How We Grew Our Inbound Leads by 80x in 9 Months

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, everyone. We are on episode number 98 of inbound sales Journey and I am joined live in studio with Gray MacKenzie. We don't have a studio. We're in a big office conference room.

That's true. We could call it a studio if you want to, but we also call it a conference room here.

It's got some pretty good acoustics.

How long is this table, by the way? This is probably two 12 footers put together, right?

Yeah, it's about the size of my dining room table at home.

Pretty close. My 6 foot, 5 foot wide by 24 foot long dining room table.

Yeah, that's like the dimensions of our row house that we own, actually. Yeah, that's pretty much my. That's pretty much the floor plan downtown Pittsburgh. Anyways, we are gonna do a little bit more of an interview style podcast episode. I thought it'd be really, really helpful for some of our listeners out there to hear kind of our story with Guava Box a little bit more in depth from specifically from a growth and lead gen side. And I think that there are both a lot of younger agencies that are trying to figure out how do we grow and scale the agency, what do we need to do in the beginning and then after that and after we've been kind of hustling for a while, what's the next step practically? And what did you guys do? How did it work for you? What are maybe some shortcuts that we could teach or that we could learn from that. And then I think also from agencies who have been around for a while, it might be helpful just to hear what that progression was like and potentially some new things for them to try as well.

So.

Great. I'm gonna just toss over to you first. I just want to hear a little bit about how we started from a sales perspective with Guavabox and how long kind of that we call like the startup phase lasted with that. And I guess just start there and I'll ask questions from there.

Cool. Well, this could go a lot of different ways and could go pretty long winded. So cut me off whenever you're falling asleep over there.

Will do.

But basically we started the company and we. So starting right out of college, we had a transitional phase here. So we had a period of time where I was full time in Guava Box straight out of the gate in 2011, I guess that was. But I was the only person initially. And then Andrew came on eight, nine months. Well, yeah, almost, almost a year into the business, came on full time. And so there was, there was some transition as everyone was kind of handling different things. But out of the gate, the way that we had it set up was basically whoever got the lead. So really early on to get business initially it was basically friends and family. We've talked about that quite a bit. But just reach out to your personal network, try and generate business directly from them. So at that point in time, as we were going through that process, because there were already personal relationships with a lot of the folks who we initially were doing business with, it would basically be, hey, Ryan knows this person already, so he's going to own the sales conversation. Or Gray knows this person already, he's going to own that sales conversation, whatever the case may be. So we ran it that way probably for a little over a year, probably a year and a half.

So it's more of an internal competition style almost if you think about it that way. You get compensated more if you bring in the weed and you're the salesperson.

Yep. Yeah. And that's why it was, that's the way it was structured is the person who brought the business in kind of coordinated, who got brought in to do what on the project and definitely had a monetary incentive to do that as well early on. So now we had, we were able to still work pretty well together because we had a diverse skill set. So we didn't all have the same skills. So project came in, you kind of needed multiple people to be involved. You couldn't just take it and run with it in most cases. So we did that. I could certainly see looking back at it, how that could have gone downhill really quickly and Guavabox could have died out. And having seen more companies and agencies having gone through that and died out, I realize that we were really blessed to make it through that phase. From there, it then evolved into more or less having a point person on sales. And then if there was a pre existing relationship, whoever had that pre existing relationship essentially would take the business. But if it was someone who came through the website miraculously in those early.

Days, then that one lead a month.

Right then, then that would go to the dedicated point person.

So let me just back up and recap real quick. So first year, there's a few of us, we are all basically reaching out to personal network, trying to figure out who can we do websites for, maybe some marketing, some social media. That was a big thing. We were coming out of college, they were like, okay, you guys are young, you probably know social media better than we did. And that's how we got started after a year when we transitioned away from that. Do you want to give people a background on what the team looked like at that point as we made the transition to having a point person and how you also selected that point person?

Yep. So the team at that point there were three of us. Andrew, Brandon and myself. Ryan, you at that point had left the company.

Peace.

For a big bike trip which. Have we told that story?

I don't think so.

That might be a good podcast episode. Maybe I'll interview you here at some point and we'll get your.

The bike trip of 2012.

