[Fully Managed] Islin Munisteri Ep. 57 – Podcast Highlights and Transcript

Shannon (Host): Everyone, and welcome to the Fully Managed by Penji Podcast, the podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you in your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon, Penji’s partnership coordinator, and I’m joined here today with a very special guest, Islin Munisteri from Theia Strategies.

Thank you so much for coming on with me today. I really appreciate it.

Islin Munisteri: You are welcome. Thanks for having me.

About Theia Strategies

Shannon: So, could you please tell me a little bit about your agency, kind of where it is at its cycle and kind of your day to day and what kind of work you do?

Islin: Sure. So, I run a HubSpot Rev Ops agency with my partner. We specialize in really helping nonprofits, government, technology and SaaS folks implement onboard onto HubSpot. And also we have ongoing services with HubSpot. And then we also do APIs like the Bullhorn integration with HubSpot. And we also code websites on the HubSpot CMS. So, we’re an all-in-one technical HubSpot shop.

And what I do day to day is that I’m focused on the sales side and operations and making sure the agency is running smoothly. Prospecting, trying to do that every day, knock on wood. And also making sure we stay ahead of our accounting and our project management.

Finding a Specialization

Shannon: Fantastic. So how did you decide to specialize in HubSpot specifically, was this something that you started out doing or kind of something that you adjusted naturally to because you realized you were good at it?

Islin: Yeah, so in the beginning, my partner actually started as an engineering firm, realized he liked marketing the engineering more. And so we went into marketing, but marketing has so much you can do within it. And then I realized I had used HubSpot for a nonprofit before. So we became HubSpot partners. And the rest is history and we’ve loved doing business with HubSpot. And we’ve gotten quite good at the platform. That’s how we started and became HubSpot Partners since 2018.

Shannon: That’s great. So it seems like you kind of found your niche, which a lot of agencies really strive to find. So it’s really great that you were able to kind of get to that point where you’re specializing in something that you’re really good at.

Islin: Yeah, I mean, we found we can do content and marketing strategy built in HubSpot. We can do that, but we’re really good at the technical aspects of HubSpot, like account structure, parent-child relationships. You know, entity relationship diagrams, coding. It’s the CMS, the coding, and integration. I find that we’re really good at the technical aspects of HubSpot, so that’s where we’ll stick. There’ll be other agencies that can do demand generation or Google ads or Facebook ads. But we just focus on technical HubSpot.

Shannon: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, there’s a lot of people that use HubSpot, so, and there’s continuously more and more people that are signing up for it and using the software. So it’s good that you’re able to, you know, always be there for those people. And it’s not a limited source, so it’s really great because you’re always guaranteeing incoming customers.

Islin: Yeah, I think like HubSpot’s always focused on growing their base and protecting their current base of customers or growing new business and protecting that. So it’s a good partnership.

The Story Behind Their Name

Shannon: So, how did you come up with your name, like what is it inspired by? Is it just something that you’re interested in space or was it like an idea that you kind of came up with your partner before you had started when you were kind of brainstorming, maybe ideas for naming it?

Islin: Yeah. Our kids are actually named after Greek gods and goddesses. And with Theia we liked the story of Theia. So Theia is the ancient Greek titan goddess of sight in the shining of the bright blue sky, which she’s associated with the sunrise and bringing light to problems. And that’s what we do. We bring chaos to calm. Right. So that’s what we enjoy doing. We take a struggling HubSpot portal and a business process and really improve it to make sure every part of the process is working as it should.

Shannon: I really like that you were inspired by this interest of yours and then you also implemented that into your business. I think that makes a business unique and personal to the person, and I really like that. It’s nice to be able to, it’s also really cool because it’s a unique design for your website, which I feel like makes it stand out among maybe competitors or people that do something similar to you.

I notice a unique website when I see one because I look at websites all day. So it’s nice to see something that’s new and something that catches my eye. So I like that you were able to implement a niche interest into something that is attractive to customers and something that’s kind of fun and new.

Islin: I like, so we came out of engineering in the oil field. And my partner’s really into space and the whole engineering space race and everything, all the history behind it. And so that’s why we have a space themed website. And our brand is based on space because if you can take a man to the moon and there’s this saying, “shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars” this saying from Les Brown. So that’s what we’re aiming for.

Shannon: That’s awesome. That’s a good place to strive for and also shows that it’s a good motto to have for your customers too. Not only to have that theme that’s being unique, but also it comes with a lot of terms and phrases that are really positive for your goals for a client as well, so that’s awesome.

