Agency Forward

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone. Today, I'm joined by Tony Dowling. Tony is the co founder and director at real inbound and a CRM adoption expert, and we bounce around the same HubSpot ecosystem, but finally, we're able to connect to chat service offerings for agencies. Tony is a walking example of why you should pinpoint the problem in the market that to point to your solution. And we get into the HubSpot adoption gap, which is his framework, and how that framing builds focus and redundancy into his own agency. In this episode, we discuss why most CRM implementations fail and how to avoid common pitfalls, the critical role of leadership in driving CRM adoption and digital transformation, the importance of aligning systems, processes and automation with business goals and more. No one is asking for another community, but I've made one anyways. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content. Access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested. Right now. The price for founding members is only $97 a year. You join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You join at Dynamic agency, dot community and now. Tony Dowling,

Unknown Speaker 1:23
it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency for awarding

Unknown Speaker 1:41
what is the adoption gap?

Unknown Speaker 1:44
I'm glad you asked me that

Unknown Speaker 1:47
the adoption gap, it can apply to lots of things, and it's very much like a management consultancy term. We use it specifically to apply to the HubSpot adoption gap. There's a bit of a coincidence, or happy coincidence that we talk about HubSpot adoption as a very specific thing. So think of it as the bit that follows your onboarding or implementation. There's lots of language in HubSpot that that sort of means the same thing that is taken to mean different things, even by different people. So but generally speaking, we think of onboarding as the sort of setting up, getting your team registered and logged in and have the

Unknown Speaker 2:32
extension downloaded and so on. And so adoption specifically is when they get to the point where they're using it. It being HubSpot in a business as usual sense. So every day I come to my workstation, wherever that may be, and I log into HubSpot and I do my work from HubSpot. That's that's full adoption. So the adoption gap is the space between buying HubSpot and getting to that point where it is used every day by every person within the business.

Unknown Speaker 3:00
Now I feel like a lot of people will kind of identify that gap as just someone coming in and building the system for them, but like, they they completely miss that whole other layer of like, No, you actually need to be willing to adopt this, right? Your team has to to get into this. So I know you're capable of, like, setting up the CRM and doing all the pieces that, like, for very specific pieces for that business. But how do you now win over, like, leaderships got buy in because they purchased it, yeah, how do, how do you help them get their team to buy in? Yeah, no, and that's it, because this is the problem that we specifically spotted. I think there are a lot of extremely careful HubSpot partners out there. There are a lot of organizations with extremely

Unknown Speaker 3:48
competent IT departments and so on, and the setting up of the system is just one and one small part of this whole process, right? If you go back and you will buy in HubSpot to do your email or your social media, or even your email and your social media. That's fairly straightforward. If you're buying it, to use it as a CRM and maybe a repository for your contact records, and maybe to manage your pipelines. That's fairly straightforward. Even then. You know, adoption isn't guaranteed, but it's a it's a relatively straightforward process to achieve it. Now, HubSpot, increasingly can be viewed as a customer platform. Then it's a slightly different perspective. Now, we've got probably at least three teams in there, if not four, including finance in that. We've got sales, marketing and customer service in there. And I think what, what tends to happen with the best intentions, the best will in the world. A lot of businesses delegate the responsibility for the adoption to those teams, which makes all sorts of sense, you know? So the sales people will be involved in designing the sales process. Marketing people into designing the marketing process and so on.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
They may even own part of the training design and certainly the design of the actual delivery itself, that maybe the data design and so on, all of which is fantastic, but is divorced from the leadership that you mentioned, who bought it in the first place, is divorced from potentially what a leadership want to achieve. So what we find is a really vague state, a brilliant way to describe it. This morning, actually, I spoke to a client this morning

Unknown Speaker 5:28
who said the feedback from their teams was that the training they'd received for HubSpot was very vague. There wasn't much point to it. They didn't really understand what he was for. And that's not down to the partner or the trainer, or anybody else that was down to the brief clearly, so they weren't given a brief to train these people in HubSpot. So where we specifically work, where we specifically help, is working with the leadership team, the management team, to help them understand what it is they need from HubSpot so that what it is the need can be designed, and the people that work for them can then be trained in it's a very, very subtle difference, but it's a major difference. Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, it makes all the difference in actually seeing the return on their investment. And so

