This webinar will cover how marketing agencies and consultants can:
1. Generate more sales-ready leads for their business
2. Improve their sales process and close longer and larger retainers upfront, instead of chasing project after project
3. Develop new service offerings that deliver greater ROI to clients, provide upsell opportunities and ensure client retention
3. Agenda Agency Training Program Update State of Marketing Services Industry 3 Ways to Grow Your Business Smarter Generate More Inbound Leads Offer More Lucrative Services Improve Your Sales Process Next Steps if You Want Help
4. Training Program Launch Delayed. But! Application: http://www.hubspot.com/partners/training-program/
11. You Do NOT Need to Wait for the Training Program⌠11 "Our agency is on pace to grow 130%-150% this year⌠Obviously there is demand in the market for these [inbound marketing] services.â - Paul Roetzer, PR 20/20 Lynton Web PR 20/20 âJoining the [HubSpot ] partner program ⌠has helped me grow my business beyond what I ever would have imagined a year ago,â - Dan Lynton, Lynton Web Case Studies: http://www.hubspot.com/customer-case-studies/?Tag=partner%20case%20study
12. Agenda Agency Training Program Update State of Marketing Services Industry 3 Ways to Grow Your Business Smarter Generate More Inbound Leads Offer More Lucrative Services Improve Your Sales Process Next Steps if You Want Help
21. Agenda Agency Training Program Update State of Marketing Services Industry 3 Ways to Grow Your Business Smarter Generate More Inbound Leads Offer More Lucrative Services Improve Your Sales Process Next Steps if You Want Help
22. HubSpot Grew by Inbound Marketing 2800 customers 150 employees $20 million
38. Kuno Creative is Poised for Huge Growth "With nearly a year of HubSpot and inbound marketing under our belt, we are ready to take our services offering to the next level. Our content creation, social media engagement and HubSpot services have consistently increased qualified leads and generated new sales month over month. Now we are preparing to expand both staff and inbound marketing efforts with a 24 month business plan aimed at driving revenues and profits to unprecedented levels.â- Chris Knipper, President, Kuno Creative 26
39. Agenda Agency Training Program Update State of Marketing Services Industry 3 Ways to Grow Your Business Smarter Generate More Inbound Leads Offer More Lucrative Services Improve Your Sales Process Next Steps if You Want Help
41. Lead Generation as Primary Service Offering Use Calls to Action to drive traffic to Landing Pages where site visitors can complete a form to download a Compelling Offer. 29 Compelling Offer Call to Action Landing Page
43. Services that Help Marketing Enable Sales Use Website-CRM Integration, Lead Scoring, Social Media Account Detection and Lead Intelligence to feed your clientâs sales teams w/ actionable information about their leads, so they can time and focus follow up calls and emails to maximize connect rates and close rates. 31
44. Closed Loop Reporting Enables Upselling Use Closed Loop Marketing Analytics to determine which marketing activities produce traffic, leads and sales. 32
45. Weâve Done the R&D for You⌠33 See All Recommended Services: http://services.hubspot.com
46. Agenda Agency Training Program Update State of Marketing Services Industry 3 Ways to Grow Your Business Smarter Generate More Inbound Leads Offer More Lucrative Services Improve Your Sales Process Next Steps if You Want Help
48. Use Data to Educate Prospects 36 Webinars: http://www.hubspot.com/partners/sales/
49. Help Prospects Set Numeric Marketing Goals 37 Download: http://zephyrmarketing.net/2010/03/31/an-inbound-marketing-traffic-calculator
50. Run Experiments to Confirm Commitment 38 Webinar: http://www.hubspot.com/partner-archived-webinar-using-your-hubspot-trial
51. Agenda Agency Training Program Update State of Marketing Services Industry 3 Ways to Grow Your Business Smarter Generate More Inbound Leads Offer More Lucrative Services Improve Your Sales Process Next Steps if You Want Help
52. How to Become a Successful HubSpot Partner http://www.hubspot.com/internet-marketing-company/partner-program-process/
53. Start A Trial The only way to truly learn the product & methodology is to understand its value is to use it! http://www.hubspot.com/free-trial-30-day-partners-creating-trial-for-their-clients
54. Are you Ready to Talk Turkey? Request a Consultation with a Senior Member of the HubSpot Team to discuss: http://www.hubspot.com/partners/marketing-agency-consultation-request
Hinweis der Redaktion
Before we get into it, I should tell you thatâŚ. touaremore invited to participate on Twitter. Use @hubspot to address any questions for feedback. If you want to follow along go to http://search.twitter.com and search for â@hubspotâ.Also use the gotomeeting question pane too. Thereâll be an opportunity to request a call from a real live human at HubSpot. Now that weâve built an internal team beyond me and marketing help to support our partners, this is actually the first time weâll invite prospective partners to have a conversation. So, Iâm extra special excited about that. Hopefully some of you are too.
