The “Little m” Marketing Dilemma: How to move your growing business from reactive tactics to revenue-driving results

Most entrepreneurial businesses share a frustrating pattern: Marketing exists in the organization, but it’s stuck in what we call “little m” mode — reactive, fragmented, overly focused on acquisition, and failing to demonstrate clear ROI or strategic value.

The root cause isn’t always about organizational structure. It’s about how marketing functions within your business. When marketing operates without strategic leadership, clear systems, or full lifecycle accountability, it remains tactical rather than transformational — regardless of where it sits on the org chart.

In this webinar, Jennifer Zick, Founder & CEO of Authentic, will unpack the “little m” dilemma and share how businesses can evolve to “Big M” marketing that drives measurable revenue impact across the entire customer journey.

Key Takeaways

• Putting marketing into a sales support role limits strategy, leading to short-term focus and missed growth opportunities.
• Integrating marketing across the full customer lifecycle boosts retention and drives sustainable growth beyond just lead generation.
• Defining the ideal customer profile ensures focused marketing efforts, improving resource allocation and enhancing customer trust.
• Increased marketing maturity supports scalable growth, with long-term relationships delivering better results and business value.
• Prioritizing profitable segments reduces costs and enhances company valuation, making it attractive for potential acquisitions.
• Flexible marketing strategies allow quick adaptations to market changes, maximizing ROI and supporting overall business growth.

Webinar Transcription

Opening & Context Setting

Jennifer Zick: So glad that you’re here and we will kick off really soon. All right, I’m seeing the counter tick up a little bit as everybody makes their way through the zoom links to arrive here at today’s Authentic Growth webinar as we’re going to be talking about the Little M dilemma. So glad to be your host today. If you’re a regular attendee to Authentic Growth webinars, you know that generally I sit in the seat of a host and moderator for a panel of experts on different marketing and growth related topics. 

But today I stole the microphone and I’m very excited to share with you more of a presentation-style of a webinar as I walk you through some concepts that are near and dear to my heart on the topic of building marketing muscle and maturity and momentum for growing businesses. So with that I’m going to go ahead and re-tee back up my slideshare and hope that all of my technology cooperates and we will get started. One moment please. It’s hard for me when I can’t see any of your faces or get any actual body language back on what’s working or thumbs up if you see things. But I’m hoping that you are now seeing my screen and if you’re hearing my voice and not seeing my screen, I know my marketing manager in the next room will come and let me know. 

So with that, we’ll dive right in again. I’m Jennifer Zick. I’m the founder and CEO of Authentic. We are a fractional CMO firm and marketing transformation firm that helps great businesses overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step in healthy growth. And making that next step means overcoming some really common challenges that growth businesses face and that we see very commonly with the businesses that we serve. So we’re going to go ahead and dive right in today. And if you attended a webinar that I led last year on the topic of overcoming random acts, you’ll see a couple familiar slides as I tee this concept up. But then we’re going to go into some new material. So hang with me. Let’s go. 

Marketing Leadership & Organizational Structure

I want to start by asking the question of what do you feel when you hear the word marketing? Now I know today on our webinar we have a wide variety of guests attending, from business owners to small stage early stage startup companies to larger enterprises to founders and marketing leaders agencies. Whatever role you’re in, you’re going to have a different lens on what Word marketing means to you. 

But day to day at Authentic, we work with entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs and the leaders of growth businesses. The clients we serve are generally between 10 million to 250 million in revenue. So they are small to mid market and they’re growing actively through a lot of change in the organization. And the concepts that we hear from them on how they feel about the word marketing can look a little bit like this. 

A lot of them express that they feel like they’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Some of them talk about marketing being the black hole where they just throw money and hope that good things happen, but they really have no way to track it. Other leaders have said that marketing feels like a gamble, like they’re placing bets that other people have suggested might be good bets and they feel good about it, but then nothing results. It doesn’t take them anywhere. Finally, we hear from a lot of, I would say the leadership team that might be reporting to a really visionary founder or CEO that marketing just feels like chasing shiny objects, that the flag keeps moving in terms of where we’re heading and we’re just trying a lot of different things as we go. 