Marketing Strategy and Business Focus

Shannon: So something that I was curious about. I see differences in this one, talking to agencies. Do you spend a lot of time on marketing yourself or are you kind of more in the interest of focusing all of your resources into your business, making sure that’s up to snuff so that maybe clients that are happy with your work will then refer someone? Like do you focus more energy on trying to get incoming customers and clients, or do you kind of focus more on the clients that you have and getting kind of lead generation from those people through a referral kind of base?

Islin: I mean, I feel like you really need to have both. Which is incredibly difficult as an agency because you’ll be prospecting one day and then you’ll be project managing another day. It’s just very difficult to prioritize sales. But I think your current base of customers is great, but there will be layoffs, there will be folks that prioritize other things. So you have to always be selling. And then also sell them multiple niches, too.

It’s both. You really need to have both going on because you need to maintain your current client base, which is how you’re going to pay your AP and payroll, your accounts payable and payroll. But you also need to have always be constantly feeding what I would call the accounts receivable bus as well. So you gotta have both sales and project delivery going on at the same time. Because if you don’t, then that’s how a lot of agencies find themselves out of business. They lose one or two big clients and then it’s the end.

Whereas if you’re constantly prospecting constantly, doing sales, having good things coming out on LinkedIn, then you can bridge the gap and make it through any market conditions or any economic issues that are happening is to always be selling. But while also maintaining your current client base, you gotta do both.

Lead Generation Strategies

Shannon: I definitely agree with you, by the way. I think that doing both is something that’s really important. I know that some agencies prioritize one or the other, depending on what’s working for them. But, so, if you do both, then what is your strategy for lead generation? You mentioned LinkedIn briefly. Is that something that you utilize a lot in your work when looking for new clients or potential sales?

Islin: Yeah, it’s really when I’m prospecting, you need to have an ICP, which is your ideal customer profile. And then just prospect. I recommend Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blunt to start. There’s also a book called Cold Calling Sucks, which is by the folks who founded 30 Minutes, the President’s Club.

It’s easy to hate sales until you realize it’s feeding your paycheck. And then you look at some of the tech executives read on their LinkedIn profiles, they’re bringing in a million dollars a year to their companies just by one seller. So that would be nice to have one seller scaled agency to like 1 million.

But that’s really what it takes, I think, is really a mixture of prospecting, referrals, networking, but it’s really having more of that outbound process, and then you can drive inbound process. For optimizing your services pages and landing pages and that type of thing. But I would say it’s all work. Like, I wouldn’t say you start an agency to dodge out of work. Like it’s all work. You have to do.

Shannon: That’s the downside.

Islin: No worries. That’s good. The downside and the upside cause it’s kind of fun at the same time. But the downside of an agency is the fact that there’s always work. Especially if you’re providing a service that keeps coming and coming, there’s never gonna be a lull. Especially if you’re doing good work, that’s gonna be people that keep coming in. And that’s good for your agency, but it’s also a process, and everything keeps changing and adjusting in the marketing world.

S,o you constantly have to factor in these new things and implement those in your work and kind of keep readjusting and pivoting to make sure that your clients are happy. And so it’s a process that continues to go and go, but you don’t, I agree that you don’t just stop ever.

Shannon: You can’t just stop. And when if you do stop, that is problematic unless you have a team. Like a dedicated team that’s keeping on going for you. But as a small agency you don’t necessarily have that.

Islin: Exactly. And then you also have to make sure that the quality of work that you’re doing is what you said you would do.

Shannon: Yeah, no, I definitely agree. You can get someone in the door, but if you’re not doing what you promised, then obviously they’re not gonna be very happy. And you’re not gonna not only get a referral, but you might lose a client in the process as well. So you have to make sure that everything’s up to snuff for sure.

HubSpot Audits

Shannon: I haven’t run into a lot of agencies that specifically do work as niches like yours for HubSpot specifically, which I think is really cool and interesting. I like to talk to different sects of people or agencies that do different things because I learn a lot from that.

Can you walk me through a HubSpot audit? Like what are some examples of things that you do during this process? I know you might not wanna reveal too much your secret sauce, if you will, but if you could touch on that, I think I’d be really interested.

Islin: Yeah, so the point of a HubSpot audit is to really identify gaps in how you’re using HubSpot and identify gaps in your business process. Whether that’s like marketing, sales, service, or your entire revenue operations, how it’s connected to accounting and finance.

But in an audit, it should answer, is your lead routing performing as it should? Is your lead scoring if you’re advanced, is it actually delivering leads at the right time to sales or is it just magically adding points and nothing is happening?

That’s like the workflows and automation side. Are your marketing tools being fully utilized? Are you using all your landing pages, website pages? Is that converting folks? Like is your website converting traffic? Are your content offers creating leads, basically?

