If your agency has focused on execution (aka being the labor) you’re in for a bumpy road ahead.
Execution is increasingly becoming a commodity.
So, if you fall into 1 of 2 buckets below you’re gonna want to listen.
Bucket 1:
Take payment 1 and develop the strategy and or audit for your client.
Then sell them again for payment 2 to execute the strategy.
Bucket 2:
Give away strategy and or audit for free in hopes of getting paid to execute.Both of these are bad moves.
In today’s video, I’m going to share why it’s important for you to bundle your strategy with execution.
And, how It’s actually a win-win for you and your client.
Transcript / MP3
As an agency owner or service provider, you probably fall into one of two buckets. You will sell your strategy session or an audit to get the business. The foot in the door offer only to have to resell that person into the actual execution or bucket two. You give away the strategy or the audit for free in hopes that that will help you land the actual sale, which is the execution. Both of these are no bueno. And I’m going to talk about why we should be bundling strategy and execution together. Let’s get it going. … Welcome back. That was Greg Hickman here with all agency@allagency.com. And I want to talk to you about the importance of bundling your strategy and execution and why it’s a win-win for both you and your clients. Now, if you’re new here, go ahead and click that subscribe button because we have a new video that comes out each and every Thursday. And we put together a free group for agency owners, just like you it’s over on Facebook, you can visit all agency.com forward slash group. We share live training each and every week for you to improve your business, to systematize and automate your business as well. So hop on over and we hope to see you in that group now bundling strategy and execution. Here’s the problem that I see execution is becoming a commodity. If you’re here, you’re probably have consumed enough content on the internet over the last few years, to understand that this is already a problem, and only going to become more of a challenge for those of you that historically got paid for your labor for your time between AI and between the globalization and the competition for executional services, the fivers, the, all the communities like that, where you can get websites built and get marketing services. Um, you know, for really, really affordable, it’s put a strain on a lot of agency owners and digital marketers and creatives that historically got paid for building beautiful websites. But now there’s tools out there that make, make it a lot more seamless, not to say that you can’t make money building or designing beautiful websites. It’s just going to continue to get harder with the commoditization. If you build websites or you do any sort of marketing service and you’ve come across some sort of price challenge, this is likely why that’s why I think the solution here moving forward is to bundle your strategy with execution. This is a win-win because not only do you get paid for your thinking, but you can also start to have your clients feel the impact of that strategy of that thinking being applied to their business. And that’s where the client is going to want to pay you more and stick around longer because they see that your strategy is working when you get paid to give them a piece of paper. And that piece of paper is the blueprint or a presentation, or what have you. They still don’t necessarily know if it’s going to work. So you got to show them that it’s going to work, but there’s, there’s a right way to do that. And a wrong way to do that. And I want to talk about that now, now, if you’re a generalist, here’s the situation. You’re probably in that situation where you actually only know what to do because your client tells you that means making this transition is going to be hard because you don’t have the strategy. You’re waiting for someone to tell you what to do. You’re an order taker, which you know, is great to get started. But if you want to build your own agency or build your own business, at some point, you need to be able to direct and tell clients what they need. So that’s where specialization comes in to be able to say, Hey, this is the problem that I know you have, and here’s the solution that’s going to help you go get more clients, hit the market with a more clear message and also more predictably get clients results. The reality is the old way of doing business is really get paid for, for the, uh, you know, Hey, you’re going to pay it. We’re going to find out how we need to solve this problem. Uh, and then we’re going to get paid again. Hey, I can actually solve this if you want. That’s really one of those buckets. And now what’s worse is if you didn’t get paid for figuring out what the problem is, the solution is target people with a problem that you already know you can solve. This is where productization and specialization comes in. This is where you can say, Hey, I already know you have this problem because you have these symptoms. Do you have these symptoms? Yes. Oh, well, here’s how I can help. It’s the predefined solution to a predefined problem that has a predefined turnaround that is woven strategy with execution, predefined price, and predefined deliverables. And that’s where you’re going to eliminate scope creep. And a lot of the challenges that come along with the traditional way of back and forth proposals and all of that stuff. So the new way is you get paid and you already know what the problem is and give them the solution right out of the gate. So we got to bundle it together. Now, one key thing here that is really important is many agencies jump right into selling long-term retainers and they promise is big. Grandiose vision of here are all the things we’re going to work on. And clients don’t even start to feel results until like four to six months in. And you’re just hoping to get monthly recurring revenue. So it’s more about, you know, you getting paid each and every month and having that stability, but it takes a really long time to get the client results. So in order to do this right, when you bundle the strategy and execution, you’re looking for the most bang for buck, low hanging fruit, the key pieces of the solution, not maybe the entire solution that you can put in place and get them fast results so that they can feel the experience and see the experience. Um, you know, tangibly from the work that just got done from the application of that strategy. And that’s the key piece. We are in an economy now where people want transformations. People want outcomes and selling just a piece of paper as a deliverable that has a blueprint and a game plan that they’re going to have to go pay someone else to go execute is not enough. You can win that business and get paid once for it. When you bundle the strategy and execution, and yes, you will still need to upsell them into ongoing work. If that’s part of your business model, we recommend that there are a couple of different ways to do that. That’s for a different video, but if you have been giving away strategy for free and, or trying to make two sales by charging for the strategy, I highly encourage that in 2021, you focus on selling strategy and execution bundled together so that your client receives an outcome, receives a transformation, receives a result, not just a roadmap. So hope you enjoy this video, leave a comment with your biggest takeaway, and we’ll see you in the next video. [inaudible].
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