Author: Maddy Osman
Even if you offer the best marketing services in the world, your business won’t survive long unless you reliably turn interested parties into paying clients.
I’m biased towards this aspect of agency management because I practiced my sales fundamentals at Groupon, and then at a marketing agency before I turned my freelance writing habit into an agency of my own. By the time I started my business, I learned how a successful company lands customers, received feedback to improve my sales technique, and built a field-tested sales process—all priceless knowledge.
Here are the lessons and workflows I’ve learned to build a solid and repeatable sales process so that you can do for the same for your marketing agency:
Build your sales process with intention: Stages of the sales cycle
During my freelancing days, I took an informal approach to dealing with leads (no defined process). As a result, it was hard to accurately plan my next steps to nurture potential clients.
As I gained experience, I built my sales process according to distinct stages of the sales cycle. With a standard procedure, it became easy to understand which leads are most likely to close and which need more nurturing.
Let’s talk about the essential elements from which to build your sales process.
The building blocks of a sales process
A lot of businesses have applied the sales cycle concept to their industry/needs, and I’ve done so as well for digital marketing agencies. Below are the seven crucial steps I’ve identified for this process.
Prospect: Start by compiling a list of potential clients that match your ideal customer persona. In addition to targeting based on companies in a specific industry, consider the specific job roles you can reach out to. For example, if you specialize in SEO for cybersecurity firms, you’ll need to appeal to both business and technical personas. Prioritize those with decision-making and budget power. Crucially, develop multiple lead sources that you can rely on based on what’s working well at the moment (and what isn’t). Be careful not to rely exclusively on one lead generation method—especially one you have no direct control over, such as referrals. It’s a trap a lot of agencies unwittingly fall into.
Make first contact with a lead: Depending on the lead’s industry and niche, determine the best contact method (email, phone calls, social media, etc). Then, reach out: Use a templated approach with some personalization for the individual lead (I’ll discuss more about templated resources and standard operating procedures in the next sections). Your outreach success rate may vary depending on the ‘warmth’ of the lead and the contact method, so keep detailed records to improve this part of the process. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) software to log every touch (i.e., customer interaction). Sales success ultimately comes down to building relationships and staying top of mind—A CRM acts as a log for all of the important details and can also help you manage an ideal follow-up timeline. In the next section, I’ll provide some tips on selecting a CRM.
Listen for pain points: If there’s interest, meet with the prospect in a more dynamic environment, like over a Zoom call. Real-time communication is advantageous because you can better convey the nuance of your work, which helps you differentiate from your competitors and enables you to give the prospect a sample of what it’s like to work with you. The goal here is to learn more about the brand you’ll be working with and listen for their pain points.
Present a proposal to collaborate: Transform the data you gathered into a proposal that demonstrates how you’d help solve their problem effectively. To help you do this, I’ve compiled my tips for creating the best pitches in a section we’ll get to a bit later.
Address objections: There are almost always objections. Focus on understanding the root concern based on what the prospect says. It’s the only way to effectively address the roadblock. It may sound counter-intuitive, but to effectively address an objection, start by agreeing with it (e.g., “I totally hear what you’re saying…”). From there, you can pivot by describing your offering as a solution to their objection. For example, if the objection is about being too busy to consider a new vendor, you might address the objection by sharing how working with your agency can create great efficiencies.
Close the deal: Once you’ve reached an agreement, you need to formalize it to move forward and begin work. Typically, this means a contract with specific working terms.
Facilitate sales-to-client services handoff: Keep the good vibes going with a seamless handoff process between the sales rep and the internal team that will work with the client.
Ultimately, improving the results of your sales process is a numbers game. Success depends on maintaining consistency.
On average, how many activities throughout the sales process does it take you to close a sale? It’s so important to track the numbers so you can improve, forecast the future, and position accordingly. A CRM is just the tool for the job.
