Our Story At Sales Driven Agency

Dear Agency Owner,

Our genesis story at the Sales Driven Agency has more to do with you than it does us.

You see…

There is a massive problem in the agency world today. It’s a problem that will cause 92% of digital agencies to shut their doors in the next 5 years.

That’s 9 out of every 10 who are currently reading this.

But before we talk about the problem, let me take a stab at what your journey has been up until this very moment where you’re sitting here reading this open letter.

It maybe has gone something like this…

Years and years ago you started out working for someone else.

You could do something cool and valuable within the marketing space (design, copywriting, brand strategy, drive traffic, video, etc).

Nonetheless, you didn’t have an agency like you have today.

Then, in one way, shape, or form you had an opportunity come across your “desk.”

An opportunity to take your craft that you had been using at someone else’s company and now make some money on the side… on your own time… and you liked it.

You thought to yourself, “I could probably do this whole entrepreneurship thing.”

Afterall, you could make your own schedule, make more money, and do the work that you love.

You could have freedom.

And whether or not you jumped right then and started something or you took on a few more side projects before you made the leap…

…eventually you made the leap on your own.

Now you’re a freelancer.

Things were going great.

You had a network that started out strong bringing you organic referrals and leads.

You were making more money than you probably were when you worked for someone else.

The dream.

Then you took on a few projects you didn’t love, did some work you weren’t thrilled with, had some poor experiences with clients and thought to yourself…

“I need some help.”

You hired someone.

BOOM!

You’re now an agency owner.

It’s more than just YOU.

Congrats!

You continued to work on the agency…

…delivery, brand, hiring, sales, coaching, training, courses, masterminds… you name it.

And you had some success.

It’s why you’re still around right now reading this.

But you’ve noticed something while running your agency.

Whether you’ve noticed it by trying tactics and silver-bullets, by hiring (and firing) sales people, or you’ve always been relatively comfortable waiting around for your network to drive your leads for you (albeit unpredictably).

You’ve noticed that you can’t quite crack the code on sales…

And more specifically you’ve not been able to crack the code on building out a sales operation.

You’re not able to grow predictably — you have no idea what’s coming in, when it’s coming in, and for how much.

You’re not able to grow sustainably — you are too dependent on a tactic, your network, a random lucky hire with a salesperson that could leave you at any moment for a better opportunity… and send you right back to zero.

You’re not able to grow scalably — you are the bottleneck more than likely.

You see, your journey has never led you into a career in sales…

… and you’ve certainly never learned how to build out an actual sales operation within your agency.

And because of that, there is a ceiling placed on your agency that you have either already experienced or that you are likely going to experience at some point in the near future.

Whether your ceiling is the $3.5-5 million in revenue mark like we see some agencies hitting who are REALLY good at what they do and their work has created enough leads to get them to a respectable revenue amount.

OR

Whether your ceiling is the $300,000 in revenue mark where you are scratching and clawing trying to make it to the coveted 7-figure mark.

Either way…

Your problems are the same.

You’ve not figured out sales.

And that’s why Sales Driven Agency exists.

Hey, this is Joey Gilkey (the founder) writing here.

Hopefully I’ve gotten your attention and I’ve read your journey like a book (or at least pieces of it).

I know what I’m talking about when it comes to agencies…

…and even more so when talking about sales for agencies.

My path to agency world was a bit different than yours.

I started my career in the corporate Fortune 100 world.

I had the privilege of being given more responsibility than I probably deserved and I got to be a part of building and managing a 115 person sales department within a global IT services division at a massive company.

Had a lot of success… and a lot of failures that I got to learn from.

I took my experience and knowledge to the SMB world where I got to lead the charge on business development for a small consulting firm.

Had A LOT of success there.

I got poached to be the VP of Sales at a Hubspot Inbound Marketing Agency which is what thrusted me into agency world where I’ve been ever since.

After building sales operations for other people I set out on my own to build my own dream.

That took me down a wild path where I’ve had to change my business model twice now to solve the bigger problem for agencies.

You see… when I set out on my own after my career of selling and building out sales departments/operations I didn’t jump into what Sales Driven Agency does today.

I did what I thought was the “right” thing.

I listened to my market (you, agency owners) and built a company around what you all wanted…

I should say, I built a company around what agency owners thought they wanted.

So I built an outbound sales lead generation agency (aka we did cold sales to drive leads for agencies) called TRIBE… 

And we were incredibly good at what we did… to the point where we were charging $20,000+ per month on retainers.

But… here’s the problem.

No matter how good we were at what we did, we still weren’t able to move the needle for our client’s top line revenue as much as we thought we would be able to. 

What was happening was we were solving “a” problem, but we were not solving “the” problem.

We were solving for the “leads problem” when in actuality the underlying problem was that most (almost every single one) had a broken sales infrastructure and no way to actually solve for that.

It was like putting a bandaid on a massive gash that required surgery and stitches.

And that frustrated me.

So, I did what any sane person would do… I shut down a successful company and built one that actually solved the bigger problem.

(My wife was really happy with me as you’d imagine — kidding. She is a rockstar but this definitely made her a little uncomfortable)

I couldn’t just sit back and not solve the bigger problem when I knew I could… I did it at the Fortune 100 level, did it for the consulting company and inbound agency, and did it for TRIBE.

Sales Driven Agency was born.

And now we’ve had the privilege of serving hundreds of agencies as clients and probably tens of thousands of agencies from stages, podcasts, and channels at this point.

You. Are. My. People.

Sales Driven Agency was created out of a pain point that I saw a lot of my agency owner friends experiencing around growth… and more specifically… around SALES.

They couldn’t crack the code.

Afterall, you haven’t had the type of background that I have had…

…and thank goodness.

If you were just like me then you wouldn’t be the awesome, creative, strategic agency owner that you are today.

But we are different and we both exist for a reason.

My reason just happens to be that I can help you grow a predictable and scalable agency by building out your entire sales operation.

My experience has enabled me to build a company that can solve digital agency’s biggest problem and achieve what most agencies dream of achieving…. predictable, sustainable, and scalable growth through a sales operation that doesn’t require YOU, the agency owner, to be involved in sales.

If that’s your dream too…

I want to help you go after it and get it.

Give us 30 minutes of your time on a strategy call and let us prove it to you.

Cheers,
Joey Gilkey
CEO  |  Sales Driven Agency