No one likes to waste time, especially with leads you’re pretty sure aren’t right for your agency from the very beginning. After all, time is money.
Here at Impulse Creative, 2018 is a year to cut fat. For the sake of sales, if your lead identifies with any of the following 19 types, then cut the fat and let them go!
Here at Impulse Creative we live and breath by our core Values. We are proud of them and want our clients to share the values that drive our agency. This is a deal breaker for our agency and client partnership.
These values include:
We use so much technology at our agency! While we’re happy to teach our clients that are willing to learn, not every client is open to the many apps that organize and deliver our projects. We cater directly to clients’ needs and strategically choose the best technology to communicate and showcase our deliverables. Because we offer many services at Impulse Creative, there are many different ways to communicate and work with our clients.
For example, an inbound marketing client may need to see heat mapping and look through all the pages of their website in order to see where they need help with SEO. Not every company needs this service or level of technology.
For most clients, we deliver results, data and updates through different visual dashboards. While they’re easy to use and understand, the client has to be open to learning how to access them.
The resistance of our technological process usually results in a poor fit.
We have weekly/bi weekly meetings to touch base with each of our clients, as well as a monthly meeting to discuss the client’s project. These meetings are vital to ensure nothing slips between the cracks. The client's perception is our reality here at Impulse, so if we dont communicate and let them know what is happening, eventually they will believe nothing is happening. So if a lead doesn’t see the value in these meetings, eventually they will not see the value in us. Meetings this frequently may seem tedious, but they’re essential to staying on the same page.
“I need it done in one week…..”
This isn’t just impossible, you really don't want to work with someone who says it is. To make a responsive remarkable product, we need time. Rome wasn't built in a day after all. Odds are, if a lead is rushed, the entire process will be miserable and stressful on both sides. No one needs this and I wouldn't put my project team through this. While it's exciting to turn over projects faster than the deadline, planning a project on an unreasonable timeline is planning for failure.
Building a website and creating marketing campaigns for your company should be exciting! Branding, growth and profits are exciting stuff! A lead that isn't excited to achieve their business goals isn’t a lead we want to deal with.
Our main goal here at Impulse Creative is help navigate to your goals and grow your company. If you’re happy with your current size and want to stay there, you’re not a good fit for us. We build websites that can take you to the next level, then we fuel them with marketing efforts to attract more leads and convert more customers. If you are not able or willing to stoke that fire with the commitment and information we need, we may not be your best option.
During the sales and audit process, our agency maps out a project plan that includes tactics to reach your company's goals. If we don’t both invest in and connect on this plan, our relationship is bound for failure. We need to be on the same page and believe in the process.
Our process operates like a finely-tuned machine and we won’t drastically change it to appease every lead (with the exception of confidentiality and legal reasons.) We do things the way we do because it works and we’re more than willing to explain our process at length during the sales process so that every client thoroughly understands it. We are the professionals thats why your coming to us. If it's not broken don't fix it!
After initial audits, the next step is a discovery meeting. This meeting is vital to our process. This is the stage where the client really takes us through the company's story and goals for the project, likes/dislikes and timeline while we introduce both teams. If a lead doesn't see value in this or doesn't want to participate, our team can’t do our jobs to the best of our ability. After a discovery meeting, the project or marketing retainer will include at least once weekly meetings and frequent emails. We work best with clients that are comfortable being hands-on and using us as an extension of their sales or marketing teams.
10. Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen
Before a lead becomes a client, we need to establish a single point of contact who will approve our work before it’s published. When there are too many cooks in the kitchen, it gets confusing and difficult for our team to progress the project without backtracking. The entire approval board needs to approve the content, design, campaign or development before publishing. Having one or two dedicated approvers is best, and we need to establish who they are well before we dive in to the project.
Once we begin to refine a client’s goals after our initial proposal, we put together a custom contract specifically to reach them. Every client is different and calls for different set of services. If you aren’t willing to sign an agreement to paying for our fairly-priced services, the trust of the partnership is broken. It may not be as easy as paying cash for a cheeseburger, but contracts protect both of us, our employees and our financial assets.
No matter how you approach marketing in or out of the inbound realm, personas are essential to your marketing. If we don't know who a company is trying to sell to, we don't know how to speak to their potential clients. Building personas is what we do because without knowing who their customers are, brands fail.
This one is pretty simple: if you don't have the budget for a 100 page website, don't ask for one! We want to help your company grow but we’re a business too. You can really start from anywhere when you’re boosting your marketing. Even a single blog per month can help. Sometimes budgets require brands to walk before they can run. And we can work with that! As long as you understand the limitations of a dollar.
We’re an audit first agency. How can anyone help you if they don’t know what’s broken?
We offer several different types of audits: a marketing audit, sales audit, website audit, a content audit and a paid discovery. These assessments are a crucial deep dive into your company and data-driven findings that direct your strategy and help us to accurately project your results.
No one likes to deal with people who have a bad attitude. We love our clients, so we don't want to get off a call with someone and take on their bad attitude. If a lead constantly has a bad attitude, don't let them in your client base long enough to effect your team’s attitude.
Communication is essential to our process. If the geographical distance makes communication too hard and stops us from being able to pick up a phone and call a client during our work day, we may not be a good fit.
This is something I see a lot as a project manager: a lead just wants a pretty website. I love a pretty website but a website needs more than looks to be successful. Just like wood that does nothing without fire, what would we be if we created a award winning website without bothering to optimize it or set it up to attract traffic? A website does nothing if it is not optimized correctly and can’t work toward your goals without being fueled by the right strategy and tools.
Ok, this one isn’t as serious, but it’s still important to note. At Impulse Creative, we bleed orange. From our orange walls to our orange shoes, it’s the citrus-shade of our homegrown brand pride. So if you hate orange, you may not be a good fit.
We’re awesome and we protect that reputation fiercely. So we don't mix with terrible people here, just awesome leads for our awesome team. Our talents are reserved for people who don’t suck (negativity, bad attitudes, drama, inappropriate communication, etc.) :)
There’s a lot of fish in the sea and a lot of agencies that will take anyone’s money without thinking about it. We’re just not one of them. We don’t sell a product, we create a relationship that drives your goals and your growth. So when you become an Impulse Creative client, it’s because we believe in what you do and how you run your company. It’s because we know we can help you to be successful. Don’t ever settle for less.