Outsourcing
When deciding which roles to outsource, there’s one message I think it’s important to keep in mind.
When might it be beneficial to have someone with expertise from multiple organisations? Meaning when might this level of exposure and learning from working with multiple orgs help to shortcut your internal learning period.
It’s unlikely that an internal hire would be able to offer the same unless you can afford someone with ALL the years' experience.
This combination really levelled up our set-up and maturity from a marketing operations standpoint, as I touched on in my earlier post.
One note though, I did this work. And I think that’s important. I’m so in the detail that I can think about all the downstream impact of any changes and this is vital. When you work with outsourced talent they will need you to be able to think through all the implications of any changes, as they will not have this experience and knowledge to draw on.
Web development is another great area to outsource.
When you find a good agency, stick with them. We have a monthly retainer with ours.
Recently, I was challenged by my CEO, asking why we should work with the same agency for the Kaspr projects we had after we acquired the brand earlier in the year.
He was determined we could find a French equivalent or another agency that would work just as well. I remember him saying ‘in all the world are you saying there is not a better or equivalent agency to yours?’ Of course that is extreme, but it is also hard to argue against.
So I dutifully went ahead with a search for alternatives, but my warning was: we will go through a lot of pain to get there, and a lot of wasted cost. And I still believe the output will very likely not be as good.
So we chose another agency.
And very swiftly reverted back to our Cognism partner. They just weren’t as good, everything took longer, mistakes were many, and the end result was hugely painful and not very well executed. So when you find a good one, keep them. They have come with me everywhere.
Outsourcing innovation
I actually think this has been one of my biggest hacks to scaling learning and growth quickly in B2B marketing. You could spend a year running various experiments and content processes trying to hit on the right way to do these things for scalable growth.
OR, you could cheat.
You could find those people doing it really well today, hire them on a project or consultancy basis and learn from them. Then instil those processes, skills and ideas into your team.
This is exactly what I have done at Cognism, and it has 100% enabled us to scale 10X faster than waiting to work it all out for ourselves.
Some of the people we have worked with to do this are:
Refine Labs
They were crucial in bringing structure to our paid social campaign set-up. They also gave us some very strong processes around reporting on our demand generation activity.
Refine Labs are learning by working with multiple organisations every day, so their process of iterating and building out playbooks is much faster than ours would be.
Gaetano DiNardi
This is someone who has had huge success scaling multiple marketing organisations, he is the kind of talent we could never afford in-house, but provides us another vital cheat code to scaling our learnings much faster than we would without his advice and expertise.
We don’t need another pair of hands executing, we require another strategic brain who can utilise their past experiences to advise us on a stage of growth we have not yet experienced.
Todd Clouser and Obaid Durrani
Two people who truly get demand generation content creation.
In a world of mediocre content, and very little known process and structure around how to build a truly predictable high-quality content engine, Todd and Obaid are teaching us their methods.
We have a transparent goal of upskilling ourselves to a point of redundancy for them. We actually utilised the budget for a DG content headcount in order to work with them.
Why?
We knew that we could hire someone in the role, and we could spend a year trying to build out a playbook for this function, or we could work with people already doing it successfully today, people we could not normally afford to hire, and learn the playbook before we then hire.
