Multiply Your Success with Dr. Tom DuFore

263. Your Marketing Agency Isn't the Problem, Your Strategy Is—Peter Murphy Lewis

• Franchise Your Business | BigSkyFranchiseTeam.com

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Have you struggled with finding success when hiring marketing agencies? If you have, there’s a good chance it is not because the marketer doesn’t know what to do. Our guest today is Peter Murphy Lewis, and he explains to us the Big 5 Mistakes leaders make when hiring marketing agencies.

TODAY'S WIN-WIN:
Consider using LinkedIn as a second website for your franchise recruitment efforts.

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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Peter Murphy Lewis, founder of StrategicPete.com and a notable fractional Chief Marketing Officer, excels in transforming intricate marketing data into actionable strategies that drive growth in various sectors including software, travel, media, zoos, and banking. His talent for finding common ground across diverse industries distinguishes him as a strategic marketing expert. Additionally, Peter hosts two TV shows and produces a documentary, showcasing his storytelling prowess. Residing with his family in an actual zoo in Wichita, Kansas, his personal and professional life is vibrant and engaging. Renowned for leading high-performance teams, Peter is a key advisor for CEOs aiming to clarify their marketing strategies and boost business growth.

ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.

The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any business decisions. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host, Big Sky Franchise Team, or our affiliates. Additionally, this podcast may feature sponsors or advertisers, but any mention of products or services does not constitute an endorsement. Please do your own research before making any purchasing or business decisions.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Multiply your Success podcast, where each week, we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team, and as we open today, I'm wondering if you have struggled with finding success when hiring marketing agencies. And if you have, there's a good chance it's not because the marketer doesn't know what to do. Our guest today is Peter Murphy Lewis, and he explains to us the big mistakes leaders make when hiring marketing agencies, as well as a few little nuggets about LinkedIn and working with interns. You're going to really like these.

Speaker 1:

Now, Peter Murphy Lewis is the founder of StrategicPetecom and a notable fractional chief marketing officer. He excels in transforming intricate marketing data into actionable strategies that drive growth in various sectors, including software, travel, media, zoos and banking. His talent for finding common ground across diverse industries distinguishes him as a marketing expert. Additionally, Peter hosts two TV shows and produces a documentary showcasing his storytelling prowess. Residing with his family in an actual zoo in Wichita, Kansas, his personal and professional life is vibrant and engaging. Renowned for leading high-performance teams, Peter is a key advisor for CEOs aiming to clarify their marketing strategies and boost business growth. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Speaker 2:

Peter Murphy, lewis title founder, ceo, documentarian TV guy, dad, weird guy who lives in a zoo company is Strategic Pete strategicpetecom.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about this new webinar you've released, called the five big mistakes when hiring a marketing agency or related around that. So let's talk through it. I'd love for you to dig in and what are these five big mistakes and what prompted you to want to put this webinar and educational content together?

Speaker 2:

Before I dive into kind of what it looks like and how I help people. It came to be partially because of two things Most of my clients who hire me as a fractional chief marketing officer when they bring me in, there's a fair amount of cleanup and that cleanup doesn't have to do with employees. It has a little bit to do with scorecard, a little bit attribution, sometimes a little bit with CRM or funnels, but most of the time the very first cleanup has to do with marketing agencies and when I'm brought in most of my clients who are doing more than one to two million dollars a year, they have three to four marketing agencies in some type of retainer. It might be SEO, it might be lead generation, it might be LinkedIn, it might be PPC, it might be podcast pitching, whatever that is, and they are executing extremely well on things unrelated to the business goals of my clients. So it might be great that you know how to nail a nail better than anybody else, but if I need you to work on drywall, we need to talk about a different strategy or a different tool or a different plan. So that's how I got into it and what I realized that this was painful outside of my ecosystem is.

