Anyone run an Agency here?

I ran a web dev agency in London for 5 years, built it up to 8 devs and worked with some big name clients towards the end of it.

How do you follow up with potential customers to ensure they become a customer?
Often we went through structured tender processes. We would submit our proposal, go in for a chat and then expect to hear back by X date.

Since the projects tended to be high value, low volume ($100k +) we would do a lot of high touch things like calls and coffees.

Once a customer, how do you follow up with milestones and deliverables?
Generally we sold dev time batched up into sprints. Set expectations that we should be able to get Y feature build by Z date but the scope would fluctuate. Used JIRA for managing sprints.

In general, what are the biggest challenges in your sales cycle?

• figuring out when a tender opportunity was a good one and when the incumbent already had it stitched up.
• We specialised in a specific technology in a specific sector, so we built up brand recognition which helped a lot with inbound leads.

Hey Mark

I'm still in the process of building past my first couple of clients and find getting new prospects to be the hardest part by far.

Specifically - Finding the people that might be interested and getting the conversation started. Even with people that are interested, I've found there to be a delay of 1-2 months from interest to convo and even more time to get the ball rolling. I've found the funnel timeline to be long.

I def need to leverage my personal network more and suspect that my business will be primarily driven by referrals. Aiming to get to inbound and working on content creation & SEO to get there.

As for client deliverables - we work with client to create a schedule for deliverables and send them via email. The work we do is taking over repetitive, process-oriented tasks - so think like weekly summaries of the task KPIs and monthly summaries with business insights and possible next steps. This is not the hard part for my team.

Hi Mark. I help run Elevation Firm (elevationfirm.com) based in Austin, Texas.
1/ Most of our customers come inbound or referral. But to follow up I normally wait a week after a conversation and always schedule the next conversation.
2/ Once we have a customer we follow up with them weekly.
3/ Prospecting gets tedious but we found a way to target our ideal customer to get enough inbound.