INBOUND 2016: Bob + Verity Dearsley "Managing Ongoing Client Success After Winning the Contract"

Good afternoon, everybody. I have an odd accent. As you'll probably work out as we go along. Just wanted to ask, before we start, if I might, you're all partners, right? Most of you seem to be. Yep. That's good. Who's been a partner for more than six months? More than a year. Keep your hands up. More than two years? More than three years? More than four years? More than five years. Well, you can all sod off, you know, as much as I do in that case. So we've been a partner for five years and the nice guys at HubSpot said, why don't you come down and share some of what you've been doing? So after a few beers, they managed to persuade us that it would be a good idea. So we're going to try and do just that. Ah, yes. You see, I can push buttons. It's marvellous. So, just so that you know, this is my daughter and we've been working together for five years in this process. You can tell, obviously, that we work a lot in the laboratory. We didn't actually think that those sprockets were quite large enough, so we got these, which kind of felt a bit more like it. We are predominantly blue and red, but we bleed orange. Maybe I need to click. Oh, yeah. So that's the whole gang. We're now 22 people after five years, which I suppose you might call Stephen Growth, and you might enjoy this. There's an English element to it, I guess. It's a blog that I started at the beginning of the year. It's a series of weekly blogs on the topic and you might not spell bollocks in that traditional fashion. We felt this was just slightly less expensive, but certainly we hope it's memorable. Please. We're at currently at week 44, and once we've done the whole lot, we've managed to persuade Wiley to produce it as a book. So I'm plugging my book, as they say, what a joy to be able to do. So that's what we're going to talk about. I'm expecting you can all read, so I'm going to try not to do any more than that. That should, I hope, cover it. I'd like to keep the questions that are heckling until the end, if you would, but there should be, if we've timed it right, 10 minutes to work on at the end. So that's the premise. You've been working really hard, you've done the deal, you've actually got the po, they've signed the piece of paper and at that point you have to ask yourself, what do I do now? There is quite a lot to do and those of you that have been at it for some time will appreciate that. You've got to organize and put into place just a mind boggling array of different things if you're going to make this program work on behalf of your client. So what's the first thing that you're going to do? We find generally if you get your hand upside alongside your head, that kind of really, that's how panic works really well. And if you run around, that's quite good, that's quite reassuring. Once you've got that out of your system, you should in effect consider that this is what you're stepping into. Now, those of you that are familiar with software implementation life cycles, this is what traditionally it looks like now, the point up there, point of sale, that's the euphoric bit. It's a point that seldom reached again. But it was the point that you all drank champagne together and agree what a really good idea this whole thing was. And your job is to try to get back up there as quickly as possible. You probably will never do it, but if you can get back up into the middle there, you're doing damn well. And what you've got to try and avoid is this bit at the bottom. It happens as shit happens, but preferably you can do this. You've got to appreciate that that is going to happen. You've got to appreciate, therefore you've got to be able to deal with that. And what we're going to talk about are some processes and procedures that are methodology that should help you along the way. So fundamentally, keep calm, get planning, have a nice cup of tea if it helps, and move on to programme planning.

That'll be me, will it?

That will be you.