On your sales side, is the sales team adequately using HubSpot? Do they understand the sequencing tools? For example, is the vacation lead routing set up correctly? Or are people’s calls scheduling set up so that they can accept calls into their HubSpot phone number properly?

Really small technical details that people overlook when they’re setting up their HubSpot portal. But then when the end users trying to use it, it’s like, “oh, I can’t accept HubSpot calls.” It’s because you don’t have a call schedule, like in-office hours set up or something like that.

And then on the service hub, are you using the NPS surveys or using the CSAT surveys? The customer satisfaction surveys. Is that being sent every x number of days to clients and customers? Are they happy with your product or service? Are tickets, if you have like a ticket routing process in your customer success customer service team, are all the tickets being routed properly? Are they being followed up within a certain amount of time?

And then, going back to marketing, is your email health okay? Is your open rate and clickthrough rate in the red zone or the green zone? It’s just really understanding how you’re using your entire HubSpot portal and then identifying gaps in your business process.

Where things aren’t being done the right way? Are there too many fields that a sales rep has to fill out before they can put in a deal, and they’re just completely skipping it? Little process issues that really impact reporting for leadership.

When a leader looks at a dashboard, they’re like, “oh, there’s issues with this, or we’re not following up with leads fast enough from the sales side on our inbound leads.” Usually, there’s like a data problem, or there’s like a property that wasn’t created or something like that, so the data wasn’t even being captured for the reporting to happen.

So it’s being really clear on your lead stages, your deal stages, your pipeline stages, defining those so that your entire team understands what they mean. How to use them. But HubSpot audits usually uncover a lot of gaps in how you’re using HubSpot.

With us, we usually do audits as part of a solutions architecture. If you’re already using HubSpot, it’s just to see how you’re using it. And then we basically re-engineer HubSpot to fit current business process so that you can go for it. And if you’re implementing a new sales process or a new service process, we can help you get that set up in HubSpot right the first time. So that there’s no gaps in data being put in, no gaps in reporting and the tool that you’re using, HubSpot performs as it should.

Shannon: It seems like you’re very well-versed in the different intricacies that go into using the software. And I think that that’s not only a testament to how thorough you must be, but also it kind of shows how maybe complex this is for people to be using by themselves, and how helpful someone like you is to be able to assist navigating the software.

I think a lot of things when you look at data, I agree. What you touched on with like, maybe it’s not collecting it correctly. It’s hard to look at something, and it seems very cut and dry that the data is showing something, but you don’t know why. So it’s nice to be able to have someone like you be able to go in and explain like, “oh, this isn’t because of something you did,” or “this is because of something you did,” or different things like that.

And “this isn’t collecting this correctly at all, and it really doesn’t show anything that is crucial to your growth.” So it’s good to be able to know those things and have that expertise to be able to explain that, but also make sure that the results can be better next time.

Islin: Yeah. It’s always an iterative process. You plan, you do, and then you learn, and then you just keep on going. There’s also in sales, you make commitments or little promises to yourself that you’ll do this today and then you ask yourself whether or not you’ve done it. And that’s really what any company is built on is making the promises and the commitments to yourself and then executing each day. And that’s how we move forward.

Shannon: The little promises are really good, and it’s also a way to keep you accountable and keep growing and learning, and I like that in an agency for sure.

On Guaranteeing Business Growth

Shannon: During this process that you discussed, what are some things that you do uniquely to guarantee a business’s growth that you think would be different than maybe someone that does something like yours?

Islin: I mean, unfortunately, I cannot guarantee growth for any business. I can’t guarantee donors, I cannot guarantee any of that. Rev ops is really about people, process and technology. And we can help you with the process, like your basic process of marketing, are all the leads being routed correctly? Are your lead stages being set? Is your landing page and thank you page, and forms all set up correctly? We can help you with the process and the technology in HubSpot, but we cannot.

And even in a sense, we need to help with the people. Because our people are implementing HubSpot or doing ongoing HubSpot services for you, but it’s really up to the internal teams at times to really keep on doing the process that we set up. It’s up to them to keep on sending sales sequences or making phone calls. If they’re in sales, it’s up to them in marketing – we can set up campaigns, we can set up the landing pages, but it’s up to them to drive, have the Google ads or the LinkedIn ads, or the networking events or whatever it may be to drive those leads through the funnel.

We can set up the process and the technology no problem. But it’s really up to the business to drive growth. We can set up the process and the tech for that. We are not your outsource marketing team. For a while there, we said we’re their outsource marketing team, and we did content and SEO and Google ads and everything under the sun, until we niched down to the HubSpot.

