The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

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.

Here’s an inbound agency owner checklist to make sure your 2018 is the best year ever. The question should be answered with a simples yes or no. In just a few minutes you’ll know if you’re moving in the right direction or if you’re destined to have another flat or down year. Growing an inbound agency is hard. Don’t wait until June or July to measure your progress.

Did You Hire Someone New?

Agencies that are growing are hiring. If you’re not hiring, then doing everything yourself or with a handful of people will only get you so far. One of the true measures of growth is if your team is expanding.

Do you have a hiring process? How refined is the process? If you are hiring, how far are you into your process? Do you have qualified candidates? Are they a-players? Are you excited to have them come on board or just lukewarm abou them joining you? Going forward, only bring on people who you are excited about. Hiring for the sake of hiring, or bringing on people who are just OK is a mistake. It’s better to keep looking until you find that superstar, rather than hiring people who are available or fit your salary requirements.

Regardless, you have to be looking for great people constantly and you have to be ready to add great people to your team.  They must be onboarded with a remarkable onboarding process so they get up to speed quickly and start contributing quickly as well.

Did You Hit Your Sales Goals In January?

How did you do in January? I know you set sales goals, right? Did you hit them? Did you exceed them? Did you miss them? If you missed them, can you make up that revenue gap in February?

If not, are you prepared to unpack the causes of the missed revenue numbers? Do you know what you need to do differently this month to make sure you don’t miss two months in a row?

Everyone misses sales goals from time to time, but making sure this doesn’t become a regular monthly occurrence is your goal now. It also means you might have to go and look at your budget and adjust your cost structure to match up with your lower than expected revenue numbers.

I think it also means looking more closely at your sales process. Did you have deals you expected to win that you lost? Why did you lose them? Did you expect to have more deals? Is your funnel healthy enough to support your revenue goals? Guys, this is what we should be doing for our client.  If you’re not good at doing this for your agency, how can you help your clients? You have to get very, very good at this part of your agency management.

Does Your Pipeline Look Better Than the Same Time Last Year?

One of the most consistent pieces of advice I give agency owners at inbound agencies is to be aggressively working on your own marketing. At this point in the year, one of the check-in items is definitely the performance of your marketing and while website visitors, blog subscribers and email open rates are important metrics—the most important metrics are related to your pipeline.

Do you have more people asking to talk to you this year than at this time last year? Do you have more sales opportunities? Are those opportunities better and bigger than last year? Are you closing them more consistently? Has your close rate increased? Have you been able to lower the time it takes to close new clients? Has the monthly retainer average also increased? These are all part of your revenue metrics dashboard that you should be tracking on a weekly basis, monthly at a minimum.

If your pipeline is not better than this time last year, then it’s probably that you’ll be looking at another year of slow or no growth and that’s likely because you’re not really doing anything different this year. That should change, and it should change quickly.

Is Client Retention Up?

Want to know why most agencies don’t grow? It’s because they can’t keep their current clients. No matter how good you are at sales, if there is a leak in your bucket and clients are spilling out of the hole then it’s going to be very challenging to put enough new clients in the top of the bucket to make up for the ones leaking out the bottom.

You have to double down on keeping your clients. It’s hard enough as it is. Clients take programs in house, clients change their mind on a dime, clients hire new people who want to bring in their own agencies, and clients get acquired. These are the factors that take clients away when you do a good job. But when you do a mediocre or poor job, you have a compounding effect that makes it very difficult to grow.

You are always going to lose clients, but you must limit the losses resulting from bad service or poor results. That has to be priority one.

Is Client Happiness Up?

If client retention is a trailing indicator, they’ve already left. If you want to get a prevailing indicator, then you should start tracking client happiness. Honestly, it doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it.

You can use Net Promoter Score questions live and in person or via a survey. You can do regular outreach to clients and simply ask them for their feedback. How and what you do is much less relevant. It’s much more important that you do something to gage their happiness while the engagement is active then waiting to find out that someone fired you.

I know what you’re thinking. Because I’ve thought it too. But wait, if I ask my clients about their happiness, they are going to give me bad news, tell me they’re not happy, ask for more leads or more services, or request they skip a payment until they get the results you promised. All of those potential outcomes might present themselves and those conversations would all be positive and constructive in my opinion.

