Timing, Relationships, and AI’s Impact on B2B Marketing Strategies with Rob Twells

Mike (00:18.995)
Rob, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B sales for podcast. Great to have you.

Rob Twells (00:31.03)
Okay.

Rob Twells (00:39.554)
Hi, Mike. Thank you for letting me join. Very excited to be on. Quick intro. I'm Rob, Managing Director of the Digital Maze, full service marketing agency, sort of three core areas to our business. So design, development, PPC covering Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and sort of everything in between there. And we've got the SEO team as well. Based in the Midlands, reasonably sized business. We've got about 30 odd people working full time for us. And we're really focused on the e-commerce side of things at the moment. So...

Yeah, just excited to speak with you today. still very much at the front end of the business on the sales side. So I hope we can add some value there as well.

Mike (01:17.848)
No, And something unusual about yourself, Rob.

Rob Twells (01:21.218)
Blimey, I don't think there's a huge amount of things that are unusual about me. I guess one thing, know, I'm a huge coffee snob. So I've got about five different coffee subscriptions, much to my wife's dismay. I get different beans delivered from different areas of the world for my ridiculously expensive coffee setup, which again, my wife gets very annoyed at. There's coffee beans and coffee grimes all over the kitchen.

Mike (01:23.367)
You

Mike (01:30.065)
How are you?

Mike (01:49.129)
So you do, grind your own coffee.

Rob Twells (01:51.274)
Yeah, that's my jam. That's my thing. At this point, I'm probably half coffee, half caffeine, and I can't really live my life without it. So yeah, if that's unusual, that's one thing about me.

Mike (01:53.477)
Okay, very good.

Mike (02:02.545)
It is slightly unusual, absolutely. Yes, I'm sure we could delve into a whole world of what makes a great coffee, where should the beans come from, ethical sourcing. We won't go into all that. We'll talk about the questions we prepared. So questions to be prepared. Let's have a quick discussion around three broad topics. So firstly, what success have you had with top of funnel activities? What tactics have worked and what hasn't? Everyone's interested.

Rob Twells (02:15.458)
Okay.

Mike (02:29.859)
in obviously an agency world and broader professional services. How do you sell B2B services? How do you find new clients? How do you get them excited about what you do? And then how do you engage them?

Rob Twells (02:42.146)
Yeah, I we've been a switch in the last couple of years. You know, this business has been going now for the best part of 12 years. Certainly for the first eight, nine, maybe even 10 years of this business, we were very much around getting a lead, you had a need there and then, taking them through the sales cycle and converting them. Whereas, yes, that's still always a big part of the way we grow our business, but actually, we've started to turn our attention much more towards top of funnel now because

There's a stat, I'm not sure if it's completely accurate, but I'm sure it's somewhat accurate, where something like 2 % of any B2B buyer is in market for your product or service at any given time. So the challenge then becomes, well, how do we engage the other 98 % that aren't in market right now? What are we doing to ensure that when they are interested or have a need for what you can offer as a business, that we're the top person, we're the top of mind person?

Mike (03:22.216)
Exactly.

Mike (03:30.086)
Yes.

Mike (03:38.429)
Your front of mind, absolutely. Which is getting really hard in a very crowded market space of content, a lot of which is not that much value add, to put it nicely sometimes, in the world. How do you cut through?

Rob Twells (03:40.128)
We're friends of mine.

Rob Twells (03:46.614)
is.

Rob Twells (03:55.242)
Absolutely. mean, we use sort of a few different methods. Some work better than others. So live events is something that we really like. The reason being is, know, the whole, the C word, I'm not going to say it, but, you know, we all spend two years indoors and I think we're only just, we're only just starting to come to the point now where, you know, being in the same room as your potential clients is becoming more and more important. I'm seeing that my sales pitches are

Mike (04:10.226)
Exactly.

Mike (04:18.878)
It is.

Rob Twells (04:22.044)
A year ago, they were all on Zoom, but now I'm being requested to go to boardrooms and meetings and do them in person, which is great. I love that. So the more we can get in the room with our target customers, the better. So that's one way.

Mike (04:29.075)
Yep, so do I.

Mike (04:35.123)
And just talk to me, Rob, about for new, new, so for net new business, before you get invited into that boardroom or into that one-on-one discussion with a senior person to discuss a potential brief, what typically finding has worked to take someone from they don't know who you are and they haven't got an immediate need to you're the ones we're gonna call, you're certainly on the short list, and we've got a problem that needs solving right now.

what typically happens in that kind of early stage.