And then for some businesses who’ve really felt the burn of random acts of marketing might actually be the latest swear word in the business. Like just let’s not talk about it’s too painful. But all of that to say is that random acts of marketing are really common and they are a natural part of any growing and evolving business. And this is why, because every business starts somewhere with a founder led vision. You have a hypothesis, an idea, a product or service that you want to bring to the world. And, as you bring that to the world, you become a sales driven organization because you don’t have a business until you can sell something more than once and start to bring in actual buyers. 

And once you have those buyers, you start to gain some operational critical mass because you need to deliver the product or service, you need to be able to receive the payment for that product or service. So you’re building an operating company and it’s usually right around the mark of somewhere in between 5 million to 10 million in revenue. Or when companies start to look back at the trail of startup moves and say, you know, we’ve had a steady trail of random acts of marketing and that’s normal because for a business to find its market fit and focus, they have to experiment, explore, iterate. There’s going to be evolution in the marketing mix and so but at the point where the company recognizes we’ve committed a lot of random acts of marketing, we have an opportunity to go into the market with more focus. 

We need to level up and become more strategic. That’s generally when Authentic gets the call to say we recognize we’ve had some pain in marketing. We don’t necessarily have the right experienced leader in the marketing seat to guide us strategically forward. And that’s where we come alongside businesses with that proven experience in executive marketing wisdom on a part time, fractional basis or as a coach and guide alongside their leaders to really impart the wisdom that helps them bring confidence to how they build their plan. And today I want to walk you through some of the opportunities that we often uncover with these growing businesses. But if you haven’t met Authentic before, a little bit about us. 

I founded the business in 2017, nearly nine years ago already because I was passionate about helping businesses avoid what I had experienced in my own life as a sales leader and then as a marketing leader and my path through a fast growing startup and then into a large global enterprise. I got to experience a lot of different random acts of marketing and have the joy and the pain of trial and error and seeing what works and building my experience that way. Coming out the other side of that, I said there’s a better way for small businesses to grow. If we can bring them that wisdom sooner, we can help them avoid some of this pain. So today I’m proud that Authentic has made great strides in partnering with growing businesses and leading really from a place of values-first.

We really want to help businesses do this the right way in a way that honors the relationships and the people and the culture. Our clients now have spanned across every major industry category. B2B B2C distributor models. And we’ve worked all across the United States. We are based in Minnesota and have a really large base of clients here. But because of our model, we’re able to support clients all across the country and sometimes beyond. So it’s really a joy to align the right CMO leadership to these companies at the right time. All right, let’s get into the thick of today’s material, the little M dilemma. And it starts here with the traditional org chart or accountability chart for a small business. In most small businesses in the early formative days, there’s a founder or CEO who sits in that visionary seat. 

Beneath that seat at the leadership team, there will be somebody who’s responsible for sales, who often has a responsibility for marketing as well, somebody responsible for operations or services delivery and somebody responsible for finance. And that’s a pretty traditional org chart. Here at Authentic, we run on EOS. If you’re familiar with the entrepreneurial operating system, those organizations also designate underneath that visionary role an integrator role. That’s often a COO, a CFO, or someone who assumes the responsibility of leading that next level management team and helping to integrate all aspects of that accountability chart. 

But I think where this traditional org chart falls short, and this was really one of the inspirations for me starting authentic in the first place, is that when you put sales and marketing together in one box, 99% of the time the person who’s leading that box is by nature and training and experience a sales manager. And that’s appropriate for an early stage business. But when marketing is reporting to sales, there’s a lot of limiting factors that happen that contribute to random acts of marketing and contribute to barriers to true strategic marketing. So I want to unpack all of that and I want to say this with a lot of understanding that I’m not trying to force a model that doesn’t fit at your leadership table. 

