Everybody Lies: 3 Obvious Reasons Not to Lie to your Agency

For many years traditional agencies have been representing companies and developing sound marketing campaigns. With metrics based on reach and number of eyeballs, seldom have I heard of agencies that are connected directly to a revenue number worth. The way your customers buy is changing drastically, the way that you need to market is changing, and the relationship with your agency needs to change, too.

In this day and age, marketing is not so simple. 

Marketing in 2015 and beyond is going to mean that companies need to align with their marketing agencies or departments and freely share information that will allow the company to grow efficiently and effectively. Customers are now passing judgment on your company much earlier than ever before, for some companies, online engagement is what defines the success and the reach that a company needs to sustain growth. 

The communication in the past has been that marketing needs to produce leads for sales. Sales hates marketing because the leads suck. And that's where they leave it. This model has been used since marketing started. But it doesn't work. Or at least not as well as it could.

This is where agencies like mine are different. Impulse Creative is an Inbound Marketing agency, our model is completely different than a traditional marketing agency, and this is obvious the second that you pick up the phone for the first discussion about how we can help your company grow.

We're in the business of helping our clients grow and utilizing SMARKETING techniques to make the buyers journey of your customers a seamless one.

This is where things can get rough, during our onboarding process with a new client, (much of it pre-contract) we ask questions.

Not just questions like these:

• What do you sell?
• How many do you want to sell?
• What social networks would you like us to marketing for you on?
• What do you want your website to look like?

At Impulse, we ask lots of questions, some of them include:

• We ask about your revenue goals?
• How do you envision your business in the next 1, 2, 5 years?
• Why you do what you do?
• We talk about your revenues over the past year (or more if needed)?
• We talk about the average customers value?
• How long the sales process take for your sales people?

We're not asking this for fun people!

We ask these questions, because in order for us to be able to partner with you, we need to be able to have you trust that we're not just taking your money. We care about your success, and we need to understand the proverbial rungs in the ladder to help you get up to the roof!

This entire process crumbles if our prospects/clients lie to us.

Why would they lie? Who knows.

In my opinion, I think companies are very weary of agencies from the beginning. Many have expressed their distaste of situations in the past, but from what I have found, most of those issues arose from miss-communication which are symptoms of not asking the right question in the first place. 

In our experience, there is only one thing that can ruin a beautiful strategy written on the wall complete with target numbers that will result in the client's revenue goal:

A LIE, or a series of lies. (regardless of if you mean it or not)

Here's 3 reasons you shouldn't lie to your agency. EVER!

1. You want ROI, we're asking questions so we can project:
   
   You want to make sure you get your money's worth and no one faults you for that. But lying to us about your revenue per client affects everything else that is connected to your strategy. (For Example: if you say that your customer lifetime value is $1000 and it's actually $200 we would now have to do 5X more work in order to make the revenue we discussed (and you didn't pay for that). Even if we tell you the data you gave us was wrong in the beginning, you're still not going to be happy that we're only going to generate 1/5th of the revenue we talked about. Unless you're understanding about the mistake, our client/agency relationship is doomed for failure based on the revenue metric because chances are you're not going to get the ROI you expected in the beginning. 
   
   
2. Setting Yourself up for Failure:
   
   Partnering with an Inbound Agency is going to be unlike any other traditional marketing or PR engagement you've had. There will be much more conversation around analytics and goals. Lying about how you feel or simply not sharing what's going on with your company removes the alignment we use in order to make sure we're all on the same page and on-track. Inbound Agencies flourish when there is marketing and sales alignment. If we know how to help sales, odds are, you'll see really great results. 
   
   
3. Our strategy for your success is built on your answers we asked you in the beginning:
   
   If you are interested in growing your revenues by 25% and you give us a revenue number as a starting point, that number needs to be accurate. If it isn't, or if there are other numbers that are not correct when we start doing math and figuring our how many customers you need to achieve your goal we're doomed from the start. What really sucks is as an agency we're not going to see that until a few months have passed and the data starts rolling in.

At an Inbound Marketing Agency like Impulse Creative we are passionate about helping our clients grow, it hurts to be lied to, but it hurts more for us not to be able to do what we said could be accomplished. It's our responsibility to point our clients in the right direction.

If you're interested in talking with an agency that is passionate about helping your company grow an Inbound agency like Impulse Creative is where you should go.