Patrick Biddiscombe from New Breed Marketing
27 Jul 2015 · 40 min
Patrick Biddiscombe, CEO of New Breed Marketing, talks about scaling from social media consultant to running a 30-person agency. He launched 52 HubSpot COS websites in one year and explains how the company uses inbound methods to recruit its own team.
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Hey.
Welcome to episode number 20 of Inbound Agency Journey. This is Andrew. And today we're sharing a conversation that Gray has with Patrick Bitescomb from New Breed Marketing up in Vermont. Awesome. Awesome conversation. Patrick has some great things going on up there. He shares the story of how he came to the agency as a social media consultant and how he is today the CEO. Awesome story of how he has grown into that position and how the company has evolved from more of a traditional agency to an inbound agency. Shares how their team puts the operations in place to deliver more than one COS website launch per week. They did 52 last year. They're on pace to do over 60 this year. It's awesome. So without further ado, here we go. Welcome to Inbound Agency Journey.
This is the show where inbound agency.
Leaders share the strategies, shortcomings and successes they've experienced in their journey toward building their dream agency. Now, here are your hosts, Andrew and Gray.
Welcome to Inbound Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray MacKenzie, and I am very happy to have Patrick Bitescombe from New Breed Marketing on the call with us today. Patrick, how you doing, man?
Doing well, Doing well. Thanks for having me.
It is my pleasure. I'm excited to dig into your story, where you personally came from and also New Breed and also excited. You guys are, I think, one of four HubSpot diamond partners right now in the entire world. Is that right?
That's correct. We've been fortunate to climb the ranks pretty fast in the partner ecosystem and it's been an exciting run.
Yeah. Well, congratulations on your success. On your success. And we're excited to dig into it here. Do you want to start, Patrick, just by giving us kind of your story, how you came into New Breed and then kind of the transition, what's been going on with New Breed over the last year or so?
Yeah, yeah. Happy. Happy to jump into that. So came out of the University of Vermont Business School, needed to figure go get an internship. Was 2008 and was looking for jobs on Wall street, was going to go into the foreign currency as a broker and got a friendly hint from one of my friends who worked there and said, hey, I don't think this is a great time. 2008, right before bear Stearns crashed to go jump into the. Into the financial field. So he said, stick around. Stick around for MA for a year. See what's going on here. Also liked marketing out of the business school and went and did an informational interview at New Breed and said, I'll work for free for the summer. If you guys will, at least if there's an open position, I can apply for it. And did that for two months and then started out as a social media strategist at New Breed and then worked my way up to an account manager and then oversaw the account management team. So did that over about three and a half years and then still had the finance bug and left New Breed for a year and a half. Went off to Morgan Stanley to work in wealth management and realized you can no longer be an entrepreneur in the finance space at a big broker, broker, dealer. So took the year and a half, great learning experience, had an awesome team that we worked for, had about 400 customers, was, you know, traveling a lot and just realized that wasn't the right fit for me and had a great conversation with my boss over there and said, you know, I'm gonna head. Head back over to New Breed. They had an opening and came back over to New Breed. New Breed had kind of gone through the recession and still stayed alive, but had shrunk down to about 10 people. And I came back and hooked up with HubSpot. Brian Halligan is the CEO and he is also a University of Vermont alum. And I went down to inbound in 2000, let's say 2011, so one of the early inbound conferences still where you could walk the halls with Halligan and Volpe and Dimesh and just chat with them whenever you wanted. And went up and introduced myself, and he said, we'd love to have a partner in Burlington, Vermont, and I think you guys should do it. And had a couple more meetings with him about it, and the rest is kind of history.
Wow. So really, your buddy on Wall street kind of saved you there in 2008. I did not know that about your story. That's funny.
Yeah. And I was totally sad. University of Vermont puts a lot of folks out into New York right after school. It's very finance focused, which actually plays very nice into marketing these days. Right. So my background is much more on the math side of marketing than the brand awareness. And. But that said, it was. It was kind of. You got kind of brainwashed into the only way to make it out of is either go to Boston or New York and work in the finance markets. And so that's what all my friends were doing, thought that was the best thing to do. And I was one of the few that decided to stay back in Vermont. And now it looks like I made the right decision. So.
