AL EP 46: Christian Radley – Abandoning Lead Gen to Skyrocket Your Sales

Show Notes

Ziggy is the demand generation agency for ambitious tech brands that need to scale revenue. Ziggy delivers proven growth strategies that help brands of all sizes – from startups to Fortune 500s – grow revenue and reduce CAC.

Connect with Christian Radley & Ziggy here –
Web: https://ziggy.agency/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ziggy-agency
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ziggy66358998
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ziggy.agency0/

Episode Transcript

00:00:04:02 – 00:00:11:03
Jesse
Everybody is adjusting to your agency. Transformation coach and founder of Mission Control Greater of Leverage for Growth.

00:00:11:07 – 00:00:14:16
Christian Radley
And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist I am which scaled.

00:00:14:16 – 00:00:15:11
Jesse
From zero.

00:00:15:11 – 00:00:18:16
Christian Radley
To $200,000 a month with my own agency.

00:00:19:21 – 00:00:45:21
Jesse
We are the host of Leverage for Growth Podcast Agency Leverage Episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets and leadership styles. We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money in order for you to get your agency to the next level.

00:00:46:08 – 00:01:08:19
Jesse
If you find value in these episodes, watch the case, Study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in control Icon slash Key Study at Niche in Control Icon and slash kingdom, you are now listening to Leverage for Growth. Hey everybody, This is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche and Control and creator of Leverage for Growth.

00:01:09:01 – 00:01:22:08
Jesse
Welcome to the Agency Leverage Edition. Today I am here with Christian Radley, the co-founder of Ziggy, and a demand generation agency for ambitious tech brands. They need to scale revenue now. Thanks for coming to our show today.

00:01:23:04 – 00:01:25:09
Christian Radley
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

00:01:25:21 – 00:01:29:07
Jesse
Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of Ziggy?

00:01:30:00 – 00:02:02:22
Christian Radley
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So Ziggy is a he’s a demanding agency for B2B enterprise and tech clients. We’ve helped some some pretty big players like Stride Canon Altus Group grow revenue and reduce tech. Excuse me. And in simple, in simple terms, we help companies build and refine their go to market strategy. We build dashboards that help marketing teams optimize performance right through the sales funnel so they know exactly the details around like what’s working and what’s not.

00:02:03:04 – 00:02:23:05
Christian Radley
Like, for example, which keywords or ad is driving the highest revenue and lowest cut? Mm hmm. Our data science function builds churn models to help tech companies predict and prevent churn. And then we deploy marketing automation programs for like building out some of these data infrastructure to activating nurture campaigns.

00:02:24:08 – 00:02:37:17
Jesse
Awesome. Very cool. And what what kind of led towards the creation of Ziggy? Was it something that was like an aha moment that it kind of come from a need? And talk a little bit about those earlier days.

00:02:38:01 – 00:03:01:05
Christian Radley
Yeah, absolutely. It was an aha moment. And so I used to work at a bit of a personal story, but I got here, we, I used to work for an ad agency and manage the substantial account, the link to an account. So we managed media for LinkedIn globally. And the team were like, they were incredible super switched on and they were obviously obsessed around like driving performance.

00:03:01:05 – 00:03:24:21
Christian Radley
It very much felt like a high pressure environment because the budget that we were dealing with was like really, really big budgets, as you can imagine. And I wanted to look they wanted to look good. But then like sometimes we found like performance would fluctuate and it would do even even for the biggest and best companies. And it was a lot of pressure around understanding why.

00:03:25:02 – 00:03:57:03
Christian Radley
So we were always really try to be prepared to answer that, like why question Because really, that’s what they wanted to know. So when these questions came around, that was like the worst thing ever. It was like we felt reactive, so, so out of depth that you didn’t know exactly what the answers were. So and really all of that boiled down to is because we didn’t really have the right infrastructure in place to be able to quickly share like insight around what’s working that as well as like we were not structured enough as it seem.

00:03:57:21 – 00:04:19:07
Christian Radley
So the aha moment was we needed to think differently and it was kind of like founded in this moment right where we needed to be a lot more methodical in our approach. We needed to measure the impact of everything. So we had like the deepest understand ing a deeper understanding than anybody in the room of what was going on and why performance was heading in a certain direction.

00:04:20:12 – 00:04:45:24
Christian Radley
So essentially what we did was we we built a set of principles that basically helped us draw insight on the most granular things whenever we wanted to launch something new, like a new marketing program or like a key change within the program, we would do it in a very experimental and structured way and would do this months at a time.

00:04:45:24 – 00:05:12:15
Christian Radley
So you can kind of imagine now that the where we were was like quite reactive and then we were really proactive, really planning everything out and creating a clear vision for where we wanted to take things. So the aha moment just to draw back on that point, right, was making sure that we adopted these principles and it was kind of like my job as a scale of different positions in the agency that time.

00:05:12:15 – 00:05:38:08
Christian Radley
Then to instill that vision and instill that methodology across the rest of the teams within the agency. So we could all follow suit. That was really hard, though. It was like trying to push a rock up a mountain. So and it just because it wasn’t about adopted or it was what? We weren’t making enough progress there. I knew I had to go it alone.