Unknown Speaker 6:17
I guess,

Unknown Speaker 6:18
would you also say that's the reason why most CRM implementations fail? Yeah, in our experience, I've done a lot of research into this, as you can imagine, in terms of validating our business model, and just in terms of talking to customers, I've spoken to a lot of customers over the last six years that we've been we've been household partners, and, you know, customers and other household partners as well customers of other CRMs. And this problem comes up time and time again. I You can find official figures in various like HBr, you know, articles that talk about something like 250, and even 70% of CRM implementations fail

Unknown Speaker 6:59
as a lot, you know, it's probably higher than that in reality,

Unknown Speaker 7:04
and nine times out of 10, the way that we look at it, and this is why we developed service that we developed nine times out of 10. That is down to that management issue. As we said, it's not the technology, it's not the design, it's not the delivery, it's not the training, it's not the implementation, it's not the work that the partner's done or anything else. It's the fact that management, in effect, delegate the responsibility out to their teams. Let's get HubSpot. And as we keep saying, HubSpot is not a strategy, right? So we need to grow. Let's get HubSpot or CRM. We need to we need to increase our average order values. Let's get HubSpot. We need to improve our market. Let's get HubSpot. It doesn't do any of those things. It doesn't do any of

Unknown Speaker 7:44
them. So if you, if you don't have that strategy in place, and you don't have the the understanding of what it is, you're going to need to do that, HubSpot can help you support and you, you don't really have an adoption plan,

Unknown Speaker 7:55
yeah, the I had, so our agency was a HubSpot partner, and when selling HubSpot, it was amazing the number of companies that would come in and say, you know, we need this because it's going to solve for all of our problems. And that's what initially got me going on. I have a model of just, know

Unknown Speaker 8:15
what it what it should actually be called, but it's just the mindset, skill set, tool set, and that's the order you want to adopt anything, because if you're not thinking about it right, then you're probably not gonna have the right skills, and then the tool doesn't matter. And so it's like we really want to make sure, and this is it seems like it's exactly what you're doing with HubSpot. Let's make sure you're actually thinking about this correctly. Then let's get into the skills that your team has that we can use to put it on HubSpot. And now you get the value of that perfect. And that's brilliant. And it really is a cadence. You start here, and then you go there, and then you go there, and then you go there, and sort of each of it is kind of enabled by the previous part. So if you jump in at the end and just implement HubSpot, it's very difficult for anybody to help you get any traction with anything. So, you know, you go backstage, and then go backstage, it will go back to stage. The mindset bit is really important as well, because something else that we we work with, one of the things we understand, I was a in my previous life. I was a transformation, MD, as they called it, and I was into culture. So for me, you may have heard the same culture rich strategy for breakfast. I'm not, I'm not entirely an adherent of that, by the way, but you see why people say that, right? You see how important that is. So in order for this change to happen in the first place, you've got to have the right environment, you've got to have the right culture, you've got to have the right support. People need to feel safe, and then this is the biggie, right? They need to feel like there's a purpose for the change. So when I deliver transformation programs myself, the businesses I've worked for, we've done it for a reason, a really strong, compelling reason. It was usually based on desire for gain or fear or loss. Fear or loss tends to be the stronger, more than.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
There all of us quite negative. It's got quite a lot of negative connotation, right? But basically, you're going in and you say to people, we need to change because of this thing,

Unknown Speaker 10:09
this one clear existential threat or or, you know, enormous game changing opportunity. You're not, you're not going and going, oh, we need to do this and this and this. And, you know, there's not a big checklist of all the reasons why we change. So if you don't have that purpose,

