INBOUND 2016: Mike Lieberman - "How Agile Marketing Transformed Our Agency"

Thanks. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah. Good. Okay, so raise your hand if you own the agency. Okay. Raise your hand if you work in the agency. Okay. Raise your hand if you're not in or work in an agency. Oh, there's a few people here. That's okay. Good. Okay, first of all, I want to pay you an extremely nice compliment. You're clearly the smartest people at this conference for coming to this session right before it's time to leave. And I can promise you that when this is over, you will feel like the smartest people at the conference. Okay? So typically I like to jam as much information into the 45 minutes they give me as possible. So I'm going to go through this at a pretty nice clip. The other thing I'm going to do is allow you guys to ask some questions as I go through it. Because. Because I don't want it to be a presentation, I'd rather it be more of a conversation. Okay. So if you have a question about something I'm talking about, throw your hand up, I'll stop and we'll do a couple of questions in between and then I'll try to leave some time at the end for Q and A. And I will stay here and talk to anybody who wants to talk to me afterwards for as long as you want to talk to me. Okay. Okay, let's get into it. So I don't. Okay, agenda. I'm going to tell you a tiny, tiny bit about me. I don't like talking about me very much, but just to give you some context, I want to tell you what was going on. The agency that got us excited about Agile, what we did to get ready, what happened when we went all in and where we are today, and then some questions and an offer at the end. All right, so a little bit about me. In 2003, we started the company. We've grown it from four to 54 team members. Last year we did 5.5. This year we're going to do 6.5. And we're actually on a revenue run rate to be more like in the seven to seven and a half million range. Next year we were HubSpot's first Diamond partner. They actually created the diamond partner category for us and we've acquired and merged four agencies over the past couple of years. We have 120 HubSpot clients. So you get a little bit of a perspective from where I'm coming, when I'm going to talk to you. I knew nothing about agencies when I started this company in 2003. I was a lifelong marketer. You can see I bought an $82,000 print ad in CFO magazine once. I had an SEO company that I paid $20,000 a month to help us get found. I had a PR company that I paid $12,000 a month to. I didn't know anything about running an agency, but what I did know was that the marketing that people were doing was not right and there was a better way to do it. And my passion came from wanting to teach my clients inbound, really, and why they want to be doing that. I'm going to be your guide over the next 45 minutes. This is me in my Sherpa hat. And if you don't know anything about design, this was Photoshop. That's not really me in my Sherpa hat. But again, like, I started this to help people. And for some of you that know me, I also spend some of my time helping agency owners make the transition from traditional to inbound also. So getting an opportunity to talk to all of you for 45 minutes is something that I'm really excited about and I hope you can tell through the conversation we're going to have. I'm also going to be 100% transparent with you guys. I'm going to tell you things about our agency that you might be like, why would he tell us that? But I think you need to know some of the mistakes we made and the issues we had so that you don't make them also. Okay, so what was going on that got us to think Agile might be important to us? The first thing we started to see pretty quickly is, you know, inbound agencies are really labor intensive, right? Like when you have to start cranking out content and optimizing websites and building websites. Like, we're not buying media, right? We don't get a media check for a million dollars every quarter because we purchased all these ads, right? Everything we do requires people. And as you guys are starting to grow your agencies, you'll start to realize that some of the metrics associated with agencies are different for inbound agencies than traditional agencies. This is not my office. This is just a picture that shows you things are labor intensive. The other thing with inbound is it can be like, kind of a drag, right? It's kind of like it's time to make the donuts every day. We're really kind of doing the same thing. How many blog articles can you write? How many websites can you build? How many pages can you optimize or ebooks can you create? And Publish, you know, like, it's a lot of rinse and repeat. And honestly, the more you do rinse and repeat, the better your client's results are and the worse experience everyone in your agency is having. So it's hard. And that was one of my issues, is I wanted it not to be it's time to make the donuts again. It was like Groundhog Day for my team. Every day they would show up at work and basically do the same thing. There really weren't a lot of wins. Right. Which we'll talk about that a little bit also. So I actually took a minute to kind of compare what we do versus what a traditional agency does. And it was kind of obvious to me. So if I run a traditional creative agency that does ads, then I have a lot of work up front. I gotta be creative and create all the work. But then they're out there and I'm kinda done, right. Like I bought the media and the ads are going and maybe