Every new client, a blank page.

New scope, new proposal, new price, new way of delivering it. The team rebuilds the wheel each time, revenue comes in, and somehow very little of it stays. You want bigger deals at your price. Instead every deal is a fresh negotiation. That's the agency I want to tell you about.

I talked this through with Simone Vincenzi on Expert To Authority (July 2024). Listen to the full conversation: Double Your Sales in 90 Days with Simon Severino

When every deal is custom, every deal is small

A European marketing agency started a sprint with us. Revenue was fine. The margin was not: they kept 22%. A bitter number for that much work.

When we looked closer, the reason was plain. For every new client "they reinvent the wheel." Everything customized. "No project repeats."

That has a cost you can feel. Each proposal eats a founder evening. Each price gets negotiated from zero, because the buyer has nothing to compare it to except their own fear. And the deal size stays wherever the most nervous buyer pushes it. On average they billed about 4.5K per client.

I see the same root in most sales recordings I review: founders "could charge more, but they are afraid to charge more." A custom offer makes that fear worse, because every price feels like a guess.

Split the offer in two

In the first month we mapped who their ideal client was and what their ideal offer was. Then we cut the offer in two.

The front door. One fixed, productized offer. A brand video for your website, a hero video that tells everyone what your brand does. Three weeks. Two rounds of changes. $9,000. Same scope for everyone, so nobody haggles over that one.

The retainer. Rebranding, maintenance, landing pages, presentation materials. Around 15K per month. The catch: it's offered "only with the select clients, the ones that are fun to work with."

🐬 Picture the shift in the room. The buyer isn't asking how much for everything anymore. They're three weeks into working with you, they've seen the result on their own website, and you're the one deciding who gets the next offer. From the outside you look like the firm people wait to get into.

Why a smaller first sale makes the average deal bigger

It sounds backwards. $9,000 is less than a big custom project. And yes, "most people only get to that first product and that's it."

But after three weeks you know which clients you'd love to keep. In their case, about half. You've seen how they decide, how they pay, how they treat your team. You pitch the bigger work only where the yes is already obvious.

The result: their average went from about 4.5K per client to about 12K. Some clients pay more than 15K, because we also gave them the tools to price above that when the client has the resources. The standardized video production is outsourced now, so the front door runs without the founders. And they have more fun, because the intense, personal work is only with clients they like.

🐯 That's pricing power. Not a braver voice on the price slide. A structure where the price is fixed up front and the big number comes after the trust.

Where this sits in doubling revenue

Simone asked what goes into doubling sales in 90 days. Three moves, each about 25%: raise what you charge without losing clients, raise your win rate, shorten the time it takes to close. Stack the three and it compounds to roughly double.

This agency story is the first lever. Fix what you charge before you chase more leads, because every lead after that is worth more.

Start this week

1. List your last 10 projects. Circle what repeated in at least 7 of them. That's your front door.
2. Fix it. One scope, one timeline, one price, a set number of revisions.
3. Name the retainer. The ongoing work your best clients keep asking for.
4. Decide who gets it. Write down what a fun-to-work-with client looks like, before anyone asks.
5. Score it Friday. Set the number of front-door sales in your Monday Strategy, check it in Friday Learnings.

Picture your next quarter. A clean break from the blank page. Fewer custom proposals at midnight. A price nobody argues with. And a short list of clients you chose, paying for the work you love doing. That's Sprintlife: control of the sales conversation, and the time freedom it buys you. 🌴

Listen to the full conversation with Simone Vincenzi: Double Your Sales in 90 Days with Simon Severino

Grab the free tools and build your offer alongside other founders in the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