Unknown Speaker 10:28
there's no reason for people to buy it. And that's, in fact, it's when management don't buy it. Management don't buy into it, equally, from a change perspective, because why are we doing this again? What's going to make us more efficient? Oh, cool, correct. Great. What does that even mean? You know what? What does what does good even look like? And that's, that's the place that we want to start, right? So our gap analysis starts with, where do you want to be? What are you What are you trying to get to? And we start there because it's a lot easier for people to, I think, to get distracted with where they are. We all love a bit of a SWOT analysis. We all love to criticize each other and pat ourselves on the back and all that kind of thing. But let's look at what we're trying to achieve. What does good actually look like here, if we were to win, what does that what does that mean? How much are we going to turn over? What's our profit going to look like? What are our teams going to look like? What are we going to have training that's going to support that? Are we going to expand into other

Unknown Speaker 11:26
marketplaces? Are we going to develop new product? What does it mean? So we build this full picture of that. Then we go, okay, where are we now?

Unknown Speaker 11:35
Then we do this. Is that order that we do it? Where do you want to be? Where are we now? And then we look at, okay, so if we're here and we want to get there, how are we going to close that gap? How are we going to cross that gap? And that's the really important piece. From there, we develop what we call a management control system. So the idea is that management can use the MCS, the management control system delivered via HubSpot. In our case, there are other ways of doing it, but in our case, for use, HubSpot can use that to underpin the change that they need in order to move from A to B. So HubSpot then becomes the tool, the enabler, if you like, the scoreboard for that change. HubSpot isn't the change. Using HubSpot isn't going to do anything at all. You've decided where you want to be. You've decided how you're going to get that HubSpot is going to help you stay that course. It's going to help you control what you do, what your people are doing, how well they're doing it, and whether you pivot, whether you stay the course, whether you innovate or change. HubSpot helps you do all that stuff, but it won't do it until you've analyzed that gap, right? Yeah, I think, like at its core, all tech is just there to help us do things faster, right? And so when you realize that it's like you can have all the skills and do this on your own, or you can take those skills and just put them on a platform to now make a little your life a little easier,

Unknown Speaker 13:00
one of the things that I really want to touch on. He said, I love this concept. I feel like it's often missed with not just with agencies, but with most businesses. But being able to go back and say, like, what does good look like, right? What does What does done look like? Here, the number of agencies I've talked to that said that believed their issue was just processes. Like, we just need more processes. It's like, well, have you gotten a great result yet? And usually they can't point to an awesome result. They would want to build a process around to get more of that result. And but for some reason, we're always stuck on, well, we just need to be more efficient. It's like, Yeah, but what are we working towards? Right? Like, what does good look like? This is 100% and we were lucky enough to work with a friend of yours, I think, a chap called Nick Bennett.

Unknown Speaker 13:45
A while back, we worked with Nick for quite a long time on exactly this question. And once, once we all, all our partner, my business partners will will agree, once we, once we realized what the adoption gap was and why we were interested and we believed qualified in closing it, everything in our business came into focus.

Unknown Speaker 14:08
We really had spent, as you know, talking to an agency owner, talking as an agency owner, to agency owners. We really had spent five years probably not messing about that's the wrong way. It felt like messing about running down blind alleys.

Unknown Speaker 14:24
Try in this, try that. Spend money here, do a bit of advertising. I remember we were really successful. One of our business, one of our partners, is a bit of an SEO Google. He ran a fantastic ad campaign for us. We had tremendous results and not a single conversion because we weren't offering anything on our website. You know, we brought all of this traffic to our website. It's heartbreaking. We spent this. It wasn't tons of money. It wasn't, you know, we weren't gonna put anybody out of business or anything. But this, we realized we just didn't stand for a thing. We just, we weren't, we didn't have an offer, right? So as soon as we realized the adoption.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Gap. Was it that was our niche? Dare I say it? So we didn't go, we want to work with motor vehicle manufacturers, or we didn't go, we want to work with sports teams and things. We got experience in all of those sectors. We said we solved this problem, this specific problem, that all industries, actually our industry is HubSpot user. That was a big jump for us as well. When we, when we when we said we're going to work with you if you've already got HubSpot and it doesn't work, we're not going to work with you to sell you HubSpot, although we will. We're not going to work with you on pre we're not going to work with you to define whether house is the right thing for you. We're going to come in and work with you when HubSpot doesn't work because we know how to fix it. And it's so easy to fix because it's not all those things that we talked about already. It's this, this, this other thing, you know, so that that's what made all the difference to our business. And that was exactly what you say. That was, know, it, what does good look like for us

