Startling statistic: for three out of five agency owners, the number one pain point is finding new clients. The 2018 HubSpot survey this factoid came from focused on hundreds of marketing agencies with five to 200 employees.
Yes, agency owners wake up in the middle of the night thinking of how to find enough new clients, and not just any clients. You want right-fit clients. Let me share some hard truths about that quest:
Hard truth: The surest and fastest path to get impact and influence is to write the right book, which is no easy task. But wait, agency owners are great communicators? Ironically, many agency owners feel writing and publishing a book is too time-consuming, expensive, or undignified. Even if they tried writing, most agency owners are frustrated by a lack of results. They even worry if marketing with a book would ever work for them.
And no wonder. According to former Harvard Business School professor David Maister, the typical sales and marketing tactics that work for retailers and manufacturers are a waste of time and money for agencies, because these tactics actually make them less attractive to prospective clients. But agencies willing to write the right book have found it gives them more impact and influence with prospective clients.
Hard truth: Offer research, not rehash. You cannot just spew the same old advice to create the right book. To find new clients, the best approach for agencies is to demonstrate expertise by generously sharing valuable information through writing and speaking. The secret ingredient is to conduct research that shows prospects how they compare to their peers. For agencies this is what I believe with my heart of hearts: the number one marketing tool is a book and the number one marketing strategy is a speech. Research shows agencies can fill a pipeline with qualified prospects in as little as thirty days by offering advice and research to right-fit prospects on how to overcome their most pressing problems. Some of my books to read for research details include Client Seduction (with Denise Bryson), Client Attraction Chain Reaction, and Rainmaker Confidential (with Scott Love and Mark LeBlanc).
Hard truth: Effort must be regular, not random. Random acts of kindness are good, and random acts of marketing are bad. What should agencies do to find new clients on a regular basis? First, understand that generating leads is an investment and should be measured like any other investment. Next, quit wasting money on ineffective means like brochures, advertising, and sponsorships. The best marketing investment agencies can make is to leverage the content in the right book. This includes sending out copies of the book, doing showcase speeches for no fee, creating informative websites, hosting persuasive seminars, booking speaking engagements, and getting published as an industry expert columnist. In a phrase, thought leadership. Thought leaders are people who write and speak about a subject and are quoted by others.
Hard truth: Your stories are a hidden asset. You might start by writing how-to blogs and articles. Those articles turn into speeches and seminars. Eventually, you gather the articles and publish a book through a strategy called print-on-demand independent publishing (we’ve done it in under ninety days for agencies). You have hidden assets no other agency has: your client mess-to-success stories that you helped make happen. For help learning how to do this please see my Persuade With A Story! website. Hint: you are not the hero in these hero-quest stories; you need to accept the role of the mentor character. You are Yoda, not Luke Skywalker.
Hard truth: No investment, no return on investment. Even if you believe in the Marketing With A Book Model, how do you find time to do it and still get client and administrative work done? No agency owner ever believes they have too much time on their hands. Here is a statistic that is not startling: according to that 2018 HubSpot survey previously mentioned, the second biggest pain for almost half of the agency owners is finding time to conduct business development.
This is ironically referred to as Cobbler’s Children Syndrome. Here is how therapist Ben Dattner, PhD, described it in Psychology Today: “In many organizations I have encountered during my consulting career, people have complained about ‘Cobbler’s Children Syndrome.’ Like the proverbial children of the shoemaker who go without shoes, I have consulted to technology companies that have outdated computer systems, marketing firms that don’t market themselves in any way, and consulting firms that fail to put into practice for themselves a single theory or model upon which they have built their businesses.”
The cobbler’s children never found that fable amusing. Neither do your agency employees find it amusing when the agency owner does not do enough to market the agency.
Nothing worth happening in business ever just happens. The answer is to carve out the time for writing a book. You need to be involved, but you should not do this all on your own. It’s too expensive to use a trial-and-error learning method. Wouldn’t it be better if you were to be helped by a person who knows the tricks and shortcuts? Find someone who can show you how to leverage your time and get others to do most of the work.
Hard truth: Amazon changed the game. The good news is you do not need to get past the gatekeepers of traditional big publishing houses, you can independently publish the book. There are challenges, of course. Because print-on-demand paperback books are not typically stocked on bookstore shelves, agency authors need to do an excellent job of marketing through publicity, direct mail, and social media. But if you are willing to be a self-promoter and your book targets an identifiable market, then independent publishing may be right for you.
Hard truth: Better to write than get it right. Done is better than perfect. Any book worth writing is worth writing a first draft that sucks. We call it the sloppy first copy. The magic is in the rewrite. What about the writing? If you can author articles, then you can write a book. And if you can’t, hire a freelance ghostwriter to help you do it. The only aspect you cannot outsource are the insights. You need that supercomputer that sits on the top of your neck to come up with the insights that will prove to prospects you are worth talking to about how you help companies like theirs. Agency authors tell me repeatedly that the book effort clarified their thinking on their expertise. In the words of author Joan Didion, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”
Nobody said finding new clients was going to be easy. But it can be done. Many other successful agency owners have blazed the trail.