Grow your agency without selling

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Webinar presented live on March 6, 2025

Many – if not most – agency owners view selling as a necessary evil if they want to grow their firms or even just stay in business.

But if you think about agency business development as sales, then you may be going about things the wrong way.

Winning new clients is more about relationship-building and match-making. You’re not selling widgets where your goal might be to get the best price and the quickest close.

You need to find best-fit clients who are ready for the help that you can provide.

In this webinar, Chip Griffin walks you through how you should be thinking about agency business development and the steps to take to grow without being a salesperson.

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The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar, Grow Your Agency Without Selling. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance. And I am excited to be presenting this topic today because I know that a lot of us who started agencies didn’t do so necessarily feeling all that excited about selling, but obviously we need revenue.

We need profits in order to not just survive, but actually thrive. So we’ll be talking about that today. Before we get too deep into all of that, let’s go ahead and we will review a few of the housekeeping items as people continue to log in here today. First and foremost, a replay will be available, so obviously if you’re watching this on replay, you know this.

If you are watching this live, then just know that you will have access to a replay in the next day or so that you can tap into and watch again, so you don’t need to worry so much about taking extensive notes during the presentation. If you are here live, you can use the Q& A function at the bottom of your screen to ask questions.

I will, you can submit them at any time. I will answer them at the end of the prepared presentation. If you’re watching on replay, you won’t have the Q& A session, but you can email me questions at chip@smallagencygrowth. com. You’re also encouraged to join the SAGA community on Slack, where you can ask questions there, not just of me, but of, of your peers as well, who might be able to chime in.

With their own feedback, answers, insights, et cetera. Finally, any of the resources that I may mention today, as well as plenty of others, are available on the SAGA website at smallagencygrowth.com. The search function there is very robust and will help you search through all of our past webinars, videos, podcast episodes, articles, workbooks, templates.

Everything. So, please make sure that you’re taking advantage of that resource as well. We’ve got almost seven years worth of resources there for you to tap into. And there’s something on pretty much any topic, but certainly ways to go a lot deeper on some of the things that we will cover during today’s session.

And so what we will cover today, basically there are four key things that I’m going to focus on in today’s webinar. We’ll start with why traditional sales tactics are not the best route for agencies. We’ll talk about how you really should be thinking about growing your agency in terms of business development.

Then we’ll go through some concrete action steps that you can take in order to make a difference in how you are generating revenue in a non salesy way for your business. And then we’ll talk a little bit about some of the common mistakes and pitfalls that you want to try to avoid. So with that, let’s go ahead and start by talking about why selling is so uncomfortable.

And I, I referenced this briefly at the top, which is that most of us, we didn’t get into this to be in sales. If we wanted to be salespeople, we would have gone down that path. The reason why we typically start an agency is because we are, we like the strategy, we like the creativity, we like the results that we can deliver for clients.

And while it’s exciting to bring on new clients, the process around it can be pretty daunting. And so, typically, what that means is that we’ll pick up a lot of sales books, and I’ll explain why traditional sales books probably are not your best resource. The second reason why we find selling so uncomfortable is that we don’t like being sold to ourselves.

It’s something that we sort of recoil at for the most part. If you look at your inbox or the cold calls you get, you just, you sit there, these days LinkedIn, the number of solicitations that you get that are just off base and off putting is incredible. And so we don’t like being sold to, so therefore we typically don’t want to be selling to others in that way either.

And then finally the biggest reason why selling is so uncomfortable is because we’re selling expertise, we’re selling our solutions, we’re not selling widgets, we’re not selling something tangible that the goal is simply to get it off the shelf and into the hands of the buyer for the best possible price.

We really are trying to instead find a way that we can pull together and get solutions that work for the clients. So these tactics, if we start reading the sales books and watching the sales videos and listening to the sales podcasts, there are good nuggets in there. There’s a morsel of truth in all of it that we can apply.

But if we follow those step by step guides that you might use if you were selling software or widgets, they tend not to work. In part because our clients, they don’t want to be sold to either. They get tired of the pitches that they’re getting. But I think most importantly, when we’re thinking about the kinds of professional services that we’re delivering, the sale isn’t the end.

This is not a car where you drive it off the lot and, and that’s pretty much it unless you happen to need service. In the agency world, when the sale or the contract is complete, that’s really just the beginning of the relationship. It’s the earliest stages. And we have to follow through and deliver, and the same people who are selling are also delivering.

And that is so very different from many other sales functions, sales roles, and other industries. We also need to remember that if we are using some of these traditional sales tactics, let’s think about them. What are they designed to do? They’re designed to move people through the process as quickly as possible for the best possible price.

And so when you do that, you often end up with bad fit clients because you’re accelerating them through, which sounds good, right? And from a revenue standpoint, it might actually be temporarily good. But it’s not producing the results you want because since it is the start of the relationship you need someone who is ready to work with you, who you can produce good results for, who is good to work with. And so that’s something that traditional sales tactics typically don’t account for.

And finally, the reason why traditional sales tactics fail is because since you don’t like them, you’re probably not going to do them consistently. And as with anything else, whenever I’m asked about time tracking or project tracking or any kind of business development tactic, if you don’t like doing it, you’re not going to do it consistently.

So the best solution is always what you are going to do consistently and so therefore something that you are comfortable at, something that you feel like you’re good at. Those are the kinds of things that you need to focus on and that’s what we’ll be talking about later in today’s webinar.

So let’s think about some of the myths that you’ve probably heard about selling that you really want to be careful of. And that I’m going to try to dissuade you of as I talk about the approach that I recommend for agency business development. So first and foremost, winning clients is about persuasion. And if you read so many sales books, they always talk about persuasion.

The art of persuasion. That is not what you want to be thinking about because winning the client is not your goal. Your goal is to find good relationships and we’ll talk about the importance of matchmaking in agency business development. There’s also, you’ll always find talk about the funnel. I talk with plenty of agency owners who think about, well, you know, I’ve got this funnel or I need to build a funnel in order to, to grow my book of business as an agency.

And look, there are stages that people tend to move through, but when we’re thinking about the relationships that we’re building to win business in the agency world, it’s not that same cut and dried funnel that you follow as you’re going through if you’re going to buy a piece of software or a car or a widget.

And so we need to be careful about thinking too much about those kinds of stages when we’re thinking about the people that we’re building relationships with in order to generate new clients for our agency. You’ll also hear plenty of people telling you that agencies can’t thrive on referrals. And I, I talk to a lot of agency owners who when I first start working with them, they’ll say to me, you know, geez, I, I know I need to find some other way other than referrals in order to grow my business.

And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be looking for other avenues to grow your business. But I think it’s really dangerous to look down upon referrals. It is the bread and butter of most agencies’ growth. And so you should think about how to integrate it, how to accelerate referrals, how to get more referrals, but not think about how do I replace referrals with something else or, or how do I spend more of my time on other things?

Referrals should always be a strong part of your mix as an agency. And if it’s working, that’s generally a pretty good indication that you’re producing good results for your existing clients too, which means your retention rates are often pretty high. The next myth that I want to debunk is, is this idea that you deserve to get paid for your time.

And the reason why I have an asterisk here, because I know that some of you are going to come for me, because I’m not talking about with your actual clients. You absolutely deserve to get paid for your time with actual clients, and you should be pricing your work appropriately. But I know a lot of agency owners who are afraid, to give of themselves freely during the business development process.

They’re afraid to share ideas when they’re talking with prospective clients. They’re afraid to share too much in webinars, in articles, on podcasts, because they feel it’s like the secret sauce. But I think the worst part of it is a lot of agency owners are reluctant to take calls where someone asks to pick your brain.

Look, people can abuse picking your brain. But in the course of 30 some years of being in and around agency world, there are very, very few instances where I can think of people who truly took advantage of me and tried to find a way around paying me for work. If someone wants to pick your brain, take those calls.

