The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

It sounded good on paper, right? We’ll sell inbound sales services and sales technology just like we sold inbound marketing services and marketing technology. We’ll get bigger retainers. We’ll keep our clients longer and we’ll be even more valuable to them—helping them close the leads we generated for them.

How’s it going? It’s been almost a year since HubSpot rolled out their Growth Stack, Full Funnel concepts. They’ve been training agency owners to sell sales enablement services and sales tech but from what I’ve seen and the many conversations I’ve had with agency owners, it’s been a slow go.

At Square 2 Marketing, we’ve been delivering sales services for the past 10 years. We have a sales practice and people who have expertise in planning, delivery and optimization of sales enablement. It’s not easy and it’s completely different than marketing.

After a short break, the Agencies 2 Inbound blog is back in action and will be posting weekly starting this week. This year nothing is more important to me than giving you all good guidance around adding inbound sales to your existing inbound marketing agency practices.

Yes, there is going to be immense pressure this year from HubSpot, specifically, for you to sell inbound sales software, HubSpot CRM and start offering inbound sales services. The long-term direction here is accurate. They are correct in wanting to create a full funnel agency experience at partners so your firm enables clients to both get leads and then close those leads.

But is that right for everyone? No, it’s not.

To give you some context, at Square 2 Marketing, we’ve been delivering sales enablement or inbound sales services in a variety of configurations for the past three years. We already know what works, what doesn’t work well and why it’s so challenging.

Did you know that 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up?  The average sales person only makes two attempts to reach a prospect.  Eighty percent of sales require five follow-up phone calls after the meeting.  Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. 

Are you making some of these mistakes? Are your clients making some or all of these mistakes? What do you do about it and what’s the impact to revenue if you can fix all of or at least most of these basic blocking and tackling mistakes inherent in your sales process? The answer is significant!

Even the simplest sales process improvements, when properly designed, deployed, managed and tracked produces major improvements in all of the key metrics.

I guess that last line is what I’d like to say…not what I normally say.

I actually hope this doesn’t sound familiar but it was very familiar to me. So familiar that we decided to add Inbound Sales Services to the services we provide clients. Despite that fact that we were never hired to close leads, nor was this ever discussed as an issue, we’re getting pulled into conversations like this on a regular basis and you will too.

Inbound Marketing Expands Into Inbound Sales To Help Clients Close Leads

Going into 2016 inbound marketing agency owners are going to get more and more requests from clients to help close leads. It makes sense when you consider it—most people think about marketing as leads generated. They don’t often think about the challenges associated closing those leads.

Now that inbound agencies have taken the lead generation puzzle and solved it to the point where leads are coming in on a regular basis, the sales team is now the next area to be put under the microscope. Based on our experience, once you prove you can generate leads you’re going to get pulled into the sales conversation.

Here’s how to prepare your agency to handle the inbound sales requests in 2016.

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.

This might come as a shock, especially if you’ve never been accountable to any results-oriented metric before, but simply getting clients leads might not be enough to not get fired.

I know it seems crazy when a client comes to you and they’re getting zero leads from their website and in six months you have them getting 20 to 30 leads a month yet you still get fired. How could this be bad?

Clients say they want leads and they say they can close the leads, but past experience has proven that what they really want is revenue growth and they’re not great at closing the leads you’re getting them. So to create long term clients and to grow your business, you’re going to have to help them close leads too.

I’ve written about why an inbound marketing agency needs inbound sales services to drive significant revenue generation for clients, but this article is more about why you need to offer inbound sales services as opposed to how and why inbound sales works.

I’m sure most of you are thinking to yourselves, “I just started getting good at inbound marketing and now I have to learn how to deliver inbound sales too?” Yes, you do and here’s why these complimentary services are so important to your clients.

Today there are more inbound agencies on the planet than ever before. Regardless of what they look on the inside, from your prospect’s perspective they all look alike. It’s your job as an inbound agency owner and as a marketer to make your agency look different.

This differentiation exercise has to start from the first time a potential client visits your website. The prospect is probably visiting three or four inbound marketing agency websites and if they don’t know what makes you special in the first ten seconds, they might never come back.

But that’s an article for another day, today we’re talking about what happens when they actually reach out to you and ask to speak with you. 

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.