How Huify Masters the Marketing Agency Sales Process

Josh Harcus founded Huify, a HubSpot partner agency in Wilmington, North Carolina, that started as a content shop and moved toward sales and marketing alignment. Gray MacKenzie hosts this interview (episode 6 of Inbound Agency Journey) and Andrew Dymski joins him for the recap. Josh walks through how Huify cut its sales cycle from nine months to about three weeks, how it defines an MQL, why it calls within five minutes, and the five calls every lead goes through.

The room that didn’t want to write blog posts

Josh got into online marketing in college to pay tuition with his DJ company. At the agency he joined after school, every client meeting felt like a fight to prove the work’s value. Then he spoke at a conference alongside a HubSpot presenter named Ellie.

They raise their hands and they’re like, this is great, Ellie, but who’s going to do all this work?… I honestly don’t have time to be writing blog posts right now. And she was like, no, you’re gonna do it. And they were like, no, we’re not. And so that’s where the light bulb went off, where I was like, wow, what if I created a content agency?

(Listen at 03:24)

Three years later Huify had four full-time people, seven or eight contractors, a design partner, and its own office.

From a nine-month sales cycle to three weeks

Gray asked about a recent win and Josh was candid: a video CRM startup signed in 11 days, but they’d already been through the sales cycle with other partners and were ready to buy. The trend line mattered more.

Our overall sales process and sales life cycle has gone from nine months to now an average of one month to three weeks… Coming from a background of marketing, we understand how to attract people, we understand how to get them. But once they’re here, it’s kind of like, now what?

(Listen at 07:58)

The fix was studying classic sales: what the life cycle stages are, how to identify them, and how to keep moving people to the next one. Josh found the same gap in clients. One hadn’t sold a new account in two years despite years on HubSpot with other partner agencies; four months in with Huify, they closed one.

Define the MQL from closed deals, then call within five minutes

Every lead sits in the HubSpot CRM with a defined stage. A lead is anyone whose email they have; HubSpot flips a lead to MQL once it crosses an activity threshold, and the threshold comes from deals already won.

The best way to come up with what is an MQL is to analyze leads that you’ve closed and start to come up with the top things that they’ve done before you got on the phone with them.

(Listen at 14:44)

That could be emails opened, pages visited, or a form that says they want to work with you. Then the clock starts.

After they become an MQL, we get on the phone. Response time is the most important thing, period. So once you get a lead, we try to have a response time of less than five minutes. Our goal is to call a lead, and I mean call as in pick up the phone and call them, while they are still on our website.

(Listen at 15:20)

That first call is where Huify qualifies the lead (Josh mentions BANT and GPCT). Once a follow-up meeting is booked, the lead is moved by hand to sales qualified.

Five calls from connect to close

The connect call decides whether a lead is an SQL. The exploratory call decides whether there’s an opportunity and ends with a goal setting and planning call booked. By the end of that third call, budget and expectations are covered and a contract should be ready, so the fourth call is a working session.

We like to use what they call draft contracts. And so we’ll basically create a contract and say, hey, this is a draft, so let’s revise it together. It’s a great way to beat through the weeds and get through things very quickly.

(Listen at 18:06)

The fifth call is the close. The two calls while a lead is an opportunity are where deals go into limbo, Josh says, and his rule is to move anyone who keeps pushing back to SQL. He’s upfront that the process is close to HubSpot’s own: HubSpot has had time to test it, so Huify replicates it and customizes from there.

100 calls, one request for email instead

Gray’s follow-up was whether leads mind a call minutes after they convert.

Out of the last two months I’ve called… I’ve called over a hundred leads. Out of those hundred, I have had one person say that they wanted to do the conversation over email… And to be honest, I actually didn’t give him any more time, because my attitude was, I’m here to help you and I’m here to help your business. And so if you’re not willing to take a call with me, then it sounds like it’s not a good fit for either of us.

(Listen at 19:59)

Then the line the episode is remembered for.

It’s inbound marketing. It’s not necessarily inbound selling. So you’re not going to get someone to buy a retainer from a blog post or from an e-book. All that does is that gets them to raise their hand that they’re interested in talking with you. So picking up the phone and calling them couldn’t be more important.

(Listen at 21:22)

Some client partners and other agencies, he says, want to nurture a lead until the prospect announces they’re ready to buy. That just doesn’t happen; an inbound lead only saves you the cold call.