You build it. You own it. You reap the long-term value. Stop renting hours & insights - create your own revenue growth asset!
This advisory model combines the outside benefit of best practices and current trends with your understandable preference to build your own evergreen capability. It's built on my revenue growth process & IP. It also overcomes two shortcomings of outsourcing - cost and expertise. No agency can provide the in depth knowledge of your industry, or the pan silo perspective necessary for ongoing success.
The goal of my process is to create a system your team can use to propel your marketing forward. In order to do that, we need to start by understanding your current business, your marketing, what assets you have, and what assets you need in order to grow.
Revenue growth is an increasingly complex challenge. Many companies invest in the work, but because of seemingly insignificant details, fail to realize results.
The details are critical - and a solid program is built on a firm footing. We know from experience that ad-hoc execution generally fails. While often consulting "assessments" are vacuous, we start with the following comprehensive and actionable assessment & execution plan which creates the context and direction for the ongoing work.
The initial work takes from 45-90 days and requires access to key leadership and staff members, but doesn't involve more than a couple days of any individual's time.
With specific direction from the plan, and context from the assessment, we collectively identify priorities, identify work required and match it against available resources (with our guidance on reasonable requirements for different activities.)
This generally involves:
Once the foundation is in place then your team takes over, with advice and coaching, for the next three months.
After that it's your call. We can continue the coaching and advisory work in three month increments. While some clients roll from quarter to quarter - even opting in advance for annual assistance - others prefer to try quarter on followed by quarter off.
Want to pause periodically for your team to consolidate their lessons learned? No problem. You can license access to the toolkit, framework, content and maturity model at a reduced cost or simply go it alone at no charge - building on the expertise you've developed.
Clients for whom I'm most successful often have some common attributes:
A profitable middle market company ($10MM - $1B). They want to build internally towards long-term success. Eager to produce IP and assets around their revenue growth.
Has a growth mindset and believes you can always be improving. Is willing to buy into the process and fully engage. Encourages a culture of accountability at all levels.
Industrial, manufacturers, capital equipment are common. Most, however, are in industrial manufacturing, capital equipment, automation, instrumentation and related industries.
Traditionally, they haven't done much marketing but are now investing in marketing automation. They have a website, but it is not driving many leads. May be wondering if this was a mistake.
Normally rely on outside sales and indirect channels. When they get to the table, they close deals. They have some data management, but their metrics and process are poorly defined.
Yes. These elements all must be stitched together for it to really work. And honestly much of what passes for research is simply too shallow.
The up-front work depends on the complexity (e.g. how many major product categories to how many significantly different buyer types). It's generally between $35-70K.
The ongoing advisory is a simple $7K/month, including the toolkit and resources.
The toolkit and resources alone are $3K/month.
As described in Implementation and Process there's a formal structure. That's the baseline. It's common that other discussions are required to explore new initiatives.
Generally within a day. Often much faster and sometimes immediately. But plan on a day.
Yes. After the up front work then we'll have one quarter of coaching work which includes access to all the resources. After that it's up to you. Want to keep up the coaching? Fine. Want to drop that but keep the toolkit and resources? That's fine too. Coaching automatically renews by the quarter. Stop at any time with written notice 30 days in advance. (Please note that you can't turn the toolkit on and off - there's set up time with that.)
No. Remember your team will need to do the work. I'll make it easy for them to do it effectively and efficiently, but they need to do it. Additionally your people need to manage the leads and sell the deals.
I can provide representative examples, and confirm that I've never seen it fail as long as a company has management commitment and at least one person focused on executing internally.
Yes. If you want consistent, asynchronous assistance. Long, convoluted email strings don't help anyone....
I can, and do. The key is management and staffing. If we're never able to meet on schedule and accountabilities slip because of competing priorities and limited staff, it's probably not a good fit. On the other hand I have small business clients who have realized substantial growth through our work.
After all, increasing sales from 5 to $6MM in a year, at 50% gross margin is a great return on $110K in work - especially because this work creates and maintains momentum like a flywheel.
Edward Marsh, Principal
Presidential "E" Award Winner
Consilium is a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business
“Ed will always be the first consultant I ever liked!” - Earl P., Sales Engineer & VP of Sales
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