Speaker 2:

I saw a post by a friend inside of a Slack community the other day and this person is a broker of marketing agencies, so he's interviewed. The other day, and this person is a broker of marketing agencies, so he's interviewed thousands and thousands and he just said, over and over and over, the kind of the same thing I do. Marketing agencies are really good at executing upon what they are supposed to do, but that doesn't mean that they set up the strategy, so somebody on your team has to give them the strategy. And then I realized well, why don't I take what I do on a day-to-day basis and set up an educational format that will help people who have that marketing chaos with their agencies?

Speaker 1:

And I think, as you describe it, that marketing chaos is something that I've seen with marketing agencies I've hired for my own business. It's what I've seen in clients I've worked with. It's just a common frustration point that I've seen where the client, the owner, is looking for certain results and they like their agency. In most cases they like the digital agency they interviewed. They selected this group for a reason because they thought there was a fit. They checked the important boxes for them and yet the results aren't there. Or, as you described, the agency maybe has a different idea of what those results are supposed to be and it's not connected. It's incongruent. So I'd love for you to talk about these five mistakes that you oftentimes see. Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2:

The first one is falling for the sales pitch. So this is not talking about the agency that you like, like you mentioned, tom, or the agency that I even have. I hire agencies inside of my agency. This is falling for the person who knows how to do great sales and not following up with case studies and making sure that they're actually inside of your niche, right? So if I'm hiring a podcast agency, they might be great at B2C or they might be great in athletic space, but they don't know how to find me guests in another area. They don't know how to format my program, so it's different than somebody else, right? So be careful with your sales pitch. Make sure you're talking to some of their clients.

Speaker 2:

I am just to kind of head along the case study. I am one of the leading case studies for one of the podcast agencies that I used to hire, and people reach out to me all the time, and every single time they reach out to me, I always say what is your niche? What are you trying to achieve? Because the podcast agency you're talking to does amazing execution in X, y and Z, but I don't know if that's your goal, right? So slow down and make sure it's in your niche, it's lines with your goals. The podcast agency I hired positioned me as a keynote speaker and then helped me sell three, three documentaries Great job. Did they bring me leads for the six first six months? No, so just slow down.

Speaker 2:

I think the next next item this is probably the most important and this lines up with the fifth mistake is when you delegate strategy to the marketing agency and I think that's kind of what I shared to you with how I got into this and about my friend's post who's interviewed thousands and thousands or thousands of agencies is delegating strategy to the agency?

Speaker 2:

No, you delegate execution to the agency and you have to have someone inside of your executive team who can take your quarterly goals and your annual goals and line those up with what the execution of the agency is. And if you can't do that, then you need somebody like me and you don't have to hire me Like I'm a fractional chief marketing officer. But go find somebody specific in your niche If it's franchise, if it's brick and mortar, if it's franchise, if it's brick and mortar, if it's digital online, if it's banking. Go find a version of me who's spectacular at lining up strategy in your niche so that then, when you hire the agency, you're not throwing paint at the wall or spaghetti at the wall. You need to line that up slowly.

Speaker 1:

For delegating this strategy and finding someone like you or with that type of background. Do you have any I don't know if it's best practices or strategies to help someone kind of sift through the myriad of potential options out there? It's hard to tell not just whose quality, but just how do you kind of narrow that down or find that niche person? Do you have any suggestions or starting points someone might be able to take action on?

Speaker 2:

I think I have two based on your question. The first one is around how to find the agency, and probably also it works for trying to find your fractional chief marketing officer or maybe your sales or COO. I love to do an Eisenhower matrix, and this isn't because I'm from Kansas and Dwight D Eisenhower is from Kansas, it's because I use it in absolutely everything that I do, and this is just a simple matrix that determines what are the different alternatives I have that are going to have the most amount of impact on the outcome that I want with the least amount of effort. I do this from my internal resources. So let's say, for example, I'm going to hire that fractional CMO, what are the internal resources that I have that cost me the least amount of effort, that will give me the most amount of effort? And then I try to juxtapose that or contrast that with who is the person I need to hire? Right? So if I have somebody on my team like you, tom, who's great at speaking, good at camera, could be a keynote speaker, well, the person I'm going to hire doesn't necessarily need to be those. The person might need to be detail-oriented if Tom's not, or they might need to be good at hiring or SOPs if Tom's not, or being meticulous around metrics that Tom's not so right. So you also need to line up a little bit of personality and internal resources with that person that you plan to hire.

