This is a guest poost by Aaron Wittersheim from Straight North.

Imagine you run a grocery store and one day you receive a box from a supplier containing 10 pieces of fruit — a mix of apples and oranges.

If a customer shows up and asks for five oranges, will you be able to fill that order? You should know because you probably opened the box to find out how many of each fruit you received from the supplier.

However, in the world of online marketing, not everyone is opening the box. Far too many companies assume that every conversion on their website is a potential sales lead — but the truth is, they’re not.

Although many online marketers might believe that the number of conversions on their websites has a direct correlation to the number of sales leads they receive, the reality is that only about half of those conversions end up being sales leads. The rest typically are made up of job applications, customer service requests, incomplete form submissions and other interactions that aren’t really sales leads.

By mixing the apples with the oranges, businesses waste time and resources chasing after oranges when what they really want are apples.

During the last two and a half years, I've worked with about 250 agency partners at HubSpot. I've seen some of them grow immensely and I'm grateful that I've been able to be part of that growth because I've learnt so much together with my agencies. 

From an inbound marketing consultant, I had to become an agency business consultant because eventually the challenges that my agencies who started growing were facing, were far outreaching just marketing. They needed help with their processes and business operations. 

Today, I want to share some key learnings from the scale lifecycle stage that all agencies struggle with as soon as: 

• they start selling really quickly and have their sales process figured out;
• their CEO wears way too many hats (selling, account management, people management etc) and things begin to fall off track;
• they start hiring more and more people but are struggling with onboarding and training them for the work that they are going to be doing. 

If you as an agency are facing these challenges too, the goal of this blog post is to help you get your agency machine up and running not just from an inbound marketing and selling perspective, but really from an operational one.

Inbound PR will be two years old next month.

When I started working on the concept, I didn't think I'd get it as far as featuring it in a book chapter for #FuturePRoof or introducing it at INBOUND16 – the largest inbound conference in the world with over 19,000 attendees.

But the number of mentions, tweets, shares and comments about the concept over the past months really lead me to believe that there is a need for it. 

Inbound PR focuses on what PR does best – content – and turns it into a powerful machine that drives true bottom line results that can be measured. By doing so, Inbound PR alleviates PR's biggest challenge – measurement. 

It's a simple concept and a methodology but in its very essence, Inbound PR is a mindset change. It requires PR people to change the way they think about the work that they do, the value that they provide and how they actually do it. It requires a lot of learning and eye-opening understanding of the wider business, marketing and sales disciplines.  Otherwise, it won't be fit for the future. 

This aim of this blog is exactly that – to facilitate learning and drive change.

This is a guest post by Alex Kulbov from Escreo. 

Before we think with our heads, we need to see with our eyes. And what lies before them usually sets the course for the way we perceive and evaluate it.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t necessarily need to create something beautiful in order for it to be effective. You just have to make it memorable. To provoke a reaction. Whether it’s an ad, a step-by-step guide or a new web design, the visual elements of your marketing need to catch the eye and build a positive, credible persona for your clients to appreciate.

Design is crucial for every business. If you’ve neglected it so far, it’s about time you utilize its admirable effect.

Design trends have a lifespan of approximately two years, so it’s important to stay ahead of the game. Most of them are dictated by media and technology, but user-based feedback and demands will yet inculcate themselves into the market.

Here’s how to upgrade your marketing visual content in 2017 in order for your business strategies to cut the mustard.

Did you know that it's five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one? 

On top of that, improving customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. 

If you ask me, these are numbers that I certainly wouldn't ignore. 

Unfortunately, far too many companies focus almost exclusively on net new sales and customer service remains just there as a given. 

I see this with my agency partners at HubSpot all the time. 

Of course, money in is important. You need that to keep the business running but if you want to scale an agency, sales and services need to be on the same level. Keeping your customers happy is priority number one too because that's how you ensure you have a sustainable revenue flow coming in all the time. You renew your agency-client retainers year after year because you continue to provide value.

So how do you do keep your customer happy?  

With a simple framework that I call the three pillars of customer delight.