Catalyst for Growth

CHALLENGE

Despite tremendous success marked by 15 percent year-over-year annual growth, our highly successful U.S.-based client was struggling to continue its expansion and had stagnated at $800 million in annual revenue. It soon came to the troubling revelation that its marketing, communications and digital branding platforms were designed for a much smaller and simpler company and were hindering its drive to eclipse $1 billion in annual sales across government, infrastructure and technology markets.
The company was having difficulty attracting new customers despite having a superior business approach and commitment that outperformed large, publicly-traded competitors and which was far more sophisticated and more consistently delivering elegant solutions than its privately-held competitors. It also struggled to attract the best-in-class talent it required to remain at the front of the pack and achieve its long-range objectives. The executive leadership team as well as the CEO recognized that the marketing approach was a significant hindrance to the future success of the business.
The challenge was to sort and answer the question of whether a new leader of marketing and communications could develop and then execute the kind of market-focused strategy that could help pull the company forward into the 21st Century in the eyes of prospective clients by winning with market research, a new client extranet and a bold plan for building on our client's strengths in systems, delivery and integration.

ACTION

We leveraged our proprietary TRANSEARCH Orxestra™ Method to help our client frame the requirements – and the possibilities – critical to driving dividends from a new investment in corporate marketing and communications.

With this essential roadmap in hand and a consensus on the keys to success in this role firmly in our grasp, our TRANSEARCH consulting team developed a short-list of five highly qualified candidates from the kind of professional services and technology firms that had built market-leading marketing and communications functions that delivered transformative yet sustainable business results.

We put a strong emphasis on the candidates with strategic abilities to understand the vision, decipher market research, and bring energy, fresh insights and a strategist's confidence to pull ideas together, develop a compelling marketing and communications plan and sell it internally and externally.

Ultimately, we framed our candidate selection process around the breakthrough findings our TRANSEARCH Orxestra™ method, which stimulated some real epiphanies among our client's corporate leadership team. This led our team to recommend a superior candidate with the unique experience and potential to become a catalyst not only for the marketing function, but rather, for the entire company.

IMPACT

Our client's new leader of corporate marketing and communications has earned rave reviews during her first nine months on the job because of her ability to assess the current strategy and incumbent agency, to engage the stakeholders about the vision for the business, to aggressively challenge the company's priorities and to hire a key support staff of market researchers, designers and managers to deliver on these ideas. Her efforts have been integral in helping to align the executive leadership team around key business objectives.

It is fair to say that she has also developed a transcendent blueprint for driving the company's marketing priorities, challenging the company's approach to its traditional markets and stretching expectations of future market opportunities.

The marketing team has invested in competitive analysis, digital design and web site re-imagination, and a strategic vision backed by a nearly 500-page research compendium that helped its leaders understand the company's competitive vulnerabilities and how new marketing initiatives could turn them to business opportunities.

In the first year, our best-in-class leader has helped drive sales above $1 billion and helped establish a new level of success for the company to aspire.

CLIENT PERSPECTIVE

Our client's appointment of this new executive marketing leader has helped the company see its business – and its customers – with a new set of eyes and a new business development and external communications tool set.

When asked about the early-term impact of this bold, data-driven marketer, the reply has been consistent and unwavering: "We've simply been blown away, so far," our clients have told us on repeated occasions.

The keys, they've told our team, was the ability to properly understand the business challenge and develop a consensus approach to making the critical decisions, all of which emanated from our TRANSEARCH Orxestra™. Together, we were able to align on the issues the company faced and confidently prosecute a plan to close the gaps, make the necessary investments and deliver on the service that our client has used to build trust with customers.