Agency Forward

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Dave syllabro. Dave is the founder of harvest ROI, which is a rev ops agency that specializes in helping companies turn their CRM into a revenue generating machine, not this black hole of leads, chaos, complexity that you normally see. I wanted to talk to Dave to break down why so many companies waste their HubSpot investment, and how Dave's team approaches CRM architecture, operational alignment and long term revenue enablement like engineers, because I thought that would be helpful for everybody. In this episode, we discussed why bad data leads to total team disengagement, and how to stop the snowball, the importance of Team wide EQ in unlocking client adoption, how they build long term retainers by tying CRM work to quarterly revenue goals and more. No one was asking for another community, but I made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done them before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested. And right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join at Dynamic agency, dot community and now. Dave syllabro,

Unknown Speaker 1:22
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 forward.

Unknown Speaker 1:40
What made you decide to niche down into HubSpot and rev ops, instead of saying full service

Unknown Speaker 1:47
specifically, I think it was the opportunity right when we when we came into the HubSpot ecosystem. I came in as a go to market and turnaround consultant, and I was just advising clients and working with clients on those strategies, their go to market strategies, their brand and product positioning, and then mostly it was like all their operational processes. That's where I found most companies falling down. Was what happens when the lead comes into the system, and then how does all of that follow? And I had actually worked with a couple other HubSpot agencies doing the implementation work. And thought, Man, I feel like I could do this a lot differently right then. Then the way that I'm seeing a lot of the other agencies do this, because they led a lot with marketing, and they led a lot from top funnel. And then, just in my experience, I think most people didn't struggle with top funnel. They struggled with, what happens with the lead, how they get the lead qualified, how they drive that lead, through that process of developing that lead, IQ, the intent and qualification, moving that effectively to sales, how sales delivers on marketing's promises, and what information and data they're collecting. And how does you know? How does sales set that up for the operational piece, which is either the fulfillment or onboarding or the delivery of the product or service, right? And I always felt like that was the part that fell down. And when I had worked with agencies in the past, they just everybody focused on, let's write blogs, let's get forms set up. Let's bring in more leads. But again, if you're just bringing in leads and don't know what to do next. That's the place I saw a huge opportunity in the ecosystem. And that's kind of how harvest was born. I think it also, on some level, comes out where it's like, people find the easy option. So like, top of funnel is, like the easy part. Everything else is like, way harder. People just gravitate towards that. Oh, yeah. This is complicated. This part, right? Yeah, we see it this within the agency coaching space. It's like agency operations. You can find hundreds of coaches like, right now, you just type that in agency, like revenue coaches very hard to find, because driving revenue in an agency is way different than, like, a B to B Tech for SaaS company, correct? Yeah, I see that all the time here. I think one of the things I found too, and you know, this may be, go back to my like, my past life as a CMO and a CRO at a national finance company was just leads are leads are a commodity, right? You can buy leads, you can create leads, you can bring leads through, but again, if you don't qualify them, and you're dealing with with bad leads, you know you find like your sales reps are sometimes dealing with nine out of 10 leads. They can't even close. Once all of that data is in the system, most companies don't even do anything with it. They're not. They don't keep those leads on a leash. They're not. They're not working those leads. They're not dispositioning the leads early, right? So they're not, they don't have a disposition for leads. They don't have a disposition at close lost. They don't go back and nurture. They're not trying to win those leads back. And so they're in this process of constantly bringing in new leads and burning them. And you know the cost?

