Marketing Assessment Supports Transformational Growth

Talent recruitment powerhouse desired an assessment of their marketing capabilities to become a billion-dollar company by the end of 2024.

Background: Aggressive Growth Targets Require Sales and Marketing Alignment

A regional talent recruitment professional services powerhouse sought to grow nationally to become a billion-dollar company by the end of 2024. However, they were experiencing misalignment within their marketing and sales teams and a lack of targeted vertical market efforts. With similar industry end markets, buying groups and overall value propositions this organization required a quantitative assessment to streamline marketing investments and performance.

As a result, they desired an assessment of their marketing capabilities, focusing on identifying optimization and enhancement opportunities, allowing them to achieve a broader growth transformation.

Project goals included:

1. Elevating best practices across business and developing an operating model to scale organizational capabilities
2. Understanding their current marketing capabilities and enablers
3. Benchmarking performance and investment levels against their peers and best practices
4. Identifying marketing strategies to drive growth for the upcoming years
5. Prioritizing improvement areas to achieve benchmarks and best-in-class organizational status

The client chose Alexander Group because of our experience in marketing organization assessment and effectiveness.

Approach: Assess the Current Organization

The first step required Alexander Group to assess the marketing organization by confirming the current state and creating diagnostic and blueprint reports. In addition, we reviewed key metrics, including performance trends, peer organization benchmarks and revenue growth metrics. Finally, Alexander Group interviewed 12 stakeholders to gain qualitative insights.

Key Insights: Improve Productivity Drains, Optimize Sales Opportunities

Alexander Group’s assessment revealed:

1. The client needed to clearly define segments and account assignments, total area market (TAM) sizes and account priorities to drive targeted account-based marketing activities.
2. Only 6% of accounts make up 80% of gross margin dollars, indicating that their sales force necessitated more guidance in high-value opportunities.
3. Sales reps cannot maximize their time spent on sales-generating activities.
4. Few inbound leads impede market growth, leaving account executives (AEs) to self-prospect 79% of leads.
5. AEs spend 36% of their time on pre-sales activities, significantly lower than the 25% industry benchmark.
6. Compared to benchmarks, AMs spend nearly 50% more time on low-value activities, including order entry and fulfillment, implementation issues, customer service, administration and reporting.

Recommendations and Results: Optimized Marketing Focus Supports Sales Growth

Alexander Group’s recommendations included a) creating targeted campaign motions to propel growth and b) increasing headcount investments for the next three years across sales and marketing.

With improved market focus, the client could now set their sights on:

• Achieving go-to-market (GTM) consistency across verticals and line of businesses (LOBs)
• Expanding offerings to current clients via upsell
• Targeting mid-sized and large clients to maximize scaling capabilities
• Retaining internal talent and minimizing churn
• Accelerating a vertical market entry strategy into new industries

As a result of the marketing assessment, the client’s future vision includes increasing visibility in growth marketing that occurs earlier in the buyer journey. The client expects to create a more efficient, higher-velocity marketing funnel that enables sales to spend increased time on engaged selling. They are also planning to equip sellers to offer the correct value propositions to differentiated buyers and end markets.