Grow Your Agency by Making Clients Smarter
Your agency has three strategic assets that differentiate you from your competition: your positioning, your talent, and your clients.
Each assets fuels the others in predictable ways: your unique positioning attracts specific clients, in-house talent dictates client work, and client work affects the professional development of your staff.
By keeping your finger on the pulse of client needs, you can more effectively grow your business and potentially enhance your staff’s skill sets.
Agency positioning hinges on whether you want to evolve service offerings to satisfy new client needs or refer business elsewhere. There are two ways to think about your approach:
The first way: “Stay in your lane” and focus on your core competencies. You can focus on growing your business by targeting clients who want your expertise.
The second way: Step outside of your comfort zone and evolve your service offerings to match changing client needs.
Identifying Client Needs
Identifying new client needs means staying on top of opportunities and threats that will affect their business. It illustrates that you can see past the marketing bucket and think about their overall business. Your willingness to paint a picture of the macro forces that could affect their business validates your positioning as a strategic partner. It also has the added benefit of surfacing new opportunities based on industry trends.
When you can show clients an issue they have (or might have), you can identify ways to resolve those issues. And these challenges don’t have to be solved by your team. Recommending your client talk to someone else shows your courage and value as a trustworthy partner. After all, you might not have the capacity to implement the service. It’s better to identify the issue and refer it to another marketing partner than ignore it altogether.
Of course, many clients might listen to your recommendation and still ask you to assist them. Under those circumstances, your team will benefit from upskilling, and your firm will benefit from delivering a new service offering.
Forecasting Done Well
Use the following tips to develop new services without taking time from your current workflows:g
1. Invest your non billable hours wisely.
Forecasting requires that you and your leadership team spend time on business development. Unless you make this a priority, it won’t happen. Agency employees tend to be busy — they won’t devote time to non billables unless you bake it into their expected (and tracked) responsibilities.
If you can get members of your leadership team to spend just an hour a week on the process, you’ll end up investing about 50 hours apiece annually. Be sure to track the time spent on forecasting and include it in your monthly scorecard discussions. After all, when you keep an eye on something, you signal its importance.
2. Run potential new service lines through the three-box solution.
Vijay Govindarajan’s three-box solution is a useful way to prioritize which new services make sense for you to provide. In this framework, Vijay outlines a strategic approach for how to prioritize the future, manage the present, and selectively forget the past. It is a helpful tool when you’re thinking about creating new services.
You are essentially answering the following question on behalf of your clients: What must this business look like in the future to be successful?
Then, your agency must determine whether this is a problem that other clients will need solving in the future. If the answer is “yes,” it’s important to go through this five-point checklist to determine whether to pursue launching a new service.
Status: Will offering the service reinforce our agency’s expertise?
Profitable: Will this service be profitable?
Cannibalization: Will this new service diminish the value of our current services?
Competency: Do we have access to the talent needed to deliver the service?
Sellable: Are our clients ready to buy this service?
3. Set up client innovation workshops.
I know, I tend to look the other way when someone says innovation in the agency space. By innovation workshops, I simply mean dedicate time with your client to talk about their business and what it will look like in the future. This could mean putting together panel discussions to talk about the future of the industry with your client and folks in related businesses. Or it could mean offering to serve as a moderator for your clients offsite strategy sessions. Your goal is to discover whether you can solve future needs as your clients business evolves.
By taking a serious look forward, you’ll be in a better position to anticipate growth opportunities for your business.
Key Takeaway
Forecasting for future services is about making your client smarter. Your client may be stuck working in their business and not on their business. They are so focused on today that they are not investing resources into tomorrow. You must constantly shine a light on tomorrow. Your version of an innovation workshop is designed to inform them of the resources needed to be competitive tomorrow. You role is to help them understand how to not only survive for tomorrow but also thrive when tomorrow gets here.
A previous version of this article appeared in Spin Sucks.