Speaker 2:

I think that'll save you a lot of time because you're not doubling up on resources that you already have. And I think the same thing applies when you go find the agency. You need to slow down and you need to think about okay, so Tom and I want to grow our pipeline or shorten our sales cycle or increase the amount of MQLs this quarter so we have a big impact on Q3. Whatever this is, you need to think about those quarterly and annual goals that you have as a team. And then you need to think about what are your three to seven alternatives or options for making that come to fruition. Put that into your Eisenhower matrix. Think about your lowest effort, highest impact. Once you put those, you line those up, what's your number one, your number two and number three? Then go find the agency that can execute upon that Eisenhower matrix.

Speaker 1:

You've given us these first two mistakes. What's number three on your list?

Speaker 2:

I think that this will resonate with anybody who has hired a marketing agency in the last 10 years of their life. Overlooking operational alignment, this means is the marketing agency going to plug into your tools? Are they going to put their data, their metrics, their outcomes, their deliverables into your CRM? Are they going to speak to you on the system that you want to? Are they going to be in Trello and you're going to be in Asana? Are you going to be in HubSpot? They're going to be in Salesforce. Are they going to be on email and you're going to be in Slack? Are you going to be able to talk to them on a phone? Are they going to be on Google Meet? Are you going to be on Zoom?

Speaker 2:

Some of these operational alignments, especially once you're scaling and you're working with two agencies, are just some simple basics, right? I mean, it's coming down to friends that you're going to have over your house for a weekend. If you have to work on Friday and these friends are going to show up on Friday, are these people that you like to have on your house that are going to let you have a Zoom call? Are these people going to clean up your dishes afterwards? You have to have some operational alignment when you have some friends with kids over to your house and you're going to be working. It's the same thing when it comes to tools when working with a marketing agency.

Speaker 1:

That's very, very well said. Yeah, and I mean I just think back to experiences that I've gone through where things seemed great, but once we got into an execution standpoint, things went a bit awry because I didn't do what you had suggested here find this out ahead of time, where the tools and other technologies and systems we were using didn't line up with them, and it just it clouded the potential success we could have had. It just made it unclear.

Speaker 2:

You could probably tell by my example. I have some friends with kids coming over this weekend, so sorry to take this to real life examples of where somebody's cluttering up my small two bedroom, one bath household. I think it'll resonate.

Speaker 1:

So now we're on number four on your list. What's number four?

Speaker 2:

This is the last one, because I already kind of doubled up on the fact you shouldn't delegate strategy. And if you are going to delegate strategy to a market, if you do have to delegate it, you better hire somebody who's strategic, like a fractional CMO, so kind of the last one for this episode or this chat is paying for vanity metrics instead of business outcomes. Okay, so here you need. You need to make sure that the marketing agency is going to give you the metrics that you care about, and you should have this conversation before you hire them. And this is going to be perfect right in the moment where you're negotiating with them.

Speaker 2:

So if you're going to bend on your criteria on your checklist right, so maybe, maybe your criteria is five metrics booked calls, pipeline size and number of MQLs or whatever it is and say these people are going to have different metrics. They have a different. It's not showed calls where they have booked calls. Their definition of MQL is a little bit different than yours. Your definition is you have their phone number and their email. Their definition is they have an email. Whatever the metrics are, if you're going to bend on it, make sure you know ahead of time. That also gives you an opportunity to negotiate better rates, right? So if your checklist or your criteria is going to be a little bit flexible, then you also have the opportunity to be a little bit flexible in the pricing that they're charging you.