Unknown Speaker 15:56
all came from that. So I want to take this one more level. I think the I don't think it's easy. I think the reason it looks easy for you guys is because you've done it so many times, because you got so specific on that problem. Yep, the true so Nick and I agree on on this one, but the niche is not like your industry. It's not the vertical, right? It's the problem that you solve for because once you solve that problem, you can really go solve it for anyone. It's just who are we targeting right now? Targeting right now with this offer and and I think the important thing for any agencies listening is, like, just because, like, well, in your case, right? The saying, Hey, we only work with people who are currently on HubSpot does not stop you from taking leads who are currently off of HubSpot moving on, they're still going to find you and see you as that expert. And they do, yeah, and so, right? So, like, there's more evidence that this works. Pick that problem, get really good at it, get known for solving that. And it's it's going to pay dividends across that magic. So I hope Nick gets to see this, yeah, because I gave him a lot of credit for this. You know when he and he always said this when we were fumbling around at the beginning of the process, and it was a very painful process. But you know, I now have people who are coming to me because they know us for the adoption gap.

Unknown Speaker 17:13
We have people signing up to our lead magnets or funnels or whatever you want to call them, where we never did before. You know, we are not. We are beginning, we are beginning to be known for a thing. And for five years, we weren't. We were invisible. We were completely indistinguishable from every other household partner on the planet.

Unknown Speaker 17:35
You know? Why should we choose you? Well, there's literally no reason, because we're the same as everybody else, where does that lead? That leads you to being cheaper, doesn't it? What does that mean? That leads you to doing more work for less money? And it's just, it's just carnage. So it was, it was a big step for us. So we credit Nick for a lot of that. That work,

Unknown Speaker 17:58
right? You bring up a great point to where people are finding you around the HubSpot adoption gap, which is a lot of people, when they focus on word of mouth marketing, they just think, how do I get people talking about me? Like, just me, me, me, right? And yeah, so that is word of mouth marketing. It's super powerful when a friend refers someone, but similarly, when people talk about the problem the way you talk about the problem, and then they, if they go to search for it, they're only going to find you because you talk about the problem that way. And when you know that problem on such like, such an intricate level of detail, they just assume you have the solution, even without getting into the solution phase, like they just say, Yes, we get you.

Unknown Speaker 18:39
I think that's awesome. But I want to dive in a little to the HubSpot ecosystem, because that's kind of what got our this podcast scheduled, chatting about it, yeah, where we had a bunch of data come out from our research with partner hub and found that a lot of agencies are partnering in hopes of acquiring leads, right, getting more and so. But what we found was across all ecosystems, HubSpot, Salesforce, Tiktok, as he goes like there's Shopify, all of them as they hit a certain point in their growth. When they brought in all these agencies, the actual leads they got shared dropped dramatically. And so I've called that the starving sibling effect, because everyone's fighting for the scraps of the table, right? But they don't have them. But you've seen some similar like, or you have, I guess, similar data to kind of back that up. But then also, you can do some of your own findings. I'd love to dive a little deeper into that. Yeah, no, sure, very much. So. So again, you know, we've spent a lot of time analyzing where, where our business comes from. Where could it come from?

Unknown Speaker 19:44
And I think the one of the really important rationale behind allowing us to focus in as we have was Conversely, the realization that we weren't going to get rich off HubSpot.

Unknown Speaker 19:59
Now.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
It's not to say, and this was my finding, it's not to say that we can't get rich from HubSpot, but it means there's a very clear, predestined path that we need to follow in order to get rich,

Unknown Speaker 20:11
which which is, which is great. And lots of businesses have done it, and fair play, success has come their way. But it's enormously, in my view, it's enormously risky.