Thanks very much. So, as Bob said, there's a huge amount to get done and if you're going to keep that client happy and if you're going to get the programme rolling as quickly as possible, planning is your absolute best friend. There's a huge amount that needs to get done. Breaking that down into stages, understanding what needs to happen to prepare yourself for the program Launch, to implement HubSpot successfully, to launch your new website, HubSpot implementation and then a phase that we refer to as business as usual. So again, I refer back to this delightful slide of all the shit that you have to get done. The main thing that you really need to do is sit down and structure that into key core stages. There is a lot There what you need to do is get the client focused on the immediate. They love to get very excited about pieces that sit in that launch and business as usual phase. Let them get distracted and end game immediately, they will derail the program for you. One of the really early things that you need to know is the value of homework versus workshop. In that really early implementation phase, some activities are best to give to your client to do themselves. Initial implementation very often sits with a huge amount on the client to do. Sorry, a huge amount for the agency to do and not a huge amount for the client to do. And if you are head down, keep very very busy and don't get buy in from them immediately, they will lose faith in the momentum of the project. Homework tasks are a really good way to get buy in from them to get them feeling like they have ownership of that project. But there are some activities where you do need to see the whites of their eyes and everyone sit in a room and brainstorm together. So understanding your buyer Personas, discussing your keyword pieces, your initial content planning, all of those work really well in workshop environments. Things like understanding technical implementation pieces, set homework as and when you can and work out those processes for you and your organization. One of the pieces that you need to do as soon as possible in that early stage is to make sure that you have full buy in from sales and marketing. Quite often during that sales environment you will have spoken to a marketing department. You will probably have spoken to senior business decision makers. Getting sales buy in from day one is essential. If they have a concept of an MQL and marketing has a different concept of mql. They're just going to get kicked back on the leads. They're not going to believe in the program. Also, sales are going to be a really valuable place for you to get content ideas from in the program. They are the ones that are dealing with prospect problems and client problems. Use them, get them bought into the marketing program and you will have a far, far happier engagement for the rest of your relationship. During this face to face meeting, you want to make sure that you've got senior salespeople, senior marketing people and senior business owners. In the the checklist that's on the screen right now are all of the elements that you have to make sure you understand from ground zero. Think of it as a Monopoly game. If you don't get past it, you don't get £200, you can't pass go, you have to go back around again and make sure that all of these are super clear to Everyone in the room that includes you and your agency team as well. So timeline planning is an absolutely essential piece. We've talked a lot about the tasks that need to get done and we've broken them into phases. You have to set time frame expectations. The biggest thing after someone buys HubSpot implements it is that they want leads and they want the program up and running. Now we all know in the room that that takes time to do. So keep it broad brushstrokes and build out a project plan and timeframe. Get this in front of your client. Get it agreed. Get them understanding that there is phase one activity that has to take place first. If you're working with other stakeholders, there may be other agencies involved, they may be doing a lot of the work themselves. Color coding this to have a really clear understanding of what you're doing and what they're doing is a really good piece to get done at this point as well. Once you've got your broad brushstrokes, then we get down into the nitty gritty task for you. As an agency, you know that there are 101 things to do in each of these individual categories themselves. So this is where task management is going to be your friend. For anyone in the room who doesn't have some form of task management setup right now, the best thing I can tell you to do is go away and get this sorted, trial and test some tools. There is no one platform. Obviously we're in some of the keynotes yesterday. HubSpot has started to release their own project management tools as well. Get in them, get used to them. Find something that works for you. One of the things you'll realize is that task management for you internally and task management to play back to the client are potentially two different things. You and your team need to know all of the nitty gritty detail. You may not want to be playing all of that back to the client, which is sort of what brings me into tasks versus deliverables. You guys are focused on the tasks that need to get done. The client needs to know about the deliverables that they will be receiving and achieving. And tasks are usually the stages of completion of an individual deliverable. So as you're working out how you report back your activity to the client, bear these two conflicting factors in mind and work out how you want to message that it's context to your activity. And without that context, they won't see value. The final one is that Gantt charts are very much your friend. Now I'm going to skip a slide and everyone's going to get their phones up very quickly. This is one of our Gantt charts. I'm not leaving it on the screen for too long because we spent a long time building those. So go away and build your own. But effectively it should be all of your task activity and all of your time frame activity. You may want to keep this as a live document. We color coordinate them as we go. Green for completed, yellow for in progress, red if something stalls along the way, find out what works best, build it out and keep those processes consistent across your business. So the next piece is the power of the kick off meeting. Effectively, you have to make sure that early on you get face to face with your client if it is at all possible. I understand for some people in the room, geography means that this won't be as straightforward as you'd like. Make sure at the very least you're doing it in some form of video context. You need to be able to see the whites of their eyes. You need to understand who is going to be involved in the project. Not everyone involved in the implementation will have been involved in the sale. So make sure that you understand how involved they plan on being, the level of detail they're anticipating on getting and work out their level of buy in and understanding to inbound as a concept. Because there may well still be some education and evangelising that you need to do in the early stages of the engagement. So during this face to face kick off meeting, you need to make sure that you're recapping all of those core deliverables and metrics that you plan on achieving together. Make sure that you've agreed and re reviewed that content planner and that program planner that you've built. And make sure that your fundamental metrics and goals for the program are recapped, agreed and nodded and ticked and signed however you want to do it. Everyone in the room needs to understand them. The other really important thing to try and figure out as soon as possible in the engagement is approvals process. Approvals can be the number one thing that completely slows down or derails the program along the way. Whether that's content sign off, whether that's program activity sign off, you need to understand who their internal stakeholders will be. Decision by committee will be a disaster for you. If there are a lot of people in the client organization that needs sale need buy in, find one internal stakeholder and make sure that they know it is their responsibility to keep things moving and keep things on track. Technical setup this is a piece you have to address, but do not get bogged down in it. In that initial face to face meeting, it is the piece that everyone's very intrigued about. They have all the questions about, but realistically that's why they've hired you. Understand who the stakeholder is in that meeting, who you're going to be getting that information from. And then this is a really great place to use homework tasks. Afterwards we have an implementation checklist of web access and social media owners and all of the above. Share those as homework tasks, but make sure you set the agenda as to why this is important. First and foremost, I think we come on to content.