Get your life story, all the sales applications that came out of the bike trip. But we made the transition in mid-2012. After going back and forth for a while, we finally made the move to partner up with HubSpot, join the HubSpot Partner Program in that very early tier of partners. We've seen the HubSpot partner program grow more than 10 times since we came on in 2012. And that was the point at which we really started to get serious about our own marketing and kind of take that seriously. Say, hey, part of this program is we have to pay for HubSpot subscription. We have the software, we've got some people giving us a little bit of coaching. We need to get serious about this and double down on it for ourselves because we've got the time to put into this right now because there's not, quite frankly, there's not that much business coming in. So we're just going to focus, double down on marketing, kind of put all our chips in on. On that and. And go with that. So. And as we were coming on with HubSpot, we did not really. We did not have a point person at that time. But. But eventually move towards that probably. Well, definitely within the next nine months or whatever. So. And at that point, finally we. We were at the point where there was enough business coming in and trying to. The organizational structure became much more important in utilizing everyone's skills in the right way to get the work done that we had to get done. And as the team expanded, that became more important. So we probably made that move in 2013 towards initially Brandon Took point on sales at Guavabox and then I got involved and, and then we kept going from there.

So when you started to get more serious about marketing and making that decision to go towards HubSpot, where did you guys start from a marketing standpoint and did you know at that point like who you wanted to target and go after?

We started at a very low place. So after a year and a half, probably close to a year and a half of Guavabox, we were, I have to go back and depending on where we were, look at the exact numbers, but we were definitely 500 to 800 or 900 visits a month and just a handful of leads. Typically someone who is referred by someone else or the random spam one would come through just on the contact form. There's really. I don't believe we have to go back and look at the Wayback Machine. I don't believe there were any other conversion opportunities on the site prior to partnering up with HubSpot. So I mean we're talking like two, three, four awesome month. After a year and a half, probably is like 5, 5 leads a month coming through the website. So virtually nothing, very little came through there. And then, then we partnered up with HubSpot, we got serious about what we were doing with Inbound and at that point made the decision that we were gonna go all in, built out all the, you know, all the stuff. We started getting real serious about our own SEO. We started writing a ton of content, having marketing batch days, which we talked about a good amount where every Wednesday morning we just spend the whole entire morning just blogging, creating content, working on the website, that kind of stuff. So there's a ton of content, content marketing, basically, content offers, landing pages. Thank you. Pages lead, nurturing workflows, all that stuff.

Before that time, were you guys doing marketing, just didn't have the conversions or were you not really doing marketing and just focused on the little client work that you had and trying to grow?

There's very, very little marketing. There were, I know that we did have a few blog posts, but they were just randomly written about kind of whatever popped up. There was a little bit of social media activity, but. But virtually nothing really. Most of it was focused on the clients that we did have and trying to get our way. I think looking back on it, it sounds like, well, what did you do for that entire first year? Or whatever. But at that point you, Brandon, were both in college. Andrew's working a full time job and had very little time. And so it was most of the website Any website project that came through wound up on my plate. So really I was scrambling to do website projects. No one else was cranking out a bunch of marketing. So just with kind of the organizational chaos during that real. During that first year, it wasn't. It wasn't like we were sitting on our hands, but we should have been doing marketing during that time. But with the commitments that everybody had, we weren't doing a whole lot of marketing. Almost nothing.

So marketing batch days start. What was kind of the expectation that was set then if you're gonna do. Was pretty much all the marketing done during that batch day time, once a week.

That was the bulk of our content writing. And we would, yeah, we would try and get as much as possible done. There was always a little bit of carryover. Sometimes that would carry over into the afternoon and things where like some of the partnerships or guest posting type of opportunities, guest podcasting opportunities, that stuff would come up and that would happen outside of Wednesday morning. But really the bulk and website work, if we were doing new design or development stuff for our own website, that would typically happen outside of Wednesday morning. But as far as copywriting itself or SEO for our blog posts, building out lead nurturing sequences, building out content offers, most of that was done just on those Wednesday mornings. So really it was a time commitment. I mean, it's four hours from three of us full time at the time, so that's 12 hours a week. It really wasn't a huge time commitment, but having those focused batches. And Andrew was the one who was really heading up our like content strategy at the time. So he obviously had work to put in to come to the table with. Here's what we're gonna write this week and get done. And we'd all contribute ideas to that. But he was the point of the hub on that one.

Okay, so you had one person that kind of planned, this is what we're gonna do from a marketing standpoint. Here are your assignments. And then you all kind of sat and just cranked that together. So there was some accountability to make.

Sure that was standing desks, baby.

Standing desks.

Sitting here?

Yeah, we're sitting right now. We should be standing.

Let's do it.

Feels weird. We have our. Here's a little side tangent. Gray and I have the same desk. We went with standing and sitting desks from Autonomous. Really like them. We went with the Bamboo ergo design and I'd highly recommend it. So maybe there's someone listening that's thinking about a desk that's a huge side Tangent, but got me thinking about it. So autonomous is really good. We're not, we're not paid by them. That's a free promotion.

