The Benefits of a Remote Team with Susan LaPlante-Dube
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Susan LaPlante-Dube from Precision Marketing Group joins us on Episode 98 of Inbound Agency Journey. Susan shares her experience of growing an agency from 2002, being an early Hubspot user, and managing a team of twenty-six.
Gray and Susan covered everything from value-based pricing to the benefits of remote teams and some valuable nuggets of information for any agency owner.
Benefits of a Remote Team
Susan since the beginning in 2002 ran Precision Marketing Group as a remote company. She’s managed to grow the team to 16 employees and 10 regular contractors. One of her main reasons for sticking with building a remote team is that allows her to not be limited by geography to pick high-quality team members.
This has allowed her to pick up talented senior level team members who are tired of going to an office and are more interested in the lifestyle of their job. If she ever needs to meet with clients, that’s possible as well since they focus on a region. Her team is all located in the New England area, so getting together to meet in person isn’t impossible either.
Focus on Your Agency Strengths
Early on in her agency, Susan offered positioning services for businesses. Her understanding of positioning helps her market her agency by positioning it as an outsourced marketing department. This allows them to be considered as part of the company and more than just another vendor.
The ability to differentiate helps them in the manufacturing and technology niche where products are easily viewed as commodities and have a hard time standing out. By focusing on their agency strengths, Susan has been able to make her agency and services stand out from competition.
Importance of Pricing Your Services
Susan also goes into how they do their pricing and can increase their client retainers with their own pricing and engagement strategy. Rather than using an hours or points system, Precision Marketing Group uses an internally created pricing formula based on various value metrics.
They also break engagements into 90-day campaigns. Based on results and success of a campaign, they can scale up the retainer size and add on more deliverables based on value. This allows Precision to continually improve and scale up their efforts as they go and charge accordingly. By being sure to price her services based on value, Susan can continually grow her agency and deliver success for all her clients.
Susan also shares her experience in the early days of Hubspot and inbound marketing. As the marketer in charge of using the software for one of the first three companies to purchase it, she’s seen the evolution of the inbound community over the years. Although she has moved away from using inbound marketing for every single client and their need, she still sees it as a valuable strategy to drive ROI for clients and remains a big fan of the Hubspot platform.
Follow Susan on Twitter and if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review on iTunes!
Resources mentioned in this interview:
