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I wanted to unveil a skunkworks project we’ve been working on for a while.

But first, why it matters…

If you’re here, you are probably leading an agency that’s been around for at least a few years.

You built a compelling portfolio across different industries, and you constructed a team on whom you can rely.

You focused on exceeding expectations for clients, and the rewards were substantial: referrals, repeat business, and early momentum.

Your clients bounced around between companies and took you with them, or introduced you to their friends.

But at some point in the last few years, you realized that you haven’t focused enough on your own growth.

Call it what you want: “cobblers’ children”, reactive, sporadic…

Whether your goal is to take over the world, get acquired and cash out big, or simply do compelling and fun work with your team, building a new business system that’s bigger and more robust than your personal network is not optional.

You might be annoyed and thinking, “Ok, Dan, we are aware, thanks for rubbing it in. We’re working on it, as we have been for a while…”

That’s great, but could you be spinning your wheels?

From daily conversations with agency owners, here are the most-common roadblocks and non-starters we see.

1. Hiring an expensive salesperson too early. 
(Kind of like hiring the Formula 1 driver before you know you can build him the car). 

2. Dumping a lot of time and money into overkill software and data.

3. Pulling your team off of clients to help with sales tasks when they occasionally have downtime, as if new business was a “hobby”…

All of these amount to false-starts and inconsistency.

The journey of a thousand miles never begins at all.

After consulting with thousands of agency owners, partnering with more than fifty organizations since 2014, leading over 7,000 individual campaigns, securing more than 3,000 agency-to-brand relationships (which in the last month includes the likes of Google, Roku, SAP, Microsoft, Arizona, JLL, and others), and conducting numerous surveys and research, there is one central question that comes up over and over again:

“What is the best starting point for building an agency-focused, sustainable new business process?“

To bring all of this back to the skunkworks project I opened with, in Q1 2020, we set out to finally answer this question and offer something useful to the boutique agencies most-ready to take action.

We did this by focusing on the area we know best, which bottlenecks the entire sales process for most agencies: the top of the funnel.

‘Top of Funnel’ is sales jargon that refers to an undertaking that’s much simpler and more human than it sounds: 

Improving Top of Funnel is simply the process of de-risking conversations, continuously, with your future clients.

The genesis of our forthcoming Agency Lead Generation Course.

Here’s how it took shape:

1. In April, we ran a live webinar with more than 70 agency owners: How to Sell Agency Services in Uncertain Times.

Some things we covered:

• How and why the pandemic and its effects are accelerants for agency and B2B purchasing trends.
• Why digital sales, networking, and thought leadership is (pretty obviously) mandatory.
• Our strategic shift toward highly-targeted outreach campaigns.

2. Following the webinar, we surveyed the top agencies in our network and uncovered three interesting takeaways:

Takeaway #1: Referrals and prospecting bring the lion’s share of new business.

Takeaway #2: The biggest challenges are optimizing outbound and the sales process overall.

Takeaway #3: Outbound and strategic partnerships are viewed as the main paths to growth.

3. Informed by these findings, we built and ran The Agency Lead Generation Huddle, a four-week intensive training program over Zoom.

The goal of The Huddle was to give each and every student a complete framework for generating ideal first dates, based on everything we’ve learned from thousands of campaigns.

4. What’s next.

In the next few weeks, we will launch The Agency Lead Generation Course (creative name, eh?), covering the best and most useful aspects of The Huddle.

A sneak peak into
The Agency Lead Generation Course.

Here are a few (not all) of the modules you can expect in the forthcoming course, based on what our students found most useful.

1. The Agency Lead Generation Universe.

Almost all of our students said something to the effect of, “This is where it all clicked.” 

One of the biggest challenges in getting started is information overload, and difficulty visualizing how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together: email, LinkedIn, phone, newsletters, direct mail, webinars, and on and on.

In the course, students will get a hand-held approach to the universe so they can build a sustainable engine for agency lead generation (and ignore the stuff that’s not mission-critical).

Some things we covered:

• Where automation is worth it and where it’s not.
• Where B2B sales software products slot together.
• List building and data hygiene.

2. How to Delegate Lead Generation Activities Effectively.

During the live training (and beyond) we heard a lot of, “We start doing outreach, we get busy with clients, and everything falls apart”. In a nutshell, most agencies have well-oiled-machine-like processes for clients, but not so much for their own prospecting, so we wanted to nip this in the bud.

We spent a lot of time crafting this “roles and assignments” module, and got a ton of positive feedback from our students in response.

As with everything, people are the foundation for everything else. In the course, students will get the right framework for building and running successful campaigns by dividing up the undertaking by Three Hats.

Even if you or a colleague are the only ones running campaigns, this framework will help you stay consistent.

3. How to simplify sales copy so you can keep your pipeline full.

Typically when we start a new engagement with an agency and they’ve tried to do their own outreach previously, they overthought the process at every twist and turn, resulting in few if any solid meetings.

This is why we focus on a simple objective for all campaigns: de-risking a conversation.

A conversation is a new relationship and new relationships fuel new business, it’s that simple.

To de-risk conversations, the training and forthcoming course cover around a dozen case studies, including plenty of copy examples from successful campaigns.

Some things we covered:

• Four checkboxes for de-risking a conversation with a skeptical marketing decision maker.
• The Flashlight vs. The Laser Pointer strategy.
• How to tastefully use pattern interrupts.

How to get notified when we launch.

In the next few weeks, we are launching the course first to those who are most interested.

If that might be you, Click here to get on the early notification list so we can keep you posted.

If you enroll early, you will get the lowest possible introductory investment, plus we’re considering other goodies, like additional copy examples and handouts, or even an additional module.

Also, we’re going to keep enrollment open for just a limited time.

Here’s the link again to get notified asap when we open course enrollment in the next few weeks.

Hope to see you inside!