must get this. How do you deal with clients when they suddenly come to you and go, Hey. The phones have stopped ringing. is there like a internal strategy that you guys have to mitigate a customer who's in full on meltdown mode? So here's my advice to agencies. Number one, and I'm so afraid of saying this because know this is going to be thrown back at me. We should be the first one saying it. it depending on the client's spend. if they're not spending a ton, the longest period of time that will go without looking at a count of three days. So if you're spending, five grand a month, it's probably a three day check in because there's just nothing you can do between that. You have to have time to build up, right? So every three days we're going to jump in. And if we notice a downtrend, especially if it's distinct, what I want my team to do is just reach out and just be like, Hey, James, I saw a drop. Probably not a big deal, but I'm going to keep an eye on it. if you're an agency or an agency owner or a client manager, That alone is the thing that will build trust and maintain trust of the client for a millennia. And what sucks for most agencies is most of them are doing the work, but they're not communicating that they're doing the work. So they actually are going in and they're going, Oh, you know what? That's a drop. That's interesting. It's probably just, The, a trend or whatever. I'll come back and I'll look at it in three days. But then the client sees it the next day. They're like, Oh dear God, what's happening. And now the next words that you say are the most frustrating words. I know saw it yesterday. It's not a big deal. and either, if when you saw it yesterday, you didn't tell me like, I'm now I'm mad, or I think you're lying and you're trying to. Pacify me because anybody who sees that downtrend is there. I rate at that point. So for agencies, number one, get out ahead of it and be the one that brings up the problems. So many, especially younger agency owners. They think that if they can hide from the problems, that's not your job. Your job is to bring the problem and then sit and watch it with the client. And you're like, Hey, we're going to have to take care of this together. And that's all the client wants from you. They're not going to blame you for the problem. If you can make a reasonable case, as long as you didn't cause it. So that's number one. Number two is anytime a client comes to you and says, Oh, things are down. Everything's horrible. The world's on fire. my initial reaction used to be like, calm down, which is the wrong word. the real key I think to life is complete and total empathy. And it's, this looks really bad. I agree. Look at what they're looking at and respond to what they're looking at the way that you would respond to it as though it was yours. So they'll be like, my sales are in half. And you look at that and you're like, Oh yeah, I see that. You're absolutely right. and man, if my sales got cut in half, I'd be freaking out. Let's dig in this together. And then it's, Hey, you know what? I think we should actually stay calm. We don't want to make any big rash changes. Let's go figure out why this is, but trying to jump to logic right out of the gate, I think is a flawed model. I think it's empathy first. I agree if I were you and then you get to, now it's not you and I across the table from each other. I cross over to your side. We lock arms together. We're buddies and we're like, going to go tackle this. And I realize that feels a little touchy feely, but I just think it's so important to stop and to, Put yourself in the other person's shoes and realize, man, this for me is a job. I'm managing one account. I've got 30 accounts on my slate and I've got another call in 29 minutes. For this person, this is their livelihood. Let me just stop for a minute and say you know what? This would freak me out too. and I'm going to get to the bottom of it and then do that. that's the other thing is actually do the damn job. That was such a departure, dude. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to get on like a weird soapbox to Liliquid, forgive me. No, don't worry at all. I think, I go off on tangents all the time. So I'm the worst person for that. I had an idea when you were talking about all the things that could go wrong to kill your conversions. one of them that's come up for us often is, people starting to bid on your brand traffic or, not just your brand name, but the names of your products and you don't realize it, And so you're doing all this amazing awareness building. And then I sneak it, which is something I do, by the way, I'm not telling you it's a bad thing. I actually think it's a great. Doesn't it? Who doesn't do that? That's exactly what you're not doing it. You're flawed. Yeah. but somebody sneaking in and scooping out your bottom of the funnel traffic, and you don't even realize that they're doing it, but that's the sort of thing you'd pick up again, doing a visibility check, looking at your Google, your front page of Google and making sure you do that as well. Not in like your browser, just so you're not getting served the personalized results. if you want to be real sneaky, if you're bidding on somebody else's brand, go figure out where their corporate offices and exclude their corporate, exclude that geography from your campaign. And that way, if they're being lazy about the way they check, they'll never know. Oh, that's mean. Yeah, straight up. I don't know who would do such a thing. That's fantastic. that's one of those things you would identify. I'd like to think you'd identify and just being familiar with your AdWords account would pick that up. for most people. but yeah, Google is going to show you auction insights. It'll show you who's bidding on it, but if you're not bidding on name, you don't get that data. This is not as relevant, but, you mentioned if somebody comes in and, price matches your product, or they have a bitter image. this came from a friend of mine who sold memory cards. He sold more money in memory cards. For two or three years than anybody else in the world. He was like the primary, the number one memory card guy. he was the biggest buyer from like the whatever plant in China makes the memory cards. The thing about memory cards is a memory card is a memory card, right? Like the value proposition is very slim. You're going to have a hard time convincing me like my plastic is actually more durable. And so the thing that he did that I thought was absolutely brilliant is he would put random ad hoc stuff on the memory cards, like recipes. And so now you're, it's okay, I need a 32 gig memory card and I have two and they're the exact same price, but this one has, like every Martha Stewart recipe ever made or whatever. And it's, and so as weird a departure is, that is one thing that I think e comm store owners should do is supplement with digital products. if you're selling a barbecue grill and I'm comparing your grill to 15 other grills and they're all basically the same price, but you've got a four hour masterclass from the guy that just won, barbecue off, 2023, which would cost you nothing, right? Like it would cost you to be like, you call up that guy who's a local celebrity, but it's not like he's a billion dollars. And you're like, Hey man, if I pay you a grand, can you just record a video using whatever product this is? And, or I'll send you a free barbecue grill or whatever. And now when I'm comparing barbecue grills, It's Oh dude, I get that. And I get the masterclass. And I think you do that. I think you do that for mechanical pencils. I think you do that for cell phone, like just give them a tutorial, how to, or whatever. And now that bundle becomes a category of one and you're no longer competing only on price. enhancing your offering, in a way that would be difficult for a lot of people to match as well. Dude, the cost of delivery is absolute zero and it's a little bit of relationship building and you just got to edify and credentialize the person that you're using because there's some brand building there too. So many influencers would do that for free just because now they're going to get the brand awareness.