The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

It’s Not Uncommon To Have To Adjust Your Plan Quickly, Make Sure Your Agency Is Capable

If you read the blog regularly then you know I like to blog about ways to get better results from your marketing and sales execution. I also like to share my experiences working with CEOs of growing companies, especially when those observations become trends.

One of our newer clients kicked off their engagement in March, early March to be exact. During the sales process, we create our new client’s initial 90-day plan and this client was no different. Clients sign off on that initial 90-day plan and then we reinforce that agreed to 90-day plan during the kick-off.

All of this went down without a hitch until during the fifth week of the engagement I got an email from the client who was concerned about our progress.

I’m not giving up on my belief that strategy before tactics is the secret to success when it comes to any type of marketing engagement with clients. I’ve talked to far too many companies who are unhappy with their current agency and upon further review, we found there was little or no strategy.

However, I’m not ignoring the fact that many agencies tell clients they don’t need strategy and clients are hesitant to pay for or value strategy work. While we look diligently for clients who understand and value strategy and we work hard to help clients understand the value of strategy, I’m ready to offer clients what they want to buy, instead of what I want to deliver to them.

For those of you who’ve got eight to ten inbound marketing engagements under your belt, you might have heard this once or twice. “I know you’ve gotten us more visitors to our website and leads from our marketing effort but we haven’t seen the increase in revenue you promised us.”

First, you see an inherent challenge in the Inbound Agency path we’ve chosen. Despite having NEVER promised anyone anything, almost every client hears revenue increase when you say leads from inbound. Next, you realize that most of these businesses are as weak in sales as they are in marketing.

While inbound marketing is amazing, people aren’t practicing inbound simply because it's what all the cool kids are doing. They’re practicing because of the expected outcomes—leads and lots of them.

So if that’s the case then ensuring you know how to deliver the results might actually be the most important part of inbound marketing. Inbound is a lot like cooking a gourmet meal. You create a menu or plan, follow a recipe, taste as you go, adjust accordingly, serve the meal and then do it all over again.

In fact, the first time you serve the meal it’s not going to be as good as the 100^th time you serve the meal. You’re going to learn something every single time you make the meal and that influences how you prepare the meal the next time. This is one of the most important aspects of inbound.

Here’s how you ensure you know the recipe for inbound marketing results and how you adjust the recipe over time.