I remember the earliest days of doing new business sales at Barrel – we cobbled together screenshots of some random freelance work as our portfolio and had nicely printed business cards. The only reason we won was because our prices were unbelievably low. In many cases, we would’ve just done the work for free.

It took time for us to build up our standards for handling new business. We had to get the basics in place. You never want to take the basics for granted. Just like dribbling, passing, and boxing out, you want crisp consistency. Sloppiness reflects poorly on your preparation, and even worse, negatively impacts performance.

The following 9 basics are table stakes for handling agency new business sales:

1. Respond Quickly
2. Get Your Agency Story Straight
3. Create Strong Case Studies
4. Do Some Light Research
5. Be Prepared to Talk Timing and Budget
6. Have Clear Next Steps
7. Keep Following Up
8. Track Using a CRM
9. Have Client References Handy

1. Respond Quickly

Speed is of the essence when it comes to inbound inquiries from prospects. They’ve taken the time to express interest. Same-day responses should be the norm. Within a couple of hours might not be a bad idea. Even acknowledging receipt right away with a promise to follow up at a specified time is better than letting a prospect’s message sit for too long.

2. Get Your Agency Story Straight

Put some work into having a canned response for describing your agency. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just clear and memorable:

• We build & optimize Shopify websites for consumer brands.
• Our clients include Stanley Black & Decker, McCormick, Cabot Creamery, and Once Upon a Farm.
• In addition to websites, we help brands with email marketing & analytics.
• We’ve been in business for nearly 20 years and have 30+ team members.

Prospects typically want to know what you do, your notable clients, what services you offer, and a bit about your business. Your agency story may evolve to include unique aspects of the company history and founding, a stronger positioning message, and any other differentiating factors (e.g. awards, values, affiliations, etc.).

If you haven’t already, get an agency overview deck in place that covers these along with a few relevant case studies.

3. Create Strong Case Studies

A case study is a powerful piece of content for proving that you can do the thing you’re selling. At a minimum, you want a handful of case studies that gives the prospect a clear picture of the challenge your agency took on, how you approached the problem, what solutions you came up with, and ultimately what results you were able to help the client achieve.

You can buttress these with screenshots, videos, animations, highlight outcome stats, and testimonial quotes.

If you serve different types of audiences, you may find yourself creating groups of case studies that are presented to relevant targets.

4. Do Some Light Research

Look things up quickly before a call with a prospect. Check out their website, Google the company name to see what articles come up, check out their social pages, and look up the LinkedIn profile of the person(s) who reached out.

If you have access to third party tools (e.g. Ahrefs, SEM Rush, SimilarWeb, etc.), it doesn’t hurt to take a peek but it’s probably not necessary for the first call. As you get deeper into the sales process, you may find yourself needing to do much deeper research.

What you want early on is a general sense of the business (what they do, how big they are, if they’re known for anything) and to see if you have any connections to people who work there or specifically to the people you’ll be talking to.

5. Be Prepared to Talk Timing and Budget

At some point in a convo with a prospect, the topic of a potential engagement’s timing/duration will come up. Have an idea of how long your various engagements/projects take, even if they’re ballparks. You can always caveat that certain factors can impact timing but be confident in presenting a POV on how long something might take.

Budget convos in my experience are typically not brought up voluntarily by prospects so either be ready to ask and also have some ballparks in mind. If you’ve had enough experience doing new business, you either have a standard price list or you have a method for pricing clients based on their attributes and/or their needs. If you don’t have either, work on them so you’re better prepared.

6. Have Clear Next Steps

There’s usually a shape to a new biz sales process: inquiry, initial call, follow-up call, proposal walk-through, contract negotiation, contract signed, onboarding.

These stages may vary slightly from agency to agency and there may be situations that warrant many follow-up calls and many proposal walk-throughs. What’s important is to have a firm understand of your agency’s sales process so you can clearly articulate for the client what the next steps are. After the initial call, what’s the next step? After proposal walk-through, what’s the next step?

7. Keep Following Up

At any part of the new biz sales process, a prospect can go silent. They might get busy, lose interest, find someone else, etc. You just never know. Keep sending them messages until you get a response.

Persistence will pay off, if not in reviving a deal gone silent, then at least in getting some kind of closure so you can move on. Try using Blair Enn’s “closing the loop” email, we’ve used it ourselves many times.

8. Track Using a CRM

Every deal, every contact – get these tracked in a CRM of your choice. I personally prefer HubSpot, but some agencies get on fine using Airtable, Notion, or Google Sheets.

What you want is an easy and clear way to see the deals in the pipeline, what stages of the new biz process they’re in, and what the value of all these deals adds up to. Over time, you can get reporting on metrics like win rates and time to close.

The more accurate the data and your weighting ($ value based on what stage a deal is in), the better you can forecast your future revenue.

9. Have Client References Handy

When you get far along with a prospect, they might ask you for a couple of client references. Don’t scramble then, be prepared.

Identify your 4-6 best clients, reach out to the primary contact there, and simply ask if you could put them down for a reference and connect them with a prospect when the time comes. Those who say yes are on your list.

The courteous thing to do is to email your reference contact before you intro them to a prospect and get their okay once again. I’ve seen situations where we overused a client reference and at one point, they politely bowed out from being a reference in the future. Have an ample number of people on the list so you can share the wealth and not wear any one person out.

And don’t forget to send a thank you note and, if possible, a gift to the client who was kind enough to take time to provide a reference.