How your Agency can upsell clients, without being inauthentic

Tips for your agency to upsell clients without feeling slimy.

October 4, 2021

Who is this for?

While any Agency or Marketing Consulting business will see value from this guide, we’ve tailored this guide specifically for:

Wordpress development agencies
Social media agencies
PR agencies
Creative agencies
PPC/ SEM agencies
Email marketing agencies

Step 1: Finding Complimentary Services

According to Harvard Business Review, it’s 5-25x more expensive to acquire a new customer than upsell an existing one.

As an Agency, you’ve been trusted with your clients success, but if you’re already achieving your clients goals then it can be easy for your clients to label you as a one trick pony.

If you can help your clients business to grow other ways, the trust they have in you will help you get your foot in the door.

It’s important to brainstorm ideas to find complimentary services. Do an internal audit on the strengths/ skills of your current team to see where some complimentary services could lie.

Here’s an example of what that could look like.

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Agency Complimentary Services Venn Diagram — Complimentary Services Venn Diagram

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We’ve found that digital content creation tool is a one of the simplest, most common complimentary services most Agencies can branch into, especially if that content helps them grow their email list, or understand more about their customers.

2. Talking to your Client

It’s not as hard as it may first seem… It all starts with having an informal conversation, positioning, and asking open ended questions.

An example script could look something like:

“We haven’t caught up in a while about your wider business goals, it’d be really great for me to get a sense of what you’re trying to achieve so I can get a sense of where we may be able to help?…”

“I have a good sense of what you’re trying to achieve this year - out of curiosity what else are you doing other than [your service] to achieve that?”‍

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3. Setting Initial Prices

If your client is interested, it’s important not to shock them with too high a price. It’s wise to take the ‘Costco’ approach and let them sample what you can do, then once they’ve had a great first experience, offer them pricing options.

This could mean offering:

Cost pricing for the first month
Pro-bono for the first month
A discounted rate for the first month

A script for this could look like:

“We’re actually looking to expand into [your new service] and looking for a few case studies.

Since we have a great relationship already I’d love to see if you’d be interested in trialling the service at a [your special offer] in exchange for a testimonial?

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An Example Scenario

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Jan’s Social Media agency is looking for a way to upsell her clients, she knows it’s far easier to generate more revenue from a current client, rather than spending money to acquire even more customers.

They’re already creating social content her clients, so helping them to create a new type of content could be a great fit.

She spoke to the client to try and understand what their wider marketing objectives were for the rest of the year - and they signalled that growing their email list is a high priority.

Jan has content creators on staff, but no developers - so she’s looking for a service to achieve this, she found a link to an ebook which may help...

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Step 4: Next Steps

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You don’t need to expand your team to do Content Marketing well. We’ve done all the hard work - just add branding to our market proven campaigns and digital content.