Not yet.

Not yet. Yeah, maybe.

Graybound.com G R A Y.

So after that, after your standing. Yeah, after your standing desk sessions of writing. What. What happened over the next five to 10 months?

Oh, we're finally getting to the punchline.

Let's hit it hard.

A year later, we went from under a thousand visitors per month to the point where in exactly a year, I don't know, but wound up scaling that up in about nine months to a year to a couple hundred leads per month. 3, 400, sometimes close to 500 leads a month. And I think hit 14, 15,000 visitors per month to the site within that first year. So just a huge increase. And that was the vast majority of that traffic came through organic search. And then those conversions happened from the blog posts that were generating most of the traffic. So I think as normally happens, we published a ton of blog posts during that time period. And I say a ton, it's a ton for three for a normal three person company to put out, but it's really not a ton. I think those three posts a week, sometimes four. So really not even, it's not even like we were all writing a blog post every day. It was like we were all writing a blog post once a week.

Was when you. Because I know you said that Andrew kind of came up with the content plan and obviously sounds like he did a good job. What. I guess what was. You said it was all organic. Was it all focused towards a specific industry you guys were trying to break into? How did you pick what type of content you're going to be creating?

There was some content that was targeted towards like the industrial manufacturing vertical and then eventually the software vertical became a couple of the industries that we were targeting. A lot of the blog content itself was not geared towards those industries specifically, but a lot of the content offers became geared towards those industries. So it was a little bit more general application stuff with the exception of some blog posts. And then that would then lead into if you are in this type of industry and are interested, here's the next step for you. And so that's the conversion opportunity where we then have them go to the landing page, fill out the form and get the content offer.

So it sounds like takeaway wise. I mean that pretty much sums up, I think the first couple years and I'm sure that a lot of people can listening either have been there and have similar stories or are kind of starting that journey and trying to figure out what they can do. And it sounds like organic for you guys was great. You didn't really try any paid search. I know. For like immediate leads. From a practical takeaway standpoint, it sounds like the marketing batch days were likely. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but the single biggest differentiator that changed year one to year two there.

Yeah, just being disciplined to actually get it done, having everyone together, cranking that out all at the same time, having the accountability to actually get it done was really big. We still had a good amount of freedom and even the content offers, the types of resources that we put together were oriented towards our skill sets. I did a lot on the website. Andrew did a lot on the marketing strategy side. Brandon put together video resources and stuff aimed towards sales teams. So I think we leveraged our own personal skill sets pretty well to build that out. But also having, having that, just taking it seriously for once. And that having done personally, having done 50 plus interviews of agency owners on inbound agency journey now, and aside from the customers who we talk to of do inbound software and training products, that is like, that's the single biggest common denominator between agencies who are comparatively successful is did they ever take their own marketing seriously. There are very few examples. There are a couple agencies out there who have just focused, kind of doubled down on partnering with other agencies or doubled down on. They just have some gold mine of leads, but by and large the overwhelming majority, the turning point is when they got really serious about their own marketing. And it's also surprising to me. I did not anticipate this because I didn't know the stories a couple years ago, but the number of agencies who actually purchased HubSpot or purchased and we kind of swim in the HubSpot circles largely. So that's the environment that we've seen the most. But even other marketing automation providers, or just marketing platforms in general, the number of agencies who purchased those platforms for themselves got more serious about their own marketing and then realized, oh, now I want to offer this service for my clients. But this is just over and over and over. It's like we started focusing on our own marketing, doing the things that we were telling clients to do and amazingly enough, it actually worked. And that was the point at which our business took a turn. So that was the turning point for us. Up until that point, we had a business that was profitable for three people to run and operate, but it was definitely not. Yeah, it definitely wasn't awesome. Money. It wasn't. It was a lot of hours. It wasn't like an awesome agency. Then we start marketing and the whole business kind of turns around and we're able to expand the team and really take things to the next level.

Cool. Well, hopefully that was helpful. Guys. I learned stuff gray that I didn't know in my time of absence, so I'm glad that we got to chat about that. We're going to talk next week. This is a user or a user, a listener submitted question asking about sales scripts and if that's something that we ever found to be helpful in building using. So we're going to talk about our opinion on that, Gray and kind of our experience there. So that will be coming up next week. Be sure to tune in if you guys could give it the podcast if you're enjoying it. A like and a upvote. Not really an upvote, but just like it on itunes. That'd be great. Any comments, reviews that you want and then you can grab the show notes@doinbound.com inbound salesjourney or isj. We'll take you there. And until next time, good luck.

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