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Acquisition is, you know, you're not improving that cost per acquisition, which is going to it's going to decrease your, your overall value of your company. So what kind of things are you looking at? Once they get, they got these leads in what's, what's the first step? So the first step is, the first step in any CRM is obviously the the data architecture right, understanding the data so that eventually we can go back and make actionable decisions on that data. But beyond that, we're really looking at, you know, the pre sales process to start. I mean, that pre sales process could be, you know, everything that we do that, you know, a lead comes inbound. Like I said earlier, we need, we need a lead to have IQ right, intent and qualification. So whether that leads coming inbound, they've raised their hand, they're showing intent. How do we qualify them? Right? What are the qualification requirements to? You know, who do we route it to based on their qualification? Where is it going? You know, are we setting up our reps based on wills or skills or territory alignments, other things that we're going to be sending those, those leads off. I see a lot of people having some processes where I'm going to get the leads first and then I'm going to review those and manually assign those completely inefficient so how do we create a more efficient process for qualifying those leads, getting those leads into the hands of the people who can further qualify them and move them downstream? The other side of pre sales is really what a lot of businesses do. And HubSpot wasn't really set up four years ago, but they they've obviously changed. We were one of the leaders in in in in that is like looking at what the outbound activity is, you know. So lot of companies, especially B to B organizations, are looking at ideal customer profiles. Are looking at targeting accounts, because there's only so many accounts they can sell to in that space. They want to target. They want to bring that data in. So if we're going after that data, we hopefully they're qualifying them right before they bring those prospects into the CRM. Then the job is, how do we drive intent, right? So what does that outbound activity look like? Are we enrolling them in sequences? Do we have LinkedIn automation? Are we building an influencer network? Are we looking at channel partners to help bring deals in, right? So all of that outbounding activity also goes into your pre sales activity, right? Because they can come in from either either direction. They can also come in from referrals and other sources, but it's usually two directions. You're either going out boundary or coming inbound, and there's two different paths that we need to go through to get them to become sales qualified leads and put them into a sales funnel so that sellers can actually close these deals, right? So niching into kind of this focus, knowing where the rest of the market was headed. How did that kind of play out for you? Like, as far as were you winning better clients? Was it easier to win clients?

Unknown Speaker 8:03
Do you think easier to stand out? I think it was, you know, it's easier to stand out. It was easier to win clients. Because what we would talk about with with people is, you know, hey, you're looking for somebody to do your demand generation. That's not us. What we do is we, you know, we align your operational processes, data, architecture, people and systems together so that you're going to close more deals, so that you're going to manage that data better. And that really resonated with a lot of people, because they they knew that that's what their problem was, that wasn't being addressed.

Unknown Speaker 8:36
And I think that also gave us, you know, helped us build an influencer network, because there's a lot of failed CRM implementations that are done by marketing groups, that are done by people who, you know, hey, I've used the HubSpot or the Salesforce CRM I'm familiar with CRMs. Let me build it internally, inside the company, and we've seen how that turns out, right? And I always tell people that, like, you can you can buy a Lamborghini, you can drive a Lamborghini, or you can build a Lamborghini. It's easy to buy the Lamborghini, if you have the money, you probably need to learn how to drive it, but it's going to be a lot easier to learn how to drive it, or know how to drive it than it is to know how to build it, right? And so people who think that they have experience think they can do all three of those things, and it doesn't really pan out like that. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for us, because we also started to look at, hey, how do we start to niche into not going out and looking for net new sales and convincing people to buy the software, but how many of these implementations are out there that aren't complete, that aren't built out the way that they should be built out? There's so much opportunity there. Let's focus on that as our niche. And then how do we find an influencer to network, to introduce us to all of these people?

Unknown Speaker 9:59
Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
It came with its own set of complications. Obviously, we're not, we're not industry egg, not, you know, we're not industry specific, we're industry agnostic, which makes for its own set of challenges, but also, I think, creates a lot of opportunities by seeing what other industries are doing. You know, once we can assess their revenue models, see their processes, and you do this enough, you can start cross introducing these processes to other industries and saying, like, Hey, have you ever thought about doing it like this? We've seen this done before, and, you know, introducing something that's not industry specific to give them an edge, right? Yeah, there's a lot of overlap that you can find if you know what beats you're supposed to hit. But definitely so as a former HubSpot agency CEO, the number of onboardings that we would get from HubSpot, and we'd help, we'd work through it and, you know, month process, and someone on their team is like, I've used HubSpot before, and then you check back in with them, you know, two months later, 90 days later, whatever it is, and they haven't adopted anything, because the everything you set up that person, as soon as you left that person in the company, said, Nah, we needed, we need this. And then they completely just scrap stuff, and it never actually gets built out with an actual system, like what you guys are going into building. And so, yeah, huge opportunity, and it's impressive that you're able to identify that and then use that as a source of leverage. I think the difference too is like, there's a huge difference between an onboarding and a strategic implementation. Yeah, agreed. I think a lot of people are like, Hey, we just need to get onboarded. We need to get to use the system. And a lot of people are expecting it to do everything they want it to do for their business, right out of the right out of the box, or once you turn it on. And every business is unique, right? It's a living organism, just like we are. And there's no two businesses that are identical. They all do something a little bit different. And if you're not, if you're not capturing that in their processes, then you start to you, start to sacrifice adoption