Speaker 1:

These are great overviews here on these five big mistakes and one thing just from a practical standpoint that we had spoken briefly about, but I think this is interesting, and when we start thinking about putting into action some of your marketing strategy plans, now things are getting executed. You're in the thick of it, and one of the topics that I find myself having a conversation with many of our clients on, and we work primarily with growth-minded, successful entrepreneurs that are now franchising and they're what we call an emerging franchise, and they hear about and see the idea of generating leads through LinkedIn for franchise sales, and so this is a conversation I start to have. They're maybe talking to agencies or doing it on their own or in today's world, now they're getting proposals for AI driven tools or services that are helping cultivate this and turns out from our conversation, you happen to be a LinkedIn expert on B2B engagements and relationships, so I would love to just get your thoughts and opinion on such a strategy and maybe even some background on that.

Speaker 2:

Linkedin is my favorite platform and this kind of ties into the last marketing mistake right, paying for vanity metrics. So I run LinkedIn as my number one channel for my growth as an agency, as a professional CMO, and for the majority of my clients, it ends up being their first or second channel. And when I say vanity metrics right. What really matters is leads or booked calls, right. It's not impressions, it's not how many followers. I have no idea how many followers I have and it really doesn't matter. I don't pay anyone to get more followers. My strategy is not more followers.

Speaker 2:

All I'm trying to do is I'm using LinkedIn as my secondary website. So in 2005, 2010, the website is probably the most important part of your business if you're in the digital world. It was for me, for my first business, that I just exited, and today, you know, my website is probably my second biggest asset after LinkedIn. And so I am constantly when I'm taking my first booked calls and my you know my advisory retainers start at 5K. My larger engagements are 15k per month. I'm taking all of these calls, so I am my own SDR and I am simply asking them how did you first hear about me? They usually remember I asked them what made them book the call and 75% of all of my leads right now are saying my LinkedIn content. So the 101 right now for your audience who's thinking about using LinkedIn is have a banner that speaks to your prospect, not about you. So line up the copy so it speaks to your audience. Post every single day in a way that you're trying to deliver as much value as possible, as frequently as possible, with videos or pictures. It's not Instagram. And then you also have to think about LinkedIn like a funnel, right. So there's about seven days on LinkedIn where, when you're in recent connection with somebody, they're going to see your content, and I would say about 50% of your content should be top of funnel, about 20 to 40% should be middle of funnel and the remainder should be bottom of funnel and you should be trying to resonate and deliver value as frequently as possible.

Speaker 2:

I just had someone today reply to a cold email. So one of the playbooks that I'm running, tom and this would work for your audience as well is I'm identifying everybody who hits my website and I'm identifying them, even if they don't give me their contact. And I'm identifying everybody who hits my website and I'm identifying them, even if they don't give me their contact, and I'm getting their LinkedIn information. I'm not sending them an email for about a day or two. I'm sending them a LinkedIn connection. My LinkedIn connection is my biggest platform because LinkedIn's algorithm is doing the work for me to remind that person who I am and what I offer.

Speaker 2:

Where everybody's email is saturated. We have thousands of emails in our inbox every single week, or at least every single month, on LinkedIn. I don't have to compete for that. Linkedin is showing me to my prospects. Then I'm sending out a cold email to that person about two to three days later. I'm specifically hitting on something that they were on my website, so I know what they were looking on my website. My copy lines up with that. They usually don't reply. They observe me for that next golden week, those next seven days of LinkedIn, and sure enough, 75% of the people who then book a call with me say what got them to book a call is my LinkedIn content.

Speaker 1:

As you're describing that, I'm thinking about a franchise company, a franchisor, the founder or the CEO of the organization. They're sitting here thinking, okay, well, this is all well and good. How might this apply though I'm not selling necessarily a service, this is really someone that's maybe going to change their life. They're going to invest in this business or they're going to leave their corporate job and buy our business and start running it. How might you see this changing, if at all, for the strategy, for example, that you just laid out, compared to a franchise?

