🎥 What Goals Should You Define Before Going After New Business?

We asked some speakers from this year’s Agorapulse Agency Summit their thoughts on what goals an agency should define before going after new business.

See the video below for one set of answers, and keep reading to find out what Lee Goff, Mark Kilens, Anne Popolizio, Chris Rudolph, and Jody Sutter each had to say on the matter.

Then, tell us below:
What does your agency try to get solid on before going after new business?



Lee Goff, Marketing Agency Coach

Great question.

With all of my coaching students, the very first thing I ask them is to define whether they want to go big or build a quality of life agency.

The way you go about building a new business is largely dependent on where you want to end up. If you want to go big, then you have to reinvest a lot of the potential profits into the growth of the agency. But if you want to build a quality of life business, then you can take more profit along the way. You can reward employees more, and you’ll have a little more time with your friends and family.

Typically, a quality of life business is 100,000 to about 5 million. So it still can be a nice sized business, and you’re going to take 30 to 40% profit instead of 15 to 25% profit if you’re trying to go big. So define what you want to be when you grow up. Then put a plan to get there.

Make sure you do not try to please everyone. Have a very precise target audience or niche. Define your product lines and then stick to selling that product. When you get your goals right, your direction right, and your product lines right, everything else becomes so much easier. But when you try to please everyone, and you’re not sure where you want your agency to end up, and you don’t have a product line at first, it is easy to get started, but in the long run you end up backing yourself into a corner. And it is very unpleasant and it’s very difficult to get out of.


Mark Kilens, Airmeet

Revenue and pipeline.

But to really define those two goals, you have to define: who are your customers? Not just the type of people you’re looking to sell to, but the businesses that they’re at.

If you’re talking about B2B, you’ve really got to understand what is going to create a customer that has a high likelihood to buy, but that also has a high likelihood to retain and stick around. So you’ve really got to look at a number of different factors—from company size, maturity, industry, maybe even website traffic, maybe even their technographic information in terms of the tools and technologies they use—to really understand what’s a good account fit. And then looking at, then, based off of who at that company would maybe buy your product for what problems they need to help solve, the outcomes they’re looking to generate.

You tie those two things together—the account, the type of buyer—and then are they in market, out of market, or are they showing intent, showing interest? Those three things can really, really help you understand who to who to go after proactively, who can you could passively market to, and who’s just going to come more just naturally inbound.

So those three things are the most important to look at when trying to generate revenue for your business.


Anne Popolizio, Social Squib

I think you need to be really clear on who your ideal ideal client is—and, frankly, what kind of work brings you the most joy. Who you excel at serving.

Once you’re clear on that, once you’re clear on exactly who you want to be working with, then it gets a lot easier to attract the right business.


Chris Rudolph, The Freedom Agency Coach

So there’s three things you really want to think of before you start going after new business.

One is: what is your capacity like? How many new clients could you and your agency actually take on? This is really important because if your goal is to have 20 new clients, but you don’t really have capacity for that, you want to really iron that out first. And a second part of that capacity question is, how many new clients can you onboard at one time and do it well within a given month?

The second thing is your pricing. When you think about your pricing for your packages and your services, even if you were to meet that goal, let’s say, of ten new clients, will your pricing be enough to really get you to your revenue goals if it actually happens? If it isn’t, you want to go back and reevaluate your prices and what you offer to make yourself more profitable.

And then the third thing is, you’ve got to be really focused, and that should be a goal: you want to provide one result for one niche, and really look for one traffic source to think about when you go out to really look for new business. If you’re looking at the whole world, it’s just overwhelming, and you can just be really scattering your energy and your focus in too many directions and not really see traction. You really want to focus on that one result that you’re able to provide for that one niche, and then really go out and find them.


Jody Sutter, The Sutter Company

I would say the number one goal or the number one definition that they need to look at is defining their audience, and what makes them of value to that audience.

It’s really about that foundational positioning. Everything else, every marketing or business development decision that you make, makes sense if it’s being made based on that definition. Likewise, if that positioning is not strong or you skip that step, every marketing or business development decision that you make without it often doesn’t make sense; it oftentimes ends up being a jumble and not very effective, or effective in an ad-hoc way.


Tell Us Below:

What do you make sure to think about before going out to try and generate new business?

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