John McTigue from Kuno Creative on Training Clients

John McTigue is a partner and executive vice president at Kuno Creative, which his partner Chris started near Cleveland in 2003. John merged his web development company into it in 2004, after earlier careers as a geophysicist with Shell and a decade selling oil and gas software. Andrew Dymski hosted the interview for episode 9 of Inbound Agency Journey. Gray MacKenzie opened the show with Andrew and introduced Kuno as one of only two HubSpot Diamond partner agencies in the world at the time. John explains how Kuno narrowed its market, the campaign that changed how it delivers services, and the process discipline behind it.

Kuno stopped doing a little of everything for everyone

Andrew asked about the campaign John had presented at HubSpot’s agency event in Boston. John backed up a couple of years first.

Like most inbound agencies, we started out kind of trying to do a little bit of everything for everyone, and we found that that was becoming more and more of a problem because we didn’t really specialize in anything. We weren’t doing anything particularly well, and our clients were kind of all over the map, so we had to kind of relearn things every time we got a new client.

(Listen at 11:52)

Kuno now specializes in technology and software companies of $10 million and up, and no longer does much work for small businesses. The other two niches are legacy ones: specialty manufacturing such as medical devices, and medical services and software.

One blog post, more than 600 leads

The new service replaces the old three-or-four-posts-a-week retainer with campaigns aimed at one persona at a time. Kuno tested it on its own marketing first, targeting SaaS companies.

We built a campaign around that with a kind of high-level e-book, SaaS Marketing for CEOs. And we tried different channels to put it out there to publish and get response. And we had a lead nurturing campaign to follow up on that with very personalized emails about just how to improve your SaaS marketing. And the interesting thing about it was of all the channels we tried, publishing a blog post on HubSpot has delivered well over 600 new leads just from that one blog post.

(Listen at 14:25)

Not every agency has HubSpot’s blog as a channel, but John said any publication with a big following can do the same job for a single post. Andrew asked whether clients get the same approach now.

That’s really all we do now is we’ve kind of thrown away the old sort of general marketing strategy and gone really targeted… Because what we want to do is deliver results. We don’t want to deliver deliverables, we want to deliver results.

(Listen at 15:45)

Conversion rates run two or three times higher than a general campaign. It takes some education, because clients know who their customers are but resist focusing on one niche at a time.

Winging it was the worst problem

Andrew asked about a struggle that made the agency stronger. John’s answer was the difficulty of getting everyone to work the same way, so that customers always know where they are in the process. Kuno spent two or three years writing down how it builds a website or runs a campaign.

We have detailed processes for all of those things and we share them with our customers so they know what to expect, and then we also, when we hire people, we take them through those processes as they’re onboarding. So it makes things a lot easier and you’re not just kind of winging it all the time. That’s probably the worst thing we had as a problem was just sort of winging it.

(Listen at 18:44)

The buyer insights report, and the sales question that screens clients

The most useful process has been client onboarding, which starts with what Kuno calls the buyer insights report.

It really helps discipline them to think in terms of what their customers are looking for and not what they’re looking for. So you have to get them out of that mindset. That process has been super, super helpful in getting them on the same page with us and also helping us to understand what’s the best strategy for them.

(Listen at 19:20)

The best version is a one-to-three-day workshop with a few people in a room; clients in Australia or Belgium get it online. There’s no research tool. Kuno interviews the sales team and product managers, asks which customers it can call, and then one of its brand journalists interviews those customers one on one to learn how they buy and where they get information. That dependence on customer access produced a rule.

We actually use that as a bit of a requirement in the sales process, ask them, our process is this, we interview your customers, we find out what makes them tick, and is that okay with you? And if they say no, then we got a problem.

(Listen at 24:10)

Andrew called it screening the problem out before it becomes one. John’s reply: you learn from your mistakes, after making that one enough times.

Forty-five minutes in the barn

John works from a 10-acre ranch in south central Texas as one of Kuno’s three full-time remote employees. Andrew asked about his mornings.

The first thing I do is go out and scoop horse poop out of the barn. I mean, literally every day. That’s my chore… What it does is actually gives me about 45 minutes to think about what I’m going to try to accomplish that day, instead of just jumping into it.

(Listen at 25:27)

A blog or campaign idea usually comes out of it. Kuno’s tools are ordinary by John’s own admission: Google Docs, Hangouts, GoToMeeting, Basecamp, Balsamiq for wireframes, and the HubSpot CRM, which Kuno was about to start pushing to clients.