During Partner Day at Inbound 18, if you were paying attention you might have heard JD Sherman, COO at HubSpot say not everyone is going to want to sell and provide services around HubSpot’s full suite of products.
I thought that was astute for HubSpot to realize that and honest for them to admit it to a few hundred of their best partners. But agencies are at an inflection point. What kind of agency do you want to be? What kind of services do you want to provide to clients?
Perhaps more importantly, is not what you want, but what your clients want and what your team is prepared to deliver. So today, here’s how to know what direction you might want to consider for your agency.
What Are Your Roots?
To make a decision like this means looking back at where you came from and why you started the agency to begin with.
Did you start as a website development shop? Were you a PR agency at the start? Maybe you started an agency because you are a great designer?
What do you as an owner love doing? Do you love building websites? Do you love designing logos? Do you love helping your clients grow their companies?
The first place to start evaluating your role in the evolution of the agency industry is to know what you love doing. If you don’t love what you do, every day is going to be a slog. If you don’t love what you do, you’ll never be great at it nor will you be able to lead a team and build a great company.
Most agency owners start their agencies because of their passion for the work and then find themselves working in an agency that does much more or different work than they ever expected to be doing.
You don’t want anyone, any stakeholder or any software company to dictate what you do or how you do it.
If you love marketing, remain a marketing agency. If you love sales, be a sales consulting agency. If you love website development than website development is what you should do.
If you truly want to help your clients grow their businesses, if you want to help your clients increase their revenue generation, if this is something you are passionate about—then this is what your agency should aspire to be great at doing for your clients.
Who Are Your Clients?
Understanding who your clients are and who you want your clients to be is the next step in figuring out an answer to the question posed in this article.
Are you passionate about working with small businesses? Are you passionate about working with businesses in a particular vertical? What about startups? Whatever you choose, how likely are they to let you work on their sales challenges? What about their service delivery? How open are they going to be to let you look at their entire Revenue Cycle and make recommendations on how they market, sell and service customers?
How do your clients see you? How likely is that to change? How hard are you prepared to work to make that change?
If you want to provide a wider variety of services and start working in sales and customer service and if your current clients might not be open to hearing that story and paying for those services, are you prepared to find an entirely new portfolio of clients?
It’s critical to your success to be able to sell your clients and prospects what they’re prepared to buy. If you’re offering red shirts and they want blue shirts—that’s a big problem regardless of how excited you are about your new red shirts.
If you’re a sales consulting company, its going to be challenging getting your clients to let you work on their website. If you’re a marketing agency, it might be challenging to get your clients to let you redesign their sales process. Not impossible, but quite possibly challenging. You have to be up for that challenge if you’re going to undertake it.
How Good Are You At Training Your Team?
We looked at what you’re great at, we looked at what your clients want and now we’re looking at what might be involved in moving your team from purely marketing services to offering sales and or customer service support.
This means you’ll either have to hire new people, acquire another agency with a different specialty or train your existing team on new skills.
How good are you at training your team? Would you be willing to do an acquisition or merger? What about hiring? These are skills that a lot of agency owners readily admit might not be what they’re best at.
Training takes time, it takes investment if you bring in outside training resources, and it takes your team away from clients so they can gain the training they need. Are you prepared for this?
Training doesn’t mean sitting in classrooms, watching videos, or doing online classes.
It means teaching your team an entirely new set of plays, skills and expertise. Teaching a marketing consultant how to stand up in front of a room of sales people to present an new sales process will take some heavy lifting.
Making the move out of marketing and into sales and or customer service might also mean you have to learn a new set of skills. Are you ready to change how you work?
How Good Are You At Getting Your Clients To Change?
There’s no point in doing any of this if your clients are not willing to change how they market their companies, how they work with prospects and how they take care of their own customers.
Human beings fear change. People will do almost anything to prevent themselves and others from having to change.
Are you good at getting people to change their behaviors, attitudes and opinions around how they grow their companies? Are you good at getting people inspired? Can you get them excited enough to start the process of change?
Can you settle them down when in the middle of the process they get nervous and want to go back to how they used to do it? Are you good at rallying the troops and getting a client’s entire company to be part of the change? Do you even want to do work like this or have conversations like this with clients?
It’s a big part of the story. Change the way you think about growth. Create an orchestrated experience that crosses three different departments. Change the way you plan, execute and track everything associated with revenue generation.
What Kind Of Agency Do You Aspire To Be?
Please don’t misunderstand. I’m in no way trying to talk you out of being a revenue growth agency. I’m only pointing out the challenges associated with continuing your evolution from web agency, to inbound agency to growth agency.
If you aspire to have a company who helps other companies create revenue generation machines, then you should go all in on everything you need.
Know where your aspiration is going to take you. There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to be the best digital marketing agency and when your client asks about sales enablement, you say, “no, we don’t do that, but we partner with an agency who does that, let me introduce you.”
There is nothing wrong with being a sales expert and helping your clients understand that when it comes to websites, your company doesn’t do that, but you could refer them to a marketing agency who does.
It fact, my advice to all of you is be great at one thing. Don’t try to do so many things that you eventually become mediocre at many different things. If you do aspire to be amazing at providing marketing, sales and customer service guidance then make sure you’re amazing at the entire suite. Whatever that means for you, your team and your agency—be prepared to do it.
The agency business is changing quickly. Technology, client expectations and the services you provide are the key changes that are redefining the agency business.
How you chose to respond to those changes will define your agency for years to come. The secret is making sure you properly evaluate all aspects of the changes you’re considering.
When it comes to the services you offer, you have to look at the full picture facing your agency. Just wanting to offer it won’t be enough and offering services that are not delivered at a high level of excellence could kill your agency.
Do all the assessments I outlined here and define your agency’s vision and mission, and within your core value, start executing that vision and mission. This is how you’ll achieve the success you desire.
Interested in joining a Cohort? A NEW Cohort for Agencies is launching THIS MONTH. To join, click the link below.
Start Today Tip – Don’t jump in and start offering new services in new areas within you clients’ business. Instead apply some strategy and thinking to what you want to do. Evaluate your skills, your desires, your passions and look closely at your team. Look very closely at your clients. Do they want what you want to sell? How hard is it going to be to stretch into new business areas? Once you have a clear picture of your journey, you’ll be able to accurately assess your changes of success and make any necessary plans around training, client shift, or services considerations. This is the only way to ensure your business not only survives but thrives in what will be a very competitive and fast-moving industry.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Grow Your Agency Beyond Your Expectations