Choose a CRM (don’t overthink it)
Whether you’re a founder-led solo operation or you have a team of sales representatives and managers, your sales process will require paying careful attention to potential client details. One of the biggest hurdles to an effective sales process is failing to properly log sales touches, contacts, and relevant details.
The elephant in the room: Sales tends to be a high-churn profession. Using a CRM helps you retain important information when a salesperson leaves your team.
There are so many CRM solutions on the market; it’s easy to get confused, especially if building a sales process is your first experience with using a CRM.
My suggestion: Just start using something. It’s better to get started and figure out your needs as you go (rather than prolonging analysis-paralysis and letting that affect your client communications).
Wix website owners already have access to a range of CRM features, including live chat, forms, a robust contact library (shown below), workflows, and automations.
HubSpot’s CRM is also a solid option that smaller marketing agencies can use for free to start. The standard sales pipeline setup provides an excellent foundation you can build on and configure to parallel your unique sales process. As a bonus, HubSpot offers various integrations (including a Gmail extension) that help sales team members log email exchanges. In other words, you can capture relevant details without doing double data entry between tools.
Set standard operating procedures for consistency and accountability
Before assembling your sales team, spend some time creating guidelines and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that establish the goals of client relationship building, encourage team cooperation, and measure what’s working.
Ideally, these procedures enable your team to work effectively without your approval on small decisions. Besides giving your initial team a kickstart, SOPs make it easier to bring new sales support staff into the fold as you scale up, with no need to reinvent the wheel or spend too long on training.
Some of the most important SOPs I’ve created with my team include:
Guidelines for using our CRM and sales pipeline stages
How to find and qualify relevant leads based on our ideal customers
How to craft compelling pitches to move prospects through the sales funnel
Boilerplate responses for common objections
Don’t create SOPs with the goal of perfection—it’s impossible, especially because approaches should change as you flesh out your sales process, test it, and grow as an agency.
And remember, SOPs are only useful if they’re easy to access when you need them. Ensure that you have a straightforward way to store and retrieve the rules; a company intranet works well for this. For a more modern and dynamic solution, create a custom GPT that team members can use to ask for directions.
Start small with your sales team to find the right fit
If you’re a founder, shouldering all of the sales process can be effective in the early stages of your agency—especially if you have an enticing personal brand, a lucrative network, or niche expertise. Still, the lone wolf act will eventually limit your growth potential. The long-term approach to sales success is to build a team.
Personally, sales is by far the hardest business function for me to delegate (even compared to the many intricacies of client delivery). I’ve created extensive SOPs for every other department and function in my agency, and that was easier.
My advice: Start small as you build your sales operation.
Lessons: What I learned from building out my sales team
I used to believe that to delegate sales effectively, I needed to step back from the process entirely and hire an all-in-one sales representative. Now, I realize there are many ways to delegate parts of this process and many ways to build the ideal sales support team.
Don’t start with a sales rep: The Blogsmith’s managing director started as a writer and evolved toward helping with big-picture planning and operations. She doesn’t call herself a salesperson, but her insider knowledge of how we operate, and her experience with our body of work, make her exceptional at winning over warm leads. Stay open-minded about which team members help with sales. Save hiring a sales rep for when your processes are highly developed and your revenue is stable.
Field tests reveal what works for you: Twice, we hired a dedicated sales representative. In both situations, it didn’t work out. In the process, we learned a lot about developing our sales process and SOPs.
Pick and choose your involvement: We now have two sales admin assistants who find and qualify leads, keep our CRM and pipeline up to date, and make suggestions for lead messaging that I can build from. I’m still hands-on with sales, but I’m not responsible for all the little details throughout the process when that’s not the best use of my time.
My recipe for the best pitches
Attracting and signing clients is about embodying the solution to their problems. You must proactively answer the question they’re all thinking: “What’s in it for me?”
Audit how you publicly communicate what your agency does. Do you align yourself with a specific niche or focus (e.g., local SEO, content marketing, UX)? Is it crystal clear how potential clients can engage with you?
