Why You Need to Know How Your Clients Define Success

Jackie Hermes is Owner and CEO at Accelity Marketing, A Hubspot Gold partner that provides B2B inbound marketing and lead generation, conversion, and nurturing. Accelity works primarily with B-to-B software companies operating at a pre-revenue, fundraising, or bootstrapping level on up to around $80 million in revenue. Accelity guarantees results: warm leads every month, and coordinates. product launches for unknown companies, helping them to bring new products to the market. The company focuses on building long-term, "deep" client relationships with fewer clients . . .

Jackie observes that internal marketing initiatives often don't fail so much at promotion as they do in the ancillary functions: testing, measuring, and reporting successes. At the same time, conflicting objectives, failure to identify and appeal to the correct target market, and a lack of understanding of and clarity about the desired result all play a part in marketing initiative failure.

Jackie feels it is important to meet a client's leadership team and stakeholders to learn their industry and their pain points and who they're targeting. Have they identified the correct target market? Are they approaching that target market correctly? Who are their decision-makers? Have they done all of this work? Does her team believe the information is accurate and complete? What is the potential for long-term success?

As a project is conceptually developed, Jackie believes it is critical that stakeholders reach consensus on who they're targeting, what comprises the project deliverables, and what success looks like. An agency can only be effective when this foundation is set – when it truly understands the client's business – and when the client stakeholders are aligned in their expectations.

Within Accelity, Jackie tracks each employee's profitability every month to monitor agency health and track the impact of internal projects on productivity. Many agencies use unpaid interns as profit centers. Jackie doesn't do this because she wants to ensure her clients get top quality services and interns can't provide the full-time, long-term relationships (typically 3 years) Jackie thinks are best for her clients.

Jackie sees many companies making the old-school mistake of tasking cold-callers to generate business, and shorting the budget on the marketing side . . . because they don't understand that marketing can function as a powerful lead generator. For companies using cold-calling, she highly recommends HubSpot 's Sales Boot Camps (These programs are only available to HubSpot partners) as a way to dramatically improve cold-calling results. She took the program early in her career and spoke about it a Hubspot's Inbound last year.

Jackie is available on LinkedIn at /thejackiehermes and is @thejackiehermes on every platform (Instagram, Twitter). Accelity is on all of those platforms as well.