It’s great market research for you. It’s a great relationship development tool. And the more of those conversations you have, the more of those will turn into actual paying clients that don’t just pay you for your time, but pay you handsomely for your time. And finally, there’s a lot of talk about ghosting when it comes to agency business development.

I talk with a lot of owners who are worried that prospects are ghosting them and not getting back. And, and ghosting in and of itself is not a bad thing. There are lessons we can take from it. If we’re getting ghosted a lot after we give a proposal, then we need to think about, are we giving proposals to too many people too soon?

But just because someone is ghosting you, that is not a bad thing. It may be rude, it may not be the appropriate professional behavior on their part to simply ignore you, but ghosting is, in effect, an answer. They are telling you that they are not ready, at least now, and they may never be ready. And so, instead of trying to, to get someone to, to get on the phone with you, and, and following typical sales advice, which is just kind of keep the momentum going, you need to accept that they may not be ready and that that’s an okay thing because you don’t want clients Coming on board before they’re ready. If they come on board before they’re ready they probably don’t have the resources to invest from their side to make the relationship successful. Maybe they don’t truly have the financial resources They need to make that investment or maybe they are not completely sold on the solution that you’re offering in the return on investment that you can provide.

And so if you don’t have that meeting of the minds, if you don’t have them ready at the same time you are, there’s no sense in accelerating that close. Because again, we’re not selling a fixed product that is already ready to hand over. We are building the relationship and we have to work collaborative, collaboratively with our clients to deliver that ultimate end product.

So. If all of these things are bad, if these are all the myths and these are the reasons why traditional sales don’t work, what should we be doing? And so what I encourage you to be thinking about is to think about agency business development more as matchmaking. Your goal, ultimately, is to find the right solution for the folks that you are talking with who might work with your agency.

But that solution might be that they shouldn’t work with an agency at all. Maybe they should work with a different agency. Maybe they should work with your agency but not for another 6, 12, or 18 months until whatever evolution that they are in as a business matches up with what you can do. So think about that in terms of matchmaking, because you really want to try to find the right fits.

And, and so much of agency growth, successful agency growth, comes down to making sure that you are finding the right clients. You can be a generalist who’s coming in and sweeping up as many clients as possible, and in the short term, that generates revenue. But what does it also do? It also tends to erode profit margins because you don’t develop the kind of expertise and repeatable processes that make you more efficient.

It tends to hurt your retention because you are not developing that expertise and ability to deliver as well. It makes it harder over time to sell because people can’t really place you and they can’t figure out where you fit and whether they are a good fit for you. So you need to think about finding those right fit clients rather than revenue at any cost.

You also need to focus on the fact that you are really trying to, to develop relationships. And so this is not about building a list of as many people as possible. It’s not, it’s not a numbers game like traditional sales will tell you where you need to go out and just talk to as many people as possible.

Yes, you need to probably talk to more people than you are today. You need to build new relationships. But it’s building actual meaningful relationships, particularly during the prospect phase. And what that means is that you probably should have more conversations rather than less. I sometimes see these YouTube videos where an agency guru will talk to you about the one call close that they can show you how to do.

You don’t really want to close prospective clients for your agency in all likelihood in one call because you haven’t really even evaluated them correctly to determine if they really are a best fit client or they are simply someone who might be able to cut the initial check and then who knows where it goes from there.

So what you really need to be doing in addition to building these relationships is making sure that you’re visible to them, you stay top of mind. With your prospects, and we’ll talk about how to do that a little bit later. You need to, to demonstrate that you are a valuable resource for them and you need to be ready.

And so being ready means that you need to, to keep in touch with folks. You need to make sure that they know what you do, how you can help, so that when they have that need, when that right fit client is ready for you, they can come on board and have the appropriate conversation. And if they are truly a match, if you agree that you can produce results for them, well then great.

Now you can bring them on as a client and it’s successful for everybody involved. So, it all starts with understanding who your ideal client is. And a lot of agencies that I work with struggle a bit with this. And so you need to be as specific as possible when you are defining your ideal client. Because you need to understand that defining your ideal client is as much about figuring out who is a bad fit as who is a good fit.

And that means you need to know who you help best. And what makes an ideal client are basically three things. It needs to be a client that you can produce excellent results for. It needs to be a client that can produce reasonable, if not, more than reasonable profits for yourself, for your agency. And it needs to be someone who provides satisfaction for you and your team.

And satisfaction can be defined in many different ways. It might be satisfaction because they treat you with respect, and your values are compatible. They don’t necessarily need to be identical, but they need to be compatible. And so you, you want to make sure that you are finding those folks that, that really work well with you on the human level because ultimately logos don’t hire logos, people hire people. And that means that our people need to work well with their people. And if you don’t have a meshing there, if there’s not chemistry there, if there’s not mutual respect there, it’s not going to be an ideal client for you. So your real goal then in this matchmaking process is to have meaningful conversations.

What’s a meaningful conversation? Well, a meaningful conversation is something beyond just the general platitudes where you talk about the weather and you talk in general terms about what services you offer. Meaningful conversations are these conversations that you have with people who you can learn from them, they can learn from you and you start to figure out Is there a possibility here?

Can I learn something from you? Can you learn something from me? Might there be somewhere on the timeline a time when you can either refer business to me or you might do business with me directly. And so your whole goal in agency business development should be to be having more and better meaningful conversations with prospective clients.

So the next set of things that I’m going to talk about are the steps to getting to these meaningful conversations. So here are the five steps that I think you need to be thinking about. Step one, you need to clarify your positioning. We’ve talked about the importance of ideal client profiles. You really need to make sure that you have clarity about how you are positioning yourself in the marketplace and who you are positioning yourself for.

Step two is to start building and nurturing relationships with people who, as I said, could either refer business or might become actual clients one day. Step three is to, with all of these people that you’re building relationships with, try to figure out how you can provide value to them free of charge before you even get to an agency client relationship.

Step four is allowing your prospective clients to self qualify, self identify, to stand up, raise their hand, and say, I’m ready to work with you, or at least I’m ready to have that conversation about what an arrangement between my organization and your agency might look like. And finally, step five is having real conversations with real people as much as possible.

Not talking about what you do. Not pitching what you do. Not, not saying, hey, you know, your website’s awful, can we get on the phone and I’ll talk about it. But having real conversations at a human level with the people that you are targeting. So let’s go through these steps one by one and put a little bit more meat on the bones for you.

So step one is clarifying your positioning. That means being specific about what you do and who you serve. You want to do it in such a way that your prospective clients can see themselves in you. You want to make sure that you do it in such a way that someone who might be referring business to you has a real clear idea in their mind who in their mental rolodex of contacts they should be suggesting to you.

If I come to you and say that I’m a PR agency, do you have anybody who you can send my way? Well that’s all fine and well and maybe someone will think of a few people. But more than likely, it’s just overwhelming to them as they process it. But if you say, I’m a PR agency and I specialize in dairy businesses.

Well now all of a sudden, if I happen to know someone who is in that industry, I will immediately think of them and I might say to myself, might that be a good fit for, for this agency. That’s so much easier if you’re asking for referrals, and it’s so much better for the prospective clients, because you’re talking their language.

You’re presenting yourself in such a way that they say, you’ve got the kind of expertise that I want. For example, what I do now, obviously I’m not an agency today, but as SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, I’m very clear in my position that I work with small agency owners. It’s immediately obvious if you have what you consider to be a small agency and if you are an owner.

So therefore, you know if you are a fit. Or not. You need to do the same thing with your prospective clients so that it’s immediately obvious in the way you talk, in the way you present yourself in social media, and on your website, whether someone is a fit and who should be referred to you. And just like I talked about the importance of, of making sure that you’re bringing on the right clients and not just any client, that positioning should also help to repel those bad fits.

