The Three Reasons Why You Get Hired

Everyone wants to know why they get hired. 

After you get the good news from a potential client that they want to move forward, that’s usually the next question you hear, “did they tell you why they went with us?”. 

It’s probably a field in your CRM and something you attempt to track, predict, and optimize. 

Clients rarely give us meaningful answers and we rarely push to learn more. After all, we won the business. Why rock the boat?

There’s no need to push too hard. There are three things you need to focus on and optimize. Agencies win new business based on Relationships, Referrals, and Reputation.

Relationships 

Relationship building is the bedrock on which agency growth is built. Nearly every agency’s first customer was a friend, or a friend of a friend. 

As agencies grow, relationship building becomes a job - typically handled by senior leaders or a dedicated business development person.

For most agencies, relationships are considered to be the top driver of new business. People want to collaborate with individuals they trust - and strong relationships are built on trust. 

However, the keyword there is “individual”. Relationships are built between individual people, not between organizations - and are inherently limited. Regardless of how strong a relationship may be, its value to an organization is completely dependent on dual-sided retention - both in-house and on the client-side.

Although over-relying on relationships as a new business tool is problematic, it’s a crucial part of your strategy. There’s no faster way to a sale and no better way to retain a client over the long term than mutual trust. Make sure you and your team have the resources to build it. 

Referrals 

Referrals can feel like they’re a bonus or a “nice to have”, but they don’t happen based on luck. Yes, you have to do good work (that should be a requirement for agency existence) but you also should have a system and a strategy. 

Too often I see agencies operating without a prescriptive referral plan. There’s a nebulous idea that we should ask for a referral towards the end of a project, but the “who we ask”, “what we say”, and “when we say it” isn’t defined.

It’s up to you as an agency leader to define the plan and make sure it’s being followed by every project team. 

A starting point? Read this from Blair Enns on “The Best Referral Machine I Have Ever Seen”. 

Reputation

The hardest but most important to cultivate. Solid reputations get you through the bad times and they make the good times even better. 

Bad times occur because relationships sour and referrals dry up. The best thing about your reputation is that you control it. Relationships and referrals are by definition symbiotic. 

Reputations are beautifully non-symbiotic. 

Building a strong reputation starts with specific and smart positioning. Your reputation needs to begin and end somewhere. It’s all about creating a unique niche and a powerful message to support that niche. 

From there, a hyper-focus on content creation and amplification gets you an audience that starts to think of you not as a vendor, but as the expert. However, it’s hard - and potentially cost-prohibitive - to accomplish that internally.

But once you do achieve a strong reputation, inbound leads become inevitable and the work driven by your relationships and referrals are just a bonus.