Hereâs what weâll cover today. Iâll give you an update about the free agency training program which you all applied for. Weâll talk about a large amount of data that weâve analyzed to help you benchmark yourself against your competitoprs. Then, weâre going to dive into what I think are the 3 easiest and best ways to ensure you really grow your business. Then, weâll talk about next steps if you want our help.
First. I need to start out by apologizing. I was anticipating that only a few hundred marketing agencies and consultants would apply for the training program. The plan was to review the applications, interview 200 people to ensure theyâd have the werewithal to implement the training weâll provide in their marketing services business and then start the training. The plan was to start it this month. What happened was that we had 1,000+ applicants into the training program. So, instead of rejecting 800 applicants w/out even interviewing them, I pulled Mike Volpe, Mark Roberge and Brian Halligan into a room and we discussed how we could accommodate atleast 600 companies into the program. We decided to take 4 additional senior HubSpot team members (now a total of 6) and move them into a position where they focus entirely on helping marketing agencies. The plan is to move up to 10 people into the team by the end of the year. My team is now hard at work interviewing as many marketing agency applicants as we can. We also have tasked 3 of our consultant to continue creating additional training decks on top of the 20+ sessions we already have ready to go. So, while my team interviews applicants, we plan to do some training that is available to everyone who has applied. We realize that some of you were attracted because this was an exclusive training program, but we hope that youâll mostly be interested because the training will help you grow your business. As weâll talk about now, it wonât be too hard to outgrow your competition. Now is a time of unprecedented change in the marketing services industry. There is massive upheaval in the industry where firms that do mostly traditional advertising and marketing are struggling. Weâre seeing young new companies who focus on inbound internet marketing services prospering and growing rapidly. But, weâre also seeing many flail from technique to technique, making lots of mistakes and figuring this stuff out on their clients dimes. If youâre focused and willful enough to acknowledge that these changes are happening and that you havenât figured it all out yet, the training program will provide you with a roadmap to follow to build a fast growing, scale-able business. Today, I hope to give you a taste and help you get started on your growth path.
In the training program, youâre going to first learn the inbound marketing methodology; a proven step by step process for inbound marketing. The methodology will help you provide services to your clients that to will a) attract more traffic b) convert more of their visitors into leads c) convert more of their leads into sales, then analyze so you can continuously improve the results you deliver. Weâll review today how you can get started learning some of this right away.
Next, we will provide you with a roadmap for managing your sales process. We want to help you build your own business, first and foremost. In a time when marketing results are more important than ever to your clients, too many marketing agencies are struggling to build and scale their own sales and revenue. So, weâll provide you with our own hard-won process that has helped us bring on more than 2800 customers in less than 3 years. Weâll provide scripts that you can use, and proposals that you can customize. Again, weâll point you to some of these resources that weâve already published. Itâs not as polished as what weâll have in the training program. But thereâs plenty of material already published that you can start to leverage to increase your sales.
Concurrently, weâll provide you with a list of services you should begin offering to your prospects and clients. Using the HubSpot services marketplace, youâll learn what services to offer, as well as what other agencies are charging. Through the services marketplace, weâve helped our partners generate 100s of thousands of dollars of business in just a few short months, since itâs launch. Agencies offering these services to their own prospects and clients have generated millions more dollars in revenue. Put simply, these services are in demand, because they deliver an ROI. Youâll learn what services to add and how to deliver them. You can learn about these by visiting http://services.hubspot.com
Launching new services and selling is only half the battle. Youâll then need to predict, measure and deliver an ROI. Youâll learn how to use the HubSpot software to ensure that youâre delivering an ROI to your clients. This takes time and practice. But, you can start as many free trials as you want and start learning now.