So that if someone is looking at you, they say, I’m probably not going to fit here. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t occasionally take on a client who doesn’t fit exactly with your ideal client definition. We all do that from time to time for one reason or another. And particularly in the early stages of your agency, it can be valuable to do some of that.

So you can explore and figure out what truly is a best fit client for you. But you want to, to have as many of your meaningful conversations with people who are potentially good fits, as opposed to those who really just don’t align at all with the results you can produce with the way that your team works or with the values that you hold.

So your action item number one to implement this step that I would encourage you to do after this webinar is to write or rewrite, review at least your clear positioning statement and your ideal client definition. So really be as as specific as possible about what makes an ideal client. And I have a number of resources on the SAGA website that I would encourage you to check out that will help you to think through all of those details because there’s a lot of little nuances in there.

There are a lot of granular things that you can think about to find that ideal client. For example, do you work best with a client who has worked with an agency before? Or are you better when you’re the first agency that they’ve ever experienced? Do you work better with someone who’s got a CMO, for example, in house?

Or do you work better with folks who are just outsourcing almost all of their work to you, the agency? These are all things that you need to think about in terms of figuring out who you really work best with, who you want to be attracting, and who you probably want to repel because you don’t think it is likely to be a good fit for either of you.

Alright, step two. You need to be thinking about how you can expand your circle of relationships. And so, the first place to start, honestly, is revitalizing your existing contacts. My experience, myself included, is that I have lots of people I’ve gotten to know over the years. Former co workers, former clients, people we’ve collaborated with on projects, maybe people that we went to college with.

There are so many different people, and if we start with our LinkedIn connections, for example, we can just scroll through there and say, Oh yeah, I haven’t talked to Sam or Sally in a long time, I should follow up with them. And so you need to start by looking at your existing contacts. But that’s not going to be the end of the story.

It’s a great place to start, make sure that you’re reinvigorating them, putting additional life into your existing network, but you also need to be thinking about how you can expand your network. And so you need to be putting your mind to who do you want to get to know? Who would be good to get to know?

What are some prospective clients that fit your ideal client definition? How can you start making connections there or with people who might refer those? And then you also need to think as about these relationships in terms of how you make sure you stay top of mind. That means following up with the people who are in your network and not just having one and done relationships where you go on and you have that first conversation and you never revisit it.

So think about the different circles of your network and how you can continue to expand them and reinvigorate them over time. So your action item here is going to be to create what I call a nifty 50 list. It’s a list of 50 contacts that you might already have or that you would like to make. And it’s a great starting point for those of you who haven’t done a lot of proactive relationship building where you’re simply sort of sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring either because you feel like you’re too busy with other things or you just you’re sort of looking at this giant sea of potential connections and you really haven’t got a plan. If you start with this target list of 50 folks and you say okay I’m going to make sure that I touch at least one person on this list every single business day.

That means that effectively every two to three months you’re going to cycle through this list and it’s another opportunity to connect. And those connections don’t have to be deep. I encourage you to use the nifty 50 list as a way to just touch someone by forwarding them an article by email that you came across that might be of interest.

Comment on something that they post on LinkedIn. Drop them a note to say, Hey, you saw something or, or you had a conversation that made you think of them and so you thought you’d pass something along or you had a question for them ’cause you’re trying to learn from them. There’s a lot of different ways that you can do it that are not high burden that are not resource intensive, but allow you to with this group of 50 folks to really work through it effectively. And again, I’ve got a number of resources with more details on the nifty 50 approach, but it should be ideally a good mix of people that you’ve known in the past, people that you want to get to know.

Some of them should be more aspirational, a few of them might be people that you’re not even sure how you would build a relationship, but you’d like to figure it out. The vast majority, though, should be people that are reasonable lifts for you. They’re not the Bill Gateses of the world or something like that.

They are people who you reasonably might be able to build a relationship with or reinvigorate a relationship with. So, start with that nifty fifty list as a way to start to build those circles out of the relationships that you have.

All right. Step three, providing value. And this is where you need to really think of yourself as someone who can be a resource and be helpful to as many people in your target market as possible.

And that means that you need to be willing to share freely of the insights, ideas, perspectives that you have. You need to be open to those pick your brain conversations. And I will, that’s a hill I will die on. I think that if someone reaches out to pick your brain, you should take virtually 100 percent of those requests.

They are so powerful, they are so useful. And again, I’ve got a number of resources where I lay out the specific reasons why those are valuable and how to make those conversations even more useful to you. You also need to make sure that in this providing a value, you show up where your prospects live. So that means that if your prospects are on LinkedIn, you need to be there.

If they’re on Facebook, you need to be there. If they’re on Instagram or TikTok, you need to be there. If they are at certain conferences, you need to be there. You need to make sure that you are asking yourself, where are your ideal clients today? Where can you go and meet them as opposed to trying to force them to come to you?

You absolutely should have your own resources that over time people will migrate to. They will join your email list for your newsletters. They will subscribe to your podcast channels or whatever vehicles you’re using to put things out. But you need to start by providing value in the places where they already live because it’s going to be so much easier to build those relationships from there to nurture those relationships there as opposed to forcing them to do things when and where you choose.

So it’s got to be a mix, but start with where they live. So your action item here is really, I would encourage you to pick one primary tactic for how you share your knowledge. Some of you may already have this. Some of you may be showing up regularly with comments, ideas, etc. on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ve got a blog on your website that you are regularly keeping updated.

Maybe you contribute to a third party publication on a regular basis. Maybe you’re starting a, maybe you have a podcast, that is a great way to, to reach out to people. It doesn’t really matter too much which tactic you choose, as long as it’s something that you’re comfortable with, something that you feel you can do well at, something that you will do consistently, and something that you will stick with in order to make sure that it has an impact.

And generally speaking, If you’re able to narrow yourself down to just one or two tactics, you’re going to have a lot more success than if you spread yourself too thin and say, I’m going to start a podcast and a YouTube channel and I’m going to write articles for third parties and I’m going to speak at events. And there are a whole list of things that you could do and you might be good at all of them, but I can tell you from my own personal experience, the more you focus on just a couple of things at most, the more likely you are to be successful.

As those do well, as you’re doing them consistently, as you have additional bandwidth to resources, now you can add some additional tactics as well. But make sure that you are excelling at what you are doing first. And this is the way that you start getting out to your marketplace the value that you can provide.

They get a chance to take a peek inside your brain and see the expertise that you have. You can even leverage your team here as well and make sure that people see the expertise that they have so that you’re able to magnify the impact that you have as a thought leader in the world in which you want to exist as an agency.

Alright, step four. You need to let your prospects identify themselves, raise their hands, as I say, when they are ready. And so you need to make sure that you are there. That means staying in touch, getting them on your email list so that you can stay top of mind. Making sure that you are connecting with them and reconnecting with them in places like LinkedIn so they see you pop up in their notifications as someone who liked one of their posts or you comment on things.

You need to make sure that people can think of you at that right time when they actually have the need to refer business to you or they would like to work with you directly. It also means you need to educate a lot more than you think you do about how you can help and who you can help. And this is something that, that frankly, I have not done a great job at over the course of my career.

I share a lot of ideas, a lot of input. Even today, I am not as good necessarily about making sure that everybody understands exactly how I can help agency owners. Particularly in one on one scenarios whether it’s one off audits or ongoing coaching and consulting. Those are things that I am trying to do a better job at and making sure that I’m posting on social and sharing with my email list periodically how I can work with them.

You need to do the same thing. I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my career I’ve talked with someone who said oh, yeah I totally forgot you did that. And it may be that they forgot that I did it. It may be that I never told them explicitly that I did that. It may be that I just hadn’t found a good way to stay top of mind.

So you need to make sure that you are staying top of mind, staying relevant, so that people are ready to make that decision to work with you when the time comes.

So, your action item here is, you should really be thinking about this in terms of having at least a quarterly ish cadence for sharing information with your network, with your email lists, with your social networks, about how you can help, what value you can provide, who you work best with, and just make sure that that is out there.

