You’re watching competitors win business with lower prices while you’re trying to justify your value, and it’s becoming harder to retain clients long-term. The traditional agency model of piecing together multiple tools, managing countless subscriptions, and acting as a go-between for various platforms is becoming obsolete, leaving agencies scrambling to prove their worth in an evolving landscape.
Meet Shaun Clark, CEO of HighLevel, who has revolutionized how agencies operate by creating the first-ever all-in-one white-label marketing platform designed exclusively for marketing agencies. Shaun has empowered thousands of agencies to transform from service providers into comprehensive solution partners, helping them build stronger client relationships, increase retention, and position themselves as indispensable strategic allies rather than replaceable vendors.
Social Pulse Podcast host Mike Allton asked Shaun Clark about:
- Agency Evolution Strategy. How traditional agencies can transform their service models to stay competitive in today’s market and position themselves as strategic partners rather than vendors.
- Platform Integration Benefits. Why consolidating tools into unified platforms creates better client experiences and stronger agency-client relationships than managing multiple software solutions.
- Future-Proofing Your Business. What emerging trends and technologies agencies need to adopt now to ensure they remain relevant and valuable to clients in the years ahead.
Learn more about Shaun Clark
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Mike Allton: Welcome back to Social Pulse Podcast, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry just like you. Subscribe to gain valuable insights that you’ll be able to apply to your own work and social presence from each and every episode.
Now, are you struggling to differentiate your agency or your freelance work in an increasingly crowded marketplace? Being like clients see you as just another vendor rather than a strategic partner, you’re watching competitors win business with lower prices while you are trying to justify your value, and it’s becoming harder to retain clients long term.
The traditional agency model of piecing together multiple tools, managing countless subscriptions, and acting as a go-between for various platforms is becoming obsolete, leaving agencies scrambling to prove their worth in an evolving landscape. So, meet Shaun Clark, CEO of High-Level, who has revolutionized how agencies operate by creating the first-ever all-in-one white label marketing platform designed exclusively for marketing agencies.
Shaun has empowered thousands of agencies to transform from service providers into comprehensive solution partners, helping them build stronger client relationships, increase retention, and position themselves as indispensable strategic allies rather than replaceable vendors.
Hey Shaun, welcome to the show.
Shaun Clark: Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Mike Allton: My pleasure. Shaun, let’s start with the provocative statement.
Do you believe the traditional marketing agency model is dying, and what exactly do you think that means, and what are you seeing in the industry that might support that idea?
Shaun Clark: Sure. I would say yes and no, so I would say that if we really peel back what people used to hire or what people hire agencies for, I don’t think that has changed remarkably that much. I think what is dying, though, is the means by which, or the ways by which, these solutions are delivered, because I think if you’re in the industry, if I say something like SEO, you know what that is? Or social media posting, you know what that is, you know all those things. But if you really think about it from the outside, from the customer perspective, they’ve always thought about it as, I want more customers and these constructs like SEO and social media posting and so forth.
There are some business owners who might think, Oh, I need more branding or that sort of thing. But most business owners are saying no, I’m hiring a marketing agency ’cause I want more customers, now I think what is fundamentally changing is in the past, and I think this is technology at its best.
Technology wasn’t a place where there were tools that allowed service providers or marketing agencies, what have you, to actually do these services, but they were still very much human-powered, and they were very expensive. Most of the time, they were bespoke, and so I think that is what is changing, and that I think is fundamentally upending this market, but honestly, I think in a very positive way at the end of the day.
Mike Allton: So, what do we think you’re moving or what do you think we’re moving towards? What does that model look like now?
Shaun Clark: Sure. So I think it’s about being able to do a lot more with less.
When I first got into this industry, the number one problem that existed, that I saw, is you had all of these amazing people doing fantastic things for their clients, and then they would turn around and they would get fired for it.
