How to Build an Agency and Software at the Same Time
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In this episode of Agency Journey, Andrew interviews Charles Drengberg from Big Presence and Belch.io about building his agency and how his team also makes software for agencies and businesses.
Several years ago, Charles left his job in business development and, seeing the importance of inbound marketing, began his agency. They now work with high-tech, SaaS, and manufacturing companies to help them deliver results online.
Here are the main takeaways from the interview.
Use Education to Guide Your Prospects and Clients
Starting, Big Presence worked with a lot of small and local clients.
This showed them very early on the importance of educating prospects. Many of these businesses hadn’t had the time to learn and keep up with the trends in marketing in the digital age. They didn’t see the growth of content marketing. Charles saw it was their job to educate.
To sign on clients and keep them around, it becomes essential to teach clients but not in a way that makes them feel dumb or confused. It’s important to be transparent and guide them through the process and what they need to know, what affects what, and how to understand what the agency is suggesting and doing.
Big Presence now works with larger accounts, but they have seen the need to educate these businesses. Many of these companies have established marketers who don’t want to be told that everything they’re doing is wrong. It’s important to come along with existing teams and work with them productively.
The added benefits of education and guiding prospects is as you work with them you’ll be asking questions and helping them see what they need you for. This means helping the client think more clearly about their business and processes from a sales and marketing perspective.
For example, if a client wants a website, you educate them about how to make the site generate leads and not just a placeholder. If they see the value of a website for leads and not just something nice to have, then ask them how they plan on handling these new leads being generated from their website. Then ask about their process for closing leads and how they’ll use this database of current and past leads and customers.
By asking questions and educating the prospect along their funnel, you’ll be in the position as the trusted person to turn to solve their problems and learn how to do it correctly. It will make sense for them to work with your agency.
Scratching Their Itch with Belch.io
More and more agencies that are exploring building software and developing products that they can sell and monetize outside of client work, whether it’s to sell it to other agencies or sell it to clients.
Before diving in, you need to have the team decided and have the chance to address an issue the agency is facing themselves. It has to be a real pain point.
The software can be viewed as the sexy new thing for agencies, but you want to make sure there’s a market for it that’s there and that you are building a solution you have the team to create and have the resources to launch it.
Belch.io was born out of the frustration of the process of building templates in HubSpot. It would require a developer and be frustrating to update, and creatives felt they couldn’t make the changes they wanted to when they needed to.
Belch.io is a visual template builder for HubSpot. First launched internally to help the Big Presence team, it is now a Mac Desktop app offered to other HubSpot users.
If you’re interested in learning more about Belch.io, check it out here.
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