It doesn’t need to be salesy. It doesn’t need to be persistent. But there’s no reason why you can’t tell the people that you’re already helping. Now, I will tell you, this works best if you are providing lots of other resources in the interim. If the only time you pop up is to email your list every quarter to say what you do, and you don’t share anything in the interim, this won’t be nearly as effective.

But if you are sharing things on a weekly, bi weekly basis, and you’re providing real value for free to your target audience, well then you’re in a great place to be periodically just reminding them about how they might be able to work with you, or who they might be able to refer to you. So that means, reinforcing the positioning, reinforcing the services that you offer, talking about your target market, and if you have that clarity, people will be ready to self identify at the right time for them.

So then, step five is having these real conversations, these meaningful conversations that I emphasized earlier on. And so, when you’re having conversations with people who are prospective clients or might refer business, you need to do much more listening and a lot less talking. Look, you can tell probably from this webinar if this is the first one you’ve seen of mine or if you’ve seen my other content, you know I love to talk. But you need to remember that these conversations are really about not necessarily sitting back and looking meek and quiet, but really allowing the prospective client or the prospective referrer to share more about their knowledge, their challenges, their experiences.

You’ll learn a lot from it. You’ll have a better opportunity to make intelligent comments, ask intelligent questions, and periodically sprinkle in how you match up with what they are potentially looking for or how you might potentially help. Unfortunately, in the agency world, we typically go into this with a creds deck and a desire to just really gush about all of the great things that we do, the talented team that we have, the results that we’ve produced, the logos that we’ve worked for.

These are all great things, but the more time we spend talking about us, the less time we have to learn about our prospects challenges. Really diagnose and figure out how we might be able to help or if we can even help because again, if we’re not a good fit, we’re in a better position if we tell them we’re not the right fit for you.

Ideally, we were able to refer them to someone else, but even if we can’t do that, we will increase our trust in the overall marketplace if we are not pushing ourselves on folks who we would love to work with, even though we see it’s not a fit. More importantly. If you start working with a lot of bad fit clients, you start to damage your reputation.

You start to have high churn rates, low retention rates. These are not good things for your business. They are a distraction from a successful agency and they will make it so much harder to grow effectively. So really focus on making sure that you are listening, you are understanding, you are trying to be helpful, you are trying to find that right fit.

And get rid of the old fashioned sales notion of just winning, of getting to yes. Your goal is not to get to yes. Your goal is to figure out if there is a fit and if so, what the timing of that fit is. And if you can do that, you will start winning the right kinds of business at the right time.

So your action item here is I would encourage you to set a clear goal for your target number of meaningful conversations per week. And if you’re at zero now, that might just be one meaningful conversation every week. And so that means taking this circle of connections that you’re doing, the value that you’re putting out there, and trying to figure out how you can convert some of those to just conversations.

And it might be that you’re asking to pick someone’s brain. Or you’re saying, hey, I’d like to get your feedback on this or that thing. It doesn’t need to be pushing on your services. It can be framed initially as trying to get expertise from that individual. Get their perspective on what’s going on in an industry for example. It’s one of the reasons why I love podcasts as a tool. And I have a webinar where I talk about the power of podcasting for agencies, and in particular, the value it can provide for building relationships. In fact, I’ve been working with some agency owners on podcasts recently, and they have been amazed by the number of new connections that they’ve been able to make in the very earliest stages of these podcasts, because it’s a great excuse to have these meaningful conversations.

People love to say yes to share their expertise. So as you’re thinking about having these meaningful conversations, don’t be afraid of them. Don’t think of them as sales pitches. Think of them as an opportunity to learn. They’ll be easier to have, but you need to set a clear target and measure your success.

Not necessarily in the number of contracts won initially, but really in the number of meaningful conversations that you have. Because I can tell you if you’re not having these very often, if it’s really once in a blue moon that you have meaningful conversations with prospective clients or referrers and you simply get to one every single week or two every single week, it’s going to make a dramatic difference in the outcomes for your agency.

So, set a number for your goal, and then be clear about how you’re going to get there, whether that’s inviting people for research conversations, or inviting them as podcast guests, or simply finding specific reasons to follow up with them based on what you’re seeing them post on social media. You need to have a clear plan for how you get from these nifty fifty lists and the thought leadership that you’re putting out to the meaningful conversations, because that will accelerate your growth dramatically.

So, before we wrap up here, I do want to talk about a couple of, of common mistakes, and I’ve alluded to most of these already, but I want to reinforce these, as I’m wrapping up the prepared presentation.

You need to be careful about chasing every prospect. Just because someone fills out a contact form, sends you an email, just because someone is referred to you doesn’t mean that you need to think about them in terms of this should absolutely be business for us because they’ve already expressed some level of interest.

Some people will raise their hand at the wrong time. They might not be the right fit for you. And so you need to be evaluating them and making sure that it makes sense for you to pursue them. Certainly, if you’ve been referred business, it often makes sense to have a preliminary conversation at least, right?

That’s good for the relationship with the referrer, and who knows, you might learn something from that conversation. So, unless you’re getting absolutely inundated with contact requests, and the vast majority of agency owners I know are not getting inundated. If you’re not being inundated, take these calls, because you never know, you might learn something from them.

But don’t feel like after that initial conversation, you need to follow up and push for a proposal. Push for a formal pitch presentation or anything like that. You need to be choosy and picky because that will lead to better relationships which will lead to better clients for you. You need to be careful about talking too much about your agency because people don’t care about your agency.

They care about the specifics of how you can diagnose their challenges and offer solutions that fit. So rather than talking about all of the capabilities that you might have, make sure that you’re focusing your conversations with people on how you can actually help in their real world situations.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reference other things that you can do so that they’re aware of it. They’ve got it in the back of their mind should that come up later on. But don’t be really focused on explaining everything you can do. Focus instead on what their challenge is and how you fit within that. As I’ve talked about repeatedly here, I will keep drilling this point home, you need to give freely, during this business development phase.

You cannot be afraid to share ideas. The vast majority of us are not having such brilliant ideas that, in a five minute conversation with someone, we’re gonna give away all of, all of the, the goods that we have. If, if that is what we are selling, we probably need to rethink our business model because it’s all of the execution.

It’s all of the other things that we bring to the table over the course of the relationship. It’s our ability to adapt as circumstances develop. If it’s all in that five minute or 20 minute or 50 minute conversation, then we’re missing the boat. And so we just need to be not afraid to share freely during prospect conversations, during relationship conversations, on our blogs, podcasts, videos, etc.

We need to make sure that we are not going out there and just having a bunch of conversations and not letting all those relationships fall off to the wayside. We need to be following up and we need to be doing it consistently. The vast majority of agency initiatives, whether we’re talking about profit initiatives, client service initiatives, measurement initiatives like project tracking or time tracking, the vast majority of things, including business development, fall short because of a lack of consistency.

So do a few things. Do them really well. Do them all the time and you will be much more likely to see real success.

So with that I will tie things up with a bow here and then we will move on to the Q& A portion. So feel free to start dropping questions in if you are here with us live. And so the key points that we talked about today, focusing on relationships rather than traditional sales.

We talked about how persuasion is not really the thing we need to think about. We need to think about meaningful conversations and diagnosing problems to get to solutions. We need to think about how we deliver value freely and consistently in order to show ourselves as the experts that we are and to make sure that people understand that they, that we are here for them when they are ready.

We need to be making sure that we are being present in all our interactions, which means that we are listening very clearly. We are participating in the places where our target audience already exists. We’re showing up to the events and other things that we need to. And then we finally, we need to make it easy for prospects to reach out to have a direct conversation when they are ready. We need to make sure that they know what we do, who we help and how to get in touch with us. If we do all of those things, we are going to see much better growth within our agencies rather than focusing on the old fashioned sales tactics that we all hate, that we all dislike and we don’t want to do.

