Ethan Denney

Growing Together: Introducing ConvertFlow's Partner Program for Agencies

We're launching a partner program to help agencies grow faster, and grow smarter.

Note: We’re only accepting 30 new partners for the first cohort of ConvertFlow’s partner program. If you’re interested, read below to see how you can apply.

Before we tell you how it can help you, let us tell you why we're building this partner program...

You see, before we started ConvertFlow, we also ran a small marketing agency.

Initially, our agency offered a variety of services to our clients; website development, copywriting, marketing funnel creation and automation, UX design, and more.

We were a small, hungry team with a variety of skills we wanted to monetize, so when clients asked us for help with something in our wheelhouse, we figured we could take it on.

In the beginning, this seemed great because we quickly began generating revenue, and contracted tens of thousands of dollars in client work.

What we didn't know, is how hard it would be to grow using this "our team can do it all" approach in our agency.

What set us apart from local agencies was our marketing expertise and quality of our creative work. But, we didn't have the margins to afford outsourcing our work to skilled designers, developers and copywriters who could deliver the same level of quality. So, we had to do it ourselves.

Our agency took on almost any project that came our way, and our team was almost always drowned in project work. This meant that we never had time to work "on" our business and do marketing for ourselves, rather than just for our clients.

As we got busier with multiple projects, closing new clients became a lot less fun and a lot more painful.

When times were busy, we had to pitch potential clients bigger projects in order to justify investing our time and attention. This required a bigger upfront investment from us when creating proposals, increased sales cycles (which, honestly, we couldn't afford), and reduced our close rate. We were pitching $15,000-$20,000 website development projects to clients who didn’t need complex sites, simply because we couldn’t afford to get involved for any less.

Lots of deals were lost because we were pitching big, custom projects to the wrong types of clients.

When we did close a new client, we would feel a rush of excitement, followed by a gut-wrenching pain in our stomachs, as we remembered our existing workload and realized that we would have to burn the midnight oil to fulfill for the client.

When our big projects finished, our team would scramble to get any size project we could from clients, just to keep the lights on.

We lived project-to-project. Every month, it felt like we were riding the feast-or-famine rollercoaster.

Our agency didn’t have any leverage, systems or packaged services that we could sell profitably, and predictably scale. Our team was just trading time for money.

This was not what we expected life would be like when we set out to be entrepreneurs.

It wasn't until we started to make some strategic changes in our agency, that we finally broke free from the feast-or-famine cycle that made growing our agency so hard.

  • We started optimizing for growing recurring revenue vs selling one-off projects
  • We prioritized selling productized services over closing big deals
  • We offered entry-level packages that allowed us to close clients quickly
  • We cross-sold clients on a base retainer service, which created opportunities to upsell them to other services
  • We started narrowing our client focus and began targeting clients based on the tools they were using
  • Our productized services and client targeting enabled us to make outbound sales prospecting work as a channel for growing our agency
  • We soon had enough time to start marketing our services through webinars with co-marketing partners

At some point, our team found enough validation and success with one of our productized services, that we decided to invest in building software that allowed us to make that service a lot more profitable and make delivery a lot easier.

That software eventually became ConvertFlow's platform, which we've been growing full-time since 2016, and that now powers over 10,000 marketing teams and agencies.

Even though we now run a software company, we've never lost touch with our agency roots – and hopefully as our team grows, we never will.

While ConvertFlow was also made for marketing teams, it was built from the ground up for agencies to land more clients, streamline their workflow, and scale their services.

ConvertFlow allows you to deliver all of your conversion and lead generation services from one platform that integrates with the various tools your clients use.

This way, you're not limited to servicing clients using any one CMS or email service provider.

We built the platform for providing scalable conversion services, so your agency doesn't have to.

Now, we're building the partner program that will support your entire journey from first client to full scale.

What is ConvertFlow's partner program?

Agencies play a crucial role in the success of businesses both small and large. They're catalysts for growth. And many businesses or products wouldn't be as successful as they have been, without them.

For a lot of businesses, they serve as the bridge between the point the business is at and the results the business wants to achieve.

At ConvertFlow, we've seen a lot of agencies in our community generate amazing results for their clients, and have a huge impact on their growth.

Our team has also seen lots of demand from businesses who want to be connected with ConvertFlow experts and agencies who can help them with setup and management of their lead generation and conversion funnels.

That's why we're building a partner program for agencies. It’s a program through which we can help drive growth for our agency customers and facilitate the connections between their expert teams and the businesses that need their help.

By working together with our agency partners to educate and service businesses, we can drive a lot more growth for the companies using ConvertFlow. We can also reach and drive growth for businesses that need marketing help, and are not yet part of the ConvertFlow community.

Beyond helping businesses drive growth, one of the main motivations for us to start this program is to do our part in helping agencies avoid the costly mistakes that keep them trapped in the feast-or-famine cycle, and help them learn the strategies, business models and processes that have worked for fast-growing agencies to scale.

How the ConvertFlow Partner Program can help your agency grow faster?

As a ConvertFlow partner, you'll get professional tools, training and support to land more clients, streamline your services, and scale your agency.

Our goals with ConvertFlow’s partner program is to help you…

  1. Drive transformational results for your agency and your clients
  2. Start offering in-demand conversion services quickly
  3. Take advantage of exclusive growth channels for partners

To see how we plan to help you achieve each of these goals, keep reading...

