How to Build a HubSpot Platinum Partner Agency

Charles McKay founded Synx, a HubSpot Platinum partner agency in Port Melbourne, Australia, after roughly 15 years in IT. Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode of Inbound Agency Journey, recorded at 5pm on a Sunday in western Pennsylvania and 7am the next morning in Melbourne. Charles covers the road from a sheep and grain farm to agency owner, why most of Synx’s work is now sales enablement, and what he’s fixing in 2017.

From a 2,500-acre farm to IT, without university

Charles grew up two and a half hours west of Melbourne on a mixed farm of about 2,500 acres: merino sheep, then grain and cattle. He’s dyslexic, was addicted to sport, and says the classroom and he were not the best of friends. The decision point came at boarding school.

Dad and I actually sat in the car park at school. And he said, what do you want to do? And I’m like, I don’t know, but I’m not going home. That’s for sure. I want to have a crack at something of my own.

(Listen at 04:23)

They agreed on a 10-year plan: build his own career, or come home and take over the farm. In 2007 an offer came in for the farm, and Charles told his dad to take it. He skipped university, spent about four years as an IT consultant, then worked through a large family business until he was running its construction division in Queensland with 60 people under him. The habit that carried through all of it, in his words, is finding out how someone does something and cutting it in half to make it easier.

He didn’t want to run a services business

Charles started his own IT company, then around three years in lost the passion for technology. He kept seeing the same gap: every business had ideas and talked only about its product, and almost nobody could sell or market it. In mid-2014 he went looking for platforms that could do that better than people and found a chance to sell one.

I just wanted to broker the deal. I didn’t even want to implement or service the deal. But obviously, once you start getting into those partner programs, you realize that that’s not possible. So I was like, okay, so I’m gonna have to build another service based business here.

(Listen at 08:19)

Synx committed to the HubSpot partner program in February 2015. The certifications took six to eight months, and Charles quickly saw that implementation plus a little consulting left a lot of services, and cash, on the table. Two years on, Synx had moved up-market toward businesses with processes already in place.

Articulate your value instead of describing what you do

Gray asked about that shift. Charles’s answer: the work in inbound is badly underestimated, down to what it takes to write one blog post well.

I think the value of that has been diminished slightly. And what is that real value? What does that really mean to a business? And that’s, I think, the biggest lessons that I’ve had is how do you articulate your value and not talk about what you do… This is the playbook we’ve been told to sell. But how do you articulate that value when other people are trying to sell that for $4 an hour?

(Listen at 11:30)

Sales enablement, quick wins, and change management

Gray asked how Synx’s work breaks down across inbound marketing, sales enablement, and platform migrations.

Most of the work now is more morphing into, how do you enable the sales team to do more deals?… Most of the time, it’s a big shift to go from an outbound marketing strategy to an inbound marketing strategy, or no marketing strategy to an inbound marketing strategy. So you have to get some quick wins on the board as quickly as you can to convince that change. So like most of this stuff, it’s all change management.

(Listen at 12:52)

In practice that means asking the sales team where they’re frustrated and which systems they refuse to use; Charles has implemented enough older CRMs to know that forcing salespeople into one they hate doesn’t produce more deals. Gray added that partners were once taught to warn clients not to expect ROI until month six to twelve, and few owners will invest $30,000 and wait that long. Charles added the other half: the problem.

Every business probably has exactly the same problem, but what they see the problem to be might be completely different. So you’ve got to know how to ask the better questions to get them to tell you what their problem is. The sooner you solve that problem for them, the quicker you have their trust, and then they can start to listen to you from a bigger picture of where you’re trying to go.

(Listen at 16:46)

What he’s fixing in 2017: subjectivity and repeatable playbooks

Design and content are subjective, and Synx has watched client involvement slow results down. The agency is moving toward growth-driven design with quarterly or annual goals.

We found that when we had early clients where they didn’t really get what we were doing, we would get better results, until when they started to get involved and take it over. And that’s when everything gets so subjective. So content writing, design, etc., gets so important to them.

(Listen at 21:59)

The second focus is standardizing internal playbooks by client stage: alignment, growth, or conversions. They won’t fit everyone, but Charles says doing 80 percent of a playbook makes a big difference most of the time. His parting advice for owners who feel stuck:

It doesn’t have to happen in a month or three months. You’ve got time. People can massively overestimate what they’re going to do in one year and massively underestimate what they’re going to do in three and five years.

(Listen at 28:23)