The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Tips And Techniques To Make Sure You Are Always On The Same Page With Your Clients When It Comes To Results

A lot of what I write about comes from my conversions with other agency owners. As part of my consulting and Cohort Coaching programs I talk to roughly 30 agency owners each month and one of the most consistent challenges is helping clients understand their own results.

In full transparency, Square 2 is challenged with the same set of issues. I think ALL agencies deal with this, some more than others and the common denominator in all these situations is—the client. This makes the key to helping clients understand their results ALL about you and how your team works with your clients, day in and day out.

Inbound marketing agency owners, welcome to one of the most challenging aspects of agency life. You need new customers to drive the agency growth but if you take everyone who comes along, you’ll be working with clients who never appreciate what you do, who never let you execute a profitable engagement, who never refer you and who consistently drive your team crazy.

It becomes a very difficult decision. Do you walk away from someone who wants to hire your inbound agency? Or do we take them on and try to turn this into a referenceable engagement. The best way to manage this is to understand what to look for during the sales process so you can limit the risk associated with bringing on challenging clients.

Welcome to the most significant challenge facing inbound marketing agency owners. It’s not staffing, it’s not sales, it’s not hiring and it’s not finance. The most significant challenge facing us all is helping our new and existing clients understand what to expect from an inbound marketing engagement.

For all of you who are positive you’re setting these upfront during the sales process, guess again. After 13 years of selling inbound marketing engagements of all shapes and sizes to clients of all shapes and sizes they rarely hear what you’re saying to them.

In fact, I’m sure that most inbound marketing agency clients don’t hear anything other than the magic word—leads.