How To Sell Agency Services In Uncertain Times
Six actions you can take today to prospect and close business effectively in a chaotic economic climate without hurting your brand. This is not meant to be a cheesy, ‘glass-half-full’ platitude, but I think it’s an important question to ask genuinely: Is there a way in which this crisis could make your agency stronger? Recently at Sales Schema, an agency-specialized new business consultancy, we centered a live workshop, with around 70 agency owners, on the above question. We are not prophets, economists, or epidemiologists, but we’ve learned a lot in recent weeks, combined with many hard-won lessons from working with 50+ agencies, executing 7,000+ campaigns, and generating 3,000+ qualified brand meetings. Here are six actions your agency can take today to ensure you’re healthy and thriving in 90-180 days. 1.Deal in facts, not rumors. We are hearing a lot about spending freezes, furloughs, and firings. Sometimes the rumors are true, and the obvious cases are in-person-centric industries like restaurants, retail, and cruises. Just as often, we see agency owners making brash assumptions based on one or two data points, such as a single terse email response from a client or an ill-informed news article. For example, it’s easy to assume that interest in event marketing is fading, but we have a client in that space for whom we secured conversations with three ‘blue chip’ tech companies last week - after all, these brands are looking for leadership and ideas to move from in-person to digital, and they have more time than usual to talk to salespeople. In another case, a web services and staff-augmentation client of ours is landing renewals with clients because this crisis revealed them to be the best, fastest, cheapest option [...]
