Most San Francisco business professionals or CEO’s are asking themselves how they are going to meet their 2017 goals. Achieving your revenue goals for the year will take a combination of an effective sales team and a savvy marketing group.
While your sales team should be internal, your marketing group can be a blend of internal and external resources. I wrote recently about why B2B companies should hire a marketing agency. But let’s take an honest look at why you should NOT hire a marketing agency.
A lot of B2B companies find that they don’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to really leverage their marketing automation platform and produce a strong marketing ROI. Over the past three years I’ve learned many things from these companies, so here’s my understanding of why HubSpot customers should not hire a HubSpot-certified inbound marketing agency.
We’re Not Magicians
A lot of small and medium businesses hire consultants because they are looking for miracles. I hate to break it to you, but no agency is going to take a business that is doing very little in revenue and quickly turn it around.
We have no rabbits and no black hats (despite this photo). We can’t turn a sow’s ear into a purse and nor saw a body in half. We simply don’t do magic. We can’t take your 700 website visits a month and turn them into 20 sales-ready leads. Can’t be done. Not by us. Not by nobody.
What we CAN help you do is to take a sustainable business and build website traffic and sales-ready leads. We can also help your sales team close these leads faster.
We Need Some of Your Time and Energy to Make Your Marketing Effective
It takes time to develop a strong partnership and to understand your company. While we’re ramping up, you’ll need to be involved. And then we’ll want to connect with you regularly as we work together.
We’ll show you how to create a marketing and editorial calendar for the year. This allows us to plan ahead to help you be successful at trade shows, speaking events, webinars, etc. Additionally, the calendar establishes a regular publication schedule for blog posts, white papers, ebooks, etc. With as marketing calendar in place, we need less of your time, because we know what to do and when to do it!
And since we provide digital marketing, advertising, PR, social media, copywriting, branding, website development, event marketing, and more, everything will flow together cohesively, without needing to hire these additional skill sets internally.
You Don’t Have Measurable Company Goals
If your company doesn’t have measurable goals, we won’t be able to help you. Acquiring more customers is good, but how many more do you need to meet your revenue goal?
Look at the revenue you want to achieve, then divide by the lifetime value of a customer, and you’ll know the number of customers you’ll need to meet that goal. Is that number achievable? Can your sales team grow to meet the new pace of customer acquisition?
Need help setting realistic goals for your company growth? Call us — we’d be happy to schedule a 30-minute call to help you do this. No charge!
Every deliverable we create and every action item we address will relate back to your company’s overall goals. We’ll show you how to tie marketing activities to site traffic, lead generation, and revenue. And we’ll scale our team to meet your goals!
We Don’t Work for Free
Sorry, we’re all professionals and produce great results for our clients — but we don’t work for free. If you can’t afford to add one marketing director to your team, you can’t afford to rent our entire team for the same price.
However, we can show you how to get a positive ROI from your marketing and ad spend.
We Have a Strong Aversion to Unproductive Meetings
If you want to schedule long unproductive meetings to discuss tactics and all the reason why you think your tactics are better, you wouldn’t like working with us. We certainly have a lot of meetings, both internally and externally, but we insist that they be productive. And short!
Your Sales Team Can’t Handle the Leads They’ve Already Got
This one is a little tricky. If your sales team can’t handle the volume of leads you already have, one or both of these two things needs to happen:
- train the sales team in a more effective process for closing deals
- hire more salespeople
We help a lot of our clients create more effective sales processes. We’ve also created an automated hiring process for several companies. Since we generate sales-ready leads, it’s important to know how/when to grow your sales team.
We Can’t Make Your HubSpot Investment Automatically Produce Marketing Results
I wish it was that easy! But the fact is that effective inbound marketing takes a lot of effort and a lot of different skillsets. We can definitely leverage your HubSpot investment to help generate a real ROI on your marketing, but the software alone is only software — someone needs to write all that content, plan all those campaigns, socialize everything, measure and track everything, send the emails, think of new ways of engaging your audience, plan the marketing for events, and figure out how to make you a thought leader in your industry.
That’s what we do!
We Love Big Goals, but They Need a Solid Foundation
Just like a building, fast growth needs a strong foundation. Once that’s in place, we can help you build quickly. If your goal of exponential growth for the year is merely a pipedream, let’s talk about realities.
Our target is a minimum of 300% annual ROI. If that works for you, we have something to talk about.
So there you have it: 8 great reasons not to hire a marketing agency to support your inbound marketing! How did I come up with those eight ideas? Believe it or not, I’ve heard all of them (several times over) from existing HubSpot customers.
We love working with HubSpot customers because we already share a common language and understanding of the inbound marketing process. What’s usually missing is the time and expertise to get all the various pieces of inbound marketing done.
For less than the price of a single marketing director, you can hire an entire agency to work with you to achieve your revenue goals. Want to know more, let’s talk!
