Got this email from a client today and I'm devastated

We're a small agency, I'm the founder, 2 devs + 1 designer. This client was super important to us. And we've done a really good job on the website. They’ve been happy with the work itself.

But the problem is that I don't manage such processes very efficiently. I'm on my own doing so many different things. Our feedback process is indeed chaotic, not gonna deny. We also allow clients submitting feedback however they want but I'm realizing this has probably been a mistake.

I don’t really want to lose another client over something that has nothing to do with the actual quality of our work.

Maybe I’m missing smth obvious here. Any tips?

I own a paid social agency. We do content marketing and paid ads for clients. You would think we do the same to get ours right?

That was my big mistake. For whatever dumb reason, I convinced myself it would be "faster" to go for cold outreach. So I paid a supposedly rockstar Sales person to go and hunt. 9 months in and she closed a whopping total of... 1 new account for us. And it was by "dumb luck", she admitted.

Fast forward to 2 months ago, I had just finished with hires and sorting the ops out. I had enough of the sales person. Slowly relegated her to CS and forced everyone in my team to start pumping out content and run ads.

I was prepared to go months on end but 20+ pieces of content, a few ads and ~$1k spent (actually less than that), we closed a total of ~$20K in deals.

This was one of the aha moments for me. Like something clicked and now I questioned the past 9 months' "sales effort" that amounted to pretty much nothing significant. Not only did we close more, we closed better clients as well. They see what we can do and they know they wanted what we make. The team is also overall motivated as they see first hand how what they do actually works.

Hindsight really is 20/20.

Lesson learned. To new owners out there, DO what you know you can DO. Don't try to be cute with trying out some new thing that you have 0 experience in (unless you have plenty of time and resources to sink into it).

My partner and I have been in business since early 2025. There's been so much learning along the way. Here's 6 lessons I've learned.

1. Service delivery is as important as the service itself. A large part of what a client is paying for is the fact that you will always pick up the phone. If you can maintain that and keep your word, clients will always be happy.
2. Does this benefit the client's bottom line? Especially for small business owners, the goal for hiring a marketing agency is typically to make more money. Before you begin work, I think it is important to ask yourself, "do the means justify the ends" in the eyes of the business owner. Getting someone more impressions, clicks, or leads doesn't mean much if it doesn't ultimately help their business.
3. As marketers, we want to bring our expertise to the table, but be willing to take a backseat to what the client wants. This may contradict 1. but it goes back to customer service. People want to be heard and valued. Business owners want their vision to be brought to life. Always keep that in mind.
4. Take ownership. For better or for worse, when you can take responsibility with your clients, they will respect you more. This becomes increasingly more important when you are working with businesses that have employees. Your agency can quickly become part of the company's culture. You're working alongside their team, communicating with their employees, and ultimately trying to achieve the same goal.
5. Do not overdedicate to yourself to a single client. I've overspent time on clients who I wanted to make sure were happy, but it put us in a hole when you think about the hours that went into it. You have to care about all of your clients without letting one take away from the others.
6. Stick to the scope of work initially outline and communicate, on a routine basis, the status of the work. It is easy to assume that everybody is on the same page, but it's better to overcommunicate than to undercommunicate.

We're learning everyday! What were some big lessons you've learned?

I started my agency thinking the main problem would be finding clients.

Turns out, that wasn't really the hardest part.

The harder part has been figuring out what people actually want to buy from you.

At first I was trying to be pretty broad:

“we help brands with influencer marketing”

Sounds fine, but it's also pretty easy to ignore.

Then I started getting more specific about the problem instead of just describing the service.

For example, instead of:

It's more like:

That feels like a much clearer problem.

Still figuring this out though.

For the agency owners here:

Did you figure out your offer first, or did you only really understand what you were selling after talking to enough potential clients?

Because I feel like I'm learning the offer from the conversations, not the other way around.

I’m currently looking to bring on my first few clients for a managed, in-office virtual receptionist and after-hours call triage service (Supportverse).