Yeah. Okay, so I think you probably guessed who does all the work around here and I was getting fed up with standing there looking pretty.

So what's that over here then?

Okay, buy a Personas. The one thing that if you're working with your HubSpot rep that they've been pushing down your throat is bipersonas via Personas and more Viper. So you've got to map your content. You have to work out what content you've got and how you're going to engage that with your clients prospects. It's a job that's got to get done. We've just been doing this funny enough with Google with 250 documents and videos that they have.

It's a nice name drop.

That's a good name drop. Yeah. And there's a degree of, I don't want to say tedium, but certain necessity in getting this into place. But it's one of those things that's got to get done. Once you've got it mapped and you know what you're looking to create, then you've got to find the actual content. Now that's where it moves from process to creativity, which is what you're all about. Right? You're all marvelously creative, aren't you? Yeah. But actually fundamentally it's about getting the client to be creative and the idea of the brainstorm, the process of pulling a bunch of people into a room who are subject matter experts. They don't necessarily need to be physically in the room. They can be part of a conference call. But in my experience over the last three, four, five years, it's that point at which you get a series of subject matter experts, the boss, ideally the sales marketing director, into the room together to work on your content and those ideas behind it. Then you can capture those. Don't expect the client to do anything is my advice to you. You manage it, you drive it all. The client does is talk at you. Have them talk at you and bottle what they say. Obviously record it, get it down and a key piece to it. Do synopses before you produce full scale content. Make sure they've seen the synopsis and signed off on that. Because when you deliver it back and they say no, that wasn't what we were looking for, then you can cough politely and move back to the synopsis and say which bit of the synopsis did you understand? Then you will not have wasted eight or 10 hours in your preparation process. The sign off and approval process takes a little time to work out. They're all slightly different, but fundamentally that's how it works. Whatever your piece of content being created is, from case study through to full scale white paper, use it. Get the client to sign off against it and continue to use it.

Keep it in place.

Who owns what, who's going to do what. And this is inherently setting out your methodology to make sure that the client knows their responsibilities. That marvellous Gantt chart that you saw earlier on the times in which those go wrong, almost invariably, not always, but almost invariably come down to bottlenecks that get created and everything on there starts going red. It hasn't been completed or isn't work in progress and is overdue. Very often the problem revolves back to the fact that ownership wasn't established early on in the process. Kind of broadly covered. The setup and management. How we doing this? Useful. You're all still awake. That's a good sign. Good sign. So let's just talk about. Thank you for that. Let's just talk about reporting, therefore. And the lovely thing about HubSpot is one of those super dashboards, automated reports that come out, fire off to your client and after you've been firing them to the client automatically for a month or so, and there's an appreciation that they've never been discussed. You're not exactly getting a lot of feedback on them. And there's an appreciation that maybe they're just not exactly what your client was looking for. So roll that back to the beginning and think about what it is you think the client needs. Because they don't know enough at the outset to be able to tell you precisely what they want. So guide them through that process. We create monthly impact reports which in themselves are both infographic based because most chief execs don't read. They look at pictures, they are backed up by the detailed data and that's there if people want to drill into it. But 90% of the time they're not going to go anywhere near it. The only thing they're going to react to is whether or not they're getting enough leads in enough quantity and the salesmen aren't bitching about them. So create your dashboards. And you guys saw the announcements yesterday of the higher levels of custom customizability. The ability to customize dashboards will be very valuable in making sure we actually start to get what people are looking for when they want to see it. And this thing here, this to me, come on, snap away. That's probably the most fundamentally important report that I would ever consider chatting to the sales and marketing director about. For me, this was kind of the reason why we bought into HubSpot. I'm a PR man of old and most people do PR expecting to generate sales leads and inquiries. It doesn't in general. What it does is promote brand awareness, which leads to the generation of leads and inquiries. This stuff allows me to count and project from the bottom upwards. So if I put one closed one in the bottom, how many opportunities do I need to get to closed one? How many SQLs do I need to get to an opportunity? And how are they converting MQLs into SQLs? Now, I'd expect the bottom part of that to be known at the outset by the sales director or the chief exec of the organization that we're dealing with. It in my experience is unlikely that they will understand the top part of this funnel process. That is to say, we should be able to, with that bottom level of information, predict that from a number of sessions on the website, just how many submission form submissions we're going to get as a percentage of total and from that, predict the number of online leads that we're going to get and have a decent stab at how online leads will convert to MQLs once I understand and get into their business. That makes sense. I got to that as a eureka moment and I share it with you for free.

