How to find agencies that will resell your product

To find agency partners who will resell your product, start in the partner directories of the tools that sit beside yours in your buyer's work, where agencies already list themselves as resellers. Read each agency's own page and rank it on three facts: it does by hand the work your product does, it is small enough that a referral fee moves it, and it already sits in more than one directory. Write down a reason for every agency you leave out, then send one message in which only one sentence changes from agency to agency.

Why an agency is worth more than a direct customer, and what to offer one, is covered in why one agency is worth three customers. Large platforms are a different test, set out in when a partnership is a strategy. This page is the search for the small agencies you do not know yet.

Start in the directories where agencies list themselves

Tool vendors publish directories of the agencies that resell them, and often pay those agencies to do it. An agency in one of those lists has already said, in public, that it sells other companies' tools to its clients.

Start with the vendors whose tools do the job next to yours. One list of twenty outbound agencies was built from four such directories, and they were not worth the same: two held most of the agencies that fit, one was half revenue operations and CRM consultancies, and one covered a single national market with its own prices. The same agency often sits in several, so merge them into one list. Building that one took 34 directory listings and 34 agency pages.

Read the listing before the agency's site. Some directories let an agency type a starting price into its listing, and five of the twenty had a price on a listing and none on their own site. A listing can also be out of date: one agency still called itself a prospecting agency on its listing while its own site had started selling a data product. Take the price from the listing and what the agency does from its own page.

The vendors' partner programme pages say what an agency is paid to resell a tool, and an agency that already resells tools knows that rate.

Rank each agency on three facts from its own page

An agency fits when three things are true on its own page:

• It does by hand the work your product does, for its clients, on a monthly retainer, so your product replaces a cost it already carries. On the list of twenty, every agency ranked wrote its clients' cold email.
• It is small enough that a referral fee moves it. A founder-led agency, or a shop that works with three clients at a time, turns clients away, and a fee for those is money it does not have today.
• It already sits in more than one directory. An agency that resells two tools knows what a partner arrangement looks like.

A directory's badge does not decide the rank. The agency in one directory's highest tier ranked fifteenth of twenty, because what it sold was a volume of email rather than the writing.

Record what decides the message

Four more facts go on each row. They decide what you say to the agency, and they leave its rank alone:

• Size, in the agency's own words: three clients at a time, thirty companies, eight people.
• Price, with where you read it and the date, or "not published". A published price is what an agency owner will measure yours against.
• The tools it names, which tell you whether it already works in something your product connects to.
• The route it publishes for new business: a booking page or a contact form, never a personal address or phone number. One agency's only route was its directory listing, which says something about its size too.

Write a reason for every agency you leave out

The agencies that miss the cut get a row of their own, with the reason in one line. On the list of twenty, the reasons were these:

• too large for a referral fee to matter, with a team of more than eighty;
• the writing is one service of four;
• paid per meeting booked, so the writing is no cost it carries;
• consulting or revenue operations first, and writing second;
• turned into a vendor, or no longer an outbound agency at all;
• two names and two offers, so ask which one before writing.

Some reasons expire. The large agency was marked as a later and larger conversation, and one whose site was a parked domain would be worth a message once a real site is found. Pages that will not load go at the bottom as unread, never ranked on a guess, the way cleaning a prospect list sets aside any row it cannot check.

A full agency still has clients to send you

An agency whose own page caps how many clients it takes is turning founders away. One agency's site said it works with three clients at a time; another's said it takes five a month. The founders they turn away still need the work done.

That makes the cap the reason to write. Ask for the clients the agency cannot take on, and a referral fee for them is money it would not otherwise earn. On the list of twenty, the agency ranked first had both facts on its page: a numbered cap, and one person writing every client's cold email.

Send one message in which one sentence changes

One message serves every agency on the list. The second sentence is the only line that changes, and it carries the fact from that agency's own page:

Subject: A referral for the clients you can't take on

Hi {first name},

Your site says {the fact from their own page: the work they do by hand, and how many clients they take}.

{Your product} does that part. {One sentence on what it does today.}

{The offer: a partner rate if they run it for their own clients, a referral fee for a client they send you, or both.}

Worth a 15-minute call?

Re-read the fact on the agency's page on the day you send. Promise nothing your product does not do today. Have the offer working before the first message goes: the discount an agency would use, and a way to tell which customer it sent you. Then send each message yourself.

Five things

1. Start in the partner directories of the tools beside yours, and read each listing before the agency's own site.
2. Rank on three facts from the agency's own page: it does your product's work by hand, a referral fee moves it, and it already resells more than one tool.
3. Record size, price, tools and route on every row, because they decide the message.
4. Write a reason for every agency you leave out, and park the pages you cannot read.
5. Send one message in which only the sentence from the agency's own page changes.