Agency Growth Tips 7/21: Good is not good enough.

Published 06.03.2019

I’ve promised a few short, sharp tips. This is one of them. #agencygrowthtips 7/21 – good isn’t good enough. It’s still the workend in the UK. See 5/21.

This is one that’s about your product driving new business. And the fact that most agencies don’t understand the importance of their work being better than acceptable.

Tomorrow is one of the longest articles I’ll write in this whole series… about new business… and how to choose, which opportunities are the ones to bet on.

Right, straight to it.

Agency Growth Tip #7/21 Good isn’t good enough.

Your work. Your product. Your output. It’s your marketing.

Client brands spend 7-20% o their turnover on marketing. Do you as an agency. Ha. Come one. I promise you – most of us don’t. Nowhere near it.

We bitch about pitching. Rightly so. It is a totally flawed concept. But, for most agencies it’s the one we’ve got. It’s out marketing spend. Get into the value game, out of the pitching game or accept it.

Here’s some facts about quality in our game. Most clients will be perfectly happy at around 70% of the potential execution of an idea. At 80% most clients will think you’ve smashed the ball out of the park.

If you want to drive inbound enquiries, the extra 20% is where I’d put my marketing budget, effort and spend. The final hard yards in any campaign, tv spot, piece of content, website are not for the client – they’re for your agency.

Inbound happens when an agency develops and boundless appetite for creating killer work.

Make your work your new business strategy. Go beyond. Go further. Do not stay satisfied with client sign-offs. They’re easy too get. Make work that other people would want. That will make them want to know who made it.

We all think we do amazing work. If you’re phone isn’t ringing off the hook, or email inbox full of great new business enquiries, trust me – as hard as this is to hear… you are not. You may be good. But to generate inbound – that’s nowhere near good enough.

Push. Yourself. Your team. Limits. Budgets. Just push.

In agency terms, that’s there most commercial point of difference you can ever have. It’s the extra mile.

And the wonderful thing about going the extra mile, you’ll find hardly anyone else there.