Rev & Reach Episode 10 – When the Wheels Fall Off: Navigating Client Engagements Gone Wrong – Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest, and you are welcome to this episode of Rev and Reach. I’m here with Kiley Metcalfe. Say hi, Kiley.

KILEY: Hi, everybody.

LORI: And we are going to have a little fun today talking about client engagements that went wrong, because there’s lessons in here, right? There’s things that we learned, and there’s things that we hope we can teach our other clients, right? So we’re going to start with a story of a restaurant that we worked with, and we were so excited. It was a really cool concept. How would you describe them, Kiley?

KILEY: I would say it was, like, kind of high-end luxury bar food, almost. They had so much fun with their menu, with the types of creative spins they took on everything from burgers to tacos to ice cream to their cocktails and everything in between. It was very creative. It was very different. And, you know, with that, the food is good.

LORI: They were the home of the $20 hamburger, right?

KILEY: Yeah, $20 hamburger.

LORI: So things had to be really good, and really the service had to measure up. It had to be a really great environment in order for them to be successful, right? So we started working with them, and I think we had the account for about nine months, right?

KILEY: That sounds about right.

LORI: Some of the basic things that we know to be true about social media, they didn’t agree with, and that’s where things can get a little crazy. In this particular—we’ll just call it the restaurant—in this situation, with the restaurant, they didn’t believe that they should have to put out much effort or give coupons in order to maximize the results of their social media. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get them to do coupons that were social-only—things like that that let you reward your social media audience and turn them into on-site customers of your restaurant. And we kind of fought with them for a while about it. What do you remember as being the biggest problem with them, Kiley? It’s been a couple of years.

02:25

KILEY: Yeah, I distinctly remember, and they were, you know, to their own credit, they were very upfront at the beginning of engagement that it was really important to them to see tangible ROI from a social effort, which, you know, you’ve heard us say here before, that’s a really difficult thing to do without things like, you know, social media-specific promotions and coupons and contests and discounts and, you know, things of that sort. If you’re not rewarding the audience that is engaging with your marketing, whether that’s social media or email or, you know, Google—even, you know, whatever that looks like—if you’re not rewarding those people that are paying attention, finding that ROI, especially in relation to a restaurant, when you’re not running ads that are leads, right? Of course not. We’re not looking for leads. We’re looking for restaurant patrons, right? They were very upfront about that, and it’s something that, you know, one of the things that I love about us and our company is that we’re not gonna, we’re gonna set realistic expectations from the jump. It doesn’t serve us or our clients if we lie and say, “No, 100%.” You’ll see the direct translation in some industries you can. In this one, it gets a little bit trickier.

So we were, we had that level set very early on where we said, you know, we’ll do what we can, but ultimately, like, we want sales to go up, and that’s the goal here. So it was something we had gone back and forth about a little bit, I would say, throughout the entire engagement. You know, if they had a slow week, “What’s not working on social?” when, you know, it was the week of Fourth of July and everybody’s out of town, of course, it’s going to be slow. Every restaurant’s a little bit slower if you’re not in a tourist town, right? It was little things like that that would just come up pretty regularly. And not to, you know, we’re, we’re always very, like, hand up, “Our bad” if something goes wrong. But to the opposite of that, we’re also very, okay, well, if you’re slow over the week of the Fourth of July, that’s not really something that social media marketing can fix, you know. So, so, yeah, so it was a battle of setting realistic expectations without, you know, kind of achieving that middle ground of, okay, well, you want tangible ROI to be seen from social, then we really need to give our customers something in return to get them in the door here, and to be able to show you that people that see our content are people that are coming in, right?

