driving the pain up solutions after that and closing would they'll just set you up really well. For me I followed the sales philosophy forever. Like trust, win. If they like you, they'll trust you. If they trust you, you'll generally win. You know. And if a lot of salespeople follow that structure within the SEO world, you more often than not you'll close seven to eight calls out of ten.

[00:35:05] Michael: Yeah, love it. Well, we've spoken about discovery, pitching, closing, dealing with objections. Let's say we've done all of that. We've bam famed. We've spoken to whoever we need to but they're still sitting on it and now we're in the follow ups and we've got to like check just checking in with you which is not a good follow up. What are some examples of good follow ups or ways you can go about like trying to stay top of mind, add value whatever the case may be when trying to yeah ultimately close through.

[00:35:37] Steven Khanna: The follow up correct multichannel. A lot of follow ups are just email driven email if you want to be just singular channel make sure that there are new loom videos being included that what they're missing out create a FOMO for them as to oh just had this recent win for our existing client which is in your niche. This is what they did. This they, this is where they were three months ago and this is where they've ended up. I would urge if there are any bottlenecks, tell me what they are just ask more specific questions. But another thing some talented salespeople do is at the end of the call they ask the permission to be connected on LinkedIn or even on WhatsApp and that just catapults the communication cadence quite quickly. And I'm a big fan of voice notes. I keep dropping a lot of voice notes to the leads. I'm chasing my existing clients. That just gets the responses quite quickly. And then of course you top it up with some, some videos. And sometimes in between your follow ups you could just casually say hi, you know, the weekend, wish them whatever. So it feels that it's not just about business, business and the bloke wants my money. But as long as you're asking the right questions as to what is the bottleneck and you really carefully telling them, say, listen, I might not again be the right fit at this time. Maybe it's bad timing, maybe it's the offer, you know, feedback is the food for champions. Just tell me what's stopping you and I'm sure we can work something out. But give me some feedback. But as you rightfully said, usually the follow ups are a one line email with a bit of cat memes in there where, you know, checking in, making sure this is at the top of your inbox on a Monday morning and all of that, that's just a checkbox exercise for lazy salespeople rather than someone who wants a result out of that.

[00:37:45] Michael: Yep, totally agree. And I love that voice note concept because so much follow up is largely going to be 95% of the time emails. You know you've sent it off, it goes off into the ether, but you feel good because you followed up and you can put it in the CRM that you followed up. But that sort of stuff is really cool. Bit different, humanizes it, you know, like you said, it's a real bloke who's talking to you. He's not just some words on a screen.

[00:38:11] Steven Khanna: Correct.

[00:38:12] Michael: Which is awesome. I'm interested in what you think about like divvying up salespeople because like, some people are great at closing, others are like good at sort of outbound building their pipeline. Should sales people be prospecting, building their pipe or should they have an inbound flow of leads? This is always tricky in the SEO world to get leads, they're expensive to generate. What do you find out there in the world of agencies at the moment really works best?

[00:38:40] Steven Khanna: Yeah, 95% of the agencies struggle with lead flow to fill up their pipe. They could work hard on that if they create a personal brand around them, like Julian Goldie's 97% of inbound leads, they come from his YouTube channel. But the bloke works seven days a week, records two videos every day and they don't do any outbound at all. But then it also comes down to skill set. If you're comfortable in front of a camera, how skillful you are to add value on a YouTube channel. And if you can't do that, then of course it needs to be outbound. Small agencies, which are a lot of my clients currently, you can't have a structure of setter and closer. You need to look at a complete personality who will do everything, which means leveraging Apollo Hunter. Look at the Churn pipeline, look at the active pipeline and see if you can go back, build relationships and increase the spend per month. You know, normally when I ask, have you actually asked these leads or these active clients of yours, do they have more to spend? Never ask them, mate. Oh, have you asked some of them for referrals? Nah, never done it. Wow. Some things are just blatantly obvious and they don't do it. And that one salesperson, if someone's on, I don't know, 25 grand Mr. Sterling and they want to get up to 75 by the end of 2025, just that one person, a clever, hungry salesperson coming in can easily, easily do that and generate its own pipe. That's the thing. And I'm a bit disappointed now that when I follow other salespeople outside of SEO is they've become so dependent on inbound leads that the beauty of outbound is disappearing very quickly. And I was like, mate, I don't think I've ever worked at any establishment where the inbound lead flow was fantastic. I always had to hustle. I always had to find creative ways to, to fill my lead. I like this voice note thing. Didn't read it anyway. It just worked for me and I made sure that I kept, kept scaling it. And I think outbound makes you a lot more resilient and a lot more creative. Inbound LeapFlow is always important once you get to a certain point, but if you can't do it, then the specific cadence of what I'd recommend to small agencies, as long as you've got your sales plan of where you want to be, you've got your robust 15 to 20 SOPs, which are part of your central sales playbook, and the templates there. It needs to be multi channel. So you could have an email sequence running in the background with Apollo or instantly, whatever, but then the salesperson should be doing highly personalized 50 to 60 daily outreaches every day with the idea that by week three, use week four, in month one, you start generating three to five discovery calls a week, which then equates into 15, 20 discovery calls. And even if you close two to three new clients every week, that's, that's, that's good growth. And you literally Build on that of what's happening. But it's work in progress. It takes effort, it takes creativity. And that's where a lot of leaders, founder led agencies, they fail because they're so busy doing their testing when it comes to SEO methodologies and all of that, they think, oh, I spend that money, I've got the person in, oh, he should be generating 15 grand by the end of month one, which is impossible because if you doing 25 grand MRR and your agency has been running for three years, it's just expecting, you know, blood from stones. So again, managing expectations. Yeah, that's that. That's why I would say outbound. Any SEO agencies struggling with cash flow and all of that, outbound still works if it's done consistently and decently at scale. Classic sales funnel. The more you put in, the more you're going to get out. And any salesperson you interview who has always done just inbound closing and doesn't believe in cold outbound, never hire that guy or girl because they've, they'll crack very quickly. Just. Just a snowflake. Yeah.

[00:43:36] Michael: Awesome. Well, this has been a really great chat. I think anyone listening to it that hasn't really got their sales dialed in will have gotten some great nuggets out of it. But I'm sure people will want to connect you, connect with you after this. So where can people go to find you online and connect with you?

[00:43:52] Steven Khanna: Yeah, I'm Quite active on LinkedIn, but I've also got my sales training and consulting website which is stevenkanna.com someone wants to just have a chit chat. Book a discovery call with me. 20 minutes. I'm happy to help. You know, for the sake of the SEO community spirit, do that. And lastly, what I'll say is SEOs can also benefit by networking. James Dooleys and Matt Singers say that quite a lot. Network equals your net worth. And I think that's another thing SEOs are quite guilty of. They just don't network enough. Just go out there, chat to people and that just increases your lead flow organically.

[00:44:33] Michael: Awesome. Love it. Stephen, it's been great chatting. Thanks for joining us on the SEO Show.

[00:44:37] Steven Khanna: Cheers. Michael, thank you. Thanks for having me.

[00:44:40] Intro & Outro: Thanks for listening to the SEO Show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.

‍