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Inbound Marketing Agency Consulting vs. Tactical Delivery

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Nov 7, 2017 7:00:00 AM

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Inbound Marketing Agency OwnersOver the past few months I’ve had a few inbound marketing agency owners email me regarding their agency and the consulting they do. This would be different than the services delivery model that most agencies operate under.

To be clear, you can tell people what to do and then expect them to do it—that’s consulting. Or you can tell them what to do and then help them do it—that’s services. 

Most of the time, I’m talking about the agencies who are responsible for delivering the services associated with inbound marketing engagements but I know there are agencies who simply consult. Today’s article outlines the differences and some of the benefits and challenges that go with both models.

Here are the pluses and minuses associated with the consulting vs. delivery agency models. 

The Pluses For Consulting Only

This is clear, you don’t have to worry about doing anything. You simply have to tell other people what to do. Of course, this assumes you know what to tell other people. Which might be called into question if you’ve never done it yourself. I’ve often thought that inbound is a learned practice. You have to do it to know how to do it. If you’re providing consulting services and you’ve never done it yourself, I’d be concerned. 

But this is about the pluses, not the negatives. That’s in the next section. Clearly you don’t have to burden any of the cost associated with delivery. You don’t have to train people, don’t have to hire people, don’t have to get people certified and keep them current on the changes going on in the delivery area or changes associated with the tools you use. Those are major plusses for agency owners. 

This should translate into a highly profitable agency model, assuming you're charging enough and any of you in this type of agency are probably not charging enough. It’s not personal, just an epidemic in our space.

You're not really on the hook for results, but I’d suggest that if your recommendations don’t pan out and produce results, you won’t be engaged for long. Even if you start blaming your client for not executing properly, I’d argue that’s your responsibility as their consultant. This is also where we see the gray area between just consulting and also providing services support and this gray area is exactly why we do both. 

The Minuses For Consulting Only

Inbound Marketing Agency OwnersThe biggest challenge for just providing consulting is what I mentioned above—control. Your clients want results. They don’t really care whose fault it is if results don’t appear. As a consultant and not an executer, you can blame the internal team or the delivery agency, but in the end—it’s as much your fault as theirs. If you want to get your clients results, not having control of the team responsible for planning, building and optimizing the tactics is a big minus for this model.

Another challenge is you’re limited. You can only consult with so many clients. You’re limited by your own bandwidth and the hours in a day. Yes, you can hire more consultants but you're now limited to the time they have in the day. There are no efficiencies, no economies of scale or systems and processes that make this agency more profitable or scalable. It’s all about the consultants. The more business you get the less time you have to spend with your clients and ultimately the service experience can suffer. 

Hire more consultants and now you have to train them, mentor them, review them and make sure your clients are getting the same level of guidance as you provide. Doable, but highly challenged from a scale perspective. There are no ways to generate extra revenue from current clients. All you have to offer is your advice, not additional services, no product extensions and no cross-sell opportunities. 

Again, a good model for a lifestyle business, but not a great model for someone who wants to grow their agency into a 50 or 100-person firm. 

The Pluses For Delivering Services Too

You can’t provide services and NOT provide consulting. So there is no section here for providing services but not consulting. When we start looking at the benefits of doing both, you see pretty quickly the benefits far outweigh the challenges—which is why so many agencies choose to provide both consulting and services. 

The first, and the most important, is control. As I said earlier, clients want results. Results including knowing what to do and how to do it. Having control over both gives you control over everything you need to get results for your client.  If the website isn’t working as expected, change it. If the content isn’t converting as planned, fix it. If the nurtures are not producing leads, adjust it. 

The shear nature of inbound, demand generation and today’s revenue generation effort demands that you have your fingers in all aspects of marketing and sales delivery. There are so many moving parts, so many tactics required and such a complex collection of places that together produce the experience your prospects are using to decide.  So, if they hire your client or not—giving up even part of that control makes turning that collection of tactics into a revenue machine uber hard. 

The Minuses For Delivering Services Too

Inbound Marketing Agency Of course, there are challenges in this model too. It’s expensive to deliver inbound, demand gen and sales enablement services. In most cases you’re looking at $100k to $200k a year. If you only have to sell a consulting engagement for $2500 a month to oversee delivery, that’s much easier than selling that big services engagement. 

They’re paying you big money, so they expect big results. You have to deliver and you have to deliver quickly. There is no place to hide or other party to blame. Saying you can get them leads in the second month means you have to get them leads in the second month. In my experience and with my team, the control that comes with managing all aspects of the program gives us the confidence to say, “if you turn it over to us, we’ll deliver.” You all should be that confident too.

Along with that control comes the burden of the team. You have to hire the right people, train them, coach them, equip them with the right tools, the right methodology and the right processes. If they mess up, it’s on you. 

Neither of these agency models offer any amazing insights into what you should be doing or shouldn’t be doing. You can see they both come with their own set of challenges and have a lot more to do with the owner’s skill set than any insight into the future of the inbound agency business.

They key in my opinion is simply setting the client expectations around what you can do, what you will do, when you will do it and being smart enough about what you DO do to define a set of business results that everyone agrees on. Once you’re smart enough and confident enough to define those business results and be able to consistently deliver at or beyond those results—that’s when you’ll have an agency worth talking about.

Running an inbound agency isn’t easy. It would be much easier simply delivering websites, handling email marketing or getting businesses on the first page of Google. But we’ve chosen to be strategic partners for our clients. We’ve chosen to tackle the most challenging part of business—revenue growth. We’ve chosen to lead the agency community by putting our name out there and promising real business results. It’s not easy, but it’s us and these are the kind of challenges that get us going every single day. 

Start thinking about what’s going to make you remarkable instead of what’s easy and you might change your perception around consulting vs. services delivery.

Start Today Tip – The big takeaway here is, you have to know who you are and what you’re good at. HubSpot for years has been getting agencies to focus not for their own benefit but yours. What are you good at? Is it working in an industry? Is it working with a particular slice of the engagement? Is it executing a specific tactic within the bigger engagement? This all makes sense if you can’t be great at the entire engagement for a wide variety of industries. That still makes the most sense to me, but if you can’t, then identify where you can be great and focus on that area. Consulting or delivery? Just pick one and be great at it. 

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Topics: inbound marketing agency owners, inbound marketing agency planning

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