How To Increase Your Agency’s Sales So Much It Feels Like CHEATING
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[00:00:00] Corey Quinn: Most agencies struggle with sales because they're focusing on all the wrong things. I've spent 20 years in the agency space where most recently I was the chief marketing officer of a digital agency called Scorpion, where we scaled revenue from 20 million to 200 million in seven years. I found that there is one thing that separates agencies who chase low ticket deals.
[00:00:25] Corey Quinn: From the ones who get chased by high ticket clients today, I'm gonna walk you through that one thing so you can increase your agency sales so much, it feels like cheating. Let's begin by talking about a negative flywheel called the generalist trap. This is where 99% of agencies who struggle with sales get stuck.
[00:00:46] Corey Quinn: The cycle starts when you as an agency founder start to say yes to everyone, right? This may be because you have a great podcast and it attracts a lot of [00:01:00] clients of all shapes and sizes. Or maybe you have a fantastic network, or maybe you just have a good Facebook campaign and it's just driving a bunch of inbounds as a result of saying yes to everyone.
[00:01:14] Corey Quinn: The natural byproduct is that you have a lot of context switching within your agency. For example, maybe today you're building a website for a dental office, and then maybe tomorrow you and your team are doing an SEO strategy for a manufacturing firm, and then maybe the next day you're doing an e-commerce strategy for a local furniture store.
[00:01:39] Corey Quinn: Tons and tons of context switching. This of course leads to operational inefficiencies. That's because maybe you have a bunch of SOPs, but they're stuck in a Google Drive somewhere that nobody looks at because frankly they suck and they're just not useful. And of course when you [00:02:00] have an agency that is full of context switching, 'cause you have too many different types of clients.
[00:02:05] Corey Quinn: You have a ton of operational inefficiencies. Every new client is basically like a new client. You have no programs, you have no frameworks. Well, that means that there is a ton of bottlenecks in your business. And guess who is the number one bottleneck in the firm? That's right. You as the founder, you're probably very familiar with all the clients who came in and, and what they were sold.
[00:02:33] Corey Quinn: 'cause you probably sold them yourself. Right, and your team has no idea exactly what they were sold. They were just told to go do this thing without a whole lot of context. Right? And so as a result of being that bottleneck, the work product that you produce, well, it's just not that great. You have really kind of a mediocre product that maybe inside, you know, could be much stronger, but you're unable to deliver that with [00:03:00] consistency when that happens.
[00:03:02] Corey Quinn: Unfortunately. Your clients begin to see you as a commodity. And what that means is that your clients say, wow, we're paying this agency a lot of money. We're kind of getting a mediocre product. I think I can get this somewhere else and probably pay less. Or maybe I can go and work with a specialist who truly understands my business.
[00:03:23] Corey Quinn: Right? So when you're treated like a commodity, guess what happens next? Client churn. That's right. Your clients begin to leave you because they feel like they can get something better or the same somewhere else, maybe even cheaper. And when clients leave you, it naturally causes you to chase revenue because guess what?
[00:03:46] Corey Quinn: You have a mortgage, you have rent, you have employees. You're trying to get your kids through college. Whatever that is for you, you have overhead, and so that causes you to go out and chase more revenue, which of course [00:04:00] repeats this cycle of chaos where you have to say yes to everyone and it goes round and around, right?
[00:04:09] Corey Quinn: Problem is, is that this leads to bottlenecks. It leads to burnout. It is truly a race to the bottom. Now, if you're an agency owner that recognizes this generalist trap as something that they're living in day to day and you're having a hard time getting out, let me share with you what most agency owners do to try to escape but actually fail.
[00:04:35] Corey Quinn: So what most agencies do when they start to chase revenue, when they have client churn is they say. Why am I not getting more leads? Right? We have a sales and marketing problem, right? We need to generate a new offer, fire up a new Facebook campaign, uh, create a new landing page, whatever that is. And the reality [00:05:00] is that if you look at this, and if you, if, if this, you see this as an iceberg, we know that only 10%.
[00:05:08] Corey Quinn: Of an iceberg is above the waterline. Right? And that's what, if I'm in a boat and I'm surrounded by icebergs, I can only see the tips of the iceberg, right? The 10%. And as, as an agency owner, you're probably looking around to your competition and saying, well, gosh, uh, what are these agencies doing? And they're of course, seeing all of the different marketing campaigns.
[00:05:33] Corey Quinn: The reality is, is that. That is a shallow way to approach solving this fundamental growth problem you have as an agency. What I do, what I do with my clients and what I teach, is to go much, much deeper beneath the water line to the 90%, which is really where the power is when it comes to truly scaling an [00:06:00] agency.
[00:06:01] Corey Quinn: At the base, at the foundation of this iceberg is. Something I call strategic specialization, not random specialization, strategic. You want to be strategic in this choice of where you're going to specialize your agency. I teach about vertical specialization. This means specializing in an industry or a vertical market.