Not every business can afford or assemble in a way that makes sense to have a dedicated head of sales and a dedicated head of marketing. But if you do have somebody who leads sales and marketing, it’s really critical that person be equipped to understand how to build a modern marketing team and function and bring the right marketing strategy together with the right sales approach. That’s really important. So that’s why we offer both fractional CMO to provide that seat at the leadership table for marketing or that coaching and guide role to come alongside the person who might be leading on both sides. All right, let’s talk about what a traditional sales pipeline looks like. When you have a sales and marketing leader that is mostly a sales manager. 

The way that they’re looking at the funnel is really focused on the sales pipeline aspect of that funnel. Lead generation, demand generation, give us more at bats, right? So the marketing role becomes about brand building brand and awareness and pulling that awareness into engagement and then converting them into leads and then converting those leads into wins. 

And so the sales mindset and the sales manager mindset is most often focused on winning net new business, filling that pipeline, moving the pace of conversion through and doing those short term activities that make this work to help close the deal and keep salespeople selling. And this is an appropriate sales mindset. All of these things need to happen because without net new business, you don’t have the lifeblood that’s going to continue to really grow your business. 

I’ve seen far too many founder led sales driven businesses become simply founder led operating businesses that forget to sell. We don’t want that for you. Instead I want you to continue this kind of a sales momentum and sales focus. But I want you to understand how marketing expands your revenue opportunity and that’s really the focus of today’s conversation. So random acts of marketing, if marketing is reporting to sales in a little M marketing capacity, what happens in most cases is that marketing gets stuck supporting sales and that means chasing quick wins. It means that there’s nobody really shepherding a long term strategic roadmap for going to market or brand and plan. And like what is the experience that we’re creating for our customers? So it can be random. Often marketing resources are limited and then they get wasted on random acts. 

And nobody is accountable for the ROI and the systems aren’t in place. There’s no guidance on how to structure that to really drive that ROI impact. Marketing is treated like a lead factory, not a growth engine. Over the entire span of the customer life cycle, which we’ll look at in more detail, customer insights get lost, which puts retention at risk, which is a huge revenue risk opportunity. Because if we’re only chasing new business and we’re not focused on existing customers, we’re really missing the bigger picture and the higher value. And of course team alignment breaks down because often when marketing is in a subservient supportive role to sales and is then forced to focus on short term wins and activities, they don’t create meaningful results, they don’t create quality leads, they don’t convert to real revenue. 

And that’s when you see salespeople saying marketing leads aren’t quality and marketing saying, but I don’t have the resources or the support to do this the right way. We don’t want to see that happen. And the biggest missed opportunity that I see for growing businesses is that they fail to shift their mindset from startup growth net new business acquisition to sustainable business revenue growth, which is looking at the full customer life cycle. So without marketing allocated to reach across the aisle and collaborate with operations and collaborate with existing customer relationships, we don’t have marketing’s brand experience wrapped around customer retention. And we really are creating a much more expensive, much more complex marketing approach if we’re only focused on net new acquisitions. 

So there becomes a tipping point in a growth company where the balance of marketing dollars, energy, talent and resources need to shift from being all new net new business to supporting the full customer funnel. So the statistics I put in front of you help to underscore that fact of what companies are missing if they’re only focused on net new sales. And this is really a little bit of a deeper look at that. If marketing is not following the customer journey and helping shape and craft that customer experience and making sure that there’s marketing support for retention, some of the things that marketing would not be supporting is assisting with the customer onboarding, communications and brand experience with retaining those customers with helping to the sales team and the account management team. Look at where there is strategic upsell cross sell opportunity. 

Maybe nobody in the organization formally has a process for capturing customer feedback. Without that feedback, we lack that connective tissue between marketing, sales and delivery and product and innovation to make sure that what we’re bringing to market is what is valued by buyers. So many companies have no process or ownership around harvesting the wins out of the client’s successes and making sure that somebody’s building a library of case studies or reviews or other proof points. There’s no formal program for customer advocacy and referrals from customers, which is some of the strongest new business you can bring in. And nobody’s paying attention to how marketing can help to make your current customers the hero of the story. Because marketing isn’t familiar with the customer experience. 

