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As an agency owner, consultant, or freelancer you’ve likely worked with account managers at some point in your career. Maybe you even started as one. I’ll be honest – I often think account managers are unnecessary in agencies and think that having them does more harm than good for client relationships 99% of the time.
Today I set live a whole new version of my company Credo. While I’ve been iterating on the original idea of generating leads for marketing consultants and agencies for a while, and done it well (I’ve sent over $500k of work to pros on Credo), the time has come for phase 2. I’m excited to be here and absolutely terrified by it as well.
If you’re an agency owner or consultant, you probably have challenges with client retention. Retaining clients is the holy grail of consulting, but it’s hard. You’re consistently driving results for them, working super hard on their strategies, even over-delivering on work at the expense of your company’s profitability. And then they fire you with two weeks notice even though you have 30 days in the contract. Sucks, right?
I hate wasting time. I do everything in my power to optimize my time so that I can maximize it, which means that I can get a lot done and then have as much time as possible to spend with my wife, my dog, and our friends.
I’m not going to bury the lede. Your greatest lead source of qualified business is already in your possession. No, I’m not talking about raising prices on your current clients or expanding their business (though you should be doing that already!). I’m talking about people who already contacted you who went cold.
When I do the occasional consulting project, I often get asked if I’ll do work for cheaper than what I quote. I’m not cheap to hire, but I’m also far from the most expensive. I hate it when potential clients ask me to do this. I used to give in (and let’s be honest, sometimes give friend discounts when I know I shouldn’t) because I didn’t believe in myself enough and the value I bring.
Do you ever have prospective clients telling you that you are too expensive for them? If this happens super early in the sales cycle, that’s a gift because you’re not spending time on leads that aren’t qualified for you. But if they meet your minimum project budget and they still tell you this, that sucks. You might be familiar with the idea of price anchoring. If you’re hearing that you’re too expensive late in the process, that is a breakdown…
I get asked often by consultants and agencies for feedback about how they sell business. I see a lot of the sales discussions happening via email between Credo pros and the businesses contacting them through the platform, so I see many varying styles. My goal with Credo is to help you close more business. To that end, I’m starting something new – The View From My Seat.
A note from John: this post comes to you from Everett Sizemore at Inflow, who also wrote the monster Prioritizing Your Marketing Channels post. I asked Everett to write this post because I have seen a number of Inflow’s sales cycles and am very impressed with how consultative they are in their process. I believe that this is paramount to the success of consulting businesses who charge a premium for their services. Because they charge a premium, they can afford…
Looking for a new digital agency to help grow your business? Schedule a free marketing evaluation with our team to meet the right agencies fast. It’s fast, free, and we get it right. Small businesses and freelancers rejoice! Invoicing sucks (let’s be honest) and is often a bigger time sink than we’d all like (much like proposals and pitching new work), but it’s also paramount to our businesses because without invoicing you don’t get paid. And that REALLY sucks. So I’ve…
If you run a software business, you are either an engineer yourself or have hired engineers. While hiring engineers can be challenging for many reasons (multitude of choices for them for jobs, salary requirements, etc), I think there are some common mistakes made when hiring engineers that when remedied can help us hire better. When I was at HotPads we hired a four person growth engineering team. This team sat on the regular product engineering team, but the focus of…
There are a whole host of WordPress plugins. At a quick glance at the WordPress Plugin directory shows that there are close to 43,000 plugins available. That number does not appear to include those stand-alone plugins that work with WordPress. In the unofficial WordPress Plugin Directory, there are 22 different categories of plugins, with over 2,700 subcategories. That is a lot of plugins! Based on our experience, here are the 8 best WordPress lead generation plugins, both paid and free….
Today I learned that 62% of SEOs are less focused on #1 rankings than five years ago. For years, search engine marketers and specifically SEO professionals have focused on getting their keywords to that ever-elusive and super competitive #1 spot in the search engines. Specifically, we have been hyper-focused on ranking #1 because we’ve believed that they get more traffic and therefore better leads/conversions. The search results are constantly in flux, though, as shown via Dr. Pete’s Mozcast Metrics and Algorithm Change…
Note from John: this guest post comes to you from Mike Arnesen of UpBuild, a Credo partner agency in Portland, Oregon. Mike contacted me about writing this post because he uses a great workflow that helps him qualify leads and send the ones that are not a good fit for his agency to Credo, so that they can find the right agency or consultant for their needs. Mike found that by implementing this into his workflow, his response time to…
Looking for a new digital agency to help grow your business? Schedule a free marketing evaluation with our team to meet the right agencies fast. It’s fast, free, and we get it right. The digital marketing industry is still young, having started in very nascent forms around 1996 with the first search engines, where all that mattered was onpage text. The notion of links as a way to connect the Internet came into being in 1999-2001 with Google coming onto the…
Today I want to tell you about the email that we launched when I was at HotPads that outperformed our expectations, and it’s something that most companies out there should do. I can’t wait to do it on Credo someday when I have the right data in place (more on that some other time) because I know that it drives leads like crazy and when you drive leads you drive revenue. Those of you who know me know that I…
Marketplaces are an interesting business to build because you are in actuality building two companies. One side is B2C, where you acquire customers as the demand side (either people or businesses). On the other side you have the B2B portion where you are building out the supply side to serve the demand side. It’s a double headed problem, so where do you start? I’m only a little bit into building out Credo, the marketplace that I founded, so I have…
Here at Credo, we’re bringing transparency to the digital marketing consulting industry. Digital marketing is an opaque industry where a lot of practitioners do not do a great job for their clients and thus earn the industry a bad name (if you’ve been in SEO for more than a few years you are well familiar with this) and hurts all of us. Most importantly, great honest businesses experience harm. I want to put a stop to this. Today I’ve pushed…
Lots has been written over the years about hiring a consultant or agency for your business. When I sit back and think about what you as a business owner have on your plate for the day to day of your business, worrying about whether or not a service provider can do the job you need them to do should not be something you have to do. More businesses have come to me as of late who want to work with…
I’ve been in the digital marketing world for about 6 years now and have worked at 2 agencies, two brands inhouse, and now I’m running this company whose blog you are on and doing a bit of side consulting myself. As such, I see and have seen a lot of emails and leads from people seeking SEO services. The SEO and digital marketing industries are still in their nascent early stages. Until just a few years ago, it was relatively…
Any SEO consultant or SEO agency owner will inevitably get asked this question sometime during their career: Should I (or my business) do SEO? Well folks, we at Credo want to answer this question for you once and for all, We created this handy-dandy flowchart for you to send to anyone who asks this question:
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