Six Areas Inbound Marketing Agency Owners Need To Focus On Next Year To Make 2017 Your Best Year Ever!
I wanted to let everyone know how grateful I am for all the warm wishes and wonderful feedback all the agency owners have provided me over the past year or two. Many of you have worked directly with me on your agencies in one form or the other and the progress you’ve all made is wonderful.
To give back, I’d love to be able to give all of you a gift on this holiday season. Obviously, that would be a logistical challenge as well as setting me back financially. However, I can give you the gift of knowledge and here’s a little chance for me to give you what I wish I could give you and let you know why these are the most important gifts you should be giving yourself this season.
Here are six gifts I wish I could give you and the reasoning behind each of them.
A New Client Who’s Going To Be With You For Years
There is nothing better than a client who trusts you, who is all in on inbound, who respects you and your team, who pays you promptly and is reasonable when aspects of the engagement don’t go as planned.
Clients who view you as their partner and have no intentions of looking for a different partner are going to be with you for years and years. Even when they’re not working with you directly, they consider you their marketing company, they refer you and they’re happy to speak about their experience with you to anyone you need them to.
They see your value to their businesses and they compensation you appropriately. They say please and thank you when it comes time to discussing specific action items and they always understand the health of your business is just as much a priority as the health of their own business. For all of you, I hope you have at least a handful of clients just like this. It should be what you expect, not what you have to demand and not the exception.
A New Team Member Who Knows How To Generate Leads With Inbound Marketing
If you’ve been hiring, then finding people who know inbound marketing and how to generate leads with inbound marketing tactics is a major find. Despite your remarkable hiring process, your amazing benefits, your knock out culture and killer team, hiring for inbound agencies is a tough job.
My second gift to you is the perfect new team member. Someone who doesn’t need to much training, someone who can hit the ground running, someone who is never going to drop the ball or say the wrong thing to your clients. They’re going to be analytical and have perfect communication skills. They’ll be able to explain complex concepts and collaborate effectively with all different types of clients.
Finally, they’ll appreciate you and your company for the amazing opportunity you're providing them and they’ll work, on their own, to continue to educate themselves on the changes going on within the field of marketing. Believe it or not, this type of team member is out there. Don’t give up and don’t give in. Keep looking until you find this unicorn. You, your current team and your clients will appreciate it.
An Inbound Sales Practice
We all heard it at Inbound this year. Marketing and sales are on a crash course to become one and revenue generation is going to be the key metrics for marketing agencies all over the planet. With my third gift, I give you a complete and ready to go, Inbound Sales practice so you can offer your clients both inbound marketing and inbound sales services to help them close the leads you’re already generating for them.
The gift comes complete with the pricing, services, deliver model and the individuals required to provide these new services to your client. As a bonus, the gift also comes with the stories you need to use to sell inbound sales to your clients and the ability to help them understand that sales is perhaps even more important than what they’re doing from a marketing perspective. If we generate leads for them and they can’t close them—well, what’s the point of generating the leads in the first place.
While you might not think you need this gift today, you will eventually. Maybe not even in 2017, but eventually clients will keep telling you they can’t close the leads you’re generating for them and you’ll come to appreciate this gift. Hold onto this one, don’t regift it and remember where you put it, so you can get it out and use it when you're ready.
A Fully Integrated Operation That Uses Agile And Scrum
I’m encouraged at all the agencies who have embraced agile and started doing at least some aspects of agile marketing. I’m even more impressed with the smaller agencies who went all in, hired a consultant, purchased the software, changed their pricing and moved forward with Srum in their operations.
But for those who didn’t think they needed it, didn’t think they were big enough, or didn’t think it would make a difference in terms of results or profits—this gift is for you.
This is a big gift, it comes with over a year of hard work you won’t have to invest in and mistakes that you won’t have to make. You’ll get your gift complete with team members who are ready and willing to practice Scurm. It comes with clients who get the advantages and support the transition. It will come with points-based pricing that all your prospects understand right out of the gate.
Now for the biggest and best aspect of this gift, right out of the box you’ll realize double the production for half the cost, taking most of your net profit margins and doubling them right out of the gate. That’s a gift that keeps on giving. Enjoy!
A 20% Increase In All Your Pricing
For those of you running agnencies only to find at month's end there's not enough left in the account to pay yourself, the gift I can give you today is an immediate and across the board 20% price increase. This is a gift you can give yourself, right here and now. You deserve it and across the board, almost every inbound agency is underpricing your own value, cutting into profit, cutting out your own compensation and preventing your agency from growing into its true potential.
By increasing your approach to pricing inbound engagements by 20% minimum, you’ll be charging closer to what you’re worth. You’ll see that price increase drop immediately to the bottom line and with that extra money you’ll be able to staff your engagements properly—producing even better results for your clients. Another gift that keeps on giving, now you leverage those client experiences to get more clients and extend your engagements and the entire cycle spins more quickly for everyone. Do it today and enjoy the rewards in 2017.
A Link To My Talk On Agile In The Inbound Agency From Inbound 2016
I hope you understand the nature of the blog article. Clearly these are gifts you can give yourself with some time, energy and solid thinking. My gift is the ability to inspire you to think differently about your agency. For you to aspire to be more than you are, to grow bigger than you thought you could grow.
However, I do have a gift for all of you, the readers of the Agencies 2 Inbound blog. I know many of you were not able to attend Inbound 2016 and I was lucky enough to have my session recorded, so my actual gift to all of you is my session on our agency’s journey over the past 12 months towards being 100% agile and using Scrum to deliver every aspect of our engagement with every client.
Here it is, click here and get all the insights, learning and guidance I wish I had before we started back in September of last year. Enjoy!
Start Today Tip – My advice for all of you today is to look back at 2016 and use the time between now and the end of the year to start planning for an even better 2017. Take these gifts and apply them to your companies. Go all in. Hire new team members, fire bad clients, charge more for the services you provide, try new services, focus your energies on getting clients amazing results and you’ll find an agency that is not only growing, but thriving. As always, if you need anything, feel free to contact me, I’ll talk to any agency owner at any time and I’ll offer the benefit of my experience to anyone, all you have to do is ask.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN ON Inbound!
