The Agency for Agencies: How Katie Street Helps Agencies Win New Business
Key Takeaways
- Cold-calling lead gen solves the problem for a moment. Street Agency uses email marketing automation and content to solve new business permanently.
- You don't need case studies to start. You need an opinion about the problems that keep your audience up at night.
- Three kinds of content, in order: attract (insights), prove it, and make it easy to buy. Lead scoring flags who's hot, at 30 points in Street's setup.
- Most clients only care if they win work, so Street added sales coaching and earns about 5% of first-year revenue on clients it introduces.
- Street grew 300% in a year with a dedicated marketing team it has had since it was four people. Katie's monthly webinar has 1,200 signups.
- Tanba is a 75-pound-a-month membership for agencies that can't afford Street. 80 people applied for the beta before launch.
Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode with Katie Street, founder and managing director of Street Agency, a UK “agency for agencies” that runs new business marketing for other agencies. Katie led new business inside agencies before starting her own, and at recording she was weeks from launching Tanba, a membership for agencies that can’t afford Street. Gray asked how an engagement runs, what she’s measured on, and what a membership takes.
Skip the cold calls, and don’t wait for case studies
Gray asked for a quick breakdown of what Street does. Katie’s answer doubled as a critique of the usual new business playbook.
Not your kind of normal cold-calling lead gen approach, that often solves a problem but, as you know, is a short-term fix… What we aim to do is to help solve the new business problem permanently… So we help agencies build really engaged audiences by pushing out marketing tactics, and we do that predominantly using email marketing automation tools.
Engagements start with an immersion phase (understanding the agency, interviewing its clients, researching peers and competitors), then the value proposition and the niche, which agencies resist because they’re afraid of cutting off business. In Katie’s experience, you need to niche. She also pushed back on what agencies think they need first.
It’s very much insights driven, and the content is talking to the problem that we know those people have… I think agencies often think they need to have case studies. You do not need to have case studies. You just need to have an opinion based on what you do, and something that’s different, and that’s going to help them answer things that keep them up at night.
Three kinds of content, in order: attract, prove it, make it easy to buy
Gray asked whether she builds from the bottom of the funnel up or the top down. Katie always starts with the insight piece, because it gets the best engagement, and sends one to three emails a week depending on the client’s ambition. The automation is built on three content types in a fixed order.
We will start with an insightful piece of content, and that’s the attract piece… You’ve then got the second piece, which is prove it. So that’s telling them how you’ve done that. That might be in a form of a case study, it might not… And then the third piece of content that we push out is making sure that you’ve got something that’s really easy to buy. So often packaged up, so it could be, buy this workshop.
Engagement with each piece earns points, and the score decides what happens next.
Some things might get two points, some things might get three points. When they reach 30 points, we go, right, they’re really hot, they’re hugely engaged with us and the content that we’re pushing out… Sometimes the alert will go to the campaign success manager who’s running those campaigns, and they’ll go, actually, I’m going to look a bit more deeply into this.
Clients only care if they win work, so Street coaches sales too
Gray wanted to know what Street reports on, since agencies tend to report top-of-funnel numbers owners don’t care about. Katie agreed: most of her clients only care if they win work, so Street KPIs itself on helping them convert, and that changed the business.
Most clients come to us and go, we just need more leads, we’re really good at converting them. And then we start working with them and we go, hmm, converting the leads that we’re giving you, there’s something that’s not quite right here. So we’ve actually introduced a kind of sales coaching element.
Otherwise, she said, there’s no point feeding a leaky bucket. Street works on retainer and also earns about five percent of first-year revenue on any client it introduces, so campaign success managers are measured on conversions as well as meetings booked.
A dedicated marketing team is why Street grew
Street was 14 people at recording and heading toward 20 by year end. Katie credited the growth (300% in a year, through the pandemic) to a decision she made when the agency was four people: dedicated marketing resource.
If you try to double down or use someone else within your agency to do it, you know what it’s all like. You’ve all been there. It just doesn’t happen. You get busy on client work. It’s the first thing to get pushed. So having a team, even as a small agency… our head of marketing was here right at the beginning, when there were only sort of four people.
The marketing team is now three people (usually two), and Katie’s monthly webinar has 1,200 signups. Gray said that’s a common thread among the fastest-growing agencies on the show.
Tanba: 75 pounds a month for the agencies Street has to turn away
Gray had assumed Tanba was a play for recurring revenue. Katie said it came from a different place. Street is expensive, and she has to qualify out a lot of the agencies that come to her because they can’t afford it.
Tanba was born out of the idea that all agencies deserve to get noticed and deserve to know how to better attract and win more new clients. There are some amazing agencies out there that are maybe too small or too busy or whatever it is… they can’t use an agency like Street.
Membership is 75 pounds a month. Katie and two co-founders (who started the BD100 in the UK) are self-funding it plus one small grant, hiring three people for marketing, membership, and content, and built the platform bespoke, which has meant bugs and late nights. 80 people applied for the beta before launch. Gray’s caution: he’s watched dozens of agencies try this and seen about four stick.