How to Use Agile to Make Your Agency More Profitable with Dechay Watts from SPROUT Content

Foreign.

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. All right, welcome to this week's episode of Inbound Agency Journey. This is Gray, and this week I am joined by Deshay Watts, who is officially dshea, according to the website, the chief strategy officer at Sprout Content. But I think the backstory is that this spun out of that. You were. Are you the sole founder or did you have partners early on?

Yeah, so I started a content development company initially by myself and I did that for about eight months and then I brought on my business partner who's still with me, Debbie Williams.

Oh, that's awesome.

Officially a co founder as a year one.

Right. Well, I'm excited to have you on the podcast. Appreciate you making time to jump on with me here today. So when did you and Debbie start? Start Sprout Content or the first iteration of it?

The first iteration. We can kind of skip the first iteration. It was trial, but Debbie and I started sprout content 2008, so nearly 10 years ago.

Wow, that's awesome. And has the. I guess how is the focus whether it has shifted or hasn't shifted? Have you had the. Obviously. Was that the name at the beginning too? I guess that's maybe the first question before I get too far ahead of myself. Has it been Sprout Content?

You know, it was actually a really bad name before that it was called Watts Writing Studio and it was more of a. I was just doing more freelance content development while I was still working at another job. So it was just one of those quick. I basically registered an LLC and threw it out there. So yeah, Sprout Content, when we really got together and thought about what we were doing and decided we wanted to participate in the content space, that's where the name came from.

That's awesome. Everybody's got that story of. And for so many people, I got to throw something together to do a business with and the work is more important than the name early on. And then you can always adjust that down the road. So compared to kind of starting out, it sounds like there's from even the name of Watts Writing Studio. It sounds like content has always been a big part of your vision and services. How have things shifted from kind of early on, obviously doing primarily writing, to. And maybe the better question here is like, what do you guys offer today? Or obviously you're a HubSpot Partner agency, you do inbound marketing. But is it largely still. Is content still at the core of everything? Is it a lot of producing content or has that kind of veered out into more of the technical side of things? And a lot of people have added website development or video production or whatever other services. What's the service package or the service offerings that you guys have now?

Yeah. So I think it's kind of interesting how the whole content space has evolved. When we first started, really the way it all started is I used to be a project manager for a web development company and the piece that was always missing from every web project was the content. So you have this beautiful design and then you're ready to go, the client's ready to go, and they're like, well, what do we put on the about page? I come from a PR background, so I would just write the content. This is ten plus years ago. So was baby baby of getting all that going and just kind of saw a gap in how there was a gap between content and design. So that's really how the foundation got started. And then by about 2008, 9, there started to be discussion around content. Not sure if you know Joe Paoluzzi with content marketing, but he started this movement of content marketing and we were like, well, that's what we're doing. I mean, we're creating content for websites. We were just starting to blog a little bit, just starting to investigate social and just thought that that was the way that this was going. And the term content marketing made so much sense. So we got involved with his organization and met him. And the first time we met Joe, it was like, I remember we drove to Atlanta from Pensacola, Florida, just a five hour drive and went to this meetup group that literally had like 10 people there and him explaining what content marketing was. And so we got in pretty early on the content marketing theme and we still rank on page one for content marketing agency because we had such an early adopt. We were really early adopters on that. So we were a quote, content marketing agency for about four years. And then what started happening is people like, yeah, we understand content marketing, but how do you prove results? And that's when we started to look at a way to show that all of the content we're developing actually helps the bottom line. And that's where the HubSpot relationship came in. So HubSpot really allowed us to kind of come full circle with not only does content sound good and it's also meeting your needs of driving traffic and bringing in leads. So we're still in that, we're still participating in that a bit. Not a bit a lot. But I think the next iteration that we're seeing is really tying together not only developing the content and showing that it's bringing in traffic and leads, but also that it results in sales. So that sales enablement piece is, is kind of the current future of where the content, I think is going.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. And that's something that's kind of been a recurring theme here recently. Are you currently kind of working with clients on the sales enablement piece or is that something that you're in the process of planning out how to deliver that now or working with partners? Because that's, that's a transition that a lot of agencies are struggling with. Most people who start an agency are starting the agency because they enjoy the marketing piece. A lot of times that same personality or skill set doesn't overlap with, I'm really excited to get into sales and so a lot of people are realizing I need to move in this direction. That's not really what I personally want to do. So is that bringing people into my agency, is that partnering with somebody else? Is that just figuring out how to do it? Where are you guys at on that spectrum and in that process?

