[Top Agency Series] Matchmaking Tips for Businesses and Agencies With Behdad Jamshidi

Behdad Jamshidi is the Founder and CEO of CJAM Marketing, providing access to digital marketing partners ideal for your brand’s current and future goals. His unique background in marketing, engineering, consulting, leadership, sales, and strategy makes him the perfect intermediary for connecting business owners with vetted marketing teams that fit their objectives. Behdad’s work has been featured in several publications, including MarketWatch, Bloomberg, National Post, and Financial Post. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:39] Behdad Jamshidi discusses CJAM Marketing’s services on offer for businesses and agencies
• [07:27] The pivotal role of conflict resolution in business and agency-client relationships
• [11:28] The truth behind the full-service agency myth and what businesses should really look for
• [15:10] Behdad discusses how CJAM Marketing helped a serial entrepreneur excel in personal injury law
• [17:57] Strategies for using influencer marketing agencies to leverage audience growth
• [19:55] Criteria for when businesses should choose to work with an agency over in-house teams
• [23:14] CJAM Marketing’s ideal customer profile
• [30:13] A case study on helping a client smoothly transition from a sold home service business to e-commerce
• [32:37] How to avoid the common pitfalls encountered by marketing agencies
• [37:31] How agencies can manage scope creep and maintain profitability

In this episode…

Many companies find it challenging to choose the right agency that aligns with their specific needs, often resulting in mismatches and unmet expectations. What is the secret to effectively bridging the gap between businesses and marketing agencies in a way that fosters efficient business growth?

Behdad Jamshidi, a marketing super connector, has mastered matching businesses with marketing agencies by vetting and working closely with over 850 partners. He shares his process of assessing businesses to ensure they are paired with agencies that can meet their unique needs and facilitate their growth journey. Behdad emphasizes the importance of communication and specialization, ensuring that agencies focus on their core strengths to deliver optimal results. By focusing on human interaction as a fundamental aspect of his matchmaking process, he has curated a network of specialized and high-performing partners who will take your firm to the next level.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Behdad Jamshidi, Founder and CEO of CJAM Marketing, about the nuances of selecting and working with marketing agencies. Behdad talks about the services CJAM Marketing offers, its evolution, criteria for when to work with an agency over in-house teams, tips for choosing your ideal agency partner, and the common mistakes marketing agencies make.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Behdad Jamshidi on LinkedIn
• CJAM Marketing

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

Related episode(s):

• “Navigating the Digital Business Landscape With Chris Yates of Rhodium Network” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Unlocking Sales Potential With Video Case Stories With Ian Garlic” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Negotiation Tactics From FBI Agent Christopher Voss, Founder of Black Swan Ltd” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Marketing agencies don’t understand business, and businesses don’t understand marketing. I thought I could be the person in the middle.”
• “Full-service is like a unicorn. If you’re trying to find a full-service marketing agency, you’re likely going to fail many, many times.”
• “I’ve always had this hope of finding 10 solid partners that would solve all the world’s problems. But that’s the agency world — you need so many different partners.”
• “Agencies are not scalable businesses — if you’re growing too fast as an agency, you’re going to break.”
• “The biggest problem agencies have is communication — knowing how to disarm and just be able to have a heart-to-heart talk.”

Action Steps:

1. Seek targeted expertise from agencies for core marketing services crucial to your business: This focuses resources effectively and leverages specialized skills for maximum impact.
2. Establish clear communication and scope with marketing agencies upfront: Transparency ensures a shared understanding of project boundaries and expectations.
3. Embrace the value of conflict resolution training for better agency-client relationships: This foundation enhances collaboration and problem-solving.
4. Regularly vet and refine your agency partnerships to maintain a high-quality network: Continuous evaluation keeps your collaborations top-notch and aligned with business goals.
5. Consider the growth pace of your agency carefully to avoid scalability issues: Managed growth ensures consistent quality and sustainable business development.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, a founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Behdad Jamshidi of CJAM Marketing to check them out at cjammarketing.com. And before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. One big shout out to Chris Yates. That’s how we met, actually, the founder of Rhodium Network. Check it out. That was a great episode. And since this is part of the top agency series, and I’ll share a little, B has a unique perspective on agencies, and has, I think, interviewed over 850 of them with his business. But some of the top ones, I had Jason Swenk on. He talked about how he built his business to over eight figures and sold it. I had Ian Garlic on, who runs Video Case Story. And B, I would love to get unique perspectives. He comes from an entrepreneurial family, and his dad had a restaurant, and the restaurant had live dolphins in it, which is strange in itself. Is even more strange that that restaurant was in Wisconsin, so that was definitely unique. Another one, Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps match private equity with agencies to help sell agencies. That’s what he does. I don’t know if you know Todd, but you guys would be good potential partners, so I’ll have to send him this. But he basically has a Second Bite Podcast.