they're working, maybe they're not. Maybe I don't care because I got paid to be smart, creative, not necessarily drive business for them. So there's a lot of heavy lifting up front and then they kind of sit back or move, move on to another project. So the experiences people have at traditional creative agencies are a lot different than ours. We are basically doing the same thing every day. And it was starting to kind of drag on the team and on me and on everything associated with what we do. And it really felt like chores. The faces on these little kids was perfect for me. I don't want people coming to my office and feeling like they're doing chores. So this was a big issue we were having at the company. This may resonate with you guys. Like inbound agencies habitually over service their clients, right? Why do we over service our clients? Because they're expecting results from us, not fancy ads. And results sometimes comes with, oh, I'll do this extra thing for them here. Well, we didn't quite do as well as we thought we were going to do last month. I'll do this extra work for them there. Before you know it, you're not making any money on your clients. You're working really hard and you're not making any money. Who's in business here to not make any money? You are. Wow, Good for you guys. Most of us are here to make money, right? Sorry if that seems like entrepreneurial or business owner ish, but we got to make money or we won't be in these businesses next year. So you have to find a way to service clients, get them results and make money also. And over servicing is a problem. I talked a little bit about team wins. Like the team never got any wins. Even when we got the client 100 leads, they were like, well, I thought I was going to get 130 leads. We're like, come on, when you met us three months ago, you didn't have any leads. They don't care. It's what have you done for me lately? And how do you get more and how do we ramp this up? And I thought this was going to happen faster. And it's not easy what we've chosen to do. And some of my team, they were quitting, right? They didn't want to do the same thing every day. They didn't feel like they were stimulated. They felt like it was a factory. They didn't feel like they were really being creative. And I don't want people quitting and I don't want people at my shop who are not having an incredible professional experience. Now. We were getting results, right? HubSpot's amazing. It's showing us the results that we're driving for our clients. So we were driving traffic and we were driving leads. But it just wasn't quite working out the way we wanted to. We were not making the money we wanted to. Like I said, profit is very important to us. Sorry, that's my dog. And there's more like, isn't this enough? Like, God, isn't all that crap enough? No, there's more to the story that isn't great. My agency was really kind of like a Frankenstein. It wasn't really what I had hoped it would be. There wasn't enough collaboration. People weren't accountable for results. We really weren't cross training people. There was no involvement from the people delivering the work. And the estimating process, like sales pretty much made it up and we had to deliver it. I'm not in sales, I'm on delivery. There was not a lot of flexibility and there were not enough happy people. So look, this is like a pretty sad state of affairs. And there were times when we looked at what we were doing and we were like, why is it like this? It shouldn't be like this. What can we do differently? The other thing we realized, and this may seem a little different than what I said last year, but I'll explain it to you. Inbound marketing is 100% a long term play. If you're telling anybody that you're going to get them results in a month or two you're probably not giving them the honest truth. It's going to take a year to two years to really ramp up this program and deliver the kind of results they're probably expecting. So I don't mean that this slide contradicts that. What I mean is we used to do what I used to do when I was the VP of marketing. It was November. I did the 2017 marketing plan, a 12 month plan with all the things I want to do over the whole next 12 months. And I presented it to my management team. They were like, Mike, sounds good. I know they didn't understand a word I said, but they were going to let me do whatever I wanted to do anyway. You can't do a 12 month marketing plan for inbound. You can't. How can I? Here's what I used to do. I used to write 52 blog article ideas and put it in my plan and say, okay, you're getting one blog a week. Here are the 52 blogs we're going to be doing. Let's get started. How the heck do I know what the blog should be three or four months from now? I have no idea. Why am I planning for a whole year? I need to see what's working, I need to adapt to what's working. I need to change things. I need to be responsive to the results that HubSpot software specifically shows us. So inbound is not a 12 month exercise. And this got me thinking about Agile. It's really more of a series of sprints, right? So in this case it's really the way we look at it today is it's a series of 30 day sprints. So we now do 30 day planning with our clients every single month. Right. So it's the middle of November. My clients know what we're going to be working on in December. Now I'm not suggesting they have no idea what's going to happen in January or February or March. Obviously if we have a webinar scheduled for February, they there are things we have