Should you be focused on new client acquisition all the time or should you be focused on cross selling and upselling your existing clients? The answer to that is yes. It’s both.
In early stages, agencies should have a primary service that they’re really good at and then a secondary service, or offer, that they’re still very good at, but they maybe don’t have the capacity or the expertise that somebody who’s made that their only focus has. Once you have figured out how to get new clients and provide your primary service effectively, then you can start to seriously accelerate your growth rate by cross selling to your customers.Let’s imagine that you are a really good paid search agency, and you’ve built up a good business. Now it’s time to add in organic search optimization, SEO.
Not only is there a wide world of people out there that would like to buy SEO services, but you actually have a corral of people that know, like, and trust you. You’re working on their search engine marketing, and you can cross sell SEO to them.
Once you have established your primary service, are able to effectively execute it and maintain customers for at least six months, then you can start thinking about adding a second service. This will allow you to attract a new set of new customers, and it will also give you an opportunity to sell into your existing customer base. You have two audiences that can grow more quickly. You need to be careful about adding multiple services because it’s hard, but once you’re able to, your growth opportunities double.
