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It's been an interesting couple weeks. It's still sort of the beginning of the year, as Kathleen sees it. We've on-boarded several new clients, which has been great. We've on-boarded several new employees, which has also been great. All that growth and change is exciting but can also be really stressful. With it comes concerns that your new employees are getting up to speed quickly enough, that they have what they need to succeed.

Onboarding new clients seems to inevitably come with its own set of concerns. Are they getting what they need? Are they seeing results? We're so focused on results and getting results quickly with inbound marketing is not always easy. It's not a short game, it's a long game, but Kathleen still likes to get some quick wins for clients.

The one constant is change. Change is disruptive and stressful, but I look at change as something natural. Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design she does a phenomenal job of talking about storytelling. I would say that in place of storytelling and stories you could look at change within the services that we offer and marketing, and that the path of a story, the universal truth for a story and the different sections that you have map perfectly to our marketing engagements and the campaigns that we build as a part of our marketing engagements.

I ended up staying up late, and I Googled Nancy for another half hour, and I watched her TED talk and got even more invested in it because it's so fantastic.

Kathleen was like, "You're trying to make me think philosophically at 11:00 at night. Are you nuts?" Now that she's had a few days and mornings specifically to look back at what I showed her, it's actually pretty interesting and it does apply to a lot of things.

The Cycles of Relationships & Change

To bring this back down to Earth and to what we're talking about, it's just about relationships, and the cycles that you go through, and communication, and the way you interact with other people – whether that's with a marketing agency, whether that's with your sales people, whether that's with your director of marketing, whether that is with your clients as we talk about, your children, your family, whatever. Any kind of relationship, any kind of communication cycle, goes through this progression that she talks about.

The whole idea is that relationships are not this linear progression of, "Hey, it's good and it's always going to be good. We're going to be on this even plane." It's very interesting when you look at it because what it says to me is that there's something there relating to how we set expectations.

We talked about this, how we're going to enter into a process this spring of redoing our website. One of the things we really want to communicate more about is before clients start working with us what they should expect because I think some of them come on and it's becoming clearer that their expectation is that their inbound marketing program starts on day one.

The world is not a static place. Whether it's because your competitor is doing something differently or you're launching a new product, or you're just looking at the plan you were implementing and figuring out it needs to be tweaked. That kind of change is going to happen and I feel like so often what we see with clients is they have this expectation coming in that's not realistic and it's not their fault because in some cases I think we just haven't communicated to them how does it work, what is it like and what should you expect.

Yes, You Can Be Too Excited

Kathleen often encounters an overabundance of excitement, like "Hey, you've really convinced me this is the way to go, so I want the results to start happening tomorrow. I've seen what the future could be like and I really like it." We've talked about that, too. We have some clients who, we're starting a contract with them and by the first day of their retainer, they've sent us 15 draft blogs to review. It's like you're killing me with kindness.

She loves it when clients send us content. And when they send us a ton of content, even better, but when they send us all this stuff, and they want a response next day, it's difficult. It's fantastic, but fear can also do the same thing. "Hey, where's my stuff? When am I getting it?"

Bringing this back to marketing and sales, this is true of working with anyone in a marketing capacity, because you have to be so adaptable to what's happening in the world and what's happening in the marketplace. Changes in technology and introductions of new platforms. That adaptability inherently means you need to constantly be changing.

Constant Friction Is Necessary

If you think about marketing that way, it's very interesting because what it means is that there is going to be constant friction. Marketing is a field where you're never going to have that stasis, that consistent state of "things are going great." If you're doing it right, you should because if you were doing the same thing always and you're on this even plane.

If there isn't friction and resistance and you're not feeling like you have to adjust and change, you're in big trouble.

"If there isn't friction and resistance, like you have to adjust and change, you're in big trouble."

I think that people should just look at the customers they're selling to; their world is always changing. If you are constantly selling the exact same thing, and you're seeing diminishing results, you shouldn't be surprised because everything around them is changing.

