The Challenge

A boutique management consulting firm that had grown through reputation and great relationships but had always struggled to build a solid marketing foundation.

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Client Struggles

The company had grown consistently over 25 years but had found itself with plateauing growth at around $30 million in revenue.

They knew they needed to grow to continue to attract top talent. They also recognized an unsustainable strategy and inconsistent execution was stunting their growth.

Their director of marketing, who they had originally hired from one of the big four firms, didn’t pan out and left, and in the past they had also struggled with fractional sales and marketing leadership

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The Work

Assess the ecosystem, build the infrastructure, perform in-market testing, and build the growth team… all in 9 months 😲

The Plan

Developing Their Strategic Narrative

Leveraging a small number of customer interviews, we ran a series of workshops with the executive team to uncover the core pain points and related language that actual customers use. Leveraging these insights, we crafted an all-new narrative and that will be implemented across core assets (homepage, careers page, and sales deck).

Developing the Right Processes

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Operationalizing the growth function and the intersection between marketing and business development has helped them execute a more integrated strategy and move faster and with more consistency.

Aligning on the Right KPIs

Working with the various practice leads and internal Salesforce practice team, we developed data collection and reporting to show the full customer lifecycle and impact on revenue.

Building the Right Team

Sales and marketing were disjointed, with little visibility across all relationships and pipeline across practices. We helped the client design a team and alignment process that created a more centralized go-to-market function, and helped them hire the VP of Growth that will build out this team.

Results

• Team aligned on and forecasting from better metrics
• Team aligned on clear value story that everyone knows how to tell
• VP of Growth hired to lead and build the team. He has now been there for over two years.

It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though

While this client was bought into the overall plan, they were much more interested in the tactical science of marketing rather than the art of alignment and messaging, which caused for some early frustrations as they believed we weren’t moving fast enough.

This required us to adapt our approach, and create parallel work streams where we tackled some tactical things early to show progress, while still focusing on the core strategic initiatives.

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