One of the other things that's worth pointing out about the funnel is as you look and report on these numbers month on month, this is what's going to show you what's not working. If you're finding that you're getting a huge volume of online leads coming through and nothing's ending up as an mql, your content may not be right where you're promoting, it may not be right your understanding between agency and client of what an MQL may have become muddied again, those are the opportunities to go back and review. Alternatively, you may find you're getting an awful lot of marketing qualified leads and nothing's going down to sales. There is then a communication issue between marketing and sales again that needs to be addressed.

I must have forgotten something because she went off piece. So few hacks, tips and tricks thoughts that might help along the way.

Yeah, that'll be me. Make sure that you have a really clear understanding of all of the activity that your client is doing. It is super important for you to move away from being a supplier to being a partner. You want them to see you as an engaged partner in all of their activity. It happens to me a lot has done historically where someone will be like, oh by the way, I've got an event next week. It will affect and play into all of the other activities. If you're just responsible for inbound, you have to make sure that you have an understanding of the context of inbound within the rest of their marketing activity. Get them to share under promise and over deliver. This applies to the sales process as well as it does your ongoing management. Don't be tempted to promise to the end of the world just to get that deal closed. If you start the relationship off that way and you're permanently over servicing, permanently over delivering, the client will expect that and you will run yourself ragged for the rest of that engagement. Be clear about what you plan on doing and then overachieve when you can and they'll see the value of you as the agency. This is a very interesting one. It's very easy as an agency to be very protective of the website and HubSpot portal that you've built. There has to be some knowledge transfer with the client. You have to have them using the tool whether or not it's just logging in to look at reports or an understanding of the activity that you have. Even if you're doing the best job in the world for the client. If they don't know what HubSpot as a tool does, they won't want to keep paying for it and you will see churn. So get buy in. Get them using the tool. Make sure you've got knowledge transfer built into your activities. Learn how to say no. This one's also probably learn when to say no. The client will be the number one thing that derails you and your project because they will see something shiny, something exciting that they want you to do. Bear in mind you are tied to contractual deliverables. If they ask you to go out of scope, then you have to make sure you set the understanding that you can't just keep adding to it. Something else has to Give. You have to be flexible with the engagement because stuff happens all the time. But just make sure you're being very clear about the outcome of picking up or changing methodology along the way.

The new guys in the room, if you're following the same pattern that we did, you are very, very enthusiastic about this whole piece. Right now you are in a state of high evangelism about the inbound message. And that's exactly what I got. I got so excited about this stuff that we went out and we sold it to everybody. I didn't care what they wanted. We were going to sell it to them and it was going to be great. And just be careful because it doesn't always fit. And if the organization doesn't buy into it, if they are sold on your wave of enthusiasm and they don't follow through with their own level of enthusiasm and engagement, then you're building yourself a problem. You're building yourself some future church. And hey, hands up. We did that. And you learn hard lessons in that process. And there is Paul Rotzer. Any of you guys seen Paul speak? He taught me early on the need to get big enough quickly as you can to get to a point where you can say no, where you can actually have someone come in the door who is not the right shape for your business, for your organization. And we have a focus. I've spoken to a lot of people about business size, business scale, in order to be a HubSpot prostate. And for me, there's one question. How many salesmen have you got? Because if you're trying to feed just one individual, it's odds on that you're going to run into issues. When you've got a large sales force that needs feeding regularly with leads, they need leads. The business understands and gets that. That's a great scenario to be in because you can really mobilize the troops behind the whole inbound process, get them involved and show them how it's going to work and how it's going to be good for everybody. There's a couple of quizzical faces there, but we can do that in questions. This guy, do you know who he is? So that's our version of your president. Ouch. So we thought about putting him up there, but I thought, no. So that's Alan Sugar. And actually we started this just so as you know. He said it first. He said it first. The point is that there is an occasion, and this is where you as business leaders have to make hard decisions. And there will come a time, I suspect. I hope it doesn't but there will potentially come a time where you actually just have to say, do you know what? It ain't worth it. And if you've been through the process of having your best team, your A team on the case, and Matt and I have been through this, where you've got people banging their heads against that particular wall on a regular basis and doing a fantastic job, but the client just doesn't give it back to you. You've all had one of those, haven't you? Yeah. You got to be strong and you've got to say those words. The alternative is you drive your people into the ground and your people, and if they're good people, they are more important than your client. Thank you.

Thank you. We've gotten quite intense.

Oh yeah, we did, haven't we? And maybe a little bit negative, but let's go.

