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.
Here’s how inbound agencies might go about providing services like this.
Stop Talking Marketing and Sales
Almost everyone is aware of the age old split between sale and marketing. Marketing thinks sales doesn’t follow up on the leads they generate and sales thinks marketing doesn’t understand sales so they generate bad leads.
Additionally, CEOs view marketing as an expense and sales as a necessary evil to drive new business growth. The entire paradigm is badly broken and needs to be dissolved. Stop talking to your clients about sales and marketing and start talking to them about revenue.
One goal—revenue growth. One department—the Revenue Department. One team—the revenue team. This new revenue team is made up of marketing and sales people all working toward one goal—hitting revenue targets. As thought leaders, implementers of change and as agency owners, you need to be talking to your prospects and clients about making this change within their organizations.
Your agency has the tools, expertise and programs to help them make the change. You should be helping them implement the new processes and systems required to make the change and then helping them track their progress towards their revenue goals. No more lead goals, now it’s revenue goals.
Start With Process Redesign
Unless you’re already working with your client’s sales teams to rework how they handle prospects it’s very likely the client’s sales team fumbling the leads your inbound marketing program is generating for them.
So start with this simple exercise. Create a better sales process so that when people ask to speak with your client’s sales team, they’re educating, guiding and advising prospects instead of trying to sell them something. This simple change is likely to have a major impact on improving close rates, shortening the sales cycle and increasing average revenue per new customer.
Integrate Educational Content Across The Experience
If you’re already working with clients on inbound marketing, then you're creating educational content as part of their marketing program. But did you know that you can also leverage that same content as part of the sales process to create a more seamless, a more inbound, and a more engaging prospect experience.
Prospects don’t want to be sold too, but what are sales people supposed to do if they’re not selling? The answer is simple. They need to educate the prospect but sales people don’t always know exactly how to do that. So you have to show them. Take a handful of blog articles and design a series of educational emails for sales to use that promote the blog article content.
Use Metrics At Each Stage In The Experience
Use math to show your client that the current process is under performing. Create a full funnel analytics model that shows the conversion percentages at each stage. Use their current data to snap a baseline and then keep track of these conversion rates over time. If you report on these metrics monthly, you should be able to show that the move from selling to guiding produced a significant improvement in these conversion rates and that means more new customers at the bottom of the funnel.
Set Goals For Business Results
The conversion rates are fine, for soft metrics but clients want hard, business results to justify an investment and that makes sense. So give it to them. Work with your client to understand their business results and set hard metrics for each of the most important business areas.
Then track and report on these business results. The better you are at helping your clients achieve their business results the longer your engagement, the more value you’ll be providing and the more you can charge. Remember, strategic partners get paid handsomely and vendors get paid commodity prices. You want to be strategic and you want to be a partner. Impacting their business results is the fastest way to getting paid handsomely, doing the work you want to be doing and working with clients long term.
Start Today Tip – You have to be comfortable telling potential clients this click to close story. You have to be willing to make the changes within your agency to empower your team to stretch beyond the traditional marketing services and into sales services too. It won’t be enough to simply get clients leads and call it a day. If they can’t close those leads (and they can’t) they’re going to hold you responsible. Be proactive and start talking to clients about helping them close more leads now, before they ask you about it. Create the set of services required to help you deliver and start talking strategically, not tactically.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN ON Inbound!
