Align your WordPress Agency with HubSpot to Increase Profitability
By Matt Medeiros
Published April 25, 2023
WordPress agency owners face a never ending list of challenges in business, and increasing profitability is a standout item on that ever growing to-do app.
Naturally, raising your fees is the fastest track to increasing your profitability. However, if you lack the experience or portfolio that convinces your potential customers to pay the higher fees, you may feel a bit down on yourself.
When someone tells you to just “add a zero” to the end of your next proposal, they aren’t particularly wrong, but they probably have years more experience than you. Higher fees generally come with the territory of a larger agency. But if you don’t have that larger agency experience, you could be backing yourself into a corner of an expectation mismatch with your client.
So how can we avoid a “fake it until you make it” scenario? Align yourself with better software and solutions to present to your client. In this case, we’ll be looking at how the advantages of Gravity Forms + HubSpot can open up new doors for your agency.
HubSpot Can Help You Go Beyond the Proposal
HubSpot is a popular and well-regarded brand that is not too corporate or technical for small to medium-sized businesses. The brand itself has a fairly large market across many verticals, so finding your niche within this niche will be important.
But this advice will go beyond your proposal fee to the customer.
Hopefully you’ll see some value in setting up new revenue streams and finding new opportunities for your agency work, through aligning yourself with the HubSpot brand.
The good news is: You can apply this approach with other exception software(s) and solutions, not just HubSpot. Leveraging Gravity Forms in various ways is a perfect example of this!
Here are 4 ways HubSpot can help you take your agency to the next level.
HubSpot Customers Come Pre-qualified (sort-of)
Lots of us start out selling WordPress websites for around $2,500 — where that is the entirety of the customer’s budget.
Budgets of that size can go pretty quickly, just on support/training alone.
As you level up your agency game, qualifying customers will be a big part of the pre-sales process. You’ll start to measure things like:
- Is the problem I’m solving for this customer in my core competency?
- Do they have the budget to afford my base offering?
- Are our client-to-customer expectations aligned?
If you can find customers that are already using HubSpot in their business, chances are they have more of technical understanding. They probably have larger teams for sales & marketing. Most important of all, they have some budget to invest in digital if they are already invested in HubSpot.
Your sales discussions with someone that has been using HubSpot for a year should be vastly different — and in your favor — than a small business owner just starting their business.
HubSpot Affiliate Program for a New Revenue Stream
HubSpot has an affiliate program that you can leverage to add another revenue stream to your business. By recommending HubSpot as your CRM system of choice, you can earn commission from your clients that need a CRM, email, documentation, and support system.
This set up new revenue streams that can support your slow sale seasons for the agency. You can even build up the content marketing throughout the pre-sales process, that even when a customer doesn’t sign directly with you, they may still end up using HubSpot through your affiliate link.
It’s a win-win all around.
Sharing the Load on Customer Knowledge Gap
Early in my agency career, I learned that in order to make the agency sutainable, we’d need to increase the total value of our customers.
How could we get more revenue after the website was built? Website support and marketing consulting was an easy add-on to each sale. Working with your client on a monthly retainer of services helped grow the bottom line and wasn’t a large project management nightmare.
- Do you need help maintaining this WordPress website?
- Do you need help using this WordPress website for your marketing and sales?
HubSpot has been an industry leader in content marketing and online education, which opens up a phenomenal opportunity for you to co-share that experience. While you might have a method of approaching sales & marketing that works for you, it might not work for your client.
Sure the fundamentals are there, but is helping your local florist the same as that small law firm that signed with you?
HubSpot already has a proven track record for sales and marketing training, chock full of certifications and courses to take — for free! Share that with your customers and get them to buy into a repeatable framework that you can advise on.
Take Advantage of the HubSpot Community
Like the WordPress community has pillar events in the US, EU, and Asia — HubSpot has one of the industry’s largest events called, Inbound.
Tens of thousands of online marketers, web designers, and users of the HubSpot platform come together for a star-studded event. Not only is it a fantastic way to level-up your own skills as a Hubspot user, it opens you up to new opportunities.
You get to see what else is trending in the industry, how the bigger agencies perform, and there might be someone at the event that you could partner with. Bonus points if you actually sign a new client from attending one of the after parties.
Leaning into the HubSpot brand, in various ways, is going to be as beneficial as leaning into the WordPress world. What you get out of it will be the direct result of what you put in.
Align your Agency with Better Software & Solutions for a Better Outcome
As I mentioned in the post above, this is a playbook you can take to any well-rounded piece of software. HubSpot has a lot of great opportunities to align yourself with better clients, just like WordPress does, and like Gravity Forms does within it.
Our suite of add-ons can help you build solutions for a certain set of customers in the WordPress space, just like HubSpot can help clients solve for sales & marketing in a more mature market.
I know the idea of raising rates for the sake of profitability can be a little scary, where you might feel some imposter syndrome, quite literally because you haven’t done it.
I’m here to say that you can build your confidence up, by offering a more competent and well-rounded solution to your customer. Increasing value to them, and increasing profits for you.
Don’t have Gravity Forms or the HubSpot Add-On? Test out our form builder and integrations inside your own personalized Gravity Forms demo and see why Gravity Forms is the top choice for WordPress sites worldwide.
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