The Definitive Guide to Managing Your B2B Sales Agency

For agency owners with a few clients, the following guide is for you. Their business is at this stage where they either handle those clients themselves or have a small team managing them.

Using this guide, an agency owner will be able to learn about a variety of operational processes he or she can implement. As a result, they will be able to gain a better understanding of how to manage their agency/business.

Client Management

If you don't have a good process for managing your clients, whether you're an agency owner or freelancer, it can be stressful. Make sure you keep track of projects and invoices, stay in touch with the client, and make sure they're satisfied.

It is critical to maintain a positive relationship with your clients, and this section explores client management in depth.

Onboarding & Kick-Off Call

Getting a strong start to your campaigns starts with the onboarding process for your agency.

You'll be welcoming and introducing new clients to your business, addressing their questions and concerns, and ensuring they achieve their objectives.

Find out more about how agencies should onboard clients in our in-depth article.

Onboarding Questionnaire

In order to ensure the client's requirements are met, the onboarding questionnaire will be used.

You will use a survey-style document to reveal the client's purpose for using your services.

Ongoing communication

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Communicating with your clients consistently and providing them with updates on a regular basis is crucial to maintain client relationships. Additionally, this puts the client at ease, makes the outreach process appear more professional, and shows you are in charge.

Your client communications will take place through four key channels:

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E-mail

When more than 2 people need to be notified about major updates to your process, team updates, schedule changes, client appreciation emails, etc.

Zoom/Google Hangouts

The purpose of these calls is to review the experiments performed on the week and plan for the following week with the client and your account manager.

Client Channel- Communication & Notifications

Your agency's account manager and operations manager are added to the client's Slack channel as part of onboarding. Communication, questions, copy revisions, updates, and verification will be handled here.

Client Notifications channel 

Your account manager and the client will be notified when you receive an email response to your outreach campaign when you use this channel.

Run experiments, Document, & Share your learnings

The data and learnings from your tests should be consolidated into a single document showing what worked, what didn't, and why. For an easy-to-read reference document, keep track of each step, change, and optimization made at every level. 

On the weekly recurring call, summarize the results of the experiments and the top takeaways for the account manager. 

Optimizing your campaigns Data-Driven

We discussed how cold email marketing can be a great way to gather data about prospects, value propositions, and messaging.

A successful outreach process is based on experimentation. Keeping track of the right metrics will help you determine what's working, prioritize areas for optimization, and iterate for long-term success.

Throughout your campaigns, you need to be tracking three key metrics. 

1. Open Rate

It is the Percentage of people that open your email/ Total number of emails sent

If your open rates are below 30%:

• For each of your outreach domains, have you set up DKIM, DMARC, and SPF? 
• Is your inbox warmed up? If your warmup scores are low, reduce your send rate or pause outreach until your inbox health improves.
• Do you have a valid email list of prospects
• Is the prospect you are targeting right for you?
• Be sure to check your subject line. Change the subject line a few times. Including the prospect's First Name or Company Name in the subject line is a good variant.

To further improve your open rate:

• You should keep your subject line short and avoid using spammy words. If you were sending this email to someone you knew personally, how would you do it?
• Experiment with different send times for your emails when setting them up 
• Write a good first sentence in your email. Your first line of an email can be seen by prospects when it lands in their inbox. You may be able to increase your open rates significantly by changing your intro sentence.
• Have follow-up emails! It is possible for your first email to fall through the cracks of a cluttered inbox when you send it. In order to catch the prospects' attention, you should be persistent and use follow-up emails.

2. Reply Rate 

% of emails replied / Total emails sent = Reply Rate

You can improve your reply rate by considering the following factors:

• Emails should be short and concise. When it comes to emails, people have short attention spans. Send a short, clear message to increase the chances of receiving a reply.
• Whenever possible, personalize your approach. Use powerful dynamic fields to customize your emails, such as first names, job titles, locations, etc. Also, you can mention recent achievements or news.
• Don't focus on features, focus on value propositions. Think like your prospects when crafting cold emails. Consider presenting a solution to a pain point they might be experiencing instead of listing your product's features.
• You should clearly outline what needs to be done. Cold email outreach should be used to generate as many opportunities as possible. Be clear about the ask and where you want the conversation to go. You can find out more about writing catchy and clear calls to action here:

3. Conversion Rate 

A conversion rate is a measure of how many people convert to a certain goal (such as signing up for your product or scheduling an appointment). Cold emails aim to turn cold leads into warm ones and ultimately sales! It is normal for similar campaigns to generate 10-20% replies. It is a good benchmark, but if you are offering something free like a trial or demo, then it may be even higher.

In addition to prospecting, value propositions, personalization, follow-ups, subject lines, calls to action, and reminders, conversion rates are determined by a combination of all of these factors. It's important to have targeted campaigns, with relevant content and good calls to action.

Managing Your Agency’s Capacity

Understand where your time is spent (prospecting vs. client management vs. client execution).

Identify who is responsible for what

For your agency to succeed, it's critical to manage its capacity. Without understanding the time that goes into prospecting versus client management and execution, it can be difficult to know where to allocate more resources or even have benchmarks on how much time each team member should spend on different activities.

You need data on the amount of time spent on:

• Client management - Meetings with clients, onboarding, reviewing reports, etc.
• Execution of client campaigns - Set up campaigns, manage VAs, build lists of prospects, etc.
• Prospecting - How long does it take you to identify a list of prospects and close a sale? What are the different steps involved? How many man-hours do you spend on each? 

If a client churns, you need to understand how long it takes you to get a new client and systemize whenever possible (niche down your service or process if necessary).

Toggl is a great tool for tracking time. It's free for up to five people and has several features that can help you understand how much time your team is spending on different tasks.

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