The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

If you’ve worked with me or spoken to me, you know that when it comes to growing your inbound marketing agency I like to start at the beginning. So before we get to talk about your website, sales process or inbound marketing program we have to talk about mission, vision and core values.

This is so often overlooked and it’s so important that without discussing this first, I feel like the foundation of your agency has the potential to crumble under the weight of what you’re about to take on.

It’s the first week of January and hopefully you’ve already spent a good amount of time setting your goals for 2016. Make sure those goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based. These SMART goals are the basis by which you’ll make decisions during the year, but more importantly how you’ll know if you're on track during the year.

Talking about goal setting and actually establishing a set of goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) is easier said than done. In this article, I’ll share with you some of the quantitative goals top tier inbound marketing agencies are deploying in 2016.

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No one ever said it was going to be easy. In fact, I’ll challenge you—that if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Since it’s not easy—when you get your inbound marketing agency to be the company you always envisioned it could be you’ll know all your hard work was worth it.

I wanted to share this short excerpt from an email I received a few days ago. It’s from an agency owner who I’ve known for a few years.

She’s been through the same set of challenges facing most of you.

Now that you’ve settled into your comfort zone of 12 month retainers the world is going to change again. As we get better at generating leads, inbound marketing agency owners need to consider shifting their engagements to more “pay for performance.”

In 2016 clients are going to be asking more aggressively for pay per lead engagements. Meaning, you cover your costs and potentially make a small profit with a base retainer and then you get paid for every lead generated by your program.

This type of program configuration presents a whole host of challenges but as 2016 gets closer you and your agency are going to have to start getting comfortable with this approach. Clients are going to be asking for it, you’re going to have to deliver it and if you can’t or won’t—potential clients are going to look at that as an indication you’re not confident in your own lead gen abilities.

In my role as advisor to inbound marketing agency owners many of you have asked me to review your agency strategy and specifically your differentiation strategy.

The bad news is you all sound the same. In 2016, it’s going to be increasingly more difficult to tell one inbound agency from another inbound agency.

You all talk about getting clients leads, you all have the required inbound marketing flow chart on your websites, the one with attract, convert, close and delight. Maybe you have different words, but the story is the same. You all have pictures of your team and your cool creative offices but if you were a prospect, how would you tell the difference between one vs. any of the others?

Inbound Marketing Expands Into Inbound Sales To Help Clients Close Leads

Going into 2016 inbound marketing agency owners are going to get more and more requests from clients to help close leads. It makes sense when you consider it—most people think about marketing as leads generated. They don’t often think about the challenges associated closing those leads.

Now that inbound agencies have taken the lead generation puzzle and solved it to the point where leads are coming in on a regular basis, the sales team is now the next area to be put under the microscope. Based on our experience, once you prove you can generate leads you’re going to get pulled into the sales conversation.

Here’s how to prepare your agency to handle the inbound sales requests in 2016.

If you think you’re busy today get ready for an even busier 2016. More and more people are realizing inbound marketing is what they should be doing. Here’s a picture of inbound marketing’s popularity from Google which is a fairly solid predictor of interest. The tide is turning.

Your job as an inbound agency owner is to turn this interest into revenue. So in this article I’ll share with you the ten steps you need to be taking RIGHT NOW to get ready for the increase in interest from companies wanting help with their own inbound marketing programs.

If you’re an inbound marketing agency owner, then you have a lot to be thankful for during this holiday season. While I know it might seem like your hair is on fire most days and clients have become more and more demanding there has never been a time when so many tools and resources are available to delight every client.

The challenge for most of us has become how do we leverage the tools and resources efficiently and at the right time to enable our agencies and our teams to deliver on our service promise—we’ll get you leads.

Many of the experts have started to shift their thinking away from interruptive advertising as a way to get a prospect’s attention and towards creating a dynamic and remarkable experience for those prospects. In this Harvard Business Review article, the author talks about this being the new way to differentiate businesses.

So if that’s the case, how do we, as Inbound Agency owners, help our clients create this new marketing experience for their clients? The answer lies in the blending of inbound marketing and inbound sales services together to deliver a fully integrated Click To Close experience for our clients’ prospects.

This might come as a shock, especially if you’ve never been accountable to any results-oriented metric before, but simply getting clients leads might not be enough to not get fired.

I know it seems crazy when a client comes to you and they’re getting zero leads from their website and in six months you have them getting 20 to 30 leads a month yet you still get fired. How could this be bad?

Clients say they want leads and they say they can close the leads, but past experience has proven that what they really want is revenue growth and they’re not great at closing the leads you’re getting them. So to create long term clients and to grow your business, you’re going to have to help them close leads too.