Agency Referral Program: How Rebecca Gonzalez Rebuilt Orange Marketing After Her One Source Dried Up

Nine years ago Rebecca Gonzalez and a friend decided they were done working for companies. “The thought of going out and interviewing and asking people for jobs just made me literally like I can’t do it,” she said. Both of them knew HubSpot, loved B2B and loved SaaS. On day one she emailed HubSpot to find out what the partner program was, and Orange Marketing joined that day. It has been HubSpot-only ever since. It would not even edit a WordPress site.

For years Orange Marketing did not need an agency referral program. It sold to venture-backed SaaS companies in Orange County, sourced its own deals, charged “extraordinary amounts of money,” and collected generous HubSpot commissions on top. It reached Diamond fast. Then in 2023 HubSpot cut the commissions, the venture money dried up, and Rebecca and her co-founder parted ways.

Rebecca told me the whole story when she came on Fast & Tierious. She rebuilt the agency without laying anyone off, and she did it by going out and meeting people: HubSpot reps, happy clients who would write a review, other founders who sell to the same buyers. What follows is how she did it, and what she would tell an agency owner who still has one good source.

What happens when one referral source carries the whole agency?

Rebecca is candid about the boom years. “We thought we were just geniuses,” she said. “Truly smart, wealthy people will tell you there’s luck involved. And there was luck involved. We were smart, but we were also very lucky until we weren’t.”

The luck ran out on two fronts. HubSpot, “the daddy that was feeding us,” in her words, “totally pulled the rug out on the commission program.” For deals closed on or after April 1, 2023, HubSpot moved partner commissions from the life of the customer to 36 months at 20% (HubSpot, 2023). At the same time the venture market cooled. Global startup investment fell 38% in 2023, to $285 billion from $462 billion in 2022 (Crunchbase News, 2024). The SaaS founders spending their friends’ money “just disappeared.”

When she went looking for new deals, she found a gap in her own network. “I didn’t know a single HubSpot rep. How is that possible?”

She calls it a mistake. “We had essentially one referral source. It’s a classic screw up.” Asked what she would never do again, she did not pause: “Put all my eggs in one basket.” It was “basically one vertical, one geography. It was insane when you think about it.”

The referral channel, the SaaS vertical and the Orange County market looked like three things. All three ran on venture money, so when the money stopped, they stopped together. On the episode I compared it to a farm that gets rain for years and then hits a dry season. My advice to anyone still getting the rain: enjoy it, and start adding sources early.

How do you build referral relationships with HubSpot reps?

Her first moves after 2023 hurt. “We had to drop our prices. Like, no one was paying those kind of prices.” Work flooded in, much of it cheap, and “everybody was going nuts.” So she raised prices slowly “and get rid of the riff raff.”

Then she started on the work she wished she had done years earlier. She began meeting HubSpot’s SMB reps, one at a time, and waited for them to graduate into bigger jobs. Her partner manager at HubSpot, Jake Basile, helped her build the plan and watched her stick to it. His verdict, as she tells it: “Never count orange marketing out.”

What she does with a rep once she knows them is small and steady:

• A partner record for each deal. Every deal she works with a rep goes into a partner object in HubSpot, so she can see who sends what.
• Useful email over sales email. She sends reps helpful information and stays active in shared Slack channels.
• A thank-you they remember. A holiday gift each year, and a breakfast at Unbound for any rep who has helped Orange Marketing.

The partner records earn their keep at invite time. When she and Jake sat down to build the breakfast list, he asked her: “Do you realize you’ve closed four deals with so and so?” She knew, because she had logged every one, and that rep went on the list. Our guide to CRM best practices covers how to set up records like that so the team keeps them current.

She is open about what is still missing. Orange Marketing has no dedicated salesperson. “It’s founder-led sales.” She would like a true sales rep whose job is calling HubSpot reps one-on-one. She also lacks the CRM accreditation that gets an agency onto the radar of reps with bigger deals, and she cannot earn it without working on bigger accounts first, which she calls “a chicken egg problem.” Getting it is her goal for the year.