Absolutely. That's. That's a crazy story, but it's Funny the journeys that take us to where we are. So Patrick, tell us a little bit about New Breed now. Kind of the specialties and what the team looks like.
Yeah. So we're at 30 people and New Breed is, as you mentioned, a HubSpot diamond partner. We hooked up with HubSpot again in 2011. We did about six months of inbound on ourselves before we brought it to any customers and really kind of just perfected us and what I always say, dog fooded on ourselves. And that was immensely valuable because we found out all the little quirks behind the machine. Right. And we're able to dial it in before we brought any customers. And that really helped us with any churn issues that we may have had of bringing out a new service. So did that started picking up our own lead gen over inbound. Really Started running your own blog. And it was then in about early 2012 was really when we started bringing our existing customer base onto the platform and into our inbound services packages. Ran the pretty standard packages for a while of kind of what HubSpot gives you. I think probably all the listeners are aware of kind of the fast, faster, fastest model. And then we realized that those work for a while and then you need to really evolve. So now we have what we call a demand gen process and it's much more of a looking at where our clients have issues within the funnel. So if you kind of think about the funnel and if it looks like a sieve, you got to figure out which holes you need to plug. And your inbound package really should be designed to not only fill the funnel, but actually move people all the way through and look for those gaps in it. So we do a gap analysis on our client's funnel and then determine the package from there.
Gotcha. So when a client comes to you, that's the first step in the process is the gap analysis?
If we have the data, yes. So that works really well for folks that were on other marketing automation platforms or on HubSpot or at least at minimum had some level of analytics. But we can only go so far with that. So really it's. If they're leveraging automation systems already, we can do the gap analysis. So if they're new to inbound or new to a marketing automation platform, we have to make some assumptions. We use some benchmarks across our customer base to do that.
Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Gotcha. And Patrick, you guys also do a good amount of COs work and work that's really, really well done.
I remember.
I think that the first time that I saw the New Breed name was actually when the cos came out and you guys were all over everything. How has the web side of things and the COS side played into the business development over the last couple years?
Yeah, so I mean, obviously HubSpot's got a big push around the cos. It's one of their kind of core unique features than any other automation platform. It's a brilliant tool. You can do the smart content and personalization and really what we call build a sales ready website that can really be a lead gen machine. And so we were the second website to launch New Breeds website on the cos again, dogfooded it on ourselves, kind of perfected it. We had been doing kind of lead gen focused sites for about 10 years now, but then the COS gave us a whole new level of power with the database kind of hooked into it. And last year we launched 52 websites on the COS. So one a week, which was an interesting sprint. And we're working with a lot of HubSpot's enterprise customers. So these are a lot of large 200, 300 page sites that we're building on there as well. Wow.
Those big sites are a huge challenge just to keep all the content straight, migrating between sites. So to get those cranked out, that just sucks up so much time. So to get those cranked out at the pace that you guys are going speaks a lot to the team that you've got in place and also the processes that you guys have going on, what does the team look like that enables you to get that done and kind of what's the internal structure powering all that?
Yeah, so we have a customer success team that's led by our director of customer success, Taylor Forrest does an awesome job. He came from a large software company in Burlington, Vermont, so he has a background kind of in that high volume space and kind of came in and overhauled our existing process and really streamlined it so that we could be that efficient but still deliver that same level of quality that we had because every one of our sites is a custom website. And then kind of how that splits out. Every customer who's doing a site with us gets a growth strategist as well as a web strategist to oversee the site and then a web specialist who's more of a project manager to make sure all those details. Most of the websites we write all the content for, so we have our copywriting team and then we kind of pair them up by verticals with the customer and we write all the content and then inside that content team is also our SEO analyst and then we have a five person development and design team and they handle all of the building of the core product.