Rob Twells (05:06.434)
Well, there is things like our events, like our webinars and stuff like that. the way we do it, they are, yeah, the way we do it is typically we have, take the events in the webinar, we have LinkedIn advertising, which has the targeting set up to attract our ideal customer. So our ICP, they get signed up, they enter into our email marketing system. So two things happen. They turn up to the event. So immediately they are presented with, so the way we do it is we invite

Mike (05:11.849)
So, webinar's still working.

Rob Twells (05:36.878)
people from our team to speak. So maybe there's three or four people from our team, heads of departments who speak and give value, that immediately builds trust with that customer. And then second to that, there's a whole load of sequences that go on behind the scenes that keep engaging the customer. So email sequences that add value, blog posts, other webinars we've done, recordings, invites to new events, podcast recordings that we've done, all this different stuff.

That again then gets handed over to our sales team to prospect. So what we do is we

Mike (06:07.529)
So the 11 contact points basically is what you're saying, think, isn't it? Is that they've either read something, they've heard something, they've seen something, they've done it two or three times, it's starting to make some sense, you're becoming a bit of trusted advisor without being spoken to way before any meeting happens.

Rob Twells (06:24.45)
100 % and as soon as it gets to the point where they've engaged with something of ours, whether it's turn up to an event, sign up to an event, click an email, open an email five times, that's the prospecting list for our sales team. Now that prospecting list continues to grow because we're always doing some sort of top of funnel activities. That list is really just ever growing for us. So the sales team have always got a pool of people to prospect to and that takes it from a cold outbound outreach to a

Mike (06:36.16)
Yeah, leadership.

Rob Twells (06:54.114)
slightly warmer outreach. And at that point you get much more engagement. The door doesn't get slammed quite as hard as what it would if it would have.

Mike (07:01.227)
so this is interesting, Rob. So let's just focus on this little bit. So it makes perfect sense. People that don't know you at all may have read something, listened to something. Let's say they've seen a thought leadership paper. You've written something about developing e-commerce sites, and they've downloaded it, and they're now into your ecosystem. They're on your mailing list, and they've opted in, and that's all fine. At that point, what do your salespeople do?

Rob Twells (07:18.562)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (07:30.301)
to nurture professionally that contact before they get to, we've got a project, have a meeting. What kinds of activities are working?

Rob Twells (07:39.818)
Yeah, so we worked really hard on this. So first of all, we take them out of the automation so it becomes less about automated outreach to actual unique direct outreach from our sales team. We use a tool called HustBot that allows us to sort of task up and all that kind of stuff. Aside from that, there's a couple of things that work really well. One is always having something top of the funnel available. So always having a reason to reach out for them. So got another event coming up because see you went to the last one, do you want to go to this one? I've just launched a new podcast. We think it would add value. It's with that.

it's with so-and-so would you like to listen to it. So always having a reason to reach out to them. The second thing is what the objective is. I I certainly spent a long time thinking the objective is a sale. to be always money in the back pocket. It's always been money in somebody's back pocket. But actually the objective now is because of the nature of our business, often works in budget cycles.

Mike (08:23.197)
Right. Yeah.

Rob Twells (08:34.796)
Typically somebody is looking at a marketing agency either at the start of the year or around April where the financial new year starts. So actually our objective is not actually to get on a sales pitch now, it's to work out when they're going to be tendering for their next agency. When's that? Yeah.

Mike (08:48.799)
Because there are selling seasons. I always talk to people about this. There's a selling season. It's normally end of year, last quarter, or it's spring before April. Typically.

Rob Twells (08:58.624)
Absolutely. So the objective now is, when's your renewal date with your current agent? When are you looking at this again? So almost having one of the members of our sales team turn to me and say, aha, just got the renewal date from company X. That's almost as good as a sale now, because then you can reverse engineer that. If their renewal date and they start looking at budgets with their CEO and whoever else is in March, we can set a task in January to reach out to them and say, hey, Customer, we know you're renewing in two months time.

Mike (09:03.058)
Exactly.

Mike (09:16.865)
Exactly.

Rob Twells (09:27.52)
Really great if you're on that list when you are ready to pitch, we're just putting our hand up. And that works really well. We get in the room. There's still two other agencies we have to pitch against, of course, but the opportunity that you can generate from that is huge.

Mike (09:39.551)
so Rob, so on this, now it's your choice clearly to reveal the conversion rates or not. But in that kind of cycle, when they've signed up to a newsletter or they've downloaded a book, a newspaper, or they've gone to an event to then becoming a client, do you know roughly what the kind of conversion rates are over that kind of length?

