Nossa Causa: an agency turned into a service portfolio

Context

An agency sells whatever the person in the room can explain. Two salespeople describe the same work differently, every delivery is negotiated from zero, and nothing that worked last quarter can be sold again without being reinvented.

Problem

Growth makes that worse rather than better. Every new person adds another version of the offer, another way of pricing it and another idea of when it is finished, and the cost lands on delivery, where nobody agreed on scope in the first place.

Approach

I built the portfolio first and the operation around it. More than 70 services, each one with a scope, a deliverable and a price, and the process behind each drawn in BPMN so that delivery was a path somebody could follow rather than a memory. Around that went the parts an agency usually improvises: the proposal and contract standards, the sales process, the support and account cycle, and the reporting. The delivery side ran on Scrum, Kanban and GTD, and the same processes served both legs of the business, the institute and the agency.

Non-obvious decisions

• Price the service, not the hour. An hour sells capacity and puts the agency and the client on opposite sides of every estimate; a named deliverable with a price puts them on the same side of the scope.
• Draw the process in BPMN rather than describe it in a document. A diagram makes the handoff explicit, and the handoff is where an agency loses the margin it priced.
• Run the content machine on our own account before selling it. A method proven on a client's budget is an anecdote about that client; proven on the house's own account, with the house's own risk, it is a method.
• Write the contract and proposal standards as part of the portfolio, not after it. A service whose scope is only settled in the contract is priced before it is defined.

Outcome

A portfolio anyone in the agency could sell without inventing it, processes that made delivery repeatable across both legs of the business, and a content operation on our own account that Resultados Digitais placed second among performance agencies in Brazil with the Espada Ninja award.