There’s also especially in B2B when significant stakeholders and decision makers and buyers move roles which happens frequently and change organizations. If marketing isn’t connected to some of those changes and able to track and nurture that relationship, we’re winning. We’re losing the opportunity for future sales and nurture with that person. And finally, if marketing doesn’t have a purview into the profitability of the customer stack, they don’t have the insights to help craft the way that we need to go to market to make sure we have the right balance and the right customer mix. This is just the beginning of the list of missed opportunities where a “little m” marketing function falls short from bringing the true strategy that marketing should bring across the customer life cycle. 

Full Customer Lifecycle Revenue Mindset

So to demonstrate the broader opportunity for creation and growth of healthy sustainable scalable revenue, we need to look at the full customer journey. And so we flip the funnel and we expand the funnel from the original attract get their consideration, win the business to how marketing supports all the next steps in the client journey. And so when you have a revenue team mindset rather than a sales led revenue mindset, you’re looking at all revenue streams from net new to expansion and Retention revenue, you’re looking at a whole life cycle. You’re not just focused on winning, but you’re equally focused on retaining and growing. You have a mindset in place and a strategy that supports the long game, not just this quarter or next quarter’s quotas. You’re focused on creating raving fans through delivering exceptional brand experience. 

And you’re organizing your entire company with everybody understanding their role in selling, which means just delivering on the brand experience. So every person in the organization is touching that customer somehow, whether it’s what the invoice looks like on the first visit to the website. So a healthy revenue organization wraps marketing around every aspect of this to create a unified and high quality brand experience and not miss out on the opportunity. You see the arrow at the top of this model connecting back around. If your organization is delivering exceptional quality and experience, you will be building raving fans. And if you have marketing involved in harnessing those wins, those raving fans have the opportunity to bring more awareness and bring more opportunities back into the top of your funnel by being promoters of your brand. Okay, so do you see how clever this is? 

There’s the Big M. The Big M is the wrapper around the full funnel. And for Big M organizations, sales and marketing are equally represented as mindsets in how we think about revenue, health and growth in the organization. You have great alignment, whether it’s somebody sitting in one seat making sure that there’s a balanced approach, or there’s a sales leader and a marketing leader working side by side to create that yin yang revenue balance. And then you’re ensuring that the organization supports your brand promises with delivery excellence and with financial clarity that you can get in terms of. We know where we’ve invested in marketing and we know how those investments are now contributing to net new business customer retention and growth. Okay, so that’s the storyboard and the background to set the tone. 

And if you recognize any of that within your story, you might be living in Little M marketing land. So I want to walk you through some of the fundamentals for how we as CMOs work with our clients to help them escape little marketing, Little M marketing, and move into a more mature approach. And it starts with a relatively simple premise. Modern marketing is not. It can be very complex. There are thousands of different tactics and technologies and techniques you could deploy at any given moment, and it’s moving faster than ever with new emerging AI tools. So the landscape is incredibly complex and getting great marketing outcomes and building a really strong, highly trusted brand that builds repeat healthy growth. And revenue. That’s hard work. There’s no way around the hard work. 

Strategic Marketing Focus and Ideal Customer Profile

But great marketing is actually based on some simple fundamental principles, as you see in this little chart. To start strategic marketing, you have to be able to answer the following questions with clarity. Who do we want to matter to? Why should we matter to them? How and where do we enter their natural habitat? And when we get there, how do we build trust? Not how do we sell something and transact, but how do we build trust? And then the question continues to be along their life cycle, how do we continue to support and deepen that trust? And so if we map those simple questions, which are the foundation and beginning for any good strategic marketing, we map them to the marketing jargon and marketing strategies that support the who we want to matter to is your ideal customer profile. 