So, with that, we will wrap up the formal presentation. If you’re watching on replay, that is where things will end. But if you have any questions, feel free to ask either on the SAGA community on Slack, or you can send me an email directly at [email protected]. And, so thank you all for joining us.

 

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar, Grow Your Agency Without Selling. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance. And I am excited to be presenting this topic today because I know that a lot of us who started agencies didn’t do so necessarily feeling all that excited about selling, but obviously we need revenue.

We need profits in order to not just survive, but actually thrive. So we’ll be talking about that today. Before we get too deep into all of that, let’s go ahead and we will review a few of the housekeeping items as people continue to log in here today. First and foremost, a replay will be available, so obviously if you’re watching this on replay, you know this.

If you are watching this live, then just know that you will have access to a replay in the next day or so that you can tap into and watch again, so you don’t need to worry so much about taking extensive notes during the presentation. If you are here live, you can use the Q& A function at the bottom of your screen to ask questions.

I will, you can submit them at any time. I will answer them at the end of the prepared presentation. If you’re watching on replay, you won’t have the Q& A session, but you can email me questions at chip@smallagencygrowth. com. You’re also encouraged to join the SAGA community on Slack, where you can ask questions there, not just of me, but of, of your peers as well, who might be able to chime in.

With their own feedback, answers, insights, et cetera. Finally, any of the resources that I may mention today, as well as plenty of others, are available on the SAGA website at smallagencygrowth.com. The search function there is very robust and will help you search through all of our past webinars, videos, podcast episodes, articles, workbooks, templates.

Everything. So, please make sure that you’re taking advantage of that resource as well. We’ve got almost seven years worth of resources there for you to tap into. And there’s something on pretty much any topic, but certainly ways to go a lot deeper on some of the things that we will cover during today’s session.

And so what we will cover today, basically there are four key things that I’m going to focus on in today’s webinar. We’ll start with why traditional sales tactics are not the best route for agencies. We’ll talk about how you really should be thinking about growing your agency in terms of business development.

Then we’ll go through some concrete action steps that you can take in order to make a difference in how you are generating revenue in a non salesy way for your business. And then we’ll talk a little bit about some of the common mistakes and pitfalls that you want to try to avoid. So with that, let’s go ahead and start by talking about why selling is so uncomfortable.

And I, I referenced this briefly at the top, which is that most of us, we didn’t get into this to be in sales. If we wanted to be salespeople, we would have gone down that path. The reason why we typically start an agency is because we are, we like the strategy, we like the creativity, we like the results that we can deliver for clients.

And while it’s exciting to bring on new clients, the process around it can be pretty daunting. And so, typically, what that means is that we’ll pick up a lot of sales books, and I’ll explain why traditional sales books probably are not your best resource. The second reason why we find selling so uncomfortable is that we don’t like being sold to ourselves.

It’s something that we sort of recoil at for the most part. If you look at your inbox or the cold calls you get, you just, you sit there, these days LinkedIn, the number of solicitations that you get that are just off base and off putting is incredible. And so we don’t like being sold to, so therefore we typically don’t want to be selling to others in that way either.

And then finally the biggest reason why selling is so uncomfortable is because we’re selling expertise, we’re selling our solutions, we’re not selling widgets, we’re not selling something tangible that the goal is simply to get it off the shelf and into the hands of the buyer for the best possible price.

We really are trying to instead find a way that we can pull together and get solutions that work for the clients. So these tactics, if we start reading the sales books and watching the sales videos and listening to the sales podcasts, there are good nuggets in there. There’s a morsel of truth in all of it that we can apply.

But if we follow those step by step guides that you might use if you were selling software or widgets, they tend not to work. In part because our clients, they don’t want to be sold to either. They get tired of the pitches that they’re getting. But I think most importantly, when we’re thinking about the kinds of professional services that we’re delivering, the sale isn’t the end.

This is not a car where you drive it off the lot and, and that’s pretty much it unless you happen to need service. In the agency world, when the sale or the contract is complete, that’s really just the beginning of the relationship. It’s the earliest stages. And we have to follow through and deliver, and the same people who are selling are also delivering.

And that is so very different from many other sales functions, sales roles, and other industries. We also need to remember that if we are using some of these traditional sales tactics, let’s think about them. What are they designed to do? They’re designed to move people through the process as quickly as possible for the best possible price.

And so when you do that, you often end up with bad fit clients because you’re accelerating them through, which sounds good, right? And from a revenue standpoint, it might actually be temporarily good. But it’s not producing the results you want because since it is the start of the relationship you need someone who is ready to work with you, who you can produce good results for, who is good to work with. And so that’s something that traditional sales tactics typically don’t account for.

And finally, the reason why traditional sales tactics fail is because since you don’t like them, you’re probably not going to do them consistently. And as with anything else, whenever I’m asked about time tracking or project tracking or any kind of business development tactic, if you don’t like doing it, you’re not going to do it consistently.

So the best solution is always what you are going to do consistently and so therefore something that you are comfortable at, something that you feel like you’re good at. Those are the kinds of things that you need to focus on and that’s what we’ll be talking about later in today’s webinar.

So let’s think about some of the myths that you’ve probably heard about selling that you really want to be careful of. And that I’m going to try to dissuade you of as I talk about the approach that I recommend for agency business development. So first and foremost, winning clients is about persuasion. And if you read so many sales books, they always talk about persuasion.

The art of persuasion. That is not what you want to be thinking about because winning the client is not your goal. Your goal is to find good relationships and we’ll talk about the importance of matchmaking in agency business development. There’s also, you’ll always find talk about the funnel. I talk with plenty of agency owners who think about, well, you know, I’ve got this funnel or I need to build a funnel in order to, to grow my book of business as an agency.

And look, there are stages that people tend to move through, but when we’re thinking about the relationships that we’re building to win business in the agency world, it’s not that same cut and dried funnel that you follow as you’re going through if you’re going to buy a piece of software or a car or a widget.

And so we need to be careful about thinking too much about those kinds of stages when we’re thinking about the people that we’re building relationships with in order to generate new clients for our agency. You’ll also hear plenty of people telling you that agencies can’t thrive on referrals. And I, I talk to a lot of agency owners who when I first start working with them, they’ll say to me, you know, geez, I, I know I need to find some other way other than referrals in order to grow my business.

And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be looking for other avenues to grow your business. But I think it’s really dangerous to look down upon referrals. It is the bread and butter of most agencies’ growth. And so you should think about how to integrate it, how to accelerate referrals, how to get more referrals, but not think about how do I replace referrals with something else or, or how do I spend more of my time on other things?

Referrals should always be a strong part of your mix as an agency. And if it’s working, that’s generally a pretty good indication that you’re producing good results for your existing clients too, which means your retention rates are often pretty high. The next myth that I want to debunk is, is this idea that you deserve to get paid for your time.

And the reason why I have an asterisk here, because I know that some of you are going to come for me, because I’m not talking about with your actual clients. You absolutely deserve to get paid for your time with actual clients, and you should be pricing your work appropriately. But I know a lot of agency owners who are afraid, to give of themselves freely during the business development process.

They’re afraid to share ideas when they’re talking with prospective clients. They’re afraid to share too much in webinars, in articles, on podcasts, because they feel it’s like the secret sauce. But I think the worst part of it is a lot of agency owners are reluctant to take calls where someone asks to pick your brain.

Look, people can abuse picking your brain. But in the course of 30 some years of being in and around agency world, there are very, very few instances where I can think of people who truly took advantage of me and tried to find a way around paying me for work. If someone wants to pick your brain, take those calls.

It’s great market research for you. It’s a great relationship development tool. And the more of those conversations you have, the more of those will turn into actual paying clients that don’t just pay you for your time, but pay you handsomely for your time. And finally, there’s a lot of talk about ghosting when it comes to agency business development.

