After a tough sales year in 2023, many of you have been looking for the next thing to consistently fill your sales pipeline with new prospects. With sales cycles taking longer than before, it’s essential always to have warm prospects teed up and ready to go. But how?
The answer is in thought leadership combined with lead gen and lead magnets. Positioning yourself and your agency as an authority in your niche (and giving some of it away for free) generates trust in your agency’s expertise before they’ve officially met you.
When done right, lead gen can be mostly automated. And having great lead magnets like a podcast or YouTube channel, or offering a free mini-service to prospects to get them interested in your services will build trust and establish your agency as a thought leader in your niche.
This week, Jay Feldman shares his tips and tricks for how his agencies used automated lead gen and lead magnets to still be profitable in a challenging sales year. This episode is packed with actionable insights that you’ll want to take notes on, so make sure you have a pen and paper ready to go, and check out the links in the show notes for all of the programs and tools he mentions during the interview.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- How lead gen and lead magnets turned a bad sales year into a good one
- Commit to being relentlessly helpful to others
- What Jay’s agencies used as lead magnets to attract attention from prospects
- How to retain the clients you close from lead gen
- Giving big wins early on when working with new clients
- Establishing trust authority in the first 90-120 days with lead gen clients
- Cold email tactics that work
- What defines success for lead gen and lead magnets
- Scalable lead magnets that bring results
- Avoiding shiny object syndrome and doing what works for your agency
We’ve all been here before — your agency grows, and your day-to-day is getting a little too chaotic for comfort. Each team member has their own way of doing things, and no one is on the same page about the best approach to doing recurring tasks. As the agency owner, you’re getting pulled into things that you shouldn’t, becoming the organization’s bottleneck.
If that’s you, it’s time to break that cycle with some project management software.
With a million choices and a few that have become the industry standard, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly which is right for your agency. Often, agencies will pick one based on how popular or how pretty it is, and forget about its functionality specific to your agency’s day-to-day needs.
This week, Alane Boyd is clearing the fog around project management software to help us decide if we need one — and if so, what tools and functionality we should be looking out for that will get our productivity back on track.
Don’t be afraid to take the time to really learn what tools are right for your team, and be generous with how long it takes for the new systems and processes to become sticky. Once you find one that works, your agency productivity will be back and better than ever.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- The benefits of project management software
- Taking your time learning new systems and software
- The signs an agency is ready for a PM software
- Questions to ask yourself before choosing which product is best for you
- Why capacity planning is the most important factor for choosing a project management software
- How to recognize if you’re using the wrong tool
- Training your project managers to use a new tool
- Setting up a project management tool to automate recurring tasks
- Considering the internal and external integrations of a PM tool that are necessary for your agency
- Finding a tool that your team is willing to adopt
- The most common mishaps with picking a project management software
Humans are hardwired to belong, and the desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves is in our blood. Whether we connect over shared values, a favorite sports team, a hobby, or even just from living near one another, we can find community and belonging all around us.
These days, many of us are finding community online through social media and spreading our social nets wider than ever. This leaves a huge opportunity for agency leaders to build their own online communities to help others learn and share their experiences about business leadership, entrepreneurship, or any form of thought leadership in which they excel.
Online communities should, first and foremost, be a way to bring people together with shared goals and interests, but the benefits reach far beyond that. With enough time and care, they can become robust sales and networking tools that do the prospecting work for you.
But it’s not for everyone, and that’s ok.
In this week’s solocast, I’m doing a deep dive into the ins and outs of creating online communities, building an audience online, and how to make sure you’re doing it all for the right reasons. With enough patience, online community building could become your agency’s secret sales weapon that provides perks and benefits for the people in it.
For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
In This Episode:
- What is a community, and how does it relate to work?
- The difference between an audience and a community
- Online communities do the selling for you
- B2B brands have less competition in creating online communities
- Asking yourself the who, what, where, and why before starting a community
- How communities make biz dev easier for agencies
- Being a safe harbor for people as a community leader
- Community building isn’t for everyone
- 3 questions to ask yourself to determine if you should build a community or an audience
- How to build an online community and spread the word about it
- Having a community is a long game — have a growth plan
Sales cycles are elongated, but that doesn’t mean agencies can’t still win new clients. If we change how we think about and approach prospecting, we can up our client outreach game to really hone in on our right-fit clients without being too sales-y about it.
In this episode, I talk with Dan Englander about how to stand out against the competition in our prospecting and outreach efforts. He shares how personalized client outreach can cut through the noise and win us new business more often if we just take the time to commit and dial in our systems and processes.
He also shares some tips and tricks for smaller agencies looking to build a sales team for the first time. You’ll learn how to identify the right hire who cares about solving your clients’ issues and won’t just read from a script or phone it in.
If you’re among the majority of agency owners who are ready to get out of the slow sales cycle and want to revamp your sales efforts this year, be sure to tune in to this advice-packed episode.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- What are companies looking to agencies for the most?
- Rethinking when it’s the right time to reach out to prospects
- A continued move toward specialization and thought leadership
- How to build and strengthen trust in the sales process
- Focusing on more than one niche isn’t a bad thing
- Best practices for personalizing client outreach efforts
- Consistency is key
- Walking the walk and talking the talk to build client trust
- Getting past the noise to stand out in your client outreach
- How a smaller shop can start building a sales team
- Common mistakes in sales training