Upselling

Hey, everybody Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week coming to you from Orlando, Florida. And one of my favorites Wilderness Lodge at Disney World. I spent the day today with an agency owner, and one of the things we were talking about is upselling. And her shop is primarily a project shop, so it's a one and done kind of a thing. And they're, been challenged with getting more work out of the project clients before the project wraps up. One of the things we talked about was when is it the appropriate time, or when is it the best time to start talking about the next phase or the next thing the client should do? And honestly, that should start in the proposal stage. And you should be baking out phases that say, okay, we know you want a website, or we know you want a landing page or an app, or a PR plan for a specific event, whatever it is. And here's the proposal for that. But what we'd like to suggest is sometimes there's some pre-work that needs to be done that maybe isn't absolute in terms of necessity for the actual deliverable they're asking for. But there's always going to be follow up, so here's what we're going to do is we recommend that we do this right off the bat to check the box for you of what you need, but we want you to consider these things, these add-ons, these post-events or post-launch tools, whether it's SEO or web maintenance, or it's an ongoing PR plan or whatever it may be, but you start in the proposal stage and then you're weaving those conversations into the work as you are getting the core project done, you're talking about next steps and phase two and things like that. So that conversation is almost almost assumptive of close. Like, Hey, of course if you're going to build a website you need to be thinking about freshening the content or SEO or whatever it may be. And you're talking to them as though this of course is something that we need to be doing on a regular basis. So let's be talking about now, when do we want to start that? And how do we want to budget for it? And what do we need from you to keep this moving? Because of course you don't want a one and done PR plan or website or landing page or whatever it is email campaign. So you've got to be planting the seeds early on and often about how you want the phase to go. And you need to be thinking about even the most rock solid of project clients as an ongoing client and it's your job to help them understand and again you're not trying to sell them something they don't need. You're not trying to sell them fluff you're trying to sell them tools or extensions or add-ons or additional things that are actually going to magnify the value and the effect of what they actually originally came and asked you to do. So what you're really doing is you're adding value, you are adding your marketing insight and strategy and you're helping them get the most for their dollars by making sure that it's not one and done but in fact, it's iterative. Okay. So next time you get asked for a project proposal bake right into the proposal, and then every conversation after that sort of next steps and you can even couch it by saying whether you hire us to do it, or you do it yourself here are some critical things you need to do to get the most value out of this thing we're making for you. Okay. Hopefully that's helpful. Talk to you soon.