Why SaaS marketing tactics probably won’t grow your agency

Some agency leaders have seen what works for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies and assume they should be doing the same thing to grow their own businesses.

While there may be things to learn from how SaaS businesses generate leads and close new accounts, the reality is that agencies are fundamentally different businesses that usually require a different approach to business development.

In this episode, Chip and Gini explain how the two types of businesses are different, but they also offer ways to use the insights you may glean from studying SaaS marketing.

Key takeaways

Gini Dietrich: “In an agency business, people are buying relationships. They’re buying chemistry, they’re buying knowledge, and your ability to do the work. But what they’re really buying is people and you can’t sell that online.”

Chip Griffin: “It is good to take inspiration from these various SaaS marketing activities, but they’re not the kind of thing that you can just cookie cutter place in.”

Gini Dietrich: “Because like we say all the time, it depends, it may or may not work. If it feels get rich quick, it’s probably not going to work.”

Chip Griffin: “There’s absolutely inspiration to be had from even the most charlatan of charlatans. They still have little nuggets in there that you can take advantage of as long as you’re listening carefully.”

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And today we’re going to be a bit sassy right after this

OR perhaps more accurately, we’ll tell you why you shouldn’t be sassy. How’s that for an opening. Did I do a little better today? I think this is, I think that’s better than the last couple of intros.

Gini Dietrich: No, no, no. But I would like to point out what you pointed out before we started recording: that we are very Ukrainian today.

Chip Griffin: We are. Yes, it was entirely unintentional.

Gini Dietrich: It was unintentional, but we are very Ukrainian.

Chip Griffin: And it’ll be a few weeks before this actually airs. But, hopefully things are better or getting better, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, when we’re recording it’s not.

Chip Griffin: It’s definitely not good right now. Um, okay, well, so let’s focus on things we can control and what we’re going to be talking about is SaaS – S A A S – not the sass that, you know, you’re probably more likely to associate with me. And we’re going to specifically be talking about why, just because you may see what works when people are selling SaaS products or when you’re helping your clients sell SaaS products, you should not simply adopt those same tactics to sell your agency’s services.

And it is a popular idea out there that you can look and see how some of these other services are being sold. And so you ought to be able to apply the same things. The drip campaigns, the Facebook ads, the, you know, the whole idea of the funnel and you know, all that kind of stuff. And you’ll see plenty of experts out there in agency land, who will tell you basically to follow that same model.