Wow, that's. It does take a lot of pieces to make everything come together. But it sounds like you guys have that smoothed out really well. So one of the things that you mentioned, Patrick, before we hit the record button here, was just how your role has evolved over time and you've moved out of, you know, you're not one of the core developers on the team at this point in time. You've got a lot of responsibilities. So talk to us about how your role has shifted and what it looks like today. Managing the team.
Yeah. So I oversee what we call our revenue team, so which is sales and marketing. Right. So New Breed's whole value prop in the marketplaces that we can unify your marketing and sales teams. And so what we found is, well, why do these need to be separate teams? Let's just combine them all into one that are all focused on growth and revenue. So we've done that on ourselves internally and it's been really successful. So technically I oversee sales and marketing, but really what we call it at New Breed is I oversee the revenue team. So my. What does that mean? We hired a couple key folks over the last year ahead of content and a Director of Customer success and a Director of operations, all coming, you know, within their, you know, mid-30s backgrounds in tech startups and understanding our client base and were able to allow me to kind of step out of the process and really leverage their strengths of, you know, looking at this. And they came from all came from much larger organizations so they were able to come in and put systems in place that, you know, I hadn't exactly been exposed to before and I really took a hands off approach and said part of our culture code is that there's nothing sacred and there's no process that can't be improved. And just because a, the founder did it or the CEO did it doesn't mean that you can't go and completely overhaul it if it's going to deliver a better product and a better experience for the customer. So that's what they did and they built it from the ground up again. Now we have a really efficient web process that say I can't speak to much in detail too, but it's working. And really impressed with what the team was able to pull off. And I think the key takeaway was that was a big leap for New Breed. We hadn't really done that in the past. We had hired a lot of folks right out of school and kind of groomed them up. I was kind of that perfect example. Right. Came in as an intern. In eight years I became the CEO. But starting to realize that that was good until we hit a certain level and then we nearly need to look for talent that could come in and plug in within the first month and really add additional value from their past experiences within a similar field set.
Wow, that's an awesome structure. I think it takes a lot of maturity to recognize that you need to delegate some other stuff and give people some autonomy and bring in folks who have different skill sets. So I think that's a huge move and that you're prompting all kinds of follow up questions in my mind right now. But one of them is with this structure in place, what's the goal for New Breed? Where would you like to be in 12 months or 18 months?
Yeah. So in 12 months from now we're keeping on pace so far this year to do another, you know, around another 50, 60 websites on the COS. So that's awesome. But then we've also been really building out our retainer based clients that are on that and we've launched a couple new programs that I can talk about. We launched under a demand gen program, so it's all the way from inbound to life cycle marketing. So we have a lot of software companies as clients and we're able to not only kind of generate the leads and do that kind of basic nurturing, but we're also then handling cohort analysis and looking at anyone who's in the free trial and be able to bring them through that free trial and then consult on kind of what is the best call strategy layered on top of the marketing strategy of that nurture stream.
Wow. I like that package a lot. And especially so in the SaaS space myself obviously with do inbound on the software side, I think that is, that's something that so many other software founders who maybe don't come from the marketing side need a ton of help with. As far as I guess where you go vertically is software one of the. Is that like the primary niche or vertical for you guys right now or are you also in a bunch of other industries?
Yeah. So kind of how it breaks down, we have, we have software as a service as our largest customer base and then IT and telecom are pretty neck and neck and then we also have a lot of enterprise level customers as well. So those are kind of our core folks. And then we have kind of a separate division that focuses on the education space as well.
Okay, great. You've got some diversity there, but I can see a lot of layers of where things overlap between the different verticals. And I think that's one of the things that I know we found with Guavabox is just overlay a lot of industries that seem like they're not related at first have some commonalities in the way that people make purchasing decisions and that work well to the way either that we think or some of the industry experiences that we've had. So I think that's a. I think that's a helpful strategy for sure. You mentioned, I want to go back to something that you said a couple minutes ago, which was your culture code, and that nothing is sacred, which is. I think that only gets harder and harder to live by as you grow and as you add layers of complexity into your organization. And so to have that outlined early and understood by people and embraced by people is really important and really helpful. But what is that kind of. What's the work that's gone into the culture code? And what does that look like? How is that communicated to the team at New Breed?
