Latest / Agency Uncovered / How Do You Win Bigger Clients for Your Agency?
Transcript
- Sasha Damon (00:00) How do you win bigger clients for your agency? We’re here with Mads Singers and he’s going to help us through this topic. So Mads, how do you win bigger clients for your agency? Mads Singers (00:09) It depends a little on your agency, the type of work you’re doing and the type of clients you’re working with. But what I’ll generally say is that many agencies box themselves into a small box, and they usually do this in two ways: through pricing and through their positioning. Mads Singers (00:30) Say you have an agency doing social media marketing, and on your website you have pricing that says you do something for two grand a month or five grand a month. I can promise you, IBM will never message you and say, “Hey, we’d like the five-grand-a-month package.” It won’t happen. Now, that’s obviously an extreme example, but it’s useful from a mindset standpoint. Mads Singers (00:56) Number one, your pricing in many cases helps the buyer assume quality. Sasha, for example — if you had to get a new wooden table built and someone offers to do it for a hundred bucks and someone else offers to do it for four hundred, who would you assume has the higher quality? Mads Singers (01:14) Everyone assumes that. The thing is, when you sell to people who don’t have a lot of money, they expect a lot for the little money they have. Mads Singers (01:23) When you sell to people who are mentally good at business — they’re focused on getting a return, they’re focused on building long term — they’re way more focused on quality than on the price itself. For example, when I first started doing coaching I was charging fifty bucks an hour, a hundred bucks an hour. I’d talk with some big corporate clients, and in the early days none of them would talk with me. Mads Singers (01:50) I thought, that makes no sense. I know what they’re paying, they could get me so much cheaper, and I’m better. Until one of my friends sat down with me and said, “The way it works is that if you don’t charge at least 20 grand a day, no one’s even going to consider you — they’ll assume you don’t have any level of skill.” So if you put an offer in, or you’re talking with one of these larger companies, and your price isn’t up there, they’re not going to consider you for a second, because they just assume you haven’t got the quality needed. Mads Singers (02:25) For me, that was such a good mindset shift. Mads Singers (02:29) The second thing is around pricing in general. It makes sense for many companies when they start out to start with smaller companies — but it’s often a lot harder to deliver great results for a small company than for a large one. Mads Singers (02:41) Say again you’re doing social media marketing. If you need to generate X amount of business for a huge chain like Starbucks, and you have access to their email list, or you can post on all of their social media, then the difficulty of generating a certain amount of money for them — with that level of access — is significantly easier. Mads Singers (03:05) Compare that to a new coffee brand that started yesterday and no one has ever heard of. The reality is that for a lot of companies, the bigger they are, the easier it is to deliver results and the easier it is to make them more money. So a lot of the time people make it difficult for themselves by working with really small businesses. When you’re working with a really small business, they have less budget. Even if you do an amazing job, you might help them make five grand extra a month, or maybe ten grand extra a month. Mads Singers (03:38) But if you take a big company like Starbucks and help them make ten grand more a month, you have to do almost nothing. It’s a 0.00001% improvement. Mads Singers (03:48) That’s a very important mindset to have when you’re thinking about your clientele and the clients you’re reaching out to. Mads Singers (03:56) This is why I really recommend people focus in on the one thing they’re good at doing, and focus on that process. If you focus on the process, get really good at it, and reach out to companies saying, “Hey, we can help increase your social media reach by 20%” — to a large company, 20% is a crazy increase. For some companies that would be millions and millions of dollars. Mads Singers (04:24) And if you can learn to do that, the process is often the same. A lot of the people I know doing SEO put nearly the same amount of work into a client paying them a thousand dollars a month as into a client paying ten thousand a month. Mads Singers (04:41) It’s often way easier to deliver value to the bigger client, because they’re a bigger company, or their clients are worth more, and so on. Sasha Damon (04:48) So what do agencies need to change when they want to move from small businesses to bigger clients? Mads Singers (04:57) The key thing you want to change when moving from smaller to bigger clients is not necessarily to kick out everyone you have right now. It’s what we were talking about earlier: focus on where you can do the same thing you’re doing now, but for a client at a much higher level. The reality is it’s so uncomfortable. If you’ve been used to asking people for five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a month, going on a call and asking a client for ten thousand a month is going to feel almost impossible. Mads Singers (05:23) It’s going to be so difficult for most people. They’ll say, “Yeah, we charge, like, ten thousand dollars a month,” and they’ll be so insecure — because if you’ve never asked for something, it’s difficult. It’s always the same with every company. If you’ve never asked for it before, it’s hard. And the second you ask, the second you ask a couple of customers, it becomes so much easier. Mads Singers (05:47) If someone has already paid you ten grand a month for a certain level of service, it becomes so much easier to ask other people for the same amount of money. Mads Singers (05:57) One of the things I absolutely love doing — and we particularly love doing this when we have a lot of clients or a lot of leads coming in — is that if