How to Build a HubSpot Platinum Partner Agency with Sean Sweet from Blend

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Welcome to Inbound Agency Journey. This is the show where inbound agency leaders share the strategies, shortcomings and successes they've experienced in their journey toward building their dream agency.

Now, here are your hosts, Andrew and Gray.

Welcome back to Inbound Agency Journey. This week I am here with Sean Sweet from Blend Marketing in the uk. Sean, welcome to the podcast, man.

Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Well, I'm excited to have you here. You guys are a HubSpot Platinum partner, if I'm not mistaken, and I'd love to hear where Blend came from. Kind of the background on Blend, and then we'll dive into where you guys are today after that. But. But how did this thing get started? And. And where do you figure in?

So we started as a design led agency back in 2010. And we were like a lot of other agencies, really. We were producing event materials. We were doing anything really to help them with their marketing. We weren't very strategic in what we were doing. We were just trying to get one project after another and stay in business.

That sounds familiar.

Yeah, that's pretty much where a lot of businesses come from. But we grew organically and we grew quite quickly initially, but churn of customers and so on was quite damaging to our business and we had to have a real rethink about three years ago.

Nice. So was it three years ago? @ what point do you guys join the HubSpot Partner Program and start kind of diving into inbound as well? And were there any pivots before you got to that point, or what's the story to get us to where you are today?

I'd like to say that we were really thoughtful in the way we got involved in Inbound and strategic, but we weren't. We sort of fell into it by mistake. And there was. There was something that happened in the business. We had a. Our salesperson, our only salesperson left. And as we were going through the process of taking someone on to replace them, we wondered if there was a better way of generating leads. And that's when we started really looking around for something. We found HubSpot, we found a few things, but HubSpot jumped out as being the best product for us. And so we decided to start using it for ourselves, not as a partner or to sell it to our clients, but to use it for our own marketing. And it wasn't until we actually started getting under the hood, until we started using it to generate our own leads, that we realized it could potentially solve so many problems for our existing client base. And so our entry into the partner program with HubSpot was by chance, really, not by design. It just made sense to be on the partner program. When we were adding people to, to HubSpot or persuaded them to come over, we might as well get commission for it, right? So that was really how our journey with HubSpot began. It was probably like a lot of other businesses.

I don't know if you know this, Sean, you probably knew being connected in the HubSpot space. But that transition is the same exact story as a lot of other top HubSpot partners where they didn't joined the HubSpot, they didn't join the partner program as they're onboarding to HubSpot, but they actually bought HubSpot, used it internally, realized what it could do, and then from that personal experience, wanted to bring it to their clients who they were serving, and joined the HubSpot Partner Program at that point. And that's not the way that our agency, Guavabox, got in. We actually joined the partner program we were looking for. Well, we knew we wanted to deliver inbound services to our clients and we were also looking for something that was going to help us and kind of guide us along the way of doing that internally for us. But we joined the HubSpot Partner Program at the same time that we became customers of HubSpot. So that wasn't our journey. But a lot of the top HubSpot partners have gone through that same journey that you guys went through. I'm curious, what were the tools when you got on board with HubSpot or what was your experience like? Did you put your website on HubSpot? Probably at that point you might have been even pre cos or close to that. Or was it a lot of blogging, content creation and landing pages forms, lead generation stuff? What was helpful for you guys and really flip the switch?