Yeah, so we did it about probably around 18, 20 people that we took on that initiative. And I wish that I did it when it was the, you know, 10 of us. You know, I wish that we did it before we even started the business, because when it was back in 2002, it just makes so much sense to have it in place, because then you hire by the culture code versus how do you get people to, you know, that you've already hired that are great people, but maybe don't fit all aspects of the culture code. So it's a fine balance. Definitely something that I wish that we had done much sooner in our kind of life cycle as a business. And it is an amazing recruiting tool as well as you, from day one of them being an employee at New Breed and really becoming what we would say a new breeder is. They understand that they were not only hired based on their skills, but they were hired that they fit all of those attributes and that they not only fit them, but they're excited to live by them every day. And then it's not really something that you need to manage because they came in as that particular, if you think about it as that particular Persona that fit all of those, and it's core to who they are. I think it's a lot harder to manage a culture code if you wait until you're in organizations that's 50 or 100 people, and you've got folks that maybe aren't the right people or they're not the right people in the right seats, or they, you know, and you're trying to kind of reverse engineer the culture code, if you will. So something I really recommend if the, you know, depending on your agency size, get it done sooner than later. There's not. You're not too small to start, and if you're already starting to be bigger, then it's still not too late. But just understand that if that's the case, you need to hire and fire by the culture code.
Right. So, Patrick, after having gone through it now and experienced the benefits of that, and also the pain of building it out and recognizing and wishing that you'd done it earlier for an agency who has not done that yet, and let's say it's a smaller, less than 10 people right now, how would you kind of. Where do they get started to put that together and what does the process look like?
Yes, I'd really recommend reading the founder Tony Hsieh's book, Delivering Happiness. It has a really good process of kind of framework of their culture and how they went about that process. And that's what we did. We followed kind of that model and then augmented it based on some additional things that we wanted to include. But I think it gives folks a good framework and great book. Obviously, Zappos was able to build a really successful company with a great culture and brand, and they've kind of really kind of latched onto this whole thing and movement and have a lot of additional content. I think they even have like a culture code workshop that you can go through and pay a Zappos employee to walk you through that process. We chose to take it on ourselves and kind of just followed their model.
That's great. Well, first of all, I'll link that resource up in the show notes for everybody. But I went through a period of time where I was like, I just got sick of hearing about Zappos. And every time anyone talked about culture, I was like, all I heard was Zappos and Tony Hsieh. And then after learning a little bit more and doing more reading, I was like, why have I had a problem with these guys? This guy spent so much time, so much energy thinking about and trying to perfect culture, that this is exactly where we should be looking for this. So that's awesome that you guys use them as a framework as well.
Yeah, no, I would really recommend it.
Great. Well, Patrick, one Of the things that is always fun to dive into and can help everybody just kind of relate to you more in the position that you're at right now is to dive into an area where you guys are either struggling right now or something that you're working, working on improving at this point in time. So when you look at New Breed and on your priorities list of what needs to get fixed or what needs to be improved first or up there at the top of the chart, what's one of those things that you guys are working on improving right now?
So we just kind of launched this new idea, new initiative internally around inbound recruiting. And recruiting is one of our biggest challenges.
Right.
We're still. We're in fairly small geo. We're in Burlington, Vermont. We're. Yeah, it's got a decent amount of tech talent, but it's still not a major metropolitan. So we've really been focused on hiring the right folks and obviously the culture code and working on this kind of more passive recruiting model. And we actually just put out a blog post on it yesterday around the idea of inbound recruiting. And we're just starting to test it out around kind of putting content out there, nurturing people, leveraging automation to kind of get people in the funnel and move them through, you know, kind of like, if you think about it, we want them to make New Breed as a choice of where they want to work long before they're ready to move from their existing job. So we're just starting to get that going. But recruiting has been a challenge. I think that's a potential solution. But we're excited to see if this.