And it took me a while to figure this out, but what I realized is when you’re a small business owner, you’re not really sitting around doing a lot of data analysis, really understanding what’s going on. You’re just running and gunning, and you’re really reacting emotionally. And a lot of time, the emotion was, Hey, what’s our most expensive thing? Can we get rid of it? And when you had this sort of outside marketing agency doing $3,000 plus ad spend every month, you’re like, gosh, that’s expensive. I feel like I don’t know if they’re doing a good job, I don’t really have time, but that’s a lot of money. I’ll just cut ’em and we’ll deal with it later, and a lot of great people were getting cut, even though they were honestly delivering a lot of great results.
But that visibility just wasn’t there, and for a long time, I tried to work really hard inside High Level to create more visibility for the agency, and that certainly helped. We automated a lot of things, and that really helped, but really, at the end of the day, what we found was that if we could bring the price point down, the agency could charge down by utilizing automation, AI, and a lot of these tools that are technology-driven.
They could then turn around and offer very similar, if not the same outcomes as they were before, but now it’s not a bespoke custom service, so they could charge a lot less for it. It scaled a lot more, and their customers stuck around versus firing them after a couple of months ’cause they felt like they were too expensive.
Mike Allton: Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. Having done agency work in the past as a solopreneur, I was making it up as I went and might find a tool, might find a process, or create some kind of automation, might not. And so you’re streamlining how these agencies operate.
Where do you think we’re going from here? What do you think the vision of the agency is, what does it look like in the future?
Shaun Clark: Yeah, so we have a really strong stance on this. We call people SaaSpreneurs, and the way we think about this is, again, the outcome the business owner’s looking for is not change; they want more customers. But now, if we can bring AI and we can behind a lot of these tools to actually do a lot of the heavy lifting, we can fundamentally deliver those same outcomes.
We can get them more five-star reviews that get them hired by Google, we can get them web chat on their website, where AI is now doing a great job, not only talking to the potential customer, but also booking them for an appointment. We can do a lot of this transactional stuff that, before, it took a human being to do.
When a lead comes in, before we were able to automatically get out to the lead, and a lot of times we’re able to convert it off the first conversation, but now we can go even deeper. Whereas before, let’s say you ran a Facebook Ad and said, Oh, register for a free teeth whitening.
Our big aha five years ago was that we would send a text to that person and say, Hey, are you interested in the free teeth whitening? Book here! And that was amazing. But now we can actually take it further. So now if the person says, yeah, but I have this question about do you take my insurance or this or that, now AI can step in and conversate the whole thing and it can do it in real time, whether it’s three in the afternoon or three in the morning, and it can bring these leads all the way into that appointment, which from the dentist’s perspective or from the customer perspective, is a lot closer to money and a customer than, the name, phone number, and email address on a spreadsheet that we were handing over to them five years ago.
So that to me is where we continue to proceed, it’s same outcomes, we’re using AI and technology, we’re unifying in a class across one platform, and we’re really still driving to the same end results, but just with a much more unified tool set that has a lot more AI in the background, doing a lot of the heavy lifting whereas we might’ve had to hire or outsource or do something like that in the past.
Mike Allton: I love that point about time to lead, speed to lead. We had one of your team members on another show, the MarTech Show, last year, and we talked at length about that. He was talking about how you gotta get in with that five-second mark because if somebody expresses interest and they don’t hear from you right away, they’re already moving on to the next prospect and the next prospect.
Shaun Clark: That is still very much the case. Now, it’s funny though, that now we’re taking it to the next level. ’cause what we would do before is it’d be like, lead comes in, we get to ’em quickly and seven out of ten would roll over and convert right then and there, take that next step.
And then the other three would ask questions, right? And then it would be like, oh no, what do we do? And we would try to alert the business owner and get them involved, but oftentimes you would lose those three ’cause the business owner’s not that fast, but now AI can step in and it’s so good it can answer all those questions just like a front desk receptionist would in that business. And the cool thing here for the agency is this opens a whole new avenue because, don’t think the dentist is creating these agents and training these agents.
