The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Inbound 19 is right around the corner and if last year is any indication, this year is going to be filled with ideas about how to work with clients across marketing, sales , and customer service. HubSpot’s Platform play is going to be in full swing come September 3rd in Boston.

The question to agency owners is, “Should my shop be providing services across all three areas?” The answer is maybe. Let’s dig into this question to prepare you all for Inbound.

It’s easy to get swept up in the orange wave associated with Inbound and I think it’s important to arrive with a plan so you can make the most of your time in Boston.

Should my agency provide services to clients beyond the marketing services we’re already providing?

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.

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.

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.

If you haven’t noticed, HubSpot is full court pressing their new Sales suite. What had been HubSpot CRM, Signals and Sidekick are now all bundled together into HubSpot Sales. They also debuted a very well-produced Inbound Sales Certification and video training series that I highly recommend. But what does that mean to inbound agencies?

It means you better get your sales enablement suite of services ready for prime time because people are going to start asking you to help them close the leads you’re generating for them. They may be asking you already, but if they’re not—they will be in the next few months.

Say what you want about HubSpot, but they are a content, PR and story generating machine. They are going to crank up the volume on this “sales is broken” story very aggressively over the summer and leading into Inbound 2016. Now is the time for agencies to take advantage of that coming wave.

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.