Weâll also teach you an efficient process for onboarding and managing your clients. Again, weâll share with you what weâve done for our 1,000s of customers and how you can leverage our processes and people for your clients. This is the stuff Iâm most excited to share. HubSpotâs MOST successful customer segment are the customers who have hired a partner and gone through the HubSpotonboarding process. You can learn about our onboarding process once you start a free trial. While we havenât published the âHow to deliver your consultingâ, once youâve mastered this, our data shows that youâll produce a strong ROI for your clients.
Weâll provide training on how to build your business, how to staff, who to hire, how to manage your clients, and more. Youâll have to wait for the training program for this information.
Weâll cover all of that info extensively in the training program. But, you donât need to wait to start learning. More than 135 companies have made the decision to partner with HubSpot after realizing that we could help them with all of these things. In fact, weâve already created a large amount of training material specifically for our resellers. Many of you have discovered how to use a HubSpot free trial to improve your sales process. Many of you have leveraged the HubSpot Inbound Marketing methodology to streamline your consulting processes and expand your services offerings. You can leverage the HubSpot Services Marketplace to specifically see what services are in demand and then launch your own. At the end of this webinar, Iâll tell you how you can access and leverage many of these resources right away.
As part of the training program application, we asked lots of questions.As mentioned earlier, 1,000+ companies shared a lot of detailed financial information on the application. Weâve anonymized and analyzed this data to identify how healthy the marketing services industry is. Since weâre increasingly building our business to help marketing agencies, we selfishly wanted to get a feel for how healthy the industry is now and how much work we have ahead of ourselves. Now that weâve benchmarked the industryâs performance, itâs time to start improving the metrics. While weâre not surprised by the results, weâre certainly concerned by them. Iâm going to share some of the information weâve collected with you so you know how you compare with your peers.
Before I get to into it, I need to warn you. The picture isnât pretty. At HubSpot, we use red, yellow, green for every strategic project we have. Every month, we evaluate each project and assign it a red, green or yellow. It denotes whether we should stop working on it, go full steam ahead or proceed with caution. Using this method, Iâd suggest that the marketing services industry really needs to stop, examine what they hell theyâre doing and fix some things before proceeding. Letâs get into the data, though, so you can see for yourself. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wlodi/2532289914/
As you can see from this graph, the majority of the marketing companies surveyed have less than 5 active retainer clients. Only about 15% have more than 11. That would be okay if these retainers were high dollar amounts per month.
But, as you can see from this graph, the average monthly retainer size for the vast majority of our respondents is less than $500 per month. Thatâs less than a ½ page ad in a small cityâs 3rd largest newspaper. And we all know how much value that brings to your average business these days. You can also see that less than 25% of our applicants have a retainer larger than $2500 per month. Thatâs the number that I suggest our resellers use for an engagement for a small business - just to get started. Most agencies try to bill around $100/hour. Itâs hard to make an impact on someoneâs business w/out atleast spending that much time helping them with their marketing. Itâs hard to make an impact for a client for less than $2500/month. Itâs also very hard to build a marketing services business w/out consistent cash flow. Since most of our applicants have very few low dollar retainers, itâs apparent that many are struggling to build a scale-able business. So, based on this data alone, it looks like we have our work cut out for ourselves.
This chart confirms that very few agencies generate their revenue through retainers. Most agencies are generating revenue through projects, which as I know from first hand experience in the event marketing business, is a very hard way to scale a business. Itâs not fun when youâre not certain if youâll be able to make payroll or pay all of your bills a month from now.
The problem seems to get worse when we look at the small number of new clients that marketing agencies tend to sign up each month. As you can see from this graph, the vast vast majority of applicants sign up 2 or fewer clients each month. Since these are most likely projects and not retainers, the problem becomes very apparent. Thereâs one possible saving grace, though. Maybe marketing agencies are signing up 1-2 new clients per month for large dollar projects.
But, as this chart shows, unfortunately, thatâs not the case. The problem looks even worse when we look at the data that shows the average project size. Almost 50% of our respondents said that their average project size is < $2500. Almost 25% said that their average project size is less than $1,000. Less than 15% of you are signing up clients for projects of $10k or more. Even at that rate, itâs difficult to scale a business. Most of the people on the right side of this graph are web developers. From conversations even with web developers, there is increasingly more competition and prices are being driven down for high end web development jobs.