This is now a skill that every agency owner needs to have. You need to be creating this sort of agentic flows, that’s kinda a bigger concept, but this sort of idea of creating agents for, whether they’re inbound voice agents, they’re chat agents. You need to be creating these for your industries or for your clients because they’re now doing a lot of heavier lifting and helping get those leads all the way to the last mile, and really helping to maximize those outcomes for your clients.
Mike Allton: I love these kinds of chat systems because they’re not like the chatbots that we had five, six years ago, where you had a very specific workflow and you had to think through all these different branches and have all of it programmed in there. And yes, no, I couldn’t do ’em, it’s not like that at all.
It’s just like having a conversation with ChatGPT. Only this ChatGPT already knows everything about your business, everything that you want it to know, and can answer all those kinds of surface-level questions.
Shaun Clark: A hundred percent.
Mike Allton: So, for folks listening, maybe who’ve never used a tool like High Level, help them understand how this is going to integrate into their existing agency.
How are they gonna use it for themselves and for their clients?
Shaun Clark: Yeah. So the original thing we came across is that almost everybody was buying, either buying tools on behalf of their clients or their clients would come to them with something, and you’re logging in and out of six or seven different apps all day long.
And the reality is, High Level allows you to have one login, and then you can basically call ’em Subaccounts, but you can think of ’em as clients, and then you can literally have your clients in there.
They have all the functionality under their subaccount, you can seamlessly, as the admin, jump in and out of those, and then the clients can also log in, but they’re only gonna see their account.
And then you can also customize the experience, so maybe you want them to only see conversations where, if someone chats in from the website, you want them to be able to see that, but you don’t want them to be able to see funnel pages or webpages or, workflow automations or whatever it might be.
You can see all that functionality, you can hide what you want your client to do, so it really gives you the opportunity to effectively give them all the tools they need and only the tools they need. And then for you, you can seamlessly see all of that stuff, manage it in one platform, and then the great thing is you can white label it, and that means you can put your URL, your brand, all of that stuff, High-Level does not appear.
So now, and this really was, we solved this as a client pain point, if you set up that software and that client later on decides, oh, you know what, you’re too expensive. Your labor’s too expensive, and says, I wanna keep this software. Now you can sell the software and create a revenue stream around that in addition to the services that you’re already doing.
Mike Allton: Makes a lot of sense, for folks listening, maybe you’re using Agorapulse for the social media side of your business, we’ve got a very similar structure.
You set up folders and groups for your clients, you put your social profiles in those folders, and you can give them access to just those profiles. So you could have a hundred different clients set up in there. They wouldn’t be able to see each other. It’s all safe and secure.
I want to talk to you or ask you about this shift, though, I’m seeing from service provider to being this idea of a strategic partner.
How do you see agencies making that kind of transformation? What does it actually look like in practice?
Shaun Clark: Yeah, so it’s really not as complex or difficult as it sounds.
So again, I think sometimes people think of this as Oh, I’ve gotta throw away everything else I’m doing. The thing about plus one, you’re really actually able to add on.. Just think about it like this, these are tools that every small business is gonna buy from someone.
They might as well buy it from you, and when they do, not only do you gain a revenue stream because you can resell high-level, that’s the whole point of it. We really want you out there being able to create a revenue stream around that’s a recurring, you can charge whatever you want for it, all of those things, but it also streamlines your operations because again, you’re gonna have to learn a CRM system.
You’re gonna have to learn a funnel-building system, you’re gonna have to learn a workflow automation system. Why not be the one who not only can learn one that works for all your clients, but you can also turn around and actually sell it as a recurring monthly software product.
You’re doing this already; there’s just no way you’re not using other products. Now you become the product, you also have it so that you can resell it, and you’ve created a revenue stream. So it’s something you gotta do anyway, you might as well make money off the deal. And it gives you a lot more flexibility with your clients because, if your client says, like I said, oh, you know what?
We’re gonna take the summer off, we don’t wanna run any Ads. If all you do is run Ads, oh, you just lost all your revenue; they’re no longer a client. It’s a big breakup. But now if you have the software, it’s oh yeah, no problem. We’ll just keep charging for the software ’cause you still have conversations coming in, web chats coming in, phone calls coming in, all these things.