....As Is Failure

Also, Kathleen points out that you need to allow for failure, because that's the other hard part that creates friction. Especially in marketing, you have to be able to go out on a limb and try things that you're not sure will work and allow yourself to fail so that you can then grow from that. Not everybody's comfortable with failure.

Failure is just an opportunity to identify what isn't working. One of my favorite stories is WD-40. Where did the name come from? Water deterrent, the 40th formula. There were 39 failures or 39 adjustments that they made that got them to the winning, successful formula.

So when you are working with an agency, recognize that both on the client side and on the agency side there is going to be friction, and that's a natural part of the relationship. But, if you're an agency, recognize there's probably a pretty good chance that you are the first relationship that your client may have that is of this nature.

What Great Partnerships Look Like

People think the same thing of marriage. They think "I'm going to get married, and it's going to be this life long, blissful romance." That is just not the case. A real marriage, a good marriage, has its ups and it has its downs. The reason I bring this up is that the same thing that makes for a successful marriage makes for a successful relationship, whether it's agency/client, whether it's marketing director/CEO.

And of course, sales/marketing.

What makes it successful is when people enter it with an attitude of partnership and not an attitude of, "I'm going to take something," or "I need to get something," Kathleen says. That partnership mentality means that you're invested in succeeding, and you're willing to work through the ups and downs, recognizing that they're necessary and communicating effectively to get through them.

This is exactly what makes a good marriage. Things are going to be bad sometimes, in sickness and in health, all that good stuff. But you're going to have to communicate and work your way through it, because then you'll be in the good times, and that makes it all worth it.

I feel that way with our agency, too. I know we talk a lot about, when look for the ideal client, it's somebody that does have the attitude of they're looking for a true partner, and a true partner doesn't look at an agency and think, "How can I get the most out of them?" And "What's in it for me?" It's about mutual success and working together to achieve it.

What Picture Are You Painting?

Kathleen is really talking about somebody's attitude. She thinks this is what this Duarte deck that we looked through really speaks to, which is that you have to go into any relationship with the right expectations. It's going to have ups and downs, and you have to be invested in communicating through the ups and downs, and realizing that it's a long term play.

What she does a great job of is going one step deeper and talking about the different types of communication that are needed during this evolution. One of the things that she talks about is how there's a time where your audience needs what she calls "speeches," and this is where you're creating the longing for the future.

Kathleen would say that's our Culture of Content marketing workshops, because that's exactly what we do. We go in and we paint a picture of what's possible and by painting that picture and getting people excited about it, we develop buy-in. They have to be able to see the future in order to believe that investing their time and effort into it will produce results.

On the stories, she likes that because we talk about that a lot with respect to the marketing work we do and also on the sales side about the need to have some quick, early wins so that people can see that things work. Getting a blog up and showing that people are going to read it and click through and convert on a call-to-action.

Demonstrating the power and success, that's where she actually talks about symbols, where you have these images or symbols that they relate the evolution or the progression during the story. The last piece that she talks about is ceremonies and celebrating the wins. Far too often, we, naturally as humans, focus on the point of conflict and we don't naturally focus on a point of when there's a friction-less existence.

HubSpot published a blog recently about client retention and one of the things they talked about was the fact that account managers within agencies tend to get very focused on working their way through difficult times with clients and over-communicating, but then they don't stop and recognize when things are going really well and they don't make a big enough deal about that.

We have a client that, just last month, had a 263 percent increase in visitor traffic to their website in one month. It was funny. I was meeting with one of my account managers, and it was brought up as an aside and I'm like, "How come we're not having some kind of celebration about that?" That's huge! 263 percent in one month? That's enormous.

That's enough for today! Look for us next week, which is a big week. We will be up at the Big Orange Headquarters in Boston for the Diamond and Platinum Partner kick-off. We will be coming back to you with plenty of new Hub Spot news… until then!

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