3 Ways A Growth Partner Solves Competing Business Interests
A good growth partner gives you business focus.
What are growth partners?
There is another way to grow business — using the power of partnerships, with a targeted business development team…
Partners are dedicated allies — able to create and connect more value and certainty, in partnership, than each could alone.
You bring your offers, capabilities, and ambitions.
Growth partners then have just one job to compliment them: Growth.
They bring their own systems, resources, and proven team of A-players — driven by experience, with actionable data to create measurable results.
And, they give your team an accountability and performance coach — to benchmark their own results against those of the top performers in your market.
Consultants might offer you new information, and experience for alternatives — but are often reliant upon your time to work on the recommendations.
Marketing managers are often excellent project managers, but become all-consumed with creative, copywriting, and analytics — consuming their capacity for broader market-research, and implementing tools to refine the direct sales journey experience.
The growth partner business model is a new business service — to save time, and deliver increased cash flow from your existing resources.
Their primary objectives are to protect your reputation, promote your offering, and find new sources of revenue.
Let's look at how your internal team, or existing agency, can benefit from having a focused external ally to solve your competing interests for time, resources, and focus…
1. In-house marketing competition
The challenge many marketing teams and agencies find is; the biggest competitor to their services are their own teams and clients.
Why?
Because the questions will always be:
Why should we pay an agency — when we can get our team to do it, or hire more staff?
Which then becomes:
What are we paying for all these people and systems to do, what are they all doing?
You can do anything OR everything — but not both.
Most internal teams spend significant amounts of time marketing the business, within the business, to the existing team, clients, and stakeholders — with never enough time dedicated to new business, unless it happens to walk in the door.
Teams naturally do what they see their peers do. Believing that being a constant presence on social media timelines, and attending the occasional event, will be enough to hope to be considered at some point — by some luck, or some chance demand event — with prospects just happening to recall your existence.
Marketing teams gets pulled into every communication, fixing presentations, working as an ad-hoc design, development, IT, and being an event management agency — all to make sure everything is “on brand” for “awareness” — with finite budgets, and infinite expectations.
Then, having to report on all the things to prove what already happened.
Only to be directed by in-house interests — and limited by existing data and systems for attribution and iteration.
Hiring then adds costs before benefits — without any guarantee of results.
Role-filling becomes the only KPI, with the remedy to all problems becoming creating or changing roles until everyone is comfortably coasting again.
Experience becomes constrained to managing multiple social media accounts, merchandising and stationery supplies, and puzzling over website statistics.
Systems get blamed, technical debts accrue, and change management becomes a battle to persuade anyone why they need to do anything different, or new, or finish what they started.
So, what are the best tasks to keep in-house, and what can leverage an agency for?
And, what can a growth partner do differently?
Communications and collaboration?
That's in-house marketing.
Focusing on growing your capabilities, and service delivery.
Persuading your team on the value of solving the needs that your offers claim to serve — the things that directors need the most attention given to — and then ensuring your clients get the results they need you focused on.
Your growth partner can add objective outsider's feedback on your offers — to help refine for the market demand that they'll be finding and bringing to you.
Existing shareholders and stakeholders?
Again, in-house marketing.
Showing those invested in the team what's happening, why, and persuading them to allocate budgets, resources, and re-investments where they are needed most.
Sell them on the benefits of a growth partner, and show them you're proactive in giving them the best returns on their investment of both capital, and attention.
Regulators and compliance?
These equally important audiences also need to your presentation to be as a competent, conscientious, and trustworthy participant in the market.
Keep it in-house — and those responsible, closer to those holding to account.
Adopt your growth partner's strict GDPR and algorithmic compliance processes — to save from creating your own, without experience for all the hazards and gotchas in modern marketing platforms.
Branding?
The in-house team is closest to the culture and vision for an organisation, if additional inspiration or skill is needed, bring in a design agency.
They will either evolve the brand — by internal committee, or as an occasional creative process with your design-led agency.
In-house teams are closest to the existing audience; colleagues, stakeholders, and clients. It's natural for these relationships to be direct, every day, and subjective or introspective.
Your growth partner is a client and partner, like any other, and will help with accessibility, optimisation, and A/B testing the best performing sales assets.
Operations and product-market fit
This is a natural responsibility for your in-house team.
You can't offer what your team doesn't believe in — and your team won't believe in what they didn't design and create, based on their direct experiences.
The in-house team is best placed to define and refine your offering.
A good growth partner will be an objective ally in accelerating this process.
Growth partners become your trusted market research and early feedback provider — without the risks of experimenting on your live audience.
Lead generation
Lead generation is something that a good growth partner business will have broader market experience at — with benchmarks for performance, results, and realistic returns to plan for.
