First Steps to Selecting a Marketing Agency …
Before starting a search or engaging with any marketing agency, a B2B tech startup must have a clear understanding of the requirements and budget available for any given activity. This information then helps inform your selection criteria. Identifying the ideal agency for your startup involves a thorough evaluation of the agency’s capability, as well as their expertise in the tech sector, their understanding of your startup’s specific market niche and their track record of success with similar companies. It’s important to prioritise agencies that not only offer innovative marketing solutions but also demonstrate a clear understanding of your proposition, target audience and business goals.
Shortlist Your Options
The compatibility of working styles, transparency in communication and flexibility in adapting to your evolving needs are also important considerations. Selecting an agency is not to be rushed; allow enough time to do your due diligence and decide within a specific time. Four to eight weeks is usually enough time to complete the beauty parade and pick your winner. Create a list of potential agencies to make enquiries and ask your initial screening questions. From there, create a shortlist of companies who will pitch for your business. This will be a head-to-head style process where you evaluate potential agencies against each other.
Alignment is Key
Three or four agencies is enough for your shortlist; any more unnecessarily elongates the process, which then becomes protracted. Make sure you use standard criteria to consistently measure the responses from each pitch, so you can score and compare them. A comprehensive vetting process, including discussions with existing clients, reviewing case studies and even running pilot projects, can help ensure your chosen agency aligns well with your strategic objectives. Any provider you work with must understand and buy into your potential for success and be a partner for growth. You will automatically know when you have found the “people” you want to work with, but you must be able to articulate the reasons why precisely.
Consider Small Agencies
Any agency you consider must be prepared to allow you to start the engagement modestly, with a flexible and low commitment arrangement that permits you to scale up or down in line with budgets. Don’t just speak to large established agencies with a blue-chip client list, because that doesn’t automatically make them better at anything, and their costs and terms are often onerous. Speak to agencies of all sizes relevant to your space; you may find the smaller ones are far more innovative, responsive and accommodating. Smaller companies tend to be hungrier for success, just like your startup, as well as flexible and easy to deal with, compared to larger established agencies with their rigid and bureaucratic ways of working. Smaller agencies are also more likely to be a closer cultural fit to your startup.
The Quality of the Individuals Makes the Difference
Larger agencies may have impressive pitch teams who dazzle to win your business but then hand you off to less experienced junior colleagues to do the work and run your account. Always be sure to meet with the people you will be working with and evaluate their individual quality before making a commitment. Perhaps even insist that the pitch is conducted by the account team who will be doing the work. As with any agency, it’s always the attributes of the people in the team doing the day-to-day tasks that make the difference; the company name above the door is almost irrelevant by comparison. This is why being impressed by famous, award-winning agencies with reassuringly expensive fees is not necessarily a good idea. In such a scenario, your small startup will inevitably get drowned out by the demands of bigger paying customers. You want to make sure your custom, while modest to begin with, still means something to the partner you choose, so they are dedicated to servicing your needs and keeping you as a valued client.
Appropriate Commercial Terms
Many startups cannot afford to be tied into expensive, long-term agreements that are rigid and commit you to extended notice periods. Whenever I have represented a small tech business and been in contract negotiations with an agency unwilling to compromise unfairly onerous terms, I have walked away and found a better partner to work with. There are many agencies that will be happy to work on more agreeable terms; ideally, a rolling monthly contract should suffice in most cases. They understand the financial challenges of being a small ambitious startup with limited resources and are generally a better match. Their true reward is to help you grow and scale by proving their worth and earning your trust, respect and loyalty. This is how strong, long-term relationships are built and valued.
Once the Honeymoon is Over
Partnering with the right marketing agency can make a positive impact, helping to accelerate growth, enhance brand visibility and drive sales. However, the relationship between a startup and its marketing agency(s) must be carefully managed to ensure it yields the optimum outcome. Initial results can often be impressive, only to tail off after the honeymoon period is over. This can reflect the early excitement of the account team giving you unusual attention, as they get to grips with learning about your business, only for their focus to shift elsewhere when they win a more lucrative new client. Keep a close watch on the performance of the agency, giving them clear targets and instructions, combined with the support and conditions they need to succeed.
No Agency Can Succeed Without Your Support
You must schedule regular meetings to monitor activity and output as well as create plans. Providing regular feedback to track progress and discuss any shortfall in performance is key, but don’t forget to also credit the agency with good results when appropriate. A marketing agency is a partner, and they must work as an extension of your team, never in isolation. I have seen many agencies fail because they were instructed by a busy founder with high expectations, but who then left them alone to deliver without any real input or support. This can only ever have disastrous outcomes, leading to inevitable blame and disappointment in the agency, which is why a founder is not the right person to select and manage marketing agencies. Full partnership, transparency, support and collaboration are all essential to achieving success together. You get out what you put in.
Growth is Seldom Linear
As you execute your marketing plan, it’s not unusual for early success to be strong, as motivated prospects feeling the pain of not having your solution are responsive to your message. At this stage, you are attracting the low hanging fruit, winning early adopters who are ready for your offer. Be mindful that as you develop over time, your growth rate may do one of two things: either exponentially grow as you hit the widespread adoption wave for your solution, or new business may actually slow down, as you engage prospects who are at different stages of awareness and not yet convinced or ready to buy a solution like yours. Growth is seldom a linear curve, and you will experience peaks and troughs in demand. Many prospects may not yet fully understand your proposition, others may be using a similar solution, and some will already be in advanced talks with a competitor. You must have sales tactics and processes for dealing with all these scenarios, including how to de-position competitors and substitute solutions during the sales process.
Monitor Conversions Closely
As you grow and engage with more prospects, you may find converting new sales opportunities becomes harder and takes longer; this is where sales teams really earn their money. It’s important you can track the sales pipeline and know the win/loss ratio of leads generated, as well as the reasons why deals are won and lost. Lead attribution will help you understand the main sources of your leads, so you can make effective decisions on which activities to focus on. Feeding this information back to your agency, if they are engaged in lead generation activity, is important. This helps them to understand what is working well and what is working less well, so they can refine and adjust their tactics accordingly. This is all part of how an agency shares your challenges to help you overcome them.
Work Through Challenges Together
While marketing to prospects and converting some of them to customers, you may need to nurture what we call the “unresponsive silent majority” of your target audience. This is where content marketing strategies that focus on education and thought leadership are needed to raise awareness and make your proposition appealing. Teaming up with knowledgeable marketing agencies can help you implement strategies to motivate inert prospects. These prospects just need a nudge in the right direction to become active, and experienced agencies can be helpful in reversing stagnant demand. You will need to try many different tactics and channels to reach your prospects in meaningful ways, which is one of the reasons why working with agencies can be so effective.
A Winning Partnership
Working with marketing agencies to help you succeed by increasing the number of leads, improving lead quality and accelerating sales conversions is a collaborative effort that requires close partnership. Engaging with them as an extension of your own internal team is essential, as this helps ensure your conversations are positive and focused on what you can do together to win your battles and improve every opportunity. All startups will likely require the help of agencies to manage and navigate through each phase of growth. It represents an investment of time, resources and energy that can reap beneficial rewards for all parties involved.
You may want to read: “Startups Must Understand Buyer Personas.”