to do in December to get ready for it, but they're really only focused on the work that has to get done in December. Okay, again, if you have any questions, just throw your hand up. So long term planning definitely has value, right? You need to know where you're going, you need to know how many visitors and conversions and leads and everything that the client. You need to know what the long term plan is. You need to know what the company's long term plan is. You need to have some concept of long term planning. But in terms of executing the tactics and it has to be shortened dramatically. I wanted my team to be more like these guys, first responders. I wanted them to be able to swoop in, assess the situation, figure out what to do really quickly and then do it right. And we were not set up to do that. We were set up to execute long, drawn out, well thought out plans. So this is where some of the changes needed to be thought through and executed. And more than the responding aspect, I wanted them to be able to respond to the data. So this is a big shift from what agencies did traditionally to what inbound agencies have to be good at. You and your teams have to be good at looking at the data, assessing it, deciding what you need to do, putting a plan together and then executing it and then doing that again and again and again and again and again. The faster you can cycle that series of activities that I just described, the, the better results you're going to get for your clients. And this is a skill set that not a lot of agency people that I've talked to really have. You need to be able to go in a HubSpot, know where to look, know what the data's telling you, know where the issues are, know how to direct your team. Hey, this isn't working like we thought it would. Let's work on that next. Create a series of experiments. Like, you know, they call me the chief inbound scientist, like it's part funny, but it's also, I think like a scientist. I want to create some experiments, I want to try some things as fast as I can to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work because that delivers better results for the clients. Again, the people that hire us are not hiring us for fancy creative, they're hiring us to get results, leads, conversions, cross sells, new clients. Now that you're all selling sales enablement services, you're going to have to actually not only get them leads, but close the leads for them. Right. Our job got infinitely more difficult. So this is what we used to do. It was a very traditional waterfall approach plan, you know, execute, you know, deliver. And it really wasn't allowing us to cycle fast enough. And as I started to look around, I was like, well what, what else is there out there? And when I started to, you know, get a little more comfortable with agile and I started to see pictures like this, this seemed a lot more like what I'm talking about, right? Fast iterations, cycling more quickly, understanding data involving the client and really kind of driving this to move more quickly. So that's what was going on. Some of the other things that I liked about Agile when we started looking at it was the teams were much more involved. So instead of me telling people what to do or my managers telling people what to do, the teams were deciding what to do. The teams were making the commitments to the clients, the teams are collaborating on the issues they had, they were starting to understand each other's areas, they were evaluating their own performance, they were planning for improvements, they were getting happier. And since they're self managed work teams, I didn't need any project managers this time. Last year I had four project managers. This time I have no project managers. The teams manage the work. Okay, so what did we do to get ready? Because obviously this is like a pretty big change. Like we've been doing it this way for 13 years and now we're going to start doing something completely different. So like a good entrepreneur. I read a book, the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Like a naive entrepreneur, I got super excited by the title and thought that was going to happen to me also. And you know the thing that kind of resonated me with Jeff's book, which by the way, you should read it, it's an excellent read and it's relatively an easy read, is he talked a lot about how Scrum and ads are all perfect for creative, complex tasks. And that line right there really spoke to me because I think what inbound agencies do is highly creative, highly complex tasks on a regular basis. So that was like one of the key lines in the book that really got me excited about this. I started looking around the Internet again. I'm kind of savvy to the web. Unfortunately I couldn't find hardly anything, so that really wasn't very helpful. And then I hired an Agile consultant. If you're interested, I can give you his name. He's actually really quite good. And he kind of helped us learn Scrum, learn Agile, and we kind of adapted it to the agency because Mark is really good at Scrum, but Mark's not really an agency guy. So he helped us with the methodology, but we had to kind of take it the rest of the way and we started a pilot. Not this kind of pilot. I took a small group of people in the company and said, you're going to start this process for us first. So I didn't want to disrupt the entire company. I wanted to kind of do a little experiment in a relatively less risky way by having a pilot of people start it. So what did our pilot look like, by the