Rob Twells (10:05.014)
Yeah, I mean, the way we work out conversion rates is we have conversion on all leads and conversion on proposals or what pitch is presented. So our conversion rate on pitch is presented around 50%, which I think is really good. It's gone from

Mike (10:15.295)
Absolutely, quite right.

Mike (10:19.817)
that's really good. That's really good. I mean, typically I'd be seeing 20 to 30 percent at the very, very top end. I'm seeing 80 percent, but that's like really rare. And 60 percent, you would be in the top, very, very top quartile.

Rob Twells (10:35.712)
I think we stringently qualify. So actually we won't pitch if something's not quite right. And therefore to win one in two just means that we qualify really well. So yeah, bottom line for me is just as important as a sale is to get that renewal date, to get that trigger point for when they'll considering your service and product. And that's when Top of Funnel works really well in my opinion.

Mike (10:39.071)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike (10:47.858)
Exactly right.

Mike (11:02.015)
How many, Rob, do you reckon, if you look to all of those, what you now call kind of warm leads, to they've asked us to pitch for something, roughly, and you win one in two. So are we talking about 50 warm connections to generate one sale, or 20, or 100, or 1,000? Have you got a feeling for what that kind of ratio typically is?

Rob Twells (11:29.602)
You do need high volumes, but when I say high volumes, I'm talking more like 50. If 50 people sign up for one webinar, mean, we get anywhere from 50 to 100 people sign up to webinar. From that, we might get three renewal dates, something like that. And from that, you might get one to two sales, which I think is great return on investment for a single webinar. But there is a period.

Mike (11:52.575)
It's fantastic. But you've got a system. You have got a system.

Rob Twells (11:57.768)
the system, some of it's automated, some of it's process driven. It's a waiting game. You when you first implement this, you have to accept that it might be six months before you yield any sort of reward. And in that six months period, you put a lot of time and effort into it. But once you build momentum and you've done it for a certain period of time, each and every month that goes by, there's five or six renewal dates and five or six people you can reach out to, five or six people you can get in room as, and you start to build up that list of

Mike (12:10.418)
Absolutely.

Mike (12:22.523)
Exactly.

Rob Twells (12:26.174)
know, warmer and then hotter prospects, it becomes really interesting and system.

Mike (12:30.143)
So an old client of mine, many, many years ago, they were a big outsourcing firm. They did exactly the same. They tracked every single prospect that they talked to. Their goal was just get the renewal date. When is that outsource contract up for renewal? And then they logged in their CRM. And over a period of three or four years, suddenly you've got like hundreds of prospects, all the renewal dates, and you know when to start your nurture programs.

Rob Twells (12:43.606)
Thanks.

Rob Twells (12:59.402)
Absolutely. mean, again, in the nature of what we do, there's two typical buying seasons, as you suggested, sort of year end and sort of near April, but a lot of agencies do three, six and 12 month contracts. So again, finding out if the objection is, we're already with an agency, the follow up to that is always, well, what's the contract look like and all that kind of stuff. And again, you just log that. I know you're coming near the end of the point of the contract with Agency X. How are they getting on?

Mike (13:12.756)
Yes.

Rob Twells (13:29.123)
maybe we can provide some due diligence in terms of what they're doing and support them and that has ways in as well. yeah, having a date, having a trigger point is a key thing for me.

Mike (13:29.66)
Exactly.

Mike (13:39.391)
So just tactically Rob also, how do you, do you have a renewal calendar? So like a spreadsheet with all renewal dates in it, or do you log it in your CRM?

Rob Twells (13:47.326)
All logged into CRM. So logged into CRM and then typically six to eight weeks before the date, we have some sort of task for one of the sales team or me to follow up and just let them know that we're aware something's coming up. Can we be on the list when you do come to retender this?

Mike (14:06.335)
Fine. And the CRM will automatically trigger. It tells the salesperson, this month you've got 12 prospects, all of which are coming up for renewal in six months time. Brilliant. Very good. So second question. What have you learned about nurturing programs from the point that someone engages? I think actually we've covered this, I think. So think we've covered what happens from the point of top of funnel through to becoming a client. I think you've just explained that really, really clearly. So let's kind of jump that.

Rob Twells (14:12.726)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, 100%.

