Why You Should Run From Traditional Marketing Agencies

If you're a founder or run a validated company, you've probably been through this: you hire a digital marketing agency. They assign you an "Account Executive" (who just learned what a sales funnel is). You pay the monthly fee. At the end of the month you get a gorgeous PDF, full of green pie charts.

The report says: "We've increased your impressions by 400% and cost per click dropped 12%".

You look at your company's bank account and say: "Hmm, weird. There's no more cash than last month".

The incentive of the traditional model is broken

The problem isn't that the people at agencies are bad. The problem is their business model. A traditional agency sells the execution of a service: they sell you 4 posts a week, 2 blog articles, or campaign management for a percentage of your spend.

Under this model, their profitability as an agency depends on having many clients and doing the work (the "deliverables") as fast and standardized as possible. Whether you sell double or zero this month, they collect exactly the same fixed retainer.

A traditional agency optimizes for keeping the account, not for blowing up your sales. They'll keep you "happy enough" with superficial metrics so you don't cancel the plan.

Growth Partner: Fewer PDFs, more "Skin in the game"

This is why the Growth Partner concept is killing the traditional model. A Growth Partner (or growth ally) doesn't sell you standardized deliverables. They sit down next to you (metaphorically or literally) and say:

"My goal is to raise your revenue by X or improve your profitability by Y. I'm going to get into your entire damn business process to make it happen. And guess what: I charge a commission on the growth."

What do they look at where the agency doesn't even glance?

A Growth Partner understands that marketing is just the start of the pipe. If the agency generates $10,000 in leads, but the sales team takes 48 hours to call them, all the marketing effort went to waste.

• The Agency looks at how to lower Cost Per Lead (CPL).
• The Growth Partner reviews the call recordings of your sales team, notices the "script" is bad, implements an AI automation to classify contacts within 5 minutes, raises the close rate from 10% to 25%, doubling revenue without spending an extra dollar on ads.

When do you need each one?

Look, the traditional agency does have its place. If you're a giant corporation that only needs brand maintenance (awareness), 3 nice photos posted on Instagram for the board of directors, and no spelling mistakes, the corporate agency is your best option.

But if you're a business where every dollar counts, where you need direct return on investment measured in sales in the bank account, you need to get out of that model.

If your "Agency" never talks to you about profit margins, Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), and hasn't proposed changing a single internal sales process of yours... you don't have a growth team. You have someone who uploads pretty pictures to the internet.