Art of marketing audit
Playbook
New Practical On-Demand Course
The sales process in a majority of B2B marketing agencies and consulting companies is broken.
Does this sound familiar:
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?
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 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:
1. 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
2. What are the best channels, marketing activities, and campaigns to create a predictable pipeline of sales-ready opportunities or scale revenue
3. What challenges you might face during project execution
4. What resources (budget, team, stack) do you need to succeed
5. 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
VP of Marketing @Platforc
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?
“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
VP of Marketing @Platforce
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.
Andrei
Zinkevich
Vladimir
Blagojevic
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
Pricing
Get The Marketing Audit Playbook
for $249
lifetime access
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