For digital agency owners, speed is everything when it comes to sales. The faster you can sell your digital agency services, the lower your customer acquisition costs will be, and the faster you can grow your Digital Marketing Agency.
In this post, we’ll be digging into the key strategies for rapidly selling your digital agency services to small business owners so you can accelerate your agency’s growth.
Specifically, we’ll be covering:
- Productizing your services
- Focusing on niches
- Making it easy to buy from you
- Pricing to sell
- Marketing more than selling
- Leveraging marketing channels
If you implement these techniques properly, you’ll be able to significantly decrease your sales cycle times and acquire customers for a fraction of what your competition is paying.
Let’s dive in!
The Importance of Speed for Service Businesses
For agencies selling services to small businesses, speed is arguably the single most important factor influencing success.
Why?
Small businesses have very limited budgets. The average small business owner is closely monitoring every dollar that leaves their bank account because that money is coming directly out of their pocket.
With such tight budget constraints, small business owners are highly sensitive to price. If your services are too expensive, most small business owners simply won’t be able to afford to work with you.
That’s why the customer acquisition cost (CAC) metric is so critical for agencies selling to small businesses.
Successful agencies targeting small businesses typically have CACs between $500 and $2,500. Anything higher than that, and you’ll struggle to acquire customers profitably.
So how do you keep your CAC so low?
You have to sell services rapidly. The faster you can sell your services, the lower your CAC will be, and the faster you can scale your agency.
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What do We Mean by Speed of Sales?
The sales and marketing cycle of a business can be visualized as follows:
The key stages include:
Marketing Activities: This is when potential prospects encounter your brand through activities like content marketing, ads, and referrals and become aware of your agency.
First Contact: This is when a prospect engages with your sales team for the first time, either by filling out a form on your website, scheduling a call, requesting a proposal, etc.
Sales Activities: The typical sales process—discovery calls, demos, proposals, negotiations, etc.
Close: When the prospect officially becomes a customer by signing an agreement and paying for your services.
In this post, when we talk about improving sales speed, we are referring specifically to shortening the length between First Contact and Close.
Essentially, how long does it take you to move a prospect from initial engagement to closed customer? The tactics covered below will help you rapidly progress prospects through this cycle.
Now let’s get into the key strategies for selling your services faster!
Tactic #1: Productize Your Services
The first major tactic for speeding up sales is to productize your digital agency services.
What does this mean exactly?
Productized services have predefined deliverables, features, and pricing all clearly laid out on your website for prospects to browse.
Essentially, you want visitors to be able to visit your site, and immediately understand what services you offer, how you can help them, and how much it will cost—all without having to talk to a sales rep.
Here’s an example from one of my businesses:
We have four packages focused on different marketing goals, with clear names and price points listed upfront.
This eliminates tire-kicking prospects by only appealing to those who see value in what we provide. It also speeds up sales because interested prospects already know exactly what they’ll be getting and what it costs before they even talk to us.
Now you may be thinking: Doesn’t this seem pushy? Won’t I turn off prospects by putting prices on my site?
If you’re targeting enterprise clients spending hundreds of thousands or millions on services, then yes—you typically want to lead with value rather than price.
But small businesses work differently. Small business owners have very little time or patience for drawn-out sales processes. They want to know upfront what they’re getting and what it will cost so they can make a quick decision.
That’s why productized services help you sell much faster. You appeal to serious prospects who see the value immediately while deterring window shoppers.
Tactic #2: Focus Your Offerings
The next tactic for selling faster is to focus on your service offerings.
There are two effective ways to focus:
- By Industry
- By Service
Let’s look at some examples of each:
Focusing By Industry
LawHustle is a web design agency focused specifically on helping law firms improve their client intake.
Rather than offer web design to everyone, they tailor their messaging, services, and case studies specifically to attract law firms looking for more clients.
This makes selling to their clients extremely fast and straightforward. Law firms visit the site, instantly recognize they work with law firms specifically, and know that LawHustle can help them get more cases.
Focusing By Service
Conversely, Repurpose House focuses specifically on repurposing content for social media—regardless of what industry you’re in.
Their messaging conveys that if you have existing content you want to be repurposed for social media, they can take care of it for you.