Speaker 2:

So this would be a person who would be on LinkedIn trying to find people interested in buying a franchise right. Yes, yes, I think it's the exact same playbook. So all of your posts talk about how helpful and how much margin and how much the industry of franchise is growing. You talk about why franchise versus its alternatives, versus competitors, is a great alternative or a great resource for growth. You talk about you know, when you're more bottom of funnel. You talk about how much income you need to have or how much savings, and then you talk about some of the unique components about franchise.

Speaker 2:

You're not building just a reservoir. Franchise, in my opinion, is probably a mix of reservoir and river right. So after a certain point you're building up capital, but over time you're also building up a river of ongoing revenue. So I think you just map out what are all the great variables or components or interests in your franchise and that's what your posts are about. And then you're setting up and you're downloading your ICP. So maybe your ICP is somebody who is an executive, who a C-level executive, whose income is probably somewhere between 250K and 800K. You figure out what size of company, you figure, and then you go into Sales Navigator. You're downloading that list, you're having some entry-level marketer connect that to your LinkedIn and you're just automatically connecting with those people. Those people are seeing your post for the first seven days when they hit your website. You're gonna start outbounding to them.

Speaker 1:

How can someone get in touch with you and get access to this webinar or get access to some of the content you're producing? How can they connect?

Speaker 2:

There's two ways to get in touch. Either way, you're going to end up in the exact same funnel that I just shared with you, so you can connect with the only Peter Murphy Lewis on LinkedIn and hopefully, within the first seven days, something about my content will resonate. Reach out to me happy to chat with you and obviously, if you come to my website, I'm also gonna identify who you are and then you'll see a connection from me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

Excellent. Well, we'll make sure we include all those links in the show notes as well, so if someone's tuning in, they can click on that and get a quick access to it. Well, this is a great time in the show here, Pete, where we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it? I have a couple of myths.

Speaker 2:

I'll give you a trivial, embarrassing myth going back to, I want to say, 2009,. Two years after I started my first travel company in South America and I sent an email to my business partner letting him know that it was time for us to let our head receptionist go. She wasn't answering emails fast enough, she wasn't answering phone calls professionally, and I sent the email to him, came into the office about an hour or two later and there was a receptionist and she said Peter, you accidentally put me in CC when you sent the email to your business partner. So embarrassing, but at least she knew I had a smart mentor in my life say never fire somebody who doesn't know that they're going to be fired. Well, she knew that she's going to be fired when I walked in the door. That was embarrassing.

Speaker 2:

A bigger miss, I think, looking back on it and this is why I love your niche, tom, with the franchise space, if you know, at my point in my life and you know you can tell your team to follow up I'm interested in investing in a franchise. So it's kind of fortunate that we were meet to meet today. But, looking back on, a big miss that I did was I, my first company, was in the travel industry, and if I were to do it all over again, I wouldn't working in the travel industry. For me to make more money, I had to onboard more personnel, so my operations got thicker, so it wasn't scalable. I grew my company to seven figures quickly. I grew it to four different cities.

Speaker 2:

In a way, I was a franchise, but I chose the wrong industry. I chose travel and there wasn't a lot of way for me to scale digitally. I had to scale through people and I got to a point where my operations got so stressful it wasn't worth the seven figures. And so everything that I've done since the travel industry has been my investments have been in different industries. It's been in banking, where I make money when people are sleeping. Now it's in consulting, where I make money for other people when they make money. So it's kind of a win-win so that, and it allows me to keep a smaller team.

Speaker 1:

Excellent. Well, thanks for sharing both of those. I appreciate it, and I'd be happy to connect you offline here with some resources to help you on your journey into franchising. Yeah Well, the second question we ask is have you had a make or a highlight you'd like to share?

Speaker 2:

I'll give you some of the superficial highlights and then get into kind of bigger ones that have had an impact. Superficial is my when I had the travel company. We got in the New York Times twice in the first three years of my company and we had Paul McCartney, beyonce and Aerosmith as a client. On the bigger level is transitioning my TV career. So I've been a TV host in South America for the last 10 years and I've now transitioned that success into South America for the last 10 years and I've now transitioned that success into doing impact storytelling in the United States. I've sold three documentaries in the last nine months and a couple of them will be on Amazon Prime in the next year. And that is that. It's a beautiful industry. It's something that keeps me creative. It has the margin that makes me have a good quality of life with my wife and my eight-year-old and that's kind of my big win.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about a multiplier. Name of the show is Multiply your Success, and so we always ask have you used a multiplier to grow yourself, personally, professionally or other organizations?

