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?
Sometimes I look at my role at Square 2 Marketing as that of head coach. I spend a lot of time reading, researching and studying leadership. I’m specifically interested in the role of a head coach on a pro football team and the role of the executive chef in a high-end restaurant (that’s an article for another day).
A coach for a professional football team has a couple of high level responsibilities that match very closely with your role as the CEO of your agency. First, you have to get the right players, (note that I didn’t say the best players). In fact, most of the teams with the best players rarely win it all. Then you have to call the right play. You have to put those players in the best position, based on their skills, to successfully execute your plays. Finally, you have to remove ALL obstacles that might prevent them from being successful.
With all that back story, here’s how I think the Eagles won and how you can help your agency win too.
Team Is Everything
We already established that the Eagles didn’t have the best players. They didn’t have the best quarterback, the best tight end, or the best coaches. But, they had the best team.
They believed in each other, they played for each other and they had each other’s back. When one stumbled, another played harder to pick up the slack. This is critical for you to understand at your agency.
You don’t need the best people. You need the right people and you need to nurture them into the team you need to win. Getting people on your team to act like a winning team comes with a lot of complexities. You have to be their leader. Every team needs a leader. You need people on your team who act like leaders, people who lead by example. You need a clearly defined culture and core values. That’s why I start every agency cohort with a discussion around culture and core values.
The Eagles have an unmatched culture. It’s articulated every single day, every single meeting, every single practice and every player understood it, could repeat it and wanted to be an active participate in that culture. This goes far beyond a written culture code, document, posters on the wall or regular meetings. It’s something you feel.
Take a look at your team. Do they go above and beyond, do they support each other, do they work as a single unit, do they understand the culture and core values at your agency enough to embody them and act accordingly every single day? This is going to take a lot more work than you think. It’s going to take talking about it every day with every person at your shop and it’s going to take you acting like you want your team to act.
Once you get there, your agency will be able to do so much more, get much better results, close more new customers and execute programs that you might not have imagined. The power of the team is so much more than the sum of all your people.
Alignment Of Short Term Execution With Long Term Goals
When I listen to people talk about the Eagles, it was clear they had well-articulated short and long-term goals. The long-term goals were obvious: Win the Super Bowl or possibly even win multiple Super Bowls. What about the short-term goals?
They kept it simple—win at every aspect of the game. They wanted to win in every meeting, win in every practice, win every play, win every series of plays, win every game. By breaking down the big goal into much smaller goals, it became manageable. Their team was able to connect a series of smaller, more attainable wins and turn that into their big win and their big goal.
You have to make it simple for your team too. At Square 2, it’s all about client results. What do we have to do today to get our clients results? This focus has reduced our attrition rate and improved our client satisfaction scores. It’s driven more positive reviews, more referrals and more renewals. Every meeting, every conversation, every action has to be about producing better or more results for our clients.
The big goals, the long-term goals—they’re easy. Get to $50 million in revenue. The short-term goals that align everyone on the team, they are much more difficult.
You Have To Know You Can Win
This is by far one of the biggest challenges facing the agencies I talk with. Most of you don’t think you’re as good as you actually are at driving value for your clients. The Eagles knew they could win. No matter what anyone said or what anyone wrote, they believed in themselves.
I’ve made it a habit of telling large audiences of agency owners that they’re better than most people at knowing how to generate leads for businesses. I truly believe that, but most of you don’t. I know that because I see you selecting to work with the wrong clients, not charging them enough, getting pushed around by them, acting like vendors and not strategic partners, and following the pack instead of doing what’s right for your agency. These are all symptoms of not feeling like you’re the best of the best.
Generally human beings are only as good as they think they are. If you don’t think you’re the best then it makes sense to charge less, to take bad clients and to think you don’t know how to get them leads. But once you start acting like you’re the only one who knows how to get leads for your clients, you’ll start realizing the benefits of this attitude change and all the benefits that comes with it.
You should try it just once. That next prospect meeting, act like you’re the only agency who’s uniquely positioned to help that company. Charge them accordingly, act like you could care less if you get the account or not and you’ll be surprised at the result. It might sound counterintuitive, but it’s not. This attitude adjustment is going to impact your agency, just like it impacted the Eagles.
Be Bold
The concept of being bold is as old dirt. One of my favorite sayings is “be bold and mighty forces will follow.” When you look that up, the quote is attributed to William Benjamin Basil King (1859–1928) a Canadian-born clergyman who became a writer after retiring from the clergy. His novels and non-fiction works were spiritually oriented, but this quote plays well today too. You have to be bold.
The Eagles continually made bold moves all season long. They traded for Jay Ajayi, they signed a rookie kicker, they stuck by their back up quarterback who considered retiring just a few months before, they hired a coach who had never been a head coach, they traded known skill players for draft picks, and to top it all off, they called bold and unexpected plays in the biggest games of their lives.
You can play it safe. You can make safe moves. You can wait to hire that next team member, you can pass on that big client opportunity because you might not have all the experience, you can opt out of that partner program and you can not hire that person who might be smarter than you. All of those moves would be the wrong moves if you’re trying to grow your agency.
No one ever made it big being safe. No one ever achieved anything remarkable being safe. They Eagles didn’t upset the Falcons, Vikings and the Patriots by being safe. While it might be a little on the scary side to be bold, you will be rewarded almost every time and if you do make mistake on your way to being bold, I promise you will learn something valuable from that experience.
Every time we opted for bold, we were rewarded. We were rewarded for that first acquisition, that first major hire that seemed expensive, that first big-name client, committing to HubSpot that we’d be their biggest partner one day, and investing in new initiatives that most agencies wouldn’t dream of working on. Those are big, bold bets that will help us grow. You can make similar bets on you, your team and your agency. I always bet on us. To me those are very safe bets. Think big and you’ll grow big.
Start Today Tip – If you want to win, you have to make the moves required to drive your agency forward. It’s a contact sport. It’s not for the faint of heart and it takes hard work. You have to invest in your culture, in your people, in your leadership skills and in your ability to make big, bold decisions for your agency. Set big goals and then manage towards smaller, tightly aligned goals that all pull towards your big goal. Bring in the right people, call the right plays, put them in the best position to be successful and work hard to remove any obstacles that are keeping you from winning it all. Do that and you’ll be in the biggest parade of your life too.
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