Why did Rebecca chase 157 five-star reviews?

Rebecca started asking for online reviews almost from day one, years before the trouble, and kept at it through the rebuild. Orange Marketing now has 157 five-star reviews. “Every single one of them is me emailing people multiple times literally begging for a review,” she said. “Smartest thing we ever did because AEO reads all this stuff.”

She has good reason to think they matter. A referred buyer still looks the agency up before calling. In Hinge Research Institute’s study of 523 professional services firms, 51.9% of respondents had ruled out a referred provider before ever contacting them. The top reasons were an unimpressive website at 29.63%, poor quality content at 23.46% and no online visibility at 15.64% (Hinge Research Institute).

Her regret is about the same kind of proof. “I didn’t start consistently posting on LinkedIn until two years ago. I could have owned LinkedIn. I’m a natural writer. What in the world?” I told her I had tried letting AI write posts and now tell people not to: if you can write, have a point of view and put it out yourself. There is data behind the payoff: in Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2024 study of 3,500 B2B decision-makers, 73% said thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging a company’s competence than its marketing materials (Edelman, 2024). Our post on G2 badges covers how buyers read the review side of that proof.

What makes partnerships the heart of an agency referral program?

Rebecca calls partnerships her third pivot, and the one she is best at. She started meeting people across the HubSpot world: Daniel from Arrows, Connor from Happily, Brian Minnick from ZeroBounce, and Marcus Sheridan’s AI Trust Signals, which she joined because she knew he was the founding money. She sought out fractional CMO groups that could refer Orange Marketing, went to their events and paid to be there.

“I wish I’d started it years ago because it’s so valuable,” she said. At Unbound now, “it’s all my friends,” and she skips the sessions because she is out on the floor talking.

A tech vendor’s pipeline, a fractional CMO’s client list and a HubSpot rep’s territory depend on different things. If venture money dries up again, some of those introductions keep coming, which was never true of her old program.

If money changes hands, keep it simple. Karl Sakas, who advises agencies, reports that agencies typically pay referral partners 5% to 10% of revenue, most often 10%, usually capped at 12 months, and warns that “agencies who promised ‘forever’ referral fees tend to regret it later” (Sakas & Company).

Being small helps her close what the partners send. When Orange Marketing goes up against the largest HubSpot agencies, she says it wins, for two reasons: “we don’t have the overhead in our pricing and b I am incredibly responsive.” She will work the weekend and “you’ll have a proposal on Monday.” Today, she says, “clients are more upscale, the jobs are bigger.”

What Rebecca Gonzalez learned from the rebuild

• Sources that fail for different reasons. One channel, one vertical and one geography were one bet on venture money. Diversify by what could break each source.
• Reps earned one at a time. Track every deal worked with a rep, send useful information, and thank the reps who help. The records show who to invest in.
• Proof where referred buyers look. 157 five-star reviews and a consistent LinkedIn point of view give a referred buyer something to find when they look her up.
• Partnerships as the program. Tech partners, fractional CMO groups and events built a referral base she wishes she had started years earlier.
• Speed as an edge. No overhead in the price and a founder who answers fast win deals against much bigger agencies.

Where should an agency start its referral program?

If your agency lives on one good source today, start now on what Rebecca had to do in a hurry. Build four or five sources that depend on different things, and make sure a referred buyer finds proof when they look you up. Start while the good source still pays the bills.

Start with reviews, because they take the longest to pile up. Ask each happy client this month, and keep asking; Hinge found that more than half of buyers had ruled out a referred provider before ever calling. Then pick a handful of reps or partners who serve your buyer, record each deal you work on together, and spend your time on the ones the records show are sending work.

If your agency sells HubSpot, our partner program is one more referral relationship built for exactly this, and Supered partners with agencies whose clients need their sales process to show up where reps work. For the prospecting side of the same problem, read our guide to the sales prospecting process next.