If you’ve ever struggled to get more clients for your agency, you’ve probably heard the cliché about the shoemaker’s children going barefoot.
People trot it out like a tired horse whenever they talk about a particular agency problem—finding the time and resources to do for ourselves what we do for our own clients.
Ask us to find customers for the people who pay us and we’re on top of the situation like experts.
But when we have to do it for ourselves, suddenly—like those poor kids whose Dad won’t make their shoes—we find ourselves foundering.
In other words, it’s a cliché for a reason.
Now we could talk all day about why that is, but it’s more helpful to simply accept that it is and focus on solutions.
The good news is it’s easier than you think to get agency clients fast.
1. Need more clients for your agency? Just ask for referrals
Word of mouth will always be the best revenue generator—because nothing works like a referral to bring you a lead who’s presold on your agency. Referrals allow you to maintain a healthy sales mindset, while not being overly pitchy and annoying. As I said, you’re speaking to people who are pre sold.
To explain what I mean, consider this scenario.
Your agency does excellent work for Charlie at Client Corporation, so you ask him for a referral. He loves your work, and he happily recommends you to Leanne at Lead, LLC because he wants you to succeed.
Leanne is a former colleague of his, and she still trusts his expertise and knowledge. So, because Leanne thinks highly of Charlie, some of that esteem transfers to you. Leanne thinks “Well, Charlie is smart, and he chose Agency A, so I’ll check them out.”
Leanne’s impression of you is already positive—which means you have to do less work in the sales process to build rapport and establish your expertise.
Contrast that with the opposite scenario, in which you cold-call Ivan at Innovation, Inc.
Ivan doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t trust you, and maybe doesn’t even want what you’re selling. With him, you’re arguably starting from a place of negative trust.
This is why research shows that 78% of marketers believe referrals generate higher lead quality and lower cost-per-lead.
How do you use referrals to get more clients for your agency?
Well, the simple answer is “you ask.”
But for “asking” to work, you need to do two things.
Since the success of your word-of-mouth efforts is only as good as your reputation, it follows that you need to treat your reputation like it’s a marketing asset. Protect it at all costs.
And second, you need to keep doing good work. Soldier on—because the bad agencies are eventually going to get tripped up by their failures… And when they go out of business, you’ll be left standing.
(Hopefully surrounded by referral clients, of course).
2. Start an inbound marketing program to bring more clients to you
Inbound marketing is the process of attracting new clients to your agency and creating brand awareness.
For example, when you SEO-optimize a blog post like this one hoping that potential clients will find it in the search engines, visit your site, and sign up for your email list so you can stay in touch with them…
That’s inbound marketing.
The goal is to find leads who might be interested in your services before they’ve considered making a purchase.
Catch them then—and provide consistent value after they ask to start a relationship with you—and you’ve got a good chance of winning the business when it’s time to buy.
Don’t believe me? One recent research report has 62% of B2B buyers saying they rely on content to guide their buying decisions.
When you do it right, even paid search can be considered inbound marketing. Show an ad against a keyword with high purchase intent—such as “best web design agency in Phoenix”—and you’re essentially hanging out your shingle in front of someone who’s looking for exactly what you have to offer.
Whenever agencies ask me whether they should invest in inbound marketing or a sales rep, my answer is the same: inbound, inbound, inbound. You’re always going to see a better conversion rate—and, therefore, more sales over time—when you’re talking to leads because they’re interested in buying, rather than because you interrupted them to see if they want what you’ve got.
3. Email marketing can be an incredible way to get more agency clients
On average, email has a better return on investment than any other marketing tactic you can spin up—about 3800% ROI, in fact. Put another way, for every dollar you spend on email, you stand to make as much as $38 in return.
Wait—you do have an email list already, right?
If not, START ONE NOW. This is the single best thing you can do for your agency. Stop reading this post—OK, maybe finish reading—and start an email list today.
Then add a sign-up form to your site, to your email footer, to your social media accounts, and so on.
When you’ve done that, move on to the advanced work and create a lead magnet you can give away in exchange for a lead’s email address, and a landing page to give it away on. Finally, repeat the promotion process with the landing page—and you’ll start growing your list in no time.
Remember, though—as an agency owner, email will probably not work as a direct response channel. In other words, you can’t constantly tell your list, “Hey, sign up for our services now!” and expect to see much of a result.
But as a reminder that you’re still open for business—and that you’ll be there to pick up the phone any time someone decides to take the plunge and buy from you? There’s nothing more effective. I’ve received many, many calls from leads saying, “I’ve been reading your newsletter—and I want to talk about having you work with our company.”