Unknown Speaker 20:21
So the story, I don't know if you have, you don't have Tescos in the US to you, there's a, there's a supermarket in the UK called Tesco. And there was a very famous story back in business school of how they would go to a farm. I'm living in farmlands of South Wales at the minute. I'm surrounded by by fields, right? They go to a farmer, and they'd say, we want to buy, buy potatoes from you.

Unknown Speaker 20:44
Enough. I'll go deal Tesco, fantastic. How many did you want? And they go, like all of them.

Unknown Speaker 20:51
And you go, Okay, how much you gonna pay? And they'd say, you know, 15% above whatever, whatever market is, right? So he spends the year, produces potato chips. And while Tesco gets rich, fantastic. Tesco come back next year. And they go, we will need to grow more

Unknown Speaker 21:07
when he goes, I suppose I could cut back on my wheat and my oats and barley, and I can just go more potatoes. Okay, how many do you want to buy? We'll buy all of them. So do that again, right? The guy is absolutely flying. He's built a fantastic business. Very, very profitable. They come back to third year, and they go, we still want to buy potatoes, but we don't want to spend that much money on them anymore. What do you mean? Well, now we need you to cut 25% off the off the top line. So we still want the potatoes, but we want to cheaper. And the guy goes, Okay, now I'm so far in this ecosystem, I'm so far down this road, I can't afford to come back out and Tescos just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. Now, I'm not saying how to sort of do it. I'm sort of don't do that, per se, but it presents the same level of risk when you're all in on the on the Think of it as a shark, you know, where there are more of fish, right? When you're all in on it. So our plan is very much starting with HubSpot, very much continuing to to

Unknown Speaker 22:09
sell that, that environment, that ecosystem. We're all fans of HubSpot and everything else, but the service that we're providing, this adoption gap we're providing, can be applied anywhere you've mentioned. It could be applied to other CRM for sure, any technology and actually any change management is the same process. So while, I believe, while we are building our way up in the HubSpot ecosystem, we're also building a platform for us to be able to move

Unknown Speaker 22:37
more broadly as as we grow. So we're not, we're not, we're not backing into a relationship with HubSpot, if you like. We're driving forward into it, you know, we get more from them. Hopefully we'll get as famous as Max Taylor got when he was doing as you guys did when you were doing it, you know, with fantastic. But we'll also have the opportunity to multiply out not just, not just be that narrow. So those were very much my findings. There was only one way to win in HubSpot land, and that's to be the Remora fish on HubSpot shark.

Unknown Speaker 23:10
And that's fine if that's what you want to do, but you take on an enormous amount of risk, right? And so a couple things. First, I think, the the idea of how you've set up, like your services, again, falls into the the mindset, skill set, tool set system, where it's like, you're thinking about this problem differently, and so you have these requisite skills to be able to solve it, no matter where you go for the tool. And so just that gives you this, like, I don't know, it's like, fail safe, right within your business where it's like, okay, HubSpot doesn't want to work with us anymore. I can go anywhere. I can solve this problem for anyone on any other platform. So the it's you're now safer as a business.

Unknown Speaker 23:53
But I'm seeing also within, not just within the HubSpot ecosystem, I think just generally as agencies, there's like, a legacy bias where we see how, how an agency is currently performing, and what they're doing, and, you know, hey, these elite partners are doing these types of things and doing that. But, like, I'd actually love to see the numbers on how many, how many elite partners joined this year. Like, we're able to, you know, to scale up

Unknown Speaker 24:20
that fast, because I think most of them were just were able to do what they're doing now, because that's how they did it when they started reputation right and now, now they're it's not actually how they're doing. It's just their reputation engine is really working. And when we look at like agencies as a whole, you have service saturation going on where, like, I can find 1000 SEO agencies doing the same thing. Yeah. So I can't just look at Neil Patel's companies and say, Well, how's, how's he doing? Let me copy that. It's like, Well, Neil Patel got there by starting this way. Such a good point. Chris, right. Such good point. Because businesses miss it. Agencies miss it absolutely. First mover advantage, as they call it. They've done the work now. They.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Have the relationships in HubSpot, that means they're going to get the referrals. Let's be frank about it, right? I know of a relatively recent elite

Unknown Speaker 25:10
business climb, climbed the pole, fantastic people and an amazing leader in Richwood.