Yeah, that's a really good question. We actually just participated in this analysis that JP Morgan did around this exact topic because it is such an issue with agencies, just hurdles with the sales enablement business. And I think a big part of it is that there's still such a gap between marketing and sales regardless of agency. Right. I mean, just in businesses in general, there's still a lot of inconsistency in how marketing approaches reaching prospects and bringing in leads and then how sales approaches closing those. So we're having the conversations with our clients, but the buy in is really, really slim. And I think part of it is that gap and the other part is exactly what you're saying. We're not sales experts, we're marketing experts. So we're a little undecided on which direction we're going to go, to be honest. Sometimes I think let's just drop it and let's let them not even promise that we're going to make the sales, but just kind of drop our portion of the engagement at we will do this great content for you. We're going to bring in leads and then it's up to you to make the sale. And then other times, I don't know, five years from now, if that's going to be enough. But it is definitely a challenge. And a couple of our clients, they even have. So this is just one example. We had one of our clients, they do really large screen kind of AV type of equipment and services. And I'm talking like really big, like for airports and for car manufacturers and that sort of thing. So we got a lead in front of. I say we because we developed a blog post we promoted in social. A lead came in from reading that blog post in social and they were from Nassau, which is amazing. And when you talk to them about what the next steps are with this lead and how we could potentially start help to nurture it and work with their sales team, they basically were like, we have a read book, literally a piece, you know, book filled with paper that they write down leads in and that's their quote, you know, like little black book version of sales. And they write down all of their conversations and any follow up that they would have in this book. And so they don't need our help with closing that sale. So when you're talking about trying to go from like a digital conversation to writing something in a book still, it's crazy to me, but that still happens. It's not a small company. So I think that's just the challenge that we're all as marketing agencies up against right now is still educating that sales team on how the digital realm can help.

Yeah, well, I think that you hit the nail on the head when you said just the buy in piece. Getting people to buy into the whole idea of this is huge. And that kind of has to come before everything else. The, I guess the openness to change is the predecessor to actually making the change. But also so much of what you just shared, I'm sure that's resonating with people and that is just like a complete echo of what I've heard in so many conversations with agency owners. Talking about inbound sales and going down that route and tying the marketing and sales piece together all under one umbrella is just, it's kind of like a daily process of wow, it'd be way easier if we just kept doing what we're doing. Is that going to be sufficient in the future? Probably not. How do we need to change? Why are people so opposed to change and not willing to accept our help with this? There's a whole lot of kind of lack of clarity around how do I price this, how do I position this? What should these services look like? Is this just something that I kind of throw in on top of our marketing stuff to make sure that they have results. But if I do that, then how do we get compensated for that? It's a hard, hard topic and we're going to see a lot of progress in that space, but there's a lot of opposition and just a lot of challenges there right now. So that definitely, that definitely makes sense. And I, it's always nice to talk to. Like I appreciate your perspective of just we don't know exactly where this is going. It's a hard problem and we're working on it to solve it. And I think that that's, that's the first step that people need to take is we understand this is a problem we need to pay attention to and work to fix. We don't have the answer today, but we're moving in that direction. So that's really cool to hear. In terms of. So this is kind of a complete, not complete, but largely complete topic change here. One of the things that's highlighted on your website is the Agile approach, which is becoming much more prevalent in the agency world, or seeing a lot of agencies move towards that type of approach. I think just realizing we need to provide better value for our clients and we also need just a differentiator internally and something that's going to align the way that our whole organization delivers results and is structured. And I think Agile has provided a lot of value for agencies in those ways and in a number of others. But can you kind of tell us maybe the place to start is what prompted the transition to Agile, what that means for you? And then I'm sure I've got a couple follow up questions around how you guys are doing that right now and especially with the team structure and in the content space. So maybe we'll start with the backstory there. How did and when did Agile become a big deal for sprout content?