way? In my olden days, I probably would have just told everybody on Tuesday, we're going to Scrum, and told them on Wednesday. I expected it to be done. So I did this a little more thoughtfully with the whole pilot idea. Selected a small group of the company. We created an Agile Hive, which is what we called it. I gave them all the resources they needed to deliver everything we do. So on the pilot, they had a marketing strategist, and this will answer some of the question about the team structure. They had a marketing strategist, they had two marketing consultants, they had a developer, a designer, a copywriter. I think that's it. So everything they needed to deliver the work for the clients that were being managed by that hive. Okay. I dedicated Mark to working with them. I said, mark, you're only working with these six people. You know, teach them agile, teach them Scrum, focus on them, everyone else's business as usual. We trained them in Scrum, so they got, you know, they're not certified Scrum Masters, but Mark taught them all the rituals and how to, you know, do the methodology and all that stuff. And we bought a new project management tool called jira. And they used Jira, while the rest of the teams used the old project management software we had. So we really kind of went. We did everything we possibly could to create this little Agile agency within the agency. Okay. And it actually worked out quite nicely. We started this, the pilot, last September, and it ended up running more or less through November or 12 sprints. And we felt like 12 sprints was enough to really get an idea in terms of what was working and what was not working. And we did end up learning a lot. Some of what we learned is that the people loved it. Some of my issues with the team were resolved. They liked the process a lot better. The SCRUM rituals allow the people participating in it to tell you how happy they are after every single sprint. So we had data on how they were feeling after every sprint was over. They do a team member happiness score, where they all tell each other how happy they are. Right. So we had data on how happy they were, and it improved immediately. We were getting a lot more work done with the same resources, which is kind of what Jeff promised in his book. Maybe it wasn't twice the work with half the people, but we were able to start seeing that there were some efficiencies being gained by these people really working together more collaboratively. And the most exciting thing is the clients in the pilot were a Lot happier than the clients outside of the pilot. And I'm not suggesting that my clients outside of the pilot weren't happy, but the clients inside the pilot were getting better results.

What were the clients roles in the Scrum?

Great question. What was the client roles in the Scrum? So if you know anything about Agile and Scrum, the client is supposed to be in all of the rituals, right? It's fast feedback, fast adjustments. So like a good student of Scrum, we went to the clients in the Scrum hive and said, hey, good news, we want you to come to all our meetings. They were like, we're not coming to any of your meetings. So we're like, okay, now what? Right. We had to figure out a surrogate for the client and that became the strategist. So the person leading the hive was responsible for interacting with the client, getting the client feedback and feeding it back into the hive. Okay, so that's how we kind of like have learned some of the adjustments to make that, you know, don't typically get to make when you're looking at a software development model applied to the agency. Yes. Do I what? Yes, we do daily standups. Well, technically, because we talk to our clients every day, but it's not like there's a report generated as a result of the standup every day. Right. The standups are really more for the team. Okay, what happened yesterday, what's going on today, what's in your way? Making sure priorities are organized and then we'll talk about the stand up. So it's in context in a little bit. So the client results during the pilot. So let's see really like how this was impacting the clients. We delivered a website in 30 days. This is not growth driven design. Let me be clear. This is not like a launchpad website. We were able to work with a client to get them their website up and running in 30 days. Was this a 200 page website with e commerce functionality? No, it was the kind of website they needed to start to get them results. In 30 days, we improved the client's site wide conversion rate to 8.9%. Let's be honest with stats. You see a ton of stats here at this conference. They already were at 5%. They asked us to get them to 6.5%. We got them to almost 9% in 30 days because the team was focused on the things that needed to get done to move the needle in that direction. We produced over 400 leads for a client in a single month. So clearly that was four sprints. Because back Then we were doing weekly sprints and I'll talk about that. So it took us four sprints to get their leads up like that. And we had a website go from 200 visitors to 2000 visitors to 4000 visitors in two months. So if you know anything about in and this wasn't with pay per click or any kind of non inbound tactics, this was all like by helping them get found and publishing content and blogging and all that stuff. Right. We're just able to cycle faster to get them better results. Yes. Yes. No, no, yes. I'm saying. Well, growth driven design is a very specific methodology. So I didn't want you to think I