The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Forget The Jargon, You Want To Help Your Clients Close The Leads You're Getting Them

There are now at least three or four labels for helping companies close leads. The ones in the title and a few more; sales consulting, sales coaching, sales training and maybe a couple of others. 

The bottom line isn’t what we call it or how good we are at confusing the clients but what you do in these engagements and the value you bring to your clients.

The key for me is what we’re including in our sales optimization work for clients, how much we charge for it, the value it delivers and how this translates into lifelong clients. 

As agency owners, continuously learning what’s going on in our industry, what’s working, what’s not and what the innovative thinkers are planning keeps me and my agency on the cutting edge of marketing, sales and revenue execution.

None of us can get to every conference, but when I have the pleasure of attending one of the year’s best conferences, I like to share those experiences with all of you.

I recently returned from one of the best conferences, Sirius Decision’s Annual Summit in Austin Texas. This is my second time attending and our agency’s third. This is the first time we exhibited. What I love about this conference is the high level of attendee (CEOs, CMOs, and VPs of both marketing and sales) and a heavy focus on technology solutions.

What I also love about this conference is the level of thought leadership shared by the Sirius Decisions team.  If you don’t know this company, I like to refer to them as the Gartner of sales and marketing.

It sounded good on paper, right? We’ll sell inbound sales services and sales technology just like we sold inbound marketing services and marketing technology. We’ll get bigger retainers. We’ll keep our clients longer and we’ll be even more valuable to them—helping them close the leads we generated for them.

How’s it going? It’s been almost a year since HubSpot rolled out their Growth Stack, Full Funnel concepts. They’ve been training agency owners to sell sales enablement services and sales tech but from what I’ve seen and the many conversations I’ve had with agency owners, it’s been a slow go.

At Square 2 Marketing, we’ve been delivering sales services for the past 10 years. We have a sales practice and people who have expertise in planning, delivery and optimization of sales enablement. It’s not easy and it’s completely different than marketing.

If You Thought You’d Be An Inbound ONLY Agency, You Might Have Been Mistaken

What? There are changes? We just became Platinum (insert HubSpot Partner Level here). We just got our fourth client and we’re starting to get the hang of it, how can there be changes?

The world of marketing is in a chaotic period and change is the only constant. If you thought what you did today was going to be what you did for the next 10 years, you might have miscalculated.

Look around you. There are new tactics, new tools, new software, new techniques, new agencies and new client requirements almost every single month. If your inbound marketing agency isn’t built to deal with these monumental shifts in the ground beneath your feet you might be in trouble.

If you haven’t noticed, HubSpot is full court pressing their new Sales suite. What had been HubSpot CRM, Signals and Sidekick are now all bundled together into HubSpot Sales. They also debuted a very well-produced Inbound Sales Certification and video training series that I highly recommend. But what does that mean to inbound agencies?

It means you better get your sales enablement suite of services ready for prime time because people are going to start asking you to help them close the leads you’re generating for them. They may be asking you already, but if they’re not—they will be in the next few months.

Say what you want about HubSpot, but they are a content, PR and story generating machine. They are going to crank up the volume on this “sales is broken” story very aggressively over the summer and leading into Inbound 2016. Now is the time for agencies to take advantage of that coming wave.