And yeah, sure, you turn off the ads, but gosh, the software’s still kicking over, you’re still charging for it, and the great thing is the margin on software is near a hundred percent versus services, it’s a lot lower and honestly it’s just a lot more scalable because, anybody’s been an agency for a minute, you realize that every single client is a custom operation and that is a very hard thing to scale. Software is completely the opposite; it’s a much higher margin, much more scalable.
Mike Allton: Could not agree more. And I know also when they implement a tool like yours, all of a sudden, that opens up capabilities that they might not have had before. We talked already about SMS marketing and messaging, and sending leads via SMS. That’s not something personally like I’ve ever done before because it would’ve been well outside of my wheelhouse and budget for tools and that sort of thing, so lots of reasons to consider a tool like High Level.
Folks, we’re talking with Shaun Clark about how marketing agencies and freelance social media marketers should approach their business automations. In a moment, we’re gonna talk about client expectations and how they’ve changed as well. But first, let’s make sure you aren’t wasting time while managing social media.
Advert: When I take a look at the biggest core benefit for Agorapulse, I have to look at two sides of the equation. I have to look at what it does for us as far as managing our community and all of the conversation management tools, which I appreciate so much, but from a far more pragmatic point of view, it saves us money. It saves us a lot of money because of the productivity of the features that are built in, with how it manages those conversations. We don’t waste time, we’re efficient.
Agrorapulse allows me to get through all my messages and my replies really quickly. That’s probably the number one reason for me wanting to use the tool: it saves so much time.
A big draw for me with Agorapulse was the ability to manage my YouTube comments. That is a huge feature for me, and here’s why: because up until then, I basically would have to go into my social media manager system to do everything there, and then I’d have to log out, go back into YouTube, and do the same thing there.
Now, when you are managing multiple clients, this becomes a huge waste of time, right? And what we wanna do is streamline that efficiency so we can log into one website, now we can manage all of our major social profiles there, and we’re able to serve our clients with more clarity and purpose.
They worked with us, they helped train us on how to get everything up and going, and we were able to cancel out all the other tools that we didn’t need anymore, so it saved us a lot of time and a lot of headache for my team members as they’re, now they only have one tool that they can maximize their clients in.
Mike Allton: So, Shaun, I think one of the differentiators at High Level is just white labeling.
Shaun Clark: Yeah.
Mike Allton: Why do you think that’s crucial to the future of agency-client relationships?
Shaun Clark: I think that if you’re not selling technology as part of your services and as your package and something you’re able to sell to clients, you’re just not gonna be relevant in the future because the reality is every customer, no matter how big or small, is gonna need technology.
And I think in the past, there was this idea that, and I think this was a reality, technology was locked off and only you had to be well funded, and you had to get a bunch of programmers and all the things. And so there was this idea that agencies couldn’t have access to this technology and certainly couldn’t own it.
And now the way we’ve done this is we’ve essentially weaponized agency owners with the same technology, but because it’s under their own brand name now, that when they come to a client, they’re providing both the service aspect as well as the technology aspect, and I think when you combine those two, that’s how you’re creating the outcome the customer’s looking for.
It’s not one or the other, and now you have ownership in the technology. You have a revenue stream behind the technology, and in fact, we have lots of customers now who have actually even built up and sold recurring SaaS businesses off the technology. So I just think it’s something where if you’re really gonna come to the market and you’re gonna solve the customer problem, this is how it’s done now, you can’t just come and show up and say, Hey, I do services. It’s just not gonna fly.
Mike Allton: I definitely agree that it’s clear the needs for the customers have changed with technology. How do you think technology has changed their expectations, though?
Shaun Clark: Yeah, I think they think it’s gonna be fast, that it’s gonna be cheap, and it’s gonna be all the things, and I think that it’s also something where they are not gonna wait months and months for weeks or even days in order to see a result. They wanna see something immediate, and they also want it to appear in the same modalities that they’re used to.
