But whether you niched out on social media, graphic design, website building, or software coding, we all run into similar fundamental problems.
These problems tend to look the same but the solutions all look different. Therein lies the problem.
These aren’t the 4 P’s you learned about in your Intro to Marketing class back in the day, and there is no textbook answer to turn to.
However, with a little guidance and knowledge you can avoid the school of hard knocks.
When reading the 4 P’s below, be open and honest with yourself… are you guilty of making these mistakes or letting important concepts fall by the wayside?
Even if your systems and processes are good, you should strive to make them great. We live in a world where consumers expect excellence, so if you don’t shine brighter and do better than all of your competitors then you’ll be left in the dust.
Being aware of the following factors will enable you to make the necessary strides to achieve greatness with your agency and its growth.
1. Proposals
If you had a nickel for every hour you spent writing, revising, presenting, and worrying about a proposal you’d have enough money to retire early.
Instead, you’re sitting here working 80-hour work weeks and worrying about making payroll.
The worst part is when you spend all of that time and effort just to lose those deals to a competitor. Now you’ve wasted all of those precious resources with little to nothing to show for it. It happens time and time again unless you lowball on the price.
Why do your proposals keep flopping? What are your competitors doing that you’re not? You have countless people revise them and give feedback, so what is the issue?
One word: Value.
If your proposals aren’t building value every step of the way, they’re guaranteed to be a swing and a miss.
You need to slap the client across the face with how awesome your agency is and stun them with everything you can do for them. You need to remove barriers to entry and common objections before they ever arise. You need to leave no doubt in your prospects’ minds that your agency is the one for them.
Your competitors are giving that prospect a million reasons to purchase from them, so you need to give them a million and one. Instead, you’re sending over a glorified service description with a price tag and calling it a day. Of course you’re not winning the deals you want!
Think of all of those failed proposals that you slaved over. Did they have ROI projections? FAQs? Definitions? If you skip those sections, it doesn’t matter how great your grammar was or even how low your price was, all a client will see is a big line item with little justification.
Build value every step of the way. When the client sees the dollar sign, they won’t hesitate because they’ll know they’re making an investment in their business’s future.
2. Project Management
The digital space is full of so many business opportunities because so few people truly understand how to utilize it to its fullest potential. That’s why they’re hiring you!
However, this means clients don’t quite understand everything you do. So, during the course of the project, they have no issues asking for more, more, more because in their minds it’s just a “quick thing” or “small adjustment.” But to you it could mean an extra two hours of work. Suddenly a few “quick things” later and you’ve put in an additional 10 hours of work with no additional pay.
Let’s say you were a home builder and you got hired to build a house. Your client wanted a basic 2 bedroom home because they were on a tight budget. So construction began and halfway through, they decided they wanted 4 bedrooms, a home movie theater, hot tub, fountain, and helicopter landing pad and they expect you stay within budget and on time.
No client in their right mind would ask for that! People understand that would mean more plumbing, electrical work, concrete, drywall, insulation… the list goes on.
Yet your agency’s clients seem to have no problem asking you to make one more graphic, to rework the design, or to create another landing page. Then you give it to them because you have a hard time saying no or because you don’t want to cause friction in the relationship, or whatever flawed logic you use to rationalize it. This little devil is called scope creep.
Scope creep is anything, and I mean anything, that falls outside of the predefined…
