According to Greek legend, Sisyphus so angered the gods that they sentenced him to the worst torture they could imagine. He will spend eternity pushing a rock up a hill — as it reaches the pinnacle, it will roll back down again. After returning to the bottom, Sisyphus would then have to push it back…
Over the last week, we’ve talked about how we have to price the customer, not the project. We’ve also looked at how letting the customer make trade-offs can help us close more deals and make more money. Today, we will talk about how charging more money helps us win better clients and provide us with…
On Thursday we talked about what your work is worth. Though we want our work to have some intrinsic value, the truth is that the only one who can tell us the value of our work is the client. The same work could be worth very little to one client, or a whole lot to…
I’m in an agency owner’s slack channel where it’s common to ask questions about how to improve and grow businesses. I enjoy popping in every few days and joining in the conversation! Last week, one question stopped me in my tracks. This agency owner asked: “If anyone is willing to share, I’d like to know…
I got a lot of feedback from my emails last week about the value of account managers, and it’s clear that there’s quite a bit of confusion about what the job of an agency Account Manager is! With a big caveat that there are a LOT of different AM job descriptions out there, here’s what…
Most creative agencies have two halves of their business. One side is the people who “do the thing” – they might be artists and writers, or developers, or analysts, but the value they bring is in their skills. They work the magic! On the other side, there are the Account Managers. The account managers are…
Things with this new client have been going along great. You had an excellent strategy session and laid out a whole marketing plan for them. They were bought in – now you are into implementation. The work you’re doing for them looks terrific, right on track. Then the phone rings. The client wants to go…
I started life as an engineer, designing aerospace control systems. When we would start to design a new system, the first question we’d ask is, “If this project fails, what happened?” We’d look for the riskiest, most uncertain part of the problem and try to solve that part first. If we could solve the hardest…
One of the key roles of a successful agency owner is to build a network outside of your agency. You are your agency’s eyes and ears. You are scanning the horizon to find the “next thing” that clients are going to need, the problems that they are going to run into so that you can…
Thanks for your replies to Tuesday’s email about making business development easy. If I could summarize the replies, they’d (collectively) say, Once I’m “in the room” with a buyer, I’m golden – but how do I get “in the room”? How do I find more people who could hire me? 1. Who are the “people…