As a regular attendee of WordCamps and various meetups, I often hear from agency owners who are overwhelmed with work, saying they don't have enough engineering capacity to keep up. Meanwhile, some agencies, including my own, face the opposite challenge—struggling to secure a steady flow of projects.
I run an agency with a strong track record, earning only 5-star reviews across various platforms and multiple 5-star plugins and themes on WordPress.org. My prices are highly competitive, often below market rates (I've never lost a client due to pricing), and I even take on pro bono work when needed. The clients I do acquire tend to stay with me long-term, so quality is certainly not the issue.
I'm genuinely curious—what factors contribute to this disparity? How are some agencies swamped with work while others, like mine, find it difficult to maintain a consistent pipeline of clients?
Sales people
What market are you in? Do you specialize in any particular verticals? What’s your target client profile like? What are you doing to canvas for prospects? How well developed is your sales deck?
Very little about selling WordPress comes down to how well you implement WordPress. It’s a sales process, first and foremost. Yes, being competent helps maintain your reputation but without a solid process for identifying and closing leads, you’ll struggle.
I think most agencies are getting clients based on their strength. They know a lot of people. And I’m sure a fair percentage of their projects are collaborative jobs they partner with.
Be good at what you do. Get case studies and then go to similar companies with those case studies.
You’d be surprised how many are not waiting for work but actually building sales decks and materials to pitch clients.
1. Make something useful
2. Sell it
When we listed products on WordPress dot org, there was a steady steam of customers for our paid products. We made more money from the service related to those products than the products themselves.
If you have plugins and themes that are not generating service rev then figure out what you are doing wrong.
For example, we felt lifetime deals were a scam. Turns out we are supporting the plugins anyway and should have just ran that play. Sometimes the key is reworking what you already have. Good luck
A lot of top agencies have dedicated sales person, sometimes more than one. A friend of mine who
does higher paying clients specializes in branding, another at his company specializes in marketing, they a videographer and all
Get your clients to give you Google reviews. Get word of mouth reviews. Price projects so that you know it’ll get you more projects.