I think you kind of just answered the question for me in a way. So it was about two and a half years ago and so the COS was around, but it's very early stages, I believe. I think like a lot of other companies, our website was on WordPress and we got involved with HubSpot because we believed that if we created content, we were already blogging at the time, but we didn't know why particularly, but we realized that this was going to be a great place to have our data, to be able to build landing pages quickly and efficiently, to have our blog sitting there and to create calls to action and all the other good stuff. We totally bought into the Whole inbound methodology, we totally got it and we loved it. But we didn't move our website onto the platform until later. And I think in retrospect, I'm kind of glad we did it that way around because it wasn't until we moved our website onto the HubSpot platform that we realized what an important piece of the whole equation the website really is. And it wasn't until then that we started looking at our clients where maybe we were struggling to get some the results that we'd hoped for with customers. And they get a little bit, well, where are our leads? This is what you sold us. It wasn't until we moved our own website on there and our leads suddenly sort of opened up the arteries of lead generation for us, we realized that was how important it was for our clients to have a good website built with Inbound in mind, residing on the HubSpot cos so that it could actually benefit from those changes in data and having the data sitting beneath it. It wasn't until then that we sort of realized, I'm kind of glad we did it that way around because it just opened our eyes to all the additional possibilities. And now we're developing a lot of websites on the HubSpot Cosmic.

That's awesome. So you guys have obviously grown pretty quickly there from first coming on board with HubSpot here just a couple years ago, to the point now where you're HubSpot, your Platinum partners with HubSpot and you're a team of 13 right now, which is continuing to grow. What is, as far as. So we can kind of understand blend, what's the relationship with most clients? Are you guys largely inbound retainers or partnership or running campaigns and kind of the content creation and promotion side of things or on the web design side, is there one piece that's a lot larger of the business or are both pretty evenly split? How is the agency structured?

85% of our work is retainer and we were, we were always a retainer agency, actually. And one of the big issues was before we got involved with Inbound and that regular work you need to do to make. Make it work, we were still retainer based. And the problem came when we would sell someone a number of days, like 10 days, and we'd say, okay, what are you going to do with your 10 days this month? And we'd kind of make stuff up with the clients and after a while they go, we're kind of trying to find things to do rather than doing things for a reason. And we would Churn clients at that point. HubSpot, it makes much more sense to be on a retainer. So our retainer model worked so much better when we moved to HubSpot. It was really good to see, actually. And so 85% of our work is retainer based, which is great from a cash flow point of view and a planning point of view. It means you can recruit with much more confidence. And we're going to be 15 people by the middle of July. We anticipate being 20 people by the end of the year. So we're growing quite quickly in terms of website development. Maybe half a third of our clients we've developed websites for so far. I anticipate that rising rapidly when people see the benefits of having that on the portal. Right, right.

That makes a lot of sense. Well, so in terms of what you guys are doing in your inbound marketing retainers, is it a lot of content creation? Obviously, I'm sure you've got a strategy in just getting kind of the engine built or getting things set up on the front end, and there's some ongoing analysis and strategy pieces. Is it a lot of content creation where you're blogging, creating content, offers, landing pages, all that stuff during the retainers, or is there anything kind of outside of what we might think of as the traditional inbound scope that you guys are doing differently in those packages?

I think we're trying to subscribe to the Agile methodology, so we will perform a variety of functions for our clients within the retainer amount that they're retaining us for. So, yes, there is a lot of traditional work like blog production, ebooks, the usual stuff you'd imagine. We're starting to cut a bit more video now for clients as well, and we're doing that internally, but we try and do the most appropriate work in any given months and that can change. So if we have four really good pieces of content operating on a client's portal, we don't really see the need to have more. What we do see the need to do is drive more traffic to good converting content. And so at that point, we'll start putting much more energy into blogging, into social media activities, more and more into paid activities. So content promotion via LinkedIn, retargeting via Facebook, some of our technical, because we specialize in the tech space, so. So we're starting to use Reddit a lot in terms of outreach. So yeah, we're spreading our wings as we go. It really depends where. I should say actually that all of our retainer clients now we're starting with strategy with them. So we don't do anything until we've done a full strategy piece for them because we want to find out where they're, we want to find out where their customers are hanging out so that we can put that content in front of them in the most appropriate place. And I think if you don't do that, then you are really, you know, there's the potential to waste your clients money. We're quite commercially driven. We want to get the right results. We don't necessarily want a heap of traffic to a website that's not useful. We want to get the right traffic to a website so the conversion rates are better and the SEO performance is better as a result.