I’m going to talk further about an analogy that I like to use about a baseball team to talk about what ICP means, how to make those decisions in your business. But you have to get laser focused on who you’re trying to engage. Otherwise, if you’re marketing to everybody, you’re marketing to nobody, truly. So why should we matter to them? That’s your unique value proposition and eos, which I talked about earlier. The entrepreneurial operating system likes to talk about defining your three uniques. And a lot of companies do that. They come up with the three things they feel makes them very unique. The problem is it’s still all about them. You know, we this, we that, we this. A unique value proposition that you can take into the market has to be all about the customer. 

So you have to take those three uniques, or however many uniques make your special sauce, and you have to translate it into a way that speaks to the buyer. All right, so where and how do we enter their natural habitat? This is where I see too many companies get tripped up. Okay, many companies are executing tactics. Our next slide will talk more about that. They’re doing the things they’re trying the things they’re. They’re building their Instagram, they’re trying to get more followers on LinkedIn, they’re trying to increase their web views or their email opens or whatever that might be. But they’re implementing all of these tactics or turning on different channels without really assessing. Are these the channels that really work to connect with our ideal buyer? Maybe they see a competitor doing it or their agency is advising them they should. 

But that is not where you should start making decisions. You need to start at the top of this list before you decide what their natural Habitat is and how you can best reach them. And then in terms of building trust, this is your brand promise and your customer experience. And I like to say simply that your brand is the promise that your business is making to the world and to the stakeholders around your business. And your brand is whether or not you deliver on that promise to the world. How is that promise experienced or not experienced? If you’re making a promise and every company does in one way or another, you’re either keeping it and that’s building trust, or you’re breaking it and that’s losing trust, which is very hard to get back. So that’s where strategic marketing starts. 

Now the next slide is going to go deeper. It has a lot of content on it. Please don’t try to read it all, but this is our authentic growth roadmap. This is a one page slide that explains how we approach the work that we do as growth guides and as fractional CMOs to help our clients understand how they answer those four simple questions and then move to activation. So whenever we step into a business, if they’re a 12 million, 15 million, $50 million business, they certainly have, at the top of this page, they have a business strategy. There’s something on paper that the leadership has agreed to, defining the targets and what the successful outcomes would be. They also have marketing tactics. 

At the bottom of this page, they’re doing something, they have a website, they have sales collateral, they have some channels activated, they’ve got some campaigns or content out in the world. But the reason they bring Authentic in is because there’s still pain and uncertainty, because there are missing pieces in the middle, in the marketing foundation and in really tying the strategy for the business all the way through so that the tactics are aligned. And so that’s our role as CMOs, is to come in and to help quickly assess where are the gaps, where are the strengths and then how do we take the resources. That red layer that everybody has, that resource reality. We don’t have unlimited time, energy or human capital to just throw against every idea or every gap. 

We have to pace ourselves, get it in the right order, do it with the right resources and understand how to measure the outcomes. So this is how we approach the work that we do. And we love to give this content away. As a thought starter for your teams too, feel free to grab this, use this in any way that’s helpful to you. The next slide is why we do what we do. This is our maturity matrix. This is really important because we’re not just trying to create more successful campaigns. Of course, we want to drive the marketing activities that increase revenue, bring in new business, support existing business, grow the brand, all of those things. But at the core, every business needs to be thinking about how to create more business value for its stakeholders and so that the business is truly worth something. 

It has transferable value. And to get there, our role as CMO means we need to be looking at all the attributes on the left side of this page and we need to understand how mature or immature is the client or is the business at this point on those attributes. Maybe they’ve spent a lot of money to really articulate their brand message and they’ve, they’re really strong on that, but maybe they’re really significantly under budgeted to bring that message to market. And maybe they don’t have the right technology in place to capture engagement. And so we need to balance these things out and continue to move further to the right. Increasing maturity, increasing the ability for the business to scale, increasing the value of the organization. Those are two tools that are an example from our complete marketing operating system, which is called Authentic Growth. 

