Jason Swenk | The System to Grow a Multi-Million Dollar Digital Agency & Sell It

Step 1: Define your agency.

• What kind of agency do you want to create?
• What are your core values?
• Who believes in similar things that you do?
  • Surround yourself with people who believe in the same things you believe in.
  • Bring in and hire those people as it helps your business create better decisions as a team.

• Tell people where you’re going.
  • Set your vision and inform your people about it.
  • This also directs your track to the right one and helps you learn to say no to things that won’t matter to your goal.

Step 2: Know the people you can help.

• There are various niches, but no one can tell you what your perfect niche is.
• Sometimes, it takes a long time to figure out your agency’s niche.
• Trial out as much as you can in order to figure out which ones you’d like to take on.
  • Consider doing a process of elimination.
  • From there, configure which niche that your knowledge, expertise, experience and passion lie.

• When you pick a niche, you must come up with a “why?”.
• In order to create a predictable pipeline, an agency should:
  • Know who you’re going after.
  • Those people’s biggest challenges.

• Though it takes time to figure out your niche and your target audience, you always have to be aware that you’re looking for it.

Step 3: When marketing, ask questions and do not talk only about your agency.

• Make your target audience the centre of your marketing.
• Position yourself in a way that you don’t look like a “me too” agency.
• Instead of focusing on using “we”, “our”, and “us”, try focusing your attention on your audience to get to know more about them.
• Tell your own story but make your target audience the star of it.
• This thinking should flow into your marketing channels such as your website.
  • Tell the people who you help and how you can help them.
  • This will boost your target audience’s confidence and trust in your agency.
  • Do not forget to include a call to action on your content.

Step 4: Know your right offering.

• Do not pitch in your offer right off the bat.
• Figure the right order of service you can offer and do to win the deal quicker than everybody else.
• Build trust once you’ve won a deal. You can even raise your prices from there.
• Try to win small commitments and start building client trust from there.

Step 5: Prospecting.

• This stage is where most agencies usually jump right off the bat without building foundations first.
• In prospecting, you should have these three channels:
  • Outbound channel.
    • Through phone calls.
    • Get on a call with your top 50 hit list.

• • Inbound channel.
    • Create various rich media contents such as podcasts, blogs and videos that show how your agency takes motion.

• • Strategic partnerships.
    • Think of an upcoming technology or someone that needs you and grow with them.
    • Your partners don’t have to be huge corporations.

Step 6: Sales.

• Make sure you’re talking to the right people by closing sales with the ones you actually want.
• Establish a sales system.
  • Qualify prospects.
    • What are their needs?
    • Does it match up with what you do?
    • If not, turn it down.

• • Get their budget.
    • Reverse engineer and start high.

• • Know who’s the person in charge.
  • Know their timing.

• Agencies should sell what their customers need. In order to figure it out, go through the three I’s:
  • Issue – Know which one is the biggest.
  • Impact – Know what the impact will be it causes on your business and the impact once your agency fixes it.
  • Importance – How important it is to you?

• Craft your offer based on what will fit your client’s needs.
• If you do the right offering, you don’t have to do a proposal until right at the start of the project. It all matters on the right positioning of your agency.
• Never submit your proposal for review to your clients.
  • Put the price at the very bottom.

Step 7: Deliver the results.

• Onboarding.
  • The first 90 days are crucial.
  • Make your client feel they made the right decision in investing in your agency.
  • Make sure that everything is documented.

• Have a change order prepared.
  • Use this when a client asks you for additional service that is out of your scope.
  • State the amount you would charge on each change order.
  • Charge them at no cost at their first request but charge the next ones.

• Do benchmarking on every conversation.
  • Communicate the values that your services have produced for your clients.
  • Schedule a regular meeting to keep your clients updated with your progress.
  • Along the way towards the completion of your project with a client, identify which areas a client struggles with and offer help.

Step 8: Take leadership.

• Start working on your business instead of working in it.
• Be sure to constantly communicate your agency’s vision to your team members.
• Coach and mentor your leadership team.
• Be the face of your organisation.
• Understand the financials.
• Assist with sales. Don’t do all of the sales.
• From there, scale your agency.

System Notes

• Always upgrade your systems as you constantly grow.