00:05:39:05 – 00:06:10:03
Christian Radley
And that’s exactly what we did, right? We built an agency then on these principles where we really helped B2B companies adopt the the best type of way of working. But ultimately, it was all really designed around one simple thing, and that was like helping B2B companies solve really key problem. And that was across outside of the barriers of in a lot of companies, we’re not able to tie marketing performance back to what was happening in the sales funnel.

00:06:10:12 – 00:06:38:12
Christian Radley
So they’re essentially making decisions, blind decisions. So so we kind of entered this world with a vision of like helping companies immediately bridge this gap, which takes me back to my very first days. It was just me at the very beginning, and I used to have to spend every Sunday like building these reports that allowed us to make these sophisticated data joints in Excel, to be able to understand what was going on.

00:06:38:12 – 00:07:01:05
Christian Radley
And it was just so encompassing. So that was like the starting point of Ziggy. It was like freelancing on the side and it grew quite quickly into winning more clients, people that we used to work with before that had experienced how we work so that they wanted to work with us. And it was just from there, a rocky ship, actually.

00:07:01:05 – 00:07:23:14
Christian Radley
So we went in terms of like the size, just to give you some numbers. We went in our first year, we scaled from like what was the numbers. Now it was like half a million in revenue to a jump to 1.4 million in year two. And then with continuing to see like grow into year three and beyond. So the growth was pretty fast.

00:07:24:11 – 00:07:51:19
Christian Radley
And now obviously now we’ve got much bigger. Now we’re a bigger team. We’ve got specific functions that are, you know, thriving in their own area instead of external hotspots, things together. But it was a bit of a journey right from and I suppose one thing that your listeners might be interested in is the transition from how you can take something that’s just like a small freelancing over to ultimately a consistent seven figure business.

00:07:53:18 – 00:08:17:08
Christian Radley
And there’s kind of like three principles really that are going to help people make this transition. And I’m going to expand on the third one a little bit more, because I think that’s the one that’s probably most important, that you’ve got to do things that don’t scale like these are like. So they ultimately focus on delivering an excellent service and that might be going over and above on specific details that are just tiresome.

00:08:17:13 – 00:08:40:01
Christian Radley
But they really matter because if you can set the precedent at that level, it just sets the tone for everything else that you do. So focusing on delivering an excellent service is just like the number one word. Yeah. Like another thing, another learning, if you like, that will help people make that transition is the people that they hire.

00:08:40:18 – 00:09:08:00
Christian Radley
One thing that we did that we were fortunate to do actually is hire people with worked with before, which was definitely not like, but like, yeah, not the it’s not the perfect strategy, right? Because you’re not exactly getting the fresh ideas you might need, but to deal with the time scale that we were working with in the early days, we needed to have people that could just roll up their sleeves on day one and get in, get stuck in exactly how we need to.

00:09:10:05 – 00:09:29:21
Christian Radley
The story changes that I like. That has a limit, right? You do need to bring in fresh ideas pretty quickly after that. But the third point is the one I think that matters the most, right? So how you can get your business to it to scale is having a point of view. And we were talking about this fact just before the interview, right.

00:09:29:22 – 00:09:55:09
Christian Radley
The point of view section. And I’m on the side and having a strong point of view matters more than anything because it sends a signal out to your actual audience and you know, those that don’t want to work with you also get the message, too. And that’s, you know, that that’s a shared consensual feeling. So it’s finding is having a point of view.

00:09:55:09 – 00:10:13:21
Christian Radley
And what I mean by that is a different a differentiated point of view. So having something that sets you apart from other agencies in this example. Right. Is going to win every time than just being better. You can’t really tell people that you’re better. That’s just everybody would say that. You’ve got to explain to people why you are different.

00:10:14:02 – 00:10:57:19
Christian Radley
And for us, we celebrate that different, and it’s in our DNA. And it comes back to our point of view, which is largely around abandoning this idea that, well, it’s largely around like demand gen versus we to simplify it right down. And really what that means is demand gen is launching strategies that create demand in the right type of verticals, not just any old verticals and scaling budget based on how much revenue you’re delivering versus lead gen, which is just capturing as many leads as possible for as lower cost as possible.

00:10:58:05 – 00:11:22:01
Christian Radley
And the two are completely worlds apart. They weren’t everything has such a significant impact on the rest of the company. In a company that focuses on driving lead gen, what you find is misalignment between marketing and sales because the marketing team are over here celebrating that they’ve driven this many leads or this many wells and none of them have moved down the funnel.

00:11:22:01 – 00:11:50:13
Christian Radley
So the sales guys are really frustrated that they’re not getting anything of quality and substance. What is the demanding aligns everybody’s goals to be the same thing, right? Which is maximizing revenue. So that means your budget decisions are completely different. You’re no longer trying to scale based on what’s the most efficient you’re scaling based on what’s going to deliver the longest lifetime value, the lowest churn in the most revenue of time.

