When we first met our client, they had a vision for their business, but they’d never really been able to implement it. They helped clients every day who wanted to sell their businesses, but when it came time to market their own services, they felt lost.
They knew they needed a marketing strategy to get things up and running, and they had a general idea of where they wanted to go, but no clear pathway from A to B.
They were doing very little in the way of outreach — mostly 1-to-1 networking within their personal networks — but they just had no coordinated strategy or method of measuring success and failure.
So the leadership team reached out to us for help.
They loved that we were well-versed in the exit-planning world and understood what they did for their clients, something many other marketing companies just didn’t get. They were ready to work with us to define their vision for the future and make it happen.
Discovering Their Vision
We sat down with our client and walked them through the Vision Value Model™, helping them to clearly define their vision for the future of their organization.
We showed them how they could use marketing as a catalyst for change in their organization — to help them get where they wanted to be.
The main thing they wanted to do in the upcoming 3–5 years was to bring on new business advisors who were experts in selling businesses in a specific vertical, and while they’d been trying to make that happen, they’d gotten stuck.
They had run into the classic business owner problem — they tried to learn marketing on their own and run it themselves, only to get lost in the weeds. As a result, they’d been wasting their time on non-revenue-generating activities.
On top of that, they had purchased several tools and resources that they weren’t taking full advantage of (but were paying full price for) — another common problem.
They knew that new business advisors would only want to come on board if they knew they’d be supported with the marketing tools and resources they’d need to be successful. Past experience proved that there was a direct correlation between the support they give new advisors and how much those advisors accomplish.
Their vision was to have new advisors knocking down their doors to join up because they believe they’ll be successful if they work for our client.
Once we had a clear idea of their vision, we got to work.
Building Processes and Business Value
Something that makes a business extremely attractive to potential buyers (not to mention highly successful) is repeatable processes. By putting the right processes in place, the business is able to scale exponentially.
That’s exactly what we started working on for our client.
You see, they needed to do more than just hit some revenue targets — they needed to forge the foundation on which their future could be built.
We started by reviewing all their assets and their current processes, sifting through resources and bottlenecks to find exactly where opportunities lay and changes needed to be made.
We then built out a complete marketing strategy utilizing those resources as effectively as possible (including their website and CRM by Deal Studio, an amazing tool that hadn’t been utilized effectively yet).
After that, we designed the processes that they needed, building effective lead-generation pipelines (and the marketing assets to support them) that they could hand over to any new advisor, allowing them to start building their own books of business.
Finally, we created extremely detailed 12-month playbooks for every type of marketing they’d be doing.
Getting Into the Details
Each playbook was as granular as possible, showing them exactly what to do and how to do it every month.
All those playbooks were gathered together and linked to a single, simple index that they can access at any time from anywhere, allowing them to review objectives, check off tasks, and share those playbooks with whomever they wanted to.
Many of those playbooks were designed to help them establish repeatable marketing processes, such as how to provide collaborative education to local centers of influence (COIs) like financial planners.
This allows new business advisors to come on board and immediately start making connections with these referral partners, even if they’ve never had to do this before and have no idea where to start.
We created playbooks walking them through identifying the best potential referral partners, how to find these people, how to build a relationship with them, and how to convert them into a regular referral source.
Each playbook is more than just a broad guide — it contains extremely specific instructions on how to implement these processes with the tools available, how to measure success, what to do if they’re working, and how to pivot if they’re not.
These playbooks were designed for any marketing team to be able to use — in this case, our client decided they wanted to work with us to implement this marketing strategy.
Working with a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
Most businesses don’t find it financially feasible to bring on a full-time chief marketing officer until they’ve grown pretty big, which might mean they can only outsource a few specific marketing tasks to an agency.
The other option is to bring on a single marketing person to do everything, which means they are probably going to get so lost in the weeds that they can miss the big picture — they also tend not to have as much experience in the field as a full-time CMO would.
That’s where a fractional CMO can come in extra handy. Our job is act as your chief marketing officer, implementing what needs to be implemented while keeping an eye on the big picture.
You get access to our decades of knowledge and experience without having to pay the premium that a full-time CMO charges.
When our client brought us on board, we put the playbooks we’d created into action immediately.
We were able to quickly get all the processes we’d designed into place in the first quarter, ensuring all the top priorities were taken care of. Within that timeframe, we were able to generate 40% of the lead volume they needed to reach their goals for the first year.
On top of that, they were able to get guest-speaking opportunities on top podcasts in their industry, improving their brand awareness and positioning themselves as thought leaders.
They are now at a point where they can bring on a new business advisor full-time to take care of an entire vertical that they weren’t previously able to tap into — that advisor had tons of marketing collateral and a fully implemented CRM at the fingertips by the time they’d been onboarded.
Everything our client wanted for years was put together in a single quarter — there’s no telling how far they’ll go in the next one.
Build Marketing Processes into Your Business and Grow Your Business’s Value
If you’re ready to get a clear marketing strategy for next year and beyond, if you’re ready to put powerful marketing processes in place that will help you achieve your vision for the future of your business, then we’d love to talk.