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.
Here’s why you should proceed with caution when it comes to inbound sales services and software.
You Think Inbound Marketing Is Hard, Inbound Sales Is Twice As Hard
“We’re just not seeing the results so we’re going in a different direction.” We’ve all heard this before. Despite the facts, it’s only been three months, you didn’t approve our recommendations, your budget was dramatically too low to hit your lead goals—you’re still out. Inbound marketing is hard to do and harder to get your clients to understand.
Inbound sales is even harder. Now you are on the hook for revenue even though you’ll never talk to a single client prospect. You’re on the hook to change the behavior of every single sales person on your client’s sales team. You client will be putting the top line revenue of their company in your sweaty little hands. You’ll have sales reps questioning the methodology, telling you it won’t work, actively sabotaging the effort, purposefully not following the process and making it exponentially more difficult than it needs to be—and it will all be on you.
This means you need to be hyper focused on picking the perfect prospects for any inbound sales programs. They need to be supportive, they need to have progressive sales people, you need buy-in from the CEO and you need them to have a long-term—we’re NOT turning back mentality, for this to be successful, especially in your first couple of engagements.
Your Clients And Prospects Are Risk Adverse And This Is High Risk
People are risk adverse. Anything they can do to NOT put themselves in a precarious situation—they’ll do it. Messing around with marketing is risky, but messing around with sales is much riskier. After all, it’s the life blood of the company. If the inbound marketing initiative fails, they blame the agency and move one. If the inbound sales initiative fails, they might go out of business. That’s how they look at it.
This perspective is played out every time you have a conversation with prospects about inbound marketing and inbound sales. Does your sales process need improvement? Nope, we’re good. Fast forward six months when the leads start coming in and the revenue isn’t going up at the same rate, now you find out their sales reps can’t close the leads you’re generating. Your client new they had sales issues but thought that more leads would flow through their weak sales process and improvements in revenue would happen anyway. Unfortunately, it rarely works like that.
It Produces Less Revenue And Less Reoccurring Revenue
Most of your prospective clients know they need to be doing marketing all the time, at least they know they should be doing something. Inbound marketing makes that requirement more obvious. Once you start to see improvements from inbound, stopping or reducing the program usually produces a drop in results, so clients usually realize they’re going to need you long term. Of course, this produces a nice stream of steady, predictable reoccurring revenue for the agency.
But sales services isn’t typically purchased like that. Sales consulting, sales training and sales enablement are typically projects. They might be six month projects, but they’re projects nonetheless. Only a few sales ONLY coaching companies have ongoing sales coaching, mentoring and training that produces the same revenue month over month. Now you’re looking at smaller retainers, that last only four to six months. This means you have to work harder to get the engagement, work harder to deliver it and it produces less revenue for a shorter amount of time.
Even if you are able to get ongoing coaching, mentoring or training you won’t likely be looking at the $10,000 a month revenue that most marketing clients produce.
You Probably Can’t Deliver It With Your Current Team
The people who deliver inbound marketing are probably not going to be able to deliver inbound sales. We’ve done it both ways. Dedicated inbound sales resources and the same team that delivers inbound marketing services. The second scenario takes training, allocation challenges, and presents difficulties in recruiting. There just aren’t too many people with sales consulting and marketing consulting expertise.
Which means you’re going to need new people to deliver these new services. Now you’re working hard to get your inbound marketing team trained, configured properly and producing results for clients while you do the same exact effort for your new inbound sales practice. Double the challenge, double the risk, double the energy and cost. Make sure you’re planning for this from a budget perspective and make sure you have the time and energy to devote to this effort.
The Disruption Message Is Less Effective
When you tell a prospect that marketing has changed and ask them to tell you about their last purchase experience—most people see the changes. They don’t watch commercials, they don’t answer their phones, they do searches, and read emails. They get it. Their marketing is still from the 70s and its now 2017, something must change.
But when it comes to disrupting their status quo around sales—it’s much harder to do. To give you an example in a client sales training session a few years ago, while we were talking about not selling but guiding, advising, helping and becoming a prospect’s trusted advisor, one sales rep interrupted the session, adding to the conversation, “make a friend, lose a sale.” That was his way of saying—this sh** isn’t going to work.
“We know what we’re doing now isn’t working like it used to, but we don’t know what else to do and we’re not up for figuring it out.” Another quote from another client. While almost no one will say it like this, it’s exactly what they’re thinking.
“Just get me more leads and we’ll work though through our bad sales process improving revenue that way.” This is almost everyone’s go to thought process. While flawed, it’s difficult to get them to change and the messages required to get them to sit up and take notice are equally difficult to come up with.
One way we do this is to ask CEOs if they ever answer their phones in their offices or even if they have phones in their offices (most still do but more and more are moving to not having them) or how easy is it to get them on the phone. Almost every one admits they don’t answer the phone unless they recognize the number.
We then ask them how many of their sales organizations are still making cold-calls and most raise their hand. The irony of the conversation is most don’t make the connection until we point it out. They do realize the silliness of the situation at that point, but is that enough to get them to take action? Nope, not usually.
I think its going to take more time. Just like inbound marketing is early in the game, inbound sales is even earlier and the idea of a combined Revenue Team (sales and marketing working together as one department instead of two) like we wrote in our book, Fire Your Sales Team Today! is even earlier. We need more time for people to get comfortable with these concepts.
Now that I scared you away, you should all be thinking, its ok. “What’s hard to do is high value and if I can figure this out, we’re going to be better than a lot of other agencies.” That is 100% correct and I like the way you think. You want to also consider—it’s the right advice. Your clients and prospects should be hiring you to help them with sales. They should probably be hiring you to help them with sale first and marketing second, but they won’t.
I’m not trying to talk you out of offering inbound sales. My role in the community is as a guide. To help you step over or around major potholes. To share with you my experiences so that you can make better more informed decisions and get to your goals faster. The information in this article is to help you mitigate the risks and plan for them in a productive way. With that in mind, proceed accordingly.
Start Today Tip – Think carefully before you jump in and create the full funnel agency everyone is pushing you to create. Run thought an internal checklist before moving forward. Do we have the right clients for this? Do we attract the right prospects for this? Do we have the internal resources (people) to deliver this? Do we have the process and methodology to deliver this? Do we have the technical expertise? Then make sure you are up for the task associated with creating the stories, sales process, marketing messages and content to support it. This effort has the potential to distract you from your current activities. Go into this with both eyes open, then make a smart decision for your agency and your agency alone.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN ON Inbound!