So, based on all of this data, weâve made the conclusion that most agencies arenât very good at marketing or selling their own services. This is confirmed when we look at the results of the question, âWhatâs your Biggest Challenge as a Marketing Agencyâ. The most popular answer is âNot generating enough leadsâ. That confirms that marketing agencies arenât very good at creating demand for their own services. Weâll dive in and share why HubSpot and our resellers donât have this problem and how you can eliminate the issue for your business. The response âcash flow is too variableâ confirms that most agencies are way too dependent on project revenue, instead of retainer revenue. The easiest way Iâve seen this fixed is by changing the way agencies sell. Weâll discuss this today and point you to some learning resources that can help. âDifficulty signing up new clientsâ again points to the fact that marketing agencies need help with sales and marketing. Iâve also witnessed first hand time and time again how the âright mix of servicesâ will accelerate client acquisition for agencies. This ties into âDifficulty staying up to date with technologyâ which is the 4th largest challenge agencies shared. HubSpot was formed with the mission of making modern marketing simple for small businesses. Weâre also baked the latest trends in marketing right into our software and methodology including seo, social media, business blogging, lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing automation, and closed loop sales and marketing. So, weâll talk about how you leverage us to not only stay up to date with new technology, but to leverage new technology to deliver greater value and to sign up more clients for longer and larger retainers.
During the rest of the webinar, Iâm going to share 3 ways that you could and probably should explore if youâre serious about growing your business. First, Iâm going to suggest that you eat your own cooking. Iâm going to suggest that you stop doing client work for atleast 2 hours per day and focus on your own inbound lead generation. Itâs going to be hard, but the first lesson I learned from my sales coach was âNever stop filling the top of your funnelâ. With inbound marketing, marketing fills the top of the sales funnel. So, you must discipline yourself to spend the time marketing your business and generating leads for your services. The MOST scale-able and low cost way to build your funnel is by generating inbound sales leads. We have this down to a science at HubSpot. Besides our reseller program, our lowest cost marketing channel is our organic internet marketing activities, which includes SEO, blogging and social media traffic sources. Of course, we do other things to convert that traffic into leads, but thatâs the cheapest source of leads in our business. All other methods of acquiring a new customer are multiples of that number.
HubSpot grew by eating our own cooking. We are our best customer. We use inbound marketing to build our business. I joined the company in November 2007. I remember celebrating when we signed up our 100th customer. It was 15 of us in a room. 4 people in sales. Brian Halligan, our CEO, was on half of our calls with us. Today, we have more than 2800 customers, 150+ employees and an annual run rate around $20M.
This is how we do it. We do it using our own software and the inbound marketing methodology. We publish content, promote it via social media, the blogosphere and email and optimize it to be found via search engines. We create compelling offers and drive our traffic to landing pages where the offers can be downloaded in exchange for contact information. We use our analysis tools to identify whatâs working and do more of the stuff that works and less of what doesnât.
We grew because our marketing team focused on generating inbound sales leads for our sales team. Back when I started, there were only 2 people on the marketing team. When we had 3 people on our marketing team, is when we began hitting our stride. At HubSpot now, marketing is everyoneâs job. We all contribute to the blog. We are all active on social media. Many of us do webinars. In your company, if you want to grow, you should make sales and marketing your main focus. It shouldnât be done only when youâre not billing. It should be everyoneâs job. Weâve recently been working with some larger PR firms. PR firms are usually set up so that everyone has motivation to bring in new business. It works really well. Make sure you align your organization the same way. If youâre a one person shop, just start doing inbound lead generation. Start filling the top of your funnel.
Now, many of you are going to say that itâs not fair to compare HubSpot to my small agency. So, if you take a high level view, maybe youâre right. I could argue that it should actually be easier for you. At HubSpot, we have investors who are looking for a very big return. We have to sign up 200+ customers this month to hit our goals. But, we have very little hours we have to deliver after we sign up a customer. All you can probably handle (if you sell them the right services on retainer) is 1 or 2 new clients per month, based on the fact that 1 of your employees should only be able to handle 3-5 retainer clients at capacity. So your lead generation goals are actually much lower. That aside, I figured itâd make sense to share some stats from one of our partners. Iâd encourage you to watch the two case studies from PR 2020 and Lynton Web on our website. Another very successful HubSpot reseller is Kuno Creative. This is a screen capture of their HubSpot analytics showing the traffic theyâve generated from search engines, other websites and direct traffic. As you can see from the chart, theyâve generated 258 leads over the last year and theyâve acquired 12 clients from it.
