It's easier to hire high quality designers than it is to find sales people who can connect with your customers with the passion and experience that you bring. In a small agency the owner needs to be spending 50% of their time selling. Only you can convince the clients that your team understands their challenges and has the right skills to meet them.

Another possibility is to Raise your prices. When you charge more you will communicate to clients that you are very confident that they will receive a value for your services. This allows you to make more money, while serving the same number of clients. You get to stay focused, do great work and grow your firm.

I work with many firms that experience these challenges and I'm happy to talk further (www.anchoradvisors.com)

Brad

You could create a beautiful portfolio, create a series of landing pages and target them for specific keywords for local and then regional and national terms. The beauty of starting local is, you can always get more face time with clients from setting up meetings, and it may well in fact be a hidden gem in your overall marketing arsenal.

I am not suggesting to rely too heavily on any one marketing method, but at least it is another avenue to get the word out (since a mere fraction of prospects use the yellow pages). These days, it really boils down to Google and ranking above the fold to get conversion.

We have never had to advertise with our SEO business, organic traffic is truly priceless if you have what the searcher is looking for. It boils down to standing in front of the right type of traffic through having the right on page factors as well as a compelling offer once the traffic arrives.

My approach to growing the business was honestly through a series of trials and errors, but by doing so gained vital experience. I will give to items of advice – The first is I learned to have the infrastructure in place to grow – the data center, the virtual servers, the call centers. Secondly, mix your sales efforts – one track won't always lead to success.

The important part was learning how to create the perfect mix for sales – online advertising, hiring sales managers, partnerships, etc. After spending thousands on pay-per-clicks and other online/print forms of advertising, I dropped it. I brought in an outside sales manager and also an inside sales manager. This was a great move on my part, because I could not focus on every item that needed to be done in a day. Building a quote, looking up prices, meeting with current clients, meeting with potential clients, overseeing the workflow of projects, etc. Just to much for one person. So the inside and outside guys work together building teh quotes with me reviewing their quotes before the client see them. It is a great system. Then I mentioned partnerships, this is our true secret to success. Everything that we do/offer can be re-branded. I created a channel program, where others in the IT arena can resell our services as if they are their own. From the Managed Services to our Online Backup Solution – everything can be rebranded for a partner to resell. We started this program the first of the year with one partner on trial, today we have 7 channel partners across the US – 35% of the gross revenues come from these channel partners. If you think about it, I don't have 2 or 3 sales managers and a few inside sales representatives. I actually have close to 50 sellng services of Net-Flow Solutions.

Best Regards
Mike Holland
CEO

Net-Flow Solutions
http://www.net-flowsolutions.com