Stop Relying on Unpredictable
Referrals for Growth
Most agencies risk their growth by leaving their pipeline to their network and existing clients. They’ve made haphazard attempts at marketing themselves, but nothing seems to work.
As a 3x agency marketing lead, I know the struggle—and what to do about it.
Who Is This For?
Is lead management and capacity planning a nightmare?
Do you often scramble to find new clients when a project wraps up?
Are you struggling to explain why clients should choose your agency over others?
Does your agency lose opportunities to competitors because your agencies look interchangeable?
Is your service team sitting around waiting for work?
Does it concern you to see billable hours go unused, affecting your agency's overall profitability?
If any of these resonate with you, then you're in the right place...
Most development agencies struggle to
grow for the same reasons.
They depend heavily on client referrals to grow.
This means that:
The agency is put in a tough spot when a client cancels or completes a project.
The agency finds it difficult to differentiate themselves from similar agencies.
The agency runs into staffing ups and downs that impact team culture and morale.
Serving a broad audience works when you start, but it won’t help you scale.
The fact is, In order to grow sustainably, you need to focus on where you provide the most value to your best clients, and build on a foundation of focus.
When you serve multiple client profile’s you end up multiplying the work needed to connect with each of them.
Providing custom services to every client might sound appealing at first, but it’s unsustainable from a marketing, operations, and team bandwidth perspective.
With greater focus, I’ve seen not only stronger lead flows, but stronger strategic partnerships, more impactful content, many other unexpected opportunities.
This is the key mindset shift that many agency leaders need to make.
You must muster the courage to focus your agency—to actually say NO to some of the poor fit leads that come in—if you want to set yourself up for greater success.
Start by taking a deep look at who your best customers are
When you pivot your agency to focus on your best fit clients and find more clients like them you’ll start to see all the secondary benefits that come from that focus. Benefits like:
You provide higher quality work because you better understand the ins and outs of your new niche.
You can market more easily because you can speak to the specific pains of your core audience.
Your operations can be streamlined because you’re doing more of the same type of work repeatedly.
You have more pricing power because specialists provide greater perceived value to your audience.
Your retention increases because you understand your audience better and provide better work and better results
The days of trying to grow an agency by serving a wide range of clients are numbered.
That approach may have worked in the early days when there were far fewer competitors and much larger agencies, but today it's working less and less.
In the crowded agency world of today, you need to go deep with your audience, not just your expertise.
When you take this to heart, you’ll be wondering why it took you so long to make the shift.
Grow your agency into the business you’ve always wanted it to be
Capture more referrals beyond your clients
Build a strong network of folks who recognize you as the best in your field and industry and the natural place to refer folks to when they have the specific pain points you solve best.
Publish more content that converts into new opportunities
Publish a library of content that connects and resonates deeply with the challenges of your focused and well defined target-audience.
Unlock your pricing power
Deliver higher value to your audience due to your greater depth of expertise in their niche and position yourself as the premium specialized provider.
Maximize your client service efficiency
Deliver more effectively by automating and systematizing the activities that are consistent across all your great-fit clients.
Maintain a happy team
Provide your team with consistent similar and steady work with great fit clients allowing them to not only grow in their technical skills but in audience understanding.