I just returned from a speaking engagement at Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Convention where I discussed the importance of marketing agencies putting on their sales hats if they have any chance of winning your business.

They have to stop operating like agencies and start operating like sales people.  Simply waiting for you to call them isn’t going to work anymore.  You guys are busy, you have too many agencies reaching out to you doing nothing but talking about themselves and even fewer agencies really taking interest in your business.

But as interesting as my presentation may have been to the agencies there, I must say I was much more intrigued by the entire phenomena of what was going on around me.

Hubspot

The latest tool in the belt of agencies looking to help their marketing partners grow their business by activating their social and other marketing content.  It’s a way to take what may have been mostly a manual exercise (sending follow-up emails, tracking leads, creating great content) and automating much of the process.  Their analytics are very solid and it is generally very easy to implement.

The challenging part of managing Hubspot is still the difficult thing about managing any social program/content development program:  creating and maintaining the creation of content. 

I bring this all to your attention for really two reasons:

  1. Your agency may come knocking on your door to introduce you to it (if they haven’t already) and more than likely if they are a great VAR, they will get you pretty jazzed up about the possibilities of the program; and
  2. If you sign on, make sure you have fully assessed your capacity internally to determine if you can manage what’s needed for the necessary content development.  And if you aren’t, before you sign on, get a good handle from your agency on what they will want from you (financially) to manage it all for you.

Hubspot can be a great program if used to its fullest.

Key is making sure you’re taking full advantage of all its capabilities and partnering with an agency that can shepherd you through the process or is fully capable of managing it for you.