The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Drift, Crayon, Terminis, Accelo, or Yext. You might have heard of some, working with others and unfamiliar with the rest. There are now 125 HubSpot Connect Partners for you to work with. Click here to check out the visual representation of the Connect partners.

How can you possibly make heads or tails out of so many technology options? How can you organize them, prioritize them, provide services around them, sell them to prospects, learn them, train clients on them, install them and most importantly use them to produce better results for your clients?

Maybe you only work with a handful? But which ones? What does that mean for your agency? How do explain it to clients?

No Matter How Good A Job Your Doing Clients Are Going To Transition Out

Growing your inbound marketing agency is harder than you thought right? After all, almost everyone tells you; follow this playbook, buy this software, sign up for this training and attend this conference and you’ll grow up big and strong.

Now you know it’s not nearly as easy as that and if it was all the agencies would be $10 million by now. If fact, its exponentially harder than almost everyone tells you and one of the reasons its so hard is that clients don’t stay with their agencies forever—so you’re constantly working to fill up the leak in the bottom of your client bucket.

Since clients are always leaving, you have to have a new business effort that outpaces the inherent retention challenge.

HubSpot continues to transform how people think about revenue by including customer service in the conversation. On the surface this might seem strange to owners of inbound marketing agencies, especially those steeped in traditional marketing related tactics like web design or public relations, but when you dig a little deeper you should be able to see how this is the right advice for almost every company.

The traditional digital agency is dying a slow death, but most of the inbound agencies associated with HubSpot and those more innovative agencies have already seen their path to the future involves helping companies learn how to generate revenue in new and more buyer-centric ways. This move into services is one of the best ways to become much more strategic, garner higher retainers and make a bigger impact on your clients’ companies.

You finally landed that new client. That in and of itself was a huge accomplishment but now the hard work is starting. How do you make sure your new client gets an amazing experience from the very minute they sign until they become a new advocate for you, your team and your agency?

Isn’t that the point? Why onboard a new client if they’re not going to help you tell your story? Why spend so much time and so much energy trying to get your new client leads and new customers if they’re not going to be an advocate for your agency?

Most agencies are already aware of CASL and GDPR regulations, especially the European agency owners who are part of the Agencies 2 Inbound Cohort programs. While the markets outside of the US are behind from an inbound marketing perspective, (12 to 18 months), they are way ahead in terms of privacy, and protection from unwanted electronic marketing.

If you’re a US based digital marketing agency or inbound marketing agency,  get ready because the regulations are coming, and they are going to be challenging. How do I know? Why I am I writing about this today? Spend 5 minutes watching Mark Zuckerberg, CEO at Facebook, testify in front of the Senate committee investigating the Russian situation and you’ll see what I see.

If you’ve been to Inbound and loved it, then HubSpot’s Partner Day is something you should consider. While the registration is limited (I don’t think it’s been closed yet), Partner Day is a unique opportunity to spend quality time with HubSpot team members.

It’s also time to talk to and learn from agencies who all have similar challenges and issues. This smaller event (around 200 people) and its location (in HubSpot) offices allow for a more intimate, educational, and highly productive two days. I would highly recommend anyone working with HubSpot to find the time and money to attend the event.

We recently won a large retainer client and the feedback from our prospect was that they were confused. In fact, our contract stated that they recently made a $60 million-dollar purchase decision that was less complicated than their decision around which agency to hire.

This is very consistent with what we’re seeing in a wide variety of client situations. You can pretend that this isn’t happening, or you can take action to deal with the dynamics of our market. In a recent Agency Unfiltered episode, I filmed at the HubSpot Studios in Boston. I talked extensively on how your sales process needs to be adjusted or re-engineered in consideration for your prospect’s buyer journey.

If you want to check out the episode which had over 500 attendees live, click here to watch it.

I get asked two questions when it comes to inbound agency growth. The first one is “How do we get more new clients?” and the second is “How do we get our current clients better results?” These are both good questions and both important aspects of agency operations that should be getting a fair amount of attention from agency owners. 

I think we talk more about how to get new clients, so today let’s focus on getting clients better results. The inbound agency team structure has a ton to do with giving your team enough time, attention, direction and experience to drive client results—no matter what results you’ve agreed to with your clients.

I want to preface the advice I provide here by pointing out that inbound marketing agencies are all different and  each agency is going to have to make the inbound marketing team structure decisions that are right for you and your shop. However, I will also tell you that we’ve run through a wide variety of team structures and the structure I describe here has been the only one that allows us to provide clients great experiences AND allows us to scale as we grow.

February is almost over. That means 18% of the year is behind you. How are you doing?

I get it, I ran an inbound marketing agency with less than $1 million in revenue for years. I was the marketing consultant, copywriter, and QA guy for years. I know that almost every day is a whirlwind of wearing different hats and putting out a variety of fires, just to keep the whole thing from coming crashing down. But that cycle is what keeps you from growing. You have to breakout and be the agency owner, leader or CEO.

To make that move you have to act differently. The heroics that got you this far are not going to get you to the next level. To grow, you’ll need systems, process and methodologies.

Most of you know I’m from Philly (born and raised) and this might seem like a frivolous article that is taking advantage of my hometown team’s big Super Bowl win, but the reality of it is—there are lessons to be learned here and after years of working with inbound agency owners, there might be some significant lessons that can be applied to your inbound agencies immediately.

The Eagles weren’t the best team, they didn’t miss having to deal with significant injuries and no one expected them to win much of anything this year. They didn’t have the most experienced coaches, they didn’t have the best draft choices and they didn’t have the biggest budgets for players. All these factors were against them and they still won it all. How did they do it? What can we learn from their big win?