[00:06:23] Corey Quinn: It could be dentists, it could be manufacturers, it could be, you know, any kind of industry that you can think of. There is a way to analyze that beyond the scope of this video, but there's a way to analyze that, to identify a great vertical fit for you and your agency. And then once you have identified strategically a vertical market to target, you wanna do two things.
[00:06:46] Corey Quinn: You want to position your firm and focus your messaging on the vertical market that you are specialized in. So once you've specialized. All of a [00:07:00] sudden, you know how to position your agency and how to talk to your buyers. The key here is that you want to be able to communicate with empathy, that you understand this specific audience, you understand their pain points, you understand how to solve them.
[00:07:17] Corey Quinn: You've built systems and frameworks and playbooks that communicate that you truly, deeply understand them and that you also have evidence that you've done this for other people just like them. Right, but it's only when you have that strategic specialization, when you know who you're targeting, that will inform your positioning and messaging.
[00:07:39] Corey Quinn: And then once you have your positioning and messaging dialed in, that's when your sales and marketing campaigns become much more profound. You get out of the, what I call the peanut butter marketing strategy, where you're. It's kinda spreading your resources thin over a lot of different channels without really saying much to being much [00:08:00] more strategic and much more powerful in your sales and marketing.
[00:08:03] Corey Quinn: All of this comes together in what I call the deep specialization flywheel. Let me show you how that works. Where this begins is having a vertical focus. That means going out and acquiring 5, 10, 15, 20, and so on. Clients in this vertical market. Of course, by doing that, you build expertise. It's like the old Bruce Lee quote, I fear not the man who's practiced a thousand kicks once.
[00:08:34] Corey Quinn: I fear the man that has practiced one kick a thousand times. When you are working with, let's call it plumbers, and you work with five of them, and then you have 10 clients, and then you have 20 clients and you have 30, 40, 50 plumbing clients. All of a sudden, you really get good at serving them through repetition, right?
[00:08:56] Corey Quinn: And that repetition allows you to start to build [00:09:00] systems. These are the frameworks and the playbooks that actually get used, right. Those systems and playbooks turn into operational leverage. You're able to not depend on your highly paid. Account strategists to come up with the best strategies. You're able to actually have a, what we used to call it, scorpion, more of an assembly line approach to producing predictable results for clients.
[00:09:32] Corey Quinn: That operational leverage creates a predictable outcome for your clients, and you could do that at scale. You can provide great results for your plumbing clients over and over again. That begins to build your authority. In that vertical market, people begin to see you as the reliable, safe option, the go-to agency in the world of plumbers in this example.[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Corey Quinn: And when you become that authority, you be able to have more of a premium pricing model when you are a specialist, a well-respected specialist. That has amazing case studies and has amazing clients in the industry. Well, you become a rare commodity. You become someone that's hard to find and you know, things that are hard to find true specialists, uh, they have rare and valuable skills.
[00:10:29] Corey Quinn: And as a result of that, of course, you could charge more. And this last piece is probably the most important piece in this, that you can't get wrong, you cannot forget. And this is about reinvesting and accelerating. Okay. What that means is you take the scale that was created in your systems and your leverage, and the fact that you're able to charge a higher price.
[00:10:55] Corey Quinn: What do you do with that extra margin? You actually reinvest it in [00:11:00] that vertical so that you can grow faster and you can sell more. So what does that mean? I'll give you a quick example from my time at Scorpion. We had a deep specialization in attorneys, specifically personal injury attorneys, and these attorneys would hire us for 10, 20, $30,000 a month and they would stay with us for 30 months.
[00:11:25] Corey Quinn: Our next closest competitors, these generalist agencies, would sell these same attorneys, a $2,000 a month package, and they would lose those clients in about 12 months. So if you take a step back and you look at. Let's call it $10,000 a month for 30 months. That's a $300,000 client for Scorpion. For our competitors, that same client was only worth $24,000.
[00:11:53] Corey Quinn: So every client that we generated, produced a lot more profit, allowed us to do a lot [00:12:00] better marketing, allowed us to do things like giveaway cars and cookies and gifts. Hire better employees and more trained employees and write better software, and bring in amazing coaches and do all of these wonderful things that really helped us to build out that vertical and become the dominant player in the market.
[00:12:23] Corey Quinn: By running this playbook, it gives you authority in the market. You begin to attract great clients. Who guess what are willing to pay a premium for your services? 'cause again, you are a hard to find partner out there. And of course the key is you need to reinvest in order to accelerate your focus and impact in that vertical market.
[00:12:50] Corey Quinn: This is a positive flywheel and it will help you to scale. It'll help you to sell much easier premium offering. Stand out from your competitors. [00:13:00] If all this sounds good and you ready to uncover your clearest path to attract better clients in your agency, I've created a free quiz that generates your agency growth scalability score.
[00:13:12] Corey Quinn: You can take the quiz at the link at the top of the description below, and please let me know in the comments what the biggest challenge is right now for growing your agency.
