3min
I recently wrote about the reason we chose to do free work for our clients. Basically to help us both understand how to work together and what the scope of the forthcoming engagement will be. But obviously, that's not the end of the story, and from our perspective, we'd like to get on with paid work too!
Our Process
Over the last few years of life as a HubSpot services agency, we have learned how to best approach our engagements with our clients. And that's one of the reasons we start with that free discovery session.
But second up is the paid-for strategy work. Strategy is different to discovery work in that this is the time we will start to get serious about gathering your requirements, the scale of the problem you face, and the order in which they should be faced.
We'll design the solution for you here, and document everything so that we can all agree on what the solution will look like and what a successful completion of the project means on both sides.
If there is a website to be built, a HubSpot Hub to be set up, or a team to be onboarded, all the thinking that goes into it is done here. We often offer to do the strategy as an individual piece of work for the client. In other words, if you are cautious, let's get the plan all laid out and documented before you decide to undertake the work.
If you move on with the rest of the work the cost of the strategy work we did becomes wrapped up in the overall bill - so you don't pay any extra when you want to take this approach.
The Launch Pad
Sometimes called an MVP (minimum viable product) the Launch Pad is the first phase of the work we have agreed to do together. It can be problematic to take on a huge piece of work like a major website build and agree to ship the whole thing in one go.
For one thing, projects have a habit of taking on a life of their own, and before you know it can have gone way over budget, and quite often, over deadline too.
It's also possible that the work can take some time when approached all in one go, so you can find the solution is out of date by the time you get a chance to use it.
We'd much rather get something built and deployed quickly, fixing your problem statement as efficiently and as fast as possible. We will continue to build out that solution of course, as fresh data and learning are made by the team using this solution.
This has the added benefit of making sure features of the project are 'data-driven' that is, based on real-world information gathered as the solution is tested out there in the field.
This can be the extent of our work, as you know, we also like to teach our clients how to do teh things they need to do for themselves!
But often it's not...
Continuous Improvement
I sometimes think this is the best part of the job. We continue to work with you after the project has been shipped, but now comes the hard part. Getting it to work to its best effect.
If its a website, we like to ensure it's delivering on its potential to drive traffic and convert this traffic into leads for your business. This doesnt usually happen overnight.
If we are working with you on a CRM implementation, we like to make sure that everyone who needs to use it is comfortable doing so and finds the platform as accessible as possible and indeed is enabled by using it, not held back by not understanding what it can do.
While we train everyone during the onboarding session, the best-trained team wins, and that means repeating the messages and refining the knowledge they have as time goes on. People change and adapt as their roles change and adapt, so it's important that their training stays up to date too.
When it comes to performance optimisation, we follow the 'Plan, Build, Learn' mantra.
- Plan - what is the theory we want to test?
- Build - Get it up and running in the simplest most efficient way possible
- Learn - What worked, what didn't? What do we do differently next time?
That way everything is done in a sensible, repeatable way. Learning as we go how to get the most out of the technology and provide the most value to the business.
If you'd like to find out more, or even just kick off a free discovery session to see how our process works in practice, get in touch!
