The State of Inbound is out!

It's a yearly survey we do at HubSpot and it reveals the top challenges and priorities facing businesses today in the realms of marketing and sales and changing consumer habits.

The survey also looks at the future to highlight new trends and channels that will soon affect the way we all do business. 

You can grab the global report here, however, I want to look at the EMEA results and share with you 17 about that you need to know now to plan the rest of your year and 2018. 

17 Facts About The State of Inbound That You Need to Know Now: 

1. 62% of marketers say their top challenge is generating leads. 
2. 63% of marketers believe their organisation's marketing strategy is effective. 
3. 73% of C-level executives believe their organisation's marketing strategy is effective. 
4. 55% of individual contributors believe their organisation's marketing strategy is effective. 

Organisational structure inefficiencies, lack of documented processes and standardised service packages, no plan for new hire training and onboarding as well a lack of visibility into overservicing are some of the key challenges that agencies face when they start to scale.

We covered them in part 1 and part 2 of these series.

Today, we'll look at the last set of agency growth challenges, namely: 

• Stepping back as the agency founder or CEO and allowing team members to make decisions on their own is an internal struggle that can stall sustainable growth.
• Growing the team, the customer base and the service offerings often leads to a leadership and an identity and positioning crisis internally that inevitably has the potential to slow growth as it expands externally too.
• Showing the real value the agency brings to clients is a constant struggle, particularly with year two or three renewals, so agencies need to think about developing a delight programme that also includes the identification of upsells.

Let's take a look at each challenge in more detail.

My start-up Smile Arty has now been live for about three months. 

Painful months. It was hard, really hard in the beginning. Things like getting the company registered, getting a bank account, setting up everything for accounting, revenue etc. were nerve-racking. 

The one thing that was easy was the website and all the content. 

I say easy because I have a PR background and I now work in inbound marketing so I didn't have to start learning any of this from scratch whereas the whole administrative thing for a new business was completely new to me.

I have to say, though, in less than three months, content started working. 

Inbound PR is two years old!

I can't even believe it. Time flies... 

The other day as I was looking at some past blog posts on the topic for my book (yes, I'm writing a book about Inbound PR), I saw that I have written quite a few pieces about it.

But shifting through them wasn't that easy. Yes, I can go by topic and search in my HubSpot software, however, wouldn't it be great to have it all in one place instead of clicking to the next page again and again? 

This is what this post is all about - the entire collection of everything I have written about Inbound PR over the past two years, everything you can read to learn about it. 

Everything You Need to Know About Inbound PR

Organisational structure and time inefficiencies, service packages development and new hire training and onboarding are three challenges that agencies face when they start to scale. We covered this in the first part of this series, if you missed it, read it here. 

Today, we're going to look at three more challenges that agencies face when they've grown past five people and have a good number of clients on retainers or long-term engagements. These include:

• over-servicing but being underpaid and failing to ask for what their worth is;
• lack of a documented account management process so that each new account manager has a blueprint to start doing their job and the leader doesn't need to be involved in everything from scratch with each new person on that team;
• lack of a renewal management process and a structured way of securing that the client is happy and agrees to your plan for the future to stay with you.

Let's get started. 

When Agencies Start to Scale: 3 More Key Learnings & Fixes