Experiment pans out that's really cool with recruiting. And one of the things that one of the guys on the team here at do Inbound, Ryan Herman and I have been talking about specifically related to sales folks, is just if you're a good salesperson, there are going to be probably very few times in your life where you're actively searching for a job. It's more of kind of a passive job search. What you said about wanting people to already commit to that mentally, in my mind, I'd like to work at New Breed while they're still happily or somewhat unhappily, but happily enough to still work there, employed at some other place, I think is really key to recruiting. When you think about recruiting, though, what are some of the best places that you. So you've taken the team. You guys have gone from 10 people not too long ago to 30 people today. Where do those people come from?
You Know, so we've got, I think, part going back to the culture code, the biggest thing that we've leveraged so far is employee referrals. Right. So, you know, if you think about it as you're kind of the kind of. Your Persona is kind of the makeup of the five people you surround yourself with. So our goal has been to figure out who are those five people you surround you with, are they in a similar industry? And most likely they're going to be a culture fit as well, and then hire those people. So we've hired one employee's group, I think, has referred one employee right now, has hired. Referred eight people to New Breed. Wow. Yeah. So we've leveraged that, but I think we're at that point. Well, it's. It's snowballing a little bit. Right. Because every new person then has another five that we can kind of tap into, if you will, how we kind of look at it. But definitely spend a lot of time sitting with employees, going through their LinkedIn profiles, thinking about who's in their network and who are similar Personas and mindsets to them, and then starting to kind of ask for permission to kind of passively recruit them. And that's been successful as well.
Right. Nice. So you're really getting to the point where the network effect is kind of kicking in, not just on the sales side, but on the recruiting side, I.
Think, of recruiting just like a sales funnel, it's no different. You got to build a pipeline. Not everyone's going to become, you know, a new hire, so you got to build the pipe wide at the top of the funnel. Then you got to interview them. You can kind of think of that as the middle of the funnel. And then you got to bring them through the culture, and that's kind of the bottom of the funnel. And if they. If they make it all the way down, you know, you're looking at weeding quite a few folks out throughout that process. So you got to always kind of be passively recruiting.
Yeah, it really is the same. Almost the same exact thing. I mean, in sales, you're providing value for money, and you're just doing the same value transaction just going the other way with an employee. So I think it's a perfect parallel. One of the things I've thought about and haven't. Haven't spent a lot of time. I don't know whether there's a bunch of other folks who are doing the same type of research, but how at some point in time does this just kind of funnel methodology play into, like, a vendor selection. I'm curious to see if that. If we change the way that we select vendors at some point in time, obviously they are kind of working their funnel, but how does our funnel. Does it mirror any of these same things? So something just a random concept that has been running through my brain.
Yeah. I mean, I think you can apply that to a lot of different, you know, aspects of the business model. Right. And at the end of the day, there's typically a selection process, which is really kind of. If you start thinking about lead scoring. Right. You can apply that whole model to a lot of different things of how do we score all the way through? And, you know, I think there's going to be automation starting to branch out in a lot of other sides of the. Of the business operations.
Totally agree. Yep. So, Patrick, you are running a team that is doing a ton of great things right now. What keeps you going? What keeps you energized? What is you get up in the morning? What does an average morning for you look like?
Yeah. So I'll start with what keeps me going. I've been fortunate to hire a great group of good friends at New Breed. So we're all really passionate about what we do, and it's exciting to go and work with people that you want to wake up and work, and everyone's equally as excited every day. So we have that passion and that drive inherently. The second thing I would say is we haven't built our business for an exit. We're really building it because this is what we want to wake up and think about all day long and not just thinking about when are we going to be able to either sell or acquire or get acquired. We're really looking at building this for the long run, and I think that gives you a whole different mindset. If it's not what you want to do and you're just building it for the money, at some point you're going to get burned out as an entrepreneur because it's too much damn work.