Second bite because they’ll sell and then private equity sells again. Sometimes the founders make more on the second bite than they do on the first. So I wonder if you’ve seen some of those scenarios at this point with all the agencies, but check out that many more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So B as you know, we’re like the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content and run their business. So for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I know it is for you too, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people in companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce B, Behdad Jamshidi. He started CJAM Marketing, and after realizing that most companies don’t know how to evaluate the value of a marketing agency or assess their own needs, he created this where he is a matchmaker. So he’ll take a company, he’ll take an agency, and they’ll find that perfect mix of agency for that company so they can fulfill their needs, have the expertise and grow their business essentially. So every business is different, so not only in their needs, but also their growth process. So it’s not a one size fits all scenario. So in the past five years, B’s met with and assessed I was mentioning 850 plus marketing agencies. He’s vetted them down to maybe over 100 and their preferred partners that he’s vetted across all different marketing niches. And after pairing hundreds of businesses with the right partners, he’s found his skill set, it actually lies in the matchmaking process. So we’re going to talk about, how do you evaluate a marketing agency? When do you need an agency? And all of those questions that I’m sure you get a lot of B, and he’s been featured in Market Watch Bloomberg National Post, you know, Financial Post, and he’s got a unique background, which we’ll talk through. But B, thanks for joining me.

Behdad Jamshidi  4:23 

Yeah, thanks for having me. Jeremy, I’m excited.

Jeremy Weisz  4:25 

So there is a video version if you’re listening to the audio version. So I ask, I’m going to pull up B’s website as we’re talking, but just talk and start with CJAM marketing and what you do?

Behdad Jamshidi  4:39 

Yeah , so as you mentioned, I became a matchmaker. Originally, I was an engineer. I used to do sales engineering for a very long time. That’s where I learned a lot of my business consulting experience. I used to work with businesses in the mid-market, 50 to 1000 type, employee range, and really just like understanding what’s happening from a business sense and then building out road maps for them in technology. And on the marketing side, once I build up that skill set of business consulting, sales, leadership and technology experience, I got into the marketing world, and I took that same skill set, but I realized, as you mentioned, marketing agencies don’t understand business, and businesses don’t understand marketing, and I thought I could be the person in the middle where I’m doing the vetting.

I’d find partners that I want to work with, and after I understand what a business truly needs, I could basically help connect them with the right marketing partners based on where they’re at and where they’re trying to go. And a lot of the times, most businesses need more than one partner, typically it’s a mixture of two to four. And that’s where I kind of help, kind of like, guide and bridge that gap.

Jeremy Weisz  5:34 

Talk about, I know I get, I think it’s like the equivalent of Verizon in Canada that you worked for, talk about some of the lessons you learned in that position that you bring to just, you know, the business acumen.

Behdad Jamshidi  5:50 

Yeah. So when I was working at a TELUS is where I was working at, they put probably over $100,000 just in my training, from like conflict resolution to mediation training to storytelling to just like how enterprises need to work and all the different aspects to it, we got TOGAF training, ideal training, like man, the amount of resources put into training us was very, very high, and so that kind of gave me a step up when I started getting into my own business, because I could see what I needed to do, right? Like I am a solopreneur. I do have a team of eight to nine people working for me, but I do know where I need to head and what I need to do to set up systems and processes to kind of move things forward. And so that was one aspect.

The other aspect is, when you work for TELUS, you talk to all sorts of different businesses, from retail to not for profits, to senior homes to manufacturing, you get such a breadth of knowledge and experience about how a lot of these industries run. So you start understanding the different business drivers and business aspects, what the CEO is looking for, versus what their VP team is looking for, and looking how to cater that, and how to communicate that to all aspects of the business. So it gave me so much value, because then, when I’m talking to businesses now that aren’t in the, you know, 50 to 1000 type employee range. It’s a lot easier to understand and move forward with it.

Jeremy Weisz  7:06 

So I do want to talk about the evolution of CJAM, because it is a unique business model. But I do want to, you mentioned the conflict resolution. So I want to stick to that for a second. I’m curious, because this comes up a lot in business conversations, and I’m wondering, what have you learned in that sense, in the conflict resolution?

Behdad Jamshidi  7:27 

Yeah, the biggest thing for me in conflict resolution is making sure the other person feels heard. Like, that’s the number one thing, a lot of the times, like, even if we aren’t in the wrong, if you don’t feel that, like, if the other person doesn’t feel that they’ve actually been heard, their emotions have been heard, that they’ve taken every taken everything off the plate they’re not going to listen to, right? And so this is what I actually see a lot of, one businesses and also agencies struggle with, is just that aspect of conflict resolution and knowing, okay, something’s wrong here. Can I go into the talk? Put my ego aside. Put all the other stuff aside. Understand what the other person is seeing, so I understand where they’re coming from, so that once they get everything off their chest, I can come back and say, do you mind if I share kind of what happened from my side of the experience, once someone feels heard, then they’re open to listening to you. And I mean, this works for every other relationship, too in life, and it’s an extremely unique skill set and important skill set to have.