Growth partners can research entire markets, find prospects that match your ideal client profile, and make the introductions — removing the distractions of tyre-kickers, technology maintenance, or lack of performance tracking.
You want a growth partner agency that's invested in single-purpose systems — to pick up the heavy-lifting of repetitive, laborious data mining at scale, and takes on meticulous testing and refinement of messages — to get results, faster.
They should bring systems that have no requirements from your own IT or staff resources.
Then present your brand consistently, with respect to all terms and compliance expectations for each channel.
Your team is then only concerned with is handling more pre-qualified connections — so growing your brand experience is relaxed, confident, and inspiring.
Sales funnels
Your sales funnel is more-than-likely a customer service process — supplied with enquiries from general brand awareness, or being present on the same platforms that people do their product research on, where all your competitors are, too.
A good growth partner will fill in every gap in your sales funnels — making sure you maximise conversions at every stage, and out-rank competitors on every channel.
They will ensure you educate and qualify prospects throughout the sales process, help eliminate wasted efforts, and build a library of responses to every concern.
You'll be reminded to make the most of every possible opportunity to accrue brand assets, in the form of; case studies, testimonials, reviews, articles, PR, collaborations, influencers, and backlinks.
They will track and train your team to make sure that you capture the right audience, at the beginning of their discovery journey — and build on every interaction to inspire confidence with every step that follows.
Only with an outsider's point of view, can they give you the actionable feedback that your clients might not, and your team often doesn't get time to compare.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Without a specific and experienced strategy, your search engine rankings are likely accidental, with techniques based on hearsay.
How do you know what's working for everyone else, and still focus on what you feel you need to do?
How do you know what matters the most, the least, and what opportunities there are to improve rankings, from the efforts you're already making being guided.
Your growth partner should have no doubts about the exact steps necessary to rank your website, pages, and social media posts higher on search engines.
If you're not getting to the first page or search results quickly with your content, why not?
Paid ads expensive are rented billboards — and with fewer clicks, due to people's scepticism of the qualifications for an advert placement being bought. They are interruption marketing, or worse subversive, and treated as-such.
Organic ranking is search engine is authenticity, by being endorsed by enough customers, peers, and fellows in your industry for the search engines to rank you accordingly. They are signals of trust — in being the most desirable solution.
2. Recruitment, retention, and systems
The best sales and marketing people know their skills and worth — and once they outgrow the opportunities their current employer offers, often have no choice but to move on to maximise their personal growth, or go independent.
This creates a regular cycle of replacement, on-boarding, and re-acquainting replacement staff with all of the theatre of business — all before your new team members can add value beyond their predecessors.
Your in-house marketing team need to focus on communicating an organisation's vision — at every touch-point — for colleagues and the outside world to buy into.
Your growth partner can research entire markets, and bring new people directly to your brand, for your team to pick up the qualifying and onboarding process.
Recruiting remote staffing
It's difficult, expensive, and distracting for organisations to add satellite offices in other countries — in trying to benefit from the cost-of-living arbitrage, and access to youth advantages, that talent based in other countries may offer.
Plus, the political difficulties in managing equality of treatment of teams between offices, with apparent pay disparities being at odds with cost-efficiency, and keeping all feeling valued.
Businesses need to remain focused, by separation of in-house staffing management, from external service supplies — that can typically self-manage.
It might sound great to have offices around the world but, again, it's all costs before benefits.
Most in-house teams need their HR resources focused on the needs of the service and delivery teams — and diluting their attention with recruitment and retention of non-core skills comes with in-house time-costs and compromises.
Partners already have their costs-covered, with systems and training in place — so can focus on presenting your benefits and opportunities first — carrying with them the credibility of independence in their referrals, to benefit all parties.
Building new systems or working with existing infrastructure
Technology often comes with many promises, for which many later find out become a job in themselves to realise.
Decision junctions prevent progress, as we have to weigh-up costs, pros, cons, compromises, gotchas, training, onboarding, security, and perhaps later migrations or decommissioning.
All now with respect to GDPR laws, and marketing channel terms and conditions.
Organisations are only ever in one of three states:
- Don't have the systems to solve the needs.
- Do have the systems, but aren't using them to their full potential.
- Don't know what they have or need — as everyone has a different opinion, interest, and often beliefs about what can or can't be done — based on limited experience or conflicted sales pitches.
A good growth partner is systems-agnostic.
They have all the systems they need, tried and tested.
They can work with their own systems, or apply the same principles to your own.
The systems are a prerequisite to strategies that scale — but systems cost money.
Growth partners with integrity will work on generating you income — first — and give you experience through that process to have greater certainty on what you really need, or could be making more from.
3. Agencies spread across disciplines
Typically, agencies are brought in to collaborate and work on accelerating deliverables for the in-house team. You fund the cost risks of their results.
