Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] I decided to cold call the top 50 fastest growing companies in Australia. I cold called them. Was a grind. I had to get past the receptionist. I had to find out who the decision maker was. I should have made a million dollars. It took me two weeks on the phone and I generated exactly $1,700 in new revenue. I said to my business partner at the time, I'm never doing cold outreach again.
[00:00:27] Hey, welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, the most helpful podcast for digital agency own.
[00:00:32] In this episode, I just want to share a practical AI powered content system that lets you batch create weeks of high quality content in just a couple of hours. Instead of trying to keep up with unrealistic content demands, you're going to learn how to build a system that turns one idea into an entire content engine. Across YouTube, your blog, social media and email, we'll cover why most content strategies fail and you burn out. How to create a brand guide in less than 60 minutes using AI, how to generate a 12 week content plan in just a few minutes and the system for turning one video idea into blog posts, social media content and email campaigns. How to track which content actually drives clients and a whole lot more. And hey, if at any point you're listening to this and you know that you just want to take action on this, but you haven't made any notes, that's okay. Just go to Instagram, follow us at Agency Mavericks and send us a DM with the word trust and I'll get you a step by step action plan so that you can implement everything that we're talking about in this episode. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Listen. The era of cheap outbound is over. The agencies winning today are building authority driven inbound engines, right? So cheap meta ads, cold email, it just. They just don't work on their own. Michael Leben said that when you send a cold email and land in someone's inbox, people are going to look you up online and they're always going to choose the competitor who's been posting regularly as opposed to the ghost. So let's talk about the friction that you're feeling. Right? Referrals have dried up. The market's tighter word of mouth is just not what it used to be. I speak to agencies that are doing three or four million dollars a year in revenue, and referrals at some point always dry up. You cannot rely on referrals and word of mouth because you have no control over it. And when you turn up the volume on cold outreach, whether it's Facebook ads or cold Email. You just hit resistance. Decision makers are drowning in automated pitches. I don't know about you, but I get pitched multiple times a day across Facebook, Messenger, LinkedIn, email. In fact, my transparency post, my pin post on my Facebook profile says that if you're going to pitch me, it better be a fucking good offer because I get pitched so, so much. You better do your research. And the irony is, most people pitch me and they think I'm an agency. They don't even bother to read my profile. I haven't been in the agency game since 2017. I'm an agency coach and I've been that way for 10 years. I'm about to launch a new agency, but they haven't even been doing the basics. And that's why people don't trust cold pitches. It's like walking up to a stranger in a bar and asking to have sex, right? It's takes a lot of courage. It's exhausting. It destroys your reputation, it destroys your confidence, and it kills your margins because you're going to end up competing on price just to win the deal. And if you've got a team, the pressure to feed your team means you take on bad clients with bad projects, bad outcomes. And so here's the alternative. I want you to stop chasing people and start attracting. And this is the long game. Yep, welcome to the jungle. Put your big girl panties on and your big boy panties on and let's play the grown up game. Okay? Stop chasing people and start attracting them. Position yourself as the undeniable expert, the authority, the trusted source of information. You create that gravitational pull where prospects turn up on a call and they're educated, they already trust you and they expect to pay a premium. By the way, if you're doing any cold outreach, if you're doing Facebook ads, or you're doing Instagram ads or YouTube ads or TikTok, or you're doing cold email.
[00:04:08] Having the trust engine and having this authority content built in is just going to help. There's no downside from doing this. The idea is you move from annoying vendor who's just pitching your services to a trusted advisor before someone gets on the call. So the way that we do this is we call this the trust engine. And there are three phases to the trust engine. Phase number one is content. Now stop posting generic updates. No one gives a shit about your new logo or what happened at the Christmas party or what happened at that fucking networking event you went to. Stop doing that. Publish deep, opinionated insights that solve specific problems for your ideal client. The only reason you should be posting images of you at a networking event is if you are on stage sharing your opinion and being seen as an authority. Document your frameworks, share actual SOPs.