launched a two page website in 30 days because that's not that interesting. A few more pages. What I'm saying is we weren't practicing the growth driven design methodology. Did we really just. We don't really do that. I mean we do regular website optimization and we do slow rollout of websites. We just don't practice the growth driven design methodology. What we do works pretty good already. I mean we'll talk about growth driven design. I'm not putting it down in any way. I think it's really good. But we already kind of did it. We didn't need to do it the way like Luke will tell you, you should follow to do it. That's all I'm saying. When was the pilot? The pilot was started in September and ran of last year and ran through November. Yeah. Okay. So we ran into some trouble. This wasn't all, you know, peaches and cream. There were issues and I'm a big fan of failure. Right. You want to fail fast and you want to learn from your failures. So you know, this is what didn't go well. The team is everything in Scrum and Agile. Right. So this pilot was still suffering from some of the people not feeling great and they quit. And every time someone quit we had a setback. Right. When you put a new person on the team, the team has to reform their bonds and they have to re establish how they're going to work together. It was very disruptive. I also had some people who really didn't want to do Agile. They liked it the way we used to do it. They really weren't too hard on us moving to Agile. They left so that impacted the team. Also you have to train new people. Like the turnover is very disruptive to Agile. So we had to figure out how we were going to deal with that because I'm not expecting everyone in the company to stay with Us forever. So you're going to have turnover. You have to figure out how to deal with it. We found some efficiencies, right? So right away we started to realize that we don't need a designer on every single team. We, we don't do enough design work to support having every single team have a designer. Okay. So for the four teams we had at the time, we really only needed two designers. This is problematic for Scrum because I have to now share a resource across two teams. So what do they do? Go to two standups, go to two retrospectives. Like, we had to figure out how to manage shared resources, right? So the good news was, hey, we don't need an extra designer. The bad news was, okay, what do we do with these shared resources? How do we manage that? That's a little bit of the allocation thing. Designers. We didn't need any project managers, so I didn't know I didn't need any project managers when the pilot was running, but I saw that the project manager role was a lot less interesting than it was prior to running the pilot. So that was interesting. Also, people started to realize that when they were planning their Sprint, they only had maybe three quarters of a week's worth of work in the Sprint. So they were going like, oh, well, what else can I do to help you guys? Right? So I had a team deciding what to work on and I had just a designer as an example, saying, well, I only have 30 hours worth of design work. Hey, can I help you with that landing page? And we were like, this is interesting. Maybe the concept of these really specialists isn't the right way to go with Scrum and Agile. Maybe we should have more generalists, right? Maybe, maybe we should start teaching our designers how to do a little coding or at least how to manage in HubSpot so they could go in and update a landing page so they could do some optimization work. So we started thinking about how we might want to cross train people so they could be more effective in terms of getting the team to get their Sprint finished. So major changes in our thinking. Again, one of the issues with Inbound and one of the issues why we wanted to look at something different was I felt like we were a slave to our agreement with our clients. So clients want to buy stuff, right? They bought stuff for 100 years. I bought a website, I bought a brochure, I bought get me on the first page of Google. They bought all these things that didn't always translate into business results. And we had been selling them things for a Long time. Our agreement said we're going to build you a 20 page website. We're going to do one blog post a week for you or 52 blog posts. We're going to give you four white papers, we're going to do one email a month that we had a list of items that they bought from us. We were a slave to the agreement. Clients were like, where's my blog articles? We're like, well, you don't need blog articles anymore because we're doing a really good job. I don't care. It says in my contract I get a blog article every week. That was a big problem for us because it prevented us from being agile. So we had to rethink our agreements. We had to rethink how we deliver strategy. So if you guys heard me talk last year, I talked about how for every client we do two months of strategy, right? We don't do that anymore. Now we agilely identify the strategic components that need to get done and when they need to get done and they get woven into the work just like the rest of the work does. So if we're going to build a website, we need search strategy done, we need web strategy done. Maybe the content strategy can come a little later, but we can start with these elements of strategy and start to get some of the tactics done more quickly for the client and then get around to the other strategic components a little bit later in the engagement. It