Marketing Maturity and Long-Term Client Relationships

This is the methodology that I started to build as I launched Authentic and that has continued to be rebuilt and refined through all of our CMOs input across industries and business models and the activation in over 150 different clients. So what we have built is really a full system to teach growing businesses how to operationalize marketing so that it is just as concrete and tangible and adding as much value as other areas of the business rather than being this unknown, the black hole, the spaghetti at the wall. We really want to help organizations learn how to align marketing to the business strategy and build programs that are accountable and scalable. To that end, just to clarify again what I said, we have two different business models for how we engage. 

This is not a pitch, but I want to put this out there because if we can help your business in any way, it would be an honor to do so. We either come alongside of your sales and marketing or marketing leader to help level up with this marketing operating system and the wisdom of our entire community of CMOs, or we come inside and we step into and create that true strategic marketing leadership seat and leverage the resources you have through your staff and your agency partners, or deploy other resources that you need and make sure that alignment and orchestration is there. The process that we take and I invite you to adopt any of this that works in your business. I said earlier how we run on eos. 

If you’re familiar, a business operating system like EOS creates a cadence within an organization where there is annual planning, annual goal setting, and strategic framing. There are budgets set, but within that annual plan, you’re running your business with the agility to adapt. And that’s exactly what we do with our clients. On the marketing side of the business, there’s no such thing as building a marketing strategy and then just running that playbook for three years. There’s not even such a thing as building a marketing plan and just running it for a year. Marketing plans need to have parameters, but they need to have the wisdom to quickly harvest the insights and adapt the plan as you go based on what’s working or not working or how is the market changing? 

Heavens knows, this year we’ve seen a lot of market changes based on influences coming from every direction. So a marketing plan has to be agile and it has to have the wisdom to know how to turn the dials and levers at the right time. So that’s how we help our clients learn how to run their marketing organizations. Annual planning, strategic frameworks, and then quarterly, you know, think of it like a sprint execution, making sure that there’s accountability, there’s metrics, and there’s good basis for the places that we’re investing our resources. All right, so far I’ve framed up the reality that Little M marketing, frankly, is just a cost center. If your marketing is a small M approach, it’s reactive, it’s tactical, only it’s shiny objects, then you’re really losing time, money, and potentially trust with your brand. 

If you’re switching gears all the time and the opportunity cost is huge. Because if you’re working in a competitive ecosystem where others are getting ahead of you’re missing out. So Big M marketing is meant to not be a cost center in your business, but a revenue and growth driver. And it comes in a lot of different ways. So Big M marketing is meant to increase your profitability, increase your revenue, decrease your overall cost of growth so that you can scale without just throwing more bodies at it and increase your business value. And so I want to share a few stories with you to that end. And I should have mentioned when I kicked this webinar off that it’s not my intention to fill a whole hour of time with me talking to you. 

Big M Marketing Impact on Profitability and Exit Value

I want to set the stage with these concepts, with these stories and preserve a little time for audience Q and A. If you have any questions that you want to throw my way, there is a Q and A feature, a little icon in the webinar Controls that you should be able to find. Please drop your question in there. I would love to take as many as we can fit in and I expect we’ll probably get you out of here with maybe 10 to 15 extra minutes in your day. So I’m trying to be on your side, give you back a little more time. But let me walk you through some stories of Big M marketing impact that have been real life here at Authentic. 

First, I want to give you the analogy that I shared with you prior about the baseball team. This is a story of how Big M marketing increases your profitability. I like to tell clients, think about your business as a baseball team. And here’s why this analogy is important. When you’ve been a founder led, sales driven company, you have often said yes to any revenue because you need the revenue to grow and to scale. But eventually there will be some revenue that’s better for you than others and you need to start to get focused. But when we start talking about narrowing your ideal client focus, a lot of founders, leaders, and sales leaders get really nervous because they don’t want to have to say no to revenue. So. 

