beer steinMany of our clients come to us to help them become more strategic in the way they approach their marketing spending. One of our middle market clients was in the midst of  a major geographic expansion when we first began working together to build a comprehensive marketing plan.

The plan we developed together included two key tools to facilitate the company’s goal of rapid growth from both organic and inorganic (acquisition) revenue. The first tool was to test a variety of grassroots activities in three “high potential” geographies so that we could develop an arsenal of different, proven tactics to deploy as the company expanded.

The second was the groundbreaking creation of a discretionary marketing fund for the sales team. The fund is set up to allocate a set amount of marketing money, based on seniority, for each individual sales person to spend as he/she would like, within certain parameters. To provide clarity to the sales team, we provided a list of sample “acceptable” tactics as well as a list of “unacceptable tactics.”

Given the brand’s dignified, upscale equity, the unacceptable tactics included things that had actually been requested by sales people that were subsequently rejected by marketing such as:

  • Sponsoring beer festivals
  • Yard signs
  • Passing out flyers in a mall

You can read the case study here.