The most powerful skill I learnt building a UX/UI Agency
Leads are the lifeblood of any agency. Without them, you have no clients. Without clients you have no revenue, and without revenue you have no business. There are a few common ways to generate leads for an agency:
- Cold-emailing
- Adverts
- Outsource to a lead-gen agency
- Create targeted (free) content
These can all work pretty well.
But leads don’t keep an agency running, actual paying clients do.
From my experience building ZeroToDesign from 0 to 10+ clients in under 18 months, there is one stream that trumps all when it comes to converting leads into paying clients for a Design Agency:
- Network Referrals
I found this the most powerful strategy & stream when creating an agency from scratch. It helped a great deal as I was creating it at the age of 27 without a lovely track record of past clients to DM.
Statistically, for Z2D, our network and their subsequent referrals have led to 50% of our total clients. It’s worked pretty well and continues to do so. But it’s easy to say ‘Hey this stream works for us, you should do it too!’. Sometimes what made it work for us, might not work for you.
So let’s dig into exactly how I did it, and specifically how I honed the skill behind it.
Networking and getting referrals isn't just for extroverts that are comfortable approaching people, it’s a skill that can be honed by anyone.
Positioning > Pushing
I wrote an article earlier this year listing some of my favourite quotes as I Nomadded my way across the world. This was one of the standouts:
Sometimes it’s not about pushing, it’s about positioning.
Richmond Amoah
Agencies aren’t revolutionary. They’ve been done before, and many times before as well. The good thing about this is the material available out there is deep and has tried and tested methods to help you get results.
The bad?
It’s been done before and will be done again, by many many people, and therefore you have…
Competition!
And plenty of it.
But that’s fine. It’s expected, right? You’re not going to walk your way to creating a great company, you’re going to fight your way to the top.
These are the two ways I used to differentiate Z2D from others:
- Present something unique — this doesn’t mean doing something completely different, but position yourself as doing something in a unique way. We did this with our DesignDuo Model. This is powerful when people eventually ask the question ‘What separates you from other agencies?’
- Position yourself in the right environment— Being an Agency in delivering landing pages is going to be hard because it's so classic. Being an Agency that creates copy for landing page hero sections? Less crowded. Seeking a specific (niche) or new environment helps you position yourself better because there are fewer people doing what you do.
I learnt this lesson a lot from conferences and travelling as a Digital Nomad, and I realised it’s been quite a common theme in life.
Position yourself with something unique, and in an environment that lacks that flavour, and you have a recipe to be remembered, for a very long time.
I saw that opportunity for positioning particularly within Web3. Crypto was hyping at the end of 2021, and I started to really dig deeper into how certain chains and products worked. To me, it looked like a good environment for good Design to be injected, so I decided to book a trip to Miami for the biggest conference of the year, The Bitcoin Conference.
It was surprisingly easy to talk to Product people about what I did, and I made a ton of good connections with builders in the space. And not just like your mom-and-pop type builders, like big folks that had projects with 10s of millions in market cap.
All through some good positioning.
After testing out the waters at Bitcoin Miami 22, I decided to venture to more crypto events, with the sole goal of:
Positioning myself as the person known for UX/UI.
I positioned myself in a space that didn’t have many designers. Web3 events are filled with a lot of devs & creators and not many Design practitioners. It became very easy to educate people and stand out as a Designer. I have a no-nonsense approach when it comes to UX/UI and people generally appreciated that (likely due to Web3’s being so poor).
The effort led to a fair amount of leads for an agency of our size. We hit more than 5 warm leads in under 4 months, eventually landed our first Web3 client and we started getting more regular inbounds from the industry.
It was a long-term play in a space where I saw great potential.
A fitting example
Referrals might seem daunting for those of you that don’t have many connections or are introverted or whatever else. But there are many ways in which you can build up your stature, without needing to wait 10 years or attend 100s of events.
Be smart with it and position yourself uniquely in a niche and you’ll make it a lot easier for yourself.
As a % of our total revenue since the start, referrals have accounted for more than >60% of our revenue.
60% of total revenue from one stream.
When it comes to building a standing within a space and putting yourself out there as a service provider… it’s important to value the long-term, and not sweat over completely a sale there and then. That type of sales tactic, to me, feels quite cringe and most definitely extractive.
I focused on being good at my craft, being in the right environment and creating relationships that weren’t just about closing a sale there and then.
Because when you focus on being authentic to your value, you never know how people might remember you:
To action & abundance,
Sakky B
Co-founder @ ZeroToDesign
