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Hey, everybody, this is Jessie Michael Moore, agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control. Creator of leverage for growth and I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist Attire, which scaled from 0 to $200,000 a month with my own agency. We are the host of leverage for growth, podcast agency leverage and 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.
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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. If you find value in these episodes, watch the case study video to learn more about leverage growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in Control Decomp case study at Niche in Control Decomp case.
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You are now listening to leverage for growth. Hey everybody. This is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of leverage for growth. Welcome to the agency Leverage Edition. Today I am here with Christopher Windage, the founder of Catch Moby, a sales and marketing agency specializing in focused account based marketing, hyper personalized messaging and sales marketing alignment, paving the way for landing strategic customers.
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Think catching whales instead of fishing. Welcome to our show today. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Excellent. So can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency? Sure, sure. I know, we have a lot of a lot of words around hyper personalized messaging, and so I can break it down very simply.
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I’ve been in sales and marketing for 30 years, and the focus of my has always been strategic accounts. I always wanted the big accounts. I never kind of wanted the transactional, you know, hit and run type of accounts. I always wanted the larger accounts a lot more strategy, a lot more, which I think is the most underused skill, creativity, curiosity, a lot of that to bring in kind of a big whale of a deal.
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The challenge was I never really had the support I needed. So, you know, in a traditional agency or traditional organization, you have marketing that’s doing demand gen, brand awareness, lead gen, and they’re tossing leads over the fence, and then sales are supposed to run with it and close the deal and then toss it over the fence to customer success or product, and then they run with it.
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in our model, we kind of everyone works all together. So as a sales rep in my career, I was creating marketing sequences. I was creating collateral. I had meetings where executives would come and say, where did you get that piece of collateral? It’s really good. I said, oh, I made it. And they said, yeah, but that’s not our logo.
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I said, well, you know, I’m doing the best I can. I’m a sales rep. I’m a sales rep trying to be a marketer. I’m trying to do business enablement, trying to do business development, trying to do PR, try and do all this work in a large territory. because a lot of organizations just say, hey, you’re a sales guy, just go get it.
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You’re a sales guy. You should do it all. that’s why you have these great statistics that less than 50% of a sales person’s time is spent on revenue generating activity. Why? Because they’re researching. They are trying to create collateral, which they shouldn’t be doing. And so we kind of started the agency to fill that space to say, hey, if I was a rep, what would I really want?
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I want to focus on talking to customers. I want to focus on closing deals. I wish I had a support team that did A, B, and C that would whitespace an account, do deep research, figure out how I can build this emotional connection. Help me through the entire journey and keep marketing and enabling me up until we sign the contract.
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And so that’s what we do. I love it. I’ve seen the the power of integration, where instead of those kind of information silos. Yeah, that don’t really work when you’re throwing it over the fence. Right. and, and I guess the cool thing is, is that your, your agency is fitting the niche that you saw as an an issue before.
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can you talk a little bit about how catch mobi? either came into existence? How did you know that you were going to start an agency? Yeah. So when I came out of corporate, I kind of said, hey, corporate’s enough for me. And I worked for, you know, the big boys, AT&T, Oracle, SAP, these large companies who still, you know, didn’t give the support.
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And so I said, you know, I can go into a product. I’ve done product startups before. but I really just wanted to get back to what I know, and I wanted to kind of give the support that someone like me was looking for. And it’s kind of a perfect storm because you have multiple things at play. One, you have a lot of salespeople in marketing working on SAS software, which is all product led.
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And so what I think is if you look at small, medium and large enterprise, the medium is kind of getting squashed and you’re either going to small sales, which is now going to be all AI driven, supposedly all the way up to the funnel. But then you have those large accounts that cannot be AI driven. They simply can’t.
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They’re not going to need human touch. They’re going to need strategy. They’re going to need creativity and curiosity. and so the creation was, again, to fill that void. And it was funny. You go to market and you do product validation, say, does the market need this? I really went to market and said, I really need this. So I hope there are others like me out there that need that.
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And it was funny because, you know, in one thing for, for your listeners who’s when you’re starting that agency, I wanted it to be purposeful. I wanted to have good branding, have a good name. We always talk about whales. When I was in sales and three years. Oh, so who’s going to land the whale? Who’s going to land the whale?
