I don’t want to be overpaying for marketing support. How can I manage the resources I plan to hire, in order to help us grow new business opportunities?
Thoughts of the Day: Hiring the right marketing support is a process. Focus on ROI. You’ll likely be using more than one vendor in marketing, so your job includes coordinating resources as well as measuring results. Think through how you plan to manage each marketing vendor.
Define what you really want to accomplish in terms of marketing program success.
Some things to think about:
- quantity (# of leads delivered to sales),
- quality (close-ratio between leads and sales),
- speed (average and median time from receiving a lead to closing a sale)
- exposure (more followers)
- dollar payoff (increased revenue %, gain in gross profit %)
- changes to / growth with current or new target markets – measured in dollars and percent in each target market
Make sure all potential vendors know what your top success measures are. Use an RFP (Request for Proposal) process to gather information from a variety of vendors. With the right questions, you’ll get lots of viewpoints from competing vendors on what to look for and how best to set up and manage a relationship.
As a small business owner, you just want to get things done.
Seems faster and easier to make a bunch of phone calls to companies that you find through the web, or names you get as referrals from your buddies, right? Wrong! Might save you time up front, but lead to lots of headaches and misfires as you hire without understanding the fit between what you need and what the vendor you hire can actually do for you.
Establish clear criteria – what it is that you want to get done. What does this marketing vendor or group of vendors have to deliver in order to pay you back for hiring them? Keep total marketing spending around 10% – 20% of gross profit, which, depending on your percent of gross profit, could translate to a small percentage of total revenue, usually in the range of 3% – 10% of total sales.
Start your RFP with a marketing success statement of goals you hope to accomplish.
Include the following questions in your RFP:
- Vendor’s experience working with each target market that you’ve identified
- Recommendations for approaching the puzzle of how to achieve your total marketing success goals.
- Vendor’s experience working with companies similar to your company – companies of similar size, target market, experience in marketing.
- Ask for budget recommendations and suggestions on how to spread that budget across multiple initiatives
- Recommendations on what to expect for results: tangible changes, report examples, timeline
Pick a list of vendors to send RFPs to. Ask around for vendor recommendations for marketing support. Do some searching for companies on the internet. Once you have a list of people to send RFPs to, you might want to start with a comment period – sending out your RFP as a draft and asking for suggestions. Once you send out the final RFP and get answers back, compare RFP results in a spreadsheet, so you can see results side by side. Make a list of questions to ask in face-to-face interviews with each vendor.
Building a marketing team – coordinate marketing vendors and resources.
You’ll likely be using more than one vendor in marketing, so your job includes coordinating resources as well as measuring results. Once you’ve hired your marketing vendors, get to work on building a team. Explain to each vendor their role on the team, and how you expect them to interact with your staff and other marketing vendors.
Track & monitor vendor activities and results for marketing support. Remember that you hired them for a reason.
Using information provided in the RFPs, establish reporting protocols for each vendor. Layout the reports you expect to see each week or month. Ask the vendors to track their results in a spreadsheet you provide, so you can see how things are trending over time. Be open to suggestions from each vendor on how to best monitor progress, but don’t let anyone off the hook when it comes to regularly reporting on standard metrics.
Looking for a good book? How to Write an RFP: and Manage an RFP Project, by E. B. Diamond.
