1. Clear Vision and Unique Positioning

The agencies that succeed at inbound PR are those that first and foremost undergo a complete transformation of their business model. This is the biggest hurdle because it's about making the conscious decision about where you want to be three years from now and what you want to be known for. It's often choosing to go digital and ditching the old traditional world of outbound tactics. It also includes deciding to focus on a particular industry or core competency that you want to excel at and truly learn to specialize in.

Having a clear direction and being 100 percent focused is key because if you don't know where you are going, how are you going to get there (or anywhere), how are your people going to help you get there? Your positioning is crucial both externally and internally; existing and potential clients will know what you do and what you stand for, employees will know your values and align their work with your mission.

The longer you wait to make the decision about where you want to go, the further away you're going to be from becoming a sustainable, profitable, scalable, and known agency.

2. Being Your Own Best Client

I can't say this enough: whatever services you offer—content creation, PR, social media, and so on—you need to be delivering them to your own business, always. You need to nail content and you need to nail the numbers. You need to prove to yourself that inbound PR works. Why? Because, first, you need to learn the methodology; second, you don't want to experiment on your clients; and third, you want to be perceived as credible and trustworthy. How are you going to do that if you're offering services to your clients that you don't seem to be using to grow your own business?

Also, do you want be seen as an expert in your field, a thought leader? In the digital era, that happens with content, a lot of content. One of my previous agency clients at HubSpot, for example, has hundreds of videos on YouTube. They do webinars, they blog regularly, they do live video when they travel, they Snapchat, and more. Using these channels, they generate 100 percent of their new business through their own marketing and PR only, and they've managed to triple their revenue in a year. The best part? Their customers are some of the happiest HubSpot customers. Why? Because they trust the agency's expertise and knowledge in inbound, seeing how well it works for the agency itself.

3. Hiring the Right People (at the Right Time)

This one is hard but so crucial. If you want to build a scalable agency you need people not just with the right skills (because skills can be taught) but with the right attitude: the drive to learn and grow, the willingness to be involved in your agency's future, and the desire to challenge you how to move forward.

Finding the people that are a good fit for your business and your clients is one thing, getting them at the right time is another. You need to be able to plan in advance and start your recruiting process as soon as you decide to transform your business. Because once you've made that step, the clients will come and you will need to be ready to service them well.

Getting clients through the door is the easy part, truly making them happy and driving results on an ongoing basis is the magic you need to build a scalable business. And you need people to do that. As an agency owner, you shouldn't be doing project management or service delivery, nor should your employees be working 24/7 to handle the workload.

4. Strong Agency Culture

Having a clearly defined agency culture has two key benefits: it helps with processes and it helps with hiring and training.

Your culture needs to be based on your core values that you need to make abundantly clear so that your people can recite them. These core values will guide everything they do and the way they deliver the work. They will guide how you teach and train your people, too.

Having defined your values will also determine your hiring standards; you'll be able to better decide whether the person you're evaluating will be the right fit for your team.

One important thing to remember here is that if you're going the inbound PR route, then you need 100 percent inbound PR buy-in, not only from your senior people but from everyone at your agency. Inbound PR needs to be embedded within your culture, processes, and standards.

5. Ability to Say “No”

As human beings, we have an innate desire to help. In the business world, that translates into the need for more profit and more clients. But one key step when undergoing your business transformation is the ability to say “no” to the wrong clients. You don't want to be working with companies that don't have the budget or the willingness to grow or those that don't trust your expertise and want things done their way. These clients are not worth your time or effort, and as one of my previous agency clients used to say, “Let them be another agency's problem.” The agencies that choose to say no early on are the ones set for success.

Another thing that agencies often forget is that being able to say no applies to your team, too. Sometimes you need to make the hard decision and let the wrong employees go. For example, if you have decided your agency will adopt inbound PR, the people who don't believe in it or don't get it have no place in your agency. They're only going to hold you back. Is that what you want?

6. Top-Notch Ongoing Client Servicing

Sadly, agencies often forget that it's not just about creating that tremendous service offering plan that gets the client through the door; it's about delivering these services on an ongoing basis and driving real results. With inbound PR, it's all about the numbers. Having very, very clearly defined processes on servicing clients throughout the agreed engagement is crucial. What does the kickoff meeting look like? Have you set up key performance indicators with the client? Do you perform regular performance review calls with them, et cetera?

To retain clients, you need to delight them. Here's something you may not like. You need to spend more, not less, time with your clients. Build and document these processes for onboarding, retaining, and renewing and learn to be efficient at them and always optimize.

To succeed here you need to invest in your people, because it's their skills and capabilities that will deliver either remarkable or poor results. It's your internal knowledge, process, and culture that create external success.

7. Drive to Learn and Share the Knowledge

What lies at the heart of all we are talking about is the drive to learn and the motivation to grow by sharing knowledge internally with the team and externally with the world to be helpful and position yourself as an expert. You shouldn't be afraid of competition. Competition shouldn't be stopping you but motivating you even more. Inbound is a movement, but it still needs the bandwidth to spread, especially outside the United States, and this needs to happen collaboratively.

It doesn't just stop with gathering the knowledge; it's much more about sharing it with your employees, with your advocates, with your clients. One of my previous partners is well known for doing just that in the industry—they are educators, they teach and empower their clients to be experts on their own. That reputation alone brings them more clients.

This is what a successful agency is—a living, breathing, always growing, and continuously learning people-driven organization.

And inbound PR can be your wake-up call. It's an approach that's easy to understand and apply and is not a conventional way of thinking.

It involves a mindset change that will allow PR to reinvent itself and earn the coveted management seat at the table as a truly value-driving discipline.

Inbound PR is all about changing how we see and do things to stay fit for the future.