Do you have a clear agency vision? If so, have you shared it with your team and have their full buy-in? It takes courage to make changes that will help you scale faster. You need clarity to define your vision for the agency and a team that shares that vision. It may rock the boat a bit too much for some in your team. However, when you surround yourself with people that believe in your vision you'll see results so much faster than working with those who resist it.

Arti Sharma is a marketing and business leader who had worked for 15 years contributing to the growth and success of several start-ups and Fortune 500 companies when she created Measure Marketing Results Inc. As a marketer, she felt a lot of people were talking about marketing but no one was measuring it. She saw the opportunity and started reaching out to some old clients offering to build a campaign for them. Her business has changed a lot since then, but the most significant change came about five years ago when she redefined the agency’s goals and created a vision script.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

Why finding clarity is the first step toward change.
Your mission statement and vision script.
The importance of surrounding yourself with the right people.

Sponsors and Resources

Agency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you.

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How To Find Clarity for Your Agency

Digital agencies nowadays find themselves in a very crowded space. In order to stand out, agency owners must answer the question “how do I differentiate myself from everyone else?” Usually, agencies go to Jason with a variety of problems that are standing in the way of their growth. The majority of those problems stem from a lack of clarity which affects the agency owners' ability to focus on niche, services, pricing, and even leadership.

Five years ago, Arti ran a successful company that had changed between building websites and offering SEO and SEM services. She started to question what she was building and whether it aligned with her personal and business goals. In essence, the agency’s mission statement “influence, inspire and impact” had not changed. However, she realized her clarity was lost somewhere along the way.

As agency owners know, sometimes this can happen as you worry about all sorts of issues like building a team, getting new clients, and maintaining sales.

Holding Your Agency Team Accountable to the Mission

The real change began in January 2020, when the team met to discuss the mission statement and create a complete vision script establishing how they would operate based on that mission. From then on, they made the commitment to hold themselves accountable to the mission by measuring operations, serving customers, hiring, and sales and marketing. Turns out it was perfect timing.

The company navigated the pandemic by serving its customers and building a niche based on the new commitment. Looking back, those were uncertain times for any business, but their new commitment was the push they needed to think outside the box and actually live their mission in daily actions.

Arti's team is still working on their changes, but so far they’ve become Hubspot partners and changed their offering to be more of an account-based marketing and sales enablement company. They’ve even built another business, an agency for agencies that wish to outsource some of their services.

The Importance of Creating Your Agency’s Vision Script

Measure Marketing Results' mission statement remains the same and continues being true to its goals. The next step Arti took was redefining the vision statement in accordance with its goals and creating a script.

To do this, they got really specific and identified, among other things, who their ideal clients are, where they would find them, what sort of impact would they have on their business and growth. They broke that vision down as much as they could and this provided much-needed clarity for the agency.

Creating this vision script ultimately impacted their systems, sales scripts, thinking about where they would find clients and partnerships. It became clear that the agency would need to align itself with companies like Hubspot and leverage its tools to expedite the agency’s go-to marketing strategy in the world of inbound marketing.

Crafting your Value Script entails:

Defining your core values.
Having a vision of where you want to be in 2 years, 4 years, and 10 years.
Big action items for each year to move toward your goal.

The Vision Can’t Stop with the Leadership Team

Defining your agency’s vision is another important step, but you need your team’s commitment to make it a reality. The problem many agencies have is the vision stops at the top management tier. The CEO and leaders are committed to the core values and goals but what about the rest of the team?

Arti’s team held a two-hour meeting with all their staff when they crafted the vision script. They explained the vision, answered questions, gave examples of who the customer was. They also explained how these changes would affect them as service delivery or client management team. Team members needed to understand how implementing these principles correctly would impact the agency.

It was important for them to have everyone on the same page and have the newly defined vision for the company align with the staff’s vision.

Don’t Let Your Clear Vision Get Distorted

Not everyone will be on board with the changes, but those are the ones that will probably end up going in a different direction. You can’t let your vision get distorted by other peoples' opinions of the vision. Go over your vision and if they don’t get it, then maybe they aren't the right people to help the vision become reality.

Changing the trajectory of your company takes time and work. Having the right people on your team is essential for that.

Investing In Your Agency Team

Arti doesn’t take all the credit for knowing what steps to take to lead her agency in the right direction. She heavily invested in finding her mentors and surrounded herself with the type of people that would advise her on the next steps for her agency. Additionally, she completed a leadership program, read business books, listened to Jason’s podcast (always a wise decision:) brainstormed, tested, tried, failed, and finally succeeded.

She believes in the impact of having a team that shares your vision for the future of the business. With the guidance of her mentors, she identified key people in the team that would be ready to take the risk with her and started to invest in them. They have now wrapped up a leadership program and are working on building a management team.

For her, it’s about investing back in your people, in your processes, in your systems. If you do this, the sales will come through and you’ll be able to retain customers.

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