What’s your agency’s point of view?

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute, this week, coming to you from Whitefish, Montana where I am in Glacier National Park, getting ready to meet with one of our agency peer groups. So, I had an interesting coaching call this morning with one of my agency owners, and we were talking about how an agency needs to have a point of view. This is one of the things that Stephen Woessner and I talked a lot about in our book "Sell with Authority"; that when you are going to be a thought leader, when you are going to position yourself as a subject-matter expert, one of the elements of that thought-leadership position or that subject-matter-expert position, is that you have a point of view. So, it's a way you look at the world differently. It's a way you solve your clients' problems differently. It's a belief that you hold so true that it is woven through all of the work you have. Sometimes, it's a belief around the audience you serve and something they're doing or not doing that would make a difference in their world. So, when you have that strong point of view, what it does is it becomes a filter. When you're creating content or you are talking to clients or you're working on a proposal, you want to make sure that that filter is in place so that you are differentiating you from everybody else who they're talking to, or who else? The content they're consuming. So, let me give you an example. At Agency Management Institute, our point of view is that most agency owners are accidental business owners. They were great and are great at the client-facing stuff, but they didn't go to school or no one taught them how to run the business of their business, and that that gets in the way of them being as profitable and successful as they want to be. And that's where AMI comes in, as we come in alongside those agency owners and help them run the business of their business better by teaching them best practices, giving them tips, tools, tricks, all of that sort of thing. So, all the content we create is from that point of view, is helping agency owners run the business of their business better. So that allows our content to be very unique from everybody else out there who's talking to agency owners like you. You too need to have a point of view. So, again, it might be about the audience you serve, it might be about the work that you do. So, at my agency, our point of view is that most clients spend their marketing dollars backwards. And what our belief is, is that the lion's share of your marketing dollars should be spent on existing clients or past clients, not on prospecting for new clients. And all of our work is around how to strengthen the relationships that you have with existing clients, earning back previous clients. And yes, you're certainly spending a portion of their dollars on new clients, but that's the conversation that we have that differentiates us from all of our competitors. So the question is, what is your agency's point of view? And how do you begin to articulate that and weave it through everything you do: your website, your content, your proposals? How do you demonstrate to your audience that how you think is different, and it's fresh, and it's unique to you, so that when they're going to make a buying decision, part of the buying decision is, do they buy into your point of view? And if they do, then odds are they're going to be a great client for a long period of time because they're already in alignment with you around the way you're going to approach the work. So the question is, what is your strong point of view, and how do you weave it through everything that your agency produces? Give that some thought. All right? I'll be back next week with another idea or two for you. See you then.