00:11:50:22 – 00:12:17:04
Christian Radley
That’s a completely different ballgame. A lot of companies today don’t really have the infrastructure to be able to make those decisions, which is essentially why we formed to help companies, number one, create that connection between marketing and sales and then be able to truly understand what programs work effectively driving the right type of metrics versus ones that are simply just ineffective.

00:12:17:15 – 00:12:22:02
Christian Radley
And so having that point of view is super, super important.

00:12:23:04 – 00:12:46:05
Jesse
That’s awesome. And I know our audience that may not have heard of the demand generation before or not understood the difference between those. It’s really helpful to kind of see the US versus them kind of format because I’ve also experienced before where leads come in, but then they don’t move forward and you don’t want to celebrate that. You actually want to celebrate actually people moving forward.

00:12:46:19 – 00:13:09:22
Jesse
Yeah. And I can also understand how important it is to have metrics around churn, because churn is actually one of the biggest issues with agencies. If they don’t focus on you know, minimizing churn and keeping clients for a long time. So whatever you do when you’re looking at let’s take churn for an example that you had you had talked about the Excel sheets.

00:13:10:06 – 00:13:10:14
Christian Radley
You know.

00:13:11:16 – 00:13:36:21
Jesse
Hopefully it’s not in Excel anymore, but what is what are some like actionable things that maybe agencies that are listening could start focusing if they’re not currently measuring churn? What are some things that you would give them? As I know this is totally off the cuff, but. Well, what what kind of ways could you get them to practically start measuring churn and minimizing churn in their agency?

00:13:37:15 – 00:14:00:00
Christian Radley
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think so. So we look at we often look at this from a helping companies analyze that. Yeah, but the same principles apply. What we try to do whenever it’s really important, do you understand your customer base? So I’m going to talk I’m going to I’m going to flip between both perspectives of what we advise SAS companies and tech companies that are facing churn problems is the same thing.

00:14:00:16 – 00:14:28:13
Christian Radley
It’s important to understand who is your best fit customer. And what I mean by that is which customers pay the most and stay the longest. Who is your worst customer? Like, who’s chatting the most? Why? Who’s paying the least? Who’s causing like, more problems than disruption than any other type of customer? Like analyzing these data points will quickly help you build a perspective of who is the right fit customer for you.

00:14:28:13 – 00:15:01:09
Christian Radley
And you obviously need to focus on building those, going after those types of customers. So the things that we typically we do when try when facing this problem is we have to run an analysis that looks at like lifetime value. So like revenue over the lifetime of a single customer at just like churn. So obviously analyzing the historical customer data, analyzing churn we have to analyze and RR and all, all of those different like success metrics and also like churn metrics.

00:15:01:14 – 00:15:24:17
Christian Radley
But doing it’s important that you segment that out by things like where somebody is based, what’s their company size, what vertical are they in, and what service or product are they buying? All of these are like key dimensions that you need to chop that it’s a way to really get under the skin of like, who is your best customer and who is your worst.

00:15:24:24 – 00:15:47:04
Christian Radley
And it’s only really until then that you can say, right, the go to market strategy strategies built around going after this segment. And this is why because if you don’t do that, you’ve just got a perspective of what you think your ICP is and you’re going after a whole sea of a market that you could essentially go after.

00:15:47:05 – 00:15:54:21
Christian Radley
But that’s not that’s not the best approach. But you’ve got to you’ve got a niche down on that exactly where you where you play best.

00:15:55:05 – 00:15:58:04
Jesse
Mm hmm. It’s early. Speak in my language with the.

00:15:58:19 – 00:15:59:07
Christian Radley
You know.

00:15:59:23 – 00:16:22:22
Jesse
Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s awesome. It gives them actionable insights into minimizing churn because I know that that is a big topic, especially with AI and trying to make sure you’re still relevant as an agency, as in the midst of all of it. So what is what what’s kind of like the best way for people to get in touch with you, whether they’re a tech brand or an agency that’s listening?

00:16:22:22 – 00:16:24:05
Jesse
Yeah. Um, yeah.

00:16:24:16 – 00:16:44:07
Christian Radley
Yes. I mean, you can reach me. You can reach me on my email. It’s Christina, Ziggy Dot, and same with my LinkedIn handle, which is Christian Dash Radley. And there’s also the newsletter if you if you’re interested in reading some of the content that we put out on our website, So go subscribe there or just follow us on social channels.

00:16:45:05 – 00:16:53:04
Jesse
Cool. Excellent. And for anybody that’s listening, I will include links to Christian and Ziggy in the show notes. I just want to thank you very much for being on the show, Christian.

00:16:53:14 – 00:16:54:12
Christian Radley
Awesome. Thank you.

00:16:57:16 – 00:17:19:05
Jesse
Agency owners. If you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business where you can regain control of your time to delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day. Go to niche incontrol dot com slash case study right now.

00:17:19:05 – 00:17:39:24
Jesse
To learn more about leverage for growth, you can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems, understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year to live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve always dreamed about. Go to niche in control dot com slash case study that is niche in control dot com slash case of now.

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