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and so I just thought that would be a perfect, name for my company. Now, my first company before that was called selling. And that’s what I really went to. I think a salesperson needs to be a cult leader, right? They need to command an audience because that’s what Gartner says. Gartner says, hey, if you become that trusted advisor and you they really start listening to you and start, you know, almost obeying you and what you’re talking about, the industry.
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But I went a little bit too far with the with the cult analogy. I was like, maybe that’s not maybe people want to join a cult, right? That’s not really good advertising. Come join my cult. so I dialed it down a little bit to say, make it a little bit more friendly for customers, but yet still be on message.
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And I think that’s what a lot of companies do are doing their spraying and praying. They’re fishing, they’re throwing nets. They’re doing whatever they can out there, rather than when you think about hunting whales, it is a focused team. It is a focused weapon. They figure out where the whales live and breathe and hunt and you know where they are and they track them.
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It’s very analogous to to landing a large strategic customer. Even as you were talking about it, I was thinking about depth, because ultimately when you’re thinking about fish, you’re thinking about like, you know, shallow. Right, right. And even the conversations that, when people are doing this brain remodel, they’re either serving to the average, not going deep and trying to solve, like an average as opposed to the whale and the depth.
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I love that analogy. I mean, I don’t know where the question was going to come out of that, but, it did the did the logo and the imagery of Catch Moby come from, talking about whales all the time, and, and sales are, talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So I had a marketing partner, and when I was developing this, I kind of, I came up.
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I love brainstorming names. Like, everyone probably does. Names and logos, names and logos love to get your name and logo done. And so I had a whole list of names and his his names were more on target, like, you know, target account or something. And I was like, no, I want something to be really, you know, really good imagery.
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And so I gave him a list and I kind of pushed Catch Moby to the top and I’m like, oh, here’s all the lists. What do you think about this one? And I kind of made a makeshift logo. and the key is that when we when we did our website, I didn’t want vector images, I didn’t want to stock images.
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We went and we got an artist to actually create a one of a kind artwork to keep with the branding. again, we’re targeting large accounts. Each of our sales cycles are going to be one of a kind. They’re going to be unique. They’re going to have meaning. They’re going to create this kind of emotional, connection. And so all of that kind of went into the branding and it kind of fell into place.
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And like we mentioned a little bit, you know, beforehand is that, you know, whales are classified by their teeth. You either have these filter teeth that filter in lots of small fish, or the ones with the big teeth that go after big prey. So it’s like the the analogy was so perfect that selling small companies is totally different than selling large companies.
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So all of that one kind of in the branding, the messaging and the artwork on the website. Absolutely. So I guess my question, is with with the big accounts, sometimes smaller agencies, let’s just say a six figure agency. When they take on a big account, it basically comes up to be the majority of their revenue. and obviously I always would say get more than one whale, but, what kind of, suggestions would you have, for somebody that maybe has a large client that’s taking a majority of their revenue, obviously you need to get more whales, but, yeah.
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What kind of suggestions would you have for people that are maybe starting to get into the whale game? and so that their whole agency is not based around, you know, one client. Yeah. It’s, it’s a problem. And even on my website, I kind of have a guy in a little rowboat. Right? And he’s fishing, and there’s a whale that’s like three times the size of the of the rowboat.
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Right. And you bring that into your rowboat, you’re sunk. so I think the key is, you know, you need a purposeful plan for landing large accounts because it’s kind of in retail. It’s kind of like Walmart, right? Yeah, we land at Walmart now. Walmart requires so much of you, you have to go bankrupt because they want a $10 million inventory system installed.
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So large accounts require a lot of maintenance and management. And so I think, you know, some people grab large accounts by being lucky. Hey, we’ve got these small accounts. Hey, a large account kind of, you know, converted on our website. And why don’t we close it? Yeah, we landed a large account, but they don’t create a purposeful and repeatable process for grabbing large accounts, which is making sure you have a support team dedicated to those accounts.
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And rather than what accounts jump in your boat and be lucky. Why don’t you pick 4 or 5 that you want to go and hunt? And this is very tough for marketing, right? Was very tough for marketing to say I want four banks by the end of the year. Out of the top 50 banks, I want those four.