Jeremy Weisz  8:20 

Love it. Yeah, that’s it’s echoes. One of my favorite books was Never Split The Difference with Chris Voss. I had Chris Voss on as a guest, and he echoes all those sentiments that you just talked about. So I love that. And it’s not like I was saying it’s simple to do. I’m not saying it’s always easy, but it is. It’s a simple concept, because sometimes our ego gets in the way. Talk about the evolution of CJAM, because it is a unique business model and how you came to doing this.

Behdad Jamshidi  8:54 

Yeah. So originally, when I started out, I was actually building out websites, doing Google ads and SEO, and I was taking courses and all this different kind of stuff. So, after working on the weekends, I’d be doing a lot of that work. I really quickly realized I hated doing 80-hour websites on the weekend. I was like, man, I don’t want to do this. And I did some Google ads and SEO like, this is still a lot of work. And then I had someone say, hey B, we already have a referral model set up.

So if you want to send us like the website, we’ll give you a referral fee. So I was like, hold on a second. Like, I can just, like, set everything up and then, like, step away and get paid a referral fee for this. Like, okay. Like, this is an interesting model. Let’s go through it. And as I did that, I started realizing that, like, specific agency, they said they could do Google ads and SEO, but when the project was done on the website front and it passed off the other things, I was like, ah, you don’t do Google ads at that level. You need to do it at, and you don’t do SEO at that level. So my naive thinking was like, oh, maybe I’ll just go find an agency that’s really good at Google and SEO, and that solved that problem. It turns out that agency was really good at just building out creative and videos and that kind of stuff. And so I have this hope. And I was always asked myself the question, why have I met with over like, 868 different marketing agencies? Because they’ve always had this hope of, like, maybe I can find those, like, 10 solid partners that would solve all the world’s problems.

And to this point, I haven’t been able to do that, right. Like, that’s why I’ve met with so many, because you need so many different partners to be able to help support a business. So that’s kind of like, how the evolution kind of went and just kept adding partners and kept adding partners and adding partners, and as customers would ask me for more and different things, my network kind of grew to the point where I could potentially find anything that someone asked me to find. And so now that this is where we are today, where I have met as many partners as I have about 100 partners in the network, I’m constantly refining, and we’ll talk a little bit about the future later, I’m sure, but now that’s going to evolve into another way to make me even more efficient at what I do. But the one thing that I think is extremely important in my business, that a lot of marketplaces and things don’t do, is that human interaction, like someone actually being the filter on both sides and making those relationship matches. I think that’s what’s missing in a lot of the solutions today, is that actual human aspect of it.

Jeremy Weisz  11:06 

Talk about full service as a term, and I know you have a lot to say on this, and even instruct it from like an agency perspective, and also from someone looking for an agency perspective, talk through what you’ve seen when someone says, full service.

Behdad Jamshidi  11:28 

Man, full service is like a unicorn. It’s a unicorn. If people are trying to find a full service marketing agency, I would say you’re likely going to fail many, many, many, many times. I’ve been in this world enough times to know that it just doesn’t exist. What does exist, though, is that agencies are typically pretty good at one to three things, right? They might have some other stuff they do off the side, but if you’re mentally comfortable with that, you’re like, okay, well, they’re really good at the one to three core services that I need. But let’s say social media or influence and marketing is stuff that can be done on average, just because we want to get it off the ground, great, like, hire that full service agency, right? But you have to go in with the mindset of understanding, as a business owner, they’re not going to be the top level at all of those things. Usually, when I’m talking to agencies in the background, they’ll show me a slide, and they’ll say, hey, here’s the nine things that we do.

And we do these things really, really well. And I go, guys, listen, man, I’ve done enough of these interviews where I know you’re only really good at three. So tell me what those three are. And they go, well, listen, we don’t tell customers this, but these are the three core services. The other six we do when once they come in on these three services, we’ll do the other stuff, because they just want to do everything in one place. And that’s really starting to become a bit of a sticky point, right? Like they just want to take as many services from the customer as possible so they don’t ever have a chance of losing that customer, but another agency says they can do it. But I think if you’re working with really intelligent customers, or businesses that know how to scale and work with agencies, they’ll know like, hey, I’m using this agency for these two things. I’m using this one for these two things, and I’m not gonna overlap them, because I know they can’t be good at everything.

