Want to attract higher-paying clients? This is how we did it:

[roydan]

At some point a few years ago, I started targeting bigger companies as clients for my agency, but doing it as a small (or “boutique”, which is the same thing but less offensive) marketing agency with two people is often challenging.
We work from home, so I don’t have a fancy office (although I do have an espresso machine, if it changes anything) to show off, or a big staff - we do everything ourselves, and pretty successfully once we got the opportunity. Still, we just couldn’t get through the door.

What we did was quite simple but effective. We decided to arrive at the first meeting with a potential client (over Zoom, of course) with a presentation, something we had never bothered to do until then.
That presentation included a few snippets of the client’s current activity, what competitors do, our ideas (that do need to be good), and that’s it.

Overnight our close-rate almost doubled from 15 to 30% and our average starting retainer went from $1K to a little over $2.5K within six months (because presenting that way meant we stopped losing the bigger clients).
It changed how we saw ourselves, and it definitely changed the way clients saw us. It also made it easier to approach clients overseas and still stand out compared to swarms of cheaper agencies from all over the world and agencies that are local to the client.

Here’s a Canva template I made. It changes between presentations based on the client, but this is basically it:

Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software – Canva

Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software – Canva

www.canva.com

Enjoy, and let me know how it goes!

 

[Zwielicht]

That template is great! I did this fairly recently with a potential client, except I used a Word document that I formatted.

Unluckily for me, their social media and "AI tech guy" apparently just took my presentation notes and suggested that they could just implement it themselves (no, they can't, and I can see they still haven't!)

Technically, we were paid about $5k for that, so I can't complain too much, but we were hoping for a, how do I put this... long-term thing?

Anyway, I've done similar presentations in the past, and it's amazing how many people are impressed by that level of effort.

Great share, @roydan!

 

[SilverClouds]

Damn, I actually sell something like that (more involved... Usually pdf with everything explained for future use + call or for lower amount just call/screensharing)

Unluckily for me, their social media and "AI tech guy" apparently just took my presentation notes and suggested that they could just implement it themselves (no, they can't, and I can see they still haven't!)

Technically, we were paid about $5k for that, so I can't complain too much, but we were hoping for a, how do I put this... long-term thing?

Anyway, I've done similar presentations in the past, and it's amazing how many people are impressed by that level of effort.

Great share, @roydan!

Yeah, exactly. It's nice to sell this though, less effort than actual service... Some prospects go with monthly retainer after that but most will just buy an audit and leave.

 

[Zwielicht]

Damn, I actually sell something like that (more involved... Usually pdf with everything explained for future use + call or for lower amount just call/screensharing)

That's really interesting to hear! Do you by any chance know what doing that kind of thing is called? Another member here shared that he does this as well, so it's neat to see more people who do this.

Yeah, exactly. It's nice to sell this though, less effort than actual service... Some prospects go with monthly retainer after that but most will just buy an audit and leave.

Now that I think about it, she did give us $5k to do that, so maybe we can look into offering that as a standalone service on my company site. It is far easier to do this than to actually make the changes.

Maybe I'll start another thread on whenever I've done this kind of thing as I wonder how many other members offer this kind of service as well.

 

[SilverClouds]

That's really interesting to hear! Do you by any chance know what doing that kind of thing is called? Another member here shared that he does this as well, so it's neat to see more people who do this.

Now that I think about it, she did give us $5k to do that, so maybe we can look into offering that as a standalone service on my company site. It is far easier to do this than to actually make the changes.

Maybe I'll start another thread on whenever I've done this kind of thing as I wonder how many other members offer this kind of service as well.

Paid marketing audit?

Tbh I've seen people that have business and finance experience offer something similar but auditing general business and financial situation of companies, why not do that in marketing? That was always paid service, seen that advertised at offline events, for some reason in marketing it's often free.

One flaw I noticed in agency model is that it's assumed that companies want to pay a monthly retainer / want someone long term. But often they just need paid audit or one-time configuration. And that's ok too if we know that and they don't lie that they're looking for someone for long term to get a free in-depth audit. Some want someone for long term but it seems to be a minority in my experience. And some companies also come back every 6 months or once a year lol. They never planned to get someone that they'd pay monthly.

It is a bit annoying because you end up with TONS of sales calls but it is what it is, have to adapt to market situation somehow. I still like to offer quick free audits but these are usualy screenshots from ahrefs and spyfu sent in dm + relatively persuasive copy and paste dms with pricing and what's offered. Sometimes I'll advise something on a sales call if I see that client might spend more but it often backfires so I limit that. Sometimes it's good to get a sale but it's hard to tell, safer to make this a paid service.

 

[roydan]

Now that I think about it, she did give us $5k to do that, so maybe we can look into offering that as a standalone service on my company site. It is far easier to do this than to actually make the changes.

Really?! I find it the exact opposite. I hate auditing accounts, would take me a lot less time just running campaigns.

I shouldn't say "hate", but prefer running the campaigns. It's a lot easier and allows for a lot more creativity.

Maybe different industries work differently.

 

[Zwielicht]

Paid marketing audit?

Tbh I've seen people that have business and finance experience offer something similar but auditing general business and financial situation of companies, why not do that in marketing? That was always paid service, seen that advertised at offline events, for some reason in marketing it's often free.

One flaw I noticed in agency model is that it's assumed that companies want to pay a monthly retainer / want someone long term. But often they just need paid audit or one-time configuration. And that's ok too if we know that and they don't lie that they're looking for someone for long term to get a free in-depth audit. Some want someone for long term but it seems to be a minority in my experience. And some companies also come back every 6 months or once a year lol. They never planned to get someone that they'd pay monthly.

It is a bit annoying because you end up with TONS of sales calls but it is what it is, have to adapt to market situation somehow. I still like to offer quick free audits but these are usualy screenshots from ahrefs and spyfu sent in dm + relatively persuasive copy and paste dms with pricing and what's offered. Sometimes I'll advise something on a sales call if I see that client might spend more but it often backfires so I limit that. Sometimes it's good to get a sale but it's hard to tell, safer to make this a paid service.

A lot of these businesses seem to just want something one-time. I suppose the reason I didn't offer it before is because I've wanted steady work where I work with their team or in their company. That seems to be too hard to get these days, so we've been re-evaluating our services.

Believe it or not, I'm actually not very good at marketing myself, so my clients in the past always came through word-of-mouth. In some cases, people would find my company site and work with me through there because if I can rank my own site, then I could probably rank their site as well. I never liked offering SEO services though because clients tended to be results-driven, as in my SEO work alone should be increasing their sales. It was like, if their conversion rate sucked, I'd somehow get blamed even though they're getting more traffic and calls. I had nothing to do with their sales team and I just got tired of that same scenario happening.

Really?! I find it the exact opposite. I hate auditing accounts, would take me a lot less time just running campaigns.

I shouldn't say "hate", but prefer running the campaigns. It's a lot easier and allows for a lot more creativity.

Maybe different industries work differently.

Yeah, it's easier for us to do that than it is to make the changes.

I mean, the client in the story is a good example of why. All of these businesses have weird little issues a lot of the time. Making the changes for that company would've been a pain or just downright impossible when both the pill maker web designer and the "AI guy" would get in the way of any of our changes.

Creating these documents and doing audits is something I used to do for clients after they brought me on, and I actually enjoy doing that far more than anything else.