Right. Well, I want to come back to what you do strategy wise on the front end and then a little bit of the agile process that you guys are going through. But before we do that, I want to just highlight one thing that you just brought up, which is that a lot of agencies, a common mistake in the inbound space is the thought of, well, in our contract we said we were going to do one new content offer or conversion offer each month or each quarter, whatever it is. So we're just going to keep cranking those out and maintain the same consistency of everything else because that's what we agreed to. Instead of the realization that for the funnel to work, it can be really simple and work really well and your goal is to get something there that works and then drive as much traffic to that and as many qualified opportunities into that. I love that that's the approach that you guys are taking. I was just having this conversation with a young agency owner the other day where they just kept building out content offers. And I think they had 20 or 30 different content offers. But the traffic that was there's like 5,000 visits a month to the site at that point. You need like three or four content offers in a lot of cases. And you just need to spend all the rest of that time and energy driving the right people there, whether that's through blogging or whether that's through, like you mentioned, being on Reddit, whatever works or paid acquisition. But don't keep building out content offers when there's four of them that have 90% of the impact and those are the ones that convert. Well, I love that point and that approach.

Yeah, just add to that having the approach where you say in any one month we're going to create one content offer, four blog posts, 20 social media messages. When you say to a client that that's what you're going to do and it's almost set in stone, then that's what they expect. Even if it doesn't make sense to create another blog post, you miss that blog post, they're going to be down on you and that could be really detrimental to the results that they get. And if they're not getting the results, they're going to be down on you again. So really it's about doing the most. It's just taking a common sense approach to and thinking about why you're doing stuff. Right, right.

The strategic value. So speaking of strategy on the front end, when you're doing that strategic piece, is that part of, I guess this kind of goes to the sales process as well. How are you, Are you selling like a 12 month or a month to month agreement or is that strategy piece its own project, like a discovery project on the front end? Whether that's 5 or 10 or 15,000, whatever the price point is, is that its own piece or is that integrated into the retainer agreement?

Actually it's its own piece. So we've tried this a number of ways and I'm sure it works differently for different agencies depending on your history and how you're sort of geared sales wise. But what we do is we sell a strategy, a 30 day strategy, upfront, the customer's not willing to pay for it and we don't really feel that they're buying into the whole process anyway, so we don't want to work with them. So a 30 day strategy is a must. And at the end of that strategy, we present them with a number of programs that they could run with depending on their budget, and they can pick one and invariably they do. And those are 12 month agreements.

Yep. Okay, that makes sense. And that's what more and more people have gone to. And a ton of agencies in the HubSpot Partner Program specifically don't start with that because HubSpot obviously is interested in selling annual subscription software and teaching people to sell annual subscriptions, which is starting to change in some of their training. But a lot of agencies wind up figuring that out or learning from that. So with those packages that you're then presenting, you mentioned agile. And one of the things that's gone along with that for a handful of agencies has been adopting points based pricing model. Some folks have not gone points, some people have done hours, some people have done it. There's a lot of different ways of handling it. How are you kind of outlining or communicating the value or I guess just figuring out if we are doing agile. What's the cap on what we give people for what value they're paying? Do you guys use points or do you use hours or deliverables or how do you structure those packages?

Yeah, we use points and I didn't really get points. I was lucky enough to spend a week with Square Two marketing, who are not too far away from you last year and learned an awful lot from the week that I had out there. And one of the things that they were talking about were points, and I didn't get it at all. I just couldn't get my head around, you know, points. Why do you just use hours? It wasn't until we started using them here as part of arranging our month sprints that I realized the value in points. And I suppose the value is that a customer will start thinking about the points in terms of how much work they're going to get. They start sweating about whether that blog post took you two hours or six hours. They know that blog post might cost them five points. How many blog posts can you do? Within my retainer agreement because I'm buying 45 points from you as an example. So it made it much easier for us to a plan our capacity with our team and our velocity as well. And it made it much easier for the customers to understand what we were doing for them. And then reporting at the end of the month on what we did and what we plan on doing became easier again. So it's just easier all round to say they got 45 points. We've got this menu of points charges depending on whether you're creating a new landing page, web page, if you're producing a new workflow on the HubSpot portal, we know we assign points to those tasks and so we know whether we can do it as a team. So there are, you know, 13 people are actually doing the work here. We know how many points that they have tied to them, and so we know our capacity as an organization. So points have been a revelation to me and it's certainly allowed us to operate more efficiently. I mean, not just to make sure we don't underserve our clients, but to make sure we don't overserve them as well, because that can be a real problem. The ones that shout the loudest obviously get more. Right. That's bad for business, really. Right.