Unknown Speaker 12:04
of the users, right? Because if the if it doesn't fit seamlessly into how they work or what their work process is, then they're not gonna, they're not gonna fully utilize it, which means, then the data model gets gets compromised, and your data and your decision making ability gets compromised, right? Something, actually, I brought this up on a podcast earlier today,

Unknown Speaker 12:26
someone I was at a retreat, and someone mentioned, like, as soon as the data doesn't jive within a platform, your team that references that data is going to stop accessing it. They're just going to stop going into it, because they know it's useless. And so now it only gets harder to get everybody back into that platform, to actually use it. How do you go about training, teaching your clients to do that like so, yeah, once that happens and it just, it just picks up momentum, right? One user, stop doing it, one user, and then it starts, it snowballs. It gets worse. So what we do is we have something called the rev ops hierarchy of needs.

Unknown Speaker 13:04
It's sort of loosely based on that same framework as like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but we build this and show this to clients, and it becomes a problem solving framework for how a good CRM should be set up at the very bottom, foundationally, is that data architecture, right? What's the data structure that we need to make sure that we can segment people for marketing, right? How are we going to communicate to people by role, by industry, by where they are on the buyer's journey, by what products they own, all of those different things. How are we going to filter the data for sales opportunities? Where are they in the pipeline? Where are they in the journey? You know, who are the who are the decision makers in this process? All of those things need to be considered in the data model.

Unknown Speaker 13:51
You know, we start to look at products. There's a million ways to start to look at data integrations from other systems. Do we need custom objects in the data architecture, all of these things start to, you know, they'll make a difference when we get to reporting. But if we start with a good, solid data architecture, the next thing we look at layering is people in process alignment, right? So we've got the data now. What does that process look like, from pre sales, the handoff to sales, the handoff to post sales, customer support, customer service, all of those things. And how do those processes support the data model? Right? Because we can't collect all the data at the beginning. We can't collect all the data at the end. It's a linear process where we're talking to this prospect or client throughout the entire buyer's journey from lead through the sales process, through onboarding or fulfillment, and we're collecting data, right? And that architecture that we develop should give us the data points that we're collecting based on the data architecture. Anything that we can't collect in the data architecture is typically enrichment, right?

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Like firmographic demographic type data that we want to bring in to learn more about, like market penetration and things like that we may be getting from external sources. Once people and processes are aligned, then we need to look at adoption and enablement in the hierarchy, right? We need to make sure that the team has access to the tools they know how to use it, and what are the activities that we're doing that are going to drive adoption of the system, if we've got good, solid adoption and enablement, the next thing we're looking at is your reporting and analytics, and if, and if the three things in the bottom are aligned, your reporting and analytics are going to be good. And then at the very top of that pyramid is your is your ability to make

Unknown Speaker 15:43
strategic analysis and make actionable decisions based on your data. And then at any point in that, as the business iterates, you change products. Maybe you're changing a market that you're going after the business changes externally, and we need to make a change, you know, and you start to go, Hey, I've got a gap in my reporting here, and I can't seem to support it. Now we have a framework to solve the problem of, okay, can't see the information in a report. Is the data structure there to support the reporting? If yes, then we go to is the people and processes aligned that are fulfilling that data and if yes, then we know we have a an enablement or an adoption issue, right? But now we can start to go in and figure out where it's missing and fill in the blanks. And so that's how we go from like a rev ops optimization engagement, where we're building that foundation and structure, to how do we how do we go through the cycles of iterating, problem solving, right, finding that actionable insight, and going up and down that hierarchy to find the information, make decisions and make the changes to drive revenue forward.