1. Drive transformational results for your agency and your clients

Up until now, we’ve worked directly with hundreds of consultants, freelancers, and agencies by assisting them in playing a pivotal role in helping businesses succeed through conversion marketing, as well as use ConvertFlow to transform their clients’ websites into finely-tuned growth machines.

This has helped us identify common patterns and processes that agencies are successfully using to acquire new clients, position and package their services, onboard clients, and scale their businesses.

Through ConvertFlow’s partner program, our team is planning to use this understanding of what’s working, to develop training, tools, templates, and features for partners that help them execute and grow faster.

Here are four ways that being a ConvertFlow Partner can help drive transformational results in your business...

  • Land more clients for your agency
    Generate more clients for your agency by offering conversion marketing services and by using our lead generation and sales funnel templates for agencies.
  • Generate better results for your clients
    Show ROI on your services, as well as your impact on lead generation and sales, by creating targeted conversion campaigns for your clients.
  • Streamline your workflow and services
    Build all of your clients' campaigns from one platform, without coding. Templatize your work, manage multiple clients, and integrate with the tools your clients use.
  • Earn more recurring revenue
    Get paid monthly by clients for campaign management services and earn recurring commissions when you sign up new clients on their own ConvertFlow accounts.

2. Start offering in-demand conversion services quickly

By becoming a ConvertFlow partner, you’ll get everything you need to add conversion marketing to your agency's services quickly.

Within the category of conversion marketing, there are a lot of potential services you could offer clients. Here are a few that may help you increase your client base or your revenue per client...

  • Help companies set up and optimize their conversion funnel
    To help optimize a company’s conversion funnel, you can provide conversion marketing services that set up and optimize a process for...

    1.Segmenting the audience
    2.Capturing leads
    3.Converting leads into customers

    This means improving the funnel designed to take people from new website visitors, all the way through to initial sale and buying additional products.
  • Help companies fill the funnel by bundling conversion marketing & traffic generation services
    Filling the funnel for clients typically involves providing services for paid advertising, SEO, content marketing, or social media marketing. If you offer traffic generation services, you can attribute the leads and sales being generated through your traffic efforts by creating landing pages for ad campaigns and targeted CTAs to convert visitors across the site.
  • Help companies optimize the full funnel
    By optimizing the entire funnel, agencies can create optimal conditions to achieve the best results for their clients.

    Instead of limiting an agency’s results by the client’s existing website traffic or an ineffective follow-up process to get potential buyers back on the site, the agency seeks to control how much traffic is driven to the site, the conversion funnel performance, and the remarketing/follow-up process.

    If this this full-funnel service approach sounds like a good fit for your agency, it could allow you to have a significant impact on your client’s marketing results. It can also help you forge longer-lasting relationships with clients that generate substantially more revenue for your agency and establish your services as an integral part of a company’s marketing workflow.

Regardless of which conversion services you choose to offer, our partner resources will help you be up and running in days.

You'll be able to use our client onboarding kits, customize our marketing assets and sales material for your agency, and access the in-depth product training you need to be up and running in a matter of days.

3. Take advantage of exclusive growth channels for partners

One of the challenges many agencies face that prevent them from growing, is that they spend so much time helping their clients with marketing, that they don’t do any marketing for themselves.

Having run a small agency before, we understand what that’s like. That’s why for our ConvertFlow Partners, we want to support them by giving them exclusive access to growth channels they can use to gain exposure, generate leads, and meet potential clients.

These growth channels for partners include...

  • Templates – Generate leads by creating campaign templates
    Create campaign templates to share with your own audience or with the ConvertFlow community and get notified of users that create campaigns with your templates, as well as add these contacts to your email list.
  • Client connections – Get matched with potential clients
    Thousands of companies use ConvertFlow. Every month customers reach out to our team to be introduced to ConvertFlow experts who can help them out with setup of their conversion funnels, and campaign management to scale their marketing.
  • Co-marketing – Increase your exposure with co-marketing opportunities
    Gain access to opportunities to share your marketing expertise and client case studies with the ConvertFlow community, giving your agency exposure to thousands of companies (currently 16,000+ companies and growing).

These growth channels provide a win-win situation for both customers and partners.

  1. Partners will grow the ConvertFlow template library faster for everyone.
  2. Partners will be able to better service businesses using ConvertFlow.
  3. Partners will be able to more frequently provide in-depth, conversion training from their experiences in the trenches, working with businesses in different industries.

We’re looking forward to working with our partners to make this happen!

How to become a ConvertFlow Partner

If you’re an agency or consultant that wants to grow faster by providing conversion marketing services for ConvertFlow customers, your current clients, and for future clients, the new Partner Program provides you with an opportunity to grow your business while helping others grow their businesses too.

We're currently accepting applications to join our first cohort of 2020. Initially, we plan to keep the cohorts small, so that we can work closely with each partner to help them get great results, and so that we can learn what resources we need to invest in to help more agencies succeed and have a big impact.

To learn more about ConvertFlow's partner program or to apply, visit the ConvertFlow Partners page.

What's next?

We have a lot more planned for our partner program, including agency growth training, a conversion marketing course, more perks, etc. If there’s anything you would like for us to include in the program to better support your agency’s growth, let us know! We’d love your input.

About the author
Ethan Denney
Co-Founder & CEO, ConvertFlow
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Ethan is the Co-Founder & CEO of ConvertFlow. He loves reading about and sharing anything that helps marketers convert more website visitors.