How to Keep Your Agency's Clients Focused on What They Need

Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of Inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by Do Inbound, the world's first project and process management platform built specifically for inbound marketing agencies. Learn more@doinbound.com now here are your hosts, Ryan and Gray.

Welcome back to Inbound Sales journey, season number nine, episode number 102. Ryan and I just enjoyed a Fourth of July weekend together. Ryan, what's up at the lake? Ryan's can we, can we share where we were or is that undisputed? No, you can share Ryan. We had pretty much the whole. Well, a good chunk of the Dune Bound crew up at Ryan's family has a lake house up on the Great Lakes. Ryan, in New York State. You want to get into what lake we were on or should we leave that. That part undisclosed and let our targets.

I think we can say the lake. It was Ontario.

Lake Ontario. Enjoying, enjoying the 4th of July long 4th of July weekend together. So then we decided to put our work hats back on our podcast. Microphones up to the mouth and crank away here with episode number 102 already of Inbound Sales Journey Season 9. Enough with our personal updates though. Let's cut the personal chit chat and get right into what we're talking about, which is today we're going to be talking about how to keep your agency's clients focused on what they actually need, not what they think they need or what they want, which I'm sure anybody listening to this can relate to. So, Ryan, let's start with you. What tips do you have for trying to keep your clients focused?

So this is actually one of the most common things that I hear that agencies struggle with where it presents itself in a few ways. So like scope, creep. So they'll kind of stick with your plan, the client will kind of stick with your plan, but then they'll ask for a few things and they'll start with a few things and then it will grow or they, they just have suggestion after suggestion of just what they want you to do and what they want the deliverables to be. And the big problem here with this is as an agency, you really don't want to get in the position where you're being paid to just create content. That's not really the value of you as an agency. That's the value of just someone who's a writer or a creator. But as an agency, what you should be being paid for. What your primary purpose is, is to help educate the client on what they don't know and provide some structured approach towards marketing. Right. So where I think that this starts and why we're talking about an un inbound sales journey is in the sales process. And in the sales process, it's so important to be clear that you as an agency has a process to get them from point A, where they are now, to point B of where they want to be and that the, that the processes is in place so that you are going to walk them through that. And you know, for us it's. It's through doing the game plan where we kind of look at all those different things about where they are now, where they're trying to get to, and we will create an actual roadmap and share that with them so that they can see where the vision is and what we're actually doing are going to be doing for them. And where that's been hugely helpful is they feel like, okay, these guys have a clear plan. They understand what the objectives are. The plan's been shared with us now so that we understand it as well. And we're going to let them continue to roll this out. And we know that we have some strategic goals along the way. So we know that whether we're being successful or not, we can, we can quantify success. But I think where agencies really get stuck is not being clear on the plan up front for the client and presenting that to them. Therefore, the client feels like, okay, I need to kind of micromanage the situation, tell you what I want, and that just, just leads to kind of disaster.