Unknown Speaker 16:51
I'm envisioning your HubSpot account as being just perfect. Our HubSpot,

Unknown Speaker 16:59
no, you've worked at an agency, you know, the college children have no shoes, right? But it's getting better every day, right? It gets better every day, but it's not,

Unknown Speaker 17:10
it's not as tight as we make our clients, yeah, and but, but it's improving over time. I don't want to, I don't want to come in here and, you know, tell other agencies, perfect. Yeah, it is Solomon's paradox. We're great at everyone else's problems, but everything you just said

Unknown Speaker 17:29
was probably simplified and is actually way more complex than what you're actually doing. Like,

Unknown Speaker 17:36
how do you go about? Like, maintaining that level of quality of your work when you bring in new team members, you're working with new clients, especially like cross industries. How do you that's a lot, right? There's a lot of details that you're looking at with this. Even if you have, you know, this hierarchy of needs, there's

Unknown Speaker 17:51
still a lot going on there. How do you kind of maintain that quality? There is a lot. So one of the things that we do different, I think, than a lot of agencies, is, you know, our projects are. We have project managers in every project that keeps the project tight, that keeps things moving forward.

Unknown Speaker 18:07
We also have a philosophy of, you know, we we make sure that we help align the the client's vision, their goals. There's a framework for the solutions engineer, the Rev op strategist, the

Unknown Speaker 18:23
client success manager, to work within, whether that's our optimization framework or our rev ops framework that we have in place that allows them to sort of solve the problems in a in a particular order of operations. And then then you just need to hire really smart, talented people who you know, really understand it, really get it, and then just empower them to do the best work possible, and then have a series of checks and balances to make sure we've got quality insurance in place, so that there's always two sets of eyes looking on something before it gets released to a client. Right?

Unknown Speaker 19:01
Even there, it feels like it's way more complex than

Unknown Speaker 19:05
it is complex. But I think that's where our niches, our niches working, working in the complex and doing the jobs and doing the the optimizations that nobody else wants to do, right? Well, they need to be done, right? Somebody needs to do. And the philosophy, the you can sell complexity as long as it's in its simplest form. And so, like, we want to show clients, like, this is everything going on in the background. There's a lot here, but you don't have to worry about that. You just have to look at these like three things. We'll do the rest. And so now you've sold yourself as the go between to like you're protecting me from all of that chaos by giving me these few simple things to focus on, right? So let's

Unknown Speaker 19:53
shift gears to

Unknown Speaker 19:55
what So as you've been growing this agency, what are some of those leadership lessons that you've pulled.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Doubt things like that, going through re niching, just, even just growing a business in general, right? Yeah, I think one, one that's really, really served us well is, is, you know, our philosophy around hiring, right? And it's just like I said, You've got to hire really smart people who really get it, who really want it,

Unknown Speaker 20:26
you need to pay them well, right? Agencies never succeed by underpaying people, you get a lot of employee churn. So employee retention is super, super important in building a really strong agency, and then you need to have some things that support the culture around that. And I go back to people more than I go back to anything else when it comes to building an agency, because to have momentum, you need to have a team, and that team needs to grow. They need to solidify, and new members need to come on and feel like they're part of that team from day one, you

Unknown Speaker 21:01
know, and continue to grow that team. And so we do, we do some things very, very differently. We focus on

Unknown Speaker 21:07
a structure of servant leadership, right? So every leader in this company is, is there to support the people you know, that are working for the company, right? So at right, at the very bottom of the of the organizational chart is myself. I'm there to support the leadership team. The leadership team is there to support everybody else. It's not the other way around, right? We're there to help serve everybody else. Another major component of that is, is how do we how do we work with the EQ of people? Because the EQ of our team is just as important as their skill set. If they can't communicate to clients, if they can't identify that a client is under stress. And by the way, anytime you're doing any of these projects, your clients and your team is under stress, especially if they're not aligned, and the first job that our team has is to identify that if that team is out of alignment, there's got to be one or two members of that team who are under stress about this project. We're making changes. So if you think about a really successful project, you're book ending it with change management and adoption. Right at the very, very front is that change management. So if we can identify the people who are experiencing or displaying stress behaviors and help them unpack their needs and understand it, let them be heard across the rest of that team, and we can get that team aligned, now, we can start to build a really successful process that everybody is going to have buy in on, because they participated on, because they were aligned, and then at the end, it's going to help drive a lot better adoption,