allowed us to get clients results faster, which is an issue with inbound. Like we talked about, we had to rethink how we do planning. So this concept of 30 day planning was new. How are we going to basically get the client involved without them coming to the meetings? Right. The way to do that is to work with them every month on what their priorities are for the next month, what you think you should be working on the next month. Because we all know better than they do how to get them results or they wouldn't have hired us. At least that's the concept and we have to help them make good decisions. So we go to them and say, here's how we want to spend your points and is this aligning with what you want to do? And they might say yes. And we say, great, off we go. They might say, well, you know, I kind of feel like I want you to work on my logo also. And we'll say, ok, we. Well, if your logo redesign is going to take 20 points, what 20 points would you like to take out of this plan? Oh no, no, I want you to do that. And the things that you said you were going to do, well, that's not how it works. You have 100 points and let's talk about how you want to spend the points. So my hope is that this also starts to talk them out of these non results oriented tactics and lets us do what they wanted us to do originally because clients are awesome at getting us away from what we're supposed to be doing. So we had to rethink that whole exercise. Also we had to rethink how we collaborate with them. Like we talked about. Our entire engagement profile has changed too. So again, like you heard me talk about how every client pays us the same amount of money every month. 10,000, 12,000, 13,000 every month. That's the retainer and we do work for that. We've now introduced this concept of flexible retainers. So for the client who we recommend the $12,000 a month program and they say, well, I only have a budget for nine, we say, great, we'll start with nine. Instead of getting 120 points a month, you get 90 points a month. And guess what? In the second month, they don't have enough points to do everything they want to do because they didn't take our advice during the sales process. So we say that to them, look, you're out of points. We told you you needed 120, you opted for 90. Why don't you buy 10 more? That's a good idea. Okay, I'll buy 10 more. Now I'm at 10,000. And what happens the next month? They run out of points again and they can't do everything they want to do. Eventually they get to the point that they should have been originally because we recommended 12. So there's a little bit of flexibility that you can install there. Everybody always asks me, well, what happens if they go down? So I'll answer that question for you. They don't go down if you do good work. They only go down if you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing or if you get super smart and super efficient and then maybe you can really get them the same amount of results for less money, which would be a really great story to tell. So in January, we went all in on Agile. And what happened when we went all in? I think I was naive and maybe overly hopeful. I was really expecting this. I didn't get that. But we did get a lot of really positive things that happened. So team member happiness, like I talked about, it went from 5.6 to 8.9 across the entire company. Okay. That's a pretty significant improvement. People were much happier. The over servicing was reduced dramatically. Now, I'm going to tell you that it took us a long time to get that over servicing down. And it's really only now that the servicing and the money they're paying us are starting to normalize. So it's not going to happen overnight. Your team has to learn new conversations, your team has to learn how to use the points in conversation with the client, and they have to learn how to prioritize based on what's going to get the best results. So it takes a little finessing and we have a little bit ways to go. But today it's better than it's ever been before. It's all due to the points mechanism. So it's not as if his question was all due to points. It's not about the points. It's about how you use the points and how you talk to clients about the points and how you prioritize with points. So. So when you're prioritizing with a client, you want to put the work in first. That's going to have the biggest impact on results and take the least amount of effort. So if I can do something for two points, that's going to double my conversion rate on a landing page that gets in first. So that's the conversation we're having with the clients. So we fill up their bucket first with the things that are going to have the biggest impact, and then we work in those other things. So back to this question about the big ebook project. They're breaking that down into a ton of little projects, and that allows them to manage that across multiple sprints. Not everything gets done in a week or two weeks. Some things take longer. Yes, sir.

Are different tactics or duties like strategy a different value and point value?

Yes. Everything in the agency has a different point value. Right. So things that take us longer are worth more points. Things that take us less time are worth less points. But there's a value conversation here also. So I could do something for two points that is extremely valuable and I'm charging the client six, even though it's costing me two.

Are you basing all that on a blended grade or are you also factoring in compensation that the strategies may cost me?