Yeah, sure. I started looking into Agile probably three years ago. We actually worked with a company that provided Agile training. So we were writing content for them and it just kind of opened my eyes to what Agile even was. And so I was sort of familiar with the concept, but more from a software development angle. And then about two years ago I went to a HubSpot training. It was a HubSpot partner day and there's a great HubSpot partner named Kula Partners. They're out of Canada. They're just awesome guys. And they had adopted Agile. I think they're probably the first HubSpot partner that really did it. And when I went to session, Jeff is the partner's name. He Did a whole session on Agile and how they went about it and I was just like, we have to do this. It made so much sense to start adopting this. And he actually worked with a Agile consultant named Mark Long who we ended up hiring pretty much right away because I just was kind of, I knew we needed to go all in and nobody on our team had the background to do it. So at this point we are in January of last year, so we just decided to go all in Agile. And the reasons were several, but kind of big picture reasons were that we, from an Agile philosophy perspective, what we kept running into was just getting stuck in the same routine of deliverables for clients and that just doesn't work anymore. So you know, you can't have a hey, here's your marketing plan a year out and follow it step by step because things change too quickly. And so we were getting into these ruts of okay, we have this contract that says we're going to do four blog posts a month and we're going to do one video a quarter and we're going to do one ebook campaign a quarter. And that just got, it just wasn't working. We're having a hard time pretty results just following this step by step. So philosophy wise, that's why we decided to do it. Not only does it help us stay more active and more on top of deliverables and really continue to look at what's best for the client, it also helps the client think that way and use us more as their ongoing partner brainstorming, just kind of incorporating us into all of their marketing activities, knowing that we can adjust and adapt based on what they need. So that was the buy in there. And then as far as process goes, it's just made a huge, huge difference in how much we can get done as a team and how organized we are. So we ended up using Jira, which is a. Have you heard of Jira as a tool? Okay, so we ended up using Jira and that's where we used our marketing or our Agile consultant to kind of help us migrate all of our projects and our clients from. We were using teamwork before we moved it over to Jira and we just have a very clear process now that each month we can plan out our capacity and then be able to break that down into weekly sprints where we actually know what the team capacity is, who's working on what and be also able to like cross train our employees. So for example, we do all of our content in house. We have three content developers. So if for some reason, two of the content developers are slammed because everyone's cross trained. We can take some of that workload and make sure that the third content developer that we're using their capacity and not overburdening the other ones. It's just little things like that that come into looking at numbers and being able to adjust pretty quickly for the team.

Right. Well, that's a great overview and I appreciate that background. It's actually, it's funny that you mentioned Jeff because it's almost exactly two years since he came on this podcast and we talked through their transition to Agile, which is pretty new at that point. We can link up the show notes for that. In those show notes he talked about working with Mark Long and also included a snapshot of the internal dashboard that Jeff and the team there used to measure the effectiveness of their team. So it's like a ship rate scorecard for them. But one of the things that we talked about in that conversation, that was a challenge for them as they moved to Agile and a number of other people have gone through this transition and trying to figure out the right way to set this up is an evolving process and journey for a lot of agencies. But when you move to the. One of the reasons that a standard or a stock set of deliverables took hold in the first place was because that made it really easy to price. And there's this whole push towards the retainer movement and say for five or ten thousand dollars a month you're going to get this many deliverables and here's what they are and list them all out. And one of the big concerns that a lot of agencies have and one of the hard, one of the obstacles to get through with the switch to Agile, it's not, I've never really heard anybody push back from the, from a logical perspective and say, no, I think it would actually be better if we weren't, if we didn't try and respond to what we were seeing. Everybody understands there's value here in this approach, but one of the, one of the pieces of pushback is how do we price this if we might be doing a different amount of work each month or how do we do a consistent amount of work? And so that kind of led to the point system and a lot that's come from there. So I'm curious to know, Dusha, how you are. How does sprout content price relationships right now? Are they still retainers? Is it x thousand dollars in exchange for the this many story points or this many hours? Or do you start with a base set of deliverables and say, well, just from here it's not going to all be in the contract necessarily, or is it some other model and there are a million varieties of those. But how are you doing that right now?

Yeah, I think we're in the. If there's a traditional approach to this. The first one that you mentioned, which is we have a, we basically know their budget and we do do a contract typically a year and that's broken down into a monthly plan for them based on their budget. So if it's say $5,000, they get a certain amount of story points to use each month.

Okay. So yeah, so story points, I think once the client understands what that means, and there's certainly some education that needs to happen there, but I think once you have them in that place, that makes sense. And as far as for how things work internally, I know Jeff had mentioned like a story point effectively means an hour of time internally. Is that how you construct that as well or kind of translate that to what that means as far as team planning or does that mean something different?

