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:
or sometimes its tactical:
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:
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: