The Marketing Audit Playbook

Win up to 75% of projects and grow your deal size — while delivering marketing solutions your customers actually need and want to pay for

The sales process in a majority of B2B marketing agencies and consulting companies is broken. Does this sound familiar:

You book a meeting with a prospect, and your entire focus is on selling the project

You spend countless hours learning about the client’s business, meeting with execs and marketing teams, trying to understand the fit and explaining your process

You battle your way through objections, trying to prove the value of your services, and differentiate from other agencies

And yet, you’re still not done.

Once the opportunity is moved to the RFP (request for proposal) stage, you face a bunch of hard and stressful questions:

What should be the price and the scope of the project, so I’ll win it and won’t piss off the client?

How to make sure all the costs are covered, and we’ll make a profit?

How to match the expectations set during sales calls with the budget available, so there won’t be wrong expectations from the client’s side?

How to explain the project performance, so the client won’t stop it in 2 months because “there are no leads”?

And after spending an enormous amount of non-billable time on meetings and creating the project scope, the proposal is sent.

But then, usually, an awkward pause occurs and generates lots of uncertainty. You start asking yourself:

  • Why am I not hearing back from them?

  • Did we screw something up?

  • Was the price too high?

  • Should I follow up again, or will it be pushy and annoying?

  • Does their silence mean we lost the opportunity?

Unless you are selling Fiverr-y low—cost commodity services, you have dealt with or are dealing with this now.

Unfortunately, you can’t forecast on luck. That’s why every single opportunity your agency generates is unpredictable, and you cannot forecast the revenue at the end of the day.

Now let’s take a step back and discuss why it’s so hard to win high-ticket agency or consulting gigs… from the client’s perspective.

When you create a new opportunity, you are dealing with people who don’t know you (and, probably) don’t trust you yet.

Even if somebody referred you, or the prospect came from an inbound channel, they have no experience of working with you.

And here is the hardest and the most difficult part:

A majority of your prospects don’t have a marketing background! That’s why they might not clearly understand what solution they need. Or what solution would be the best fit for their business.

Whenever they hire a vendor for “demand generation”, “branding”, “growth marketing”, “SEO” or anything else, they have only one goal:

Growing their revenue.

And if they don’t see in your offer how you’ll help to make at least 2 cents out of every cent spent with you, they are going to ghost you.

Here is a brutal truth: they take a huge risk with you.

First, they take budget risks, not you. You ask them to spend 5-6 figures with somebody they have no track record with. They want to make sure this budget will be invested wisely and generate ROI.

Second, they risk time and in-house resources. If you screw up the project, they not only lose the budget but also the time their team could use differently to grow the business. While money could be returned, nobody can return months spent on an unsuccessful project.

This creates a dilemma.

Your potential client wants to see a clear solution, simply explaining how your service can help grow their business with a compelling ROI and the payback timeline.

At the same time, you don’t want to undervalue yourself and you want to charge what you’re worth without spending countless unbilled hours on discovery calls and business analysis to craft a personalized proposal that might not win the project.

What if you could predictably win more deals, charge what you are worth, and get paid for discovery and analysis while delivering highly personalized offers your prospects would happily pay for?

Right now, it takes a lot of time to run discovery calls, learn about customer needs, describe your processes, prove your value and estimate the scope of the project and the necessary budget to achieve your client’s goals.

And because you are not paid for this, you or your sales team are probably rushing the estimate to hit the revenue quota. Which becomes a major friction point.

Marketing audit and roadmapping is the key to changing this, winning more projects, delivering exactly what your clients need, and helping them predictably grow their revenue.

We started selling marketing audits at Fullfunnel.io in early 2017. Since then, our win rate increased to 75%, while ACV grew 3X.

So what exactly is marketing audit and roadmapping?

It’s essentially a small, easy to sell, fixed-price engagement that delivers great value to a client, while preparing them to invest in a much larger engagement.

With an audit, your client discovers:

What should be fixed and improved in the existing sales, marketing, and lead generation process (existing bottlenecks, “leaks”), to generate qualified sales opportunities, increase deal value, and shorten the sales cycle to hit client’s revenue milestones

What are the best channels, marketing activities, and campaigns to create a predictable pipeline of sales-ready opportunities or scale revenue

What challenges you might face during project execution

What resources (budget, team, stack) do you need to succeed

What metrics will show that the project is performing as expected

I implemented marketing audit and roadmapping the way Andrei and Vlad teach in the program with a few clients of mine: one is a software development company in the UK, another one is in the US. They were both thrilled with the results, and it gave them a lot of food for thought. 

They told me that the recommendations were “golden” and brought them a lot of value. For example, the UK client did not know that financial institutions get him more than 70% of his revenue! He wanted to work with startups 🙂 

That’s another benefit of the audit; it will take the bias out of your hand so your business will look clear and pristine, like from a helicopter view.