When we first started, that's how we went about it. We're actually trying to, to more of the value points pricing. So whether it, instead of it just being quote, an hour person's time, it's more of the time for the whole team to complete something. Instead of breaking down per hour, it's more like quarter day, half day, full day. So it gets a little gray when we start looking at it that way. But I think it does make, I think for pricing it's going to be better going forward, but we're just now starting to look at that. We just needed about a year to get our processes together first. And from a client end, you know, really every single one of our clients, when we made the transition, they were totally on board with it. The way that we, you know, we did actual presentations to them and reconciled their contracts and explained how this would be better for them. Every single one, except for one client was totally on board. So one out of, let's say 16, 17 clients, they were like, that sounds great. So I think that they really appreciate having a little more flexibility. And of course they get buy in into what strategy we're recommending each month and they seem to enjoy that. And in the sales process, we obviously talk about how we're agile and how it benefits them and they usually come into the relationship excited about the opportunity to switch things around as needed.

Yeah, I think once you get transitioned over, I think it can put you in a really good place as far as how you price that out. And moving points towards value based pricing, which is something Paul Raetzer has spoken a lot about in the past and other folks have shared a lot of good lessons and teaching on that. I think that's definitely the transition that ought to happen and needs to happen is can we position this based on value and help the client understand that versus versus just having it be a cover up for an hour, for an hour of time or for some number of time. So that's helpful to have that. I don't want to eat up too much more your time. I just have a couple specific questions I think would be helpful for folks who are either in the process of transitioning to Agile or are thinking about this. So these are just the questions that I hear pretty much pretty frequently when having these conversations. And it's always interesting to know how other agencies are handling it from a billing side of things. In terms of the overall number of points, I don't know if that's. I guess maybe the best way to ask the question is I guess for an average client that you have right now on retainer, what's the total number of story points that would be typical. Is it like if it's based on half day, is, you know, is it like a 10 or 20 or 30 point type of. Type of spread? Or if it's based more similarly to hours, you know, it might be a 80 or 120 or whatever amount. What's the total number of story points? What does that look like?

Yeah, so it ranges for each client, but anywhere I think our lowest is probably 35 points a month and our highest is around 70. So if you want to take an average, what's that maybe 50ish is probably on average how many points. Yeah. A client would get each month. But again that depends on your contract.

Right. And then is there a standard price per point that you use or I'm assuming, you know, if you're at 80 story points, you pay a little bit less per price than if you're at 35.

Yep, that's how it works. It's just a scale that way.

Gotcha.

And then one other thing that is that I think is really helpful on this is making sure that you actually complete the amount of points that each contract has each month. So there's not, we don't, I mean on special occasion there's rollover, but we do not promote rollover of points. And that keeps the client accountable to getting production done as well. So that's one of the reasons that the points are currently broken out monthly rather than like, hey, you've got 1,000 points to use this year.

Right.

They might suddenly not use all of them.

Right. Yeah. It makes resource allocation or internal team planning really challenging if you don't kind of have that scope down to a specific time frame that's not too long. And that's actually, that was the last kind of specific question I was going to ask is do clients have access to your JIRA instance where they're looking at point usage over the course of the month, or is that a monthly report or does it not really come up that frequently? You just kind of tell them without necessarily bringing them into a dashboard. Just say, hey, you had 50 story points and we used 52. We threw in a couple extra ones for you here at the end of the month. How does that get communicated to clients?

We currently, we do not share JIRA with our clients. Not because we're trying to be untransparent, but they really are interested.

One more platform for them to dig into.

Yeah. So currently what we do is the end of each month, usually the third week of the month, we still deliver a. It's Basically just a PowerPoint presentation. Simon presentation. It's two slides and the first one is progress for let's say July. And we just list out everything that was completed and then strategy for August and we list out what we'd like to do. And so it's kind of line items but not detailed out. So they can see the line item and the points associated with it. They just don't see if it's an eight point project. All everything that goes into those eight points. So they just see like the top line of how many points that costs. Yeah, so that's how we do it. And it's just. So it's just progress. This is everything we finished. This is what we're planning to work on. Let's chat, discuss, you know, if we're on the right track for August or if there's something else that you like to switch out that we should pay attention to.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, d', Shay, this has been really helpful. I think that digging into some of these details is those are the specific questions that get asked a ton of times in follow up. And so I appreciate you just being able to share a lot of kind of the intricacies and behind the scenes how sprout content is working and obviously excited about the way that you guys have grown and continue to evolve and the future growth and challenges there. So just want to say thank you for coming on today, being willing to share with us and certainly wish you the best moving forward.

You're very welcome. It's my pleasure and hopefully this is helpful and happy to answer any other questions that might come up.