Frequently Asked Questions.
Process
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We follow a project framework to ensure that the strategies we help clients develop align with corporate strategies and are grounded in a solid understanding of their customer. Within that framework, we follow proven processes that address each component. How much emphasis and effort we apply to each part varies by client. We take into account their needs and preexisting content, processes, and technology.
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Your business complexity, the maturity of your existing content, processes, and technology, and your team's available time and resources determine project length. We typically provide continuous support anywhere from a few months to a few years, customized to your team’s experience and bandwidth.
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Most marketing agencies approach things from a creative foundation. They are creators and builders at heart, with strong skillsets in graphic design, web design, and social media marketing. We come at things from a different perspective. Our foundation is business strategy, marketing strategy, and marketing technology. Our goal is to unite marketing, sales, and service teams with common platforms and a ground truth set of customer data. We focus on building a customer experiences that is grounded in a deep understanding of your customers. We partner with designers, developers, and content creators to deliver the assets your company needs to produce a compelling customer experience. In that sense, we complement marketing agencies rather than compete with them.
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We offer ongoing support to complement the skills and availability of your internal resources. We have designed our maintenance services to help you maximize value from your technology while connecting you, as needed, with specialists for creative pieces such as content generation, ad campaign design and optimization, and video production.
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The boundaries between B2B, B2B2C, and B2C strategies are blurring as corporate buyers bring habits and preferences from their home lives into the workplace. But, our experience is concentrated in the B2B sector and we see a significant opportunity to help those businesses adopt approaches that are already prevalent in the B2C sector. We assess B2B2C opportunities on a case-by-case basis to see whether they are likely to benefit more from a B2B or B2C approach. We know some great B2C experts to whom we can refer you if the B2C route seems more compelling.
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Not at all. We’re focused on businesses with an appetite to grow and a budget to invest in projects, software, and marketing. This includes companies going through their first growth journey, companies regrowing after suffering the negative impacts of sector contraction or macroeconomic recession, and older businesses seeking to rejuvenate and grow in new ways. The common characteristic is a willingness to invest in transforming the business to achieve revenue growth in today’s buyer-controlled markets.
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Through our connections in the angel, venture capital, corporate venture capital, private equity, and commercial banking communities, we can help some businesses raise capital. However, we only do this on a selective basis when we see a clearly investible opportunity and preferably when there is an ongoing project between Strategic Piece and the company.
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Training is an important component in many of our projects. It ensures that your team understands, adopts, and enjoys any technology that we help you implement. For more general marketing and sales skills training, we are happy to refer you to dedicated resources specializing in those areas.
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An interactive relationship with our clients is key to successful project delivery. You know your business, market, solutions, customers, and competitors much better than we, and those insights are critical to designing effective strategies. But, we know that time is a precious commodity, so we structure our interactions to be as effective and non-intrusive as possible. We use many communication platforms and tools (e.g. phone, email, Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, and Google Workspace). We do our best to accommodate our clients' existing ways of working. At a minimum, we will hold weekly meetings with project stakeholders to review progress, clarify next steps, keep everyone on the same page, and sustain momentum.
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We’re pretty good at writing and editing content, but you know much more about your business, market, customers, and competitors than we do. So, while we can help you turn rough ideas into compelling content, we rely on your team for the starting points. There are various ways we can collect your input, ranging from handwritten notes to recorded interviews, and we have proven methods for repurposing content across multiple channels and formats.
Cost + Compensation
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A typical implementation project involving a strategy review, customer analysis, strategy design, planning, rollout, and training will cost anywhere from $20,000 to $75,000 depending on the size and complexity of your business. This does not include software licenses (typically $1,000-4,000 per month) or marketing costs for advertising and social media (your total marketing budget should be 10-15% of your targeted revenue).
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Hourly rates encourage service providers to pad their time with “busy work”, so we don’t use them. We charge a monthly retainer that’s linked to an overall estimated project cost. This gives our clients predictable costs and helps them to manage cashflow.