Yeah, no, you're right. I think everyone probably can relate to the feeling of getting stuck in that rut where you feel like you're the tactician rather than the strategist. And obviously the strategy piece is where you're going to add value and how you're going to actually produce good results for your clients. I do think a couple things that you said. Number one, start off by focusing on the strategy and the end results, not just the methods to get there during the sales process, like you were mentioning, but one of the key things about the game plan and having that, whatever you call that, if it's a strategic piece during that discovery project that you do, the very first thing that you're ever doing with a client is around strategy. And that I think sets you up really well to be viewed as a strategist, not just a tactician. During the rest of the client relationship. So both of those pieces are really important. I think another huge piece for agencies is what are you reporting on? I see a lot of agencies, when you talk to agencies who are frustrated with I feel like the client just views me as a web designer. I feel like a client just views me as their PPC arm. When you start asking those agencies what they're reporting on on a monthly basis, almost across the board, they'll say, you know, we're giving them this report on what pages we developed and it's all. Everything that they're reporting on is activity based, not results based. So if you want to be on the strategy, if you want to be seen as a strategist, if you want to be valued for that, you need to start reporting on results, not primarily on the deliverables or what you're actually doing for the client. Obviously there needs to be, in most cases there needs to be a little bit of a combination. Clients want to know what are you doing. And in a lot of cases the work that you're doing isn't going to produce immediate results. There's going to be a longer term payoff, but you need to be reporting on both, looking at both and having some indicators of what's going to come down the road in terms of results. So I think focus on results. Start off with strategy from the sales process to that discovery project and then just keep coming back to that during the engagement and be honest with your customers and let them know if you are going to allow them to push you around and just say no, why don't you just go build another webpage or why don't you run another PPC campaign or why don't you do whatever and you just always say yes and don't ever push back on. Well, is that the right thing to do? Then you're going to be viewed the way that you allow yourself to be treated. So set the standard in the bar early. And almost all clients, not all clients, there are clients out there who are definitely not the clients that you want, but there are clients who won't be okay with it. But almost across the board, almost all clients will actually appreciate and respect that when they get the agency salesperson or the agency project manager or agency owner who's willing to say, let's pump the brakes here. We have a process for this. And I think that to push back and say I think you're doing this wrong, I don't think that's going to produce the best results for you. Let's do this to figure out what's actually going to get you the results you're looking for?

I think the last thing, gray, for me at least, is the importance of meetings and what you discuss during meetings. So having the strategy up front, showing and reporting on results, but always taking in the meeting. So whether, you know, it's a monthly meeting, which is something that we would do, we'd have a larger quarterly meeting as well. That's the big thing that you want to do there, is take that strategy piece and reflect on it. This is what we've done and the results we've gotten, and then share that we still have more strategy moving forward. So whether things need to be changed, clients can make suggestions, certainly. And sometimes clients can make good suggestions. But if you don't agree with it, you need to be upfront and let them know. And if things do need to be changed, you better come to that meeting with a plan of this is how the strategy is going to change and what we're hoping to get as a result for it. So always taking that game plan, if it needs to be modified, modifying it, but using that in the meeting that way. I think what people really want is just reassurance of is there a clear vision? Is there a clear plan? Because, you know, it's a big deal partner with an agency, it can be a big expense for people and they just want to make sure that getting the value there. So, you know, come to the meeting with results and results focus, but also come to the meeting with, hey, the plan doesn't stop. You know, if we made a quarterly plan, we have a plan for next quarter too. And this is what it is. And that just reassures people.

Yep. Like it. Cool. One last tool I'm going to throw in there. If people have not checked out Databox before and there's a whole bunch of tools you could use. But speaking of client reporting and that kind of thing, Databox, we have an agency toolbox episode. If you go to the Doinbound Learning center, doinbound.com learningcenter, you can find that kind of review and walkthrough of what we've done for some of the client reporting inside Databox and what other people are using. So that might be a tool for you to check out there as well. That's going to wrap us up for this week. Hope you guys all enjoy your fourth of July weekend. I realized that Independence Day is an un American holiday, so a lot of folks probably didn't have the day off, but we enjoyed it here. Good to see some fireworks. And speaking of fireworks. We're going to be coming back next week in episode number 103, talking about when and why and how you'd bring your agency sales reps back to be involved in firing bad clients. So definitely be bringing the fireworks for next week. Until then, keep rolling.

Thank you for listening to Inbound Sales Journey. You can find the show's notes for today's episode@doinbound.com salesjourney that's doinbound all one word.com salesjourney today's show was brought to you by the Agency Sales System, the online course designed specifically to teach you how to build a rock solid agency sales system inside your HubSpot CRM. Learn more at doinbound. Com salescourse. That's doinboundalloneword. Com salescourse. If you enjoyed this episode, head over to itunes and subscribe. And make sure to leave us a review of the show until next time. Remember, life is a journey. Keep moving forward.