The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

For those of you who’ve got eight to ten inbound marketing engagements under your belt, you might have heard this once or twice. “I know you’ve gotten us more visitors to our website and leads from our marketing effort but we haven’t seen the increase in revenue you promised us.”

First, you see an inherent challenge in the Inbound Agency path we’ve chosen. Despite having NEVER promised anyone anything, almost every client hears revenue increase when you say leads from inbound. Next, you realize that most of these businesses are as weak in sales as they are in marketing.

While inbound marketing is amazing, people aren’t practicing inbound simply because it's what all the cool kids are doing. They’re practicing because of the expected outcomes—leads and lots of them.

So if that’s the case then ensuring you know how to deliver the results might actually be the most important part of inbound marketing. Inbound is a lot like cooking a gourmet meal. You create a menu or plan, follow a recipe, taste as you go, adjust accordingly, serve the meal and then do it all over again.

In fact, the first time you serve the meal it’s not going to be as good as the 100^th time you serve the meal. You’re going to learn something every single time you make the meal and that influences how you prepare the meal the next time. This is one of the most important aspects of inbound.

Here’s how you ensure you know the recipe for inbound marketing results and how you adjust the recipe over time.

I have regular contact with five or six agency owners ever single week and what I see more often than any other challenge is an agency’s inability to add detailed marketing strategy to their inbound marketing engagements.

Don’t get me wrong, almost every agency is charging for, selling and delivering marketing strategy, but this isn’t the kind of marketing strategy required to move the needle with inbound engagements.

It’s not hard to see where the problem is, after all, most agencies practicing inbound marketing today used to do something else. They used to build websites, or handle public relations, some did pure branding and others focused on search engine optimization.

For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about how to scale an inbound marketing agency. Who to hire, who to promote, whether to staff the team with internal or external resources and how to organize the agency for today and for tomorrow.

But I thought it might be interesting to share with you what an inbound agency looks like from the inside. Not what you see from the outside or what other people tell you about their inbound agency, but what goes on inside – day in and day out.

I don’t know about your agency, but ours always feels a little like a bee hive to me. Perhaps that’s why our Hive Team names became so sticky so fast.

It sounds irresistible. You don’t have to hire a single person. You don’t have to pay any taxes, healthcare or benefits.

You get people to help you do your work, deliver your client engagements, build your inbound marketing agency and all you have to do is select them from a pool and pay them a fair fee for their contribution. If you like them you continue, if you don’t you never have to speak with them again. If only it was that easy.

I know plenty of agency owners who don’t have a single employee, they freelance out everything. I also know for them, it works. It works primarily because they’re running a “lifestyle” business. They don’t want employees, they want to leave at 3PM to watch their child’s softball game and they want to take 8 weeks of vacation every single year. I applaud their focus, resolve and their ability to create the perfect business for their personal goals.

You're in hiring mode. Great news! You’re bringing in new clients at a regular pace and you’re retaining your current clients so revenue is up month over month and you see a trend.

Now the question becomes how do you scale this business so that you make more money, grow the team and continue to keep clients happy?

This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing inbound marketing agency owners. What you need to scale up in a manageable way is a system. This system consists of two parts, the numbers and the team model. Both give you the mechanisms you’re looking for to help with the scaling process.

Let’s take two minutes to appreciate the good times we’re all enjoying right now. A rising tide floats all boats and for the most part inbound marketing agencies and creative shops in general are all doing well in today’s market.

The economy is good and businesses are investing in their own marketing. Let’s take advantage of this situation.

With that success comes growth and many of the inbound agency owners I speak with are asking who they should hire, when should they hire and into what role should this new person move into. All very valid questions. Hiring for inbound agencies is challenging but not impossible.

In Part Three of this Blog Series on inbound agency New Business Development we talked about the importance of qualifying your prospects early and often.

Today, we’re going to look at how prospects think, how their brain works and what we have to do to get them to say “yes, let’s get started.”

To really understand how prospects think, we need to understand how the human brain processes certain types of information. In each of our brains, there is a buy button.

Inbound agencies need to be hyper selective in deciding who to work with and who not to work with. 

In Part One of this Blog Series on inbound agency New Business Development we talked about planning, executing and optimizing your own inbound marketing program and in Part Two we discussed the importance of your own your sales process.

In Part Three, we’re focusing on how critical it is to qualify prospects IN and OUT as early as possible.

In Part One of this Blog Series on New Business Development we talked about planning, executing and optimizing your own inbound marketing program to ensure businesses are reaching out to you on a daily basis.

In this Part Two of the series, we’re going to focus on your sales process. This is by far the weakest area for agencies, whether they want to be inbound or not, most of the agencies I’ve spoken with are working without a defined and documented agency sales process.