The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

The 7 Most Common Complaints From Inbound Marketing Agency Owners And How To Fix Them

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Sep 8, 2016 5:30:00 PM

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ThinkstockPhotos-186351347.jpgHaving worked with over 100 inbound marketing agency owners over the past two years and having talked to four or five times that since launch Agencies 2 Inbound, I’ve started to see a pattern in the issues and challenges facing the inbound agency community.

Below I’ve listed out the seven most common challenges agency owners share with me during our conversations and these are in order. The first is the most common and so on down the list. I’m sure these won’t surprise many of you and perhaps you have similar challenges with your agency.

I’m also including a collection of recommendations on how you fix these challenges so you can cross these off your list and move on to other issues that will undoubtedly pop up when these are corrected. Here we go!

The Challenge - We Don’t Have Enough Inbound Leads

Surprisingly enough, this one is by far the most popular. I always find it ironic that lead generation is a challenge for agencies who are supposed to be specialists at this but I also recognize that most agencies don’t invest enough time or money on their own inbound marketing.

The Fix – Treat Your Agency Like It’s Your Most Important Client

If you can’t generate inbound leads for your agency how on earth are you going to do it for clients and if you can’t generate inbound leads you’ll never be able to grow your agency. It has to be priority 1, 1A and all the other numbers and or letters. This isn’t optional, it’s mandatory. Create all the meetings, documents and accounts. Set up all the technology, software and systems just like you would for a client. Don’t cut any corners. If you meet with clients for one hour a week, now you meet with your internal marketing team for one hour a week. You get picture.

Hold your team accountable, just like your clients hold you accountable for results. This is a great way to get a perspective on how your team services, talks to and responds when clients challenge them. Make sure you give your team the time they need to produce, but make no mistake—produce they must. Since you’re in such a hyper competitive space, be realistic about the results. You’re not ranking page one for inbound marketing so pick other keywords that you can rank for. Once your team is up and running you should see more leads and this issue will be behind you.

Challenge - We Don’t Have A Sales Process

I find this challenge to be more understandable. Almost every business we come in contact with is lacking a formal, documented, tested and managed sales process. So it makes sense that most of you are missing one too. However, technology like CRM tools make this easier than ever to set up, track and hold you and your team accountable for following it.

Fix – Map Out Your Current Sales Process And Then Create Your Optimal Sales Process

In order to get where you’re going, you have to know where you are today. Once you have your current sales process (no matter what condition it’s in) mapped out you can start rebuilding it. HubSpot offers some excellent training on Inbound Sales that walks you through an inbound sales process. You should consider adopting this in its entirety. It’s actually one of the best modules I’ve seen from them.

Once you have your new process, stick to it. No matter how uncomfortable it feels or how often you feel like you want to skip any of the steps in the process—don’t do it. Keep in mind that your entire sales effort should be designed to make your prospects feel safe with your agency.

Challenge - I Don’t Know Who To Hire Next

I hear this all the time. We think we’re ready to hire our next team member but we don’t know if that should be a writer, a marketing person, a sales person or an interactive person. If you’re growing this is a good sign that you’re getting new clients and keeping your clients, this is a good challenge to be facing. Regardless, you don’t want to make a mistake and hire the wrong role.

Fix - The key to knowing who to hire is having a plan.

You should have an org chart for today, one for six months from today and one for 18 months from today. This is about roles, not individuals so put roles in the boxes not people’s names. This means if you have one person doing two roles, you have two boxes with the same name in each box. As you start to plan for six months from now, you want to try to have less duplicate names and as you plan for 18 months from now you want to have almost no duplicate names. This exercise is going to give you insight into what roles to add and when.

Challenge - We’re Not Making Enough Money For Me To Get Paid

Like it or not, inbound marketing is a labor intensive effort. It takes people to optimize programs, write content, update landing pages, publish blog articles, and more. It also takes activity to generate results for clients. In the beginning, you’re going to make mistakes, waste time and work on stuff that doesn’t produce the results you expected or hoped for.

This is the cost of learning inbound. While it might be easier to sell a $3,000 a month engagement it’s hard to get clients results at that level of investment, so you end up putting more time into the client than you're getting paid for because you don’t want to lose the client. Trust me. Been there, done that! You should try to avoid that trap.

Fix - If you’re seeing costs going up then you’re not charging clients enough to cover the costs to deliver the work.

You have to charge clients the right price for the work they need to get them the results they expect. Clients who want remarkable results should be prepared to pay remarkable retainers. No one ever said inbound marketing was some kind of simple, easy, cheap way to get leads. It’s actually quite complicated and the people who know how to do it should get paid for the value that expertise brings. That’s you and your agency.

Challenge - We’re Not Getting Clients Great Results

This one might be hard for me to help with because I firmly believe that getting good at inbound marketing takes experiences. The more clients you get, the more programs you manage, the more situations you encounter, the more tactics you execute the better you get at getting clients results. This is why I recommend that agencies go ALL IN. If you only have a couple of clients, while you get your feet wet, it’s only going to take you longer go get good at inbound.

Fix – Go ALL IN!

Once you go all in and you get more clients, in different industries, with different issues and your team gets different experiences producing results with different budget levels and different tactics they’ll become better and better at getting clients the results they expect. There’s also an element of expectation setting here too. If you tell new clients they’re going to see results in 30 days and they’re leads are going to triple in 90 days and they’re only investing $2,000 a month—well you’ve probably going to get fired. Not only do you have to get good at actually getting results, but you also have to get good at setting accurate expectations and this is even harder than getting them great results.

Challenge - I’m Doing Everything Here

You’re working IN the business, instead of ON the business. You’re an employee, not an owner or CEO. This gets back to the I Don’t Know Who To Hire Next challenge. Perhaps it even answers that question for you. You can’t do everything. You’ll become a bottle neck for growth, you’ll actually limit your agency’s ability to grow because you can only work so many hours. If you want your business to grow, you have to trust your team to do what you’re doing.

Fix – Hire Your Replacement

How many boxes is your name in? Start moving or hiring people into those boxes with your name in it. Take your new found free time and work on CEO level tasks for the company instead of working with clients or selling new prospects. You’re going to quickly see that hovering up over the business and spending your valuable time working on strategic initiatives will have huge pay offs for the company. You’ll actually contribute more to the business this way, than by taking care of clients.

The journey you’ve embarked on is going to take time, it’s going to have setbacks, it’s going to have wins and losses. Celebrate your wins and recover from your losses. It’s not about how many times you get knocked down, it’s what you do when you get back up that defines you. Keep that in mind and keep pushing forward.

New Call-to-actionStart Today Tip - It might sound like a lot, but don’t try to tackle all these challenges at once. Set priorities and work down the list over time. The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Put time on your schedule to work on these challenges. One hour a day is probably five hours a week more than you’ve been devoting to these issues previously. If you tackled one issue a week, after the entire year is over you would have solved 52 issues. That’s pretty exciting.

Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN ON Inbound!

 

Topics: inbound agency hiring, inbound agency growth, inbound agency planning

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