Pro tip: Once your newsletter is up and humming, you might even consider sponsoring it yourself.
After all, if you’re providing solid value that people look forward to opening every week, why not explicitly advertise your services? Newsletters have a hard time monetizing. And as an agency, you don’t want to sell products and pull attention away from your services—so affiliate marketing is out.
That’s where plugging your agency with a short “This issue is brought to you by” message can help. (Not only to generate sales but to build trust week-in and week-out.)
Bonus: you’ll also build name recognition, since every issue will remind your readers what that name is.
4. Set up strategic partnerships using the Rule of 10
There are two pieces to unpack here if you want to use this tactic to get more agency clients.
First, what’s a strategic partnership? Wikipedia says it’s “a relationship between two commercial enterprises… [where] each possesses one or more business assets or has expertise that will help the other.”
In other words, let’s say you’re a web agency. You might make a strategic partnership with a PPC company, where you refer them clients who need ads … And they send you ad clients who need better websites.
But in my experience, it’s the second piece—the Rule of 10—that makes strategic partnerships sing.
The Rule of 10 is a great concept I adapted from David Sacks’ 10/10/20 Rule for paying sales reps.
He says if you have a sales rep, both their commission and their salary should be 10% of their quota—setting it up so the rep is earning 20% of the sales they make. So if Rep Ruth is expected to sell $500,000 a year in revenue, her salary should be $50k a year, and her commission should be the same. If Ruth hits her quota, she’ll have earned $100,000.
Sales reps have a place in getting more agency clients, but in my experience, hiring internal sales reps is the last step of the process. Before you start paying employees to generate sales, you should make the most of the relationships you have.
Back to the rule of 10… I created a variation of Sacks’ formula that follows similar guidelines.
The idea is to make relationships with other professionals in your industry and offer them 10% commission on any deals they bring you—and 10% recurring commission on recurring sales!
One of our contacts, for example, sends us, on average, one lead every month. Let’s say we close a deal with that lead for $5000 a month—that’s 500 bucks in his pocket every 30 days. Right now, he’s making an extra $3000 a month for free simply because he made introductions.
That might seem like a lot until you do the math in reverse—we’re paying him that 3,000 out of $30k in revenue we generated from companies he introduced us to.
I’ll happily pay him for that upside.
One thing that’s important, however? You need to set up your systems so it’s easy to tell how much commission each of your referring partners is due every month.
We set up our invoicing so that QuickBooks automatically tells us which client invoices were paid each month, and which strategic partners are attached to those paid invoices. That makes it easy for us to analyze in QB and find out that Strategic Partners Sam and Paul are owed $3,000 and $1,400, respectively.
Then we ACH Sam and Paul in the first week of each month for the money that our clients paid us in the previous month. (This way, we’re using client money to fund our strategic partnerships, not going out-of-pocket.)
But what’s important here isn’t the actual method—it’s that you pay your SPs on time every month without fail.
They are your sales reps, except you don’t have to pay their salary. (Which is why the 10/10/10 Rule became the Rule of 10… And why I believe that strategic partnerships are game-changers.)
5. Yes, you can also rely on outbound sales—but only sometimes
Outbound selling is by far the least effective tactic on this list—or at least in the short term—so I won’t spend a lot of time on it.
For most agencies starting out—and indeed for a lot of them that have been in business a long time—paying sales representatives to call or email leads (not to mention someone to manage them) just isn’t an option.
Paradoxically, you almost need to not want new business before you use a sales rep. But if you have a stellar reputation, as well as a solid offer, outbound sales can pour gas on an already burning fire and really light up your revenue. If you’re calling up cold leads and you hear people say, “Yes, I’ve heard of you,” then you’re probably ready to hire a sales team.
To get more clients for your agency… You just have to go get them
Growing your agency is by no means the easiest thing in the world. But the truth is, you’ve got a better chance of getting more clients if you put any or all of these tactics in place.
I recommend trying referral marketing or inbound marketing first; both are easy ways to start getting more leads without having to spend a lot of time on outbound sales tactics like cold calling or direct mail.
Or, as I said, you can hire an outside team—although I would recommend that for only a few agencies in a hundred.
And, as always, if you want more tips on agency growth, don’t forget to sign up to my free course below. I’ll walk you through exactly what it takes to go from one-person operation to thriving agency…
And then maybe you can finally put some shoes on those kids of yours.