Effectively On-Board Clients and Deliver Leads

Eric Pratt founded Revenue River, a HubSpot agency in the Denver area, in 2009, and had 12 marketers on staff when this was recorded in 2015. Gray MacKenzie hosted; Andrew Dymski introduced the episode and joined Gray for the recap. They cover the move from outbound sales to inbound retainers, the 30-day onboarding, how Revenue River sets goals and builds campaigns, and what Eric was struggling with that year.

Revenue River started as an outbound sales company

Eric started in sales and launched Revenue River “with the intent that we were going to be a sales company.” The turn toward creative work came from watching prospects on the other end of the phone.

We had a client that we were doing outbound sales for that we found that the person on the phone on the other end of the line kept Googling us on his computer and finding that we just didn’t have very good presence. So we started building some websites for clients in 2010, kind of the creative side of it.

(Listen at 2:31)

Revenue River became a HubSpot VAR in 2012, and by 2015 it sold websites “as part of or as a lead into a retainer,” with most of the team inbound focused.

A 30-day onboarding that signed a second company before the first invoice

Gray asked for a recent win. Eric’s favorite was a client that had to give its previous agency 30 days’ notice, so Revenue River gave them that month free and started onboarding early.

Our free 30 days started off so well, they were so impressed with us just through the onboarding that we ended up signing another one of their companies before we even invoice the first one.

(Listen at 5:46)

Gray asked what the process looks like.

It is so, so critical to get clients off on the right foot. And it’s critically important for us to set up the campaign for success, to really dial in on the foundational elements. So before we start doing any marketing actions, before we start building any assets, we are addressing foundation. So for us, the onboarding process is basically a 30 day whirlwind of task activities and meetings.

(Listen at 6:22)

The 30 days covers personas, messaging, keyword and content strategy, and a 12-month calendar of the client’s trade shows and events that the quarterly campaigns get built around. The roadmap is set during the sales process, so the client sees the timeline before they get a price. On day 31, when posts and emails start going out, all of that is done.

Set the SMART goal at the end of onboarding, not the start

Revenue River moved goal-setting to the end of onboarding about a year before this recording.

We really try to look forward at the end of 30 days, we like to have our SMART goals in place. We found that it’s hard to start a campaign with a goal until you really dig in. A lot of times we just weren’t able to dig in deep enough on the sales process to really get quantifiable with certain types of prospects and clients.

(Listen at 7:38)

Gray asked what holds a campaign together, a block of time or a conversion goal. Eric said the conversion goal, every time.

We want to raise demo conversions from 4 per month to 12 per month over the next 90 days. And then we will evaluate all the existing assets, like is the top, middle, bottom of the funnel fed for that? How does the existing demo offer look? Do we need any additional assets to be built?

(Listen at 11:01)

Each mini campaign gets about 30 days of planning and 60 to 90 of execution, and feeds the main SMART goal. Scattered goals are “a little bit of a disaster from an agency perspective” when the team runs weekly goal meetings for every client.

”A business development agency instead of just an inbound marketing agency”

Gray asked how Revenue River connects marketing and sales. Because of its sales lineage, Eric said, the agency has always considered itself a business development agency, and it manages several clients full cycle. For clients without Salesforce, the HubSpot CRM let the team train sales staff and track every lead through to close. The stakes, as Eric put it:

We all know that our days are numbered if we’re producing a bunch of what we consider to be sales qualified leads that the customer considers bad leads at the end of the day. So getting them to really truly understand what is a good lead, what is a bad lead and then how to handle it is I think vitally important and it’s why we focus a little bit more on full-scale business development than just solely inbound marketing.

(Listen at 16:07)

The struggles: cash poor, too many hats, and graduating old retainers

Eric said the struggles were the easier question. Revenue River was built on sweat equity with no investors or loans, so “it just seems like we’re always cash poor,” putting $2 back into the business for every dollar that comes in. The harder problem was his own calendar.

The hardest part for me as a business owner is focusing on the truly important with my time. There’s just so many distractions, you wear so many hats, you have so many roles, there’s so many issues and pressing matters… So there’s a lot of urgent to get in the way of the important.

(Listen at 20:31)

The year’s biggest initiative was retention and expansion, graduating older, smaller retainers into a larger scope of work now that more specialists go into each campaign.

The full episode also covers Eric’s morning routine and the tools Revenue River ran on in 2015: Asana, ReadyTalk, and HubSpot’s Sidekick.