It's all in costs. It's all in costs. It covers our variable costs and our fixed costs. Right. And the beautiful thing about the value aspect to this is if I think something's worth, instead of converting it to dollars, if I think something's worth $6,000. And the value engineered number is only $4,000. I'm still charging 60 points to deliver that. That's how we make even more money. And the client is all in on the points. They know how we're allocating the points. They don't know my cost points but they know my value points. So we share everything with them. Every single month they get an allocation of how they spent their points and how much everything costs. And none of them ever complained about that at all. You ask a lot of questions. I gotta give you like a book or something. Yes. The question was did the movement to points coincide with the movement to Agile? Yes it did. We did it all at the same time. And I'll talk about the sales aspect of that because that's important. Also co created the 30 day plans. We work with them on their budget again. So if they don't have enough money allocated, this is a great opportunity to upsell them on a regular basis. Basically based on what they want to do. Right. And the results they want to get. Okay, I want to keep going. It took us a little bit of time to figure out the Agile implications to strategy. So like I said, we modularized these two months so that people could pick and choose pieces of it and deploy it in the same way. We did that through a series of workshops. So we'll have a search engine optimization, really it's a get found workshop. We'll have a web workshop, we'll have a conversion workshop, we'll have a content workshop. And that kind of gets the strategy piece broken down into smaller nuggets. It's prioritized the same way. It's allowing us to move tactical work forward in the engagement which gets them better results. So let's talk about client results. Because I am super focused on client results at our agency. It's really my job. Let me give you some practical examples. 183 increase in inbound leads in just 60 days. So forget the percentage increases you hear around here. I like to give you numbers. 236 leads a month to 671 leads a month. This was one of the, not the pilot clients but one of the other clients. So they started working like this in December. Okay. These are real things from the HubSpot portal site. Wide conversion rate improved to almost 6%. 7,000 visitors a month in six months. So this client went from three leads a month to over 300 leads a month in just a couple months. So where are we today? Right, we're still working on it. Right. We still Have a lot to do. Yeah. We basically do the same thing for everybody, everything they need to get them results. We're building their website, we're creating content, we're optimizing that site, we're doing conversion, we're doing email, we're doing all of the inbound tactics that you guys are all very comfortable with. I said this lots of times to you guys. It's not about the tactics. It's about how you take the tactics, configure them, and then execute them and optimize them. Yes. Go ahead. No, no. The clients are included in those workshops. Yes.

So the trend line had some jagged. How did clients say, well, you're trending and then suddenly you're dropping. What's going on?

Yeah, well, I mean, lead generation is not always up and to the right. Sometimes there's some spikes. There's a ton of seasonality in clients, businesses that they don't want to admit to. So lots of times we go back and look at what you did last year at this time, and almost all the time our numbers are above where they were last year at the same time. So a dip doesn't mean you didn't do a good job. A dip means they're still getting 10 times more what they were getting same time last year. Yeah. So the way we handle shared resources across teams is I have a super scrum master at the company, and the super scrum master is responsible for making sure that everybody is allocated and making sure that those resources get shared. So she's kind of looking at this hive needs this, this hive needs that. And here's how we're going to share the resources across it. And the teams do a lot of collaboration too. Oh, I don't need Becky so much. This week you take her. I don't need Becky so much next week you take her. So they do a lot of that collaboration also at the strategist level. No, the shared resources participate in everything. So the way I stagger my events is they literally can go to a stand up at 9 and a stand up at 9. 15. Okay. Now, they don't always do that, but they can if they want to. And then I stagger the retrospectives and the planning. So they can go to one retrospective and then the next retrospective. Yeah, retrospective after that. Planning. Planning. Now, they don't do that every week because that's a lot of overhead in meetings, but they can if they want to. And if someone needs them in one of those meetings, they can say, hey, we're going to talk about the project you're working on at 3:45. Pop into my planning meeting at 3:45 and we can catch you up. Let me keep going because I don't run out of time. And then I'll take questions at the end. How are we doing? Eight minutes. Okay. So my agency has a tendency to change a lot of things very frequently. So one of the mistakes we made was in the second quarter of 2016, because my team was calling it change fatigue, I agreed to stop making changes for an entire quarter. What a big mistake. First of all, I kept wanting to change things and they kept reminding me I agreed not to change things. And I kept getting annoyed at that. And I go, this is tiny. You won't even notice it. That was a big mistake. And our entire 2017 is about innovation. We're going to continue to innovate what we're