Frequently Asked Questions

Working With Us

We partner with complex B2B organizations with long consultative sales cycles and we focus on niche technology enabled industries. Our team is skilled at digging into and understanding complex business models and sales cycles, and developing strategies that create real business impact.

Specifically, we focus on the below three sectors:
  • Software (SaaS)
  • High Tech manufacturing (e.g.: Medical Device Companies)
  • Tech-Enabled Professional Services (e.g.: Engineering Firms, Contract Manufacturing firms, Software Development Firms)
     

We’ve done a lot of great work across a variety of industries and organizations. However, our unique skills and point of view on marketing are best utilized by organizations and teams that can emphatically answer YES to the following questions:

  • Do you sell a complex product or service that requires customization and/or white glove support?
  • Do you sell into a technical industry or audience?
  • Do you sell to a complicated buying committee rather than an individual decision maker?
  • Does your leadership believe marketing can and should be a revenue driver?
  • Does your leadership believe in being customer-centric and in the value of relationships?
  • Are you and your team willing to invest time and resources to test and learn your way to success?

We work with complex clients. We do complex work. And we move fast. The only way we can do this is only by hiring seasoned professionals. There is no “B-Team” here. We are all “A players.”

You’re in luck! We hate being locked into long-term contracts with no way out. All of our engagements come with a 30-day out. No limitations. Let’s say you simply can’t stand our brand color scheme, and want out…no problem. Just give us a 30-day notice.

The only caveat is if you are pre-paying for services. In that case, whatever you have prepaid is locked in and will not be refunded.

What We Do

Traditionally, Relationship Marketing has focused on building relationships through social media and other online channels. While social media is an important channel, we feel the concept is channel-agnostic because revenue is an outcome of great relationships. This means that relationship marketing is the process of driving revenue by systematically building the right relationships at scale.

Velocity is a vector—it’s speed with purpose. And its purpose is in driving valuable relationships—because relationships are what contribute to revenue and profitability.  Relationship Velocity™ is our proprietary growth framework that leverages relationship psychology to deeply understand your customers and how they make decisions, so that you can be the trusted partner that helps them along the journey of meeting their success milestones.

We believe revenue is an outcome of great relationships. And if your goal is to scale revenue, we recommend scaling your ability to build relationships.

Relationship Enablement™  is what connects sales and marketing together in a single go-to-market motion, and fixes the broken processes when it comes to driving revenue. Relationship EnablementTM entails creating and using marketing assets in pre-sales to start conversations. These aren’t necessarily sales conversations, but they are business conversations. We do this by creating content and experiences that allow us to collect first-party intent data to better understand your customers and help them along their relationship journey with you.

Our Process

Relationships aren’t built overnight, which means revenue results shouldn’t be expected overnight, either. We break results into 3 distinct stages:

  1. Message-Market-Fit: Are we reaching the right people and is the message resonating? We expect to establish this within 60 days of launching campaigns.

  2. Demand Generation: Are campaigns driving the right people to want to learn more about you and what you do? We expect to see meaningful results after 3 – 4 months of having campaigns in-market.

  3. Pipeline and Revenue: Have we created enough demand with the right people to generate revenue? We expect to see marketing-sourced pipeline withing 6 – 9 months of having campaigns in-market and revenue within 9 – 12 months of having campaigns in-market.


NOTE: Your exact results timeline may be different, depending on existing market awareness, market penetration and sales cycle length.

The beauty of the Relationship VelocityTM Framework is that it allows us to identify the why—why is something working or not working. Traditional funnel models are still important because they can help us understand the what—what is and isn’t working—but it’s measuring relationship health and progression that helps us understand why, and how to fix and further scale.

Once we identify messaging that resonates, and build experiences that address the points of friction, we can then measure how the combination of message plus experience is moving relationships forward—or not.

Over time, this allows us to glean deeper insights and build more accurate models based on predictable behaviors.