Unknown Speaker 25:19
They're a great business, right? But I know, I also know how hard he worked to overcome that legacy, the others legacy. You know, the people who'd come before, if you like, that was their strategy. That's what they decided to do, and it worked, fantastic for them. But again, Rich will say is fraud. Is absolutely fraud.

Unknown Speaker 25:40
It's the only, only way, and it's not how. So either. You know, the interesting thing for me is, if you look ahead, if you look forward, as we've been discussing, where's HubSpot going to go? Well, they've just launched something called everboarding. Have you come across? Have you heard this, this idea? They have. I haven't. I haven't done a deep dive yet. All right, three 350 pounds, $350

Unknown Speaker 26:02
I think, since I think it's the same, whatever you're in for a year's worth of access to onboarding content, right? 300 pounds for the year, you get to join three cohorts which are already established, already running, absolute genius. They've just re, re badged, repackaged, the whole thing, you get access to the Academy, which you already had. You know, it's brilliantly packaged. So years, here's a year's worth of support for your onboarding, years worth of book counts, years worth of training from HubSpot, years for 300

Unknown Speaker 26:37
you know, the agencies couldn't do that for for a month, 300 months. So, right?

Unknown Speaker 26:44
Yeah, there's, there's a, and they've set up to do it, right? There's a swathe of client there, small to mid client that they've probably just sucked up into them, into the machine. So you've got to think about things like this. You've got to realize this is, this is what's going to happen.

Unknown Speaker 26:59
One that, yeah. I mean, that's a

Unknown Speaker 27:02
Yeah. That's a big one, because there are a lot of agencies who are HubSpot onboarding was how they were acquiring clients, yep. And HubSpot, I got rid of their onboarding program to say we're going to just have partners doing everything is going to partners. And we did the like, I got certified or accredited with the partner. Scaled onboarding set up like didn't, did all that, and like they were, it was a rigorous process to make sure you understood how to onboard, and the fact that they're just, you know this, but like, I question the the value that people are going to get from it, because you know probably better than anyone, if you don't have someone actually walking you through this, the implementation process.

Unknown Speaker 27:42
That adoption gap only spreads further. Well, from our perspective, it's almost pointless if you haven't done the adoption work in the first place. You know, by all means, use that once you know what it is you're using nubs fault for, say, it's, it's deceptively simple. You know, it feels like us the easiest thing in the world, as you say, because it comes up in every conversation. You know, I think it's even hard for some people to describe what they use, what why did they buy it was, I'm so for, you know, beyond that, we want to be more efficient. We want to sell more stuff.

Unknown Speaker 28:17
So, but, yeah, that, that, that onboarding play, and, yeah, you know, think about it. How so, what are they to $2 billion a year, or something like that. I think growing as fast, yeah, a lot, right? A lot. And, and 40, 40% of the revenue comes from agencies.

Unknown Speaker 28:35
You know, if it's a way to cut out all of that commission, or a significant part of that commission, yeah, 50, 75% of that commission, that would be interesting. 20% commission on 40% of that revenue. That's quite a lot of money. That's quite a lot of money. I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying that that's what they're going to do, or that's what even they want to do. I'm saying as a responsible business, these are the things that we must consider. Look at every number, yep, every every line item is a potential. Yeah, exactly way to make more money.

Unknown Speaker 29:05
I think just going back for a second on the like, building relationships within an ecosystem, even the

Unknown Speaker 29:14
So, when I was at lean labs, great. I mean Kevin, I got in as a partner. I think in 2016

Unknown Speaker 29:21
I want to say, like, it was very early, right? So it was easy to build relationships. And that really paid off on a lot of different things. We kind of stopped paying as much attention to, like, just growing our HubSpot, like, tier our status, which, no, we're just going to focus on clients. We had lead gen source coming in from other places. So, like, we weren't solely reliant on HubSpot for all that, but at some point we said, you know, let's actually just try raising our tier and see what what happens. We had brought in a sales rep who was helping us do everything. Rebuilding those relationships, especially after cams went away, was was a challenge, because you're fighting with everybody else. And so the way that we had were successful was like we.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
Had a couple sales reps who we built really strong relationships with, and we helped them close deals so they looked good. And now every deal that they got, they would think about us, but this, again, the reason we were able to sell those was because we were like service partners. We knew the intricacies of whatever the client needed done. And so I'm also wondering, How soon is it before HubSpot starts offering, you know, actual services within HubSpot, and says, Oh, we can do all of these things for you. You just have to work with us.