we’re pretty busy, we love increasing our prices. We’ll say, “We’re pretty busy right now, we can handle a few more clients, but let’s try and put the price up and see what happens.” Mads Singers (06:14) So instead of saying four grand a month, say five or six grand a month. And here’s the thing: when you get more comfortable with it, when you get used to playing with the mindset of how much you’re charging, it becomes a bit of a game. Many of the salespeople I work with love that game. They love trying to see what they can get away with. But it’s not really about what you can get away with — because the reality is that if a customer pays you a lot more money, you can also afford to do more. Mads Singers (06:39) The problem is that if a customer pays you a thousand dollars a month and you’re spending six or seven hundred dollars delivering, you can’t really do much extra. Whereas if a customer is paying you ten grand a month, many agencies are spending three, four or five grand delivering — so if something happens, if something goes wrong, they can afford to spend a bit more money on it. Sasha Damon (06:58) So how can an agency position itself as an expert rather than just another service provider? Mads Singers (07:05) For me it comes back to really niching down. A lot of it comes down to case studies, it comes down to data, and it comes down to proving to yourself that you can do it. Because here’s the thing: if you’re not confident you can do it, it’s hard to convince other people. But if you’ve shown yourself, and you’ve shown other clients, that you can do it many times, the way you come across in meetings and the way you represent yourself is significantly more confident. Mads Singers (07:32) On positioning upwards — if you’ve figured out how to do something, say I can push out YouTube videos and I’m brilliant at getting people a lot of traffic on YouTube. If I know how to do it, no matter the size of client, then it’s simply about targeting and reaching out to people at a higher level. Start connecting with people at a higher level and say, “I can see you already have a million followers. I can get you to 1.2 million in a short span of time by doing X, Y and Z.” Mads Singers (07:58) “We’re a company that specialises in this process, and we can do it for X amount of money.” Really honing in on your skill and becoming confident in it, on your own, is probably the biggest thing where I see most people fail. I’ve seen it so much with AI, where people say, “Yeah, we can totally build that,” and the company asks, “Have you ever built something like that before?” And they say, “Yeah, we kind of have.” Mads Singers (08:24) If you’ve never done it and you’re trying to sell to a large company, it becomes so much harder. But if you can say, “Yep — here are two of your competitors we’ve done it with, here’s the benefit they got, and here’s the time it took to implement,” they’re going to buy it. Sasha Damon (08:37) So what’s the best way for agencies to find and approach high-value clients? Mads Singers (08:42) There are many ways to go about it. You can qualify leads in many ways, and there’s not really a better or worse way. Generally, from my experience, it’s about finding one lead generation channel that works for you. It doesn’t matter what it is, but find one channel and really hone in on it. Obviously certain channels might work at one level and not at another. Mads Singers (09:06) Let’s say you’re running Facebook ads to a particular offer and a particular funnel. They might work extremely well for clients paying zero to five K a month, but not work well for clients paying ten K plus. That doesn’t mean Facebook ads don’t work — it’s probably a question of your offer and funnel not working for a higher-level audience. Looking at that can make a lot of sense. It’s always about testing. Mads Singers (09:34) But I’m a firm believer in this: don’t do more things until you crack it with one method that works really well. Sasha Damon (09:39) In your experience, how important are case studies, results and industry expertise when you’re trying to land a bigger client as an agency? Mads Singers (09:51) Generally, very important. If you can’t show them you’ve done something similar, you’re going to have a really hard time. Some of the fastest-growing agencies I work with right now — I have a couple of friends running AI automation companies, and one in particular I’ve been helping a lot — he’s gone from zero to $250K a month in less than twelve months. Mads Singers (10:15) And it’s been by really focusing on: here are the three things we’re exceptionally good at, here are the three types of workflows we can do, and then scaling that like crazy. Everyone’s trying to do everything for every customer. Can you make money from that? Yes. But when you have something you’re really good at and you know it works for one client, find ten other clients who need the same thing. Sasha Damon (10:35) Do you think agencies really need bigger clients to grow, or can you focus on a smaller client base and actually create a more profitable business that way? Mads Singers (10:46) That goes back to a question we discussed a little earlier: what is your goal? If your goal is to create an agency that makes five, ten or fifteen K a month, you definitely can. If you want to build a two-hundred-million-dollar company on thousand-dollar-a-month clients, you’re going to need a lot of clients. Can it be done? Yes. Is it going to be very difficult? Extremely. Mads Singers (11:09) So it depends a lot on your goals, your targets, and what you’re trying to do. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong. Mads Singers (11:16) I think for most agencies, if they focus on two aspects — one, getting the process of what they’re delivering right, so a scalable, repeatable process, and two, finding that one lead gen channel — and then you could say the third aspect is the people game: learning to grow the organisation by hiring more and better people. Get those three things right and you’re going to be in a very good place. Sasha Damon (11:41) Thank you for answering our questions, Mads. We really appreciate it.