Mike (14:35.079)
Let's go to the last question, which is, as a bigger picture roundup, what trends are you seeing in the market in terms of signing new clients? Are needs and buying cycles changing dramatically, or is it just as everyone says, it's a slow market? What's your view on this?

Rob Twells (14:53.634)
Blimey, it a loaded question. is a loaded question because the market is very, very different to what it was five or six years ago. And I've been in this game 12 years now. So as much as I don't class myself as a veteran by any means, but I do feel like I've gone through various cycles now and can get a forefoot how the market's looking. The first thing is it's slow. It's very, very slow. There's a lot of cautiousness around spend now.

Mike (14:55.667)
Hahaha!

Mike (15:04.681)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (15:12.99)
You have.

Rob Twells (15:22.242)
There's obviously a lot of distrust in what we do. Again, I'm in the agency world, so marketing SEO, PPC, there's a lot of fingers being burned and you have to almost educate the customer what it is you do before you even convince them to go with you as a supplier. In terms of the landscape, for me it is slower. I think, you know, costs.

Mike (15:35.294)
Yeah.

Rob Twells (15:46.004)
across all businesses are inflating now and they're much more cautious as to where they spend. I think marketing is one of those areas, Longer sales cycles is probably the first and most frustrating one. We've seen sales cycles go from six weeks, maybe two years ago to three to four months in the last year or so. It's really frustrating for all sorts of reasons, forecasting, resourcing, et cetera, et cetera.

And in terms of spend, again, I don't personally think that spend has gone up in rate with inflation. still think that we are, and this could be an issue with my own business, but if I think about what we were charging two or three years ago, I wouldn't say it's a huge amount different to what it is now. And I think there's a lot more.

Mike (16:26.161)
Interesting. Yeah.

Mike (16:39.111)
And I think that's interesting, Rob. I think that and day rates is the same problem. I I hate negotiating contracts where it's all about the day rate because it's pointless. You're basically buying activities. And as an ex-buyer, as you know, I always thought that was a bit strange. Why don't you buy activities which encourages someone to do more activity? That's just counterintuitive. But putting that to one side, if you look at day rates,

Rob Twells (17:01.218)
100 %

Mike (17:07.495)
over the last like 10 years, yeah, they've gone up, but I don't think they've gone up in line with inflation. I've not seen that analysis, but I don't think they have.

Rob Twells (17:15.202)
No, 100. And again, this is again, same as you, it's just a feeling. But if I look at our day, when I talk about price and talk about day rate, you know, it's if our day rate was to go up with inflation, would probably be four figures at this point. And it certainly per day, it certainly isn't it isn't that. And like you said, I think the biggest shift I can see coming down the tracks and something that is very high, my agenda is moving away from it's very difficult to achieve. And we're not we're not there yet. But moving away from this input pricing model.

Mike (17:45.65)
Exactly.

Rob Twells (17:46.123)
The activity, the time is, it is scalable, but it's only scalable with quite thin margins, I think. And I think the industry and ourselves are looking to move towards being judged on what the output is rather than what the input is.

Mike (18:03.495)
Now there's a real rabbit hole here, which I've been very interested in your view, which again, we haven't prepared. So if you just take AI as obviously something that's very topical, think we're probably in, think Forrest has said there's like a pit of despair where everyone goes, well, it's not what it's cracked up to be, blah, blah, blah. So I think we're probably in that pit somewhere now and it'll come out the other side it's bound to. However, if you look at agency models potentially about how agencies charge for their

Rob Twells (18:20.49)
Yes, I'm...

Mike (18:34.155)
for their work, for their outputs, then, and you look at AI, it's going to get really difficult for an agency to charge hours when they're using AI to deliver part of that solution. Because you can't, it makes no sense.

Rob Twells (18:46.05)
That's exactly why we're going through this exercise. And this is such a huge topic internally at our place at the minute because this task that would have taken us four hours to do a year ago, it'd take us 45 minutes now. And in a minute, because our model still needs tweaking and I'll hold my hands up to that, the client sees the benefit of that. We don't get the benefit of that.

Mike (19:10.013)
Yeah, you don't see the benefit of that exactly. Yeah.

Rob Twells (19:13.442)
agencies have benefits. So actually the client's actually getting much more out of us for a similar price to what they were getting two years ago. We're probably almost on like two times speed if you think about fast forwarding a DED or whatever. So yeah, that's the issue with the agency model. That's nail on the head. That's absolutely nail on the head. But there's just this intrinsic, this whole thing about it's just the way it's been for the last 25 years.

Mike (19:24.743)
Exactly. Yeah.

