When you think about the idea of trying to sell someone on a long term retainer or some 6 figure deal, it really does seem kind of crazy.
Put yourselves in the shoes of your potential client.
Imagine you’re being marketed to (and now approached by a salesperson or sales team) in order to purchase a large, long term, marketing retainer.
Think about the commitment, AND TRUST, you’d need to be willing to give in that kind of a purchase.
It’s not an easy ask, and it’s not something you’d make on a whim.
I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy of marriage before, but it’s quite a good one.
Asking someone to invest in a long term retainer after just meeting you is like meeting a girl and asking her to marry you from the first time you speak.
You would be shocked if on the first date the person who asked you out was like “well, I think this conversation went really well. I’d like to go ahead and propose we get married.”
Even if you were somewhat interested in that person, you’d be like, “okay weirdo, I’ll just take an uber back to my place.”
Just like how most relationships go, when you meet someone and have a great conversation, usually the next best step is to say “hey, do you want to go grab coffee? Or maybe hey, we should do lunch.”
It’s a very natural progression to date someone for a while until you know you’re ready to move forward.
This is no different in any other relationship building that we seek in our own lives, and the same goes for working with companies over time.
Sell Small Services As A Foot In The Door
If a prospective client comes to you and seems like a good fit, it can be a very difficult sell to get them to commit to signing a long term retainer because that is a big ask.
You may find that your digital marketing agency sales process takes a considerable amount of time, and that you lose far more than you win.
When your agency switches to “Selling Small,” this is simply not the case.
Selling small is the art of breaking off bite-sized pieces of your service, or maybe it’s a product, that you can sell for a small amount of revenue to let the client TEST the waters, EXPERIENCE some success, and BUILD trust with you. it's about building relationships which in turn increases your recurring revenues across the board.
You can do this with any number of things.
At Web Canopy Studio, we broke off the discovery portion of our retainers and website projects into a standalone service called “The Foundry,” which is a 6-week long discovery and game plan exercise.
Other companies do something similar and call it a “road map” or a “blueprint.”
These are all great opportunities to sell something small to the client and let them experience the professionalism of your company.
Once they buy into this kind of service, it’s up to your account management team to deliver and build trust.
However, the opportunity for conversion is drastically higher, and you turn your client onboarding process into a paid service.
We found that a large percentage of our sales opportunities were not panning out. We would close about 2 out of every 10 negotiations for inbound marketing retainers historically.
But when we started the Foundry, we were able to close roughly 8 out of 10 negotiations into Foundry projects.
This is because it was an easier sell, it was not a long sales cycle, there was high value for low cost, and the client was able to test the waters with us before jumping head first into a long term deal.
We close roughly 6 of those 8 Foundry projects into ongoing services and retainers of some kind.
For the same number of clients that enter into negotiations with us, meaning we’ve taken them to the proposal phase - we now land 4x more clients into paid services, and 3x more clients into long-term deals.
If you’re highly proficient in website design, can you offer a portion of that business for low barrier - low cost?
If your focus is in content marketing or social media, can you break off a small content project to get clients in the door?
for ad agency owners, can you bring to the table a small advertising fact finding and setup for your customers?
Think of what you might be able to do and build on that for your company. You can build some great case studies with just a small amount of info. Let it just grow from there!
