The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Agency Week Is Back And New Inbound Agency Coaching Cohorts Are Launching

After a whirlwind week of sessions, conversations, meeting, product launches and parties, Inbound 17 is behind us. Back to work at our agencies. Now we face the real challenges. How do we grow our agencies? How do we make them more profitable? How do we decide what services to offer and most importantly, how do we make sure our agencies are differentiated?

This is not easy work folks. This is heavy lifting. What I can tell you from running a growing agency for over 15 years is that this work never stops. Even agencies like Square 2 Marketing have challenges we’re working on every single day. How to be more profitable, how to close more new clients, how to get current clients even better results and how to make sure prospects know exactly why they want to do business with us.

Short answer? Sell your prospects what they want to buy. If you have a pizza place and people keep coming in asking for salads, add salads to the menu. If your inbound marketing prospects keep asking about ABM, then it’s time to consider it.

Now there are other factors that go into deciding to add or remove services from your services catalog. Like do the desired services violate any principles or morals that you find important? As an example, if you were dead set against doing anything that was not 100% inbound then ABM might not be something you’re comfortable with.

How To Identify What’s Going Wrong at Your Inbound Marketing Agency, When It’s Going Wrong And How To Fix It

You’re getting new prospects. Some come from inbound, more still come from referrals but you’re continuing to have trouble closing them. You’re working them all the way to the end, producing proposals, submitting presentations, and creating contracts—but in the end, they pick someone else. What’s going on? What are you doing wrong? How do you fix your agency new business development challenges?

If you can’t take your prospects from click to close, you’re not going to have an agency for very long. If you can’t sustain a steady stream of new clients at the pace of two to three a month minimum, then it’s likely your agency will be treading water at a clip somewhere under $1 Million in annual revenue. Worse yet, if you’re having trouble holding on to clients and not bringing on new clients, you might actually find your agency shrinking.

Understanding How The Inbound Marketing Tactics Work Together Is The Key

I’ve done a lot of talking and a lot of writing about inbound marketing, running an inbound marketing agency and how inbound agency owners should be thinking about their shops. Most of that content has ignored the specific tactics we’re all executing. These include websites, blogging, content creation, social, search and email marketing.

I’ve always had the position that everyone knows what the tactics are and how to execute them. My theory has always been that programs fail or underdelver when the strategy or the tactical orchestration is missed or done incorrectly. I still believe that.

But for the first time ever, at Inbound 17, I’m going to be talking about the tactics and how they’re used to predict results and get results for clients at Square 2 Marketing. It’s going to be special. If you’re attending and you should be (we covered that two weeks ago) and you still need to register, the session is filling up fast. Click here to grab your seat.

AND 6 Better Inbound Marketing Tactics You Can Start Doing Today To Get New Leads Immediately

I just watched an hour webinar from the sales consulting crew at HubSpot. The session was on the virtue and application of cold calling and warm calling for agencies trying to grow their inbound marketing companies.

Having worked with hundreds of agency owners I know where the advice is coming from and I know why it’s being delivered. Over the past few weeks I’ve received many emails and calls from owners who responded to the new Biz Dev Cohort. I know getting new clients is one of the most strategic pain points for agencies trying to grow. 

However, I don’t think making cold calls to prospective inbound marketing agency clients is the right advice nor do I think it sends the right message to the very people you’re trying to help understand inbound marketing and how it works.

Depending On Your Goals And Your Level Of Inbound Expertise—The Answer Is Probably Yes!

In just about month, annual pilgrimage to Boston begins for what has become a religious gathering for everything inbound. Inbound 17 will kick off on Monday, September 25^th for partners (the actual conference starts on Tuesday) and the event is full of amazing speakers, killer content and almost everything an inbound pro could want from an event.

For inbound marketing agency owners, all 3,454 of you, the annual event also brings with it the age-old question, “Should I stay or should I go?” When I started attending Inbound back in 2011, there were 300 attendees. Today the event is supposed to bring over 20,000 attendees. Ultimately the decision to attend should come down to what you can get out of the conference to grow your business, improve its efficiency or help you deliver better results for your clients.

New Business Remains The Biggest Obstacle To Growth For Inbound Agency Owners

Anyone even close to the agency life knows that agency new business development, sales and getting new clients is the life blood of the agency. It’s not an inbound marketing agency challenge, it’s a challenge for all agencies everywhere.

I hear it every day.

“We lost a client and we don’t have any new ones coming on.”
“If we could just sign a couple of new retainer clients, we’d be great.”
“I have to cut costs because we can’t sign any new clients.”

What’s going on? We’re the ones who are supposed to be the experts at attracting new eyeballs to our businesses, helping those people get comfortable with our companies and then getting them to sign our agreements. Right? Clearly there appears to be a disconnect. But someone is closing business. At Square 2 Marketing, we close between three and five new clients a month. I’d like to think that qualifies us to know what we’re talking about and if we can do it, you can too.

Getting New Clients Or Keeping Current Clients?

It’s an age-old question, if I just had a couple more new clients I’d be great or if we could just hold onto our current clients we could grow. Truth be told? You better be awesome at both if you want your inbound marketing agency to grow. If you can’t land new clients at a clip of one a month and you can’t keep the clients you have—you’ll be in a hamster wheel that never ends.

Those challenges you have now—not getting paid regularly, not being able to hire, dealing with challenging clients and you having to wear 20 different hats is going to be your future. Until you can bring on new clients and hold onto your current clients—you better get used to it. What you’ve been doing isn’t working. It’s time to do something different.

It’s Probably Your Fault And Any Inbound Marketing Agency Owner Can Change It Today!

I’m not trying to be confrontational. I hear this from a lot of agency owners. They feel like they can’t charge more because they’re competing with other agencies who charge less or their smaller clients can’t afford a larger retainer. Sound familiar?

I’ve even heard some misinformed owners say, “we’re not Square 2 Marketing so we can’t get $10,000 retainers.” That’s total bull shit. What you charge is 100% related to what you think your value is worth. The reality of this situation is those agencies charging too little are not sure they know what they’re doing. They don’t think they’re worth full value.

Want to charge more? Here are some changes to help you with pricing inbound engagements to produce larger retainers and help you feel more confident that what you are charging is fair value for the business results you’re delivering to your clients.

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.