Mike (19:42.013)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Twells (19:42.902)
It's very, very difficult to, you know, if you're pitching against three other agencies and your pricing is very different to the other two, how that goes down with the prospect, I don't know, but that's the shift we need to make as an industry. So it's not as see, it's not seen as obscure like it might be now. Moving towards the output model percentage of, know, revenue, or whatever it might be, I don't know, but that's the biggest issue with the agency model or any time-based model at the minute where AI can speed up your ability to do certain things.

Mike (19:55.699)
Definitely.

Mike (20:09.183)
I so.

Mike (20:13.439)
Because in my old buyer's role, we would look at the value chain activities. So for big deals, we'd take the value chain of activities to deliver an output and you break it down. And then you break it down into, well, there's eight value chain activities here. And then for each value chain activity, you do well. If we did it in-house, what would it cost? If we did it offshore, what would it cost? If we did it with an agency, what would it cost? If we brought the whole thing in, what would it cost? And then you optimize this model based upon quality.

Rob Twells (20:22.978)
Hmm.

Mike (20:42.451)
based upon price, availability, risk, and you start to build this of this optimization model effectively. And I think in agency world, working with clients, where it's more of a full service, which is more of what you provide, that's gonna become increasingly a discussion with your clients is well, which bits of the really high value add, which will pay a premium for and which bits are more commoditized, which we can automate.

I think that the real value is going to be unlocked when you can truly partner with clients and have that open discussion.

Rob Twells (21:17.44)
Yeah, I think the consultancy angle is going to be a big one as well going forward. know, a lot of this, there's been a trend over the last couple of years and this probably has impacted the market of, you know, we've churned clients because they're going in-house now. And that's the big reason as to why we've lost clients over the last couple of years. But I think it's because they can be so efficient in-house now with AI.

Mike (21:21.204)
It is.

Rob Twells (21:41.026)
of things but what they don't have is the benefit of know 32 people or 32 different experience brains like we have at our place so how do we sell that as a product or service or consultancy is the first thing that springs to my mind. But yeah I think the agency world is the next three years are huge I think for digital agencies.

Mike (21:48.377)
Exactly.

Mike (21:54.139)
Absolutely.

Mike (22:01.255)
I'm with you. I think it's enormous. Because I also think if you look at, I've been through, I think five recessions now, I'm accounted, over my business life, and growth spurts and technology changes, and when the late 90s and 2000s, the advent of the internet, et cetera. If you look at the insourcing versus outsourcing model that clients go through, it's a cycle normally.

Normally, they've outsourced it in high growth times and they insource it when costs get tough. I wonder this time if the insourcing trend that we're seeing and we are seeing it, clients are insourcing certain activities from agencies. I'm not convinced that's going to come back because of your point. I think what's happening is they're insourcing certain activities that normally they do with an agency because they've got enabling

AI ML technologies. And therefore that's unlikely to go back out to an agency. What do you think?

Rob Twells (23:07.286)
I agree. And I think we're in a period at the minute of we're kind of getting away with it because the use of AI isn't quite as clear cut as maybe it will be in two or three years time. When that becomes very, very obvious. Cause at the minute, you know, there's an argument to say that using AI is, is, you know, not dangerous, but it's not fantastic for your marketing. It's not good at doing this. It's not good at doing that. And I think companies get a little bit nervous and maybe just decide to steer clear of it and outsource it all anyway. So agencies are getting away with it.

It's been two years time when all this, the AI tools are much more mature and much more publicized and the boardrooms become much wiser to it and what the abilities and capabilities are. And everyone learns that actually it's a good thing rather than a bad thing. That's we're in dangerous territory as an agency. And if you haven't changed your model by then, you're probably in big trouble.

Mike (23:43.676)
Exactly.

Mike (24:01.107)
You are in big trouble. Yeah. Now's the time to do it. as you... Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, know, Rob, I'm fascinated by AI. I'm building my own AI product with an AI partner. I think it's gonna revolutionize, genuinely revolutionize consulting services, genuinely. I think it's, if you look at the results you get out of any of the foundation LLM models, the results are getting pretty good at reasoning.

Rob Twells (24:04.202)
Yeah, a of a grace period in there.

Rob Twells (24:12.034)
Mm.

Rob Twells (24:15.542)
Deal.

Rob Twells (24:30.018)
Hmm.

