The Revenue Retainer Series: Pricing Agency Work on Revenue You Can Prove

Your agency produces real value for your clients. So why aren't you pricing on that value?

The vast majority of marketing agencies structure their pricing around costs: ad budget, hours spent, scope of projects. But these models demand more overhead in order to scale. And as revenue grows, margins continue to shrink.

Pricing your agency on value earned is the solution. Rather than charging clients for the hours you spend, you should be charging clients for the revenue you generate.

This is the heart of the Revenue Engine, a new system powered by WhatConverts. Below is a series of articles walking you through how the Revenue Engine helps agencies like yours thrive through value-based pricing.

What the Revenue Engine Does

The Revenue Engine is how you prove the revenue and price on it. It connects every Google Ads lead to the paid invoice in Jobber, so every dollar of campaign revenue traces to the campaign that earned it. Because the number comes from the client's own books, they can verify it themselves. That turns a budget review from "here are your leads" into "here is the revenue your marketing produced."

Win Revenue-Based Retainers that Grow with Clients The Revenue Engine connects Jobber revenue with marketing spend so you can prove your value, grow your ROI, and scale your agency.

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Between the first click and the final payment, it tracks five stages: contact, appointment, estimate, job, and paid invoice. Six pieces make that work:

• Revenue Proof attaches Jobber-validated revenue to each lead
• Clean Data qualifies and organizes those leads automatically
• Full Visibility follows every step from first click to paid invoice
• The Optimization Flywheel sends invoiced revenue to Google Ads so bids target paid jobs
• Owner-Ready Reports give you financial statements for the client conversation
• The AREVOS integration adds forecasts, audits, quarterly reviews, and P&L reporting

The Revenue Engine is in limited beta with a fixed number of slots. It is free while the beta runs, and there is no commitment when it ends. Agencies in the pilot give feedback in exchange for premium features at no cost.

1. AI Can Do the Tasks. It Can't Own the Revenue Number.

Read this if a client has started asking what your retainer actually covers.

Smart Bidding sets the bids. AI Max builds the targeting and rewrites the ad copy. Performance Max assembles whole campaigns across Search, Display, YouTube, and Shopping. Every line on a standard PPC scope of work now has a Google feature that handles it, using ad spend the client already pays for. The article works through what a client is still paying you for, and how you prove it with a revenue figure checked against their own invoices.

You'll learn:

• The four PPC line items Google automated, each mapped to the feature that replaced it
• Why paid media churns at 49% a year, the highest of any agency service line
• A direct answer for the client who asks what they are still paying you for
• Three things a revenue number needs: a real click, a booked job, a paid invoice
• How uploading invoiced revenue to Google Ads teaches Smart Bidding which clicks pay off

2. From Cost to Value: The Pricing Mindset Shift That Changes Everything for Agencies

Read this if you believe in value pricing but can't work out how to actually charge for it.

Cost-based pricing starts with your hours and overhead, so your own expenses cap the fee no matter how well the campaigns perform. Value-based pricing starts with the revenue the campaigns created, so the fee rises with campaign revenue. Most agencies believe in value pricing. What they lack is the proof: nobody can charge based on revenue they cannot prove they produced.

You'll learn:

• A quick check on whether you have underpriced your best client
• McKinsey's finding that a 1% price increase lifts operating profit by roughly 8%
• Worked example: a $4,500 retainer holds flat while campaign revenue rises from $40K to $200K
• Five steps that turn an attributed revenue figure into a monthly price
• Why Google Ads and the client's CRM can't produce the number value pricing needs

3. From Lead to Paid Invoice: How WhatConverts Closes the Attribution Loop

Read this if your monthly report ends at lead count and the client wants revenue.

Most agency reporting stops at the lead, which turns every budget review into a conversation about volume. Closing the loop means keeping the source, campaign, and keyword attached to a lead from first call through paid invoice. The invoiced amount then lands back on the campaign that earned it. Most stacks break the loop in two places: the CRM handoff, and Google's deadline for uploading offline conversions.

You'll learn:

• Growing pressure from CFOs, CEOs, and boards to prove marketing's impact, per the CMO Survey
• Same month, same client: 'Leads: 47' or '$182,400 in invoiced jobs across nine campaigns'
• Google's 90-day window for offline conversions, 63-day for enhanced conversions for leads
• Why a storm-damage roof waiting on insurance approval can invoice after the 63-day window closes
• Three checkpoints that find where your own stack drops the lead source
• An interactive "Where does your loop break?" diagnostic, built into the article

4. Introducing the Revenue Retainer: A New Way to Price Agency Work

Read this if you have decided to change how you price and need the number that goes on the invoice.

Value-pricing advice tells you to stop billing hours without telling you what to bill instead. In Consulting Success's survey, 39% of consultants said they had never tried value-based pricing because they did not know how. A Revenue Retainer fills the blank in four steps: take the trailing twelve months of revenue your marketing drove, forecast it forward, agree on a share of that forecast, and divide by twelve. Only the first step needs a tool. The other three are arithmetic you can do in a spreadsheet.

You'll learn:

• The four-step formula worked through on an example roofing client with a $2.4M attributed baseline
• What $250 an hour across 25 billable hours a week caps a single biller at
• Why a fee based on ad spend shrinks every time you improve the account
• Four industries already charging a share of the result, and what each takes it from
• A readiness checklist and a Revenue Retainer calculator for your own numbers

5. You Don't Have to Jump All at Once: A Practical Path to a Revenue Retainer

Read this if you want to move on revenue-based pricing without betting the whole book.