[00:05:01] Give away the recipe. So they hire you to cook the meal. Think of all the famous celebrity chefs. What do they do? They publish a recipe book. Every piece of content you produce becomes a permanent asset. It doesn't disappear, it becomes part of the trust engine and the 7114 framework, which I'll talk about in a moment. Phase two is to capture people who are engaging with your content. Don't leave attention for floating in the wind. Drive your content to a high value asset. A custom GPT, a diagnostic tool, a definitive guide, a private briefing, right? Get their name, email and a verified phone number. There is no reason with today's technology that you cannot verify someone's phone number before you deliver them the free thing that you're offering, right? A simple code to their phone. They verify their code. You've now got a verified phone number. And over time you build a list of people who are raising their hands and saying, I'm interested in what it is that you have to offer. I just want you to take a moment now and go to your CRM or your email marketing platform, if you have one, and count. How many email addresses do I have that I'm emailing every single week and adding value and being useful. If the answer is not at least a thousand, you've got some serious work to do. People who put their hand up and opt in for your free thing, they're warm prospects. They already know what you do and why it matters, right? They're engaged and you can do this from free organic content. Phase three is to consult, don't pitch people. Invite them to a structured conversation to diagnose and prescribe. That is your job, right? We have a whole methodology here called Get Paid to Close, where we teach you how to get paid to close a new client into an ongoing engagement. And so this is the shift from a sales pitch to a paid strategic engagement. By the way, I'm going to make a whole other video about this, but with everything that's going on with AI right now, in 2026, early April, at the time of shooting this video, in 2026, you've got one product left. You've got one thing left that you can sell your clients that cannot be replaced by AI. It is your unique thinking and your unique take on how they can solve their problem and achieve their goals. That's all you have left. Right.
[00:07:27] So I just want to recap here. Produce content, super opinionated, super deep frameworks, processes and just give, give away the farm. Push the free line as far as you can. Give away as much free content as possible. Then send people to an actionable tool or some kind of framework where they can take action on what they've learned in your piece of content. Yeah. And then invite them to a consult where you can help them by working with them or working for them to get the thing done. Without the first two pieces, you're just another vendor and you're going to compete on price. If you produce content and you give something away that's highly valuable to them and doesn't cost you much. This is why custom GPTs are such a great idea. Then they'll already see you as an authority and they'll reach out to you to hire you to do the thing for them. Right. It makes perfect sense.
[00:08:20] And here's what Google's own research tells us about how trust is built before a purchasing decision. Google calls it the 711 4. Actually they call it the zero moment of truth, but it's kind of been, the phrase has been coined the 711 4. And what Google have said is that a buyer needs on average seven hours of engagement with you across 11 touch points in four different locations before they're ready to buy. Now this isn't theory, this is Google's data on how modern purchasing decisions are made. And the way I think about it is if you're an agency, a coach, a consultant, you're selling services and you're selling high ticket services. And I define a high ticket service as, you know, I probably need to get on a phone call with you before I make a decision. I'm not just going to go to your e commerce store and buy a $5,000 a month retainer or a $30,000, you know, website.
[00:09:15] We need to have a conversation before I'm ready to make that decision. That's what I call high ticket. If I can buy it without a zoom call or without a phone call, it's not high ticket. And so to take someone from stranger to all prospect to high ticket client, Google have said, requires seven hours of engagement with your brand, ie content across 11 touch points and four platforms. Now the good thing is we use high level as our CRM and so that just automates the shit out of everything. Right. Someone signs up for one of our free things, we send them emails, we send them text messages, we send them off to our blog, we send them to our YouTube channel, we send them to the podcast.
[00:09:51] Yeah. And very quickly we can get to that 7114 metric very, very quickly. And this is why every single piece of content that you produce is not just a post, it's an asset. A blog post, a YouTube video, a podcast episode, a LinkedIn article. Each one is a building block in your 7 11, 4. So every time someone consumes a piece of your content, the clock is ticking towards that seven hour threshold. Yeah.
[00:10:16] As I said, we run all of these automations at a high level. So when a prospect enters our pipeline, high level automatically texts and emails them links to our content across multiple platforms. By the way, if you don't have a high level account, there'll probably be a link near this description to sign up for one of our free trials. So they get a YouTube video, they get a blog post, they get a podcast clip. Each touch point is a different location. And this is how you get that feeling that holy shit, you guys are everywhere. Every time I'm on the Internet, all I see is, you know, all I see is this brand. It's not accident we're not leaving it up to the algorithms to just magically make us go viral. We're engineering this experience. Right. So each touch point is a different location. Each one builds more trust. So by the time they get on a call with your team, they've already consumed hours of your thinking. The sale is done before the sales call starts. Okay. With cold outreach every month, you start from zero.
[00:11:12] You stop sending emails, you stop running ads. The pipeline dries up in two weeks with the trust engine, which is a fancy name that we've given it so that it's easy to talk about, easy to teach, and easy to distribute, and easy to do for our clients. The content you publish today is still building trust in 12 months time. I promise you, you publish a YouTube video today, it's going to get no views. Go back and look at it. In 18 months time, it'll have more views. YouTube videos don't disappear like LinkedIn posts or tweets. They tend to compound.
[00:11:42] The pipeline becomes self sustaining.