I talk with a lot of owners who are worried that prospects are ghosting them and not getting back. And, and ghosting in and of itself is not a bad thing. There are lessons we can take from it. If we’re getting ghosted a lot after we give a proposal, then we need to think about, are we giving proposals to too many people too soon?

But just because someone is ghosting you, that is not a bad thing. It may be rude, it may not be the appropriate professional behavior on their part to simply ignore you, but ghosting is, in effect, an answer. They are telling you that they are not ready, at least now, and they may never be ready. And so, instead of trying to, to get someone to, to get on the phone with you, and, and following typical sales advice, which is just kind of keep the momentum going, you need to accept that they may not be ready and that that’s an okay thing because you don’t want clients Coming on board before they’re ready. If they come on board before they’re ready they probably don’t have the resources to invest from their side to make the relationship successful. Maybe they don’t truly have the financial resources They need to make that investment or maybe they are not completely sold on the solution that you’re offering in the return on investment that you can provide.

And so if you don’t have that meeting of the minds, if you don’t have them ready at the same time you are, there’s no sense in accelerating that close. Because again, we’re not selling a fixed product that is already ready to hand over. We are building the relationship and we have to work collaborative, collaboratively with our clients to deliver that ultimate end product.

So. If all of these things are bad, if these are all the myths and these are the reasons why traditional sales don’t work, what should we be doing? And so what I encourage you to be thinking about is to think about agency business development more as matchmaking. Your goal, ultimately, is to find the right solution for the folks that you are talking with who might work with your agency.

But that solution might be that they shouldn’t work with an agency at all. Maybe they should work with a different agency. Maybe they should work with your agency but not for another 6, 12, or 18 months until whatever evolution that they are in as a business matches up with what you can do. So think about that in terms of matchmaking, because you really want to try to find the right fits.

And, and so much of agency growth, successful agency growth, comes down to making sure that you are finding the right clients. You can be a generalist who’s coming in and sweeping up as many clients as possible, and in the short term, that generates revenue. But what does it also do? It also tends to erode profit margins because you don’t develop the kind of expertise and repeatable processes that make you more efficient.

It tends to hurt your retention because you are not developing that expertise and ability to deliver as well. It makes it harder over time to sell because people can’t really place you and they can’t figure out where you fit and whether they are a good fit for you. So you need to think about finding those right fit clients rather than revenue at any cost.

You also need to focus on the fact that you are really trying to, to develop relationships. And so this is not about building a list of as many people as possible. It’s not, it’s not a numbers game like traditional sales will tell you where you need to go out and just talk to as many people as possible.

Yes, you need to probably talk to more people than you are today. You need to build new relationships. But it’s building actual meaningful relationships, particularly during the prospect phase. And what that means is that you probably should have more conversations rather than less. I sometimes see these YouTube videos where an agency guru will talk to you about the one call close that they can show you how to do.

You don’t really want to close prospective clients for your agency in all likelihood in one call because you haven’t really even evaluated them correctly to determine if they really are a best fit client or they are simply someone who might be able to cut the initial check and then who knows where it goes from there.

So what you really need to be doing in addition to building these relationships is making sure that you’re visible to them, you stay top of mind. With your prospects, and we’ll talk about how to do that a little bit later. You need to, to demonstrate that you are a valuable resource for them and you need to be ready.

And so being ready means that you need to, to keep in touch with folks. You need to make sure that they know what you do, how you can help, so that when they have that need, when that right fit client is ready for you, they can come on board and have the appropriate conversation. And if they are truly a match, if you agree that you can produce results for them, well then great.

Now you can bring them on as a client and it’s successful for everybody involved. So, it all starts with understanding who your ideal client is. And a lot of agencies that I work with struggle a bit with this. And so you need to be as specific as possible when you are defining your ideal client. Because you need to understand that defining your ideal client is as much about figuring out who is a bad fit as who is a good fit.

And that means you need to know who you help best. And what makes an ideal client are basically three things. It needs to be a client that you can produce excellent results for. It needs to be a client that can produce reasonable, if not, more than reasonable profits for yourself, for your agency. And it needs to be someone who provides satisfaction for you and your team.

And satisfaction can be defined in many different ways. It might be satisfaction because they treat you with respect, and your values are compatible. They don’t necessarily need to be identical, but they need to be compatible. And so you, you want to make sure that you are finding those folks that, that really work well with you on the human level because ultimately logos don’t hire logos, people hire people. And that means that our people need to work well with their people. And if you don’t have a meshing there, if there’s not chemistry there, if there’s not mutual respect there, it’s not going to be an ideal client for you. So your real goal then in this matchmaking process is to have meaningful conversations.

What’s a meaningful conversation? Well, a meaningful conversation is something beyond just the general platitudes where you talk about the weather and you talk in general terms about what services you offer. Meaningful conversations are these conversations that you have with people who you can learn from them, they can learn from you and you start to figure out Is there a possibility here?

Can I learn something from you? Can you learn something from me? Might there be somewhere on the timeline a time when you can either refer business to me or you might do business with me directly. And so your whole goal in agency business development should be to be having more and better meaningful conversations with prospective clients.

So the next set of things that I’m going to talk about are the steps to getting to these meaningful conversations. So here are the five steps that I think you need to be thinking about. Step one, you need to clarify your positioning. We’ve talked about the importance of ideal client profiles. You really need to make sure that you have clarity about how you are positioning yourself in the marketplace and who you are positioning yourself for.

Step two is to start building and nurturing relationships with people who, as I said, could either refer business or might become actual clients one day. Step three is to, with all of these people that you’re building relationships with, try to figure out how you can provide value to them free of charge before you even get to an agency client relationship.

Step four is allowing your prospective clients to self qualify, self identify, to stand up, raise their hand, and say, I’m ready to work with you, or at least I’m ready to have that conversation about what an arrangement between my organization and your agency might look like. And finally, step five is having real conversations with real people as much as possible.

Not talking about what you do. Not pitching what you do. Not, not saying, hey, you know, your website’s awful, can we get on the phone and I’ll talk about it. But having real conversations at a human level with the people that you are targeting. So let’s go through these steps one by one and put a little bit more meat on the bones for you.

So step one is clarifying your positioning. That means being specific about what you do and who you serve. You want to do it in such a way that your prospective clients can see themselves in you. You want to make sure that you do it in such a way that someone who might be referring business to you has a real clear idea in their mind who in their mental rolodex of contacts they should be suggesting to you.

If I come to you and say that I’m a PR agency, do you have anybody who you can send my way? Well that’s all fine and well and maybe someone will think of a few people. But more than likely, it’s just overwhelming to them as they process it. But if you say, I’m a PR agency and I specialize in dairy businesses.

Well now all of a sudden, if I happen to know someone who is in that industry, I will immediately think of them and I might say to myself, might that be a good fit for, for this agency. That’s so much easier if you’re asking for referrals, and it’s so much better for the prospective clients, because you’re talking their language.

You’re presenting yourself in such a way that they say, you’ve got the kind of expertise that I want. For example, what I do now, obviously I’m not an agency today, but as SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, I’m very clear in my position that I work with small agency owners. It’s immediately obvious if you have what you consider to be a small agency and if you are an owner.

So therefore, you know if you are a fit. Or not. You need to do the same thing with your prospective clients so that it’s immediately obvious in the way you talk, in the way you present yourself in social media, and on your website, whether someone is a fit and who should be referred to you. And just like I talked about the importance of, of making sure that you’re bringing on the right clients and not just any client, that positioning should also help to repel those bad fits.

So that if someone is looking at you, they say, I’m probably not going to fit here. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t occasionally take on a client who doesn’t fit exactly with your ideal client definition. We all do that from time to time for one reason or another. And particularly in the early stages of your agency, it can be valuable to do some of that.

So you can explore and figure out what truly is a best fit client for you. But you want to, to have as many of your meaningful conversations with people who are potentially good fits, as opposed to those who really just don’t align at all with the results you can produce with the way that your team works or with the values that you hold.