05:05
LORI: And the thing that I—that I just drove me absolutely nuts about that one—was the fact that the ownership really thought that they were doing everything they could. Why should they have to give a coupon? And it was a real bone of contention. And when you look out into the ecosystem of restaurants on social media, coupons are a huge draw, specials are a huge draw, happy hours with reduced prices are a huge draw. There are ways that you can prove that social media works. For example, you have a happy hour

that has these three to five cocktails that are on special. They’re really awesome, and you’re only going to tell people about it on social media. That means when people come in, they’re going to say, “Hey, I saw it on social media,” or your team is going to be able to say, “Hey, where’d you hear about this?” And you’ll get some solid return. They weren’t willing to do it. It just, and it was a $20 hamburger. And the other issue that we ran into, and this is something that I would recommend all marketers pay attention to, is that their team wasn’t really up to the challenge. They were not excited about being there. They were not excited about Kiley coming in to shoot social media content.

Oh, there was one guy behind the bar that was just so rude. It made it really hard for no reason. And, you know, we kind of figured out that there were some things going on that we were not able to do anything about behind the scenes. You know, things like quality of service that were a problem, but we couldn’t fix it, right? And so with the inability to get really great content with their team, which is an important part of any social media effort, and the fact that they didn’t want to give anything in order to get the returns from social, right? They were like, “Well, we pay you guys. Why should we have to give coupons?” It’s like, well, because you need to entice and draw people in, and then once they come in, your people and the quality of what you’re giving them—I mean, service is so critical in that business—yeah, that’s how you get success on social, right? It’s by a little coupon here and there to reward them.

And the fun thing about that too, which with restaurants is amazing, is the UGC. Now you’ll hear us talk about UGC. I did a great job managing the UGC for this client. User-generated content is when a customer says, “Oh, my God, this is such a great ice cream cone. I want to put a picture of me.” Or, you know, “Food eats first. I went to this restaurant, the food looks so awesome on the plate, they would share it,” and then I would reshare it. So, I mean, how—what was that like?

08:02
KILEYI: Well, I think it was, it was so interesting because you just made so many good points that tie into this. I think their UGC, the amount of content that this restaurant would get tagged in, was like nothing I had seen before, and nothing I’ve seen since. It was daily. It was, I mean, consistently very high-quality content, too. It did not take much to get UGC for this client. And it was easy because there was so much of it to pull from. You know, which, you know, to Kiley’s point before I did, I went into this restaurant pretty often to get that sort of content, to make some TikToks, to have some fun with the staff. And it turned out to not be very fun because nobody was really happy to be doing it.

 

KILEY: Yeah, which, you know, is so funny, because when we describe the vibe of this restaurant, the food and the menu—creative, fun, light-hearted. And the people behind the brand were not feeling that for whatever reason. But then I think that the amount of just sheer, really, really positive UGC that we were able to collect for them not only made up for the lack of, you know, really good, solid content we were able to get when we were in there, which did zero, but it wasn’t as much as I think it should have been, or could have been, right? But it also, I think, spoke to not necessarily the quality of service, but the quality of the product and how cool the vibe of the place was and how good the food was and how creative the menu was and, you know, just the fun atmosphere you’re in when you’re there, even if, you know, your server isn’t of, you know…

LORI: Yeah, maybe your server is a little snarky. A bit disgruntled…

KILEY: Right. Exactly, exactly. So I think that really spoke to how far we could have gone with this client just based on the quality of their product. And if all of those moving pieces that come together to make an atmosphere at a restaurant really, really special could have been pieced together, how strong it would have been. You know?

10:27
LORI: Yeah, it could have been something. It really could have. And in the end, because they weren’t able to prove the value of social media by having, you know, saying, “Here’s, you know, 20 people came in with a coupon last week off of social,” we couldn’t get them that kind of proof because they wouldn’t cooperate. And as a result, they wanted to cut our retainer. And they came to me. They were struggling as a business. They came to me, and, you know, they had a location in an area that wasn’t great, and they also didn’t have great service, so they started to see some declines in the revenue of the business, and wanted us to do the same work for like half the retainer. And based on the fact that they weren’t cooperating, that it was so difficult that we knew the service was never going to change—I mean, they really weren’t going to do anything about it, or so it seemed—we resigned the account, so we fired that client, and as much as I hate to do that, it was one of those things that neither of us was going to win.

