Pitch
The progency can be seen as the services arm of the martech companies. But it is not a classical people-led services business. The progency is actually a very scalable tech powerhouse with the full stack martech platform as the machine. Brands can either buy the machine itself (in effect, rent a version of it, since it’s all delivered from the cloud) or hire the machine developer to deliver the outcomes. It is back to the drill-or-hole question.
Martech solutions sellers today focus on the features as the differentiators. Faster segmentation! More delivery of push notifications! Better analytics! Prettier dashboards! And so on it goes. But what is the job that marketers really want done? And do they have the right machine operators?
What marketers want (or should want) is maximising customer lifetime value. It means identifying the category’s most profitable customers, acquiring them, retaining them forever, and getting them to refer their family and friends to create an unbeatable profits flywheel – thus creating a “profipoly” (profits monopoly). But in doing this, they get lost in the trees of various point solutions that they buy and are forced to integrate. They then have to hire software engineers – never an easy exercise. And slowly, it comes down to the sub-optimal basics: just do the campaign and send out the emails or notifications. And spend more on new customer acquisition to cover the gap.
This is where the progency can come in. Its pitch is simple: we will deliver the outcomes you need, we will get the job done for you. We have the machine and the operators. No one knows the machine better than we do. We constantly make the machine better. You don’t need to worry how it works. (No marketer knows how the targeting machines of Google and Facebook work.) You can of course buy the drill, but we are here to give you the hole that you really desire. You pay based on the performance, so we are on the same side.
The progency pitch can be even sharper by focusing on the most important aspects of the marketer’s goal of maximising lifetime value: we will identify your Best customers so you can focus on creating a separate business unit to provide them differentiated experiences, we will help move the Rest customers to become tomorrow’s Best customers, we will reduce costs of dealing with the Test customers (long tail), and we will help provide you with the right information so that you can acquire Next customers who are likely to be more profitable.
No one is making this pitch today to marketers, and that’s where the progency opportunity lies.