We specialize in businesses that sell high-value, complex, or complicated products and services to other businesses (B2B). Examples include technology, environmental services, engineering services, medical devices, and innovative business services.
We consider high-value to be $50,000 or more, and a sales process is complex when it’s multi-step, has multiple parties involved in the final decision, the messaging is complicated, and/or the sales cycle is longer than six months.
Although many of our clients are in those B2B areas and we understand how to work with them, we rarely work with consumer-focused businesses (B2C) unless a close friend of the firm refers you.
Rather than a fee-for-services or time-and-materials approach, Leading Results prices services using a point system. Every activity we perform for our clients has a point value, and the total estimated point value for a client engagement, when averaged over the length of the engagement, allows for a consistent monthly fee.
Our goal is to perform the majority of marketing strategy, execution, and web development with our employees. There are a few services we partner with other individuals or firms for, and we’re transparent about those relationships.
Clients often ask if we’ll work in a way that provides incentives for outstanding work (percentage of revenue). While we’re always willing to consider the opportunity to share the risk and reward for our efforts, we believe marketing is everything you do as a company and therefore only agree to these types of engagements if they’re based on overall company revenue during nine or more months.
Absolutely not. If you have vendor relationships that work well, we encourage you to keep them. We’re happy to work with your current vendors and in some cases can even make those relationships more productive. If you want us to do your marketing, however, we insist that those vendors work with us under strict performance contracts so we can deliver what we’ve agreed on.
We’re a Platinum-level HubSpot partner and will work with you to move your web presence to HubSpot for more effective and measurable marketing. And, while we won’t build a website on WordPress, we can make a WordPress site more effective.
We adhere to the Duct Tape mantra of ‘strategy before tactics’ and have found that, when engaged for just tactical work, the strategy is misaligned and the results aren’t satisfactory to the client. So while ‘never’ is too strong of a statement, we rarely do just tactical work and will only do so when we believe a client has a clear strategy and well-defined program in place.
Results vary. Pay-per-click programs generate results quickly, whereas inbound (content) marketing takes longer and depends on the demand for your product or service.
The best way to think about it is to take your traditional sales cycle and double it. The first half is getting the lead generation programs working; the second half is your normal sales cycle.
Duct Tape Marketing was developed by John Jantsch over twenty years of working with small business clients. It applies a systematic approach to the steps necessary to build a solid foundation for marketing, including using the internet and social media in the right places at the right times. It then leverages that foundation through time-proven tactics that small businesses can afford.
You can read our statement of qualifications or download it here.