What will convince the prospective client that spending their marketing budget with you will actually solve their problems? Show a prospect that you’ve gotten results for other clients like them to demonstrate that it’s not a risky move to partner with you.
You’ll need to adapt my advice for your own situation. Oftentimes, though, the best pitches only receive approval through persistence, so consistent follow-up is crucial. You’re unlikely to get the sale with your first few interactions unless you’re dealing with a highly motivated lead. Typically, it’s the follow-up that gets the sale.
Craft strategic assets to nurture leads
You need to communicate the value of your solution in an impactful way—sales assets are a fantastic way to do this. These content pieces don’t need to be complicated, but they do need to inspire confidence and lead your potential customers through the stages of your sales process.
Great sales assets make it easier to close leads. Classic examples of strategic assets include:
Case studies — Share social proof and demonstrate how effective your agency is at achieving various client objectives.
Landing pages — Showcase specific services with targeted sales messaging. Pro tip: Wix is one of the best website builders to create landing pages to send your leads.
E-books — Establish your expertise in a niche.
Resource templates — Help prospective clients while warming them up to your brand and getting their basic contact details.
At The Blogsmith, we share case studies with prospects to convey how we solve our clients’ challenges, the specific service offerings that helped, achieved metrics, and testimonials from happy clients. Our case studies address different buyer personas and industries we work with, so prospects see that we’ve achieved milestones with businesses like theirs.
Track sales metrics: The perks of being data-driven
It’s hard to understand what’s working unless you take the time to track, analyze, and reflect on the success of your efforts—this includes reviewing the metrics by which you judge success.
For example, Apollo is one tool I use to track opens, clicks, and reply rates for our cold email campaigns. If we’re not hitting expected numbers with a new approach, we can quickly pivot until we land on a better performing campaign.
Before we started using Apollo, we were less able to determine the impact of each element in our approach. Now, we use the data to make small improvements that significantly impact sales results.
Here’s my advice for tracking sales success across channels:
Research industry benchmarks for success metrics—these can look different depending on how competitive the industry is.
Track success across various lead sources to understand where opportunities come from and where your time is most valuable.
Use internal and industry benchmarks as a basis for A/B testing various website and campaign elements. If performance is far off from what’s expected, A/B testing can help uncover specific improvement opportunities.
Hold regular sales meetings for better collaboration
Maintain a consistent meeting schedule to hold team members accountable for specific actions, brainstorm refinements to your approach, and plan out new initiatives.
Meetings are a must for all agencies, even if yours is fully remote and primarily async, like The Blogsmith. We still hold two weekly synchronous sales meetings to expedite decision-making and improve the end result of our collaboration.
Over time, I learned a few tips to make meetings more productive:
Create a focused, predetermined agenda that all attendees can contribute to and access before the meeting.
Avoid adding tons of new agenda items when many pending items remain open.
Spend time talking through new sales initiatives and catching up with ongoing initiatives.
Your ideal sales process should always be a work in progress
Industry trends develop in unexpected ways and navigating the unknowns can throw an agency into chaos if there isn’t a set of best practices and fundamentals to return to. Take control by creating a sales process with a solid foundation to support you through the multiple pivots you’ll inevitably have to make. The stable habits will be your lifeline.
Creating strategic assets with thoughtful positioning is one of the most impactful sales activities in my sales process. With Wix, you can design landing pages, case studies, and other content assets. The template library and AI assistant make it a nearly effortless process, but even so, you’ll still need to pay attention to all the elements I’ve discussed above if you want your sales process to evolve and adapt as your agency grows.
Maddy Osman - Founder, the blogsmith Maddy Osman is the bestselling author of Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style, and one of Semrush and BuzzSumo's Top 100 Content Marketers. She's also a digital native with a decade-long devotion to creating engaging content and the founder of The Blogsmith content agency. Twitter | Linkedin