Why one agency is worth three customers
A direct customer's spend is flat from the day they sign. An agency's compounds. That difference changes what you can afford to spend acquiring one — and it is the argument most B2B teams never run.
Two customers sign on the same day at the same price. One is a brand buying for itself. One is an agency buying on behalf of a client. Twelve months later they look nothing alike, and the reason is worth more than most growth tactics.
An agency can bring one, you can tactically maybe get one or two more out of existing ones, and over time they'll bring you more. Your business model with agencies is a parabola of revenue. Whereas a brand that comes in, then that's flat. And you never know how to get them to pay you more. So brands are roughly speaking flat and agencies roughly speaking can grow. That's a wholly different financial business model.
Jason Cohen
That is not a preference. It is two different revenue shapes, and the second one compounds without you doing anything except keeping the relationship warm.
The acquisition-cost consequence
Here is the part that changes decisions. In one teardown, DropInBlog's median agency turned into roughly three customers over time, against a direct signup's one. Cohen's conclusion is immediate:
You could afford to spend three times as much to go get them.
Jason Cohen
Three times the acquisition budget is not a marginal advantage. It is the difference between "we cannot afford outbound" and "we can afford to fly to the conference." Most teams never compute this, so they apply the same CAC ceiling to a channel that pays back three times over.
Run your own version of it: what is the median number of accounts an agency customer brings you over two years? If you have any agencies at all, you can answer it today, and the answer sets your budget.
The stickiness argument, which is the bigger one
Revenue shape is the visible benefit. The invisible one is retention, and it is better.
A tool is genuinely hard to cancel when it is built into something the customer themselves sells. For a brand, your product is an internal cost line — cancellable in a quarterly review by someone who has never used it. For an agency that has built your output into a retained service, cancelling means renegotiating their own client contracts.
Focusing on agencies solves the value of the product and churn issue altogether, because as long as they have clients, they're getting value from your product and they're not going to leave. It's a core business solution for them.
Craig Hewitt
And the sharper version, on what makes it structural rather than merely sticky:
Especially if they incorporate it into the pitch that they give to their clients. If it's part of what their clients are now paying for, they can't stop without changing the contract with their client.
Jason Cohen
There is a neat test for whether a customer is the compounding kind, from a teardown of an SEO keyword tool: the agency needs the tool every month, forever. The single brand needs it twice a year. Ask it of your own product. If the honest answer is that a direct customer works through their obvious use once and is done, you have a project-shaped product being sold as a subscription — and agencies are not a nice-to-have segment, they are the fix.
What agencies actually want, and it is not a commission
The default assumption is that agency partnerships run on kickbacks. Sometimes. But the more valuable thing is cheaper than a revenue share:
What does an agency want? They want you to show up on a call with a client when stuff's going sideways, that you make them look amazing, that you support the hell out of them. No hassles, return phone calls. They want premium level support. That is worth way more money to them than 20% commission.
Rob Walling
An agency's product is its credibility with its client. Anything that protects that credibility is worth more than margin, because margin is recoverable and a burned client relationship is not.
On the commission question itself, the honest answer is that agencies split, and you should say so out loud. Cohen used this at WP Engine, close to word for word:
Some agencies want a kickback and some are offended if you talk about a kickback. So I just say, hey, whatever you want.
Jason Cohen
Offering both and letting them choose costs nothing and avoids the one genuinely expensive mistake: implying to a high-end consultancy that their recommendations are purchasable.
The tactic that works on the agencies you already have
The highest-return agency move is not acquisition. It is going back to the ones you already work with and asking, specifically, rather than waiting.
You have a bank of 10 or 20 existing clients. I bet for some of them, this would be a good addition. Maybe two or three of those out of 20 would agree to a quickie new project. And all of a sudden they're at three, quickly, because you planted this in their mind. Because you're asking the agency to do it. You're not just passively waiting around.
Jason Cohen
The email is short and it works because it makes the agency money in the way agencies normally make money — a new project on an account that is otherwise in maintenance mode:
Quick one. When we set up {client A} we built {the thing}. Looking at your client list, I'd guess {client B} and {client C} have the same gap. If you want, I'll put together the same one-pager for either of them at no charge — you can take it to them as your own recommendation.
Note what that is doing. You are not asking for a referral. You are handing them a billable project and doing the preparation for it.
The honest counter-argument
Agencies are the obvious answer, which is exactly the problem:
Selling to agencies maybe isn't as easy as Jason and I make it out to seem. Agencies get sold to a lot, because everybody says the same thing.
Craig Hewitt
Every vendor in your category has had this idea. The agency inbox is accordingly cynical, and the generic partner-program email is dead on arrival.
Two things get through. Credibility — if you have run an agency, say so in the first line, because it is the fastest trust transfer available. And doing the work first — send the finished artefact for one of their actual accounts rather than a description of what you could do. A partner deck is a request. A completed one-pager for their client, with their name on it and not yours, is a demonstration.
The four things to do
- Compute your agency multiple. Median accounts per agency over two years. That number is your permission to spend.
- Ask the agencies you have. One email, naming two of their specific clients, offering to do the first piece of work free.
- Offer both commercial models in the same sentence, and let them pick.
- Give them something to hand their client — a document with their branding on it, not yours. An agency cannot resell a tool it has to explain; it can resell an artefact it can put its name on.
Keep reading
- Personalisation that works, and personalisation that costs you trust Using someone's first name is not personalisation — and the people you most want to reach read it as proof that a machine sent the email. Here is the line between the two.
- The only prospects worth emailing this quarter Most lost deals were never deals. They were people who agreed the problem was real, took the meeting, and then went back to the two things their job actually depends on.
- What to say when everyone already knows the problem Naming a pain your prospect discusses openly proves nothing — they hear it from every vendor in the category. There are two deeper levels, and the third one is where deals are actually won.