You see a lot of companies that gotten money, investor money, venture capital or private equity money during Covid, and many of them are shutting their doors now because they couldn’t grow because they ran out of money. That’s why I’m saying your account process and keeping your customers happy is so very important to growth. Because you gotta maintain your current customer base and keep them happy and then also grow on top of that through sales and marketing.

But I can’t be your company. Your company succeeds or fails because of the people you hired, the processes we helped set up or didn’t set up. I wish I could say I was responsible for growth, but our retainers would be a lot bigger because then we’d charge a percentage of your growth. But it’s often not that simple.

Growth is, I mean, everyone knows how to grow, but can you successfully execute it? Because the formulas and all of that, all the playbooks, all of that is out there on the internet, on chat GPT, on YouTube. It is all out there. But you have to be able to shape the process that’s unique to your business, unique to what you’re selling, whether it’s a product or a service or a campaign or a movement. I can’t guarantee your growth for you.

Shannon: No, I like the transparency with that too. I think a lot of people will over promise things like that where you’re just kind of like you are doing a service that can certainly assist people with agency growth. But if they are not continuously practicing and implementing what you started for them, then there’s no guarantee, or it’s even probably unlikely that they’ll continue to grow if they’re not continuing with this.

So there’s a lot of responsibility on the client to be able to be proactive with doing this, and I think it’s important to say that because I think a lot of agencies will guarantee things that they can’t guarantee. And that might bring in clients if they’re guaranteed some certain thing. But then they’ll leave unhappy because they realize that, “oh, they didn’t set us up.” You’re setting them up for success. Whereas other agencies maybe might not be setting them up for success, they just promise something that they can’t guarantee down the line because they’re doing this thing that might work for this isolated period, but it might not work for the long run.

Islin: And I would say that I feel like everyone, myself included, is looking for that magical silver bullet that will magically generate like 10K a month if you’re selling like a product or something. And there are masterminds, there’s books, there’s all sorts of things that say if you do this, you will get there.

But it goes back to, as an engineering, the first principles of marketing, sales, and customer success. Keep your customers happy, prospect every day to the right people. And have the right messaging and marketing, and sales. The formula for success is well understood. But it’s the implementation part. That’s where a lot of agencies and everything diverge.

Like one graphic design will save your company. It’s like, yeah, but it’s not right. Or one mastermind group will unearth you out of your current issues. It’s not true. You need to do the work consistently day in and day out. And that’s what gets you out of a hole or that’s what gets you new clients or whatever issue or challenge that you’re facing right now, it’s doing the work consistently day in and day out.

I think in Fanatical Prospecting, you’ll see your efforts from prospecting the first 30 days for your for the next 90 days. So if you stop prospecting for like a month, then you’ll be hurting for three months after that. That’s why HubSpot hires account executives. That’s why we have salespeople, we have marketing people, we have customer success people. Everyone’s doing their job consistently to make sure the company is running successfully. And if you’re missing any one of those things, pretty soon, you’ll see the gap. And then you’ll be trying to fill that gap.

Conclusion

Shannon: No, you’re definitely right. And I think that’s a great sentiment to end on because I think it emphasizes hard work on the agency side too. You have to, there’s not a cure all for lead generation or agency growth. You have to put in the work regularly, all day, every day, to continue to see the outcome that you want and you know, you can get help along the way to be able to make it more likely to reach your goals. But I think that you have to really work at it. And that’s the important part of being an agency.

Islin: Yep. And I mean, there are components of luck involved of course, but you need to be positioned in the right way to capture, to get that luck.

Shannon: Exactly. It’s luck and hard work. Some people make millions in sales because they just capitalized upon the right market condition that their product they were selling were like Zoom. This came about in the pandemic and everyone needed it. And so they made billions.

Islin: They did great. It was luck. But a lot of times there’s hard work too.

Shannon: Exactly. The pandemic, a lot of people got lucky and a lot of people got unlucky, so things like that happen all the time, and it’s insane. But you know, you can project things through hard work no matter what. Hopefully, you’ll always stay afloat.

Thank you so much. I’m so sorry to cut this short, but this is all the time we have for today. I really appreciate you coming on and chatting with me. This is absolutely incredible. I love talking to niche agencies specifically because I get to learn new things. And I will repetitively keep saying this throughout all the podcasts. I love learning new things. It’s my favorite thing. So, thank you so much for being able to chat with me today.

Islin: You’re welcome, and thanks for having me, Shannon.

Shannon: Of course. And thank you, everyone at home, for watching or listening. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to see more professionals like Islin and be able to learn like I do every day. Thank you so much.

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