Again, this allows them to sell their services very rapidly because visitors immediately understand whether or not Repurpose House is a fit.
The key benefit of focusing your services is that it makes your value proposition crystal clear to your ideal customers—which greatly simplifies and speeds up selling.
Tactic #3: Make it Easy to Buy From You
If your goal is to sell services rapidly, you need to make it as easy and frictionless as possible for prospects to buy from you.
This means removing any hurdles in the sales process that may cause prospects to slow down or change their mind.
Here are some ways to do this:
Offer Free Trials
One of the best ways to expedite sales is by letting prospects test out your services at no cost. This builds trust and conviction quickly so prospects feel comfortable purchasing.
One of the best ways to expedite sales is by letting prospects test out your services at no cost. This builds trust and conviction quickly so prospects feel comfortable purchasing.
For example, Bench Accounting offers a free 30-day trial so prospects can experience their service risk-free before deciding to buy.
Use Simple, Transparent Pricing
A surefire way to lose prospects is by surprising them with hidden fees halfway through the sales cycle. Make sure your pricing is clear and straightforward from the beginning.
Bench accomplishes this nicely by listing their monthly prices clearly on their pricing page. No fine print or ambiguous statements—just clear pricing.
Remove Long and Confusing Contracts
You want prospects to look forward to doing business with you, and not dread having to negotiate complex contracts. Simplify your contracts as much as possible and communicate in plain English (not legalese).
Tactic #4: Price Your Services to Sell
As a service business targeting small businesses, pricing is critical. The price is too high, and you’ll severely limit your prospective customer pool.
But how do you know if your prices are set correctly?
Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and consider what they would have to sacrifice or give up to buy from you. This helps frame your pricing in terms of personal value rather than abstract numbers.
For example, at $2,000/mo my services may seem somewhat reasonable to a small business owner.
But framed differently, $2,000/mo could instead mean:
- Not buying that luxury car I wanted
- Not hiring the part-time VA I need
- Having less money to save for my kids’ college
When viewed through a personal lens, $2,000 feels like a lot more money. And that sticker shock could easily result in lost sales.
That’s why tactical pricing matters. Instead of arbitrarily setting prices, consciously price based on the perceived value and trade-offs for your small business prospects.
Tactic #5: Marketing Over Selling
In today’s world, selling solely through cold calls, emails, and sales reps is incredibly challenging. Buyers have become desensitized to sales outreach and will simply ignore or block anything that feels remotely pushy.
That’s why smart agencies now focus more heavily on “marketing” their services rather than hardcore selling. They create valuable content, run targeted ads, leverage referrals, and make it easy for prospects to learn about their agency passively without being sold to directly.
Business legend Peter Drucker summed it up best: “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”
Now obviously at some point, prospects do need to be contacted directly and sold to convert them into paying customers.
But you want your actual selling activities to happen much further downstream after prospects are already highly educated and sold on your agency. This makes conversions happen much faster.
Here’s a comparison of what that sales process typically looks like:
Cold Outbound Selling
With cold outbound selling, prospects typically aren’t aware of or looking for your services when you first reach out. Because of this, even if you capture their interest, they still need to:
This extUnderstand and validate the problem you can solve
- Research multiple competing agencies
- Assess whether you’re the best fit
- Get buy-in from stakeholders
ended consideration and consensus-building process means closing deals from cold contacts can easily take 3, 6, or even 12+ months.
Inbound Sales
Compare this to inbound selling where prospects find you organically through things like content, advertising, and referrals.
In most cases, prospects are already fairly well-educated and sold on your agency by the time they reach out to you. They’ve likely:
- Identified the problem on their own
- Researched your specific agency
- Consumed your content
- Determined you can solve their problem
Because of this, you can immediately jump into discussions around solution implementation and pricing instead of first needing to convince prospects about basic value.
That acceleration is why deals from inbound leads on average close much faster than outbound leads.
Tactic #6: Leverage Marketing Channels to Sell Faster
At this point, we’ve covered several strategies to help you sell services more rapidly to individual prospects. Now let’s talk about how you can leverage third-party marketing channels to sell your services en masse faster than you ever thought possible.
