Andrew from DoInbound with #Inbound16 Takeaways and Action Steps

With #Inbound16 in the rearview mirror, we wanted to share some of our thoughts from the conference. It was a big year on many fronts! At the conference level, there were more than 19,000 in attendance. This gave the place a totally different feeling from when Gray and I first went four years ago.

For the most part I felt like it was a good thing, but you did loose some of the tight-knit feel from years past. The fact that the Partner Track was spread throughout the center rather than in the same series of rooms made it hard to connect with fellow agency owners. 

For the DoInbound community, it was a great chance to connect in-person. Ryan and I spent the majority of our time meeting up with DoInbound customers from all over the world. As always, it is refreshing to get a chance to meet people you know so well in a face-to-face environment. A huge thank you to all the people who took time out of their busy conference schedules to hang out! It was awesome! 

From the presentations and keynotes, a big takeaway that I had personally was how critical it is today for marketing to serve as the conversation starters for sales. We’re not just here to deliver leads. It is more personal than that. We’re here to help start a conversation.

A healthy conversation starts with truly listening. That is why in-depth discovery sessions are such a critical part of the Inbound GamePlan process. We to know the questions that people are asking first, then answer them in the right order to help our clients see an inbound ROI fast. 

Practically, this means spending time in the middle of the funnel optimizing key pages on the site with chat. This could be live chat or a bot-powered chat. There needs to be a helpful presence there to help the user find what they’re looking for. If they can’t find it, they’re not going to stick around for long trying to find it! 

This year was also the first time we got the opportunity to share on the Partner Track. I had a chance to share the Top 5 Lessons Learned from Over 70 Inbound Agency Interviews. It was a blast! The hardest part was trying to condense all the awesome content shared on this podcast to only five points and get all that shared in just 45 minutes. 

As soon as HubSpot gets the video posted, we’ll update this post and get it out through the podcast RSS, too. 

We got a lot of really positive feedback about the content shared in the talk. But with a limited time frame and just the nature of conferences, there really wasn’t an opportunity to dive as deep as needed. To help take it to the next level, we’re going to be kicking off a 3-Part Agency Framework Workshop in the coming weeks. These videos and downloads are going to help walk through the phases and exercises necessary to put an agency framework in place and finally scale. 

If you’re on our email list, you’ll see a message about the workshops soon! If you’re not, subscribe or download an eBook today so you don’t miss out. This is the deepest free training we’ve put together to date and I’m pumped to get it out to as many agencies as possible!