Last week we hosted eight inbound marketing agency owners from as far away as Milan, Italy at the Square 2 Marketing offices for Agency Week 2.0. This is the second time we’ve opened the doors at Square 2 and allowed agency owners to see a true “behind the scenes” at one of the largest of HubSpot’s partners.
The experience was a truly immersive experience and there is no simlar educational opportunity for agency owner coaching on the planet.
The owners came to meetings, listened in on prospect and client calls, sat in on internal planning meetings and attended company-wide creative sessions. Their agenda included sales, marketing, client services, creative, project management, agency-wide retrospectives and our all-hands Friday brunch session.
Based on the feedback from the people participating, it seemed even more successful than the 2015 Agency Week. Much of the week was spent talking about and working on common agency challenges. Here are a few of the challenge we worked on as a team:
Improve Operational Efficiencies
Inbound agencies are incredibly labor intensive and require a lot of team members. As you grow, you need more people for almost every aspect of the inbound engagement. If you’re trying to make a net profit of between 15% and 20% month over month (and you should be), you can’t simply throw bodies at the problem. Instead you should look for ways to be more efficient.
We talked early and often about the configuration of the team, how they work together, how they assign work and ensure 100% allocation on a regular basis. We do have a handful of contractors with specialized skill sets for those tasks that we don’t do on a regular basis and we also talked about how to balance in-house and contractor resources.
Specifically we talked about the processes and the responsibility of the agency owners to be looking for these efficiencies and building them into the agency as operational mandates. These systems, processes and methodologies help you to be more efficient and make more money.
Use Agile
One of these is Agile. We talked extensively about our journey with agile and the challenges that have had us go from one week, to two-week sprints and now out transition to Kanban and 30-day fluid sprints. We went into detail about how we plan our 30-day work, how we communicate it to the client, prioritize the work and schedule the work internally.
Our Scrum Masters spent over an hour reviewing the way we use Agile and how we’ve adapted the software development methodology to work inside an agency. We talked about the challenges shared resources and client involvement have presented to our agency and how we overcame those issues. We shared our Engagement Tracker and gave the agency owners a deep dive into how we use Jira to manage our projects.
Consistently Market The Agency
The group consistently asked about priorities and the one best move to make. Without a doubt my answer was almost always and has consistently been—you must be great at marketing your own agency first. We talked extensively about the marketing we do at Square 2 and they saw firsthand the wide variety of tactics being executed for us. If you compared our marketing effort to a client program it would be roughly a $20,000 a month program.
Regardless of other priorities, you must be consistently creating content, working on your website, emailing your database, nurturing your lead and most importantly running tests and experiments that produce insight into what’s working and what’s not. This insight drives upgrades to client programs that help your team produce better results day in and day out. Without that experience, your ability to get client results is going to take twice as long and produce many more unhappy clients than happy clients. It’s a non-negotiable for me.
Have A Scalable Sales Processes
We also talked about the importance of a solid and well thought out sales process. We spent time going through our sales process and how each step is designed to help our prospects get to know, like and trust us. Without a defined sales process you end up running around producing proposals for people who are unqualified and never likely to hire you.
With a solid sales process, you qualify up front, get to NO early, spend time working on only the best opportunities, can forecast better to help with staffing and client services team configuration but most importantly create a scalable new business machine that keeps new clients coming in month in and month out.
Manage The Team
I think one of the biggest takeaways was the quality and size of our management team. Yes, we have people running teams, managing departments and leading initiatives. This requires an investment on our part and a commitment to hiring high quality and in some cases more expensive team members. But the payoff is they can handle a lot of what I used to do and as owners what you currently do. That allows you to hover up and over everything, making more strategic use of your time and add much more value than simply taking care of your clients.
That management is going to require a higher level of leadership and mentoring from you, the owners. We spent a lot of time talking about what that would look like, the skills required to deliver this type of leadership and the quality of people you need to add that layer into your organization. As almost every agency is growing, finding people who are upwardly mobile, promotable and capable of handling leadership roles is critical to helping you scale and grow.
Spending a week at Square 2 Marketing and working on your agency instead of in your agency opens your eyes to everything required to grow an agency in 2018. It’s not easy. It’s not easy for us and it’s not easy for all of you. But there are resources and people who are willing to share to make it a little easier and a little more attainable than ever before.
Here are a few of the comments from the participants.
"What an incredible experience! I learned more in just the first few hours of Agency Week than I've learned in several days at industry events. Mike was an open book, sharing his valuable expertise and insight freely with the other agency owners. "
- Mario Medina, Miles Madison Media
"I have no words to express my appreciation for this amazing opportunity, I feel that everything I learned came just in time so we can structure our agency and the interactions with customers the proper way. I had a meeting with my team this morning and everyone is extremely excited about implementing the new agile approach."
- Ron Benvenisti, Fontimedia
“Agency week is a mini-mba for agency owners. The opportunity to observe the inter-workings of an agency we admire gave me actionable insights that I was able to implement the minute I returned to the office. If you want to fast-track your agency’s growth, don’t miss Agency Week with Square 2 Marketing.”
- Christina May, Ilumine8 Marketing and PR
Start Today Tip – Spending a week at Square 2 Marketing’s offices is only going to be a once a year opportunity. For everyone else struggling with the same challenges, you’re going to have to find a way to gain access to the same knowledge in a different way. The Cohort Programs with Agencies 2 Inbound is one of those ways. The Agency Cohort, Advanced Agency Cohort and New Business Development Cohort are all designed to take what we’ve learned over the years at our agency and share that knowledge with other agency owners in a straight-forward, no fluff and easy to digest format.
If you’re feeling like you could use a boost, schedule 30 minutes with me and I’ll give you a few secrets you can use in your agency today. Just click on the link to schdule your call and let’s get started.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Grow Your Agency Beyond ALL Expectations!