No, that makes a lot of sense. And that's helpful to hear your experience with that and what you guys have gone through in terms of the way that the team is structured to service those accounts. This is kind of another thing that I'm always curious about. Talking with agencies who are doing agile, are you? Obviously there's some agencies who have like a pod model or little teams who are servicing a set number of accounts. How do you guys structure with 13 people now? And obviously that growing. How do you structure who manages and works on accounts? Is it kind of all hands on deck or is it pods or some hybrid or combination of those models?

Yeah, I mean, we started with one hive and it's quite an interesting time around these parts because we're in the process of splitting into two, because that one hive, we're looking after an awful lot of clients. And so as you put it all hands on deck, that's not really good because you suddenly hear about a client, you go, yeah, I remember them. She suddenly talked about so many clients that it's hard to manage that many, however big your hive is, because you need certain areas of responsibility. So we're splitting into two hives now, and we're dividing our clients between those hives. And each hive will have the core elements because we have everyone in house, everyone sits under one roof, but they all have the core elements of strategy, coordination, design, development and writing that we need. And so they can look after and be responsible for a set number of clients. And also because we use points, we know what their capacity will be, we'll know what they need to deliver on a monthly basis without us getting too factory like. Again, if you're running points, you've got to be careful to treat people like humans and not lot of a term, which is a difficult balance to tread. Especially we use JIRA as a project management software that's been really good for us because people can see what they've got to get through, but it can feel like being on a bit of a treadmill. So we've got to take people to the pub quite regularly just to get them through it.

Right, that's a good point. I think that keeping things human and not just looking at. Looking at people, it can be easy, I think, to kind of get into seeing people as a resource, bucket of points, capacity on a weekly basis. So that makes a lot of sense. Well, I have two more questions for you, Sean. One is around areas of improvement, whether it's addressing current weaknesses at the agency or taking advantage of kind of an opportunity or gap you see in the marketplace right now. Is there anything here in the second half of 2017 and beyond that you guys are focused on.

At the beginning? Well, at the end of last year, we have an annual wrap up of how we've done, what we could have done better and what we want to do next year and so on. So we set a variety of goals. I think one of our goals is to try and become a diamond partner for HubSpot, because there's only one other in the UK currently, but that's quite a tall order. Obviously you've got to look after a lot of clients. I suppose our big challenge is to grow with sales but still maintain a quality of service for our customers. Because we want to grow, we want to grow as quickly as we can, but we don't want to lose sight of looking after the customers who kind of got us where we are. So it's that balance which is the real challenge we're facing. And of course, to really look after customers well, you need to be organized, you need processes in place, you need good team of people. But also as a youngish agency, our rates are not massively high. So when you take on new members of staff to beef up your team, you're kind of eating into your own bottom line. So it's basically you're investing back in your business and we're doing a lot of that at the moment to make sure we're delivering good service to our customers.

Right, right. No, that makes a lot of sense. I think balancing trying to scale with the quality of that service is tough, especially when you're adding people. And obviously that relies a lot on the culture that you have internally and the ability to bring new people into the fold. And also kind of the processes and systems that you have built out ahead of time to enable you to bring people in and integrate them relatively seamlessly. So that makes a lot of sense. My last, and this is more of a technical tactical type question, but outside of HubSpot, are there any tools that you guys are using either internally or in servicing clients that are kind of the big difference makers, the tools that you rely on? And also I guess bonus points here if it's something that maybe would be lesser known or not everyone is using. So maybe not Slack or Google Apps or whatever. Are you laughing because Slack was the first one that you thought of?