So let me just be clear that I’m not saying that you need to say no to opportunities that fall outside of your ideal client. But what I am saying is that you need to align your go to market focus and resources to pursue the best and healthiest growth. So if you think about your delivery organization, whether that’s a service or product that you deliver, think of them as your outfield. They have a wide range of capabilities. From left to right. There’s, you know, let’s say you manufacture widgets. You could manufacture that widget for basically any industry to solve any issue. Like there’s a huge wide range. So that’s just the case. Your capabilities are very wide now. Your sales organization is going to be more like your infield. 

They can still go left to right and chase down different deals, but they’re probably going to focus on where they see their best opportunities to win. So they’re going to be a little bit more focused for sure. But then marketing should be your picture and marketing should be directing all of your resources, your money, your time and your energy to go to market in pursuit of a very specific strike zone. Right? So rather than trying to go to market to pursue any kind of business that we can sell and deliver, we’re going to go to market pursuing only the healthiest and happiest most profitable business for our organization. 

So as an example, if your business has sold across every industry, but you’ve done analysis and you see that boy, when we sell to the construction industry, that is our best fit client. Like we love to serve those clients. They’re great to work with, they’re strong partners, those deals are profitable, whatever that is. Maybe it’s time to start to narrow down your ideal client focus to pursue more of those relationships and be known as an expert. That doesn’t mean that if a healthcare company comes to you and you can serve them, that you must say no. It just means that now we have a lens through which we are pursuing our best and healthiest, most profitable revenue that’s going to grow our company in the healthiest way. And not every business should niche down to just an industry focus. 

I’m just using that as an example of getting clear. All right, so Big M Marketing also builds sustainable revenue. For this story, I’m going to draw right from the archives of authentics. When I started this business, I didn’t even know the word fractional yet. I discovered it as I was exploring how to explain part time executive marketing leadership? The word is fractional. But as I first started and was building our first generation methodology, I thought that we would come onto client accounts and lead and guide for a year and take them through a cycle of authentic growth methodology and then hand it off to them to continue that work. And so we basically teed up every new engagement with the expectation that we would serve them for 12 months. 

But as we got further down the line, we had clients that wanted to work longer with us, had we built the deep trust, were just, you know, really starting to execute some of the elements of the plan. And we learned that the longer we were with a client on that journey, the stronger the results became. And so we needed to very intentionally change our narrative in the sales process, our content, with our delivery team to be advising clients for a longer term engagement because that’s where we’re going to get better results for the client. And so we had to go back and kind of reorchestrate all of our go to market and get the whole team aligned. And within the span of just two years, just by changing our story, our average client engagement is now 22 months and growing. 

And in fact, with the way that marketing is changing now, with new efficiencies coming into play through AI and new ways of leveraging resources, we expect that this narrative will change again. That there’s an even longer opportunity for us to be strategically guiding our clients. In the next evolution of their marketing programs. So this is a story right from Authentic’s archives just to underscore the importance of asking the right question. It’s not always about winning more new business. We stopped asking only the question of how many new deals can we sell this year for X amount of annual contract value. And instead we started asking the question is how can we bring more value to our clients and then how could we retain them longer? 

And this gets into healthy revenue recurring growth and in like one year’s time it added another almost 3 million to our, you know, to our revenue mix for the year. So these are really important moments to pause and understand how the way you’re marketing may be limiting your revenue opportunity. All right. Big M marketing should drive down your cost of growth. We’ve worked with a number of organizations, in fact many that are multi generational family businesses that have always operated as sales driven organizations with very little marketing. But their only opportunity to scale and drive more revenue means putting more sales bodies on the team. And eventually that gets really expensive. 

Especially if your competitors are becoming more nimble because they’re activating modern big M marketing and they’re finding ways to create more, nurture, build more brand trust, drive more credibility, lead people through the sales funnel without having to have more sales bodies in the mix. And so it’s really important that you start to understand what is your true cost of acquisition. That’s that CAC you see on the page cost of acquisition and how you influence the cost of acquisition by optimizing your go to market team. So there’s a client we’re working with right now that when they brought us in they were explaining they are very heavy on the sales team, very light on the marketing team. They are seeing their competitors engineering the opposite direction. 

