Yesterday I spoke at Google’s Engage Workshop on a panel about marketing digital agencies
I’ll sum up a couple of notes about that first, but I also wanted to share my notes from Dave Booth’s excellent sessions on ways that he’s built Cardinal Path from 2 to 60+ people in the past 7 years!
Lara & Mark joined me on the panel & we kicked off talking about general ways to market.
The main ones were speaking, joint ventures/partnerships & just doing great work!
Personally speaking has been the best possible way to grow WebSavvy. I’ve been lucky enough to speak at a number of Aussie events for world-class marketers like Siimon Reynolds, Dale Beaumont, Ed Dale & James Schramko. And the events here & overseas for a national radio network have been great for building relationships with some of this country’s top CEOs.
Partnerships are great & as Dave pointed out they need to be beneficial to both sides of the deal. For us that’s meant partnering with the best Magento guys in Australia at Balance Internet as well as various other SEO & web agencies.
We don’t compete, we make each other look good by being able to refer & we help joint clients grow their businesses. And yes if the odd bottle of pinot changes hands to say thanks for those leads, then so be it!
“Doing great work” was a line that Mark (of zen10.com.au) used. It’s been my philosophy about work since we started the agency. That’s why were “fanatical about results”. For our clients the only result that matters is profitability – in other words a decent ROI on the ad spend. In that regard we’re lucky to be in such a measurable industry & we embrace that (I wouldn’t want to be selling newpaper ads!)
Dave’s sessions were wide ranging, I’ll try to briefly sum them up below:
In a sentence “Job is not to sell, but to best serve our clients”
That means doing excellent work, doing what you say you will, being radically honest (illustrated by this great vid https://youtu.be/5T9DSgEclPA) & having an awesome team.
All of which I believe WebSavvy does 🙂
Partnerships
People buy people! So your relationships matter.
And they’re not clients, they’re partners (I’ll be changing my internal dialogue thanks to this insight).
And focus on existing customer first. Then prospects. Then your business. Then everything else.
Story.
There’s no story behind price or quality. Explain that you’re not the cheapest & tell the great story about why that is. What’s your competitive advantage?
Metrics
Dave’s covered this before, but focus on business outcomes (eg leads, rev, profit!) not clicks & other meaningless KPIs
Zig when others zag
Look for the hard things that everyone else avoids. There’s less competition & a need. That means profit for you agency.
Hunt Wooly MammothsÂ
Don’t go after lots of small one-time clients. Spend the time to find bigger, longer-term clients (partners!) and serve them with excellence
Follow through
And follow up
Speak for itself!
Team
Your people matter! Invest in a great team.
Let them create the systems your business needs.
Tools
Lots were mentioned. Some were
Project Management: Gantter, Huddle, Flow, Attask
Cloud tools: Xero, Dropbox, Evernote, Basecamp, Highrise (I’d like to add 1password & podio to that list!)
Pricing
You must understand (before you start) things like Scope, Complexity, Dependencies & Exclusivity – they matter. A lot.
There are different pricing models: percentage of spend, fixed fee or performance based. Dave (like us) prefers fixed fee.
But something I know we need to get better at is upselling a wider range of services to our happy partners (used to be clients!)
Training
Good lead gen, good income stream & important to train your clients/partners enough so that they understand what you do & can have better conversations about it!
Pitching
We role played this one. Highlights were:
Have a great looking deck
Solid opening. Have them remember 3 things
Be the hero
Let them interact. And ask open questions
Give them a reason to believe. Case studies
Finish with the suspense. Cost of delaying. Big one!
Case Studies
Have more! In many formats: Print. PowerPoint. Web.
Build into terms of service (that you’re likely to use it) & be clear about how using it. Give options (eg it might be internal only, not always whole world).
Ask for the sale
Ask more questions
Have I won your business? (They never say yes). Great conversation starter though.
Does this align with your expectations?
What have I said that resonates with you (end on positive note)
Detail Next steps
Tell them when you’ll be contacting them (& follow up!). What factors are involved? Who making decision? Give contact info. Tell them they can ask questions.
That’s it!
Hope it’s been useful.
And hopefully I’ll see you at a future Google event.