If your clients are not happy, you must know about it, so you can do something about it. Putting your head in the sand is NOT going to help you grow. It is better to know and be working on fixing the situation than not knowing or pretending to not know.

Are You Actively Working On Culture?

You have a culture. Your culture is either one you’re working on or one that is working on you. What have you done this year to improve your culture or to nurture your culture? Are you talking about it every day? Do you use it when you reward team members? Do you use it when you review team members? Do you stand up in front (or virtually) of team members and reference your culture or core values? If not, then you’re not working on it. You’re not nurturing it.

Are Your Own Marketing Metrics Up?

We talked briefly above about marketing metrics in relation to your pipeline but here you want to make sure that all your marketing metrics are up and to the right. These are early indicators that your marketing is working but also that you’ll have a steady stream of opportunities to work through your sales process.

Are you seeing more website visitors? Are you seeing more leads? More bottom of the funnel leads? Is the quality of lead improving? Are you getting more blog subscribers? Are your subscribers viewing the blog articles you write? Are they converting? Are you optimizing your top viewed pages? Is that optimization increasing conversions? Which content is converting? How are you promoting that content? Optimizing your own marketing might be one of the most important tasks. The better you are at generating results for your agency, the better you’ll be at generating results for clients.

Are You Using A Management Methodology?

We started Square 2 Marketing without any type of formal management methodology. We then realized using the Gazelles and the Rockefeller Habits made the most sense for our business. Since then I’ve seen a lot of successful agencies use Traction to give them guidance around management and strategic planning methodology.

Both of these philosophies help you make decisions, stay focused, eliminate distractions and give you a planning guide that helps you identify key issues, organize your leaders and improve overall performance. Regardless of which one you use or which one you like, you should be using something.

Also, it might take you time to get comfortable with a new way of running your companies. This is new muscle memory and it’s going to feel uncomfortable initially. However, over time you’ll start to rely on these tools as important aspects of how you run your companies efficiently and effectively.

Do You Know What Makes Your Agency Different?

This is big, and I know that most of you don’t know what makes your agency different. I know that more of you think you know what makes you different, but it doesn’t and the rest of you haven’t even tried very hard to be different. You have to work on this and it is some of the most important work you’ll do this year. The  sooner you get it done, the sooner that aspect of your business starts to help you close new clients and keep current clients.

It’s an epic fail, as far as I can see. Don’t get me wrong, we’re failing too (I am working on something right now). Square 2 Marketing is not remarkable enough for my tastes. But just like I’m working hard to make us different, you should be too. When someone asks you why I should hire you over the other two agencies their talking to, you have to have a great response. Do you? I didn’t think so.

Sometimes people need a little push or some momentum to get them moving in a different direction. It could be a conversation with a person you respect, it could be a conference you attend, or an article you read. Some people need a personal connection like working with a fitness trainer at the gym to make the changes required to get in shape or lose weight. Those personal connections translate into the agency community too.  Sometimes having a person on your team to give you that nudge is all it takes to get you to the next level.

Other people feel alone in their agency. No one to talk to or bounce ideas off of. No one to validate your opinions or perspectives. No one to honestly talk about concerns or fears. You can’t always share your most intimate thoughts with employees or contractors.

Whether you need a push or a sounding board, there are resources available to help you get to that next agency level quickly, efficiently and without making agency killing mistakes. All you have to do is reach out and take advantage of those resources and they are much more affordable than you might think. Just a few hundred dollars a month and you could have access to a wealth of knowledge, experience and ideas.

Start Today Tip – You should probably be checking your progress toward your goals on a daily basis. Some goals are hyper short term, but other mid and long-term goals can still be looked in on more frequently. For example, if you are planning on hiring, then check in on the amount of resumes you have to screen, the number of approved resumes and the number of phone screens you have set up. If you're trying to improve your own marketing, then look at site visitors, site-wide conversion rate and number of leads every single day. This should be improving. If client happiness is a long-term goal, make sure you talk to a client or two every day and NOT about their program details but about their happiness. Would they refer you, would they write a review? Those are the questions you need answered.

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