Stefan Repin

Marketing audit helps to:

  • Produce a robust marketing plan with an accurate estimate of the project timeline. This often increases the scope of the project and the ACV

  • Avoid experimentation and guesswork, and focus on the 20% of activities that will produce 80% of results

  • Convert more leads into clients because it de-risks clients’ investment in a project and makes sure you’ll have a solid ROI

  • Showcase your expertise and in-depth niche knowledge. When you sell a Roadmapping engagement to a client, you’re selling your expertise. This helps position yourself as an advisor and not just an outsourced, expendable resource

  • Get paid for all of the time you spent diving deeply into the client’s business and creating a custom marketing or channel strategy

  • Have more successful case studies. When you’re rushing through learning about your clients and estimating their projects because it’s time you’re not billing for, you’re shortchanging your clients. With audit and roadmapping you can present all the bottlenecks and clear solutions that help to get buy-in and support from the client’s team

After sharing our marketing audit and roadmapping process with the members of our Full-Funnel Academy, we got a lot of questions:

How to convince a client that wants a service to pay for the audit first?

What do I charge for the marketing audit and roadmapping?

What exactly should be included?

How should I present a project after the audit?

After receiving so many questions, we decided to document the entire process and share it with other marketing agencies and consultants to help them to win more clients.

Without the B2B Full Funnel framework, we couldn’t land this client.

We first did a paid audit. Then a paid workshop and now they have a B2B strategy/framework that they can use for their own marketing and we can make a proposal for consultancy/ads management.

The internal marketeer for the company was already setting up a lot of tools (phantombuster, leadfeeder, lemlist, sales navigator,…) so he was a bit experienced in the opportunities. but with you guys course we could set clear audiences and give them a framework and connect the dots.

Thanks for the course so far! Really interesting and enjoying it. Finally a course that’s not let’s put up some slides and sell it for 997 dollars (you know those gurus).

So thank you very much!

Dieter Vanden Heede

I sold a Marketing Audit following the Full-Funnel model to a fire security prospect, and the advice of Vladimir Blagojevic and Andrei Zinkevich was instrumental to close the client.

This project is a foot in the door, and they expect me to keep working with them post-audit.

Before, I used to embed audits within my PPC/funnel retainers. So I’d work for free during the first month = stupid. Now I get paid good money for formulating a plan that will help me execute for them later.

So grateful to the course and community!

Mony Chhim

INTRODUCING: THE B2B MARKETING AUDIT PLAYBOOK

You’ll get actionable training, templates, process maps, and a clear step-by-step plan on how you can sell and run marketing audits for your clients, how to identify their bottlenecks, and create clear solutions they would love to pay for.

After implementing our framework you’ll:

Win more projects with a bigger scope and higher ACV

Clearly articulate your process and the value your client gets

Pre-qualifying and weeding out time-wasters and window shoppers who are looking for the cheapest vendor

Justify the price of your services without endless discovery calls and never having a pushback on the price

Create highly personalized marketing programs with a clear estimate, budget, forecast, and ROI your clients need and want to pay for

Position yourself as a trusted advisor and a partner that cares of client’s revenue instead of being treated as “yet another marketing vendor” and “expense”

HERE IS WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE B2B MARKETING AUDIT PLAYBOOK TRAINING PROGRAM

17 training videos

Videos include a step-by-step process from setting up a discovery call with a project lead to sending audit results and the core project proposal.

Benefits for you and your clients of running a marketing audit and roadmapping

The standard process of running a marketing audit

Roadmapping in-depth interview before analysis

Analysis & Recommendations

Marketing audit report as a final delivery

Other deliveries: marketing plan, tech stack, and resources

Core program proposal

Detailed proposal overview

Marketing Audit Checklist

Overview of the sales process

Preparing the discovery call

Discovery call part 1: Identify needs and qualify

Discovery call part 2: Presenting the audit, benefits, and addressing needs

Proposal structure and template

Content hubs to influence the decision-making process

Common objections and how to overcome them

Sending the proposal and following up

Documents and templates

Get access to all the documents, templates, and swipe material you need to close high-value marketing audit and roadmapping engagements.

Questions for the roadmapping call

Marketing audit report

Core project proposal template

Marketing audit checklist

Email scripts

Scripts to overcome common objections

Marketing audit proposal template

Discovery call questions template

Intake questionnaire example

Marketing audit sales process

MEET THE INSTRUCTORS

We’re Andrei Zinkevich and Vladimir Blagojevic, with 30 combined years of experience in B2B marketing and sales, working with 100+ B2B companies across the globe. Since 2017 we have successfully delivered 50+ marketing audits to B2B companies with high ACV and complex sale cycles.

THE MARKETING AUDIT PLAYBOOK IS FOR YOU IF

  • You always deal with explaining the process and value you will deliver

  • You are being compared to other marketing vendors

  • You spend an enormous amount of time diving deeply into customer’s business and created a personalized offer

  • You’ve heard “we’ll think about it and get back to you…” way too many times

  • You’ve ever had a client get upset over the fact that what they paid didn’t match what they were expected

Get The Marketing Audit Playbook
for $249

100% Satisfaction Guarantee for 30-Days

If what you see is not what you expected, just reply to the download email within 30 days, and you’ll get a full refund. No questions asked.

Thanks for reading,

Andrei and Vlad