The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

It appears that one of the bigger HubSpot partner agencies is moving to “strategy only” services. Just consulting on how to grow, no delivery services, no content, no websites, no paid media management, no organic SEO work—just thoughts on how to drive revenue.

I’ll preface this by saying my knowledge of the “news” is second hand and via social media primarily, so let’s have a more conceptual conversation about this idea, as opposed to commenting on this specific agency’s new strategy.

Can an agency exist to just offer strategic consulting services and no delivery?

You’re all in on HubSpot. You went all in on Inbound Marketing a few years ago. Then early last year you went all in on Inbound Sales. In September HubSpot said you should offer services for customer service too and they gave you the final piece of the puzzle, ServiceHub to go with SalesHub and MarketingHub.

To make this all easy for you, they also handed you the Flywheel to help you wrap all the hubs into a nice simple package for clients. But the services that go with both sales and customer service aren’t as easy to wrap up in a nice package, are they?

Specifically, agency services for the customer service area. Most of us can figure out sales services, but customer service—not as easy. What can a digital agency do to help customer service?

I get it, long-term, contractual relationships with inbound marketing agency clients who pay you every month is going to be better than managing month to month project work.

However, what if there was a way to do both and do it in a way that kept cashflow predictable, matched delivery with revenue and allowed you to service many more clients. Would that be interesting? It should be.

When you look at the market opportunity there are just as many inbound marketing agencies who still do project work as those who only work on retainer. That means, by definition, there’s a big group of clients who prefer to hire agencies to do project work. Now the question becomes, how do you handle both, so that you can work with everyone and anyone who qualifies in to work with your agency?

This might come as a shock, especially if you’ve never been accountable to any results-oriented metric before, but simply getting clients leads might not be enough to not get fired.

I know it seems crazy when a client comes to you and they’re getting zero leads from their website and in six months you have them getting 20 to 30 leads a month yet you still get fired. How could this be bad?

Clients say they want leads and they say they can close the leads, but past experience has proven that what they really want is revenue growth and they’re not great at closing the leads you’re getting them. So to create long term clients and to grow your business, you’re going to have to help them close leads too.