This is why we have mobile apps, because they wanna see it on their phone, they want to be able to see something tangible. They wanna be able to track things, they wanna be able to interface with things they wanna have, they wanna be part of that process, and the technology really enables that, and gives them that connection. It also gives that visibility.
But from the agency perspective, I think it’s awesome because it also shows what I’ve long known about agencies, which is, they are doing an amazing job, they’re delivering tons of results, but when the client can’t see those things or interact with them or have some kind of experience around them, they quickly think, oh outta sight, outta mind. The agency is not doing a good job; they are not delivering any value. I can’t see anything but the technology bridges that gap and gives you the ability to actually show the client, in many cases, in real time, exactly the value you’re bringing.
And I think it really raises the level of performance you’re able to give your client. And again, this, we see this all the time. We see agencies make a heck of a lot more money. They retain their clients a lot longer. It’s a total game changer for them.
Mike Allton: As you were saying that, I was thinking about how, in traditional agency work, we would tell a client fast, cheap, high quality. You pick two.
Shaun Clark: That’s right. I remember. I remember that. Yep.
Mike Allton: Yeah. Sounds like you can’t say that anymore.
Shaun Clark: I’ve always long known this it, and I think it’s hard for people to think through it, I always say Hey, look, the car you drive is the same car as about a million other people drive. I hate to break it to you, that’s the only way it’s gonna work because if at the end of the day, everyone got a custom car, man, it would be so expensive no one would buy them.
And yet, as agency owners, we go to the market in the exact opposite way. The first thing we do is show up and say What kind of custom car would you like? And no wonder these are unscalable models, and of course, when asked, everyone has their, oh, I’d like it like this, and I want it to do that. And all of a sudden, you’ve painted yourself into a corner where you’re saying all now, in order to do that, lemme give you a really expensive price that you don’t wanna pay. And oh, by the way, because it’s custom, I’ve gotta start from scratch, and it’s gonna take a long time. And all of a sudden, you’re just setting yourself up for failure.
Now, if you look at what the customer’s really wanting, they want an ROI positive outcome, they want for the money I pay you, can I get a 10x return on that? It doesn’t have to be custom. It doesn’t have to be the best job you can do. It doesn’t have to be the most amazing outcome. It simply has to be ROI positive, and so when you use High-Level, you’re charging $300 a month for what you used to charge $3,000 a month for, and people are thrilled because they are getting $3,000 worth of return.
They are and in many cases, much more. But the reality is, price to value, there is just a much better deal from their perspective, and again, I always give the example of the dentist, they sit down at the end of the month with the bookkeeper. They say, Look, I saw a new Mercedes, the lease price is 800 bucks. How do we cut 800 bucks off the list and gimme my most expensive thing on down? And if you’re up there, they’re cutting you. But if you’re 300 bucks a month, now you’re down here with the utility bills, and you’re never gonna get cut.
So fundamentally, it’s about delivering an ROI positive experience for your client very quickly for a very low price that allows you to scale your business, and you’re not starting over from scratch and really just setting yourself up for failure every time.
Mike Allton: That is terrific advice, regardless of what tools we’re using, a really great mindset for agency owners.
A moment ago, you talked about the fact that you’re allowing agency owners to eliminate a lot of the tools that they would’ve been subscribing to on behalf of clients. What role do you think plays now in strengthening agency-client relationships?
Shaun Clark: I think it just makes agencies come to coming to market a lot more like useful. Who doesn’t want a one-stop shop? All of us. If you look at consumer behavior, there used to be a vacuum store and a wine store and a food store, and a clothing store, and now it’s just called Costco.
And I’m sure there’s a better vacuum than what they carry, but the reality is we all know they carry a good vacuum. And for most people, and this is the poll point, for most people, that vacuum will do the job. They don’t need the super specific, one that you can only be found in the vacuum store that still exists somewhere, that’s not necessary to get a ROI positive outcome.