There was a bit more that we just wanted to run through which is about growing and scaling your agencies as well. It's one of the pieces that we get asked quite a lot about how you add net new people.

As in how do we grow and.

Grow our team and our business?

Yeah, no, it's easy. So here's how you grow your team, hire your family, hire your kids.

Thank you. Can we please move on? That's a very embarrassing photo for me.

I had hair. Dammit. I had hair. Okay, so in truth, you know about T shaped people. You heard HubSpot talking about T shaped people? No. Yeah. No. Okay, so T shaped hire people with a broad knowledge, broad knowledge of marketing, preferably digital marketing. We hire first choice marketing grads, better still masters in digital marketing. Some form of digital. They still know fuck all. But in principle they are sponges for knowledge and they will do great things for you if you can bring them on, nurture them and get them experience. Now what you've got to do is to work out the downstrike. What are they going to excel in? So are they creative? Are they writers? Are they true digital analysts? Do they have other skills in other digital aspects? You've got to work that out with them. But as soon as you find that, drive that level of expertise downwards and you will have very valuable people. Very valuable people. And the other thing to bear in mind is make it fun, otherwise they aren't going to stick around. On that note, culture code. So we got taken on one side by HubSpot and slapped around a bit, said, you haven't got a culture code. What's that then? Well, it's what you do, it's what you are oh, we know what we are. We just hadn't written it down. Now, HubSpot talk about this being the biggest downloaded item on their website. It isn't for us yet, but it's kind of getting that way. Or anyone who's interested. Sorry, go back a step. Recruitment for me is really, really expensive if you're going to use recruitment agencies to bring your people in. We pay a fortune in my country for them. They are painfully expensive ways to recruit. So if we can build a process, use a tip, use LinkedIn, get LinkedIn recruiter. Not expensive. Fantastic way of finding people. You have to filter a lot of them out. The last job we put up had 276 applicants and over 100 of them were in other countries. Okay, I can deal with that as long as their English is good and they've got somewhere to live. But in principle I wanted to move us from the point where we were using a recruitment agency. I was getting two people or three if I was lucky. And having to make a choice from those 276 gives me another problem. We have to do group interviewing. But that's cool. You can set up a process to do that, bring a batch of people in that you shortlisted and get them to meet all of your people. So the last one of these we ran, we went from 276 down to 15. We did a group interview half day. They met all of our people. The last three came with us to the pub. I know it's not necessarily right for all of you, but a pub is an important thing in England and you have to kind of have one nearby the office, otherwise it, well, it doesn't quite work. People tell you more things in a relaxed environment than anywhere else and sat in an artificial environment of an interview, yet they just tell you what they think you want to hear. So they go off, I leave them to it. Some of the guys take them off. They basically get an hour into informal interview to actually really start to try and find out what they're about. But by the end of the day they've certainly met at least four or five people. And we have a group view on whether they are. Seth Godin says people like us. And that's fundamentally where we go with the culture code, because the culture code helps us to move it to an understanding of what we're about. And the key aspects for us is the kind of day to day tenants that we like to try and live by.

Do you want to explain gsd?

Get shit done? Of course there's nothing, just Remember, there's nothing that you can do that your client can't do themselves. Right. So the reason why what they employ us is to get shit done. Because most of the big companies can't do it themselves. They're hopeless at it. So they have a dozen agencies that do all their work for them. You're all partners. Right. But as fundamentally right, I would say think hard, do it and optimize it. That's our fundamental axiom that comes out of those particular points. Oh, one more. So just a small. So this is, this is Seth Godin's thing. People like us. So I want fundamentally to have people in the business that aren't assholes. Why? Because you can't train that out of people. But if you can find people that aren't, you can train them to do. Particularly if they're young and enthusiastic. Like average age of Our team is 20 something. Take me out of the. But the, the addition of the net new was a conversation with Halligan actually which was on the basis of they appreciated after a while that they had. You got some in the business you can't get. You're stuck with those. In my case, you're stuck with at least one. Yeah, that's you.

Yeah, it's just my final one which is. Did everyone go to the partner kickoff yesterday? Was everyone in that room? So there is a huge amount of internal training resource that HubSpot made available to you. I think it's a given that everyone here should have everyone in their agencies, at least inbound and HubSpot certified. The one that I will say is that anyone who is client facing in your organization, get them to take the partner certification. It's got a real, real wealth of, of information. It talks about client conflict, it talks about understanding and building and being bought into the business you work in. There are a whole host of others. Your team will need constant learning and constant training predominantly because HubSpot changed their product every 15 minutes. So you have to keep up to scratch. So keep learning and keep going with it. And I think that's us.

Thanks very much.