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There’s no way to significantly reduce your upfront costs and get a reliable read on long-term results potential. A better question would be: how do we implement and optimize this approach to ensure maximum revenue growth and return on our investment? That strategy lies at the heart of our implementation process. We develop your strategy and plan while considering the nuances of your business, market, solution, and customers.
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Start what? If your goal is to experiment with a few random acts of marketing and see whether anything sticks, then publish a few blog posts and see if anyone notices. Odds are nobody will. Strategic marketing requires focus, intent, commitment, measurement, optimization, and patience. Real results take 12-18 months as successive layers of marketing and sales achieve the 12-20 touch points buyers must encounter before trusting and engaging with your business. To design and implement an effective go-to-market or growth strategy, you must have an appetite for significant revenue growth and be ready to commit the necessary time and investment.
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Check out our blog post on the range of marketing spend that’s appropriate for a growth-oriented B2B company. We have also created a calculator to help you see the numbers based on your situation. Your total marketing budget should be ~10-15% of your targeted annual revenue (i.e. $100-150k for each million dollars of revenue).
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We never work for free – and you shouldn’t want us to, either. Your project would be relegated to the bottom of our priority list, only getting attention after our paying customers have been satisfied. However, we do like the idea of having some “skin in the game” and frequently include success-based elements in our project agreements. Get in touch and let’s discuss how this might apply to your project.
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While we are happy to put our money where our mouth is and frequently include success-based elements in our project agreements, we seldom take on projects where our compensation is entirely at risk. For equity compensation to make sense, your stock should either be liquid (publicly traded) or readily valued (mature business with established enterprise value and clear pathway to a liquidity event), and our involvement should be explicitly linked to a step-change in equity value or to the company reaching a point where we can monetize our share. A combination of retainer fees, success fees, and equity can usually be found that links our success with yours.
Client Expectations + Results
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How much time do you have? We tailor our project plans to fit with your team’s availability. We typically spend 2-8 hours per week with some or all of your team, depending on the phase of the project and the speed at which we’re collectively trying to deliver a solution. It’s key to have the right people from your side involved at the right times, and we will delay or rearrange the project if we need to wait on the right person to contribute.
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Provided you have a proven product, initial market traction, and an appropriate budget, we are all about helping you close strategy and process gaps. If we don’t think you’re in a position where we can add enough value, we’ll give you candid feedback on the gaps you need to close and steps you might take to close them. We’ll be here whenever you’re ready.
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Are you ready to hand them the keys to your revenue generating future? Do they have the knowledge and experience to set a strategy that aligns with your corporate goals? Will you grant them authority to commit the organization to a technology platform that unites marketing, sales, and service? Hopefully, you answered “no” to most, if not all, of those questions. What we do requires vision, leadership, expertise, and the ability and authority to bring the whole customer-facing team along. Once the systems are up and running, your marketing coordinator will play a key role in keeping things moving, but it’s not appropriate to have them lead the entire project.
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Not ready to start marketing usually means not completely sure about your solution (product, pricing, market, target customer) and/or don’t have time, budget, or both to invest. If that’s the case, focus on reaching those milestones first. If something else is causing your hesitation, let’s set up a call to discuss. You might be overthinking what marketing means for your business or underestimating its importance at this stage in your growth journey.
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We hear versions of this question all the time. The content you generate should first-and-foremost answer common questions that your prospective customers are asking. Secondly, you should share relevant information that your prospects and customers will find valuable, drawing on your sector expertise. You'll also want to highlight the challenges your products and solutions help customers address. Content covering all of those themes lies throughout your organization. The key is getting it out of your team’s heads and into a consistent, shareable format. We can help turn those rough ideas into compelling content. There are many ways we can collect that input, ranging from handwritten notes to recorded interviews,. We have proven methods for repurposing content across multiple channels and formats.
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Investors, particularly B2B investors, tend to undervalue marketing while clamoring for a go-to-market strategy. B2B companies have traditionally depended on boots-on-the-ground sales for much of their revenue while marketing delivered brand recognition, collateral, and promo goods in support of that sales effort. Today, the game has changed. B2B buyers are performing most of their research and evaluation online before contacting vendors. Companies that recognize this shift and adjust their strategies accordingly will dramatically outperform companies that are slow to adapt. Your investors need to understand this threat as well as the opportunity that exists in aligning your approach with the way today’s B2B buyers operate. Be clear about the consequences of not investing (becoming obsolete and getting left behind) and the implications of investing in effective solutions (sector leadership and revenue growth).