And that’s the whole point, and so as a result, as an agency, if you think about it now, you’re showing up and saying not only do I have all the services you need, but I also have all the tools you need. So you don’t need to go anywhere else. You can stay right here with me, and I can deliver the entire thing end-to-end in a one-stop shop.
One person to get to know, one relationship to have, one interface, one timeline, all of these things in one spot. Man, that is so much easier than sending your clients out and saying hey, I can do all these services, but you need to go out on the internet right now and talk to a bunch of salespeople who make you a bunch of promises and figure out the right tools to put together and then come on back.
That sounds terrible. So this makes the agency a much more formidable weapon when it comes to actually solving client issues.
Mike Allton: That makes so much sense. Sure, if you’re targeting and serving the top 1% of humanity. So then, yeah, you can have a custom solution that’s all white gloves, yeah. Knock yourselves out. But for most of us who are servicing small to medium businesses, it makes sense to have very streamlined, scalable, repeatable operations that are a one-stop shop for those folks, just like you said, that’s what most people want, that’s where the pool is.
My last question, Shaun, I’m just wondering, for agencies listening, freelancers, they recognize that they need to evolve. What’s the first step they should take? What resources or tools well, are you turning to stay ahead of these kinds of industry changes?
Shaun Clark: I’ll give two things here. So one, you should go to our YouTube Channel ’cause I think that’s the best place to learn about us and our software and everything else. But a lot of people ask me like, What’s the one thing you would sell? I’ll tell you it’s Inbound Voice AI. And I’ll give you a great example. Have you ever called a business and had ’em not pick up the phone? The answer is yes.
So imagine that if you call that business and instead of that business owner, by the way, those business owners aren’t slackers, they’re just out busy, they’re doing their thing, right? So, if you could show that for a client, every time they miss a phone call, AI could pick it up automatically and book an appointment, give out information to the caller, and do a great job there.
All you have to do is convert one of those calls on average every month, and you can easily create a whole business around that one thing. It’s incredibly valuable. It scales super well, and every business has this problem. Every business has this problem, and that is exactly the way I would go about it.
And what’s beautiful about it is, it allows you to not have to put them in the software, not have to train them, you don’t have to replace their phone number. You can set it up so it rolls over automatically. It’s an awesome way to get started, and it creates just tremendous value because what all of these small business owners have, whether they know it or not, is a lot of people calling them at all hours when they’re not picking up the phone because they’re out doing something. And if you can convert those, that remnant lead, and by the way, an inbound phone call, if you don’t know, this is the absolute best type of lead ever, that’s high intent.
If you can convert those into customers, you can easily keep that small business for life. So that is a fantastic, very precise example of what I would sell out of the gate.
Mike Allton: Terrific advice, and folks, this is exactly why I love bringing terrific partners and solutions like Shaun at High Level on the show ’cause not only are we learning about High-Level, but of course Shaun’s laying out all kinds of terrific advice and wisdom for agencies, he’s been in this industry for a long time.
You’ve been amazing, Shaun. For folks who wanna learn more about you or High Level, where should they go?
Shaun Clark: Definitely, go to YouTube and just search High-Level.
Our YouTube channel is great because it’s not just about us. We bring all kinds of other amazing people, and they talk about exactly what they’re doing, their successes, their failures, their challenges, how they’ve overcome them, and all the tools they use to do that, and all the businesses they run and who they serve.
So it’s a really good opportunity to learn about our software, but also all the people out in the marketing world who are doing amazing things.
Mike Allton: Perfect. That’s all the time we’ve got for today. Friends, of course, we’ll have that YouTube channel and all of Shaun to the links in the show notes below.
Don’t forget to find Social Pulse podcasts on Apple. Drop me a review. Let me know what you thought of this episode, and be sure to join our exclusive community on Facebook Social Pulse Community, where you can network with providers and experts like Shaun, as well as literally thousands of other social media experts in the industry, learning alongside you every single day. That’s all the time we’ve got for today. Until next time.
