Quick tip – Look for a Digital Marketing AND Sales Agency.
First and foremost, your digital marketing agency should be a strategic partner that is focused on helping you to achieve your marketing AND sales objectives. Sales is the missing ingredient in many marketing agencies capability because they don’t have experience and they struggle to monetise sales services. That’s right, hiring an agency that can converse and is passionate and capable about sales as much as marketing, will ensure that you get the most out of your digital marketing agency relationship.
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However, a relationship with an agency partner is a lot like marriage — it's not easy to find the right fit and committing to a dotted line signature is always a leap of faith, considering the impact of a poor choice. And while we are an agency, we have also sat in the client seat attempting to make these choices, so we thought we’d provide you with the benefit of our collective experiences from both sides of the relationship, to help you realise the full potential of your agency.
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Hire an agency that can value add with sales services Ideally, you want an agency partner that is much a partner of the marketing team as it is the sales team. You want the agency to actively integrate content and video into the sales process through an assignment selling approach. And you will want your digital marketing agency to converse with your sales team across the sales process to drive significant improvements in close rates and revenue.Ensuring that your sales team is included in campaign planning, execution and review with your agency, is critically important given the sales team’s wealth of customer knowledge. Sales teams are rarely, if ever included and this leads to missed opportunities to create shorter sales cycles and higher close rates. Your digital marketing agency should also be highly capable in the provision of sales services. These sales services cover strategic to executional services across CRM implementation and training, sales enablement and automation and finally, coaching sales and marketing teams to work on alignment and singular campaigns. |
| Make sure your agency sells its services the way you want to buy them Have you ever heard this term before? We love it, because in this day and age of digital disruption, many agencies are still trying to lock up clients on long term retainers that are either poorly scoped or based on no scope at all. Most businesses now want to minimise the risk of purchase, so short-term, flexible and accountable terms of business arrangements from a digital marketing agency is what you should be looking for. Why? It will keep the agency on their toes and hungry for more work to continue. This approach has a trade-off and that is that it can’t just be a one-sided relationship. You as the client must provide detailed briefing, time to educate the agency on your business and its challenges and finally, a commitment to future work based on agreed success measures. |
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Ensure your agency emphasises training your team If you can find an agency that actively helps your team members grow so you don’t have be dependent on them forever is an ideal worth reaching for. Traditionally agencies of all shapes and sizes have either consciously or sub-consciously created a cycle of dependency, in order to make it difficult to “churn” and therefore are in a best position generate the largest possible retainer from their client. An agency that actively trains your team should have evidence of this in action and be willing to articulate how they can implement such a program for your business. |
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Prioritise collaborative content creation The agency that creates content in a silo, often ends up missing the tone and expertise contained within your business. Co-creation of content can take numerous forms however, at its core should be a process of content creation from the initial research into keywords and topics through to the content plan, calendar and individual content creation. A collaborative agency partner will be ‘grown-up’ in relation to the disclosure of the partners it brings in and demanding on the client when it comes to their contribution to content creation. |
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Ensure your agency understands marketing and sales technology In many instances we see businesses investing thousands of dollars in technology per annum and yet they are only using a small part of its overall functional capability. Enter your digital marketing agency. They should have a team that is highly skilled in the purpose and an everyday usage basis. You don’t want to be that business that never learns how to use your own sales and marketing tools, like HubSpot. You should hire an agency that will provide thorough training and guidance, so you become a master of your own sales and marketing tools, like HubSpot, resulting in a much greater return on spend, and less dependency on your agency. |
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Hire an agency that provides strategic consultation Don’t hire a ‘yes man’ agency. You want and require a trusted advisor, who you believe in and has the confidence to push back when necessary. It’s often this tension that generates the best thinking and actions which drives you on to achieve your greatest business success. Of course most agencies say they provide strategic consulting services. However, do they understand how to conduct market research? Do they have access to insights beyond the norm? What are their workshop facilitation skills like? And are they passionate, articulate writers of great sales and marketing strategy? Given all of this, it is best to test it out, either in the pitch process itself or via discrete projects that a separate from executional projects. |
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Focus your agency on being great at what they do not what you do This kind of seems obvious. However, it is often the case that the client prioritises knowledge of their business and or category over the competency of the agency to execute its digital sales and marketing campaigns. It might take a month of immersion to master the legal restrictions or technical competencies of a client and category. Not much time at all when considering the many years of study and experience most agencies have expended to achieve their position. So test of the capabilities by briefing a content pillar creation or a video marketing strategy. See how they respond and assess the quality and how they went about the project rather than their ability to describe a distribution channel or an obscure legal restraint. |
Key takeaways