They weren’t going to win because they weren’t going to change their service demeanor, and they weren’t going to do the things they needed to do. We weren’t going to win because we were never going to be able to prove that social media could grow their sales, because once someone went in once, don’t have a good experience, might not come back.

11:46
KILEY: I think, I think too that, I think that’s such a good point. And one of the things that, you know, we never want our clients to have to think about, but I think you know, in this regard, and on that, this platform, I think you know, hopefully most of the people listening can relate to this to some degree. When you, when you live in agency land, you don’t have just one client, yeah, and despite the fact that I genuinely had so much fun working on this account, this account was sucking up, I would say, out of a 40-hour work week for me, probably close to 30 to 32 of those hours. So this account became largely my full-time job. I was passing off other clients to other people on our team to make sure that our quality and the work was—it was in-depth. It was a lot. Like Lori said, they had multiple locations. They were expanding. We did a lot of emails. We, you know, we were going there. It was social on multiple channels for multiple accounts and locations. So that gets a little bit difficult. And I’m sure Lori can speak to that, you know, as the business owner, we’re a small team, and if, if we have, you know, one of our team members spending that much time on a single account? Yeah, it makes it a little bit hard to cut your budget without cutting the work, you know?

13:10
LORI: We knew if we cut the work, we would end up cutting our effectiveness. And we knew we were effective. We knew based on what was happening on social that people were really interested in this place and going, they opened a new location. While we were serving them, we were able to get into some, you know, some Facebook groups that were specific to that town and the foodies in that town and start talking about it. We did some promotion for some of their products that were sold nationally, and we saw some hits from that. So things were going well for the marketing. What wasn’t going well was the operations, and that’s something that we can’t fix.

13:54
So, when they asked us to reduce our scope, and I knew that that would mean, you know, basically just paying them, getting more for less. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. So we parted ways with them in as positive a way as possible, and we moved along. But we learned a lot about restaurants and how they work, and how social works, and how you’re able to get UGC, which is extremely effective, and the things that worked, we really got a good handle on what worked in the restaurant space. That’s a win. You can’t really say that’s not a win. And you know, anytime we can learn more about a specific type of industry for social media, the better off we are. So we look at that as a win, even though it sounds like a loss, and the wheels were falling off. And when the wheels fall off, we usually make sure we’re the first ones to walk away, because I don’t want to be hanging on. And we’re not desperate. You know, we have clients. We have a
good stream of revenue coming in. So let’s talk about the client we just fired a few weeks ago. Oh, this is fun. This was in our dental category that we’re so good at, too. So open up the floor on this one. Kiley, go ahead.

15:08
KILEY: So we’ve done an entire—I think our first episode with Rev and Reach was on our dental clients. We have, I would argue, the most experience, proof, results, and success in this category. We can, you know, to incoming clients. We can prove it. We have the numbers to back us. I think, I think we’ve earned our confidence in this category. We have no problem speaking to it, right? So anytime, anytime somebody new, like, within this space or in a space similar comes to us or, you know, enters our orbit. So to say, we get really excited. To some people, that might sound really interesting, because who loves going to the dentist, but we have a formula that really works, and this was our, I would say, first experience in the land of—in the land of dental—out of many people that are firms that we’ve worked with before, where I don’t think that our proof was necessarily what they wanted to see. All they wanted was overnight, instant, not leads, booked appointments with—

LORI: —with ROI seven to ten times ROI within the first two weeks. It was insane.

16:32
KILEY: Which, yeah, I think this is, this is something we talked about on that first episode. We know what type of content works in this category, and in a lot of ways, this one was a little bit different because Lori was able to, you know, be present. It was a little bit more local to where Lori is. A lot of our other ones are, you know, somewhere farther away in different regions of the US. But we rely heavily on these clients to kind of get us those smile reveals and the videos and the day-to-day, like photos of a happy patient with the doctor and things of that nature. So it is collaborative. Absolutely, it’s collaborative.