So your action item number one to implement this step that I would encourage you to do after this webinar is to write or rewrite, review at least your clear positioning statement and your ideal client definition. So really be as as specific as possible about what makes an ideal client. And I have a number of resources on the SAGA website that I would encourage you to check out that will help you to think through all of those details because there’s a lot of little nuances in there.

There are a lot of granular things that you can think about to find that ideal client. For example, do you work best with a client who has worked with an agency before? Or are you better when you’re the first agency that they’ve ever experienced? Do you work better with someone who’s got a CMO, for example, in house?

Or do you work better with folks who are just outsourcing almost all of their work to you, the agency? These are all things that you need to think about in terms of figuring out who you really work best with, who you want to be attracting, and who you probably want to repel because you don’t think it is likely to be a good fit for either of you.

Alright, step two. You need to be thinking about how you can expand your circle of relationships. And so, the first place to start, honestly, is revitalizing your existing contacts. My experience, myself included, is that I have lots of people I’ve gotten to know over the years. Former co workers, former clients, people we’ve collaborated with on projects, maybe people that we went to college with.

There are so many different people, and if we start with our LinkedIn connections, for example, we can just scroll through there and say, Oh yeah, I haven’t talked to Sam or Sally in a long time, I should follow up with them. And so you need to start by looking at your existing contacts. But that’s not going to be the end of the story.

It’s a great place to start, make sure that you’re reinvigorating them, putting additional life into your existing network, but you also need to be thinking about how you can expand your network. And so you need to be putting your mind to who do you want to get to know? Who would be good to get to know?

What are some prospective clients that fit your ideal client definition? How can you start making connections there or with people who might refer those? And then you also need to think as about these relationships in terms of how you make sure you stay top of mind. That means following up with the people who are in your network and not just having one and done relationships where you go on and you have that first conversation and you never revisit it.

So think about the different circles of your network and how you can continue to expand them and reinvigorate them over time. So your action item here is going to be to create what I call a nifty 50 list. It’s a list of 50 contacts that you might already have or that you would like to make. And it’s a great starting point for those of you who haven’t done a lot of proactive relationship building where you’re simply sort of sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring either because you feel like you’re too busy with other things or you just you’re sort of looking at this giant sea of potential connections and you really haven’t got a plan. If you start with this target list of 50 folks and you say okay I’m going to make sure that I touch at least one person on this list every single business day.

That means that effectively every two to three months you’re going to cycle through this list and it’s another opportunity to connect. And those connections don’t have to be deep. I encourage you to use the nifty 50 list as a way to just touch someone by forwarding them an article by email that you came across that might be of interest.

Comment on something that they post on LinkedIn. Drop them a note to say, Hey, you saw something or, or you had a conversation that made you think of them and so you thought you’d pass something along or you had a question for them ’cause you’re trying to learn from them. There’s a lot of different ways that you can do it that are not high burden that are not resource intensive, but allow you to with this group of 50 folks to really work through it effectively. And again, I’ve got a number of resources with more details on the nifty 50 approach, but it should be ideally a good mix of people that you’ve known in the past, people that you want to get to know.

Some of them should be more aspirational, a few of them might be people that you’re not even sure how you would build a relationship, but you’d like to figure it out. The vast majority, though, should be people that are reasonable lifts for you. They’re not the Bill Gateses of the world or something like that.

They are people who you reasonably might be able to build a relationship with or reinvigorate a relationship with. So, start with that nifty fifty list as a way to start to build those circles out of the relationships that you have.

All right. Step three, providing value. And this is where you need to really think of yourself as someone who can be a resource and be helpful to as many people in your target market as possible.

And that means that you need to be willing to share freely of the insights, ideas, perspectives that you have. You need to be open to those pick your brain conversations. And I will, that’s a hill I will die on. I think that if someone reaches out to pick your brain, you should take virtually 100 percent of those requests.

They are so powerful, they are so useful. And again, I’ve got a number of resources where I lay out the specific reasons why those are valuable and how to make those conversations even more useful to you. You also need to make sure that in this providing a value, you show up where your prospects live. So that means that if your prospects are on LinkedIn, you need to be there.

If they’re on Facebook, you need to be there. If they’re on Instagram or TikTok, you need to be there. If they are at certain conferences, you need to be there. You need to make sure that you are asking yourself, where are your ideal clients today? Where can you go and meet them as opposed to trying to force them to come to you?

You absolutely should have your own resources that over time people will migrate to. They will join your email list for your newsletters. They will subscribe to your podcast channels or whatever vehicles you’re using to put things out. But you need to start by providing value in the places where they already live because it’s going to be so much easier to build those relationships from there to nurture those relationships there as opposed to forcing them to do things when and where you choose.

So it’s got to be a mix, but start with where they live. So your action item here is really, I would encourage you to pick one primary tactic for how you share your knowledge. Some of you may already have this. Some of you may be showing up regularly with comments, ideas, etc. on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ve got a blog on your website that you are regularly keeping updated.

Maybe you contribute to a third party publication on a regular basis. Maybe you’re starting a, maybe you have a podcast, that is a great way to, to reach out to people. It doesn’t really matter too much which tactic you choose, as long as it’s something that you’re comfortable with, something that you feel you can do well at, something that you will do consistently, and something that you will stick with in order to make sure that it has an impact.

And generally speaking, If you’re able to narrow yourself down to just one or two tactics, you’re going to have a lot more success than if you spread yourself too thin and say, I’m going to start a podcast and a YouTube channel and I’m going to write articles for third parties and I’m going to speak at events. And there are a whole list of things that you could do and you might be good at all of them, but I can tell you from my own personal experience, the more you focus on just a couple of things at most, the more likely you are to be successful.

As those do well, as you’re doing them consistently, as you have additional bandwidth to resources, now you can add some additional tactics as well. But make sure that you are excelling at what you are doing first. And this is the way that you start getting out to your marketplace the value that you can provide.

They get a chance to take a peek inside your brain and see the expertise that you have. You can even leverage your team here as well and make sure that people see the expertise that they have so that you’re able to magnify the impact that you have as a thought leader in the world in which you want to exist as an agency.

Alright, step four. You need to let your prospects identify themselves, raise their hands, as I say, when they are ready. And so you need to make sure that you are there. That means staying in touch, getting them on your email list so that you can stay top of mind. Making sure that you are connecting with them and reconnecting with them in places like LinkedIn so they see you pop up in their notifications as someone who liked one of their posts or you comment on things.

You need to make sure that people can think of you at that right time when they actually have the need to refer business to you or they would like to work with you directly. It also means you need to educate a lot more than you think you do about how you can help and who you can help. And this is something that, that frankly, I have not done a great job at over the course of my career.

I share a lot of ideas, a lot of input. Even today, I am not as good necessarily about making sure that everybody understands exactly how I can help agency owners. Particularly in one on one scenarios whether it’s one off audits or ongoing coaching and consulting. Those are things that I am trying to do a better job at and making sure that I’m posting on social and sharing with my email list periodically how I can work with them.

You need to do the same thing. I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my career I’ve talked with someone who said oh, yeah I totally forgot you did that. And it may be that they forgot that I did it. It may be that I never told them explicitly that I did that. It may be that I just hadn’t found a good way to stay top of mind.

So you need to make sure that you are staying top of mind, staying relevant, so that people are ready to make that decision to work with you when the time comes.

So, your action item here is, you should really be thinking about this in terms of having at least a quarterly ish cadence for sharing information with your network, with your email lists, with your social networks, about how you can help, what value you can provide, who you work best with, and just make sure that that is out there.

It doesn’t need to be salesy. It doesn’t need to be persistent. But there’s no reason why you can’t tell the people that you’re already helping. Now, I will tell you, this works best if you are providing lots of other resources in the interim. If the only time you pop up is to email your list every quarter to say what you do, and you don’t share anything in the interim, this won’t be nearly as effective.

