“Finding someone at Chief Outsiders who’s already been where you're trying to go is a great way to fast track your problem-solving skills to scale and grow your company.”
Derek Lokey, Executive Vice President, Teamalytics
Teamalytics helps clients build and sustain strong teams within an increasingly complex workplace. Working with leading organizations across industries, uniquely qualified coaches tackle team dissonance to face challenges like corporate transformation, mergers, and performance gaps.
A little known brand operating in a very crowded space, the company generated about 50% of its revenue from referrals. Another 50% came through a conference strategy that included sponsoring, speaking, and meeting with attendees.
Looking to double its business over 3 years, Teamalytics sought to achieve growth through new account acquisition. With a strong renewal rate, it still needed to find a way to generate enough leads grow another 20 to 25% YoY.
A significant challenge for the company was getting the attention of VPs and above at companies with $500 million to $2 billion in revenue. “It would take someone with experience in doing that to have confidence that they could help us,” related Derek Lokey, Executive Vice President.
With most of the team busy selling and delivering to clients, the firm lacked a strong marketing function, processes, and systems. “We were really focused on growing through referrals,” reported Lokey. “That worked but wasn't predictable.”
Although the company had just completed a contract with a previous consultancy to redo its brand and messaging, leadership looked for additional help.
“Because of their systematic approach and Robin Liebowitz’s relevant experience, we decided to partner with Chief Outsiders,” Lokey related. “She had been in our space and accomplished what we were trying to do. From the outset, we had a lot of confidence in her guiding us to those same results. She also had great rapport and fit in well with our team culture.”
Working with the management team to develop and align marketing strategy and priorities, Liebowitz drove execution utilizing available internal and external resources. She led weekly marketing team meetings to review marketing priorities and projects, obtain feedback, discuss blockers, and align on action steps and deliverables.
The engagement included three phases:
Assessment and Marketing Plan: Assess the current marketing functions and state of revenue generation. Produce a marketing plan with recommendations for programs, people, processes, and technology to enable Teamalytics to achieve its growth goals.
Branding and Messaging: Since the firm had recently completed a brand exercise, focus on reviewing past work to identify gaps or areas that warranted deeper development.
Marketing Plan Implementation: Assist Teamalytics kick-off and implement two demand gen campaigns with multiple components aimed at generating sales-qualified leads to test and learn for ongoing scalable implementation.
“Our scope of work with Chief Outsiders also required Robin to establish a marketing function within our organization,” added Lokey. “By taking the time to build relationships, she had buy-in from the whole team on her ability to set it up.”
Then Liebowitz executed agreed-to marketing priorities including, driving a large scale rebrand and web revamp, developing content and thought-leadership, refining conference strategy and participation, and designing and managing paid campaigns.
Teamalytics had run two campaigns on LinkedIn with atypical results. “Although the CTR rate was well above average, we were not generating the conversions we expected,” reported Lokey. “So, we decided to pause the campaigns.”
They also tried to drive more leads for conferences through existing platforms, but determined that these were not effective. So, they identified and selected other conference and meeting setting forums that aligned with the more targeted marketing strategy.
At this point, Liebowitz recommended that she conduct a peer review of their approach to obtain recommendations from 12 Chief Outsiders CMOs on other possible strategies and tactics. She invited Teamalytics leadership to participate so they could hear first-hand the questions and suggestions from the other CMOs.
“It was extremely enlightening to hear where the 12 CMOs on the call thought we needed to focus our attention,” reported Lokey. “We realized we needed to do a deeper dive into the brand and messaging work.”
That led the team to define its brand proposition and messaging much more clearly and to overhaul its web presence to better support lead gen. “I give Robin a lot of credit for making that pivot and helping us quickly go through the messaging and branding exercise, rebuilding our website in a short time with limited resources.” related Lokey.
The Chief Outsider's hands-on approach to execution got the job mdone. “Where the rubber meets the road is the relationship between our leaders and the Fractional CMO, and how willing they are to get their hands dirty with everything needed day-to-day to drive momentum,” explained Lokey.
With the brand work completed, content in place and website rebuilt, Teamalytics is in a much stronger position to generate sales qualified leads. The 15-month engagement generated:
“Everything that we put out needed to be elevated to a higher level,” related Lokey. “Robin drove that process, helped to establish a marketing function, and to hire and onboard someone to lead it.”
During the pivot, Leadership used the Chief Outsiders OrangeBook to source 5-6 brand and web agencies. “Not starting from scratch saved a lot of time,” reported Lokey. “We also had a higher level of trust in these resources.”
The Chief Outsiders peer review process was one of the most impactful activities conducted over the 15-month engagement. “Sharing the work product mid-course with 12 other CMOs with varying experience in different industries was massively valuable to us,” confirmed Lokey.
“It helped us understand that we were talking too much about what we do and not enough about the benefits that it brings to our clients. That helped us change the trajectory of the company and to build what we're working on today.”
“The greatest outcome that we received is brand clarity,” Lokey continued. “Not only externally, but internally. Everyone on our team now speaks the same language about what we do and how we service clients.”
“And we've built a strong foundation to develop the predictable leads process and growth that we're looking for. We anticipate a strong return on investment in implementing the strategies that Robin helped us put into place.”
“We couldn't be happier with our fractional CMO and her role on our team as a teammate,” concluded Lokey. “The quality of work and especially the commitment from Robin was phenomenal! I would strongly encourage other executives to partner with Chief Outsiders to help them solve their growth problems.”