This concept can best be explained through an example…
Several years back I was launching a new paid advertising agency. I had productized services and was getting decent traction with my early marketing.
However, I knew that individually onboarding customers one by one would limit my growth. I needed to find a way to scale customer acquisition faster.
That’s when I identified and partnered with a channel partner already serving my ideal customers. This allowed me to instantly put my offer in front of THOUSANDS of perfect-fit prospects overnight.
Leveraging this channel helped me sign over 300 new customers in my first month—something that would have taken years of slowly building one by one.
This channel leveraging strategy is incredibly powerful—IF you get the setup right.
Here’s what’s required to successfully sell through channels:
Step 1: Identify Channel Partners Serving Your Ideal Clients
The very first step is identifying potential channel partners that already have direct access to your perfect customers.
Some channel examples include:
Industry Associations: Great for getting your service in front of ALL the companies within a specific niche. For example, tapping into an association like the American Dental Association opens up access to promote dentist offices nationwide.
Industry Trade Shows: Trade shows draw hundreds or thousands of companies within a particular space. Getting a speaking slot, vendor booth, or sponsorship at an industry-focused show lets you engage that highly targeted audience.
Popular Podcasts: Podcasts focused on your niche make awesome channels since their audiences self-identify as interested in those topics. Offering to co-host an episode instantly gives you direct access to educate and sell to that engaged listener base.
Relevant Online Communities: Popular forums, Facebook Groups, Subreddits, etc. related to your niche also house engaged prospects that normally are difficult to identify and contact at scale. Getting involved in those communities lets you tap into these passionately interested prospects.
Relevant Blog/Youtube Channels: Similar to podcasts and communities, blogs and YouTube channels serving your audience provide a way to access their crowds. See if you can contribute content or simply sponsor/advertise to their followers.
Industry Influencers: Individuals with huge followings and audiences related to your niche. Getting endorsements, interviews or co-created content with them gives you instant promotion to buyers.
Step 2: Make Sure Your Offering Aligns with the Channel
This should go without saying, but before selling through any channel you need to ensure your services match up with the audience. Otherwise, you’ll just confuse people regardless of how targeted the channel is.
Make sure to polish your messaging and tighten your focus before soliciting any channel partnerships. Even small tweaks to better-fit prospects can result in much higher conversion rates.
Step 3: Productize Your Offering for Seamless Selling
As touched on earlier, you absolutely MUST have productized services before trying to sell through channels—otherwise, you’ll completely bottleneck.
With channels, you often have just seconds to capture people’s interest before they disengage. So removing any friction from the selling process is critical.
Visitors from channels need to land on your site, quickly grasp what you do, and make an instant decision about whether to buy.
Any kind of friction like demo requests, call booking forms, or custom pricing docs will tank your conversions.
Step 4: Automate and Streamline Ordering Logistics
You don’t just want prospects from channels to easily purchase…you want the ordering and fulfillment to happen completely automated without any back-and-forth or human involvement.
Why?
Because channels often bring such an insane flood of leads that you physically don’t have enough sales reps to communicate with each prospect individually.
For example, from that one channel partnership, I managed to close over 300 customers in a month. But If I had to manually call or email every inbound lead from that channel, there’s no way I could have captured more than a small fraction of the potential business.
That’s why creating automated, self-serve ordering systems is so important when selling through channels. It lets you scale without bottlenecking operations.
Fast Tracking Sales
Selling services rapidly is one of the most crucial ingredients for digital agency growth and success.
The faster you can sell, the lower your CAC will be and the quicker you will be able to scale your client roster and revenue.
While many minor tactics can help accelerate sales, the six overarching strategies we just covered will have the most dramatic impact on speeding up your agency’s sales cycle:
- Productizing services
- Focusing your niche
- Making buying frictionless
- Pricing to sell
- Marketing over selling
- Leveraging channels
Optimizing these critical leverage points will empower you to rapidly sign customers and scale your agency faster than you thought possible.
So don’t leave sales velocity up to chance. Get strategic with designing your entire sales process and infrastructure for scalable speed and efficiency.
Your future agency growth is counting on it!
All the best,
PS – I made six shifts in my approach to building my business that allowed me to grow quickly and stop trading my time for money. You can learn them here 👈🏻
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