Unknown Speaker 22:47
right

Unknown Speaker 22:49
when you so after, let's say the client does have, like, full adoption, you got everything in. Do you have something set up for, like, a next offer where you actually work with them on an ongoing basis to maintain all of their systems? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that's, I think that's the dream for everybody. I think there's a lot of agencies that kind of do the one and done. That's just you, but you're constantly chasing pipeline, feast and famine, feast and famine, right? You're chasing pipeline because you're completing a project, and then you need to fill that pipeline to do other projects. But I think people always need this expertise on some level, like we talked about earlier, a business is a living organism, right? You set it up once, it doesn't mean it's not going to iterate. It should iterate. If it's not iterating, it's dying, right? If you're not moving forward and you're not changing, you're moving backward and you're dying. So I think there's a lot of organizations that need help, and the smart organizations will keep us on, but we have offerings post the implementation or the optimization of the full CRM and the architecture. One is, one is a rev ops engagement, right? What are we doing to help drive revenue forward so that continuous loop of what's our quarterly revenue goals? What's our quarterly goals? What are our sprints to help make sure that we're fulfilling those goals and launching campaigns? What are the QBRs to make sure we're going back and seeing how we did how do we realign what next quarter's goals are so that we're driving revenue forward? And if the team has people like that on board and sales operations or revenue operations who are in depth at that, then we're also there to just support them on an ad hoc basis, because they will always need that expertise. Software is always changing. You know, HubSpot release, especially with HubSpot 200 200 this year alone. We're only in April still, so there's always new features, new AI that's coming out new new things that you can do, new workspaces that can help improve that work, that even if you've got a team that's solid that has adopted HubSpot, it doesn't mean they're going to start rolling out all of these iterations that are going to make it better. So I think as long as you know you're thinking about that in in terms of how.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
You're building that relationship with the client to not just set that foundation, but help them drive revenue and support them long term, then I think you've got a good business model, right? Yeah, so you just brought back a story.

Unknown Speaker 25:15
When I was a marketer at the my last agency, I jumped on a call for HubSpot onboarding, I was going to show them, like, the settings menu and how they could work through certain things in HubSpot and move the settings from the top to the side. And I jumped on and was like, I have no idea what's going on anymore. Like, did I break something? How do you with those 200 changes that HubSpot has already brought out? How do you make sure your entire team is up to date on all of these changes and fully trained so that they don't run into that same issue. So we have one. We have a Slack channel, right? So as people are identifying updates, seeing updates, we have a Slack channel that we post the updates. We talk about how it how it applies to us. We've also brought in a new director of marketing who is freaking awesome, and so he's now doing like internal podcasts to generate the data with our team, to talk about those updates, to talk about how they applicable, so that we're all staying fresh and on top of it, not just looking at Kyle's LinkedIn posts, right? Gotta be. Got to be a little bit more than that, so that constant communication as a team is super, super important. Teams that don't communicate, you're losing, you're losing this because if you've got 2030, people on your team, and they're all in HubSpot, in different areas every day, somebody is going to, you know, put their finger in the mouse trap, right? Yeah. And I do it. I know I do it. When I'm doing the same thing that you're talking about. They just, they change the menu the other day, and I was like, Oh, it can't find it, right? When I think you have to be you get caught in that situation on the call to client, be humble, you know, talk about all the changes that HubSpot is making, and, you know, you've got to be adaptable, right? But it, I think, you know, even when HubSpot is making those changes. It the UX is always so intuitive. It takes you about 30 seconds to figure out what happened and where to go, right? It's not it's the PC versus the Mac scenario, as far as I'm concerned, right? So I feel like it's always at least intuitive enough to figure it out on the fly. Yeah. So I guess, speaking of changes,

