Oct 23, 2017 How Can An Agency Prove Their Value? How Can An Agency Prove Their Value?

Agencies charge a significant amount of money up front, and you don’t see the outcome until after the work is done.

At the end of the day, if you don’t have actual sales that means your advertising and marketing campaign isn’t actually working. You prove your value to your clients is the impact you can have on their bottom line.

In Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy talks about tracking award winning agencies and the clients whose campaigns won the awards. In most cases, the award winners didn’t retain their clients, because those campaigns were focused on winning trophies, not selling product. In other words, those awards didn’t translate into sales, and therefore don’t provide us with a way to prove value.

So…what else is there??

To effectively sell, you have to make a massive promise that you can support with action and results. The promise will take the client through a journey from X to Y after working with that agency. For example, before working with the agency, the client had X amount of sales, but after working with the agency, the client’s sales increased to Y amount of sales. How you communicate and frame this transformation to the prospective client is extremely important.

You may be concerned that a prospective client might not want help if they think they’re doing well by their own standards. In the book, the Consultant’s Bible, Alan Weiss says that one of the best deals that he ever made involved a client that came to him and said and asked why he should hire an agency if his company already had high sales. At that point, Weiss persuaded him to hire his agency by asking a better question: “How do you know that your sales shouldn’t be higher than your current numbers?”

How do you know that that is the best you can be doing?

Your client may not know that their sales should be double the amount, because they don’t even recognize what is “normal” for their industry. By challenging your client’s preconceived notions, you will be able to show them what is possible and prove your value. Remember, the flashiest campaign is worthless if it does not improve your client’s situation, so you have to focus on how to improve their bottom line to create a real impact on their business.

Just like a doctor, you must do no harm, but you must also make sure that you leave your clients in a better position than you found them. So that when you try to prove value to your next client, you can say that’s how I approached my last clients.

At Speedlancer, many of its clients are agencies that use freelancers. This arrangement is optimal, because an agency should be focusing on strategy. Agencies are working on their client’s strategy and overseeing the work. If you order pizza from a company, you want to be sure the pizza tastes right and meets safety standards. You don’t care about who specifically made the pizza, or what tools they used to make that pizza. Similarly, whether an agency uses freelancers or in house staff to complete tasks is is insignificant so long as the desired outcome is reached.

Agencies may ask how they can prove their value if they are getting other people to help them with their work? The answer is simple- agencies are made up of people, and agencies may bring in other people to help produce high quality work that generates results. As long as the work is high quality and completed in a timely manner, the client has gotten the results it hired the agency for, and everyone is happy.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, make sure you check out Speedlancer, our tech platform that allows agencies of any size to power up their teams and get more done for their clients…