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3 contributions to Leveling Up Accelerator
What's working in client acquisition?
The majority of you noted that the reason that you're not growing has to do with client acquisition in some way, shape, or form. Let's use this post to describe what's actually working so everyone can benefit. Our top channels are: - SEO - Email - Referral We get a few hundred leads a month from SEO and we send a weekly e-mail with a summary of our content (which also includes a CTA to get a free marketing plan from us). If you really want to compound for the long term though, you should focus on getting referrals from your current customers. If you do a really good job, everything compounds. Your customers want to spend more with you, they'll refer other people, plus your main POC that moves to another company will want to work with you again. People ultimately just want to work with people that they trust. I know people that have 8-9 figure agencies that get 50%+ of their business just from referrals. Focus on doing damn good work and do it for a long time and you'll never have an issue with client acquisition again. What's working for you?
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New comment Jan '23
2 likes • Jan '23
Success rates in this order: - SEO - Partnerships - Executive branding (mine) - Referrals SEO is definitely our go-to for some transactional keywords. It carried us over for years up until the pandemic, and higher churn since required additional effort on more fronts. Leads via strategic partnerships are warm and great - but hard to close the right deals (and expect a streamlined flow). Same for referrals - which mostly is managers switching jobs and calling us back. Executive branding - networking, events, tactical conversations over webinars or podcasts - brings business and helps with link building or featured media as an added bonus.
Start here
Welcome to Leveling Up Accelerator. The goal of this community is to help coaches, consultants, and agency owners grow their businesses faster. You can start off with any of the resources below: - Start an agency YouTube playlist How to use this group: - Ask business questions - Share remarkable content that you've found - Help others in the community - Share this community if you think others would find it helpful Please introduce yourself in the comments below: - Who you are - What you do - One brag (show off a little, don't be too humble here) - feel free to show off your work portfolio here - One big thing you'd like to accomplish in the next 12 months - One thing you can offer to the group Welcome!
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New comment Feb '23
Start here
2 likes • Jan '23
Hey everyone, glad to be here. Thanks Eric for organizing that! I'm Mario Peshev, serial entrepreneur and founder/CEO of DevriX. We're a top 20 WordPress agency for SMEs founded back in 2010. We coined "WordPress retainers" back in 2014 and have helped hundreds of other agencies to adopt that recurring revenue model. We've also scaled nearly a dozen publishers past 100,000,000 monthly page views, built 10+ SaaS apps on top of WordPress, and worked with multiple Fortune 1000s over the years. In the next 12 months, as Eric said himself in his other post, key thing is retaining as many current partners as possible. Second point is streamlining sales during an enconomic downturn. And automatic our offerings to improve pricing and scalability with some turnkey tooling. I'm based in Europe so I'd be happy to help the community with some insights and relationships in the local market (including partners, vendors, events, sponsorships, etc). Also, if retainer plans are a struggle, let me know. I'm an angel investor connected with two funds around and can make intros for possible funding opportunities. Of course, high-scale WordPress help is a given.
0 likes • Jan '23
@Eric Siu thanks for having me!
Your top focus of the year probably needs to be retention
Read a really good piece yesterday that talks about the 'churn snowball'. I know we'd all like to think that really good marketing can offset churn, but that just doesn't work long term. Plus, it's embarrassing to market a turd. Below are some of the most significant impacts of churn: 1) FOREVER Lost ARR I added emphasis to the “forever” part because churned ARR isn’t something companies can magically make up for by selling more next year. A lot of people talk about churned ARR as if they can make up for it with more sales. Yes, companies can add more ARR, but sales reps would have theoretically closed those deals regardless of the churn because they only have so much capacity. A sales rep isn’t going to say “Hey, we churned a lot last quarter so I am going to work a little bit harder and close an extra deal this quarter to make up for the churn!”. ARR is a double-edged sword. It is recurring so the revenue can repeat for many years, but if companies churn a customer then that is multiple years of lost revenue that is lost forever. 2) Lost Expansion Opportunities When a customer churns, companies lose the opportunity to expand that customer. Expanding existing customers is significantly easier and cheaper than selling to a new customer so churn means companies don’t get that efficient revenue growth. For example, if a company’s annual expansion target is 30% then that revenue is also lost FOREVER. 3) Lost Second Order Revenue Second-order revenue consists of: - Sales that come from existing customer referrals - Sales from customers changing employers and buying the product again at their new employer - It’s hard to quantify this but in the tech world, these costs are very real and likely more significant than most people realize. As an example, if Bob buys SaaS widget from Company ABC and doesn’t have a good experience (deployment is bad, features were oversold/lacking, etc) then when Bob changes jobs there is a high chance he doesn’t purchase from Company ABC at his new company. Not only that, but Bob likely will tell his friends about his bad experience and that Company XYZ is much better.
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New comment Jan '23
1 like • Jan '23
@Eric Siu about 50% of the clients we had 4 months ago. We lost two, and we also have several SMBs (~20 people staff so easier to handle). We've been working with one of Meta's companies and their slash of 11,000 people globally hit nearly 30% of our client. I know of two more with about 20%, and one with 60% where my agency now covers more services for 3 new departments.
1 like • Jan '23
@Eric Siu you bet. Also signed an overdraft contract before Christmas just in case (and prior to the next interest hike)
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Mario Peshev
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13points to level up
@mario-peshev-5141
CEO DevriX & Growth Shuttle. Business Advisor, Angel Investor. Passionate about B2B, GTM, growth hacking, martech innovation, the creator economy.

Active 4h ago
Joined Jan 15, 2023
INTJ
Europe
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