When you think about your marketing partners, do you think to yourself, "I really need a firm that can transform my business." (As a business owner or leader its possible you dont even speak with your marketing partners at all!)
Unlikely. I can only think of one recent engagement in the last six months where the Managing Director had that broader vision from the outset. In most cases we initially get asked to help with specific pain points such as:
- "We can't produce enough content."
- "Our lead quality is falling; our sales team are struggling to close."
or sometimes its tactical:
- "I need an updated website, my current site is too old."
- "We need someone to run our social media for us."
But once we perform our initial pre sales assessment and start discussing with the client, we invariably discover all kinds of problems that need to be fixed, most commonly:
- Website and marketing campaigns all push your products rather than address customer (target buyer) problems
- Marketing messaging is all about "me" (the brand) and not about "you" (the customer/buyer)
- Content is all product-centric and/or simply doesnt exist in any meaningful way.
- Search strategy is out of date and ineffective
- Social media plan and influencer engagement is non-existent
- Website isn't a responsive design for desktop and mobile
- There are no top of funnel lead conversion offers
- There is no way of really measuring what is and isnt working.
Not that our customers don't know how to market themselves—they just don't know how to adapt to new digital (inbound) marketing strategies and use the right resources and processes.
When we analyse how the firm attracts, converts, nurtures and closes opportunities it becomes obvious that the firm needs a clearly articulated revenue generation process that straddles the full sales AND marketing funnel. Otherwise its just more "random acts of marketing."
But mostly, they just don't know where to start.
In their excellent book, "Switch," Chip and Dan Heath talk a lot about why change is so hard. "... when you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that's just flat wrong. In fact, the opposite is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion."
So indeed you should look to your agency to be a transformation or change agent for your full go to market business process.
Our conversations with business leaders are increasingly about how to install a transformation plan around digital to sit at the heart of their go-to-market model.
Whilst firms do vary in their requirements the following six components are always present in one form or another:
- A crystal clear plan that reflects your business growth goals
- A funnel framework that lays out exactly how to attract, convert, nurture and close opportunities, a revenue "engine" for your business across the full funnel.
- Content that fuels the engine.
- A series of creative, inventive campaigns to attract, engage and drive lead activity
- A team of people armed with the right set of digital skills
- A formal measurement framework so you know what is and isn't working and you can measure real ROI.