Mike (24:31.133)
Like O1 is a pretty good reasoning engine and you get pretty good outputs from it. So if you're not embracing it now in two or three years time, I think you're spot on. It's going to be a very different market. I think the other thing that's going to happen is the whole agentic model development is going to be huge in the next 12 months, whereby you'll start to get agents that you can genuinely give tasks to that it will automate those tasks.

and you can have interventions and you can check quality before it does something. But all of that, that's on our doorstep. mean, some of it you can do now. And so I think agencies, many agencies now are embracing that. The big agencies, the big networks definitely, definitely are. And they're spending like Publicis Group, Omnicom, WPP, they're all investing heavily in AI because they can see what's coming. And indies that aren't doing it, I think that's going to be a big problem.

Rob Twells (25:27.65)
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And like I say, it's high up on our agenda, very aware that the minute again, we're in this sort of getting away with it period. And I think a lot of agents are in the same boat as me where I'm thinking, right, we're okay at the minute, actually we're not, it's a bit of a timer. It's just, it's just sudden time we're just ticking down to, okay, you need to change your model now. We need to add value in different ways. then, yeah, it's tough. It's tough. And it's,

Mike (25:49.586)
Exactly.

Rob Twells (25:56.15)
But it's interesting at the same time, I think.

Mike (25:57.599)
So Rob, so I think answering that question together, know, do we think buying patterns, buying needs, behaviors have changed or is it just a slow market? My vote would be that they've changed. Would yours? He says lead in the witness.

Rob Twells (26:15.525)
Yeah, I know agree. Yeah, I know 100%. They have changed for sure. And I think the more mature the company you work with, the more wise they are to this kind of stuff as well. So the higher up the food chain you go, the demands are very different to when you're working with potentially a start for a smaller company. So yeah, we've got to change our model. And I think a lot of businesses that are on the time-based model have got to change as well. So yeah, certainly going be interesting.

Mike (26:34.013)
Exactly.

Mike (26:41.555)
They have. And that's a good thing.

Rob Twells (26:43.796)
Obliviate is a good thing, yeah.

Mike (26:46.409)
So this whole services as a software model, as opposed to software as a service, I think that is absolutely what's gonna happen is that our services will be deployed in part through AI enabled technology platforms. And then the clients will want us for a really high value ad consulting services on top.

Rob Twells (27:10.026)
I agree. I agree. And that's the route we're looking at going down to be fair. So how do we, yeah, how do we monetize our experience, our brains, our strategies, and then rather than doing the doing, because I think the AI is going to be doing the doing in next few years. So yeah.

Mike (27:23.697)
It is. So Rob, this has been amazing. Really great insights through 12 years of very, very practical hands-on experience at building pipeline and working with clients and delivering great results. What are your kind of two or three takeaways? If you were an agency leader listening and maybe they're not at 30 people, maybe they're at 10, 15 people and they're trying to scale up, what would be your advice to someone in that situation?

Rob Twells (27:49.154)
I think my advice would be to just be very, very conscious that as we've highlighted, buyer behavior is becoming less about buying time and more about buying outputs and buying value. And that typically means that your pricing model needs to change. So thinking less about day rates and rate cards and thinking more about what sort of value you add. There's a whole exercise to go through there about quantifying the value. It's not easy, it's very complicated, it's very complex.

Mike (28:04.905)
Yes.

Rob Twells (28:18.536)
I haven't got all the answers we're going through that process now. Yeah, my first bit of advice certainly would be to look at the model. Think about at the moment as well, like, who's seeing the benefit of your efficiency at the minute? Is it you or is it client? Because I bet you it's the client, because it certainly is in our case. The second bit of advice is it's not it's less about advice, more, it's a more of a rallying cry, whereas I'm in a lot of different groups.

Mike (28:31.975)
Aha!

Rob Twells (28:48.31)
you know, I'm communicating a lot with different agency owners and different agent leaders. And I think the general feeling is a little bit low, a little bit down, like the market down. But for me, I try to stay optimistic and I still think there's a lot of opportunity out there. You we've, we've grown this year only very slightly, but we have grown. So, you know, the signs are there. And I think the change of model I just mentioned.

Mike (29:09.151)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Twells (29:17.162)
represents an opportunity rather than something that's gonna kill you. So yeah, that's about two words of wisdom, should we say.

Mike (29:26.931)
Robertson brilliant. Thank you ever so much for joining me on Hagle the B2B Salesforce podcast.

Rob Twells (29:30.902)
Nevermind, thank you for having me. No words.

Mike (29:33.363)
Thanks Rob. And we're out. Okay, let me just stop the recording.