doing and innovate it at a rapid pace. A lot of the reasons I want to do that is because I feel like I need to stay ahead of the entire inbound agency community. And the only way to do that is be constantly iterating your agency, innovating what you're doing, and using it to get better results. So one of the issues we're still dealing with, and as far as I understand, is something that is a big issue across all kinds of agencies is the scoping and estimating process. It's really hard to get all the information you need from your prospects in order to scope the project properly. I actually thought the Agile methodology would help with that, but it actually didn't help with it at all. So we have to get better at the scoping and estimating part of our jobs and give clients more insight into what we're going to be doing and how much it's going to cost. The other thing that happened there was a question about the sales process in the beginning. We were like, hey, Mr. Prospect, we do Agile and it's going to be great. And they were like, what the heck is that? I don't care about that. How many leads are you going to get me? This confuses me. I'm scared. So we had to tailor our story a little bit differently so that we didn't really lead with that as something that was special or interesting. But we said, we now say things like, oh, you have complete flexibility around your agreement. If you want to go up, we can. If you want to go down, we can. No problem. It's all about what you want to get accomplished. We're going to collaborate with you. How do you do all that? Oh, we use the Scrum and Agile methodology. Okay. They don't really want to know any of those details. They just want to know that they're going to get what they want out of it. If you heard me talk on Wednesday, everything in sales should be nothing about you and everything about the prospect. So you make it about them and all of a sudden they're on board. You got to really, if you're going to take this on, it's going to be a fairly lengthy process and you got to kind of think about it like sports science. I'm kind of enamored with what the athletic pro sports teams do now with science. So I'm really starting to think like what we do is more like that. How do I tweak this, how do I adjust that? When we started we did one week sprints and the team was like, well, what if we did two week sprints and we wouldn't have to take a whole Friday, every Friday to do planning. We would only have the rituals every other week. Right. That sounds like kind of a good idea right now. My Agile consultant was like, well that is a good idea, but you know, you're planning might be twice as long if you're only doing it every two weeks instead of every week. Which he was kind of right, but not exactly right. So the two week sprints seem to be working better than the one week sprints are. So you have to try these different things in order to see what works for you. We had to refine our 30 day planning process, the conversations with clients. We had to do some role play training with client services people. You know, it required some adjustments. We needed our Super Scrum Master. She's also responsible for removing company wide impediments. So if there's something going on in the company, her job is to remove it. Her job is to make sure resources are allocated. Her job is to help the teams know how to run their Scrums and exercise the ritual. So it became a very important role. We're actually learning that this is maybe not a full time job. So she has been now doing some marketing consulting work with some clients and working as our Super Scrum Master. So again, that's the kind of thing you learn after you do it long enough. We really wanted to focus on the client experience, so we wanted to make our relationships more personal. We wanted to remove friction and conflict, continue to educate them and get them to feel like we're working with them. Some of the results we've been getting a lot More referrals and a lot more referenceable clients. More glowing reviews on websites where they actually vet the clients instead of just accepting what someone says as verbatim. So that's kind of exciting. A much higher renewal rate. We made our engagements evergreen. So you guys know I used to talk about 12 month engagements. Our contracts now have no end date. Work with us as long as you want. So I wanted to remove the friction of the renewal from the conversation completely. If I'm not getting your results, you should fire me. If I'm getting your results, we can work together forever. And like I said, the clients are increasing their engagements every month because these retainers are flexible. They're not stuck in a contract for 12 months. You could work with us for one month, but there's a 30 day out in the contract, so technically the least amount of time you could work with us for would be two months. Unless you fired me on the first day, which would make no sense. Okay, so I'll answer questions and I have a special offer for you guys. If you text the word agency to 66866, you'll get the deck immediately. Okay. And also, so you know, part of what I do besides square two marketing is I have a real small consulting business. And some of you guys already work with me where I hope I help agencies who want to get into Inbound and want to get into agile. I do it with them in kind of a cohort and one on one way. It's called Agencies to Inbound. If you're interested in me helping you, just go to the website, take a look at what we do, send me an email and I'm happy to talk to you about how I might be able to help your agency with all of that. If you guys have other questions, I really appreciate you coming. 1:00 on a Friday. I'll stay outside and talk to you for as long as you want. See you later. All right, I'll try. Okay.