Before I cut and pasted a bunch of Kunoâs data, I asked them if I could share their stats and how theyâve done what theyâve done. They also sent me a quote yesterday which I thought was worth sharing. You can read it for yourself. Based on my interaction with Kuno and based on their track record of delivering value to their clients, as measured by our software, Iâm confident they will grow significantly this year based on doing their own inbound lead generation and by enhancing their service offerings. They are on the right track. If I were a social media marketer, Iâd stop reading Chris Brogan and David Meerman Scott and start reading Kuno Creativeâs blog.
As Chris alluded to in his quote, theyâre launching a bunch of new service offerings. Weâve been working with many of our resellers to help them identify what services offer the greatest value and ROI to clients, that also enable our resellers to increase their retainers and margins. Itâs really pretty simple. The problem with many agencies is that theyâre offering the wrong services. The two largest types of âmarketing companiesâ who applied for our training program are web designers and social media marketers. We all know that there are way too many web designers out there. Theyâve multiplied faster than financial planners in the last decade. Whatâs really scare is the fact there are so many people who have jumped on the social media bandwagon. When my team talks to social media marketers, we havenât found any of them have built a business around just that. Itâs a hot topic, and if you follow HubSpot, you know that weâre obsessed with social media marketing too. But, itâs the worst converting source of traffic for us. It generates the least qualified lead for us. Social media marketing does not make a complete service offering for a marketing agency. Itâs one tactic in a healthy service offering. But, it shouldnât be the meat or even the lead service offering. So, what should a marketing company lead with?
What every marketing agency should deliver, first and foremost, is ROI. Now, I know thatâs not a service in the classic sense of a âmarketing serviceâ. Of course, ROI should be the outcome of the service. But, too often, agencies let their prospects pigeonhole them into a predefined budget for a pre-defined project they already got approved. The difference between designing a website and designing a website that generates an ROI is huge. The difference between helping someone connect with their customers and fans via social media is a lot different than generating an ROI from social media. The difference between doing SEO and generating an ROI from SEO services is HUGE. Too many agencies lead with tactics that might produce more traffic if done right. But, very few agencies deliver services that generate leads and sales for their clients. So, letâs talk about the services that deliver the ROI and letâs talk about how you can start delivering them.
Lead generation is the quickest way to start delivering an ROI from social media, blogging and SEO. Itâs a pretty simple process that very few companies do right. Weâll use Kuno as an example, once again, of a company who is doing a great job at their own lead generation, as well as for their clients. To do lead generation right, you must create âcalls to actionâ and place them on your website or email or really anywhere. These calls to action should direct your traffic to landing pages where your site visitor can complete a form to download the compelling offer.
Generating conversions is just the beginning of converting traffic into sales. Increasingly, marketing is expected to turn leads into sales ready warm leads. Using email marketing, lead segmentation and lead nurturing via email using blogs and other premium content like white papers, ebooks and webinars. Thereâs a huge opportunity for marketing agencies to really help improve lead to customer conversion rates for clients using these techniques.
It doesnât end there, though. Technology and tools like HubSpotâs CRM integration, lead scoring, social media account detection and analytics that attaches web visit information to lead recordsâŚ. All enables marketing to supply intelligence directly to sales. This enables a salesperson to prioritize their calls to the leads that are most engaged. It enables a salesperson to initiate conversations that are relevant based on what pages a lead views on a website. It also enables a salesperson to wake up opportunities that would otherwise appear to have gone cold. Marketing is really improving sales efficiency and productivity. Agencies that deliver training and services that enables this are making themselves indispensible to their clientâs marketing AND sales organizations.