Clients leave over the size of a fee jump and how little warning they got. Beaton Research tracks law, accounting, and consulting firms and found that clients care far more about trust and how easy a firm is to work with than about price. Perceived price accounts for under 1% of how clients rate a firm. Four on-ramps let you move gradually, and three of them depend on having attribution in place first.

You'll learn:

• Four on-ramps: parallel run, bonus on the base fee, single-client pilot, or switch at renewal
• An interactive decision helper that matches an on-ramp to your book of business
• Karl Sakas: the 50% raise he accepted, the 75% jump that cost the vendor work
• Why renewal is the only on-ramp that works before your attribution is solid

6. Trust Before Price: What Happens in Your First 30 Days with a Revenue Retainer

Read this if a client stalls on your revenue-based fee and says they will think about it.

A client who says "I'll think about it" is rarely objecting to the price. They are objecting to the revenue number behind it, because they cannot open your system, trace a call to a booked job, and check the figure themselves. You cannot argue past that gap, so the first thirty days close it instead. The phase runs on the client's existing campaigns, launches nothing new, and makes the number real before anyone prices against it.

You'll learn:

• A 30-day plan you can run on a client's existing campaigns without launching anything new
• Why charging for the proof phase wins the deal that discounting it loses
• What proving the number early is worth: 8.1 years of client tenure against 3.8 for agencies that get audited every quarter
• The four checks that turn your revenue claim into a number the client can trace back to their own booked jobs

7. What Percentage Should You Charge? 5%, 10%, or 15% of Revenue

Read this if you are staring at a blank percentage field and cannot say why you picked the number.

Standard advice says charge 5-25% of revenue and work it out from there, which is a range rather than an answer, and it leaves you with nothing to say when the client asks why that number. Fields that have charged a share of value for decades never invent the rate fresh; they read it off a schedule or a measured baseline. Yours reads three inputs you can name and the client can check, which are the benchmark for their trade, their close rate, and their typical job value.

You'll learn:

• A defensible answer to "why that number?" that does not require becoming a pricing expert
• Why no clean "home services" rate exists, and how two inputs make one lead worth $135 to one client and $2,400 to another
• Whether 10% reads high or low, answered against what recruiting, consulting, franchising, and M&A charge
• Why a rate the client can trace to their own close rate and invoiced job values ends the argument over the percentage

8. The Mortgage Valuation for Marketing: Why Your Retainer Should Work Like an Appraisal

Read this if the client asks how you landed on that number and your only answer is your own judgment.

However solid your reasoning, a number you set yourself is one the client discounts, because you are the party with money riding on it. More explaining does not fix that. Home lending removes the problem by taking the figure out of the interested party's hands entirely, and your retainer can work the same way: a defined process reads the client's close rate, their average job value, and the published benchmark for their trade, and issues the number. You stop defending a figure and start handing one over with its inputs on the table.

You'll learn:

• Why your expertise is not what is failing, and what actually changes the client's answer
• What a number nobody in the room invented buys you, and why it holds even when the client wishes it were lower
• The four-step version you can run by hand on your next proposal, before any tool is involved
• Why a figure built from the client's own close rate and invoiced job values is the one they stop negotiating

9. How to Handle Seasonality Without Changing Your Price

Read this if a client's revenue swings by season and you are renegotiating every few months.

The standard advice is to ramp the fee with demand, which buys you four to six pricing talks a year and one recurring question from the client: am I paying for results, or subsidizing your peak season? Your utility company settled this a long time ago by averaging a year of usage into one flat monthly charge. A Revenue Retainer holds the same way. Estimate twelve months of attributable revenue, agree a share, and divide by twelve, so every peak and trough is already inside the number your fee comes from.

You'll learn:

• How to hold one price across a swinging year, and what to tell the client who asks why it does not move
• What ramping the fee actually costs you: four to six pricing talks a year, each reopening the same question
• Why a packed July and a dead February are both already inside the number, worked through a modeled $2M contractor
• Why the twelve-month number has to be attributable revenue rather than the client's whole top line

10. When Reality Doesn't Match the Forecast: What a Revenue Retainer Miss Actually Means

Read this if the question stopping you is what happens the first quarter you come in under.

A forecast miss feels like a broken promise because you filed the number under promises you made. It is not one, and the fix is not switching to performance pay. Services that have priced on estimates for decades kept the fixed price and put a checkpoint on the calendar instead, which is what the quarterly review does here. The fee for the quarter that just closed holds, nothing gets renegotiated mid-contract, and only the next quarter's plan changes.

You'll learn:

• Why the fee for the closed quarter stays earned, and what the review actually adjusts
• A worked HVAC quarter, $180,000 planned against $152,000 actual, and how to show the gap was the client's staffing rather than your targeting
• Clean answers to the three money questions: do I refund the difference, is this just renegotiation, what if I miss every quarter
• Why the review needs the forecast and the attributable-revenue actual on one screen, not two versions of the number

Start With the Number, Then Pick the Price

Start with article 3 if your reporting still ends at lead count. Start with article 4 if you already have the revenue number and need the price that goes on the invoice. Either way the fee depends on the same link, and the Revenue Engine builds it between Google Ads and Jobber.

Win Revenue-Based Retainers that Grow with Clients The Revenue Engine connects Jobber revenue with marketing spend so you can prove your value, grow your ROI, and scale your agency.

Get Free Beta Access