Expansion of services increases grip on current business, as well as business development success

Client

Marketing Agency Serving Life Science Companies

Situation

Due to changing market dynamics, agency leadership felt it necessary to evolve the organization from serving its customers solely as an execution partner to also partnering with them on strategy development. If they weren’t successful, the agency risked losing its executional work to its customers’ strategic agency partners, who were aggressively pursuing that work as an extension of their strategy role.

Solution

A thorough assessment of the agency, including its position within the marketplace, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, was completed. From this work set, a plan was developed that would evolve the 15-year-old executional agency into a strategic partner. Critical elements of this process included:

• Leadership alignment on core competencies of the organization – Multiple meetings and exercises with senior leadership team to flush out all possible core competencies and ultimately align behind the truly CORE competencies
• Assessment of competitors with comparative self-evaluation – SWOT assessment to determine core competencies and opportunities for major competitors with a comparison of how client performed on each
• Recognition of customer needs from a strategic partner – Review of all agency competitive research, along with interviews with various team members and selected customers, providing key insights into the needs of the client’s customers
• Identification of gaps in current service offerings – Objective comparison of current service offering with what the client’s customers needed from an agency partner, along with competitors’ strengths in each of these areas
• Plan for developing and delivering services that would fill the gaps identified – Proposal for hiring for missing skill sets, training employees to better align skills to customer needs and better leveraging technology to provide turnkey services needed by client’s customers
• Development of communication materials – Materials to clearly articulate new agency value proposition internally and externally
  • Website
  • Capabilities presentation
  • Sales aids
  • Press releases
  • New executive bios
  • Employee training materials
• Training of agency personnel – Multiple training sessions to ensure that employees were comfortable delivering new brand messages
• Frequent reinforcement of training messages – Frequent and varied formats of training and internal messaging to ensure 100 percent organizational alignment

Results

The agency was successful in evolving its organizational capabilities to support its customers’ strategy development for projects it was once only executing. This allowed for easier business development and client diversification. Over a three-year period, at least one new million-dollar client was added each year.