It’s hard to imagine (at least for me), but Relevant Business Development is coming up on its 10th anniversary!?! I started the company on the notable date of 9-9-09 and we've come a long way.
Like most start-ups, we launched on a shoe string and tried to offer everything to our clients, including creating direct mail pieces, printing, labeling, and mailing them, (no joke, just ask my partner about the “high-tech” mailroom we ran on his dining room table), buying and filtering contact lists, influencer marketing efforts, and social media promotions. It was a lot of stuff! And we charged our very few first clients $5k/month to run it all for them. We don't do it that way anymore.
What We’ve Learned
Every month, sometimes every day, I was learning at a highly-accelerated rate what was working for our clients. And I like to think we were getting better at delivering what mattered to them. We also learned what was not working, and we responded quickly to minimize or cut those inefficiencies.
The result is that many of our earliest clients went through the learning process with us, helping Relevant to build a better, more targeted, more results-focused service around the original MTX2 System.
And that led to a few important learnings for us:
Clients needed time to “ramp up” to the full system. It didn’t generate better results any earlier for us to crash our timelines or “race” the processes we’d developed. Slow and steady were better.
Clients are seeing the most success when they work within our System as a partner to scale and outsource their own marketing and biz dev efforts.
Even with the discounts we could offer for long-term contracts, we were too expensive for many of the prospects that would benefit the most. We needed to make it lower cost.
Why That Matters to You
The result was a rethinking of our offering to meet the true needs of our target customers. We rebuilt the whole system…the technology, the launch plan, our processes and pricing … from the ground up during the months of July and August, and beginning in September, we’re running what we internally call “Relevant 2.0.”
CHANGE #1: The most significant change to the System is that we’ve separated out the elements of the process by its specific deliverables, which ensures that clients can use the tools they need when they need them and only for as long as they need them:
Core Module – Build Your Audience Combine our data-centric approach with cutting-edge tactics for audience targeting and outreach to grow a qualified, micro-targeted custom list.
Remarketing Module – Maintain Awareness Use proven digital marketing tools to re-engage with the visitors to your landing page for your lowest-cost, highest-efficiency paid ads return.
Email Module – Deepen Prospect Relationships Follow up with interested prospects using a friendly, value-focused follow-up email campaign in a proven sequence of timing and frequency to keep your business top-of-mind.
Content Module – Grow Your Influence Keep your company’s name and expertise in front of your prospects by posting great content that establishes your authority in the industry and reminds them of what you do.
CHANGE #2: The second most significant change is that we now pace out the Modules of a successful campaign at each client’s speed of growth. We’ve determined it’s the size of your audience, your response rates, and your industry’s typical sales cycle that should dictate which Module(s) of the System you should be using at any given time. So now, they each operate separately and stack together when you’re ready to scale-up.
CHANGE #3: The third significant change is the result of the two above. Because we have separated the System into unique Modules and streamlined how and when each is launched, we can deliver the same (or even better!) results with less management, man-hours, info gathering, and general back-and-forth time. Which has allowed us to incorporate significant tech enhancements and cut the price by over 50% from $3,500/month to just $1,588/month and we can get the campaign started for less than $800 for the first month.
The Bottom Line (literally!)
Over the past two years, Relevant has generated over 125,000 micro-targeted new business connections for our clients resulting in $100s of thousands of new business sales. And starting right now, we do it better than ever before at less than half the cost.