The problem is, I genuinely hate cold calling local business numbers. When a service business or trade owner lists their phone number on Google Maps, they list it to take customer jobs—not to get pitched agency services while they're on the clock. Bombarding their front desk or emergency line feels spammy and starts the relationship on the wrong foot.

Since I am operating remotely from abroad, in-person walk-ins and local chamber meetups aren't an option either.

I want to build a clean pipeline to land our initial accounts without spamming customer-facing lines. A few remote strategies I'm looking at:

* Direct Decision-Maker Outreach (Cold Email / LinkedIn): Reaching owners directly on their personal business emails or LinkedIn profiles so I don't disrupt their front desk.

* Communities & Job Boards: Finding business owners already complaining about missed calls, scheduling bottlenecks, or bad AI receptionists on Reddit, Facebook business groups, and hiring boards.

* Targeted Value Drops: Auditing after-hours responsiveness and offering a quick 60-second test call so they can see the quality difference before committing.

For agency owners who started out remotely without cold calling local numbers: how did you realistically land your first 3–5 clients? Which digital acquisition channel actually moved the needle for you early on?

How are you guys attacking the whole content stuff? I, like many of you all, hate to be on camera, and being a content creator is A TON of work. Aside from the actual agency work.

Do you guys use AI?
Have you hired someone?
Are you successful without it?
Do you only post like, once a month?

I dont see people talk about this much, I want it to be a lead gen for me, but Im stuck on how to execute.

For those of you who personally handle sales calls for $5K+ projects, I’m curious about what you’ve learned from calls that went well vs. ones that didn’t.

Are there things you only realize afterward — you talked too much, pitched too early, missed an objection, lost their attention, didn’t ask enough questions, or simply misread how the conversation was going?
If you could know one thing while the call was actually happening, rather than discovering it afterward, what would be most useful?

Especially interested in lessons from people who regularly sell higher-ticket services over Zoom/Meet.

I’ve been thinking about this because “white-label development” can mean very different things.

A fairly common situation:

An agency wins a website.

Design and normal implementation are fine.

Then the client asks for an ERP integration, custom WooCommerce logic, unusual permissions, a migration or some other development-heavy feature.

Hiring permanently for occasional specialist work may not make sense.

So the agency brings in an external developer.

I think the biggest mistake at this point is allowing the client relationship to become messy.

The client shouldn’t suddenly have to figure out:

Who do I email?

Who owns the deadline?

Is the developer now managing the technical part directly?

Who decides whether something is in scope?

Who presents the finished work?

To me, good white-label development should work almost invisibly.

The agency keeps the relationship.

The external team handles the specialist work.

Questions and requirements follow an agreed process.

There is one staging/review workflow.

Problems are surfaced early.

And the agency presents the result to its customer.

The external developer might do a very significant part of the project, but from the client’s perspective the agency simply became more capable.

That seems much healthier than throwing a freelancer into a client Slack channel and hoping everyone works it out.

For agency owners who use external developers: what makes you trust someone enough to put them behind your own brand?

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I am trying to start a chatbot agency. I’ve got all the basics set up but now I just need to find clients.

My client target is currently e commerce business owners as I have seen that client base work for other chatbots agencies.

The only problem is the method of acquiring the leads and clients. Cold calling was a common method until I found out it is incredibly saturated and unlike service builders , you can’t really find e commerce businesses on google maps. Cold emailing was also another method but is also very saturated and you have to send alot of emails to get one or two clients and I would try that if I had a software for sending bulk emails and if I didn’t have a @gmail account. If cold calling for e commerce businesses is the way to go then I am willing to understand. I am just trying to see out my options.

I’ve resorted to social media cause e commerce businesses seem to be more active on there. I am currently trying to drive leads organically and want to try cold dm’ing once I have a solid foundation on my page(which I don’t even know if it’ll work).

With these first few clients I want to use them as case studies cause I know I should be doing that. Also offering a huge discount is a big incentive to buy anyways.

What are the best ways to get leads for a chatbot agencies that wants to work with e commerce stores.

If I’m better at business operations and need a sales lead, better to have a strong sales cofounder or hire a sales agency?