So, you have a new client who has hired your digital agency to solve a critical problem–quickly. As a technical expert, you know just the right technology and tools to get the job done. But there’s a head-scratching question. How do you actually buy the software you need?
Or, if you’re thinking ahead, a more powerful question may come to your mind – how can your agency build sustainable, scalable recurring revenue just like the software companies do?
You may not write the software, but you did build the system of all the software products integrated together to solve your client’s problem. That’s a product you can own and maintain. In fact, if you’re free to deploy more software, you can solve bigger problems for clients, deliver higher value, and most importantly, continue managing over the long term with sticky recurring maintenance retainers.
Let us talk about this method in detail.
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Why Do Clients Hire Contractors?
Most clients don’t know how to solve their problems, or lack the organizational capability and capacity to get a specific job done, like managing their digital marketing funnel. The bigger the business problem grows, the more the client’s anxiety grows until they finally decide to hire outside their organization.
That’s when they reach out to hire you.
What Do Agencies Do For These Clients?
Yes, agencies sell their trusted expertise to their clients. But really, agencies make the client feel like their business is back in control. Ultimately, it’s about calming that anxiety that motivated the client to hire you.
Your superpower and your opportunity is that you know how to use digital marketing and technology to deliver a high-performance,reliable result for clients. If you have the expertise to solve the problem up front, you have the expertise to solve that problem month after month.
Why Subscription Management Is The Problem That Kills Agency Revenue?
If a digital agency’s job is to make a client’s life easier and simpler, the agency should not make a client buy their own technology. After all, a plumber would never send a client to the hardware store to buy their own pipes.
It’s no secret why digital agencies can’t meet this expectation. Even though you’re the expert, and you know exactly what technology will deliver the results your clients need, buying subscription-based services is a major financial risk for agencies. Getting stuck in the middle of the recurring billing of your clients requires ongoing expense tracking and bookkeeping, plus the chance you’re going to have to cover the costs for your clients.
That’s why digital agencies tell clients to manage those subscriptions themselves.
This leaves agencies waiting weeks for the client to buy subscriptions you need, making planning your scheduling difficult. Clients take a long time because they simply don’t have the time, which is why they hired you. Clients get confused setting up their own technology stacks because clients don’t understand the technology, which is also why they hired you.
This slows down the project drastically, wasting both your client’s time and yours. This experience is hardly the professional experience clients expect. Clients just want you to take care of it all for them!
The Solution To Managing Subscriptions For Clients
Agencies just need a less risky way to do subscription management. That’s why we use subscription managers for agencies. They let you buy subscriptions for clients, without getting stuck with the financial risk of paying for them.
How Do Subscription Managers Work?
When you use a subscription manager, you never have to wait for your clients to subscribe to software. You can “just take care of it” for your clients, just like they expect.
A subscription is really the email you sign up with and the credit card you pay with. You just never as an agency want to use your own email and your own credit card.
The subscription manager manages the financial risk. They let agencies create a virtual credit card to buy the subscription services that automatically expense your client. Clients pay a consolidated bill. All of these transactions are automatically tracked and controlled in your account, so you skip tedious expense tracking and bookkeeping.
The subscription manager also lets you create a shared email address, which forwards all sign-up emails, product alerts, and invoices to both you and your client. That way you can manage the subscription but your client will own it. You can create these email addresses in an instant without waiting for your client to create one.
Clients love seeing their subscriptions all in one place and the peace of mind they own their subscriptions while you are just managing them. Once you are done working with your client, you can immediately cancel or transfer the subscriptions to your clients. You never have to worry about getting a surprise charge from a subscription from a client you worked with before.
Creating An Opportunity To Grow Your Revenue
Yes, a subscription manager lets you professionally manage subscriptions for your client projects saving you both time and confusion. They keep clients satisfied knowing that they own all their data, all the subscriptions are organized and managed in one place, and they have full control over their technology stack. This will build up the trust between you and the client so you can sell them more projects in the future.
But the real opportunity is how you can scale your agency’s revenue. Managing subscriptions creates a better business model.
The easiest way is to add your management fee for managing subscriptions, like a 20% fee to managing the advertising budget. You use commissions earned from software vendors to provide discounts to your clients, creating extra stickiness.
Best of all is the power of creating long-term, sticky recurring retainers for managing the technology stack. Not only can the clients rely on you as the technology expert to set them up with a complete solution, but they can rely on you to maintain it and then expand the system to solve new problems in the future. This is a win-win situation for both of you.
Conclusion
Managing subscriptions of technologies and services required by agencies can be a headache for both the agency and the client. It can be a waste of time, and the overall experience of working with the agency can become bad. Instead, it is better to use a subscription manager. The clients can own their data and see their subscriptions organized in one place, and the agency can manage those subscriptions while the clients pay for them.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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