The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Did you know that 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up?  The average sales person only makes two attempts to reach a prospect.  Eighty percent of sales require five follow-up phone calls after the meeting.  Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. 

Are you making some of these mistakes? Are your clients making some or all of these mistakes? What do you do about it and what’s the impact to revenue if you can fix all of or at least most of these basic blocking and tackling mistakes inherent in your sales process? The answer is significant!

Even the simplest sales process improvements, when properly designed, deployed, managed and tracked produces major improvements in all of the key metrics.

There are a lot of ways to get the advice, guidance and counsel you need to grow your inbound marketing agency. You can get individual consulting help, you can join a group and get coaching support, you can lean on a peer network, you can trust your software vendor to help you or you could consider a Mastermind Group.

What’s a Mastermind Group? Good question. To keep it simple, a mastermind group is a collection of like-minded individuals who come together regularly to work on the challenges and issues associated with their businesses. They agree to follow a specific style of meeting and they agree to hold each other accountable for real progress toward solving their specific challenges.  If you want more information you can click here to get more details on the definition of a mastermind group. 

July is quickly coming to an end which means the summer’s end is not too far behind too. Now is the perfect time to assess how the first part of the year went and make adjustments so you can finish 2016 strong.

But what inbound agency numbers do you used to measure your agency? Do you compare yourself to other agencies or do you compare your performance against your own expectations and goals?

I’ve always loved the scorecard concept. Setting up some measurable goals and then grading those goals over time. I also like the Balanced Scorecard concept because it makes sure that our goals are balanced across the company.

Before Prospects Hire You For Inbound, You Have To Move Them Out Of Their Comfort Zone

Your prospects are human beings. That might sound obvious, but we ignore that fact every single day. Because they’re humans, they don’t want to change, they don’t want to stop doing what they’ve been doing for 20 years, just because you showed up and introduced them to inbound marketing.

In fact, they are going to do everything in their power to NOT make changes. They are going to convince themselves and everyone around them that inbound marketing is just like what they’re currently doing.

Oh, inbound….that includes email marketing—we already do that. Oh, inbound…that includes search, we hired an SEO firm last year and that didn’t work out. Inbound…do we need software for that? Right, well we have salesforce.com, that’s almost the same thing. We’re good.

They’re pre-programed to NOT make any changes. Changes are scary, people get fired for changes. So you’re going to have to work extra hard to move them out of their comfort zone, to disrupt their status quo and get them to feel like if they DON’T change, they are going to be facing even bigger risks.

Did you know not all inbound marketing agency blogging is created equal?

Have you already figured out that it’s difficult to make money and I mean real money blogging? Are you charging your clients what it’s costing you plus margin to produce all their blog articles?

Unless you’re charging your clients $1,000 per blog you’re either losing money, not making enough money or looking at your blog as a loss leader while you make more margin on your other services.

Break it down. How long does it take to produce a high quality blog that’s search engine optimized and optimized for social too? Remember, it’s not just the writing.

Over the past few months I’ve talked to a number of agency owners who have expressed concern at the level of effort required grow their inbound agencies and in two circumstances, I’ve spoken with owners who have thrown in the towel. Giving up the fight to return to something more comfortable.

I’m not judging anyone and in both cases I congratulated the owners for having the guts to admit they didn’t want to fight the good fight anymore and were going back to something that was easier. After all, we only go around this world once, you have to live the right life for you. Sometimes lifestyle businesses are just fine.

But these conversations got me thinking. For some of you trying to grow your agency might actually be the wrong move. Here are some signals that growth might be bad in your case.

I spend a lot of my time talking to other inbound marketing agency owners. I hear things, what’s not working, interesting client stories, delivery experiences and more often than not what’s keeping you up at night.

One of the things I hear most frequently is how inexperienced the clients are when it comes to inbound marketing.  Yes, it’s true. Many of the businesses we work with are new to inbound marketing and they don’t have the level of understanding or experiences we (agencies) do.

That makes it even more important for you to build in an educational component to your engagement. Yes, a workshop at the beginning of the engagement is part of it, maybe, but I’m talking about making sure that they’re getting educated every single day.

We’re all marketers. Smart marketers know if your agency isn’t remarkable it’s invisible. That’s what we tell our clients right? So what makes your inbound marketing agency remarkable? Even I’ve been challenged over the past few weeks to know what makes Square 2 Marketing remarkable.

If you’re not looking in the mirror and asking yourself this question, you’re going to be in for a surprise when you lose that prospect to another agency for a lower retainer. Why should they pick you? Why should they pay more for your retainer than for some other agency’s retainer? If you don’t know the answer—you can be sure your prospects won’t either.

I’m a big believer that the better you inbound marketing agency is at inbound marketing, the better you are at getting your clients leads and the happier your clients. I also believe, and this is based on feedback I get from prospects, most of the inbound agencies are still struggling to get clients results.

So if actual, quantifiable, program performance is what makes or breaks our engagement with clients, then you need to be adept at benchmarking their pre-program funnel, so you can illustrate for them the in-program funnel and then eventually the post-program funnel numbers.

The inbound marketing metrics and results should be dramatic enough for these clients to be—as we like to put it—raving fans. Here's how to produce a Click To Close Funnel Analysis.

If I asked 20 inbound marketing agency owners,  "what is your biggest challenge," the answers would probably all be the wrong answers.

The biggest challenge facing inbound agencies is not hiring, it’s not culture, it’s not picking the right clients, it’s not pricing and it’s not technology.

The biggest challenge facing inbound marketing agencies today is that we’re all not good enough at inbound to make it obvious why businesses should invest in inbound and hire us.