10 steps to grow your agency quickly and effectively

Agency owners must be proactive and energetic to drive agency growth. Too many agencies are overly passive, relying on general brand and reputation marketing, word of mouth, award wins, or referrals to fuel their development. Whilst all of these will generate some traction, real superfast growth that will increase your agency valuation comes from taking significant positive actions above and beyond that of your competition.

Here are 10 key steps that done well will deliver exciting and significant growth for your agency:

1. Work out the core value that you can deliver for clients against what you know (or have researched to understand) are their critical business challenges and focus your agency’s attention on them.
2. Create illustrative and quantified stories that demonstrate how you have solved challenges for previous clients to be used as evidence and proof points.
3. Segment your target market into those that have the business problems you can and have solved already for others. Research your prospects in advance to understand their problems so you know you can help them.
4. Be constantly active outbound, directly connecting with senior business level prospects across numerous channels, (LinkedIn, email, events, phone, Vidyard etc.) that have those problems and demonstrate how you can resolve them quickly and cost effectively.
5. Qualify every opportunity thoroughly using the 3 WHYs qualification method to avoid wasting time on opportunities that cannot be closed by your agency.
6. Meet and influence multiple stakeholders in your prospects too understand and deliver  personal wins for them delivered from the solution you are providing.
7. Identify and develop at least one stakeholder with both power and influence in your prospect as a “champion” for your solution who will support you and your proposal in their business because you have helped them have a vested interested in you winning the contract.
8. Scope the solution accurately accounting for the actual time and effort required to deliver the value you are promising, so that everyone knows what’s going to happen and you can ensure there will be no need to overservice the client and erode your margin.
9. Price your solution in proportion to the positive business impact you can deliver and ensure it more than covers all costs with a sensible margin so you make profit from it. For example, if your solution delivers £1m of incremental sales at a profit margin of 25% (£250k) then £50k for that return is great value.
10. Present and pitch your solution in a succinct way against the resolution of the prospect’s critical business challenge. Actively demonstrate your understanding of the problem, how it manifests, how it will be resolved, and importantly justify the investment required to realise the quantified return for the prospect in a way that is meaningful to them. (£’s rev / profit gained, time saved, customers onboarded, lifetime value, or whatever they care about). Remember people will buy things that solve their problems and if you can help them see how and what return they will get then this makes buying from you much easier.

These activities needs to be “always on”, consistent and approached with energy and vigour, riding past the disappointments and setbacks to focus in on the positives and upsides of running great “value led business development” in your agency.

If you’d like to learn more, drop me a line at phil@waypointpartners.co.uk