Yeah, that's very true, man. The passion thing. And I actually just got done listening to a podcast episode, I think, from the Product Hunt podcast, talking about the same exact thing where very few great companies are built with, you know, with a very solid exit strategy from day one. If you're building it to sell, you're probably not building it the best way. So I love that philosophy of mindset.
Yeah, totally. I mean. I mean, there's. It's just if you start as an entrepreneur, you start. If you don't ever do it because you're not ever going to be satisfied. But if you broke down your salary by many hours you put in over that time you've made that amount of money, it doesn't spit out a great number.
So true. So true.
Do it for the passion and the money will follow. And if it doesn't, you still wake up happy every day, right?
For sure. Good words. Patrick. Where is the best place for folks to connect with you online? Follow you?
Yeah, so you can connect on LinkedIn with me as well as Twitter. So it's just my, my name's kind of long so it's, it's going to be. And then it's my first initial P Bitiscombe B I, D D I S C O M B E and that's my Twitter handle and same for LinkedIn.
Awesome. Good stuff. I'll hook that stuff up in the show notes as well. So if people can find that easily. And Patrick, just really appreciate you making the time to jump on here today. Share with us about your personal journey and the journey with New Breed and wish you the best success with that company.
Awesome. Happy to be here.
All right, thanks, Patrick. Talk to you soon.
Cheers.
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Great. Kick us off with your thoughts after that conversation.
Alrighty. Really good time chatting with Patrick. He's the man and I just really excited to see what they've done at New Breed and especially though some of the web work that they've done. I know we were at the Andrew, you and I made the trip together to the Partner Innovation and Growth Summit up in Boston. I'm trying to even remember that might have been in April of this year and I sat in most of the day on the developer side of things. You were on the owner side of things. So you got to hear Patrick speak and gave me the recap about what they're doing with Inbound and using it for recruiting. But I also got to spend a good amount of time with Patrick and with Chris Christopher, one of their developers, and just really appreciate what they're doing on the COs right now and some of the ways that they're pushing it forward. Some of the work that they've done is absolutely awesome. So excited to chat with him. One of the things that I pulled out of that and I chatted with him a little bit afterwards was talking about the culture code and the way that they went about implementing that for their business and how much if he could go back and change things, he wishes that they would have done that earlier. Andrew, what were your takeaways when he started talking about culture in that interview?
I was kind of laughing and wondering who the poor employee was that he has on staff that wishes he wasn't there anymore. I thought that was kind of funny. But higher and more mature than that was just the, I think the impact that taking the time to analyze how you do something and then documenting it and what an impact that can have on your thought process, I think it clarifies a lot of things. I think we saw that with, with Michael Rose a few episodes ago from Mojo Media Labs, how he has really thought a lot about his culture and how his culture dictates the type of deliverables that he's going to create for his clients. I heard the same vibes coming from Patrick and after hearing how passionate he was about the positive impact that that had on his team, I think it's really, really important for people to not just think about the talent that you are, are hiring, but also who that person is as a human and understanding how your team is going to come together and function and what type of an environment that creates. So really, really good thoughts to have. And I think it's going to. I think that contributes a lot to profitability, more than, more than perhaps we can forecast or perhaps that we can consider at the beginning of things. But I think that helps make them a more profitable, more successful agency at the end of the day.
Yeah. A couple things that Patrick also said about how they actually went about putting that together and some of the ways that they accomplish stuff that is kind of the big picture agency stuff, because the culture code, it sounds great. Everybody probably wishes that they had one, but it takes discipline and work and it's a little bit overwhelming to know where to get started with that kind of stuff. But Patrick mentioned that he took his leadership team and they go, they go once a quarter to an off site retreat and they go to a place that has no sales service. So they're completely off the grid. And before they go, they communicate to the team exactly what's going to come out of that. So, hey, at the end of these three days that we're away, we're going to have A culture code that we're going to live by and work by here at New Breed. And so there's some external accountability. And I thought that one defining the objective and this is absolutely what we're going to come away with. It may not be perfect, it may be refined in the future, but we will finish this. And then just going and getting away from distractions, taking the team off site. I think that those are really good tips and stuff that I know you and I, Andrew, have talked about ways that we can continue that with the Guavabox team and do inbound team and some of our best experiences together. I feel like best and worst, probably depending on who you're asking, but the car trips when we've driven up to inbound or we've made road trips together a number of different places. And so the time in the car, hanging out out in the woods somewhere, if we're camping, those times together are really valuable for the business as well as the relationship.