So when we are very forthcoming about needing, you know, somebody in the office that just a couple of times a week even can make a big difference to send us those photos, videos, you know, whatever, in whichever case, and we’re not getting those, that can make an effort take a little bit longer to take off. That’s not what happened here, which is very interesting. We hit the ground running. We started very quickly. We did a very brief strategy, a little bit less in-depth than what we normally recommend for clients, just to help them save a little bit on the cost, and we hit the ground running without any of that specific type of content. We had no smile reveals. We had not—when we first started, we had not a lot of, you know, patient-doctor content. But we’re like, you know, we’ll get going right away. Let’s get this thing off the ground. And we saw leads instantly.

18:16
LORI: Yeah, we had leads coming in. We had like 20 leads coming in. But what happened? This was so bizarre. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was two weeks into the engagement, or maybe it was a weekend, but a weekend that, after we had started posting, the dentist had a husband that was retired as a big wig from some global corporation, right? So he was, like, Big Cheese somewhere, and he would retired, and one day she said, “Well, I need you to come in and meet with my husband.” Okay? So I met with him, and he basically said that he needed seven to ten ROI on what we were doing, and he needed it by the end of the month. So this was two weeks in, two weeks left of the month, and we had already had probably 15 leads by then. But when you’re starting to set up a Lead Gen system, it takes a little bit of time to find the right targeting.

You know, they had, for example, a piece they gave us about whitening and actually putting a gem on the tooth. And we did a really fun video about it. We did some promotion behind it. They got a lot of calls that it was too expensive. So what that tells us is, after three or four days, back off, don’t promote that anymore. Wrong type of lead. And then we went with an Invisalign, and the Invisalign got some appointments, the general doctor conversation got some appointments. So by the end of the month, I believe we probably would have had 30 leads total, and probably ten of those would be solid. And one person had already come in and scheduled a treatment, you know, some kind of implant or something. And I went in and met with him, and he acted like nothing was happening. So toward the engagement lasted about three weekends, and at the three-week mark, I looked at the leads coming in, and I said, “I think you can agree with me that we’re headed in a really strong direction. We’d like our invoice paid.” And he said, “I can’t pay your invoice until I get seven to ten ROI.

What? What? And at this point, their front desk person had kind of stopped calling people right away, because she got a little disgruntled over the two or three leads that were just, that’s too much money, and she kind of thought, and I don’t know what happened, but she got a little less interested. And so I said, you know, here are a few things. We need to shore it up. We need to have your front desk call immediately because leads are most likely to close if they’re contacted within two hours of showing up in your system. And so some of the leads she was leaving for a couple of days and things like that. And he came back to me after I sent that email and said, we’re not—you know, this is—we’re following up immediately on everything. I knew that wasn’t true because I could see the spreadsheet and, you know, we’re not getting—this is the wrong targeting, and this is the wrong. And I knew that by the end of the month, especially if you got into 90 days, if you can give your social media 90 days to take off, he would have been, he would have had a significant increase in his patient load. I know they would have, because we were already starting.

And I’m willing to bet three or four of those actually are happening now, in June, but seven to eight ROI within two weeks isn’t going to happen. It’s just not realistic. And while I was expressing to him, this takes a little bit of time and things like that, I think he was kind of one of those mean girl kind of guys, and he just wanted to see me struggle. I mean, it really felt like that’s how he motivates people under his leadership, is to make you struggle and give you goals that were kind of insurmountable, that you would never achieve. And I sent him an email, and after he responded to that one, saying that they weren’t going to pay, with “I’m really sorry, but we’re going to walk away from this engagement. We’re going to walk away from this piece of business because we cannot be held to these standards that are so incredibly unrealistic.” Now, I know we would have gotten him a seven to ten ROI in 90 days, and so he’s so short-sighted, he couldn’t see it. And I wish, I wish I had access to that patient list now, because it would be so cool to see what happened in the last 30 days, right? But I don’t know. There’s a policy we have, Kiley. I’ll let you tell them about it too. We have a policy for our client roster that is really important to me.