Agencies that are using closed loop reporting are also getting the data back from their clientâs sales teams that enables them to actually calculate the ROI of their services. Not only can they determine the ROI from their overall services. They can actually see which marketing activities and campaigns are generating a stronger or weaker ROI. In this case, you can see which social media site is producing the best visitor to lead and lead to customer conversion rate. Closed loop marketing analytics also lets agencies determine which email marketing, keywords from organic and paid search traffic, referring sites or really any campaign they run. This helps agencies determine which activities to repeat and which to tweak or axe. This enables an agency to continuously improve ROI. This also â and hereâs the key â gives the ability to marketing agencies to propose new services and campaigns to their client which enables them to upsell or increase retainers over time.
So, those are some of the services that growing agencies are providing to their clients. Thereâs many more services that make up a complete inbound marketing service offering. Weâve been doing the R&D for our partners, leveraging the inquiries from our 2800+ customers and gradually recruiting our best resellers to offer them. Visit http://services.hubspot.com to learn more about the services you should be offering on your website to your prospects and clients.
So, assuming you follow this advice and you start generating more leads for your own business, and then you start qualifying your prospectâs needs around these new service offerings, youâre going to also need to think about how you improve your sales process. In order to sell longer and larger retainers upfront, youâll need to be as good at selling value as you are at delivering it.
Most agencies follow the same sales process they learned from last centuryâs ad men. Theyâre showing up with pretty pictures, portfolios and slightly customized proposals. While your design work may win you web design jobs. And your press clipping might win you some PR work, in order to secure a client for a long term inbound marketing retainer, you need to demonstrate to them that you can help them grow their business. The problem with most agencies is that when they write proposals or do pitches, itâs all about them. Theyâre guessing that what theyâre pitching is relevant to their prospect. Itâs the equivalent of closing your eyes and throwing a dart at the dartboard. Itâs going to be hard to hit the mark this way. Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gozalewis/3351037214/
Instead of pitching tactics, itâs critical to use data in your sales process in order to start educating your prospects about what they should hire you to do. Competitor grader, which is accessible via a HubSpot free trial, provides a scorecard for your prospects vs their competitors and gives you the data to start educating your prospect about SEO. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Iâve done several webinars which explain a new approach to using data in your sales process. We recently shared 50+ marketing charts that show benchmark data for SEO, blogging, social media and lead generation that you should use during your sales process as a way to educate your prospects about the impact that inbound marketing could have on their businessâs growth.
For most prospects, I can guarantee that no marketing company has ever asked them about their revenue goals or helped them calculate their traffic and lead generation goals based on them. Download this calculator and start using it in your sales process. Your prospects â atleast the ones that are serious about managing their company by the numbers â will appreciate that youâre relating inbound marketing back to their financial goals.
You shouldnât stop there, though. Most prospects will have no clue how to turn website traffic into leads. You should run experiments in order to show them how itâs done. You can charge them a nominal fee and leverage a HubSpot free trial to show them how you can take their existing traffic or email list and convert it into warmer sales ready leads. At this point, youâll be in a much better position to write a meaningful proposal for your clients that aligns your services with their business goals. During the training program, weâll spell out much more detail about how you can leverage these approaches in your sales process. But, if youâre serious about growing your sales, you should study the webinars weâve already published.
As part of the training program application, we asked lots of questions.As mentioned earlier, 1,000+ companies shared a lot of detailed financial information on the application. Weâve anonymized and analyzed this data to identify how healthy the marketing services industry is. Since weâre increasingly building our business to help marketing agencies, we selfishly wanted to get a feel for how healthy the industry is now and how much work we have ahead of ourselves. Now that weâve benchmarked the industryâs performance, itâs time to start improving the metrics. While weâre not surprised by the results, weâre certainly concerned by them. Iâm going to share some of the information weâve collected with you so you know how you compare with your peers.
Your trial gives you access to the methodology located at success.hubspot.com
My team is 4 of our most senior team members. Weâre adding 2 additional team members to the team next week. If youâd like to discuss how we can you help you, request a call.During this call, we typically talk about -The challenges that are holding you back from growth- Ways to increase client acquisition and retention rates- Ways to transition from project work to securing larger and longer retainers- Recruiting, training and managing employees and contractors successfully- Identifying service offerings that can provide additional value to your clients and growth potential for you- Ways to stay steps ahead of your competition in your knowledge of how to apply technology to marketing- Setting your inbound lead generation goals based on your sales and revenue goals