How do they start to make use of a full go to market team approach so that there is momentum around every side of that client relationship from pre sale, during the deal, following the deal, nurturing those relationships. So that’s the teeter totter. The balance looks different in every organization. But you need to first know how to measure your cost of acquisition and the value, the lifetime value of your clients to understand where the opportunities are to fine tune. And finally Big M marketing will increase your business value. One of my favorite stories from our past client was a software custom software development shop that had a long tenure with a great reputation building amazing technology. Anything custom right when they engaged authentic they had been a nice stable kind of lifestyle business. 

But the owner wanted to move toward an exit down the road in three to five years. So they brought us in to help them figure out how we create growth to increase our value for exit, eventual exit. And so the first thing that we noticed about their business was that they weren’t operating like that baseball team. Their marketing was not focused, they had not defined any ideal target audiences. They were marketing to everybody and passively taking whatever business came their way. So when we analyzed their projects and looked for where they were most profitable, most sticky, most successful in this case, actually this is probably why I referenced a construction industry focus previously because I knew this story was coming up. But among all their solutions, their construction industry solutions were the most established. 

They had the deepest relationships in that sector and they were the most profitable. So we repositioned the company to go to market as a software development company specifically for that industry. And the wild thing that happened after that is that once they were focused with that particular industry focus, within six to 12 months they had multiple increases for acquisition because of platform roll ups that were happening specifically in that industry. Looking for technology expertise. They would have never been on the radar had they been all things to all people. But because they chose a path, that path made them evident to the kinds of businesses that needed their expertise. 

And so they actually were able to sell their business at a much higher valuation at three times their multiple, three times the multiple they were expecting and three years sooner than they had expected to sell the business. So that’s how powerful Big M strategic marketing can truly be for your business. So that’s all I have for you. Informal presentation content. I would love to invite you to explore Authentic further on our website or look at our client stories, but I’d love to open the floor. I’m going to stop sharing my screen because when I’m sharing my screen, I cannot see the rest of my webinar control. I want to see if there are any questions from the audience that I can help to address. I don’t see anything in the chat right now, but I’m going to give it a moment. 

And while I do, I want to also mention for those of you who might be joining us today from within the Twin Cities, Authentic will be participating as a host and a speaker on November 20 for the Twin Cities Business Growth Conference. I’m going to cover some of this content again, but in a 20 minute format. So some of what you’d hear from me would be repeated. But we have a whole lineup of business leaders from other specialties and Focus areas that are really essential from technology and finance, talent, sales. Would love for you to come out and join us. It’s going to be held at the Metropolitan Ballroom on November 20, so you can find information about that on our website as well. 

I am looking at my Q and A. I don’t see anything coming in from the audience, but here’s what I would say. First of all, I appreciate your time today. Thank you for joining me. I would love to hear from you. If you have feedback or questions, you can email me directly. My email is Jennifer.Zick@authenticbrand.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn pretty easily. Drop me a note. I would love to continue a conversation and then one last offer coming up in January, I think it’s January 26th, it’s a Monday afternoon. I will be hosting an executive workshop here at our office in the Twin Cities and for revenue leaders. 

So if you’re somebody who sits in that sales and marketing seat today or you’re a founder who’s looking to figure out how to solve some of these issues, I would love for you to come join us. So information about that event is on our website as well. Oh, there is one question. Thanks, Sharon. Is there a recording of this? Yes, it is being recorded and we are going to share the recording out immediately following this event. So as soon as it’s processed, we’ll get it out to your inbox. So look for that email coming. And Amy, I saw you raise a hand, but I don’t think I can hear guests on this call. And Julie, maybe you’re waving at me. I’m not sure. But thank you for raising your hands. 

If you didn’t get a question in the Q and A, but you have a question for me, please reach out to my inbox. I would love to connect. I just want to thank you again so much for your time today. Go forth, shine your light, be a blessing, be blessed, and good luck moving into that big M marketing land. We’re cheering you on for sure. All right, take care everybody. Have a great afternoon.