23:08
KILEYI: Yeah, it’s our no assholes allowed policy. I know exactly what Lori’s referring to, and I was really glad to because obviously, in this case, with Lori being so much more client-facing than the rest of us, I was glad that she applied it to herself, too, because she was getting beat up bad by this client. But I think that, I think that it, you know, all of these, all of these engagements gone south, or engagements gone wrong, as you know, as Lori said earlier about the restaurant, they teach us something, yes. And I think, like, I think one of the things here, as Lori said it, was, you know, we had a contract signed. We had, you know, our plan in place. We’re not an agency that works, you know, off of, “We got you leads. Now you pay us.” We’re an agency like “We work. You pay us.”

LORI: We’re retainer-based.

KILEY: Yeah. And I think that when you initially kick off an engagement, which, you know, hindsight is 2020 but you kick off an engagement, and within two weeks of actually starting to post content, somebody comes in kind of out of, out of the clear blue, and says, “Well, no, even though a contract is signed and we’ve started working, and we’re posting, and we’ve put all of this effort in, red flag right there.”

Yeah, and I think it’s so true too, because, you know, it’s an industry we’re so confident in, and it’s an industry that we have this—I hate to say it, it sounds so click-baity, but we have this model that really genuinely works in this industry, like time and time again, very consistently. We, I don’t think we’ve had an experience yet when, when we work in the way that we want to within the dental space, that it doesn’t get a significant amount of leads. So I think that, I think that it’s good that it happened recently in this industry because, you know, we know that we can do it. And it’s not to a lack of confidence. It’s to a fear that once we hit that seven to ten ratio, which we know we’re going to do again, once we start receiving that content, once the effort has been built up for more than 5 to 6 weeks, of us coming in and doing our thing, that that will get there, but then still somehow that won’t be enough, you know, like if you can’t let us get in and kind of get our gears turning and do our thing and get there, and then follow up with the leads in the timely manner and the way that we tell you works, you’re never going to be happy, and then we’re never going to be happy, and no one’s going to be happy. And then what’s the point? If it’s not fun, right?

25:48
LORI: It’s true. And if it’s not fun, we don’t want to do it. And if it’s not effective, we don’t want to do it. So let’s talk about that. If it’s not effective, we’re not doing it. And that’s, that’s the thing that I find, I find so revealing about that particular engagement as well. That gentleman—I’ll call him—chased me. Like he came after us a couple of times like, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. I really thought that if anybody could do it, you could do it,” which is that weird love-bombing thing that sometimes people do. And then I finally, I had to tell him, “Please do not contact us anymore. Your front desk has everything. If you have other questions, go directly to Meta. I’m done,” because he kept kind of chasing us. So I got a feeling that it was his style, that that was his style of leadership, and I wasn’t having it. I just, you know, that’s—and we are very collaborative in how we work. We love client input. We love client feedback. We are here to support our clients, but we’re not here to be abused, and that happens sometimes. So we’re fortunate that we are not in a position where we have to take every piece of business. We will never just take any piece of business, and when the wheels fall off, we will learn from that experience. And I think one of the things that we learned is it may be that—and he was one practice, one dental practice, and that that the percentage of our retainer, which was only $2,300, was way too much for them. So what we’re going to be doing moving forward is looking for practices with multiple locations. If you’re a dentist that has a practice with multiple locations, get in touch with us. We can help you. We know how to do it. We’ve done it. We’re doing it now for a bunch of practices in Colorado, and we’re here to help.

So with that, I think we’ll let this one go. It’s always good to talk about the mistakes and the things that happen, and it will change how I onboard people, you know, that specific one will change how I onboard restaurants as well as dental practices, you know, because, again, we learn. So that’s what we’ve got for you today, guys. Thank you, Kiley, for joining me, and we will see you again very soon. Take care.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.