For most agencies, the majority of income comes from existing clients. It’s the simplest and most cost-effective way to win new work. If this is the case in your agency, are your teams pro-actively trying to get more work from clients? In this article for BIMA, we share proven techniques for upselling to clients. Not ruthless sales techniques, but a value-led approach that benefits everyone and builds a truly pro-active partnership.
Your agency is busy so you get a brief, put a quote together and start doing the work. Simple!
But if your client has sent you a brief, this is their interpretation of what needs doing. They’re paying you for your expertise and guidance so spending time digging into the brief and listening to what they wants to achieve can be wonderfully beneficial to you both. Your client gets the pro-active partner they crave, and there’s potential for you to land a much larger project if you add on some genuinely valuable suggestions.
A great way to add value to a brief, without your client feeling sold-to, is to offer tiered options:
One: What they asked for
Two: What they asked for with a little more
Three: A much bigger, but more beneficial project
When presented with three options, most people will go for the middle one so you’ll likely get a bigger project, and you offer to do option three in stages.
Clients want your support, it’s the primary role of an account manager along with ensuring projects run smoothly so it’s important to nurture rather than sell. This means offering the guidance and pro-activity we discussed above. Offering solutions that are aligned to a client’s long-term goals and budgets will naturally unearth more work opportunities. This nurturing approach doesn’t have to only happen when a client presents a brief, continually suggesting opportunities is something a client will cherish.
OK this is a little simplistic, but actively focusing on not over-servicing has the same effect as upselling. Of course, you can’t charge a client if something simply took you longer to complete. You need to be able to prove that something is out of scope, and that’s where a complete agency management system helps.
With an integrated resource schedule, people have clarity on how long a task should take and in Synergist for example, scope documents and briefs can be attached to schedule so everyone has clarity on what they should be delivering. This makes over-servicing easy to spot and proove so you can have honest conversations with your clients and either stop overservicing or get paid for the extra time.
When a piece of work comes in from a client, spend time thinking about what the client is trying to achieve and whether your agency can help them with more than just this piece of work. For example, if you’re building a website, does your client know you also have a digital ads department that can help them promote it?
You don’t have to over-service or bend over backwards to please a client, just produce really great work that gets them the results they’re after. If you do this, your clients are going to give you more work.
In most agencies there isn’t a traditional sales team metaphorically knocking on doors so it’s everyone’s responsibility to spot opportunities. Therefore, a lot of the advice in this article can be distilled into simply building a more commercial focused agency culture. If people are thinking about growth opportunities, then doing this in a natural and benefit-led way comes naturally to most folk.
If you’re interested in hearing more about building this commercial focus, you may enjoy our piece, How to raise your agency’s commercial awareness.