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Want To Know What's Going On In The Agency Selection Process? Just Ask Your Prospects

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Feb 7, 2019 8:22:00 AM

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Inbound Agency SelectionThe past two years have felt very different than the previous 14 years, at least for me. As a curious person and one who likes to solve problems, I started looking into it. One approach I took was to ask our prospects and new clients more questions about their buyer journey.

Their answers, comments and feedback have been eye-opening. It’s been directing our strategy for the past 12 months, but it continues to be challenging. In short, everyone seems paralyzed with confusion and apprehension AND as agency owners, we’re not helping ourselves.

Here’s a comment I picked up from a prospect last week.

This is a person we spoke with a year ago and he decided to go with another agency. He reconnected with us at Square 2 over the past few weeks, and we’ve been exploring how we might be able to help. Look at his honest comments after I asked him to share his buyer journey feedback with me.

Absolutely, I appreciate the question.

Nothing changed in terms of my goals and desire to potentially collaborate. It's more around how we deploy our relatively limited resources.  We're small, but we're spending big on biz dev (including marketing).

What I'm seeing now is that the team (his internal team) has zero capacity between servicing clients and working on some corporate development initiatives to focus effectively on supporting a big marketing effort. We have a lot going on in terms of direct outreach, a big PR effort underway with our CEO and head of design, plus launching an online course that's also a feeder for potential prospects. That's a lot to manage for now.

You're right that it's hard to sift through the options out there.  There are good quality options and others that are nothing more than spam. It's not only a challenge to determine which is which, but also choose from the many approaches out there (click funnels, content-driven inbound, etc.) and compare them not only to each other but also other types of biz dev. I also come across companies that have no experience working with agencies vs. other B2B companies. I do have some options on the table for very tight funnel-type campaigns that I am thinking through, but that still feels like a subset of inbound.

I think I have a good handle on things conceptually, but the partner (his current agency) I chose just didn't go far enough in terms of strategy before launch, and the implications are clear. I've slowed down the effort to a near crawl, so I don't keep investing without more clarity on the best approach.

Open and honest feedback from prospects who decided NOT to hire you is rare, so I thought I would share it with you. It’s not the first time I’ve heard similar stories, but it does provide insight into what prospects are dealing with when deciding what to do to drive revenue.

They’re Confused by The Sheer Number Of Marketing Options

Over the years marketing has become much more complex. Forget the high-level approach like inbound, outbound, demand gen, content marketing or account-based marketing, I’m talking about the sheer number of tactics that need to be executed simultaneously to drive results.

One of the benefits of working with an agency is supposed to be clients get it all done, at once, with a single team of people. They work on your website, create content, run email campaigns, promote with social media, optimize conversions, create and promote videos, blog, nurture leads, support sales, and report on the metrics associated with progress.

But this just scratches the surface and doesn’t include any conversation around strategy like targeting, messaging, differentiation and analytics. It doesn’t talk about the technology required to do all this at once in an orchestrated way.

It’s not surprising a company’s internal marketing team might be confused or conflicted, or not doing enough, or not getting the best results, or uncertain how to prioritize all these tactics.

And we haven’t even talked about aligning marketing with sales or bringing marketing into help with the customer experience. How can we expect anyone to make sense of all this?

They’re Confused By The Number Of Agencies Available To Help

If agencies were easy to identify, classify and select, the world might be simpler for companies, but that’s not the case.

“It’s hard to sift through the options and some are nothing better than spam.” It’s very difficult to separate the good agencies from the average agencies. It’s hard to know what kind of agency you need when you’re not sure what types of tactics to utilize and it’s almost impossible to know how strategic any agency is going to be unless you know the right questions to ask them before you get started.

What might be even more challenging is knowing enough to ask about strategy or to want to even work on strategy. As our prospect identifies, he didn’t realize the importance of strategy until he started to see “random acts of marketing” and we hear this over and over again.

Today you still have your website agencies, your pay per click agencies, your SEO agencies and your social media agencies. Factor on top of this, your inbound agencies, your demand generation agencies, and now your growth agencies.

You also have your cheap outsourced, off shore agencies who can do everything anyone else can do for 25% of the cost. The options for experienced CMOs are challenging enough, let alone an inexperienced CEO trying to find the right partner for his company.

There are over 3,000 agencies in the HubSpot Partner Program. They look alike, tell a similar story, share the same content, and offer very similar services. How does someone decide who to hire? The answer is going to upset you. They pick the cheapest or second cheapest option. It’s not their fault.  When everything looks similar, why not pick the cheaper option?

They’re Confused By The Services Agencies Offer

What potential clients should be doing and who they should be working with is challenging, but now layer on top of those two issues how agencies talk about the services they provide. It’s a triple play of confusion.

The smart agencies have figured out they can’t provide a laundry list of services to clients. They can’t contractually commit to 12 months of deliverables. Doing that limits what they can work on, makes shifting client deliverables problematic, and often prevents them from delivering top notch results.

The best agencies know they have to be data-driven and respond to the results in an agile way. They need to respond not a flexible way, but an actual Agile Methodology way. Today’s marketing is responsive. You know quickly what’s working and what’s not working. There are levers that can be tuned today that produce better results tomorrow.

Unfortunately, this makes the client engagement much trickier to manage. It requires more communication, more education, more explanation and more trust on the client side. Trust is very hard to find amidst all this confusion.

What Should You Be Doing To Help?

I mention this not because I’m frustrated or venting. I’m writing about this in an attempt to help other agency owners work through this current environment. If people are so confused, there must be something we can do to help.

Here are things you should be thinking about as agency owners and actions you should be taking to help all of us change the narrative, change the current situation and put us all in a much better position to help businesses execute more effective sales, marketing and customer service.

1. Keep on educating people. This education is not just about landing pages, email and Facebook posting but on the big, strategic issues facing companies today.

2. Stop competing on price. We (all of us) add a ton of value to the companies we work with and that value is worth more than $1,500, $3,500 or even $5,000 a month in a retainer.

3. Don’t expect a single software product like HubSpot or Drift to drive a huge increase in results for any client. Without strategy, tactics and analytics, marketing software is never going to produce enough results to justify the investment.

4. Don’t skip the strategy. If you read our prospect’s comments, he knows they skipped the strategy and now he’s regretting it. Make sure all your clients and prospects know that they need to invest in the strategy and be patient while you work on the strategy.

5. Don’t make promises you can’t keep just to close the deal. Work with the prospect to understand their current metrics, where they need their metrics to be to hit their stated goals and in what timeframe. Then make it clear what level of investment is required to get them to their goals. If their goals and investment profile don’t line up, help them reset one of the two variables or walk away.

6. Stop taking orders or doing exactly what the client wants you to do. If they don’t know what to do then why are you listening to them? You have more experience so use it. If you don’t know what to do, stop pretending you do and get some training or practical experience before you start telling clients what they should be doing.

These are all good moves and over time they should help our entire industry and your agency to elevate up and improve your position in the marketplace. But in the meantime, stop thinking about your agency as a marketing agency and start thinking about it as professional services firm.

Think more like a physician, attorney or an CPA. Would any of these types of companies shortcut their process, discount a proposal or do anything their clients instructed them to do if they thought it was not in their client’s best interest?

More importantly, would you ever shop around for the cheapest doctor, lawyer or accountant to handle your situation? No, no and no.

Marketing and sales execution are so complicated today that companies cannot do it on their own. They need agencies like ours and we need to be paid according to the value of those services we provide. Keep telling yourself this, make agency decisions that align to this thinking and you’ll see revenue go up, your agency will grow, and you’ll make a lot more money.  

New Call-to-actionStart Today Tip – There’s no “good time” to start thinking differently about your agency and the value of the services you provide your clients. Nor is there a “good time” to start talking differently to your prospects. This can all start today. You just have to jump in and start. You’re going to be very surprised at how your prospects respond. They are NOT going to yell at you, NOT going to push back, nor will they be surprised at your pricing when they understand the value you’re proposing. This is not really about what you charge, but what you think you’re worth and what you are doing for your clients. You’re NOT building them a website, you’re installing a revenue generation machine. Ask them what that would be worth to them? That will give you an indicator of the difference between what you think you’re worth and what your prospect thinks you’re worth when you position your value correctly. You can do it.

Agencies 2 Inbound – Focusing On Helping Agencies Who Want To Grow

Topics: agency selection, prospect buyer journey

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