Agency Backstage Pass

In 2013 I first met Jouni & his wife, Leila, when they purchased HubSpot to set up an Inbound Department in their long-established Finnish agency. Fast forward to today, I am working with them to grow our their Inbound Team which is now part of a larger agency of nearly 200 people called Zeeland Family. Every time I visit them I learn something new and this trip was no different. We covered a multitude of topics here are some of them you can look forward to learning more about. How they have embraced Growth Driven Design and praise to the legendary Luke Summerfield  What they learned from our friends at MPull How Sprint works for their agency projects. A super tool to help explain complex processes called Real Time Board Funnelytics - to help map out a buyers journey for prospects and clients. You need a technical team to implement GDD properly as they will fully understand the CMS. You cannot increase visitors for all of your clients - sometimes industries have low traffic - this is ok now you can work on improving conversion, are their websites mobile optimized? Look at the data using tools like hotjar and heatmaps really help  You have to buy traffic - yes even in this Inbound world getting PPC and Facebook ads to jump start your inbound campaigns is ok if done correctly. Websites today need to be more than a brochure, they must have a story, design, text, and videos. Personally, Jouni loves using the project management tool Asana Number one Tip for agencies starting out today? - Go all in . . . be committed :) If you would like to book a time to speak to Clodagh about how to grow your Digital Agency head over to www.growitgroup.com

Wes Schaeffer a.k.a. The Sales Whisperer®, an obsessively pragmatic entrepreneur, sales trainer, copywriter, and speaker who believes marketing is just selling in print. He is the author of three books on sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship and has helped 2,400 of the world’s top speakers, authors, coaches, and sales professionals achieve nearly miraculous growth by implementing his repeatable, transferable, and proven processes. His agency has a been an Infusionsoft partner since 2008, HubSpot partner since 2014. He has helped over 2,355 of the world's top professional salespeople, sales managers, business owners and entrepreneurs in 29 countries sell more, faster, at a higher margin, with less stress, and more fun. On today's interview, Wes shares with us his methodology - Process before Login He uses Asana as their project management tool of choice. The importance of taking a pen and paper and drawing things out, the journey you wish your prospect to take on your website for an example - before you start building it out on your chosen tool. Remember to keep things simple, a confused mind says no. Don't give prospects too many options - they came to you with a problem - solve that then move to the next. Be comfortable with Hurt & Rescue. Get into a mastermind group, or hire a mentor or an accountability partner to help you get things done. Be the Product of the Product (you sell). You can contact Wes here Thank you for listening, see you next time, Clodagh

I met Abhinav Sahai after my talk at Inbound 17 and he was so enthusiastic about his agency I knew he would be great to interview. On today's podcast, we discussed how he started his agency Niswey with a business colleague and his referral as his first two clients and they are still with him today 7 years later. How Asana is his project management tool of choice for the agency and why. The word that is the backbone of his agency’s methodology  A new SEO & SEM tool that is really helping their B2B clients Ahrefs  By aiming to solve for their clients they came up with a new tool Irayo  His top productivity tool . . . can you guess what it is? A reminder to agencies to look at including Ad campaigns for clients to help them get results as part of your overall strategy. If you are looking for white label services for your own agency you can check out their website Knowiz Thank you, Abhinav, you were a fantastic guest  Enjoy, Clodagh

On this episode we speak to Tracy Graziani from Graziani Multimedia in Mansfield, Ohio who have been in operation as an agency for over 3 and a half years. We talk about . . . The importance of getting the project management of your clients under control to reduce scope creep and help you stay on schedule and that a good tool can show them visually the importance of them completing the tasks that are requested of them. Better on boarding practises are key to successful client engagements. How.a tool called Likeable Hub (local in 2018) that helps boosting of social media posts for clients. The pitfalls of hosting and how Flywheel is helping to reduce the horror stories. Investing in a sales prospecting tool called Prospectify is helping them to cut their prospecting time by 2/3 and is supplying them with high quality leads to supplement their own Inbound activities. Thank you Tracy for the insights on the tools you use and how they help you be a Rockstar Agency

Barbro Fagerbakk is a co-Founder & Head of Sales for Inbound Norway has been doing Inbound Sales for over 3 years. She has worked in growing two agencies to the tiered ranks of the HubSpot Partner Program and today she shares some new tools on how she prospects and reports her sales successes with us. Barbro talks to about a new tool she is using called Vainu to help her prospect for good fit clients and her account management team can also use it to find potential up-sell opportunities with their current clients. Another challenge that Inbound Agencies face is the ability to create useful reports not just for their own sales and forecasting but to quickly create reports for their clients in a quick and timely fashion. Barbro and the team at Inbound Norway use Databox to help them report the numbers needed for their monthly board meetings while creating valuable client reports quickly. If you would like to share your Inbound Agency tools with us please fill out our Interview Form If you would like to book a time to speak to Clodagh about how to grow your Inbound Agency head over here

Charles McKay is founder and CEO of SYNX, a B2B digital marketing agency based in Australia, they focus on Marketing Automation, Demand Generation, Lead Generation and Social Selling. He has built a very successful I.T. Business from the ground up prior to SYNX. bringing advanced technology skills to digital marketing, along with the ability to explain it simply to his customers, this allows SYNX to stand out in an overcrowded under-educated market. On this episode Charles shares his unique perspective on how his agency has evolved over the years. He has a lot of experience with software, project management and is still on the search for an all in one business management software for his agency.

Daryn Smith is the co-founder and director of MPULL, an inbound marketing agency based in South Africa. Daryn has qualifications in both marketing and computer science and has combined these disciplines to bring accountability and measurability to the creative magic of marketing. In this episode, Daryn shares his lessons learned from scaling his agency, MPULL, which helps other agencies grow by providing a range of white-labelled inbound marketing and supporting services for their clients.

Craig Wiltshire, founder and CEO of Struto shares how his agency launched its inbound marketing services in two countries and embraced the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®) as a methodology to help them be more efficient and profitable.

Bob Ruffolo, CEO of IMPACT Branding, shares lessons learned on the journey from a startup agency in his condo to a HubSpot Diamond Partner with more than 20 employees.