Unknown Speaker 30:32
It's it's benefit stands to reason why that's outsourced. There's a degree of freedom, flexibility, overhead that they don't have to get involved with. But once, once the business is moving into maturity, it's moving into the into the cash cow. You know, it's it won't accelerate the way it's accelerating forever. And when you get to there, what do businesses do? They look at how they can increase their average order values. They look at how they reduce their costs and how they become more efficient? So, yeah, with an organization with 1000s of people in it, maybe they can shake it all up and redeploy a lot of service providers, as opposed to CSMs previously, or something like that. And again, you know, they're a great organization to work with.

Unknown Speaker 31:17
You know, as well as I, you much more so the night, even, you know, we should probably throw a disclaimer on the episode, like, we love HubSpot, it's still great, like 100% I've got no intentions of moving anywhere in the near future. You know, in fact, we will, like we were talking about the other day, we'll be going into accreditations and maintaining our certifications. You know, we, do play the game. You have to play the game. You have to be able to look them in the eye and say, yeah, we can do a good job for your clients. Of course. Of course you do. But from a business perspective, it can't be the be all and end all.

Unknown Speaker 31:54
It can't be the only play. Or at least not, in my opinion, that's exactly it, I think even the best. So I'm spending a lot of time working with the guys at TAC go to market right now, and their model requires you to not just look at that one where, hey, we're event led an event led growth company. It's like, let's look at all of the different things that you need to be doing within your go to market strategy, then decide, like, some of those pieces from there, I think a lot of people are like doing HubSpot, like growth, and at some point that might not be be the right option. So,

Unknown Speaker 32:29
yeah, so I want to, want to get just one kind of final question before we start wrapping it up. Cool. What is the like? 8020 for you? As far as like, getting people to understand the adoption gap is a problem that they need it solved, right? What is that one thing that they need to just realize,

Unknown Speaker 32:48
you know, that makes it clear that this is their problem? Yeah, no, see now I think I know about this as well. This is really interesting, right? So when I started selling

Unknown Speaker 32:59
advertising,

Unknown Speaker 33:01
somewhere along the line you got taught or, uh, maybe you picked up osmosis. You got picked up from other sales reps. You know, you'd go in and you say to somebody, so it wouldn't be as straightforward as this. But so, yeah, so you spend money on advertising, yeah. So where do you advertise? Oh, I tried. My thing was radio, right? When I started, I tried the radio, but it didn't work.

Unknown Speaker 33:22
And you go, okay, so what? What did you do? Right? You go into what we used to call the autopsy, what did you do? What radio station Did you did you choose? What? How many spots Did you run? What was your creative like? And so on and so on, which makes a lot of sense, doesn't it right? Until you realize what you're actually doing is telling the person who bought the advertising that they're a complete idiot. If

Unknown Speaker 33:46
you think about it, you're saying you clearly didn't know what you were doing when you ran that advertising. You totally messed up the campaign, and it's no wonder you didn't get any response, right? So when you go into an organization at the management level,

Unknown Speaker 33:59
there's a very fine line between saying to them that it's their fault HubSpot is not working, and that you can show them the way

Unknown Speaker 34:10
between that and criticizing them for having messed the whole thing up. What do you mean? So we've just spent $40,000 $50,000 on software, and it's our fault it didn't work. Well, yes, actually, yes.

