If you’ve been paying attention to what other agency owners are talking about you probably heard something about Agile Marketing.
Maybe you know what it is, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve tried it, maybe you are considering it, maybe you’re already doing it. Regardless, its time you all got comfortable enough with it to think about it for your inbound marketing agency.
Agile marketing is the application of software development processes in the delivery of marketing services to clients. In short, we’ve adapted how highly efficient software firms deliver software to the way we deliver inbound marketing services to clients.
Here’s a little insight into what we’ve been doing and how it’s been benefiting us.
Why Did We Do It?
Inbound marketing agencies are different than almost every other type of shop. We have labor intensive businesses, we do a lot of the same work day in and day out, we habitually over service our clients to get them results, the clients always want more and there are very few regular team wins.
This made it difficult to keep our best people, it made it difficult to keep great people engaged, it made it difficult to be highly profitable and it made it challenging to get clients really amazing results. We could have limped along like we were, everything would have been fine, but we don’t settle for fine, we’re looking for remarkable.
In addition to all this, our experience with inbound kept pulling us back to wanting a more flexible engagement that was more driven by data and program performance instead of what the contract stated. We felt like we could get clients better results if we were not slaves to our agreements.
All this pointed to Agile. Agile is perfect for complex and creative tasks. Agile is data driven. Agile provides a prioritization structure for work and a self-managed, collaborative team model. All of this sounded like it might be perfect for what we were doing.
What Exactly Did We Do?
After some research, we decided to run a pilot with a small group of people. We selected one of our teama, to test Agile and Srum and started our pilot in September. We trained everyone, purchased new project management software, hired an Agile Consultant and went to town.
We converted all our engagements into points and started doing daily stand ups, weekly Sprint retros, weekly Sprint planning and weekly backlog grooming.
For those who are unfamiliar with the terminology of Scrum, the daily stand ups are to keep the team focused day in and day out, to remove daily impediments and to make sure the team is aligned with priorities. The weekly Sprint retros are to evaluate the previous Sprint, make suggestions on how to improve it and to measure team member happiness during the Sprint.
The weekly Sprint planning was to create the package of deliverables for each Sprint. We started with weekly Sprints and since have moved to two week Sprints. The planning is done by the entire team and what they agree to delivering is what gets promised to clients.
The last ritual is called backlog grooming and that’s done between the strategist/consultant and the client. Today we do 30-day planning sessions with every client ever month and this helps us prioritize what needs to get done and helps us know what we’ll need to plan to do during upcoming Sprint planning. The grooming gets done by the marketing people to prepare the backlog for assignment when the team does their Sprint planning.
Once we were up and running we ran the pilot for three months or 12 full sprints. The learning was off the charts. We found our team configurations were off, we learned we needed more cross functional team members, we found out how many points a team could process in a week (this is also called Velocity), we saw the impact on the team when we lost a team member, we saw what could be automated and what had to be done manually—in short, we learned a lot.
What Value Has It Delivered?
In January, we called the pilot complete and announced the company was going all in on Agile and the Scrum methodology. It took us about four months to get the rest of the team to a state of steady delivery using the new approach.
This experience changed almost everything we do at Square 2 Marketing. It changed our agreements with clients. It changed the way we deliver services. It changed the way we do strategy. It changed the way we do websites. It changed the way we talk to clients about their programs and how we manage their expectations, budgets and priorities.
The results have been dramatic. We now have flexible retainers, which means they can move every month and the early data shows they move up 90% of the time and down 10% of the time. We now have evergreen, never ending agreements. Since we have flexible retainers there’s no need for a 12-month contract. We’ve had more clients get results faster and we haven’t lost a single client because of underperformance since June of this year.
Clients are seeing much better results in much shorter time frames. We saw a 10x improvement in leads in 5 months instead of 12 months. We saw site traffic double in 60 days instead of six months. We saw hundreds of leads a month in the third month instead of having to wait for the second year of our relationship. All in all, the improvement to results has been impressive.
What’s Left To Still Do?
Our journey has been far from perfect. We haven’t realized the promise in Jeff Sutherland’s book of twice the work with half the effort. We’ve probably seen a 20% improvement in efficiency and we still have issues with scoping/estimating during the sales process. We’re still over servicing clients but that’s dropped to 8% over budget for the last twomonths as opposed to, in some cases, 50% over what was budgeted.
We just started having 30-day planning conversations with clients, so while that’s going well, we can get better at that. We’re not tracking time anymore, so there is some question as to exactly what it’s costing us to deliver our services, but we’re honing in on a methodology to track that without tracking time. We have a much better system for allocation. Instead of doing number of clients or revenue, we now look at allocations based on points purchased and the team’s ability to deliver points.
We’re probably about 75% of the way towards our goal, with another three to six months still needed to polish the rough edges.
Here’s What You Should Be Doing
If you like what you hear, then your simple starting point is to do your homework. Talk to as many people as possible, do your research, study the other agencies working like this and assess the situation at your shop. This might be perfect for you but it might be a huge mistake trying to undertake something like this.
The other aspect to keep in mind is we already know how to do inbound marketing. So I’d suggest that if you’re still learning inbound and feeling like you have more to learn on the deployment of inbound to drive leads for clients—my advice to you is focus on that first and then work on Agile after you’re comfortable with your deliver methodology around inbound programs.
I’ve said it over and over again. Every agency is a little different and just because we use Agile doesn’t mean you should. But it’s my role to share ideas with you, get you thinking and then help you decide whether this makes sense for your agency or not.
But if you’re having some of the same challenges we were and the strategic goal for your agency is growth then I think it makes sense to a least consider what would be involved in taking your agency to Agile.
Start Today Tip – Don’t enter into this lightly. No matter what your size, waking up tomorrow and moving to Agile and Scrum might not be the smartest move you’ve made this year. If you like the sound of it. If you think it’s going to work for you then consider all aspects and make the moves thoughtfully, strategically and with a plan of attack. Regardless, its going to help in a number of challenging areas.
If you’d like to see what adding agile marketing can do for your agency, or if you’d like to see what lessons we learned over the past 12 months installing agile and Scrum at Square 2 Marketing then register for my session on Friday, November 11th at INBOUND 2016 in Boston. Click the link and see my session, then pre-register to save your seat. These sessions fill up quickly and you don’t want to be left standing outside.
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