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Are you struggling to scale your agency and looking for expert advice on how to command higher fees?
We recently hosted an insightful webinar with Mandy Ellefson, the CEO of Hands-Off CEO, where she shares her experiences, strategies, and tools for overcoming these challenges and creating a successful and scalable business. With a wealth of experience in helping businesses scale up, Mandy is an authority in her field and has valuable insights to share.
This post will give you a quick rundown of the highlights of the webinar, including:
Focusing on the right target clients
Creating irresistible offers that address the specific client’s risks and rewards
Connecting operations, marketing, and sales for better outcomes
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Focusing on the right target clients
It can be hard for agencies to resist casting a wide net to capture as many clients as possible. But to scale, you need to shift that focus to quality over quantity — because that’s where you have the greatest opportunities to command higher fees.
With deep, layered questioning, your agency can take a step back and determine what type of client it makes the most sense to target. Ask questions like:
What type of business can we do the most impactful work for?
What systems/services do they already have in place?
What can we provide to help them see even bigger results?
When discussing your services with clients, it’s essential to make your points specific to the client you’re speaking with. Mandy encourages using the “power of ones,” which is to focus on one painful problem your agency solves, one client type (she reiterates that this does not have to be industry specific), and one outcome.
“You cannot do your best work if you're not narrowly focused on a particular problem that you're solving and a particular client type,” says Mandy, “because the problem that you're solving and the client type that you're solving it for determines the outcome. It's like an algebra problem.”
The takeaway: Ultimately, having a clear focus on solving one painful problem for one client type allows agencies to confidently sell to their ideal clients — and improve operations by eliminating low-paying customers.
Creating irresistible offers that address the specific client’s risks and rewards
Although your objective is ultimately scaling your agency, your focus during the discussion phase should be creating a world-class offer with clear, measurable outcomes.
In order to create an irresistible offer, focus on the minimum time commitment needed, budget requirements, and desired outcomes for the prospective project — including specific examples of results achieved for similar clients.
With your offer, you’ll want to help your client see the greatest rewards for the lowest possible risks. Mandy emphasizes the importance of nailing the balance between risk and reward to help clients see huge value in your services: “The way most agencies and services position themselves is that the reward that they're willing to offer is pretty low. And then the risk of actually getting the reward is really high. So you have this teeny tiny gap here… and this is the value that they see. So when we jack up the reward and lower the risk, they see a massive amount of value and you're able to charge more.”
The takeaway: While standardizing service offerings is one avenue agencies often use to save time, it could be costing you in the long run. Focus on making your proposals specific, tailored to each client — or prospective client — to present an offer they can’t refuse.
Connecting operations, marketing, and sales for better outcomes
There are four major aspects of scaling: world-class positioning, irresistible offers, operations management, and quality and profits. The problem many agencies trying to scale run into is that they focus entirely on the latter two, overlooking the importance of positioning and the offer-building.
Mandy and Logan bucket positioning and offer-building into “sales and marketing” and operations, quality, and profits into “operations.” However, to successfully scale and command higher fees, you need the complete package.
Mandy says: “You have to be able to find a way to be able to connect the operations, marketing and sales together. And this is what this does as a foundation. 80% of your operational issues are created in the sales process.”
The takeaway: To create an irresistible offer, companies should focus on defining what they want to sell — and what they can sell. Do you have the expertise? The cash flow? The resources? This is where collaboration between sales, marketing, and operations is key. Sales and marketing has insights into what clients need and want from your services, but operations has insights into what’s realistic and achievable. To scale successfully, your agency needs to fill both “buckets.”
Key strategies for scaling your business effectively
Building irresistible offers and helping clients see huge value in your services are a crucial part of commanding higher fees, but keeping your operations, marketing, and sales efforts aligned internally is the other: Without streamlined internal processes, your agency can’t reach efficiency needed to command higher fees.
With Mandy's expert advice and practical tips, you can apply these strategies to your own business and take it to new heights. Watch the full webinar recording for an even deeper look at the strategies you need to scale your agency.
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