Unknown Speaker 34:22
And this is why I think it's so easy also for them to delegate this stuff out. You know, managers have got where they've got, there's a little bit, you know, they've got sharp elbows. They've got very well developed sense of persever preservation. I'm sorry

Unknown Speaker 34:36
that they're political animals, you know? They play, they play the odds, right? Somebody brings HubSpot in until it looks like it's working, they're going to be very messy, messy, and it hasn't proved itself to me yet. I never liked the thing in the first place. I you know, you've got that whole thing going on, right? So what they've got to realize, what we need them to realize, is that.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
At this. You know, it's not criticism. This is not it's not a failing, per se. This is a lack of knowledge. It's just a lack of experience on their part that we can help them overcome. There's, there's, if you like, the learning curve is equivalent to the adoption gap, right? If you think of a learning curve from the box, you're kind of your performance level is cutting along on a certain certain degree, and then when you start to learn something new, it drops your productivity, your effectiveness, your efficiency drops when you start to learn something new, only for it to come back up the other side and overtake where you were before you undertook the learning right? That's the Learning Kit. It's exactly the same thing as the adoption gap. So here we are before. We're going along. We're going along. We bring in HubSpot. Everything drops. Why? Because we're learning new systems. We're refining our processes, we're optimizing we're replacing our data, we're training ourselves teams. We're doing all the things that we need to do in order to close that adoption gap so that we can surpass where we were before.

Unknown Speaker 36:01
If you get stuck in that curve, if you don't come up the other side, and then beyond where you were previously, the adoption gap cost, or the learning cost, just increases.

Unknown Speaker 36:12
So this is, this is the massive this is the thing where we have to win, say, is to is a non fault thing is to explain the science behind what we're trying to achieve. You know, you wouldn't play football if you hadn't been shown how to play football. You couldn't. You couldn't

Unknown Speaker 36:30
play a hand of bridge if nobody taught you how to play bridge or poker or anything. You know, this is the same thing. You can't adopt a SAS platform, a CRM system until you know what you need to do in order to do it. Now there are businesses, clearly, lots of businesses out there who know exactly what to do. They're change management experts themselves. They know precisely what's required. They know to build their own management consultancy, sorry, management control systems, and they do it. And that's why that focus is so important to us. We I don't want to talk to that because, because they know what they're doing. We want to talk to businesses that are really hungry for that growth, that look inside themselves and say, there's something going on here. We've missed something, right? We're blind to something here, little bit like polar tradies, right? We need somebody who's going to look into the future for us where we can't see at the minute and help us go there. And that's why we say we're a combination management consultancy and HubSpot partner. Because we do both those things, we almost have a strategic operational aspect to what we do. We start with that strategy piece, and then we drive into that operational but unless we can cross that gap, you know, unless we can get on their side and make them realize that we're not insulting their intelligence or criticizing their ability to do it themselves. We're actually there to help them achieve something that they don't know how to achieve. That that's the big piece for us.

Unknown Speaker 37:51
Awesome. All right, I got two more questions for you, first one being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read? All right? Oh, well, there's a book I read, like, a few years ago. I think it's been updated a couple of times. It's called agency nomics. Agency nomics. It's by a Brit whose

Unknown Speaker 38:10
name escapes me at the minute, but you'll find it is also kicked off as one does. He's kicked off a

Unknown Speaker 38:18
community off the back of agency. No, it's called the agency nomics community. But basically long time agency guy, long time marketing agency guy, and he's written about how he built his agency, the lessons that you can learn from him, and some really for a new agency, some fantastic insights in there, some brilliant, really practical tips, yeah, agency nomics definitely, right. And where can people learn more about you?

Unknown Speaker 38:43
They can, they can find us on, on the website, real inbound.co.uk,

Unknown Speaker 38:49
but I spend most of my time on LinkedIn when I should be working. I'm either writing or commenting on other people's posts. So it's Tony Dowling, sales and marketing, as it happens. But just search me on on LinkedIn, I do and one of those people, I accept those requests, I answer those outreach emails, at least if they're vaguely interesting, and I'd be more than happy to get into a conversation with you there and

Unknown Speaker 39:15
then awesome. Tony, as always, it was a pleasure. Thanks, Chris, speak to you again.

Unknown Speaker 39:22
You

Unknown Speaker 39:24
that's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai