Our Story
How our founder’s obsession with complex funnels gave birth to our agency
In the early 2000s, if you asked businesses what impact the Internet had on them, they would have given one of two answers.
Easy for Ecommerce
B2C companies who had embraced ecommerce would say everything was great. They were either selling on Amazon and eBay, or for pennies a click they could guide searchers to buy directly on their site. They loved the predictable profits; consumers loved shopping online.
What worked for B2C doesn't cut it in B2B
Meanwhile, if you asked those in B2B companies (like I used to work in), they would tell you that not much had changed except for putting up a website. But the convenience of online research was catching on in B2B businesses, where buyers were bypassing sales representatives and trade shows and going to a website instead.
In my case, I joined a startup with a complex product that was pinning their hopes on non-digital channels and weren’t engaging with buyers digitally. Sales started to slip and a few months later, they went out of business. Frustrated and out of a job, I wondered why if all their marketing had hurt their ability to make a profit. Digital marketing platforms hadn’t worked for B2B in early Internet days, but could they?
Tooling up for complexity
Engineers break down complex problems into pieces. So I broke the complex selling problem down to two pieces: making a sale and also making a profit. Sales come from leads, acquired from site visitors which ad platforms provide. By 2010 acquisition costs even for the most complex funnels could be tracked.
I felt it was possible to know marketing’s impact on profit. If the tools were now complex enough to work with complex sales, I could develop an approach that optimizes costs and show leads being acquired at a cost that preserves profit. A company that did this could in theory keep on marketing forever.
The key twist that made it all work
I began looking for companies and agencies who would buy into this approach. They liked my pitch, but weren’t willing to trust a lone consultant. The only way to take the risk out of it was by incorporating as an agency. It was important enough to know if the approach worked, so that’s what I did. I used the method on a client who hadn’t been successful marketing their complex product…and it worked! The fact that we had got it working proved that the difference was our approach.
Unlocking Value for Others
Just like our agency successfully marketed a complex sale for one client, we’ve chosen to focus on repeating this process again and again for others. These companies can now use digital marketing to generate leads in a profitable way. There are no second-class companies here; every company can now unlock the value of the Internet.