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I want to name them. I want to know who runs them. I want to create landing pages just for them. I want messaging just for them. I want to hunt them, and I want to land one of those very different than, hey, whoever shows intent, whoever shows, you know, they want the services or some kind of, you know, demand.
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I’m going to close them. And so that’s what I would say if you’re looking at that large game, you know, McKinsey says 50% of B2B organizations, need to have at least half their revenue coming from strategic accounts. So it’s a good mix. Obviously, you don’t want 90%. You want diversity, right? You want to spread your revenue among your different accounts.
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But I think the other is true, too. People are living off small fish and they don’t have any strategic account. And the strategic account, there’s, someone I know that wrote a book about how, you know, a whale feeds a village. It’s true. A strategic account pushes you to make your product better because they’re demanding more of your product.
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It pushes you to make your support better because they’re obviously a more, you know, whiny and demanding customer. You get better support. It pushes you to make your sales better, to close more deals. They’re going to give you case studies, they’re going to give you references, they’re going to partner with you. And, you know, conferences. There’s so much to be had from landing these large customers.
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And again, I think people are just, you know, they let them fall in our lap. And as we all know, customer retention is huge. Then they let the fish fall out of your lap. They don’t put a whole customer retention strategy. So my advice would be if you think you’re at the time we’ve got your model working, you have enough six figure, seven figure.
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Wherever you are, you have enough salespeople, referrals, revenue, whatever you’re doing for small accounts, put a purposeful program together to land large accounts and figure what four large accounts would fit my agency. And that’s the other thing you land customers. Sometimes they’re not good for your agency, right? They’re not on your vertical. And now you’re stretching your services to meet them because they’re a customer.
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When you do it this way, you get to pick the exact ideal, customer for your agency that’s going to help grow your agency. So it’s much better, but that would be it. My advice is create that kind of concerted effort. Oh, I love it. Awesome. what is the kind of success for you? And catch Moby over the next 1 to 3 years or so.
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What do you what are you excited about and what are you working on? Yeah, I think what, you know, we kind of have a certain niche and that we serve B2B technology companies and we kind of sell into sales, which is funny because sales is never used to buying support. All they do is hire account reps and they buy things like Salesforce.com.
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That’s it. That’s their whole budget. They know by consulting, they know by support. So we’re kind of trying to break into that niche and we provide kind of a Swat team approach. We don’t integrate with their system. We don’t work with their marketing. We are a wholly enclosed services team. Everything to go support the sales team. So I think the growth for us, obviously, you know, we’d love to have more and more large customers, out there.
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I’d love to pick a vertical more than just B2B tech, whether it be AI, whether it be services, organizations. So I’d love to really hone in on that vertical. And then I think we’re going to expand into more of marketing. So I think we’re going to do it backwards. We’ll start with sales and then grow into more of the creative, more of the branding and strategy.
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Because again, another perfect storm. Is the CRO, right? The chief revenue officer that’s becoming very hot over the past two years. And if you look at the number of roles and the increase the number of people that are applying for those jobs, a CRO is hot because they finally see the need to unify revenue operations across marketing and sales.
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So now you don’t have a CMO sitting next to a CSO. You know, chief sales officer, you have a CRO managing both. And so he’s laser focused on only do marketing that supports revenue. and I think that’s our focus is let’s do I kind of call it guerrilla marketing. If it’s not going to support revenue and bring a dollar, I don’t want to do it.
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So I think we’ll bleed more to the creative and brand. Again, just supporting large accounts. I love how this conversation has linked back to the talk about breaking silos. Even with a CRO and marketing and sales and coming into one. it’s awesome. So what is, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you, or do you have any offers that they can take advantage of?
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we always offer free consultations to businesses because, again, this is something new. And in sales you don’t always want to be the profit. So we always say you want to have something that people understand and know. but we’re happy to be someone of a profit because it is part of a new process. So we offer free consultations to say, hey, where are you in your sales journey and how can we help you?
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And so the best way to reach us is hit our website at catch. MLB.com. Or you can always catch me on LinkedIn. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. And for anybody that’s listening, we’ll include, links for Catch Moby, in the show notes. And, thanks a lot for your time. We appreciate it.
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All right. Thank you for sharing. 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, delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day.
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Go to niche incontrol.com/case study right now 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.
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