Do you feel like your agency spends more time being an order taker than providing insight and value to your clients? If so – listen up. It’s time to show your clients how much value you bring their business. You can increase revenue by measuring your client’s success and finding new opportunities for them. Data reporting done right can be your secret weapon to growing your agency.

In this episode, we’ll cover:

• • How agencies can retain their clients.
  • What KPI’s agencies should measure in their data reporting for clients.
  • How to use data reporting to grow agency business.
  • Steps to acquiring and growing retainers.

Today’s guest is Peter Caputa CEO at Databox, a SaaS tool to simplifying analytics and reporting for agencies. He joined Databox after serving as the VP of Sales at Hubspot, so in this interview he brings us a ton of knowledge on retaining and growing clients.

How Agencies Can Retain Clients

It’s all about reporting. And we’re not talking about just going through the motions of reporting. More like, actual face time with the client to present them with an analysis of metrics and provide insightful value.

Most agencies start out a new client relationship by going over their analytics reports but after a few months it turns into a mundane task, the client loses interest and no one pays much attention to it… That’s where agencies are losing out!

Pete says it’s super important to start every client relationship by selecting the metrics that are important to the client and show them a return on their investment. He suggests agencies also benchmark where the client is at the beginning of the engagement and measure changes that are resulting from your work. That’s how you’ll prove your agency’s worth and value.

Data Reporting: The KPI’s Agencies Should Measure for Clients

Most agencies are pulling data from several sources. Then, they do a cut and paste of data into their own slides or template, which is a major time suck. (And a big reason why most agencies just “go through the motions” when it comes to reporting!) Databox offers a unique solution to that problem by integrating with CRMs and marketing automation tools to pull and format data from several sources all into one place. KPI’s most agencies are pulling for clients are: traffic, leads, customer counts, revenue, and CRM stages.

How Can You Use Data to Up-Sell Existing Clients?

Don’t just pull the data – analyze it. Good agencies pull and present data every month. Really great agencies go a level deeper and show the impact of their activity on the data. Report the effectiveness of blog and social posts, Adwords and landing pages to set your agency apart from others. The key is to analyze the data, find holes or areas for growth. Use that information as a springboard to pitch areas for improvement. Turn monthly reporting from a chore into an up-sell opportunity.

Pete says you do have to be comfortable having the “it didn’t work” conversation. Don’t be afraid of it – agencies don’t get fired for campaigns that don’t work; they get fired for not catching it or not owning up to it.

It happens. Sometimes email campaigns don’t get any clicks, blog posts don’t rank high, etc. An agency should always have a pulse on what’s happening and know about issues before the client. Be truthful and have integrity. If the report isn’t good, the client probably already knows it and just needs to hear it from you. Glossing over bad news only makes matters worse in the long run. It’s your job to report the good and the bad, the innovate a solution to overcome the bad.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t just sit idle with blog or social posts for your clients. Use innovative technology to add value!” quote=”Don’t just sit idle with blog or social posts for your clients. Use innovative technology to add value!”]

How to Prove Your Agency’s Value to a Client

Too many agencies don’t know the results they’re achieving because they aren’t benchmarking from the beginning. Clients care about one thing – their bottom line. So, the agency has the burden of proof and must to tie activity to results. Pete says agencies need to ask the tough questions from the start, such as:

• “How much is a lead worth?”
• “What’s the average deal size?”
• “How many deals are you getting per month?”
• “What are you trying to achieve? Why?”

To skirt around some the tough questions, you can use an inbound marketing calculator. But it’s SO important to get a baseline at the beginning of an engagement so you can document improvements. Equally important is frequent conversations with the client about results. Agencies are good at selling visions but not always good at revisiting the topic. Prove your agency’s value by showing them a direct correlation to their ROI.

Steps to Acquiring and Growing Retainers

1. At the beginning of an engagement, meet with the client and agree on the key metrics to measure and monitor success.
2. Get a benchmark on the key data from the beginning and measure success against it.
3. Meet with the client regularly to present changes in key metrics and suggest areas of opportunity.
4. Introduce new ways to improve client metrics and stand out among the “me too” agencies….

Marketing technology has come a long way in a very short period of time. It is incredibly sophisticated and as an agency, you can become indispensable black box agency by deploying your knowledge and use of information. Using software like Databox to pull, analyze and interpret data is a step in that direction of improving the data reporting of your agency.

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