[00:11:45] This doesn't only work for digital agencies. Marcus Sheridan was on the WP Elevation podcast 150 years ago when I was running that thing. And he ran a fiberglass swimming pool company called river pools. In 2008, the global financial crisis hit. The housing market shit its pants in the US and he lost 80% of his market overnight. He had 250 grand in loans and no pipeline. So instead of buying ads, he couldn't Afford. He built his own version of the trust engine. He answered every single customer question by writing a blog post. He talked about pricing. He talked about problems, comparisons between the different types of pools. He talked about things that his competitors kept close to their chest. The result?
[00:12:27] One single article on how much a fiberglass pool costs generated two and a half million dollars in sales. River Pools became the most trafficked pool website in the world. They grew through the recession.
[00:12:42] So if a pool company in rural Virginia can build a trust engine that dominates a national market, your digital agency has absolutely no excuse.
[00:12:52] Now I know how soul crushing outbound is because I lived it. When I started my agency, there was a website here in Australia that wrote an article on the 100 fastest growing companies in Australia. It was called Fast Company. And I decided to cold call the top 50 fastest growing companies in Australia. I cold called them. Was a grind. I had to get past the receptionist. I had to find out who the decision maker was. I had to figure out, you know, and this is in like 2010, where no one knew how to use the Internet. I should have made a million dollars. It took me two weeks on the phone and I generated exactly seventeen hundred dollars in new revenue. Partially because I didn't know what the fuck I was doing and partially because cold calling is the absolute worst way to reach out to people. I didn't even have a blog post that I could point them to. Like, it would have been better if I said, hi, my name's Troy from Tonto Digital. We just published a blog post on how you can do XYZ on. I want to know who to email it to because it's super helpful and I think you guys could benefit from it and I'm not asking for anything in return. I've got nothing to sell you. We're a capacity at the moment. I genuinely just want to help. Who should I email it to?
[00:14:00] Right? That would have been a better outcome than me going, who's the decision maker and can I sell you some shit? So exactly $1700 in new revenue, right? Worse than that.
[00:14:09] I just felt so shit and icky and dirty and slightly salesy and pathetic and needy about the whole thing. I literally would just like shower every day and just try and get rid of the yuck. It just felt fucking horrible. I said to my business partner at the time, I'm never doing cold outreach again. The next week, I put my iPhone on a tripod with one of those little fucking iPhone holders that had just come out at the time in my Office. I recorded 16 one minute videos called the 60 Second Lesson and I taught one thing about digital marketing in each video And I published one video every Thursday afternoon for 16 weeks. And I was so new back then. I put them on Vimeo. I didn't even put them on YouTube, right, because I was an idiot. I had no idea what I was doing.
[00:15:01] I published a video every Thursday afternoon for 16 weeks and by the end of that 16 weeks I had enough business in our pipeline to get us through the next 12 months. I got asked to speak at digital marketing conferences here in Australia. I got asked to speak at wordcamps around Australia, which then led me to get asked to speak at wordcamps internationally. That was the absolute end of Outbound for me. Now yes, we still run meta ads, we've still done a little bit of cold email, but we always make sure that we have got content and a trust engine built on the back of it, right?
[00:15:34] So just want to bring this back to something super actionable for you. The era of cheap outbound is done. Agencies who are scaling today are building authority driven inbound engines, right? Build the trust engine content to prove your expertise and create permanent assets.
[00:15:53] Then capture people who are interested in what it is you're talking about by offering them something highly valuable that cost you nothing. Custom GPTs are the bomb or even like a custom bit of software. Just don't spend a week vibe coding something unless you've got a whole bunch of people putting their hand up on a piece of content. The fastest way to validate whether or not a lead magnet is going to work is to say hey, I built this thing that helps this particular client get this outcome. If you want to leave a comment below or DM me if you get no DMs and no comments, don't build it. If it blows up, go build it. Just go fire up replit or Bolt or claude code or whatever and just build something and then build that warm audience. Email them at least a couple of times a week to keep in touch with them and then consult, diagnose and prescribe. Do not pitch okay? Feed every asset into your 7114 automation stack.
[00:16:42] Stop chasing strangers and start attracting clients who already respect your process and respect your value.
[00:16:49] Hi, thanks for listening to the AgencyHour podcast and a big thanks to E2M Solutions for sponsoring the AgencyHour podcast and helping us make it possible. If you need help support scaling delivery without hiring. They are one of the most trusted partners in the agency space for white label development, Design, SEO and AI. So go to e2m Solutions.com AgencyMavericks hit them up, have a conversation with them and get on board. All right, remember to share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. Also remember, if you want a complete guide that walks you through our AI content system, check out the link in the description. Just go to Instagram Instagram, hit us up on agents in Mavericks and DM us the word trust and let's get to work.
