Why prospecting matters to your agency (and where to start)
Struggling to find new clients? You’re not alone. Many agencies avoid prospecting because they think it's difficult, time-consuming, or ineffective. But, with a repeatable strategy, you can attract and engage the right clients without wasting time.
Before we even dive into prospecting, let’s start with this question: if a prospect looked up your agency today, would they immediately see value? Most clients research your agency before responding to your outreach. If they can’t instantly tell who you help and how you drive results, they’ll move on.
Your online presence is your first impression, so make it count! Hear from Jen Wallace at Northern Co. on how her team strategically markets their agency to attract and convert leads.
Bonus tip: Jen is about to discuss the power of case studies to grow your agency. If you haven't already, use our case study template as a place to start when building out your own!
Use key tools for prospecting
Now that your site is ready for viewing, the next step is to build the right toolkit. Sales prospecting involves finding potential clients that you want to sell to. In the past, prospecting was all about cold calling and blasting emails to purchased lists, but in today’s world, you have to be more strategic and targeted with your strategy in order to effectively close deals.
In the gallery below, identify a few key tools that you can employ to research and target your leads. These are broken down by category, from sourcing to outreach.
Sourcing
Sourcing refers to the process of searching for new clients. Your goal is to find decision makers at a company that fits your ideal client profile.
Tools to discover new business accounts:
Tools to find specific contacts at a business:
- Cognism
- Hunter
- 6sense
- LinkedIn sales navigator (Particularly helpful to map contacts to a particular business account)
Research
Research your leads to understand how to best pitch your services. In particular, you should:
- Browse the brand website and social accounts, noting: their brand voice, what they sell, what messages they send, etc.
- Monitor how they’ve previously engaged with your brand (i.e., lead tracking) if applicable.
- Look at their current tech stack to uncover pain points that can spur an initial conversation.
Tools you can use to conduct research:
- Salesforce (CRM and lead tracking).
- https://builtwith.com/ (Tech stack identification).
- Store Leads (Tech stack identification).
Scoping
Projecting scope is crucial before reaching out to a potential client, since you’ll want an idea of the scope of work that would be needed.
Tools you can use to research leads:
- eDataSource (Project email list volume)
- Similarweb (Estimate monthly website traffic)
- ZoomInfo (Estimate revenue data)
- Charm.io (Estimate revenue data)
Outreach
Outreach is exactly what it sounds like: reaching out to your lead directly to gauge their interest. Often this will be via email, but it could also take place on LinkedIn, over the phone, in person, etc.
Tools that can help you to reach out to leads:
Boost your agency’s discoverability with Klaviyo
Prospects receive information from multiple channels: email, social media, and ads. With inboxes overflowing, cold emails often go unread or marked as spam. What they really want is a sense of connection and trust before making a purchase.
To help you stand out, the Klaviyo Partner Marketing team has created key templates and resources to boost your agency’s discoverability. Here are 3 ways to organically expand your client base, along with how to optimize the comarketing resources that Klaviyo offers to make it easy:
List your business on the Agency Partner Directory
The Agency Partner Directory is a space where Klaviyo customers can find a partner to work with, regardless of your tier. By listing your services here, you will allow more inbound leads to contact you directly.
How this works: Customers can filter by the type of services they require, their budget, location, etc. to help them find your individual agency profile. On that profile, you can include a brief introduction to your brand, a quote, relevant media links, your website, and more. Customers will be able to contact you directly from this page.
How to add your services
- Head to Klaviyo's Partner Directory sign-up page, and click the button labeled Get Listed. The Klaviyo directory is built on PartnerPage. As a result, you will be prompted to either create a PartnerPage account with your email or sign in to an existing account.
- Next, complete your profile by filling in key details about your business and the services you offer. Once your profile is approved by Klaviyo, it will be published in the directory.
- Follow best practices for building your profile: If you build it well, they will come. Customers go to the Agency Partner Directory when looking for partners to work with. This is your opportunity to highlight your services and show off the great work you do.Agencies with complete and thorough directory listings have a higher likelihood of being matched via the agency matchmaking process. We have a few best practices to help you create a smarter directory listing and gain insights from some of our highest-performing examples.
- After your profile is live, you'll be alerted via email when Klaviyo customers reach out looking to learn more about your product or have questions. Respond to them and get a conversation going to drive a sale.
Demonstrate thought leadership
Want to create a funnel for new prospects to discover your brand? Find ways to build authority in the industry you want to target so that they access your content organically.
Here are some ways to demonstrate thought leadership and, in turn, gain marketing qualified leads:
- Webinars: Host your own webinars or be a guest speaker on someone else’s webinar. Address common challenges your ideal client might be facing.
- Blog posts: Write your own blog posts or be a guest blogger for a partner who could benefit from your expertise.
- Events: Sponsor an event, purchase a booth, or attend a key event to just network. Look for conferences and industry events where you can share your agency story in person. Moreover, seek out online event opportunities to cast a wide net online.
How Klaviyo can help:
- Guest author a blog
- Cohost a webinar
- Host an in-person event
- Host your own webinar with a Klaviyo-sponsored webinar in a box!
All of these options are detailed in our co-marketing playbook!
Start a referral program
Did you know that approximately 92% of global consumers say that they value recommendations from a friend or family member above all other forms of advertising? (Source: Nielsen) This indicates that people are more likely to work with you if a trusted source informed them about your agency.
Set up a referral program to demonstrate social proof of your agency’s impact and speed up the process to initiate and close a sale. Offer referral incentives like discounts, free strategy sessions, and more in exchange for qualified referrals from your clients.
Want to start a referral program, but don’t know where to start? Check out these Klaviyo tech partner integrations that help businesses build robust referral programs.
Here is a quick guide in our Customer Academy that walks through how to set up a referral program to grow your customer base, but a lot of these tactics work for agencies as well!
Automate the lead collection process
It is always best practice to collect leads on your site via sign-up forms, and you can use Klaviyo to accomplish this! Make sure to:
- Create a set of forms, including a pop-up and embed, so that prospects who land on your website have a way to submit their contact information.
- Set up an automated flow to thank the lead for submitting their information and inform them of when they can expect a response from your team (e.g., in the next 48 hours).
Tip: You can add an alert to your flow to ping your own agency team when a new client submits the form. This will keep you up-to-date if you then conduct more manual outreach after the flow sends. Here is an example of what this may look like:
Nurture your leads with the Partner Demand Center
The Partner Demand Center allows you to sequence your referred leads into customizable prebuilt flows directly in the partner portal. Navigate to the pre-built campaigns and customize them to your business directly on the Partner Demand Center homepage.
Use social media strategically
Social media is a powerful tool for researching potential clients and marketing your agency. Many platforms also allow direct engagement with leads. Here are key best practices across top platforms:
- Share wins on personal and agency pages to build social proof (e.g., growth milestones, partnerships, case studies).
- Use keywords and filters to find companies that fit your ideal client profile.
- Review profiles for contact details and links to company websites.
- Message potential leads to start conversations.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
- Highlight case studies and engage with your audience through posts and community-building.
- Use search filters to find and research ideal clients.
- Gather insights from company pages, including marketing content and key contacts.
- Invest in paid ads (e.g., Facebook lead ads) to expand reach.
- Optimize your website with SEO best practices to improve search rankings.
- Invest in paid ads to appear in search results and on relevant web pages.
How Klaviyo can help:
- Tag the Klaviyo Partner Page and we will engage with your post!
Use some of our Canva images and recommended copy to write a B2C CRM post of your own.