But if you are sharing things on a weekly, bi weekly basis, and you’re providing real value for free to your target audience, well then you’re in a great place to be periodically just reminding them about how they might be able to work with you, or who they might be able to refer to you. So that means, reinforcing the positioning, reinforcing the services that you offer, talking about your target market, and if you have that clarity, people will be ready to self identify at the right time for them.

So then, step five is having these real conversations, these meaningful conversations that I emphasized earlier on. And so, when you’re having conversations with people who are prospective clients or might refer business, you need to do much more listening and a lot less talking. Look, you can tell probably from this webinar if this is the first one you’ve seen of mine or if you’ve seen my other content, you know I love to talk. But you need to remember that these conversations are really about not necessarily sitting back and looking meek and quiet, but really allowing the prospective client or the prospective referrer to share more about their knowledge, their challenges, their experiences.

You’ll learn a lot from it. You’ll have a better opportunity to make intelligent comments, ask intelligent questions, and periodically sprinkle in how you match up with what they are potentially looking for or how you might potentially help. Unfortunately, in the agency world, we typically go into this with a creds deck and a desire to just really gush about all of the great things that we do, the talented team that we have, the results that we’ve produced, the logos that we’ve worked for.

These are all great things, but the more time we spend talking about us, the less time we have to learn about our prospects challenges. Really diagnose and figure out how we might be able to help or if we can even help because again, if we’re not a good fit, we’re in a better position if we tell them we’re not the right fit for you.

Ideally, we were able to refer them to someone else, but even if we can’t do that, we will increase our trust in the overall marketplace if we are not pushing ourselves on folks who we would love to work with, even though we see it’s not a fit. More importantly. If you start working with a lot of bad fit clients, you start to damage your reputation.

You start to have high churn rates, low retention rates. These are not good things for your business. They are a distraction from a successful agency and they will make it so much harder to grow effectively. So really focus on making sure that you are listening, you are understanding, you are trying to be helpful, you are trying to find that right fit.

And get rid of the old fashioned sales notion of just winning, of getting to yes. Your goal is not to get to yes. Your goal is to figure out if there is a fit and if so, what the timing of that fit is. And if you can do that, you will start winning the right kinds of business at the right time.

So your action item here is I would encourage you to set a clear goal for your target number of meaningful conversations per week. And if you’re at zero now, that might just be one meaningful conversation every week. And so that means taking this circle of connections that you’re doing, the value that you’re putting out there, and trying to figure out how you can convert some of those to just conversations.

And it might be that you’re asking to pick someone’s brain. Or you’re saying, hey, I’d like to get your feedback on this or that thing. It doesn’t need to be pushing on your services. It can be framed initially as trying to get expertise from that individual. Get their perspective on what’s going on in an industry for example. It’s one of the reasons why I love podcasts as a tool. And I have a webinar where I talk about the power of podcasting for agencies, and in particular, the value it can provide for building relationships. In fact, I’ve been working with some agency owners on podcasts recently, and they have been amazed by the number of new connections that they’ve been able to make in the very earliest stages of these podcasts, because it’s a great excuse to have these meaningful conversations.

People love to say yes to share their expertise. So as you’re thinking about having these meaningful conversations, don’t be afraid of them. Don’t think of them as sales pitches. Think of them as an opportunity to learn. They’ll be easier to have, but you need to set a clear target and measure your success.

Not necessarily in the number of contracts won initially, but really in the number of meaningful conversations that you have. Because I can tell you if you’re not having these very often, if it’s really once in a blue moon that you have meaningful conversations with prospective clients or referrers and you simply get to one every single week or two every single week, it’s going to make a dramatic difference in the outcomes for your agency.

So, set a number for your goal, and then be clear about how you’re going to get there, whether that’s inviting people for research conversations, or inviting them as podcast guests, or simply finding specific reasons to follow up with them based on what you’re seeing them post on social media. You need to have a clear plan for how you get from these nifty fifty lists and the thought leadership that you’re putting out to the meaningful conversations, because that will accelerate your growth dramatically.

So, before we wrap up here, I do want to talk about a couple of, of common mistakes, and I’ve alluded to most of these already, but I want to reinforce these, as I’m wrapping up the prepared presentation.

You need to be careful about chasing every prospect. Just because someone fills out a contact form, sends you an email, just because someone is referred to you doesn’t mean that you need to think about them in terms of this should absolutely be business for us because they’ve already expressed some level of interest.

Some people will raise their hand at the wrong time. They might not be the right fit for you. And so you need to be evaluating them and making sure that it makes sense for you to pursue them. Certainly, if you’ve been referred business, it often makes sense to have a preliminary conversation at least, right?

That’s good for the relationship with the referrer, and who knows, you might learn something from that conversation. So, unless you’re getting absolutely inundated with contact requests, and the vast majority of agency owners I know are not getting inundated. If you’re not being inundated, take these calls, because you never know, you might learn something from them.

But don’t feel like after that initial conversation, you need to follow up and push for a proposal. Push for a formal pitch presentation or anything like that. You need to be choosy and picky because that will lead to better relationships which will lead to better clients for you. You need to be careful about talking too much about your agency because people don’t care about your agency.

They care about the specifics of how you can diagnose their challenges and offer solutions that fit. So rather than talking about all of the capabilities that you might have, make sure that you’re focusing your conversations with people on how you can actually help in their real world situations.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reference other things that you can do so that they’re aware of it. They’ve got it in the back of their mind should that come up later on. But don’t be really focused on explaining everything you can do. Focus instead on what their challenge is and how you fit within that. As I’ve talked about repeatedly here, I will keep drilling this point home, you need to give freely, during this business development phase.

You cannot be afraid to share ideas. The vast majority of us are not having such brilliant ideas that, in a five minute conversation with someone, we’re gonna give away all of, all of the, the goods that we have. If, if that is what we are selling, we probably need to rethink our business model because it’s all of the execution.

It’s all of the other things that we bring to the table over the course of the relationship. It’s our ability to adapt as circumstances develop. If it’s all in that five minute or 20 minute or 50 minute conversation, then we’re missing the boat. And so we just need to be not afraid to share freely during prospect conversations, during relationship conversations, on our blogs, podcasts, videos, etc.

We need to make sure that we are not going out there and just having a bunch of conversations and not letting all those relationships fall off to the wayside. We need to be following up and we need to be doing it consistently. The vast majority of agency initiatives, whether we’re talking about profit initiatives, client service initiatives, measurement initiatives like project tracking or time tracking, the vast majority of things, including business development, fall short because of a lack of consistency.

So do a few things. Do them really well. Do them all the time and you will be much more likely to see real success.

So with that I will tie things up with a bow here and then we will move on to the Q& A portion. So feel free to start dropping questions in if you are here with us live. And so the key points that we talked about today, focusing on relationships rather than traditional sales.

We talked about how persuasion is not really the thing we need to think about. We need to think about meaningful conversations and diagnosing problems to get to solutions. We need to think about how we deliver value freely and consistently in order to show ourselves as the experts that we are and to make sure that people understand that they, that we are here for them when they are ready.

We need to be making sure that we are being present in all our interactions, which means that we are listening very clearly. We are participating in the places where our target audience already exists. We’re showing up to the events and other things that we need to. And then we finally, we need to make it easy for prospects to reach out to have a direct conversation when they are ready. We need to make sure that they know what we do, who we help and how to get in touch with us. If we do all of those things, we are going to see much better growth within our agencies rather than focusing on the old fashioned sales tactics that we all hate, that we all dislike and we don’t want to do.

So, with that, we will wrap up the formal presentation. If you’re watching on replay, that is where things will end. But if you have any questions, feel free to ask either on the SAGA community on Slack, or you can send me an email directly at [email protected]. And, so thank you all for joining us.

 

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