9 Ways I Do the Exact Opposite of What You’re “Supposed to Do” to Drive Results
In the last 20 years of running an agency, I’ve learned that the best way to qualify clients is to defy conventional wisdom. For example:
- We DISQUALIFY as many prospects and clients as possible – Forget about conversion optimization. My goal is to eliminate as many potential headache clients as possible, so that we have just a few good ones. “We’re not right for everyone”. Remember that simple phrase and you can avoid taking on the cheap clients – the ones with the least amount of money, who also happens to be the neediest and hardest to deal with.
- We say NO to potential clients who want to get on the phone to chat – “Let’s hop on a call”. “I want to pick your brain”. “It will take only 5-10 minutes”. These are all traps. Don’t fall for them! If you have the expertise, people will pay for your time.
- We price our services “high”. Instead of saying how we’re affordable or cheaper than the rest, we say we’re one of the most expensive. This way, we attract serious inquiries and get to work on the coolest projects. Of course, if you’re already spending $10,000 a day on Facebook ads, spending $750 to get your ads tuned to get a 10% improvement is a great investment.
4. We actively tell people what we DON’T do – our company doesn’t do creative, account management, websites, or most agency things. We require the client or their agencies to handle this so that we can focus on what we’re good at – ads and analytics.
5. We don’t have any salespeople – no cold calling or prospecting, wining and dining of clients, or big parties. No extra layers of account management. Nobody to answer the “office phone” for sales inquiries. Everyone is a practitioner, so they have expertise in particular areas.
6. We don’t have PowerPoint presentations – No pitch deck, no general services overview, and no conference PowerPoints. We demonstrate through our actual experience and by logging into Facebook and Google tools live to demonstrate it.
7. We say NO to most requests from most verticals – instead of trying to offer every single service to every single industry, we do only what we can reliably achieve via our checklists. If not in our checklists, we don’t want to touch it, since it’s risky.
8. We don’t publish on our website – we aren’t even sure when our last blog post was. We prefer to write for AdWeek, the Facebook blog, Infusionsoft’s blog, and other sites that have dominant positions in their respective categories.
9. We talk about others instead of ourselves. It’s better to lift up the success of others to make them look good. Clients, industry friends, and partners are happy to share their knowledge when we treat our content marketing efforts with journalistic integrity.
