Learnings at INBOUND18

TL;DR: Most (>85%) are struggling, while it was not nice to hear, it was definitely comforting.

Pete Caputa, while announcing Databox’s agency partner program, points out here: 

“With 250,000 agencies worldwide, many of them struggling to get over 5 employees (or disinterested in doing so)...”

• • • • • • In cases where the client wants to do the content themselves, it often never comes from the client, or it comes so late that your plan doesn’t matter anymore.
            
            
          • If we are to do the content, when we ask a client team questions, they don’t speak. It could be that they don’t consider a specific thing important (which marketing would consider important). It could also be that they should not be wasting time in explaining us about their business/technologies/processes. I remember one instance while we were creating video stories for a client, along with the founder, we were told (by the founder herself) that her team thought all this content creation (writing case studies, videos etc) was a waste of time and resources (and money).
            
            
          • Learning: Build trust with the client team, get a buy in from them, not just the decision maker. Show them the value of your work and build relationships so that they are ready to help you do your job.
            
            

Given that all these challenges exist, this is probably why there were a lot of sessions around the theme of how to grow your agency. I am grateful to HubSpot that they’ve built this amazing community of agency partners, who are so open and willing about sharing their learnings, processes and failures. In fact, the successful agencies are even coaching other agencies, which is kind of amazing. There could always be a fear of the agency you are coaching becomes your competitor, but I guess the HubSpot community believes, there is enough room for everyone, and hence, is always ready to help. Which is what makes this community even more amazing!