Building Your Brand on Social: How This Agency Uses Social Media to Scale

Welcome to our Agency Spotlight series! Each article will feature pioneers of the #agencylife and how they run their businesses in the modern world. This week, B2B Consulting firm, Skaled, share their tips on how they build their client's brand on social and how to create and maintain a great client-agency relationship.

Who are you? What is your background?

I'm Jake Dunlap, CEO at Skaled. I've been selling and advising companies on sales and marketing for nearly two decades. From telemarketing vacation packages in Springfield, Missouri to helping close seven-figure deals for some of the fast-growing tech companies in the world, I've worked with and advised 1000s of companies during my career on modern sales processes and technologies.

Before building Skaled, I held the roles of VP of Sales at Nowait (acquired by Yelp), Head of Sales & Customer Success at Chartbeat, and was the first VP of Sales at Glassdoor (acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion dollars in 2018).

In 2013, I founded Skaled to break the model of modern consulting. Practitioner led and results-focused, Skaled serves nearly 100 companies every year in building and modernizing their Sales and Marketing organizations.

How would you describe Skaled Consulting?

Skaled is a B2B sales consultancy focused on helping organizations and the people that work there reach their full potential.

We believe that today's buyers demand value-driven interactions, with one of those main touchpoints being social media.

Last year, I realized the white paper and blog play wasn't getting the results we wanted, so we shifted our strategy to building out my personal brand on social media. It became so successful that we took the insights we gained and began offering them to our clients through our Digital Presence services.

What does Skaled do especially well? What is your speciality?

Building out brands for individuals and their teams. We help sales and marketing teams get leads through social platforms, especially Linkedin. Everyone has a brand - everyone. You just have to decide whether you or someone else is in control of it.

What digital tactics have you found worked in your client's industry?

Using social media as a touchpoint in the sales process. You should be both prospecting on social and nurturing using social. This can be done by adding more of the right industry people to your network, and establishing yourself as a leader in your space to drive more business and brand recognition to your company or team.

Also, we've seen most B2B sellers and marketers need to be less professional. Overproduced, super-stiff communication from both sales teams and marketers is not what plays on LinkedIn and other social channels.

Any advice on building a great client-agency relationship?

1. Start focusing on the person. Get to know them and not just their business challenges.
   
   
2. Have a set rhythm, number, and type of interactions set for every account by tier. You should never have to think about who to reach out to on a given day. Of course, you follow up and talk when you need to but this is so nothing slips.
   
   
3. Level up your multi-threading skills. Across our client base, we see that having one point of contact who leaves the company as one of the top 2-5 reasons for churn...so avoidable. Go get two new POCs next week. The role isn't to be a service person or order taker. The role is about adding value. Make sure you add value and are never catching up touching base or checking in. That's when they cancel your monthly meetings.
   
   

What problems are you solving with HeyOrca?

With HeyOrca, we can streamline client approval process much faster and easier. It's a much more collaborative process, so clients feel more involved in the process. Also, with the events tabs, we are able to plan high-level strategy months out. This keeps us organized and gives our clients peace of mind that we're creating content aligned with strategy and goals.

Want to showcase your agency? Email us at katie@heyorca.com to have your agency feature in our Agency Spotlight series!

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