Lately, agency owners and leaders have been hitting their heads against a biz dev brick wall. With increased sales cycles, difficulty getting clients to start projects, tightened budgets, and more, it seems like we’re in a cycle of never-ending struggle. […]
"Authority" sounds like a word a bully would love: It suggests power, prestige, command. But the truth is that "authority" is more about honing and sharing your expertise through speaking, writing, a point of view. The word "author" is embedded right into "authority." Clever, huh? What Drew and Stephen have done is given you a field guide to being a true authority, and showing you how to connect that to your growing business. Recommend! — Ann Handley CCO, MarketingProfs and WSJ bestselling author of Everybody Writes and Content Rules Incredibly useful! This is the ultimate guide to growing an agency with thought leadership and content marketing. A must-read for every agency owner and manager. — Jay Baer Founder of Convince & Convert and co-author of Talk Triggers If I was writing a business and strategy book for marketing agencies, it would be Sell With Authority. This book is most likely the only thing standing between your agency and oblivion. Save yourself (and your agency) by following this critical guide to agency success. — Joe Pulizzi Author, Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing I read Drew and Stephen's book, Sell With Authority, and my first reaction was, 'yeah... I know.' I wasn't able to stand back and realize that I had spent a decade fumbling over the concepts in this book - doing them, making mistakes, trying more, trying again - before figuring out what really worked for us. — Mitch Joel Author, Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, Former President of Twist Image/Mirum Experts are afforded the highest level of confidence and trust because they [...]
As agency owners and leaders, we have goals and we don't share them with the people around us. We don't share them with our leadership team. We don't share them with the agency as a whole, and when we don't share them, our team, our leadership team, and our employees can't participate in accomplishing the goal or celebrating the goal. I think all too often we hold that stuff so close to the vest that we lose the opportunity, one, to collaborate, and two, to celebrate. We need to be better about that in our agencies too, we need to talk about our goals, we need to talk about why they matter, and we need to have other people contribute to accomplishing the goals. Remember, we learn better when we learn together. We accomplished things better when we accomplished them together.
Here's my challenge for you. My challenge for you is to read one new business book, read one new fiction book that's just interesting to you, whether it's a murder mystery or a cookbook, or something that just is something that piques a passion of yours. And then find a new podcast and find and try a new AI tool. So those four things: read a business book, read a book for pleasure, find a new podcast that you can enjoy throughout the summer, and find a new AI tool that you can experiment with and you can take back and teach your team. So let's have our own summer enrichment program this summer and see how much smarter we can be by Labor Day.
Sometimes we are in such a hurry to get the work done. And especially today, because everything is so computerized, we're not sitting down with clients anymore to present work. We're just emailing it over to them. We've lost the art of sort of beautifying our world and our work. And I think there's a lost art to making something tantalizing to look at or to open or to feel like somebody went a little extra just because just for the effort of making something beautiful. As you think about how you present your work to clients, how you mail things to clients, how you show up, even how you do it for your employees, it's not just for our clients, but are there ways that you can really kind of beautify your work and the way you present yourself, the way you present the agency? Can you find little moments where you can create something special that makes someone feel like they were important enough to you for you to go that little extra mile?
For many agencies, for most agencies, Biz Dev has really been challenging in 23, and that's going to continue, I think, for the next several months. As we go into the summer, and it's so easy to sort of take our eye off the ball, I want to remind you of three things that you need to be doing right now to make sure that you have opportunities for Biz Dev in the fall and winter.
You know, as agency owners, we often fly by the seat of our pants. We don't rehearse. We walk into new business pitches cold. Oh, you're going to say this and I'm going to say that, but we don't actually practice. And I'm telling you, one of the things that I have learned over my 30-some years in the business is that that is not a way to success. Success comes from careful preparation, and anticipating all the things that could go wrong. Whether you're putting on an event for a client, you're in a new business pitch, or you're having a meeting with one of your most important clients or employees, all of those are pressure-cooked moments that have big potential outcomes for you and none of them should be taken for chance. And the more you prep and the more you prepare, the more you anticipate what could go wrong, and the more you surround yourself with people who are as invested in the success of that moment as you are, then no matter what happens, the event is successful.
I recently got asked "if we're using freelancers or contract labor, should I count them or can I count them in the billability and utilization numbers because they're 100%? And so that would really improve my numbers." This is not about gaming the system. The metric is too important for you to start putting false data into the dataset so your numbers look better. One of the key reasons why you're not more profitable is because your utilization is too low. Too many of your hours are either non-billable or they're billable but they're not moving over to an invoice. Don't game the system by adding contractors who by default, of course, are going to be at 100 or close to 100%. It's sort of like saying you are on a quest to lose weight and you hop on the scale, and you're not crazy about the numbers. So then you talk yourself into saying, well, you know what? I had a steak for dinner last night and I had a big breakfast, so that's probably 10 pounds. That's going to work its way right through me. So I'm just going to subtract that from the scale. Accuracy is what is most important, so make sure that your billability and utilization numbers are clean, are accurate, and only include W-2 employees because otherwise, you can't know the truth and you can't start diagnosing why the numbers aren't what they should be.
How do you deal with challenging clients? Now, I'm not talking about the normal level of challenging, I'm not talking about clients who have high standards or clients who miss deadlines. I'm talking about clients who make people quit. I'm talking about clients who are unappreciative. I'm talking about clients who are mean and who communicate in a way that is disheartening to your team. Sometimes, when an agency has this kind of client, this is an easy problem to solve when the client is small. But when the client is large when they are a good share of your AGI, this is a problem. If letting this client go because of their behavior would mean that you have to let go of staff as well, you have to reduce the team because they're that important to the business in terms of money. Now all of a sudden, there are complications.
One of the key things for you retaining your team and keeping them engaged in the agency and focused on the same goals that you're focused on, is actually having agency values that are clearly defined, that are regularly discussed, that are woven into performance appraisals, interviews, exit interviews, team meetings, and most important in your decision making metrics. So when you have core values that you really live by and that you talk about often, and your employees can recite them, can be guided by them, can remember what they are, and also bring them up when you're making decisions, that is a game changer in terms of employee retention. Our employees want to know why the agency exists, what we stand for, what we're about, what are our boundaries, and what are the criteria by which we make decisions? And an agency employee whose values align with our values is a really clear indicator of the stickiness of that employee.
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