Well, I did think of Slack because we do use it. It's been great. We have a lot of channels and it matches the way we work. And I've mentioned Jira, obviously, and I think a lot of agencies will be using products like these. We went through a lot of pain trying to pick the products that we now work with. A lot of pain and spent A lot of money getting it wrong. But we're very happy with the tools that we've landed on Slack for communicating with some of our customers. And certainly internally we use Trello for some planning. Again, when we're communicating with customers, Trello is quite nice for them to be able to use and go to meeting. So we're working with more and more overseas clients from the us, Norway, Denmark, Australia, hopefully France. And that means that we're having to do a lot of our strategy sessions via a Meeting app and we're using GoToMeeting. We found it very, very good. But I don't think we're using anything that isn't widely known currently. So I'm afraid I have to. Bonus points.

No, that's always helpful and so you can earn back some of those bonus points. I have one follow up question on the Slack thing here. I have talked with and personally have used Slack on client projects before with clients. Are there any tips or anything that you guys have learned or maybe maybe even guidelines for when to set it up for working with clients or when not to around using Slack to directly communicate with your actual clients?

If there's one piece of advice I could give you or anyone, it would be don't do it. Because Slack is like a direct way in to your organization for a client. And some clients just think the minute they slack you, they expect a response. So. So we try to now limit our clients to email because the expectation isn't for an instant response. And we used to find it the same with Skype people Skype messaging members of the team and you can be working on anything and that pops up in your screen and it takes your attention away and you feel like it's urgent and it's like a ringing phone, you've got to answer it. And actually that's very disruptive, especially to team members. And with Psych, of course, you're opening up your whole organization potentially to your customers to talk to anyone. And not that we want to hide our people from our customers necessarily, but we do want to control that communication because it's not always good if the calls are going into the studio when they're busy working on stuff. That takes concentration. So yeah, I would avoid it actually.

I'm so glad you said that. And that's something that I'm really curious to know. The way that we have structured, we've never done it with a retain your client and only in a couple heavily accelerated large website projects where we basically have team members who are working large portions of their day for a month or two months at a time directly with the client to speed up some of the communication. But you're exactly right, it's a direct line in and unless you want to look like you're constantly away and change your status to away and not be interrupted by it, it definitely will interrupt what you're doing. So I'm curious to see whether, whether people figure out a way to do that effectively with clients and manage expectations because I think that you hit on the key there. It's just a total different expectation when you're slacking somebody versus email. People understand that you may not get an email response for four or eight hours or you know, there's a different level of response time that's kind of the status quo on different platforms. So that's helpful.

Yeah, I think you've got to hang tough and push back on a client, then just make them aware that it can be disruptive. And obviously clients, they're paying your bills, right? They're in charge to a certain extent. So it can be hard to push back. But I think it's really important that you do. What we do do is we share with certain clients, our jury board, so that they can see the progress of what we're doing and also the points associated with them. Again, so, so they can see how they're getting used. And that's very effective because that's not necessarily a direct communication channel, but it is a place where a bucket where they can drop files, make comments, notes. And the other tool we use, which I didn't mention, is Proof hq. So I don't know if you've used that, but we found that to be absolutely fantastic.

That's awesome. Cool. Well, Sean, thanks so much for coming on, for being willing to share. I think that people are going to really benefit from your experience and the lessons that you shared here. Obviously based on what, seven years now of running an agency. If people have any follow up questions or just want to connect with you, what's the best place for them to do that?

Typically it'd be email. So it's seanblendbtob.com awesome.

Well Sean, appreciate your time and you being willing to share. Thanks for coming on.

No problem at all. Thanks for having me.