Today’s episode welcomes Shawna Tregunna, CEO and Chief Strategist of Acclivity - a B2B marketing agency specializing in Account-Based Marketing, Content Marketing, Earned Media and Virtual Marketing. Their focus market consists of manufacturers, IoT providers, and innovative technologies.

Acclivity has been active for almost 4 years, but it’s not Shawnas first agency venture. Her first agency came to be due to the explosion of Twitter back in the day. She was an early adopter, making noise on the platform and experimenting with a variety of formats until she was approached by an investor that saw an early opportunity in social media and chose Shawna to pioneer the SMMA movement. She ran that agency for 7 years up until a client decided to buy the agency, giving Shawna her first exit.

Her current agency started during COVID, when the world went fully virtual and social media became an even bigger part of how brands get their message to potential clients. Shawna couldn’t idly stand by while businesses that have close to 0 social media expertise were now thrown into a new world, so she started Acclivity to put her years of experience to great use. They’ve now expanded their service offering to include account based marketing, which is one of the hottest marketing strategies in B2B.

The first ideal client profile that Shawna pursued was other agencies that were looking to add social to their marketing offering. This helped her grow tremendously, as her clients book of business would also become her book of business, allowing for a huge increase in their overall reach and industry knowledge. She also approached clients as partnerships, helping increase her nearbound circle and organically grow her referral network.

Going viral shouldn’t always be the goal, but that’s a tough sell as an SMMA. Shawna’s first challenges arose when clients would expect a huge dose of vanity metrics across the board with every engagement, which led to a lot of misalignment between her agency and clients. Nowadays, most B2B companies understand that virality isn’t the best metric to gauge the success of an SMMA engagement, but there’s still many that expect likes and comments to be the North Star, which simply doesn’t make sense when selling into technical folks that aren’t chronically online.

Tune into the full episode to learn more on how Shawna pioneered the SMMA movement and transitioned into ABM!

HIGHLIGHTS:

01:16 First Agency to exit
03:31 The birth of Acclivity
06:04 How Shawna grew her agency
09:01 The challenges of growing an SMMA
12:31 Thriving in a data-driven world
16:40 Tips for selling your agency
18:31 Grow through ABM

Connect with Shawna - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnaactually/

Connect with Mikael - www.linkedin.com/in/mikaeldia/

This is a snippet from the Kyle Vamvouris episode of Funnel Vision. For the full scoop, check out the last episode!

Meet Kyle Vamvouris, CEO of Vouris. They help B2B SaaS and service companies build their SDR and AE teams. Vouris uses a data-first approach to structure teams, optimize performance, and to ultimately develop a repeatable sales process. Kyle has worked with over 70 B2B companies, generated $100m+ in sales, helped raise over $280m in venture capital and written 3 sales books.

Today’s episode welcomes Kyle Vamvouris, CEO of Vouris. They help B2B SaaS and service companies build their SDR and AE teams. Vouris uses a data-first approach to structure teams, optimize performance, and to ultimately develop a repeatable sales process. Kyle has worked with over 70 B2B companies, generated $100m+ in sales, helped raise over $280m in venture capital and written 3 sales books.

Improving your sales through tactical means can only get you so far. When consulting startups, Kyle has noticed that many sales organizations fail to become data-driven and end up building unnecessary bottlenecks by focusing on the wrong growth paths.

After a career of selling everything from transactional products to B2B software, Kyle went out on his own and started Vouris. At the time he had 2 small kids and he was the sole financial provider for his family. Even when he secured his first 2 clients, he still couldn’t afford to pay himself a salary. As he kept investing back into the business, a year later he was quickly hit with the opposite problem - spending 39 hours/week on client calls alone.

Once you’re past the stage where you can sustainably service all your clients alone, the logical next step is to start hiring. Kyle initially wanted his new team to take over client deliverables, but it quickly backfired. When you’re hiring someone to deliver on your behalf, you can’t expect them to take over what you’re doing without proper guidelines, systems and operational procedures.

In a service based business, you should focus on hiring those who can fill in the gaps between the business functions that you’re best at. Kyle’s agency journey improved significantly after he finally filled the operational part of his business and got to focus on sales and marketing.

Tune into the full episode to learn how to build an agency from 0!

HIGHLIGHTS:
01:58 Should sellers be data-driven?
03:42 Kyle’s sales journey
06:39 Building a sales agency
08:33 The challenges of building a team
09:44 How to make the right hires
11:34 The value of experience
17:24 Talk to your customers!

Connect with Kyle - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylevamvouris/

Connect with Mikael - www.linkedin.com/in/mikaeldia/