Is Growth Driven Design Worth the Investment?

When we started GuavaBox, we were a website design agency focused in WordPress.

When we made the transition to becoming a HubSpot partner in 2012 we started to check out the HubSpot COS.

We quickly shifted from WordPress websites to being almost exclusively HubSpot CMS developers.

Almost every week I have a conversation with an agency who is in a similar situation. They are wondering what we think of HubSpot COS and whether becoming a COS development agency and practicing Growth Driven Design is worth the time investment. 

Gray is on the HubSpot COS advisory board and we get to hear his thoughts as a very talented COS developer. I also dig into how I like offering those services from a sales perspective and how that plays into the sales process. 

Selling HubSpot’s COS

GuavaBox quickly grew its name recognition in the COS community and we started to get a new type of lead. People would reach out to us wanting to switch their current website over to the COS. 

Our marketing at this point was focused on inbound retainers, COS redesigns were a large part of those retainers but not what we were looking to sell independently. Our goal in switching to HubSpot was to get away from the project work of website redesigns and take on a new type of client.

The nice thing about clients looking for COS redesigns is that they are a different type of “website project.” These prospects are already HubSpot customers and at some level understand the importance of inbound marketing. The conversation around what they were looking for beyond a website was much easier because they were a more educated consumer. 

This gave us another type of lead that was essentially looking for the same goal as our retainer leads, just starting at a different point. Some leads started asking for marketing help and a website redesign was part of that conversation, while now these new types of leads were looking for a website redesign and additional marketing help became part of the conversation.

We still ran into the issue of clients only wanting a website built on the COS and they would worry about the marketing “later”. Before growth driven design, we were running into the same issues that caused us to switch to being a HubSpot partner in the beginning. When the idea behind growth driven design was born, that solved our problem with these clients.

Is GDD Worth the Investment?

The question now becomes, is learning COS development and GDD worth the time and resource investment for your agency? 

At our agency, COS and GDD projects have been crucial to our revenue. Over the past four years, we are very grateful that we got behind the HubSpot COS and now have started implementing GDD. 

However, that does not make it a right fit for everyone. Growth driven design can be a huge distraction for your agency. If you do not have the time and resources to really commit to doing it well, it isn’t worth it. Instead, spend a much smaller amount of time building relationships with agencies that excel at GDD and form partnerships to work together. 

This will allow you to have a solution for a customer you bring on without having to be the expert yourself. It is hard as an agency owner to not be distracted by “shiny objects”. Growth driven design and HubSpot COS development can be one of those shiny objects if you are not fully committed to making that a core service of your agency.