Amen. You can unplug and actually evaluate a little bit of what you're doing and where you want to go. That's always valuable. I love that Gray. His one other point that he made kind of relating to his culture and his team was the different people he's brought in to help handle operations and how he's brought them in from tech company backgrounds. What were your thoughts on that strategy and how they've implemented those folks?
Yeah, one, I think that's, you know, to bring on other people who are, in his case, bringing on folks to run it who have been through the different experiences before. They've lived out where some of his, where some of their best clients work, they're older, they're a little bit more experienced. I think that takes some maturity to bring in other people. But what really sticks out to me is just his willingness to kind of go with a hands off empowerment approach and say nothing is sacred here and you guys evaluate it and help build this. We'll build this together from the ground up. But I'm not tied to the preconceived notions or the traditions of how we've done things in the past. So I think that was the biggest takeaway and would just encourage other agency owners to, you know, to embrace the same principles.
Yeah, I like that a lot. And really it gives your delivery side a whole new asset as well because you've got internal expertise that aligns with the verticals that you're going after as an agency. I think that's a strategy that could help a lot of Folks out.
Yeah, it makes those sales count. And he's not just hiring, he's not hiring salespeople specifically. He didn't talk about that, bringing out people specifically for sales. But I can relate to this in sales. Obviously in the client servicing side, this is probably just intensified and amplified even more so, but it makes a sales conversation. So I spent a couple years in the building materials supply industry and working with contractors on a day to day basis, that kind of thing in sales. And so talking with somebody who's in that space, it just makes this conversation so much easier when you already know the vernacular and kind of the ins and outs of that industry. So it makes, I don't know, just adds a different perspective that I don't have going into, you know, when we go into healthcare marketing, that's, you know, that's a different ballgame and that's something I haven't spent time in. So there's just a whole other level I need to come up and just be brought up kind of to speed and then beyond that to actually know the ins and outs of what's going on there.
Yeah, that's a significant time and a learning curve associated with that. And that's like that much more time that if you are working with them as a client, you're not delivering results is that your team is getting up to speed and kind of learning the baseline things and you got to learn before you can help and before you can teach. So that does take time there.
Yep, absolutely. Andrew, I think that that's probably good for this recap. Did you have any other thoughts you wanted to add in here?
Last nugget? Like look at, look at Patrick and the team and how they do inbound for themselves. Great. We see it time and time again. I'm getting sick of saying it, but the folks that do inbound and as he said, eat their own dog food see success. So define where you want to go, what vertical you want to go after and then create content targeted towards them, quality content. Make time for that and you're going to see success. I think it's inevitable.
Yeah, absolutely. I didn't even mention it. I was going to skip over that just because we've said that so many times. But you see it once again. The people who are at the top of the industry, the folks who are having success, they've practiced this stuff, tested it out on themselves and they're constantly testing new things internally before bringing it out to clients. You see that, you see the innovation being used internally and then you take it to the marketplace once you've tested it. I know that's what that's what we try to do. We try to be the lab and try out the different strategies and tactics before bringing it out to clients. And I think that we see that definitely as a consistent theme here. All righty. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of Inbound Agency Journey. As always, all the show notes can be found@doinbound.com inboundagencyjourney. You can grab the links to the resources that Patrick mentioned and find his contact info as well from there. If you enjoyed this show, we would definitely appreciate a review in itunes. If you're not feeling up to heading over to itunes, shoot us out a tweet or an email and we'd love to hear from you, hear what you're going through, and continue to move forward together on this journey.
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