They have to be adept at design, development, imagery, video, copywriting, project management, social media campaigns, paid advertising, media buying, systems integrations, online security, print, merchandising, events — you name it.
Specialist skills and experience are needed for things like; brand assets, branding, style guides, a website, adverts, brochures, events, apps, training, etc.
Agencies retain creative and communications talent, and know their worth — selling skilled time and deliverables to the highest bidders.
The agency business model is securing retainers for the equivalent of in-house staffing — shared among clients, without the full-time commitments.
An agency will often do, or figure out how to do, whatever your in-house team asks them to do — regardless of whether it achieves the desired results, as they don't take on any of the risks of performance — and do all they can to learn and deliver on every request you have, that they can find someone to do.
Agency performance is somewhat reliant on your affording their retention, regardless of how long things take — to then spend an amount of time marketing themselves to find more clients to fund their own continuity and growth. It's a tough business, and necessarily multifaceted.
You are the client. Which is nice, if you like shopping for attention, but selling to you necessarily becomes their primary objective for their own job security —which we all respect, but does come with competing interests for budgets when the work is always costs-first.
Don't get us wrong — agencies solve a useful and natural need to acquire a range of skills and services on-demand — and we work to promote many agencies as their growth partner.
It's just important to distinguish, in terms of risk, responsibilities, and expectations — a growth partner is typically a long-term alliance, focused purely on growth.
A good growth partner will work with whatever infrastructure you have for branding and delivery because the majority of their work is as another user of your systems, and bringing their own for all the things you don't need to recreate.
The growth partner business model
Growth-partners are paid on performance.
They need their clients to be able to deliver exceptional, repeatable experiences.
With an ability to generate business, growth partners will choose the clients to work with that have the most potential — for everyone's commensurate reward.
The growth partner model works as dedicated support for the executive team, as a supplier of connections and sales. If they don't deliver, they don't get paid.
You are taking on the reward, at your growth-partner's risk. They have to select the best services for delivery, trusting management with the growth they'll bring.
The deliverables are results in growth. They create and direct the mechanisms that are needed for these results. They don't profit from the time it takes to create anything requested by the in-house team or agency, regardless of effectiveness.
Your growth partners are objective. Looking at your organisation and offers from the outside, as a supplier for their introductions — they represent the market.
A good growth partner will be your most challenging, collaborative, and encouraging external client. Their entire business relies on finding you new business — and ensuring you convert it to measurable, sustainable value.
In short; a growth partner, by their nature, is focused on growth — the skills, experience, and talent needed for that focus — and adapting with the market.
Your new clients come from your growth partner's introductions.
Your growth partner's success relies on your success, and your client's success — not just in spirit, but to make sure everyone gets paid, and achieves their goals.
Cross-market research
With your team's natural focus in your business, the perspective is limited to your organisation's experience, and immediate network.
Growth partners, by definition, work with a range of clients — and with this, access to a broad range of research and testing data.
They bring a continual cycle of finding and introducing the highest-performing tactics, to work on the business of growing their clients.
They have more privileged data. Bringing you what works — and filtering out experimental efforts — mitigating any one client's risks in exploring new concepts.
Markets evolve faster than organisations
Your growth partner's only role is; solve market problems with your solutions.
Effectively, a growth partner becomes a retailer for your then onboarding new business and delivery of satisfying results.
They aren't involved in your team-building, structural, and community activities — although, will be there to celebrate the wins.
They're self-managed, self-trained — and must be proactive.
They are paid on performance — not on presence.
A growth partner's business is following the market, studying the latest tactics, and forming strategies that convert into growth.
They won't waste your time, as they need your focus to be on managing growth, which will need your dedicated attention.
Ideas guy vs opportunity creation
You know your market best from the point of delivery.
A growth-partner will know the opportunities, common across many markets.
It's this comparison and collaboration that creates new opportunities for all.
Knowing about opportunities has all the value of being “ideas guy”.
There's no shortage of ideas and opportunities — there is finite time and attention to give to each.
It's the skill and means to act on an opportunity — to the point of realizing and repeating results — that is the true and only method of creating tangible value.
Money talks
You'd be surprised how much less reporting and explaining you need to do when you can simply buy growth — as and when you need it — and as quickly as you can create capacity.
Of course, everyone working in the business will have ideas on ways to “spend money to make money”, or “cut costs” — only to then spend it again, or in-fact cut investment in capabilities.
However, business development needs to be proactive in creating abundance.
Working with what you already have.
Getting paid more from the existing resources — so you generate the surplus funds to then refine your operations — once they are paid for by sales.
If we're speaking your language, and you feel there's pent-up potential in your organisation, that just isn't quite getting the attention it needs — we're here as your trusted confides, to find out what's truly possible with focus…
