The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Over the past year, I’ve worked with over 60 agency owners and spoke to more than 200 people who have agencies with inbound in the name. Unfortunately, there are still a ton of agencies who are pretending to be inbound agencies, when in reality they're still doing what they’ve always done.

I know moving from web design, development, SEO, PR, branding, email marketing or video to inbound marketing is a big change. I know it requires sacrifice, investment of both time and money, clients need to be fired, team members trained—it’s a ton of work.

So let’s get introspective and look at our agencies honestly and decide are we an inbound agency or just pretending to be one?

I do a lot of work with inbound marketing agency owners on their own inbound marketing. We look at their messaging, their differentiation, their websites, their lead nurturing, their content offers and their social media. While most of it is pretty good, there are always recommendations to improve their results.

So the question becomes, how do you know if your own inbound marketing is missing something important? As agency owners you have to be able to evaluate and analyze your own inbound programs and the inbound programs of your clients to identify the weak spots and make the necessary upgrades.

Running an inbound marketing agency is one thing, running one that makes money is something completely different.

The type of businesses we’ve chosen to be involved in are labor intensive and require a commitment to both driving efficiency and driving results for clients.

There are a number of key financial measures you need to be aware of and more importantly you need to be tracking on at least a monthly basis.

Does it sometimes feel like your inbound agency is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? You’re mad to process as many blog articles, landing pages and new websites through the shop and still make a profit while having to be hyper creative and flexible when clients need that strategic thinking?

How do you teach your team to follow your processes because the efficiency makes you inbound marketing agency money and at the same time get them to understand that each client needs to have a highly creative, collaborative and educational experience with your agency?

Yes, that’s a monumental challenge. Welcome to the world of inbound agencies, where for the first time in your history you have to be great at both to make money and get your clients the leads they need to continue supporting inbound.

We all have them, those clients who no matter what you do, are never happy. Get them 50 leads last month and they want to know why it wasn’t 60 leads. Finish their website a week early and they want to know why it wasn’t done two weeks early. Double their website visitors in two months and they want to know why it was ONLY double and not triple.

Then there are the clients who don’t give you approvals for two weeks but expect your schedule to remain intact or they call you at 5PM with a request that absolutely has to be done by 9AM tomorrow morning. What about the clients who don’t want to pay you because your deliverables are behind schedule (or at least that’s what they think) even though you’re right on schedule?

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.

I recently got a puppy and we’ve been diligently training him to handle all the obvious commands. First and most important, he needs to do his business outside. Next we want him to be controlled so walking next to us on the leash, stay when directed, come when requested and down if necessary. Just the basics, after all, he’s just a puppy. We can’t expect him to do everything on day one.

That got me thinking about how we train new inbound marketing agency team members and how similar some of the experiences probably should be, yet how different they are in reality. I’ll preface this by saying I think we could be much better at training new team members. I think in general it’s a lot of, “your smart, figure it out.” I’m pretty sure that’s not the right approach.

Here are a few techniques to consider when you’re getting new inbound agency team members up to speed.

More and more agencies are considering going to points based pricing. It makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to charge by the hour and you don’t want to be arguing with clients every time something takes longer than they think it should take to deliver.

However, points based pricing is not a magical answer to a more complicated challenge. Simply converting an hour of work into a single point is not going to fool anyone and it’s not going to help you get paid true value for the work you're doing.

Here are some considerations as you try to decide to use points or not to use points.

I get a lot of questions about the finance and the funding required to grow an inbound agency. I especially like getting the opportunity to answer questions like this on the blog. 

I want to preface that banking, finance and business funding are not my areas of expertise. If you want your business to grow with marketing and sales—I’m your guy.

When it comes to finance I would quickly point you to other experts. But having operated a profitable inbound agency for over 13 years, I’m obviously doing something right and I’m happy to share what I do know about this topic.

It’s a delicate balance. Your client wants results but they also want to tell you what to do. They want you accountable for the performance of their inbound marketing program but they don’t want to follow your advice. What do you do?

It’s certainly easier to just do what they want. But is that the right thing to do? After all, they've never done inbound marketing before, but they sure are adamant aren’t they?

They hired you for your expertise, but now they don’t seem to trust you. Are they going to remember this when their program doesn’t perform? Are you going to be able to remind them how they didn’t follow your advice? Nope, you’re not and even if you do, they won’t remember it like you do.

This is a big challenge for inbound marketing agencies.