Becoming an Agency Expert Through HubSpot Academy with Kevin Dunn
Key Takeaways
- HubSpot Academy's partner section teaches how to sell, demo, implement, integrate, service, and price and package services, on top of the public certifications.
- The biggest trend Kevin hears is service consolidation: agencies pulling bloated menus back to what they're best at, because it's impossible to stay profitable delivering everything.
- Remote work opens the talent pool to any pocket of the country or the world, but agencies have to rethink what their culture and benefits mean without the office.
- Not every hire has to go to billable hours. Kevin points to BDRs, HR or culture roles, and in-house developers.
- If Kevin started an agency it would do tech stack consulting and RevOps: removing silos between teams and making data consistent and reportable.
- HubSpot Academy will never teach your team your time tracking software or client communication preferences. Build your own self-paced modules and pair them with vendor education.
Kevin Dunn is Manager of Education at HubSpot Academy, where he manages the partner and developer professors who build the training made exclusively for solutions partners (selling, demoing, implementing, servicing, pricing and packaging). He started at HubSpot as a channel consultant and hosts the Agency Unfiltered podcast. Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode, recorded at the end of Q2 2021, and asked Kevin what he’s hearing from agencies in the partner ecosystem, what he’d build if he started an agency, and how a 30-person education team keeps its content current.
Agencies are pulling back bloated service menus
Gray asked about the recurring challenges Kevin hears from agency owners. The first one was service consolidation.
I think the first is about the services that you offer and who you offer it to, and determining, okay, do we want to continue being everything to everybody, or should we really pull back our menu, reflect on what we’re truly the best at and who are the best fits for that service offering, and then just really double down on that.
He walked through how the bloat happens: sales services, then integrations, then third-party apps on top of the system the agency just migrated the client to, then RevOps as a persona to target.
It’s really easy to expand your menu of services, and so I think the trend we’re starting to see is folks realizing that’s too much bloat. It’s impossible to remain profitable and deliver great work in a timely fashion for everything. So going against the grain and pulling back.
Remote work opens the talent pool, if you rethink the culture
On the wins side, Kevin said everyone’s hand was forced over the previous 18 months, and the agencies doing well had embraced remote at two levels: the existing team, and hiring.
If you’re going to embrace remote… deep into your culture, you can start to source talent from any pocket of the country or the world.
Gray noted that ZenPilot has been remote since 2014, and what used to be an advantage is now the status quo. Kevin agreed it’s easier said than done.
You have your coffees, you have your snack bar, maybe you have your ping pong table, and it’s deeply rooted into your culture. And so you have to rethink what it means… What do the benefits now look like? What’s the value of joining your team if they don’t get those things?
Not every hire has to be billable
Gray asked for the one mistake he sees partners make over and over. Kevin’s pick:
Be open to non-billable hour employees. Hiring BDRs to support the sales effort, somebody to handle HR or culture, even just specialty hires. I think a lot of folks freelance or contract out developer work, when I think there’s a ton of value to add when you have a developer in-house… Not every single hire has to go directly to billable hours for client delivery.
Gray brought up IMPACT, which hired a full-time in-house marketer early and scaled quickly. Kevin extended the point to leadership.
I think that expands too to leadership positions. I think there’s an opportunity where if somebody climbs the career ladder, it’s okay for them to be less time dedicated to billable hours for clients and more strategy…
What he’d build: tech stack consulting and RevOps
Gray asked what Kevin would offer if he left HubSpot and started an agency.
If I had to pick some sort of service specialty, I think people really need help with tech stack consultancy, tech stack migration or integration… We’ve been using this term RevOps or revenue operations a ton, but really that just comes down to removing the silos between functions at your business and ensuring that the data is consistent across all teams, there’s clarity, it’s reportable, and it speaks similarly to all systems they use.
He’d surround himself with people who had the expertise to deliver it.
Tools, systems, and process keep 30 people’s content current
Kevin had mentioned that a strategy change (a funnel turning into a flywheel) or a product change can make a tutorial stale, so Gray asked how HubSpot Academy handles revision control on the back end. Kevin’s answer was tools, systems, and process, including a prescriptive update methodology.
How do we mark something as either up to date, or what are the flags, what are the things that officially moves an up-to-date piece of education to requiring an update? And once that triggers… what are the steps, what are the teams you have to collaborate with and work on? And then once the update happens, okay, how do we distribute that, set that live, who do we alert internally and externally?
The education group is about 30 people across customer, partner, developer, and international professors plus a content operations team. From the outside, Kevin said, it’s “like a duck swimming on a pond”: calm on top, legs kicking underneath. He thinks agencies should run the same play.
I think there’s an opportunity for agencies to formalize and to operationalize the training that they need that’s specific to them. You can point folks to HubSpot Academy, but our courses are never going to teach them how to use your time tracking software, or your intranet, or your preferences for client communications, or things like that. And so there’s an opportunity there to build self-paced on-demand modules for new employees and pair it with SaaS-based education as well.
The full episode also covers how Agency Unfiltered started, the LMS opportunity Kevin sees for agencies, the role-based learning paths he wants to build, and his favorite Dave Matthews Band songs.