More tactically, we look at three pillars of attribution to triangulate on the real marketing impact:

  • Click-Based attribution, which is the technology-based multi-touch attribution models marketers have become over-reliant on. They have their place and value, but they shouldn’t be the only source of your measurement data.

  • Self-reported attribution is a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures, including “how did you hear about us?” form fields, vanity URL visits, vanity email inbounds, etc.

  • Performance correlations is where the rubber really hits the road, as this is where we look to correlate, through things like suppression testing and time-series analysis, what impact various changes in the marketing mix are having on business results.

Our Relationship Velocity™ Framework leverages traditional revenue marketing funnel metrics, and connects them to metrics that measure relationship progression and health. Before you even sign a contract with us, we’ll discuss your business goals during the sales process. And we use those insights to come up with mutually agreed upon success measures, so there are no surprises once we start working together.

Not only have we tested  Relationship VelocityTM with our clients across a variety of industries, our entire go-to-market strategy is built using this framework. Everything we recommend for clients, we test on ourselves first, and that’s how we know it works!

Team & Stakeholder Involvement

Our team and engagement model are built to flex up or down based on your existing resources. We are experts in building and executing against our Relationship VelocityTM Framework. As long as we are put in a position to drive strategy, we can work with any resources you currently have at your disposal. The one caveat we will mention is that our team is already optimized to execute, so depending on how much of a mindset shift this approach is for your team and existing partners, it may impact how quickly we execute and ultimately time-to-result.
Our goal is to make things as streamlined as possible for your team. That said, there will be key junctures during the engagement where we need to work together and get your input and feedback. Usually, the first 3 months are much more intensive, especially as we are doing stakeholder and customer interviews. Then we switch to an easier ongoing meeting and deliverable cadence.
Unfortunately this is a deal breaker. A marketer without access to direct customer insights is pretty much throwing darts with their eyes closed. You wouldn’t want that, would you? We know it can be challenging, but we promise it’s worth it. We’ll provide you with all the assets necessary to put your internal stakeholders at ease about this process.

Services

No, we do not. We’re happy to work with your development team or external vendor to ensure your website is technically sound and SEO friendly, but we don’t provide development services in-house. If you need a recommendation, let us know. We have trusted partners and can help consult and manage web projects for retainer clients, if needed.

No we do not. We know more than enough to be dangerous in marketing analytics and operations, but if you’re looking for custom data models or custom technology implementations, we’ve got some great recommendations for you.

Yes we do! We believe performance marketing is key to building relationships at scale. It’s a critical part of demand generation and content distribution, and we have top class performance marketers on our team. We do not, however, offer paid media as a stand alone service. Instead it’s layered strategically into our overall Relationship VelocityTM approach.

Yes we do! We believe content is king when it comes to building relationships at scale. We have some top class content marketers on our team, and we employ amazing copywriters as needed. We do not, however, offer content marketing, copywriting, or content development services as a stand alone offering. Instead, it’s strategically layered into our overall Relationship VelocityTM approach.

We believe organic search is still a valuable channel when it comes to building relationships at scale, but it is only that—a single channel. When it comes to SEO, we focus on quality content that ranks well and drives results, and we work with your development team to ensure your website is technically sound. If, however, you are looking for someone to do link building and technical SEO, that isn’t something we offer or specialize in.

Not the traditional branding services you might be thinking of. While we do help clients with their Strategic Brand Narratives and Go-To-Market Messaging, we do not offer a full creative branding design package. We do admire that kind of talent and have some great recommendations if you need branding work done. 

We believe good creative is often the difference between content that simply gets attention and content that builds strong relationships. Because of that, we do offer creative services in a limited capacity. We focus only on content design (including ad creative). Specifically: content design that is part of our Relationship VelocityTM offering. If you’re looking for help with sell sheets, board decks, website redesign, or branding, we are happy to recommend some great creative resources, and can help consult for retainer clients, if needed.