The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Some days it seems like no one is happy. When in reality, the handful of unhappy clients get 90% of your attention, while most of the happy clients get little or none of your attention. Sometimes this makes it feel like everyone isn’t happy and that’s just not the case.

Regardless, the goal should be to make as many clients happy as possible. While you’ll never get ALL of them to be happy. Even the best and nicest restaurant have a handful of bad reviews. The key here is to build process and systems that work together with your teams to ensure a large majority of your clients are happy, referenceable and willing to write a review.

Tips And Techniques To Make Sure You Are Always On The Same Page With Your Clients When It Comes To Results

A lot of what I write about comes from my conversions with other agency owners. As part of my consulting and Cohort Coaching programs I talk to roughly 30 agency owners each month and one of the most consistent challenges is helping clients understand their own results.

In full transparency, Square 2 is challenged with the same set of issues. I think ALL agencies deal with this, some more than others and the common denominator in all these situations is—the client. This makes the key to helping clients understand their results ALL about you and how your team works with your clients, day in and day out.

When we started Square 2, almost 17 years ago, we were smart enough to know that doing projects for clients was not going to get them the results they expected from an investment in marketing. Fast forward to 2019 and now the 12-month retainer engagement is not getting clients the results they expected either.

How is that possible? Everyone told you to sign up clients for ongoing, retainer engagements to balance out cash flow, create long term relationships with clients and help you build your agencies.

But 12-month retainer engagements don’t do anything to get clients what they want—FAST RESULTS. Do you know any clients who don’t want fast results? Right, I don’t either.

You’re not running an ad agency. When you get a new client, you can’t pull your creative team into the conference room and start banging out ideas for print ads or a billboard campaign. You can’t treat every new client like they’re your first and only client.

Perhaps even more challenging, if you want to scale and grow, you can’t be the bottleneck, you can’t be in every meeting for every client and you can’t control every process.

When it comes to growth, the agency owner is almost always why the agency isn’t growing.  

The answer to this is systems, processes and a defined, differentiated methodology. Think McDonald's. Not the fast part, but the scalable, repeatable and trainable part. Want to know how to make French fries at McDonald's? There is a manual for that. Want to know how to wash the window? There is a manual for that. Want to know how to greet the customers? You guessed it—a manual. Today it’s probably a video tutorial, but you get the idea.

I talk to a lot of agency owners who are handling both sales and client services for their agencies. They might have a couple of marketing consultants who are also working with clients but when it comes to the client engagement, the owners are still very much involved.

The question they ask me is, “Do I need a salesperson?” Or sometimes, “When should I hire a salesperson?”

It’s a good question for growing agencies. But my answer is almost always the same. I ask them, “Do you like sales or taking care of the clients?” This answer usually requires some soul searching. What I mean is, that you can’t do both.  You have to pick either selling your services to new clients or taking care of current clients.”

The answer is important if you're planning on hiring a salesperson.

We started transforming Square 2 into an agile agency back in September of 2014. As one of the first agencies to adopt the Agile Methodology (back then there were only two other shops that I was aware of who ran agile), today we have buckets and buckets of experience making agile work.

Last week at HubSpot’s Partner Day in Boston, being agile was again noted by a few of the presenting agencies as one of their “secrets” to success.

But the agile we practice is not even close to the agile we rolled out in September of 2014. Almost five years later, the way we use agile to service our clients has changed dramatically.

As agency owners, continuously learning what’s going on in our industry, what’s working, what’s not and what the innovative thinkers are planning keeps me and my agency on the cutting edge of marketing, sales and revenue execution.

None of us can get to every conference, but when I have the pleasure of attending one of the year’s best conferences, I like to share those experiences with all of you.

I recently returned from one of the best conferences, Sirius Decision’s Annual Summit in Austin Texas. This is my second time attending and our agency’s third. This is the first time we exhibited. What I love about this conference is the high level of attendee (CEOs, CMOs, and VPs of both marketing and sales) and a heavy focus on technology solutions.

What I also love about this conference is the level of thought leadership shared by the Sirius Decisions team.  If you don’t know this company, I like to refer to them as the Gartner of sales and marketing.

We first met HubSpot back in 2009. At the time, I pledged to Pete Caputa, that Square 2 would be HubSpot’s best partner. Almost 10 years later, we get a lucrative commission check every quarter from HubSpot and every quarter I look back 10 years and kick myself for not pursuing similar deals with other technology partners.

While I can’t go back in time and do it differently, I can try to look forward today at who might be the new HubSpot over the next ten years and make sure we have partnership agreements and an operational model that helps these new companies the same way we helped HubSpot over the past 10 years.

It’s Not Uncommon To Have To Adjust Your Plan Quickly, Make Sure Your Agency Is Capable

If you read the blog regularly then you know I like to blog about ways to get better results from your marketing and sales execution. I also like to share my experiences working with CEOs of growing companies, especially when those observations become trends.

One of our newer clients kicked off their engagement in March, early March to be exact. During the sales process, we create our new client’s initial 90-day plan and this client was no different. Clients sign off on that initial 90-day plan and then we reinforce that agreed to 90-day plan during the kick-off.

All of this went down without a hitch until during the fifth week of the engagement I got an email from the client who was concerned about our progress.

For those of you who know me (really know me), you also know that I’ll talk to any agency owner at any time and anything I can do to help them with their challenges, I’m happy to do so.

Agencies 2 Inbound recently celebrated its four year anniversary. I started working with other agencies in March of 2015. Over the past four years, I’ve worked with over 120 agency owners. That is a much bigger number than I ever expected, and I am honored to have worked with and helped that many people.

One of the reasons I love Agencies 2 Inbound so much is the responses I get from other agency owners and the impact I’ve had on their companies and their lives.