Speaker 2:

you've been a part of I think I'm answering your question my multiplier would be the team underneath me and what's unique about my team, so that you know that this is probably different than most people? Almost every single person under all of the companies that I have either owned, founded or teams that I consult with, all come from interns. Let me let that sit in Interns, apprentices. So in my 20 years of entrepreneurship, I have supervised. I've hired, trained, supervised, managed more than 100 to 150 interns. Right now, at Strategic Pete, 15 people work full-time at my agency. 13 of them were interns and that's why I have. I'm about to publish a book that's called Interns into A Players. It is a remote blueprint for CEOs to scale their company and it's just a systematic approach how I find the most amazing talent as interns and I keep the culture that I want and those are my multipliers. A lot of people think that I'm doing a bunch of things all day long, seven days a week. It's amazing people behind me and they all started off as interns.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's fantastic. Well, once that book gets published, we might have to have you back on and share the book and highlights and go through that. That sounds like a great topic, Pete. The final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you? I am 44 years old.

Speaker 2:

I am almost financially independent in the sense that I could retire. I had hoped to be there before the age of 50. I will definitely be there before the age of 50. And I will then, at that point, only work on creative processes. Creative projects that you know make me want to wake up every single day and turn on my computer and the rest of the time spending time with my son and my wife. We have a camper, we travel about three months out of the year. We go to South America right now three months out of the year, and the rest of the time we live in the middle of the zoo. So I'm almost there. I feel successful. I haven't checked off the box to success as my, as my, definition, yet Wonderful.

Speaker 1:

Well, and as we bring this to a close, is there anything you're hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

Speaker 2:

I think my call to action would be if you're in the franchise space which I'm guessing you are because you listen to Tom and you're not using LinkedIn that's the first thing that you have to go check out, follow me on LinkedIn. Go follow five people in the franchise space that you know, that already have their franchise and how they're using it. Go study and dive into LinkedIn. I think you're going to realize that this is a multiplier. You can use LinkedIn's algorithm to help you grow your financial independence.

Speaker 1:

Peter, thank you so much for a fantastic interview and let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when he talked about the big mistakes companies make and leaders make when hiring different agencies. Success stories and industries align with what you're looking to do. Number two is when you delegate that strategy to the agency. I thought that was a really, really good takeaway. He said don't delegate the strategy to the agency. Number three is overlooking operational alignment. And number four was paying from vanity metrics instead of business outcomes.

Speaker 1:

Takeaway number two is when he talked about some strategies to help someone sift through best practices and he likes to use the Eisenhower matrix and I thought that was a great little nugget. And the Eisenhower matrix helps you identify and making decisions from the urgent and important. So what's urgent and important versus not urgent and not important? And looking at that matrix, takeaway number three is when he talked about LinkedIn and to think of it as a funnel, and he said think of it as a funnel. He said 50% of what you should do should be a top of funnel, about 20 to 40% should be middle of funnel and about 10 to 30% should be bottom of funnel. And now it's time for today's win-win.

Speaker 1:

Today's win-win comes from the episode when he talked about considering LinkedIn as a second website for your business, especially for people in franchise development, and I found that very interesting. He described how he uses it to drive leads and opportunities for his business and he described a suggestion in some pathways for how franchise companies can use it. I thought that was very, very fascinating. So if you're not active on LinkedIn, or maybe you are currently on LinkedIn but not using it in this way, this might be a worthwhile venture for you to give a try to. And so that's the episode today, folks, please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review, and remember if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level. Please connect with us at BigSkyFranchiseTeamcom. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.

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Tom DuFore

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