Unknown Speaker 27:24
the market is continuously changing, and since you're hitting multiple industries, that's a lot of other changes to kind of keep up with. What how are you also saying on top of all of those, to know how you can best serve those clients as things are changing. So it depends on the I guess it depends on the client, right? Since we're so industry agnostic, I think it, it makes it a lot easier for us. We're not as easily affected like right now, I know that, like

Unknown Speaker 27:51
HubSpot, HubSpot agencies, for example, that that niche manufacturing as they're vertical, there's a so much uncertainty with tariffs and everything else coming along that doesn't affect us the same way. Since we're industry agnostic, there's different industries, and it's like the stock market. Even when the stock market's down, people make money. So if you're if you're diversified enough in your approach, I don't think we ever get hit and we get affected that way, right? Because we're not, we're not targeting one specific vertical for our business. It really does help us just kind of go where the need is right. Well,

Unknown Speaker 28:28
awesome, Dave, this has been insightful, but I got two more questions for you Sure. First being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read? I've got, you're gonna laugh, but I've got stacks of books

Unknown Speaker 28:43
I like, so these two, the traction and EOS. Those are prerequisites. My favorite is ask more, right? Because if you're consultants, the worst thing you could do is not ask questions. So this book is a great book written by Frank says no about how to how to ask questions, written by a journalist, right? So if you get in that mindset of asking questions, you're in good shape. The growth gears by art Saxby and Pete Hays. They own a company called chief outsiders, great framework for go to market strategies

Unknown Speaker 29:20
and then leaders eat left. And this is no joke. You asked me this, but these things were just sitting on my desk because these are books that I go back to and read a lot, yeah, and then I also read a lot of, like, Harvard Business Review. Have a subscription to that. And, you know, always new ideas, new things that are being introduced. It's a, you know, a great subscription to have. Yeah, I feel, I feel you on the reading the Yeah. I've kept this question in the podcast purely for myself, so hopefully guests find value in it. But it's like I just got two more books that I haven't heard of that I added to my list. I do all the time. I same thing. I hear a book on a podcast or something, the first thing I do is I go to Amazon, I buy the book. Yeah?

Unknown Speaker 30:00
Just my wife. My wife probably gets angry at me for buying before even considering the book, before considering

Unknown Speaker 30:07
books. Just, you know what happens? A lot of I'll buy the book, and then I'll be on a road trip, and I'll just download the audiobook, so I'll buy it twice, and I'll end up listening to it, and then I'll use the other one as a reference. But right? I just say it's like a trophy for me, yeah. So I actually did that with

Unknown Speaker 30:24
Seth Godin. All marketers are liars, and I was listening to at the same time I was reading it. And I never done that before, but it was, like, it was awesome. Like, I was hearing everything twice. It was like, it all the ideas stuck a lot faster. It was a, yeah, it's cool. I've got books on the shelf back there. I've got books in boxes. I've got books that I've read. I I feel like, if you're not continuously reading, you're missing right? 100% and I think the new reading is podcasts, right? I think you get more information at a podcast much more quickly, because things are changing so rapidly right now. Yeah, having a good, having a good, you know, rotation of podcasts of where you're getting your information, how you're getting your information, is also, I think, super important, yeah. And I think with the changing of even the publishing industry,

Unknown Speaker 31:15
it's like, if you're if you have a one page summary at the end of every chapter, and I could just read that summary is, then it needed to be a book, and so it's like, it's disappointing in a lot of ways, where it's like, I want your ideas, I want the stories, but like, sell me throughout the book. Yep, but AI tools I use for that too. There's, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 31:38
Last question is, where can people find you?

Unknown Speaker 31:41
People can find us at harvest roi.com that's harvest. Return on Investment. Harvest roi.com

Unknown Speaker 31:48
Awesome. We're on LinkedIn, and you can find us find our website, or you can find us in the HubSpot partner directory. All right. Well, Dave, thanks for joining. Thank you, Chris, appreciate you having me

Unknown Speaker 32:02
on you

Unknown Speaker 32:04
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