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Not necessarily. You will likely want to make some updates as we fine-tune messaging and set up analytics tools to track your website visitor interactions. If your website is due for a facelift, combining that project with go-to-market strategy development will likely make sense, but we recommend approaching what can become a behemoth of a project in phases. Consistency across your customer-facing assets and properties is important, so an outdated or inconsistent website could quickly become a liability.
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Yikes! There are some very philosophical answers to that question. If you’ve read our website from tip to toe and still have unanswered questions, then we’d love to chat. If you think your business could benefit from a strategy copilot and you check most of the boxes under “Are We Right for Each Other?” on our homepage, let’s set up a time to discuss what a project might look like. Other than that, we recommend trusting the little voice in your head that’s saying this is a no-brainer. Start by getting in touch to set up a call!
Results
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Yes, this can work for any B2B sector, provided you commit to growth mindset and are willing to invest in content, processes, and technology. Letting go of “old school” beliefs about your target customer and their approach to buying is the first big step toward unlocking new customers and revenue growth. Importantly, others in your sector may already be adopting this approach, putting your business at risk of suddenly becoming obsolete.
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You should feel the difference right away. Marketing will have a clearer understanding of your customers and how to communicate with them. Your sales team will be working on richer, better-defined leads that are receptive to engagement because they’ve been properly identified and nurtured. Your support team will feel connected to other customer-facing team members and better able to identify and realize new business opportunities. And your leadership team will have regular – even real-time – insight into what’s working best and where to focus improvement efforts. Building and engaging an audience, generating leads, and converting them into revenue takes time – depending on your sales cycle it might be 12-18 months before you see the full benefits – but you’ll have rich analytical insight along the way that shows progress is being made.
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If only that were the case. Unfortunately, buyers, markets, marketing, and marketing technology constantly change. Social media platforms adjust their algorithms. Groups of buyers change their preferences. Competitors exert influence on the market. We hope to quickly find effective solutions based on our experience and knowledge of current market trends, but there is always an element of experimentation needed to uncover nuanced improvements and achieve the best results. How else would we know whether a buyer would prefer to see your face in an advert or a cute puppy?
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So many factors influence the outcomes of your marketing, sales, and service efforts that it’s impossible to guarantee any particular result. We work to maximize the value created by whatever level of investment you choose to make, but external factors as well as internal decisions based on incomplete information, mean that we don’t always succeed to the same degree. If your marketing and sales efforts are missing the mark, we will regroup and revisit your strategies to see what we might have missed or where our combined assumptions have proven erroneous. Then, we will adjust and go back to the market.
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There is no such thing as a “typical ROI” because too many other factors come into play. For example, your marketing could be working exceptionally well but if your sales team fails to convert qualified leads into sales, the revenue outcome will be poor and return on investment low. Or, your sales might coincidentally benefit from a run of high-value referrals or unusually high conversion rates, boosting revenue and making the marketing ROI seem exceptional. Since we can’t predict or control any of these scenarios, we prefer to establish relevant metrics to track performance within each piece of your business and use those to assess success. Ultimately, the only goal that matters is revenue, but it takes more than an investment in marketing to make that happen.
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How much money are you willing to spend? Leads can be generated by direct, account-based marketing (ABM) as well as through inbound marketing. How many leads your ABM team can generate will depend on the size of the group and the addressable market they’re tackling. Leads from inbound marketing will depend on impressions (how many people see your posts and ads), click through rate (how many people who see your posts and ads click on them and visit your website and landing page), and conversion rate (how many visitors are interested in your offer and become leads). The more you invest to sponsor posts and ads, the more impressions you will generate. The better targeted and designed that content, the higher your click through rate will be. The more valuable and relevant your offer, the higher your conversion rate will be. Each of these factors will be positively influenced by solid strategy and deep customer understanding.