Jeremy Weisz  12:59 

Talk about that for a second. How can agencies improve their marketing? Because, as you just said, that agency you talk to has all of them, let’s say on the website. Would they be better off, just I don’t know through your conversations with them, do they realize, well, maybe we should literally our messaging and everything should be towards those two things. Or how can agencies improve from that mindset of, well, I don’t want to lose the client, because they may be looking for all these things, but really highlight what we are absolutely best in class in

Behdad Jamshidi  13:32 

Yeah, I think that’s what separates, like, your average agencies with, like, your really good agencies, right? Like, they know what they’re good at. They’re really good agencies, and they don’t go outside of it typically, right? Like, they’re like, we just do SEO, and that’s all we do. Or there’s some that just do Google and email, for example, and that’s all they do. And they’ll say that to customers, and then they have other partners that they’ll just refer out to. They say, Hey, you’re looking for this. I know you do this, Jeremy. Like, you’re like, I don’t touch this stuff. So I’m going to pass it off to someone else, right? Like, you stay in your zone of genius. Same thing for like, the best agencies, they stay in their zone of genius. I would say the ones that are doing the other stuff, they’re typically going to just be average agencies, right? And the way that I use them is like, okay, well, if I have a customer that’s at a level zero or one of agency, I’m like, and they need multiple different things, and they have no in-house resource, that’s the time where it might make sense to do that.

But as long as the customer is aware that, like, hey, they’re really good at these two things, these other stuff they can do, but at some point you’re going to need to replace them for that aspect, right? And so it’s really hard for a customer to be able to do that unless you truly know what agencies are good at, which is always why. Like, one of the main questions I ask agencies, like, tell me your story. How did you build what you built? And you’ll hear things like, Well, I started out as an SEO person in an SEO person in an agency, and I started with that, and then we added paid media, and now we’re adding these things over the last, like, year, and you’re like, okay, these are new services. Don’t mess with those, right? Stick with the core stuff. And this is just some insights like, how you might be able to identify what agency is telling the truth and what services they’re actually good at.

Jeremy Weisz  14:58 

There was an instance, where you had a serial entrepreneur. It was involving a service-based business in PI. Can you talk a little bit about that and what happened with that?

Behdad Jamshidi  15:10 

Yeah, this is really cool, because I was part of a community at some point called trends, which is no longer there. They were purchased by HubSpot and it disappeared. But in that group, a lot of people kind of people kind of knew who I was and what I did. So whenever someone would ask for some sort of marketing thing, like, just go talk to B, he knows it. And my customer there, like, that’s how we met, and it was kind of cool. He’s like, Hey, I’ve been hearing your name everywhere. I have this, like, business where we help, basically personal injury lawyers with their clients, basically helping them take them to appointments, for example, so that if they’re injured, they can get their settlement afterwards. Like, why are you driving a car? Thought you said you’re back, you couldn’t move, right? That kind of thing. And so he built a service around this.

And he’s like, look, I don’t know how to reach this audience. And I was like, well, it’s really hard to reach that audience, right? They’re very referral based. They’re not all over the place. So I said, maybe social media might work, or maybe this thing might work, and I can make some intros for you. And I was like, I made no promises like, this is a very hard match, and I don’t know if I’ll find the right match for you. Turns out, this was, like, over three years ago now, Maxim went to social media agency. He’s still using them. They actually recommended that he build the podcast for personal injury lawyers. So back to what Jeremy does, makes sense.

Jeremy Weisz  16:22 

With that agency, were they doing paid ads? Is that what they were doing? Yeah, just like, organic social, organic social, okay.

Behdad Jamshidi  16:29 

Yeah, organic social stuff. And what was cool is like, out of that one relationship, he actually has like, four other businesses. So he’s a pharmacist originally but became a serial entrepreneur. There was a time during COVID where COVID tests were basically free to give to the public as long as they had. I think it was like Medicare and or Medicaid, or whatever it was. And he’s like, B, I need some help here. Like, do you have any resources that can help you build up this landing page? Help with copy? We need to conversion rate optimization this. We don’t have a ton of time. We only have like, a five month runway at max. And then he also asked for influencer marketing agency. So I gave him, like, three influencer marketing agencies, a copywriter, we built up a landing page, and he literally on video said, well, we did over 10 million and 3 million in profits just from like, those relationships that you helped me connect with. And every single one of those relationships I gave to him in less than two days.

Like, that’s how fast he was moving. And he’s used me for multiple others. I give him email marketing partners now we’re doing development-based stuff for his other business in the pharmaceutical space. Like, just, it’s kind of cool just being able to work with someone like that, because they’ll be like, B, you got someone for this, and I’ll either say yes or no. And we built that kind of relationship where he’s like, when you help me move really fast?

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